Finis origine pendet. (The end hangs on the beginning.)
So good news with Tyson early on...a short introduction! Less than 10 pages. You might be tempted to skip over this chapter, but that would be a mistake. (Certainly Mortimer Adler in his How to Read a Book would think so.) There are several terms Tyson explains that we will be using all year, such as authorial intention, critic, reading "with the grain" or "against the grain," and others. She also explains the way she lays out the book. You're going to hear the word lens a lot this year. Each literary theory is like trying on a pair of different glasses. We've all read The Great Gatsby, but because we're all different people with different experiences, our readings of Gatsby were all different from each other's. (In fact, my reading of Gatsby in my forties is quite different from that in my thirties, let alone when I was a teenager.) Different things jump out at us; we notice different patterns. It has been argued that there isn't simply one Gatsby, but as many Gatsbys as readers. It all depends on what lens is being used. Formal literary criticism is nothing more than a highly organized collection of lenses pointed in the same general direction. So don't think of the literary critic just as someone who says thumbs-up/thumbs-down on a piece of art, although that sometimes will happen. We're interested in how the author creates meaning, intentionally and unintentionally. So for this first posting (after you've read the first chapter, of course) I want you to consider some of the following questions: 1. What do I suppose is the function of literature? 2. What do I look for in a literary work? 3. What do I think is the purpose of writing about literature? 4. What have I read that has made me stop to admire its quality? What have I read that has made me stop to bewail its lack of quality? (Try to be specific!) And what do we mean by quality, anyhow?
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