Posts Tagged ‘illustrations’
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010
“I used to have a professor in medical school who, when a student gave a particularly murky answer, would hand him a piece of chalk, escort him to the blackboard, and say, ‘Draw me a picture of it’” (14).
This from Walker Percy’s chapter “The Delta Factor” in The Message in the Bottle as a way of arguing for the power of images to clarify and communicate what can’t be clarified and communicated any other way.
In this chapter, Percy attempts to draw a picture himself of the event (which he calls the Delta phenomenon) when “[m]an became man by breaking through the daylight of language” (45). This picture is a triangle (or Delta) that captures what naturally occurs between a person, a symbol, and the thing the symbol stands for. That is, it depicts the “ah-ha” moment when the person acquires or makes meaning in language.
Here’s an excerpt below with a discussion of Helen Keller and her Delta epiphany. (The last paragraph on the left page is particularly telling about the power of drawing.)
Tags: illustrations, The Delta Factor, The Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy
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Friday, July 30th, 2010
Here’s a handmade response to Alberto Manguel’s chapter titled “Reading the Future” in A History of Reading. In this chapter, Manguel scans the history of textual divination; that is, the use of texts to substantiate prophesy and power.
He writes, “Faced with a text, the reader can transform the words into a meaning that deciphers for him or her a question historically unrelated to the text itself or the author This transmigration of the text with the circumstances of the reader can enlarge or impoverish the text itself; invariably it imbues the text with the circumstances of the reader” (211).
Tags: A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, handmade thinking, illustrations, reading visuals, Teaching Reading
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Friday, July 30th, 2010
Here’s a handmade response to the final chapter in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading titled “The Endpaper Pages.” In this chapter, Manguel acknowledges that his book was only a partial history and imagines what would need to be included in THE History of Reading, which of course can never be completed. As long as there are readers and writers, a new history of reading is always before us.
Tags: A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, handmade thinking, illustrations, Teaching Reading, timeline
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Thursday, 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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Wednesday, 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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Wednesday, 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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Monday, 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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Monday, 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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Monday, 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
Posted in Teaching Reading, Visual Thinking | No Comments »
Monday, 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
Posted in Visual Thinking | 1 Comment »
