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so, my group and i presented today. caitlin and jenn went ahead of me. caitlin talked about how intention is a part of the scientific process because scientists not only collect but come to conclusions about their information. jenn talked about the complex relationship between readers and authors and how they may have different motivations when reading a text and how that leads to different interpretations. then i went up to my "lecturn" and talked about intentionality in barthes, foucault and smith. my final paper, which says all this in more detail than my presentation, has already been posted. basically, barthes and foucault don't think the author matters and wants to give text back to the reader, and smith, 40 years later, restates the conservative position, that the reader has to figure out what the writer is saying. if there aren't right ways to interpret a text, there are "less wrong" ones, and barthes and foucault wouldn't even say that. i ended by presenting 4 comparisons. (all are in my paper except the beckett quotes.) they address these subjects differently: the relationship between narration and reality, the author is universal fact or changing cultural phenomenon, and the place of the critic.

the main difference between my presentation and the others was that the others managed to be interactive. i would have asked questions, but i went over 5 minutes as it was! i actually skipped or skimmed plenty of what was in my 2 pages of "lecture notes." i detailed foucault's 4 ways of explaining why a text is constructed by the author function in my notes, but i only described one of them in the presentation. that's fine, because this list is detailed and the point comes across without it. it was fun having the lecturn because i had a nice place for my hands. i can see why profs enjoy them so much. i hope to use them for all future presentations (i have one on thursday in fact, and the classroom has a lovely lecturn). i suppose most people did "performances" a few did "presentations" and i basically did "a lecture." i think that diversity is cool. i hope this lecture will be the first of many, and that they'll get longer and more complicated.