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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# Genres and Their Historical Changes

Literature has traditionally been categorized by scholars into different groups on the basis of various characteristic features.

There have been various attempts to categorize literary texts on the basis of their formal, outward, external characteristic features. We might argue that poetry is short and structured into stanzas, drama is a kind of literature that only contains dialogues, and that prose is a longer form and it contains story-telling. However, this formalistic approach is not satisfactory since the formal, technical characteristics do not exclusively refer to particular groups. We very often find dialogues in poems and novels, and we usually encounter short poetic passages in drama as well as story-telling. If we think of the well-known form of poetry the ballad, we will realize that it traditionally has the main formal features of all of these three types of literature: dialogue, story-telling and stanza form with poetic images.

A more successful way to categorize literature is the philosophical approach which was propagated, among other scholars, by the German poet and philosopher Goethe. This approach argues that the various great kinds of literature represent a fundamental human attitude to the reality which is represented in the text. In a text there is always a voice, a source of information which provides us with a representation of a world, be it a possible world or the actual world. The distance between the voice and the represented world can be various. In poetry this distance is very small, and we very much feel the subjective, personal, engaged presence of a speaking self. In narrative fiction the distance is greater, and there is an attempt by the speaking voice to be more impersonal, objective, and to maintain a greater detachment from the represented world. In drama, the presence of a subjective self or narrator is not felt since we traditionally only have dialogues and maybe some stage directions: drama hides the speaking voice and appears to be a direct recording of actual human dialogues. In this way, the three great kinds of literature represent three different attitudes to representation: poetry, narrative fiction and drama employ various amounts of subjectivity or objectivity to establish a linguistic representation of a possible world and to exert an effect upon the reader.

For a long time in the history of literature, the kinds of literature and the various genres and subgenres were clearly defined and separated, and the classical principle of decorum argued that the various genres or the different registers of language should not be mixed. If you employ elevated language in tragedy, it should not be mixed with the base themes and more colloquial language of comedy, for example.

With the historical changes of literature, however, genre categories became more and more loose, and the changes resulted in the formation of newer and newer genres and subgenres. The two main types of changes in the history of genres are subdivision and fusion.

With new themes and needs in the reading public, a genre might subdivide into new subgenres. The novel, which emerges as a dominant genre of a new social middle class in the 17th and 18th centuries, will soon subdivide into historical novel, picaresque novel, education novel, and the particular subgenres will also further subdivide. In the end, we might have a novel that can be categorized as a historical – psychological – national – detective novel, which will be different from a Gothic – historical – fantasy novel.

Authors might also start ignoring the principle of decorum in specific social – cultural circumstances, and this will lead to fusion. William Shakespeare, for example, working in the English Renaissance at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, realized that our social existence cannot be described by black and white, clear-cut categories: life is neither tragic, not comic, but usually a mixture of the two. In order to represent how reality resists our patterns, he started experimenting with the new genre of the tragicomedy, and this was made possible by a social – cultural climate that was not against experimentation and novelty. The result was a group of plays now called problem plays or bitter comedies (e.g., Measure for Measure) which tried to reflect on the new social and political antagonisms, tensions and themes of early modern culture.

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