Supporting Argument: The Tension between Context and Intertext

In The Scholemaster, Roger Ascham raises concerns about students becoming too dependent on commonplace books:

But to dwell in Epitomies and bookes of common places, and not to binde himselfe dailie by orderlie studie, to reade with all diligence, principallie the holyest scripture and withall, the best Doctors, and so to learne to make trewe difference betwixt, the authoritie of one, and the Counsell of the other, maketh many seeming, and sonburnt ministers as we have. (259, also quoted here)

Ascham warns against focussing exclusively on intertext and therefore not understanding the deeper arguments of the texts themselves. Hypertexts present a variation on the problem. In discussing the example of a hypertextual study version of a T.S. Eliot poem in which other writers' poetry and criticism is linked, George Landow writes that "readers experience the texts outside The Wasteland and the passage inside the work as existing equally distant from the first passage. Hypertext thereby blurs the distinction between what is 'inside' and what is 'outside' a text (63). Both the commonplace book and hypertext priviledge the making of intertextual links, and they likewise both endanger reading in context. The Wasteland must still be understood as a poem in its own right before intertextual links can be truly insightful.

Back to The Commonplace and Intertextuality

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