Pretext, Context, Subtext: Textual Power in the Writing of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Abstract
In recent years, as poststructuralist criticism has achieved a certain amount of acceptance and even dominance in some English departments, many scholars who are interested in bridging the gap between what they believe and publish professionally and what they teach have begun to construct pedagogical systems in which the analysis of texts, various entities that may fall within or without the customarily prescribed canon of literature, is the focus of study. Robert Scholes, in Textual Power, the third book in his critical trilogy, advocates bridging the gap between professional/critical stances and pedagogical practices, especially for those critics who espouse structural, semiotic, and poststructuralist practices. Scholes asserts that teachers of English have an obligation to teach their students about textuality: how texts function (both on a synchronic and diachronic level), how texts can be read (often in different ways and with different results), what informs texts (pretextual, contextual, and subtextual meaning always already inscribed in the text), how texts become part of readers' consciousness and spawn new texts (reading, interpreting, and critiquing), and how so much of what we refer to as culture (especially in a postmodern economy that is informationrather than industrial-based) is textual. Many authors, both directly and indirectly, have discussed the change from an industrial-based economy to an information-based economy as one of the characteristics of a postmodern era (see Huyssen; Jameson; Lyotard; Rowe). Reading (encountering a text), interpreting (creating a companion text), and critiquing (generating a dialectic or dialogic text) are essential acts for students as readers of literature, for students as writers, as well as for students as individuals. Scholes concisely summarizes the teacher's role in this process:
- Journal
- College English
- Published
- 1990-11-01
- DOI
- 10.2307/377634
- CompPile
- Open Access
- Closed
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