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April 22, 2007
EL312: More square pegs
Texts are certainly not available for innocent, unhistorical readings. Any reading must be made from a particular position, but is not reducible to that position (not least because texts are not infinitely malleable or interpretable, but offer certain constraints and resistances to readings made of them). Rather, different readings struggle with each other on the site of the text, and all that can count, however provisionally, as knowledge of a text, is achieved through this discursive conflict. (444)
So no matter what we say about a text, we must know that we're saying it from a position--since we must all have experiences and "positions" in time and space from which we are speaking--and we also must know that the text can't every be broken down to that one meaning since texts themselves are created within different constraints and can't be shifted through time and space to suit our needs.
Square peg, round hole. Cliché? Yeah, I know and I don't really care ;)
I'm grateful for the term "autotelic" so now I can describe things with meaning embedded into their souls. Much of the rest of the essay is, to me, summarized by that grand question, "Which came first: the chicken or the egg?"
Looking forward to what David has to say on this. Hoping to be inspired.
Barker and Hulme, ''Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish'' -- Jerz EL312 (Literary Criticism)
Posted by KarissaKilgore at April 22, 2007 11:31 PM
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