meg4meg
December 14, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Mrs. Chili,
I am honored you would want to print and share me with your class. Permission granted!
Meg @ The Anonymous Truth
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1 Comment.
jrh
December 10, 2006 at 8:56 am
This doesn’t belong here, but as a reply to “what should I have my students read?” post…
Songs: I love the imagery in I’ve Been Delivered by the Wallflowers and I love the analogies in Breathe by Anna Nalick (also like that she acknowledges how we analyze and interpret lyrics and writing to suit our own needs).
Articles/columns: Try Rick Reilly’s column at the back of SI for humor/pop-culture/sports writing.
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8 Comments.
feather
December 9, 2006 at 9:01 am
I was so eager to get to the bits about the books that I missed the part where you talked about me. I agree with your mom about history. I am perhaps over-preoccupied with it. I expand my reverence of it to all things in life — I just talk about the history of literature because words are what I think about the most — but context is terribly important to me. It makes it hard for me to have serious discussions with anyone — I qualify too much, and am too aware of what I do not know.
History in regards to peoples’ lives is trickier. I’ve studied enough psychology to have thought a lot about the lifelong influences that early childhood environment, experiences, and even, yes, genetics have in determining the life story of a person. I think — I hope — that these things can be changed, but I can’t discount their importance any less than I could ignore the role that the Bible has had in shaping western literature. It isn’t the same at all. But at the very least I think it’s vital for an individual to understand their personal history before it can be changed. I find myself wanting to fall back on Freudian terminology and say that it’s necessary to bring history to the conscious level to prevent it from festering in the shadowy subconscious and spawning one or many of his rather brilliant defense mechanisms.
Since I’m speaking Freudishly, I don’t mean to project or assume. It’s just that it’s hard for me to think about the history of literature without equating it to the much more immediate personal histories. This is because, in moods of grand idealism, I tend to think of literature as the most perfect reflection of human nature, a centuries-spanning illustration of the pains and joys we grapple with in our own relatively small lifetimes. So, for me, thinking about the importance of history to literature is almost the same as considering personal histories in human lifetimes. Same concepts, different scales…
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