Context #3

Context of Reception

There are two main things that influence how we read:
• When we are reading (at the time the poem was published, or later)
• What kind of reader we are (man or woman, young or old, political views etc.)

Think about how readers respond differently to Shakespeare today than they would have done in Elizabethan times. (The Merchant of Venice is a good example)

The following lines by Wordsworth would have been considered quite revolutionary in 1800 because they were as close as a poet could get to plain, almost conversational language. Today we would find the inversion of the first line very old-fashioned

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

How we read a poem is, of course, dependent on when we read it. Imagine reading Auden in 1939.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

(From ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’)

This may remain a powerful verse at the beginning of the 21st century, but it would have had a very different impact if we read it when it was written, on the eve of the Second World War.

How we read a poem is also determined by who we are. Age, gender, ethnicity, are only three of the things that might affect what we think of a poem. Look at the following two poems. How might age, gender and ethnicity affect what a person might think of them? Imagine some famous people reading them. How might their interpretations be different? What might they say in a dialogue about the poems? Take as an obvious example, George Bush and Osama Bin Laden. If that seems too obvious, consider how might your teacher react differently to a poem compared to you or another student.









Rudyard Kipling From “The White Man’s Burden” 1899
(A poem urging America to take up the ‘burden’ of creating an Empire, and to assume the task of developing the Philippines, recently won in the Spanish-American War.)

Take up the White Man’s burden-
Send forth the best ye breed-
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need,
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild-
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child .

Take up the White Man’s burden-
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;




Claude McKay: “If We Must Die” 1919
(Born in Jamaica and living in America, McKay wrote this sonnet in response to race riots, during which there were many attacks on Black neighbourhoods.)

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Context #2

Context of Production

(For the purpose of these postings I will use poems as examples)
It is obvious that certain poems or novels could not have been written at a different time. This is clear in the case of subject matter that points to a particular event. The poem could not have been written before the event. There are thousands of examples of this. Consider Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916.’

Poems also fit into their particular time because of the style in which they were written. Look at the two excerpts below, taken from poems written two hundred years apart:

Never seek to tell thy love

Love that never told can be

For the gentle wind does move

Silently invisibly.

(William Blake – 1793)

About ten days or so
After we saw you dead
You came back in a dream.
I’m all right now you said.
(Thom Gunn ‘Reassurance’ – 1992)


If the dates of these poems were swapped around they would not ‘work.’ Gunn’s poem would probably not have been considered poetry in 1793 and Blake’s poems would seem overly-poetical in 1993. Which aspects of the poems’ language places them firmly in their time?

For a poem to ‘work,’ it must seem to fit in with what has gone before it. In his well-known essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (written in 1922), T. S. Eliot says this, although in a much more elaborate way.

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”

Eliot’s ‘the dead’ is simply all the important poems that were written in the past, which determine how a new poem is written and how we interpret a new poem. Poets have to work within the bounds of what is accepted as poetry in their own time. Where these bounds lie is different for each generation.

Types of Context #1 (AO4)

Remember that AO4 asks you to 'demonstrate an understanding of the significance and influence of contexts.'

Intro

The texts, in this unit, are the poems and novels which you will study. Context is all that surrounds the text, or frames it. This might include:
• the author’s life
• the time in which the author was living
• the values of that time
• the historical events that had an impact on the author and his/her work
• the other works of art that were produced around the same time
• even the debates about the meaning of a text that have gone on since its creation


The poems you will study were not written in a vacuum. They were written by people who have lived and breathed and who were probably influenced by the same kinds of things as you, by the conditions they grew up in, by the political landscape of their time, by the people whom they lived with and loved. These all go to inform the poems that they wrote and often become the subject matter of the poems. It is therefore important to understand the poems in context, to understand what the times were like in which they were written.

Context is about looking at the bigger picture.

There has long been a debate about how much context should be studied in order to understand the text and whether it should be studied at all.

For the purposes of this unit, there are two main kinds of context:
• the context of production (the author’s context)
• the context of reception (what the text meant to others at different times)

Literary Theory - Some Websites to Explore (AO3)

AO3 asks you to explore 'interpretations of other readers'. It might be worth taking on board recognised critical approaches.

Wikipedia is as good a place to start as any. Click here. Look at the History and Differences among schools. This makes the point that there has been a long debate (still ongoing) as to whether Lit Theory should be taught or whether it needs to be applied to a text. Really theory is all about debate, critical thinking and approaching texts in different ways. So it's not suprising that there is a debate about the nature or necessity of theory. One site says that Literary Theory creates questions, not answers and this might be worth keeping in mind when studying it.

Another nice intro is here. There is an exhaustive list of theoretical approaches. Don't bother with them all. Look mainly at New Criticism, Marxism, Feminism, Structuralism and New Historicism.

This page is another nice intro with a very good bibliography.

Here is a set of 25 lectures of literary theory from Yale Uni. It might be tough going! Again, be selective. you might want to have a look at New Criticism, Feminism, Gender...