“Be generous to the text.”

This simple sentence has changed my life. And I wish it would change yours too.

I first heard a once popular professor of Rhetoric at the University of California – Berkeley offer this notion, and I found in it and his short explanation a recipe for productive encounters to which I owe an unquantifiable debt. But my own conversion is not enough. I need you to convert as well.

First, lets define some terms. A text, for our purposes, is not just those ‘sequences of paragraphs representing an extended unit of speech’ we meet on page or screen, but anything you are capable of reading. And by reading, I mean making sense of, parsing, or understanding. Of course a book is a text, but a film as well, in these terms, is a text. So too is an event, or clothing. A dance is a text; also, a deer stand. A Pontiac? What about a milk carton? How about a language? You guessed it: text, text, text. I labor this point not to get us all talking like intellectuals [shudder], but to make room to argue that this ethic of generosity I want to outline actually provides in more encounters than just that old familiar one: you alone (and then later among others) with a piece of writing. But first, lets us turn to that familiar encounter. It’s quite important.

Even if you are a math major, or a computer science student, the game is the same: You buy books. You read the books and attend classes wherein you talk about the books; what they say, how you hear it. Finally, you write about what you read in the books, or produce something resulting from your encounter with the books. Maybe the fine arts people, or the music department, seem to run a slightly different game, but by now we’ve all learned that images, sculptures, improvised solos and musical compositions are texts; so, no: same game, same shame. This, as you have discovered, is most of what college is: you, encountering text and texts, and writing and talking about it. So lets get better at it, shall we? It can be easy; here we go.

The key is the last term we have to define: generous. Luckily, this term doesn’t have some pretentious, counter-intuitive definition like that last one. You already know what it means. Or rather, you almost know what it means, you just forgot what it really means, what all it means, and you may need to be reminded. Forget the dictionary, it uses words to explain the meaning of other words, so if you are too thorough, you may just get stuck in there forever. Just think about the word: generous. What do you make of that root, gene? And what other words do generous, and its root, seem to hang together with? Maybe: Genetic? Genre? Genus? Generative? It is this last word that is essential to our task here; it’s all about generation. You see, to be truly generous to the word generous it is crucial we don’t overlook its particular kind of charity, it own particular way of going. Simply, generous doesn’t only give or share willingly, it generates - it makes things, and makes room for things, as it does so. Thus, to “be generous to the text”, is not only to willingly give yourself to it, to go with the text, it is to do so in the service of a joyful production of novel, radical particularities, of new things: ideas, experiences, reactions, perspectives, even people. I want to argue that these tangible rewards can be yours, and you can produce these same worthwhile results for student thinkers merely in earshot of your productive generosity, but how? Let’s turn to what this generosity might look like.

Most importantly, to be generous is to let the text take you where it wants to go. A text is always an argument, of some sort, and the task of the generous reader is to give that argument a deep listen, to give it time and space to perform itself, to let it work you over. Of course the argument of a scholarly book or article is usually quite clear, and its intentions are often nicely explicated in the introduction, but what about that Pontiac, or the milk carton? These texts too are making arguments. In the simplest sense, they are saying, “this is how a car goes; this is how automobile-ness is to be expressed” or “milk carton is like this, and not like that”. So, if we are to really give these arguments their due diligence, if we are to be generous to them, what is required is that we don’t bring to the scholarly article on, say, the Spanish Civil War or the milk carton some too-firm and generosity-killing preconceived notion of, for instance, what a milk carton is, or, what the Spanish Civil War was really all about. To be generous to the text is not to forget all of your previous experiences with other milk cartons, or to ignore your hypothetical wealth of knowledge about the Spanish Civil War, it is to try and set those notions aside for a while and generously go with the text; see where it takes you, how it takes you, and in doing so unearth its own particular insight, explanatory magic, or just its own special way of going, its style. The basic idea here is simple, and like the best ideas, one, I think, you seem to intuitively know already. But it is not always easy to apply.

I often experience a failure of generosity in classes. I have myself been guilty of it countless times, and I do not begrudged my fellow students in their failure at applying this ethic, for it is both an easy thing to keep in mind and at once can be a terribly difficult thing to accomplish, depending on our own radically particular histories, knowledge bases and experiences. But what’s strange about failing to be generous to the text, especially in class, is that you are being generous to a text, or texts, just not the one we all have read and are trying to make something of. That is, if your hypothetical wealth of knowledge about the Spanish Civil War has you skeptical of an article’s take on that event to the point that you fail to be generous to it, in the end, you are being generous to previously experienced texts at the expense of that work in front of you, and in front of the class. As well, if your previous experience with milk cartons closes your mind to the possibility of a strange and new argument about how a milk carton can go, can be, then your generosity is misplaced as it, in this failure to confront what the class is confronting, will never rise to the potential proceeds of the generative thoughts of a group of differently minded student scholars and their capable guide. Now, this is not to say that generosity does not include criticism. It surely does. Maybe those other texts that have given you insight into the Spanish Civil War are more powerful and meritorious works of scholarship, and the argument of the article that the class is parsing, in the end, fails to convince you. That is all fine and good, but the key here is the amazing potential a room full of UWS students and their professor has to produce insights and ideas that you personally may never had the pleasure of experiencing. That is, generosity to a text can take you more places than just to the ‘right answer’, but you must be open to that possibility, and you must take a few steps to prepare yourself to be open to it. As well, this is not to say that those other texts, those other previously experienced milk cartons, have no place in the discourse of the classroom. They assuredly do. It’s just that a generous parsing or confrontation with the text we have all been charged with experiencing should come first, and your own previously generous encounters with other texts, second. This is the recipe for producing novel and exciting ideas and perspectives, new things. If all we do in our guided confrontations with texts in the classroom is to confirm our preconceived notions of a topic, of ourselves, then, in my humble opinion, we have failed to rise to the daring challenge of the university.

Of course, to be generous to a text takes time. So, perhaps the easiest (or is it, in our too-full lives, the hardest?) aspect of this process is the one you already know, the one your professors are so often harping on: that you must not just read, but give yourself time to think about the reading, the film, or the milk carton. Is the text boring? Maybe it is. Does the film lose your attention? Perhaps it does. But give your professors the benefit of the doubt. The job market for tenure track positions in four-year universities is Mogadishu-tough, and as a result we, on this small and scrappy campus, have been blessed with a shocking number of brilliant and talented professors, orators and thinkers. These accomplished scholars and writers have chosen these milk cartons for a good reason, a reason that may not be instantly obvious to you, but nevertheless, that reason is there, I promise you. If you are generous, you will reap rewards, I assure you. And again, what’s great about the university setting is even if you don’t seem to reap those rewards immediately, the properly applied generosity of your fellow students will, at times, do so for you. And it will blow your mind.

Professors themselves should articulate something like this idea more often, I believe. Too few do so in the course of their classes, and I believe their failure to speak to some version of this ethic has for too long allowed a knee-jerk failure of generosity to reign unchecked in too many classrooms. Certainly some do explicate this crucial idea to their students. As a denizen of the beautifully titled Department of Social Inquiry, I am pleased to report a much greater percentage, in my limited experience, of professors in this exceptional enclave do indeed speak to this notion with force, in comparison to this, and other universities as a whole. Dr. Marshall Johnson, professor of sociology, deserves a special commendation in this area, as he can often be heard extolling the virtues of an “ethic of charity”, or generosity, as articulated by Blaise Pascal and interpreted by Pierre Bourdieu, in his classes, and I believe the results of his explication here can be observed and experienced in his students. Other professors I have personally heard make this argument for a kind of generosity include Dr.’s Joel Sipress, Karl Bahm and Richard Hudleson. I too, salute these professors and their invocation of this ethic, and also believe they preside over learning environments that are exceptional in their quality in ways utterly tied to their own intellectual and pedagogical generosity, and to the idea I am trying to be generous to, and trying to get you to be generous to as well.

Be generous to the text, and I assure you that this kind of generative generosity will produce results. It will reveal new ways of thinking, of going. It will utterly transform the humble act of reading. And it will teach you to reject the too easy pull of confirming oneself, and one’s notions of that self and the world, and inure you to a way of experiencing the world that is less an imposition of preexisting and formulaic shackles of thought unto the wild and complex phenomena of life, and more a productive posture of generous uncertainty and active sense-making. Personally, I have seen this ethic of generosity wielded in the hands of the Amos Tarfa’s, Chris Jersett’s and Taylor Gombos’ of this university and I am much the richer for it. If a greater number of the student learners of this exceptional university took up my challenge of textual generosity, or were forecfully exposed to this idea by one of their professors as I once was, I believe the effects would be unmistakable. I think the level of intellectual productivity of the average UWS classroom would be increased in ways that we couldn’t fail to notice. So, if you would, be generous to my humble polemic, and let the radically particular milk cartons of this world take you where they want to go - you won’t be sorry.