On the whole I agree, which is why when I was Sara's age I majored in
"History and Literature." But there are some texts whose cultural contexts
remain not only remote but largely unknown. Homer's predecessors? W know a
little, but not as much as we do about, say,
Hemingway. Gilgamesh? Sometimes we think we know a context and/or author
and then discover that we don't. A minor but amusing example: a few years
ago a French scholar reported on a manuscript of Henri II's poetry in the
Bibliotheque Nationale and remarked of one poem that it was typical of the
weak sort of stuff Henri had scribbled, or had scribbled for him, in this
MS. Problem: the poem wasn't by Henri at all (as a later scholar
noted) but was rather a transcription of one of the French Renaissance's
most admired sonnet sequences, Joachim Du Bellay's *Regrets*. Same poem,
different cultural context. I myself, as a scholar, would not want to
detach a poem from its context--but that very preference *is itself*
culturally pressured and produced and not, after all, the result of
instructions from on high. So this literary scholar uses context--but I
can because the context is pretty well known. I would want to keep the
right to read a bit of text as a thing-in-itself when that's all we have,
or almost all. Anne Prescott.
On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Sara Hillis wrote:
> I have just joined this list but I should like to contribute to the
> dialogue on "the object". I personally do not feel that literature can be
> extricated from the culture in which it is produced. I feel that Bakhtin is
> right when he says that literature is dialogic, containing many different
> voices--social classes, races, professions and ideological discourses. I
> feel it would be a false assumption to take literature and set it apart from
> cultural beliefs and "norms". However, I feel that we can bring other
> things into it as well. Note: I am a student, about to get my BA in English.
> I am by no means a scholar.
>
> Sara
>
>
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