Gender Roles- Listening to Classroom Talk about Literary Characters.pdf (original) (raw)
Conference paper, Sheffield, United Kingdom, University of Sheffield, PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association), July 2008, 2008
When a character is introduced in a narrative text, his/her aspect and personality are constructed by the reader on the basis both of information found in the text and of inferences actively produced by the readers. The first perception of a character is likely to change in the course of reading, as the reader encounters new information and activates relevant inferences: this changes in the state of the mind are components of reading pleasure. The type of the information given by the narrator depends on his/her priorities. Therefore, the reader receives information on the character and, at the same time, on the narrator's priorities. In the course of his/her act of reading, the reader activates, in his memory, material to be used in his concretization. In this way, s/he introduces new information; what is not explicitly described may be concretized differently by different readers. At the same time, the act of reading is very selective, removing information that is considered irrelevant. If the reader is then asked about information which has not been maintained in memory, s/he may be unable to recover it in full and may be forced to draw inferences that lead to results that are different from the text's surface. In this paper we examine the way in which six characters are introduced in Italian novels by Gadda, Manzoni, Moravia, Svevo, Tarchetti and Vassalli. Participants were asked to read passages from the texts where the characters were presented for the first time and then summarize the passages and answer some questions. In our examination of the answers, every time we find information that was not given in the texts, we have evidence of material coming from the readers' inferences and world knowledge. This study shows how characters can be concretized differently by different readers, particularly in relation to gender and education.
Reading Minor Characters: an English Literary Society and its Culture of Investigation
PMLA, 2019
This essay approaches the cultures of reading anthropologically, drawing on my ethnographic research with the Henry Williamson Society to excavate the ways readers enthusiastically commit to the minor characters of Williamson’s novels. It places Alex Woloch’s literary analysis of minor characterization in dialogue with the anthropological theory of “distributed agency” developed by Alfred Gell in order to examine the idea of the reader as someone who “gives” and may in turn “receive” attention. The essay asks whether it might be more helpful to conceive of readers’ activities as a form of reading without “culture”—whether plurality, if it must be invoked, might better be located in the dynamism of the reading person.
Gender roles and gender stereotypes in teaching literature
Temida, 2012
Gender, identity and sexuality have to be more closely integrated into the broader discussion of literature and language, which can be achieved only through wider application of literary texts in the teaching process. Teaching literature to students of English serves not only the purpose of building an understanding of the human experience, but also tackles the issues of femininity and masculinity and helps sensitize the students to the gender differences and the codes of patriarchal society which result in male dominance. Poems by Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton have proved as valuable texts in teaching gender, as will be discussed in the paper, which focuses on Plath?s ?Lady Lazarus? and the strategies the educator can select in order to achieve the desired objective.