Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The goal of the analytic approach described and illustrated in this book is a kind of literary interpretation. Its procedures and perspectives aim at nurturing creative understandings of verbal art-readings that are culturally and historically specific yet have the richness of abstraction and allegory; that place a single work within the “community discourse history” from which it emerged; that attend to the creator and his or her work with a deep and complex critical gaze; and that provide a framework within which indigenous and outsider knowledge can engage in an always unfinished dialogue about form and significance. This system of interpretation is based on the idea of genre as a specific, concrete, yet often changing body of texts, as a framework for creating and interpreting them, and as a “form-shaping ideology” through which both creator and critic enter into dialogue with the collective wisdom of a tradition. An analysis that harnesses the conceptual powers of genre aims at interpretations on several levels. These include the four levels of reading described by Henri De Lubac and cited by Fredric Jameson (1981) in formulating his own critical approach. The levels are: (1) the literal (i.e., attending to and making interpretive use of cultural and historical referents in the texts); (2) the allegorical (i.e., uncovering symbolic codes in the text that are forms of cultural knowledge); (3) the moral (i.e., discovering the cultural rules for individual action in the text); and (4) the anagogic (i.e., reading the text politically, as societal envisionings of the collective “meaning” of history; as Greek epics sing of the heroic age that underlies the development of nations, and as the Bible tells of both the beginning and the end of days).