Symbols and Attitude
A symbol points back at whoever used it
- Symbols in a text and the way they are used may imply that a narrator, character or speaker has a particular attitude or perspective.
- So a symbol is not only about the idea it represents — it is evidence about the person who reached for it.
- This is the same double reading you learned for comparisons, applied to symbols.
A symbol is evidence about the idea it represents and about...
The same double reading you learned for comparisons.
"The way they are used" is the operative phrase
- Two speakers can use the same symbol and imply opposite attitudes.
- One treats an inherited house as a duty; another treats it as proof of worth.
- So the attitude is in the handling, not in the object, and the handling is quotable.
The attitude lives in the ____, not in the object.
Where it sits, how much detail, approached or avoided.
Reading the handling
- Where is the symbol placed in the sentence — subject, object, an afterthought?
- Is it approached, avoided, described in detail, or mentioned and dropped?
- Each of those choices is evidence about the attitude, and each can be pointed at.
What does this handling imply?
Sort each treatment of the same symbol by the attitude it implies.
Select all the handling signals this lesson names.
Commonness is about the symbol, not about this speaker's handling of it.
Two speakers can use the same symbol and imply opposite attitudes. The CED's phrase is symbols and the way they are used, so the attitude lives in the handling — where the symbol sits, how much detail it gets, whether it is approached or avoided — not in the object itself.
Two uses of one symbol by the same speaker form a controlled comparison.
Anything that changed between them is an evidenced change in attitude.
Compare two uses if the poem gives you two
- A symbol used twice by the same speaker is a controlled comparison.
- Anything that changed between the two uses is a change in attitude, evidenced.
- This is the strongest form the analysis can take, and it needs no outside claim at all.
Put the symbol-attitude pass in order.
The handling comes before the attitude, because it is the evidence for it.
A symbol-attitude pass
- Name the symbol and the idea it represents.
- Describe how the speaker handles it: where it sits, how much detail, approached or avoided.
- Then name the attitude that handling implies — and if there are two uses, what changed.
The house appears in stanza one as "the house my mother kept" — a subject, given four lines. In stanza five it is "that place", an object, mentioned and dropped. Same symbol, and the shift from naming to not-naming is the whole change in the speaker's attitude.
Symbols and the way they are used may imply that a speaker has a particular attitude or perspective. The attitude lives in the handling — placement, detail, approached or avoided — which is quotable. Two uses of one symbol form a controlled comparison: whatever changed is a change in attitude.