Dear All,
I would like to invite you all to share your thoughts on one (or more) of the three texts listed below.
Please write down your own comments FIRST and THEN read what others have written about the same text. This will help you
1) post your own unique approach to the text and
2) learn more about the text in question by also looking at it through someone else's eyes.
Please feel free to comment on what other people have posted to get a real discussion going.
Our goal: to approach the three texts from different directions and angles. Since we are all unique, we necessarily have a unique way of interacting with a text. In fact, each of us has MANY unique ways of interacting with the SAME text - since each time we interact with the text, the context is different, the situation is different, our mood is different and therefore the connections we make and the associations we bring to the text are different each time as well.
By thinking about the same text in different contexts - and by reading how other people understand the same text - we gain a deeper understanding of the text because we will gradually become able to look at it - more or less simultaneously - from different directions and through different people's eyes.
What T.S. Eliot said in "Little Gidding" holds definitely true for the understanding of texts - and works of art as well as reality in general: only after we have walked around something and looked at it from all sides, can we begin to grasp it's meaning:
Here the three texts I would like us to explore:
Deepak Chopra, "Speech for Cinema for Peace"
-> http://www.lighthousecompany.com/downloads/Choprah_speech.pdf
This is the full version of the text.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, "Only Breath" (translated by Coleman Barks)
-> http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/rumipoetry1.html#anchor_13849
Margaret Atwood, "Habitation"
-> http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3743.html
Please note that this version contains one additional line that is omitted in most anthologies!
I think all three texts are wonderful texts and definitely worth some deeper exploration.
Enjoy!
gudrun
I would like to invite you all to share your thoughts on one (or more) of the three texts listed below.
Please write down your own comments FIRST and THEN read what others have written about the same text. This will help you
1) post your own unique approach to the text and
2) learn more about the text in question by also looking at it through someone else's eyes.
Please feel free to comment on what other people have posted to get a real discussion going.
Our goal: to approach the three texts from different directions and angles. Since we are all unique, we necessarily have a unique way of interacting with a text. In fact, each of us has MANY unique ways of interacting with the SAME text - since each time we interact with the text, the context is different, the situation is different, our mood is different and therefore the connections we make and the associations we bring to the text are different each time as well.
By thinking about the same text in different contexts - and by reading how other people understand the same text - we gain a deeper understanding of the text because we will gradually become able to look at it - more or less simultaneously - from different directions and through different people's eyes.
What T.S. Eliot said in "Little Gidding" holds definitely true for the understanding of texts - and works of art as well as reality in general: only after we have walked around something and looked at it from all sides, can we begin to grasp it's meaning:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.Here the three texts I would like us to explore:
Deepak Chopra, "Speech for Cinema for Peace"
-> http://www.lighthousecompany.com/downloads/Choprah_speech.pdf
This is the full version of the text.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, "Only Breath" (translated by Coleman Barks)
-> http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/rumipoetry1.html#anchor_13849
Margaret Atwood, "Habitation"
-> http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3743.html
Please note that this version contains one additional line that is omitted in most anthologies!
I think all three texts are wonderful texts and definitely worth some deeper exploration.
Enjoy!
gudrun
