[Download] "Building a City of Ladies with Christine de Pizan and Arkansas State University Honors Students (Research Essays)" by Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Building a City of Ladies with Christine de Pizan and Arkansas State University Honors Students (Research Essays)
- Author : Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 215 KB
Description
In "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," Adrienne Rich--American poet, feminist, and social critic--expressed exhilaration and confusion in being alive "in a time of awakening consciousness" (18). Self-knowledge, Rich emphasized, eludes us until we recognize and question the basic assumptions that shape our perspectives. Re-visioning is an important part of this process. For Rich, re-visioning is not the meticulous correcting of our comma splices and dangling modifiers but "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (18). The task Rich set before herself is not just the work of a feminist poet in the 1970s but an appropriate intellectual challenge for honors students in any decade. Interdisciplinary honors seminars should encourage students to move beyond the platitudes and prejudices of the past and examine a variety of issues with fresh perspective. In the fall of 2003 I taught an honors seminar at Arkansas State University that engaged students in the act of re-visioning. The course focused on medieval and early modern women writers and was designed to dispel the misconception that the literary, artistic, and cultural contributions of these women were nil or at best insignificant. The audience for the course was a group of junior and senior students from the ASU Honors Program. Their majors were diverse and included Psychology, Radio-TV, Graphic Design, History, Marketing, Theatre Arts, English, and even the ubiquitous Undecided. Not all of these students took the course because they were interested in the subject; some simply needed an honors seminar to fulfill requirements for graduation.