Research and Readings

Week Three

How could a work be a reading of a theory, another text, another author?

Reader Response Theory
Stanley Fish
from Wikipedia

The reader is an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance.

As opposed, see New Criticism, T.S. Eliot, for example, or I.A. Richards

a text can display multiple simultaneous meanings
overdetermination
disregard authorial intention
disregard reader response

Or see formalism,
interpreting or evaluating literary works that focus on features of the text itself rather than on the contexts of its creation or the contexts of its reception.

Why and how could a creative work require information and interpretation?

Masterplots. How to write a story. The failure of "how to write a poem." Exercises and recipes for poems.

Bernadette Mayer
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html

More standard ones:
http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/writingexercises1-20.html