Naiveté and Greatness

Yes, another post about myself.  Remember, "to be, or to be believed to be, a Genus, you must adopt an objective viewpoint of the world...and a rather subjective viewpoint of yourself."

I am exceedingly naive.  Especially when it comes to reading and understanding books--whether philosophy, literary theory, or pure fiction.  I often love or hate a book, phrase, thought, or image without any knowledge whatsoever about the author.  Sometimes this gets me into trouble.

For example: I am an unabashed fan of Martin Heidegger.  I decided to bring in a comment about Heidegger and "Being" during a conversation (admittedly sophomoric) about sub-strains of generic existentialism in modern Christianity.  I was consequently shunned from the rest of the conversation for sympathizing with a Nazi.

Please remember that I qualified the discussion as sophomoric, so you can't really give much credit to the crowd or the conversation that ensued, but it is an example of my common way of thinking.  Another time, in a Graduate class on Shakespeare's Tragedies, while discussing the "Rape of Lucrece", I brought up something about the Neo-Platonic imagery in the poem and was immediately shot down, as that seems to be an observation that has been made about 30 trillion times in the great land of Academia.

Well, I don't care.  I would prefer to be somewhat naive about the things I read (not knowing that Emerson was a Transcendentalist, Marquez and Rushdie Magical Realists, etc.) than know about it going into the story.  I don't like carrying prejudices into my reading.  If I do, I will judge the material based on what I know going in and not on its own merit.  I guess this goes against more mainstream literary criticism, but even if I were to critique a work of literature or poem, I would rather not know the history.  I don't want to know that Ginsberg was a homosexual before I read "Howl".  Not because I will judge it more positively or negatively on that basis, but because I will begin to read things into it even in the first line.  It is extremely difficult to break myself of knowledge if I do have it.