Above all else that I learned about in this class, the connections made back to authors were by far the most profound. In other classes before this the author was never ignored, but was usually only mentioned as a context for the historical time period and how the mentality of the general people was influenced at the time. In this class we looked into the author as an extension of their work, allowing what we knew about them to leak into the themes we could extrapolate from their writing. It started off in an unavoidable fashion, as Walden was autobiographical which made it hard to avoid bringing the author up. But other stories such as The Importance of Being Earnest brought up discussions about homosexuality that could be heavily supported with background knowledge on Oscar Wilde, as well as similar discussions with Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf. An author, their personality, their lives, and when and where they live(d) all have a huge impact on the theorycraft that can come up relating to their stories. An author and their identity can’t be separated from their work and still allow for the full scope of their artistic vision.
The second thing I took out of the class the most is related to the fluidity of text. The easiest place to see this is in our in class group discussions, where we’re almost always given enough time to come up with multiple theories for what certain things in stories can mean. As an example, in the discussions for A Christmas Carol, each group had to discuss the symbolism of a different object or theme. My group did light, and there were multiple places throughout the story that supported the idea of light equaling good and darkness equaling bad, in simple terms. But as we looked deeper, there were multiple places where this theme could be looked into deeper than that. When the light shows up, where it does so, where the darkness is in relation to the light, how much of it there is. While there’s plenty of evidence for each of these being intentional symbolism, there might be a scene in which, for example, darkness engulfing light could represent Scrooge becoming more unhappy or making someone else unhappy, or both. This one group discussion wasn’t the extent of this fluidity of course, every reading and class discussion was firmly rooted in this idea, especially the discussions. The class discussions were almost always people going back and forth having different interpretations for what a scene meant or supporting a theory already brought up by someone else. One of these that stuck in my mind the most was the one we had on Through the Looking Glass where we were comparing it Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where we flipflopped between saying it was the same and completely different in its structure. The stories being part of the same series by the same author added to the discussion, showing how the text’s own merits added exclusions to the interpretations we could make purely off of the author alone.