The Active Reader: Composing in Reading and Writing

by Jeffrey Carroll and Anne Ruggles Gere

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 003014132X
• ISBN13: 9780030141324
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Holt McDougal
• Length: 399 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

best I've ever seen

This is a delightful but totally out-of-print college reader. Its method is very unusual, though. It takes the broadest possible approach to the art of "reading," defining it, arrestingly, as the means by which the universe is perceived, structured, and given meaning by the mental delineations of the perceiver. It's trippy. Many of the readings are the oft-anthologized pieces one finds in many freshman-level readers, such as Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant," Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," and Mill's "The Subjection of Women." But as the volume progresses, the editors' idea of what constitutes a reading, we find, becomes increasing amorphous. Pictures, paintings, and maps are unexpectedly offered up for analysis, until in the final pages the student is asked to interpret seemingly nonsensical items, such as the wiring diagram to a 1750 Berline or the floor plan to Lincoln's house. I was so blown away (and edified) by this approach that I sent the author, now firmly ensconced at the University of Michigan, a gushing email of praise. Never got an answer, though. One day I arrived at work to find out that my school had bodily tossed our few remaining copies into the trash heap, since the book could no longer be obtained from the publisher. Believe me when I say that I marched right down to the dumpster and unabashedly fetched all nine of them out.