Inventory and Reflection: due as a draft on Thursday September 8th. Please place the Google Doc here.
The assignment is in two parts:
The first part is for you to write out an inventory--as complete as possible--of what you have read, and organize this list chronologically and/or according to genre. Please include the title and author. If you are struggling to recall books, you could widen the net and include anything that was a significant reading experience for you, such as films, television shows, video games, websites, works of performing artists (musicians, comedians, athletes), albums and songs, theatre, books of poetry, which may be of any genre, fiction or creative nonfiction, the personal or the academic, fantasy to horror to philosophical to romance to adventure, etc... The second part will be to write a reflective narrative on how at least five of the books you've listed impacted you as a reader/writer/human being, and helped form how and what you "read for" whenever you read. Strive to write at least a hundred to two hundred words for each of those five books (500 - 1000 words total), and tell a story about the kind of reader you've become, and how each book impacted the way you read. Consider that you have a style of reading, and that all of your readings are yours because of that style. Most of us do not notice our style of reading: the world just shows up the way it does, in all its significance, already and always the way it does. Meaningfulness and significance are already there, always there. Discovering our style--discovering that we even have a style we bring with us to every reading experience--that's what you are working toward in this exercise. I am asking you to strive to bring that discovery to language in this reflective narrative--or at the very least to hint at the style by virtue of what you select to write about, which you say impacted you as a reader and writer. |
Together, the inventory and reflection are worth 4% of your grade for the course. As with every assignment, I will assess your effort in terms of your having done complete work (having followed all the instructions) and having done so in a professional manner appropriate to share with your classmates.
Here is an excellent example of a reflective narrative. |
Although you are to do part 1 first (the Inventory), and then part 2 (the reflection) last, please place the reflection prior to the inventory in the Google document you submit as the completed assignment.
Part 1: The Inventory (details on what to do)
Chronological ListList every book (title and author) you can remember reading, or that others can tell you that you read. That's right, even books adults read to you as a child could very well find their way on this list. Think of this as a kind of meditation in which you remember (that is, you go through the challenging process of un-forgetting) your reading history and what impact different reading experience had on your becoming the reader and writer you are today. This will take some time. Don't rush through this (that's why we are starting this before the actual semester begins).
Identify Register (mimetic, thematic, synthetic)For either list, work to identify dominant registers you find operative within each text (the mimetic, the thematic, and the synthetic).
Think of it this way:
If we have an individual reading style, that is, a style that does not entirely follow the generic expectations of a given genre and its conventions, then it will likely include all three elements as possibilities for the reader to experience, even when a text seems to clearly lack one or the other. That is a subjective consideration, where the reader has all the power.
The objective consideration leaves the author and her representative, the text, with all the power. On this view, either the text attempts artistically to combine all three as integrated, we might appreciate such a work as truly great. Maybe. But most texts will have one of the three--mimetic, thematic, or synthetic--emerging as dominant over the other two. |
Recommended: Genre ListI recommend that you compose a secondary list in which you organize all your past readings into the genres they fall within. Think about: What is the style of the genre? How much is my reading experience determined by a given genre?
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PART 2: The "Reading For" Reflective Narrative
Select at least five reading experiences from your inventory that were the most impactful for you as a developing reader. You are to narrate how you wound up being the kind of reader you are today--with what style, and with what strengths and weaknesses--and how these past reading experiences worked to shape your current style, the readerly role (the rhetorical stance) that appears to control how and what you "read for" when you read.
You are invited to write about how these readerly roles may correlate with the variety (or lack thereof) of registers (mimetic, thematic, and synthetic) and genres (fantasy, science fiction, young adult, etc.) expressed in your inventory. It's important to get that to tell a story, the protagonist (you as a reader) begins the story being a certain way as a reader: looking back you can see that you were constrained to read a certain way, that is, you might have been limited to reading certain kinds of books, and even with those books you were limited in how you "read for" certain qualities. Then, the protagonist (the younger you constrained by this style of reading/reading for) encounters something challenging (hopefully one of your five books). Narrate what the challenge was and how the protagonist (the younger you) responded to this challenge, which brought her to be a different sort of "reader" who "reads for" certain kinds of experiences, or meanings, distinct from how she started. Do this for all five books. Please begin this as a Google doc. The inventory will exist as a file you provide a link to in the eventual blog post. |
For instance, my pre-teen daughter was for a brief time in a phase where she was deeply reluctant to read anything I recommend her to read, and then it had to fit a certain set of criteria: fantasy, written by a female author, and with a principle female protagonist. Nonfiction is strictly prohibited in her current style of "reading for," and concerning the prose, there must be lots of action and dialogue |
What to include in the "Reading For" Reflective Narrative
For your reflective narrative,
The quality of the impact may have been in any of these three registers: mimetic, thematic, and synthetic:
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The mimetic, thematic, and synthetic qualities of narrative are discussed by James Phelan in his Introduction to Living to Tell About It, page 20. Reading for the mimetic register means reading for entering the narrative world. This calls the reader to look through the text as if it were a transparent window. Reading for the thematic register means you read to discover the meanings the text points to. Reading for the synthetic register means you delight in the play of words and sentences there on the page. Each way of "reading for" calls for the reader to play a specific role regarding the text. |
NOTE:
One of the dominant readerly roles we have been trained to play is "reading for recognition," that is, reading for confirmation of what we already know. But this kind of "reading for" is superficial and if we obey it, we will not even get into the mimetic or thematic registers (the aesthetic experience and the meanings at work in a text). There may have been a text that you regarded in this way at first, but then you "broke through" into another way of "reading for."
Any given genre or register calls for us to become someone who reads for certain possibilities (including but not limited to the mimetic, thematic, and the synthetic). Thus, reading texts within an unfamiliar genre, or that employ registers we find difficult or annoying, helps us develop new repertoires, new readerly roles that allow us to read for new possibilities within the text. This may become a key component to developing a rationale for your reading proposal for this course.
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