The Contact Zone

Illegal Contact!

       Mary Louise Pratt writes about what she calls the contact zone in "The Arts of the Contact Zone." She gives the example of her son and him acquiring knowledge from the time spent with his baseball cards. The information he learned gave him a point of contact to have intelligible conversations with adults. Pratt defines contact zone as "the term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today." Her main example is the autoethnographic text written by Guaman Poma. European and Andean cultures clashed in multiple ways, including through language, societal ideas, and governmental ideas. She lastly explains how she brought the contact zone to college students who wrestled with cultural and historic events from all of their races of origin.

       The contact zones that Pratt describes are a lot like poetry. Pratt explains that contact zones have to be applicable to everyone and they inspire feelings of "rage, incomprehension, and pain," as well as understanding and awe. Aristotle's arguments in Poetics support this idea. He explains that poetry must be relatable to all people because this will cause a greater sense of emotion in those who feel connected to the ideas and story that the poet portrays in his art. Eliot's argument of tradition and good art in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" also supports this idea. Poetry is that which conveys truth in a way which hasn't been organized in such a way before but has a sense of timelessness. It forces a sense of emotion from the truth, or -- in Pratt's argument -- historic and cultural events, and not emotion from the poet, teacher, or any speaker of the truth.

Has there been any later research or historic findings that explain why Guaman Poma's letter never reached King Philip III?

Tradition!

Fiddler on the Roof- Tradition!

       T. S. Eliot writes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that each poet ought to be unique in some way, but the best poets portray the traditions of poetry in their art. Instead of expressing their personality and the truth of the contemporary, they write what ought to be timeless and modern at the same time. This is tradition, not conforming to the the form that Aristotle may have written about years ago because "the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past." Eliot explains that poetry it is most important for poetry to express truth in a way that combines images, words, metaphors and such things into one idea. Through this, and not the author's personality, will emotion flow. Eliot explains it as, "emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet."

       Eliot's ideas are much like a combination of those of Shelley, in "A Defence of Poetry" and Wordsworth, in "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." Wordsworth gave his definition of good poetry, which is a "spontaneous overflow of power feelings" but on a topic which has been thought about very thoroughly. Shelley writes about the puzzle piecing of poetry, as well as the indefinite time of poetry. He writes, "a poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not." Eliot's argues what is a mixture of Shelley and Wordsworth's ideas. Traditional poets and poetry are found in those who convey truths in a way that is timeless, while good poetry also contains spontaneous feelings about a topic which has been on the mind of the poet for a great period of time. Once all the parts and pieces make sense in a particular order, the poet forms art through his poetry only if he expresses the truth in a way that no other artist has but still uses tradition.

How does Eliot's analogy of platinum, gases, and sulphurous acid work?