Contrapuntal reading
From Geography
Contrapuntal reading and especially contrapuntal analysis is a way of thinking developed by Edward Said (1993). In music contrapuntal means 'having two or more independent but harmonically related melodic parts sounding together'. Contrapuntal basically means 'relating to a counterpoint or a "contrapuntal base"'. Edward Said (1993) used the term 'contrapuntal reading' in his book Culture and Imperialism, using it as a method to understand novels (and especially colonial texts) by taking into account intertwined histories and perspectives: so by taking into account the perspectives of both the colonizer as the colonized.
Interpreting contrapuntally is interpreting different perspectives simultaneously and seeing how the text interacts with itself as well as with historical or biographical contexts (Said, 1993). Basically: one may miss the weight behind the presence of Antigua (an island in the Caribbean with plantations and slavery) in Mansfield Park (Austen, 1813) or the role of the escaped convict from Australia in the novel Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861), which is about an orphan in Great Britain (Ferriter, 2007). Contrapuntal reading is reading with "awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (Saidm, 1993, p. 51). It means reading a text "with an understanding of what is involved when an author shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England" (Said, 1993, p.66).
References
- Austen, J. (1814). Mansfield Park. Penguin: London.
- Dickens, C. (1861). Great Expectations.
- Ferriter, L. (2007) Contrapuntal Reading or Analysis. Retrieved from http://academics.hamilton.edu/english/ggane/contrapuntal.html
- Said, E.W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.
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Page created by Lars-Olof Haverkort --LarsHaverkort 13:46, 6 October 2012 (CEST)
