Interpretive challenges and how might you meet them:

Who is the speaker?

Who is the speakers audience?
How does the text progress?
Are there any unanswered questions?
Narrative authority. How much can we trust the narrator?
Context within the text: creation of the work
Time. Is time necessary to the text? (Form/style of the text)

PROSE

The Oval Portrait Edgar Allan Poe:

1. Who has agency, the speaker or the painting?
Gothic literature typically considered the delegation/displacement of agency by
representation. Agency delegated to others.
Main question is does the speaker give life to the painting or does the painting take
life from the speaker.
Our agency does persist after our extinction the subject fascinates the narrator
The negotiation of agency between subject and speaker. The painters agency
persists after death link to allusion to Thomas Sullys Self Portrait of the artist
painting his wife He has may be guided by hers. The agency of the wifes hand and
the representation of the wifely figure are equally equivocal you dont know how
real or representation the wife is to her husband.
Negotiation of agency between subject of a portrait and the painter who is
persuading the other to make a certain action.

2. Negotiation between imagination and reality
Links to 2 allusions in the text: Mrs Radcliffe gothic author. Gothic genre
represents a new exposure in human activity. Gothic genre was interested in this
displacement of agency but also in a transitive state of reality and imagination.
Delirium brought on by feverish illness and contemplation. Relations between the
factual and fanciful. His states suggests that the truth of human experiences has to
account for a whole range of cognitive states the world also is what it is when you
are mad it is just as real.
Role imagination plays in cognition how imagination shapes our sense of what is
real.
The extremity of his needs renders his actions not breaking on property rights
The hotel suite is prepared as if for him real value of anything is not tested unless
someone tries to take it by force
The portrait comes out of the darkness evocation of the picture gallery suggests
that the painting is going to sum up everything about the narrators world and his
experiences of the chateau.
Eerie vitality of inanimate objects saturated by the human activity that generates
and arranges them. They have a power to fascinated them.
Inanimate objects are so enthralling and fascinating that the narrators reality
disappears when he finds the volume.
As if the portrait lies in wait to test its own representational power on someone it
hasnt met it came to be endowed with that power.
An Encounter James Joyce:

1. Identity of the speaker
The personas identity is at first difficult to identify because Joyces omniscient
narrative style limits the authorial voice of the narrator. In An Encounter, the
narrators discourse is largely concerned with occurring actions, not constrained by
time, in a very stream of consciousness fashion. Therefore, Joyce holds the
audience directly to the persona of the speaker without imparting any 3
rd
person
perspective. It becomes the fictional characters that make authorial choices in an
Encounter
Although, what we can tell about the narrators disposition is that he sees himself
the binary opposite of his somewhat reckless, action-motivated friend Mahony. The
narrator's despising Mahony here is analogous with the age-old antipathy that the
man of thought feels for the man of action and therefore the civilized man for the
primitive man. Thus, the reader can gain an understanding of the speakers values
by his somewhat scornful commentary of Mahonys brash actions.
Furthermore, the narrators quite, intellectual disposition is cemented through the
metaphor of the Wild West. The narrator thinks of himself as a "reluctant Indian,"
and the Wild West being "remote from [his] nature."
Depiction of Leo as a scapegoat for his own fears, we may not therefore be getting
a real portrayal of the Leo character as it could be a projection of the narrators
image of himself onto Leo.
The narrator then usurps himself into the position of Joe Dillon by creating his own
game and adventure and we see Joe Dillon literally disappear from the narrative
he then becomes a more authoritative and derogatory narrator especially over Leo
Dillon. The narrator is mesmerized by the Dillon family and never mentions his
own shows obsession the family
Narrator is guilty of subterfuge throughout the text. The title An Encounter
conjures connotations of chivalry and heroic experience in which a child
encounters the wild and then learns himself.
Not sure who it is that he is seeing the narrator isnt trustworthy and he gives a
disingenuous account of this man perhaps a monster of his own making.
Narrator is organically propelled beyond childhood realizes trough the man the
fears about his own adulthood. Forcible exploitation and misapprehension of the
man. (He looks for sailors with green eyes and is then surprised to see that the
unnamed man has a pair of bottle green eyes)

2. Who is the speakers audience?
In whom is the narrator confiding?
Himself what part of himself is he rendering the kind of account
Dissembled pleasure he takes in schoolboy slang but always attributes them to one
of his playmates and excuses it as childish surreptitiously revels in it. Mahony
uses slang freely.
Stories were traversed from time to time show off in language. Self-conscious
language of a schoolboy evolved into his own self-regard.
The protagonist is mimicking this image of childhood innocence on order to thwart
the onset of adulthood.
Jocyean style not to impart any knowledge further than the narrator can think or
say

POETRY

We are Seven William Wordsworth

Near universality or ubiquity of disingenuousness in 19
th
century lyric poetry
Disassembly and disavowal of agency bestowed by force of nature on someone who is
shocked having to exercise that power

1. Identity of the speaker and his role
Poet is an agent of death what should it know of death supposing that the crisis
encounter with death is a representation of human experience shown in the joy
evoked by her liveliness and her vitality. Fair and very fair like fairy there
is something supernatural about the girl.
Death is meant to cross-examine someone before they died.
Similar to Satan looking at eve (lost book 4) The poet senses he is involuntarily an
agent of death.
Autobiographical catch dear brother Jim. Unsure of the power of fraternal
regard. Stressing how much he love Jim and in doing so is begging his brother to
love him beyond even his death like the girl.

2. Dichotomy between life and death
Wordsworth resists the temptation until the final 2 stanzas to use the word seven as
a rhyme in conjunction with heaven by the speaker it is at this point when the
speaker realises the point that the little girl makes about death.
The term Heaven doesnt mean anything to the girl
Metrical regularity implodes the conventional reality of the monosyllabism of
heaven and seven.
Only the 2 siblings are named.
The poet asks her how many brothers and sisters may she be (including her in that
number). If her existence solely sustains the existence of her sibling the two dead
siblings may maintain the identity of the 5 others the living cant think of
themselves as abstracted from the dead in that all of the siblings are together in the
churchyard equally. According to a child, one cant speak of the dead because those
who are living give them life by agency.

On moonlit heath and lonesome bank A. E. Housman

The educated poet reminds himself that he is no less subject to a common fate
Modern classical pastoral elegy: one Sheppard yearns for another biblical allusion
One play on words ring a neck
Strenuous overwhelming effort to keep himself calm and censor himself finds its displaced
expression in the cacophony of all the machinery he refers to throughout the text
snapping necks and striking bells the only time you are going to get a good sleep is
when you are dead common notion especially after Darwin survival costs a large
effort, just living is exhausting.
The bodys own noisy straining machinery is drowned out by its inanimate amplification.
Time motif clocks ticking in stanzas 5 & 7 and trains
What crime has he committed? The vigilant poet said that the lad is a better one than the
ones outside of jail is. Last stanza sodomy. Housman is using poetic license but isnt
overstating a critique. Human law and natural law conspire in judging human activity as
natural. Of eight = of fate/of hate. The text is self-censored
Goblin Market Christina Rossetti

Prosodic compulsiveness phonemic/sound compulsiveness and metaphoric compulsiveness.
Language leads us on without knowing about it same thing with phonemic similarities
between semantically dissimilar words
In the stanzas whose motific content is the goblins has largely no significant rhyme scheme
Lizzie as incarnation of sovereign female autonomy. She is fertile linguistic autonomy.
Lizzie is a bearer of fruit (fertile) not the purchaser of Goblin fruit.
Lauras description or like similes tend to diverge rather than converge.
Individual agency is a repressive resistance to this impersonal ambient agency centered in
language form the beginning.
Dense traffic of ambient agency is only controlled by resistance that develops into repression
enough to signal your claim to tenuous autonomous agency.

The Solitary Reaper William Wordsworth

Central idea romantic poetry: Who or what speaks when you speak, who ultimately speaks
through you?

1. Identity of the reaper
The reaper acts as the voice of the Highlands in the sense that in the transfer of
agency the listener then evokes the whole world of the singer just by listening to
her song shown in third stanza.
Prosopopoeia giving life to the inanimate objects. Imputation of that voice to the
inarticulate. Someone or something that couldnt and no longer saying what one
hears form someone else who is now speaking those words as their agent or
delegate.
Definitive of harvest of natural beauty of human experience
Likened to a nightingale in an Arabian oasis indigenous gift
Likened to a Cuckoo in spring laid like an egg into a local ear burden
Both are represented in the song of the reaper

2. Identity of the speaker
Doesnt recognize himself or his own emotions until the final stanza in which there
is a repetition of the word I this goes to represent the way in which (typical of
Wordsworth). Suggests stuttering recovery of his own composure.
Acts as the new singer or speaker in which the song has now passed.
Use of couplets allow memory the speaker is recording the song so that it
echoes in his heart the sound of the song is decanted from the valley into the
poets heart which it is filling.
Tries to erase his own presence when listening to the reaper
Only in the 3
rd
stanza things about its meaning (probably language) language
tricks such as single = sing, melancholy = melody, heart = hear.

Mont Blanc, or Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni Percy Shelley

He hears another voice in another vale listening to a noise of a particular place.
He finds the place so cognitively suggested that he imputes a particular voice to it because it
play on his imagination so exquisitely that he cant imagine that it isnt saying anything to
him. He also recognizes his own state of being as hardly different from that of the river
valleys state of being.
He listens to his won mouth and begins to find that noisy element than what we normally
regard as the meaning of language for the semantic patterns in it. The significance of the
signifying traces of noise.
Shelley attends to the noise in his own speech as a natural phenomenon.
Significance of R and V sounds as noticed from first line of the text throughout the 2
nd
stanza.
Unremitting interchange, which doesnt so much anthropomorphize the human world but
instead, objectifies humanity in the natural world.
Is the speaker just delusional or would it regulate our apprehension of the world and therefore
inform our understanding of the world.
The valley becomes a stage through which the speaker explores constructs of the human mind
and nature.
Percy Shelley compares the power of the mountain against the power of the human
imagination. Although he emphasised the ability of the human imagination to uncover truth
through a study of nature, he questions the notion of religious certainty. The poet concludes
that only a privileged few can see nature as it really is, and are able to express its benevolence
and malevolence through the device of poetry.
The poem discusses the influence of perception on the mind, and how the world can become a
reflection of the operation of the mind.
Although Shelley believed that the human mind should be free of restraints, he also recognised
that nothing in the universe is truly free. He believed that there is a force in the universe to
which the human mind is connected and by which it is influenced.
The poet is privileged because he can understand the truth found in nature, and the poet is then
able to use this truth to guide humanity. The poet interprets the mountain's "voice" and relays
nature's truth through his poetry. The poet, in putting faith in the truth that he has received, has
earned a place among nature and been given the right to speak on this truth. Nature's role does
not matter as much as the poet's mediation between nature and man.

Lyric XCV Alfred Tennyson In Memoriam A.H.H

Tennysons language is almost entirely monosyllabic.
Regulation of the enjambment and regular clauses is evinced with the regular use of And at
the start of several lines enhancing its steadiness.
Then, however, towards the middle of the poem, And begins appearing the in the centre of
each line and this indicates agitation. These mid-line ands always signal a run-on line to signal
that this agitation hasnt ended. Particularly emphasized technique towards the end of the
poem.
Sequence of repeated words in formulaic phrases eg line by line word by word. The
dawn the dawn. On mine and mine self-hypnotizing effect on the speaker. The speaker
is tempting you to go to speak but also thwarting you from going to sleep.
Poet falls into this hypnotized state as reading the letters from his dead friend.
Ritual abstraction signaled by the repetition of the image of the white car
Word strangely taking letters of the dead literally and imposing them on the word strangely