Comments on: Course Outcomes and Reading Skills http://litbits.tengrrl.com/2012/09/13/course-outcomes-and-reading-skills/ Just another WordPress site Thu, 13 Sep 2012 20:03:16 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: Sam Cohen http://litbits.tengrrl.com/2012/09/13/course-outcomes-and-reading-skills/#comment-330 Fri, 14 Sep 2012 17:39:37 +0000 http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/litbits/?p=5581#comment-330 Happy to see this–couldn’t agree more. It’s one of the hardest things to do for students, helping them to slow down, but it’s crucial to getting them to really think about what they’re reading and not simply generalize. An added benefit for teaching fiction is it’s one way to get them past talking about whether they like characters (or find them “relatable”(!)), because it makes them talk about how our impression of characters is constructed by authors.

(A nice historical account of how literary scholarship has been moving away from close reading, and an argument for a return, was made a few years ago by Jane Gallop here: http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1632/prof.2007.2007.1.181)

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