Comments on "A Response Based Approach to Reading Literature"

While reading this paper, I am reminded of a time when I was in high school. The class was reading Stephen Crane’s short story, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. After the reading, Mrs. Smith opened the classroom up for discussing the possible metaphors of the text. What followed was a static, dictatorial interpretation of metaphors: the color yellow is cowardice, the color white represent innocence, the color black represents evil, and so on. I loved the text while I was reading it: the irony of the nervous sheriff with his young, fish out of water bride; the touching glances they give each other; the near comic exuberance of the villain—the metaphors were there, of course, but what moved me about the story was the humor and emotional efficacy that Crane pulled out of these rather slim, archetypical characters. What didn’t interest me, or the rest of the class for that matter, was the stationary, boring, and rather irrelevant pinning down of abstract terms found in the text.

Judith A. Langer’s paper provides teachers with a model that creates the opportunity for their students to express their own personal proclivity towards interpretation. Langer proposes that this be done by giving them a voice. The way Mrs. Smith taught English robbed students of this opportunity and in turn robbed them of their idiosyncratic and unique interpretive abilities: their own voice. We became parrots to the cause of Mrs. Smith’s rather flaccid hermeneutics.

What I did not know at the time, unfortunately, was that my method of interpretation was not wrong—but I thought it was. I believed that the static metaphors were the point of the story and that the emotional affect on me was muted by other, more important factors. With Langer’s model this crisis of interpretation I experienced would have been avoided and my own personal experience of the text would have been rewarded.