Figure and Ground: More Thinking Outloud
by Jacob Russell on July 25, 2008
Originally posted at: Jacob Russell's Barking Dog
tags: aesthetics of process, blanchot, literary theory,Leave a comment
Steven Beattie asked, in a post to my Thinking Outloud:
“I wonder, is there a way to reconcile the desire to view the reading of a novel as a purely aesthetic experience with the desire to engage in an act of interpretation? Should this even be an issue?”
Both of my posts are as much about writing as reading and interpretation--what I call the aesthetics of process. Writing is another form of reading--reading an unfixed text. Reading… drawing on the newspad, still in the dark.
Isn’t every interpretation an attempt to do just that? How could it not be? Because we have a split subject, aren’t we always talking about two things: the text or our own respose. We go wrong if we either forget that we are not involved and part of the subject, or overwhelm the text with a response that is not sufficiently engaged with it.
In the post quoted above I was thinking about painting--as though Emma and Mr. Knightley were figures on a ground in a painting and the question had to do distinguishing figure from ground.
to read the rest… go to Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog
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