10 Years After

Stabbing A Star

When I took World Civ last Fall it toook a while for me to warm up to the professor. However, by the end of the course I came to appreciate him. He was hard on the area and on religious people. Well, at least biblical literalists.

After my Lit Crit class I ended up in what amounted to an unexpected defense of the instructor. Yes, he is very harsh on students. However, I think that too many people look at history as being whatever stories one wants to accept. This is, I believe, entirely the wrong focus of history. Or, at least, histor as it has been for. . . the past century? Now it is a scientific field.

I guess, I ended up being more of an apologist than an actual defender of his practice in class of demeaning bible literalists. However, this is a hot topic for me and it has taken me many years to come to some concept of faith without literalism.

Literary Criticism itself was enjoyable. I think I am finding the moderate reader-response critics to be very much to my liking. They serve as a happy medium between the tediousness of the New Critics (with their verbal objects and disregard for the reader) and the more extreme reader-response critics who see interpretation as purely subjective. This purely subjectiveness seems just as injurious to studying literature as the New Critics.

One thing I like is the moderate's concept of reader communities. This balances the subjectivity of the individual and the idea the Formalist idea of the text as a verbal object. People get various things out of reading a text, but the text not only reflects back onto the reader, but, also, what is important about these various interpretations is the negotiations that occur in communities.

"I'm hungry. Let's get a taco."