Sunday, September 14, 2014

Week Five: Reading As Mind Expansion

This week we are reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. This is a short novel whose reading is intended to inform the actual practice of our lives. Not all books are designed to do this, but many texts are surrounded by a rhetoric of application that goes beyond entertainment--the idea that a text should be useful and an aid to the increase of our understanding of the world and the people in it.

During our discussion of the work in class, we will explore the nature of meaning in the work, how "meaning" is created by the narrative, and how that meaning might be applied. We must also consider how texts contradict themselves and offer a variety of doorways into multiple constructions of meaning. Please read the book before coming to class. If you have read it before, try reading it again and see if your idea of the book and its application to your life has changed since the first time you read it.

Writing Assignment #2:  This week please post your second writing in Canvas. Your writing should consider an extended passage or scene from either True Grit or Pride and Prejudice and the four levels of discourse the passage incites. Start with a restatement of text and then a description of what the text seems to be doing. Move on to an interpretation of the passage and finally discuss how this interpretation is affected by the elements of  mediation that contextualize the text. The target length for this exercise is about 500 words. 

No Class Next Week: Next week there will be no classes on Tuesday because of faculty professional day. There will be a writing assignment as well as an assignment to read "Howl" by Allen Ginsburg. We will discuss the poem in more detail in class in our next class meeting on Sept. 30.



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