Reading conditions 11s to derive me

Reading conditions 11s to derive meaning associatively, and we apply that technique as much to comprehend genres as to understand individual works. With this technique in mind, I take up in chapter 5 a form with clear affinities to the fairy tale, the epic. Although any number of works would serve as an example of epic composition, I have selected Beowulf because of its resonances with the literary tradition from which I emerge. Additionally, Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary rendering of that work into modern English allows us to see the efficacy of nonlinear reading of fine poetry.In my examination, I intend to show how the writing of an anonymous poet (or, as some critics have argued, poets) descending from an oral tradition yields much greater satisfaction when read from a perspective that accommodates its inherent diversity. As is highlighted by the Heaney version, it is the evocative and often contradictory images provoked by the language of Beowulf that give the poem its strongest imaginative appeal. Heaney’s rendition beautifully illustrates how the denial of resolution, the invocation of nonexclusionary perceptions, opens the experience of reading Beowulf to sensations that conventional linear responses would never acknowledge.