Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Preface to third edition

This third edition of Ways of Reading has been substantially revised in the light of developments in the field, in the light of our own experience using the book and in the light of feedback from others, both colleagues and students. References have been updated and fresh examples introduced, a new unit has been added and the overall organization of the book has changed.

The central emphasis of the original book - on reading as an active and reflective process - remains. We continue to treat reading as much more than the simple decipherment of words on the page. Instead, Ways of Reading is designed to encourage a critical and analytic engagement with text, one in which readers pose questions and attend to details of form and structure in pursuit of understanding. To enable or facilitate this process we have assembled a set of tools for thinking and reading. Many of these ’tools for reading’ amount to particular skills of analysis; and this helps to explain the structure of units, each of which moves from exposition of an approach to its application. In this way, the book is not only reader-centred but also student-centred, treating knowledge as a set of procedures for inquiring about and exploring text as much as a set of pre-constituted facts.

The units are grouped into six sections. Section 1 introduces basic techniques and problem-solving. Section 2 presents the dimensions along which language may vary, and gives attention to issues of historical change, gender and social position. Section 3 explores questions of meaning, including modes of indirection such as irony and allusion. It also explores the respective roles of the author and the reader in the process of creating and constraining meaning. Section 4 focuses on the sound patterning and grammar of poetic texts, including ways in which such texts may both achieve an extra layer of patterning and break with normal patterns of linguistic construction. Section 5 is concerned broadly with aspects of narrative - what makes a story and how stories are told. Section 6 addresses the question of translation between one medium and another, from prose fiction to film, and from the page to performance.