Hello all, welcome back to the second addition of my weekly reflections. Overall this week was pretty decent. A highlight of my week included my cousins birthday (shoutout Lucas), during his birthday dinner my other cousin and I discussed school and the subject of humanities came up, I may or may not have complained about my humanities class more specifically the commonlit assignments we have been assigned recently, I made a point about how there can rarely be right answers about interpreting texts so my cousin said something along the lines of “I don’t want you to get in trouble with your teacher, but, you should really read ‘The Death of The Author’ by Roland Barthes” I in fact did not read it because I couldn’t find a free version on the internet but I did read a few synopsis’. 

 

In short, “The Death of The Author” argues against in discerning objective meanings and purposes of any text, taking into account an author’s perspective and biases usually provides an insight to the purpose and meaning of texts, or text can be used to determine an author’s perspective on life or it’s issues, Barthes argues against this citing that acknowledging an author’s perspective limits the amount of interpretations. individuals can make for themselves. Acknowledging an author’s own interpretation of their text defeats the purpose of most literature, the lessons and meaning of literature should be determined by the reader. Obviously there are some flaws to these arguments, perhaps an argument can be made that readers should learn how to interpret an author’s message before finding their own but I think that’s pointless because you will get the end result either way and I believe most PLP students are able to find their own meaningful connections with text. This is why I think commonlit is pointless for the most part and shouldn’t contribute to any of the PLP students’ grades, because we are learning how to identify an author’s meaning and message, not our own, although learning how to identify themes is good mostly. 

 

That was a large tangent, bringing it back to school overall, I think I had some ups and downs with most classes but I am doing better everyday and that’s great but I can still do better with keeping up with physics homework and work experience. As you can tell I’ve mostly been thinking about humanities this week but I expect next week will have more than just one connection about my learning.

 

As always thanks for reading and have a great rest of your day/evening.