personal responses: how was it for you?

[jbor]

lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> Teachers of literature, often, cannot
>> be bothered to engage with critical theory; they promote personal response
>> on that basis, which is where I was coming from originally. This, I suppose,
>> is what I consider dishonest because self-serving. Students might deliver
>> imaginative readings against the grain; such analyses might be considered
>> 'interesting' or dismissed as 'irrelevant'.
> 
> I think an extreme subjectivism has little value. Moby-Dick, I like to
> say, is not about my mother and her little black cat.

But the point might be that literature is being used to teach things other
than what the text is "about": literacy, for example, or a new language. Or
it might be a strategy of therapy or grief counselling of some kind, and
that what's important are the values and attitudes which are drawn from the
text. Literature has thematic content as well as literal content, which is
what makes it relevant and personal. No kid is ever going to say that
Moby-Dick is *about* your mother and her cat, but she or he, after reading
that particularly novel, might finally open up and start to discuss the way
Mum was always having to chase that damn cat until one day the both of them
ran under a bus, and so begin to come to terms with the death of a parent.
Depends on your purpose.

best