1.
I believe all of the approaches
that McMahan presents are very relevant, and they are key to owning a full set
of “literacy tools”. However, the most appealing or intriguing approach for me
is the Historical approach, and of the historical approaches, the cultural
approach is most appealing. This is most appealing to me because of my general
interest in history, politics, business and society in general. Also, it is
very useful in these subjects for analytic purposes. For example, using the
historical approach we can look at the ideology, conduct, way of living,
scientific perspectives of those before us, and most importantly how they
speculated future events and facts. We can compare their speculation to what we
know factually happen after their time period. This is useful to use because we
can compare it to our own current speculation and can give us insight into what
we currently believe and speculate. To me this is invaluable because it help
ground us, and ensure that we constantly question our current believes.
2. I can analyze “The Red Wheel Burrow” by William Carlos
Williams using the historical perspective. Although the “The Red Wheel Burrow”
is a mere 15 word poem, the time period and the poem itself tell a lot about
the authors work. For example, the time period the author lived in: 1883-1963.
The fact that the author wrote the poem in 1923 and the setting takes place on
a farm which can tell us that unless most likely the Red Wheel Burrow was the
means to accomplishing the production on the farm at that time. We can tell
this because some during the authors time period the means of wheel burrow as a
main piece of equipment was still common place. The setting is most likely a
farm because of the presence of chickens. However, it is important to note that
another person interpretation could be completely different then mine.
Thanks Nicholas.
ReplyDeleteAs I'm sure you can guess, I agree that a full literary toolkit is invaluable if you want to read intelligently and with insight. I'm quite attracted to the Cultural Criticism approach myself. The value of it, as you've said is that since it seems obvious that no poem or story or text of any kind just appeared out of nowhere, context must matter. But one difficulty of Cultural Criticism is that we can never know the full context, much less understand it, which is why some literary critics argue that we should stick to what we CAN know: the text itself.
Your analysis of "The Red Wheelbarrow" seems to me to emphasize this. Without knowing a lot more about William Carlos Williams and what his daily life looked like and where he lived and what life was like in there in the 1920s and what kind of books he had read and what kind of songs he had heard and what ideas were popular and influential at that time and a whole lot of other stuff you just don't have much to say that isn't pure speculation.
I'm not saying that to suggest that you did a bad job on this assignment (you didn't) but to say that Cultural Criticism requires a whole lot of research to do well.
Thanks for the feedback. It gives me more to think about when using this approach. I would have to agree with you about the research required and the speculation being less adequate. This approach, being research intensive is not a good match for this course (which is non research based). Relying on text is the best method we have.
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