Good Afternoon.
I was given the topic for my term paper today and the topic is simply "What makes a text worth reading - not a novel, not a poem, not a magazine - anything, any piece of text" Onward from that, i have to use the novel "The Sirens of Baghdad" by Yasmina Khadra to support my thesis. The hard part is coming up with an answer to why a text is worth reading.
If anyone has idea's please do post here.
Thanks and Regards
Maz
bump for help
Why not begin with a few bullet points about what reasons you have come up with? Does not one read a text for a purpose (even if only for "enjoyment" but there are other valid ones as well)?
And if you have used a novel to support your thesis, then what IS your thesis?
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
enjoyment or to fulfill a curiosity
''It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.''
- Allen Ginsberg
"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois."
- Gustave Flaubert
A text that satisfies us is it is full of searches.
“Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature””
“If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.
It depends on what is one's purpose of reading?!! Just funn? Learning something! Searching sepecial information. Based on the purpose we can say which worths reading. Literary texts of course are different from other texts. If we want to answer to this question on the basis of any kind of text, it is the information one gets from the text. And I think it is not enough.
Art is a lie that leads to the truth.
--Picasso
The text should meet our expectations, and as other said, these depend on the purpose of the reading. That means the text "worth" of reading
- gives us information we look for
- explains something in more detail
- presents different point of view that we can confront with our own
- makes us think and reconsider our opinions and values
- entertains us
Which means you can only now if the text was "worth" of reading after you've read it. Before that, you can have some ideas about the text, but they can turn out to be wrong. Even if the text is recommended by someone who had already read it, his justification of its "worthiness" may differ from your own...
Someone should be able to get something from the text and interpret/analyse it, whether it be information on deserts or Romeo and Juliet's demises.
Let us say for the moment that you wish to have a better understanding of Muslim fundamentalism, both because it is interesting in-itself, or because it adds a different perspective upon current events, and because of its bearing on world affairs and the upcoming election in the US.
Or let us say that reading a novel about a person caught up in what is a layered warfare presents to the reader an existentialist insight into how others might be motivated and might interpret an event that lead to action.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
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