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Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.
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Re: Also here via metafandom
Date: 2010-11-30 01:12 pm (UTC)This implies that you think the point of the text is to analyze cultural context. That may be true if you are a cultural critic, who is using the text to analyze a cultural or aesthetic moment. But in pure literary criticism it is absolutely possible to analyze the text for its own sake. which is not necessarily the same thing as a vacuum!
Analyzing children's literature makes it abundantly clear that a critic needs to think about the implied reader, and about the distance between the critic and the implied and actual readers. But if that's a very Wolfgang Iser way of looking at texts, I would also bring in Stanley Fish, and the reader's interpretive community is hugely important, especially when addressing the different effects texts have at different points in history.
No, the text is the medium through which the cultural context is transmitted. In fact, there are parts of the text conveying cultural context which have nothing to do with the author at all: the marketing history, the book packaging, the book design, etc.