(Download) "Introduction to Ambiguity in Culture and Literature (Essay)" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Introduction to Ambiguity in Culture and Literature (Essay)
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 73 KB
Description
A simplistic approach to ambiguity might claim that it is negative when the context is day-to-day communication and positive when literature, especially poetry, is involved. The exigencies of everyday life dictate clarity and transparency, while those of poetic language allow for multiple meanings. The problem of such an approach is that it neglects history and excludes the sphere of cultural ambiguity. There have been periods in literature when ambiguity has been positively marked and striven for, others when clarity of expression carries most value. Ambiguity in literature was cultivated, for example, in Alexandrian Greece, as exemplified by Lycophron's canonical poem Alexandra. It enjoys another vogue in Elizabethan drama, with its relentless punning and word-plays. That ambiguity in literature is expected and esteemed in the early twenty-first century stems from the fact that the legacy of European Symbolism, which had its origins in late nineteenth-century France, is still the dominant influence on Western literary values. Cultural ambiguity likewise goes through phases when it is stigmatized and when it receives approval. Cultural ambiguity often becomes most visible when a dominant, host culture protests against a real or imaginary "contamination" by minority cultures or when a culture that has been in subjection seeks to emancipate itself from cultural imperialism. The present debates in Europe and elsewhere about the meaning and desirability of "multiculturalism" and the rapidly growing literature on postcolonialism illustrate this point. Even in everyday life, the fascination of the exotic and the appropriation of aspects of one culture by another often go unnoticed until a nerve is struck and there is a programmatic movement to restore the imagined "purity" of a dominant or supposedly "pristine" culture. The burning in nazi Germany of books and artworks deemed "decadent" and the marginal phenomenon of neo-nazism in Germany today both make cultural ambiguity visible by setting out to efface it. It thus seems that ambiguity, or its lack, may be the entrance to different domains, determining in turn the possibility--which is also our potentiality--to move at ease between modalities of discourse and being. When deliberate, ambiguity works alternatively to entertain, evoke, and stimulate thought or to distract and mystify. Can any distinction between ambiguity and its lack be adequate, and, assuming that the ambiguous works for literature in our time, how exactly does it work? Further, is ambiguity always deliberate, and if not, could we still call it ambiguity? The articles collected in this thematic issue approach ambiguity from different perspectives and with a variety of intentions, illuminating in the process several modalities of ambiguity and shedding light on ambiguity's historical phases as well as on specific instances in the history of the ambiguous. Ambiguity, as this collection demonstrates, is not simply a literary and philosophical phenomenon; it informs other artistic media, such as cinema and photography; but it also impinges on the theorization of labor in the global and post-industrial economy, the discourse on child pornography in the contemporary media and in academia, and the study of today's urban meeting spaces.
 "Introduction to Ambiguity in Culture and Literature (Essay)" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}