Polarity
Strange that humans have a predilection to polarising debates and then investing themselves so completely in one extreme that they find any criticism shattering. How counterproductive.
In today’s English lecture I was educated about the Culture/Theory Wars between the 1970s and the 1980s. As with any seriously contested ideological debate, positions were assumed at the farthest remove from the other. Those who think texts should be examined linguistically, and those who think the reading of texts should only be concerned with context, the author and symbolism.
Preferencing one side over another can be rationalised, but why should one approach preclude the other? This is not equivalent to philosophical argument, where some of the questions asked in a particular school completely deny the validity of other questions. Since literature is constituted by both language and context, literary theory should be studied according to both.
In today’s English lecture I was educated about the Culture/Theory Wars between the 1970s and the 1980s. As with any seriously contested ideological debate, positions were assumed at the farthest remove from the other. Those who think texts should be examined linguistically, and those who think the reading of texts should only be concerned with context, the author and symbolism.
Preferencing one side over another can be rationalised, but why should one approach preclude the other? This is not equivalent to philosophical argument, where some of the questions asked in a particular school completely deny the validity of other questions. Since literature is constituted by both language and context, literary theory should be studied according to both.
posted by Alice at 10:09 am
3 Comments:
Please ignore this comment. I am shocked and horrified to see that there are people who use programs to put spam comments on blogs! Anyway it won't happen again. That's what the word verification is for when you leave comments.
Cheers,
VF
I was horrified too. You can block them ... somehow.
The culture wars hey? Funny, I studies a very different "culture wars" in relation to art history. I don't think that it's as polarised as you suggest. i think much critical literary theory is influenced by critical social theory, so there are fluxes, mixes, blurrings between what is studied - and context, at least since the 1980s, always seems to get a mention.
Perhaps art theory is more reasonable. Also I had a scaremongering lecturer and upon checking her position I found that while someone like Harold Bloom is mostly interested in a more traditional version of criticism he doesn't go to such extremes as suggesting that all else is bunk. Bunk is such a fun word.
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