Bricolage: A Womans Use of Canonical Ideology :: Canonical Ideology Literature

Bricolage A Womans Use of Canonical Ideologyle bricolage travail dont la technique est improvise, adapte aux materiaux, aux circonstances.1In chapter one of The Savage Mind, Claude Lev-Strauss explains bricolage as a way of understanding the structure of mythical thought in savage societies. The term bricoleur can be utilise practically, to represent a kind of craftsman though Lev-Strauss brings the word to an analytical level, and it is with this level that we are concerned. The bricoleurs universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to do with whatever is at hand2 so, as a craftsman, he is conservative and ecological. He works from within a structure in order to build step up of it the materials of the bricoleur are elements which can be defined by two criteria they have had a use.... and they can be used again either for the same routine or for a different one if they are at all diverted from their previous function.3 For more information on this chapt er, The Science of the Concrete, prate here. In this paper, I will examine this invention as it applies to certain patterns and ideas that exist in canonical American ideology and literature in the nineteenth century and how its double nature presents an opportunity for those marginal or other Americans. In examining this, the American writer will be considered a sort of craftsman. The concept of bricolage resonates strongly in the American literary tradition that is constructed alongside the nation itself. T.S. Eliot and Octavio Paz both support its prevalence in the tradition. They conceive of the literary canon as an ivory tower, a closed edifice... that cracks open to allow entrance only to the work of genius - by implication, to a gifted man.4 As Eliot perceives this monument as necessarily alterable, one which allows a new work to enter upon it if the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted,5 Paz presents a similar, though important ly radicalized view of the constant revolt of tradition rather than its continuity.6 Pazs tradition against itself extends Eliots with the notion that what constitutes the modern tradition is the constant renewal of literary forms, as contemporary textual practices.7 However divergent, both of these theories rely on a similar concept which shapes an American literary tradition according to Lev-Strauss bricolage in order to belong to tradition...