(Sample) Reading Response for Lessing, Laocoon

from Course Policies handout:
"You will be required, one time over the course, to post a reading response to the blog. This should consist of three or four numbered paragraphs which each reference a specific passage in the text and focus on that passage in order to make an argument or offer an insightful interpretation. You will also be required, at least twice, to respond to other students’ posts on the blog. Append your comments to their reading response; refer to the numbered paragraph you are commenting on and the relevant passage in the text; go back to the text yourself and offer an elaboration or counterargument. Your comments should not be as much about ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ the student’s response but either lending further support for their argument or offering an alternative reading of the same material. Always sign your full name to your blog posts since your login may not be recognizable."

Each numbered paragraph of your reading response should offer an interpretation of or argument about something specific in the text. You do not need to summarize the reading or cover all the reading in your response. Your responses should be about your own ideas rather than outlining the material.

(Sample) Reading Response by Brooke Belisle
on Lessing, selections from Laocoon (p.3 in reader)

1. Lessing differentiates poetry and painting based on an assumption that each medium is best at representing whatever corresponds to its specific mode of presentation. Since poems are constituted by “sounds in time” and paintings are constituted by figures in space, Lessing claims that “succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist.” (3) As his argument develops, however, he seems to describe a kind of “succession in time” that belongs to painting. In the section labeled “2”, he claims that when we perceive an object in space, “first we observe its separate parts, then the union of these parts, and finally the whole.” (3) If painting presents objects in space, then this argument introduces a kind of time into painting: ‘wholes’ are not instantaneously perceived but built-up from a process of perceiving parts and relationships between parts. In the first paragraph of section 2 he refers to “parts” but in the second paragraph he switches to the word “details” as if it is interchangeable with “parts.” If details are also considered “parts” then even the most simple, singular, or undifferentiated object—one which seemed not to have ‘parts’—would be multiple just in the sense of having details. I wonder if the way the whole painting works as a ‘pregnant moment’ could also be a way of thinking about how each detail in a painting works like a mini pregnant-moment, offering potential connections with everything else in the painting.


(I only wrote one numbered paragraph, but you will need to write three or four--though they don't have to be quite as long as mine. The Lessing reading was only one page (page 3), but for other readings you need to include page numbers. To avoid confusion, refer to the page number in the READER rather than the page of the photocopied text.)