Literary references

So I read somewhere - I think it was that Pew Forum survey that was going around about religious knowledges - that less than half of Americans know who Job was in the Bible. That bothered me, since probably half of my literary references are biblical. I don't have the background to reference Plato and Cicero and all the other Romans, or the Greeks, or even Shakespeare, really, but I read most of the Old Testament in first grade.

I suppose having to explain what a griffin was (with visual aids) in 11th grade should have clued me in that the mythic and fantasy background that I did have at that point, while limited compared to true readers/scholars, was still more expansive than most of the people I knew outside my family. It was kind of weird to realize that what used to be commonly recognizable heraldic elements have started trickling out of common knowledge.

At this point, the realizations leave me with two trains of thought: firstly, to fill in the gaps in my own literary knowledge (via reading classics) and secondly, what the hell do I do about my tendency to reference Biblical characters? What's the point of setting up a Job character if no one's going to recognize it?

I come from a relatively mainstream Protestant background; vacation Bible school, confirmation, Bible in first grade, Sunday school, youth group - relatively active and engaged up till leaving for college. We didn't really talk religion much at home that I recall; most of my exploration of spiritual issues came after I'd left for college, when I took a couple courses on the Renaissance and read some Erasmus and other Renaissance philosophers. I picked up enough to realized that I had learned practically nothing about the history of Christianity at church.

Taking the Pew Forum's short quiz, I've come to realize that most of what I know about religion that isn't based on scriptural knowledge, I learned in my American Lit class in high school, as well as the courses I took on Byzantine history and the Renaissance in the course of my undergraduate degree in history. Most of the rest? From the New York Times. And that's still really a drop in the bucket; there are vast swaths of humanity about whom I know nothing of what they believe (or believed, for religions that have died) on a spiritual level.

Knowing what I do know, and what I don't know, and being involved in education from a library point of view - how do you teach literature when so many people nowadays don't understand the underlying implications of the text? Do the underlying implications matter, or can literature be studied devoid of knowledge of its influences?

I think I actually had this debate with my sister, regarding art. If art is removed from its context - if you have a poster of a famous painting, but know nothing about the painting other than that you like the picture - is it still art? Is it somehow devalued by not knowing the artist's intent? Does making posters of famous paintings devalue the original art? I believe I actually came at the reproduction debate from a point of access: hundreds of thousands - millions, even - of people will never see most works of art in the flesh, such as it is. But sell it as a poster in a print shop, and thousands more people are exposed to it. I guess it comes down to the purpose of art: the artist has one purpose, each individual viewer his or her own. Does mass distribution devalue art, or does it just give more people the opportunity to reap its benefits?

So if you consider something like Animal Farm: can it be read, and studied, as literature, without getting into its references to the Russian Revolution? Something written as a direct commentary on an event or era - what, if anything, is lost when the reader has no knowledge of the topic being referenced? If you don't know anything about the Russian Revolution, can you still get value out of Animal Farm, or is its value lost without the underlying theme?

I think, really, the answer for me lies in the quality of the work in question. A great work of literature or art will be timeless even if its content is, like that of Animal Farm or Picasso's Guernica, directly commenting on a historical event or era. It has value outside its context. Not all works achieve this.

So is understanding of the literary references necessary? I think a reader will have a much richer experience with it, but if the work is of good quality, it will be able to stand on its own without needing understanding of the references.