In Jorge Luis Borges’s essay, “Blindness,”one of many essays in a form of a lecture that comes from his compilation Seven Nights. His audience is mainly a reader wanting to know more about blindness or has some sort of disability that wants to connect to real life experiences from someone who is struggling with not being like everyone else because of blindness Jorge Luis Borges's Essay 'Blindness'. Words | 2 Pages. He goes back and forth talking about the positives and negative of dealing with his blindness. The prevailing tone is feeling isolated from the real world and also has a visual tone of the pros and cons of his life influenced by his disability. Throughout JORGE LUIS BORGES Those two gits contradicted each other: the countless books and the night, the inability to read them. I imagined the author of that poem to be Groussac, fo r Groussac was also the director of the library and also blind. Groussac was more coura geous than I: he kept his silence. But I knew that there had certainly been
Jorge Luis Borges 'Blindness' - Words | Internet Public Library
My introductory to creative writing students have borges essay on blindness notions about what non-fiction is or should be. The essay as a form of non-fiction is not well known to them; the genre has been established in their minds as one devoted to the long-form narrative: shocking tales of harrowing experiences borges essay on blindness bestselling celebrity memoir.
They are worried about being tasked to write non-fiction because they do not think their lives have been interesting enough; they worry they will be reduced to writing about cliché subject matters like death of grandparents, breaking up with a significant other, the first time they saw or did something incredibly shocking.
They also seem preoccupied by the idea that non-fiction is simply storytelling. But non-fiction is not relegated to the telling it straight storytelling and it does not have to be book length, borges essay on blindness. It finds a home in different types of essay as well, and essay—in the introductory class—is our non-fiction focus. I begin our unit with a quote from Philip Lopate:. The essay is a notoriously flexible and adaptable form, borges essay on blindness.
It possesses the freedom to move anywhere, in all directions…. This freedom can be daunting, not only for the novice essayist confronting such latitude but for the critic attempting to pin down its formal properties.
We begin by talking about the traditional narrative essay: using narrative and the borges essay on blindness experience as an investigative tool. The braided essay: narrative threads and themes that work together to create a certain impact on the reader. The lyric essay: one concerned with representation of time and use of language.
The researched essay: one that relies upon response to other writers and events and relays required and investigated material to the reader. The meditative essay: a dwelling of thought on a subject matter that trumps narrative. But he also learns that this loss is not one that overwhelms; it is loss as recovery and discovery, borges essay on blindness.
The narrative aspect is present across the essay—the story of Borges deteriorating eyesight and his journey from writer of prose to writer of poetry. The braided essay is present too in the way Borges moves between central themes.
The lyric essay is embodied in moments of poetic description. The meditative essay is present borges essay on blindness Borges, on multiple occasions, anticipates needing to contextualize his content and so he gives us thoughts as opposed to action. Confession is present in his fears, and the borges essay on blindness glue to the essay is revelation: that blindness is not a not such a bad thing after all, when it has in turn given him so much.
More importantly maybe, why would we need to define it? My students are smart. Borges essay on blindness suggest all sorts of reasons: we need rules and terms so that we learn how to manipulate them in productive ways; we label it because it helps us locate types of essays we want to read and write, borges essay on blindness.
This, in part, is why I assign Borges last. But more than this, Borges also makes us think about how non-fiction writing speaks to all writing and what is most important to the writer: language. Borges has used the essay as a teaching tool about other genres. Education is central to all literature and creative writing, I tell my students.
Non-fiction, poetry, and fiction all teach us something about the human experience, borges essay on blindness, just in different ways.
In non-fiction we have the tool of knowing that this thing —this story, borges essay on blindness, experience, trial, the thoughts, epiphanies—belong to a person who we are invited to view and respond to.
There might be something more approachable about non-fiction. What better tool for education do we have than honesty about experience? Students often struggle with poetry—not only the labyrinth of interpretation, but the idea of poetry itself.
It seems students fall into one of two categories: familiar with canonical poetry and receptive to discussion about more contemporary borges essay on blindness, or distrustful of poetry and viewing it as cryptic or inaccessible, borges essay on blindness. Early in the essay Borges says. I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind.
My class tends to agree with Borges: the non-blind think of blindness as blackness or a dark nothingness. Borges, borges essay on blindness, I tell my students, is teaching us a way of seeing. His essay, more than anything else, is giving us ways to approach writing across genres: he shows us how to see with language, and seeing with language is one form of understanding, uncovering, discovering.
When we discuss the essay and how Borges begins his foray into poetry, we talk about how we process language. On a second read, I ask students to sub-vocalize, to play with how to stress words, where they find pauses both directed and natural, borges essay on blindness. Then we take turns reading it aloud. Inevitably the students read it aloud in different ways. As the poem continues, some students pick up speed. Some students slow down. To think not only of what we write but what that writing sounds like and how it guides our readers?
By the time we begin our unit on poetry, students seem more at ease. I hope that the boundary between essay and reader collapses and that they find one of the greatest joys of non-fiction: when we find ourselves becoming the text of an essay, when the experience of one person becomes the experience shared among many. This thoughtful? What if we all could learn to compose with some form of blindness—that as much as it limited us—also freed us?
Many times, the students whose work is being read delight at this when the discover the intricacies of language are actually engaging their readers—just as much, sometimes, as their stories do. At the end of the semester, Borges finds us again. My favorite time in the semester is this: the end. The pieces we read in workshop evolve into work more nuanced. Gwendolyn Edward is a Pushcart nominated writer of non-fiction, poetry, and fiction. Her work has been accepted by Crab Orchard Review, Fourth River, Bourbon Penn, Crack the Spine, and others.
She retains a MA in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas where she worked with American Literary Review, and she is currently pursuing a MFA at Bennington. She works with Fifth Wednesday Journal as an assistant non-fiction and fiction editor and also teaches Creative Writing.
You are commenting using your WordPress. com account. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account, borges essay on blindness. Notify me of new comments via email, borges essay on blindness. Notify me of new posts via email. November 2, April 29, assayjournal. I begin our unit with a quote from Philip Lopate: The essay is a notoriously flexible and adaptable form.
Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:.
Email required Address never made public. Name required. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website.
Profile of a Writer: Jorge Luis Borges
, time: 1:20:38Jorge Luis Borges's Essay 'Blindness' - Words | Cram
In Jorge Luis Borges’s essay, “Blindness,”one of many essays in a form of a lecture that comes from his compilation Seven Nights. His audience is mainly a reader wanting to know more about blindness or has some sort of disability that wants to connect to real life experiences from someone who is struggling with not being like everyone else because of blindness Jorge Luis Borges's Essay 'Blindness'. Words | 2 Pages. He goes back and forth talking about the positives and negative of dealing with his blindness. The prevailing tone is feeling isolated from the real world and also has a visual tone of the pros and cons of his life influenced by his disability. Throughout JORGE LUIS BORGES Those two gits contradicted each other: the countless books and the night, the inability to read them. I imagined the author of that poem to be Groussac, fo r Groussac was also the director of the library and also blind. Groussac was more coura geous than I: he kept his silence. But I knew that there had certainly been
No comments:
Post a Comment