Introductory Reading Assignment

Hey everyone, sorry for posting this late but I just registered for this class, but better late than never! New Humanities Reader offers a vastly different approach to teaching literature that I have previously been exposed to in middle and high school. Before, the education system focused on reading mainly fiction pieces and telling us what to think rather than letting us decide how we analyze the piece. We are asked how we feel about a passage presented in the fiction, not how the issue impacts us in any way. Instead of having an open dialogue of the issues presented in the fiction pieces, we laboriously look for symbolism, metaphors, and dialogue. The New Humanities Reader is a much better approach, an approach that is more in line with how reading occurs in real life. The book consists of nonfiction pieces in subject matters that pertain to situations that we may come across in our daily lives, and we are instead asked to ponder how these issues presented genuinely impact us. We search for the main idea, the information hidden in the passage, and extensively discuss each passage. New Humanities Reader actually asks for our own voice, not the voice of other literary analysts. We are then asked to use our depth of knowledge to make connections between the pieces and what we believe. In previous literature classes, we were only asked to make connections between different pieces of fiction, or fiction and our own lives. New Humanities Reader offers a fresh and welcoming view on education on literature, one that will surely inspire us to find our own unique voices.