Post-Small Discussion Blog

In preparation for last week's small discussion groups, I read the text not one or two times, but three. I needed to in order to find the answers to some of the prompted questions. I went through all of them just to get a feel for the answers to each, but focused on four questions in particular. Using these questions, I combed through the text more thoroughly than usual. My questions concerned use of foreshadowing, Catholicism, and Southern Gothic literature. In order to fully answer these questions, I had to look for every occurrence of, say, foreshadowing. Usually I would read over a short story or poem just once and try to remember what it was about as we prepared to discuss it in class.

Aside from more thoroughly reading through the text this week, I also looked up secondary information to help me answer the prompted questions, especially for the foreshadowing and religious aspects. Using those secondary sources helped me greatly in understanding the story on several deeper levels.

From this exercise, I feel I learned how to more closely read literature. When we, as students, are required to depend only on ourselves for truly understanding the texts, simply reading a story once over will not do. There are so many more ideas out there, and utilizing the information available helps to open up even more questions and helps readers understand even more context. I also learned that no matter how hard you try, one person can never think of every interpretation for one story. I believe that even if someone has studied one text their whole life, they still cannot know what every reader will uncover themselves. That's the beauty of interpretation. Lastly, I relearned (as we've already known this, but it was simply reiterated) that no matter how hard we try as literary critics, there are some things about a story that only the author will ever know and that's part of the reason that literary criticism exists. What the author leaves out, even the smallest of information, can result in a multitude of speculation, dissertations, and hair-pulling frustration.

I found this discussion much more insightful than our regular discussions because we had the whole class time to discuss our story in particular and because we only had this one story to read for the whole week, which allowed much more time to read, reread, and re-reread the text in order to understand it better.