Identifying Critical Cruxes: Engaging Ambiguity, Ambivalence, & Tension
Much if not most academic writing involves the reasoned interpretation of texts, and such interpretation requires skill in distinguishing between dimensions of meaning that are clear, obvious, and straightforward and those that are more difficult, perplexing, or obscure. The interpretation of literary texts, in particular, often demands addressing and making sense of moments of ambiguity, ambivalence, and tension. In great literature, such moments are important and strategic in challenging the reader to look beyond the obvious to explore deeper and more complex meanings. Instances of ambiguity, ambivalence, and tension often provoke diverse and divergent responses, asking, even forcing readers to choose among different interpretive possibilities or directions. Such moments are “crossroads” or cruxes in the journey of reading. When they are attended to carefully, they can both complicate and enrich the critical act of making sense of great literature.
Dante’s Inferno offers several such cruxes. For example, we discussed the “struggle of the pity” in Dante’s story of Francesca and Paolo in Canto V: How are we to understand the nature of the pity Francesca’s story evokes from Dante and the pity Dante’s story evokes from the reader? How does this pity relate to the poem’s larger purpose of moral education, to Dante’s pilgrimage, and the depiction of Hell as a structure of Divine justice? If we’re meant to “feel sorry” for Francesca or for Dante the pilgrim, what is the effect of that pity in understanding the episode?
Assignment
For this paper, you are asked to identify and explain another crux in the poem, selected from somewhere between Cantos VI and XXV. Find a particular moment of apparent ambiguity, ambivalence, and tension – a “crossroads” at which the reader must choose a direction to continue.
(1) Identify the crux.
(2) Explain its context or implications.
(3) Formulate a series of questions that pose alternative directions or possibilities of meanings.
(4) Develop one or more hypotheses for choosing a direction of interpretation, some ideas for clarifying the ambiguity, resolving the ambivalence, or making sense of the tension.
