3: gained experience

Each and every one of us understands things based on what we already know. With accumulated personal experience certain concepts or knowledge on these concepts very well become second nature to us. But it is not enough.

I’m going to be honest. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to obtain the Eagleton text Literary Theory on time. But despite that, upon reading the comments posted before mine, I was able to determine that he basically puts in his own thoughts on the subject of our previous class discussions: What makes a genre what it is? How is it that, when we watch a movie or read a book, we are able to point out whether it’s a comedy or a science fiction adventure? The answer is experience. Either we’ve encountered these types of stories before or someone went to the trouble of explaining to us what we will expect of them. Either way, we know what category they fall under due to the prior knowledge we have of them. We see a version of this (with school assignments in the place of story genres) in Stanley Fish’s How to Recognize a Poem When You See One. His students who were trained to read into religious poetry were invited to explain the meaning of the names written on the blackboard. Based on what they had previously learned, they came up with all sorts of religious interpretations as to what they meant. They saw something completely different than what was actually written because that is what they were taught to know. “…while it is true to say that we create poetry, we create it through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own...” I really feel this sentence sums it all up. We can write a good poem or a western story but only based on western stories we have seen beforehand. And it’s the same with everything else we do, whether it be taking a bus or punching in a time card. We act according to prior knowledge and experience.