'Tilism to Cosmos' - Interview with the Friday Times (12 Sep 2014) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, 2011
There is a widely held view that Arabs in general are not readers and that the Arab world is a non-reading culture. However, if we ask students about their reading habits, we may find that such assumptions are not always accurate. This article relates six female university students' brief autobiographical stories about how they became interested in reading. Khulood's father brought her stories from Egypt while Iman's father read to her and regularly took her shopping for books; Nada recalls how she initially resisted her teacher's efforts to get her to read; a school library was the scene of Ayesha's awakening to reading; a chance encounter led Shaikha into the world of reading and Athra's mother played a major role in encouraging her to read. All of these stories demonstrate the role that both parents and teachers can play in passing on a love of reading to those in their care.
Reading Matter: Modernism and the Book (2007)
ABSTRACT Reading Matter: Modernism and the Book reconceives the relationship between modernism and the material history of the book. By examining representations of books, archives, libraries, and bibliophiles in modernist Anglo-American literature, this study calls attention to a particular attitude towards reading and cultural heritage that marks modern fiction. Texts by Henry James, Edith Wharton, and E.M. Forster exemplify the modernist principle that to write a classic one must first read the classics. But the messiness of archives haunts these works, suggesting that cultural attainment in modernism requires the acquisition of peripheral information in addition to more canonical knowledge. Encyclopaedic reading is, I argue, a hallmark of literary modernism. This study also identifies the library as an obsessional site in literary modernism. James, Wharton, and Forster set key scenes in libraries and reading rooms in their fiction, depicting the library as a repository of the material past and a place where things happen. Accidents, romance, and conversation occur in libraries, where the past intrudes, sometimes in violent ways: falling books crush Leonard Bast in Howards End; the contents of a private archive threaten public scandal in The Aspern Papers. I show how these authors negotiate the transformation of the book and the library in this period, faced with the rise of the public library movement, the decline of the nineteenth-century gentleman’s library, and the burning and blasting of books during warfare. By exploring their own contradictory impulses towards bibliophilia and biblioclasm, these authors dramatize in their fiction a sense of the durability and the susceptibility of cultural knowledge. Critical studies of the history of books and reading in the Victorian period have been produced, but similar work in the field of modernism is scarce. Reading Matter redresses this gap by identifying the book as fundamentally entwined with the intellectual, cultural, and material histories of the twentieth century.
ORGANISING RESOURCES FOR SCHOOL LIBRARY USERS
The paper discussed elaborately the organization and provision of a school library by defining a library in the present day activities carry out in schools. It went further to highlight the personnel that are needed to organize the library resources, as well as the space to be provided for the administration of the library. The space covered the size of the building, location of library within the school premises, and its architectural design to meet the present day learning environment. The resources to be organized include books, shelves, carrels that will be housed in decent spacious building, and how these resources can be organized were also discussed. A detailed explanation was given on the use of Universal Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme in cataloguing school library resources. Using this scheme in classifying and arranging library resources will enable easy access to the books and other information needs of pupils. Items arranged should be labeled and protected with shelf guides. The paper concluded that teacher-librarians should be involved in training through workshops, seminars. Also, that librarian should endeavour to come up with proposal toward helping teacher-librarians in order to promote readership in schools.
Why do children in Singapore read? An exploratory study
The study aims to find out why Singaporean children read, as well as the role and benefit reading plays in their lives. It also probes into their motivation for reading and how they choose books. Thirty children were interviewed and the findings of several previous studies confirmed. A significant new finding was that although children are aware of the benefits and pragmatic reasons of reading, they read for their own satisfaction, and any benefit they reap is incidental and not intentional. Recommendations to improve library services for children are made at the end.