Reading and Caring with Patsy Schweickart

I met Patsy Schweickart at the end of her long career as a reception studies theorist and feminist scholar. In her final course before retirement, Reception and Asian American Literature, there were six of us—two Americans, two students from China, and two students from Pakistan—all women. As readers, and with Patsy’s guidance, we put into practice her theory of reading as an act of caretaking as described in “The Receiving Function: Ethics, Communication, and Reading.” In this essay, Patsy characterizes the writer-reader relationship as unbalanced, one in which the “writer is dependent on the reader to do for her what she cannot do for herself—understand, appreciate, interpret, in a word receive—what she has written.”1 Our community of readers had no shared understanding of “Asian” or “American” experience, and together we practiced the role of the caretaker by using our “subjective resources—experience, knowledge, intelligence, moral judgment, emotional disposition—to do the work that is required” in reading Asian American literature.2 We explained marriage, parenting, reading and religion across our various cultures and families; we asked one another vulnerable questions to bridge our understandings of a text and give an author’s work the most generous reading possible.Toward the end of “The Receiving Function,” Patsy claims that in reading “one has to do the negative work of controlling the impulse toward androcentric, ethnocentric, egocentric readings. But there is also positive work to be done. Reading, understanding the utterance of another, involves a kind of advocacy,” which she defines as a prerequisite to the act of reading: “before one composes one’s interpretation, the reader must let an other ‘speak’ to her. And this can only happen to the extent that she undertakes the work of speaking for the other.”3 Towards the end of the semester, one of our classmates began petitioning to start an Asian and Asian American Resource and Cultural Center, a space that would provide community and mental health support for a large population at our university. We all joined her efforts, contributing what we could through writing, meeting with deans, and hosting campus events. After the AAARC opened, the relationships we built in Patsy’s class continued—we attended weddings, hosted Thanksgivings, stayed in touch across continents. Patsy once told me that writing theory should be easy; good theorists make obvious what is already in front of us. It was obvious to me that once our community of readers read with care we could not stop—the caring act extended beyond the texts to the people around us. The act of reading then, like the act of caring, does not cease when we no longer have the text in front of us.