Post # 3

In Terry Eagleton writings from Literary Theory, he talks about the meaning of the word Literature. People see literature as writing “which they think is good”(Eagleton). Does that mean that the bad writings are not considered literature, but who are the judges of good literature and bad literature. It creates a debate because there can be writings I see great and useful and others may find it unimportant and not good at all, does that make the writing literature just because some people can think its great and others don’t. You can relate this idea to Chandler because what makes a certain genres that genre? Who are the judges of what makes a western a western or a war story a war story.

In Fish’s writing he speaks of poetry to his class. In the reading he talks about how he wrote names on a blackboard in a class. To the students the names on the blackboard were just names, but when he told his students that it was actually a poem, the student started looking at the text much differently. From paragraph [8] “It was almost as if they were following a recipe—if its poem do this, if it’s a poem, see it that way—and indeed definitions of poetry are recipes, for by directing readers as to what to look for in a poem, they instruct them….”(Fish). In other words telling the students that the text was indeed a poem it changed their whole approach in interpreting the text. This also relates to Chander’s idea of genre because being told that certain stories are of a certain genre will make us readers or viewers look at the story at a different perspective and search and notice expectations to make the genre true.

When trying to find an example drawn from life where social expectations and conventions are critical to interpreting interaction I can only think of one thing, cars. When people see cars they see the outside of what maybe is a Mercedes or a Volkswagen and critique just by its name. When people see BMWs driving around they see a luxury car and criticize them just because of its name, without even knowing what’s even under the hood. This globalizing world created a social expectations that the names of these “luxury” cars makes us create high expectations for them. On the other hand other car companies such as Mazda are not seen with such a high expectations can be just as good at times. You can give a person two cars that look exactly alike but put a different brand on them and it will change the value or even our expectations and conventions to interpreting the car and change our view in how good the cars actually are. Of course there can be exceptions to this for people who actually know a lot about cars and make an argument against my idea, but most of the world does not know much about cars, just that Mercedes and BMWs are really good, and that Toyota and Honda are not as good.