Sunday, September 12, 2010

Pedagogy Entry 9-12-10 Wk 5

In my Sign Analyses over the past couple of weeks I've been noticing a problem. Dr. Davidson picked up on this as well. I have a tendency to move rather quickly into interpretation. I think this is really apparent in my take on Sylvia Plath, but that's I think because I've studied her extensively.  On some level I think I understand why this happens. This could possibly stem from the fact that like many of us,  I've been studying poetry and doing sign/poetry analyses just like this for a number of years. It's obviously an old hat in many ways and I think I may be delving into interpretation because of the fact that these exercises seem so familiar to me now. Obviously the key here is to slow down and really crawl my way through the poem, but I was considering any possible ways to make the exercise a little foreign again. I'm not saying that poetry gives up its signs and secrets easily, but I think its easy for studying poets and scholars to get a little complacent. I don't think that's the right word, but I hope this makes a shred of sense.

1 comment:

  1. Definitely. Plus, you have to practice at it constantly. If you stop doing the work--even for a summer--you lose a little of that fluency. Interpretation is always where we're headed. My sense, though, is that you will make interpretation more interesting and less anxiety-producing if you spend time up front drafting interesting phenomena to analyze.

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