Picturing the beleaguered TA
Sigh. Your paper should consist of a play. Well done.
— Irish Lit AutoTweets (@IrishLitTweets) April 11, 2017
It’s meaningless, of course, but I can absolutely picture myself saying it to a student, admitting that I’d missed something and should raise a grade.
What’s actually at work here, generating the illusion of meaning? My initial thought is that the reader—me, of course, in this case—is predisposed to approach the text (any text? probably not) assuming that there was a good-faith effort to create meaning and that this assumption causes the reader to engage in hermeneutic processes: a series of “what if it means …?” questions are triggered that propose reading models that might become productive interpretive pathways.
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Published
13 April 2017