{"id":136,"date":"2003-02-05T14:24:48","date_gmt":"2003-02-05T14:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/?p=136"},"modified":"2003-02-05T14:24:48","modified_gmt":"2003-02-05T14:24:48","slug":"contextual-literary-criticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/archives\/136","title":{"rendered":"Contextual literary criticism."},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’m on this email discussion list with a bunch of my old classmates from Kenyon, and somehow we got onto the topic of “meaning” in literature. I almost never<\/i> go for that kind of bait, but this time I decided to bite. The result was a short essay on my philosophy of meaning, which I’d like to share with you (and archive for my own personal reference) here. Apologies for any linguistic philosopher arrogance that may follow. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

\n

For the longest time I ranted and railed against this notion that we can
\npick apart any work, rip out the symbols and cast them on the ground like so
\nmany scryer’s bones in order to learn its secret meaning. The older I get,
\nthough, the more I feel like looking for meaning isn’t such a bad idea, but
\nthe notion that there is only one meaning to a work, like some encrypted
\nmessage waiting for the right decoder ring, feels wrong.<\/p>\n

Literature is language, frozen in mid-leap. The little squiggles that form
\nletters and words themselves are devoid of any objective meaning, save from
\nour recognition that someone arranged them in a particular pattern for some
\nkind of purpose. That’s how we know we’re supposed to try and interpret
\nthem. (The same goes for modern art — even a seemingly meaningless pattern
\ncan become “art” when somebody says it’s meant to be seen as such, because
\nthat’s the trigger that sets us trying to interpret it.) The trouble with
\ntrying to set a particular “meaning” is that all readers come to those
\nsquiggles under different circumstances, and almost certainly under
\ndifferent circumstances than the ones under which the squiggles were
\nwritten. To get back to Evangeline’s associate, and I’ll quote that point
\nhere:<\/p>\n

\n“Art is (or should be, according to this guy) the communication of specific
\nthoughts and\/or emotions, so any piece of artwork wherein the viewer (or
\nreader) cannot grasp the message the artist meant to convey is a failure.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This definition is impossible. No two people will ever take away the same
\nthoughts\/emotions from any kind of artistic work, for the same reason that
\nno two people ever get the same thoughts\/emotions from ANY kind of work: we
\ntranslate those little squiggles into thoughts using tools forged from our
\nown personal experiences. This is why I think that any given work can’t
\nhave “one true meaning”, but a myriad of different meanings based on who is
\nwriting or reading it.<\/p>\n

If readers want to gain a clearer understanding of what the author was
\nthinking when it was written, then I think they should search the context in
\nwhich the work was created. What was happening in the author’s life? What
\nwas happening in the world at the time? Those are the keys to what the work
\nprobably “meant” to the person creating it.<\/p>\n

If readers want to understand what a work means to THEM, then they should do
\nthe same thing for their own lives. Do they think there’s a
\npostmodern\/feminist\/vegetarian message to be taken away from ULYSSES? If
\nthey take something like that away, then fine, there must have been
\nsomething in it that triggered that reaction in them — only that “meaning”
\nmay have only come as a result of their own experiences. Did the author
\nhave any postmodern\/feminist\/vegetarian experiences? If so, he might have
\nintended to infuse the work with that meaning, and both reader and writer
\nhave that element in common. If not, then he probably didn’t — but that
\ndoesn’t mean that the work can’t have that meaning to the reader.<\/p>\n

If I ever become a professor, or try to get back into the academic writing
\nprofession (apologies for all the intellectual sloppiness in this, BTW, I’m
\nreally rusty), I’ll ask my students to do contextual reports on a work in
\norder to analyze it for meaning. Whether they study the context under which
\nthis “frozen language” was dispatched or the context under which it was
\nreceived, well, that should be up to them. A possible final exam question:
\nWould a reader in 16th century France get the same mental images and take
\naway the same impressions from reading THE ODYSSEY as someone in 21st
\ncentury China?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I’m on this email discussion list with a bunch of my old classmates from Kenyon, and somehow we got onto the topic of “meaning” in literature. I almost never go for that kind of bait, but this time I decided to bite. The result was a short essay on my philosophy of meaning, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-voice-tip-of-the-quill"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4e5QR-2c","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}