The Fluidity of Context in Literary Analysis: A Critique by Brian Moon
Summary of the Reading:
Brian Moons article Context from Literary Terms: A Practical Glossary dedicatedly focus on definition of the context in procedures for analyzing literature, thereby, arguing against fixed functionalist beliefs regarding context that operates only as relevant background information about the text and its writer. Moon brings some new ideas to the definition of context and, in her opinion, context is not only about historical setting; it is about the matrices of culture beliefs and values interactions in the past and now. He dismisses the notion of placing a favorable context on literature works especially now that the subject has become flexible and creates a lot of perspectives.
Key Idea/Argument Under Examination:
Moons main thesis of the paper can be reduced to the question of how context can change and what implications this has for reading literature. He criticizes traditional generics approaches to context as historical preconditions because of, among other reasons, cultural diversity of beliefs and values, historical records incompleteness, and bias. There are countless documented cases of fans perceiving a work in one way while detractors do so in another, accounting for reception history In some cases reception history is no more than a set of slanted historical documents that reinterpret the text in light of the authors own biases. This raises questions regarding the eminence of historical context data as the sole way to apprehend the literary piece correctly. Moon talks about the existence of pluralism of beliefs and values that exist within any society and realizes that the context considered is not unified. Thus, the idea or beliefs that people had about witchcraft, roles of women, blacks, and animals were in sharp contrast to what Shakespeare wrote and depicted in his plays during the Elizabethan England. Continuously shaped by contemporary interpretations: Moreover, in a similar vein to what has already been mentioned, Moon claimed that context is not static but rather a construct of the present interpretation and culture. He contends that people carry out culture and ideology with them in their reading activities; this determines the meaning they give to the texts (Moon, 1992, pp. 21-23).
Implications and Discussion:
It is necessary to outline that Moons critique of traditional context contributes to the discussion on how literature works as the field of constant reading and writing. His argument rises the awareness of the diversified context, such as historical, cultural, and the current one, to explain how and why different textual meanings exist.
But, it is also important to note that Moons perspective put forward some questions about the contemporary interpreters imposing their biases on the texts. Reading Moons Mobile Subjects, it is evident that he effectively questions the reader to engage with a notion of multiple contexts while perceiving the fluidity in construction of meaning and its contingency upon cultural and temporal factors. Finally, when it comes to the nature of context, the approach of Moon makes the analysis of literary works more diverse, pointing to the active mutual Different texts and the communities that read them throughout history and nowadays.
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