Reading fiction
Many types of fiction give us great reading pleasure:
novels and short stories can be historic, westerns, science fiction, thrillers, romance, horror, etc. The following can provide a framework for discussing these in book clubs and for writing book reports.
Point of view: test your knowlege (narrator and character types)
An author creates a person to tell the story, and this person is the narrator.
The narrator delivers the point of view of the story.
Multiple narrators of the story can also present multiple points of view.
-A first person narrator
uses the pronoun "I" to tell the story, and can be either a major or minor character.
It may be easier for a reader to relate to a story told in a first person account.
-A subjective narrator is generally unreliable
because he/she is in the story,
and can only speak to his/her experience within it.
-A second person narrator
uses the pronoun "you" and is not used very often since it makes the reader a participant in the story (and you, as reader, may be reluctant to be in the action!).
-A third person narrator
uses the pronoun "he" or "she" and does not take part in the story.
-An objective narrator is an observer
and describes or interprets thoughts, feelings, motivations, of the characters. Details such as setting, scenes, and what was said is stronger with an objective observer
-An omniscient (omniscient = all knowing) narrator has access to all
the actions and thoughts within fiction
-A limited narrator has a restricted view of events,
and doesn't "know" the whole story
Questions:
- How much does the narrator know?
- Does he or she know everything, including the thoughts, feelings, motivations, etc. or present just limited information?
- Do you (the reader) know more?
- Time?
Do events take place "now" (verbs in the present tense)?
or in the past (verbs are in the past tense)?
- Are past recollections fresh, or distant, and maybe hazy?
- Is the narrator a participant in, or a witness to, the action?
- Is the story second-hand, related "as told to" the narrator?
- Think of yourself telling someone something that happened:
- How much of the event do you know, and how does that affect the story?
- Why is the story being told, and why now?
- What is the motivation?
Character types in fiction
Characters are the people of a story, or the opposing forces.
A protagonist or hero/heroine is the central character of the story.
An antagonist is the counterpart to the protagonist
Tension between the protagonist and antagonist creates the story.
Speech, thoughts, actions, appearance, desires, and relationships reveal characters, and each undergoes development and/or change as the story unfolds.
Static characters are role players, and may not “develop.”
Questions:
- Can the protagonist and antagonist be the same person?
- Can events or situations act as an antagonist?
- How do your characters speak? How does it affect the dialogue?
- What effect has the social class of the characters?
Environment
Environment consists of the time, place, and mood of a story.
- How does the setting affect the story?
- Are the situations happy, unhappy, mysterious, joyful, what?
- Where does the story take place: in nature, in a city, within a room?
- How does location affect the story?
- How is emotion created?
- Is it dramatic at the outset, or build in intensity?
- Maybe the effect is to maintain a certain evenness throughout: creating its own type of tension?
- How would you change the setting of a story to change it?
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7 CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES
1. Previewing: Learning about a text before really reading it.
Previewing enables readers to get a sense of what the text is about and how it is organized before reading it closely. This simple strategy includes seeing what you can learn from the headnotes or other introductory material, skimming to get an overview of the content and organization, and identifying the rhetorical situation.
2. Contextualizing: Placing a text in its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts.
When you read a text, you read it through the lens of your own experience. Your understanding of the words on the page and their significance is informed by what you have come to know and value from living in a particular time and place. But the texts you read were all written in the past, sometimes in a radically different time and place. To read critically, you need to contextualize, to recognize the differences between your contemporary values and attitudes and those represented in the text.
3. Questioning to understand and remember: Asking questions about the content.
As students, you are accustomed (I hope) to teachers asking you questions about your reading. These questions are designed to help you understand a reading and respond to it more fully, and often this technique works. When you need to understand and use new information though it is most beneficial if you write the questions, as you read the text for the first time. With this strategy, you can write questions any time, but in difficult academic readings, you will understand the material better and remember it longer if you write a question for every paragraph or brief section. Each question should focus on a main idea, not on illustrations or details, and each should be expressed in your own words, not just copied from parts of the paragraph.
4. Reflecting on challenges to your beliefs and values: Examining your personal responses.
The reading that you do for this class might challenge your attitudes, your unconsciously held beliefs, or your positions on current issues. As you read a text for the first time, mark an X in the margin at each point where you feel a personal challenge to your attitudes, beliefs, or status. Make a brief note in the margin about what you feel or about what in the text created the challenge. Now look again at the places you marked in the text where you felt personally challenged. What patterns do you see?
5. Outlining and summarizing: Identifying the main ideas and restating them in your own words.
Outlining and summarizing are especially helpful strategies for understanding the content and structure of a reading selection. Whereas outlining reveals the basic structure of the text, summarizing synopsizes a selection's main argument in brief. Outlining may be part of the annotating process, or it may be done separately (as it is in this class). The key to both outlining and summarizing is being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the supporting ideas and examples. The main ideas form the backbone, the strand that holds the various parts and pieces of the text together. Outlining the main ideas helps you to discover this structure. When you make an outline, don't use the text's exact words.
Summarizing begins with outlining, but instead of merely listing the main ideas, a summary recomposes them to form a new text. Whereas outlining depends on a close analysis of each paragraph, summarizing also requires creative synthesis. Putting ideas together again -- in your own words and in a condensed form -- shows how reading critically can lead to deeper understanding of any text.
6. Evaluating an argument: Testing the logic of a text as well as its credibility and emotional impact.
All writers make assertions that they want you to accept as true. As a critical reader, you should not accept anything on face value but to recognize every assertion as an argument that must be carefully evaluated. An argument has two essential parts: a claim and support. The claim asserts a conclusion -- an idea, an opinion, a judgment, or a point of view -- that the writer wants you to accept. The support includes reasons (shared beliefs, assumptions, and values) and evidence (facts, examples, statistics, and authorities) that give readers the basis for accepting the conclusion. When you assess an argument, you are concerned with the process of reasoning as well as its truthfulness (these are not the same thing). At the most basic level, in order for an argument to be acceptable, the support must be appropriate to the claim and the statements must be consistent with one another.
7. Comparing and contrasting related readings: Exploring likenesses and differences between texts to understand them better.
Many of the authors we read are concerned with the same issues or questions, but approach how to discuss them in different ways. Fitting a text into an ongoing dialectic helps increase understanding of why an author approached a particular issue or question in the way he or she did.
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