Hey guys,
I'm mostly posting this a s a summery of my SCD 3, in the hopes you can validate my thoughts and tell me that I managed to say something worth while, perhaps if I accomplished this I might spark some thoughts of yours.
I was absolutely drawn in immediately by Killingsworth's work, "Appeals through Tropes" as soon as we read it for class. It seemed to me that the major process Killingsworth was working through in his text was mapping how we interpret and process tropes, because they are based in the abstract. A major claim he makes in how we do this especially in metaphor is based in a sort of self-reference, interpretation by means of embodiment: "Lakeoff and Johnson are convinced that the brain itself functions metaphorically. And since human beings live by their wits, metaphor- by connecting abstractions and unfamiliar things to the root experience of the body- provides the underpinning for all thinking" (Killingsworth 123). Killingsworth goes on to support this idea by breaking metaphors into ratios which usually use some bodily experience to make sense of an abstractions, Wind/ autumn = Breath/ human life etc. This idea of self-referential interpretation led me to a long strand of thoughts. What does it mean if we interpret figurative language and by extension all parts of literature by placing ourselves in the center of them? If you think about how you experience novels or movies for that matter you are constantly taking the situation at hand and using relationships in your own life that are comparable to make sense of what is happening. Is this not the same logical practice we use in literary interpretation?
Alternatively you could think of this in terms of Mitchell's "Metapictures," particularly his work with multistable images. With multistable images Mitchell highlights how we interpret and observe the image has everything to do with self-reference (Mitchell 48). He discusses how the multistable image works as a mirror for the beholder, because what we see in the image or how we approach looking at it is d"emerge[s] in a dialogue with specific cultural stereotypes... Or it may locate itself in something as simple ( and apparently neutral) as the position of the observer's body." Most inspiring from this section of Mitchell's work was his belief that if the multistable image is asking what it is or how it looks the answer is completely dependent on how the observer asks these same questions (48). I think this perspective furthers this strand of reader interpretation as self-referential. Perhaps in the end we are all egoists, and our only way to make sense of the abstract ( as ideas or images) has everything to do with how we see ourselves and the world that surrounds us.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.