I'm responding to Brian's post under subobjectivity. He said that one of the important parts of literature was looking at different interpretations. We should focus on "why each person has a different interpretation, and what are the social causes behind these subjective readings? We could certainly learn much more about our own cultures by 'interpreting' the interpretation." I think this is a valid way of going about reading and discussing literature. Yes, the text loses some of its importance, but if texts are supposed to affect readers, we should be looking at how and why people respond to things differently.
I don't think we deal with reader responce in classes at all. This could be to avoid all of the problems that go along with reader responce, like the ever present problem of whether all interpretations are valid. Is it ok to not really ever tackle this in class rooms or are we losing something by not talking about our gut feelings about the text and how the text affects us now?
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7 comments:
Sylvi writes,
"I don't think we deal with reader responce in classes at all. This could be to avoid all of the problems that go along with reader responce, like the ever present problem of whether all interpretations are valid. Is it ok to not really ever tackle this in class rooms or are we losing something by not talking about our gut feelings about the text and how the text affects us now?"
We do and we don't, I think. Issues of how a text affects the reader come up all the time in classes, or at least they do in and in the ones I've taken, but what doesn't come up in classes very often are questions which are genuinely open to wholly personal responses. "Does the text encourage us to sympathize with Gabriel Conroy?" is a question about the reader, but it is open to personal response in only a limited way. "Who in your life does Gabiel remind you of, and why?" (to borrow a question from a book by Norman Holland) is open to a much more personal response.
OK, I know exactly why we don't do more of that in classes: teachers want to encourage the kind of engagement with texts that are required for writing papers, i.e. constructing arguments with claims supported by evidence. That kind of engagement is NOT natural--it has to be taught--and anything that interferes with that (and wholly personal responses most certainly do) gets short shrift.
But I do think that we lose something important by making this decision. Even if we wanted to say that wholly personal responses aren't interesting to anyone but the personal responding (and I don't think that's entirely true), it is surely the case that those kinds of subjective responses are necessarily part of the reading process, and therefore a part of even the most stringent argumentative interpretations. If Gabriel Conroy reminds me of my uncle Joe, that's going to color my interpretation of his character (I will "mind-read" him in a certain way), and that will dispose me to look at the available evidence with that coloring in mind. Even if I base my interpretation strictly on the evidence at hand, my having made the connection between Gabriel and Uncle Joe will have made me look at some evidence a lot more closely than others. We can't help but do this: how many times have you found yourself treating a person in a particular way because he or she reminds you of someone else?
Wes
I agree that the personal connection can and will color the way you read, and the way you argue. The problem is, it's difficult to imagine how you could address it, especially in an argumentative setting. Every paper would need a hundred-page appendix listing who every character reminds you of, what events in your childhood might be affecting your reading, what you had for lunch that day, etcetera. And that's ignoring all of the subconscious issues that could affect your reading!
The way we discuss and criticize literature is, funnily enough, one of the few practical moves theorists make. We all agree that, even if we cannot be perfectly objective, we can all pretend we are and work from there. I can't really imagine a more realistic solution than that, can you?
I definitely have to agree that we are conditioned to respond to texts in a certain way. Since we are conditioned, though, that implies it is not natural, thus the conflict that occurs while interpreting. We want to use our personal explanation to interpret, but we are always subject to the check that is the learned interpretive strategies...the preferred in most classrooms.
In addition, I think Joe has an interesting point. We all come at interpretation knowing that it will never be objective--since things characters remind us of people and certain events remind us of things that happened in our lives. Yet, we all, at one time or another, tried to push an interpretation that we think is completely objective and then, inevitably, learning that the guy or gal next to us thinks differently--sometimes much differently. Although, secretly, I think we know all along that nothing is objective.
I made that post a while ago on a hunch that we would eventually come to the point of discussing why texts make us think certain things. I disagree with "minimus", whoever you are(!), in "his or her" idea that something that is taught to be engaged in a certain way is not "natural." Even engagement by listing out characters comes on the battlefront of the individual, and all of the individual's little individual moments experienced through time. That person interprets even how the teacher explains the text and even how the text should be approached. They make it their own. They make the method their own, the problem, the plot, the characters. Maybe the texts themselves are part of the larger picture-with art, music, political decisions, and instead of figuring out what everybody thinks about them from afar, we should find out what they did when they were first published and what they are doing now--and how the former and the later combine to create some sort of a social force. Is a text important if it has no social wave of influence?
I think that to some extent we do cover reader response theory in classes, just not English classes. Psychology and sociology classes are rooted in examining how and why people respond to things differently and the classes look at texts as they would be interpreted by different groups (although usually with a different focus than would normally be taken in an English class). I agree that there is much to be learned about our own cultures by "interpreting interpretations" of literature, but it seems like that would be more of a combination between literature and sociology than purely the study of literature. Perhaps this is why some universities have begun to incorporate their English programs into other majors.
With that said, I still think that it is important to examine texts themselves and not just the interpretations they inspire.
This all exemplifies, I think, not only why there are several (countless) different interpretations of the same text, but also why you can use the different theories that have developed to examine the same text. The whole point about Sociology and the psychology of why people think what they think is what cognitive theory deals with. this, too, ties into the Fish article, as he attributes the way we look at things to the interpretive communities we belong to. We are conditioned to see things a certain way because of our environment and our upbringing. Coupled with Prof. Chapman's observation of what comes natural to us and what we have to learn, how we interpret based on personal experience and how we have to be trained to interpret based on other criteria, I think it ties into psychology's "Nature vs. Nurture" question, and would indeed explain the integration of english departments into other majors or disciplines, along with the rising prevalence of humanities courses, learning intellectual traditions throughout history, seeing how they change, not necessarily dealing with just literature as a medium, but as one of many vehicles to a more informed end.
That was kyle, sorry.
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