One can read (and teach) any work without full exposition of its historical, social, etc. "context." BUT... the term "context" has an essential and different meaning for ALL English and Language Arts teachers and students.
When attempting to understand, explicate, or analyze a poem, passage, or work as a whole, one must ALWAYS remember to stay in the context, "the parts of a written or spoken statement that precede or follow a specific word or passage, usually influencing its meaning or effect." The analogy here would be that one cannot play golf on a tennis court. Students and teachers are so quick (and weak) to allow themselves to bring meanings to text that are outside the text's fundamental and literal context - this is a cardinal sin of close reading and teaches students that "anything goes."
We must first and foremost use what's called "objective criticism" when reading works of literature. This practice is defined as approaching a work as "something which stands free from the poet, audience, and the environing world. It describes the literary product as a self-sufficient object, or else as a world-in-itself, which is to be analyzed and judged by intrinsic criteria such as complexity, coherence, equilibrium, integrity, and interrelations of its component elements" (from A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams, 4th edition, page 37). Without understanding and appreciating the literal meanings of the text first, any other "interpretation" is suspect to erroneous and illogical explication.
No comments:
Post a Comment