At Colby, we are trained to read frequently and abundantly. Words are the mechanism through which we gather knowledge. Thus, we live vicariously through the actions of other people — observing imaginary personas and historical individuals. We read to inform our own morals. To make choices. To predict the consequences of our decisions. But, in academic settings, literature is often characterized by the sole purpose of educating, which can create the all too prevalent feeling that reading is obligatory, tiresome, or futile.
Dyani Taff, an English professor at the College, teaches a Foundations of Literary Studies course. One of the goals of the class, among many, is to define literature — to dismantle the idea that good writing must be high brow, that reading is an exclusive or elitist club, and that worth exists wholly in traditional texts (for example, most appreciate a classic novel, while the artistic underpinnings of a comic book or the words on a street sign are more debateable). In fact, in True Relations, a reading for the course, Frances Dolan suggests that almost anything is literature. A document can be four hundred pages of written prose or a stop sign. Documents are simply the vessels for text, and text holds meaning as long as we allow ourselves to perceive beyond established archetypes, to question the original bounds of literature, and to think creatively.
As a student of this course, I’ve been thinking about why we read what we read. A different sensation is invoked when reading academically versus for personal interest. I am not attempting to quantify which is preferential to the other — that is for a later survey. But, the art of words is something students are repeatedly forced to acknowledge (sometimes begrudgingly) at Colby. In the age of easily accessible technology and artificial intelligence, evading reading is evermore simple. So, then, what we do truly read — the documents we analyze thoroughly, that we sit with and contemplate and fully engross ourselves in — must bear some sort of additional significance. This is plainly because of how effortless it is to not truly read. Even if, by principle, one avoids a large language model summarizing a day’s worth of course work, one can, with only slightly more effort, skim a text, and quite possibly, acquire less knowledge than that of an AI-generated response.
Ideally, what we read in an academic setting should be absolutely interesting. Otherwise, why study it? It seems that the best way one can be of use to the world, to contribute to society both inside and outside of one’s career, is by loving what one does. In this way, we exude effort, concern, and knowledge for what we do. But it would also be overly optimistic to say that all students unanimously and consistently love the reading they are prescribed. While my conversations with peers in class about the documents we read are most often complex, informative, and stimulating, there seems to be a different emotion attached to what we read for personal pleasure — a sort of inherent enthusiasm.
I was curious to put Dolan’s ideas to the test. She talks of how truth is illuminated through words and that these words, which constitute a document, vary in medium. While Dolan points out that such documents need not be just books, during my survey of Colby students, the responses symbol on a trash can or words on the back of my jacket were unsurprisingly, not answers to the question, what is your favorite piece of literature? So, I focused instead on students’ favorite books. While this may not result in the most concrete evidence that meaningful literature exists everywhere and in everything, my conversations with peers provided some important insights.
One student I talked to said her most recent favorite read was Swan Song, a book by Elin Hilderbrand about a family who moves to the coast of Nantucket and becomes the center of a series of disruptions. “I liked all of the different characters and their backgrounds,” she said. It included “a lot of different stories weaved together.”
Another student says her favorite book remains one from her childhood, titled Miss Rumphius. “It reminds me of growing up in Maine and seeing lupines bloom in the late spring,” she explained.
These students’ experience with literature mirrored that of most people I talked to. The reading we love is not based on fancy vocabulary or the facade of intellectual importance. Instead, our ties to literature are founded on emotional connection — a type of sentimentality or entertainment that either moves us outside of our own lives or connects us more directly to something important within. While these two things may seem completely different, regardless of the literature we read, there should be truth associated with it. Real or fiction, an escape or a souvenir of reality, words reveal something about life — about being here.
My conversations with students provided me with a variety of reading recommendations. It can be difficult to balance academic and personal reading. But, it seems that to most people at Colby, reading is important not for the semblance of cognitive prowess it presents but for the truth and feeling it promotes. During this process, I was encouraged to keep reading, and to read eclectically. As Dolan points out, reading can be anything as long as you make something of it. So, read widely and diversely. Read thick doorstoppers and dissertations and books of short stories and the words on the back of your water bottle. It all counts.
~ Maya Corrie `29
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