A Little Food for Thought.....

D.H. Lawrence was quoted as saying "Trust the Tale, not the Teller". I sat for a while and thought to myself, 'how are we not to trust the one who told'? It then came to me that what he was getting at is that every individual in this world will read that tale and it will be something totally different to each person. I think that this is one of the major themes in this class. We are all to read something that then make something of that text, and not every person is going to walk into class each day with the same exact ideas and same exact reading of literature. How we interpret things is a huge theme of literary criticism as well as American Literature.

That brings me to my next thought, and that is simply how far do we read into each text we are assigned? Through all of the historical, psychological, and fairy tale ideas, I think that each person can read as far into something as they need to. It goes back to the different ways people interpret readings. Those are a couple of very interesting thoughts that were brought up in class on September 5th.

An example of the way that different people interpret things is little book we read called Daisy Miller. This book could be taken in so many different directions. I found it to be quite humerous. I thought that Daisy Miller might have been the Paris Hilton of her day. Very flirtatious, yet stupid and vain at the same time! I think that if there was a picture of Daisy Miller in a magazine, she would have been quite comparable to one of Miss Hilton! That is my interpretation of her, and I am sure that some would agree with me and some would not. That is just the beauty of words on a page. They are what we make them!