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Changing Horizons

by | Sep 12, 2011 | Books, Writing New York | 1 comment

It was an interesting experience, rereading E. B. White’s Here is New York on 9/11. It reminded me how valuable a tool the concept of the horizon of expectations is for literary critics. Coined by the literary historian and reader-response theorist Hans Robert Jauss, the term refers to the set of expectations against which a literary text — indeed any work of art — positions itself when it is conceived and then brought before the public. This horizon is created both by social practice

1 Comment

  1. Ryan
    Ryan on September 15, 2011 at 2:19 am

    Hi Prof. Patell. White viewed New York (as incipient host of the United Nations) as a broker of international dialogue “housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be forestalled” and (as a site of intermingling of races and creeds) as “a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world.” Though this is consistent with the “hope” component of a jeremiad, I found it in fact to be the predominant tone of the piece – i.e. that of a celebration of the plurality and uniqueness of the city – rather than merely a coda to an accounting of social and moral evils (whether empirical or prophetic).

    Although the destroying planes of our historical moment were not forestalled (though those of White’s era were), since 9/11, New York has mostly maintained the tolerance that White describes as a necessary byproduct of the proximity of so many different cultures, and without which tolerance the city “would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry.” Extrapolating from White’s logic, the more diffuse spatial and cultural topography of the nation as a whole conceivably plays a role today in its apparently growing lack of the tolerance that he admired in the city.