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By Doug
Buehl,
Madison East High School teacher
Member, Wisconsin State Reading Association
February 2004
“Hey, Hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill
today?”
This highly charged refrain, shouted by Vietnam protesters in the late
1960s, resurfaced in my life this winter in a fascinating history about
the Vietnam War and its ties to campus unrest in Wisconsin. David Maraniss,
author of “They Marched Into Sunlight,” connects a single
tragic week in Vietnam with the Dow Chemical confrontations on the University
of Wisconsin-Madison campus. A significant sub-current of these co-joined
stories examines the emotions of the various participants in these momentous
events. How did the soldiers feel about their involvement in the search-and-destroy
missions in Vietnam? How did the army unit, nicknamed the Black Lions,
feel about the circumstances that led to their deadly ambush? How did
Lyndon Johnson feel about the progress of the war and its impact on
his presidency? How did the Dow protesters feel about the napalm manufacturer
recruiting on campus? How did many formerly nonpolitical students feel
about the police reaction to the protesters’ sit-in?
Recognizing emotional content of a text is a critical comprehension strategy, and developing sensitivity to what characters are feeling provides readers with a deeper understanding of an author’s message. Clearly, the controversy over U.S. intervention in Vietnam, as featured in the book’s depiction of two events that occurred simultaneously in 1967, sparked a host of complicated emotions that are vividly portrayed as the stories unfold.
Yet readers must also be aware of who is talking to them, as these intertwining stories are recounted. How does the author feel about our involvement in Vietnam? About the military decisions and a catastrophic loss of life? About the Vietnam protesters? Detecting author attitude and perspective is also an essential component to reading comprehension.
The Strategy
The December Reading Room column described emotion coding as a strategy
for helping students perceive more sophisticated layers of meaning in
a text. This column continues to explore strategies that prompt students
to analyze how emotional aspects of a text influence their understanding.
Step 1: Some emotions in a text are readily apparent. For example, most readers of “They Marched Into Sunlight” will have little difficulty gauging the emotions of the demonstrators who denounced the war with the taunting, image-invoking chant cited at the beginning of this column.
But frequently, emotional content of a text is not directly stated, and as a result must be inferred by a reader. Introduce to students the three levels of detecting emotion as a strategy to access implicit meanings of a text:
Step 2: Students will benefit from practice in detecting all three levels of emotion as they read. In particular, readers of prose fiction need to be especially sensitive to an author’s word choice as they search for Character Emotions. The specific language chosen by the author can signal an implied emotional dynamic.
Step 3: Character Emotions and Reader Emotions are often the
easiest for students to discern when reading a text. Author Emotions
are in many cases less obvious and must be inferred. A highly effective
strategy to help students locate the person behind the words is to ask:
“Does the author have an attitude?”
Students can readily identify with “having an attitude.”
In this case, students consider whether an author seems to show attitude
about something – a viewpoint, an opinion, a perspective, a bias.
Locating author attitude is an essential component to critical reading. Authors may “lead” a reader toward certain ideas or conclusions that greatly influence how a text is understood and how a reader thinks about a topic. Some authors are up-front in communicating the perspective they bring to their writing, so that readers know “who” is talking to them and can factor this insight into their understanding. But many authors leave their personal imprint on a text unstated, so that readers must figure out on their own the extent to which an author’s prejudices and experiences undergird their message.
So students must be prompted to ask, when considering any written text – fiction or nonfiction – whether the author has an “attitude.”
To return to the questions posed earlier in this column, does David Maraniss, author of “They Marched Into Sunlight,” have an attitude? Throughout the book, Maraniss attempts to project a dispassionate and journalistic approach to his analysis. He states (in an epilogue) that he grew up in Madison, the son of an editor of the liberal, anti-war Capital Times newspaper, and that he personally witnessed the Dow demonstrations as a non-participant. But he clearly endeavors to tell his stories in an even-handed way, whether it is examining the protesters and their aims, the dilemmas for the UW officials, the decisions taken by the police department, the agonizations of the Johnson administration, or the view of the war from “in country,” by the soldiers caught in its midst.
Does the author have an attitude? Although he does not explicitly say so, one can conclude that Maraniss is highly skeptical of our involvement in Vietnam and is sympathetic to those who protested the war. He draws unfavorable conclusions about military decision-making, although he is careful to present university officials and police officers as caught in difficult circumstances. The book, then, represents his “take” on these events, which is underscored by his thorough and meticulous scholarship.
Posted February 3, 2004