One of your classmates writes:
"[Some of the remarks and discussions in 427 this past week] lead me to believe that ENGLISH STUDENTS BELIEVE THAT THEY are uncovering Facts. This is terribly problematic to me. The reason I study literature is because it knows that it is fiction. It is what people of the past thought about stuff. HISTORY masquerades as truth but literature knows its inconsistency."Discuss (kindly and collegially, please!).
Deadline: Monday (2/2), 10am.
5 comments:
Wow. I'm glad that someone else brought this up. I also always found that to be problematic, but I thought that that was just me. The whole reason that I became an English major is because I simply enjoy reading. When taking lower level English classes, I would continually get frustrated when that class thought that they discovered some new "truth" about Shakespeare or Twain. I would always think to myself, "How do you know that? Twain was making this stuff up. It could mean anything you or he wanted it to mean." After thinking about this for a while, I wondered what the point of an English major was. If we aren't really discovering anything new, then what are we actually doing? I think that what we actually do is try and combine theories or criticism and come up with something new. If we succeed, that's wonderful. If we don't succeed, oh well.
The best analogy that I can think of is in fashion. Everyone has worn a coat before. Saying that you were the first one to design a coat just isn't true. What designers actually do is different. They take different ideas and concepts and meld them together into their own new design.
I think looking at the subject of english/literature study in this way is a positive thing. While we do read constructions of fiction that are not grounded in fact, I think operating in terms of "fact" and "fiction" is fundamentally flawed.
I argue that in an existence like ours that is so horrifically subjective. It is difficult to take any absolutes out a particular work (or event, or anything.) Can we ever truly know what Shakespeare or Milton or whoever else were thinking? Could we ever put ourselves in the shoes of a famous literary character or people? These people are impossible to know, inextricable from the constructions surrounding them such as the exaltation, revilement, or simple acknowledgement of writers and their works as somehow significant to a geneology of creative works, ideas, etc.
To me our studies ultimately result in an examination of how these people construct an amalgamation of the life they lived, the art around them and what preceded them, what they wanted for the future, etc.
To think of the creative process of art as "making this stuff up." Seems to deny them the credit that they left a little bit of themselves, their surroundings, their life, on the page, however corny that might sound.
I agree that we cannot uncover facts within the works that we study, however we can choose to be influenced by these works. These influences, like experiences, can be gathered and used to build a sort of expertise on humanity. So while literature cannot render facts, it can point us down the road to a better understanding of the process of human existence. And through this better understanding, we may arrive at an easier way to recognize truth, which is a lot like fact.
I'm done being cliche now I promise.
Oooh, very interesting. I'm so happy that someone said this out loud. Honestly, I became an English major because I wanted to study the ways the people interpret things differently. This extended to politics, philosophy and religion too. The ambiguity surrounding "the truth" was exciting, because one of the precepts for understanding a text or a period meant knowing that there was no "right" answer. I wish that we took this direction in English more often, because this critical thinking skill is what the humanities have over the social sciences. Plus, it leaves more engaging questions for new generations of scholars (like us, maybe). Taryn is absolutely right about the low-level classes too. It almost seems as of the instructors are trying to legitimize English as a "scientific" field of study by holding students to concrete facts, when really most of the meat of the field is open to interpretation. This frustrated me to no end, too. If the department focused more on empowering students to look critically and theoretically at the history that produces text, then our real-world abilities would be less questionable then they are now. I'm glad this was brought up.
I don't really have a problem with 'believing' in a text as fact. Christians, for example, believe the word of the Bible is fact. Muslims, the same with Qur'an. Now, are these texts literature?
Maybe, Maybe not. Both texts appear in literature textbooks worldwide, and here at UIUC, CWL 241, among many other classes, actively uses the Bible as a text. However, people also call these 'divine texts' or 'holy texts,' which separate them from general literature.
Whatever the case is, I think people should be able to believe that 'literature' contains facts. It's another dimension literature offers to readers, another dimension that makes us truth seekers come back for more.
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