Understanding Literature: Experience, Interpretation, Evaluation

Here the approach to reading, understanding, and appreciating literature is divided into three major parts: 1) experiencing and responding to literary works; 2) interpreting literary works, and 3) evaluating literary works by considering the values they express. Since each genre discussion - fiction, poetry, and drama - employs this three-part approach in detail, we provide here a brief overview of what we mean by the experience, interpretation, and evaluation of literature.

Experience 

When we read a literary work, something happens to us. A poem, for example, may provoke our thinking, evoke a memory, elicit a strong emotional response. A short story may arouse our curiosity about what will happen, engage our feelings for its characters, stimulate our thoughts about why things happen as they do. A play may move us to laughter or tears, which may prompt us to link its dialogue and action with our lives.

    In responding to literary works in these and other ways, we bring our personal and shared human experience to ur reading of them. This kind of response - subjective, emotional, impressionistic - illustrates what we mean by the experience of literature. Our experience of literature, in this sense, however, is not enough for understanding and appreciating it, for which we need to move beyond our subjective impressions and emotional responses to other types of comprehension. 

Interpretation

Our understanding of literary works results from our effort to interpret them, to make sense of their implied meanings. Our interpretation of literature provides an intellectual counterpart to our emotional experience. When we interpret literary works we concern ourselves less with how they affect us and more with what they mean. Interpretation, in short, aims at understanding.

    How do we come to understand works of literature? How do we develop an ability to interpret literature with competence and confidence? One way is to become familiar with its basic elements or characteristics. In reading fiction, for example, we rely on the analysis of such elements as plot, character, setting, and point of view. In interpreting poems, we analyze their diction, imagery, syntax, and structure to get at meaning. In viewing or reading plays we focus on dialogue, setting, plot, and character. These and other literary elements are explained and illustrated later on. 

Evaluation 

Our evaluation of literary works involves two kinds of judgments: 1) our assessment of their quality and values; and 2) our assessment of the cultural, social, and moral values they display. Evaluation of a literary work, which is a complex process, is closely related to our experience and interpretation of it. Grounded in interpretation, evaluation is also linked to our emotional response and subjective reactions regarding aspects of the work that please or shock us, that stimulate, frighten, repulse, amuse, or amaze us. 

    While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh god get me out of here. Dear God, please get me out. God please please god. If you'll only keep me from getting killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell everyone in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear god. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy, and cheerful, and quiet. The next night back at master he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about god. And he never told anybody.

The piece says little directly. It's close-mouthed and tight-lipped about what it expects from us as readers - somewhat like the soldier who "never told anybody" about his experience. But it makes strong statement by implication, nonetheless, about its three central subjects, religion, war, and love, largely by playing off conventional expectations about these subjects. 

    Our evaluation of the soldier turns on considerations such as whether he really believes in god, and what such a belief may mean. It turns on whether we think the soldier's prayer is "answered" by God in a providential intervention to move the shelling "further up the line," or whether we see that as a coincidence, attributable purely to luck. It turns also on whether he's going to a house of prostitution is something we can understand, sympathize with, and approve of - or not; and whether his not telling the girl or anybody else about god is a serious violation of a solemn vow, or an excusable, perfectly understandable response. 

    Besides evaluating the behavior of the soldier, we also make a judgment about the values we think the text espouses. Does the author seem to display sympathy for the soldier? Does he judge harshly? The narrative voice is noncommittal, concerned more with portraying a situation than with commenting on it. This stance of objectivity is itself a "value," an attitude or disposition we must eventually assess, as we must also respond to the fact that the world depicted is a man's world, a world of war and violence, in which women (or girls as the text stipulates them) figure only marginally, and then only as they can be used by men. (We know, for example, what the man feels and fears, but we are told nothing about the girl's thoughts and emotions. )