1] In his article, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” King discusses Robinson’s collection of stories. King explains that while the stories are written in English, “the patterns, metaphors, structures as well as the themes and characters come primarily from oral literature.” More than this, Robinson, he says “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats reader’s efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read aloud” and in so doing, “recreating at once the storyteller and the performance” (186). Read “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England”, in Living by Stories. Read it silently, read it out loud, read it to a friend, and have a friend read it to you. See if you can discover how this oral syntax works to shape meaning for the story by shaping your reading and listening of the story. Write a blog about this reading/listening experience that provides references to the story.

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The first time I read “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King of England” I was so confused and I really had no idea half the time what was going on.  In hindsight I was skimming and in order to properly understand this text I found that I had to slow down and read out loud.  I read this text three times. First I read it quickly and in my head, then I read it out loud to a friend, and finally I had my friend read it to me.

As I said before, my first attempt was a little bit of a failure, my second attempt however gave me a new perspective on the entire text.  I found that the sentences that before had made no sense at all, now flowed with ease and even the mistakes and oddities within the text didn’t seem to matter as much.  It wasn’t an immediate transformation however, it did take me a few pages to allow the words to flow and to stop being so focused on the text itself.  I feel that often as students we are taught to read in the same way that we wright.  This I feel, makes us susceptible to every word that we read.  This method of reading takes a lot of effort! I’m sure many of you have read a paragraph and realized that you have absolutely no idea what you just read, then you go back and read the paragraph again word for word to understand what it was that your brain skimmed over the first time.  I feel that in this text you are forced to read the words as if they were your own, and simply on the page as a guideline for the direction of the story.  Without making your own changes mentally as you read it out loud, it really makes no sense.  Once you allow your mouth to make the small changes as you go and to stop fixating on the words themselves the story comes together.

The third time, I had my friend read the story to me.  This was a different experience all together because as much as she initially struggled, I simply listened and absorbed the words that she was saying.  Although at this point I was pretty clear on the story I felt that listening was the most natural way to hear this story.  When I was reading out loud I still had to process the words that I said, when the story was told to me I felt that there was no restriction placed on the meaning.  My friend initially though that the story was a little odd, however she did not feel that her comprehension of the story was greater after having read it out loud. I found this very interesting because I found that after having the story told to me, I had more understanding.  Perhaps had I had the story read to me initially, I would not have not struggled so much to understand the story in the first place.

Check out a blog posted by Scicurious, there is a very interesting post on silent reading and how our brains process written word when reading in our own heads.  Although I agree with the post, I do feel that they should have acknowledged the difference between how we perceive text when we read silently and when we read out loud, instead of simply focusing on how our brains process silent reading.  

– Jennifer

Works Cited

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190.

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 64-85.

“Silent Reading isn’t so Silent, at Least, not to your Brain.” Blog Post. Neurotic Physiology. Scientopia, Jan 23, 2013. Web. Feb. 13, 2015.