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Created: August 24, 2002
Latest Update: August 24, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Contextural Poetics

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, August 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

I wouldn't normally have ventured into contextural poetics. That's probably going further into literature than is advisable in undergraduate and beginning graduate sociology courses. But an e-mail came from Dr. Roberta Baldi, Dept. of English Literature - UC Milan, asking for "any substantial works in the field that you would kindly suggest – apart from Fraistat’s." Dear me, I hadn't a clue. But the request did intrigue me. So I went out on the Web to see who Fraistat was, whose work Dr. Baldi seemed already to have. Lots of material on Fraistat and his work at the University of Maryland with the technology of making texts available for research and teaching. But didn't find "contextural poetics."

From what I did find, however, I suspect that we should know about contextural poetics because it sounds to me like interpretation that recognizes that the author IS NOT the artistic work, and that the author does have control over the identities presented in the work. I'll to try to follow through on this and discover whether in fact this branch of poetics is examining the interdependence of author and work and reader, and thus exploring the importance of context to reader as well as author. Meanwhile, here's a little of what I found.

By the way, all the search engines kept asking me if I meant "contextual poetics," but when I tried saying yes, they found NO RESULTS! The irony of machines. If they didn't have any "contextual poetics" why ask in the first place? There I go again, assuming the world is a rational place.

"Rowing in Eden: Reading Dickinson Reading" Martha Nell Smith. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. 50-95, 232-238.

Modern Philology. Journals from Chicago. Volume 95, Number 2, November 1997. Came upon this TOC accidentally, while checking out "contextural poetics." August 24, 2002.

Articles:

• James Joyce and the Problem of "Otherness." Brian W. Shaffer p. 218 .

  Book reviews:

• Jesse M. Gellrich, Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts of Writing in Philosophy, Politics, and Poetry. Review by Catherine S. Cox. p. 233
• Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832. Reveiw by Alan Bewell. p. 261

"As Harold Bloom points out, Dickinson "compels us to begin again in rethinking our relation to poems, and to the equally troubling and dynamic relations of poems to our world of appearances."63 . . . . "Thus like the Apostle Paul telling the Greeks about Jesus by pointing to their memorial to the Unknown God and promising to tell all about him (Acts 17:22-32), using what our young people already know so well-the Academy and Grammy awards both constantly remind their audience of the collaborative processes necessary to produce a movie or record-can greatly enhance everyone's insights." Scroll about two inches up from the bottom of the file.

It seems to me that this article raises many of the same theoretical issues we are discussing as "contextural poetics." jeanne