Word: readerly
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...Caught up in the paranoia, Nathanial retreats back to the rich and stable relationships that he has with his loving stepfather and mute sister. Baxter’s characters are obliquely formed through third-party description, and their identities are further confused by paranoid and erratic actions that the reader can’t understand. In “The Soul Thief,” the gaze of others constitutes one’s self-conception. The narration and structure reflect the confused identities of each character. From the opening paragraph there is an uneasy tension between third-person...
...government leaders, however, would do well to remember the words of John Milton, penned in 1643 in a treatise against British censorship: “Knowledge cannot defile […] if the will and conscience be not defiled. Bad books […] to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.” All people, regardless of geographic and cultural bias, have a basic capacity for reason; governments should leave it to their citizens to discern between the true, the absurd, and the erroneous. Freedom of speech?...
...race card. Richard Thompson Ford’s new book, “The Race Card: How Bluffing about Bias Makes Race Relations Worse,” examines the fine line between ignoring the elephant and blaming everything on the beast. Ford, a Stanford law professor, leads the reader across this racial relations tightrope of discerning when “complaints of racial prejudice are valid and appropriate and when...they are exaggerated, paranoid, or simply dishonest” but never presents any truly satisfying answers. The work’s premised on the idea that racism has become...
...fact, they have been happy partners for so many years that their fellow townsmen see them as twins. Society is shocked when they start coming before congregation every week to confess their secret lusts. Questions abound, both in the minds of the congregation and in the mind of the reader. Have Mariko and Maritha tended to their souls and neglected the needs of their bodies? Does a healthy sexual relationship clash with religious piety? It is only when they visit the traditional African magician, The Wizard of the Crow, that the couple finds a solution to their problem. Thiong?...
...point he gently exhorts the reader to place a hand on a life-size photo reproduction of a handprint left by its maker on a ceramic brick, taken from an unearthed Han tomb wall. It's a hauntingly visceral exercise, like shaking hands with a dead man, but precisely the type of immanent encounter with a past typically coffined in museum display cases that Barbieri-Low hopes to inspire. "Understanding these lives," he says, "will allow us to humanize the material remains of the past...