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"Meta-mimesis: the narrative of a class reading".
Changing English,
: Studies in Reading & Culture,
March 2004, vol. 11, iss. 1, pp.
89-103.
This article presents
most of a 27-minute co-authored classroom dialogue exploring Ishiguro’s
Pale View of the Hills
in order to
co-construct meaning. Students comprise a more or less bicultural mix of
Japanese and North American backgrounds, ranging from full Japanese
attending an American school to mixed Japanese and American to full
American living in Japan, all representing degrees of biculturality. The
rich linguistic and cultural variation both enhances and complicates the
reading the class undertakes. The inherent tensions involved in dialogue
highlight the ability of students to engage energetically in a negotiation
of differences in interpretation. As such, the experience represents
Bakhtin’s sense of open dialogical exchange between self and other as well
as Gadamer’s hermeneutic of differing horizons of understanding. It
represents, as well, the depth of exploration possible when culturally
complex groups negotiate meaning in free-flowing discussion.
"Julia in Ricoeur's World." Changing English:
Studies in Reading & Culture, Oct 2001, Vol. 8 Issue 2,
p177, 12p.
Student readers/writers need the opportunity to bring to literary texts
the imaginative knowledge crucial for retelling the author’s story
(concretizing the author’s schema) in order to complete the act of
reading. Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of reading as a three-fold mimesis as
articulated in his multi-volume series Time and Narrative suggests
the necessary role of the reader as implementer of the text. This essay
looks in detail at one free response essay written by Julia, a bicultural
student fluent in Japanese and English, as she makes sense for herself of
Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. Arguing for the necessarily
heightened sensitivity and engagement of bicultural readers in questioning
texts to make sense of both texts and life, this essay links Julia’s
writing about the novel with Ricoeur’s theories and suggests a few
principles for the teaching of literature in order to engage them in
mimesis, as Ricoeur envisions the reader’s role in the act of reading.
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