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 HOME: Dan Pearlman 102 Blackstone Blvd. #5 Providence, RI 02906 Tel.: 401 453-3027 email: [log in to unmask] Fax: (253) 681-8518 http://www.uri.edu/artsci/english/clf/ OFFICE Department of English University of Rhode Island Kingston, RI 02881 Tel.: 401 874-4659