INTEGRATION: ADDRESSING DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF LITERATURE AND HISTORY

INTEGRATION:  ADDRESSING DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF LITERATURE AND HISTORY

The history of a people can be traced through its forms of cultural manifestations, as they evolve over time. Forms of cultural manifestation are the artistic forms that are considered beautiful at a given age by their admirers and producers. At the same time, the beauty of a mode of cultural expression at any age is defined both by its present and past authors. Which is why history can not be neglected when one is studying literature in general and foreign literature in particular. History can show us how forms of culture vary and change through time.

The idea behind this statement is that literature is a mirror to the world. Being literature a form of cultural expression, it is a mirror for the cultures of peoples, each one according to their own typical heritage, handed down from generation to generation, and recorded by history.

This implies that we can study the culture of a people through its history or its history through its culture, or cultural /aesthetic development over time. In the field of literature, one way of doing this is by studying one of the modes of literary expression: poetry, or verse, if we want to broaden the subject a little more.

One example of this kind of study is the concept developed by Ezra Pound, “paideuma”, which is a way of organizing knowledge or culture by identifying its highest forms of expression, so that the following generation may find it without wasting time on what does not contain high aesthetic value(s).

In this case, in his book ABC of Reading, he proposed a list of poets/authors (the paideuma) who contributed to the development of English verse. The paideuma helps the students to trace back the authors/poets who created important aesthetic forms at each age. This kind of study also provides the students with a historical view of literature/poetry, since it is a cultural mirror of the social, economic, and cultural situation of a people. These aspects of human knowledge are not separate, although they have been treated as so in different sciences: history, language and literature, economy, sociology, etc.

Ezra Pound is an example of integration of different scientific fields, for he was interested in poetry as well as in economy, which he included in his major poetic work, The Cantos. Walt Whitman, his literary “father”, is another example of this. The first line of the Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass states that “America does not repel the past.” Which means that his view of the past was not limited to verse or literature or aesthetics. He advanced a general statement about the past, which includes everything he received from past generations, domestic or foreign, be it in the field of mythology, astronomy, economy or politics, botany, or religion, etc.

In this sense, literary pieces can be considered as documents or monuments of the past for us as well as the present ones will be considered as such by future generations. I believe all these aspects of human knowledge are connected and must be viewed as so in a foreign literature class, as well as they should in a national literature one. Ezra Pound is always a precursor in this attitude, for the very word paideuma (term used by Leo Frobenius) was borrowed from the fields of ethnology and archaeology, where cultures showing similar traits created meaning, and his method of comparing poetic pieces to find the highest form of aesthetic expression was borrowed from the field of biology. Let alone his studies and actions in economy and politics. Thus integration is an appropriate term to define the attitude of students when addressing literature from their own country or from abroad, so that they do not fall prey to nationalisms or simple narrow-mindedness.