Reader Response and Personal Responsibility

Audience: Diploma Programme
Session: Block 6: Saturday 3:45 to 5:00, Room: Pacific M

Aimed at modeling critical inquiry, this session summarizes three response theories, Elizabethan ideology, and the plot and themes of King Lear. After viewing a film clip of Edgar's manipulation of his blinded father's suicide attempt, participants are asked to respond to textual discontinuities: Do good intentions excuse deception? Does his father's epiphany, predicated on a sham "miracle," imply that hope is an illusion? Does Edgar’s moral ambiguity dramatize realism or merely intensify our pathos? Given "the affective fallacy," that the merit of texts is based on the responses they evoke, does the media "trifle thus with [our] despair"?


Charles Fremuth, Diploma Programme Coordinator; English Department Head, Detroit Country Day School

Over his 30-year career at Detroit Country Day School, Charles Fremuth has taught English A1, the Theory of Knowledge, and coordinated the Diploma Programme. He has also served as an IB volunteer. As an assistant examiner (1997-2001) and a workshop leader for TOK, he has integrated response theory with the critical inquiry of contemporary knowledge issues in courses ranging from ninth grade pre-IB language arts to college preparatory literature classes. He has twice been selected a Distinguished Teacher of the Presidential Scholars Program (1993, 2006) and a Whitehead Teacher of Distinction (2006, 2007).


Organization website: http://www.dcds.edu