I agree with what a few people said in class: "Text contains meaning within itself." There are aspects out of just the text that need to be analyzed. James Joyce's "The Dead" wouldn't have the same, deep impacts (albeit perhaps different reactions) from readers if we did not have the socio-political element. There's more to study than just the text. No writer is completely free from their environments or their society. Not even Thoreau.
Now, I have a question.
Professor Chapman talked a lot about text having "the same meaning" when it was written as it does today. Why do they need to have the "same" meaning? Isn't that it has meaning enough? Even in the time period texts were written in, they would have garnered varying meanings from varying readers. But perhaps that's oversimplifying it.
What do you think?
~Emily~
10 comments:
The problem is, to my mind, that we can't be sure that any human emotion or value will last forever. To say that the Dead has lasting meaning inherent to itself implies that humanity will always react the same way to literature, which we already know is untrue.
When we read Romeo and Juliet, we can already know with some certainty that we react differently from the groundlings. They say "Aww, young love." And we say "Wait,isn't she fourteen?" We can still be touched by it, of course, but as human values change and evolve, it's impossible to guarantee that we will get any meaning out of it, let alone the same meaning.
I also have been fighting with the question of a "same" meaning. My thoughts are not quite clear and might, too, be an oversimplified version, but here it goes. If looking at the basics of a story, and by basics I do not intend to mean the sequence of events aka what happened, we can see what ideas have survived. For instance, if an author intended (and I use that loosely) to convey certain themes, would those themes not stand the test of time? Of course, in the world we live in there may just be a person that "sees" the opposite of what everyone else sees in a text, as everything is open to interpretation. I would like to think that themes and certain concepts of life (such as love, which can certainly be a theme and a concept in life) remain throughout time.
Emily also has a point in saying that sometimes just the fact that a text has meaning may be enough. If you take it one step further, and refer to a specific passage of a story that seems to elicit some kind of response, whether those responses be the same or not. So maybe, saying that if a certain passage plagues readers over the years, it is meaningful and maintains its timelessness and meaning within the text.
I apologize for the confusing train of thought and the work that will take in deciphering it. Maybe someone else can add more and help to iron out the issue of "meaning within itself."
What did you guys think of the tenth tenet Barry listed? “The job of criticism is to interpret the text, to mediate between it and the reader.” I find that this does not give the reader enough credit. Personally, I think the job of criticism is to give the reader tools for interpretation. Barry also mentions that criticism is necessary so that “preconceived ideas” don’t get in the way of the reader and the text.
First of all, there are critics writing these theories, and they are human just like everyone else. They may find it difficult to separate themselves from their own preconceived ideas while writing criticism.
Second of all, who’s to say preconceived ideas are a bad thing? These ideas make up who we are, and can make a text more meaningful. The text can either confirm these ideas for us, thereby reaffirming our identity. Or the text can present ideas that contradict our preconceived notions, and this leads to stimulating discussion and reexamination of our beliefs.
I may be way off, but let me know what you thought of this one. :)
Emily, I agree. I think that the mere fact that thousands of people, each with their own unique perspective, can read the same text and each find meaning in it is amazing and enough by itself.
When you get down to it, I don't know if you can say that a text has the same meaning for any two people, similar yes,but not exactly the same.
And I said it in class, but I'm saying it again, I think that texts have meaning because they contain some aspect that is common/fundamental to the human experience. Maybe you can't relate personally to the situation or the time period, etc but there's something there that moves people. This also allows people in different situations to reinterpret a piece of literature in a way that is meaningful and/or pertinent to their lives and the world they live in.
In my opinion, it's the ability of a piece of literature to adapt, to be reinterpreted and continue to have meaning for the people reading it that makes it timeless; not the ability to retain a rigid message that should be uniform for everyone.
Now bring on the counterarguments!
I hate to disappoint you Megan, but I don’t think I’ll be making many counterarguments because I actually agree with you quite a bit. I also believe that two people could read the same text and take two completely different ideas away from it. It is part of the unique human perspective that each of us brings when we’re reading or looking at a certain text.
If a text has been considered “timeless,” then it has to have some sort of meaning which extends to the audience. And since no two people are the same, how could they interpret the same meaning out of that text? It almost seems impossible once you really think about it. So, I don’t really understand why we presume a text only has one meaning, or the meaning pertains to the time period it was written in. While, I do believe that the author has been affected by the time and circumstances he/she is living in, I don’t believe that we should dissect that information out of the text and force ourselves to look at it only in that way. What I find brilliant about literature is the capability it has to transform and change. Meaning, you can read a novel when you were 16, and then read it again now and take different messages away from it, based on the way your perspective has changed over the past years.
Maybe my problem is that I don’t really understand what we are talking about when we say the “meaning of a text.” While I see it as a message that we are taking away from a certain text, I’m not entirely certain that everyone else agrees with me on that. Although, this question is something I believe we are discussing up on the “Terms and Theory” entry, and not necessarily in this part of the blog.
In my opinion, when you strip down certain societal or environmental influences of a piece of good literature, a reader can discover some very basic, raw elements of concepts or ideas that have stood the test of time. For instance, love has been the core influence of hundreds of great pieces of literature and the basic elements of love have remained fairly consistent. However, I have my doubts that these core concepts and ideas have the EXACT same meaning now that they d id when they were written. As Emily said, No writer is completely free from their environment or their society." So is it even possible to strip away a piece's environmental or societal influence to get those core, lasting concepts such as love? Society is always changing/developing as is literature. A work viewed in today's society can take a raw element (like love) and perceive it completely differently than the time period in which it w as written. Joe said that humanity won't always react the same to it - and I believe that is partially to do with societal influences
I feel like no text really does have meaning within itself. The meaning we take from it is filtered through our own experiences and emotions, and the meaning of one text may change for us even throughout our lives, much less over a significant period of history.
for example, i am currently reading the play Henry V for another class. the play presents an almost cryptic view of war, where as readers we cannot really be sure if it's meant to glorify war or arouse doubts about the trivialities of it. In today's current social context, i'm seeing nothing but the senselessness of war in the name of patriotism, and see the presentation as almost satirical. However, is this because Shakespeare meant the play to have that meaning? Or have my own experiences, political values, and the society I'm living in led me to interpret the text that way?
As Emily points out, Barry mentions that criticism is necessary to prevent "preconceived ideas" from getting between a text and the reader. However, I think schools of literary criticism are themselves made up of preconceived ideas (of what a text should accomplish/ be) which define what the reader notes in a text and it is in that way that criticism is able to act as a tool for interpretation.
I don't think it's possible for us to look at a text without interpreting it, so I suppose I'm saying that a text is dependent upon a reader for meaning. If you are making an effort to understand what the signs on the paper mean, you should be interpreting them in the manner most meaningful to yourself.
I think I agree with Megan that it's the ability of a piece of literature to be reinterpreted in a meaningful way which makes it timeless. However, I have a problem with people saying that the text is adapting because the physical work itself is not what changes, it is the reader who changes and grows to find new meaning in the same text.
I have to qualify Katie's point in order to agree: she disagreed to some extent with other posters' assertions that texts are adaptive, stating that "the physical work itself is not what changes" but that the *reader* changes. Does this mean that if the same reader read the same, theoretically stable text, that he or she would establish meaning for the work in an identical way? Why, then, do many of us observe that there are some things--things we hold to be excellent works of literature--which we can read again and again and always get something new?
I think that the ideas about the "changing reader" and "stable text" are both wrong and correct; ultimately, though, they miss what is really happening. The physical blobs of ink on the page are arguably static, yes. But the language that forms the meaning and the societal "values" that inform our interpretations change tremendously, rapidly, and are individualistic at best.
Something isn't "timeless" because of some romanticized notion of human beings having the shared ability to admire something about a stable or static text. Something is timeless because it has been incorporated into an authoritative canon that has the self-deterministic goal of maintaining its own authority (the patriarchal components of Western tradition are "timeless" precisely because they assert their own self- and shared importance).
In answer to your question Renee, No, if an individual reads the same text more than once they are not going to have an identical interpretation. I would argue that individuals develop over time and are influenced by different preconceptions and ideas at different points in their life *this was the "changing reader" I was talking about*. (I certainly don't hold all of the same values as I did when I was ten and I'm sure they've varied from last year/ month/ etc.) Thus, we are able to read these works of literature "again and again and always get somehting different from them." I suppose I was talking about the "societal values" you mentioned and just wasn't clear. I do like your point that meaning behind the words changes as well and leads to differences of interpretation.
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