Surrendering Oz

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Bonnie Friedman. Surrendering Oz

Отрывок из книги

ALSO BY BONNIE FRIEDMAN

Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life (HarperCollins)

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The boy clicked his pen, but less. The girl had taken a note or two, nodding slowly.

Walking uphill on Jefferson Street after class, I thought: So, in teaching literature, how you register the emotional valences matters. You can’t afford to be comatose. The institution—the university—values the felt sense of things! Has to! There’s no teaching English without it. “You’re beating a dead horse!” complained some students next class, those who could see nothing in rereading. You think this horse is dead? It’s panting! It’s sweating! It’s laid out before you but its heart is pounding! You think I’m beating it? Stories, I realized, were like McDonald’s wrappers to many of these students—to be emptied and tossed. And I could show them otherwise. I could show them lines to read between, with incandescent meanings clustered there, and sunken compartments in which spirits lay. For the first time in my entire life, I knew I knew something.

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