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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# 1. Preliminary problems: definitions, scientific expectations

## Lecture summary

If you are an English major, and you start studying literature in a college or university program, you might have a very legitimate expectation that you are going to deal with a science just like those in the mathematics, geography or biology programs. You will be expecting solid definitions, a very well defined and tangible field of studies, and reliable, widely accepted scientific methods to approach and understand the phenomena under scrutiny. You might also carry some expectations on the basis of your studies in high school: you will be prepared to search for the message the author wanted to communicate with the literary work of art, or, for the way the text instructs us to observe the most important, fundamental values of human existence.

Text, author, literary work of art, value, meaning, communication, and method: the great problem in the study of literature is that even the most professional and well known scholars of literature have failed to agree unanimously on the exact meaning or definition of these crucial terms. During the long history of the development of literary theory and literary studies, various trends, different scholars and different schools have argued in sometimes radically different ways about the same central issues of literary studies.

## Task/groupwork

Let’s do an experiment with the following activity. Read the texts listed below (numbered 1-7), and decide if you consider them a piece of literature. We will use these texts later on as examples for analysis as well, so it is important to study them thoroughly.

1.

For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. He has come to the seashore with his family for the holiday, the occasion of their visit is Independence Day, the most important secular holiday of the United States of America. A single straight underline is the manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed equivalent to oral emphasis of words and phrases as well as the customary type for titles of complete works, not to mention. Italics are also employed, in fiction stories especially, for “outside,” intrusive, or artificial voices, such as radio announcements, the texts of telegrams and newspaper articles, et cetera. They should be used sparingly. If passages originally in roman type are italicized by someone repeating them, it’s customary to acknowledge the fact. Italics mine.

2.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals a wet, black bough.

3.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

4.

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

who

a)s w(e loo)k

upnowgath

PPEGORHRASS

eringint(o-

aThe):l

eA

!p:

S a

(r

rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)

to

rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly

,grasshopper;

5.

Behold, the sower went forth to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside, and the birds came and devoured them. Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth; and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: and when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: but other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.

6.

)
(

7.

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

What were your reactions to the texts? You probably did not find them all very “literary” upon first reading, some of them may have indeed appeared nonsensical, strange or at least puzzling to you. This is something worth observing more closely, because, as a matter of fact, each one of these texts is very famous and widely recognized literature, but, of course, there are various reasons why we may not recognize them immediately as examples of literature. The main reason is that they are out of context, or they are only one part of the entire text.

No. 1 may appear as a mixture of technical instructions and story-telling. In fact, it is the first paragraph of “Lost in the Funhouse”, a short story by the postmodern American writer John Barth. The text is considered to be one of the most typical examples of postmodern narrative techniques, but when it is taken out of the entire composition, it may look very strange.

No. 2 is very brief, condensed, and it might be a challenge upon first glance to understand what it wants to communicate. In fact, it is one entire (although very short) poem by the American imagist poet Ezra Pound, its title is “In a Station of the Metro”, and it is considered by many scholars to be one of the most beautiful metaphors in literature in English.

No. 3 is probably immediately recognized by everybody as literature, even if it is without the title and the name of the author. The structure, the expressive language, the rhythm, and the rhetorical figures all suggest that this is a poem. Indeed, it is one of the best known pre-romantic English poems, “The Tyger” by William Blake.

No. 4 most probably puzzles everybody who is not familiar with it. The text might just appear as an example of printer malfunction, although upon closer examination we might discover certain patterns in it. It is a poem entitled “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” by the American experimental poet E. E. Cummings.

No. 5 has a style which certainly may sound familiar. This is a parable from the Bible, an example told by Christ to teach with the help of a simple story. However, the question becomes immediately whether we can consider the Bible literature. This has been a much-debated issue in literary history for a long time, but we can certainly say that it is a very important text in our cultural heritage, no matter if we are religious or not.

No. 6 is probably the most confusing example, since it is nothing else but two brackets, two parentheses under each other. How could anyone in their right mind consider this literary? Well, this is a poem by the experimental Hungarian poet Dezső Tandori, and it is praised by many critics as a perfectly condensed and expressive visual poem, which, of course, only makes sense together with its title: “Halottas urna két füle E. E. Cummings magángyűjteményéből.” We will come back to it shortly.

No. 7 may look familiar on the basis of the structure, although the meaning will certainly puzzle the unfamiliar reader. It very much looks like a Shakespearean sonnet, an example of English Renaissance poetry, but it is very strange that the poetic voice praises a woman who is exceedingly ugly, with bad smell, unpleasant voice, and appalling hair. We are confused if we do not know that this is a mock Petrarchan sonnet which tries to ridicule the compulsory but already boring and exhausted clichés of love poetry.

On the basis of our reactions to these texts, we might conclude that literature, or literariness, is not something which exists objectively as a piece of empirical reality that we will recognize any time in any situation. Various readers have very different reactions to the same text in different circumstances and different historical, social, cultural contexts. A desk or a lamp or a tree will be generally recognized by us even if they are only seen partially or out of their context, but a poem without its title, and outside the volume of poetry as its environment, will be difficult to appreciate as literature; a text which mixes different styles and registers of language will be confusing to us if we are not familiar with postmodern narratives and if we do not see the title, the author, and the entire text; visual poetry might just appear as an accidental collection of letters if we are not prepared or asked to understand it as literature. It seems that we recognize and appreciate something as literature or literary on the basis of a number of factors: we need a proper context, we need the entire text, and we need to be familiar with the raditions on the basis of which the text we are observing was written. The reason for the fact that opinions differ about literature, even if different readers are talking about the same text, is that literature has a special mode of existence; that literature might not be identical with the text in front of us; and that literature exits through language. Let’s have a closer look at the theoretical reasons for the difficulties in discussing or studying literature in a consensual and scientific manner.

To start with, the very notion of literature is without one commonly accepted definition. How could the study of literature be a separate scientific discipline if the professionals of the field cannot even agree on the understanding of the thing they are supposed to be studying?

In order for a study field to become an autonomous scientific discipline, it needs to meet certain requirements, and then it can function as a scientific paradigm. As was already mentioned earlier on, Thomas Kuhn argues in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that, in order to become a paradigm, the scientific activity has to have the following components:

Paradigm=

S (problem-solving strategies: agreement on how to proceed in the scientific activities)

+

F (field of intended applications: a well-defined area of studies)

+

SC (community of scientists: a coherent group of scientists who share the same views; the scientists have to agree on a coherent world-model [epistemology: theory of knowledge] and a coherent science-model [metatheory: the theory about how they build up and use their theories])

+

LC (legitimatizing community: the social environment which will provide recognition and support)

The fundamental problem in literary studies is that the above components are diverse in various schools and theoretical orientations, without one commonly accepted consensus. Various scholars have various different ideas about what strategies to use when we read literature (S), what actually to study when we do literary studies (F), and different communities of readers and authorities (LC) have supported and sponsored different groups of literature scholars in various historical periods. Scholarly communities in literary studies tend to have various concepts about how to get to know reality and literature (epistemology), and they tend to rely on different philosophies of science itself (metatheory).

So, what are we to do when we study literature (or, in a broader sense, culture) in a university program? What and how are we supposed to study?

Is there a science of literature, after all?

On the basis of the above differences and absence of consensus, from the perspective of the theory of science we can argue that the study of literature does not constitute one single coherent paradigm. There is NO ONE SINGLE SCIENCE of literature. This is because the differences result in various anomalies, since there are differing answers to the fundamental questions of the field:

- meaning-anomaly:

Is there only one adequate meaning for a LWA? This question is unsettled in literary studies, because of the problem of polyvalency: the same text can mean different things to different communities of readers.

- evaluation anomaly:

Is there an objective standard to decide what is literary, and how to study it? Scholars cannot agree on a set of objective and commonly accepted criteria on the basis of which we could separate the literary from the non-literary: literariness is not a stable, objective, permanent category or entity.

- subject anomaly:

Following the above mentioned anomalies, it is no surprise that the very notion of literature has no common and standard definition.

When we finally try to provide a definition of literature, we encounter an ontological problem: it is difficult to say where and how literature and the various literary works of art (LWA) exist.

We can conclude, for the time being, that literature has no objective ontological foundation. Literature is not an ontological but a functional category. We will now examine the reasons for this.

## Review questions

1. Why is it so difficult to make the scientific study of literature uniform and consensual?

2. How does the context of reception determine our attitude to a text we are trying to understand?

3. What texts would you choose to explain to your students that the evaluation of literature has always been changing throughout history?

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