Do you read better the more you read?
Have you ever picked up a work you've neglected for ages, read it, and enjoyed it a million times more than you ever did? Or, picked up a work you thought was the bomb when you were a teenager, read it over again and realized that there's really not much to it?
I've been experiencing this a lot lately, which is why I've been interested in some of the reader response critics I've been reading. I recently read an essay by Jonathan Culler about "literary competence," where he argues in favour of Northrop Frye's suggestion that, by building up a literary repertoire, as compared with studying science, a "similar training of the mind takes place, and a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up." Culler says that an easy way to test the effectiveness of a response to a poem is to see whether or not an explanation of one's own response will allow others to identify errors or problems with their own responses, or reconsider their readings of the poem.
Dealing with first-year students on the topic of poetry I found that a lot of people came to me with the somewhat useless self-diagnosis of having not "gotten" a poem. Reading through with them, and showing them some possibilities for creating meaning, many students became a lot more enthusiastic about their reading of the poem and found many new ways of exploring paper topics as a result. What surprised me most was that the things I explained were, for the most part, basic structural assumptions with which to approach a poem: Each line is not necessarily a sentence on its own, repetition of single words is a deliberate process rather than a stylistic faux-pas, the meaning of line 1 is capable of complicating the meaning of line 6, the poem may have a unified "meaning" beyond its literal level, and such---just basic things you take for granted, and don't even really think much about, when you're reading a poem. It may be harder to identify similar principles of reading, since we don't notice them so easily, but a conventional knowledge of "Rose" tends to control a reading of Blake's "Sick Rose":O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
And his dark, secret love
Does thy life destroy.
OrAl nist by þe rose, rose--
al nist bi þe rose i lay;
darf ich noust þe rose stele,
ant get ich bar þe flour away
It has the reverse effect when we read Shakespeare's first sonnet and come across the word "beauty's rose," as he's clearly talking about a man, as when he reuses "rose" throughout his sonnets---his sonnets take advantage of our expectations by drawing an unconventional connection of a man to a woman as the object of veneration in his earliest sonnets. Thus, conventional knowledge of poetry is capable of increasing the effects of a reading in both ways---by understanding the implications of any given conventional model, and also by understanding the significance of departures from literary convention.
I think this is a wonderful bit of wisdom I've come across (Culler's essay) and I hope it proves effective in my work with Chaucer's poetry.
I've been experiencing this a lot lately, which is why I've been interested in some of the reader response critics I've been reading. I recently read an essay by Jonathan Culler about "literary competence," where he argues in favour of Northrop Frye's suggestion that, by building up a literary repertoire, as compared with studying science, a "similar training of the mind takes place, and a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up." Culler says that an easy way to test the effectiveness of a response to a poem is to see whether or not an explanation of one's own response will allow others to identify errors or problems with their own responses, or reconsider their readings of the poem.
Dealing with first-year students on the topic of poetry I found that a lot of people came to me with the somewhat useless self-diagnosis of having not "gotten" a poem. Reading through with them, and showing them some possibilities for creating meaning, many students became a lot more enthusiastic about their reading of the poem and found many new ways of exploring paper topics as a result. What surprised me most was that the things I explained were, for the most part, basic structural assumptions with which to approach a poem: Each line is not necessarily a sentence on its own, repetition of single words is a deliberate process rather than a stylistic faux-pas, the meaning of line 1 is capable of complicating the meaning of line 6, the poem may have a unified "meaning" beyond its literal level, and such---just basic things you take for granted, and don't even really think much about, when you're reading a poem. It may be harder to identify similar principles of reading, since we don't notice them so easily, but a conventional knowledge of "Rose" tends to control a reading of Blake's "Sick Rose":O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
And his dark, secret love
Does thy life destroy.
OrAl nist by þe rose, rose--
al nist bi þe rose i lay;
darf ich noust þe rose stele,
ant get ich bar þe flour away
It has the reverse effect when we read Shakespeare's first sonnet and come across the word "beauty's rose," as he's clearly talking about a man, as when he reuses "rose" throughout his sonnets---his sonnets take advantage of our expectations by drawing an unconventional connection of a man to a woman as the object of veneration in his earliest sonnets. Thus, conventional knowledge of poetry is capable of increasing the effects of a reading in both ways---by understanding the implications of any given conventional model, and also by understanding the significance of departures from literary convention.
I think this is a wonderful bit of wisdom I've come across (Culler's essay) and I hope it proves effective in my work with Chaucer's poetry.