Jeremy Bentham's Wager, the Game of Reading and "Wesron Wind." (1997)

Practitioners of the literary whether it is called new historicism, cultural poetics, or simply new history, generally agree on the value of examining the vast interconnections of literary texts history. As Herbert Lindenberger observes, writing, as we have begun to realize...imitates and expresses the characteristic gestures and practices of the artistic as surely as the latter feeds upon what could once confidently be isolated as the historical realm (192). The issue that must be addressed consistently from the perspective of the is the question of what factors at any given time actually imposed meaning or were used an effort to explain actual historic events. From this perspective, even literary cannot really be examined isolation from other culturally or historically specific forces. Better to understand the literary past often necessitates being able to make use of other concrete disciplines that help to recover historical particularities that often have simply gotten lost time. Anonymous works, especially those from early periods, offer a particularly good challenge and call for innovative reading strategies that are strengthened by interdisciplinary research. The anonymous 16th-century lyric, Westron wind, for instance, is a textual mystery since nothing is known for certain about the historical circumstances upon which it was based. Yet, as I will argue this essay, the lyric's meaning and literary appeal can be enhanced by making an educated and reasonably acceptable effort to fill in details that are missing. The effort requires a close look at the poem's texture and the willingness to with its meaning. The is what Clifford Geertz, citing Jeremy Bentham as his source, calls the deep play (432). In order to solidify the argument upon which my risky subjective reading and response to Westron wind ultimately depends, I will draw support from past theoretical discussions of texture as a useful, though neglected, critical and analytical tool the effort to recoup history. I will also discuss some detail the notion of the gamble as Geertz and Bentham present it, taking into consideration the relationship between the gamble and Stephen Jay Gould's recent discussion of contingency theory as a way of replaying the tapes of history (287). By appealing to the authority of Geertz, Bentham, and Gould an argument for reclaiming I hope to promote among critics and students of literature an increased willingness, especially the context of reader-response criticism, to make the deep play, to with the historicity of a text an effort to add to its meaning and significance. And since, as Wolfgang Iser suggests, literature must always be regarded as 'evidence' of I hope that my reading of Westron wind sheds a credible light on the something, now hidden time, that was the motivating factor for the production of the poem the first place. John Crowe Ransom's essay on Poetry: A Note Ontology The World's Body (1938) has gained fame as a classic example of early formalist hostility to a preoccupation with literary didacticism associated with 19th-century critical theory. But the essay also includes a pioneering discussion of distinctions between texture and structure literary analysis that has gone largely unnoticed over the years. As Rene Wellek suggested 1963 Concepts of Criticism, Ransom's was the first convincing modern effort to distinguish between the two concepts: texture embodying the minute particulars, the half-formed often seemingly irrelevant detail, the concrete local life of a text; structure embodying the indispensable logical statement, message, or idea that the text links psychologically to the reader's comprehension of reality (61). More recently, a 1990 collection of essays on critical terminology, John Carlos Rowe has similarly described structure as a referent for the ultimate human product as opposed to simply a natural use for an object (37). …