Four weddings and a funeral? - making Emily Dickinson work for nationhood

Abstract

The Malaysian citizen of the 21 st century needs to activate critical and creative thinking skills for national progress. It is this paper's contention that the process of activation can be better enhanced by awareness of varied responses to literary texts than by monolithic views of poem and writer. The funeral in this paper is not only the Dickinsonian nineteenth century American image, but also the funeral of the single fixed interpretation. The marriages are the blending of appropriation with surface, symbolic, historical and cultural approaches to the text in order to create a set of interpretations and interfaces allowing for both local and outsider viewpoints and choices. Accordingly, this paper takes Emily Dickinson's poem 'There's Been a Death in the Opposite House' (currently a selected text for the school literature syllabus) and suggests 5 different approaches to this text. It considers each approach in terms of positive and negative appropriation, and speculates on what these approaches may be able to contribute to the development of nationhood.