Quentin Skinner Essay

He argues that in analysing literary works, the reader’s response to a literary work is as important as the text itself. All readers interpret and react to any given text differently, and these different reactions to the same piece of writing combine to shape the overall meaning of the literary work. In addition, when a single reader interprets a text and later revisits that same piece of writing, the reader often emerges with two different interpretations of the text and its overall purpose and meaning. Iser also stresses on the importance of the imagination of the reader. In reading, one is forced to imagine within the mind the information being read, and so one’s perception is “simultaneously richer and more private”. Also, one separates information into groups and form illusions in order to make sense of a literary text. The different ways in which a reader interprets and makes sense of a literary work all combine together to create the overall meaning and purpose of the

This chapter is centered on researcher B.F Skinner, who was known for highlighting rewards and reinforcements through animal experiments. He also demonstrated operant conditioning through positive reinforcements. Today, many individuals possess both a negative and a positive view of Skinner and his experiments (ranging from evil to highest esteem respectively). This may be due to the difficulty of “separating content from controversy”(8). Skinner was born in 1904 and can be identified for many quirks such as working only on a cluttered desk. He went onto go and study psychology at Harvard in 1928, rather than taking up his desire of becoming a novelist. Despite initially avoiding the softer psychology fields, Skinner came across a psychology workshop

Psychologist, born in Susquhanna, Pa. He studied at Harvard, teaching there (1931-6, 1947-74). A leading behaviorist, he is a proponent of operant conditioning, and the inventor of the Skinner box for facilitating experimental observations.

Based on this thesis statement, I would expect the essay to argue for the theory that each reader will assign their own meanings to a literary work. This expectation was proven correct as I read through the rest of the essay. In addition, Leach stayed true to this thesis statement throughout the essay and no other thesis statements popped up.

Throughout history, ideas of how a country should be ran has changed. As we look back on history, beginning with the Anglo-Saxon time period (410 – 1066), we can see that see that with a change in ”ideas”, comes a change in the idea’s on politics, religion and language has changed as well. A shift in politics, language and religion are the focal points around the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval societies; therefore, literature was altered based on their traditions.

Through examples like these, our author make his point about Matthew was using Mark as a written source for the Transfiguration information. He also used similar examples to show us that the first part of Luke’s Gospel was used for a written source for the Gospel of Mark. As for the second part of Luke, we find an internal contradiction that, according to our author, suggests that an editor changed the existing text.

Skinner experienced a renewed interest in Literature when he realized that the written word could also be analyzed for human behavior. He stopped trying to write

Defamiliariation is the process by which ordinary language is modified in order to achieve an effect of "artificiality” and strangeness, drawing attention not to the meaning, but to "the way it says that it has to say” (Bertens 27). Thus, the formalist approach leaves aside the refferential function of a literary text ("the way it reflects the world we live in” – Bertens 26) and focuses

Douglas McGregor is one of the founding fathers of organizational behavior management thinking. As a social psychologist, McGregor is most known for his Theory X and Theory Y from his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, which revolutionized the view on how management should run the workplace. After earning an A B.E. Mechanical from Rangoon Institute of Technology, McGregor went on to earn an A.B. from Wayne State University, and went on to study Psychology at Harvard.

Prior to deconstruction, new critics, reader-response theorists, structuralists —regardless of the title they chose—subscribed to the theory that all texts are defined within themselves with minimal extratextual consideration. In the 1960s, a paradigmatic shift occurred in the literary world when deconstruction—which questioned the previously set rules—increased in popularity (Bressler 95). With the advent of this post structuralist theory, all the previously subscribed-to theories were challenged, thereby instituting a new set of beliefs for guiding and understanding humanity. This new set of beliefs incorporated the idea that there is more than one correct meaning to a work of literature, poetry, or art. It also applied the notion that outside help, reference material and personal data, could be used to find a meaning to any work. The terms poststructuralism and postmodernism are used synonymously with deconstruction, denoting that both take place after structuralism and modernism (Bressler 95).

Jerrold Levinson, a prominent hypothetical intentionalist, through his explanation of the relationship between artworks and exploratory interpretations, has gone under criticism for allowing misinterpretations to be deemed as valid “could mean” options. However, one finds when reading “Two Notions of Interpretation” and “Intention and Interpretation in Literature” that these criticisms are effectively countered by two arguments that Levinson presents. Firstly, although the exploratory mode of inquiry can have multiple, if not infinite, could mean answers, it also has could not mean answers. These could not mean interpretations provide insight into the work and allow for interpretations to be judged on a scale

Moreover, Barthes claims that a text is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash” (1468). Certainly, Barthes states that everything writing is never original, for the only power of the author is to combine preexisting writings (1468). With this in mind, Christopher Watkin, a professor of Monash University in Australia, discusses Barthes’ theory in his article “Rewriting the Death of the Author”. In particular, Watkin claims that the death of the author is the “fundamental rupture in which complete authorial control … gives away to the author as the impersonal site for the combination of preexisting quotations” (35). In accordance with Barthes, Watkin affirms that no original writings come from the hand of the writer. In view of that statement, Barthes affirms that “in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered” (1469). In other words, Barthes claims that the text should not be deciphered anymore, because the author has not left a personal message hidden. Furthermore, Barthes asserts that the text is left open to liberate its own meaning

Inferior texts are written to cater to such readings [the readings that project a text through what is already known, preventing it from expanding beyond the conventional boundaries], good texts to undo them... The Sound and the Fury is a novel which carries its resistance to the most extreme end this side of incoherence. Its principal object is that it should not be read, in the sense that it seeks to withstand from beginning to end every critical strategy. (New Essays on The Sound and the Fury

mind, the internal mental events, was never productive since the mind acted like a black box. For

When Pennycook analyzed the issue of plagiarism in his essay, Borrowing Others’ Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism, he introduced the essence of language learning and the evolution of the notion of author in a more detailed way, which provides a different angle to interpret Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author. Barthes describes writing in the beginning of his essay as a “composite, oblique space where our subject slip away” (142). Pennycook’s passages can give a lucid explanation of Barthes’s word choice of “composite”. Pennycook believed that, according to Western traditions, literary originality came into being alongside a “wholesale borrowing of language and ideas” (212). Writing, as a part of language learning, needs