CRITICAL TERMS FOR LITERARY STUDIES.
Edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Introduction:
• Literary theory escaped from the academy and became part of popular culture. The mindset of Literary Theory has become pervasive in our time
• Nature and function of Literary Theory: Schools of thought are joined together by a shred commitment to understanding how language and other systems of signs provide frameworks which determine how we read, more generally, make sense of what we experience construct our identity, produce meaning in the world
• Language should be the focus of alternation of theory
• Language sets the boundaries within which we read, so terms should ordinary and common. (this volume challenges this)
• Historicity of terms + social cultural debates
• A reading is a rhetorical act within a huge cultural debate
1. REPRESENTATION ( W. J. T. Mitchell)
• Aristotle = Modes of Representation
• Representation depend on a series of common codes.
• Representation in language is symbolic, it works around the object.
• Represent = describes, narrate, dramatize
• Representation is not divorced from political + ideological questions.
• Representation is about language (structuralists)
2. STRUCTURE (John Carlos Rowe)
• Term which recognizes the interrelation time x space as fundamental to the concept of structuralism. (Modern view sees time subordinate to space)
• STREW
• Structure = relations among elements shaped by historical situation
• Structure = essential properties of the artwork and ultimately the essence of aesthetic experience
• Structure as simulation (Barthes)
• Structure = dissect in order to understand/ ‘humanize’
3. WRITING (Barbara Johnson)
• Fascination with the mechanics of written word (thinking about writing)
• Barthes: split between work (Great Literature) and text (open ended). Closure x Subversion, Product x Practice
• Writing = the structure of the authority itself
4. DISCOURSE (Paul A. Bové)
• Links to forms of power
• Hierarquization of authority x subservience, identity x difference, etc.
• Basic categories of understanding and thought
• Institutionalized system for the production of knowledge and language.
• The study of discourse leads to a study of institutions
• Discourse: method to the description/meaning
• An address (speech or writing) dealing with a particular topic
5. NARRATIVE (J. Hillis Miller)
• Repetition of narrative form have to do with affirmation, culture-making function rather than critical or subversive function
• Propp’s Morphology of Folktale + Struturalists
• Narrative depends on the trope (figurative language) of personification. A system of figures deconstructed and blindly reaffirmed
• Tells particulars of an act/occurrence/course of events, presented in writing/drama/cinema/radio
6. FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE (Thomas McLaughlin)
• Twists the meaning of the word (TROPE=FIGURE)
• Rhetoric = study of figure/study of persuasion
• Metaphor = transfer of meaning/compressed analogy
• Personification = characteristics of human subject projected in an animal/object
• Apostrophe = object cannot hear of respond to the speech
• Simile = comparison of terms ‘lips like red wine’
• Metonymy = one things stands for other ‘crown = king’ deep identity; historical world of events situation
• Differ from ordinary language by presenting images/relations/mediations giving insight to the power of language itself
7. PERFORMANCE (Henry Sayre)
• Using knowledge rather than just possessing it
• Giving emphasis to what is ‘outside’ a sense of ‘being in the present’, in its immediacy/role played
• Concept or activity upon which community is formed (ritual)
8. AUTHOR (Donald E. Pease)
• Someone who originates/causes/imitates something
• Auctor x Author (power/authority x delineator of a text)
• “Whereas Barthes declares the author is dead, the text he thereby produces is not without an author. In Barthes’ metatextual account of the writing activity” (p. 112)
II
9. INTERPRETATIO (Steven Mailloux)
• Theory of interpretation = a general account of how readers make sense of texts
• 2 approaches = historicizing (context of production) and allegorizing (universal)
• Interpretation is a politically-interested act of persuasion
10. INTENTION (Annabel Patterson)
• Wrestle with the imprecision of language
• Literary intention will shift from formalism towards history and theory of culture
11. UNCONCIOUS (Françoise Meltzer)
• Inferred existence, transcendental idealism
• The way we imagine the unknowable. The way we explain the unexplainable
12. DETERMINACY/INDERTERMINACY (Gerard Graff)
• Anti-hermeneutics = indeterminacy = ambiguity
• Correctness of interpretation
• Science argues for one and only meaning
13. VALUE/ EVALUATION (Barbara Herrstein Smith)
• Stem when cultural activity is a focus of discussion
• ‘Classic’, ‘Masterpiece’
• Evaluation: continuous process/ value fixed
14. INFLUENCE (Louis A. Renza)
• Affirmative relations between past/present literary texts or their authors
• Handing down a testimony of argument throughout the centuries (Bloom conforming to canon/authority
15. RHETORIC (Stanley Fish)
• Art of analyzing and presenting local exigencies
• Persuading method/ literary voice
III
16. CULTURE (Stephen Greenblatt)
• A network of negotiations for the exchange of good/ideas and people
17. CANON (John Guillory)
• System/principle of selection by which same authors/texts deemed worthier of preservation than others
• Exclusion of groups of people
• Canon formation = historic ways societies have regulated reading practices
• A work that creates advance is a canon
18. LITERARY HISTORY (Lee Paterson)
• Different from history of literature (epic, sonnet, ode) chronology of forms (intrinsic approach) [Literature cannot say anything history had not authorized]
• Extrinsic = forces that caused, or were expressed by literary texts
• Literature: a form of social practice; texts do not merely reflect social reality but create it
19. GENDER (Myra Jehlen)
• Designates sexual identity and its associated characteristics. Culture, history, society define gender, not nature (sex)
• Role played
20. RACE (Kwane Anthony Appiah)
• Matin Tupper ‘The Anglo-Saxon Race’ (1850)
• A concept historically fixed as the biological stock
21. ETHNICITY (Werner Sollors)
• Symbolic boundaries of identification
• Boundary-supporting verbal strategy
22. IDEOLOGY (James H. Kavanagh)
• Cultural complexity of language
• System of political ideas/system of representations
Edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin
University of Chicago Press, 1990
# UFSC 82.09 C934
IIntroduction:
• Literary theory escaped from the academy and became part of popular culture. The mindset of Literary Theory has become pervasive in our time
• Nature and function of Literary Theory: Schools of thought are joined together by a shred commitment to understanding how language and other systems of signs provide frameworks which determine how we read, more generally, make sense of what we experience construct our identity, produce meaning in the world
• Language should be the focus of alternation of theory
• Language sets the boundaries within which we read, so terms should ordinary and common. (this volume challenges this)
• Historicity of terms + social cultural debates
• A reading is a rhetorical act within a huge cultural debate
1. REPRESENTATION ( W. J. T. Mitchell)
• Aristotle = Modes of Representation
• Representation depend on a series of common codes.
• Representation in language is symbolic, it works around the object.
• Represent = describes, narrate, dramatize
• Representation is not divorced from political + ideological questions.
• Representation is about language (structuralists)
2. STRUCTURE (John Carlos Rowe)
• Term which recognizes the interrelation time x space as fundamental to the concept of structuralism. (Modern view sees time subordinate to space)
• STREW
• Structure = relations among elements shaped by historical situation
• Structure = essential properties of the artwork and ultimately the essence of aesthetic experience
• Structure as simulation (Barthes)
• Structure = dissect in order to understand/ ‘humanize’
3. WRITING (Barbara Johnson)
• Fascination with the mechanics of written word (thinking about writing)
• Barthes: split between work (Great Literature) and text (open ended). Closure x Subversion, Product x Practice
• Writing = the structure of the authority itself
4. DISCOURSE (Paul A. Bové)
• Links to forms of power
• Hierarquization of authority x subservience, identity x difference, etc.
• Basic categories of understanding and thought
• Institutionalized system for the production of knowledge and language.
• The study of discourse leads to a study of institutions
• Discourse: method to the description/meaning
• An address (speech or writing) dealing with a particular topic
5. NARRATIVE (J. Hillis Miller)
• Repetition of narrative form have to do with affirmation, culture-making function rather than critical or subversive function
• Propp’s Morphology of Folktale + Struturalists
• Narrative depends on the trope (figurative language) of personification. A system of figures deconstructed and blindly reaffirmed
• Tells particulars of an act/occurrence/course of events, presented in writing/drama/cinema/radio
6. FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE (Thomas McLaughlin)
• Twists the meaning of the word (TROPE=FIGURE)
• Rhetoric = study of figure/study of persuasion
• Metaphor = transfer of meaning/compressed analogy
• Personification = characteristics of human subject projected in an animal/object
• Apostrophe = object cannot hear of respond to the speech
• Simile = comparison of terms ‘lips like red wine’
• Metonymy = one things stands for other ‘crown = king’ deep identity; historical world of events situation
• Differ from ordinary language by presenting images/relations/mediations giving insight to the power of language itself
7. PERFORMANCE (Henry Sayre)
• Using knowledge rather than just possessing it
• Giving emphasis to what is ‘outside’ a sense of ‘being in the present’, in its immediacy/role played
• Concept or activity upon which community is formed (ritual)
8. AUTHOR (Donald E. Pease)
• Someone who originates/causes/imitates something
• Auctor x Author (power/authority x delineator of a text)
• “Whereas Barthes declares the author is dead, the text he thereby produces is not without an author. In Barthes’ metatextual account of the writing activity” (p. 112)
II
9. INTERPRETATIO (Steven Mailloux)
• Theory of interpretation = a general account of how readers make sense of texts
• 2 approaches = historicizing (context of production) and allegorizing (universal)
• Interpretation is a politically-interested act of persuasion
10. INTENTION (Annabel Patterson)
• Wrestle with the imprecision of language
• Literary intention will shift from formalism towards history and theory of culture
11. UNCONCIOUS (Françoise Meltzer)
• Inferred existence, transcendental idealism
• The way we imagine the unknowable. The way we explain the unexplainable
12. DETERMINACY/INDERTERMINACY (Gerard Graff)
• Anti-hermeneutics = indeterminacy = ambiguity
• Correctness of interpretation
• Science argues for one and only meaning
13. VALUE/ EVALUATION (Barbara Herrstein Smith)
• Stem when cultural activity is a focus of discussion
• ‘Classic’, ‘Masterpiece’
• Evaluation: continuous process/ value fixed
14. INFLUENCE (Louis A. Renza)
• Affirmative relations between past/present literary texts or their authors
• Handing down a testimony of argument throughout the centuries (Bloom conforming to canon/authority
15. RHETORIC (Stanley Fish)
• Art of analyzing and presenting local exigencies
• Persuading method/ literary voice
III
16. CULTURE (Stephen Greenblatt)
• A network of negotiations for the exchange of good/ideas and people
17. CANON (John Guillory)
• System/principle of selection by which same authors/texts deemed worthier of preservation than others
• Exclusion of groups of people
• Canon formation = historic ways societies have regulated reading practices
• A work that creates advance is a canon
18. LITERARY HISTORY (Lee Paterson)
• Different from history of literature (epic, sonnet, ode) chronology of forms (intrinsic approach) [Literature cannot say anything history had not authorized]
• Extrinsic = forces that caused, or were expressed by literary texts
• Literature: a form of social practice; texts do not merely reflect social reality but create it
19. GENDER (Myra Jehlen)
• Designates sexual identity and its associated characteristics. Culture, history, society define gender, not nature (sex)
• Role played
20. RACE (Kwane Anthony Appiah)
• Matin Tupper ‘The Anglo-Saxon Race’ (1850)
• A concept historically fixed as the biological stock
21. ETHNICITY (Werner Sollors)
• Symbolic boundaries of identification
• Boundary-supporting verbal strategy
22. IDEOLOGY (James H. Kavanagh)
• Cultural complexity of language
• System of political ideas/system of representations
