what the dominant literary tradition actually is depends a bit on which shaded group you're looking at. from the feminist point of view it's the entire male-dominated canon and from the colonized point of view it's pretty much all of white culture, but if you look at an individual shaded tradition like Romanticism, the lighted side for it was neo-classicism and by extension the greek poets that movement idolized. but yeah, for the most part by that phrase i simply mean the accepted canon of 'literary' works.
and in a lot of cases a shaded or lighted identity depends more on the identity of the work, rather than the author. oppressed groups tend to produce shaded writing because the difficulties they have getting work published (and often with life in general) push them to be suspicious or even hostile to literary 'authority', but individuals from those groups are quite capable of lighted writing of a sort as well. shaded writing is defined by it's innovation, straightforwardness, subversive qualities and emphasis of normally devalued values, as opposed to lighted writing's complex intertexual links that build up and add to the existing framework of traditional ideas.
Of course, this being the taijitu, there's a spot of yang in the yin and a spot of yin in the yang. as we approach purely shaded writing, the difficulty of creating and distributing works approaches impossiblity, and as we approach purely lighted writing the level of derivation and complexity threatens to make texts both meaningless and utterly incomprehensible. pure writing on either side is basically unheard of, though, because all writers have something in them that pushes them to innovate and think differently at least a little bit, and all cultures have _some_ traditional stories and ideas and idioms for the writer to draw on.
finally, note that lighted/shaded binaries are all contextual and it's quite possible for a movement to be lighted in one context and shaded in another (as a rock on the lighted side of the mountain has its own lighted and shaded side.) so 'lighted' and 'shaded' are more useful ways of thinking about how texts relate to one another rather than absolute qualities of the texts themselves. in that sense, in some contexts lighted/shaded quality might be dependent on the author's identity, for example in cultural settings where women are not supposed to be able to write, all works which are identifiably by a woman are subversive to cultural norms simply by existing.
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Date: 2011-11-06 04:49 pm (UTC)and in a lot of cases a shaded or lighted identity depends more on the identity of the work, rather than the author. oppressed groups tend to produce shaded writing because the difficulties they have getting work published (and often with life in general) push them to be suspicious or even hostile to literary 'authority', but individuals from those groups are quite capable of lighted writing of a sort as well. shaded writing is defined by it's innovation, straightforwardness, subversive qualities and emphasis of normally devalued values, as opposed to lighted writing's complex intertexual links that build up and add to the existing framework of traditional ideas.
Of course, this being the taijitu, there's a spot of yang in the yin and a spot of yin in the yang. as we approach purely shaded writing, the difficulty of creating and distributing works approaches impossiblity, and as we approach purely lighted writing the level of derivation and complexity threatens to make texts both meaningless and utterly incomprehensible. pure writing on either side is basically unheard of, though, because all writers have something in them that pushes them to innovate and think differently at least a little bit, and all cultures have _some_ traditional stories and ideas and idioms for the writer to draw on.
finally, note that lighted/shaded binaries are all contextual and it's quite possible for a movement to be lighted in one context and shaded in another (as a rock on the lighted side of the mountain has its own lighted and shaded side.) so 'lighted' and 'shaded' are more useful ways of thinking about how texts relate to one another rather than absolute qualities of the texts themselves. in that sense, in some contexts lighted/shaded quality might be dependent on the author's identity, for example in cultural settings where women are not supposed to be able to write, all works which are identifiably by a woman are subversive to cultural norms simply by existing.