_Proust and the Squid_ Response #1 & 2

This week I returned to Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.  A professor of child development, Wolf examines reading from historical, cultural, and biological perspectives.  Wolf has a particular interest in dyslexia, which her oldest son has.  The book emerges from her concern that, as reading becomes more and more an online experience, the human brain is losing some of the unique capacities enabled by traditional print reading.

So far I am enjoying the book...but skeptical.  I hear echoes in her argument of some older arguments about how literacy changes the brain that I thought were pretty much dismantled by the New Literacy Studies group.  Once I get further in, I will go back to some of the NLS work to compare and develop a stronger opinion about that.  For now I'm trying to suspend judgment.  I'm also not easily convinced by arguments that digital literacies are either THE future of literacy (in a positive sense) or will result in the death of our current forms of literacy (in a negative sense).  I'm also suspending judgment on that issue until I have a better sense of her argument and can better put it in context.

Whatever my final thoughts on her arguments are, Wolf does say and quote some lovely things about reading that certainly ring true for me.  "The generative capacity of reading," she writes, "parallels the fundamental plasticity in the circuit wiring of our brains: both permit us to go beyond the particulars of the given" (17).  She continues, "the rich associations, inferences, and insights emerging from this capacity allow, and indeed invite, us to reach beyond the specific content of what we read to form new thoughts" (17).  I read for many reasons; one of the most important ones is that reading makes me think in ways that are neither direct results of what I'm reading nor possible without it.  Wolf describes this as a "paradox: the goal of reading is to go beyond the author's ideas to thoughts that are increasingly autonomous, transformative, and ultimately independent of the written text" (17-18).

_Wintergirls_ Response #2

After all of our talk in class about whether YA fiction is too dark, it was good for me to begin with a book that is pretty intense, dealing with two girls with eating disorders, major mental health issues, and self-harm through substance abuse and cutting.  It is hard to read, and Anderson doesn't offer any easy answers, as much as I may have wanted Lia to enjoy drinking hot chocolate with Elijah enough to choose that kind of life over the one she was living, for example, or decide that her stepsister Emma having a healthy body image was more important than her quest for thinness.  I read many dark and difficult books in my own adolescence, but it is harder now, as a teacher and a parent, to think about these issues that may someday affect my students and children.

One of the things that caught my attention in this novel were the contradictions that were not emphasized as much as the strike-out ones but that are key to anorexia as a condition.  Lia knows she is and is proud to be the thinnest girl in the room at the memorial for Cassie at school; yet, her image of her body at New Seasons is grotesquely overweight.  She hides her thinness from her family under layers of clothing but she takes pride in her appearance as a sign of her strength.  She disapproves of her stepmother Jennifer's attempts to control her 9-year-old stepsister's diet, but doesn't identify the factors that contribute to her own negative body image.  Anderson does not attempt to explain these contradictions away.

Something that surprised me in the book was the way Cassie's ghost made it into Lia's meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Parker.  I think having the metaphorical ghost of a character who has died present in a narrative is a common enough thing that it really never occurred to me that Lia's hallucinations might be real and different from her other issues, not just a literary representation of her feelings of guilt about Cassie's death.  When she was talking to Dr. Parker about Cassie's ghost and about the other issues she had had since early adolescence, I began to wonder if she were really developing schizophrenia.  I don't feel like that prediction was confirmed at the end of the book, but that seemed to me to be where the diagnosis was headed.

Laurie Halse Anderson's _Wintergirls_ Response #1

My reading for this week began as Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, but I left it at school over the weekend, so I pulled Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls from my to-read stack at home.  Wintergirls is narrated by Lia, a high school senior who struggles with anorexia and self-mutilation, and whose childhood best friend Cassie has just died.  We don't know the details of her death early on, but we know she struggles with bulimia and alcoholism.

One of the ways that Anderson brings us into Lia's mind is through the use of strike-out type.  Lia's contradictions in thinking about food are shown as her thoughts of hunger struck out and followed by her "strong" thoughts resisting the urge to eat.  For example, thinking about having a bowl of cereal, she narrates, "I could eat the entire box I probably won't even fill the bowl" (5).  When the school nurse forces her to drink a cup of orange juice, she describes her reaction: "I take the cup from her. My throat wants it my brain wants it my blood wants it my hand does not want this my mouth does not want this" (20).  The strike-out seems to show Lia's initial thoughts and reactions and what follows is what she forces herself to think.  Lia also thinks in strike-out when making reference to her family: her mother is often "My mother Dr. Marrigan" (148) and her father is sometimes "Dad Professor Overbrook" (230), emphasizing that she thinks they are more involved in their work than their parenting.