Reference:
Review Excerpts '"Culture" is a term that is repeatedly used without meaning much of
anything at all, a vague gesture toward a dimly perceived ethos'
(228).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | culture | meaning |
term |
'Here we can make our first tentative move toward the use of culture
for the study of literature... to recover a sense of the stakes that once
gave readers pleasure and pain. An awareness of culture as a complex
whole can help us to recover that sense by leading us to reconstruct the
boundaries upon whose existence the works were predicated.... What
kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to
enforce? Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work
compelling? Are there differences between my values and the values
implicit in the work I am reading? Upon what social understandings does
the work depend? Whose freedom of thought or movement might be
constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work? What are the larger social
structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be
connected?' (?227).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | culture | implicit |
reading |
study |
thought |
'Cultural analysis has much to learn from scrupulous formal analysis
of literary texts because those texts are not merely cultural by virtue of
reference to the world beyond themselves; they are cultural by virtue of
social values and contexts that they have themselves successfully
absorbed....Cultural analysis must be opposed on principle to the rigid
distinction between that which is within a text and that which lies outside'
(227).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | analysis |
distinction |
literary |
reference |
text |
world |
'If culture functions as a structure of limits, it also functions as the
regulator and guarantor of movement. Indeed the limits are virtually
meaningless without movement; it is only through improvisation,
experiment, and exchange that cultural boundaries can be established.
Obviously, among different cultures there will be a great diversity in the
ratio between mobility and constraint. Some cultures dream of imposing
an absolute order, a perfect stasis, but even these, if they are to
reproduce themselves from one generation to the next, will have to
commit themselves, however tentatively or unwillingly, to some minimal
measure of movement; conversely, some cultures dream of an absolute
mobility, a perfect freedom, but these too have always been compelled,
in the interest of survival, to accept some limits' (228-9).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | absolute |
constraint |
culture |
ratio |
structure |
'This mobility is not the expression of random motion but of
exchange' (229).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | expression |
'Great works of art are not neutral relay stations in the circulation of
cultural materials. Something happens to objects, beliefs and practices
when they are represented, reimagined, and performed in literary texts,
something often unpredictable and disturbing. That "something" is the
sign both of the power of art and of the embeddedness of culture in the
contingencies of history' (230-1).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | culture | history |
literary |
power |
sign |
Referring to Shakespeare's The Tempest, Greenblatt advances that
'If it is the task of cultural criticism to decipher the power of Prospero, it
is also its task to hear the accents of Caliban'. The critic's job is to
notice that contradictory elements of the author's world are being
juxtaposed in the author's work to bring to light significant conflict and
make statements about the world. In this kind of reading, Prospero
represents the imperialism of European exploration of the New World
and Caliban represents the right of the people of the New World to
self-determination. (232).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | criticism |
power |
reading |
world |
Last Modified:
July-12-96 9:23:44
Reply to randy_radney@sil.org[A Lexicon of the Humanities |
SIL Home Page | Contributions]