Word: reade
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...certain kinds of psychological or realist fiction,” he says, “peoples’ inward states appear to be determined mostly by who they fall in love with or how their families work. But when you read science fiction attentively you see how much of an individual’s life is guided not by psychology, and not by the unconscious so much as by technological and material circumstances—the difficulty of obtaining information, the availability of transport fuel, the speed of communications...
...also believes that science fiction can train students to better understand the nuances of what they read, whatever the genre. “Part of learning to read attentively is learning to pick up on those signals a text gives out about what you should expect, so you can see when that text and its language violate those expectations,” Burt says. Originality, in other words, is only perceptible if the reader knows what conventions have been broken...
According to Burt, science fiction, as a highly self-conscious genre, lends itself to this sort of analysis. But being cognizant of how a text expects to be read, he says, is as important for comprehending poetry as it is for understanding science fiction. For Burt, the experience of reading Robert Heinlein and Octavia Butler is similar to going line-by-line through the poetry of John Ashbery or Jorie Graham. Reading science fiction helps students grasp other literature as much as it encourages them to ponder space ships, telekinesis, and sentient robots...
...It’s true that if you study 18th century poetry that you can acquire skills that will help you read Victorian fiction and skills that will help you read contemporary graphic novels,” Burt says. “But we teach 18th century poetry because 18th century poetry is worth studying in and of itself. Science fiction is an end in and of itself...
...film feels slightly ill at ease. By any standard other than its source material, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is not a kids’ movie. The dialogue is packed with ironic jokes and self-referential winks that sail over children of the appropriate age to read Dahl, and while its narrative rarely stagnates (at barely an hour and a half, it can’t afford to), most of the film’s action operates a shade below that of an average episode of “Wallace and Grommit...