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The following is from my Honors Lit Theory class:

"The perspective of the aesthetics of reception mediates between passive reception and active understanding, experience formative of norms, and new production. If the history of literature is viewed in this way within the horizon of a dialogue between work and audience that forms a continuity, the opposition between its aesthetic and its historical aspects is also continually mediated. Thus the thread from the past appearance to the present experience of literature, which historicism had cut, is tied back together.

...remind me why I'm an English major? *Tries to wade through twenty pages of this*

There will be SotP when I'm in class.

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What topic are you studying?

The Reader response theory of literary analysis.

Gah, we studied that first week of term and I hated it. I'll try and find my notes when I'm back and send you them if you want.

Oh, he gives decent notes. It's just boring trying to get through the source material. Basically, this class goes through all kinds of theories of analysis using "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and then sends us off to do our on analysis of an independent piece of work. It's a cool class, just LOTS of reading.

Our source material was about a stream and some weird stuff like that, we also did a lot on Barthes? I think. About the death of the author in the text. Neat.

Oh, I just had my exam on that. It was on anthropocentric dualism and ecocriticism in TRotAM. It was innnteresting to say the least, I had about fifteen pages of revision notes on it.

We've just had hundreds of pages worth of reading. New Criticism, Old Historicism, and Reader Response, so far. God, I'm going to be READING this weekend. All kinds of crap.

Because the thing to remember is that it's all, ultimately, bullshit.

I don't feel so bad, now. I was searching around on google to try to figure out what 'paradigmatic isotopy' is and apparently grad students have trouble translating that particular quote.

And yes. You're absolutely right. Bullshit.

Yep. Pretty much it's stuff people made up so English majors could have jobs.

Too true. XD

This is why I'm a medievalist. We don't have time for theory, we're still working out such fundamental questions about our canon as "When was it written" and "what do the words mean?"

*Snort* Oh, come on. Surely you can apply feminist critical theory to something like Beowulf? *Grin*

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