July 29th, 2010
Here’s a handmade response to Alberto Manguel’s chapter “The Book Fool” in A History of Reading. In this chapter, Manguel provides a brief history of the invention (1286?) and use of eyeglasses, and how they have contributed to the history of reading, as well as how the bespectacled reader has sometimes been ridiculed as an ivory-towerish nerdball.
When I got my glasses for the first time in 3rd grade, on the first day I wore them to school, a boy in my class walked up, took them from my face, and dropped them on the ground in front of me. Glasses produce in some a fear of the bookish or intellectual. Blinding another is one of the most extreme punishments to be handed down.
Tags: A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, glasses, handmade thinking, illustrations, reading visuals
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July 28th, 2010
Here is a handmade response to “Forbidden Reading” in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. In this chapter, Manguel surveys the history of censorship and the control of meaning by authoritarian powers.
A nice concluding sentence of this chapter:
“Every reader makes up readings, which is not the same as lying; but every reader can also lie, wilfully declaring the text subservient to a doctrine, to an arbitrary law, to a private advantage, to the rights of slave owners or the authority of tyrants” (288).
Tags: A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, censorship, handmade thinking, illustrations, Teaching Reading
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July 28th, 2010
Here’s a handmade response to “The Translator as Reader” in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. This bit here on reading as genealogy was particularly striking to me:
“I mean that every book has been engendered by long successions of other books whose covers you may never see and whose authors you may never know but which echo in the one you now hold in your hand” (266).
Tags: A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, genealogy chart, handmade thinking, reading visuals, Teaching Reading
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July 28th, 2010
Here’s a handmade post-it response to Trevor B. Hall’s “Feeling for a Story” in Robert Coles’ Teaching Stories. I like what he says here about the need for emotional engagement with narrative.
Tags: emotional reading, handmade thinking, illustrations, reading visuals, Teaching Reading
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July 26th, 2010
Here’s a handmade response to Alberto Manguel’s chapter “The Author as Reader” in A History of Reading. In this chapter, Manguel recounts a brief history of authors as public performers of their own work, from Pliny the Younger to modern literary festival readings.
At the close of this chapter, he writes:
“At the best of the literary festivals, at the most successful public readings, writers are both preserved and propogated. Preserved because they are made to feel (as Pliny confessed) that they have an audience that attaches importance to their work; preserved, in the crudest sense, because they get paid (as Pliny wasn’t) for their labors; and propogated because writers breed readers, who in turn breed writers” (258-259).
Tags: A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, genealogy chart, handmade thinking, illustrations, literary festival, reading visuals
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July 26th, 2010
Here’s a handmade response to “Stealing Books,” a chapter in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading–this from page 244.
I’m experimenting with inserting my drawings into the pages of the books I’m reading, just as I did here.
I think the section above on the multiple sensations of reading is really outstanding–a reminder of the full-bodied experience of reading. I’d add to Manguel’s list above the pulse of the heart and bellows of the lungs keeping rhythm with the song of the text.
Tags: A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, handmade thinking, illustrations, reading visuals, Teaching Reading, turning pages
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July 26th, 2010
Here’s a handmade response to Louise M. Rosenblatt’s “Epilogue: Against Dualisms” in The Reader, The Text, The Poem. The irony of opposing oppositions doesn’t escape Rosenblatt here. The entire argument of her book is to argue against the subject/object split in human experience (her focus of course is the experience of reading literature), specifically the belief that the knower (or reader) and the known (the literary object) are autonomous entities or experiences. By that I mean (she means) that a reader is as much defined by the work being read as the work being read is defined by the reader. Each is conditioned by the other, as well as by the circumstances under which the reading takes place.
When we are asked to choose an “either/or” choice, we should respond with, “I’ll take both.” Vanilla or chocolate? A scoop of each.
Tags: false dichotomies, handmade thinking, illustrations, Louise M. Rosenblatt, reader response theory, reading visuals, Teaching Reading
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July 26th, 2010
Here’s another handmade response to Robert Coles’ “A Witness to Public Education” in Teaching Stories. The first one was here.
I found this sentence particularly striking: “All our recent knowledge notwithstanding…..the way to the waywardness of the children I meet in our public schools is, finally, through their minds and hearts: they can be stirred and touched by teachers and athletic coaches and counselors and school nurses–by us grown-ups who are part of the world of children, and are able to offer various talents and skills for these young fellow-citizens so much in need of them” (267-268).
Number 5 could be “learning,” too. Whatever it is, it’s both an intersection and embrace. A beautiful combination of different forms.
Tags: handmade thinking, reading visuals, Robert Coles, Teaching Reading, Teaching Stories, Venn diagram
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July 26th, 2010
Here’s a handmade post-it response to Robert Coles’ essay “A Witness to Public Education” in Teaching Stories. I was particularly struck by the reminder that the long-term goal of secondary education is not college-prep.
Tags: handmade thinking, illustrations, map, public education, reading visuals, Robert Coles, Teaching Reading
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July 25th, 2010
Here’s a handmade drawing in response to “Interpretation, Evaluation, Criticism” in Louise M. Rosenblatt’s The Reader, The Text, The Poem. In this chapter, Rosenblatt argues that the work of the reader is ultimately practice in self-awareness and self-interpretation.
Interpretation is the act of reflecting on our engagement with a text, what we make out of it, and how we made what we made out of it (that is, how the text and our lives entered into a relationship to birth our response). Thus, the reflection upon the (1) experience of reading, (2) the created response, and (3) all of the ingredients that led to that response (reader and text) is a study of one’s own participation in and contribution to the making of a literary response.
In the end, therefore, the purpose of reading literary art (like any other form of art) is not to capture the object once and for all (pin that butterfly to the table) or to depend upon the answers of others (CliffNotes or Wikipedia), but to see ourselves at work and play with art (and with others) and, as a result, to come to know ourselves (and others) better.
And this has a deeply democratic purpose as well. Rosenblatt ends with this from Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas”:
Tags: handmade thinking, illustrations, Louise M. Rosenblatt, reader response theory, reading visuals, self-awareness, self-understanding, Teaching Reading
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