Housekeeping

• Reading Quiz #3 and Return of Quizzes 1 and 2
• Many people did not complete the annotations due this week. Set a reminder for yourself if you haven’t already — missing these will have a negative impact on your final grade
  • I occasionally leave comments if I’d like you to dig deeper with your analysis or questions, so do revisit your annotations for occasional feedback!
• Short Analysis #1 feedback: by next Monday

---

Reader-Response Theory

Let’s spend a few minutes finding passages from Fish to discuss in detail. What ideas struck you as important, or particularly difficult to grasp?

How does Fish attempt to answer the question in his title?

We might also ask not just “what,” but who…

In page 343 Fish refers to “the unwritten rules of the literary game.” What are those? Are they still the same today as when this was written?

What is the condition for these interpretative rules to change, according to Fish?

Fish and Blake’s The Tiger

The rhetoric of critical argument, as it is usually  conducted in our  journals, de­pends  upon  a  distinction  between interpretations  on  the  one hand  and  the  textual and  contextual facts  that  will  either sup­port  or  disconfirm them  on  the  other; but  as the  example of Blake’s “Tyger” shows,   text,   context,  and   interpretation  all emerge  together

(Fish 340)

As one obvious and indisputable in­terpretation supplants another, it brings with  it a new set of ob­vious  and   indisputable facts.  Of  course  each  new  reading is elaborated in  the  name  of the  poem  itself,  but  the  poem  itself is always a function of the  interpretive  perspective from  which the critic  “discovers” it.

(Fish 341)

 As that  structure emerges (under  the  pressure   of  interrogation)  it  takes  the  form  of  a “reading,” and  insofar as the  procedures which  produced it are recognized   by  the  literary community as something that  some of its members do,  that  reading will have the status  of a compet­ing interpretation. …. Again  the  point is that  while  there are  always mechanisms for ruling out  readings, their source is not  the text  but  the  pres­ently  recognized interpretive strategies  (or  producing) the  text.

What does this mean?

Reader Response overview

---

In-Class Exercise: Breaking down Morisson’s Challenge to the Reader

In groups of 3-4, sit together to discuss your perceptions of the text in regards to the following questions:

1. What is left unsaid in this text, and how does it affect interpretation?
   • What did you do to “fill in the blanks” of what was unsaid?
2. Is there an ideal, or implied reader of this text? What is that reader’s potential expectations about literature, race, and American society?
3. Are there ways this text defies analysis and interpretation?
4. How does the point of view (i.e. the narrator) affect or control your understanding? (Dobie 137)
5. Is this text uncomfortable to read or think about? Why/why not?

Please write your answers down in one paper to turn in at the end of class. I’d love to see, in particular, any disagreements you have on your answers to these questions!

Last 5 minutes: Group 1 handout and self-assessment time