In my literary criticism course, we read one title -- Tim O'Brien's fantastic work of metafiction, In the Lake of the Woods -- and then apply a different school of theory to it about every week. The novel lends itself well to this analysis, and while we also study a film after midterms, it serves as the centerpiece of the course, freeing up the student to spend more time on reading criticism itself. I expect that students will reread it from a new perspective each week.

Structured as an "unsolved mystery" the book is so open to multiple interpretations that it was practically written for my course. This is something like the fifth time I've taught this course, and every year I read the entire book again, on top of the numerous readings I performed on the text after I first received it (as a review copy for the Eugene Weekly newspaper back in the 90's). Never mind that the novel has been made into a Lifetime Movie -- it's really one of the best books you'll ever read.

Or reread.

Although I'm happy to reread O'Brien's book again and again (because I always discover something new), I've been thinking about how many time literature teachers must necessarily reread the works they teach. Spending so much time living inside a book is one of the joys, in fact, of teaching lit, but there also comes a point, inevitably, when you resist rereading it for the umpteenth time. Once you've got the book "nailed," it feels like there's no need to hammer at it any more. You can even teach some titles without bothering to reread it at all. But you also always feel a little guilty about doing so and realize that you must try to reread the text you're teaching -- especially if you hope to have meaningful discussions -- no matter how many times you've read it before. The longer you neglect to review your book, the more you'll forget about it, and the more mistakes you might make in lectures or quizzes. Or worse: if you miseducate students based on false assumptions grounded in failed memories.

At the same time, we also need to teach students the value of rereading a work. But I find this notion -- rereading -- extremely difficult to "sell" today's harried and stressed-out students. I beg them to reread pieces, especially if we're going to discuss the same text for more than one period. But so few of them do. The root of this problem lies in consumer culture, of course, which trains us to swallow texts like chocolate bars, bank them in our brains, and move right along. Clearly, the arts don't work that way and literature is not a commodity the way that a Hershey bar is. A student might be able to absorb primary details or even pick up common interpretations of a piece (from something like Sparks Notes) but she'll never truly be reading for meaning if she isn't rereading. The first time we read we react, as though to stimulae. It's the second time through where we are at greater liberty to contemplate, to analyze, to interpret -- in ways that are less under the guidence of the author and more under the guile of the reader.

But there are also pragmatic reasons why students won't reread. Time constraints. And brain constraints. You can only do so much at once. College students who major in English often take three or four lit classes at the same time, which, under some circumstances, can translate into reading up to four novels during the same week of assignments. This is usually an institutional problem, grounded in the way the major curriculum is shaped and when courses are offered. Granted, English professors are partially to blame -- since they feel they must cover a lot of ground in each course, "surveying" breadth as much as "digging" any one of them for depth, they will rarely sacrifice a book (and if you're not a lit teacher, you don't know how hard it is to whittle down to a few select representative choices!). In the process, students must cut corners wherever they can (skipping reading altogether for some classes where they know they won't be quizzed, for example -- to be a literary professor is to become an expert of detecting when students don't read!), and it's hard enough to get a student to read in the first place, let alone reread. Assigning research papers which require mining the text for passages for analysis can accomplish this...but I wonder how much of this process is rereading in the way that I think of it.

On the flip side of the coin, often there are overlaps of material across a student's lifetime that solicit rereading. Like, say, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which many students read in junior high school (when they know absolutely nothing about the adult issues in that book -- adultery at fifteen?), which they later then encounter in American Literature courses in college (where adultery finally means something a little more concrete). Rereading at a later date like this can open up so much of the text that was "missed" the first time through and -- like any book we read several years later -- we discover that as we change, the books change as well.

But sometimes college classes will overlap texts so close together, however, that it's unlikely that the students will really reread the work in question. Even short stories. It's wishful thinking to assume a student who reads "Hills Like White Elephants" in an Introduction to Ficton course will then reread it closely in a 400-level seminar in Hemingway. I think, too, I would be somewhat devestated if another professor on my campus chose to use a book that I am very dependent on -- like In the Lake of the Woods -- in a course before I got the majors as seniors in their Literary Criticism course. And it's frustrating to encounter students who are cocky with set interpretations they picked up from another class -- and it's as if you're arguing with another teacher, through the medium of the student's brain, just to get them to think again about what they assume to be true. To me, reading literature is a way of challenging assumptions. Rereading makes that possible.

One reason why I enjoy teaching popular fiction and film is because more often than not, it involves texts that students think they already know quite well, but haven't yet analyzed or read critically before. They find they want to reread popular texts, but sometimes you run into different problems: resistence to criticism, rather than rereading.

Writing is one of the reasons why I value rereading so much. Writers must reread their own work if they hope to revise it well. Writers have to anticipate and predict multiple responses from various readers to their work, and take care of those potentialities in their revisions. There are also texts that are "retellings" of various earlier texts -- revisions that perform a sort of rereading.

In my creative writing courses, students will sometimes write very entertaining work -- usually humor or adventure narratives -- which are very successful in terms of generating emotional reactions, but which do very little to stimulate the intellect. I usually tell the student that there's nothing really wrong with "fun" fiction or poetry -- with writing for entertainment -- but if the piece "doesn't invite rereading" it probably isn't as good as it could be. For one thing, because rereading is a part of revision, I'm asking the student to spend more time with their own language. But beyond that, I value texts which beg to be reread. A good piece of writing really demands to be read again, because it either creates a world that the reader wants to return to and spend more time inside, or because it raises issues that are worth reconsidering -- or else it simply is open to multivalent interpretations that one can only 'see' upon rereading. The works we treasure tend to be those we want to keep on our bookshelves and reread. Although I'm no salesman for the literary canon, as I get older and more experienced teaching literature, that the canon serves a grand purpose in terms of rereading. The literary "canon" is -- at base -- a group of texts that scholars believe it is important for audiences to return to again and again. Works worth rereading over a lifetime -- or even more than one's own lifetime. Indeed, some scholars commit their whole academic lives to rereading one or a handful of classics by the same author over and over again, teaching and writing about them in hopes of keeping those classics "alive" -- read and reread -- in perpetuity.

So how can we encourage students to reread? One way is to talk about our own pleasures of rereading and have students journal about their own experiences. Another is to craft assignments that require rereading while not making it an act that seems like more work to the student: pull out passages or assign specific chapters with guided interpretive questions. In our freshman composition courses, we use a book called Rereading America, which asks students to rethink assumptions about cultural myths and invites rereading. You can also teach a unit on literary parody, adaptation, or retelling -- there are even textbooks available, like Retellings, which incorporate literary revsionism as an archetecture for the course. And literature teachers can also craft assignments using methods mined from Reader Response Theory; perhaps even teach the criticism itself in upper division courses. (I invite you to share your own methods by leaving a comment below.)

A final point worth considering: How do (or can) online materials invite rereading? Sure, we can bookmark and return to pages, but I bet most people do so for information rather than for rereading a literary work online. (And there's a degree of serialization and deletion to online texts: how often do you reread, say, a blog entry?) There's a good article by Marcel Cornis-Pope and Ann Woodlief
on the University of Virginia Commonwealth site, called "The Rereading/Rewriting Process: Theory and Collaborative, On-line Pedagogy," which you might find of interest if computer mediated teaching is of interest to you.

You can ping this entry by using .