Transformational Spaces
Transformation is a catalyst toward creating a new self-identity. It is the process that when an individual faces an experience that is so powerful it creates change in one’s life. Polleck’s article “Creating Transformational Spaces: High School Book Clubs with Adolescent Females” highlights the importance of transformation acquired through collective reading. The young girls in this article, like most individuals, connect their personal lives to the characters within the text they read, in order to understand, symbolize and represent themselves better. Novels have enlarged a female’s “emotional capacity and maturity, where both cognitive and affective development is enhanced”(Polleck 52). Not only does reading enhance emotional aspects of
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This common satisfaction in turn “contributes to the group’s solidarity” (Rehberg Sedo 67). Rehberg Sedo acknowledges that women relate themselves to the text, which leads to the creation of new identities as they are able to “map their developing self-identities”(67) through the fictional and real world. Women’s identity traits allow individuals to escape from undesired aspects of life and “create different ways of being in their world”(Rehberg Sedo 68). Striphas recognizes that women embrace this new world through the influence of novels in order “to create spaces and thus remove themselves both symbolically and practically from their domestic, female role-assigned duties"(302). Women, often living in a patriarchal society, enjoy reading because it allows them to escape from their everyday errands, however “on the contrary [reading] also enable[s] book readers to interrogate their everyday lives as women via characters and events in the books”(309). Davis agrees with Striphas’ notion of readers relating their lives to novels and further explains that “sympathetic reading experiences can play an important role in larger chain of events”(412). Reading allows readers to imagine themselves as the main character and understand the conditions the character is facing. This may lead to a shift in an individual’s perspective of
This common satisfaction in turn “contributes to the group’s solidarity” (Rehberg Sedo 67). Rehberg Sedo acknowledges that women relate themselves to the text, which leads to the creation of new identities as they are able to “map their developing self-identities”(67) through the fictional and real world. Women’s identity traits allow individuals to escape from undesired aspects of life and “create different ways of being in their world”(Rehberg Sedo 68). Striphas recognizes that women embrace this new world through the influence of novels in order “to create spaces and thus remove themselves both symbolically and practically from their domestic, female role-assigned duties"(302). Women, often living in a patriarchal society, enjoy reading because it allows them to escape from their everyday errands, however “on the contrary [reading] also enable[s] book readers to interrogate their everyday lives as women via characters and events in the books”(309). Davis agrees with Striphas’ notion of readers relating their lives to novels and further explains that “sympathetic reading experiences can play an important role in larger chain of events”(412). Reading allows readers to imagine themselves as the main character and understand the conditions the character is facing. This may lead to a shift in an individual’s perspective of