Socio-Political Influence on Literature & Art

If we look at the criticism and theories of Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., we see how socio-political influences impact literature and art. In the case of Woolf and Gates, we see that socio-political influence often silences or distorts artworks by those marginalized by mainstream socio-political groups. This is true with women in the sixteenth century, as Woolf argues, as it was true of African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Benjamin's (1998) theories provide an analysis of the impact of technology and innovation on art, an impact that often serves to undermine the impact of time and space on art when originally produced, "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be" (p. 1107). This analysis will compare and contrast the interpretations of Woolf, Gates, and Benjamin, including aspects of art and/or literature they leave uncovered.

In Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the author theorizes that mechanical means of reproducing art serve to remove the artist and the era by whom and in which it was created. Absent of the impact of the era's values and beliefs in which art was created, its meaning changes. Art has always "been reproducible," in Benjamin's (1998) view, but mechanical reproduction changes the ways in which art is experienced and

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a woman with talent and desire to create literature in Shakespeare's era would have been hampered by a number of material and immaterial challenges. Her money would have to come from her father, her socializing as a single woman to gain experience about humanity would have been mocked and criticized, and the indifference shown to many writers by society would have turned to hostility in the case of a female writer of the era. We see why Benjamin asserts that out of space and time a work is harder to judge, due to mechanical reproduction. For any woman that did overcome the enormous obstacles to creating great literature in Shakespeare's time would have signed her work anonymous, according to Woolf (1998), because of prevailing norms, values, and mores of the era, "�her work would have gone unsigned. That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century" (p. 552). Woolf's theories and criticism of the impact of socio-political influences on art and artist are furthered by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In Woolf's case, the silencing of women due to socio-political realities is little different than the silencing of the African Am

Category: Literature - S