In this 90-minute seminar, we will practice slow, close-reading, shifting our relationship with reading from one of desiring to get to the end—of a sentence, a chapter, an entire work—to one of welcoming the awarenesses and revelations that arise as we savor every word, every phrase, every pause and rush facilitated by punctuation and syntax. In short, we’ll be doing what students whose relationship with reading has thinned to skimming for the gist avoid—but avoid at the expense of strengthening their ability to read with attention to detail and nuance and beauty, and, consequently, at the expense of building confidence in their own capacity to do such mature reading, a confidence that, once kindled, sparkles with the power and possibility of discovery and energizes any reading experience. We will be reading slowly, of course, but, subject to time, we will read selections from The Destiny Thief, a collection of essays by Richard Russo; “The Doctor,” a short story by Andre Dubus; Sula, a novel by Toni Morrison; “Puerto Vallarta,” a short story by Jennifer Egan; 1984, a novel by George Orwell; and The Great Gatsby, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. We welcome you to this seminar if you already know and love the quiet joys of reading slowly and closely; we welcome you if you’ve resisted reading this way (perhaps dating all the way back to those high school English discussions in which the brilliant kids told everybody else what everything really meant) because it always seemed too boring or too out of reach for you. We believe those joys are very much within anyone’s reach. All it takes to touch them, then to grasp them, then to carry them forever, is to begin by reading, slowly, carefully, that first magical word.
