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Part 1, Listening Comprehension
SECTION A MINI-LECTURE
Good morning! In today's lecture we shall discuss what meaning is in literary, works. When we read novels, poems, etc. , we invariably ask ourselves a question—that is, what does the writer mean here? In other words, we are interested in finding out the meaning. But meaning is a difficult issue in literature. How do we know what a work of literature is supposed to mean or what its real meaning is? I'd like to discuss three ways to explain what meaning is.
No. 1, meaning is what is intended by the author. ( Q1)
No. 2, meaning is created by and contained in the text itself.
And No. 3 , meaning is created by the reader.
Now, let's take a look at the first approach—that is, meaning is what is intended by the author. Does a work of literature mean what the author intended to mean? And if so, how can we tell? If all the evidence we have is the text itself and nothing else, we can only guess what ideas the author had according to our understanding of literature and world. In order to have a better idea of what one par¬ticular author means in one of his works; I suggest that you do the following:
First, go to the library and read other works by the same author. ( Q2)
Second get to know something about what sort of meanings seem to be common in literary works in that particular tradition and .at that time. In other words, we need to find out what the literary trends were in those days. ( Q3)
And last, get to know what were the cultural values and symbols of the time. I guess you can understand the author's meaning much more clearly after you do the related background research.
Now, let's move on to the second approach to meaning—that is, meaning is created by and con¬tained in the text itself. Does the meaning exist in the text? Some scholars argue that the formal prop¬erties of the text like grammar, diction, uses of image and so on and so forth, contain and produce the meaning, ( Q4) so that any educated or competent reader will inevitably come to more or less the same interpretation as any other. As. far as I am concerned, the meaning is not only to be found in the literary traditions and grammatical conventions of meaning but also in the cultural codes which have been handed down from generation to generation. ( Q5) So when we and other readers, inclu¬ding the author as well, are said to come up with similar interpretations. That kind of agreement could be created by common traditions and conventions of usage, practice and interpretation. In other words, we have some kind of shared bases for the same interpretation, but that does not mean that readers agree on the meaning all the time. In different time periods, with different cultural perspec¬tives, including class, belief and world view, readers, I mean competent readers, can arrive at dif¬ferent interpretations of tdxts: ( Q6) So meaning in the text is determined by how readers see it. It is not contained in the text in a fixed way.
Now, the third approach to meaning—that is, meaning is created by the reader. ( Q7) Does the meaning then exist in the reader's response? In a sense, this is inescapable. Meaning exists only in so far as it means to someone , and literary works are written in order to evoke sets of responses in the reader. This leads us to consider three essential issues.
The first is—meaning is social—( Q8) that is, language and conventions work only a shared meaning and our way of viewing the world can exist only a shared or sharable. Similarly, when we read a text, we are participating in social or cultural meaning, so a response to a piece of literary work is not merely an individual thing but is part of culture and history.
Second, meaning is contextual. If you change the context, you often change the meaning.
And last, meaning requires reader competency. ( Q9) Texts constructed as literature have their own ways of expressions or sometimes we say styles. And the more we know of them, the more we can understand the text. Consequently, there is in regard to the question of meaning; the matter of reader competency as it is called the experience and knowledge of comprehending literary texts. Your professors might insist that you practice and improve competency in reading and they might also insist that you interpret meaning in the context of the whole work. But you may have to learn other compe¬tencies too. For instance, in reading Mulk Raj Anand's The Untouchables' you might have to learn what the social structure of India was like at that time, what traditions of writing were in practice in India in the early 1930s, what political, cultural and personal influences Mulk Raj Anand came un¬der when constructing the imaginative world of the short novel. ( Q10) Ok , you may see that this i¬dea that meaning requires competency in reading in fact brings us back to the historically situated un¬derstandings of an author and his works as we mentioned earlier in this lecture, to different conven¬tions and ways of reading and writing and to the point that meaning requires a negotiation between cultural meanings across time, culture, class, etc. As readers, you have in fact acquired a good deal of competency already but you should acquire more. The essential point of this lecture is that mean¬ing in literature is a phenomenon that is not easily located, that meaning is historical, social and de¬rived from the traditions of reading and thinking and understanding of the world that you are educated about. Thank you for your attention!
