The New Kind Of Scholarship Halpern Analysis

Conclusion What this essay seeks to achieve, at the end of all of this, is a vision of the new kind of scholarship Halpern calls on us to strive toward at the end of her essay: First, we might stop seeing our students’ growing distance from sentimental rhetoric— something I used to think of as proof of a job well-done—as an unmixed blessing. We should not let them forget or forget to value the kinds of reading practices they give up when they emulate currently dominant critical habits. In fact, we can use these sentimental texts to begin a discussion about some things that have often gone unremarked, at least in my classroom: the distance there can be between how a text wants to be read and how undergraduates and especially graduate students are trained to read it, as well as the benefits and costs of being (or at least pretending to be) a single kind of reader. (65-66, emphasis mine) …show more content…
But what she does advocate is the allowance for possibility—for the liminal, for a foot in two audiences that seem like they would not go together. Especially relevant are the four words I have emphasized: “wants to be read.” Halpern there suggests that the text has a desire of its own—that it wants things, craves being read a certain way. And she suggests we should let students do as such in our classrooms. I agree, but I add a caveat: let us let the conversation be alive not only in our classrooms, but in our students’ papers, and in the work we ourselves submit, so that we may no longer be these uncomfortable scholars sneering away what we do not initially