Culture in Action: Another Journal Entry

While Old Historicism considers history a necessary background to literature, it also considers history to be objective and consistent. This belief held through the 1940s and into the 1960s, until Structuralists (1950s-1960s) and Deconstructionists (mid-1960s) began to study our cultural habits and use this material to analyze a text. Hew Historicists (aka Cultural Poetics) took this one step further and, during the 1970s and 1980s, decided that history is both subjective and interrelated. History affects--and effects--art, society, and culture. This group of Poststructuralists questioned the act of reading, the reader, and the definition of a text.

During the February visit of the Visiting Writers Series, I watched Laura McCullough read a "work in progress" off her BlackBerry and was struck by the image. She may have used her smart phone out of necessity; after all, if it's not in print then she can't read it from the anthology to which it belongs, and if she were to print it out on a piece of computer paper (or <gasp> scribbled it on a piece of loose-leaf!) then she risked looking unprofessional. Or maybe she hadn't planned on reading it at all, but the moment felt right and, that being her only copy...

Because culture influences everything, New Historicists believe that culture is an interconnected social creation of art, politics, literature, and anything else that creates a society. Text, therefore, is a "culture in action;" everything is textual, Bressler explains, from Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (an essay I fell in love with in high school, btw! and deserves more study), to a presidential inauguration. This helps Laura's digital reading make sense. She read a graphically disturbing poem, with dark images and serious undertones (I wish I could remember the poem, but all I kept was the image.), yet managed to remove herself from the poem. Modern society's digital dependency desensitizes us; video games like Call of  Duty and Grand Theft Auto have belittled crime, death, and war enough that we can accept it.

The text becomes a social document that reflects and responds to a particular moment. Because text is culture in action, the author, society, customs, and almost anything else you can think of, are sorted and shaped by both the author and the reader. Language, culture, and society shape and interact with each other. The Cultural Poetic might study everything that effects society, but will focus on a certain moment, considering Laura's poem to e one text, her poem and her method of delivery to be another text, and her poem and a future reading as yet another text. And each would be studied in relation to that particular moment in time.

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Laura's "BlackBerry Reading" might be interpreted as a sign of how our reading process has changed. Because of digital apps, we now have a greater variety of reading material, and easier access to them. My smart phone holds my Kindle, Nook, and Google Books apps, and each app has a different book open. I no longer need to wait until I get home to finish a chapter, or carve out an hour of time in my favorite reading chair. (Although I still do that! That's the best way to read!) I can stand in line at the grocery store, open up my phone, and read a page or, if I'm bored with that text, then I can download a new one. I now take for granted what I once thought unthinkable. My digital library will soon rival my traditional one.

But that's another thought for another time.

Deconstruction, Narnia, Derrida and Cougar Town: A Journal Entry

Structuralists study the social and cultural practices that occur around someone while they read, and then apply that knowledge to the text you're reading to discover the meaning of the text. When a group of critics challenged these structuralists, citing the impossibility of "knowing" a text because too many interpretations exist, they became deconstructionists. They claim that every time we read (and reread) a text, we pull something different from it and, therefore, find a new meaning. Because of this, a separation exists between what the author writes and what the reader learns.

For example: I've read The Chronicles of Narnia so many times that I've given up counting; the boxed set always has a prominent spot on my "currently reading" bookshelf. Each time I read the stories, I learn something. When Lewis wrote The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, relating King Caspian's search for seven lost lords, and Reepicheep's quest to find Aslan's world, he filled the story with religious imagery and symbolism that was lost to my ten-year-old mind. At that time, I read the story at face value and enjoyed it for the adventure that it was.

Several months ago, I reread the book and was surprised to find an element of loneliness that I'd never noticed before. As I read about Eustace discovering himself to be a dragon, I remembered my first read-through: curled up on a pillow in my closet. "Good!" I thought to myself. "He deserves this after acting so mean."

I didn't say that this time. Nearly thirty years later, what ran through my head was "How lonely that poor boy must have felt." And then I compared this reading to my first reading, and realized that I might have missed Eustace's loneliness because I was living in a solitude of my own (let's be honest: how many kids read in their closet??).

Even now, I'm only just realizing that the Eustace-dragon transformation is a HUGE religious theme: salvation. It's blatantly obvious, but because I wasn't looking for it, I didn't see the author's intent. My focus was elsewhere. This is deconstruction: separating the author's intent from both the written text and my personal interpretations.

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But all this deconstruction talk would not be complete without addressing Jacques Derrida's theory on binary oppositions and the Western metaphysical belief that one concept is always superior to the other, and that the superior concept is defined by its inferior opposite. We understand the concept of "good" because we know "evil."

Derrida believes that this has happened to speech and writing, and blames Plato's belief in writing as only a copy of what was actually said.. Derrida created a binary opposition in which speech signified a presence and writing signified an absence, and created a new way to interpret a text.

SPEECH = PRESENCE

WRITING = ABSENCE

SPEECH VS WRITING

PRESENT VS ABSENT

If speech is superior to writing, then writing becomes symbols of what was said. But if we recognize this, then we can reverse it, and examine the values and beliefs that created both speech and writing. We can see this in a recent episode of Cougar Town. 

Grayson: "Sorry, Bobby. I'm out."

Bobby: "Aahh. That really kicks ass."

Grayson: "You know, when something 'kicks ass,' that's a good thing."

Bobby: "However, any time I have my ass kicked, it's been horrible."

Andy: "We've been misusing that phrase for years. So. All agree to change it?"

Laurie: "Absolutely." 

Grayson: "No. You can't just change common phrases. Words have meaning."

Laurie: "Whatever. Slap out of it."

To relate this to binary oppostion and the speech/writing hierarchy: if we watch Bobby says, "That really kicks ass," we see him hang his head in disappointment. We know exactly what he means because we not only hear him, but also see him. This is why Plato valued speech over writing--the first-hand experience.

But if you read the line, you can inflect any tone you want: irony, sarcasm, happy, dejected. Uttering the phrase, "That really kicks ass," can now be analyzed several different ways, all leading to different interpretations.