Who creates the meaning to what I am writing right now? It could be me, the one behind the keyboard, slaving away at creating something that will hopefully sound creative and intelligible. But it also could be you, the reader, picking apart my diction and creating a new meaning for yourself. Foucault argues that it is you. You are the one who takes the subject of the work, mulls it around in your head, and generates fresh ideas out of it.
If you are the one who gets the privilege to tear apart my words and form something else, how am I supposed to feel? I suppose I don't mind. I have done it plenty of times before. But what is someone had wrote this template and I just filled in the blanks? Do I still get the credit? Are you deriving meaning from my work or someone else?
In one of my other classes we have been talking a lot about love letters. If you type that simple phrase into the Google search bar, the first website that pops up is called The Love Letters Collection. In essence, it is a compilation of letters that have been made anonymous. All the names and dates have been taken out, but the body of the work still remains. It is almost like a blank template for writing the one you love even if you are not romantic or creative enough to do so. This interested me. I always thought the idea of receiving a love letter was a nice one. Reading about the way someone cherishes and admires you would make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But what if you knew your special someone cheated and stole the template off the internet? Well, personally, I would be a little upset. I would think the feeling wasn't real. But the meaning still remains the same.
Despite the fact that your significant other didn't feel up to the challenge of choosing all the correct words to formulate a letter to you doesn't mean that the meaning behind the letter isn't the same. As a reader you would never know that some other lucky person received this same gift. So what is the true meaning? Fish asks the question, "Do readers make meanings?" in How to Recognize a Poem When You See One, and I would argue that yes, they do.
Fish describes a scene in one of his college classrooms where students see a list of 5 linguists names on the board arranged in no special order, but end up analyzing them for an entire class period coming up with lofty proposals that it was some religious or spiritual poem including an altar of some sort. Fish states "as soon as my students were aware that it was poetry they were seeing, they began to look with poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties they knew poems to possess." Just like the students, the teary eyed love bird is going to read the letter with the eyes of delight. Despite the cliches and the empty adjectives, the person who receives the love letter will still think of it as individual to their unique love.
The meaning of the letter in the end would be up to the reader to create. If the sender took a template off of the website, the receiver would have to look at it with a critical eye, finding the examples of their own personal love in the letter. It would be to the sender's advantage that the templates are so gushy that their sweetie would be so overcome with love that there would be no critical thinking involved.
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Click here for The Love Letters Collection website:
lovey dovey
This post made me think of the birthday card that I got from my step-dad yesterday. It from Hallmark and it was sweet and talked about how even though he wasn't my dad and couldn't really take credit for how I turned out but that he was still proud of me and blah blah blah. I thought it was really nice and I fogged up a little, but when I talked to him on the phone later, he mentioned that my mom picked it out but he still meant it. I was a little shocked. First of all, he didn't even write it, like the love letters from the internet you found. And second, he didn't even pick it out. But he did tell me that he meant what the card said. I came to the conclusion that it didn't matter who wrote it or even that he didn't choose it but that he still loves me just the same and the card is meaningful because I, the reader, knows how proud he is of me, for real.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading this piece. First off id like to say that you just mastered so many guys out there creative side on love and im sure alot of guys will be going on google typing in love and using those poems to impress there girl friends or dream girls (not me of course). I also find it very interesting that you took something so real and brought it to light with some of the theories that we talked about in class. The questions that you asked in the intro really are questions that I began to think about after reading this. I really liked the blog and how you pieced everything together.
ReplyDeleteWell done! I love where you are coming from calling out how easy it is to just find templates for writing and then going a step further in asking if that takes away from being an author. After all most love poems/letters while very cute and lovey dovey can be taken and moved to any person and situation. It's funny how poems carry "significant emotions"like Eliot said.
ReplyDeleteNice use of Fish to drive home your idea there. I think the idea is a little different, but still applicable. My main problem with the whole thing is that I would think that somebody who really knows you would probably not be so easily deceived by a fake template love letter. The voice, word choice, and style would be very different and fake-sounding. But yeah, good question in asking if it really matters if its a fake. On the one hand, its the same message, but on the other its perhaps less authentic. Moral dilemma.
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