During our previous class my ears opened a little wider during our discussions about specific poems and what the poet's or the speaker's 'intended meaning' appeared to be. In pondering the danger of reading literature as biography, I offer some tidbits from Tory Young's Studying English Literature as food for thought:
"Trying to work out what an author 'means' by a work has been discredited as a critical practice, not least because it reduces literary study to a series of speculations, and reduces poems, novels and plays to codified messages or morals. Do authors even fully comprehend what they intend when they begin to write?"
Good point Brenda. And how much do we assume a "place" from biography rather than from actual cues/markers in the text itself. Extra hard in an anthology like Unfurled that first frames itself a place based.
ReplyDeleteI know that this is an anachronistic sentiment, but I am not entirely sure that avoiding authorial purpose is entirely responsible.
ReplyDeleteIn the process of
Author --> Text --> Reader
There is a lot of room for things to go wrong. (Does the author ever perfectly capture his or her sentiments in a poem? Does a reader ever perfectly interpret these sentiments?) The thing that makes poetry really quite interesting is that it consists largely of imperfect readers reading imperfect representations of some meditative abstraction.
For better or for worse, however, I think the dangers of mistaking an author's intention are to be preferred over the reader reading his or her own thoughts _into_ a poem. Interpretively, I prefer my errors to come from within, rather than without, the poem.