How Meaning Is Made

Summary: literature and criticism are conversations.  To enter a thread, you must ensure your works, literary and/or critical, are complete, valid and persuasive.
 
I will begin this post with the conclusion that literature is a conversation--a perpetual, complex and dynamic discussion.  In "What Is Literature?" I state that a literary work is a product of both the writer and its readers.  If we consider a literary work as simply a product of its readers, we ignore the fact that the writer was making sense of (making meaning of) some aspect of the universe.  Just as readers make meaning of texts in different ways, writers make meaning of their surroundings in different ways.  For example, whereas Ben Johnson prefers "Still To Be Neat" (1609), Robert Herrick takes "Delight in Disorder" (1648).  A swine is not simply a pig according to Richard Eberhart ("The Groundhog"), Sylvia Plath ("Sow"), Thom Gunn ("Moly"), Paul Muldoon ("Hedgehog"), Galway Kinnell ("Saint Francis and the Sow"), Charles Thomlinson ("On a Pig's Head"), and William Cowper ("The Love of the World Reproved: or, Hypocrisy Detected").  And some critics have claimed that William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just to Say" (1934) is a counterargument to William Wordsworth's "The world is too much with us" (1807).  Furthermore, Kenneth Koch ("Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams"), Denise Levertov ("O Taste and See"), and Helen Chasin ("The Word Plum") wrote poems in response to Williams' poem. 

More examples will support the point that writers read and respond to texts that are not their own.  They engage in conversations with other writers, other works.  Both creative people and critical people analyze and evaluate what others have done.  With respect to writers, doing such allows them to frame old topics in new ways or to shift the conversation to new topics. 

If we accept the fact that writers converse with each other, then it is easy to accept that literary critics converse with other literary critics, and they have been doing such for some time.  You may be wondering both why you need to enter the discussion and how you can enter it.

You need to enter the discussion because literary criticism is applicative to every aspect of our lives.  Literature broadens our experiences by deepening our understanding of people, situations and problems, allowing us, as members of a society, to reflect on the many issues that arise in our lives.  Literary criticism allows us to analyze and evaluate those experiences.  If everything is an argument (refer to "Communication: The Basis of Life"), then literary criticism is applicative to every person, situation and problem.

Marketers and advertisers, for example, use psychological criticism to determine the ways to package or present products that consumers will interpret positively.  Their goal is to evoke a positive response from potential consumers so that they (the consumers) will purchase their products.  Lawyers use historical criticism to construct cases against and for people; they analyze and interpret relevant cases from the past and apply the court rulings to their cases.  The fashion industry uses feminist criticism.  As women have been gaining equivalence, fashion designers have been altering styles to reflect such.  Women did not wear jeans until the 1950's.  In the '60's, '70's and '80's, women's jeans looked masculine.  Now, low-ride jeans accentuate the female figure--that is, fit women's hips.  With respect to politics, let us imagine you are working for the National Republican Committee, and you want to undermine President Obama's State of the Union address.  You will deconstruct it to "expose the gaps, the incoherencies, the contradictions" to turn the speech against the Democrats.¹  If you are a musician and want to study the syncopation (counter rhythm) in a song by Miles Davis, you will use New Criticism to understand how such oppositions contribute to the harmonious balance of the work.  Every day you have been using reader-response criticism.  Let us imagine you are at an Abercrombie and Fitch, and after reading a price tag, you state, "What?  One hundred dollars for this, yeah, right!"  That is an example of reader-response criticism.

Before you interpose your thoughts and feelings into the long literary conversation, you need to be aware of several restrictions.  First, context--internal and external--is everything.  There always is tension among intention (what the writer wants to say), execution (how he/she says it), and interpretation (the way in which the reader interprets it).  You need to realize, when you approach a work, such tension exists.  Furthermore, the context in which the work was written probably is different from the context in which you are approaching it.  As Steven Lynn states, "The meaning of a thing is shaped by the context in which we place it.  When we think about how to read a photograph, a story, a poem, or a life, we cannot avoid this interplay of texts and contexts."²  A crude example is the word gay in Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" (1807): "A poet could not be gay, / In such jocund company."³  Gay, in the nineteenth century, meant "cheerful, merry."  In the latter half of the twentieth century, its sense changed to "homosexual," and now gay in its standard use connotes "a homosexual male."  Without placing Wordsworth's poem in its proper context and without knowing the etymology of gay, an inexperienced critic could misinterpret the poem.  Swaying daffodils and glittering waves, not men, make the speaker happy, not homosexual.

Because each of us brings our own knowledge and point of view to a text, each of us will interpret a text differently.  But certainly some interpretations are incorrect.  According to Steven Lynn, "for a particular audience, in a particular context, supported by particular evidence, a reading might be considered to be wrong.  But the same argument, in another context, might be right."⁴  He is not suggesting that literary criticism is relativistic; rather, a critical interpretation of a text that is complete and valid is correct, although it may be oppositional to others.  If it is oppositional to others, it needs to be persuasive:
     From a given perspective, some readings of a text are more
     persuasive than others.  Some seem more right, and some seem
     clearly more wrong.  If we understand our assumptions, and
     we're conscious of the contexts we apply, we can struggle toward
     an agreement on the correctness of a particular claim.  We might
     not get to an agreement always (or ever), but we can at least
     (from this viewpoint) agree that such agreement is possible, and
     worth working toward.⁵
Thus, the second restriction is you must follow Toulmin's scheme for argumentation when practicing literary criticism.  By basing your interpretation on a warrant (an assumption) for which you provide backing, your interpretation will be more persuasive than one that is purely emotional or another that strictly adheres to a single critical approach.  Toulmin's scheme forces a literary critic to consider alternative viewpoints, and if you realize there is more than one way to critically approach a text, then you may be able to incorporate several critical strategies to make your interpretation more meaningful.
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     ¹Steven Lynn, Literature: Reading and Writing with Critical Strategies (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004) 19.
     ²Ibidem, 8.
     ³William Wordsworth, "I wandered lonely as a cloud" The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2, 6th ed.  Ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: Norton, 1993) 186-187.
     ⁴Steven Lynn, 9.
     ⁵Ibidem, 9-10.