Mary Louise Pratt’s Arts of a Contact Zone

In Mary Louise Pratt’s Arts of a Contact Zone she discusses the mixing of cultures in regions where two diverse peoples must live together. A contact zone is defined as “the space in which transculturation takes place – where two different cultures meet and inform each other, often in highly asymmetrical ways.”  A person living in a "contact zone" is surrounded by two different cultures, hears two different languages, and in each, the people groups must work to preserve themselves. Usually in such zones one culture is dominant and one inferior, therefore one naturally has power over the other. The controlling people command the power to dictate what truly defines the overall culture. Pratt also considers the error of supposing that people in a community all share the same language, purposes and beliefs. These are the factors that are dictated by the superior culture. In truth they are only "marginalized" and people who live without their individuality being known by the whole. Pratt argues that an understanding of the contact zones applied to what we believe is community is what is needed.

I agree with Pratt in most of what she states in Arts of a Contact Zone. I believe she has a valid point when saying often cultures collide in a certain area and must struggle to maintain their individuality. Also, I would agree that one particular culture, in the end, does show superiority in comparison to the other. This concept reminded me of the early American Colonist’s and Indians. Both were separate cultures living in one area, however the Colonist’s proved to be superior, driving out the Indians and dictating what American culture will be defined as, with language, religion, purposes, and such. 

Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Eliot attempts to provide two important insights to poetry in this essay. He first gives a new definition to “tradition” by stressing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry. He then goes on to argue that poetry should be mainly “impersonal,” and detached from the personality or bias of its writer. Eliot’s idea of tradition is complicated and unusual, This view, in which “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past,” requires that a poet be familiar with almost all literary, not just the present  times or literature of the history in his or her country. Thus, the poet must be in touch with the mindset of all Europe in its past and presents days in order to create Eliot’s idea of traditionally sound poetry. In Eliot’s second point he applies a “self-sacrifice” aspect to this special awareness of the past. This self-sacrificial point he makes refers to cutting your personality completely out of your writing. Once this mindfulness is achieved, it be rids any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has separated himself from personal experience and opinion and will now only write true historically correct expression. For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the individual life of the artist but is rather the result of a greater ability to fuse impersonal writing with accurate and historically correct writing with the ability to still maintain true aesthetic, artistic and poetic characteristics within itself. This however, he explains is an ability derived from deep comprehensive knowledge.

In response to Eliot I would question his position on what he believes is “real poetry.” I would ask him, what he thinks sets apart these impersonal recordings he explained from a historical documentation? If real poetry has to be from deep comprehensive study of past European cultures, and separated from any personality or character, what makes it so beautiful? Is it even considered an art, or just a recorded form of writing? I would argue the point of writing is like Wordworth’s view. It is more to express feelings of personal experience. Poetry is a way to express thoughts in a beautiful form of literature; it is supposed to be personal and relatable, not impersonal and historically sound. The concept of poetry Eliot describes defeats the whole artistic point of poetry in my mind.