Reading as Study and Fun
Looking forward to completing his undergraduate degree and moving into graduate work, Aaron foresaw an opportunity to link his in- and out-of-school reading behaviors.
Interviewer: Did you ever bring your outside reading into your school reading? Thomas Sabo Sterling Silver
Aaron: I fully expect, when I go back into school actually, I 100% expect if I study what I want to be studying, cultural anthropology, in grad school, that comic books will be [included in my academic reading], because one of the things I am interested in is how we view Japan. And basically, what people I know about Japan, we know about Japan from manga, anime, and movies. Pop culture, that’s what we know. I’ve read a few novels, and maybe a few other people have read novels, but really we don’t know much else about, I mean, that’s how we know about Japan, the culture, about how people live. But that’s something I want to study is how, I’m learning this thing, I’m learning about Chinese culture that way, or expatriate Chinese culture, because almost all of the things, the comics, the movies, and the novels that I am reading now are from post-1949 China. So they are from Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore, and they are from places where the Chinese who did not become the communist Chinese went to live.
Aaron attributed reading in a variety of contexts as a large part of his learning. In describing his past reading practices, Aaron said that “when I was reading a whole lot, it was my escape, my protection place,” but more recently he added, “It plays the role of, I guess, teacher maybe, mostly now.” His description pointed to a more authoritative role of texts, and the learning he described took place both inside and outside of school contexts. “I kind of read where my interests are going,” Aaron told me, explaining that on his own he studied Japanese and Chinese cultures through reading manga, watching anime and kung fu films, and studying historical and anthropological works, as well as novels from and about those cultures. His conceptions of reading and texts dovetailed with those of Jenkins’s (1992) views about media texts in that a number of different media types were conflated. For Aaron, reading was described as an intersexual activity, involving a variety of texts and a variety of media. Reading was intertwined with a number of other activities; it was part of a larger conglomeration of information, media, behaviors, and pastimes.
Within this conception of reader as student and text as teacher, Aaron displayed an awareness of a number of roles. “Now [being a reader’s] much more, it’s just part of how I process information, how I gather information, and actually even in reading things how I expel information or regurgitate information or meld different pieces of information.” Reading entailed a number of different activities, combinations of being receptive, creative, and connective. Being a lifelong reader was akin to being a student who has a number of activities to perform, and outcomes shaped textual interactions. Sometimes, he found it necessary to regurgitate texts for papers and exams, but there was also a component of integrating texts together into a larger body of knowledge; Aaron described this type of reading as taking up “a large chunk of [his] cognitive power.” Thomas Sabo Carriers
Reading was also an opportunity for him to usurp the authority of texts to gain his own version of authority as a scholar. Aaron described his reading as research that contributed to his perceived role as an anthropologist. He used what could be considered frivolous, popular culture readings to construct an identity as an intellectual authority, one who conversed in a circle of peers. Aaron wasn’t simply reading comic books and watching movies; he was studying and analyzing cultures. He was an unaccredited academic, a consumer of texts who bended them to his purposes.
Processing your request, Please wait....
