jueves, 20 de agosto de 2009

A Russian Formalist


Vladimir Propp was a Russian formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements.

He extended the Russian Formalist approach to the study of narrative structure. In the Formalist approach, sentence structures were broken down into analyzable elements, or morphemes, and Propp used this method by analogy to analyze Russian fairy tales. Propp was able to arrive at a typology of narrative structures.

Propp's approach was not intended to unearth meaning in the fairy tales he examined (as may be the case with Structuralist or Psychoanalytic analysis), nor to find the elements that differentiate one tale from another, but to unearth the elemental building blocks that formed the basis of their narrative structure.

Inteligence + Imagination= Egan



He is primarily interested in education. His work focuses on a new educational theory and its implications for a changed curriculum, teaching practices, and the institution of the school.

Kieran Egan is one of the most original ''big picture'' thinkers in education. He always read what he writes. Egan critiques both traditional and progressive education and puts forth his own provocative ideas on how change might be implemented. He proposes a radical change of approach for the whole process of education, he is convinced that the imagination-based approach to education could have a crucial and lasting impact on the way we learn.

He focuses on enhancing students' metalinguistic awareness and not just their intuitive use of words, fostering the development of higher mental functions.

The Importance of being literatured!


Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in German Studies, Folklore, and Children’s Literature.
She loves the combination between horror and beauty. She believes that is the contribution of aspects like sex and violene gives stories and special power in children imagination.
Maria Tatar challenges many of our assumptions about childhood reading. Much as our culture pays lip service to the importance of literature, we rarely examine the creative and cognitive benefits of reading from infancy through adolescence. By exploring how beauty and horror operate in C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, and many other narratives, Tatar provides a delightful work for parents, teachers, and general readers, not just examining how and what children read but also showing through vivid examples how literature transports and transforms children with its intoxicating, captivating, and occasionally terrifying energy.