Thinking about identities

When I think in the word “Identity” immediately come to my mind the customs that we have as country, but also in a minor scale as citizens (without to play down the importance of it ) and finally as an individual. However, the identity is not just what we share (the sameness), also are our differences. So I think, we have a constant inward struggle: the struggle to fit in a group where it share common likes (hobbies, music, qualities, etc) and the struggle to be recognized as individual, better, as unique person for something that makes you different from the others.
But this Identity can't be dissociated of our Culture, because is in the culture where we take an identity. For instance, in the Colombian culture we have Vallenato, Salsa, Rock etc. this music belong to our culture, but we can choose which identify us. The problem comes when we don’t accept the customs of other people or what is worst when we criticize some aspects of a different culture, it’s better to take the positives aspects to apply them in the our.

What is Fordism?

Well guys this is a brief explanation of what Fordism means...Although we already ended up giving a definition in class, I think it's important to catch a glimpse at this piece of writing I found on the web, in order to increase a little bit more our knowledge for a better reading comprenhension...

The fordist model of production was based on the large factory and mass production. The name comes from the Ford car factory (whose owner was Henry Ford), where in the year 1907 the production of the "T-model" was began, realized with the so called "sliding line". A typical fordist factory was an enormous construction, which was surrounded by a city. Thousands of mass workers, producing commodities by serial production, functioned in the factory. The work was extremely simple repetition of the same phases. It was divided into small parts and it was managed by tailoristic methods. In some cases the duration of the movement phases was ten seconds. The work demanded no particular skill. The production was organized in a very hierarchical way and single workers did not control the totality of the production process. The organization of work belonged to technical executives, which usually functioned in separate areas and in the direct control of the leadership. In the factories the workers used mechanical devices and machines. Concerning the results the fordist factory was based on large serial productions of standardized products. The customer's choice was for example the colour of the car, if even that. ♦♣♠♥...See ya...♥♠♣♦

Human Nature

"Violence strangely overwhelmes us in both cases, given that what happens is foreing to the established order, which opposes such violence. There's indecency in death, different, with no doubt, of what sex activity has of incongruous. Death is associated to tears, the same way sexual desire is associated to laughter; but laughter is not, in the messure it appears to be, the opposite to tears, both the laughter target as the tears' are always related to a kind of violence that interrupts the regular course, the average course of things. Obviuosly the sex whirlwind doesn't make us cry, but always disturb us, in somecases even upset us and, one of both, either make us laugh or embraces us in the violence of hugh...IT IS BECAUSE WE'RE HUMANS AND WE LIVE IN THE DEATH'S GRIM PERSPECTIVE THAT WE KNOW EXASPERATED VIOLENCE, the exasperated violence of erotism.

Taken from "The Tears of Eros"

By Georges Bataille.

I forgot the author...

Michele Petit, (1999) Nuevos acercamientos a los jóvenes y la lectura

Human Nature

" La violencia nos abruma extrañamente en ambos casos, ya que lo que ocurre es extraño al orden establecido, al cual se opone esta violencia. Hay en la muerte una indecencia, distinta, sin duda alguna, de aquello que la actividad sexual tiene de incongruente. La muerte se asocia a las lágrimas, del mismo modo que en ocasiones el deseo sexual se asocia a la risa; pero la risa no es, en la medida en que parece serlo, lo opuesto a las lágrimas: tanto el objeto de la risa como el de las lágrimas se relacionan siempre con un tipo de violencia que interrumpe el curso regular, el curso habitual de las cosas. Evidentemente el torbellino sexual no nos hace llorar, pero siempre nos turba, en ocasiones nos trastorna y, una de dos: o nos hace reír o nos envuelve en la violencia del abrazo... es debido a que somos humanos y a que vivimos en la sombría perspectiva de la muerte el que conozcamos la violencia exasperada, la violencia desesperada del erotismo. "

Fragmento de "Las lágrimas de Eros"

Autor: Georges Bataille

About reading

Reading is the way to know ourselves, to decipher ourselves and to decode the world. Books are endless possibilities for cognitive, emotional and cultural growth, in which we develop different emotions and therefore, different interpretations. With books, we seek alternatives to learn, reflect and create ourselves as critic human beings . In the books we also seek to discover something new, they are revealing of different realities and other dimensions of knowledge.

Through reading, we stablish connections between reading and our particular lived human experience. Besides, reading can be differently interpreted through the time, depending on social conditions and/or individual esperiences.

In"La importancia del acto de leer" by Freire (1989), the author says that reading is not only to decode the written word or language, but, in an act proceeded by ( and interlaced with) the knowledge of reality. Language and reality are dynamically interconnected, understanding is achieved through a critical reading of a text and implies that the reader perceives the relationship between text and contex. He emphasizes that reading always involves a perception, an interpretation and a critical rewriting of what is read.

GLORIA PATRICIA

When I read these lines some years ago, it was for me the naicest and accurate definition about reading could make in people´s mind but the idea which best stired up my attention was this about reading could make you become a rebel.

Pero leer puede volverlo a uno algo rebelde, e infundirle la idea de que es posible apartarse del camino que le habían trazado otros, escoger la propia ruta, su propia manera de decir, tener derecho a tomar las decisiones y participar en un devenir compartido, en vez de siempre remitirse a los demás. Estar familiarizado con los juegos del lenguaje permite estar menos desprotegido ante cualquier charlatán que pase por ahí y proponga curarle a uno las heridas con un retórica simplista.

Does this definition have some relationship with identity?

Thinking about identities

Thinking about identities

LONDRES 2

Sol Colmenares

Hoy es uno de esos días en los que a uno no le queda más remedio que hacer todo llorando. Debí presentirlo en el despertar agitado precedido por la inmovilidad que se repite cada vez más en mis pesadillas y que fue causada esta vez por una rata enorme que colgaba de mi cara. Después fue el mar frío: una maratónica jornada a nado y una absurda taza de café con una vieja decrépita que no conozco y que espero francamente que no sea yo en el futuro. Debí…pero no lo hice. Sólo me vine a dar cuenta después de la ducha y el café y el jugo de tomate que me recomendó la mamá de Angélica y que está funcionando maravillosamente para aliviar la cistitis.
Después de esa absurda comunión matutina de cereal con yogur espeso –que es la consistencia que tiene el yogur en el primer mundo-, café instantáneo y jugo de tomate enlatado, empezó a configurarse la fatalidad. Jugando al teléfono roto con operadoras virtuales y después de innumerables unos y ceros y doses y asteriscos, enfrento una vez más mi destino sudaca, tercermundista, posible terrorista porque tal como se fractaliza el mundo en nuestras sociedades post-contemporáneas y pese a todos los discursos políticos y no que hacen un llamado a la tolerancia y a la interculturalidad, prueba uno amargamente que no basta con que vos y yo nos queramos tanto. Obras son amores y no buenas razones. Y aquí voy entonces, camino al zoo, en el carro de Robert, dejando que las lágrimas salgan gordas y estropeen las páginas de rayuela, que mejor/peor compañía me podía haber escogido para hoy. Rob no sabe qué hacer con mis lágrimas pero acierta a pasarme este papelito que dice customer copy leicester forest east(south)motorway please debit my account with the total amount (imaginate uno pidiendo el favor de que tengan a bien sus mercedes la bondad de sacar esta platica de mi cuenta) y al que ya no le queda sino un espaciecito en blanco y por eso voy a tener que empezar a escribir muy chiquito. Robert no tiene más papelitos pero la inspiración no le llega a uno todos los días, no señor. Así que tendremos que hacer uso del siempre utilísimo papel higiénico. Mirá vos que mañosa la inspiración. No más encuentro el papel higiénico y ya me entran ganas es de empezar a escribir bobadas. Ya. En fin. Creo que lo único que me faltaba era mencionar a Chirico y recordar aquello de que en las lágrimas tuyas esta todo el terror y a Borges de paso.
Y ahora sí, ya casi voy a tener que parar porque necesito el cuadrito de papel que queda para limpiarme los mocos porque ya estoy llorando otra vez pensando en que no voy a estar de tu lado el 8 de enero y que aquello de voy a estar con vos de corazón no es sino pura mierda porque lo que uno a veces (muchas) realmente necesita es un abrazo ultra concreto y una mirada tangible y una mano al alcance de la mano. ¿Sí o no?

The danger of a single story, transcript

The danger of a single story
By novelist Chimamanda Adichie

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader. And what I read were British and American children's books.
I was also an early writer. And when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. (Laughter) And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.
My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.
What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available. And they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.
Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.
I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.
Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit. And his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket, made of dyed raffia, that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them is how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.
Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listed to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very dissapointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.
I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity. And in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country. The most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." (Laughter)
So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved, by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family.
This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to west Africa in 1561, and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."
Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West. A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet, Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child."
And so I began to realize that my American roommate must have, throughout her life, seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places. But I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.
But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time, was tense. And there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.
I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" -- (Laughter) -- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter)
I would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. And now, this is not because I am a better person than that student, but, because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.
When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. (Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.
But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our firetrucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.
All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo. And depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe. And it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.
I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.
So what if before my Mexican trip I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories."
What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Mukta Bakaray, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.
Shortly after he published my first novel I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview. And a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." (Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. Now I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.
Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music? Talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds? Films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce. What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition?
Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government. But also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer. And it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.
My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust. And we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist, and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.
The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her southern relatives who had moved to the north. She introduced them to a book about the southern life that they had left behind. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you. (Applause)

Chimamanda Adichie The Danger of a Single Story

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

PDF

Hi! This is the link to download the PDF " Beyond"Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference" By Akhil Gupta; James Ferguson:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/programmes/07-08/integration/bhambra/1/gupta_ferguson_beyond_culture.pdf

Beckett On Film: Waiting for Godot Act I 2001

This weekend death knocked to my door and her pale, bony face smiled to me in a silent agony... Is death the answer to the uncomprehensible fact of life? ... the grooming peace in a tomb is nothing but a cry of pain, bitter tears run through my eyes and the untold truth can't get out of my throat, words look eagerly for some way out, found themselves in a jail of flesh...

An interview with writer Mary Gaitskill

http://www.kcrw.com/media-player/mediaPlayer2.html?type=audio&id=bw090611mary_gaitskill

Toni Morrison discusses freedom of expression and the writer's role

While I expect for the muse of the inspiration, I'm listenning "Alfonsina y el Mar" _Mercedes Sosa; this's a f#cking great song, I'm thinking. Do we really leave? Will we become just a remembrance of what we use to be?

The piano notes take me away and the lirics of farewell make me feel a little ansious, but I realized that we'll walk the green mille, the path through the dark, cold and deep ocean as Alfonsina did... but those who left first will be waiting for us and the voice of ancient thinkers, musicians and poets will be the voice of those who would'nt have a voice...

Mercedes' voice a rough, deep and sonorous expression of unconsent, of disconform... a real "cantaora" a voice or voices...

Graphic story

“Notes to My Biographer” illustrated story by Adam Haslett and Thomas Quinn.

http://www.blankisthenewblack.com/galleries/Notes.html

According to Meurer, in genre as diversity, and rethorial modes as unity in lenguage use, how can a genrer reinforce, reproduce or challenge different social relations?

Diana Lopez
Leidy Ostos
Jhon Cortés

1. In the writing process is always the author aware that she is using a rhetorical mode?

2. Why rhetorical mode may be an important notion in genre studies?

3. What is the Meurer’s purpose to present genres as diversity and rhetorical modes as unity in language use?

4. Why rhetorical modes constitute a reduced number of linguistic patterns?

Juliana Carmona

Olga Villegas

Cristian Díaz

NORMAL OR COMMON?

I was wondering about something happened in last class, maybe vague, without importance for some people, but necessary since we already have made this distinction in any moment, place and for some specific context. This idea has surrounded in my mind since that…

While listening to my friends’ presentations, all those meaningful aspects in every author’s life they described, I found these little remarks:

I realized that we tend to call “genius” anybody having specific skills in any field or even in more than one knowledge area, I’m not saying that’s false, I think the same in certain way, but are we conscious of what we can make and the place of our own thoughts? There are countless possibilities and it really matters the way you see your I-can-do-the-same-even-better process, so, maybe we’re “genius” as well (in the worst case, we’re going to be) B +.

Let’s talk about the most interesting thing I heard in class and I was thinking about.

Have you thought about the real meaning of normal? Hmmmm I guess you so…

Well, that class was really important to me because it gave me some clues in order to increase all the ideas I have had in mind and as Susan Sontag said: “it was burning in my brain” well, kind of.

…This author is a normal guy… hmmm since we say something like that; do we have the position and the right to assure what is normal in this inscrutable world? Are we normal people?

What is normal?

Yes, I’m with teacher’s position even if she forgot that I raised my hand to give my opinion while se was talking about that… I’m not trying to be such an asshole because I write this. It’s just to point it out. J In certain way that was a reason for what I’m doing now.

I don’t know if you have noted the same but, this exercise of presenting biographies has shown different perspectives of life, alternative ways of managing situations. That implies many backgrounds in every piece of history. After see a great bunch of characteristics related in those authors, I tried to understand what a “genius mind” requires: A very deep pleasure for freedom, in all sides, life, religion, social, sex relations (most of them are very open-minded about that, some of them homosexuals, bisexuals, etc). The inspiration to be heroes, through writing or assuming risky positions in society and one of the most important: to be considered “crazy/mad” in some part of your life.

I remember in last class a funny drawing made by one of my friends, with a little man holding a kind of banner and the following message: “craziness is not allowed here”. Jeje that was pretty interesting for me, although I didn’t ask him the reason of that.

I restructured my questions: Are we crazy people because we think the others are crazy?

Are we “normal” because they’re crazy? And what does “to be crazy” mean? It has to do with illness every time? Do we need a mental illness to be considered as genius?

Finally, I would say is better to use the word “common” if we try to show whatever as something ordinary. Don’t you think?

Maybe I’m a little crazy writing all these…

STYLES OF RADICAL WILL QUESTION

While through the reading of “A trip to Hanoi”, we can repeatedly find propositions that express, almost unanimously, conclusions of previous showed arguments, such as in page (217-218): “(a cultural trait that precedes any grafting on of the moralizing framework of Communist language.) And perhaps it’s the general tendency of aesthetic consciousness, when Developer, to make judgments more complex and more highly qualified…” According to this, ¿could we also say that conclusions will always appear as propositions? And hence, Could a proposition be used as a thesis on which the author builds her arguments using her travel experiences?

JUAN DAVID FIGUEROA.
GLORIA PATRICIA MARTINEZ.
BRYAN VARGAS RAMOS.

Question

Why and how did Susan Sontag changed her outlook about Hanoi and Hanoin people? taking into account that she came from an occidental culture?

Monica Medina

Luis Agudelo

Jhon Gomez

Questions about reading

Can you make a comparison between the reader you were before taking this course and the reader you are now? Has it contributed to your academic process as a reader in a foreign language?

Compare the factors that influence in the understanding of a text in a foreign language and in the mother tongue.

Claudia Lorena Neira
Edward Sarasty
Eduardo Valderrama

Questions about reading

1. A meaningful reading experience can or cannot be determined by the fact that you were born as a good reader or you became a good reader?

2. From your own experience and taking into account the discussion in the course about reading definition, what do you think is the main purpose of it?

Cielo Osorio

Rogelio Herrera

Carlos Martínez

some sample questions

Dear students,
the following are some examples of questions for you to have an idea of what I expect. Best wishes, joy in your minds and hearts, Sol.

*Define “reading” including these notions in your definition: social practice, construction, citizenship, genres, knowledge, technology.
*In the context of foreign language learning, do you consider that recognizing morphology and syntax is a level of reading comprehension? Explain your answer.
*Is reading a matter of cultural awareness? Think of reading in your mother tongue in comparison to reading in a foreign language.
*Establish at least two differences between genres and rhetorical mechanisms.
*Explain the following analogy: Genres stand for diversity as rhetorical modes stand for unity.
*According to Luis Fernando Agudelo (2010, edited by professor Colmenares), “Reading is more than following some words orally or mentally. The process of reading involves the reader in a complex activity in which she must try to identify what the author wants to say. The author uses a series of resources (morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, etc) with a purpose, she uses these resources to convey her intentions of persuading or dissuading her reader about an idea or a point of view. What the reader must do is to identify those purposes, decoding the text as a unity.” Do you agree with this statement? Explain your answer.