#Literature, Meta-Analysis Goes Mainstream

Will this enhance or diminish reading? One wishes for the former but suspects the latter. Understanding references is hard won and a measure of ones own reading and life experiences. Touchstones are not gifts outright but treasures earned on the quest. Still, one cannot but wonder how they have done with Dante, hoping too that Godot flummoxes them.

The website Small Demons and the X-Ray feature of Amazon’s e-readers are the first in a new crop of digital literary tools that promise to change how readers interact with texts. By equipping users with digital reference frameworks, these new meta-analytical approaches give readers immediate access to the contextual worlds of literary works.

Community-wide reads with Big Read

The Big Read is accepting applications from nonprofit organizations seeking funding to conduct month-long, community-wide reads between September 2011 and June 2012. The Big Read is a national program designed to revitalize the role of literature in American culture. 

Organizations selected to participate in The Big Read will receive grants ranging from $2,500 to $20,000, access to online training resources, educational and promotional materials, inclusion of your organization and activities on The Big Read Web site, and the prestige of participating in a highly visible national program. Approximately 75 organizations from across the country will be selected by a panel of experts. The deadline to submit applications is February 1, 2011.

The Big Read gives communities the opportunity to come together to read, discuss, and celebrate one of 31 selections from U.S. and world literature. The Big Read catalog includes the great American poets Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robinson Jeffers, and Edgar Allan Poe.

To review the Guidelines & Application Instructions visit The Big Read web site.

Questions? 

Call Arts Midwest at 612.238.8010 or email, TheBigRead@artsmidwest.org

Reposted from The Poetry Foundation newsletter. The Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with Arts Midwest.