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Post by Somak Meitei on Oct 3, 2014 14:27:32 GMT 5.5
When we read a poem,I think it is not significant that we read its background, though to a lesser extent, but the text.I feel it unsatisfied that most of the readers of Walt Whiteman's poem, 'O Captain! My Captain!' answer that the captain is Abraham Lincohn for the question:'Who is the captain?' as there is no mention of Abraham Lincohn in the poem.If someone who has a considerable expertise in poetry reads the poem without a knowledge of the president of the U.S.A., how will they mean it substantively? We don't need to look for the piece of paper with the writing of the background relevance on it for reading a poem.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Oct 3, 2014 23:11:49 GMT 5.5
I am not for biographical/historical/background reading of texts beyond certain (not fixed) point, though we cannot ultimately draw a line between what can be called biographical information in a text from what is not biographical. My problem is not just with biographical reading, it is also with all kinds of reading that limits the practice/act/exercise of reading within some narrow arbitrary bounds or norms imposing on the practitioners strict do's and dont's.
Knowledge is sometimes dangerous because what you know determines your practice, limiting your view within the bounds of that knowledge, which is not the size of the entire expanse of human knowlege at the moment, limiting you within what is already known and often preventing you from turning the other way round and living and acting differently than the convention. Most of the time, inventions and discoveries, the fuel of development, are acts of parting with the convention.
If you know much about the biographical/historical background of a text you tend to remain glued to that, with your mind engaged in no creative reading but humming that old folk tune. That's the danger.
However, if you can manage your knowledge, and if what you know does not block your mind from seeing the same thing from a diffrent perspective or learning things different from or even contradictory to what you alreagy know, being aware of what is called the background knowledge of a text is no harm. It can even be very good. But we should know that that's not all, meaning that texts with no record anywhere of its "background information" is not meaningless or unreadable. Biographical information is just one strand in the tissue of meaning.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Oct 4, 2014 8:43:25 GMT 5.5
Three important inputs:
1. During the romantic age of poetry (in practice, most of the ages preceding it and several years after it as well), critics studied the biographies of poets in an attempt to appreciate poetry, mostly because poetry of this kind, that is romantic poetry, is mostly personal and they thought knowing the intention of the poet is understanding the meaning of the poem. The poet says something and you fail to get that if you don't get the "intention" of the poet in the poem. Intentionalism.
Several many people still have this fallacy.
2. New Critics, T. S. Eliot being one of them, dealt quite a death blow to the romantic tradition in the early twentieth century. Their project "was" focused only on the text, and nothing more. In effect, to them texts had/created their own world which had nothing to do with the experientialworld of ours in terms of meaning. No cross-reference from inside the literary world. So, history came to mean quite nothing. As everything, in this scheme of reading, was in the text, and nothing outside it, these critics were very sure of "the"meaning--a text had just one meaning, just what the text said, and nothing more. No complexity. Life was so simple for them. They were so sure.
However, life is not that simple. Texts are not that innocent and just one- or two-dimensional. Words are not used that literally. Writers, like speakers and like all of us in our daily interactions, draw heavily on their personal experiences or their personal observations on actual occurrences (history), and it helps if you know what a particular book is about though no help guide, in this regard, may be in or appended to the text itself. In fact, books fight--what many Western historians say about "Middle East" differs drastically from what the middle-east "militants" claim as history. Histories fight.
3. Thus, the tenets of new criticism don't suffice. Many of their basic arguments are not acceptable though this theory is still in practice in nearly every classroom across the world just because it is the most convenient and hence "practical" (think of I. A. Richard's Practical Criticism) in the classroom.
The blow that killed new criticism in social practice (even reducing much from "practical criticism" in the classroom) came from postmodernism/poststructuralism. I'm not going into this, though.
If anybody thinks the poststructualist position is flawed and some stone tools used in one of the stone ages are more true to life, then they can practice that. I am not of the view that A is true just because a philosopher (say, Plato) said that, or B is true just because it is more recent than A. It doesn't work so.
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