Last day to blog! woo
I realized, when looking over the blogs, that no one had really talked about Smith #2 as of yet, and that article, though long, was one of my favorites (though not at first). When I first started to read Smith I saw words like 'economics' and 'cost-benefit' and 'accounting' which brought me back to horrible memories of accounting I freshman year and made me cringe in horror that she would dare compare literature (my love) to accounting (hate). However, as I continued to read the article, I realized for one, that it was more about economics and sociology than accounting and that it actually made a lot of sense. Books do seem to change value over time and even if they are 'timeless' their meaning and importance changes to an extent. I immediately thought of Shakespeare. When I saw Titus Andronicus performed at the Globe, complete with Lavinia dripping cups of blood from her mouth as it stained down her white dress, I saw a type of Shakespeare that was completely different from that which I had learned in school. Titus was entertaining. It was loud and in your face and the crowd wildly cheered or gasped in horror together, we were so enraptured by this 'drama' that was more of a Shakespearean slasher. True, in Shakespeare's days, they might not have used as much fake blood, (though I'm not really sure of that) but watching that play in the Globe as it might have been performed in the 1500s showed me a different side to Shakespeare. His plays have really changed from what they once were, entertaining shows that even peasants could watch for a penny, to required curriculum in schools. Don't like Shakespeare? Read the spark notes, right? But Shakespeare wasn't originally meant to be read in a classroom so students could suffer through understanding the difficult language, it was meant to be seen and enjoyed. This isn't to say Shakespeare didn't possess that deeper meaning (though I wouldn't cite Titus as the best example for deep interpretation) but how we read Shakespeare, how he is important, and why he is valued has changed. I think that's why I liked Smith's 'contingency of value' idea so much. It ensured that literature was never static.
2 comments:
I agree with Michelle: Smith’s reading started out as being rather dubious for me but then, as I read more, it got better and I think that Smith makes several excellent points. First of all (and this is kinda off-topic but I think that it is HILARIUOS) is when Smith says of the epic poem "The Creation" that “its function—indeed, one might say, its value—has been to stand as an instance of bad poetry.” Take THAT Blackmore! Geeeze—now that’s harsh! But anyway, I will get serious now. Back to the point, I particularly wanted to comment about Smith’s “two possible trajectories” about the value of a work. I think that Smith captures the reality of the situation very well. In case you don’t remember, Smith’s theory goes as follows: the functions for which a text is valued are either no longer desired or are still desired. Of the ones that are no longer desired, or, better said, no longer perform their original function well, some can attain a new value: that of a relic (which can also be “rediscovered” later if its functions become relevant again). The rest of the no-longer-valued works will fade away and not survive. On the other hand, some works continue to perform their original functions but more often, books that survive are still performing some desired function, just not necessarily the one(s) that the text originally intended.
The whole time I read this section of Smith’s article, I got really excited because it seems SO true. But I also know, especially after a semester of Literary Theories, that almost anything can be torn apart. So, what I am wondering is if anyone sees any flaws in Smith’s theory that I summarized above. It is on pages 1572-1573 of the handout. Or, people can probably talk about Smith some more—I felt like we really didn’t spend a whole lot of time discussing her article in class!
Smith's second track for literature, that the work will "continue to perform some desired/able functions particularly well, even if not the same ones for which it was initially valued (1573) brings to mind Barry's first tenent of liberal humanism, "Good literature is of timeless significance; it somehow transcends the limitations and peculiarities of the age it was written in, and thereby speaks to what is constant in human nature." They both seem to agree that works which prove able to "transcend time" attain a higher status, although Smith reserves the right for the work to switch to the track of extinction whereas Barry seems to make the decision more of a lasting one. Overall though, Smith's theory is much more in accordance with Barry's recurrent ideas in critical history.
I think that Smith has a valid point when she says that, in regard to works whose value we deem "unquestionable... those of its features that would, in a noncanonical work, be found alienating... will be glazed over or backgrounded." Her argument that we make texts timeless by "suppressing their temporality."
The idea that critics change what people notice/ what meaning they find in a text by "changing the locus of its interest" seems to bring up the interpretive communities we have talked so much about. If the critics are deciding what elements of a text the reader is focusing on, they exert a huge influence on the types of interpretations the members of their community come up with.
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