Susie Callahan is a student in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Reed College. She holds a Master of Arts in Education from Washington University in St. Louis. Her professional focus has been on education and literacy.
commentary
Why Read . . . Gertrude Stein?
Susan Callahan, Reed College
Commentaries are brief opinion pieces that are intended to introduce an idea or identify connections between works which beg for deeper investigation and analysis. Explicitly not an account of a research project or a comprehensive investigative endeavor, a Commentary in Confluence is a snapshot, a single moment from the initial encounter with an idea or connection that suggests possibilities for interrogation toward new understanding. The Commentary is an appeal to think about an idea, to consider a question, and to take up in earnest the possible conversation toward which the Commentary points.
I have had the privilege and pleasure of teaching preliterate children to read. In this process, I have glimpsed Jacques Derrida’s différance. During the early stages of literacy, children rely on speech and text, equally, to (de)construct meaning. In so doing, the young scholars challenge the primacy of speech over writing. Anyone who spends time in a first-grade classroom will see mouths moving and hear loud whispers during “sustained silent reading.” In Derridian jargon, the observer is witnessing the child’s middle voice, or, in this case, the juncture between active and passive literacy. The emerging reader cannot restrain from vocalizing to make meaning on the page. Ask a young child to read silently and she will reply, “I am”; or, “I have to hear myself read to understand.” The beginning reader’s seemingly aural acts are situated between speech and sign communication, relying upon and responding to both modalities for meaning. This added step enables the child time to gather more information as she translates from phonemic to semantic understanding. In short, children come to know by deferring, or stretching out, the reading process as a means of (de)constructing text. Deferral serves as a critical analytical tool that opens up and exposes possibilities of reading with heightened awareness, thus creating a space where readers may identify aporias and traces in text. Moreover, during the ongoing labor of learning to read, young students continually (re)invent and (re)think, working with and against what they know and with what is on and not on the page, to create anew. To do this, they accept that words and concepts are in flux and thus cannot be fully known or grasped; they live in the in-between space where ambiguities and contradictions reside. Finally, in the process of becoming literate, emerging readers learn that meaning is dispersed throughout the text in different chains of signification with multiple interconnections (assemblages).
To decipher challenging text, I often mimic emerging readers. For example, shortly after attempting to silently read Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” and realizing that I was unable to follow the awkward syntax, I changed course and read it aloud. As I labored through the narrative, I began to interpret and experience the text differently. I consciously connected the material and semantic aspects of the text. I paid closer attention to how punctuation affects intonation and meaning. I noticed, visually and auditorily, how Stein privileges the “continuous present” to incrementally develop characters. I scrutinized the insistent repetition of words and sentences which move and morph thoughts from page to page. I was able to access, experience, and interrogate that which I could not “see” on the page before. By situating myself in the in-between space of the young reader, I (re)activated the play (jeu) of traces in Stein’s prose; as I progressed, the bizarre (defamiliarized) text became more coherent and lucid as well as layered and complex.
To become literate, students practice critical reading strategies inherent in Derrida’s différance. With a studied simplicity, Stein executes language in a way that demands readers dig below the surface of her prose. Mirroring text in children’s books, Stein uses repetition exhaustively to build, bridge, distort, and stretch meaning, incorporates a monosyllabic lexicon that both negates and supports phonemic fluency, and deploys a syntactical structure which simultaneously lacks and overuses punctuation as well as other ordinary conventions of language to clarify and complicate meaning. As Stein plays with these dualisms, she gestures towards the discovery of a new discourse. I wonder: “Is Stein brilliantly and deliberately naive in her writing so that we may (re)emerge as readers and experience the struggles and joys of learning to read all over again?”
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