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

« Previous | Next »

# I Preliminaries

1. Textual scholarship and the canon

In order to study literature, we need to have access to the LWA itself, or more precisely, to the text. This appears to be no problem if we are dealing with modern literature in a culture where texts are generally accessible, since all the textual products of writers are generally made available in various editions to the general public.

However, the situation is more complex if we are dealing with older literature, when the texts are not totally reliable, when they have various different versions, when there is no authoritative original manuscript to rely on, or when we are in a culture where the political regime imposes censorship, and not all the textual products are made available to the general practice.

Philology (textual scholarship) studies the various available versions of a text, and tries to provide a standardized version.

Philology:

- a necessary prerequisite for criticism and literary history;

- has to provide the basis for study: the TEXT itself;

- thus, it always has an inevitable ideological function in the historically specific canon-formation: editors of manuscripts and texts are always influenced by the current ideology and taste of culture when they make decisions about the texts, especially when there are many variants ;

- has an especially important role in the study of older texts: which version is “authentic”, which one are we supposed to examine?

- Hamlet, for example, has three contemporary forms (First Quarto 1603, Second Quarto 1604, First Folio 1623): philology studies the stylistic, morphological, structural variations, and puts together “a final version” – when we do academic work, it is important to consult a critical edition which includes historical and textological introduction, glossaries, explanations of words, and the different variants of the text or parts of the text;

Textual scholarship appears to be neutral and objective, but this is only the surface. Philology has to make choices (which version, which spelling, which amendment to accept as authentic and which ones to neglect), and these choices are always determined, manipulated by the contemporary cultural taste, ideology, politics. Under the communist – socialist regime, Szabad ötletek jegyzéke by Attila József was considered to be incompatible with the socialist image of “the poet of the proletariat,” and it was not included in the editions of his writings. Thus, this writing was not part of the official canon for a long time.

In a similar fashion, no women were supposed to write and publish in traditional, patriarchal, male dominated societies, so women writers in the English Renaissance or in Victorian England could not publish their writings, and these texts got canonized only later. If we check the Norton Anthology of American Literature, we realize that there are different historical times when it starts to include black, native America, gay, lesbian, or homosexual writers who had been impossible to widely publish before that point of time.

2. Traditional approaches

These are the oldest, most traditional and probably the best known critical approaches. They employ concepts that are highly problematic from a theoretical point of view. Still, they are quite common in textbooks and writings that rely on “a common sense approach” to literature. Since no linguistic or semiotic theoretical considerations were observed yet, these approaches made no difference between the idea of the TEXT and the idea of the LWA.

a/ Historical-Biographical approaches

Old historicism: in this approach, the study of literature is always subordinated to some more important discipline (history, theology, geography), the study of literature is a helping tool for other research.

- they emphasize the “topical” quality of the work: the LWA automatically reflects the contemporary historical atmosphere and setting, we need background knowledge to interpret the work;

- the argument about environmental determinism: space, milieu, history is reflected, mirrored in the work: the author always writes about the current social determinations;

- the personal biography of the author helps us to reveal how his/her life is manifest in the work.

b/ Moral-Philosophical approaches

Essentialism: in these approaches we very often find the generalizing argument that literature and the study of literature are important because these texts teach us the most fundamental, essential values of the human condition.

- these trends go back to classical moralism and utilitarianism;

- Horace: „dulce and utile”: entertain and instruct – according to this classical tenet, literature is important, tolerable and useful because it simultaneously teaches and gives us delight;

- the larger function of literature is to teach morality (social corrective role) and to investigate the basic „transhistorical” philosophical issues.

The key arguments of these trends are more and more difficult to accept nowadays since we tend to realize that these “transhistorically essential” values are just abstractions, they do not really exist independent of context, and the same categories or words might mean very different things in different historical periods. The category of love exits in the beginning of the 21th century and it also existed in Renaissance England, but we still cannot be sure that we have the same concept and the same meaning when we read “love” in a Shakespearean comedy, in a Latin-American love story, or a Hollywood soap opera.

« Previous | Next »