Metaphors We Read By Laurence Musgrove English and Foreign Languages Saint Xavier University

Consider the kinds of reading assignments you generally give your students. How do you commonly present “reading” as an activity to your students? What do you ask them to do as they read or with the texts they are assigned? Make a list of the verbs you use to describe these activities.

“But I was not a good reader. Merely bookish, I lacked a point of view. I vacuumed books for epigrams, scraps of information, ideas, themes — anything to fill the hollow within me and make me feel educated.” Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

Surveying Holding Taking apart Weighing Integrating Counting Soaking up Traveling Spelunking Mirroring Stealing Fearing Exercising Comforting Investing Hardening Forgetting Translating Embracing Wrestling

“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

What are the metaphors we use to describe the “reading relationships” we want our students to have with texts?

I I go among the trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle. Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight. What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear of me leaves it. It sings, and I hear its song. Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song. After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, and day turns, the trees move. Wendell Berry from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems