The other week a student I was working with expressed frustration at the experience of engaged annotation. “To switch perspectives every time a new character comes up is confusing,” he complained, “Can’t I just identify at length with the experience of one character?” While I agreed that he could, I also explained that the reason… Continue reading Rationale as a form of safety
Case studies
Psychic mapping
Psychic mapping is the essence of our process of reading literature, that place where we do the seizing of wisdom that is central to this process. As such, it is also the place about which we most likely experience trepidation: if we have access to wisdom through our process of reading literature, then surely we… Continue reading Psychic mapping
The high horse
Usually not long after we finish the final sentence of our final character identification, the mind asks itself, ‘How do I know if I’m doing it right?’ This question might arise even prior to that point, after any individual character identification: ‘What I wrote just now didn’t feel right to me; how do I know… Continue reading The high horse
Character identifications
Character identifications constitute the ‘meat’ of our process of reading literature, and become available to us once we have read the text in a sufficiently engaged manner. Through this process, we have defamiliarized ourselves with the story of ourselves—which was simultaneously a story of perfection—and in so doing, we have ceased to judge the characters,… Continue reading Character identifications
Engaged reading, part II: engaged annotation
In the way that we were taught to annotate texts in school, a standard annotation might have pursued a formula something like the following: ‘on this page, such and such character does such and such. This connects with the novel’s overall theme of blank, producing the holistic theme of blank.’ This is obviously simplified, but… Continue reading Engaged reading, part II: engaged annotation
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 