The Logic of Characters’ Virtual Lives

Author(s):  
Jeremy Rosen

Argues that writers of minor-character elaboration foreground a tension between structural and referential views of character that has dominated theories and scholarly debates surrounding literary character. The chapter argues that authors who adopt the genre reveals how reference is produced by readers’ supplementing textual structure with outside information, a process that is both central to realist reading practices and, when extended, produces characters’ virtual lives.

Author(s):  
Jeremy Rosen

Traces the recent surge in minor-character elaboration to the late 1960s and a set of active reading practices and textual acquisitiveness shared by feminist, anticolonial, poststructuralist, and postmodernist writers. It argues that early forays into the genre by writers like Jean Rhys, John Gardner, and Tom Stoppard reveal a variety of formal permutations and agendas that later writers might inherit.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Fernandes de Oliveira ◽  
Iran Ferreira de Melo

With this work, we aim to propose a didactic application of the news genre, from the perspective of critical reading practices in Portuguese language teaching, to approach the experiences of dissident gender and sexuality people who are being viewed and represented by the media hegemonic in Brazil. Therefore, we offer teachers 5 texts and 10 activities that can be used for the development of a didactic project that articulates several areas of knowledge and that is also built from an educational vision that dialogues reading, criticism , teaching, learning, assessment and self-assessment. In this sense, due to the theme we are dealing with, we assume a political-epistemological tone combating gender and sexual violence, with education being our battlefield.


Author(s):  
Matthew D. C. Larsen

What does it mean to read the gospels “before the book”? For centuries, the way people have talked about the gospels has been shaped by ideas that have more to do with the printing press and modern notions of the author than they do with ancient writing and reading practices. Gospels Before the Book challenges several subtle yet problematic assumptions about authors, books, and publication at work in early Christian studies. The author explores a host of underappreciated elements of ancient textual culture, such as unfinished texts, accidental publication, postpublication revision, and multiple authorized versions of the same work. Turning to the gospels, he argues the earliest readers and users of the text we now call the Gospel according to Mark treated it not as a book published by an author but as an unfinished, open, and fluid collection of notes (hypomnēmata). The Gospel according to Matthew, then, would not be regarded as a separate book published by a different author but, rather, as a continuation of the same unfinished gospel tradition. Similarly, it is not the case that, of the five different endings in the textual tradition, one is “right” and the others are “wrong.” Rather, each ending represents its own effort to fill in what some perceived to be lacking in the Gospel according to Mark. The text of the Gospel according to Mark is better understood when approached as unfinished notes than as a book published by an author. Larsen also offers a new methodological framework for future scholarship on early Christian gospels.


Author(s):  
Jill Hicks-Keeton

The Introduction claims that the ancient romance Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel’s God. Aseneth’s story is a tale of the heroine’s transformation from exclusion to inclusion. It is simultaneously a transformative tale. For Second Temple-period thinkers, the epic of the Jewish people recounted in scriptural texts was a story that invited interpretation, interruption, and even intervention. Joseph and Aseneth participates in a broader literary phenomenon in Jewish antiquity wherein authors took up figures from Israel’s mythic past and crafted new stories as a means of explaining their own present and of envisioning collective futures. By incorporating a gentile woman and magnifying Aseneth’s role in Jewish history, Joseph and Aseneth changes the story. Aseneth’s ultimate inclusion makes possible the inclusion of others originally excluded.


1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Lloyd Eldredge ◽  
D. Ray Reutzel ◽  
Paul M. Hollingsworth

This study compared the effectiveness of two oral reading practices on second graders' reading growth: shared book reading and round-robin reading. The results indicated that the Shared Book Experience was superior to round-robin reading in reducing young children's oral reading errors, improving their reading fluency, increasing their vocabulary acquisition, and improving their reading comprehension. An analysis of the primary-grade basal readers submitted for adoption in 1993 revealed that most had incorporated “shared reading” into their instructional designs. Before “shared reading,” the common practice was “individual reading,” and although the authors of basals did not recommend it, round-robin oral reading was widely used. Although the Shared Book Experience had been widely used in schools prior to its inclusion in basal designs, there were no experimental studies supporting it. The findings of this study are discussed and related to these classroom practices and trends.


2020 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Pablo Cavallero

Abstract The changes in the short version of Leontios of Neapolis’ Life of John the Almsgiver are analyzed in order to evaluate their cause and to expose their literary character. It is shown that the saint’s oaths are suppressed due to a misunderstanding of a passage in the Prologue, and by respect of the Evangelical commandment. The short version also eliminates pagan concepts of fortune, emphasises the social hierarchy, the accordance between words and thoughts, the action of God as a cause of miracles, and avoids to name God as a reason. The short version raises the stylistical level of the text using the methods of the Metaphrast which is common in the 10th century. The textual tradition also allows to date it into this century. The long version is surely the original text, and the changes made to it show a cultural change between the 7th and 10th centuries.


Mnemosyne ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
Christoph Pieper

Abstract The article analyses how Ovid in the 10th letter of his Heroides experiments with the concept of a female voice within Roman literature. Ovid constructs Ariadne as a literary speaker against the background of (1) the Augustan elegiac tradition with its mostly male speakers, (2) the earlier phases of the Ariadne-myth in which Ariadne’s fate is determined by men (Theseus and Bacchus), and (3) the reception of this myth in Catullus’ famous ecphrasis in carmen 64. In the beginning of Heroides 10, Ovid shows how Ariadne develops consciousness of her own ability to speak. She develops from a heterodiegetic (epic) narrator to a homodiegetic (elegiac) speaker. In a second step, however, Ovid demonstrates that Ariadne is not only generally inexperienced in the field of literature, but that her attempt to re-shape her own story from a female perspective must necessarily fail. Her literary character cannot be separated from the previous (male) myth. At the end of the letter, she accepts her own literary immaturity when she asks Theseus to be the future narrator of her own fate. By showing that Ovid in his Ariadne-letter actually stages the failure of his protagonist’s attempt to free herself from a male literary tradition, I suggest that the Heroides should not be read as female literature, but as texts which reaffirm male dominance within Roman literary society.


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