English Teaching: Practice and Critique

Following the curve of a sentence: Notes from a reader's diary

Volume 5 Number 3 December 2006

Rishma Dunlop (York University)

“Following the Curve of the Sentence: Notes From a Reader's Diary” is comprised of excerpts from the author's Reader's Diary, using experimental writing practices that can be modeled and used by English teachers in classrooms. The Reader's Diary is a subgenre of autobiography, memoir and poetic prose essay, a flexible, hybrid form of inquiry. The author uses collagist techniques of intergeneric writings, moving back and forth between fragments of memory and more recent reflections, visual images, poems, theoretical considerations of teaching literary studies and teacher education, as well as focusing on the effect of reading on the shaping of schooled, gendered and cultural identity. Through these forms, the author draws on poststructural strategies to inform her work and to demonstrate an advocacy of experimental writing methodologies to create an “open text,” which uses inter or cross-generic forms including collage and fictocritical writing (writing that combines “creative” and “fictional/poetic” modes with those of criticism and commentary). Imaginative, innovative practical and philosophical approaches to the teaching of English are considered. 

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