Thinking of things to blog about, I was sidetracked thinking about how literature is never really complete. All of literature is just drafts, being revised over and over again and the work will never fully be complete because English is not a subject which always has concrete answers. Reading chapter 4 in Interdisciplinarity, I stumbled on a quote by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren that stated exactly what I was thinking, “…literature must be conceived as a whole system of works which is, with the accretion of new ones, constantly changing its relationships, growing as a changing whole” (page 105).
This quote just blew me away, the coincidence that I would read it so soon after thinking this myself. But then I got to thinking, how often does it happen that we learn a new vocabulary word, only to come across it in our reading, on television, or somewhere else, even multiple times? It happens quite often.
We often learn things and then see them elsewhere. We get that feeling like, “I’ve seen this before…” or sometimes we don’t make the connection and see something as brand new, when we already do know it. Literature is derived from literature, and texts speak to each other. Plots and story lines are repeated with different characters, or altered slightly and it is used again. This is why texts speak to each other. All of literature is not complete, it is just revision after revision, and new ideas arise as well to be revised over and over in the future. There are also no concrete answers in literature. Some things are implied, some are left hanging for the reader to ponder forever. Readers have different interpretations of everything. So literature is never-ending.