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Quote by Owen Arlin

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Owen Arlin

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“In my experience, all the good literature professors, the ones that are able to get you to see the genius and magic of a book, begin the same way. They provide an overview of the historical beliefs, prejudices, and concerns of the era when the book was written and how the specific writer conformed, or did not conform with these beliefs -- especially important when studying books, plays, or poems written a long time ago.”

Reading
Book:Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader
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“We can read without seeing, and we can also read without understanding. What happens to our imaginations when we have lost the narrative thread in a story, when we breeze past words we don't understand, when we read words without knowing to what they refer? "When I am reading a sentence in a book that references something unknown to me (as when I have inadvertently skipped a passage), I feel as though I am reading a syntactically correct but semantically meaningless 'nonsense' sentence. The sentence feels meaningful -- it has the flavor of meaning -- and the structure of its grammar thrusts me forward through the sentence and on to the next, though in truth I understand (and picture) nothing. "How much of our reading takes place in such a suspension of meaning? How much time do we spend reading seemingly meaningful sentences without knowing their referents? How much of our reading takes place in such a void -- propelled by mere syntax? "All good books are, at heart, mysteries. (Authors withhold information. This information may be revealed over time. This is one reason we bother to tum a book's pages.) A book may be a literal mystery (Murder on the Orient Express, The Brothers Karamazov) or metaphysical mystery (Moby-Dick, Doctor Faustus) or a mystery of a purely architectonic kind -- a chronotopic mystery (Emma, The Odyssey). "These mysteries are narrative mysteries -- but books also defend their pictorial secrets ... "'Call me Ishmael ... ' "This statement invites more questions than it answers. We desire that Ishmael's face be, like the identity of one of Agatha Christie's murderers: "Revealed! "Writers of fiction tell us stories, and they also tell us how to read these stories. From a novel I assemble a series of rules -- not only a methodology for reading (a suggested hermeneutics) but a manner of cognition, all of which carries me through the text (and sometimes lingers after a book ends). The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine, and how much.”

ReadingSeeing
Book:What We See When We Read
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