Generous Reading

A few days ago, doing my routine perusal of new articles and pieces on Academia.edu, I stumbled upon a post on the collaborative blog 'In the Middle' by medievalist (and more) Eileen Joy, who I originally followed for her articles on humanism and post-humanism. Her piece, titled "This is Not My (or, Our) Time, so Please Take Ecstasy With Me: The Necessity of Generous Reading" resonated deeply with me not only as I am a junior, budding scholar - still, hopefully, an academic blank slate, apt to pick up on good habits and practises as much as bad ones - but also as someone who, fresh from dissertation writing and defense, still has clear in his mind the difficult, loaded process of completing what amounts, in the end, to pitching a first flag on turf that, most likely, is inhabited by other and more senior voices.

Eileen Joy's article puts forward what she terms 'generous reading': "a way to read the work of others -- even those we might disagree with for all sorts of reasons, or from whom we might feel disciplinarily (and otherwise) estranged -- with some sort of spirit of radical openness to what others are desiring to think and articulate at any given". It is not only an healthy practice of courtesy and respect for fellow researchers that is at stake but, rather, the very ethics that come into cause as we work in a profession that involves routine contact between different, sometimes hardly compatible, world-views.

What Joy seems to take issue with (as I interpret) is the way in which, within contemporary humanities research, critique and criticism moved against a certain idea, theory or approach - the materials and 'objects' of academic research - often turns into a discounting of others' very paradigms, leading ideas, and even research principles as somehow detrimental to the discipline on the ethical level of intellectual integrity; as if certain (usually emerging) approaches would somehow 'corrupt' the discipline and constitute, in the end, pernicious fads that future scholarship would have to painfully remove as so much tumoral mass. She convincingly makes, among others, the example of Object Oriented Ontology as one of such targets: in spite of OOO having already a wealth of research, bibliography and professionals that should, in theory, legitimise it as a field of research, humanities (above and beyond medievalism, one could add) still have a hard time accepting that differing paradigms can, and do, coexist.

What Joy then proposes as an 'antidote' to this malady is 'generous reading': approaching others' research with the affirmative attitude of assuming a priori the 'good intention' of the researcher, showing to 'be willing to enter into the other's provocations without a desire for being sovereign in the encounter'. What emerges is not relativism, since the point is not to 'tolerate' others' ideas: the thinking of others is encountered in a mutually perceptive way, so that a communality of spirit and intent, if not of fine points, can be established. 'Generous reading' is, essentially, the reader and the writer engaging in mutual intellectual (and spiritual) generosity.

As a PhD candidate, and as a junior scholar, I have many times been guilty of not showing such generosity. I think that in the early stages of one's academic life it is easy to mistake blunt ad hominem attacks for what should pass as lively engagement, iconoclasm, or supposedly revolutionary ideas. Not engaging in 'generous reading' cost me dearly: aggressive (and, I realised later, unjustified) attacks toward certain authors, my unwillingness to accept them at least as bearers of good faith, if not correct, put in question my depth of analysis and forced me to rethink a whole third of my doctoral dissertation, setting me back more than a few months (the names of my victims shall remain secret). I do count, however, as one of my chief doctoral achievements, exactly that: an understanding that academic research is always collaborative, even between researchers who do not, and never would, put their names on the same piece of paper; and now I understand that, in simple words, my colleagues are not 'out to get me', just as I am not 'out to get them'. Encountering articles such as Eileen Joy's only reinforces my resolve to accept others' research as ethically and morally innocent, unless proven guilty.

Please visit the excellent In the Middle blog for thought-provoking medievalism, and thought-provocation in general.  All quotes are from Eileen Joy's cited post.