Word: sommerance
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...describe its project confront the standard top-down model of literary education. They call the creative interpretation of literature “intervention,” and teachers “facilitators.” “If this is a revolution,” says Doris Sommer, a Professor of Romance Languages and Literature and African and African American Studies, “it’s in the spirit of [Marxist thinker Antonio] Gramsci—of reformism through cultural practices, because it gets people to read and write at a high level, in which creativity...
...Press encourages active engagement with high-level texts through its activities. “The program can change the culture of school,” Sommer says. “When you develop critical thinking and understand it through the arts, you’re in fact changing the world simply by trying to understand it.” True to the project’s Latin American roots, the students write “literature de cordel,” understanding an existing work by writing their own version of it, and hanging it on a clothesline...
...Press is part of the Cultural Agents Initiative, a project which advocates for active humanities, and of which Sommer is the Faculty Director. “What we’re saying here is that the humanities are a field that can create and promote effective interventions, because it trains and promotes judgments and an exercise of possibilities. Most humanists would be averse to thinking of the humanities as a field for preparing you for other things—that the humanities should be fixed on purposelessness, on disinterested art. The whole mission of Cultural Agents... is about reviving, linking...
...underlying the importance of arts in the development of the curriculum. All of the issues that the Arts Task Force are communicating come alive in an immediate and practical way with the Paper Picker Press. Arts become a way of interpreting, exploring, rehearsing ethics.” Sommer says...
...doing so, the Press demonstrates that “our partners outside of the university are quite as sophisticated as our partners inside,” Sommer says. “To show people that they’re already sophisticated or can be, just by making art, is part of the bridge that we’re making with the community. It’s not top-down. It’s really reciprocal...