08-28-2014, 12:00 AM
❝ Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to. ❞
- Toni Cade Bambara, (“What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” in The Writer on Her Work, p.163
"Alright, so, anyone who’s ever used the concept “literature” will have absorbed a theory of literature, a set of implicit assumptions—about what it is, what separates it from all other forms of writing, what’s meant by the terms “author” and “reader”, what interventions literature makes in the world, how it produces meaning, how it’s read, how it “should” be read, &c. Studying literary theory makes visible the ideological assumptions you’ve formed, and forces you to scrutinise them.
(Literature becomes twice as interesting when you grasp that it’s not a fixed and constant object of study—“literature” is an unstable, indefinite, contingent concept that is being endlessly negotiated and (re)constructed to accommodate new texts and forms of writing.)
Theory is strange and eclectic: it traverses linguistics, anthropology, sociology, art history, historiography, philosophy, political philosophy, science, aesthetics, &c. It’s the study of the many lenses through which we read literature—but they’re lenses which challenge or reframe or recolour not just the text but the world. Theory dismantles “common sense”. It unsettles and disrupts what you’ve taken for granted.(elucipher)
- Toni Cade Bambara, (“What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” in The Writer on Her Work, p.163
"Alright, so, anyone who’s ever used the concept “literature” will have absorbed a theory of literature, a set of implicit assumptions—about what it is, what separates it from all other forms of writing, what’s meant by the terms “author” and “reader”, what interventions literature makes in the world, how it produces meaning, how it’s read, how it “should” be read, &c. Studying literary theory makes visible the ideological assumptions you’ve formed, and forces you to scrutinise them.
(Literature becomes twice as interesting when you grasp that it’s not a fixed and constant object of study—“literature” is an unstable, indefinite, contingent concept that is being endlessly negotiated and (re)constructed to accommodate new texts and forms of writing.)
Theory is strange and eclectic: it traverses linguistics, anthropology, sociology, art history, historiography, philosophy, political philosophy, science, aesthetics, &c. It’s the study of the many lenses through which we read literature—but they’re lenses which challenge or reframe or recolour not just the text but the world. Theory dismantles “common sense”. It unsettles and disrupts what you’ve taken for granted.(elucipher)