Transitions and Transactions Conference
http://communitycollegelitandcreativewritingconference.com/index.html
http://communitycollegelitandcreativewritingconference.com/index.html
Our proposal
“Making the
Implicit Explicit: Understanding Culture, Cannon, and Concrete in the
Literature Classroom”
by Chey Davis
and Joseph L. Lewis[1]
_____________________________________________________________________
I. A. Richards’
seminal study, Practical Criticism
interrogates the process of literary interpretation by analyzing possible misreadings
of a literary text. What came from his experiment was one of the first attempts
to create a process of objectively reading a text to ascertain meaning.
Considering the process in which a reader objectively ascertains meaning, this
paper seeks to understand the limits of the close reading process. While
Richards among other New Critical theorists have given educators a framework to
teach the interpretive process, we pose the following question, how does a
reader’s cultural background influence the process of interpretive meaning? Is
there a possibility to apply a close reading to a text, yet receive varying
results of interpretation due to variations in culture? Further, how do
“correct” interpretations influence the canonization of a particular genre?
Finally, is the process of canonization based on so-called objective
interpretive meanings?
Our study
questions the relevancy of literature with hopes of engaging a more eclectic
choice of literature in the college classroom. With this, we will consider ways
in which literature instructors can teach literature in a way that allows
students to be both critical consumers of a text and knowledgeable critics of
language before they ever touch a book. Finally, we seek to create a tool that
educates students on some of the perceivable effects of “great literature”
before they encounter that literature, in order that they might experience more
agency in the creation of canonical concretization.
[1] Chey Davis
is an Assistant Professor of English at Delta College in University Center,
Michigan. She received a B.A. in Theater from Michigan State University and
M.A. in English with an emphasis in Critical Theory from Central Michigan
University. Her research and teaching interests include composition, gender
studies, permaculture, and human rights.
Joseph
L. Lewis is an Assistant Professor of English at Delta College in
University Center, Michigan. He received a B.A. in English from Hampton
University and an M.A. in Africana and Literary Studies from New York
University. His research and teaching interests include literature, rhetoric, composition
and critical theory. Specifically, Lewis is interested in how representations
of race, death, anxiety, and fear create cultural sensibilities in the United
States.
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