So, I gave my first reading quiz: eleven questions on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The average grade was 5.8. (I always give eleven questions and mark quizzes out of ten. I like to think it evidence of grace.) I received a very thoughtful critique of the practice from one of my students, who argued, essentially, that she is excellent at grasping the concepts demonstrated in a text, but that she has never had reason, before, to pay too close attention to the little details.
That is fair, to a point.
I accept that it is possible to get through Gertrude Stein's text and understand, simply, that it subverts conventions of autobiography by having Stein tell her story by voicing Toklas's life. One might conclude that the book reveals something fundamental about Stein's consideration of authorship in the modern period, how a writer in the early twentieth century might engage with her audience. One might see how Stein's relationship with Toklas allows us to interrogate assumptions about gender and conventions like marriage. And, yes, I accept that one might get that without ever noticing that Gertrude Stein calls her dog Basket.
But, for me, there are different kinds of close reading, and these cannot be satisfactorily separated. For example, while Gertrude Stein was independently wealthy, combining a family inheritance with a fabulous art collection that appreciated in value, she still placed great emphasis on getting paid for her work. Of course, judging success as an author by level of pay was nothing new, but it seems unusual amongst writers who had an elitist disdain for their audience. Now, can this significance truly be grasped for readers who, by quiz results, seem to think that Stein chummed around with Walt Whitman? Is late-nineteenth-century conceptions of authorship in America at all relevant to the argument? I think that creating around the understanding of a concept a greater sense of context is essential, and this context is built with detail.
One more example: my quiz demonstrated whether students noticed that Stein claimed to have bullied Ernest Hemingway but seemed to accept, with some unusual tolerance, the criticism of T. S. Eliot. Would students who thought that she told Ezra Pound not to write for newspapers and had rejected by Henry James a piece for The Criterionget as good a sense of the tensions and rivalries of Paris in the 1920s?
As I explained it, the six autobiographies these students will read, if read very carefully, will allow them to sit on a cafe terrace, feel the dust under their feet as they piece together the world that gave rise to these books. Can that happen except through reading for even the tiniest detail?
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