Class Summary March 10

Today in class, we started with some more reader response theory. We discussed the “Political/Ideological” view and the “Post-Structuralist” view. The political/ideological view says that the text has inclusions that are intrinsically ideological and that in turn the readers themselves interpret with ideological convictions. Thus, readers must perform “critical readings” to demystify ideologies. For the post-structuralist view, (like that of Derrida, Lacan, etc.), the meaning of a text is not found IN the text, but instead through the play of language and nuances of conventions, in which the reader is an active participant. Within this view’s discussion, we talked about Stanley Fish, the herd mentality, Marx’s base and superstructure, and Aristotle’s idea of art being a “mimesis”. From this Aristotle-derived idea of art, we talked about photography and different ways that art can present reality; staying close to sensory perception (Renaissance art) or interpreting the nature of reality (such as cubism). We then began to talk about aspects of postmodernism, such as fragmentation and the ability of a text to be deconstructed, or have its implicit meanings unearthed. While in the postmodern discussion now, we began to discuss Calvino’s novel. The class was questioned as to whether this was really a novel, and we talked about how it differs from an epic, poem, or tale. Robert helped to give us a summary of the numbered chapters, listing off all of the characters of the numbered chapters and the main plot of the readers finding the publisher and discovering author/editor/publishing fraud. It was mentioned that the frame story’s genre is that of a whodunit or detective-like story. Through Calvino’s novel, he prompts a question: How important is the plot to a novel? In postmodern literature, there are frequently no unifying themes or bigger picture formed. Calvino constantly reminds the reader that they are present and that all in the novel is imagined. We learned about Bertolt Brecht, who was a Marxist playwright and writer whose plays always kept the audience aware of the imagined. He did not want audiences to be swayed by propaganda—he was always looking out for the proletariat audience. The actors in his plays would frequently interact directly with the audience, breaking down false walls. After this, we discussed about how Calvino takes on ten or eleven different voices, such as in “Looks down in the gathering shadow” versus “Without fear of wind or vertigo”. A writer has to be very sophisticated to write in different voices (Milan Kundera was also noted in this discussion).