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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# III Contextual aproaches: from text to context

Reader-Oriented Criticism: from the text to the act of reading (2ND SHIFT)

a/ Reader-Response Criticism (USA, Stanley E. Fish, Norman N. Holland)

- E. D. Hirsch: continuation of hermeneutics; the text’s meaning is intended by the author, but its significance is a result of the dynamic interaction between text and reader; the text is not an independent set of characteristics, but the reader is not totally free in reading either;

- rather a perspective, a critical attitude than a separate school: emphasis on interaction between reader and text, the act and temporality of reading, the reader-dependent ontology of meaning, the importance of the reading and interpretive community (Fish).

b/ Reception Theory (“Constance School”, Germany)

- influence of Hans Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics of (historical) understanding; interpretation is always a fusion of horizons: we are always standing under the shower of traditions.

The text’s meaning and significance are a result of the dynamic interaction between text and reader: the text is not an independent set of characteristics, but the reader is not totally free in reading either.

-Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: reading is an active process in which the reader actualizes the text on the basis of its response-inviting structures that create the implied reader. These structures predispose us to follow certain interpretive strategies: the text is full of GAPS that have to be filled by the actual reader; this actualization is based on the reader's repertoire and the networks of gaps.

The structure of theme and horizon: one part, one theme creates an expectation in us, a horizon which is either satisfied or rejected in the next part; parts illuminate the whole, the whole makes the parts understandable: reading is a continuous self-correction and rereading.

- Hans Robert Jauss: the reader’s interpretive activity always depends on his/her historical situatedness: we always read within a dominant horizon of expectations.

Poststructuralism: from the act of reading to the reader as socially positioned subject (3RD SHIFT)

Poststructuralism provides a general critique of our Enlightenment heritage, in the centre of which we have the Cartesian self-identical and homogeneous individuum as the foundation of the “project of modernity” (Jürgen Habermas); an essentialist belief in the human being’s sovereign self-mastery, in science, reason, and society, in humankind’s ultimate conquest of reality and the universe (a heritage from positivism). These grand narratives of modernity are being questioned in the time of postmodernism according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, and poststructuralism provides the cultural critical theories for the understanding of these changes.

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