Saturday, May 8, 2010

Reading Journal

Hello everyone, what a glorious day it has been - all that sunshine! I love the publicity for King Lear - the ad currently circulating has the caption " The Dangers of playing favourites with your children". Very funny.

To clarify the Reflective Reading Journal: You are encouraged to write reflectively about your reading process, and responses, and changing reactions, to your reading. This can be to any books you read, if you wish to include books outside the scope of our Literature studies. However, to achieve a pass in this AOS, your responses to the novels on the Wider Reading List must be included. So, for example, if you have read three books for Semester 1, and you write your Journal responses about those three books, and NONE of them are from the Wider Reading List, that is not meeting the task requirements. The first aim of the task is for you to note your responses to books from the Wider Reading List. Other books of your own selection will round out your reading experience and growth as a reader, and of course it is very valuable for you to reflect on how you respond to these also. It will broaden your knowledge and understanding of context if you read a mixture of Classic novels, poems, Australian authors, short stories, and modern novels as well. But certainly at the end of semester 1 you should have completed 3 books from the Wider Reading list, and that is the minimum requirement for yor Reading Journal. Other novels you read are a binus. If you can mount a case for one of your novels to be included in the Wider Reading List, bring it to me and we'll discuss it.

It is great that so many of you love reading and are passionate readers. As Literature students, though, you must expand your reading choices to gain an understanding and appreciation of literature outside of your usual selection. These reading choices will enahnce your understanding of historical periods, cultural changes, societal pressures at different times, and will allow you to study subtext, values, ideas. The Wider Reading List has not been hastily cobbled together, they are carefully chosen!
Hope that clarifies matters. You'll let me know otherwise.
Have a great remainder of the weekend, be kind to your mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and everyone you know who is a mum! JC

5 comments:

  1. I was just looking up some information on King Lear and found a pdf file that is completely to do with social order in relation to King Lear. It's a lot to read, but it has a lot of good quotes and information.

    The site is: http://www.lluisvives.com/servlet/SirveObras/01715529104585000770035/014544_4.pdf

    Enjoy :)
    Sarah

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  2. hey sarah, interested in looking at this pdf, however my computer is silly and won't let me view it because i have n older version of adobe reader or something, do you know if the information you found is available in another format?
    regards, lyndel. :)
    (also everyone i remember to get my note signed and the like!!!) :D

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  3. oooooo it's week 5. journals friday then? :) everyone i hope you've all been reading books. :)

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  4. ATTENTION CLASS!! :)
    KING LEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!
    i have found a lovely site: http://absoluteshakespeare.com/guides/king_lear/king_lear.htm

    it's fantastic! well i think so anyway. Great way to read Lear, if you click on the link "commentary" its like a little teachter squished into the link giving the shakepeare fearers little hints as to whats going on in each scene as you read. could be advantageous somehow perhaps to read it in this way. But there are other lovely and wonderful links on the site, so have a look as perhaps reading them will help for with what ever is install for the king lear assesment?
    See you all wednesday then. :)

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  5. Hi there, that is a good site, although why they woudl choose that font is hard to understand. It is off putting, and makes the site look anachronistic, which is kind of amusing considering it is about Shakespeare. At least they could make the font suitably Elizabethan, not just old Times New Roman- ish.
    I love the time line link.
    Don't forget the hyper-history site also, that's a wonderful site for all sorts of timlines, including literary timelines.
    Hope there are no "Shakespeare fearers" out there in 11-Blog land.

    JC

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