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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Literary theory offers:

1) The systematic study of the nature of literature

A body of concept used in defining literature

2) The systematic study of methods in the interpretation of literary texts

They investigate the formal elements of literary structure

Literary scholarship is connected with:

Linguistics

Philosophy

Intellectual history

Psychology

Anthropology

Generic studies

Contemporary theory a collection of theoretical approaches; each approach is marked by a number of premises.

Approaches:

1. Phenomenology

2. Russian Formalism

3. New Criticism

4. Prague Structuralism

5. French Structuralism

6. Semiotics

7. Reception Theory

8. Reader Response Criticism

9. Psychoanalytical Literary Criticism

10. Archetypal Literary Criticism

11. Narratology

AUTHOR

TEXT

- Fictional world - Narration

- Character-to-character communication

READER

4 overriding approaches to theory:

1) RELATION AUTHOR-TEXT

The text is not the source of information of the authors emotions and feelings.

Russian Formalism, New Criticism

Beginning of the 20th century

2) LINGUISTIC TURN

The literary artwork exists independently of the author and reader.

Its a self-sustaining and self-regulating entity; its isolated from the circumstances of its creation and from

its social and cultural context.

Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism

Proliferation of terms: the implied author, the implied reader

3) CONCEPT OF THE READER

The perception of literary texts.

Reception Theory, Reader Response Criticism the literary text evolves in the problem of perception.

4) LITERARY TEXT EXISTS IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

Significance of race, class, gender.

Literary text is not a self-regulating entity; literary output becomes a discourse entangled in other

discourses.

Literary theory is a set of concepts and intellectual assumptions. Its a side of theories.

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PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenology philosophical movement based on the investigation of phenomena (things apprehended by consciousness)

It doesnt take interest in the outer reality for its own sake.

Its concerned with conscious experience.

It studies the structure of various types of experience:

Perception

Memory

Imagination

Emotion

Desire

Social activity (including linguistic activity)

Literary studies

Roots in philosophical studies of Edmund Husserl (a logician, who was never concerned with literature)

We cannot be sure of the independent existence of things.

When we think, out thoughts are pointing at something.

The act of thinking and the object of thought are mutually dependent, they are internally related.

ALL REALITIES = PURE PHENOMENA (not individual impressions in human mind)

Pure phenomena a system of universal essences that is concerned with each object in human imagination that is

invariable.

A sign of human consciousness

o Not perceived on the level of empirical experience but on the level of the deep structure of the human

mind.

To grasp any phenomenon purely and wholly is to grasp what is essential and unchanging about it.

Gr. eidos type

EIDETIC ABSTRACTION/REDUCTION the process of going beyond the factual aspects of perception to the experience

of the essence.

Roman Ingarden (1893-1970) a Polish realist phenomenologist, E. Husserls student

Interest in aesthetics, ontology and epistemology of literary artwork.

The outer world is the product of our consciousness.

The objective reality doesnt exist, its just a projection.

Opposing Husserls transcendental idealism.

The world has the objective existence independent of consciousness.

o Objects in reality exist independently of human mind.

Literary artwork an intentional object; it has its source in the creative consciousness of the author; BUT its not the

projection of creative consciousness, its the product of the acts of consciousness that we dont have access to.

Literary work grows out of the emotions of the author but it cannot be treated as the source of knowledge of these

emotions.

Ingardens work is not directed towards the basic structures of consciousness but towards the ontology1 of the intentional

object.

1926 The Literary Work of Art fundamentally, its a work of ontology but it also describes the essential features of

literary work.

1 Ontology philosophical study of the nature of existence.

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Literary work is composed 4 heterogeneous strata:

1) STRATUM OF WORD SOUNDS AND PHONETIC FORMATIONS OF HIGHER ORDER which are built upon

them.

Comprises the raw material of literature (the words sounds).

The sound configurations which carry meaning and potential for the aesthetic effect.

2) STRATUM OF MEANING UNITS

Formed by conjoining.

Ranges from the individual meaning of words to the meaning of sentences and paragraphs.

3) STRATUM OF MANIFOLD SCHEMATIZED ASPECTS

Visual and auditory aspects via which characters and places are presented in the literary work.

4) STRATUM OF THE REPRESENTED ENTITIES

Objects, events, states of affairs that form the plot and the characters.

These strata are arranged VERTICALLY.

Subgroupings:

1+2 phonetic and semantic levels (linguistic in nature); the means of representing objects.

3+4 connected with objects existing in literary work (everything that words create); they evoke the characters and

places.

These 4 strata are interconnected; they form an organic entity (POLYPHONIC HARMONY2).

Intricate interrelations of the individual strata.

* Ingarden, Roman Dwuwymiarowa budowa dziea sztuki literackiej

Ingardens stratified theory has an undeniable strength literary work is a complex entity.

Weakness: this approach excluded the social and cultural context in which the text exists.

Heteronomous object neither determinant nor autonomous as the real objects are.

Distinction:

All real objects have an infinite number of determinants, they are determined in every aspect.

The objects existing in literature are intentionally projected from meaning units through language; they exhibit spots

or places of INDETERMINACY

Indeterminacy on the basis of the sentence, to say whether the object has a certain attribute

Every literary text is characterized by indeterminate places.

Gaps of indeterminacy

Child kicked a ball.

Is it a girl or a boy?

What does he/she look like?

We are unable to answer these questions.

The Literary Work of Art ontology of the text

The Cognition of Literary Artwork epistemology3

Dimensions of literary artwork:

1) VERTICAL

2) TEMPORAL connected with the cognition of the text.

Reading process is dynamic; we interact with the text in a variety of ways. It unfolds in the process of concretization.

Reading is not a straightforward linear movement; its not a cumulative affair.

Reader is always active; they have to appropriate the material.

2 Polyphonic harmony literary work is similar to the polyphonic music. 3 Epistemology theory of cognition.

Issues: What is knowledge? What do people know? How do they acquire their knowledge?

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The text is read backwards and forwards simultaneously

o This complicated activity is carried on many levels at once.

The text exists in schemata which must be visualized by the reader.

PRE-UNDERSTANDINGS what the readers unreflectively bring with them to the reading of the texts.

Modified by what the reader learns.

Distinction between the text as a skeletal structure (ARTIFACT) and apprehended literary work (AN AESTHETIC

OBEJCT).

The artefact has a potential to be an aesthetic object.

The readers creativity and skills remove or fill in indeterminate places.

Concretization as an activity of an individual reader.

Every perception of an individual reader is different.

RUSSIAN FORMALISM

The school of literary criticism that emerged in Russia, 1915-1919.

It dissolved in the 1930s but it was effectively silenced by Stalinism.

More interest in poetry than in prose.

Approach:

Attempt to separate literary studies from other disciplines.

Attempt to define literary studies as its own forms of knowledge.

Focus on literary facts.

Interest in the language of literature.

The concept of literariness - the organization of language which through special linguistic and formal properties

distinguishes literary texts from non-literary texts.

Representatives:

Viktor Shklovsky

Yuri Tynianov

Boris Eichenbaum

Roman Jakobson (Prague Structuralism)

Yuri Lotman influenced by Russian Formalism

Mikhail Bakhtin influenced by Russian Formalism

Organizations:

OPOJAZ (The Society for the Study of Poetic Language) 1914-1923

The Moscow Linguistic Circle 1915-1920

Common characteristics:

Literariness

Literary language

Defamiliarization

Device

Dominant

Russian Formalists rejected the earlier views on literary work. They paid attention to the formal characteristics of a form of

art.

Focus on the material reality of the text, things that can be found in the text.

Not interested in the historical context, they were not looking for the authorial links.

Interest in

o INTRINSIC STUDY OF LITERATURE

o TEXT-INTERNAL STUDY OF LITERATURE

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3 periods of Russian Formalism:

1) THE MECHANICAL VIEW interest in a single text

Literary works resemble machines.

They result of the intentional human activity.

Transforming the raw material of life into a complex mechanism.

Defamiliarization in order to examine the task.

Material of the text = language

o Language of the literature doesnt reflect the world.

Shklovsky:

o Language offers linguistic dislocation; its the device of making strange.

o It is different from everyday speech.

o It defamiliarizes the reality that we know, it evolves fictional reality.

Examples of defamiliarization: Gullivers Travels and G.G. Marquezs works.

o Idea of the device linguistic devices which defamiliarize are inseparably bound to linguistic

expression.

o Split of thinking:

Some literature as verbal art, linguistic devices

Others some texts dont necessarily defamiliarize the language but the events.

o Binary opposition

Poetry prose

Literary language non-literary language

Story plot

Story as a sequence of the events unfolding, events follow temporal causation.

Chronology of the story may be the pre-sequence for the plot.

Chronology may be disrupted by shortening, parallelism, retardation.

o Events which are presented are deprived of any social, emotional, historical or cognitive

significance.

o It only values how they contribute to the matter of technique.

2) THE ORGANIC VIEW literature is similar to an organism

Literature as an organism of interrelated parts.

Yuri Tynianov:

o Literary work is a system of interrelated parts, its a unified body built of correlated in

a hierarchical order parts.

o Its not an editive whole but a system of devices.

o Interest in an individual artwork in the context of the genre and general classes.

o Hierarchical systems: dominant principle (constrictive) that subordinates all the rest.

o Approach:

SYNCHRONICAL how it reflects

DIACHRONICAL how the system relates to the earlier period.

V. Propp Morphology of the Folktale (1928)

o Establishing the generic identity of the folktales

o 28 functions characteristic for the folktale

3) THE SYSTEMIC VIEW interest in a single text but also in literature in general

Further broadening of horizons.

Struggle for components for dominance.

Theres always the constructive factor which dominates and the subordinated material.

Literary work of art as a single unity.

The heightened perceptibility of the text we can notice the tension between the constructive factor and

the subordinated material.

o The heightened perceptibility may be seen in synchronic and diachronic aspects.

Extended interest to various literary epochs.

Perceptibility of the text exist in a single literary artwork, also in synchronic/diachronic conception

Features:

o Literary concept of the dominant

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The focusing element of the artwork

We can associate it with the constructive factor

It rules, determines and transforms the remaining components

It guarantees the integrity of literary artwork

Individual epoch/artist

o Historical literary process history of how different dominants come into the fore.

o New perspective on literary evolution succession of schools of writing;

Old techniques of one epoch are replaced with the provocative innovations/new

approaches.

The concept of the FOREGROUND/BACKGROUND of an epoch:

Realism of the 19th-century novel replaced in the epoch that follows but it doesnt drop out entirely.

19th-century interest in psychology (background) but in the stream of consciousness psychology is in the

foreground.

Elements which were secondary may become primary.

Distinction:

Poetic language - the quintessence of literariness

Ordinary language

Considerations of meter/rhythm/versification in poetry they ought to take interest in the sounds of poems

Strong influence of the perceiving consciousness on the recipient.

Literary artwork can be devoid of the practical function which every-day language performs. Its SELF-REFERENTIAL

instead.

An autotelic kind of art art in a sense refers to itself.

FORMALISM the study of literature placed on scientific basis of motifs/devices/dominances/techniques/etc.

Shklovsky: poetic work structured system, an ordered system of artistic devices

1) Focus on the basic components of literary study which is the specificity of the literary object.

2) It modified the conception of literary artwork and broke it down into components (like Roman Ingarden), it opened

up new areas of inquiring.

An object of scientific analysis POETIC EXPRESSION

3) Dynamics of literary history, then developed synchronic/diachronic approach.

Read:

Literary Theory and Anthology J. Rilkin, M. Ryan

Introduction to the Formal Method B. Eichenbaum

Art as Technique B. Shklovsky

The Morphology of the Folktale V. Propp

NEW CRITICISM (1930s-1960s)

Written by American critics/scholars

Taught in Southern universities in the years following WW2.

Analogous to Russian Formalism.

Name given by John Crowe Ransom 1941 New Criticism

Representatives:

John Crowe Ransom

Allan Tate

R.P. Blackmur

Robert Penn Warren

Cleanth Brooks

William Empson

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New Critics criticism with the scientific basis, they developed a way of reading a poem.

They wanted to avoid Impressionistic Criticism (shallow and arbitrary).

An attempt to systematize the study of literature

o Centered on the rigorous study itself (similar to Russian Formalism).

Literary artwork studied in isolation without regard to anything external to the text (like history, authors biography)

Close attention to the internal elements.

o It discourages the use of external evidence to explain literary artwork.

Close reading method concentrated on rhythm/meter/theme/imagery/metaphor.

It reveals multiple meanings and complexities of texture.

Language wasnt emphasized as the carrier of reality.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge a British theoretician who influenced New Critics.

A poem as an organic and unified entity which reconciles its eternal conflicts in order to achieve balance and

harmony.

Literary artwork:

An autonomous object,

A self-contained universe of discourse.

A self-enclosed entity that is internally coherent.

Its full of internal tension.

Whereas, scientific language corresponds with an external reality.

Both Russian Formalism and New Criticism are based on formal devices. But New Critics pay attention to what a poem

means, they do not disregard the semantic meaning.

William Kurtz Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954):

1) INTENTIONAL FALLACY a mistake of attempting to understand the authors intentions when interpreting a

text.

The meaning of the text should be solely connected to the text itself.

The attempt to understand the authors intentions violates the autonomy of the text.

2) AFFECTIVE FALLACY a mistake of equating the text with the emotional affects that it has on the readers.

The text shouldnt be relative to the responses of the readers.

Literary text is seen as independent of the tensions.

The meaning of the text is encoded in the text itself.

The heresy of paraphrase the poem couldnt be paraphrased because it couldnt be expressed in other language than itself.

Russian Formalism

Text internal study;

Inner complexity of the parts;

Text had to be expressed in other language than itself New Criticism

The poem should be interpreted in the terms of:

COHERENCE

INTEGRATION

Meaning: objective, public, inscribed in the language of the text.

Poetry as the purest exemplification of literary values.

Poem as a spatial figure, not temporal.

New Critics insisted on the objective status of the text, they also professed the objective way of interpreting the text.

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William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) inner ambiguities of the text

Uncertainty of the overlap of meanings could be an enrichment of poetry rather than its fault.

Read:

Literary Theory T. Eagleton chapter on Psychoanalysis

Cleanth Brooks The Well-Wrought Urn

10 chapters outstanding British literary texts interpretations.

All the internal conflicts that appear in the text are resolved.

Theres only one correct reading of a poem.

The 11th chapter the heresy of paraphrase.

General principles:

1) Poetry speaks the language of paradox.

2) Since the poem objectifies a complex situation, its most natural form is dramatic.

3) The most fruitful discussion of a poem lies in a close analysis of its structure.

New Critics believe that formal devices are basic but they are also interested in the meanings (semantic value).

They rejected the division of the form and content they cannot be separated.

Critics position: they believed that the meaning of the text is encoded in the text itself.

The role of the critic is to recover the complexities of the meaning and to analyze rhetorical tropes they create the

meaning.

They should be free from their feelings, responses and fallacies when reading a text.

The text has to be considered as an object of literature which is complete in itself.

New Critics were criticized for:

It excluded the role of literary context out of which the work evolved.

It disqualified many fruitful perspectives for understanding the text.

They believed that there was only one correct reading of the text.

PSYCHOANALYTICAL LITERARY CRITICISM

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

New model of the mind.

The analysis of the relationship between the individual and the society.

Until his time, it was believed that human beings are in full rational control of whats going on in their mind.

o The whole of the mind is conscious.

Freud compared the mind to and iceberg; only 1/8 is conscious and the 7/8 is the unconscious part of the mind.

Parts of human mind:

1) THE CONSCIOUS PART what we are aware of at any particular moment.

2) THE PRECONSCIOUS PART very close to the conscious part, anything that can be easily made conscious.

3) THE UNCONSCIOUS (SUBCONSCIOUS) PART includes all things that are not easily available to awareness

Drives and instincts

Its the source of our motivations, its very often revealed in dreams.

Read:

Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams

Types of motivation:

Desires (for food, sex)

Neurotic compulsions

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We are often driven to deny our conscious motives.

Personality is composed of 3 levels:

1) ID operates beyond conscious awareness, its the reservoir of drives and impulses, and it connects them with the

presentation and propagation of life.

Completely unconscious

Desires, fears, traumas, dreams

It houses the libido

2) EGO operates on conscious and preconscious levels, its the source of perception, cognition and decision.

It processes experiences and operates as a kind of mediator between ID and SUPEREGO.

3) SUPEREGO the sensor of the EGOs functions in the light of social conventions and requirements.

Thought of as ones SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

The mental conflict between the Id and Superego plays the central role in the personality of both healthy and the unhealthy.

This conflict always exists.

Unconscious part always influences our behavior.

Psychoanalysis:

Sought to bring motives and repressed memories to the level of consciousness.

DREAMS as an important diagnostic tool.

Ego and Superego are muted down, all kinds of the suppressed urges of the Id come to the surface.

In dreams one person may fade into another one.

Fears and desires are most often masked behind symbols and they are not presented directly.

19th-century novels: instincts as impulses that could be controlled by reasons.

Karl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

Freuds conception inadequate.

Freuds theory of mind structure is incomplete it lacks the RACIAL UNCONSCIOUS.

The unconscious was divided into two separate components:

PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS

RACIAL UNCONSCIOUS is nothing but a possibility, that possibility, in fact, which from primordial time has

found expression in the definite form of mnemic images or anatomical structure. It is inherited in the structure of

the brain. It does not yield inborn ideas, but inborn possibilities of ideas.

The collective unconscious our psychic inheritance, the reservoir of our experience, a kind of knowledge which were

born with.

We all have a predisposition to act in well-defined ways under certain circumstances.

Archetype universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic

counterpart of instinct.

A sudden conjunction of our inner reality and the outer reality of the collective unconscious.

Autonomous and hidden forms which are transformed once they enter consciousness and are given particular

expression by individuals and their cultures.

The existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behavior, images, art, myths, religions, or

dreams.

They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior

on interaction with the outside world

o They may be seen as an inborn tendency to experience certain things in a certain way.

Archetypes (primordial images) appear in literature, myths and rituals.

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People behave according to the same laws (UNIVERSAL UNCONSCIOUS).

People dont have separate personal unconscious mind but a single universal unconscious.

Jung was interested in dreams, imaginings, myths, religions of various tribes universal expressions of archetypes which

reside in the collective unconscious.

Examples of archetypes:

1) Archetypal events

Death experience people of many different cultural backgrounds have similar recollections of near-

dying

Leaving their bodies and seeing them from a distance, being pulled along the tunnel

towards the light

Birth

Marriage

2) Archetypal figures

Mother

All the people have evolved in an environment having a mother or a mother substitute.

We come into this world ready to seek a mother.

Our built-in ability to recognize a certain relationship of mothering.

The primordial mother, Mother Earth, Eve, Virgin Mary

Church when mother failed, seeking help in the church

Forest, ocean, nation these may sometimes function as mother archetype.

ANIMA appears in men and is his primordial image of woman. It represents the man's biological

expectation of women, but also is a symbol of a man's feminine possibilities, his contra-sexual tendencies.

ANIMUS the analogous image of the masculine that occurs in women.

PERSONA how we present ourselves to the world.

THE SELF the whole range of psychic phenomena in man. It expresses the unity of the personality as a

whole.

Shadow representation of the personal unconscious as a whole

usually embodies the compensating values to those held by the conscious personality.

Often represents one's dark side, those aspects of oneself that exist, but which one does

not acknowledge or with which one does not identify

Father

Child

Maiden

God

3) Archetypal motifs

The apocalypse

The creation

4) Archetypal themes:

Faustian bargain

Pride preceding a fall

Inevitable nature of death

Fate

Punishment

Madness

Blindness

Taboos

Incest

5) Archetypal character types:

Witches who cannibalize children

Haunted man

Femme fatale

Wise old man as a mentor

Helpless little old lady

Stern father

Guilt-ridden person

Archetypes appear cross-culturally, they appear in many fairytales:

The orphaned prince

Damsel in distress rescued from the hideous monster by a handsome hero

Difficult quest or search

The pursuit of revenge

Descend into the other world

The end of the world

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Jungs interest in ART (the kind which attempts to find the archetypes best-suited for the age)

1) Art based on the personal unconscious

Limited to the authors personal vision

2) Art based on the racial unconscious

Music, literature, visual arts

It reflects the experiences that are embedded in the racial unconscious.

Interest in the primitive man social structure, mythology, art

Understanding the primitive man was the key to understanding the racial unconscious.

Stimulating interest in the primitive art (20th century).

Strong influence on Western forms of culture.

James George Frazer The Golden Bough (1890) comparative study of myth and religion.

Jungian Archetypal Criticism explores connection between literature and collective unconscious human race.

All stories and symbols are based on a mythic model from out past.

Read:

Maud Bodkin Studium o Sdziwym Marynarzu i archetypie odradzania si (Sztuka interpretacji)

K.G. Jung The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

RECEPTION THEORY AND READER RESPONSE CRITICISM

Germany USA

Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss Stanley Fish

Modern Literary periodization:

1) Preoccupation with the AUTHOR

a. Romanticism

b. 19th century

2) Exclusive concern with the TEXT

Text = self-sufficient entity

a. 20th century: the author removed from the sight

b. Roland Barthes The Death of the Author (1967)

3) Shift of attention to the READER

The printed text becomes a literary text in the process of reading.

Reader as an active agent, who imparts the real existence of the world, completes the meaning of the text

through interpretation.

This approach poses that a work of art is not simply passively accepted by the audience, the recipient

interprets the meaning on the basis of the cultural experiences.

Concept of the meaning:

The interpretation is based on the recipients individual background

Its not inherent in the text itself but created within the relationship between the text and the reader.

The process of reading is always dynamic; its a complex movement that develops in time.

Literary text set of schemata that the reader must actualize.

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ACTIVE ROLE OF THE READER:

Bringing pre-understandings

beliefs

expectations

in the process of perception

Within those the various features will be assessed;

They are modified by what we learn while reading.

They exclude some elements and foregrounds the other.

Reading is not a linear straightforward movement, its not just a cumulative affair. Its a complicated activity carried

on many levels at the same time. It backgrounds and foregrounds different views.

o What comes next may retrospectively change our earlier assumptions.

o Almost every sentence opens up a horizon which is anticipated, confirmed, challenged, or assessed by what the

text says.

Situated nature of our interpretation of the text and historical nature of understanding the text.

There can be a big temporal gap between the time when the text was written and the time when it was read and

interpreted.

o Text may possess different meanings.

o Its operating within the different historical/cultural horizon that the readers horizon.

Interaction between the text and the reader:

o The reader can approach the text with his own pre-understanding which is grounded in history.

Act of interpreting fusion of ones own horizon with the historical horizon implied by the text.

Our horizon colors the events.

RECEPTION THEORY

Hans Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007)

Together with Jauss, hes considered to be the founder of the Reception Theory.

Influenced by Ingarden.

Questions of how and under what conditions a text has meaning for the reader.

o Meaning as a result of interaction of the text and the reader.

o Its an effect to be experienced, not the object to be defined.

o Theres always TEXT and AESTHETIC OBJECT created on the basis of cognition of the reader.

The printed form is not the aesthetic object.

Aesthetic object comes into existence in the process of perception.

o The text is no more than a skeleton of schematized aspect which has to be concretized by the reader.

Processing of the text in reading:

o Reading involves a precisely largely conscious labor, the readers involved in creating hypotheses about

the meaning.

The reader makes explicit connections, fills in gaps, draws interferences they must draw on

the passive knowledge in general.

Not a nave reader.

Text = no more than a series of hints to the reader;

o It contains invitations to construct a piece of language into the meaning.

o Its full of elements that depend on the readers interpretation.

o It can be interpreted in a number of different ways which may even stay in conflict.

Implied author the concept formulated by Wayne C. Booth.

Implied reader (der implizite leser)

1) Pre-structuring of the potential meaning of the text.

2) Readers actualization of this potential through a reading process.

Presence of the reader without discussing the real reader.

o Not interested in the empirical investigation of the real reader.

Its the reader brought forth by the text, the reader that is implied by the text.

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Transcendental

Phenomenological

reader NOT the actual

empirical

one.

roots grounded in the

structure of the text.

Doubt: If the IMPLIED READER was purely textual, it would be senseless.

The Act of Reading (1978) literary text always conveys familiar themes and allusions.

The reader has to be familiar with the literary techniques, themes, conventions and codes introduced by literary work of art.

The text offers some codes, genres, themes.

Its the text which forces the reader into a new critical awareness, the one which challenges the perceptible

awareness of the reader.

Each literary artwork is individual and unique.

o It forces the reader to acknowledge the work in its own terms.

Literary artwork violates and transgresses the traditional way of seeing.

The text contains textual gaps that invite the reader to interfere actively in order to find their meaning.

o Things that are not expressed.

o Theyre responsible for stimulating the meanings.

Reading literature gives us the chance to formulate the unformulated.

Suspended connectability of the text, i.e. Sean OCaseys Red Roses for Me

Storyline: * * * * * *

We notice several signals which are carried

throughout the story at various stages of the text

- They turn out to be semantically connected

Every act refers to a different cultural code.

Metaphorical suspended connectability appears in the modernist texts.

The blanks chart a course for reading and organizing the readers activity.

Means by which communication takes place.

An unformulated double of the formulated text.

It cant be defined but it can only be experienced in reading.

Its like the deep structure of the text.

READER RESPONSE CRITICISM

Evolved in the United States in 1970s.

Subjectivists: Norman Holland, Robert Crossman

Reception theory: interaction between the text and the reader on the basis of the text.

Reader response criticism: not guided by the text, motivated by readers psychological needs.

While reading we find our identity in the text.

We work out through the text our own characteristic patterns of desire.

Stanley Fish (born 1938)

Opposed New Criticism

Literature exists only when it is read.

Criticism should always be concerned with what literature does, how it influences the reader.

Literature in the Reader Affective Stylistics literature as an object, claiming what it is instead of discussing what it does.

Tragic death of Ayman

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Claim that theres no objective work of literature,

Example: Charles Dickens Bleak House just all the assorted accounts of literary artwork.

Reading is the process of experiencing what the text means to the reader.

FOCUS ON THE READER!

Essay: Surprised by Sin, The Reader in Paradise Lost Milton used literary techniques to lead the reader to the false

sense of security that he knew how it was communicating. The reader has some expectations but Miltons intention was to

force the reader to see his own sinfulness.

The meaning of the literary artwork is in the readers perception.

The readers activities are at the center of attention where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having

meaning.

Theres no stable basis for the meaning of the text, its in the readers comprehension.

Is there a Text in this Class? its the reader that projects the features onto the text; the implied answer to the question in

the title is NO.

Interpretative strategies, which the readers have in common, govern the personal responses of the individual readers and

help to avoid divergent interpretations.

Any human being is determined by the rules of the society socially conditioned knowledge.

Individual readers are part of the interpretative community.

Conventional act of recognizing literature not constrained in the text.

Its not something which is encoded in the text, its not something that the individual thinks.

It proceeds from a collective decision.

Literature tend to lose its spatial use, a reflection of communal values.

HERMENEUTICS

Gr. to translate, to explain, to make something clear

Associated with Hermes, who encrypted the messages from gods for mortals.

o The god of Greek mythology, he was an interpreter between the worlds.

Methods of interpretation employed in reading literary text.

o Its concerned with the problem of understanding the meaning of the text.

o First, it was concerned with the interpretation of the Bible in order to discover the hidden truth.

Approaches:

1) LITERAL discovering literal meanings.

2) MORAL seeks to establish principles from which ethical lessons can be drawn.

3) ALLEGORICAL narrative leaves a level of reference beyond the text explicit.

4) ANAGOGICAL/MYSTICAL explaining biblical events as they appear.

INTERPRETATION AS SCIENCE it demanded technique and skill, assumed there were accepted academic rules that

had to be followed.

INTERPRETATION AS ART meaning is not found in the mechanical and rigid rules, it has to go beyond it.

Biblical hermeneutics:

1) GENERAL connected with the study of the rules that govern the interpretation of the whole biblical text.

2) SPECIAL study of the rules that apply to the specific genres included in the Bible.

19th century it became the methodology of textual interpretation

How the text should be read, how to read symbols in the text.

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Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)

Grammatical sense of the text was insufficient.

Intuitive grasp of the authors intention.

Linguisticality hypothesis were linguistic creatures.

Understanding of an utterance depended on linguistic context and on the personal context.

Eliminating problems and misunderstandings by strict methodological rejection.

Understanding is a deliberate process of reconstruction.

Hermeneutic circle a specific model of the process of interpretation.

Relating the individual parts to the text as a whole.

o The text cannot be understood without comprehending these individual parts.

It involves the psychology of the author and historical context.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)

He argues that scientific explanation of nature must be completed with a theory of how the world is given to

human beings through symbolically mediated practices.

o To provide such a theory is the aim of the philosophy of the humanities.

A line between:

o Science aimed to explain recognition of the laws exterior to men.

o Humanities aimed to explain recognition of the laws interior to men.

Link between the 19th-century Romantic tradition and the 20th-century bearers of hermeneutic tradition.

He rejected linguistic hypothesis he favored the view that understanding is an existential category.

We reconcile part and whole through successively adjusted provisional understandings or intuitive projections.

Emphasized importance of historical context.

Both subject and object are historically bound together. There may be a great temporal gap between one and another. There

can also be a social and cultural gap.

Emil Staiger (1908-1987)

He emphasized the role of emotion while dealing with literature, even in the academic context.

Interpretation is the matter of talent.

Plurality of interpretations is the result of the inexhaustibility of the text.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)

Revolutionary views rooted in the tradition of hermeneutics.

Truth and Method (1960)

3 aspects: aesthetics, linguistics, historiography

Much attention paid to the aesthetic values.

The beautiful is which is self-evidently present to us.

Symbolic character of the artwork is seen beyond any form of representationalism.

Artwork always represents something beyond literal meanings.

The artwork, no matter what its medium, opens up, through its symbolic character, a space in which both the world, and our

own being in the world, is brought to light as a single, but inexhaustibly rich totality.

Fusion of horizons

Linguisticality of understanding.

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CONVERSATION between the text and the reader.

It involves exchange between partners seeking some kind of an agreement.

Its never completely under control of either one conversational partner.

The matter of issue is the most important.

Understanding quality of interpretation and translation.

Its always linguistically mediated.

Gadamer emphasized the linguisticality of understanding.

Language is always a medium of understanding.

The key notion of understanding A MATTER OF CONCEPTUAL ARTICULATION

Language and conceptuality are the primary means of hermeneutic experience.

Language is not only the instrument through which we are able to communicate.

We are in the world through being in the language.

Its a medium through which we encounter ourselves and others.

Historiography our understanding of art is always influenced by our historical situation.

The reader is always launched in some historical epoch and they cannot escape from it.

o i.e. an attempt to experience Beowulf as it was experienced when it was written down is a futile effort.

If we attempt to place ourselves in the past, we are losing our present experience.

Any form of understanding of literary artwork should take into consideration:

Our present historical situation;

Our understanding of the world.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

1927 Being and Time whenever we are interpreting a text, we are always projecting our own possibilities of

interpretation.

o Gadamers response: To try to escape from ones own concepts in interpretation is not only impossible but

manifestly absurd.

All interpreters are historical beings we bring to interpretation our history and our traditions.

Tradition, into which were born, is like a filter through which the world of art is disclosed as our own world.

Historically affected consciousness.

Horizon is a range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.

Historically affected consciousness is capable of fusing various horizons of the past.

The reader of the 19th century uses different horizons than the reader of the 20th century.

o Horizons of the past are built in our horizons whether we acknowledge it or not.

Interpretation involves a fusion of horizons in which the old and new are always combining into something of living value.

There is no such thing as two identical interpretations through history.

The reader must engage in a dialogue with the text.

Every single interpretation is the experience of the thing itself the literary text

Theres no holistic interpretation that will stand forever.

The written text is detached from its origin, from any emotional expression of its author.

o Without interpretation theres no work of art.

If we assume that interpretations are hermeneutically acceptable, we cannot say whether they are really correct.

Gadamer accepts the existence of mistakes in interpreting the text.

Good interpretation is the interpretation that involves different aspects, it always remains open-ended.

o Theres no single, final, right, or true interpretation.

Were capable of appropriating a tradition.

o Every appropriating is historically different.

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STRUCTURALISM

The entire focus is on the TEXT.

An attempt to apply to literature, the methods and insights of Ferdinand de Saussure.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

Linguistic turn in literary theory

o 1916 Course in General Linguistics revolutionary changes to linguistic theory.

o Language may be analyzed as a formal system of differential elements. The system includes the linguistic

SIGN: the SIGNIFIER and the SIGNIFIED, and the concept of REFERENT.

SIGN is a basic linguistic unit composed of:

The SIGNIFIER the sound image; a kind of a psychological idea of the sound, not the

sound itself.

The SIGNIFIED the concept.

The signifier and the signified are differentiated for the sake of interpretation but they are

inseparable.

Language and though

Thought is a shapeless mess which is ordered by language.

Its the language that gives shape to the ideas, once theyre shaped theyre expressible.

Though cannot exist without language.

Language shapes all our conceptions of ourselves and our reality.

o Its not a substance but a form/structure/system.

Langue denotes the abstract systematic principles of language, without it no utterance would be possible.

Its not the language used by ordinary people, it represents the work of the collective intelligence.

Parole individual utterances and statements, there would be no coherent statements without the norms (langue).

Arbitrary association between a word and what it stands for.

Language treated as an abstract system.

Structuralists look at the units of the system and at the rules that apply to the system.

Language was like a game of chess in which each move is a meaning; on the whole everything is constraint by the elaborate

rules of the game.

Language may be analyzed as a formal system of differential elements (signs).

Language as a system of signs has to be studied synchronically.

He didnt favor the approach to language from historical perspective.

CAT

it means cat because of historical or cultural conventions

it means cat because its not mat

TREE

its tree because its not free

Each sign has meaning only by virtue of its difference from others. In a linguistic system there are only differences.

Meaning is not eminent in a sign, it is functional.

Each sign was defined in relation to other signs in the system.

No sign makes sense on its own but only in relation to other signs.

The meaning emerges in the system of a language.

Structuralism:

Interest in the relationship of the units and rules of the system.

Attempt to uncover structures that underline human activists.

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Concept of structure literary work of art is a structure.

Its any conceptual system which has 3 properties:

1) WHOLENESS the system functions as a whole not just as a collection of independent parts.

2) TRANSFORMATION the system is not static; its capable of change

New units can enter the system, theyre governed by the rules of the system.

3) SELF-REGULATION closely related to the 2nd property; no matter what we add to the system, were

unable to change the basic structure of the system

System always regulates the whole.

System is applying the linguistic theory of de Saussures to objects and activities other than the language itself.

i.e. Claude Levi Strauss attempt to apply system to myths, or to the paintings, or to the study of literary work of

art.

It always focuses on the relationships among the signs.

Basic premise: rethinking everything in terms of linguistics.

Roman Jakobson provided a major link between formalism and structuralism.

1926 Prague Linguistic Circle it survived until the outbreak of WW2.

A Model of Interpersonal Verbal Communication introduces the concepts of codes, etc.

Constitutive factors of speech event:

1) THE ADDRESSER

2) A MESSAGE

3) THE ADDRESSEE

4) THE CONTEXT

5) COMMON CODE used by the participants in a verbal message

6) A CONTACT physical channel

The addresser sends the message to the addressee every oral message has a context (social or historical) in which

its produced. To be operative, the message requires the context; the efficiency is reached by a common code.

Each of these factors determines a different function of language.

Any of these six factors may dominate in a particular utterance.

Functions of language:

1) EMOTIVE function stresses the attitude of the addressee.

2) CONATIVE function stresses the impact of the message on the addressee.

3) REFERENTIAL function the stress is put on the form of the message.

4) POETIC/AESTHETIC function the stress is put on the channels of communication.

It projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination.

5) PHATIC function the stress is put on the code itself.

Literary signs are dislocated from their objects it becomes an object in itself.

Poetyka w wietle jzykoznawstwa interest in the concept of literary work of art; how a verbal message becomes a work of

art.

Literary work of art is a linguistic utterance in which poetic/aesthetic function always dominates.

1930s-1940s PRAGUE STRUCTURALISM

Helpability

Attention drawn to the signs

Literary work of art is dislocated from its objects

Relation between sign and its referent is distributed

Literary sign gains a degree of independence

Literary text is a message for its own sake

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In poetry, which is a condensation of literariness, similarity is superimposed upon the contiguity of the outer reality.

How words are put together

o Not for the sake of thoughts but in order to create similarities, oppositions, parallelisms.

Prague school of Structuralism elaborated and systematized the ideas of Formalism and of de Saussure.

Poems as functional structures in which signifiers and signified are governed by complex set of relations.

Signs must be governed in their own light, not as the reflection of the outer reality.

Literary work of art = autonomous entity built up of signs and the relationships between the signs.

Arbitrary relation between the sign and the referent helped to create an autonomous object.

Literary text internal relationships without connection with the outer reality.

Jan Mukarovsky (1891-1975)

Autonomous structure exists in the social context.

View:

o Language in the literary work of art is not restrictive information on objective phenomena about the events

existing outside the text.

o Language is endowed with much more than a mere communication function.

Individual elements of the structure can be understood only when seen in connection with other elements.

o The same elements in different structures can take on completely different functions and meanings.

Signs must be studied in their own right, in relation to other signs.

The dominant within the structure one particular element influences other elements.

Literary work of art, as an aesthetic sign, bears the character of a sign.

o Its independent and its self-regulating.

3 periods:

1) 1920s FORMALISTIC PERIOD

Distinction

o STANDARD LANGUAGE language of every-day communication, its practical and

automatized.

o POETIC LANGUAGE concerned with poetic language; a deviated use of standard language.

It doesnt designate the extra-linguistic reality as strongly as the standard language does.

It attracts attention to itself; autotelic function.

It helps to foreground those aspects which are not exposed in standard language:

onomatopoeic qualities, etc.

De-automatized version of the standard language.

Concepts of:

o FOREGROUNDING possible as theres a standard language in background, as a point of

reference.

Systematic process of intentional distortion of the linguistic components in order to

defamiliarize.

Poetic language

o BACKGROUNDING

Standard language

2) 1930s

Aesthetic/poetic problems of the literary work of art

Extended interest to culture, film, drama.

3) 1934-1941

The most innovative period.

Review rejects the tendency of Russian Formalism (exclusive focus on formal devices)

o Rejects immanent analysis in favor for outer-reality aspects (political, cultural, etc.)

Literary work of art = structure of structures

o A particular specimen of social communication.

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New semiotic perspective: SEMIOTICS

Art as a Semiotic Fact 1934

Imminent intrinsic approach to literary work of art.

o He saw the danger of adapting de Saussures approach without any modifications.

Analysis is one-sided (Structuralism)

Literary work of art has to be approached from other perspectives as well.

Each individual literary work of art is a structure but it has references to what has

preceded it.

o Structures are not independent of history.

Necessity of introducing the diachronic perspective in analysis of literary work of art.

Structure shouldnt be conceived as self-sufficient entities.

Structure as a sign, a complex sign that mediates between the artist and the addressee (the

recipient).

Semiotics:

Looking at the semiotic character of literary work of art that functions as a communicative sign and as an

autonomous structure.

Communicative aspect:

Literary work of art is likened to PAROLE

Manifestation of speech in a given language.

Aesthetic Function Norm and Value as Social Facts (1936)

Nothing possesses the aesthetic function independently of place, time and person that evaluates the literary work of

art.

Material artifact physical book

Aesthetic object in human interpretation of the book

Perceiving subject

The recipient is not seen as an autonomized, idealized individual, hes neither an abstract phenomenological subject nor the

ideal perceiver acquainted with history.

A product of social relation/culture/history

o Their way of thinking is determined by these aspects.

o The recipient is a social creature.

Analogous terms:

SEMIOLOGY European tradition

o The science of signs, the science of how they operate in the social group.

o Investigates the rules that govern how they are put together to create meaning.

o A theory of production and interpretation of meaning.

o Basic principle:

Meaning is made by signs and everything can be interpreted as signs.

o Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

Conception: relational and differential.

Concepts are not defined positively in terms of their content but they are defined negatively by

contrast with other items in the system (cat is cat because its not bat).

1st principle of language the arbitrariness of signs.

Linguistic categories are not the consequences of predefined concepts in language.

Autonomy of language in relation to reality

DYAD (2 elements):

SIGNIFICATION a single signified, always arbitrary

o Theres no intrinsic connection between any signifier and any signified;

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o It is an arbitrary relation between a signified and a signifier making many

meanings possible.

o Looking at an individual sign.

VALUE an individual sign exists within a system of signs;

o An individual sign has a value because it has meaning in relation to other signs

in the system;

A has value because its not B.

o Looking at language as a whole.

o Ronald Barthes (1915-1980)

The Death of the Author (1961)

Continues and expands the idea of semiology

Elements of Semiology (1964)

Signs include various sign systems, not only linguistic ones.

o Linguistic and nonlinguistic signs.

Mythologies (1973)

Almost any cultural event can be studied from semiological point of view, i.e. fashion,

menu, advertisements.

SEMIOTICS American tradition

o Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)

Coined the term Semiotics.

TRIAD (3 elements):

REPRESENTAMEN the form the sign takes

o a sign vehicle

The element that represents a denoted object.

INTERPRETANT a sense that we made of a sign

A sign in the mind of an interpreter.

Object to which the sign refers.

Broken line at the bottom of a triangle indicates that theres no direct relationship between the

sign vehicle and the object.

Triad doesnt exclude references to abstract concepts, fictional reality and physical things.

SEMIOSIS interaction between the aspects of a sign;

A process involving multiple inferences.

3 new kinds of signs:

1) ICON verbal or nonverbal sign whose signifier bears a close resemblance to the thing it

refers to;

It physically resembles what it stand for.

Examples:

A picture of your face is an icon of you.

Onomatopoetic words.

2) SYMBOL conventional relations between a signifier and a signified;

Easily removable from its context.

Closely associated with large sets of other words.

Examples:

Language (letters, numbers)

National flags

Traffic signs

3) INDEX represent its object independently of any resemblance to it, only by virtue of

real connections with it.

A sign whose signifier we have learnt to associate with a particular signified.

Examples:

Smoke is an index of fire.

Sun rays are the index of temperature.

Symbol and index are highly conventional.

Icon has only some degree of conventionality.

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o Yuri Lotman (1922-1993)

A Russian semiotician

Founder of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School

The Structure of the Artistic Work (1970)

The Analysis of a Poetic Text (1972)

Literary text = stratified text, self-regulating entity with the meaning existing contextually.

His own semiotic perspective of the literary text he saw it in terms of signs and their

interrelationships.

In any semiotic system, the sign, interrelating with other signs, forms a text.

POLYSEMIC SIGNS signs which carry more than one meaning.

Meaning of the sign exists contextually.

A poetic text is semantically saturated it condenses more information than any other literary

discourse;

Everything is expressed in an economic way.

Poetry has a minimal redundancy of the signs, which are present in a discourse.

SYNTAGMATIC RELATION operates along horizontal axis;

A Chain of signifiers appearing in a sequence;

A syntagm a chain of words which makes sentences, a chain of sentences which makes

paragraphs, and so on.

PARADIGMATIC RELATION within the chain, some elements have a common function (i.e.

rhymes, alliterations), they display similar characteristics.

Every literary text is made up of various systems

They may be lexical, morphological, prosodic, phonological, rhythmical.

Literary text gains its special effects through constant clashes and tensions between those

systems.

o Each of the systems presents a norm from which others may deviate.

Wilfred Owen Futility poem

Paradigmatic pattern of a rhyme

It sets a norm, we expect the rhyme to follow in the next lines but it disappears

at a point.

The rhyme corresponds to the death.

Literary text as a secondary modelling system semiotic superstructure built upon primary

modelling systems.

Language = primary modelling system.

Literary text a meaning-generated system that continually enriches and transforms mere

dictionary meanings of words.

Each single word is linked to other several words that participate in several paradigmatic

relations.

A poetic text = a relation of relations, a system of systems.

MINUS-DEVICE the absence of certain devices may produce meaning.

If we expect a happy ending and it doesnt occur.

Generating and violating expectations, an interplay of norms and deviations.

The meaning depends on the wider context of culture:

Mythology

Aesthetics

Cinema

History of culture

Meaning is not just an internal matter of relations, it depends on the text relation to the wider

system of meanings.

Its also relative to the readers horizon of expectations (Reader Theory approach).