We begin this paper with a rather innocuous observation: every literary text is a challenge. And from this follows another equally innocuous observation: the ultimate aim of literary criticism, however defined, is how to come to terms with the challenge of the text. This assignment becomes daunting if you are alien to both the English language and the English culture. For in the final analysis, a text consists of those essential but often ignored linguistic and cultural nuances that give the text its very authenticity. And for those aliens who have not lived in England, America or “English” Canada (and I have not forgotten Australia and New Zealand) the challenge of the text assumes an even more daunting dimension. The English themselves are very much aware of this and sometimes wonder aloud with typical English smugness: “what do they know of England who only England know?”

We begin this paper with a rather innocuous observation: every literary text is a challenge. And from this follows another equally innocuous observation: the ultimate aim of literary criticism, however defined, is how to come to terms with the challenge of the text. This assignment becomes daunting if you are alien to both the English language and the English culture. For in the final analysis, a text consists of those essential but often ignored linguistic and cultural nuances that give the text its very authenticity. And for those aliens who have not lived in England, America or “English” Canada (and I have not forgotten Australia and New Zealand) the challenge of the text assumes an even more daunting dimension. The English themselves are very much aware of this and sometimes wonder aloud with typical English smugness: “what do they know of England who only England know?”

This is one way of reaffirming that all literatures necessarily have a cultural base, a spatial and temporal setting. Let us add that all literatures have a common creative impulse, a common inspiring cause. This is the pre-text: the private personal text from which the artist generates the text, the public text. The urge, the push to create, to transform the chaos of thought and feeling into a logically recognizable, and coherent pattern in the form of words is the clearest evidence of man’s sense of order. However conceived and however expressed, the text bears a cheerful testimony to our sense and need of order.