As I Understand It

I’m with you, Sara. I was OK with some of the chapters in Textual Power (mostly the ones in the beginning) and even with pieces of some of the later chapters, but parts of the book seemed convoluted and were very difficult for me to read. As someone else mentioned I, too, was annotating and employing some of the difficulty paper tools, but eventually the text seemed to degenerate into semantics. The lengthy discussion on whether history is anything besides text (really?) and then the pages on how to define the words that were made up by other literary theorists made my eyes spin.

I was looking forward to reading Scholes because he was referenced in some of the other texts and I liked the ideas presented on his behalf. And, I do like the idea in Textual Power of breaking down literature into the three stages of reading, interpretation, and criticism. I also appreciate Scholes’s focus on not criticizing and interpreting during the reading stage but instead on trying to read the text from a more detached point of view so as not to misinterpret or to just miss information. I also appreciate his discussion “between practice and earnest.” This reminded me of Blau’s suggestion to create a literary community within the classroom but with a suggestion to take it one step further so that practice does not merely become theory without a place for application.

But after that, Scholes began to lose me and as I meditated (i.e. began losing interest in and focus) on the text during the discussion of whether a word means a word or means an object and if the object really exists (or something like that) I kept asking myself, so what? Isn’t it Scholes’s theory that encourages the reader to ask, so what? One of the questions that I keep asking myself in this course is “what is the objective of teaching literature?” If a student doesn’t care about the end result, is he going to care about the exercises he is doing to get there? Some of the possible answers I have come across so far are to learn critical thinking skills, to explore thoughts we might not have on our own, to be entertained, to connect with humanity, for self exploration, to become a better writer, and to develop consultation and collaboration skills doing group work. Are students going to care about literature more if we are able to define “differance”? How is that going to make a difference in the world?

During the discussion of objects and signifiers I couldn’t help but think that Magritte seems to have communicated the same thing much more succinctly, creatively and poignantly in his painting, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” where he presented a picture of a pipe and wrote on it, this is not a pipe
(http://artscenecal.com/ArtistsFiles/MagritteR/MagritteRFile/MagritteRPics/RMagritte1.html).

Is literary theory about semantics, and if it is, can’t we at least make the discussion a bit more interesting? Perhaps, sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.