Assigned Reading- Information 3-50
Looking at my past blogs, I feel like the points i'm trying to make have been a little scattered (which makes sense because I scatter all of my thoughts all over the place while trying to read) so i'm going to try to organize my reading by focusing on two main points.
- "My mind wanders around, and I conceive of different things day and night. Like a science-fiction writer, i'm thinking, "What if it were like this?" Pg. 3
This reminds me of an English teacher I had my senior year, she would always talk about the different interpretations of different works of literature. Her example was always "the man with the blue house", she started by asking about what message the author meant to get across by giving the man a blue house. Classmates, myself included, gave answers such as the blue color of the man's house was a representation of things such as emotion, bad events in the man's life, the weather in the town and the teacher would always go back to the comment that maybe the man's house was blue simply because this was the color the author preferred. This experience, simple as it may be, brought my attention to the fact that one sentence in literature can be interpreted in a different way for each person that reads it.
- "When a code is not a code" Pg. 13
Opposite of the response I wrote above, this second chapter talks about how although many things in literature can be intepreted in many different ways there are still some things that can universally come up with the same meaning through context clues. In example, when the drummers on page 13 do not directly say come back home, but rather mention the movement of their feet returning to where they came from. There is another good example of this mentioned with the word "corpse" and "which lies on its back on clods of the earth" and with "don't be afraid" and "bring your heart back down out of your mouth, your heart out of your mouth, get it back down from there".
Both of these quotes, while different, represent reading well and the fact that while everyone is reading something different we are all connected by reading the same thing.
The comment you made about how one sentence can be interpreted in various ways really caught my attention. On more than one occasion while I was going a close-reading or writing an in-depth analysis of a piece of literature, I stopped and wondered if maybe there was even anything there to analyze.
ReplyDeleteMaybe there really wasn't any hidden meaning or deep symbolism. Maybe the author was just writing a simple story and it is actually us, years and years later, trying to add meaning to something the author never intended to mean anything. Take for instance your example of the man and the blue house. Maybe the author doesn't even like blue. Maybe he was just writing a story and the house needed a color so he just chose one at random, and never even gave it a second thought.
Sometimes, I wonder if certain authors, could they see into the future and watch us struggling to find meaning in their works, would laugh and think that we were over-analyzing or being ridiculous. Maybe they were just writing something because they were bored or they thought it was an interesting idea, but never intended it to mean anything.