Creative Literature: Drama, Fiction, Poetry

Introduction

Admittedly, without a good deal of experience in reading fiction, poetry, and drama judgments about the values supported in a story and about its aesthetic worth need to be made cautiously. But we must begin somewhere, since evaluation is inevitable. We cannot really avoid judging the stories we read any more than we can avoid judging the people we meet. The process is natural. What we should strive for in evaluation fiction, poetry, and drama is to understand the different kinds of values it presents, and to clarify our own attitudes, understand the different kinds of values it presents, and to clarify our own attitudes, dispositions, and values in responding to them.

We read stories for pleasure; they entertain us. And we read them for profit; they enlighten us. Stories draw us into their imaginative worlds and engage us with the power of their invention. They provide us with more than the immediate interest of narrative—of something happening—and more than the pleasures of imagination: they enlarge our understanding of ourselves and deepen our appreciation of life.

The Experience of Fiction

Our experience of fiction concerns our feelings about the characters, our sense of involvement in the story's developing action, our pleasure of confusion in its language, our joy or sorrow at its outcome. We are concerned, in short, with what the story does to us, how it affects us—and why.

It is important to remember that readers respond to stories in different ways. When you compare the reactions of your classmates and teacher to “The Prodigal Son,' you will discover different perceptions, attitudes, and feelings about it.

Why is this so? Essentially, it is because we bring to our reading a wide range of personal experience, social attitudes, religious beliefs, and cultural dispositions that influence our responses. We do not read a story in a vacuum: Our reading is always affected by who we are, what we believe, and how we think; that is, by the context we bring to our reading. Christians, for example, may experience “The Prodigal Son” differently from how Muslims, Buddhists, or atheists experience it. Women experience the story differently from men. Practiced readers experience the story differently from inexperienced ones. Parents experience it differently from those who have no children. And as we change—as we become more practiced readers, or have children, for example—our ways of understanding life and literature change too (DiYanni, p.29).

The Interpretation of Fiction

When we interpret a story we explain it to ourselves and try to make sense of it. We form subjective impressions as we experience fiction, but we have relatively objective considerations in mind when we interpret it. We say “relatively” objective because no reading of a story is entirely objective: Every interpretation is one way of understanding the text among many; every interpretation is influenced by our particular language, culture, and experience. What then do we mean by interpretation? Understanding, essentially. An interpretation is an argument about a story's meaning as we understand it. It's our way ...