I Think I Get It-Almost

I thoroughly enjoyed the readings from Peter Barry's Beginning Theory. For the first time the concept of literary criticism made sense. I especially appreciated the background Barry provided in the first chapter which examined the rise of English studies. F. D. Maurice's concept that the "middle class represents the essence of Englishness...so middle-class education should be peculiarly English, and therefore should centre on English literature" (13), made sense. I also found the Ten tenets of liberal humanism explained the why of criticism; particularly tenet ten which states in part, "The job of criticism is to interpret the text, to mediate between it and the reader" (19). Finally, something simply stated that helped me understand the why. I also found the list of recurrent ideas in critical theory (33) to be concrete and altered my previous negative view of literary criticism. As a writer, I found chapter two to be particularly enlightening (and dare I say it-entertaining). I was finally beginning to "get it"; structuralist chickens and liberal humanist eggs has opened new ways for me to approach my own writing. Saussure's linguistic studies emphasized that "no word can be defined in isolation from other words. The definition of any given word depends upon its relation with other 'adjoining' words" (41). I am going to be giving a lot of thought to the implications that there are no intrinsic fixed meanings in language. The stop and think exercise (55) is what every writer struggles with and drove home Barths's contention that all language is coded. Barry took a very difficult concept for me and made it at least approachable. Then I read Morse Peckham's "The Problem of Interpretation" in which he states, "Just as the meaning of any pattern is not immanent, so the subsumption of any pattern by a matrix is not immanent. That subsumption, it needs to be emphasized, is a matter of determination, and a determination is a judgement that the response generated is an appropriate response. Hence the subsumption of a pattern by a matrix is a judgment of appropriateness" (108). What does that mean? Peckham is what I thought literary criticism was before I read Barry.