This blog is in response to Barry’s questions on page 8 of Beginning Theory.
I first decided to study English because I enjoyed reading and writing. Simple. The stories that we read in high school, though more limited than what I was exposed to in college and after, were new to me. Until I reached high school, my reading was mostly limited to R.L. Stein, Christopher Pike and Anne Rice.
The first real piece of literature that I read was Gone with the Wind, and I loved it. I hadn’t realized that books could entertain as well as educate (which is what rhetoric is supposed to do, no?). Over the next few years I read Arthur Miller, Shakespeare, Homer, Mark Twain and several other big names, but I never gained an appreciation for them until college.
What my experience with literature has taught me (which also pertains to what I thought was absent) is that everything has multiple sides to it, not just one, and not just two, and that each side could be equally as valid as the others. It taught me that there are multiple ways to think about anything, to view anything, and it taught me that, without an open mind, it is impossible to appreciate anything.
I had one particularly brilliant professor in my first two years of college who taught me all of these things, and who refused to teach in the way of the New Critics. While studying any piece, we studied it from any angle that there was, and I learned history, philosophy and even science while in his classroom (though he made it quite clear that it was fairly impossible to study the author when it came to Shakespeare, since authorship is so frequently controversial).
Ultimately, I think that any reading of a text is important, and valid, but with New Criticism books are studied as if they were holy or unbroken; there is no context, and I think that literature without a context is difficult for many people to appreciate. I could read all of the entertaining young adult horror novels without a context, but what did I learn? Not much.
These are the stories we should be sharing with one another - this is the conversation we have when we read anything.
ReplyDeleteI actually remember being in first grade, sitting at a table with my teacher, reading Dick & Jane books - the words popped out of the page and into my head effortlessly; I don't think now I remember what it was like not reading.
My mother was a reader, so she shared her childhood with me through books - Nancy Drew, then Jane Eyre and Rebecca. I discovered Austin on my own, and I must have read The Good Earth a thousand times because I felt Buck pull me into the lives and struggles of people who I would never know any other way.
I think we should study books from all angles, and inside out. I don't believe any one school of thought is absolute, but they are all necessary. We always need someone on the other side of a dialogue, or we are only talking to ourselves.
So true, Emily. One piece of literature that came to my mind when you said that people view the work as holy and unbroken is the Bible. Fundamentalists view it exactly that way. They want the words, some of which were written down a couple of thousand years ago for people in the Middle East, to be exactly true today. They don't want to think about translation, selection, editing, proofreading, etc. They honestly believe that every letter and every punctuation mark was dictated by God and must therefore be absolutely True. Fundamentalists must be the ultimate New Critics.
ReplyDeleteLinda Daly
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that you studied English because of your love of reading and writing, as well as the importance of context. As Barry suggests, Meaning is Contingent, which makes me immediately think of context. Yet the importance of truth kept coming back in my reading and that literature is more about what cannot be understood or known than what is known. So yes, little is absolute in literature, as it is not science.
I must say, I started to study English for the same reasons you stated. But as I progressed through my undergraduate degree, I realized there was much more to the study than just reading and writing. Then, when I started to apply my degree in the classroom, I understood the importance of teaching the literature in all aspects of the verb. I think that is the beauty of studying English; you can see so many different sides of one piece of literature - content, context, structure, style, form, and conventions/grammar. We are truly in a class of our own.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, I've come to love several authors since college that I had otherwise never read (Kurt Vonnegut chief among them) and also come to realize that no matter how many awards something may have won, that didn't mean I was going to like it. I think if anything though, I have learned to appreciate the impact any work has had even if I don't care for it on an aesthetic level. I have found that knowing more of the context makes me appreciate more of a work, like being in on an inside joke.
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