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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# II Formal critical trends: from the authorial intention to the close reading of the text (1st shift)

In the first decades of the 20th century, a new interest gradually emerged in the inner, “purely artistic and aesthetic” values of the LWA. The new attitude argued that we should appreciate literature “for its own sake,” for its own beauty, and not because of other values or disciplines. Literature should no longer be the servant of other sciences: we should not read Shakespearean drama because we get to know more about the War of the Roses, but because the inner poetic devices and symbolical image networks provide us with aesthetic pleasure.

Formal approaches are mainly interested in:

- the deformation of ordinary language (deviation);

- the poetic devices which defamiliarize automatized conventions or perceptions;

- the tensions, ambiguities, or paradoxes, with which the poet grasps the complexity of experience.

The emerging scientific activities of general and applied linguistics established a methodological ground for formalism.

a/ New Criticism (USA, 1930s-1940s, Cleanth Brooks)

- objective: to make the study of literature a separate discipline;

- organicism: the LWA is a complex verbal icon of the author's experience; its poetic texture is a network of correspondences, oppositions: dialectic between parts and the whole unit;

- important strategy introduced: close reading – we have to read very carefully each and every element of the text and see its interconnections with other elements;

- the meaning of the work cannot be reduced to either external factors in the context or to the intention of the author (we should not commit the error of intentional phallacy).

b/ Russian formalism (Moscow Linguistics Circle, 1910s-20s, Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson)

- focus on the technical aspects of literature;

- study of distinctive linguistic properties of literary languages makes formalism an independent discipline: science of literature = a complete knowledge of all the formal effects that make up literature;

- influence of structuralist linguistics;

- literature, through a special usage of language, defamiliarizes and deautomatizes our usual experience of reality;

- process of analysis:

1. mastering the meanings of the words (is it possible without historical context?)

2. looking for patterns, structures, interrelationships between words

3. patterns reveal a form, a principle according to which patterns are organized

4. the internal logic of the work governs the relationship between idea and form

c/ Structuralism (1950s – 60s, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes)

- the principle of binary oppositions: fundamental binarisms (masculine / feminine, night / day, open / closed, right / wrong, lawful / unlawful) govern existence and thought, they take on meaning and become cultural signs;

- we find systems everywhere, systems are structures that have surface structure and deep structure rules;

- binary logic is characteristic of Western thought;

- the discovery of BOs governs reading and interpretive strategies;

- structuralist narrative theory studies narrative structures in the work: for example, the surface level of realization in a narrative (the actual plot) can be traced back to a limited number of fundamental stories or patterns that are called master-plots; we have these basic master-plots as fundamental orientations or directionalities in the deep structure of every text;

master-plots of literature:

romantic: comic rise (positive integration), tragic fall (waste of values, disintegration), heroic quest (movement, adventures of the positive, idealized protagonist

satiric: satiric rise (negative characters prosper undeservingly), pathetic fall (insignificant, petty people fall), antiheroic quest (the adventures of a non-idealized, often negative character)

d/ Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

- predecessor of reader-response criticism;

- Husserl’s philosophy: our sole source of knowledge about reality is our consciousness, objects are intentional object, formed and intended by the naming, interpreting consciousness, but: this consciousness is capable of getting to know the essentials, the real, authentic features of reality through the intentional procedure of bracketing out subjective prejudices and disturbances;

- phenomenological criticism: the LWA is an intentional object, containing, manifesting the author's consciousness for the reader; the act of reading is the coming together of two consciousnesses, when we get access to the mind of the author and the historical horizon of the author; the LWA maintains a direct link between the author’s and the receiver's mind;

- phenomenological reading: the work is a consistent manifestation of a state of consciousness, which governs the vision of the writing.

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