Word: readings
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...English major, so I read real books...
...there a radio button for “I don’t read books” but not “I don’t listen to your twat music?...
...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...