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Summary
Art is neither the impression of natural objectivity nor the expression of spiritual subjectivity, but it is the work and witness of the relation between the substantia humana and the substantia rerum, it is the realm of “between” which has become a form.
martin buberWe have sometimes been reminded by structuralist or post-structuralist literary theorists that reading is not an entirely naive or innocent activity. “To read a text as literature is not to make one's mind a tabula rasa and approach it without preconception,” writes Jonathan Culler in his Structuralist Poetics:
[O]ne must bring to it an implicit understanding of the operations of literary discourse which tells one what to look for.
Anyone lacking this knowledge, anyone wholly unacquainted with literature and unfamiliar with the conventions by which fictions are read, would, for example, be quite baffled if presented with a poem. His knowledge of the language would enable him to understand phrases and sentences, but he would not know, quite literally, what to make of this strange concatenation of phrases … He has not internalized the “grammar” of literature which would permit him to convert linguistic sequences into literary structures and meanings.
(pp. 113–14)It must follow – since this claim is obviously quite justified – that however much we might want to argue (and here we should be agreeing with the semiologists) that our “ordinary” ways of seeing or talking about the world are not sharply discontinuous from our more “imaginative” or “artistic” ways, there will still remain genuine questions to be answered about the nature of the literary conventions or devices – the “literary structures or meanings” – which we rely on whenever we create or experience any text as literature.
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- Myth, Truth and LiteratureTowards a True Post-modernism, pp. 86 - 114Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994