Triple A Learning IB Blogs

I put aside the book I´m currently reading to return to thoughts on literature and TOK. I´m enjoying the book immensely, largely because it takes me to a part of the world that I don´t know and absorbs me into lives utterly unlike my own, with their unfamiliar worldviews, values, and concerns. It´s What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin, and as I close it I return from the Punjab in my mind to the chair where I sit. I feel as if I know more from having entered imaginatively a work that extends my own understanding of human beings experiencing their own lives in the world. In this way, literature offers splendidly a quality that we value in TOK – perspectives – even though in the two courses we end up considering perspectives rather differently.

Literature, as we note in both literature class and TOK, uses a method of engagement through the particular and the subjective. In most literature, we respond to particular characters with names, places, and life circumstances. In literature that does not use characters and narrative, such as much poetry, we are still engaged through the specific details and the individual vision of the speaker or author. In literature, the particular roots the general; the writer´s view of life, however dispassionately or realistically observed and documented, is carried by the choices of character, setting, themes, and language within an individual work. These choices are subjective (though ¨naturalists¨attempt a ¨scientific objectivity¨), reflecting the writer´s own experiences and views, just as the experience of reading is subjective as the reader enters the imaginative world created and responds in a personal way. In the writing and reading of literature, personal perspectives are very much in play.

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