What readers bring to texts

Last week we learned of the discovery of another example in an increasingly long line of forged memoirs: Margaret “Jones” Seltzer was discovered to have forged the story of her life as a gang-affiliated, drug-running youth in LA, when her sister saw her picture in the NY Times and ratted her out. Of the many journalists covering the incident and those like it,NPR’s Scott Simon makes several points worth remembering (they’ve been made many times before) about the nature of genre in literature:

“Now if some Brooklyn or London novelist had written a story set among drug gangs and uttered those words [referring to an audio clip by Seltzer] people might have dismissed them as pretentious nonsense. Put those sentences into a so-called memoir and people call it ‘gritty and real’, or ‘raw, tender and tough-minded’ like the New York Times did.”

The point that this raises, for the purposes of this post, is that the meaning of a text cannot be divorced from the expectations brought to it by its reader(s). Simon also says “the people who wrote these frauds knew that if they had presented their books as novels they would have had to withstand a whole different kind of criticism; what critic will bash the literary style of a memoir by someone who was suckled by wolves, ran with gangs, or was dragooned into being a child soldier? Calling these books ‘memoirs’ allows their flaws to masquerade as proof that they’re ‘raw and real.’”

This has obvious implications for reading sacred literature that are already visible in the genre “sacred literature”. What it reveals is not so much about what the text contains as it does about what is invested in the texts by certain communities.

Scattered thoughts on CES, nuance, gray areas, and teaching Institute

This post is a response of sorts to posts and comments here, here, and here.

Since much of this is anecdotal and based on my own experiences, I need to explain what those experiences are. I grew up outside Utah, attended early-morning seminary, and then Institute, but only during my freshman year (not at BYU.) I’m currently a Bible-oriented graduate student and a volunteer Institute teacher with several years of varied teaching experience. The students I’ve had are probably atypical in that they have always been college students or graduate students (mostly the latter) and returned missionaries (very often).