Here's a fun piece by James Wood--excerpted from the Introduction to his new selected essays, Serious Noticing, on two different kinds of reading, exemplified by two different kinds of looking for "what's at stake": 

I’m struck by the differences between these two usages. Both are central to their relative critical discourses; each is close to the other and yet also quite far apart. In Stakes¹ (let’s call it), the text’s success is suspiciously scanned, with the expectation, perhaps hope, that the piece of literature under scrutiny will turn out to be productively unsuccessful. In Stakes², the text’s success is anxiously searched for, with the assumption that the piece of literature’s lack of success cannot be productive for reading, but simply renders the book not worth picking up. The first way of reading is non-evaluative, at least at the level of craft or technique; the second is only evaluative, and wagers everything on technical success, on questions of craft and aesthetic achievement. Stakes¹ presumes incoherence; Stakes² roots for coherence. Both modes are interestingly narrow, and their narrowness mirrors each other.…To read only suspiciously (Stakes¹) is to risk becoming a cynical detective of the word; to read only evaluatively (Stakes²) is to risk becoming a naïf of meaning, a connoisseur of local effects, someone who brings the standards of a professional guild to bear on the wide, unprofessional drama of meaning.

And also this, which for Wood is one of his tasks in reviewing, but which is also a nice summary of a lot of what I try to do in teaching:

When I write about a novel or a writer, I am essentially bearing witness. I’m describing an experience and trying to stimulate in the reader an experience of that experience. Henry James called the critic’s task “heroically vicarious.”

…

This passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature. It happens in classrooms whenever the teacher stops to read out, to re-voice, the passage under scrutiny. Sometimes all we remember of a teacher is a voice, and that is as it should be. Academic criticism is wary of what used to be called “the heresy of paraphrase.” The very thing that makes a review or essay into a vital narrative is discouraged in academic writing. We warn students—for perfectly good reasons—to avoid merely retelling or rephrasing the contents of a book. If you catch yourself doing that, we tell them, you’re probably not doing criticism, you’re not being analytical enough. But we should encourage students to do it better, for there is a quality of implicit intelligence in subtle paraphrase that is itself an act of analysis.

And besides, doesn’t much academic avoidance of paraphrase have to do, really, with anxiety or snobbery? Scholars don’t want to be caught in the act of primacy when they are supposed to have read the book a thousand times; God forbid that anyone should think we are encountering a text for the first time! Of course we all remember the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the twists and turns of Waverley or Vanity Fair or Under the Volcano! Don’t we? Yet the journalistic review is an act of primacy; to paraphrase is to dare a kind of innocence; subtle paraphrase is a kind of wise unlearning. And paraphrase is witness.

"Paraphrase is witness."  That's a nice summary of a lot of what I do in teaching--try to "represent" to people a text or a position or a proposal so that they may feel its grip, and still remain in some kind of critical distance from it.  Therefore, a great deal of teaching is a kind of pointing, of trying to get people to see what you see:

The philosopher Ted Cohen, in his book Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor, quotes from a paper written in 1949, by another philosopher, Arnold Isenberg. That paper was called “Critical Communication.” According to Cohen, Isenberg undermines the common notion that by describing an artwork, the critic is producing a reason in support of his or her value judgement. It’s not about producing reasons, says Isenberg. All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork—by re-describing that artwork—induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work. This way, in Isenberg’s phrase, the critic can achieve a “sameness of vision” in his or her audience (i.e. a sameness of vision between audience and critic). Ted Cohen goes on to point out that this is actually a brilliant description of the use of metaphor: “When your metaphor is ‘X is Y’ you are hoping that I will see X as you do, namely as Y, and, most likely, although your proximate aim is to get me to see X in this way, your ultimate wish is that I will feel about X as you do.” So the critical act is a metaphorical act.

A lot to think about here on what we do.  What I am trying to do in this post; what I am trying to do as a teacher.  Often what I am trying to do in my ordinary life as someone who cares about thought, and reality.