Fish talks about interpretive communities being the basis of our meaning of text and also the way we write a text is based upon the community we come from. We do not arbitrarily get meaning from out of the blue it is confided by our literary community. In his article How to recognize a poem when we see one he opens his statement by saying
“I sketched out an argument by which meanings are the
property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free and independent readers
but of interpretive communities that are responsible both for the shape of the
reader’s activities and for the texts those activities produced.”
He states that we know what a poem is since our literary
community which I see as our background tells us what a poem looks like. We get meaning form a poem the same we recognize
it as a poem. We use our background
knowledge of what people put into poems and we analyze it within that
framework.
He gave several examples of how this community works. The one I liked was his example of why we
know what is happening in a classroom when someone raises their hand. During one of his classes a student raised
his hand and started to wave it. He
asked the class what this student was doing they all replied he wanted
permission to speak. They were all in
the same community, the literature class.
If someone was sitting in an elementary classroom then they may say he
needs the bathroom and is asking the teacher to go to the bathroom. The elementary students would be in the
elementary community and have a common meaning.
So the same gesture is seen in schools or academic settings. We all learn these since we are a part of
that community. Our gesture is our text
in this case. Then the meaning we get is
also based on our community. One meaning
is from a college community where if one needs the bathroom we would just get
up and go, but we still need to raise our hand to speak. This
goes back to his first statement:
“interpretive communities that are responsible both for the
shape of the reader’s activities and for the texts”
I would like to know if we are not part of the community who
writes the text, but we still read the text will our meanings be valid? For example, I read poetry but I was never
good at getting the hidden meanings. I
really struggled with poetry in high school and I’m sad to say I never studied
poetry after high school. I felt I was
not part of the literary community.
His interpretation is of meaning in a text is interesting. Our communities teach us things and therefore give us background knowledge and that is where the meaning comes from. However even though people in a shared community share some similar background, I would assume every individual person is different and puts something different in a text. With your part on poetry, I felt the same way growing up. I enjoyed poems but not in an academic setting because sometimes the meanings were to hard to uncover. Although after reading Rosenblatt and her ideas on meaning-making we may not have been that wrong after all.
ReplyDeleteYou both have hit upon the tension between shared and individual meaning. One thing I find interesting is in the definition of community, English class is only one community in which poetry exists. One thing that we might consider is the extent to which we need to help kids identify the norms of different communities.
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