Introduction to Literary Studies
Literary Text
They are written acts of communication. They are aesthetically relevant and pleasurable, or they are oriented towards the aesthetic function of language. They are fictive. They are open to interpretation. They are indeterminate as to the perlocutionary effect intended. They are displaced written acts of communication. They are included in the literary canon of any given society.
Jakobson
CONTEXT
ADDRESSER > MESSAGE > ADDRESSEE
CONTACT
CODE
Stylistic
They are usually considered literature on account of their mastery of macrostylistic features and on account of another criterion that also affects highly stylized texts: fiction.
Prison
Daniel Defoe’s pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702)
Literature
Literature as a discipline can be finally defined as the discipline dealing with texts which fulfill some (possibly two at least) of the following features:
Encyclopedia
The part of our literary knowledge resulting from the double-sided activity of compiling, organizing, and classifying the information extracted from literary and non-literary texts in the course of our contacts with them. Both activities are closely interrelated and are very hard to separate.
Approaches
- Cambridge School (1920s–1930s). New Humanism (c. 1910–1933).
- Russian Formalism (1915–1929). New Criticism (1930s–1960s).
- Chicago School (1950s). Frankfurt School (c. 1923–1970). Structuralism (1950s–1960s)
- Psychoanalytic criticism. Marxist criticism. New Historicism (1980s–present)
- Cultural materialism. Feminist criticism (1960s–present). Post-structuralism (1960s–1970s):
- Queer theory (1980s–present). Post-Colonial theory.
Jonathan Dollimore
Cultural materialism, Radical Tragedy.
Modelization
A first parameter for the definition of poetry from a linguistic point of view is based on the modelization of language. In this respect, poetry can be defined as a message that is worded through an overcoding variety of language.
Attitude
The subject it is most frequently internal-intimate, at least in what would be the core of poetry: the lyric.
Feet
For the disyllabic feet: iambic foot or iamb = weak-strong succession of syllables ( ̆ ‘), trochaic foot or trochee = strong-weak ( ‘ ̆ ), phyrric or dibrach = weak-weak ( ̆ ̆ ); spondaic foot or spondee = strong-strong ( ‘ ‘ ); for the trisyllabic feet: anapestic foot or anapest = weak-weak-strong ( ̆ ̆ ‘) and dactylic foot or dactyl = strong-weak-weak ( ‘ ̆ ̆ ).
Schemes
Schemes have to do with expression. They are abnormal arrangements lending themselves to the forceful and harmonious presentations of ideas; they foreground repetition of expression.
Tropes have to do with content. They are devices involving the alteration of the normal meaning of an expression; they foreground irregularities of content.
Figures
- Prosopopoeia. Representing an imaginary or absent person as speaking or acting; attributing life, speech, or inanimate qualities to dumb or inanimate objects.
- Apostrophe. A diversion of discourse from the topic at hand to addressing some person or thing, either present or absent.
- Pleonasm. The needless repetition of words; a tautology on the level of a phrase.
- Occupatio, praeteritio, or paralipsis. “When the orator feigns and makes as though he would say nothing in some matter, when, notwithstanding he speaks most of all, or when he says something: in saying he will not say it”.
Implied
The implied author is a partly fictional author between the real author and the text; this is the person to whom we ascribe the views expressed through a work, but that does not necessarily have to coincide with the author himself, though it may.
The implied reader is the kind of reader the author has primarily in mind as sharing a common fund of knowledge and experiences.
Diagram
When a novelist reports the occurrence of some act or speech act we are apparently seeing the event entirely from his perspective. But as we move along the cline of speech presentation from the more bound to the more free end, his interference seems to become less and less noticeable, until, in the most extreme version of FDS, he apparently leaves the characters to talk entirely on their own.
Indices
Nuclei, also called kernels, are the constituent events of a story, i.e., the events that are necessary for the story to be what it is. They are the turning points, the events that drive the story forward and that lead to other events.
Catalyzers, also called satellites, are the stretches of words not necessary for the story. They do not lead anywhere. They can be removed and the story will still be recognizable as the story it is.
Indices can only be saturated on the level of characters or on the level of narration. They are part of a parametrical relationship whose second term is continuous, extended over an episode, a character, or the whole work.
Ostension
The showing of objects and events (and the performance at large) to the audience, rather than describing, explaining, or defining them.
Spectacle
- Kinesic components: actors’ body movements, gestures, facial expressions, postures, etc.
- Proxemic components: movement of approach and/or distancing between persons and objects.
- Lighting
- Settings
- Costumes
- Props
- Special effects
Turn-Taking
A cognitive operation that helps us to focus on the interactional activity performed by the participants when they exchange utterances in dialogues. Turn-taking is usually divided for analysis into adjacency pairs. Through turn-taking, the spectators focus on the interactional activity performed by the participants in the conversation.
Face
Face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self-delineated in terms of approved social attributes. There are two kinds of face:
- Negative face: the want of every ‘competent adult member’ that his actions be unimpeded by others.
- Positive face: the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others.
The way in which characters negotiate their face and their interlocutors’ face is a very common way to characterize, make the action advance, and present conflict in drama.
Practica
Bay
Seamus Heaney. North. Heaney imagines receiving advice from his Viking ancestors about his poetry. “The longship’s swimming tongue” tells him to look inwards for poetic inspiration, to “lie down in the nord-hoard” and to “compose in darkness”. This quotation shows the Vikings telling Heaney to trust his own imagining and beliefs, to trust in what he knows and search for the right words, using his intuition.
Traveller
Ozymandias. Percy Shelley. There are a lot of symbols and imagery, such as the statues and sculpting, symbolizing the ambition and longevity of art. Also, destruction, the state of the statue symbolized the processes of time and many images of the balance between life and death and how the passions are still alive. It’s a sonnet, in iambic pentameter. There are different voices, as the speaker, the traveler, and also several settings, the first encounter and the desert.
Clocks
Funeral Blues. Auden. This poem is set at a sadness to be reflected in everything. It’s a poem about death. There is a connection with music. This poem raises all kinds of questions about private and public speech and mourning. It is an elegy, written in elegiac stanzas, in iambic pentameter. Highly irregular and with many hyperboles.