Legal Commentary

When I was a graduate student in comparative literature, I had the good fortune of having a popular, older professor in his last semester of teaching. The course was a seminar on Renaissance poetry. In the decade or so before my studies began there, the comp lit department had undergone intense internal strife over methods of interpretation, and particularly the pervasive influence of deconstructionism at that time.

 This particular professor, himself no deconstructionist, took a moment at the end of his last class of his last semester of teaching, after a long and accomplished career, to urge us to do one thing as we went forward in our careers: read generously. We are taught from a very young age to read critically, of course, and he insisted that there is nothing wrong with this. But, he mourned, there is such a spirit of skepticism toward the text that now dominates our discourse. We are encouraged to take it to task, tear it apart, read it against the grain at every possible turn. There is a place for this, no doubt, he said, but don?t forget how to read with a spirit of generosity toward the text. Try to see what it is saying to you; accept it on its own terms, if only to strengthen your own critique. It is nearly impossible to learn anything from a text if you are not willing to read it in this spirit.

This has always stuck with me. Despite my considerable sympathy with the school of interpretation that this particular professor was critiquing, I have returned to these sentiments at many points in my career ? a career which obviously strayed (at least somewhat) from a predominant occupation with the interpretation of literary texts ? and I have always found that they hold up. I have tried to apply them to cases, scholarship ? everything. I think it not only makes us better critics and scholars to read generously ? I would even venture to say that we owe it, almost as an ethical responsibility, to our colleagues and our readers. Is it possible not only to read critically but also, at the same time, to read generously?