/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2510229]

Do you think an understanding of the history and intentions behind a book and the conditions it was written in necessitous to understand it? I began reading Don Quixote a few months ago, and a lot of the somewhat evident references to epics on Spanish chivalry pass over my head, although explicit ones are kind of covered in the footnotes. Now, I plan to do a little bit of reading on the context so that I can gain a deeper understanding of the book, but would you say that this creates a deeper understanding, or merely a different understanding? Of what harm is reading words as words?

[Anonymous No.2510236]

I would say it creates a different understanding, not necessarily a better one.

Interesting things can come from people who are largely ignorant of what they're reading.

[Anonymous No.2510238]

It's a good question, actually. I didn't know anything about the Spanish Civil War when I read "For Whom The Bell Tolls" other than the obvious but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Then again, Ulysses is a lot more enjoyable if you get all the references, but then again if you force yourself to get all the references by reading Irish history textbooks it will be less enjoyable. It's quite a Catch-22, I'd say just read fiction without looking it all up and you'll understand a lot of contextual stuff eventually.

[Anonymous No.2510243]

>>2510236
>Interesting things can come from people who are largely ignorant of what they're reading.
Yeah, I wonder if we'd still have Christianity if everyone reading the Bible knew that it was just a clusterfuck of other ideas shoehorned out of various other religions.

[Anonymous No.2510250]

Of course it is important. I don't think people would want to read about a bunch of animals on a farm, or an old man catching a big fish.

[Anonymous No.2510267]

>>2510250
Well that's the thing, you can't argue that context creates a better understanding because that's completely subjective. You could analyse Animal Farm in a completely different non-political sense. Pic related, it demonstrates the extremity of this idea.

[Anonymous No.2510269]

No because if you're practicing deconstructionism then you're just going to find whatever cisnormative context you were looking for in the first place anyway.

[Anonymous No.2510278]

>>2510269

Why did /pol/ suddenly start spouting literary theory terms in ways that don't make sense (in ways that demonstrate they have no idea what they mean)?

Did Stormfront publish a glossary of terms or something?

[Anonymous No.2510279]

>>2510269
>deconstructionism
Here we go