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Showing posts with the label Interpretation

Literary Theory, History, and Historical Fencing

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A funny thing happened to me on the way to being where I am with historical fencing:  I realized that the literature stuff I studied in school was actually relevant - both to thinking about history, and to thinking about fencing. Here is how. Literary Theory Part of my life path involved getting a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. Before that, though, I wanted to be a fiction writer. The main reason I never did pursue the literature path was - if I’m honest - I found a lot of it boring. I liked reading fine, but I didn’t enjoy writing - at least not writing fiction. I was engaged by some of the ideas in literary theory, though.  Literary theory doesn’t seem at first like it’s all that relevant to historical fencing, but I think it is actually pretty relevant. Literary theory, as a field, came into existence because of theoretical problems around how to interpret and understand books, stories, and other bits of text. Historical fencers working to understand and interpret the text of fen