Sunday, March 28, 2010
Confining Literary Movements
I've heard this theme come up a lot throughout the semester and felt it to be particularly pressing after Thursday's class: we read about literary movements and read about how to interpret pieces of work (such as Andre Lorde's piece), yet is it possible that literature and analysis of writing is too expansive and unique to be confined and simplified into such broad categories? To reiterate Professor Fisher's closing question, what affect does our "knowing" that a particular piece if from a certain literary period or reading Lorde's doctrine on what all poetry is comprised of have on our understanding and interpretation of the pieces of work? Are we more inclined to look for and "find" the elements of a poem that fit Lorde's mold simply because we hold her view in high regard because she is a published writer and thus she must be "right"?
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Interestingly my group in class read one of Lorde's poems through her lens but we pretty much just found her wrong. We didnt care that she was published.
ReplyDeleteBut I do believe that our view on her was tainted due to our understanding of her genre. The description the book offered described her as a black-lesbian-feminist-activist. Off the bat I was very judgmental and I think that my opinion of the poem was affected.
The question might be about whether or not we can ever really get outside of a particular lens or perspective.
ReplyDeletei definitely think that it changes the way you read something... its like asking someone to ignore the pink elephant. impossible : ?
ReplyDeleteI think it's always difficult to read something outside of a particular lens. We're always trained to put literary works into perspective by looking at when they were written, the life of the writer, etc. In the Norton Anthology, for instance, they put in a little biography for a writer at the beginning. It's really hard to then go and read their work outside the lens of their real life.
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