Class Activity

The Toolbox encourages us to move beyond an author-centered approach to meaning, or at least to question and complicate the idea that the meaning of a text comes from the author by way of some recoverable "intention." The next step is to think about the reader and "acts of reading" as the avenue for the production of meaning.  If reading is made by readers, then how do we choose between multiple possibilities? What kind of compromise does the Toolbox envision when it suggests that we can't just displace meaning from author to reader? How do the contexts within which we read (or from which a text comes) inform this meaning-making?

Today we'll look at two poems that seem to invite questions like these. Each is in some way non-traditional and in its very form makes it difficult to fall back upon authorial intention (i.e. the "main point" envisioned by the author = its meaning).  Not only do they fit with such theoretical questions about reading, but I'll suggest they seem to invite a different approach.

(words in place of questions)

1. arrangement, absurdity, point or wandering

2. sources and material, context

3. open typography and punctuation

4. vocabulary, selection, combination

5. "Flarf" or bad poetry
    

1. knives, chives, lives

2. sequence, connections, lines

3. surprise, humor

4. incongruity, irreverence

5. rhyme, repetition and loose/strict rules

Courses | Sherwood |IUP English | IUP
Last Updated: 09 December, 2008