Posing Interpretive Problems
Sarah Guayante
The goal of any essay is to solve some problem for the audience. In literature, the problems are issues that arise in interpretation, which is why we call them interpretive problems.
Interpretive Problem: Problem with the way we read or interpret an exhibit–a poem, short story, or other literary text.
Posing an Interpretive Problem
There are three steps to posing an interpretive problem:
A. When we pose an interpretive problem, we start with the tensions, disjunctions, or ambiguities we find in a text. Start by identifying the difficulty of the poem.
B. From those tensions, disjunctions, or ambiguities, we consider the possible, sometimes competing interpretations of the poem. In what way does this tension, disjunction, or ambiguity impede or complicate our understanding of the text?
C. Finally, in our thesis statement, we suggest how we are going to resolve the problem We tell the audience, first, what patterns–of literary devices, imagery, and ideas–we are going to analyze and, second, how an analysis of these patterns will resolve the problem.
Literary Analysis Thesis Statements answer two questions:
- What patterns are you going to analyze?
- How will an analysis of these patterns resolve the interpretive problem?
Exercise: Identifying the Parts of an Interpretive Problem
Use Hypothesis to label each sentence according to the role it’s playing in the interpretive problem.
Example A–Hidden Poems: The Utopian Imagination in Morejón’s “Tobacco Factory”
A tobacco worker writes a poem while sitting in a factory. In her poem is “all the desires and all the anxieties of any revolutionary, her contemporaries” and none of these revolutionaries would know because she tucks her poem into a book of verse by José Martí. So goes the utopian poem “Tobacco Worker” by Nancy Morejón, which considers the impact that poetry has on shaping sociopolitical cultures. By telling the story of the anonymous tobacco worker who both writes a poem that imagines a better world and that buries those utopian visions in the end, Nancy Morejón raises a question about poetry’s ability to imagine and create a better society. Morejón’s unveilings and obfuscations of the tobacco worker’s poetry challenges our utopian imagination, questioning whether we can imagine an end of capitalism that looks like a new growth rather than a smoldering decay.
Example B: “A Close Reading of an Infamous Poem on Grief”
If you peruse poetry Twitter on the 1st of June, you will undoubtedly come across a slew of poets quoting an infamous line from Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know“: “It is June. I am tired of being brave.” It’s one of the few lines from one of the few poems, in my opinion, whose ubiquity is very much justified. So in honor of what would have been Sexton’s 93rd birthday, I’d like to spend some time talking about it.
Written after both her parents’ death, the poem has long been hailed as a poignant, resounding exploration of grief. But what has kept me coming back again and again to it is a weighty kind of silence—a refusal—that moves throughout. Her long lyrical lines are followed by short, blunt statements[…]It makes me wonder: to what are we entitled when we read a poet’s work—especially a poet like Sexton, long hailed as one of the foremothers of female confessional poetry? And if we expect more than what she gives us, why might that be?[1]
Example C: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’ and the Challenge of Motherly Identity
Sylvia Plath’s short poem “Morning Song” explores the conflicted emotions of a new mother. On the one hand, the mother recognizes that she is expected to treasure and celebrate her infant, but on the other hand, she feels strangely removed from the child. The poem uses a combination of scientific and natural imagery to illustrate the mother’s feelings of alienation. By the end of the poem, however, we see a shift in this imagery as the mother begins to see the infant in more human terms. [2]
- Koirala, Snigdha. "A Close Reading of an Infamous Poem on Grief: Anne Sexton's 'The Truth the Dead Know,'" LitHub, Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature, Nov. 9, 2021, https://lithub.com/a-close-reading-of-an-infamous-poem-on-grief-anne-sextons-the-truth-the-dead-know/. ↵
- Laura Wilder and Joanna Wolfe. Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Analysis, and Writing. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016), 71. ↵
