Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Moment Of Transcendence: Encountering Each Other In And Beyond The Fiction Of Raymond Carver, Amy Lynn Leo

Honors Papers

This is an essay about reading Raymond Carver. It deals mostly with his work in general rather than with what individual stories mean or exemplify. My aim is to describe and understand the experience of Carver that I had upon my first reading. I will show how reading Raymond Carver can be a spiritual experience, and, in fact, was for me. The reading experience becomes spiritual when readers exchange meaning with the characters through identification and by doing so consider themselves in such a way that they fully embrace the patterns of their lives and manage to transcend them. Because …

Canons, Culture Wars And History: A Case Study Of Canonicity Through The Lens Of The Blithedale Romance, Daniel L. Shiffner

Honors Papers

The act of reading a text is twofold. There not only needs to be a text present, but also a reader who understands and interprets that text. One can think of the act of reading as the creation of a second, interpretive text. This second text documents the reader's interpretations of the physical text at hand. While the primary text remains relatively stable throughout time, the second, interpretive text changes with every reading. While these readings are circumscribed to individual readers, the culture and historical situation that the readers exist within also influence him/her.

Michel Foucault proposed that one could …