I feel like I’ve made a few blog posts about this already, but as the quarter wraps up, I want to once again stress the importance of considering the context of literacy. One of my minors is American Studies, and a lot of the work that we do in this field is to consider as many aspects of an artifact that we can. Nothing exists in a void, especially not in AMS.
A single piece of text has political, economic, social, and cultural factors that have helped in its creation. This changes the meaning and can provide further insight into the author’s perspective. Often times satire or commentary can be lost without understanding the world in which it was written. Or, if the author has a unique perspective due to their position in life, the depth to which their work goes is ignored.
While I do believe that sometimes academia does too much analysis, understanding the basic context of a work is essential to grasping the true messages within a text (or art or performance. Anything, really). Just having a fuller understanding of the literacy the author must have used to create a piece can help analysis and application to modern day.
Context is everything. One thing I strongly dislike about old school literature professors is when they try too hard to consider the text, usually novels, apart from the social and historical contexts that shaped them. The author could never have produced the same material without the personal experiences in their daily life that inspired it.