Files
Download Full Text (6.4 MB)
ISBN
0-916834-08-5
Target Grades
Secondary School (esp. ages 14-16)
Publication Date
1978
Publisher
Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children
Number of Pages
152
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Summary
Suki, a young adolescent, loves poetry and its world of metaphor. Her friend Harry hates literature class and the idea of writing poetry frightens him. Their worldviews begin to converge as the two come to see logic and poetry as two ways of finding meaning in life experience, though not before they have confronted a number of problems of language, knowledge and aesthetics. As Suki, Harry and their classmates work through the obstacles they encounter in creative writing, they construct new understandings of concepts like friendship, freedom, integrity, originality, harmony, form, balance, personhood and meaning.
Excerpt
"Suki, what's your father do?"
"What's he do?"
"Yes, I mean, what sort of work does he do?"
''He's a furniture maker.''
"He makes furniture?" Harry grinned sheepishly. "I guess that was a stupid question." He looked down." Did he make this chair? "
"He made all the furniture in this room. This table is teak—from Thailand. He made it. And the chairs are walnut. He made them, too. And this coffee table was made from a cherry tree that I can remember before it was cut down." She ran her hand over the surface of the coffee table. "Don't you just love the grain of it?"
Harry hadn't paid particular attention to the furniture, but now he began to inspect and admire it. [...] "You love this furniture, don't you?" He asked.
"Sure."
"But it's just things."
"Just things?" she echoed.
Harry shrugged. Then he asked, ''Your father's a perfectionist?''
"He has to be. He's a craftsman."
"Aren't writers craftsmen?"
"In a way."
"But don't they try for perfection?"
"No, I don't think so."
Harry looked a bit startled. "They don't? "
"Oh, they try to perfect their technique, I suppose. But I don't think a good writer cares all that much about perfection as far as his writing is concerned.''
"I don't understand."
"Well, I don't really know if I can explain it. A craftsman always has to have everything right, everything just in place. But in good writing, you always find yourself coming across something that doesn't quite fit, something that's not quite right. Yet it's just those things that seem to make it better than something that's technically perfect.''
Translations
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Portuguese translation (Brazil) by Catherine Young Silva. [Need title & publication information.]
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Spanish translation (Colombia): Lipman, Matthew (2000) Susy. Novela de pensamiento poético [Novel of poetic thought]. Translated and adapted by Diego Antonio Pineda R. [Need place of publication and publisher.]
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Spanish translation (Peru): by Francisco Rubinos. [Need title & publication information.]
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Spanish translation (Spain): Lipman, Matthew (2016) Suki. Trans. Ignacio Terrado Roura. Madrid, Spain: Ediciones de la Torre. Available for purchase here.
Keywords
aesthetics, art, language, poetry, writing
Disciplines
Aesthetics | Education | Philosophy | Philosophy of Language
Published Reviews and Research
Recommended Citation
Lipman, Matthew (1978) Suki. Montclair, NJ: Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.