BCC Composition 102
Professor Jay Kratz
Interpretation
In understanding what’s meant by “interpretation” or “analysis,” it’s important to distinguish it from summary:
Summary repeats the basic events of a story or poem. It deals only with the denotative meaning of language.
Interpretation/Analysis questions, uncovers, and evaluates. It addresses not only what happens, but also why things happen as they do, and what the significance of those events might be.
It’s fundamentally important to know the basic events of a story or poem, and the denotative meaning of every word in it. But, our work doesn’t stop there. Art isn’t just straightforward or literal. It works by suggesting in addition to saying things outright. So it’s up to us to excavate for those hidden, merely suggested meanings.
Our text usefully provides a set of concrete strategies for interpretation that I’m going to summarize here.
Ask Questions:
About the motivation and values of characters, about the meaning of images and symbols, about the writer’s attitude toward the characters, about the form of a poem, about the structure of a story, about the dialogue of a play.
Look for Patterns and Connections:
As you answer the questions above, and explore the details of a story or poem, certain patterns and/or connections between ideas and different parts of the story will emerge. Look for those patterns; they’ll accumulate into the story’s larger meaning.
Considering Multiple Perspectives:
Try on different perspectives, each with a different set of priorities, as you consider the different meanings a story or poem might have. How might your poem look from a woman’s perspective? From a man’s? From the perspective of a Native American, African American, or Asian American…? From the perspective of someone living in poverty? One of those possible meanings may present itself as better than the rest because it “fits”—it better explains and unifies the many parts of your story or poem.
Reversing Perspective:
Each perspective has it’s own set of priorities—its own notions of what’s important. Try inverting the values/priorities of the perspectives you’ve tried on. For instance, if you’ve read a poem from the perspective of someone for whom God is centrally important, try reading the poem again from a secular perspective.
Shifting Attention among Details:
If you’ve focused on a detail or set of related details that don’t finally lead you anywhere, try shifting your focus. For instance, reading the story of Genesis in the Bible, you may want to focus on the apple. But if this focus doesn’t pay off, shift your attention to the serpent…
Consider Contexts:
The context of a story or poem is the bigger picture of which it’s a part. Any story or poem can have multiple contexts. For instance, you might consider the author (her larger body of work, and biography) as one context for a poem, and the poem’s genre (all the poems of the same kind—i.e. lyric poems) as another. You might want to look at a poem’s historical and cultural contexts (i.e. the cultural assumptions made about women at the time the poem was written), or the aesthetic theories (like Romanticism or Modernism) that informed the way the poem was constructed. Each context will give you a different window on the meaning of a poem—a different way of framing and understanding it.