Bits and Bobs... flotsam of an hours thinking

As I left the Union energized by a couple of hours interesting discussion with friends on subjects that ranged from historical novels to spiritual warfare, Biblical hierarchies of authority, corporate corruption and beyond, and faced my blogging responsibility with dread, I couldn't help but attempting to analyze why i faced these opportunities for mental exercise and stimulus in two such completely different attitudes. I finally concluded that i had been going about this lit. crit. stuff in the wrong way, stifling what ought to be a simple exploration of my thoughts by imposing imagined requirements of tone, content and depth.

Browsing my classmates' blogs was a helpful step in arriving at this conclusion. Thank you. :]

So what did I read today? Wimsatt and Beardsley. I loved their direct, no-nonsense approach to correcting what they see as significant errors in approaches to literary criticism. And besides that, they make sense! It really does seem silly to blur the realms of meaning and effectiveness.

Some particularly lucid statements I enjoyed include:
"The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it)." p. 1376

While I am still significantly ignorant as to the majority of the Formalists opinions on interpretation and meaning, this statement would seem to be excellent evidence for my own tentative opinion that there is no single meaning to a work of literature, simply because of this very "independence" mentioned by W. & B.

A few lines down from the previous sentence is this statement: "[The poem] is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge." A few pages later, another sentence struck me as intriguing concerning language: the "internal" meaning of a word "is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture;"

Words and their etymologies have always been fascinating to me. I have been known to say that the thesaurus is my favorite book. Somehow, to find a "real" critic discussing the implications and realities of words as dynamic, with such realities affecting the meanings of poems is affirming of my own vague notions. Again, I return to the assertion that there cannot exist a single "right" meaning to a poem.

Finally, I was pretty tickled with W.'s & B.'s final line and shall pass on their "essay in a nutshell" to the bloggosphere: Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle. :D