Jane Austen and Deep Reading

Wrapping up the *Emma* Challenge in three parts. Part 3.

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In the first two parts of this piece, I considered Jane Austen’s Emma in the context of an English literature survey course. (You may find part 1 here and part 2 here.) I proposed a somewhat eccentric course design, in which Emma would lead off the semester.

Students began with some prep work. It is rare that undergraduates these days enter their second year having been asked to read a book of any considerable length or complexity, to the point that it seems a daunting or even impossible task to them. Some simply don’t do the reading, believing that they can rely on online summaries or ChatGPT. These students are subject to a rude awakening, because a summary will not help them with the kind of close textual analysis that we do in class.

In order to make them a bit more self-aware in how they approach reading, they are asked to listen to an interview by NYT columnist Ezra Klein with education scholar Maryanne Wolf on “deep reading,” in which she explains what happens to our brains when we read deeply, with concentration, as opposed to the sort of distracted digital skimming that is habitual for most of us in 2024. As the brain engages more fully in its task, it begins to make larger as well as more detailed connections; it draws more from memory centers; it assimilates meaning and even begins processing the text analytically—even if the reader is not familiar with specific techniques of professional literary analysis.

In short, they will perform much better on the exam. But more to the point, they will get a lot more out of the experience. They will learn something (though it sometimes seems that education is the one thing that people want less of for their money).

You can find the interview on your podcast app, but here is a direct link:

This type of reading is simply not possible for most of our students without self-aware, concentrated effort, free of digital distractions. This means disabling the phone, closing the laptop, muting notifications.

Furthermore, this type of reading is necessary for us to approach a novel like Emma, with its subtleties of word choice, its psychological complexity, and its many shades of irony and voice. After they listen to the interview (which is their homework after the first day of class), we have a conversation about their reading habits. How many of them are habitual readers? (Just a few: this is a general education course, so most of them are not English majors.) How have they approached reading assignments in the past? How many of them have had to read long books for school? How many have read a book for pleasure in the last year? (A depressingly small minority.)

The sad fact is that many of them do not know the feeling of pleasurable anticipation of having an uninterrupted afternoon that one can spend with a book, or the fugue state that the reader experiences when hours and pages slide by with no distractions. It’s not their fault. Modern life has deprived most of them of the possibility of this feeling.

The homework for the second day is simple: set aside two hours free of electronic devices, and begin reading Emma. After the two hours are up: record your impressions of the book so far, and also of the experience of reading in this way. Was it difficult? How often did you have the urge to look at your phone? Were you able to concentrate?

Next class meeting, we discuss this experience before we talk about the book. This conversation leads us to fascinating places. Some students remain disengaged, of course, but I can begin to see the self-awareness dawning for some of the more thoughtful ones—as well as a consideration of the possibility of nurturing this habit. A few even express anger and frustration that the tech industry has deprived them of their ability to concentrate, that they must swim against the overwhelming tide of the digital ocean.

Now, I don’t know, ultimately, what comes of this—whether or not this self-awareness sticks for any of them, whether or not any develop a new habit of deep reading. But I do know this: our subsequent conversations about Emma are much more productive than they would have been if they had simply been asked to read the book with no prep.

They have opinions: Mr. Woodhouse is funny. Emma is a snob. Mr. Knightley is cool, if a little overbearing. Then we challenge (or reinforce) all of these opinions, based on evidence from the text—based on reading Austen’s actual prose closely. Some of them hate the book. Some of them love it. Some still don’t read it, but what can you do?

Typically in class, I remain fairly neutral critically, unless I must adopt a strong position in order to create a balance. In the case of Emma, I become the title character’s strong advocate, simply because most of them (though not all) instantly dislike her. As we dig into it, however, some of them begin to understand that they are lot like her in some ways, that they have behaved similarly to Emma often—judging others, offering unneeded or unwanted advice, striving to please impossible parents. This realization can lead to the beginnings of a process of self-reflection and growth that is parallel to Emma’s in the novel.

This is why I start with Emma. More than any other text I can think of, it helps them to understand that deep reading is not passive, that it can become a dialogue with the text, that it can teach you something, that it can change you.

If some of them have this experience, then I have done my job—or, rather, Jane Austen has done it for me.

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Even though this is the final part of this three-part piece, we are not quite done with Emma. We still have one final installment of our chapter-by-chapter analysis for premium subscribers, which will appear later this week. Thanks for your patience as my summer schedule has become somewhat more sporadic. Lots more coming in the next few weeks—more on music, more on historical fiction, and our next reading challenge, which will take on the world’s second most famous person named Swift.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet book to yours.

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