Norwegian and Polynesian Literatures

(This is a comment on Ian's post from April 21. I upgraded it to a post when it became too long.)

Ian, you sound like you're answering TOK Qn 5 (the one with Noam Chomsky's quote) here. :)

I must say that I agree with ballista. Literature - art in general - and science and mathematics are people's representation/explanation of the world to themselves, and reveal both insights into the world and into the authors. And, have you read Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat)? Try it if you haven't - he's a neurologist who writes like an angel. And you might think after that that science tells us something about humanity too.

I think it's fair to say that we can understand (to an extent), through the books we read, the authors and, from there, the world that the authors were writing in. But we should perhaps also consider the following:

(a) To glean insights into an artist's life/personality/thoughts through an examination of his/her creations alone seems to be a rather lopsided exercise, and more guesswork/clairvoyance than scholarship sometimes.

Where the tale ends and where the author begins (& whether it's possible to find that line) - how much of the author is in the tale - is a tricky issue and many authors have explored it to great effect. If you have time, pick up The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster and let him play with your mind.

(b) It's an old chestnut from TOK - that our interpretation of works from alien cultures/periods may draw more upon the ideas from our own culture/time than our knowledge/understanding of those of the works in question.

So when we read Medea (by Euripides in the 400sBC!) or Hamlet (from 1600s England), and discuss the feminist or Freudian issues in these texts, we should be aware that these are modern interpretation frameworks that we are using on much older texts. In the same way, saying that Huck Finn was an angsty teenager ignores the fact that the idea of teenage-hood is a twentieth-century concept, whereas Mark Twain was writing in the 1870s-80s. :-( Our assumptions that characters should be rounded and psychologically realistic are fairly modern assumptions as well (eighteenth century onwards?) and thus if we choose to judge Medea on these terms, we should at least be aware that they were not the same terms that Euripides' audience judged the play on.

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But, coming back to Ian's main idea (that we may understand humanity through its art - literature) - I thought, after a degree in literature, that studying literature written only in the English language meant that you understood only the English-speaking world and (let's be modest) only a tiny bit of it at that (I can't say I understand much of the Jamaican world after only having read 2 Jamaican authors). So I would proposed, for all out there (all one of you, I guess) who are interested in studying literature to understand life, why not try comparative literature? And compare 2 really different literatures, like English and Chinese, or Russian and Swahili, to get the full flavour of humanity.

That's the end of a long post to end the drought! (And if I've made any mistakes here, please let me know & I'll gladly correct it.)

J