Heavy Versus Light Reading: The Decipherment of Literary and Non-Literary Texts

While Alexie states his voice by using metaphor, he emphasizes the meaning of reading repeatedly in his essay. He stresses how he strives to read variety of books, and he records that,” I read the books my father brought home from the pawnshops and secondhand. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes… I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs” (18). Alexie lists out all the material he has read with the same sentence structure, yet he does not conclude all these things in one sentence. He exemplifies his passion to reading, for he tries to save his life. Due to his parallel repetition, Alexie impresses the audience by these

Imagine yourself shipwrecked upon an uninhabited island. The experience of being stranded will cause you to pose many questions, with the possibility of only one of those questions to being answered. One answered question is: what is the purpose of literature? Northrop Frye, within “Motive for Metaphor”, uses the analogy of being within an uninhabited island to examines the purpose of literature by connecting it to the purposes of language and their use within the different worlds and levels of the mind Frye sees present.

The interplay of dark and light motifs underlies the narrator’s most recent hardship. On his way home on the subway, the narrator comes across his brother’s name in a newspaper and “stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside” (Baldwin). Riding in the light of the subway car, the author makes the non-suspecting narrator subject to suffering, unguarded by the protective cloak of the outside darkness. Made vulnerable by the exposed light and people surrounding him, the narrator is hit harder by the unexpected news than if he had read it in the darkness of his private room. Under the “swinging lights,” the narrator is not prepared to cope with the troubling news. This emphasizes the importance of light as a symbol for one’s need of camouflage to properly cope with tragedy.

In How To Read Literature Like A Professor, by Thomas C. Foster, the main purpose is to show readers how to go into depth with the meaning of things seen or talked about when reading literature. It highlights symbols in texts and shows how every single thing can be significant. It also talks about literary sources like greek mythology, the Bible, Children text, and Shakespeare (which he refers back to a lot ), that many stories use to form their plots or quests. The book talks about a topic and then gives the reader and example passage to refer to when talking about that that specific subject. For example, when talking about violence in Chapter 11, Foster analysis Robert Frost’s violent poem called “Out, Out-” and it’s true meaning.

The author uses pathos, Logos, and diction/ word choice to reinforce his argument of the importance of reading. In the second paragraph the author uses the literary device , logos. Logos is a great way to make a strong argument because it's hard to refute facts. The author explains the data collected in the 2002 survey of public participation in the arts.

Figurative language is used throughout many books to help readers solidify in their mind what they are reading in order to procure a deeper meaning for the text. In “Fahrenheit 451”, Ray Bradbury uses figurative language in a way that compare the events and culture of “Fahrenheit 451” to the real world we live in today. Irony, symbolism, and a simile are the many pieces of figurative language found throughout this book. On page 29 Clarisse explains to Guy why she is not in school and how she is ironically antisocial. “I don’t think it's social to get a group of people together and then not have them talk”, “Hours and hours of classes, but no one ever asks questions, they just sit us down and give us answers”.

His word choice serves as keys to the understanding, or lack thereof to his story. He uses diction to obscure description, pointing to the conjectural expressions — ambivalent uses of words like seem, appear, perhaps, possibly, evidently, might, presume, conjecture, imputed, and thought — that appear throughout the stories plot. These phrases are similar to instruments of style that reflect the coating of false looks and unanswerable contradictory ideas that seem to bemuse human perception and inquiry, a sort of fiction in which things are never as they

It is majorly found throughout the novel. Maybe not simple to comprehend during the first reading but after a definite close reading it can be found in between the lines. Nevertheless when the first evening begins Fontenelle says “All philosophy, I told her, is based on two thing only: curiosity and poor eyesight” (Fontenelle 11). This greater fulfills a deeper meaning to the audience. Fontenelle attempts in awaking the reader and their minds. He wants them to realize they must rise themselves and think outside the box. From the time when natural philosophy was not affectionate he wanted the reader to be curious to use their imagination to speculate so that they could discover new thing. Additionally, Fontenelle also states that “philosophers spend a lifetime not believing what they do see, and theorizing what they don’t see” (Fontenelle 11). This further exemplifies a type of metaphoric tone, which provides a deeper meaning for the audience. Imagination is a key factor in this novel, especially if the reader thinks deep about the literature and develops the true meaning behind the text using their

In the short stories “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin and “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift, the authors use literary criticism so the reader can dissect the many different literary elements such as symbolism and vivid ironic imagery that help explain the parallel theme going on in both stories. To achieve a world with peace throughout and reach a state of utopia some moral and ethical decay will take place. Both stories have social issues that test the citizens moral and ethical beliefs throughout the story, and actually show how the society is decaying because of what they are doing.

Iser speaks of the Actual reader in distinction to the Implied reader who is formed within a text and expected to react and respond in specific ways to the response inducing structure of the text. The actual reader, however, is an individual with its own personal experiences accumu-lated as baggage wherein responses actually are continuously and inevitably changed

Indeed, the best works of literature are those which are of relevance to our lives today. Through their relevance, these novels continue to persist and endure on. Through their relevance, we can better comprehend the messages, the themes, and the ideas that are imbued in them. Rather than literature being contradictory and in conflict with the truth and unpleasant reality of daily life, it becomes a weapon through which we can be educated about the existential crises facing our world today. In fact, the statement above could not be more far and distant from the reality of literature today. It is fatally flawed. Literature, whilst at the surface, seems whimsical and amusing is, at its very core, a medium through which we are enlightened

This commentary will explore the use of vocabulary, punctuation and imagery by Milan Kundera in an extract of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being . The passage to be analysed is located in the fourth part of the book named “Soul and Body”. It portrays a scene where one of the main characters, Tereza, is in front of a mirror and finds herself dealing with the conflict between identity and image. Her disconformities with her body act as a trigger for this questioning to arise and bring back memories from her childhood. The entire passage is structured in three sections: one where she criticises her body, another where queries arise from these observations and finally one where she demonstrates her definite opinion on the situation.

In this analytic essay, I will be exploring the use of literary language in the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan and how with the use of narration and imagery can under shadow a simple piece of literature.

That being said, comprehension is not just understanding the singular words that are being read, but being able to put them together, along with activating previous knowledge, make sense and develop meaning to the text. Essentially, when a reader is immersed and engaged in text, they are actively developing meaning to the text while formulating questions that may later be answered by the text itself.

Fish’s Reader Response Criticism is composed of two interdependent ideas: first, that the meaning of texts is shaped by the reading experience itself, and second, that these meanings cannot be judged to be correct or incorrect, but merely belonging to one “interpretive community” or another. The first idea may be identified as the executive aspect of Reader Response Criticism because it analyzes the act of reading, while the second idea is the epistemological aspect of the theory because it circumscribes the knowledge we can acquire about a text to the merely relative. Studied independently, each aspect of Reader Response Theory offers by itself strong arguments countervailing the formalist stance of the New Critics. But as we will see,