Hey, Literature Majors...some help here?

[Iolaus]

And yet, my last English prof told me that the symbolism that I interpret is the symbolism that matters. That is, what the author intended is not as important as what I think the author intended.

My last English prof was full of something.

Yeah, I think that's their catch-all excuse for having created the "interpretation monster" in the first place; that way, they can justify liking something that everyone else thinks is crap, by saying "Everyone gets something different out of it."

Seriously though, I think this class isn't about interpreting specific works, so much as learning how to read a text in detail, to train us to be aware of these things like repetition and contrasts, not having to do the rigorous dissection I'm doing now, but to let the stuff register in our brains as we read, rather than just skiming the surface and judging the work on first impressions.

[Andrew Breecher]

All right, I'd love to use this method to "analyse" David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest - half of which is endnotes (some entire chapters are endnotes, and some endnotes have footnotes).

Since writing that novel, Wallace has consistently used end/foot notes in all of his writing, both fiction and non-fiction. When asked in an interview why he chose to use that particular device ad nauseam, he replied that he'd just discovered the endnote function in Microsoft Word and started playing with it.

And yet, in a literature class, one might start to ascribe "real" meaning to his use of endnotes. (In retrospect, after having re-read this 1,000-page novel several times, there is some purposeful use to the endnotes: any of the chapters or long passages of text are flashback sequences.)

Andrew.