#reader-response

[actvtyblog]

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

A novel "Me Before You" wrote by Jojo Moyes is about a woman named Louisa Clark who is a caregiver of a man named Will Traynor who can't enjoy to do what he loves because of his condition due to an accident. The two gradually became friends, but Will wished to die because of his situation and unhappy feelings.

The novel made me think that even we feel that our life was nothing, there's always someone who makes us feel that life is worth for living. Just enjoy every moment of your life and live happy to the fullest. However, I understand Will's struggle when he said that their time together had been special, but he could not manage to live in a wheelchair, because it's really hard to pretend that you're always happy but you can't do the things you loved that makes you happy. I cannot decide if I will agree or diagree to Will's choice because I'm not on his shoes, I don't know how hard or tough for him that situation, but for me, life is really beautiful and wonderful. After reading the novel, I realized that it is important to appreciate and cherish people who help us through our tough times. While reading the novel I wished that the ending was happy but it ended up heartbreaking after all.

Overall, Me Before You is really a good novel, it made me think that life is worth living and we should treasure every moment that we made. If there's another story like this in the future, l would read it because it makes me understand the means of living. I would also read another book by Jojo Moyes because her creation is relatable to the experience and life of some readers. And I would recommend this novel to everyone who loves to read about love, friendship, and life stories.

[necksbetrim]

Why books are (and are not) like mashed potatoes

Jason Gots: I am a very changeable creature. The magic of a book depends not only on the book or on the author, but also on me and where I'm at at any given time. So I have a certain wariness of pronouncing judgment to say, 'Oh this is a good book.' 

I mean, sometimes I know a book is simply terrible, but there's also a wide band within which I would say, well, it just didn't work for me right now, because I'm so changeable that way.

Neil Gaiman: A book is a door, and the reader is a key. And sometimes you're not the right shape key to that door at that time, and you go, 'There's nothing here for me.' And then you can pick up that same book six months later, and somehow you can feel somewhere on the first page the key click in the lock. You engage, and those characters come to life.

We don't talk enough about this. We talk about books as as if each writer has made one book and that one book is one experience that everybody has. As if you, I don't know—made a plate of mashed potatoes. And you are handing those mashed potatoes out, and everybody tastes the same mashed potatoes. And that's not true.

A book is computer code. The book is raw code, and the reader is running the code. The reader is taking 26 letters, a handful of punctuation marks, and is decoding them, and building them up into something in their heads. And that's what's being experienced.

Jason Gots: I think there's a good case to be made that no two people taste the same plate of mashed potatoes.

Neil Gaiman: I think you're very probably right, especially because if you lined up, you know, 1000 people, and made them all taste the same plate of mashed potatoes, you'd get people at one end of the line going, 'That was the best thing, I just want to eat that for the rest of my life. Are there any more?'

And you'd get people down the other end of the line going, 'I'm really sorry that I vomited, but it was so disgusting!'

- Clever Creature s02e01, “THAW,” 12 May 2021 https://anchor.fm/clever-creature/episodes/THAW-wNeil-Gaiman-ev9l41

[intothinair-project-blog]

Reading Response // Scott Choi

Scott Choi

Ms. Clarke

English 9 C Block

20 November 2015

Writing #3:Weather Type: Reading response

When I first started reading Into thin air by Jon Krakauer, I thought it was going to be another boring Everest story, where everybody chases after their dream of climbing the world’s tallest mountain and become famous. However, the end of the book was quite different than what I had first expected. Many of the climbers die during the expedition and lose their lives on the mountain. Some of the bodies could not be even brought back down the mountain.

I thought this was a bad story at first because in the beginning of the book, the author

literally told the ending. I thought that he had spoiled the entire story because the very first part of the story started from the top of the Mount Everest, where the expedition was ending. Also, the author described who died while on the adventure and usually when this happens, readers already know what is going to happen, ruining the curiosity of the story.

However, Jon Krakauer does a great job at creating imagery. While reading the book, the texts were so descriptive that I could imagine the entire scene happening before my eyes.

“The ink-black wedge of the summit pyramid stood out in the stark relief, towering over the surrounding ridges. Thrust high into the jet stream, the mountain ripped a visible gash in the 120-knot hurricane, sending forth a plume of ice crystals that trailed to the east like a long silk scarf.”(Page 30).

The words depicts the tops of the mountain under a blue sky, yet words such as “jet stream” and “plume of ice crystals” bring a chill to the readers, enabling them to not only see but also feel the cold atmosphere of the scene.

I kept reading because, in addition to imagery, Jon Krakauer was not like the other writers I had read. He was different. He used real words such as “fu**,” and “sh**” that people would use in real life situations. This allowed me to feel the emotions the characters were going through and become involved personally in the story.

He also wrote about the history of the Everest, like when it was open, people who climbed it, conflict because of the Everest, etc… Which helped me a lot because I could understand the story and the history of Mt. Everest easier.

I didn’t really expect much from the book, because I read a lot Mt. Everest books and they always end up the same, but the style the author used for the story was very inspiring, it made wish that I could write as good as him.

[internationaljournalofresearch]

The Symbolism of Sexuality in Trevisan´s Short-story: ``The Vampire of Curitiba``

The Symbolism of Sexuality in Trevisan´s Short-story: “The Vampire of Curitiba“

Muhammad Usman Khan

Special Student of Literature & Linguistics

Department of Letters

UNESP-Rio Preto Campus

Abstract

The paper deals with the symbolism of sexuality represented in the text of Dalton Trevisan´s short-story “The Vampire of Curitiba“. The research is based on reader-response theory where every person may derive different meaning from the same text and according to this theory,…

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[etatil-blog-blog]

Performative Utterances

So while I’ve been spending an unholy amount of time re-reading Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author," there is a part in the essay where he starts talking about performative utterances:

[T]he modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of “painting” (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered [.]

This line lead me back to J. L. Austin, a British Philosopher of Language, and his -- wonderfully funny -- writing, "How to Do things with Words.”

A performative utterance is an action or a large part of the action being performed. Several examples Austin gives are orders given, i.e. in a will “I leave all my possessions to _____” or “I declare war.” Or to christen a ship: “I name this boat Bill. *Smashes the bottle against the stem; everybody claps*”

[Austin talking about what would not count as a performative utterance]

"Suppose, for example, I see a vessel on the stocks, walk up and smash the bottle hung at the stem, proclaim 'I name this ship the Mr. Stalin' and for good measure kick away the chocks: But the trouble is, I was not the person chosen to name it (whether or not - an additional complication - Mr. Stalin was the destined name; perhaps in a way it is even more of a shame if it was). We can all agree (1) that the ship was not thereby named; (2) that it is an infernal shame."

This can be read / found in three different ways / places (or I should say I found three different places where you could read about this!):

The University of Pennsylvania’s Linguistic department:

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/courses/103/Austin.pdf

The 2nd Edition of Literary Theory by editor Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, (pages 162-176)

Or, you could buy his book:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Do-Things-Words-Lectures/dp/0674411528

[andhowdoyourespond-blog]

DIALOGUE between ME and LOUISE ROSENBLATT, Pt. 5

Me: So, what do you think of this kind of diagram, Louise? It's standard practice in critical thinking circles, and we've encountered it in the social studies course offered at OISE.

Louise: It seems a little cut-and-dry, but it aligns with what some of my followers believe.

Me: Which ones?

Louise: Purves, Rogers and Soter. They assert that one of the objectives of a response-based approach to school literature is that "[e]ach student will reach through the story to the writer and seek to understand the culture that underlies the story to find both unique elements and points of connection to his own culture and that of other readers. He will recognize his similarity and differences with other places, other people, other times."1

Me: I was definitely aiming for those types of discussions with my students, though we didn't explicitly use Venn diagrams. After reading a poem, we'd discuss a whole host of associated topics: how it made us feel and/or think; what its author might have felt; how the text was situated in the world; the world of the poem; where our points of view diverged from the text; where we found unity with the text...

Louise: You got through all that in 40 minutes a day?



Me: To be honest, no, but we tried. We generally discussed many of those points, but not all.

Louise: It's a noble aim, this way of organizing one's thoughts. Just looking at it now, I think it makes visible the process of interacting with the text: both aesthetically and through an efferent reading. When they examine themselves in relation to world and text, it's an aesthetic experience, and when they compare the text to the world it's largely through an efferent reading.

Me: After reading William Carlos Williams' poem, "This is Just to Say", students inferred the speaker's likely feelings about the act being apologized for, and then created their own apology poems.

Louise: Fun!

Me: Yeah, they seemed to enjoy it. I feel the need to debrief it technically, though. May I?

Louise: Oh, go ahead. You are in teacher's college, after all.

Me: In critical thinking terms, they performed to specs, hypothesizing as to the speaker's frame of reference and translating it into their own. In reader-response terms, they evoked meaning from the text by living through it, and then formed a new experience, conjured up by associations made with the original.

Louise: Sounds solid to me. What were their poems like?

Me: They wrote apology poems to people, stones, tables, and dogs: whatever came to their minds upon reading about the plums in the icebox. They took the idea of guilt without remorse and layered it over stories of stealing toys, replacing old dull stones, driving cars. Though they don't necessarily like plums, they can see the significance of plums in the poem and project it onto their own worlds and consciousnesses.

Louise: Bravo!

Me: Yeah, they're good kids.

*

1 Making Love to a Porcupine III, p. 59

[andhowdoyourespond-blog]

Efferent understanding of metaphor: A comparison between two unlike things that continues throughout a series of sentences in a paragraph or lines in a poem.

Rosenblatt on metaphor: "Even when[...] a metaphor is expressed in the grammatical form of a comparison, that is, as a simile, it is still a metaphor only by virtue of a very special mode of handling on the reader's part"1. A reader, in attempting to understand or evoke a metaphor, pays attention, "not to logical connections, but to what the juxtaposition of these terms is calling forth within him."2

When I first introduced the idea of metaphor to my students, I presented them with several visual metaphors, many of them illustrations of common idioms. I later modelled the process of extending metaphors, using analogies to compare, for instance, the school with a ship, its principal with a captain, the teachers and students its fuel. Was this approach too strongly focused on making logical connections? Isn't there a benefit in using a clear foundation from which students can expand?

*

1 The Reader, the Text, the Poem, p. 93

2 Ibid., p. 94

[andhowdoyourespond-blog]

In another chapter1 of Karolides' "Reader Response in the Classroom", Ron Luce presents his class with a scribbled-out version of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall", with only its shape and punctuation intact. He presents it in this way to enable his students to approach the work free of any baggage it might hold as a poem -- they had previously admitted to him that they had no interest in further studies of English literature. Once he comes clean with its identity as a poem, he asks them to explore it line-by-line, being careful to tell them there is no correct answer. Their responses are personal and thoughtful. Rather than simply putting a poem in front of his students and asking them to read it, Mr. Luce makes the decoding process explicit, inviting careful thought about what we do when reading poetry.

This aligns with Rosenblatt's idea of the aesthetic stance: something we consciously choose to fit the requirements of a given text. Since readers "often are not conscious of the difference in stance required by different texts", we need to supply them with "signals to adjust their approach to such materials."2 This is emphasized in the Ontario curriculum when it comes to nonfiction materials; my host teacher spent multiple periods reiterating and eliciting the features of informational text to prepare her students for CASI.3

Do we treat poetic signals the same way as nonfiction texts? Yes. We must make explicit what the poetic devices are, and build up a repertoire of such tools. Yes, must alert ourselves to all the features of the text, acting as detectives. Yes, we must consciously choose an aesthetic stance and understand all that it entails.

*

1 Mending Walls: Using a Reader-Response Approach to Teach Poetry", pp. 61-74

2 The Reader, the Text, the Poem, p. 79

3Comprehension Attitude Strategies Interests, a reading assessment for students in grades 4 to 8