Reading Literary Texts and Interpreting Them

LIT 181

First Hour

When you read

• What kinds of things do you read?– Road signs?– Shopping lists?– Chemistry books?– Subtitled movies?– Forms?– Novels?– Poems?

But please don’t smoke while you are reading!

What is different about reading literature than other things?

• It’s fun… for example:• It usually is more fun

to read Harry Potter than to read the telephone book

• And also, we usually think there is some kind of “meaning” for us in literature.

Shakespeare vs. Breakfast Menu

• When you read Hamlet, you expect to gain some deeper understanding of your life somehow

• When you read a breakfast menu… you find a good omelette... Might even be a hamlet and cheese omelette? But not a “deeper understanding of human nature” omelette.

Literary Reading• Literature demands interpretation• It “means” something• To discover this meaning takes some

work – that is why you are here• This discovery causes pleasure• The Science of Interpretation =

“Hermeneutics” (< Hermes / Mercury, who brings dreams to the living, introduces the deceased soul to the underworld, is the guide of merchants, bears the caduceus, etc.

• The Hermeneutic Circle…

The “Hermeneutic Circle”

• This figure relates the artist, the work of literature, the world and the reader to each other – each relationship of this complex

Author Work

Universe Reader

Interpreting Literature

What might a critic examine?

• A critic might decide to take a look at the life of the artist

• What psychological phenomena made her/him write? Work isn’t so important, except as a revelation of the artist’s psyche.

• psychological / psychoanalytical approach: art arises as a result of creative neuroses of the individual

• Corresponds to #1 in the figure

on the previous slide

2. – textual history

• A critic might examine the manuscripts the writer employed to come to the final product.

• What got crossed out? How and why was the text changed.

• Very difficult in computer age!

• Look at #2 on slide 7Draft of Walt Whitman’s “O Captain My Captain”

3. “Explication du texte”

• "Werkimmanent" / "explication du texte" - look at art work as a closed system of symbols and themes.

• Try to exclude considerations of author or external influences

Explication (cont’d)

• So you read: “One morning, after some bad dreams, Gregor Samsa awoke in his bed to find himself transformed into a giant kind of cockroach.”

• It doesn’t matter that this is by Kafka, or when it was written, or what philosophical movement influenced the work: only pay attention to what is in the story itself, and don’t stray from the text.

4. Reader/audience-response theory

• What is important about the text is the "reading" which the reader gives the work; "horizon of expectations;" the work contains cultural and informational presuppositions, and so does the reader.

6. Ideological approaches

• e.g., Marxist, feminist - certain society produces certain art forms that reflect the social values of that society.

7. Positivism, Biography

• What is the relationship of the author to reality? - differs from "1" in that it concentrates on external facts rather than centered in artist’s psyche.

8. naturalism/romanticism controversy -

• Does/should the work of art duplicate nature? Examples: soap opera / abstract painting.

• Versimilitude: art either reproduces nature or it deviates from nature.

9. Literality of representation • - Does the artist have

something to communicate to me directly? (irony, satire, parody).

• message?

Are you talkin’ to me? Are you talking

to me?

Now, Dive In!

• You are ready to go in this course. Please start reading The Romance of Tristan & Iseult now, and see how one might begin to use some of these approaches.

• After you are done, please write me a journal. Ten Minutes, that is all! And send it my way via the electron-superhighway.

• Thanks!