Monday, October 15, 2007
Push
My reading has for the past year been grad school heavy. I'm thankful to get the opportunity to read a novel for a change. I entered this reading experience from several perspectives. I read as a lover of literature, a teacher, a grad student, a writer, a middle class white male. I found it interesting how each of my "identities" informed my reading experience, and while I read, I noted my different emotional responses as I experienced the text. This novel hit me in the viscera. At times I was absolutely repulsed by what I read. While other times, my eyes teared. How different this story would be if told from the third person.
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3 comments:
Brian, I love how you take a look around to see where your boat is in the ocean -- so to speak -- as a white male, grad student, teacher, etc etc. The Johnston talk has really got me thinking about the power of words. I knew it....but I DIDN'T know it - at all. and then to think about the mountains of just ("just"?!) the verbal abuse Precious sustained is unfathomable.
Nice efferent consideration -- about the 3rd person, that is. Ah, words.....the difference between "I", and "she"....
My reading has for the past year been grad school heavy. I'm thankful to get the opportunity to read a novel for a change.
I looked forward to a novel, too. I wonder how many of us share that background as teachers - that loving of books, of the lived through experience of a novel - that likely played an important part is our becoming teachers of reading and writing.
I chose not to go to grad school in "English" when I saw the path before me as an efferent one, playing around with different modes of literary criticism. I valued the aesthetic experience and resisted being pulled too far away from that by those wacky deconstructionists!
What I liked about grad school as an English major was the wacky deconstructions. It was all so aesthetic, and fun, and creative, and meaningless. I didn't persue a PhD because I was tired of writing about other people's writing; I like the idea that what happens in my classroom, ala Rain Blue, can change someone's life. The power of the word!
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