Clairborne,
I absolutely agree with the restraint shown by tutors at St. Johns in "leading" discussions, but almost every tutor at St Johns has a phd in something and, in addition, has spent more or less of a professional life time reading and discussing Those Books. The effect of a few well posed questions in the course of a couple of hours of discussion can be dramatic. Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of q...@aol.com Sent: Saturday, October 09, 2010 7:19 PM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works Greetings, all -- Great to see all the suggestions and conversations around them. One author with a Santa Fe (and perhaps an SFI) connection not yet mentioned, I believe, is Douglas Noel Adams (DNA). I'd recommend the Adams translation of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". As to creating a reading group, the pedagogical technique at St. John's (sorry to be tedious) is to have the books lead the discussion, largely by having a person designated to ask an "opening question" and then encouraging people to focus on the text and have a conversation about it. After about two hours, most folks are suffering from caffeine/nicotine withdrawal and agree to discuss it further over a meal/scotch/cigarette. Works for us... - Claiborne - -----Original Message----- From: Pamela McCorduck <pam...@well.com> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Sent: Sat, Oct 9, 2010 9:08 pm Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Best 10 Fictional Works On Oct 9, 2010, at 7:34 PM, Leigh Fanning wrote: And I (also) say "Why English", why not World Literature or something more expansive... and for the benefit of the women on this list... why do we (mostly) read the words of "dead white men"? Really? Without going all feminist, I'd really like to have more submissions here of women writers. Until 30 years ago, there weren't that many published... Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, early 1800s, is a great book. Is it literature? I'm not qualified to say, but it's a fantastic story with beautiful writing. Yes, I certainly think of it as literature. If I were world literature czar (well, czarina) I would insist every budding scientist read it. The male dominated Western educational experience is what most of us have had. It's all we know, until we jump to other pools of thought and nonconform to the establishment that nurtured (controlled?) us in the tender years. Some of the most unusual and ground-breaking English literature has been written by women. I mean in particular, Jane Austen, who was first to understand that the age of reading aloud was dying, and it was time to write for the reader who reads alone and in his or her own head. Before Austen, English novels were written to be read aloud to a group. She is also killingly funny about human nature. On these grounds alone, Columbia University's core curriculum admitted to the canon its first female writer in Jane. If you read Charlotte Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," the novel not the movie, you will hardly believe your eyes. Astounding stuff. "Jane Eyre" is the grandmother of a thousand and one derivatives, but is a stunning piece in its own right. So you see how futile a "top ten" is? P. "How quickly weeks glide away in such a city as New York, especially when you reckon among your friends some of the most agreeable people in either hemisphere." Fanny Trollope, "Domestic Manners of the Americans" = ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
