Here’s a useful word for anyone working on the Gallagher reading (I had to look it up, so I figured I may as well share):
autochthonic, a.
Native to the soil, aboriginal, indigenous.
(from the Oxford English Dictionary)
vocab time
20 October 2008 · 10.48 pm · by Rachel
Categories: blogging
1 response so far ↓
david // 22 October 2008 at 1.57 am
Ahh, autochthonic, it seems like just yesterday that Levi-Strauss was baffling us with this strange/beautiful choice of word. Using ‘authochthonic’ as a jumping pad (and with a particular dictionary.com definition in mind: Psychology. of or pertaining to ideas that arise independently of the individual’s own train of thought and seem instead to have some alien or external agency as their source. ), perhaps we can link new historicism back to Barthes and Foucault through one pertinent question: from where does the reading come to be?
In our intro book, B&R quote Greenblatt, writing “the work of art is a negotiation between a creator or class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of society” (Greenblatt 1990a, 158). In other words (and with Barthes’ essay ironically guiding this interpretation), the birth of the reader can thus only take place through the intermediaries of “structures and strategies of power” (B&R, 117).
Yet is there a freedom that the “great writers” have in being able to function as “masters of these codes, specialists in cultural exchange” (Greenblatt 1990b, 229-30). Can’t readers, too, be masters and not slaves in the power dynamic of a negotiable encounter with a text/history/potato?
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