Son:      “I love this book”

Mom:  “Why?”

Son:     “It’s cool……I just like it!”

Mom:    “What part did you like the best?”

Son:     “All of it – the whole book is awesome.”

A narration of facts follows.  Does this sound familiar?  Imaginative literature is written to please the reader.  Where an author aims to convey knowledge through expository writing, imaginative books are written to communicate the experience itself from which a reader may learn.  My son thoroughly enjoyed the experience conveyed by the author of his book, but he cannot break down the experience to tell me why he liked the book or even more analytically, what he learned from the experience.

In How To Read A Book, Adler confirms my son’s struggle stating,

“Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.”

My son understands this book is exceedingly pleasing, but is challenged to enumerate the factors contributing to his overall enjoyment.

Adler suggests three steps readers may employ to better realize the effect a book has upon us.  (Parentheses are my own comments)

STEP ONE:  Discover and understand the story’s elements:

            - classify its kind (genre)

            - identify the unity of the whole work (theme)

            - construct the parts of the whole

               (characters, conflict, climax, aftermath)

STEP TWO:  Engage yourself in the world of the author:

-  become thoroughly acquainted with the thoughts, feelings, speeches and actions of the characters (characterization)

-  discover the background against which the characters stand out in relief (setting)

-   experience the story’s adventures along with the characters (plot)

STEP THREE:  Appreciate and reflect upon what moves us:

-   don’t criticize what we agree with or not, but what we like or do not like

-   judge why we like or dislike the book:  these reasons often reflect our own preferences and prejudices more than the authors

-    objectify our reactions with examples of elements which move us or cause an emotional response

Reading imaginative literature and discussing it critically is a challenging goal.  Pleasurable reading need not be anything more than that.  However, if we wish to engage ourselves or our students in the habit of reading a book well, we must interact with the book to learn from it.

How can we help our students exercise the steps Adler proposes?  What questions shall we pose to extract their response to the story?

I’m going to make a list of questions we might ask our students to guide them toward analysis of a book.  But I’d like to hear what questions you might pose to help a student interact more deeply with an author and his story. 

featured in the 27th Carnival of Homeschooling

Chapter #1 – my response notes

Chapter #2 – my response notes

Chapter #3 & #4 – my response notes

Chapter #5 – my response notes

Chapter #6 & #7 - my response notes

Chapter #8 - my response notes

Chapter #9 - my response notes

Chapter #10 -  my response notes

Chapter #11-13 - my response notes

How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler

Related Tags: Great Books, literature, Mortimer Adler, reading fiction

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Posted by shaunms

I may have mentioned that my PhD is in literature, and I work from home on literature-oriented reference works for upper-level undergrads and early grad students. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about how those little units called words add up to something you could call meaning (but feeling fits too). So much time, I suppose, that it's hard for me to look back and say, "How would you help a person start to understand that concept?"
I love to talk about form, because the best artists *use* form rather than let it box them in (my favorite on that score is Wordsworth's "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room"), and they come up with something entirely new in the process. Maybe that's one way to approach it -- how does a work adhere to a given form (be it genre, meter, verse style, etc.), and where does it depart? Whatever the text, I suspect there's usually a lot of meaty material in that gap!
And those discussions lead to an awareness that form and content are inseparable. Which means that your student writer can't tell you that his paper is brilliant in its ideas even though disorganized and sloppy on the page -- not possible!

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Posted by Mamma1420/ClassicalMamma

Thank you for your kind words and your participation in the partnership. I value your contributions greatly!
Jessica

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Posted by Anonymous

Good extraction of the rules in Adler's chapters on reading imaginative literature.

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Posted by Jonathan Aquino

Also see "Plot and Structure", which is an excellent 3-page document describing unified plot, episodic plot, the four kinds of conflict, epiphany, climax, denoument, happy ending, and unhappy ending - useful signposts for analyzing fiction.

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Posted by Jonathan Aquino

The link is http://www.tccd.edu/uploadedfiles/employees/2337/courses/ENGL%202323/Plot%20and%20Structure.doc

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Posted by TRINITYPREPSCHOOL

Thank you for the link, Jonathon.

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Posted by Jonathan Aquino

Maureen - Here's an even better link, covering not only plot but also characterization and setting:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071111054413/http://www.cas.usf.edu/lis/lis6585/class/litelem.html

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