English 67

All of you I’m sure picked up on the obvious: that we were trying as a group to come to grips with reading (interpreting) texts without relying on authors or intent. Yet, in the absence of the author, it was impossible not to invent one, even unnamed. The poet/speaker was almost always referenced as “he” [...]

My group and I emerged from the poetry exercise yesterday feeling pretty triumphant.  What had at first appeared to be a jumble of words with no intention of being easily understood (I personally don’t find it encouraging when a poem starts with “th’”) came to inform what we deemed a plausible interpretation of the text.  For those of you who [...]

On Monday we gave a shot at ‘reading’ a text without an author. . . I wanted to mention a couple of things about the readings from Richter (part 3) and Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author.” This also connects somewhat with canon and curriculum: there was an NYT piece, revisiting these controversies [...]

Throughout life history has been written by the victors. I have heard the phrase”to the victors go the spoils” so many times in my life and never interpreted it’s meaning until I read it again this past week. We have been discussing why we read, how we read, and what we read. We have [...]

Does the reader really provide the meaning to a literary work? Is what is being said wholly defined by the life-experiences and interpretation of the reader? Does the author really have so little to do with the meaning of the work they have shaped and crafted?
For myself, I am uncertain. While I [...]

[My notes for week 2 are appended to this post]
As is my wont, I’ll put in a brief plug (and disclaimer, because of my bias in his favor) for Edward Said. Since reading Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Orientalism (1978), his work has become almost indispensible to me for thinking about the politics of [...]

This is sort of a response to something from the reflections on Monday’s class: “There seems to be a preference for sympathetic reading, rather than oppositional reading, or reading against the grain (we’ll talk more about this term).”
I, for one, based on the handout about close reading, found myself preferring (or at least appreciating) the [...]

“The curriculum fight, like the culture wars, is essentially over, and the result is that the university curriculum has been unhitched from the literary canon. . . The long list of books that everyone had to read is gone . . . In [its] place is a long list of options. . . ” [...]

So, as you may remember, I mentioned an article in class,”Shakespeare in the Bush,” which describes how one anthropologist attempts to tell the story of Hamlet to people of a completely different culture.  I found it pretty interesting the first time I read it, and fairly poignant the second time (particularly because the author seems [...]

The discussion was lively, which I greatly appreciate. So lively, in fact, that I needed a few moments after class to process some things that were said, but left inadequately examined or without proper responses.
Someone made an excellent point (with specific example) that, authorial intentions, and even directions on how to read a particular [...]