At 07:54 AM 7/24/00 GMT, you wrote:
>>Daniel Pearlman wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > As to reading the Cantos like a sort of dream, the whole issue of
>> > reductionist readings of literature--whether in the light of
>> > psychoanalysis, or Marxism, or feminism--is a disturbing one.
>> > Reductionist criticism, in general, has attempted to employ
>> > literature as an instrumentality for the advancement of so-
>> > called critics' personal ax-grinding missions.
>>
>
WEI: I fully agree with this objection to reductionist readings.  I also agree
>with C. Cox that every reading is, to a greater or lesser degree, a
>reduction, or simplification of the work being analyzed.  [Even great poems,
>novels, and works of philosophy are "reductions" or simplifications of the
>realities they are attempting to encompass or express].

DP: I think that it is a dangerous slippage in logic to assume that
reductionism is the same as simplification.  A reductionist reading
tends to take an element in a literary work, like the socioeconomic
status of the characters, out of the total verbal context that
conditions that element, and attributes to socioeconomic relations
primary importance for the overall understanding of that work.
It's like forgetting that "Much Ado About Nothing" is a comedy and
reading it as a treatise on repressed bisexuality.  I would rather
reserve the term *simplification* to what a GOOD critic can do
in revealing the interplay of all the major elements in producing
the total effect of a work.  *It respects the formal integrity of
the whole work.*  Any attempt to understand a literary
work involves the necessary use of abstract discourse--simplifications
in that sense--but abstract discourse which tries to explain the
interconnection of all the elements rather than assigning exclusive
explanatory power to only one of the elements.

In practical criticism, a reductionist reading leads me away from
the work; a non-reductionist reading, for which I have enlisted
the term "simplification" for want a better term, leads me further
into the work.

Pace Aristotle!

==DP
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