![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Custom Text
Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.
Expand Cut Tags
No cut tags
no subject
Date: 2010-10-29 01:58 am (UTC)It's also interesting to be teaching a writing seminar, because we talk about authorial intent all the time from a different perspective -- because my students are trying to write, and essentially half the purpose of discussing the readings for the class is to get them to think about these pieces of writing from a WRITERLY point of view. And yeah, that mean's discussing the author's intent in writing the piece -- noting where it went wrong, but also, one hopes, showing them what authors do right in terms of successfully conveying their intentions insofar as that is an achievable goal (because they have to believe that it is!), because I'm trying to teach them useful tools!
But of course I'm trying to get them to write literary-critical essays (well, sort of -- the class is on fairy tales, so it's not quite that simple! But that's still my primary discipline, of course, despite the multiplicity of useful approaches when it comes to discussing fairy tales that we're looking at) -- a discipline in which they have to remember that discussing authorial intent is NOT a window into the True Meaning of the text.
It's a lot for them to juggle, but I LOVE this stuff, so that helps.