The Touch of the Real

I dont think I understood any point out of the first 7-8 pages of Touch of the Real, it got me really confused (probably if I had read Clifford Geertz "Thick Description" it would have made the reading easier), but after those pages it has become considerably more comprehensible. There are two things, which I was particularly interested about.

Firstly a part from p. 30 that says "..there were other techniques and other texts, outside the conventional boundaries of the literary, that possessed a nearly comperable power.The greatest challange lay not simply in exploring these other texts...but in making the literary and the nonliterary seem to be each other thick description." It surey happens with film texts as well and I like the way he puts it; "making" each others thick description, because it seems to emphasize that sometimes this proccess is not natural.

Secondly, when the author talks about how literature gives an "athmospheric Historism" (I think the expression is really felicitous) he says it is a "representation of reality", but with the examples he makes he seems to emhasize that the literary writings portray their era, their reality, it seems to suggest that they reflect the historty in which the texts have been created. I do agree that in many cases this is true and most history books gives an athmospheric Historism of their age, but literary and its fantasy can do more than that. For example Mika Waltari is a finish novelist and in his book The Egyptian (Sinuhe egyptiläinen) he gives an incredibly true-to-age "athmospheric Historisim that has no direct connection to his life experience.