The Beautiful in Aristotle’s Ethics

This article argues for an aesthetic reading of to kalon, primarily as it appears in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle uses to kalon to indicate that, to the morally serious, virtue is attractive and productive of a kind of pleasure. Read aesthetically, to kalon mitigates the tension between one’s own good and the common good. Aristotle shows how his students’ understanding of to kalon can be refined and thus preserved as an important and salutary feature of moral and political life.

The Power of Love

Reading for pleasure, or aesthetic reading, brings about a colossal number of benefits. Only half of Americans can say they read even one book a year for pleasure. The rate of teachers who read for pleasure is approximately the same as the general public. The standards-based approach to education, which resulted in a surge of standards-based testing, has not resulted in a significant improvement in reading teaching or learning for students. In fact, the achievement gap and the plight of the struggling learner has not improved at all. The standards-based testing movement may be partially to blame for the reduction in reading enjoyment. Increasing a love of reading in students can make a significant impact on a student's academic career. The teachers now in the classroom do not have a love a reading to model or pass on to students. Teachers have the power to impact how students feel about reading. As higher education instructors it is time to take actions that will bring about more success for our students and their students.

The linguistics of reading literature

In this paper, I attempt a bridge between linguistics, in particular text pragmatics, and school reading of literary texts. I propose a linguistic model of these peculiarities of the reading of literary texts, especially poetry, that have been called ‘aesthetic reading’, arguing that a linguistically founded basis is what is lacking for school engagement with (not only literary) texts. In the last years there has been extensive research on the linguistics-literature interface; however, what is surprisingly still missing, is a consistent linguistic model of literary reading. In this paper, I propose such a model and show that ‘aesthetic reading’ involves a distinct reading strategy that can be captured in terms of text-world-models and the differentiation between coherence and text sense displaying. Consciously reading poetry amounts, linguistically seen, to a close reading (i) especially focusing marked expressions, i.e., deviations from phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and textpragmatic routines, (ii) maintaining of unsolved ambiguities and thus (iii) generating an array of ‘authorized inferences’ that can be productively used for a principled plurality of interpretations. I specify this proposal and illustrate it with two cases of marked pronominal reference, arguing that my proposal has some important implications that make it particularly suitable for school context.

Proposing a process of organizing teaching activities to improve the effectiveness of aesthetic reading of lyric poetry in upper secondery schools

The New Literature Curriculum in General Education (2018) aims to develop learners' qualities and competencies. This is an important step to innovate teaching and meet the requirements of international integration. Therefore, teachers and students are required to change their entire ways of teaching and learning previously to meet the aforementioned objectives. Aesthetic reading is a reading that focuses on readers’ emotions, attitudes, and ideas that appear throughout the reading process. Aesthetic reading in teaching lyric poetry in upper secondary schools is considered an effective and appropriate way of teaching, meeting part of the teaching requirements under the New Literature Curriculum. Based on the analysis of some theoretical issues on aesthetic reading and the teaching of aesthetic reading in upper secondary schools, the paper proposes a process of organizing teaching activities towards aesthetic reading in lyric poetry to improve the effectiveness of teaching Literature in upper secondary schools.

Can the reading load be engaging? Connecting the instrumental, critical and aesthetic in academic reading for student learning

Learning an academic discipline requires at a fundamental level reading of knowledge that has been recorded, debated and developed in writing over time. Given the essential role of reading in shaping knowledge, there needs to be more emphasis on approaches that nurture an engaged reading practice. This article explores the role of instrumental, critical and aesthetic reading stances in engaging students in academic reading at university and the extent to which connecting these reading stances can enhance student learning through academic reading. Using this dynamic view of reading, the article examines insights and evidence from recent research to investigate the connection between these reading stances and student learning. The studies analysed indicate elements of instrumental, critical and aesthetic reading in approaches that effectively engage learners in academic reading. These ways of reading are linked to enhanced learning in terms of individual reflexivity, disciplinary participation, social perspective and global awareness. An analysis of the studies investigated advocates for using a variety of text types, giving students choice of texts, explicitly teaching dynamic reading skills, providing opportunities for social reading practices and implementing process-based assessments for learning. These practices can lighten the academic reading load by enhancing engagement and learning of disciplinary knowledge.

Sharing information through book reviews in blogs

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on information sharing by drawing on the reader-response theory developed by Louise Rosenblatt. To this end, information sharing is approached by examining how bloggers communicate their reading experiences of fiction and non-fiction books. Design/methodology/approach The conceptual framework is based on the differentiation between efferent and aesthetic reading stances specified by Rosenblatt. The efferent stance directs attention to what is to be extracted from reading for instrumental purposes such as task performance. The aesthetic stance focuses on what is being lived through during the reading event. Rosenblatt’s framework was elaborated by specifying eight categories of efferent reading and six categories of aesthetic reading. The ways in which bloggers communicate their responses to such readings were examined by scrutinising a sample of 300 posts from two book blogs. Findings The bloggers mainly articulated responses to efferent reading by sharing information about the content of the reviewed books, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Responses to aesthetic reading were mainly articulated by describing how the bloggers experienced the narrative, what kind immersive experiences they had and what kind of emotions were felt during the reading process. Research limitations/implications As the study is explorative in nature and focusses on a sample of blog posts, the findings cannot be generalised to depict how people share their responses to efferent and aesthetic reading in social media forums. Originality/value The paper pioneers by examining the potential of Rosenblatt’s theory in the study of sharing information about reading experiences in book blogs. The findings demonstrate that the categories of efferent and aesthetic reading can be elaborated further for the needs of information behaviour research.

Fiction as Information

Information Literacy is built on the idea that when we encounter information we can evaluate that information to incorporate into our knowledge schema. As such information can be encountered in a variety of ways, as academic information, workplace information, or everyday life information. Art forms can also be considered information, including literature. As an art form literature has been theorized to be a window, mirror, and a sliding glass door (Bishop, 1990) to the reader, an information source regarding our world. The notion that fiction is an information source is not particularly considered in much of the information literacy scholarly research. This paper examines how adolescents engage with fiction as a source of information. Using a small case study of a class of 16 and 17 year olds the paper examines how they construct ficiton and aesthetic reading as an information source, particularly using the metaphor of the window and the mirror. While students might consider reading as a way to explore their identity, elements related to their stance towards reading impacted their ability to see reading fiction as an information source. Furthermore they were unlikely to engage fiction as a "window" or a way to learn about others. Specific pedagogical structures may encourage a more critical stance towards aesthetic reading as a way to engage in as a learning object.