Of course, I haven’t read this book, but PW’s review of Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read claims the central thesis is that “the act of reading is less important than knowing the social and intellectual context of a book.”1
That argument sounds a lot like Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, in which he [...]

October’s issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine has an article by Terri Windling called “Lost and Found: The Orphaned Hero in Myth, Folklore, and Fantasy.” In it, Windling traces the archetype through mythology, fairy tales, fiction, and history.1 She also offers some explanations for the continued interest in these tales, such as the [...]

Maybe it’s just interesting timing, or synchronicity, or maybe it’s because we tend to see the things we’re looking for, but I’ve come across two sources in the last few days that take up the question “why learn this?” in relation to writing and literature.The first is Sheridan Blau’s The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and [...]

A problem that I’m working on, and want to remind myself to continue solving. Also, probably a problem that I will continue to work on for most (or all) of my life. Why should people learn anything beyond that which is required for survival? And specifically, why should anyone learn whatever it [...]

I’ve started a “teaching reading” course–the last one in my Masters program. The first night, we tried to answer the questions: what is interpretation? and what is it we are doing when we interpret? A number of people, in discussing their own experiences, brought up the importance of relevance. But I don’t see relevance as [...]

I want my creative writing students to understand how important reading is to the development of writing, and I want them to be aware of what’s going on in the literary world as well as the world in general. One way to do this, I think, is to have them discover and read blogs … [...]