William Butler Yeats and Beer Goggles

Who owns the meaning of a piece of literature?  The author?  The reader?  The scholar?  For me, as an English language arts methods professor, the question of ownership of meaning lives in multiple domains. It is esoteric in that it engages epistemological and philosophical questions within literary texts that them-selves  hint  at  broader  questions  about  negotiating  life’s meaning. It is practical in that it has concrete implications for teaching English literature; after all, how  teachers  answer  this  question  both  influences  their  pedagogy  and  colors  what  their  students  take  from  the  literature  they  read.  And  it  can  be  emotional  in  that  it  may  be  the  kind  of  question  that  first  illuminates  and  then  wrests  from  the  heart  of  a teacher his or her investment in a particular truth.

In this article I explore the trickiness of navigating these competing layers of meaning by describing a  somewhat  disorienting  experience  from  my  class-room.  I explain how  interrogating  personal  literary  artifacts  in  a  shared  educational  space  highlighted  dominant  but  opposing  interpretive  paradigms  and  served  to  destabilize  two  literary  artifacts—  poems  by  William  Butler  Yeats  and  Theodore  Roethke.  I  share how the ensuing struggle between my students and me for the ownership of meaning led to my own sense of disequilibrium and consequently opened the door for new pedagogical insights.