Reading is about thinking and imagining all at the same time. It is about how you might use the facts and ideas you find to realise your own. It is as important to research as writing, experiment, practice, debate. The session will look at different ways of reading for research purposes.

1. Reading Practice
PAHC research training programme,
22 January 2020
Dr Myna Trustram

2. Matisse The Inattentive Reader (1919)

3. A proposition
Reading is a practice
(as well as a hunt for information).

4. Some propositions
• Moyra Davey
• Alan Macfarlane
• Deborah Britzman
• Wilfred Bion
• Samuel Beckett
• Roland Barthes

5. Moyra Davey, The Problem of Reading
(A Documents Book, 2003)

7. ‘… before you become a writer [or a researcher]
you must first become a reader. Every hour
spent reading is an hour spent learning to write.’
Robert Macfarlane, Guardian Review 22.9.12,
p.14

8. In The Peregrine (JA Baker 1967) I saw how to describe the
rapid actions of nature, and I experienced the power of
Baker’s metaphors ...
Arctic Dreams (1984) by Barry Lopez revealed to me the
possibility of entwining cultural history, anthropology,
travelogue, science and elegy …
… and that lyricism is a function of precision – and that exact
and exacting attention to the natural world is a kind of moral
gaze.’
Robert Macfarlane, Guardian Review 22.9.12, p.14

9. ‘Reading … provokes … “aesthetic conflict”, an
encounter with the enigmatic, unknown quality of
the outside world tied both to our hope for finding
beauty and our work of having to symbolise this
search for life.
Aesthetic conflicts remind us of our misreading: the
ways we read regardless of what is presented, the
way we read with desire and anxiety.’
Deborah P Britzman (2009), The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis
and the impossible professions. Albany: State University of New York Press

10. Difficulties of reading
Idealisation of reading
Reading means coming up against dependency, frustration and
uncertainty.
New ideas mean the loss of old ones.
Reality becomes larger
W.R.Bion (1961), Experiences in Groups, London: Tavistock Publications

11. … I have always been a poor reader,
incurably inattentive, on the lookout
for an elsewhere.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956, p.465 (CUP)

12. Matisse The Inattentive Reader (1919)

13. And I think I can say, in no spirit of paradox, that
the reading experiences which have affected me
most are those that were best at sending me to
that elsewhere.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956, p.465 (CUP)

14. Roland Barthes
Readerly text
Writerly text
“The pleasure of the text is not necessarily of a
triumphant , heroic, muscular type. […] My pleasure
can very well take the form of a drift. Drifting occurs
whenever I do not respect the whole, and whenever, by
dint of seeming driven about by language’s illusions,
seductions, and intimidations, like a cork on the waves,
I remain motionless, pivoting on the intractable bliss
that binds me to the text (to the world).’
Roland Barthes, Trans: Richard Miller, The Pleasure of the Text, New York 1975, p18.

15. Read this text to yourself
Whilst you read, notice:
Your body
Your emotions
Are you having a dialogue with the writer?
Can you concentrate?

17. Ways of reading
scan, dip, skip, skim.
speedily
slowly
analytically
curiously
critically
responsively
relationally
word for word
for pleasure, and
confused.

18. Internet reading
New forms of stimulus and new forms of reading
An illusion of mastery
No need to persist
When stumped, you don’t need to consult another book and read again
deeply
It’s fast
‘Fracturing of attention and the attenuation of memory’*
Easy to be romantic about curling up with a good book in front of a blazing
fire.
*Will Self

19. Virginia Woolf:
“[feed] greedily and lavishly upon books of all
sorts … follow your own instincts … use your
own reason … come to your own conclusions.”
Moyra Davey:
“be open and sensitised, creative, always on the
lookout for the thing that will nourish a known
or intuited desire or inkling.”
Moyra Davey, The Problem of Reading, Documents, 2003. p.38