July 9, 2009
(article source: http://www.dailygood.org/)
Changing our Minds
By imagining many possible worlds, argues novelist and psychologist Keith Oatley, fiction helps us understand ourselves and others.
For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for you. Aristotle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now call fiction—is a more serious business than history. History, he argued, tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch our moral imaginations and give us insights into ourselves and other people. This is a strong argument for schools to continue to focus on the literary arts, not just history, science, and social studies. read more »
November 28, 2006
My friend Gitta (check her site dedicated to Anne, http://www.greengables.hu) reminded me that in two days’ time it will be Lucy-Maud Montgomery’s birthday; she gave us Anne of Green Gables among other things, which is one of my favourite novels ever, so I thought I would dig up my old final exam papers I had to compile in university, and below is what I found to be relevant.
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In order to understand the 20th century women writers, a journey into the past in essential. The presence of the Canadian lady has always been felt in literary life. Frances Brooke and Rosanna Leprohon wrote French-English romances in Québéc; Pauline Johnson and Isabella Valancy Crawford depicted their Indian experiences in their poetry; and Susannah Moodie’s and Sara Jeannette Duncan’s novels were the Canadian response to American presence. read more »
