(Download) "Soul-Work: Reading As a Transformative Pursuit." by Modern Age # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Soul-Work: Reading As a Transformative Pursuit.
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 177 KB
Description
EDITOR'S NOTE: In this poignant memoir, written in a meditative mode, Professor Richard K. Cross (b. 1940) evokes the humane spirit that defined and shaped his vocation as a university teacher of English language and literature. In particular he recalls how brilliant and inspiring teachers introduced him to books and ideas, how novelists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and poets like T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, spoke to his mind and to his soul, and made him consonantly aware of the redeeming power of love, passion for truth, magnanimity, wisdom. "Endowing inferior ends with a spurious ultimacy," he warns, "has the effect of alienating us from our core selves, until we eventually reach the point where we deny the very existence of those selves." Cross reminds us that the learning process is a metaphysical quest that transcends the imperial self and the flux of the material world--and that art "asks us to live the questions it raises." His words help re-confirm Modern Age's commitment to educational standards and to the study of imaginative literature as an ethical experience that needs to be saved from modern masters of theory and ideology. "EVERYONE HERE keeps using the word discourse," observed the young man from Johannesburg. "Back home we're chary about reducing literature to abstractions. We talk about books as though our lives depended on them." The setting was the 1985 MLA meeting in Chicago; I was interviewing the young man for a position in what had only recently come to be called postcolonial literature.