From A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1588
Thomas Harriot
They are a people clothed with loose mantles made of deer skins, and aprons of the same round about their middles, all else naked . . . having no edge tools or weapons of iron or steel to offend us.
If there fall out any wars between us and them, what their fight is likely to be, we having advantages against them in so many manner of ways, as by our discipline, our strange weapons and devises, especially Ordinance great and small, it may easily be imagined: by the experiences we have had in some places, the turning up of their heels . . . running away was their best defense
I respect of us, they are but a poor people, and for want of skill and judgment in the knowledge and use of things, do esteem trifles before things of greater value.
Most things they saw with us, as Mathematical instruments, sea Compasses, the virtue of the load-stone [magnet] in drawing iron, a perspective glass [telescope] whereby was showed many strange sights, burning glasses [magnifying glass], wild fireworks, guns, books, writing and reading, spring clocks that seem to go of themselves, and many other things we had that were so strange unto them, and so far exceeded their capacities to comprehend . . . that they thought they were the works of gods then men, or at leastwise they been given and taught us of gods. Which made many of them to have such opinion of us, as that if they knew not the truth of God and Religion already, it was rather to be had from us whom God so specially loved, than from a people that were so simple.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
“What Is Literature?”
Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or imaginative, but because it uses language in peculiar ways. . . . Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language . . . if you approach me at a bus stop and murmur, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
What was specific to literary language, what distinguished it from other forms of discourse, was that it “deformed” ordinary language in various ways. Under the pressure of literary devices, ordinary language was intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out, turned on its head. It was language made strange.
The idea that there is a single “normal” language, a common currency shared equally by all members of society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status, and so on, which can by no means be neatly unified into a single homogenous linguistic community. . . One person’s norm may be another person’s deviation.
If we were to stumble across an isolated scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we could not tell whether it was poetry or not merely by inspecting it, since we might have no access to that society’s “ordinary” discourses.
The context tells me that it is literary, but the language itself has no inherent properties or qualities which might distinguish it from other kinds of discourse.
It is true that many of the works studied as literature in academic institutions were “constructed” to be read as literature, but it is also true that many of them were not. A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature.
In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways people relate themselves to writing. It would not be easy to isolate, from all that has been variously called “literature,” some constant set of inherent features. In fact it would be as impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing feature which all games have in common. There is no “essence” of literature whatsoever.
In any case, it is far from clear that we can discriminate neatly between “practical” and “non-practical” ways of relating ourselves to language. Reading a novel for pleasure obviously differs from reading a road sign for information, but how about reading a biology textbook to improve your mind? In many societies “literature” has served highly practical functions.
By and large people term “literature” writing they think is good.
Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket is was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was. The term “fine writing,” or “belles letters,” is in this sense ambiguous: it denotes a sort of writing which generally is highly regarded.
The suggestion that “literature” is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop one and for all the illusion that the category “literature” is objective, in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything regarded as unalterable and unquestionably literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature.
The reason why it follows from the definition of literature as highly-valued writing that it is not a stable entity is that value-judgments are notoriously variable. . . Just as people may treat a work of philosophy in one century and as literature in the next, or vice versa, so they may change their minds about what writing they consider valuable.
But it does mean that the so-called “literary canon,” the unquestioned “great tradition” of a “national literature,” has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by a particular people for particular reasons at a certain time . . . “Value” is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by a certain people in specific situations . . . we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare. His works may seem desperately alien . . . in such a situation Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti.
The fact is that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns . . . “Our” Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor “our” Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a “different” Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue . . . All literary works, in other words, are “rewritten,” if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed, there is no reading of a work which is not also a “re-writing.”
Excerpts taken from Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton, 1983
Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or imaginative, but because it uses language in peculiar ways. . . . Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language . . . if you approach me at a bus stop and murmur, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
What was specific to literary language, what distinguished it from other forms of discourse, was that it “deformed” ordinary language in various ways. Under the pressure of literary devices, ordinary language was intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out, turned on its head. It was language made strange.
The idea that there is a single “normal” language, a common currency shared equally by all members of society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status, and so on, which can by no means be neatly unified into a single homogenous linguistic community. . . One person’s norm may be another person’s deviation.
If we were to stumble across an isolated scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we could not tell whether it was poetry or not merely by inspecting it, since we might have no access to that society’s “ordinary” discourses.
The context tells me that it is literary, but the language itself has no inherent properties or qualities which might distinguish it from other kinds of discourse.
It is true that many of the works studied as literature in academic institutions were “constructed” to be read as literature, but it is also true that many of them were not. A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature.
In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways people relate themselves to writing. It would not be easy to isolate, from all that has been variously called “literature,” some constant set of inherent features. In fact it would be as impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing feature which all games have in common. There is no “essence” of literature whatsoever.
In any case, it is far from clear that we can discriminate neatly between “practical” and “non-practical” ways of relating ourselves to language. Reading a novel for pleasure obviously differs from reading a road sign for information, but how about reading a biology textbook to improve your mind? In many societies “literature” has served highly practical functions.
By and large people term “literature” writing they think is good.
Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket is was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was. The term “fine writing,” or “belles letters,” is in this sense ambiguous: it denotes a sort of writing which generally is highly regarded.
The suggestion that “literature” is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop one and for all the illusion that the category “literature” is objective, in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything regarded as unalterable and unquestionably literature—Shakespeare, for example—can cease to be literature.
The reason why it follows from the definition of literature as highly-valued writing that it is not a stable entity is that value-judgments are notoriously variable. . . Just as people may treat a work of philosophy in one century and as literature in the next, or vice versa, so they may change their minds about what writing they consider valuable.
But it does mean that the so-called “literary canon,” the unquestioned “great tradition” of a “national literature,” has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by a particular people for particular reasons at a certain time . . . “Value” is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by a certain people in specific situations . . . we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare. His works may seem desperately alien . . . in such a situation Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti.
The fact is that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns . . . “Our” Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor “our” Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a “different” Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue . . . All literary works, in other words, are “rewritten,” if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed, there is no reading of a work which is not also a “re-writing.”
Excerpts taken from Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton, 1983
Engl 20923, Lit and Civ II
Williams, Spring 2011
Modernism:
As a term, modernism is most often used to identify the most distinctive forms, styles, concepts, and sensibilities in literature and art from roughly WWI to the post-WWII years. Since it is a broad intellectual movement, modernism varies widely in specific features, but most critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with the traditional bases of both Western culture and Western art. Modernists were writers and artists who questioned the certainties and standard truths that had previously provided support systems for all social organization, religion, morality, and the conception of the human self. Modernists were influenced by late 19th century thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Darwin. They were especially influenced by the savagery and slaughter of WWI.
The modernist revolt against traditional literary and artistic forms and subjects manifested itself strongly after the catastrophe of WWI, which shook human faith in the continuity and foundations of Western culture. The inherited mode of ordering a literary or artistic work—and for that matter of ordering the world—assumed a relatively stable and coherent worldview. But there was a general shattering of traditional beliefs and foundational truths after WWI, and there was a general emergence of a belief in the futility and meaningless of life, that the world was characterized by disorder rather than order, by anarchy rather than stability. Experimenting with new forms and styles, modernists explored the dislocation and fragmentation of parts rather than the traditional artistic concept of unity. Modernist writers subverted the conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up narrative continuity, departing from standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language. Such techniques have obvious parallels in the violation of representational conventions in the modernist paintings of Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism as well as in the violations of standard conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm by the modernist composers (Stravinsky, Copeland).
A prominent feature of modernism is the attempt to be “avant-garde,” a military term for “advance-guard.” Quite self-consciously, authors and artists attempted to, in Pound’s famous phrase, “make it new.” By violating accepted conventions and decorums, they undertook to create new artistic forms and styles and to introduce neglected, often forbidden subjects. Frequently avant-garde artists represent themselves as alienated from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy. Their aim is often to shock the sensibilities of their audiences and to challenge the norms and pieties of bourgeois culture.
Literary Characteristics: free verse, stream-of-consciousness, objective correlative, imagism, multiple points-of-view, broken or fragmentary narratives, iceberg narratives, alienated characters, defiance of traditional values, taboo subjects, complexity.
Williams, Spring 2011
Modernism:
As a term, modernism is most often used to identify the most distinctive forms, styles, concepts, and sensibilities in literature and art from roughly WWI to the post-WWII years. Since it is a broad intellectual movement, modernism varies widely in specific features, but most critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with the traditional bases of both Western culture and Western art. Modernists were writers and artists who questioned the certainties and standard truths that had previously provided support systems for all social organization, religion, morality, and the conception of the human self. Modernists were influenced by late 19th century thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Darwin. They were especially influenced by the savagery and slaughter of WWI.
The modernist revolt against traditional literary and artistic forms and subjects manifested itself strongly after the catastrophe of WWI, which shook human faith in the continuity and foundations of Western culture. The inherited mode of ordering a literary or artistic work—and for that matter of ordering the world—assumed a relatively stable and coherent worldview. But there was a general shattering of traditional beliefs and foundational truths after WWI, and there was a general emergence of a belief in the futility and meaningless of life, that the world was characterized by disorder rather than order, by anarchy rather than stability. Experimenting with new forms and styles, modernists explored the dislocation and fragmentation of parts rather than the traditional artistic concept of unity. Modernist writers subverted the conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up narrative continuity, departing from standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language. Such techniques have obvious parallels in the violation of representational conventions in the modernist paintings of Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism as well as in the violations of standard conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm by the modernist composers (Stravinsky, Copeland).
A prominent feature of modernism is the attempt to be “avant-garde,” a military term for “advance-guard.” Quite self-consciously, authors and artists attempted to, in Pound’s famous phrase, “make it new.” By violating accepted conventions and decorums, they undertook to create new artistic forms and styles and to introduce neglected, often forbidden subjects. Frequently avant-garde artists represent themselves as alienated from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy. Their aim is often to shock the sensibilities of their audiences and to challenge the norms and pieties of bourgeois culture.
Literary Characteristics: free verse, stream-of-consciousness, objective correlative, imagism, multiple points-of-view, broken or fragmentary narratives, iceberg narratives, alienated characters, defiance of traditional values, taboo subjects, complexity.
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