Week 5: Introductory Comments on Literary Interpretation

I've assigned only one text this week in order to give us some time to process and consolidate the reactions to last weeks readings on textuality and the canon. I think you'll find that Marshall's essay productively extends the discussion of those essays we read last week.

Like the arguments of the scholars we read last week (except for Eliot), Marshall's attempt to define literary interpretation is quietly at pains to reject the assumptions of New Criticism that dominated the teaching of literature throughout most of the twentieth century. This tension between New Criticism and the succeeding versions of "theory" can be seen, for instance, in Marshall's account of the distinction between "work" and "text" at the beginning of his essay. The concept of the literary "work" is a very New Critical idea. In this understanding, the physical or material literary artifact is elided, or "confused," with a sort of "ideal" phenomenon--the ethereal aesthetic experience of literature, as it might be experienced in an ideal state of consciousness by an ideal reader. This idealized conception of the literary experience allowed teachers of literature to ignore a lot of "material" and "social" issues related to the study of literature--such as the problem of student resistance to canonical texts, questions about the gender and race bias of the canon, etc.

To her dismay and astonishment, however, the students had very little interest in and drew very little enjoyment from the literature that she found so stimulating. They became sullen and unresponsive as she kept trying to get them interested in her favorite poems and novels. She was really unprepared for this reaction from the students. Although she had never taken a course with me, she came to talk with me about the problems she was having. To me, this seemed to be a classic example of the problem of New Critical pedagogy and its treatment of the literary text as "work." This teacher was expecting her students to "enjoy" these texts, and she literally could not understand why something that was so pleasurable for her was so unpleasant for her students. Her assumptions were leading her to take her students for granted in ways that, if you stop and think about it, are quite disrespectful and arrogant.

Teaching literature from the framework of the concept of "text" rather than "work" suggests some ways to avoid this problem. First, contrary to the assumptions of New Criticism, it recognizes that, as Marshall points out:

A text is constituted and transmitted to us in a complicated social and historical process of which our act of interpretative attention becomes a part. This process and our participation in it presuppose interests that likewise have their own history (and consequently their own future as well). But even if it is not merely a given, the text does take the form of "signs," usually words but always some material bearer of meaning. What instigates interpreting is an interest in eliciting and appropriating this meaning [my italics]. (Gibaldi, p. 163)

Hence, our student was taking her personal stake, her "interest" in the works she was teaching as "universal," as an investment in the meanings and values represented by those works of literature that should be acknowledged by any reader, and as meanings and values that do not require any accountability, that need no explanation or justification, but rather need only to be revealed to those who don't see them as self-evident (by definition, the students, or, the "weaker" students).