In my Sign Analyses over the past couple of weeks I've been noticing a problem. Dr. Davidson picked up on this as well. I have a tendency to move rather quickly into interpretation. I think this is really apparent in my take on Sylvia Plath, but that's I think because I've studied her extensively. On some level I think I understand why this happens. This could possibly stem from the fact that like many of us, I've been studying poetry and doing sign/poetry analyses just like this for a number of years. It's obviously an old hat in many ways and I think I may be delving into interpretation because of the fact that these exercises seem so familiar to me now. Obviously the key here is to slow down and really crawl my way through the poem, but I was considering any possible ways to make the exercise a little foreign again. I'm not saying that poetry gives up its signs and secrets easily, but I think its easy for studying poets and scholars to get a little complacent. I don't think that's the right word, but I hope this makes a shred of sense.
I tend to do the same kind of thing when I'm looking at poems. For most of our academic lives, teachers and professors have always wanted the meanings of peotry, and not taking a chance on the surface of poems. I've been trying to work on this with my classes by having them just look at poems in very small sections. Hopefully, we will be able to break down the poems better, and they will be able to actually find signs before we move into meanings now. I've found this has really helped classroom instruction with some students thave have trouble finding meanings.
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