This week was a difficult one for me to completely grasp the concept that every writing/ understanding/ critique is situational. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states "But as a matter of fact there are a number of sciences even for the goods" (19). I took this to mean that there are a wide variety of events/ circumstances which would account for some good. Therefore, my reading one book may conjure up memories of the time I went to the beach and had an incredible time while to another person, the same book may conjure up memories of the time they went to the beach and stepped on an irate crab. Both are reading the same book, but different circumstances or "sciences" make the understanding situation. I can never fully understand another person's interpretation of the work because that person and I do not have the same outside perspective we are bringing in to the reading.
This also made me think of Barthes' Death of an Author because Barthes believes that writing is co-constructed with the reader and therefore the author is "dead." In the work, Barthes states "As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses it's origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins." (page 875) I found this quote particularly telling because it finally made sense to me that an author is only the facilitator of ideas. It is up to the reader and the writer to create a sense of understanding. Since the writer and reading will almost always come into the realm of understanding with different experiences molding how they interpret anything, it makes me wonder why there is such an emphasis on analysis of works. Both Aristotle and Barthes would agree that understanding is completely situational so I struggle with the idea that we need to analyze works in order to come to a complete sense of understand when it will always vary person to person.
5 comments:
I think that you purpose a very good question here. Why do we put so much effort in finding exact meaning to pieces of everyone's opinion may be different. Possibly we should just stay open minded to all possible meanings of everything. I wouldn't want to be put in a box with limited possible beliefs. Everyone may have something good to bring to the table. Authors may commit "suicide" when they write, but I think they understand that people will analyse their writings differently. Maybe they did not even have a specific meaning to their writing because they themselves were struggling to find the definition of what it is they are attempting to explain. Aristotle seemed as though he was also trying to find out for himself what good was and how we achieve it. He talked around in circles a lot. Isn't it possible that he was writing that piece in order to come to a better understanding himself?
I believe we have the same struggle. I do not believe that the discipline of literary history should be done away with, but I cannot help but to question literary criticism. If an author writes and publishes a work, they have done so because of they believe that their work has justified their intentions or is good evidence to what their ultimate goal was. The study of these works or one thing, but the critique of the works is another. Because there is such an ambiguity when a reader translates a literary work to their own life, situation, circumstance, etc. there is no longer a need for a critique of the work because their really isn't a guideline to critique it by. Every text and every situation it was written in is completely different than from the experience of a reader or other readers from situation to situation. No literary work can be read within the same context as the author who wrote the work. If there are so many different interpretations of a text, so many ways of making meaning from it, and so a variety of ways in which the text will be translated and made sense of, how can there be an ultimate judge of the text? Do we not all interact with the text? Who gets to choose which criticism is more credible than another? If the "voice" of the literary work has "lost its origin," how can their be a perfect mold into which it should fit?
I think you are right about the problem with analyzing a text. We can never really know what the author intended to say unless they tell us themselves, and a text that I find deeply meaningful might be completely disregarded by someone else. I think the point to analyzing a text is so that we can see how each of us views a text differently. If the author wrote the text in the first place to facilitate the sharing of ideas, then this collective analysis of their text further broadens our understanding. Honestly though, I see the reading of a text as a very private thing. My opinion of a text usually doesn't change when I hear someone else's opinion. I suppose it is helpful to stay open minded though.
You have a good point Huong; My first opinion about a text always stays in the back of my mind, even when open to other's opinions and feedback. When we read texts we usually relate it to something we have experienced, someone we know or something we wish would happen. Its intersting how that works, but the fact that we all view text differently will always be. However, I find that if the text is read aloud by,say a teacher,--and we never actual see the text--we internalize the text through the teacher's way of reading the text and how he/she proposes the information.
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