Introduction to the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English

- Introduction to the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English
- Előszó
- Contents
- Part 1 What is English Studies?
  - 1. What is a university? A proseminary
  - 2. Paradigms and paradigm shifts
  - 3. What is English Studies? English as a university subject
  - 4. Ideology, criticism, history
  - 5. Registers of Culture
  - 6. Canon formation and alternative reading practices
- Part 2 Fields of English Studies. Language, Literature, Culture, and Critical Approaches
  - 1. Preliminary problems: definitions, scientific expectations
  - 2. Ontological problems: the way literature exists
    - Semiotics
    - Literary communication
    - Language and Critical Thinking
    - The Language of the Sciences and the Language of Literature
  - 3. Methodological problems: the way we understand texts
    - Meaning and context
    - The Process of Interpretation
  - 4. The Theory of Genres
    - Genres and Their Historical Changes
    - Genre-generating Factors and Historical Changes
  - 5. Poetry and Figurative Language
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 1
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
      - III Third level of meaning
      - IV Fourth level of meaning
  - 6. Narrative Fiction
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 2
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
      - III Third level of meaning
  - 7. Drama
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 3
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
  - Self test I
  - 8. Literature, Culture, and the Reading Subject: An Overview of Major Trends in Literary and Cultural Theory
    - I Preliminaries
    - II Formal critical trends: from the authorial intention to the close reading of the text (1st shift)
    - III Contextual aproaches: from text to context
    - The critique of structuralism
  - Self test II
  - 9. Critical Literature Consulted and Recommended
  - 10. Appendix

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# The Language of the Sciences and the Language of Literature

Because of the socially conventional (and not empirically given) nature of language as a sign system, there is always an inherent ambiguity, an element of playfulness, a likelihood of game and error in language. This inherent play in language is treated in different ways by different discourses. The languages of the sciences try to reduce this playfulness, this indeterminacy and ambiguity, while the language of literature very often enhances, intensifies, and plays with this inner undecidedness in language, in order to make language even more expressive

## Review questions

1. Why is it not possible for human beings to exchange meaning directly in communication?

2. What does it mean that there is an arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified?

3. Is the empirical reality part of language as a sign system?

4. Why is literariness not an objective category?

## Task/groupwork

1. Choose a literary text and work out a plan for using it as an example in a language class for the explanation of how meaning depends on the historical, cultural, individual context of the reader.

2. Choose a scientific text and a literary text and work out an exercise for language students to compare the linguistic differences between them.

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