People discussing about classics tend to confound reading classics with the canon. Many believe that the key to effective reading of classics is the canon. However, deciding on the canon is only the first step, which cannot prevent absence of thinking in the reading process. Unthinking reading of classics arises from (1) the confusion of classics reading with general reading; (2) mistaking cognition for thinking; and (3) ignoring the complex meaning potentials in classics that defy any attempt at reading for a certainty. We hold that only when reading classics is an independent and free thinking activity can classics play their thought-provoking role.
QU Weiguo
. Abstracts of Major Papers in This IssueAbsence of Thinking in Reading Classics[J]. Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 2018
, 18(03)
: 11
-16
.
DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2018.03.002
Alter, R. 1989. The Pleasure of Reading in an Ideological Age [M]. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Arendt, H. 1971. The Life of the Mind [M]. San Diego: A Harvest Book.
Barthes, R. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text (trans. by R. Miller) [M]. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bloom, H. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages [M]. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Eliot, T.S. 1975. What is a classic? [A]. In F. Kermode (ed.). Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot [C]. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 115-131.
Foucault, M. 2015. Language, Madness and Desire (trans. by R. Bononno) [M]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Frost, R. 1979. Education by Poetry [OL]. [2018-01-03]. http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/05/education-by-poetry-robert-frost.html.
Kemp, J.C. 2015. Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as a Regionalist [M]. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kermode, F. 2004. Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon [M]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kolbas, E.D. 2001. Critical Theory and the Literary Canon [M]. Boulder: Westview Press.
Laughlin, R.B. 2008. The Crime of Reason: And Its Closing of the Scientific Mind [M]. New York: Basic Books.
Mikics, D. 2013. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age [M]. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Miller, J.H. 2002. On Literature: Thinking in Action [M]. London: Routledge.
Nabokov, V. 1982. Good readers and good writers [A]. In F. Bowers (ed.). Lectures on Literature [C]. London: Mariner Books. 1-8.
Pack, R. & J. Parini. 1996. Touchstone: American Poets on a Favorite Poem [C]. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Sontag, S. 1966. Against interpretation [A]. In. S. Sontag (ed.). Against Interpretation and Other Essays [C]. New York: Picador. 3-14.
Stevens, W. 1951. Imagination as value [A]. In W. Stevens (ed.). The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination [C]. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 131-156.
Woolf, V. 1935. How should one read a book? [A]. In V. Woolf (ed.). The Common Reader Second Series [C]. 148-155.
曲卫国. 2017. 拜读经典的祸害:谈谈经典阅读去神化问题[J]. 当代外语研究(5):3-5, 8.
