Finally, the reader is allowed to participate in the critical analysis of a text. However, the reader-response theory (outlined in Tyson’s textbook) is more complex than just analyzing how the reader (or you) feels about the text; in fact, there are a lot of formal considerations that go into making a successful reader response analysis. In Tyson’s chapter “Reader Response Criticism,” one of the types of reader response is affective stylistics. This category of reader response focuses on how the mechanics of the text shape reader response. Affect stylistics argues that “the text consists of the results it produces, and those results occur within the reader” (Tyson 167). I found affect stylistics appealing because it seemed to balance authorial intention—or the actual writer’s craft—with reader response and interpretation. Fish writes that affect stylistics should ask: “How does the reader of this sentence make meaning?” (167). Using textual clues, the reader can then make claims about the text and analyze how their reading experience was shaped by the text. While this technique of mapping “the pattern by which a text structures the reader’s response while reading” allows for active and close reading, I found that combining affect stylistics with social reader response would produce a more rounded argument (Tyson 168). Social reader response considers the “interpretive community” and evaluates how institutional assumptions influence the text (Tyson 176). If one were to combine affect stylistics with social reader response, they would produce an argument that not only looks to the text for structural clues but goes beyond the text to analyze historical or social context. Therefore, the reader response is a robust analysis of the textual craft and the social implications that surround the text. After reading about reader response, I still wonder whether it is the reader or the author who creates meaning—what came first, the reader or the meaning? Is the text completely reliant on a reliable reader to be interpreted and created into the meaningful analysis? Is there such a thing as reading for fun, or must there always be meaning and connection to the self? 

Professor Charles’ essay “Meeting ‘Me’: Charles Dickens’s Moments of Self-Encounter” uses both affect stylistics and social response to craft a complex yet clear argument about Dickens. Reading her essay helped me understand how formal linguistics and stylistic choices help the reader close read and make meaning of a text. She active includes the reader into her critical essay and does so by setting up the reader response with close analysis of the text and sentence level. In addition, she addresses the reader’s responsibility to decode Dickens’s language and his social impacts on the culture at the time. Her evidence, which goes directly back to the text (affect) and the greater context (social response) continuously points towards the greater theme of reader experience and what kind of atmosphere Dickens is trying to create. Moving forward with my own critical analysis, I hope to combine affect stylistics with a social response. 

In Le Thi Diem Thuy’s novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Thuy begins the book with the following paragraph: (pg. 3)

Reading this text using an affect stylistic reader response, one would notice the repetitious use of colors to describe places, such as “yellow house,” “Green apartment,” “Red Apartment,” and “Forty-ninth and Orange.” This childish way of identifying places and the use of the past tense then leads the reader to believe that our narrator is a child looking back on her past experiences. Time and place are now established, but the textual analysis is needed to grasp what the text wants us to feel. The narrator withholds names, as she only gives pronouns for the first seven lines. The ambiguous “we” sets the reader up to believe that the “we” group was always the same, but “we” never stood for a complete family or group dynamic. Ma was across the water in Vietnam, and the child was with her dad and four men. This observational yet delayed response to her situation gives the reader insight into the narrator’s subconscious and way of processing information. We now know that this novel is going to first overload our senses, like with the colors, and then sneak in a blunt, but profound statement that changes our course of thinking and feeling about the previously mentioned sensory images. This contrast between image and statement speaks to the emotional and intellectual minds of the readers. Also, diction such as “we eventually washed ashore” implies that the journey was tiresome and that they washed up like debris. Using a social reading response, one would understand that immigrating to American from Vietnam was common in the 1970s and that the immigrant experience in America was not simple. The child narrator implies that she washed ashore as if she drifted there—unwanted by the Americans and far from home. Her life as a Vietnam refugee has just begun in this first paragraph, but the reader is keyed into cultural details about the immigrant experience. This reading now gives the readers context for why the child narrator may be describing locations in colors: because everything in this new world seems unreal and strange. Moreover, affect stylistics and social reader response can work well together to identify meaning from the language itself and the cultural context. 

Works Cited

Lê Thi Diem Thúy. The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Anchor Books, 2016.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2015

 

When considering the deconstructive method of literary criticism, I immediately imagine a never-ending food chain in which a string of organisms (both micro and macro-sized) evolve as life goes on. I think that deconstructive theory relates to an ever-growing ecosystem in the sense that language, meaning, and semantic codes are always tumbling forward, building off one another, and leading to new life or interpretation. In Tyson’s chapter on deconstruction, she uses terms such as undecidability, dissemination, and plurality to describe how language is always changing. I find it helpful how Tyson defines undecidability as meaning “that reader and text alike are inextricably bound within the language’s dissemination of meanings” (Tyson, 245). Dissemination is defined as the action of spreading, diffusing, or distributing, and I believe that a deconstructive outlook on language would view the text as constantly diffusing and expanding across the page and the world. In analyzing a text with a deconstructive lens, one must accept that “the ‘meaning’ of the text is really an indefinite, undecidable, plural, conflicting array of possible meanings and that the text, therefore, has no meaning” (Tyson, 245). Once we can accept that language is a messy, slippery form of expression, we can allow the text to unfold in an unforced and organic way. This natural progression of a text, or dissemination, can also be applied to one’s mental and spiritual state. For example, Tyson writes that “our mental life consists not of concepts — not of solid, stable meanings — but a fleeting, continually changing play of signifiers” (Tyson, 238). Moreover, I am interested in how a deconstructive lens can be applied to both literature and a state of mind, and how this affects the structural unfolding of a text. Also, I want to explore texts that use deconstruction, rather than a formal and “meaningful” structure, to celebrate words and breath life into the beautiful, ambiguous mess of linguistics. 

Roland Barthes writes in her essay “From Work to Text” that “the work is a fragment of a substance” (Barthes, 156). This ambiguous and abstract concept works so well to describe the deconstructive theory. Each word is a fragment of an essence, and this essence is neither absolute or tangible. Therefore, language is simply an organism that has feasted on the previous organism to gain depth and movement (going back to my food chain analogy). A work of art does not have to have a concrete meaning. This is especially present in Olena Kalytiak Davis’ poem “The Unbosoming.” Davis creates a long, associative string of nonsensical words that all recall auditory connections with previous words. Her poem is highly musical and contains so much consonance and assonance that the language simple takes over any possible meaning. I would argue that her poem completely deconstructs language. Her use of sonic wordplay propels the poem forward. Her reliance on language’s instability also highlights the tension between language and expected meaning. Deconstruction aims to sustain tension by leaving the text unresolved, and Davis defers inherent meaning by stringing together impressionistic and musical words. The poem unfolds like a stream-of-consciousness that is free from any critical or structural judgment. The words and images work as associative sequences that debunk the poet’s illusion of control over the poem. She truly embraces the messy and decentralizing nature of deconstructionism by creating “nonsense” words. 

Overall, her poem would be celebrated by deconstruction critics because they would argue that her nonsensical diction and lack of narrative control is a testament to literature’s continuous journey towards nothingness. Davis writes: “Lord, I was taken under. I Repeat /Myself, Lord. I re-peat myself as the way back, the way back to Myself” (5-6). She is taken under by the power of language. The limits of language and self-expression are materialized by her poem. The narrator swallows sounds and images as if they have agency over us as if they will keep moving regardless of whether humans find meaning in them. After applying deconstructionism to “The Unbosoming” I understand how existentialists are constantly questioning whether there is a fixed existence. In reading Davis’ poem, which is a great manifestation of deconstructionist thinking, I was able to forget about authorial intention, structural form, and thematic meaning to simply follow the words and they grow and change. 

 

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” Image Music Text. Translated by Stephan Heath. Fontana Press, 1977.

Davis, Olena Kalytiak “The Unbosoming” 

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2015

 

After reading Critical Theory chapter 5 “New Criticism” and T.S. Eliot’s “Traditional and the Individual Talent” I considered the complicated relationship between art and the individual, specifically whether or not they can be separated. I think that it is impossible to completely depersonalize a piece of creative art. Therefore, I struggle to completely accept the New Criticism theory. I think that the new critic’s fascination with paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension results in compelling and complex arguments. However, I prefer to contextualize these abstract contradictions using more concrete methods. As an English major, I have struggled to imagine the real-life effects that literature has on the world, often leading me to wonder whether all of literature’s great questioning is done in vain. And while the new critics would argue that close reading stylistic and imagistic choices help us gain a better understanding of the representative truth or greater theme, I think one must balance both an affective fallacy and intentional fallacy to create a meaningful, and well-judged interpretation. Because as much as new critics want to believe that art can stand on its own, there will always be the authors’ and readers’ intrinsic biases. Therefore, I struggle to agree on the new critic’s idea of organic unity, because the new critic also believes that the art is unchanging and that each interpretation should have closure. Despite using organic unity to show harmony within a piece, the new critic still adheres to strict structures, such as analyzing form, language, and objects, instead of focusing on the natural movement or ever-changing essence of a piece. The new critic idealistically categorizes everything as a meaningful paradox that points towards greater meaning, but this alienates the reader and makes art less personal, and therefore (in my opinion) less meaningful. Art and literature are like a mirror, and in the end, everyone yearns to learn something about themselves. This is often accomplished when great art causes the audience to experience a metaphysical or artistic self-projection. I would like to further investigate the particular idea of organic unity and how the connotation of “organic” pushes against the new criticism theory. 

I analyzed Cecily Brown’s abstract painting “The River’s Tent Is Broken” using the new criticism lens, but then I also approached the painting in a more organic way. In order to show how new criticism could be improved upon by considering the natural connotation of the word “organic,” such as how organic matter often decomposes or grows as time progresses, I will address the interpretative possibilities of this painting when freed from the constraints of being a new critic. 

• New critic analysis: The painter chose the symbolic colors blue and beige to allude to the unattainable and surreal connection between heaven and humans. The heavens being the blue, sky-like color and the humans being the abstract, beige shapes. The warm and cool tones of the painting juxtapose the tangible and intangible creations in our world. This painting uses the malleable medium of oil paints in order to tie all these themes together and illustrate the interconnectedness of man, nature, and the uncontrollable. 
• Alternative, “organic” analysis: The painter, Brown, has created an oil painting in which the observer is bound to see a reflection of herself in the painting. Even though the shapes are abstract and ambiguous, our brains recognize the human shapes in the painting and immediately make personal, bodily connections. Therefore, the reader is automatically placed into the painting—going against the new critic theory of objectification. In addition, the painting is always changing because it embodies different stories depending on how you piece each part together. Abstract art is meant to change based on someone’s personal perspectives. Brown describes her work as taking from the classical expressionism but creating a “new aesthetic reality.” In this way, she conforms to T.S. Elliot’s idea that there is perhaps no individuality, but there are moments of reinventing the past in fresh, and timeless ways. Both artists embrace history and use it as a springboard to create new ideas that mesh with the past in order to create a dynamic present.

https://gagosian.com/artists/cecily-brown/

“The River’s Tent Is Broken” 

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 13 Oct. 2009

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2015