Reading Response to Birkerts

Kyle Smith
Anna Wolff
English 100 A
24 January 2010

In The Owl Has Flown by Sven Birkerts he suggests that in our culture people are reading extensively by reading all kinds of different things only once. What he is trying to get his readers to consider is that we should be reading intensively by reading the same text over and over again. He says that “When books are rare, hard to obtain, and expensive, the reader must compensate through intensified focus, must like Menocchio read the same passages over and over, memorizing, inscribing the words deeply on the slate of the attention, subjecting them to an interpretive pressure not unlike what students of scripture practice upon their texts. This ferocious reading--prison or desert island reading—and where it does not assume depth, it creates it.” He is saying that when we read only a few texts over and over again we remember them and we think about them and this creates depth in what we are reading. This passage helps me understand the essay as a whole because it gives you the idea that reading a text over and over again gives you more depth in what you are reading. This passage is written early on in the essay. It fits with the rest of the essay because it gives you a good idea that our culture should switch for extensive reading to intensive reading. This passage is giving you an example of how when people only have few books to read they will read it over and over which creates depth. In our culture we have a huge availability of texts and we feel we should be reading as many as possible and put quantity over quality. Birkerts thinks that we should be moving away from this by reading more intensively rather than extensively and let the text resonate in your mind which will give you depth in the text you are reading and this will lead to wisdom. When I think about this essay and Robert Scholes’s essay their ideas seem to have similarities. Like Scholes’s idea that when we have cultural knowledge to understand something like a Budweiser commercial we have more of an understanding of what is going on in the commercial. I think is similar to having more of an understanding or depth of a text that has been read over and over again. I think both of these writers think it is important to have a deeper understand of what you are watching or what you are reading. I think that Robert Scholes would agree with what Birkerts wrote.