MFA at Home: The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
I've been studying the The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics for a few months and have yet to finish the second page. The contents of this particular encyclopedia are dense in cited sources. Each citation is a paper or a book, which references to other papers or books. Eventually what you think is just a definition for a general term becomes a pile of books grappling with a definition such as absorption. How can one measure how a poem makes someone feel? This is tackled in a meaningful way studying one hypnotic poem by Coleridge.
Does it make someone a genius to read this material? I think not. But what I find is a trove of information that I can't stop digging. Are all symbols pointing to something or are images themselves? Such philosophical questions are indeed taken seriously, and in reading about the psychology of interpretation -- did I realize that most of my problems in literary meaning is just that rules cannot apply in the sense that certain experts think they appear.
For example, take an English teacher's adage that a literary device always points to a literal meaning that cannot be expressed (usually because of censorship). Consider that maybe, seriously, that isn't the case all the time (and not just for postmodernism) and maybe not even most of the time. Sometimes layers of expressionless, sonorous verse is just that -- a romantic image but without a real connection to rational language.
What I learned the most from my studies is how research in literature scales vertically. I think it's often easy to assume that literature is either generic or complete: yet there are many questions to be explored and plenty of meaning to unravel in spaces yet discovered.
What makes this collection cool is that it's fairly accessible, available in many libraries, etc. But it's also quite affordable. Whereas other encyclopedias start at $90, this one is nearly half that.
Does it make someone a genius to read this material? I think not. But what I find is a trove of information that I can't stop digging. Are all symbols pointing to something or are images themselves? Such philosophical questions are indeed taken seriously, and in reading about the psychology of interpretation -- did I realize that most of my problems in literary meaning is just that rules cannot apply in the sense that certain experts think they appear.
For example, take an English teacher's adage that a literary device always points to a literal meaning that cannot be expressed (usually because of censorship). Consider that maybe, seriously, that isn't the case all the time (and not just for postmodernism) and maybe not even most of the time. Sometimes layers of expressionless, sonorous verse is just that -- a romantic image but without a real connection to rational language.
What I learned the most from my studies is how research in literature scales vertically. I think it's often easy to assume that literature is either generic or complete: yet there are many questions to be explored and plenty of meaning to unravel in spaces yet discovered.
What makes this collection cool is that it's fairly accessible, available in many libraries, etc. But it's also quite affordable. Whereas other encyclopedias start at $90, this one is nearly half that.