Book Review:  How to Read, by J.B. Kerfoot, 1916

Subject:  The Capstone to Kerfoot’s Constructive and Critical Orientation:  An Attitude Towards Reading

This is the seventh and final blog entry on reviewing How to Read, by J. B. Kerfoot.  It will consider the attitude one should have to focus the areas of involvement in Kerfoot’s constructive and critical orientation to learning how to read.

The sixth blog entry on October 3, 2023 considered the fifth and final area of involvement in Kerfoot’s constructive and critical approach of learning how to read of the intellectual digestion that happens after a book is read. The blog entry on September 29, 2023 considered the fourth area of involvement in Kerfoot’s of looking at how the reader compares their understanding of what they are reading to the author’s presentation.  The blog entry on September 26, 2023 considered the third area of involvement of the driving impulses for reading and the direction reading should take.  The blog entry of September 22, 2023 considered the second area of involvement of handling word meanings.  The blog entry of September 20, 2023 considered the first area of involvement of reading as producing a mental movie.  And, the blog entry of September 15, 2023 gave an introduction to the book and considered the meaning of the title page inscription of the book, “Reading is a form of living.”

Please note that the italicized words and words that are in all capital letters in the quotes taken from the book are the author’s emphasis and are not my added emphasis. 

The Capstone to the Constructive and Critical Approach:  An Attitude towards Reading  

This covers chapter nine, “The Cosmos A La Carte,” the final chapter of the J. B. Kerfoot’s, How to Read.  In this chapter, Kerfoot posits an attitude towards reading that focuses all the areas of involvements of his constructive and critical approach of how to read.  This attitude is, “READING SHOULD BE A ZESTFUL, CONSCIOUS, DISCRIMINATING SEARCH FOR OUR OWN.” [i]  The phrase “search for our own” in this attitude is the key phrase.

Kerfoot likens the “search for our own” to the amoeba’s attitude towards what is its own.  The amoeba is a microscopic single cell life form and one of the earliest life forms.  It takes its nutrition by engulfing a particle of matter to absorb into itself.  If the particle sought can be absorbed it is accepted; if the particle cannot be absorbed it is rejected.  The amoeba is satisfying its hunger on what it can accept and rejecting what will not accept, one particle at a time, one meal at a time:  “For the amoeba’s sole attitude toward the cosmos is that the cosmos is edible. And it spends it life making experiments with the menu.”[ii]

Kerfoot says the amoeba’s attitude towards life and the cosmos-its searching for its own-is a universal law of life equally applicable to humans (a complex life form) and, in particular, applicable to the psychic life of humans who are searching out new understandings and new meanings to enhance and enlarge their lives. This is searching out of beauty, knowledge, morality, and spirituality, which are psychic human hungers.  They are, to quote Kerfoot, “…subtler searchings for our own on the menu of a Cosmos a la carte.”[iii]

The attitude towards reading then is taking one book at a time (one meal at a time, a la carte) to seek out what is one’s own and what is not one’s own.  One samples an aspect of the universe and extracts what is his or her own in their reading.  It is selective in that not everything in a book is to be taken as one’s own.  It is what can be developed and accepted by comparing one’s understanding to the author’s understanding to decide what to accept or reject from the author.

What is the communication given to the reader by the author for handling and making the contents of a book part of one’s self?  Kerfoot states the following on this:

“There are, as a matter of fact, but three services, broadly speaking, that any teacher or expounder or critic can render us.

One of these is the important and necessary, but none-the-less humble, service of supplying our memories with storable raw materials of alleged ‘facts’ of supposed relationships, and of the existence of this, that, or the other decision about these, arrived at by this, that, or the other investigator.

The other two services are of a higher order; of opposed but mutually complementary character, and hence of equal value.

One of them is to help us (by inducing us constructively and critically to agree with them) to a more intelligent synthetic formulation of our own reactions to life.

The other is to help us (by inducing us) constructively and critically to disagree with them to more intelligent syntheses of these same personal reactions.

And there is no more fatal bar to progressive and successful reduction to practice of our accepted attitude toward reading than habitually to allow the first of these author services to take for us the place of the other two.”[iv]

One will forfeit what is one’s own by accepting what the author says without being an active participant in interpreting the author’s meaning when reading. One in their reading must actively partake in finding the meanings of the author that one can make part of himself, or herself, by either agreeing or disagreeing with the author.

The attitude of taking one book at a time for reading to find out what it contains for one’s self is engaging the whole constructive and critical reading approach in directing one’s efforts towards each book one reads, thus leaning how to read one book at a time by following through on:

(1) Producing the book in one’s mind:  animating one’s mind to produce a mental movie of what is being read, which is using one’s accumulated living experience to reenact in one’s mind the author’s scenario of a story, or the author’s scenario of ideas.

(2) Building new verbal contexts for individual words; the value of “controlled meanings” of reacting spontaneously to the meanings of the words in sentences and paragraphs in the author’s text first when reading, and then to criticize and revise one’s reactions to those meanings as needed (this is the core of the constructive and critical method)

(3) Building self-culture by not having the meaning of a book given to one in advance by a critic, but by reading the book one’s self, reacting spontaneously to it, and then adjusting one’s views as necessary based on other points of view or one’s increased living experience

(4) Understanding the impulses for reading and guiding these impulses intelligently for reading

(5) Building relationships of understanding between the world inside one’s self and the world outside of one’s self as presented by the author when reading

(6) Heeding and investigating one’s impelling “subsidiary curiosities” when reading a book in order to inform and supplement the building of relationships

(7) Forming memories from the intellectual digestion process after reading and equally heeding the “subsidiary curiosities” that may occur to inform, supplement, and develop the formation of memories

(8) Allying the constructive and critical reading approach to how to read with the force of the reading attitude to partake in the text and to extract what belongs to one’s self from the text.

And a final note on my review of Kerfoot’s book.  I did not include chapter eight of the book, “How to Read a Novel,” in my review of the book.  This chapter applies the constructive and critical approach to reading a novel, a specific type of reading content.  Kerfoot believes the reading of a novel is more likely to have misdirected effort applied to it than other type of reading and he wants to show how this is to be prevented with some very sound and important general observations about novels and then the application of his constructive and critical reading approach to reading novels.  I have extracted and reviewed the core elements of Kerfoot’s constructive and critical reading approach and I will at a future date review chapter eight of his book in relation to other views on reading a novel.

The next two blog posts will consider points of view on being a general reader: reading as broadly as one can beyond specialized or career reading.  This will be to review a 2018 essay by Joseph Epstein, “The Bookish Life,” which will be the blog post of October 11, 2023; and to review a speech given in 1960 by Nicholas Samstag, “Read–And Grow Up,” which will the blog post of October 18, 2023.

FOOTNOTES

[i] How to Read, 1916, 274

[ii] Ibid, 269

[iii] Ibid, 274

[iv] Ibid, 291-292