[Download] "Work (Essay)" by English Studies in Canada # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Work (Essay)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 167 KB
Description
Definitions of "work" take up a number of pages even in the OED, reflecting the multiple and complicated networks in which some version or another of its meanings has a role. But for literary studies in the university the central meaning would seem to be simply a literary composition (often plural, the c so notes) viewed in relation to its author (e.g., the works of Virginia Woolf). The OED follows with its usual samples of usage, in this case dating back into the 14th century. Things are rarely that simple, however, and certainly not the world of work(s) in literary studies. Early 20th-century modernism emerges as more complicated as more studies proliferate, and within that complexity one strand in particular had a great deal to do with overloading the usages of work as a name for literary compositions. Largely in reaction against industrialization and the "industrialized" imagination of a rapidly growing "mass culture it he connection between literary composition and work reacquired a whole range of meanings involving labour. More specifically, the range pointed toward a kind of handcrafted artisan labour that could stand in dramatic contrast to the culture industry's repetitive, anonymous, banal, machine-made proliferation of cultural goods. Crudely, "the work of literature" also came to mean the idea that making literature took one hell of a lot of work in contrast to this other stuff. Modernism in some of its many versions at least remains the matrix of institutionalized literary study in the u.s., and the elaboration of literary works into the work of literature as I'm describing above had a central role in that development. To some great extent it helped determine everyday practices in the classroom-the work one does as a student of literature in the university. I fit takes a lot of work-artisan and individualized-to make work of literature, correspondingly one can expect that the encounter with one of these much worked on works will also require a lot of work. Back when I was an undergraduate, somewhere around the 14111 century when OED recorded usages commence, we learned a de facto ranking of literary works by how long they took to write. We knew the Wake was better than Ulysses not only because it was harder to read, but more importantly because it took longer to write. Lot of work went into that one. There were anomalies in that ranking of course-Faulkner's famous six weeks at As I Lay Dying for example, which continued to trouble a number of my teachers. Unlike industrial mass culture production, however, artisan labour could allow differential intensities of effort. And after all it was still hard to read, if not quite in the same class as the Wake.