THE PARADOX OF TEXT: WILL THE FEAL MEANING PLEASE IDENTIFY ITSELF?

Abstract

When your eye sees a series of words on a page, why should you want to see more? Why read on? We all know that many youngsters find the prospect fairly meaningless; and don't. People will generally undertake things only if they promise to have meaning for them. Tom Estes is at pains first of all to dispose of the paradox inherent in the question "Where does meaning lie?" and then to base a reconsidered pedagogy of reading on the proposition that meanings happen, and can be helped to happen. His several illustrations of process include a series of questions to be asked, about "Jack and Jill, " that cause the dark suspicion to dawn in the reader's mind that it was more than the hill that those two were getting up to.