Reading+Support


 * Week 1: September 13 - September 20 - Read the novel. Expect a reading quiz on Monday, September 20 - you will need to visit me to write the quiz.**

First, let's sort out the content:

What a bizarre novel! The world of this novel and the way it is written is certainly rather foreign to us... Let's break it down and discover some ways to read, and ways to help us better understand context, to direct our reading in a more informed way.

> As you are reading, **annotate**, just as you did last year when writing your first commentaries. Think of reading as an interactive process, where you should record the places where your mind engaged the most, for further contemplation. I suggest you use a highlighter pen, or, better still, a highlighter pen that has little post-it tabs attached, so you can mark pages as well. The more well-worn your book is at the end of your read, the more you will have got out of it. > > As you are reading, allow yourself some time for reflection. [|Take notes] to keep track of questions that emerge as your read. > > Keep a log of your reading -- I highly recommend you share your reading log on a Blog in the LO World Lit Community site. I will be reviewing any (optional) blogs as well as (compulsory) discussion forum comments when determining your participation mark. > > To get your head around the first part of the book, then, examine your annotations to identify what sorts of things we should be looking at. **Please post your quick little topic suggestions (just a sentence, or even a few words) in the Discussion Forum, [|here]**. **Everybody must post at least once.** I will sort your suggested "hooks" or ways into/through the novel into general topics for us to explore in groups and then report out on to the larger group in the "Themes" section of our unit. Your topics could be anything that takes us through the novel - a motif, a theme, a character observation, a narrative technique, etc. If you do not know where to start, you might want to start by asking some questions in the discussion instead. This posting of ways into the novel will be used throughout our study to develop themes/motifs for the Themes topics (see link to Themes in sidebar menu). This exercise lets you challenge yourself to read actively, while also learning from everyone else's experiences reading. > > The context of the novel is its bigger world - the historical context, the political context, the social context, the cultural context. Part of the fascination of literature in general is that when we read anything, we bring our own context to that reading -- interpreting from our point of view, literally -- when in fact, we need to treasure the fact that although we can look at the work through our own cultural lens, we can also shed much light on the work by stepping into the worlds of the characters and even the world of the writer (which might not be the same world as that of the characters, e.g. in historical fiction or science fiction). In World Literature, this is especially true. Different cultures really do see things differently. If you are interested in exploring this idea of cultural lenses, watch a video that looks at the whole notion of "choice" -- and how it is possibly valued or not valued depending on a person's cultural background -- interesting things to think about. If you DO watch this video, check out the conversation below it, as the discussion of science there relates nicely to the kind of work you will do in Theory of Knowledge and to the kind of faulty logic manipulation that we see in //The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum//. [|Link here to video on TED.com, including viewer comments.]media type="custom" key="6689825"
 * 1) **How to be an active and engaged reader** (no, this doesn't mean reading on exercise equipment!)
 * 1) **How to better understand context**