literary interpretation

18 responses so far ↓

•   bbug8 // 14 September 2008 at 3.39 pm

  I want to start off by saying my heart goes out to all those who knew Professor Wallace; my prayers are with you and his family.

  As far as the new critics, I feel like their perspective put a lot of pressure on the author to create one clear meaning in a work of literature. Their belief that meaning is in a text, just waiting to be extracted, makes it seem as if there was clear intent on the author’s part, and only one possible interpretation could have been meant to be drawn. In this way, the author is forced to abandon multiple meanings, in favor of a single, “correct” one. We decided that literature is meant to relate lessons about life that could not otherwise be absorbed, and in deciding that there is only one true meaning behind a text, the new critics limited the impact an author could have by not making his or her product applicable to the entire body of readers, because only those who connect with the one meaning that is deemed correct will get anything out of author’s words.

•   david // 14 September 2008 at 3.50 pm

  This sucks. I only spoke to DFW once before finding out that he wouldn’t be teaching this semester for reasons unknown to me until now; professors were saying he was ill, so obviously there were suspicions but none this grave. In anticipation for his seminar, I was reading Infinite Jest all summer long. It didn’t touch me in a way where I felt like he was speaking to me and me alone, but I couldn’t stop reading the damn thing; it is funny and brilliant and tragic and captivating. The thing was that I ill advisedly (but perhaps inevitably) could never stop searching for the author in this awesome book. And ever since hearing about it (the suicide), I’ve been feeling the numb guilt left behind in my reading’s wake. All potential grief feels phony (As I alluded to before, I didn’t know the guy at all. E.g., to me he is DFW, and all other names such as Dave or Dave Wallace or Professor David Wallace seem alien and somehow off putting.), but it is here all the same. So I am sad, sort of. Sad in the abstract sense that a writer/professor/man has died but also in the much more powerful sense that this guy that I have embarrassingly imagined having conversations with is gone for good. And then there’s that guilt for feeling the second sadness more than the first (not to mention the guilt of being sad in any manner at all, I mean who am I to be sad over this?), which until now has healed over the entire spectrum of emotion like a scab. A few weeks ago, I found out that DFW wasn’t going to be teaching the class that I had wanted to take not so much for inspiration but just to impress the genius I envisioned at the other end of the desk, and now there’s that guilt of once seeking affirmation through a man who has just committed suicide. I wanted to know the guy, and I wanted him to know me too. Not just know me but like me. That fantasy no longer exists, but that’s not what feels bad. It’s the guilt of ever having the fantasy in the first place. So yeah, pretty sucky all around. RIP, DFW.

•   tab194 // 14 September 2008 at 4.20 pm

  Throughout the readings for Monday, it seemed that new critics continuously repeated the idea of the works being re-created with each reader. I don’t believe that the new critics necessarily say that there must be only one meaning for a particular work. Instead, it seems that the new criticism school of thought says that readers should not search for an intended meaning as argued in “The Intentional Fallacy”. The focus for a new critic is the words on the page, and notes or authorial intention become irrelevant and potentially distracting. In my opinion, new criticism actually opens up more discussions of potential meanings because instead of limiting a text to one intended meaning, new critics open up to a variety of possible meanings existent in the work. Analyzing the literature existing on the page allows many different readers to find meaning in literature even if it is far from the author’s intention.

•   sfbull5 // 14 September 2008 at 5.22 pm

  I want to begin by echoing the sentiments already expressed on this message board about Professor Wallace. Being new to Pomona, I did not have a chance to meet him but had heard only the best about him as a writer, mentor, and person. I wish I had had the chance to meet him and my heart goes out to those of you who were lucky enough to have had that opportunity.

  About the new critics…I think the point that interested me the most was the notion of “allusions work[ing] when we know them” (Intentional Fallacy). When we were talking in class about Eliot’s clear reference to Chaucer in the beginning of “The Waste Land,” I began thinking about how an individual person’s literary background would influence their reading of a certain text, allowing them to notice similarities to other texts or the significance of certain words, etc. If someone had not read “The Canterbury Tales,” the opening of “The Waste Land” would have no particular higher meaning than any other line from any given text. Any individual reader can only reference those texts with which he is already familiar. “Intentional” allusions (such as Eliot’s to Chaucer) go unnoticed on the reader who has not read the alluded-to text. Therefore, a reader who has read Chaucer will have a more full, more complete, and (I would argue) better understanding of the text than the reader who does not understand the references that Eliot himself consciously includes. Comparing a reading of Eliot by someone who is fully versed in Chaucer and will understand the allusion as obvious to one by someone who has read little to no Chaucer and will move right over the first four lines without second thought, I don’t think we can really say that those two readings are “equal” just because we can’t quantitatively compare two peoples’ backgrounds.

•   spotofbother // 14 September 2008 at 6.58 pm

  I agree with the previous statement. I think there are certain readers who can understand a passage better and more completely than others. I wish I understood more of the allusions in literature so I could get a more fluid, profound sense of literature.
  I thought the discussion of Coleridge and Arnold, the poets turned critics, was interesting in the fact that “the critical tendency dried up their poetry.” The current critics we are reading, who spend so much time defining and discussing metaphor, seem to have some trouble using metaphors effectively themselves. (See the machine and bug simile on page four of the intentional fallacy article).
  I have a question: Is there anything in The Formalist Critics article that attempts to differentiate the new critics from the formalists? It seemed to me that Brooks agreed with most of the principles of the Formalists. I didn’t see where he differentiated.
  I also heard great things about Professor Wallace – about how much he cared for his students.

•   zzzzz // 14 September 2008 at 7.46 pm

  Something that struck me as very interesting in the Intentional Fallacy article was the idea that the “the poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s; the poem belongs to the public.” Speaking generally, I agree with this statement. The intentions of the author and the attempts of critics to gather knowledge of these intentions are for the most part useless in determining meaning for the general audience. But is all literature really meant to be seen? Is it all written with an audience in mind? I think in many cases, yes, but what of those works that are written solely for the author, as a creative act in itself that desires no publication nor criticism of any kind? I suppose this again brings up the question of intention– whether the author intended for his or her work to be read by others or whether he or she wrote for his or her own individual satisfaction. But if by chance an author’s intention was to portray something to himself, something meant for his eyes alone, would his writing really belong to the public? I know this is a lot of questions and kind of a specific hypothetical situation, but it was a point that I thought brought up a valid exception.

•   sparkling_bears47 // 14 September 2008 at 7.57 pm

  Taking the conversation in a bit of a different direction, I was really intrigued by Brooks’ discussion of metaphor in literature. Throughout his essay, Brooks pushes the point that only “the true lord of language will know how to rule both the quick [metaphor] and the dead [metaphor]” (327). Personally, this is something I completely agree with. But if we look back to Shklovsky’s essay, he distinguishes between poetic imagery and prosaic imagery: poetic as “a means of reinforcing an impression” and prosaic as “a means of placing objects in categories” (739). In other words, poetry is the form that plays most with metaphor, while prose is left to a style based around realism.

  But Brooks cites both prose and poetry as examples of effective and ineffectual uses of metaphor. James Joyce is “the artist of our time … who has most brilliantly exploited the cliché for positive effects” (326). There is no distinction between writers of prose or poetry. Any mastery of the written word requires a mastery of metaphor.

•   mercurylanes // 14 September 2008 at 8.03 pm

  When I was applying to Pomona two years ago, my alumni interviewer had nothing but amazing things to say about David Foster Wallace–that he was a great teacher, an inspiration, that he made her want to be a writer and showed her how it was possible.
  I picked up a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men when I was fifteen, at the recommendation of my creative writing teacher, and since then his work has occupied more of my mental real estate than any other author’s. Privately, I never use the word “favorite,” but whenever someone asks me to pick one, his is always the name that comes to mind. The times I spent reading his work are some of the most vivid experiences I’ve had sitting in one spot and reading a book.
  Like many of you, I never had the chance to meet him. I hoped someday I would.
  One of my housemates this summer used to dogsit for him. She says he was incredibly generous. He gave so much to the world as a teacher, an author, and a human being, and I took for granted that he would have more to offer.
  I spent a few hours last night reading blog threads responding to the news of his death. Thousands of people around the world feel pretty much like I do: sad, shocked and totally unmoored. Some knew him personally; most knew him only through his prose.
  crookedlawyer at 09:46 wrote:
  “What do I do now?”
  I’m asking myself the same question.

•   mercurylanes // 14 September 2008 at 8.44 pm

  Moving on to “The Intentional Fallacy”:
  It’s interesting that Wimsatt makes the distinction between “private” and “public” arts. Both authorship and criticism, he argues, are public arts. An author’s work is objectified–that is, as soon as one puts pen to paper, whatever comes out is a thing separate from oneself, no longer solely a part of one’s mental/internal life. Thus, it is the work of the critic to direct criticism not at the author, but at the object. “What is the standard by which we disown or accept the self?…this standard is an element in the definition of art which will not reduce to terms of objectification” (9-10).

  So, zzzzz asks, “Is all literature really meant to be seen?” If you agree with Wimsatt’s argument, then the answer is “yes,” I suppose. On one level, at least, if writing is an act of objectification, then there’s no such thing as “private” writing. As soon as anything is written, even the author stops being the author and becomes a reader/critic of their own work. That may not be exactly where Wimsatt was headed, but it’s now officially okay for me not to care. Whee!

•   2southgreen // 14 September 2008 at 8.59 pm

  I too was more struck than I would have imagined having heard of DFW’s passing. I had never met him, although I had always imagined taking a course from him, showing him my writing, wondering if he would approve. But, it’s not my lost opportunity to work with him that has me concerned, it’s this:

  Why do so many great people take their own lives? It seems its always the burden of the truly insightful, capable, genius individuals to have to bear incredible suffering. Does their pain give them insight or does their insight bring them pain? More and more, I’m starting to think that it’s the latter, and that concept has devastating implications. Something about this world is so fundamentally messed up that our best people are deciding that they don’t want anything further to do with it. There are so many examples historically of great authors, artists, political scientists, mathematicians, etc. taking their own lives. It seems that society responds in one way, attributing the deaths to illness or even insanity, but that seems like a very superficial explanation. We trust these people to have new and earth-shaking insights into so many fields, they’re geniuses, really, but suddenly when they decide that life is so painful that they would prefer the alternative, they’re discounted as sick. Maybe that’s right, but it seems to me that the world has to take some responsibility for being so inhospitable to the greatest people it has ever produced. Sure, individuals need help, that should be the primary focus, even, but at what point do we look at ourselves as a society and say that maybe we’re a little sick too. And what can we do about it? How can we apologize to those deep enough to feel all the pain we’ve created or failed to control? How can we possibly begin to make amends, to become a world that great people can bear to live in.

  It’s a scary concept: the more one thinks, the more he or she is depressed. If you think of the things that make people happy, it seems that thought and reflection couldn’t possibly make the list. We watch movies and television trying to escape, we alter the chemicals in our brains (be it through exercise or drugs or whatever), we dance in an over-heated room full of strangers, all to get away from thinking, looking, feeling. The world isn’t all bad, no doubt, but enough of it is to make any empathic individual profoundly miserable.

  Maybe I’m getting too carried away, I don’t know. But I’m hurting, not as a member of Pomona College or a fan of DFW’s writing, but as a piece of a broken machine. I keep thinking, what could I have done, what could we have done, where exactly does our culpability lie in this sort of tragedy and how do we fix things? I’m going through these absurdly selfish four years of taking courses that interest me, spending time with friends, going through nearly $200,000 in tuition by the time I graduate… how can I possibly justify living like that when there’s MAYBE something I could do to help.

  This probably isn’t the right forum for these thoughts, but anything else would be trivial and insincere. But, regarding the the intentional fallacy: Maybe part of the reason we’re so messed up is that even when people pour themselves out into novels or poems, we aren’t equipped to understand them. I can’t imagine a more intimate form of sharing oneself than through a novel, honestly. Sure, we can’t know precisely what the author meant, but I don’t think that’s any reason to give up on the pursuit. If we could make that interpersonal connection, that feeling what another has felt, even if it’s only a partial understanding, that seems infinitely more valuable than approaching literary criticism from a correct perspective.

  I remember in Catcher in the Rye, Holden is reading (I think) Out of Africa, when he commented that certain books make you wish that you had that author for a really good friend you could just call up and talk to when you needed it. And maybe that’s the point of looking for intent in literature, to get that same validation from a person you’d never otherwise be able to call up.

•   2southgreen // 14 September 2008 at 9.01 pm

  So, I’ve posted, and now I’m seeing that it was quite a lot, little of which related to the material, and all of which was poorly organized. It was cathartic, though, and I feel like that authenticity does something to make up for its crudeness.

•   cwr // 14 September 2008 at 9.02 pm

  When I was reading “Metaphor, Paradox, and Steroetype,” I was immediately amused by the relevance of the first sentence to our first class. Brooks begins by writing, “in our time metaphor has come to seem to be the very core of poetry, that is, the heart of the purest and most concentrated form of literature” (315). Brooks it seems, would have had a very emphatic answer to the question “what is literature?” and I wonder if our class would have so thoroughly embraced the idea that all written works are literature, had we been assigned this reading before that discussion.
  I think the most surprising part of “The Intentional Fallacy” was the emphasis that the author’s intention is “…neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art…” (Wimsatt, 3). I understand that the essay was written in response to the belief that the author’s intention was the most important measure of a work. I also agree that in many cases the intention of the author is irrelevant to an understanding of a literary work. However, I think that when the author has created a work that is clearly supposed to convey a specific point to the reader, assessing the intention is essential. Ignoring the author’s point in a work such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in my opinion, would make it very hard indeed to truly understand the book. Moreover, I think that works that are clearly written to convey an idea should be assessed, at least to a certain degree, by how well the author makes his point. I find it hard to imagine that books like Animal Farm would be considered such important literary works if critics no longer took the author’s intention into account.

•   bolon // 14 September 2008 at 9.48 pm

  In light of DFW’s death, as well as the loss of a CMC student, I’ve begun to think about how strange it is that some can choose their own deaths, while others are thrust upon it out of nowhere. I’m a bit sad to admit that I didn’t know who DFW was until I got that email, and I didn’t realize how much of an impact he made on the literary community until I saw the news of his death on my yahoo homepage. I just read Prof Seery’s tribute to him on the huffingtonpost, and I imagine that DFW must have been one of the most interesting people to be around. RIP.

  As for our reading about the intentional fallacy, I think the title is a good starting point. The fallacy of intent lies in the assumption that the author’s intent is the most important one. Although we’ve established that the reader’s interpretation on the reading based on background, state of mind, and experiences can result in different meanings, I do think it’s important to realize what the author was trying to convey in his or her work. Wimsatt asserts that a poem “belongs to the public.” Sure, but before the poem belonged to the public, it belonged to the author, and we should see where he/she is coming from.

•   roark48 // 14 September 2008 at 11.18 pm

  This weekend has been so strange and so tragic. It’s so hard to take it all in; my heart goes out to everyone who had a connection with DFW or the CMC student. I actually heard about DFW while I was reading Intentional Fallacy, and I have to admit I was never quite able to get back into it. As interesting and important as my readings were this weekend, I couldn’t help but feeling detached from the words–distracted by thoughts like “why are we doing this?”…A weekend like this really jolts you into thinking about how fragile everything is.

  Something that I liked in Intentional Fallacy was the line: “…there is a gross body of life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies behind and in some sense causes every poem, but can never be and need not be known…”. I understand that interpreting a work by trying to decipher the author’s intent is not necessarily the best way to interpret. But when I read a poem that I love, I take a sort of pleasure in trying to imagine what that “gross body of life” might have been that sparked it. Imagining a writer’s inspiration or intent, however “wrong” I might be, brings me closer to the poem. I agree with bolon that before the poem belonged to the public, it belonged to the author.

•   campusm79 // 15 September 2008 at 1.08 am

  In regards to intentional fallacy, I think cwr’s example of understanding intent when reading Animal Farm is very apt. When considering the value of author’s intent, what came to my mind was “A Modest Proposal”. In reading satire, understanding the author’s intent is absolutely necessary. Satire is by definition a literary work that is created for the specific purpose of exposing vice and folly. Examining “A Modest Proposal” without Swift’s intention in mind would render a different (and frankly, just weird) experience for both everyday readers and literary critics.

  I realize satire is but one example of literary work. I think that for other types of literature, the necessity of understanding the intent of the author is definitely more questionable. In some cases, it is possible for a reader to get something from a text without ever considering the author’s intent.

  That literature demands some individual interpretation untainted by consideration for the author’s intent is, in my opinion, an understanding that is well established. What I struggle most with is finding a balance between consideration of author’s intent and my own individual interpretations of the text. My grievance with criticism in general, so far, is that it seems that critics must choose one form of reading over another. I think examining literature from the point of view of one school of literary criticism prevents critics from accurately gauging the value of the text. In turn, accepting what one school of thought considers “complete” literary works leaves the reader with an incomplete understanding and appreciation of a text.

•   tiger // 15 September 2008 at 1.33 am

  I really liked “Metaphor, Pardox and Stereotype”. I think the author did a very good job in shedding light on some pretty grey areas of literature. That delicate balance between keeping the heart of poetry which the author states that is to “Keep the world ‘human’ by keeping the imagination alive” but at the same time having clear “fixities and definites”. the author seems to be convicted that somewhere between these two extremes lies truly “awesome” poetry. those that we can call “art”.

  Personally, however, rather than having the attitude of a reserved scientist trying to find the exact formula to a “state of the art poem”, the poetry-loving-community in general should approach the task at hand with a daring and bold attitude. for example, i’ve come to be more liberal with cliches. instead of avoiding cliches point blank simply because it is seen as malpractice or whatever seems more absurd than the cliches themselves.

  but yes. at the end of the day, the two measures set forth serve as great sobering factors in the exploration of “good poetry”. freshness disciplined by fixities.

•   koopatroopa // 15 September 2008 at 1.34 am

  Something that really resonated with me in “Intentional Fallacy” was the notion that in searching for the “intention” of a piece of literature, the critic can’t determine it straight out of the text alone; “If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do.” When the poet fails to convey his message clearly through their work, the critic “must go outside the poem”. The flaw of the new critics was, for me, kind of foggy and in the first few discussion I only had an inkling of what they were really about. I found that this article (this excerpt especially) really characterized the difference between critiquing a text and understanding it. When the author wants to make their voice heard, they will make it their life’s work to get the message across. And if others can’t comprehend the message completely, I don’t think their statements and actions are a mistake; if anything they are gestures that further reiterate what they want to tell their readers, or anyone willing to listen.

  I was gone all weekend and didn’t catch any of the recent news around campus until this afternoon. I extend my sincerest sympathies to the English department here and to the CMC campus for having to weather such a blow. I went through this situation before; while in 7th grade the staff of my junior high school sustained the loss of a well-respected and adored teacher, and much like this situation I didn’t know the teacher aside from students dropping names. All the same, I still felt like a zombie and was bewildered at the fact that it takes only a second to alter the course of innumerable lifetimes and to end one at the same time.

•   sprinkles // 15 September 2008 at 3.06 pm

  I wanted to drop by and just leave my two cents. Before class today the various readings seemed to be a web of infinite discussion points and the talk really helped focus them for me. The discussion about what makes a valid metaphor sparked by “Metaphor, Paradox, and Stereotype” was the most interesting to me. To a point, metaphors add art and poetry to literature, but certain unnecessary metaphors are crude comparisons at best and bog down the meaning of a work. I agree that the author needed to make a distinction between effective metaphors and ineffective ones, although there is not a very well defined line between the two. This brings me back to a point that I believe was brought up in every discussion, that reading is subjective and individual. Different people find artistic value in different sorts of comparisons. This aspect makes the already ill-defined line between valid and invalid metaphors, even less well defined.

  I like what tiger said about the use of cliches. I agree that they can be used artistically and with great power, but I had a teacher who disallowed them. This is a good example of the subjectivity of valid metaphors.

  I also want to exteend my support and sympathy to any one effected by the loss of DFW. Although I never had the chance to meet him, I understand that he was much revered.

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