Reading Beyond Literature: Reinterpreting the Self in the World

            As Lois Tyson states in her introduction to Critical Theory Today: A User-friendly Guide, “knowledge isn’t something we acquire: it’s something we are or something we hope to become. Knowledge is what constitutes our relationship to ourselves and to our world, for it is the lens through which we view ourselves and our world” (9).   Here, Tyson makes the argument for the importance and value of studying critical theory as a practice extending beyond literature. In our world today, scholars within the academy still grapple with what is and what is not defined as capital L-literature and how we measure its value across time, cultures, and disciplines; however, what is most fruitful from this process is how we as people can use these tools to make sense of the world around us. In order for critical theory’s relevance to extend beyond the traditional study of literature, critical theory had to confront its institutional presumptions about who owned interpretation: the scholarly readers or the text? Barthes, Fish, and Dasenbrock have all engaged in this necessary conversation, of whether meaning resides in the text, in its communities of readers, or in some combination thereof, in which an individual can work towards building new understanding. It is this very conversation that has led to many readers’ welcoming of engaging with ideologies that differ from themselves, and it is this kind of critical engagement that loosens our focus from solely literature and encourages us to confront our assumptions and perceptions that make up our ever-shifting worldview.

While Roland Barthes proclaimed “the Death of the Author” in 1977, it is still difficult even for some of the most astute readers today to remove the text from our obsession with the personal of its writer. It seems to be a cultural habit to consider the author’s intention and inspiration when questioning the selection of certain words over others on the page. Many readers assume the individual whose name is printed on the book cover has full control over what ends up inside the minds of its readers. However, Barthes asserts that writing is “the deconstruction of every voice, of every point of origin… that neutral, composite, oblique space, where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (253). This way of reading “the author,” as a deconstruction of all this person has been exposed to in terms of their gender, their social class, the time period in which they were born, their relationships with their mothers and fathers, and so forth, liberates the reader, critic, and writer, to explore how language becomes a vessel through which ideologies can hide, emerge, and clash, sometimes simultaneously. Thus, the very term “the author” becomes a construction of the work of this vessel, and while we can still freely use the term “the author” to question the words on the page, “the author” is not the starting point or a single person, but a representation of the unfathomable potency of language.

Yet Barthes’s revelation that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” puts immense interpretive responsibility on the reader, and many critics have theorized about where exactly to draw the line separating the reader’s responsibility from what the text offers (257). In his 1980 article “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” Stanley Fish argues that communities of readers and the communities’ decided conventions are responsible for creating the interpretation of a text. Fish illustrates this claim by providing the anecdotal evidence in which he presented a list of last names, which was in actuality a reading assignment for his linguistics class, as a poem to his seventeenth-century religious poetry students. Thus, the text on the blackboard was read and interpreted in different ways depending on the students’ differing expectations they brought with them into their classroom. Some students knew the classroom as a place to study linguistics; the others knew it as a place to study poetry from the seventeenth-century. According to Fish, texts are read as what we’re taught to see in them. This leads Fish to describe how “meanings are the property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that are responsible both for the shape of a reader’s activities and for the texts those activities produce” (268). Thus, according to Fish, interpretative responsibility resides in communities, institutions, and established schools of thought, neither in the text nor in an individual’s unique interpretations.

 Fish’s exercise, or gimmick, reveals the necessity of context when reading and interpreting a text, but he does not stop there; he goes on to place full authorship and creativity in the reader, which again, he views as a collective group with established conventions for reading:  “interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them” (271).  Here, Fish begins to illustrate how one poem can be read in an infinite number of ways, therefore creating an infinite number of poems.  Fish does not extend his discussion to identity politics or to include ideas about what communities shape the accepted interpretations the most, or how one’s lack of access to certain communities might also shape interpretation. Instead, he goes on to say, “once one realizes that the conceptions that fill consciousness, including any conceptions of its own status, are culturally derived, the very notion of an unconstrained self, of a consciousness wholly and dangerously free, becomes incomprehensible” (276). While to Fish, this description of the individual’s role in interpretation might seem liberating, it is limiting in that instead of examining how differing aspects of culture can provide lenses and insights into how to read, Fish renders such practices as “incomprehensible” and seems to dismiss them as also unnecessary and invisible. But what if an individual is part of institutions with conflicting beliefs, or what if an institution or community itself does not always agree on its own reading conventions?

In his 1991 essay “Do We Writing the Text We Read?” Reed Way Dasenbrock criticizes Fish’s argument that communities of interpreters, rather than language, carry the necessary tools for reading. Dasenbrock calls Fish’s argument “incoherent,” as well as offers Jonathon Cullen’s criticism of Fish: “‘a reader who creates everything learns nothing’” (286).  Dasenbrock argues that for language to have meaning, it must carry reliability and commonality across differing communities. Even when context, such as time period and culture in which a text is written, can color and influence textual interpretation, Dasenbrock asserts,

“There is at most one text just as there is at most one world, and we share that text just as we share the world. That doesn’t mean that we see it in the same way, any more than we all speak the same language, but neither does it mean that we are seeing something utterly different...For we can’t know whether we are seeing something different unless we can understand each other’s perspective, translate each other’s language, and if we can understand to translate another’s perspective it cannot have the radical otherness supposed by … Fish. It is not our different interpretive communities that keep us apart; it is simply our different interpretations” (284).

Therefore, according to Dasenbrock, what keeps scholars and critics relevant is our attempt to build bridges between different interpretive communicates rather than protecting the conventions that keep them separate. Interpretive communities must share some language in order to work together across differing value and belief systems, whether to recover lost texts from the past or to reclaim texts from traditionally silenced cultures.

            To illustrate how re-examining our interpretation of texts is a practice in rediscovery Angela Hass offers “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Traditional of Multimedia Theory and Practice.” In this article she presents how “American Indian communities have employed wampum belts as hypertextual technologies,” a technology of which Western culture has previously staked sole claim.  Haas shows how the belts and their beads have “extended human memories of inherited knowledges through interconnected, nonlinear design and associative storage and retrieval methods” (77). Thus, just as Dasenbrock predicts, by resisting the urge to believe our different communities keep us isolated, we can work through this resistance to instead find similarities, which in this case, is the American Indian use of hypertext long before the Western world’s use of a Memex or World Wide Web. This kind of thinking challenges traditional reading and interpretation in that we are presented with what Malea Powell illustrates as “a new story about ourselves, not a ‘prime’ narrative held together by the sameness of our beliefs, but a gathering of narratives designed to help us adapt and change” (96). This process of adapting and changing is exactly what Dasenbrock describes as “break[ing] out of our own circle of beliefs and assumptions” (288). Haas too encourages us to recognize these connections as “fruitful relationships between stories, the benefit of resisting an imposed hierarchy” (96-97).  Thus, Fish’s argument is proven as “incoherent” as Dasenbrock states because by isolating ourselves within our traditional communities, we would lose out on the richness and possibility of such connections.

Ultimately, Dasenbrock provides space for our examination of differing identities and how they shape our reading. Dasenbrock describes how there are times when “our immediate reaction when we encounter difference is to refuse the difference… But the interesting moments are when this doesn’t work so well, when we realize that what we are interpreting does express beliefs different from our own” (288). In these cases, we must adjust, read differently, and learn. And the value of this kind of self-reflection extends beyond the case for the importance of literature to what it means to build bridges between our differing communities as human beings. This notion reframes the purpose of literature as the opportunity to continue our innate, and in most cases repressed, instinct to question, be curious, and explore what is different from us.  Literary value no longer becomes something granted and measured by institutions, but instead belongs to individuals working together towards new understandings of their relationships in the world.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading                         Literature. Second ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. 253-258.                         Print.

Dasenbrock, Reed Way. “Dow We Write the Text we Read?” Falling into Theory: Conflicting                         Views on Reading Literature. By Richter. Second ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.                         278-288. Print.

Fish, Stanley. “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.” Falling into Theory: Conflicting                         Views on Reading Literature. By Richter. Second ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.                         268-277. Print.

Haas, Angela. “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Traditional of                                     Multimedia Theory and Practice.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 19,                         Number 4. Winter 2007, pp. 77-100. Article.

Richter, David H., eds. "How We Read: Interpretive Communities and Literary Meaning."                         Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. By Richter. Second ed.                         Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. 235-257. Print.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today a User-Friendly Guide, Second Edition. 2nd ed. Hoboken:                         Routledge, 2006. Print.