Looking over my prospectus, my thesis, and the list of responses I have written so far this term fills me with an odd mix of shame and dread. I hate most everything I have written for the class, they feel like a mix of random bits of nonsense I threw together to complete an assignment or glimpses of the inside of my head that I’d rather not have shared.
It is odd, but I find myself rather dearly missing writing lit papers that were shaped by differing lenses of literary criticism.
(And yes, I know “Reader Response Criticism” is a style of Lit Crit, Phenomenology and what-not, but it is possibly my least favorite style.)
Looking over my prospectus for my long essay it just feels like so much random rambling. I’d rather be looking at it as a Structuralist (looking at the signs and semiotics of Jack Gilbert’s piece) or as a Formalist (looking at the individual words, the shape and sound of them) or as a Historicist (what does the work say within the context of the author’s life and when and where it was written). Something, somewhere, with a lens that adds a bit more formality to the paper.
I tend to dislike Reader Response criticism because the works often generate no response within me. Poetics in particular often fail to arouse any sort of reply in me. Or, what response I do have, is utterly unrelated to the poem or the context surrounding it; a sequence or images that my brain looks at and says, “Nah. We aren’t going to even try to relate those images to one another. We aren’t drunk enough to handle that level of cognitive dissonance.”
On the pieces I do have a response to… I have a very broken view of the world, I don’t like revealing it. I don’t like writing about my more visceral responses because I prefer people not to mix up my academic writing with horror fiction. I prefer not to show, as Stephen King put in when writing on horror, the swarm of hungry alligators swimming around just beneath the surface.
Which isn’t the only reason I prefer other lens of critique to “Reader Response”, they just seem more practical to me as a writer. I can never predict how someone will respond to my writing, but looking at writing from more formal standpoints reveals a lot more (in my opinion) about the craft of the writing. Formalism is entirely about the craft, entirely about the words and the usage of them. Structuralism about the signs and semiotics, about the connotations hidden in the words, and what semiotic patterns might mean across a work or across a body of work. Blah blah blah…
Plus I like the research aspect, researching what has been written in the lit crit fields before, looking at alternative viewpoints to a work outside of my own (because my own view of the world is often not very pleasant or enjoyable).
Or maybe I just work up bitter today and what I need is chocolate, caffeine, and a strong drink.