Reading and Theory
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 4/20/2009 2:35 PM 
Categories: Around Campus, Education, Mark Edmundson, Books, Reading
Tags: Around Campus Education Mark Edmundson Books Reading
Categories: Around Campus, Education, Mark Edmundson, Books, Reading
Tags: Around Campus Education Mark Edmundson Books Reading
Listen to this article
I have had a longstanding dislike of theory, so I recommend the following essay on teaching literature (and literary theory):... [W]e need to befriend the texts that we choose to teach. They too are the testaments of human beings who have lived and suffered in the world. They too deserve honor and respect.
"Against Readings" by Mark Edmundson
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i33/33b00601.htm
I warmly believe that if a professor was terrible, a textbook was backwards, and the class' perspective belonged to the age of the pterodactyls that, even so, the opportunity to read carefully and broadly under informed guidance is always an education. I have thanked certain teachers for decades for the opportunity to 'meet' certain books and to talk with them over decades.
(I read plenty of things on my own but I doubt I would have come across these unless I was locked in a room with nothing else to read: with all the books in the world it would have taken me a long time to get to them.)
-Kushana
Comments