As an undergraduate, my literary criticism class was one of my most difficult. It wasn’t necessarily that the material itself was difficult, but moreso that it was dense, and I seemed to get Teflon-brain every time I tried to retain it. As I started reading the two Johns Hopkins articles, I was struggling to recall the slightest bit of information. I was hoping it would come to me, but it took the digging out of my trusty Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism for me to have that “duh” moment of “oh yes, THAT one.”  In the end though, neither of those articles really interested me in the same way that the Crosman article did.

Because the title is posed as a question, I immediately tried to answer it. “Of course readers make meaning,” I thought. “We just do it in different ways depending on who we are and where we come from.” By the end of the first paragraph, I was already prepared to revise my answer. Implicitly, I guess I always had this intrinsic understanding that there was more than one way to define meaning, but I had all those definitions boxed up together, and never really got around to choosing to unpack them. I had to have another “duh” moment while reading this article and think about all the “meanings” of meaning. This one common word can mean so many things, from intention to a definition, a synonym to a value. So often, the way we choose to understand it is as significance, but we don’t necessarily mean what we say. We haven’t really unpacked all those definitions yet.

So now let me revisit the title. Do readers make meaning? Well, if by ‘meaning,’ we’re talking about authorial intent, then no. In that instance, the author is the one who is shaping the literature. They’re the ones who are putting the pieces together to create something with meaning.  That meaning is, though, open to interpretation. Even the author can’t always necessarily get back to the exact same place he or she was when the piece was written. Or perhaps there was never a written account of what the piece was about, and so authorial intent is, in some ways, skewed and/or lost. However, if we’re talking about sense or understanding, then yes. The reader has to make some sort of understanding of what he or she reads. An interpretation is formed. In that way, the reader DOES make meaning. Furthermore, through readings that are of an imagist or affective nature, we’re able to use our imaginations to make every story, in some way, our own. This is, I think, partially why I have so much trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of New Criticism. From my perspective, it limits me too much in my thinking. It restricts me to a close reading, but I don’t feel that it allows me to consider things from multiple angles, necessarily.

If nothing else, this week’s readings taught me that I have to come up with a better plan for my students than using those awful questions in the text book. I know they’re awful, but I continue to use them anyway. But when I think about it, it seems like maybe those questions are coming from a New Critic’s approach because they ask the students to examine carefully certain passages in order to answer the questions. And of course, there is only ever one right answer, which, as we see in the Crosman article, isn’t necessarily so. I get really angry when people tell me that my interpretation is wrong because, by the very definition of the word, an interpretation can’t be wrong. It’s just my understanding of something – the way I’m reading it. Therefore, I don’t think it’s very fair of me to give these questions to my students and imply that there is only one right answer and one correct way to read the story. If more teachers would do that, I wonder how many more students would like reading?