Literary Theory

• Dichotomizing Ordinary Language and Literary Language

Ordinary LanguageLiterary Language

Meaning determinateever-changing

Ambiguity problemgoal

Surface form means to end end

Domain universalsparticulars

Analysis necessary;

try to completeinterference;

never exhaust

Purpose communicationexpression

Rationality rationalirrational

Truth correspondencecoherence

Disciplines linguistics; cognitive psychology; artificial intelligence;

sociology; anthropologyliterary criticism; poetics' rhetoric; stylistics; literary

history; aesthetics

Anti-Realism

• Graff: literature defamiliarizes reality; criticism defamiliarizes literature

• Poirier: Literature has only one responsibility--to be compelled and compelling about its own inventions

• Bloom: A theory of poetry must belong to poetry, must be poetry, before it can be of any use in interpreting poems.

• Scholes: Once we knew that fiction was about life and criticism was about fiction--and everything was simple. Now we know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metafiction. And we know that criticism is about the impossibility of anything being about life, really, or even about fiction, or, finally, about anything. Criticism has taken the very idea of "aboutness" away from us. It has taught us that language is tautological, if it is not nonsense, and to the extent that it is about anything it is about itself. Mathematics is about mathematics, poetry is about poetry and criticism is about the impossibility of its own existence

Tallis: degrees of realism

• Meyer L. Abrams (The Mirror & the Lamp)

– Freund, 1987, p. 2: subversion of triangle by focusing on audience

• Reader Response History

– return to reader

– resee language as power

– I. A. Richards (1929)

We are often compelled, for example, to say things

about the poem, or the words in it, which are only true of the effects of the poem on the minds of its readers... We speak of

the poem’s beauty instead of entering upon

elaborate and speculative analyses of its effect upon us... we come temporarily to think that the virtues of a poem lie not in its power

over us, but in its own structure and

conformation as an assemblage of verbal

sounds

technical v. critical remarks

– Jonathan Culler: structure => theory of reading (Freund, p. 79)

– Stanley Fish: interpretive community

but cf. Mary Louise Pratt: linguistics of contact

– Norman Holland: psychoanalytic criticism

– Roman Ingarden: phenomenological: intentional creation of text

• Wolfgang Iser: reception theory

– Implied Reader (Tompkins); Act of Reading (Suleiman & C)

– art as defamiliarizing

– situated evaluation figures

– hermeneutic circle

– illusion-making

– dialectical structure of reading

– Gestalt psychology: the shifting blank

• Social Interaction Model

– "Freckle Juice": my entry point

stories as recountings of events

summaries as desired end points

the main idea

– Impoverished view of author-reader relationship

presence of author/reader

dynamic relationship

multiple roles

interactions of author/reader

– Rip Van Winkle: intro

– Sokolov: multiple embedding

– McPhee (Pine Barrens):

– Homer (Odyssey)

– Balzac (S/Z): "as though"

– Potter: "am sorry"

– McPhee (Bark Canoe): roles

– Kundera: I understood

– purposes

• Romantic (focus on author; author's meaning)

Mid-1700s

• breakdown of patronage system• commercial printing • large reading public• mass education/standardization

unknown reader => shift to author

• direct to psychic life of individuals; indirect good

• Shelly: Eternal poets scorn to affect a moral aim

• deification of poetry

=> ordinary language v literary language

• New Criticism (focus on text; formal properties)

• competition from science

• Brooks & Warren: Study poetry as poetry

• A poem should not mean but be

Anti-realism: Self-sufficient world; not mere

representation

Wellek & Warren: The statements in a novel, in a poem, in a drama are not

literally true => not logical propositions

Coleridge: That willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic

faith

Wimsatt & Beardsley: intentional fallacy;

affective fallacy

Rhetoric of inquiry

• appeal to objective authority & denunciation of rhetoric => one of most effective rhetorical strategies available

• unity: all fields are rhetorical

• Donald McCloskey: economics

• Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, George Marcus, Mary Louise Pratt, Renato Rosaldo: anthropology

• Charles Bazerman, Bruno Latour, Stephen Woolgar, Michael Lynch: science

• Gerd Gigerenzer, David Murray: statistics in social sciences

Susan Peck McDonald, Robert Scholes, Terry

Eagleton: literary theory

Hayden White, Allan Megill: history

David Klemm: theology

Mark Kelman, Catherine McKinnon: law

diversity: special devices linked to key questions in

each field

• Ethnography (M L Pratt)

cover (Stephen Tyler in India)

ethnography as science

Malinowski quote, p. 27

(Clifford: “impossible attempt to fuse objective & subjective practices)

travel writing: narration/description

ethnography: description/narration

popular/scientific book pairs, p. 31

encounter narrative (1st person, etc)

Bushmen/!Kung writing

Shostak quote, p. 48

recognize that tropes are neither natural, nor in many cases unique to

discipline• Laboratory Science (Latour & Woolgar)

philosopher, not know TRF(H); Salk Institute,

1975-7

Sections A & B (p. 46)

papers as products, not reports

strange tribe (p. 49)

photos (pp. 93-103)

inscription devices (p. 51)

Latour’s experience as technician, p. 245

obsession with inscription (pp. 245-6)

methods

citation networks (mobilize allies)

construction of a fact/statement types:

conjecture/claim/qualified assertion/assertion/unstat

ed

black boxes

• American Essayist Prose

– sentence-sentence (decontextualized)

– text over experience

– fictionalization of audience & author