The Reading Club
The Reading Club, Department of English, Cotton University, was started with a bunch of enthusiastic students from PG 3rd Semester in 2023 under the guidance of Dr Payal Jain. The club has been formed to provide a forum to discuss literature in an informal and egalitarian ambience. Rather than a typical book club where only certain kinds of texts are discussed, this club seeks to engage with literary texts that are available in all kinds of forms and sizes, classical as well popular, canonical and almost forgotten, conventional and experimental. Any literary texts that are socially and culturally relevant, or aesthetically appealing are considered for discussion.
Engaging with literature can be immensely beneficial at individual and social levels and, as such, this forum strives to inculcate the love for reading as an exercise in leisure as well as critical engagement. The club facilitates a space for sharing views, reviews and responses of readers reading texts across languages, genres and borders. Members are also encouraged to share texts and reading lists, unearth newer and multiple ways of reading and explore newer literary genres.
The club is working towards procuring a decent pool of texts that may be borrowed by the members for a stipulated period of time, on the condition that they would submit a short review of the work at the time of return. In addition, the club organizes a yearly book exchange program, interaction with authors, screenings of a film adaptation as well as reading-writing workshop.
Activities of the Club:
• Regular maintenance of the Reading Club Display Board
• Holding of monthly meetings around a selected theme, genre, figure or text
• Record keeping of the meetings
• Celebration of at least two events annually centered around a literary figure/event/works/theme/genre
• Record keeping of the club library
The Reading Club, in collaboration with The Folded Paper Writing (TFP) organized the Reading-Writing Workshop on 26th February 2024. The main idea behind the workshop was to inculcate the idea that the more one reads, the better one writes, besides being aware of current trends in literature, different genres, writing styles and the know-hows of expression. The activities were designed in a way to tap into the creative potential of the students and the books they were reading.
In the warm-up session, called The Writer’s Journal, the writers introduced themselves and answered a question: If they had a chance to rewrite/rework a book/series/movie what would it be and what would they’ve done differently? All participants had very insightful responses and their ideas also hinted at their parameters for engaging with a literary text (book/movie/series): from character development to the idea of poetic justice. The second session was a brief writing session that focused on the importance of the time-themed concept of “first thoughts”. The participants had to scroll down a random page in their current reads and the use the first line of that page as their prompt. The catch was that every writer had to develop their writing within a particular genre within seven minutes. The last session was the main event of this workshop where the writers had to find gaps, absences and/or missing perspectives and expand on the creative potential of a published story. The story chosen for this session was Jhumpa Lahiri’s "Hell-Heaven." The first ten minutes of close reading (where they had to identify a gap or an unexplored perspective) was followed by rapid writing they had to jot down the ideas for their topics. They were given three minutes to write their first thoughts followed by a discussion where they presented their ideas, asked questions, sought suggestions and collated responses/observations. The final step was writing.The writing sessions were followed by a feedback session where the participants unanimously agreed that the activities were innovative and helped them clear their writers’ block. They emphasised that the first thought experiment helped them write freely and, due to absence of pressure to complete or make it perfect, they could be spontaneous with their writings.
The workshop turned out to be a fun and intimate experience with engaging discussions and out-of-the-box ideas. The participants were adept at expressing their thoughts in a critical and organised manner.