Murat
Nemet-Nejat suggests two complicating factors for the question of context – the
reader’s contribution and the issue of what he characterizes as divided
loyalties:
Dear
Ron,
I just read Gary [Sullivan]'s observations on "context" and Jonathan Swift for the first time. Since Swift – particularly "A Modest Proposal" and "A Tale of the Tub" - had a strong effect on my prose writing, and my views on context relate to my reading of Swift, I would like to chip in.
Context can also be tackled from the reader's point of view, his or her historical moment, which makes him or her read, misread, reimagine, etc., that text. This is not a matter of personal taste or subjectivity, but a dynamic between two historical moments. In this way context is not seen temporally or historically, but as a fluid continuum, constantly changing.
The originating occasion of "A Modest Proposal" was the Irish famine. But as important to me was that Swift was a man of "divided loyalties," an Irishman making his fortunes in the English capital. Is it possible that the ambiguityGary
As a writer, I am very interested in the questions of accent, of divided loyalty in our time. Am I merely misreading Swift, or out of my historical moment I am seeing a deeper context in Swift's work?Don 't the
two contexts merge into a new one?
Purely as a writer, what I find striking in "A Modest Proposal" is how, following the structures, "logic" of the English enlightenment (of whom Samuel Johnson, a hater and despiser of the Irish, is the "purest" example), Swift creates a counter-text, a mad text, a parody and self parody. Is this not the essence of what experiment in poetry is? Is that not what, for example, the Bernstein's poem which you mention does?
My best. Happy new year.
Murat Nemet-Nejat
I just read Gary [Sullivan]'s observations on "context" and Jonathan Swift for the first time. Since Swift – particularly "A Modest Proposal" and "A Tale of the Tub" - had a strong effect on my prose writing, and my views on context relate to my reading of Swift, I would like to chip in.
Context can also be tackled from the reader's point of view, his or her historical moment, which makes him or her read, misread, reimagine, etc., that text. This is not a matter of personal taste or subjectivity, but a dynamic between two historical moments. In this way context is not seen temporally or historically, but as a fluid continuum, constantly changing.
The originating occasion of "A Modest Proposal" was the Irish famine. But as important to me was that Swift was a man of "divided loyalties," an Irishman making his fortunes in the English capital. Is it possible that the ambiguity
As a writer, I am very interested in the questions of accent, of divided loyalty in our time. Am I merely misreading Swift, or out of my historical moment I am seeing a deeper context in Swift's work?
Purely as a writer, what I find striking in "A Modest Proposal" is how, following the structures, "logic" of the English enlightenment (of whom Samuel Johnson, a hater and despiser of the Irish, is the "purest" example), Swift creates a counter-text, a mad text, a parody and self parody. Is this not the essence of what experiment in poetry is? Is that not what, for example, the Bernstein's poem which you mention does?
My best. Happy new year.
Murat Nemet-Nejat
