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At the end of the semester we’ll be writing a long research paper about a particular work or author. This is meant to be an interpretive research paper, meaning you read about what other critics think that author’s work means, and then use those perspectives to help synthesize an argument about the meaning of the work.
However, some students are tempted to write a biography of their author, even though this isn’t meant to be a biographical paper. Often they’ll end up showing links between life experiences and literature: “Hemingway experienced war so he wrote novels about war.”
That’s a legitimate critical approach, but it’s not the only way or even the best way to think about literature. For one thing, it’s the low-hanging fruit of criticism, and it’s hard to say anything original this way. Also, lots of people have written great works about things they didn’t experience. Flannery O’Connor wrote about all kinds of weird and fascinating human experiences while leading about as small and limited a life as it’s possible to imagine. So I’d urge you to resist the temptation to fixate on biography as your primary lens for understanding an author’s work.
I also see papers which rely primarily on interviews with the author. If you want to argue that many mid-career Stephen King novels contain metaphors for addiction, and you find an interview with Stephen King where he says precisely that, you may feel like you have a slam-dunk case. In the final research paper I’ll often see a focus only on interviews with the author, particularly if it’s someone more recent.
But one of the assumptions of academic literary criticism is that authorial intent doesn’t shut out other interpretation. A good reader can find things in the text, or ways of viewing the text, that transcend what the author thinks it means.
In our last discussion we talked about Moby Dick and the various symbols attributed to the whale. Presumably if you interviewed Herman Melville he would not say “oh the whale is capitalism” but that interpretation may lend depth and texture to the reading experience for some readers — even if it falls quite flat for others.
Another classic example is Paradise Lost, the 17th-century epic poem about Satan and the fall of man. Even though the poem is written from a Christian perspective, some subsequent critics — most notably the poet William Blake — have advanced the idea that Satan is a heroic figure. Now, if you were to interview John Milton, who wrote the poem, I think he would strongly disagree with the idea that Satan is its hero, but he’s written with enough depth and texture that some readers can’t help experiencing him as the hero of the poem.
Now come up with your own example. What’s a text that can be read in an interesting way that’s likely contrary to the author’s intent? This doesn’t have to be “classic literature.” For instance, after Eddie Money died I heard a theory that the song “Two Tickets to Paradise” is actually about a murder-suicide. I think it’s very unlikely that Eddie Money had that in mind, but there are things in the text which support that reading. Can you think of another example?