Interpretation of the text

This paper will define the aesthetic value in literature and highlight its historical development.

2016

A BSTRACT : This research was intended to explore how students make meaning whenever they read a literary text. It employed a qualitative method to find out how students responded to literary text in meaning making, type of responses produced by students after reading a literary text , and condition where students produced those responses. It was a case study involving seven students who were taking a course of Prose and their teacher. Classroom observation, questionnaire , and interview served as the data collection method. The result of this research indicated that students responded to literary text in making meaning through multiple reading with different purposes ranging from reading for gaining general idea, reading for learning from the text to reading for searching information. In addition, the way students read a literary text was through the continuum from aesthetic reading to efferent reading. The process of making meaning was demonstrated by most students through questio...

2010

What does it mean to understand a text? In a learning situation, how can reading comprehension be supported and improved? What can we learn from reading literary texts? Answers to these, and similar, questions are explored by first examining what constitutes a literary text, then through describing and combining Barrett's (1968) Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension and Kohlberg's (1976) Taxonomy of Moral Development, an approach for enhancing learning from a literary text is developed.

2020

A paper discussing the differing opinions on what denotes a piece of writing as being "literary", from a New Criticism perspective and that of reader-response theory. John Donne's 'Holy Sonnet XIV' and B. S. Johnson's 'A Few Selected Sentences' are used to demonstrate both sides of this much debated coin.

British Journal for Aesthetics (forthcoming), 2020

Some philosophers, such as Alex Rosenberg, claim that the natural sciences deliver epistemic values such as knowledge and understanding, whereas, say, literature and literary studies, merely have aesthetic value. Many of those working in the field of literary studies oppose this idea. But it is not clear exactly how works of literary art embody knowledge and understanding and how literary studies can bring these to the light. After all, literary works of art are pieces of fiction, which suggests that they are not meant to represent the actual world. How then can they deliver knowledge and understanding? I argue that literature and literary studies confer knowledge and understanding in a variety of ways: they give us insight into the work and the world of the work of art in question, they shape our intellectual virtues, they invite us to apply various moral, epistemic, and prudential hypotheses, they deliver moral propositional knowledge, and they increase our understanding or bring about full understanding with respect to meaning, virtue, and significance. In the course of my argument, I refer at several junctures to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Edith Wharton’s Summer, in order to illustrate each of these claims.