—Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother’s death?
Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:
—What? Where? I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations.
— Ulysses, James Joyce
The Anhoek School’s FEMINIST READ-A-THON: WHAT IS FEMINIST LITERATURE? (February 2011).
The Feminist Read-A-Thon is part fundraiser/ part class of The Anhoek School. We are attempting to begin answering the question ‘WHAT IS FEMINIST LITERATURE?’ Readers will make their own selections of ‘feminist literature.’ The only guidelines are that the books should be:
- Fiction
- Books that you (the reader) has never read before
Our reasons are both practical and scholarly. A READ-A-THON as fundraiser retains the possibilities of conversation and transmission: each reader potentially discusses what they have read and why with their sponsors and fellow readers. Because the cultural relevancy of books, feminists, and fictions is intermittently under fire, we take this opportunity to investigate. And, more than answers, we hope to discover an even more vexed space in which we can try to talk about feminisms.
The Anhoek School is a nomadic and experimental school currently based out of Brooklyn with small classes (a limit of seven students per class), and teachers who are invested in challenging the power structures inherent in how and what people are taught. We aim to offer these classes free of cost to the students but still pay the teachers fairly for their labor.
You can volunteer to be a reader or to sponsor a reader.
If you have any questions or are interested in being a reader or sponsoring a reader, please contact us at feministreadathon@gmail.com
For more information see: http://www.anhoekschool.org/readathon.html
And it was as though, all around the defunct headgear and this shaft that was weary of disgorging its coal, creation itself were taking its revenge, as though unfettered love, lashed by instinct, were busy planting babies in the wombs of these girls who were hardly yet women.
—
Émile Zola Germinal.
Beautiful, sad.
As meat is to the body, such is reading to the soul.
— Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) from the 8th ed. (1676) on books and reading.
If a visitor from the past arrived today in our civilized societies…[he] would find a host of readers: on park benches, in the subway, on buses and trams and trains, in apartments and houses. everywhere. Our visitor could be excused if he supposed that ours was a literate society.
On the contrary. Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading — once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive — is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
—
Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night) (via teachingliteracy) (via therewascake)
Just finished reading this.
I’m merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I’m a reader.
— Jorge Luis Borges, interviewed by Daniel Bourne and Stephen Cape http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/borges.htm
When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.
— Jorge Luis Borges, interviewed by Daniel Bourne and Stephen Cape http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/borges.htm
