Navigating Ontological Difficulty

Paper Summary:

This paper examines ontological difficulty and compares the strategies for navigating ontological difficulty in Patrocinio Scheickart's "Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading" and Louis Marin's "Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia." The paper concludes that ontological difficulty is indeed a broken link between text and meaning, but one that is a necessary step toward better-informed interpretation.

From the Paper:

"This comparison of Schweickart and Marin's strategies for navigating ontological difficulty provides several insights into the nature of the concept. Firstly, both critics find that in order to transcend ontological difficulty, one must draw attention to the social and historical context of the text, be it patriarchy or capitalism. Ignoring the context on a text forfeits the reader's power of understanding, and allows ontological difficulty to flourish. Secondly, the broken link between text and meaning provides the critic with a useful starting point. For Schweickart, such misunderstanding led to her exploration of the female reading experience, and an avenue by which this link can be reinstated through the informed reading taking control of the textual experience. What was once a one-way conversation is transformed into an enlightened dialogue. For Marin, the very lack of the possibility of this dialogue provides clues to the hidden purpose of the text, wherein authorial power has been abused. Where the reader is given no autonomy and there is no opportunity for a range of reading experiences, the text becomes ideology. We may conclude that ontological difficulty is indeed a broken link between text and meaning, but one that is a necessary step toward better-informed interpretation."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Robert Con Davis; Ronald Schleifer, Editors. "General Introduction: A Preliminary Guide to Literary and Cultural Studies" in Contemporary Literary Criticism. United States: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1998.
• Louis Marin. "Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia" in Contemporary Literary Criticism. United States: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1998.
• Schweickart, Patrocinio. "Reading Ourselves: Toward Feminist Theory of Reading" in Contemporary Literary Criticism. United States: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1998.
• George Steiner. On Difficulty and Other Essays. Norfolk: Oxford University Press, 1978.

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