On first presentations

The first presentations went really well i thought. I thought both groups were very creative in their presentations, although i must admit that the new criticism group might have slightly stole some of my group's thunder since there are some similarities. For this reason I feel I must make it clear that any similarities are purely coincidental and that the script for our presentation was completely written before they presented. Great minds think alike.

I do not like New Criticism. It might be because I have been wading through it all semester in my 371 class. In my estimation of New Criticism (at least what we do in 371, perhaps there are other methods of new criticism that are ok), you miss the forest for the trees. You are so focused on stupid little things like how the color black works throughout the story or why the word splurge comes up so frequently that you miss the big picture. New criticism has the potential to suck any and all enjoyment out of a text, which it has done without fail in 371. Literature should be enjoyed, not ripped apart and analyzed under a microscope, especially when a lot of that analysis tends to be so far fetched and unimportant. I hate it.

I think I'm a psychoanalysis maybe. It seems coincidental that my critic, Julia Kristeva, was a psychoanalyst, and my group presentation is on psychoanalysis, yet in my research I discovered, to my delight, that psychoanalysts get to look at the author and not just discard him like so many other schools of literary criticism. I like this because I still refuse to say that authorial intent has no bearing on a work. new critics will say that we don't know what an author meant, and I say bull, and then they say that we can't ask them so we don't know for sure. We as English majors are not so stupid and infantile that we need an author to come forward in an interview and say "I meant such an such when i wrote this", because if we truly know how to read a work we should be able to figure this out on our own. An author shouldnt insult our intelligence by outlining their intention in a biography. I'm not saying that we can always specifically know what an author meant all the time, but we can usually get close, and often there are several meanings, and often, God forbid, it is just meant to entertain. I would say that more often than not, the most obvious meaning of a work is the one that the author's intent. Thats all for now.