Evaluating "Literary Shenanigans": Midterm Meta-analysis

For the sake of a fair analysis, I want to start looking at how I’ve grown as a reader since I started at Stritch back in 2006. Coming in, I was in the second stage (Text-Other Texts) of reading. I had a strong English background in high school and took college preparatory coursework in English and Literature my last two years of high school. In those courses, my teachers encouraged me to both connect to the texts and also to connect texts to other things we have read. My senior year, our English Literature class had a thematic approach; we read books that had themes in common and connected the texts based on those themes. We also explicitly discussed the idea of everything being a text and intertextual connections were an expectation for our coursework.
Coming to Stritch and having the background that I did, I was already predisposed to make connections from one text to another. However, I did not have the exposure to different social discourses coming out of high school. While I’m certainly no expert at the varying social discourse around the world now, attending a liberal arts college has made me aware of the other, ‘non-literary’ influences on texts. As I took classes like psychology, philosophy, religion, and government, I began to see familiarities within the texts that I was reading. Probably the best example I can see of this transformation happening in my life would be comparing the times that I read John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. I first read Dunces coming right out of high school, the summer before I entered college. What appealed to me at the time was the characterization of Ignatius and Myrna and the different relationship dynamics that ran throughout the book. However, I re-read the book a couple of summers ago (after my first year of college) and the satire on American politics and society, which had slipped past me practically unnoticed at the time, was particularly funny after having taken some liberal arts courses.
Today, I find myself to be mostly in the Text-World stage (stage three). I owe this a lot to my coursework at Stritch thus far; my professors have encouraged (for the most part) cross-curricular connections, which have encouraged the habit within me. This is a habit that is not just limited to my coursework, but also happens when I’m reading books of enjoyment like the Twilight series or authors of popular fiction like Jodi Picoult. In particular, I find myself connecting philosophical ideas and movements to texts that we are reading in class. Philosophy, much to my surprise, has become something that I enjoy working with and applying to the world around me. In my blog, “Literary Shenanigans”, I use the ideas of Descartes, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to expand on the works of Murakami and Rushdie. “Both of these philosophers [Kierkegaard and Nietzsche] advocate a world that operates in shades of gray instead of black and white, which is what Rushdie advocates for as well” (Literary Shenanigans). I’m curious about philosophy in particular, both because I have minor in the subject area and also have had more coursework in that area than in most other areas. It is a humbling experience to see esoteric ideas being looked at in a semi-concrete fashion in literature for a wider audience to be exposed to (because, let’s face it…not many people read dense philosophy texts in their spare time…).
I also try to bring in class readings that we have done on literary criticism to my blog. The works of Said and Spivak have made appearances in “Literary Shenanigans”. Literary theory adds more layers to looking at texts as well as gives readers multiple lenses to view a text through. In some ways, literary theory can also give a more objective reading of a text. For example, Spivak’s idea on the “subaltern” never being able to be authentically represented by a non-subaltern is something new to me. It adds a rather radical dimension onto the purpose of education. Many people, myself included, originally entered education to voice the plight of those who couldn’t voice it for themselves. As I have come further along as a student and teacher candidate, I have come to see that it does an extreme disservice to speak for others instead of helping them find their voice; not only does no learning occur, but I’m not truly able to represent their experience. Seeing my inability to properly represent people in situations different from mine has helped me to see that education is about helping others discover their inner power instead of an all-knowing individual dispensing knowledge.
I take issue looking at connection formation (referred to in the assignment as “Stages of Reading achieved, one is at the pinnacle of reading development. I would disagree with such a premise. While I believe that making connections to texts is a scaffolded process (if a person has trouble making text-self connections, then they will have problems making connections to text-text and text-world as well), truly meaningful reading connections include connections from all three sections (text-self, text-text, text-world).
As I reader, I try to make connections from all three categories. In my blog entry from 9/11/08 (“A Wild Sheep Chase is SUCH a Wild Goose Chase…), I make connections from all levels. I begin the blog entry by talking about how confusing I find Murakami’s novel to be. “I find myself to be intrigued by the book. I do admit, however, that logic and reason does rule my life, and I have a hard time stepping out of the box of realism, which is essential to understanding Murakami’s Sheep” (Literary Shenanigans). Then, I use a reference from the Matrix to show the dream-conscious binary at work, a text-text connection. Finally, I talk about Descartes and his meditations on consciousness-dream status. “Descartes maintains in the first of his “Meditations of First Philosophy” that the senses can be deceptive (…) while dreaming” (Literary Shenanigans). This blog entry presents a more holistic approach to literature. More connections mean a better understanding for me, the creator of the connections, as well as for my reader, the interpreter of the connections.
Sticking to any one level (text-self, text-text, text-world) means that the focus and the content that I get from each novel is either too narrow or too far away from me. If I spend too much time on connecting texts to myself alone, then I can be missing commentary that the author may be making on their world, not to mention making texts all about me instead of a product of the world in which they were created. However, if I spend too much time on trying to connect the text to the world around me, the text won’t have any concrete meaning for me as an individual, but instead be up in the clouds where it is inaccessible for readers.
My blogs, at times, have a tendency to namedrop. Instead of looking into myself for meaning, I can find myself looking to proven ‘authorities’ to make my argument for me. I need to find a balance in my own analysis of looking inward and outward for meaning of texts. Therefore, instead of reaching for any one single level, I instead want to work toward more holistic connections to texts involving all three levels. For lack of better specific name, I will refer to my goal as the Triangular Approach to connections. Achieving the Triangular Approach on a consistent basis will ensure that I stay in touch with the author’s place in the world and the text’s content as well as validate what I as a reader bring to texts, making me a better reader and teacher in the end.