Of Course Not and Other Conundrums

Fundamental to this view of the relation between text and culture, then, is a refusal to allow any rigid distinction between the inside and the outside of a work.  To study literature is to study culture, but, conversely, to understand literature, we have to understand a culture.  Literary study is of value in this account because it leads to a fuller cultural understanding but, equally, it is this understanding that informs the reading of the literary text.  There may appear to be a certain circularity to this explanation, but it is better to think of it as another version of the chiasmus that I quoted from Louis Montrose in the 'Why Greenblatt?' chapter.  Greenblatt's thinking here may be rendered as: culture produces literature and literature produces culture.  Thinking of literature in terms of culture allows the critic to see the ways in which culture may be seen as both inside and outside literature.

-From Stephen Greenblatt by Mark Robson...and of course there is no "circularity to the explanation", rather, it is the explanation that encircles the thing explained.  Conversely, it is Greenblatt's very understanding of culture that helps us to understand Robson's explanation of the understanding.