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The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

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W. W. Norton & Company, Aug 17, 2003 - Literary Criticism - 432 pages

An engaging, accessible guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition.

Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven't because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise. In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.

The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.

The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.
  

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Selected pages

Contents

Training Your Own Mind The Classical Education You Never Had
13
Wrestling with Books The Act of Reading
24
Keeping the Journal A Written Record of New Ideas
34
Starting to Read Final Preparations
41
READING JUMPING INTO THE GREAT CONVERSATION
55
The Story of People Reading through History with the Novel
57
The Story of Me Autobiography and Memoir
114
The Story of the Past The Tales of Historians and Politicians
163
The World Stage Reading through History with Drama
240
History Refracted The Poets and Their Poems
307
Permissions
405
Index
407
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

African American Agamemnon American ancient answer ASIN audience Augustine autobiography become begins Beowulf Best edition Best edition:The century chapter characters Christian Classics paperback critical death discover divine Don Quixote drama emotion English Enlightenment epic ESTRAGON eyes Ezra Pound final Gatsby Gilgamesh Greek hero historian human ideas Iliad ISBN journal king lines lives look lyric Margery Kempe Mark Strand marry meaning medieval meter mind modern mystery never NewYork novel novelist Oxford paperback New York past pattern Penguin play play's playwright poem poetry Poets Poetic language political Postmodernism question reader Recommended edition Renaissance rhyme Richmond Lattimore Robert Pinsky Romantic scene Seamus Heaney sense sentence slave sonnet spiritual stage story sure to read syllables Tartuffe tells theater things Thomas Merton tion translation truth turn understand William women words writes written wrote

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The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You ...
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Susan Wise Bauer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
She is the author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, a guide to reading the great books published by ww Norton ...
en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Susan_Wise_Bauer

About the author (2003)

Susan Wise Bauer is the best-selling author of the Story of the World series, The Well-Trained Mind, The Well-Educated Mind, The History of the Ancient World, and The History of the Medieval World. She lives in Charles City, Virginia.

Bibliographic information

QR code for The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
TitleThe Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
AuthorSusan Wise Bauer
Editionannotated
PublisherW. W. Norton & Company, 2003
ISBN0393070972, 9780393070972
Length432 pages
Subjects › 

Literary Criticism / Books & Reading
  
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