If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
M. H. AbramsRead
We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Understanding literature requires a grasp of its historical and cultural context.
M. H. Abrams emphasizes the importance of situating literature within its historical and cultural frameworks to fully appreciate its meaning and significance. This perspective highlights how literature is not created in a vacuum but rather reflects and responds to the society and era in which it was produced, enriching our understanding of both the text and the world.
Themes
LiteratureHistoryCultureUnderstandingContext
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on literary analysis, I quoted M. H. Abrams to illustrate the importance of historical context.
More from M. H. Abrams
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Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.
Marian Wright EdelmanRead
You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.
Carl RogersRead
Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns.
Hilary MantelRead
Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
Benjamin DisraeliRead
So much does the moral health depend upon the moral atmosphere that is breathed, and so great is the influence daily exercised by parents over their children by living a life before their eyes, that perhaps the best system of parental instruction might be summed up in these two words: 'Improve thyself.'
Samuel SmilesRead
It's not that our high school system was not designed well, but that it was designed in 1906 when the country was just out of the industrial era. There hasn't been a substantial systemic change the way we do high school since then.
Laurene Powell JobsRead