Weekly Response One

“The manipulation of representational devices may create a semblance of reality and allow one to have the impression of gazing through glass, but it is the devices alone that produce that impression, and they alone are what makes literature literary.”

-         Literary Theory page 3

“While practical speech facilitates access to information by making language as transparent as possible, poetic speech contorts and roughens up ordinary language and submits it to what Roman Jakobson called ‘organized violence,’ and it is this roughening up of ordinary language into tortuous ‘formed speech’ that makes poetry poetry rather than a weather report.”

-         Literary Theory page 4

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;”

-      Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds

By William Shakespeare

Question: How exactly can one determine the true meaning of a poem, its point and purpose, if the language is so "roughened" up? Intentional and affective fallacies address this, but whose place is it to say that the author's and readers' personal interpretations are any less valid? Yes, I understand that the way literary text works holds significance in making “literature literary,” but I believe that the author and the readers have a part in that as well.

Shakespeare utilizes his ability to roughen up ordinary language when he says “Love is not love which alters when alteration finds, or bends with the removers to remove…” In relation to the Literary Theory quote, a weather report would have read something along the lines of “Love does not change when the situation calls for it or leave.”  The way Shakespeare uses words allows a picture to be painted, but who can say that the picture is the same for every reader, or holds the same amount of power or significance?

Furthermore, I believe that understanding the period of time of a piece of literature or biographical information of the author adds additional significance to a piece.  Each reader feels differently about historical time periods, personality aspects, etc., that are brought to light when consideration is put towards not only the literary features of a piece, but the personal aspects of the person who created it.