Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Con't the Conversation

I am going to be in dialogue with this piece from a past posting from late last month:

So, I was reading about a Knight, who traveled around Europe seeking to defend her honor. And I also have read about the Orient, the Far East, through a book that I picked up, but then abandoned it like finding an empty house at a dead end street. If you knew that there was an empty house, and you had no reason to go inside, you would turn and walk away. Would you not? If you have searched all of its rooms and found them to be worthless, then you should leave before you become a person without any reason at all. So, I stopped reading my Japanese book, and went on from there.

    When given a section of fiction writing, I like to try to understand the character's motives by looking at what or who they associate with. However, this would be autobiographical, so consider the Knight from the Canterbury Tales instead. He traveled around Europe seeking to defend her honor, which is found in the prologue that introduces him among all of the other pilgrims. So, he is a traveler with other companions on his way to Canterbury. At this point, I would like to say that historical awareness of the surrounding events would be helpful but not necessary, so that you don't have to stop reading just to look up where all the places are in relation to what Chaucer is saying. 

    So there is the disconnect between the significant social events that historians inquire into and the significant literary works that critics duke themselves over with. This disconnect or better yet the categorization of these two methods is important because some people confuse these things to their own shame. There is overlap but I need to continue to beat the dead horse, until things start to make sense for you. And from that let's consider why the author stopped reading his Japanese book, since that conclusion does not seem to follow from the above. The answer is that there was a literary reference that set up the ordinary ending. How boring, right?

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