Well, as Davidson talks about how readers in the Early National American period read, I can't help but think that the importance of one text on a person could be greatly influenced by what other texts that person was reading around the same time. Ideas are often juxtaposed with each other in very unnatural ways in our education and individual learning processes. I remember reading Frankenstein for the first time during the same semester I was taking a Childhood Development course, and I nearly pulled a Rory Gilmore, trying to analyze Frankenstein's monster as a model of linguistic development. Really, though, I find myself creating knowledge in this manner all the time. We just read Starr and now we are reading Davidson. Putting those two books side by side in a course will always leave me with certain ideas about American exceptionalism when thinking about this period of history and how we develop histories.
What would be interesting, I think, is to look at how texts, being read at the same time, were in conversation with each other, perhaps creating little Frankenstein monster ideas of their own. What was that one man reading in the novel, listening to in a sermon, and scanning through in a newspaper? How do all these ideas from different sources of knowledge come together to create new knowledge? While Davidson is looking primarily at the novel being a "subversive" form according to a Bakhtinian understanding of prose fiction which incorporates many voices, it is interesting to think about how the external non-fiction related to the prose fiction and may have created contexts for knowledge in different ways. This is one of the benefits of doing the periodical searches. I would find it interesting to read a novel published during a certain year and read the non-fiction that was published around it. How would that context influence the reading of the novel as well?
(Forgive me for any incoherence as my head is quite clogged with the residue of the flu bug I've been fighting.)
3 comments:
Mary--
Your blog is very coherent! And lovely! And not just because you mentioned Gilmore Girls. But, like Rory's guidance counselor, I'm going to have to call you on bringing ideas from the Turner article we read in Victorian Periodicals into this class. Kindly please keep your intertextuality contained within the boundaries of a single class. Thank you.
But, to be serious, I think it is important to consider context in the ways in which you discuss above. Certainly matters of which to be cognizant when doing our weekly periodical searches and our more comprehensive examination of a single publication during its run. Brava!
Mary...hope you are feeling better.
You just articulated (and much better than I) the thoughts I had about novel reading...specifically the trilogy of novels I'm working with for my thesis. I've been reading the other novels that were best sellers or Pulitzer winners, and I've read the ads and reviews and other newspaper items, and I've read the prominent non-fiction that is applicable to the time and place I'm focused on. It is giving me new insights into both Why the novels were written, who was reading them, and what they "meant" then. I'm loving the intertextuality of the project.
Hi MAry, I also thought your blog was quite thoughtful and interesting. Your comments about subjects spilling over into other areas is particularly appropriate whenCD's approach to the early novels. Reading is a contextual act, and thus everything we read must be read in terms of everything that surrounds that reading. The spill over is inescapable. The context is historical, and history is contextual. Good post. Hope you are feeling better. dw
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