In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Why We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading," Alan Jacobs argues that "'deep attention' reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit." The inevitable minority status of deep reading "has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea […] that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level."
Mass higher education has artificially propped up reading, in Jacobs's view, leading many to falsely believe that engaged, long-form reading is something everyone should love. Drawing on a 2005 sociological survey of reading practices, which I discuss at greater length below, Jacobs calls the population of deep readers "the reading class." Our "anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree," he concludes, "arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of 'the reading class' beyond what may be its natural limits."
In fact, "the idea that many teachers hold today, that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading--or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books--is largely alien to the history of education." We are deceiving ourselves if we think we can teach students to love reading or for that matter to read more deeply than they would "naturally" do.
Because focusing on print is a cognitively alien (and alienating) activity for children, because an appreciation for long-form reading must be, in the words of Steven Pinker, "bolted on" the student, and because that bolting-on process is so very "painstaking," we should, in Jacobs's view, "extricate reading from academic expectations." Instead of teaching "[s]low and patient reading[…]"--a pursuit which "properly belongs to our leisure hours"--we would do well to teach high schoolers and undergraduates how to "skim[…] well, and read[…] carefully for information in order to upload content."
In short, mass literary culture is an artificial construction produced in part by an unnatural and inauthentic university system. The real or authentic form of reading happens--definitionally--outside academia, among autodidacts and amateurs. Though couched in a breezy and easygoing tone, Jacobs is making an extraordinarily destructive argument, not only from the perspective of someone who is invested in the flourishing of the academy but also from the perspective of someone who wants to enlarge literary culture. I count myself among both groups.
In an era where universities are seeking new ways to justify slashing and burning the humanities, Jacobs provides fresh ammunition to administrators. Real reading can't, apparently by definition, happen in the classroom. Real reading happens in the marketplace, among individuals or small private groups of enthusiasts. Why fund literature departments if they, at best, have no effect on literary appreciation or at worst actively inculcate shame and fear in potential readers by making reading a pill?1
To support his arguments, Jacobs cites a great 2005 Annual Review of Sociology article, "Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century," by Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright. In this review of recent approaches to the sociology of reading--and investigations of multiple literacies--Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright show that reading is always the product of collective determinants and institutional mediation, and suggest that reading might indeed become a minority taste in the future.
Contra Jacobs's claims, however, their discussion of the development of a "reading class" has nothing to do with the "natural" boundaries of the reading public, but is rather about the way different institutional arrangements lead to different reading levels and practices.
They do argue that "historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly" and that "[w]e are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class."
But far from being the practice of a tribe of "natural readers," as Jacobs wants to argue, reading always happens in terms of a "social base." Whether a majority or a minority taste, there is little that is "natural" or "unnatural" about what they describe. Formal education is "the main determinant of literary proficiency," but even the isolated reader (or the autodidact Jacobs celebrates) is enmeshed in large and complex social systems of literary framing and pre-digested interpretation. Whatever their motivations or virtues, the self-perpetuating minority of the "reading class" relies as much on this "social base" as mass readers do. The anomalous nature of mass reading is not an argument against it--or for it. It is merely a social fact.
What this means is that Jacobs misunderstands the real implications of his own claims. From a social fact (the unnaturalness of mass long-form reading) he derives what seem to me to be non-sequitur conclusion (the desirability of this decline). As I have argued in a previous post, the unsuitability of our biology to a certain practice is not an argument against that practice. Likewise, the universality of a biological aspect of the human organism is no argument for it. The artificiality, difficulty, and education-dependence of deep reading is not an argument against the humanities but could well be an argument for the humanities. After all, if we value long-form reading--and long-form reading requires intensive training to perform well--we had best invest in institutions whose goal is the inculcation of this skill.
Finally, in a literary-historical register, Jacobs's arguments seem to call for the development of a research program that could empirically elaborate upon the conclusions of Griswold, McDonnell, and Wright. If, as I suspect, the demand for literature is anything but "natural," but is itself produced institutionally, literary scholars should dedicate themselves to investigating the historical, social, political, and economic production of demand. Post-WWII U.S. literature would be an especially ripe case study for anyone interested in this research program, not only because the institutional forces producing demand are so well documented but because for many of us these forces have had very powerful personal effects on who we are and our relationship to literary art.
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Notes
1. Some might argue that literature departments ought to be justified without referring to their salubrious effects on reading habits and practices. This is something like Stanley Fish's argument on the uselessness of the humanities. I won't address this argument here, but I should say that it's problematic and probably leaves the humanities on even weaker footing, even if only in the purely cynical terms of the administrative fight to secure funding.
Wow. What a fantastic post. I had read the Jacobs piece and been troubled by it, without being able to put my finger on the exact source of its argumentative weaknesses. You've done just that, in a way that perhaps makes the Jacobs line even more dispiriting but that also offers a remedy. I feel a little better now!
Isn't it amazing how many people are still trying to get an "ought" out of an "is"? You'd think that David Hume would have put paid to that. (Delightfully, a certain Ayn Rand inveighed against Hume on this point, her argument being that, well, she didn't like it.)
As for teaching students how to skim -- good lord. The last thing people need to learn is how to skim and to mine for information. In this day and age, we're very good at that. Not so good, perhaps, at sitting through a complicated argument, a thick description, or a sustained aesthetic cadence.
Thanks, Josh! Jacobs's move from "is" to "ought" is strange... Even stranger, his misreading of Wright et al. means he gets his "is" wrong, too.
Well, of course, there's nothing "natural" about any kind of reading, long-form, short-form, mid-form, whatever-form. As you indicate, Lee, it's a useless analytical category. Well, I guess it's worse than useless, as it's used to motivate a wrong-headed argument.
Sometime in the past Language Log has had some posts on the difficulties of reading Japanese and, I believe, Chinese. Alas, I have no URLs to offer, but it might be worth your while to search through the archive. As I recall, the posts were commenting on studies that showed an extraordinarily low level of functionally useful adult literary in Japan and China. It seems that the writing system is so very difficult to learn that, once out of school, most adults slack off considerably.
On the institutional conditions fostering long-form literacy, J. Hillis Miller reflects on this just a bit, with tongue ever so deftly in cheek, in an article where he ponders 50 years in the profession:
That's from an article, My Fifty Years in the Profession, published in the ADE Bulletin for Winter 2003. You can download the whole issue (PDF).
I quite agree--those who invoke nature to justify their values pretty much always commit a fallacy of relevance -- though I wouldn't dismiss the term "natural" completely. It can be a useful folk term for describing certain tendencies and realities. We might say that humans are not "naturally" inclined to live in the vaccum of space, for example, without too much metaphysical worry.
Lee, thanks for responding so thoroughly to the except from my book run in the Chronicle. I have read through the excerpt again, and I can't find anywhere where I suggest that it is desirable that the "social base" of literary readers, as Griswold et al. call it, shrink. Can you point me to the spot of the foul? If I said that, it was by accident, because I don't believe a decline in literary reading is desirable. It may not be avoidable, but that's a different matter — though as I note in the book, the most recent NEA study reveals a heartening uptick in literary reading.
I think you go astray in your critique of the excerpt by imposing on it a distinction of your own, between "real reading" and . . . well, some other kind that I don't think you define. My distinction is between, on the one hand, the kind of "rapt" or "lost-in-a-book" attentiveness that (in my judgment) not many people experience and cannot be taught and, on the other hand, several kinds of reading that can be taught. These range from the quick skim to the careful, thorough analytical reading — but a careful, thorough analytical reading that can be done in many relatively small chunks of time, because it is wildly unrealistic to expect college students to spend hours on end absorbed in a single book. If a student gets so wrapped up in Kant's second critique that she forgets to go to dinner, that is a glorious thing; but not a thing that can be either taught or expected. You may consider that rapt reading the only "real" reading, but I don't.
I don't think I'm giving any ammunition to detractors of the humanities. In fact, I think I'm taking ammunition away. I don't give them room to say, "You literature people are just sitting around in a room talking about how much you love reading and how wonderful it is to appreciate literature and all that fuzzy crap." Instead, I tell the critics that whether my students love literature or not is their own business. I am training them in the kind of critical discernment, intellectual triage, that Francis Bacon recommends in that famous passage that I quote: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." It's my job to help students decide which method of reading to apply in a given situation, and then to teach them how to perform each of those tasks as well as possible.
(In light of those goals, I have to say that I couldn't disagree more with Joshua Landy's statement that "In this day and age, we're very good" at skimming and mining for information. I think we're terrible at both. My students tend to think that they do those tasks well, but they're almost always wrong. They need a great deal more instruction in both when and how to skim, and in the most elementary techniques of data mining. That's part of my job as much as teaching how to read books "wholly, and with diligence and attention.")
Well, I've gone on long enough. Thanks for the opportunity to converse on these matters. And please, read the whole book instead of the excerpt, which can't help but be misleading!
"...the kind of "rapt" or "lost-in-a-book" attentiveness that (in my judgment) not many people experience and cannot be taught and, on the other hand, several kinds of reading that can be taught."
For what it's worth this made me think back to my childhood when my father would read Huckleberry Finn and King Soloman's Mines (among others) to me, well before I could have read them myself. Is that what it takes to acquire "lost-in-the-book" attentiveness? I don't think we've got a clue on that.
On skimming and mining, I put myself through graduate school (for three years of it) by writing abstracts of the literature in computational linguistics, not exactly my home discipline. I had to learn, not only how to 'skim' effectively, but how to synthesize the results into coherent prose. Putting it in your own words, that's the test.
Come to think of it, well before graduate school I had an undergraduate teacher, James Deese, who did that, got us to put it in our own words. I took a course on psycholinguistics from him. Each week we'd read a classic article in psycholinguistics (Deese's choice) and have to summarize it. Extraordinarily good intellectual discipline.
Bill, in relation to what you say about your childhood experience: I tend to think — I wish I could find some data on this — that it's extremely difficult for people to find the lost-in-the-book experience if they didn't get an early start. I know it's possible, because my own sister managed to avoid books altogether until she was in her early 40s and is now a voracious reader. But it has to be tough.
And my guess is that your grad-school experience of writing abstracts was useful training. But it's not training that many people get.
or the bedtime story?
The thing about being told a bedtime story is you, the child, are about to go to sleep (and to dream). You are in a liminal zone of consciousness. So, you're in that zone, night after night, and, night after night, you hear story after story. I should think that would be conducive to absorbed reading or the sort where, when older, you'll stay up all night just reading a book.
Do you have any idea whether anyone's studied the bedtime story? Do we have historical information, diaries, child-rearing manuals, etc.? We do have a Charles Ives song on the subject.
It’s good to see a debate shaping up here. I have taught skimming in an English classroom and will do so again; Alan is right that skimming is among the crucial information management skills, and that it does not come naturally. He’s also right that literature classes—and not only at the post-secondary level—should have more to offer than just cultivating the taste and the skills needed to read certain kinds of books intensively and appreciatively.
But the key point in Lee’s critique was that it’s a mistake both of principle and of strategy to naturalize membership in the reading class as coming down to an accident of birth rather than something produced in institutions. The following sentences in the Chronicle piece were disturbing to me:
That sounds like a willful refusal to accept that education, including literary education, distributes cultural capital unequally, and that those inequalities both respond to and reproduce inequalities of social class. It’s not a question of whether no one from an unprivileged background can become an “extreme reader,” it’s a question of whether being born into, say, an urban professional family all of whose adult members have bachelor’s degrees or higher would improve your chances of becoming one. And whether that is something we should be complacent about.
Let me now get on my own hobbyhorse and point out that this dialogue could be improved by clarifying what genres we’re talking about. The prototypical absorptive object of reading is the novel—indeed for most of its life the novel’s absorptive power has often been considered dangerous. Are we talking about the “deep reading” of novels? Of only “serious” novels? Yet the skills of information management and filtering are most frequently called for when dealing with informational or argumentative genres (history, policy, memo?). Skimming these genres has different uses than skimming a novel. To say nothing of poetry or drama or electronic literature.
Andrew, I genuinely don't believe that academic institutions, beyond the level of elementary school anyway, have much to do with creating what I call "extreme readers." They have a lot to do with creating intellectuals, and academically ambitious readers, and maybe even scholars; but I don't think they create the kind of reader who gets "lost in a book," which was the subject of that tiny excerpt from my book (a book that also deals with other kinds of reading and other kinds of reader). I am not even convinced that "extreme readers" are disproportionately represented among professors of literature.
As Bill Benzon suggests, there may not be a lot of data to work with here — I certainly have felt the lack of data in researching these matters — but if my own experience is anything to go by, I became acquainted with the practice of "rapt" reading by growing up in a family of readers. (And that may be the only likely way, since we rarely see anyone reading raptly in school — we're all too busy and talkative and all.) I am the only member of my family to attend college, by the way; but my parents and grandmother were devoted readers. And I am sure that my own habits of reading-as-such are much more deeply formed by my family upbringing than by anything I learned in all my schooling. So if I did underrate an institutions, which is of course possible, that institution is the family.
(And that's not a "willful refusal to accept" anything; just a different read of the circumstances than yours.)
This has been a really interesting exchange to follow. The question I’m left with, though, is whether “rapt” reading is necessarily equivalent to the mode of reading that entails the “diligence and attention” that Bacon claimed some books deserve. That is, speaking out of my own experience, there’s a distinction between rapt, lost-in-the-book reading and the kind that I practice as a literary scholar and try to teach to my students. Indeed—and perhaps this is my own shortcoming—I would say that the two modes don’t happen simultaneously. I might have a rapt reading experience the first time through novel. A second time, I would read with what I would call “diligence and attention,” tracking compelling passages, the interweaving of plots, nuances of narration (etcetera) that I hadn’t noticed the first time around. Of course such reading can be deeply absorbing, too—but it feels to me like a different kind of absorption. And I find it perfectly possible to have a rapt-reading experience with a text on which I’m never going to train a serious (diligent and attentive) literary gaze.
Anne, I agree completely with your distinction and was trying to make it myself. It's rapt reading that can't be taught, while reading with "diligence and attention" can be. Or so sez me.
I completely agree with Anne's suggestion that rapt reading is different from attentive reading, and that, indeed, rapt reading often has qualities similar to skimming. But this then also goes to Andrew's point about genre; some genres (the "trashy" ones) are more skimmable than others, more likely to be "consumed"—perhaps "voraciously"—and then, of course, discarded.
That is to say, if rapt reading that can't be taught, then it's often because it doesn't need to be, since it takes the shape of the "addictive," "bad" kind of reading that makes parents and schoolteachers say, "well, at least they're reading" (e.g. in reference to Harry Potter or Twilight or, in an earlier age, to Goosebumps and similar series of various dubiousnesses).
But then, of course, that "bad" rapt reading so often conduces either to attentive reading or to rapt reading of less obviously amenable texts. I'm pretty sure a significant percentage of professional medievalists once owned a hobbit costume.
I may as well trot out my own hobbyhorse and push Anne's William James reference a bit further in order to note that his then students, Gertrude Stein and Leon Solomons, used rapt reading as a means of studying attention in their 1896 paper "Normal Motor Automatism." Stein and Solomons sought to thoroughly distract their subjects (who were, in this case, themselves, and primarily Stein) in order to see what quasicognitive acts their bodies could perform without the benefit of consciousness. Pure automatism can be achieved, they note in their paper, "when the story [used to distract the subject] grows interesting" (498).
Amazingly, the power of rapt reading to take one out of oneself is treated as an absolute given by Solomons and Stein, warranting no particular interrogation.
Sadly, they give few specifics about the stories used—only that the stories are "thrilling" (505), and that, provocatively, "Dialect stories do not go well at all" (504).
[Solomons, Leon, and Gertrude Stein. “Normal Motor Automatism.” Psychological Review 3
(1896) 492-512. Print. ]
Natalia, I am very glad to learn about this — wish I had known it when writing my book.
I'm delighted, Natalia, that my all-but-randomly chosen title solicited this fascinating account of William James and his research assistants. I can't help but wonder whether the context for this was the physiological criticism that, as Nicholas Dames has shown in his brilliant book The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007) dominated Victorian theories of the novel. Dames's main argument is that Victorian critics were interested in the way that reading fiction affected the reader's nervous system, and that certain novelists (he writes about Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing) consciously respond to and even resist these theories in their fiction.
Interestingly, he attributes the demise of this physiological criticism partly to Henry James, who, in "The Art of Fiction," promoted novel-centered criticism--criticism whose primary focus was on the text rather than on the reader's responses. I don't think he says very much about William James, though--I haven't got the book here, but according to the index published on Amazon, there are only a few pages on WJ.
I feel like I ought to clarify that while both Solomons and Stein were James's students (Solomons a grad student; Stein, of course, at the newly-so-named Radcliffe), Solomons was the PI, as it were, on this study, and James wasn't directly involved. Stein would follow it up with her own study, "Cultivated Motor Automatism," with some ninety subjects—something of an improvement over Solomons's two. You can read a slightly misleading account of this period of Stein's life in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
What's remarkable to me about "Normal Motor Automatism" is the utilitarian and absolutely unquestioning way in which rapt reading is treated. It's not at all the thing being studied, just a surefire way to get the subjects distracted.
Later, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner came across "Normal Motor Automatism" and accused Stein of doing automatic writing herself (publicly, in the Atlantic).
The fact that the kind of "automatic writing" induced in the study (which Skinner, wrongly, equates with Stein's avant-garde output) is attained only through the remarkable absorptive powers of some "thrilling" stories usually goes under the radar.
Thanks, Lee, for this terrific post. The tendency to naturalize socially-produced phenomena is a persistent mistake both within the academy and outside it, and doing so almost always has, as you suggest, disturbing implications.
I want to pull out a couple of quotes both from your post and Andrew's response that I think deserve particular attention because they point to what is at the heart of the problem with Jacob's piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. (This is not to say that there aren't some important observations in it, as well. Jacobs is right to note the sociological fact that the expansion of higher education increased our expectations regarding the reading practices of a more educated populace.)
The quotes I'd like to draw attention to are these:
Konstantinou: "the demand for literature is anything but 'natural,' but is itself produced institutionally, literary scholars should dedicate themselves to investigating the historical, social, political, and economic production of demand."
Goldstone: "It’s not a question of whether no one from an unprivileged background can become an “extreme reader,” it’s a question of whether being born into, say, an urban professional family all of whose adult members have bachelor’s degrees or higher would improve your chances of becoming one. And whether that is something we should be complacent about."
Goldstone: "this dialogue could be improved by clarifying what genres we’re talking about."
The first point implicit in your post that I'd like to emphasize is that the academy is not the only "institution" that shapes how and whether a person reads. Further, echoing Andrew here, different genres demand different kinds of reading. Finally, I'll just note that "reading" is a skill that is not limited to printed texts.
Thanks for your participation in this conversation, Alan -- and thanks to everyone else for your thoughtful replies to my original post. I have too many things to say here… Let me try to be brief...
I admit to being novel-centric in my response, though I think my arguments apply to poetry as well. My argument about "the humanities" is not so secretly really about the literature department. More broadly, I completely agree about the need to teach "intellectual triage." This skill transcends literature departments -- it's something like the metalanguage of intellectual life, and a very important tool for getting through the day, and I've been teaching it for two years as a teaching fellow in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric.
In my use of "real reading" I was referring to what I took to be the special value or fondness you were conferring on rapt reading. You seem to argue for teaching triage but argue against the possibility of teaching rapt reading. Rapt reading happens elsewhere... This is perhaps the core of our disagreement. I don't want to exclude rapt reading from the list of teachable reading styles. I don't think we need to, either. Moreover, rapt reading seems to me to have an eminently institutional character, if we understand that schools are one among many institutions that support the social base of reading.
Even leisure -- as a practice and concept -- is an institution with a complex history. In previous posts, I have expressed my suspicion that the institution of leisure probably must take a certain form to promote rapt reading. I.e., rapt reading is not a cultural universal, but the product of specific conditions. It helps, first, to HAVE leisure time. It doesn't help to come home from work every day nearly exhausted to death or to spend your off hours worried about the capacity to make ends meet. It helps to have a culture that values reading. It helps to be able to afford books. Formal schooling helps. And so on…
University literature departments are only one institution among an ensemble that facilitates rapt reading. It seems to me that if literature departments have a justification -- and a distinction from say history or political science or rhetoric -- it is the idea that rapt and attentive reading is something that can be enhanced at the university level and that the university can productively participate in the wider ensemble of institutions that shapes literary culture. Otherwise, why have literature departments at all?
Lee, I think we have literature departments in order to teach people how better to understand literature. This requires them to read literature carefully — in most cases anyway, excepting the Franco Moretti model of distanced reading — but not necessarily to be "lost in a book," to be rapt. In fact, there may not be a correlation between the ability to read "raptly" and the ability to do the kind of critical and analytical work professors tend to teach and to value. Perhaps you have noticed, as I certainly have, that the students who have the strongest personal responses to literature, who are most likely to be wholly absorbed by novels or poems or plays, are rarely the best critics and scholars. It may be that resistance to raptness is an ingredient of the scholarly temperament.
In any case, if I am wrong and you are right about the teachability of raptness — and I devoutly hope you are right! — then I must say that I have never seen a writing assignment or an in-class exercise designed to promote this mode of reading. I don't even know what such assignments and exercises would look like. It might be a useful thought experiment to try to come up with some.
Finally, about the social conditions that promote raptness: I was made to think about this a great deal (and to write about it some) while reading Jonathan Rose's magisterial Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. It was stunning to discover just how deeply committed some poor and exhausted people were to finding a "cone of silence" in which they could truly be lost in a book. But their efforts were superhuman and not to be expected of anyone; this is one reason why in my book I emphasize the importance of maintaining healthy library systems — and systems that see libraries primarily as places of peace and silence, not merely as social centers.
Thanks for the interlocution!
It's great that Alan has joined this conversation, which has become even richer as a result. (Fun to think whether its readers have been skimming, diligent, or rapt!)
I want to offer myself as a poster-child for the kind of phenomenon Alan denies. Like many people of my generation and background, I grew up reading comic books and children's novels; I had absolutely no interest, however, in "serious fiction," let alone in lyric poetry. (Hands up if you've also heard this from your students.) Thanks to a series of fantastic tutors at college, I not only learned to read lyric poetry diligently but also fell in love with it, a truly unexpected result.
How did these tutors do it? Easy: by revealing the hidden treasure and by making their enthusiasm contagious. That's how we all do it, if we do.
Alan concedes above that family makes a difference, and semi-concedes that elementary school makes a difference. Why not go all the way, with Lee, and say that all kinds of institution make a difference? Why not admit Lee's follow-up point that the kind of "scholé" granted by college -- combined with its right use -- can actually open up worlds to people previously denied them, whether for social, economic, or other reasons? (Here I'm warmly echoing Andrew and Paula.)
This brings me (back) to the most important point -- the one about offering comfort to the adversary. I wish it weren't so, but I'm afraid I have to agree with Lee that your piece doesn't exactly help our cause. It's a very thoughtful piece (you're no Stanley Fish!), and your comments here have been even more nuanced and illuminating, but still one can't help assuming that many will conclude from your piece that English departments are not much more than glorified fan-clubs, and that long-form reading (whether of fiction, lyric, or nonfiction) is something citizens of a modern democracy can perfectly well do without.
I personally doubt that. A modern democracy can indeed carry on just fine with a certain percentage of its members unable to sustain more than momentary thought and attention, but once distraction becomes the norm, we are surely all in trouble.
I'm interested in this kind of thought experiment. I teach a reading class to middle school students. As it is, the class is designed to confront aliteracy, not illiteracy. A love of reading – and the best indicator of a lover of reading: raptness – is the explicit goal of the course.
I don't know of any one lesson or exercise that can do this. I certainly don't know of any kind of writing assignment that scaffolds rapt reading. The best I've found is to teach good reading habits and strategies, get them in situations where distractions are minimized (this is very hard) and make sure they have a really good book (that's in their Lexile range and aligns with their interests; also very hard) in their hands.
The most success I've had at creating (finding?) rapt readers has come through those serendipitous moments when somehow I've handed just the right book to a reader who has enough ability and a uninterrupted chunk of time. There's not a formula for this. But if there was, it might go like this: Create the conditions. Know students. Know books. Get them together. That's it. The rest must be magic.
I do a pre, mid and post survey of student reading attitudes. This year I will include an item asking if they have ever "gotten lost in a book" or something to that effect. I hope (and have some anecdotal evidence to change "hope" to "believe") that middle school, not just elementary, can make a difference.
Alan -- I agree that having the capacity to get lost in a book is not necessarily a good predictor of a student's insight into a work of literature.
Still, though I want to avoid terminological hairsplitting, it seems to me that your are stripping the concept of "rapt reading" of many of its core features. The core aspect of reading culture that many commentators (e.g., Nicholas Carr, whom you cite) seem to think is being eroded or destroyed by the Internet or television or whatever is our capacity to sustain attention to print.
It's hard for me to believe that one can be what you call a "careful reader" without being a reader capable of sustaining at least some measure of attention, and I am hesitant to remove sustained attention from raptness. Even if carefulness and raptness are separate concepts (a claim I'm skeptical of...), both still seem to stand on the foundation of sustained attention, and I got the impression from your Chronicle excerpt (because you cite Carr, etc.) that that latter capacity was what you were talking about.
I don't want students to datamine Gravity's Rainbow -- or not only to datamine it... -- but to cultivate the cognitive abilities to understand it. And understanding it is partly about understanding -- and trying to enter into -- the particular kind of readerly experience Pynchon is seeking to create.
When I was in graduate school I concluded that reading literary texts for course work was a lousy way to read the texts. Why? Because you had to be on the look-out for things to discuss in class or take notes on, and that kind of attention was at odds with simply getting lost in the texts. It seemed to me that you really should read each text twice. Once for the experience and then again to 'data mine' it. Except there wasn't time to do that.
The New York Times has an interesting article about the problem of writing young adult fiction for boys.
Please stay on topic. Thanks.
I should think that an article about getting boys to read books is relevant to a discussion of absorption in reading. One can't be a rapt reader is one isn't a reader at all.
July 31, 2011: We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading, Alan Jacobs
Thank you for this thought provoking article on trends and factors implicated in "enraptured and engrossing," "involved but functional" and "filtering-skimming" styles of reading (phrases in quotation marks are mine). The explosion of printed literature and its superfast dissemination in modern times necessitate rigorous choices in what we choose to read for leisure, education or work. This burgeoning output of print material across several delivery platforms has clearly outgrown the 24 hour ceiling each day, even over a lifetime of reading. Although modernization has afforded more hours of rest and recreation than at any other time in human history, books are struggling against many other avenues of leisure fulfilment among an audience with rapidly diminishing capacity for attention and focus. Jacobs could have discussed the deleterious role of fast paced social networking, web- and information technology-based pursuits and modern society's impetus for multitasking in the diminution of our inclination for thoughtfully engaged reading.