![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clarification: bridging the gap
Jul. 7th, 2008 05:22 amLest I be accused of a firm grasp of the obvious by the professors of literature and religious studies among us, I want to emphasize my interest in context and audience. Essays on my foregoing observations used to be commonplace in the little quarterlies, and I hope still are, albeit updated by the newer sources I've mentioned in this journal from time to time.
But the problem is that in America, even the simple, agreed-upon shared metaphors and communal stories (a.k.a. myths) are either fossilized almost beyond recovery or absent from national discourse altogether. Their replacements do not serve exactly the same function, and the mythic-metaphoric web of references that still functions across everyday life tends to be invisible to the larger public.
In other words, a very large group of highly educated individuals does not have time to read the quarterlies, myself included. I spent many happy hours doing just that for years and years after finishing my doctorate, but eventually one finds oneself working two or three jobs if one lives in the United States.
So there is a need for interdisciplinary missionary work, so to speak. And most of all among the educated classes, for the kind of discourse that takes place in the nationally distributed print media and online sources makes it clear that scarcely anybody has even a remote clue any longer of how metaphors work in daily life as well as in literature and religion and art and...but if I get started I will go on a rant about the degree to which the status of metaphor isn't even understood in those areas these days, and then the Europeans who read this will scratch their heads at the subliteracy of Americans...though I did find myself wondering how Geert Mak could get away with the kind of old-style metaphorizing that is inherent in the very title of his new book.
There is a great forgetting of older distinctions with regard to language and its functions, and it spills over into all areas of life. Confusion regarding idioms is only a symptom of the larger degree of forgetfulness.
One needs to say that there are genuinely new degrees of commonly understood topics, or one would be merely a curmudgeon. The problem is how to incorporate a flood of new information without utterly losing what once was a reasonably shared universe of discourse about the old information.
But the problem is that in America, even the simple, agreed-upon shared metaphors and communal stories (a.k.a. myths) are either fossilized almost beyond recovery or absent from national discourse altogether. Their replacements do not serve exactly the same function, and the mythic-metaphoric web of references that still functions across everyday life tends to be invisible to the larger public.
In other words, a very large group of highly educated individuals does not have time to read the quarterlies, myself included. I spent many happy hours doing just that for years and years after finishing my doctorate, but eventually one finds oneself working two or three jobs if one lives in the United States.
So there is a need for interdisciplinary missionary work, so to speak. And most of all among the educated classes, for the kind of discourse that takes place in the nationally distributed print media and online sources makes it clear that scarcely anybody has even a remote clue any longer of how metaphors work in daily life as well as in literature and religion and art and...but if I get started I will go on a rant about the degree to which the status of metaphor isn't even understood in those areas these days, and then the Europeans who read this will scratch their heads at the subliteracy of Americans...though I did find myself wondering how Geert Mak could get away with the kind of old-style metaphorizing that is inherent in the very title of his new book.
There is a great forgetting of older distinctions with regard to language and its functions, and it spills over into all areas of life. Confusion regarding idioms is only a symptom of the larger degree of forgetfulness.
One needs to say that there are genuinely new degrees of commonly understood topics, or one would be merely a curmudgeon. The problem is how to incorporate a flood of new information without utterly losing what once was a reasonably shared universe of discourse about the old information.
