I guess I have more to say about this (expect a florid thinkpiece entitled "against generosity" to hit your navel-gazing academic journal soon) but I wonder whether I agree with the injunction to "read generously," or to apply the "three yeses" that I learned at grad school?

It was said to be fundamental to get used to affirming anything that one read for class - rather than to take the cheap shot, to refuse to budge from the narcissistic resistance with which one encounters a new idea. So I learned the "three yeses" - attributed to Kaja Silverman.

They were as follows:

1. make sure you have read every word of the text
2. make sure you have understood at least the primary semantic meaning of the text
3. try to "step inside" the argument, allow yourself to imagine making this argument yourself, suspend resistance...

As a teacher, I can see the value. One's fear is that nobody will say anything, that a text will seem too alien to allow anyone to get into it. Or perhaps that class will devolve into sophomoric slams, tho I'll say that I've seen more of the former than the latter in grad classes

And maybe (but maybe I'm just revealing my own fears here) there's another benefit to the yeses: they forestall a no that would be directed not at the text, but at the *teacher* who assigned it. Everything I assign, I find useful on some level, so I want my students to as well.

After all, in a system which uses consumerist metrics to evaluate teaching, we are incentivized to use consumer-focused marketing techniques, and emphasizing the value of the *material* one teaches is a good way to hype your own classes, get good numerical evals, etc.

...and "generous" is such a great word - like Heather Love's "rich," it is replete with possibility and semantic density; it appends an ethical virtue to a cognitive task, so that we are not merely doing well, but doing *good*.

otoh I guess as I look at it, I don't want to train students to be very good at affirming things, and reflexively squicked out when critique happens. There's something decadent about it, something self-protective and sentimental.

The problem of encouraging the sophomoric slam is v real - ppl, obviously, sound smarter when they demonstrate more sensitivity to a text, and it is generally easier to cultivate sensitivity when one has allowed oneself to affirm it on some level. But sensitivity ≠ affirmation.

an alternative method I acquired from Jed Esty, who attributed it to Jameson, was "affirm the strengths, historicize the weaknesses." I find that easier to defend - but maybe because its evocation of quasi-aesthetic judgment comports more easily with my current prejudices...

and then another, that I got from Nicholas Royle at Sussex, was "don't make any claim about a text that you can't back up at once with a quotation." It's possible that one was specifically directed against me, who was full of feelings... but it was a lesson I learned.

I mean, at core, can one look at the world and say that what it most urgently demands of us is *generosity*? Maybe - but I'd love to hear some alternatives, too. A demand for pleasure, a negative capacity, a ruthless critique of everything that exists, etc etc... what else?