Topic 6.2 What Makes Interpretation Valid
What Makes Interpretation Valid
At this point in the course, you have had a great deal of experience writing, responding to readings, and developing your own topics. Now you are enjoying the challenge and, to some extent, the freedom of discussing how your personal experience affects your relationship to a text and informs your interpretation.
While some students feel liberated, others respond cautiously to subjective-interpretation assignments; they feel unsure of what the instructor "wants them to write." In truth, the instructor is not looking for specific responses that align with the instructor's perspective on the text. Rather, as a reader, you must engage with the text in such a way that you are "in conversation" with it. This is your conversation.
However, this is not to say that your conversation can ignore the text or refuse to respond to and interpret the text in a manner that is in no way grounded in reality. Consider the duck-rabbit illustration in this module’s introduction. Interpretations of the illustration as a duck or a rabbit or even a duck-billed platypus are considered valid interpretations because they are rooted in reality or in a common experience of reality. Ducks and platypuses have bills and rabbits have two tall ears. Both animals have eyes, and these characteristic features make it possible to interpret the illustration as a depiction of one thing instead of another. A less valid interpretation of the illustration might be that of a giraffe or a toaster.
What makes one interpretation more compelling than another has everything to do with validity. Consider the essay you are assigned to read and respond to in this module, Virginia Woolf's "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid Links to an external site.." To characterize the essay as a whimsical commercial piece on collecting 19th-century antiques that got you thinking about the old couch in your living room and how you acquired it would be such a mischaracterization of the essay that the personal experience you recount in relation to it isn't going win over a reader's belief in your powers of observation. However, to acknowledge Woolf's essay as an act of pacifism that makes you wonder if there might be fewer wars if more women were represented in world governments is commentary that can be validated—by the content of the essay as well as by a common experience of reality.
Assignments
|