« The Job I want | Main | I-Pod now has... »
February 16, 2006
The Patience to Engage
Christine Mason Sutherland talks about her love of primary research emerging from her own education, of being taught to read the primary text, make some assessment of it “however naïve or mistaken it might be” (109) and only then pick up the secondary scholarship on that text. My mentor, or perhaps it would be best now to refer to him as my first academic mentor, told me the same thing a long time ago. The primary texts in question then were literature texts: short fiction, canonical literature, even poetry. Somehow I never felt like I had the time to digest the primary material when it was being assigned. Of course, I never felt like I had the time to understand the secondary material either, in part because I didn’t ever get my own handle on the primary stuff.
Why bring this up now? Well, because I am on the verge of my exam preparation. Because today I found the summary I wrote of a Hayden White essay and realized this is the kind of work I will want to have done for every text I read in relation to my exams, in fact in relation to any subject I find interesting. The ability to bring up that summary, as well worked as it is, makes having the computer the kind of enormously valuable resource I have not availed myself of so far.
I recall that I struggled with that summary – to get the most value for the word limit, of shortening sections and refining language choices to bring the key ideas of the essay, some 18 book pages long, into one single spaced typed page. It took time. Time that every semester I tell myself I will have and every semester find that I still don’t. There’s a patience and focus required that I still have to force myself into. So often it’s like reading without glasses – words on the page as a whole, the perception of text, but not the understanding and response to the key words, the key concepts. Patience. Yes, patience. I’m sure I have that packed away somewhere.
Sutherland, Christine Mason. “Feminist Historiography: Research Methods in Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Vol. 32, Number 1, Winter 2002. Rhetoric Society of America, 2002. 109-122.
Posted by cageyer at February 16, 2006 12:34 PM
Comments
I'm happy for you that you've reached this point in your studies. Your patience will come. Really. I understand the distinction you're making about having an impression of a text versus understanding it well enough to be able to craft an articulate response to it. It's like being tuned in enough to move from summary to analysis to response. On some days with some texts I can do it, and on other days, with other texts, not so much, and I just get static.
Posted by: Marcia at February 16, 2006 06:55 PM