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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# Exercise in Interpretation / 3

We are going to establish a complex reading of a very condensed but very poetic and complicated drama by Yeats entitled Purgatory (1938). Read the text carefully, and pay special attention to deixis, story-telling and conflict. You find the text in the Annex.

Interpretation

While reading the drama, you probably felt how much it is necessary and how difficult it is to continuously imagine what is actually going on on the stage. As a matter of fact, we might even argue that it is not possible to read a drama properly for the first time, because we are not yet familiar with the relationship between the characters, their emotions, their conflict, their background and history: elements that we usually get a description of in narrative fiction. For example, it is very difficult to see, to imagine how the young Boy and the old man enter the stage at the very beginning, because we do not know their relationship, and the text won’t say. Is the old man tossing the young Boy to step in front of the house, which he considers important to observe? Is the young Boy frustrated? Do they love or hate each-other? What does the house look like exactly? We only get (sometimes only partial) answers for these questions as we read on in the text.

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