scholarly journals Learning to Read Big Books: Dante, Spenser, Milton

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 291
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
Attentive Reader ◽  
Long Poems ◽  
True Knowledge ◽  
Reading For Information

The interpretive challenges posed by dense and lengthy poems such as Dante’s Inferno, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost can prove daunting for the average undergraduate reader whose experience of texts has been circumscribed by pedagogical mandates focused on reading for information. While information-retrieval based reading certainly has its place, the experience of reading these longer, more allegorical and symbolic poems can create in the attentive reader a far more valuable kind of learning, understood by Dante and his heirs, all working from Homeric and Virgilian models, as understanding. Each of these long poems pay very close attention to acts of interpretation, foregrounding the experiences of their characters to illustrate the proper way to move from sense, past speculation, to true understanding. Those who heed these lessons, and embrace the experience offered by the poet, find that the daunting task has been outlined as the necessary step to true knowledge rather than mere information.

‘A place pickt out by choyce of best alyue,/That natures worke by art can imitate’: the Bowre of Blisse and Armida’s garden revisited

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The second chapter focuses on the best-known and most extensive imitation of Tasso’s poem in all of English literature, Spenser’s re-imagining and re-working of Armida’s enchanted garden in cantos 15 and 16 as the Bowre of Blisse in the final canto of Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser’s almost immediate engagement with Gerusalemme liberata in his own romantic epic has long seen him acknowledged as ‘the arbiter of Tasso’s glory in the first half century of his life in England’. However, despite the voluminous critical work on Spenser’s episode and its sources, the profound indebtedness to Tasso throughout has, surprisingly, still not been fully appreciated and acknowledged. The second chapter of this study therefore offers a detailed re-appraisal of the complex relationship between the two episodes, to try to underline the sustained imitative virtuosity of Spenser’s emulation of his principal Italian source. The chapter also includes a brief consideration of Milton’s indebtedness to Tasso’s episode, and Spenser’s earlier imitation of it, in the poetic evocation of Eden in Book 4 of Paradise Lost.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Catherine Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. It is the peculiar and discomfiting genius of The Faerie Queene to call reading into question. Few works have a greater capacity to inspire pleasure, few do more to tax readers' patience, and none, perhaps, has a stronger propensity to fill them with self-doubt. Written at a moment when right reading was at once a stringently regulated ideal and a “complex and protean enterprise,” The Faerie Queene invests the work of interpretation with extraordinary, even existential, power: in the densely coded, relentlessly violent world of Spenser's poem, learning to read in the precise fashion that a particular text or occasion requires is the means to narrative survival. Its intricacy and immensity may be overwhelming, but they yield a fractal-like distribution of interest: famously difficult to comprehend, The Faerie Queene is nonetheless susceptible of interpretation at every scale.

scholarly journals XXIV. The Last Words of Asoka

1909 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 981-1016
Author(s):  
J. F. Fleet
Keyword(s):  
Close Attention ◽  
True Knowledge

We could hardly fail to read with interest and close attention Professor Hultzsch's note, published at p. 728 above, on the Rūpnāth recension of the Last Edict of Aśōka: particularly because his views are calculated to be completely subversive of the chronological arrangement laid out by me at p. 27 above, and to require us to find an entirely new date for the death of Buddha. Accepting what is plain, that the figures 256 are a date, he has revived the view that they mark the number of years elapsed since the renunciation of Buddha, when he left his home and went forth as a wandering ascetic mendicant into the houseless state, in the search for true knowledge.

scholarly journals "The Wombe's Burden": The Undermining of Female Agency within Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Delane Just
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Ultimate Purpose

Through their depictions of Eve and Britomart, Milton and Spenser undermine the agency of their female characters and perpetuate and preserve patriarchal values and hierarchy. Britomart, at once a strong martial knight, is undermined by Spenser’s tying of her ultimate purpose and goal to her ability to birth a noble lineage into existence. Milton’s Eve, while being a more positive depiction than her predecessors, is intended to be subservient to Adam and her purpose lies in copulation and procreation. Ultimately, while both texts do give their characters some agency beyond procreation, it is imperative to recognize the historical degradation of women to wombs, and how this still affects women to the modern-day.

scholarly journals Students’ Responses to Adapted Online Tahsin Quran Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-65
Author(s):  
Rifda Shabrina ◽  
Uwes Anis Chaeruman ◽  
Indina Tarjiah
Keyword(s):  
Online Learning ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Learning Materials ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Muslim Society ◽  
Attention To Students

AbstractTahsin Quran is a method of learning to read the Quran that strives to increase the reader's ability to adhere to the guidelines established (tajwid). In tahsin Quran learning, teachers must pay close attention to students' letter pronunciation in the Quran, ideally face-to-face or in sync. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated online learning, requiring some alterations to its application. The purpose of this study was to determine how students respond to online Quran learning conducted virtually in one of South Tangerang's Quran learning facilities. Students are given questionnaires about instructor competencies, the substance of learning materials, and the efficiency of tahsin online learning, which are reinforced by an interview with one of the teachers, an institution member, and students. The results indicated that, based on student answers, the institution's implementation of tahsin Quran online learning has been highly successful, with some notes and inputs to consider to improve the quality of Quran online learning in the future.AbstrakTahsin Al-Qur’an merupakan pembelajaran membaca Al-Qur’an yang bertujuan untuk memperbaiki bacaan Al-Qur’an agar sesuai dengan kaidah (tajwid) yang ditetapkan. Dalam pembelajaran tahsin Al-Qur’an, guru atau instruktur perlu memperhatikan ketepatan tiap siswanya dalam melafalkan huruf dalam Al-Qur’an sehingga pembelajaran idealnya dilakukan secara tatap muka atau sinkron. Namun pandemi COVID-19 mengharuskan pembelajaran dilaksanakan secara daring sehingga membutuhkan beberapa penyesuaian dalam pelaksanaannya. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk meneliti bagaimana respon siswa pembelajaran tahsin Al-Qur’an online yang dilaksanakan secara virtual di salah satu lembaga pembelajaran Al-Qur’an di Tangerang Selatan. Kuesioner mengenai kemampuan guru, isi materi pembelajaran, dan efektifitas pembelajaran tahsin yang dilaksanakan secara online diberikan kepada siswa yang kemudian hasilnya dilengkapi dengan hasil wawancara kepada salah satu guru, pihak lembaga, dan siswa. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa berdasarkan respon siswa pembelajaran tahsin Al-Qur’an online yang dilaksanakan di lembaga tersebut telah berjalan sangat baik dengan beberapa catatan dan masukan yang perlu diperhatikan untuk peningkatan kualitas pembelajaran tahsin Al-Qur’an daring yang akan datang.How to Cite: Shabrina, R., Chaeruman, U. A., Tarjiah, I. (2021). Students’ Responses to Adapted Online Tahsin Quran Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic. TARBIYA: Journal of Education in Muslim Society, 8(1), 57-65. doi:10.15408/tjems.v8i1.21715.

Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Atlas of Violence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Figurative Language ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Material Damage ◽  
The Military

Like Faerie Queene and Poly-Olbion, Milton’s Paradise Lost interrogates the essential meaning-making structures of poetry, using the enabling, distortive logics of cartography to think the work of representation. This chapter considers the ways the map’s origin as product of the military arms race haunts Milton’s epic, and how the poem probes the map’s tendency to disrupt the figurative structures on which poetry relies. Space, consciously framed for discursive consideration, defies the poem’s dominant use of simile and analogy, and the disruptions posed by the landscapes in Paradise Lost destabilize the figurative language that should contain violence within the poem—but fail, at sites of represented terrain, to blunt the materialization of corporeal injury. The poem triangulates figurative language, violence, and the topographical representation, such that the representation of terrain often accompanies the transformation of figurative injury into material damage, a perversion of the poem’s penchant for turning metaphor into concretion.

scholarly journals The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 317-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomáš Kočiský ◽  
Jonathan Schwarz ◽  
Phil Blunsom ◽  
Chris Dyer ◽  
Karl Moritz Hermann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Pattern Matching ◽  
Question Answering ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Term Frequency ◽  
Context Similarity

Reading comprehension (RC)—in contrast to information retrieval—requires integrating information and reasoning about events, entities, and their relations across a full document. Question answering is conventionally used to assess RC ability, in both artificial agents and children learning to read. However, existing RC datasets and tasks are dominated by questions that can be solved by selecting answers using superficial information (e.g., local context similarity or global term frequency); they thus fail to test for the essential integrative aspect of RC. To encourage progress on deeper comprehension of language, we present a new dataset and set of tasks in which the reader must answer questions about stories by reading entire books or movie scripts. These tasks are designed so that successfully answering their questions requires understanding the underlying narrative rather than relying on shallow pattern matching or salience. We show that although humans solve the tasks easily, standard RC models struggle on the tasks presented here. We provide an analysis of the dataset and the challenges it presents.

scholarly journals V. E. Sesemanʼs Transcendentalism: from Epistemology to Ontology

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Anna Shiyan
Keyword(s):  
Special Kind ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
Surrounding World ◽  
Russian Philosopher ◽  
The World ◽  
True Knowledge

The article examines the theory of knowledge of the Russian philosopher of the XXth century V. E. Sesemann and his understanding of reality. The author emphasizes that in the field of epistemology, Sesemann, being influenced by E. Husserlʼs phenomenology, first of all, answers the question of the possibility of cognition of the reality of the surrounding world and the special role of perception in this process. However, unlike Husserl, Sesemann is convinced that true knowledge is achievable not only in relation to the things of the world, but also in relation to their relationships and interrelations, which are seen in a special kind of intuition – a conceptual intuition. Seseman believes that the cognition of the surrounding world depends not only on the cognizing subject, but also on the objectivity itself, which may not always be accessible to cognition. The article pays close attention to Sesemannʼs understanding of reality as the reality of becoming, one of the types of which is movement. In this case, Sesemann argues, it is impossible to create a unified picture of the world, and our knowledge can only be probabilistic. The author examines the epistemological and ontological views of Seseman in the context of his time, comparing them with the main trends of philosophy of the XXth century, primarily with phenomenology and neo-Kantianism.

Learning to Read Childishly with “Master James”

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (3) ◽  
pp. 718-723
Author(s):  
Patricia Crain
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Personal Knowledge ◽  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
Moral Consciousness ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Attentive Reader ◽  
Treasure Island

This essay will read over the shoulder of Henry James as he reads a “boy's book” by Robert Louis stevenson, with the Design of using that seemingly unlikely encounter to think about children, books, and learning to read. An attentive reader of Stevenson's books for children and adults, James shared an affection and admiration for the man and the works with many of his contemporaries. The two became friendly after communicating in the pages of Longman's Magazine in 1884, beginning with James's essay “The Art of Fiction.” Often overlooked in discussions of this much cited essay is, first, the venue, a magazine that would become largely devoted to boys' adventure serials, and, second, the weight that James gives there to the recently published Treasure Island (1883), which he treats as exemplary in that it “succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts.” He contrasted it to Edmond de Goncourt's Chérie, which “deplorably” failed in its effort to depict “the development of the moral consciousness of a child” (61), as much as James thought that particular “country” worthy of the art of fiction (62). The reader will “say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before” him, and, as to childhood, James asserts expert personal knowledge. After all, he writes, “I have been a child in fact, but I have been on a quest for a buried treasure only in supposition” (62).

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