snit snat wrote:
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> >No man is an island. You're helping feed him, do the
> >housework, making it possible for him to write.
>
> :)
>
> a great person to read on this is dorothy smith who talks about all the
> labor involved in the act of writing the book you're reading: the person
> who built the building, the janitor who cleaned the floors and emptied
> waste baskets of crumpled up paper, the person who fills the vending
> machines, etc. etc.
One of the books I always assigned in an Intro to Fiction class I taught was _Bleak House_, and most of what I had to say about it focused on what we could know just by examining the physical book without opening it! Such a discussion also brought out how much collective knowledge was needed before one could know much even about a single item. For example, on major set of connections depended on recognizing that Norton editions were aimed primarily at classroom use. For the significance of that one needed to ask questions about the size of the educational establishment (how many copies of the book were needed), what could one say about a complex of social relations that devoted public monies to linking together the stockholders of Norton to 25 students in a classroom in Normal, IL, etc. The direct relevance to the text in 'strictly literary' terms was that the bewilderment of complex relations generated by examining the physical (and unopened) text echoed the bewilderment of relationships imitated in the text itself (and the fog [first paragraph] within which all those virtual relationships unfolded). One could go on forever with it.
Carrol
"Keep the x in xmas" (Michael Hoover)