Have you ever been in a class discussion where one student says something that blows your mind? I'm talking about that one guy/girl who has an idea that is so nuts, you can't even fathom how they came to that conclusion. I know I've definitely had a few of those moments.
On page 125 of The Dead, Schwarz opens by talking about "off the wall ideas." That was what initially got me thinking about the standards of "normal thinking" and what is considered to be "out of the box." Schwarz goes on to talk about what sentences mean and how we interpret them, using both the literal translation and the imagination, and how "it is the reader's struggle to make sense of a challenging work that reader-response critics seek to describe." So, what should we consider "out of the box?" What are the standards of normalcy that we give to readings? I believe that writing can be open for interpretation, unless the writer plainly states something, like "the boy ran." There's no hidden meaning to that. As we know, our minds work differently. No two minds are alike. So, its obvious that our standards of normalcy would be different, right? However, people are still able to criticize each other's own interpretation of a reading. That's pretty insane, if you ask me. Who's to tell me that my ideas of someone's writing are wrong? But then again, does that make everyone right? That's the confusing part about writing and reading. Everything is open for interpretation, and yet nothing is open for interpretation. Only the writer really knows what he was trying to say.
I think that we are told what the standards of normalcy are. Early on, we set a trend and try to follow that until a new trend, or standard, is set. But what we don't realize is that our minds are constantly changing and we're constantly shifting our views. Schwarz even states something similar on page 133: "reading and readings evolve, and that by understanding that fact we take an important step toward constructing a new, imaginative, rule-governed...reading of our own."
Does that mean we'll accept the fact that we all have our own standards of normalcy? Or will we just accept a new standard that is slightly more open-minded than before?
I agree with you post. No matter where we are in the society it is always changing day by day. It's amazing how our minds work because we always have a different idea on something. As we all read the same book everyone has a different opinion and view on what the passage is saying.
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