Saving reading from the utilitarians

You Are What You Read: A Practical Guide to Reading Well
Robert DiYanni
Princeton University Press
2021
240 pages
ISBN: 9780691206783

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Recent changes to post-primary education in Ireland have moved to deemphasise detailed and deep reading in favour of picking and choosing from a wider range sources. What little dialogue our consensus-driven commentariat permits has offered few criticisms of these modifications. The English curriculum, for instance, now gives less importance to deeper readings of an individual novel and Shakespeare play in favour of broader, more plentiful, yet ultimately more superficial readings of extracts from many plays, novels, and wider sources. Exposure to the breadth of literature undoubtedly has its benefits. But it is also a pity for many teenagers as they will miss out on the pleasure and sense of achievement gained from successfully sticking with, completing, and understanding a single longer text, such as a novel. And unfortunately, for many of them, the novel they read in school will be among the few, or even the only one, they read during their lives.

You Are What You Read by Robert DiYanni is a timely reminder that reading is a multifaceted sensory and intellectual practice that brings many enriching blessings to our existence. DiYanni is a professor of humanities at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He has written on aspects of critical thinking and teaching practice, including The Pearson Guide to Critical and Creative Thinking (2015) and Critical and Creative Thinking: A Brief Guide for Teachers (2016). The present book appraises the joys and benefits of reading from both practical and more abstract perspectives.

Comprising six chapters across three sections, the first part explores approaches to the activity of reading itself. The second part digs deeper into aspects of both non-fiction and fiction, while the final section evaluates reading as an “applied” discipline – the tangible, life-involving aspects of the practice. Each chapter draws upon generous examples from well-known writers to make its case, including some close readings of literary greats such as Austen, Joyce, and Montaigne. And, in what may be considered a pardonable moment of self-indulgence, a poem penned by DiYanni himself, dispassionately glossed and exegetised in the third person.

The book opens with the thought-provoking argument that reading for meaning ought not to overwhelm other aspects of the practice. Rather it is important and beneficial for us to read in order to “listen” to the words: “Though grappling with textual meaning(s) may be our ultimate goal, it does not follow that we should begin with the question of meaning.” As with listening to a song, our attention is often caught by the chorus or particular parts of the melody long before (if ever) we start paying particular heed to the words themselves. DiYanni encourages us to let go of our reductive tendency to categorise and define in order to let the mystery and play of the words pique and stir us.

While meaning can assure us, motivating us to understand and “get” the text, reading literature only for meaning can also confine us. Chaucer, Shakespeare and the pantheon of other literary greats were not writing instruction manuals. Meaning was often veiled beneath the wordcraft that makes such literature an art. Indeed DiYanni’s approach makes sense when one considers how precipitously our reading perspectives have narrowed today.

One need look no further than our humanities faculties, many of which have fallen under the spell of totalising narratives and ideologies. In doing so, they have made these their primary raisons d’etres, while instrumentalising and rendering contingent the literary and material artefacts they were meant to study and preserve. The process of compressing the play and polysemy of great writers into the puritanical and simplistic moral frameworks that pass for literary criticism today represents a disservice to their craft.

The question of meaning is finally broached in the second chapter. Here DiYanni accepts that, while meaning can vary from person to person, “surely there must also somehow be some core or kernel of truth these diverse groups can agree on, can accept as a central textual truth.” Unfortunately, some aspects of meaning get muddled in this chapter.

DiYanni explains that we read for the sake of truth, goodness, and beauty. All well and good. Then in a confusing agglomeration of periods and personalities, he situates the “discovery” of these transcendent values in the intellectual and affective fervour of Enlightenment and Romantiicsm. According to DiYanni, “Keats’s relation of truth with beauty was anticipated by Shakespeare in a number of sonnets, notably sonnet 14: “truth and beauty shall together thrive.” […] A few centuries later Ralph Waldo Emerson added another term to the equation – “goodness” – equating each virtue with the others in a holy trinity discovered and celebrated not in churches and creeds but in the heart of nature.”

These hasty statements badly need greater unpacking and refinement. But DiYanni probes no deeper, leading the unwitting reader to assume that the timeless qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty were somehow “discovered” by poets and philosophers a mere three hundred years ago. The voices of Aquinas and other great scholastics of medieval Europe, not to mention Aristotle and Plato, their ultimate forbears, remain silent.

Aligned perfectly with the birth of modernity, yet harnessing the language of Christianity, the book’s identification of a “holy trinity” of truth, goodness, and beauty discovered and celebrated “not in churches and creeds but in the heart of nature,” revealingly, if unintentionally, manifests the extent of our disenchantment today. In a chapter on the importance of reading for meaning, it would have helped if DiYanni had at least hinted at the timeless depths of classical and Judeo-Christian thought lying behind this triad that intersects philosophy and theology. Thankfully, growing contemporary voices – such as Pope Benedict XVI, Tom Holland, and Sohrab Ahmari, each in their own fields – are waking up to our dimmed metaphysical vision, and the terminally atrophied cultural corpus to which it leads.

All is not lost, however. Somewhat ironically, the triggered reader may obtain relief from this distressing situation a few paragraphs later in the assuring words that “[t]he author’s truth is neither singular, nor absolute, nor definitive.” We must take our consolations where we can find them, dear reader.

The second and third parts of the book move from these cognitive and affective aspects of reading practice to considerations regarding fiction and non-fiction, and the interfaces between literature and living. The chapter on non-fiction texts focuses in particular on the essay, a kind of writing that has “long had an uncertain status as literature.” DiYanni offers a spirited defence of the essay as an “accommodating genre” for teasing out ideas and telling stories. Derived from the French essayer, “to try,” the essay form, he argues, is as much about process as product. References to the writings of great essayists such as Montaigne and Orwell embellish the chapter.

The final chapters concern reading’s intersections with living. DiYanni challenges contemporary approaches to reading that are rooted in a kind of utilitarianism: “Reading is often seen as a means to an end – to acquire information, amass knowledge, deepen understanding – all worthy goals. […] These goals, however, are frequently atomized, segregated, and made to serve limited purposes, including the development of reading “skills”. Students, for example, are taught to “use” reading rather than to “enjoy it”. Echoing the arguments that opened the first chapter, DiYanni urges us to let go, “to surrender ourselves to the text,” to accept the “temporary frustrations of reading,” in order to gain a more gratifying kind of fulfilment by grappling with and working through the ideas and arguments presented therein.

In spite of its earlier dips in chapter two, the book persuasively challenges our tendency toward an enfeebled utilitarianism in our reading and understanding of texts. The emaciated functional literacy of contemporary society attests to the triumph of proceduralism that has penetrated all aspects of our lives, including the kinds of texts we read, and the ways we have learned to read them. Unfortunately the opportunity cost of such narrowly focused reading ability is a diminishing access to our rich literacy and cultural treasury, a treasury of ideas that are increasingly beyond our grasp.

Overall DiYanni’s style is engaging, relaxed, and readable, and the book presents some compelling arguments. However, one cannot help but wonder what kind of reader this book is for. Who has the time or the inclination to read about reading? You Are What You Read forms part of a “Skills for Scholars” series published by Princeton University Press. The series includes other titles such as A Field Guide to Grad School, Syllabus, and – most intriguingly of all – Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. University Presses are not typically known for affordable titles, especially not when they are hardbacks. Destitute undergraduates are unlikely to have the funds for such an investment, while postgraduates are likely to have attained a sufficient depth of cultural literacy to render a book such as this one redundant.

Beyond the ivory towers, reasonably seasoned readers with some prior exposure to our literary and aesthetic heritage are likely to reap greater rewards by exploring ever deeper the classics of western literature. And those who are only embarking on such an odyssey may not gain much by reading a lengthy tome about the benefits of reading. They will save precious time by simply getting stuck into the literary greats themselves.

A institution as reputable as Princeton University Press inevitably lends the esteem and authority of its reputation to its publications. However, You Are What You Read itself makes no claims to a monopolistic or singular outlook on reading and literature. Approached in this spirit, DiYanni’s weaker moments do not detract from his thought-provoking and persuasive insights. And ultimately the book is best read this way – as the engaging, lively, yet never totalising, perspectives of a man who has dedicated his decades-long career to the cause of the humanities in academe.