lawyers and literature

Exercise 1-4: What You Bring With You    

We don't come to any reading, in this case the reading of lawyer stories, with a fully open-mind. Robert Scholes makes the point this way:

What we know from experience of love and lust, charity and hate, pleasure and pain, we bring to bear upon the fictional events--inevitably, because we seek to make every text our own. And what we find in fiction leaks out to color our phenomenal world, to help us assign meaning, value, and importance to the individual events and situations of our lives. [Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation 32 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)]

Scholes notes that "[w]hen we become aware of ourselves, we are already thoroughly developed as textual creatures. What we are and what we may become are already shaped by powerful cultural texts." [Robert Scholes, Protocols of Reading 27 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)]

Some of this baggage we bring with us to lawyer stories can be accessed and talked about. Some of what we carry with us is composed of stored-away parts of the self that it would be inconvenient or painful to confront. Some of what we bring to reading literature is so ephemeral that we simply can't find a language to talk about it.

We have certain impressions and images of ourselves as readers that follow with us into the reading. Henriette Anne Klauser says of writers, as we might say of readers, that they have tapes playing in their head that define who they are as writers. [Henriette Anne Klauser, Writing on Both Sides of the Brain 8 (San Francisco: Harper &Row/Perennial Library, 1986)]. A reader develops, over many years of reading, strategies for reading which are called upon when there is new reading to be done. These strategies provide motives for reading, protocols for how/where/when it will be done, and how the work of interpretation will take place. These strategies encode judgments about how the overall experience of reading, its value, and whether we are strong or weak readers.

Describe, as best you can, the baggage you bring with as a reader to this new "course of reading."

Make a list of the "things" you carry with you as a reader.

Can you describe the "tapes" that play when you confront a difficult new text?

Being the kind of person you are, or imagine yourself to be--the two are not always synonymous or congruent--what questions and concerns do you now bring to your reading as a lawyer? What do you most fear about yourself as a reader?

What kinds of hopes do you have for yourself as a reader? What arguments would you make to support the claim that you are a good reader? Is it possible that with all your success as a student, that you know youself to be a weak reader?

Would you characterize your reading as an act of rebellion or conformity? How does our reading prepare us to accept the world as it is? How does reading prepare us to become critics of the world?

What reading, if any, has changed your life? What "courses" of reading have you pursued (in or out of school) that have left a mark on you and your thinking?

Note: The textual reading which inspired this exercise was: Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried With Them 3-25 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990). On the use of Tim O'Brien's text as a preface for an account of law students' views of themselves as writers, and what they bring to legal writing, see James R. Elkins, The Things They Carry Into Legal Writing

Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien Home Page

Writing Vietnam
Tim O'Brien, lecture

In the Name of Love: An Interview with Tim O'Brien

Artful Dodge: A Conversation with Tim O'Brien

How to Tell a True War Story: Metafiction in "The Things They Carried"

The Truth in Things: Personal Trauma As Historical Amnesia in The Things They Carried

Writing Vietnam: Writers' Forum

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