Beauty

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Back Seat ◽  
Wish Fulfillment

Literary beauty was once understood as intertwining sensations and ideas, and thus as providing subjective and objective reasons for literary appreciation. However, as theory and philosophy developed, the inevitable claims and counterclaims led to the view that subjective experience was not a reliable guide to literary merit. Literary theory then replaced aesthetics as did philosophy’s focus on literary truth. Along with the demise of the relevance of sensations, literary form also took a back seat. This suggested to some that either literature communicated truth like any other literal form of communication or it was a mere diversion: a springboard to harmless reverie or daydreaming. Neither response satisfactorily captured what was distinctive about literature: the love readers can have for literary texts and the edification or insight claimed of works within each culture’s respective catalogue of classics. However, a concept of literary beauty has again become viable due to developments in theories of pleasure and imagination. If the defining aspect of literature is the imaginative engagement it occasions, and if this imagining is constrained by plausibility and endorsed as effective relative to our goals, ideals, and interests, then literature is not reduced to either mere fact or wish fulfillment. An account of literary beauty is available which defines literature accordingly and explains how subjective and objective reasons for appreciation intertwine to evoke pleasure and insight.

Bleibende Aufgaben einer phänomenologischen Literaturtheorie

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-273
Author(s):  
Eckhard Lobsien
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Theory Of Reading ◽  
Phenomenological Point

Abstract What sort of object is a literary text? From a phenomenological point of view - phenomenology considered as both a radical theory of reading and a theory of radical reading - a range of answers arise, many of them tinged with deconstructive momentum. This paper aims at pointing out some basic issues in reading literary texts, offering ten theses on the enduring tasks of phenomenological literary theory.

Hopes for Reading in the Era of Globalization

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 505-520
Author(s):  
Cassandra Falke
Keyword(s):  
Effective Teaching ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Language Ideology ◽  
Literary Texts

Abstract This article identifies in contemporary literary theory a new optimism about the power of literary texts. The medium of this power is not language, ideology, or form but readers open to being changed. Drawing on phenomenology, the article discusses methods for making literary theory students open to and aware of such change, suggesting that hope is the grounding condition for any effective teaching act as well as an effective ground for reading in an era of globalization.

scholarly journals The Persian Translation of Arabic Aesthetics: Rādūyānī's Rhetorical Renaissance

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Gould
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Persian Language ◽  
Global Study ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
Persian Translation

Notwithstanding its value as the earliest extant New Persian treatment of the art of rhetoric, Rādūyānī's Interpreter of Rhetoric (Tarjumān al-Balāgha) has yet to be read from the vantage point of comparative poetics. Composed in the Ferghana region of modern Central Asia between the end of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth century, Rādūyānī's vernacularization of classical Arabic norms inaugurated literary theory in the New Persian language. I argue here that Rādūyānī's vernacularization is most consequential with respect to its transformation of the classical Arabic tropes of metaphor (istiʿāra) and comparison (tashbīh) to suit the new exigencies of a New Persian literary culture. In reversing the relation between metaphor and comparison enshrined in Arabic aesthetics, Rādūyānī concretized the Persian contribution to the global study of literary form.

Afterlife

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
The Past ◽  
Poetic Justice ◽  
Way Of Thinking

From classical antiquity onwards, writing about life after death has consistently served as a situation for questions of literary theory. The locations of the afterlife are hypotheticals and counterfactuals; they are the site of theory itself. Questions about authorship, for instance, have been articulated through the myth of Orpheus (in the forms recorded by Virgil and Ovid). The story of Orpheus tells of a poet who must go into the underworld to find the material for a tale of survivorship and loss, raising questions about the sources of creative inspiration, the art of trauma, and the suffering of the authentic artist. Dante’s imagined structures of an afterlife, in which punishments fit crimes with an apt poetic justice, have similarly been enlisted into one of the most important theoretical debates of the 20th century between formalists and historicists. The afterlife as a supplement to life’s time has also been used as a way of thinking about temporality and the implications for narrative as a literary mode that works with and through the philosophy of time. One of the most influential aspects of the literature of the afterlife to resonate in literary theory has been the ghost story. In its greatest manifestations, from Hamlet to The Turn of the Screw to Beloved, the ghost story forces its readers to acknowledge those elements of the past that refuse to be laid to rest, and it has therefore served as a vehicle for psychoanalytic questions about how processes of individual or collective memory are depicted in literary texts. In poststructuralist theory, the notion of the hauntological has also built its concepts in dialogue with earlier literary ghosts and become a way of thinking about language and its uncanny slippage between presence and absence. Subsequent critical work continued to develop hauntology into a way of understanding temporality and cultural history. Finally, the notion of prosopopoeia, or the voicing of the dead through writing, is perhaps the most far-reaching way of understanding the prevalence of dead voices as a literary trope, which reflects something of the processes of reading and writing themselves. The afterlife has therefore been a crucial source of generative metaphors for literary theory, as well as a topic and setting with an important literary history.

Imaginative Theory

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolette Zeeman
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Theoretical Figure

The literary theory of the medieval schools, found in academic prologues or commentaries, is often articulated in an analytical and explicit language. However, in both Latin and vernacular literary texts literary self-theorization may also be expressed in figured and metaphorical form. An example would be Guillaume de Machaut’s “Prologue,” but other widespread and recognizable literary theoretical figures include the dream, the mirror, the reading of a book, or the conversation overheard. It is important for scholarship in Middle English literature to focus more on these “imaginative” articulations of literary theory. This article examines one particular literary-theoretical figure, the chanson d’aventure (“the song of adventure”), which, depending on how it is put together, can perform an array of literary self-commentaries.

A New View of the Epic

1951 ◽  
Vol 20 (58) ◽  
pp. 2-10
Author(s):  
Émile Mireaux ◽  
Albin Michel ◽  
Sir John Myres
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Folk Tale ◽  
Wide Interval ◽  
The North ◽  
North Side ◽  
North Wall ◽  
New View

Much has been written about the origin of the Homeric Poems, and the processes, more or less long, by which they were given eventual literary form. The archaeological discoveries of Schliemann and his successors, from 1870 to about 1910, lengthened the perspective and changed the point of view, diverting attention from the latest to the earlier phases, from an ‘Ionian’ to an ‘Aeolic’, ‘Achaean’, and even Mycenaean epic or saga or folk-tale. But not only was there no recovery of early literary texts related to the Minoan scripts, but the decline and fall of the Minoan régime revealed even more clearly the wide interval between the traditional date for the ‘Fall of Troy’ and the emergence of the ‘Ionian’ epic. Political circumstances unfortunately terminated the American excavation of Hissarlik before the questions asked by M. Charles de Vellay about the north side of the fortress could be completely answered; but it seems certain that there was a north wall, and that this was deliberately destroyed at a rather late date, as in the story of the foundation of Achilleum. In Aeolis and Ionia, too, no large excavation is possible yet; so attempts to find archaeological equivalents for the latest indications of material culture in the poems are still conjectural.

scholarly journals Litterær kompetanse - portrett av tre lesarar

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Hallvard Kjelen
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Reading ◽  
Literature Teaching ◽  
Teaching Literature ◽  
Subjective Responses ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Reader Responses ◽  
Men I ◽  
Literature Theory

Artikkelen drøfter eit sentralt problemfelt innom litteraturdidaktikken, nemleg tilhøvet mellom litterær lesing som fagleg kompetanse og litterær lesing som oppleving. Problemfeltet er særleg knytt til Louise Rosenblatts arbeid. Ho viser ved hjelp av omgrepa efferent og estetisk lesing korleis det er ei utfordring for litteraturlæraren å utvikle ei litteraturundervisning som i tilstrekkeleg grad tek omsyn til kjensler og røynsler. I ein litteraturteoretisk kontekst er subjektive responsar på litterære tekstar irrelevante, men i ein litteraturdidaktisk kontekst er subjektive responsar høgst relevante. Denne artikkelen bidrar inn i diskusjon-en mellom anna ved å trekkje inn meir empirisk basert litteraturteori som referanseramme. Artikkelen presenterer tre lesarars litterære responsar, og viser korleis kunnskap om individuelle lesarresponsar kan vere utgangspunkt for ei litteraturundervisning som balanserer ei fagleg tilnærming til litteratur opp mot ei meir opplevingsbasert tilnærming.Emneord: Litteraturundervisning, litterær kompetanse, empirisk litteraturteori, lesarresponsAbstractThe article discusses a key issue in literature didactics, namely the relation between literary reading as an academic competence, and literary reading as an experience. The discussion draws heavily on Louise Rosenblatt’s work. By using the concepts efferent and aesthetic reading, she shows how it is a challenge for the teacher of literature to develop literature teaching that adequately takes emotions and experience into account. In a literature-theoretical context, subjective responses to literary texts are irrelevant; but in a didactics context, the subjective responses are highly relevant.  This article contributes to the discussion by bringing in a more empirically based literature theory as a frame of reference. The article presents three readers’ literary responses, and shows how knowledge of individual reader responses can be the basis for literature teaching which balances an academic approach to literature with a more experience-based approach.Key word: Teaching literature, literary competence, empirical literary theory, reader-response 

scholarly journals Til sammenligning

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (127) ◽  
pp. 111-130
Author(s):  
Rikke Andersen Kraglund
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Broad Concept ◽  
Universal Feature ◽  
The One ◽  
Gerard Genette

Generally, the conception of intertextual references in literary theory has been either very broad or very narrow and detail-oriented. On the one hand, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva conceive of intertext as a universal feature of all texts. No text is original and made by itself isolated from those existing before it. All texts, in short, are intertexts because they refer to other texts, conventions, and presuppositions beyond authors’ intentions. But this broad concept is difficult to work with in analyzing works of literature. It poses problems of identification and does not mark out a manageable area of investigation or object of attention with the undefined and infinite discursive space it designates and its idea about anonymous citations. Generally, the conception of intertextual references in literary theory has been either very broad or very narrow and detail-oriented. On the one hand, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva conceive of intertext as a universal feature of all texts. No text is original and made by itself isolated from those existing before it. All texts, in short, are intertexts because they refer to other texts, conventions, and presuppositions beyond authors’ intentions. But this broad concept is difficult to work with in analyzing works of literature. It poses problems of identification and does not mark out a manageable area of investigation or object of attention with the undefined and infinite discursive space it designates and its idea about anonymous citations.  On the other hand, we have the more restricted view that focuses on specific, readily recognized signs of intertextual relations between literary texts. Gérard Genette offers a vocabulary to describe the interaction between only two identifiable texts. In this article, I shall propose a third alternative that takes the middle ground and investigate what a rhetorical approach to intertextuality means for the understanding of the concept of comparison.

Literary theorists in and beyond French academic space (1960–1970s)

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (5) ◽  
pp. 1108-1123
Author(s):  
Lucile Dumont
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
French History ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Collective Strategy

This article demonstrates how social strategies deployed at the margins of French academic space to legitimize theoretical approaches to literary texts (semiology, semantics, structural analysis of narratives) in the 1960s and 1970s strongly relied on the interventions of their promoters beyond the academy. It specifically examines two strategies privileged by promoters of literary theory which allowed some of them to bypass several requirements for academic careers in taking advantage of the transformations of higher education, of the absence of stable and strong disciplinary frames, and of their own integration into the intellectual and literary fields. First, either through the alliance with literary avant-gardes or by the temporary constitution as one, the collective strategy of the literary avant-garde became a way to engage both politically and aesthetically. Second, the investment of transnational networks and internationalization allowed the critics and theorists to get around the national path to symbolic and academic consecration, and to reframe the modalities of their public engagement. Ultimately, this article offers an understanding of how, for aspirant or marginalized academics, interventions beyond the perimeter of the academic space have, at a certain point in French history, helped their acquisition of academic legitimacy.

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