Scarica Buck's Perspective on High Culture and Storytelling in Literature e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Angloamericana solo su Docsity! 7° lezione 29.10 SLIDE QUOTE Halford: Making High culture accessible Problem of high vs low culture/ high vs middle-brow It reclaims middle-brow as a positive term. Two examples: Virginia Woolf Russel Lynes who attacked Woolf because he considered her ideas of literature to be too limited. The aspirational qualities of middle brow were considered irrelevant. SLIDE SLIDE SLIDE high culture today? This distinction is now more difficult to define, because the difference between them has been reshaped and redefined post modern literature, plays with the expectations and the codes of what was usually considered as high culture in the past. SLIDE CH XVIII: UNDER THE SPELL OF STORIES In the 18th chapter there is crucial moment in the novel and there are two references to the role of the storyteller. In this chapter Buck hints to this figure, the person who chooses to entertain people telling stories, it’s a reference that enables us to understand the kind of cultural work that she thought she was doing and what were the cultural expectations that shaped and fashioned her way of writing. There is Wang Lung growing very rich and restless. He starts meeting a new woman. One of the thing that are strange to him is that he is no longer interested in the stories told by the storyteller. Quote Wang Lung was a consumer of stories. He like the other people in the village could not read and for that, listened to the storyteller. The form of entertainment is important for the community. Wang Lung is experiencing a crisis. He’s now rich and he is bored. At the moment he cannot work in the field because of the flood and must find other ways than work in order to spend his days. After a while, he is not interested in talking with O-lan. This crisis will introduce the second part of Wang Lung’s life as a richman. We move from the proletarian figure to the rich man (poor peasant and rich landowner) It’s important to focus on the idea of storytelling and on the differences that Buck perceives between her stories and the tradition of American literature, as she understood it at the end of the 1920s. An useful text to express these differences and to desceibe Buck’s idea of literature is the “Nobel lecture” which was the speech that she gave in 1938. She devoted her speech to the Chinese novel. Although she describe Chinese tradition, what she really was trying to do was define her role in the American literary context. Quote slide Buck, Nobel Lecture The point is to remind us that what we consider art and literature is always the outcome of some sort of negotiation. She wanted to highlight the contingency of the values we associated with literary and artistic production, which was something rare in her period. That was highly controversial. Now we can appreciate the complexity and modernity of her approach. SLIDE QUOTE ART AND THE NOVEL The novel in China was never considered art. In the western context in the mid 20 th centuy the novel was considered an acceptable work of art. The novel was not considered as a legitimate form of art at the beginning in the 18th century (popular form of entertainment). That is not the case in China. What is considered art has to be negotiated. SLIDE SCHOLARS LITERATURE AND THE NOVEL Art is something that you recognize because it Is based on classical rules. Arbitrary is the key term Buck wants to put attention on. SLIDE SCHOLARS AND SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE What was the defining element was social significance? A form of expressions had to have social significance in order to be considered art. This is where Buck links her description of the values and characteristics of the Chinese novel to the American context. SLIDE THE ART OF LITERATURE We must be aware of the idea of art of literature as something devised by men of learning. SLIDE WRITTEN TO AMUSE SLIDE a professional storyteller He is somebody who enjoys telling stories to an audience. It’s a profession where that has as its objective the amusement of the people. SLIDE WAS WHAT THEY WANTED The true reason of telling story, the plot becomes the most important element, because it is what the people want. She is defining her style. This is very far from modernist writing and experimental writing which defines that era of literature. She was aware of her difference. She was legitimizing her difference by showing that there are other possible way of looking at literature and what counts as literature is not defined by its essential traits and it’s not in its formal feature and style. It is defined by elements that are outside of the literary object itself.
