Text and Culture

<div> <div> <p><i>Text and Culture</i> was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.</p> <p>In Text & Culture Daniel Cottom examines the political aspects of contemporary disciplines of interpretation. He pleads against limiting the act of reading by disqualifying some readings as wrong or unscholarly and he argues for the necessity of multiple readings claiming that a closed-off text glosses over differences that are political in nature. He proceeds then from the notion of text to culture. Just as the reading of the text is conditioned by irreducible political differences so is the reading of culture. Finally to illustrate and further develop his arguments Cottom presents an extensive analysis of Great Expectations.</p> <p>Cottom's materials range from academic jokes to King Lear and the writers he discusses range from Kant to Derrida from Freud to Basil Bernstein from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bronislaw Malinowski to Erving Goffman Clifford Geertz and Stanley Fish. This study is especially concerned with the way culture and related terms such as context and norm are part of a larger discourse in the contemporary humanities and social sciences - a discourse in which their effect is to repress recognition of important historical differences conflicts and possibilities. At the same time that he shows how difficult it is to get beyond culture he tries to indicate how interpretation may be turned into a more socially responsible practice.</p> <p>Daniel Cottom is associate professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author of <i>Social Figures: George Eliot Social History and Literary Representation</i> (Minnesota 1987) and <i>The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott</i>.</p> </div> </div>