speaking

Summary: Distinguish between the conditions and values of your own world and those of the text. Another problem that students frequently have when they are writing on literature is that they don't distinguish between the values and conditions of the world in which they themselves live - in the present day, in a particular part of the world - and the conditions and values of the world of the text. In understanding the "world of the text", we also need to distinguish between the world in which the text is produced (for example, the world as it was when the novel, Jane Eyre, was written) and, most importantly, the conditions of the world as it is set up and depicted within the novel. For example, one of the underlying themes in Jane Eyre is that women have to fight harder than men do in their world - in the world of the novel - to make themselves heard and to leave a mark on the world. Men in the novel may or may not be treated sympathetically, but they are more likely to be in positions of power than women are, and they tend to set up situations in which the lives of women are circumscribed. If you don't recognise that the conditions of Jane's world are different from your own then you're going to be blind to some of the important concerns of the novel. Generally speaking, literature of the distant past is more likely to inhabit a world that is different from our own than literature of the present. A case of a different kind is Wide Sargasso Sea ( WSS). Wide Sargasso Sea was produced much nearer to our own time (1966), but the action in the novel is set back in the first half of the 19 th century. The author, Jean Rhys, has in fact made exactly the kind of imaginative leap from her own time to the time of the characters in the novel that readers of literature need to make. In any case, a 21 st-century reader of WSS needs to make some allowance for social relationships as they were in the West Indies in the early part of the 19 th century - and affected as they were by ethnic and racial antagonisms and hostilities. Some of these issues are presented as being extremely complex in the world of WSS. Now we've got to ask ourselves what a world would be like in which these were important factors. So that's the kind of imaginative leap that students often need to make when they are writing on a work of literature. It might still be the case that a student could allow for the fact that the text's assumptions about human relationships are normal for the time, but nevertheless the student might still want to say, "that's wrong, that's an inadequacy in the world view of the text". They can say that, but it requires quite a lot of confidence on the part of the student, and also they would need to have faced their own value system to make that kind of judgement. One of the reasons for studying Literature is to broaden mental horizons, and that involves questioning the assumptions of your own time and place, your own culture. You need to be aware too that there are possibilities for criticism of the world in which you live. The text gives you an opportunity to evaluate your own assumptions. The really worthwhile literature very rarely simplifies its moral positions; it usually shows awareness of the complexity of the issues being talked about and this will overlap with the world we live in.

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