Blog Post 1

After reading My Last Duchess, my perspective of what I thought to be necessary to correctly interpret a piece of literature changed greatly. When it was all said and done I had all but two items on my list change in importance. The two items that did not change were the element that was sixth on the list and which dealt with narration, and the other, was last on the list and spoke to biographical information as it relates to the author. While I rated the necessity of the author’s biographical information in about the middle of the scale, I rated the particulars of the narrator at the top of the list. It seems necessary to me that we understand who the narrator is, the narrator's role, and what if any underlying meaning there might be in the narrators placement in the work. Other items that ranked high on my list was the understanding of vocabulary used in the vernacular at the time the piece of work was completed. Initially I thought that context alone would be enough to decipher the intent of the author, but then quickly understood that certain words and phrases can mean something that is very different than what we understand them to be, therefore rendering context in the pursuit of interpretation completely useless.  Contemporary cultural context and modern cultural context were the items on the list that I had the greatest change of heart about. I ranked both a number one and by the end of the exercise ranked both as five on the list. I believe that a work should be all encompassing of the subject that it is speaking to regardless of any past or present cultural context.

I definitely think that I am steering towards reader-response criticism. In my opinion it allows for an all-encompassing analysis of a work. While I am not completely sold one way or the other, but it seems to me that some of the other methods of analysis seem to be more pointed in their approach and might not allow for an analysis to be done with one hundred percent objectivity, I could be wrong.