Antiquitopia

Science (and cultural consciousness) of the nineteenth century singled out only a miniature world (and we have narrowed it even more) from the boundless world of literature. This miniature world included almost nothing from the East. The world of culture and literature is essentially as boundless as the universe. We are speaking not about its geographical breadth (this is limited), but about its semantic depths, which are as bottomless as the depths of matter. The infinite diversity of interpretations, images, figurative semantic combinations, materials and their interpretations, and so forth. We have narrowed it terribly by selecting and by modernizing what we have selected. We impoverish the past and do not enrich ourselves. We are suffocating in the captivity of narrow and homogeneous interpretations. The main lines of the development of literature that have prepared one writer or another, one work or another, throughout the centuries (and in various nations). But we know on...

In an earlier post , I commented on the recent SBL Forum paper on Specialist vs. Generalist. Here are some snippets from Bakhtin speaking in a similar vein: In our enthusiasm for specification we have ignored the questions of the interconnection and interdependence of various areas of culture; we have frequently forgotten that the boundaries drawn of these areas are not absolute, that in various epochs they have been drawn in various ways; and we have not taken into account that the most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and not in places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity. .... If it is impossible to study literature apart from an epoch's entire culture, it is even more fatal to encapsulate a literary phenomenon in the single epoch of its creation, in its own contemporaneity, so to speak. We usually strive to explain a writer and his work precisely through his own time and the most recent past...