What gives literature its “true” meaning? Is it found in the speaker’s intent or embedded within the syntax itself? In vernacular literature, the meaning of an aesthetic object is often balanced between what the speaker means and what the sentence means. If intent, context, and semantic meaning become the conclusive variables in literary interpretation, thematic generalizations would only be contingent upon public convention. For a poem to retain a theme, it has to be able to not only construct its own world but refer to the phenomenal world—So, can literary interpretation only be condemned to the reflection of a communal construct?
Yet the individual’s experience is where the thematic universality comes from. The diverse immanency in each individual, albeit generalization, is, according to English teacher Zora Vermilya, not the purpose of interpretation. Through diction, structural form, and figurative language, Vermilya explains the power of words by rendering attitudinal agency to students in understanding and feeling, noting “[see] yourself in the piece.” Authors create literary endowments as asylums for individuals to find solace through the freedom of feeling, imagining, and connecting under the romanticist fervor. In this paradigm, context is nothing more meaningful than its sentimental evocation, akin to the Concord Academy ethos. At CA, the Romanticist culture thrives in favor of personal resonance, as Vermilya says, “helping every student feel a sense of belonging,” albeit with an absolute meaning. It’s about the myriad of ways words force us to see ourselves on the page. This is what our community values— an odyssey of self-discovery through the lens of literature and sentimental relativity.