scholarly journals On author’s strategies in literature

Author(s):  
Valeriy V. Prozorov ◽  

Though the term ‘author’s strategies in literature’ is being widely used, its extended definition has not been coined in literary theory encyclopedias and reference books yet. In an effort to partially fill in this gap, I would like to make an attempt to answer the following questions: What is the meaning of the notion ‘author’s strategies’ in literary studies? How do author’s strategies manifest themselves in the literary process? What is the role of the reader in author’s strategies? How do author’s strategies function in the text?

After initial remarks on the relations between literature, language, and communication, the Introduction outlines the main assumptions of relevance theory, explaining the distinctions between coded and ‘ostensive’ communication, between ‘meaning’ and ‘import’, and between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. It considers the role of relevance and inference in comprehension; discusses how implicatures are derived in context and why words are not always used to convey their literal meanings; reflects on the nature of metaphor and irony, and examines the relation between processing effort, rhetoric, and style. It then turns to ways in which a relevance theory approach might question the tenets of modern literary theory (the ‘death of the author’, scepticism about intentions), to issues of historical and contextual interpretation, and to the notion of ‘intertextuality’. Finally, it reviews a range of evidence widely taken to support an ‘embodied’ conception of cognition, language, and communication which seems particularly well-adapted to literary studies.


2009 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Rowland

The paper first considers the role of Jungian ideas in relation to academic disciplines and to literary studies in particular. Jung is a significant resource in negotiating developments in literary theory because of his characteristic treatment of the ‘other’. The paper then looks at The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis whose own construction of archetypes is very close to Jung’s. By drawing upon new post-Jungian work from Jerome Bernstein’s Living in the Borderland (2005), the novel is revealed to be intimately concerned with narratives of trauma and of origin. Indeed, a Jungian and post-Jungian approach is able to situate the text both within nature and in the historical traumas of war as well as the personal traumas of subjectivity. Where Bernstein connects his work to the postcolonial ethos of the modern Navajo shaman, this new weaving of literary and cultural theory points to the residue of shamanism within the arts of the West. 


Author(s):  
Iryna Rusnak

The author of the article analyses the problem of the female emancipation in the little-known feuilleton “Amazonia: A Very Inept Story” (1924) by Mykola Chirsky. The author determines the genre affiliation of the work and examines its compositional structure. Three parts are distinguished in the architectonics of associative feuilleton: associative conception; deployment of a “small” topic; conclusion. The author of the article clarifies the role of intertextual elements and the method of constantly switching the tone from serious to comic to reveal the thematic direction of the work. Mykola Chirsky’s interest in the problem of female emancipation is corresponded to the general mood of the era. The subject of ridicule in provocative feuilleton is the woman’s radical metamorphoses, since repulsive manifestations of emancipation becomes commonplace. At the same time, the writer shows respect for the woman, appreciates her femininity, internal and external beauty, personality. He associates the positive in women with the functions of a faithful wife, a caring mother, and a skilled housewife. In feuilleton, the writer does not bypass the problem of the modern man role in a family, but analyses the value and moral and ethical guidelines of his character. The husband’s bad habits receive a caricatured interpretation in the strange behaviour of relatives. On the one hand, the writer does not perceive the extremes brought by female emancipation, and on the other, he mercilessly criticises the male “virtues” of contemporaries far from the standard. The artistic heritage of Mykola Chirsky remains little studied. The urgent task of modern literary studies is the introduction of Mykola Chirsky’s unknown works into the scientific circulation and their thorough scientific understanding.


Author(s):  
Madara Eversone

The article aims to highlight the role of Arvīds Grigulis’ (1906–1989) personality in the Latvian Soviet literary process in the context of the Latvian Soviet Writers’ Union, attempting to discover the contradictions and significance of Arvīds Grigulis’ personality. Arvīds Grigulis was a long-time member of the Writers’ Union, a member of the Soviet nomenklatura, and an authority of the soviet literary process. His evaluations of pre-soviet literary heritage and writings of his contemporaries were often harsh and ruthless, and also influenced the development of the further literary process. The article is based on the documents of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party, the Latvian Soviet Writers’ Union and the Communist Party local organization of the Latvian Soviet Writers’ Union that are available at the Latvian State Archive of the National Archives of Latvia, as well as memories of Grigulis’ contemporaries. It is concluded that the personality of the writer Arvīds Grigulis, although unfolding less in the context of the Writers’ Union, is essential for the exploration of the soviet literary process and events behind the scenes. The article mainly describes events and episodes taking place until 1965, when Arvīds Grigulis’ influence in the Writers’ Union was more remarkable. Individual and further studies should analyse changes and the impact of his decisions in the cultural process of the 70s and 80s of the 20th century.


Author(s):  
Genevieve Liveley

This book explores the extraordinary contribution that classical poetics has made to twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of narrative. Its aim is not to argue that modern narratologies simply present ‘old wine in new wineskins’, but to identify the diachronic affinities shared between ancient and modern stories about storytelling, recognizing that modern narratologists bring particular expertise to bear upon ancient literary theory and offer valuable insights into the interpretation of some notoriously difficult texts. By interrogating ancient and modern narratologies through the mutually imbricating dynamics of their reception it aims to arrive at a better understanding of both. Each chapter selects a key moment in the history of narratology on which to focus, zooming in from an overview of significant phases to look at core theories and texts—from the Russian formalists, Chicago school neo-Aristotelians, through the prestructuralists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, to the latest unnatural and antimimetic narratologists. The reception history that thus unfolds offers some remarkable plot twists. It unmasks Plato as an unreliable narrator and theorist, and offers a rare glimpse of Aristotle putting narrative theory into practice in the role of storyteller in his work On Poets. In Horace’s Ars Poetica and in the works of ancient scholia critics and commentators it locates a rhetorically conceived poetics and a sophisticated reader-response-based narratology evincing a keen interest in audience affect and cognition—and anticipating the cognitive turn in narratology’s mot recent postclassical phase.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 274-291
Author(s):  
Andrea Polaschegg

Abstract Tracing the transformations phenomenological thought underwent in the sphere of literary studies after the 1930s, the paper outlines the epistemological potential of this tradition in regards to a proper understanding of the phenomenon ›text‹. Proceeding from reflections on the agonal relation between structuralistic and phenomenological traditions within contemporary literary theory, the article focuses on Husserl’s apprehension of texts as being »objects in procedure« by exploring the impact of this idea on the literary theories of Ingarden, Wellek, and Iser. In light of the - largely forgotten - fact that Karl Bühler’s pioneering Language Theory (1934) is mainly based on phenomenological thinking, the paper finally discusses to what extend Bühler’s idea of verbal expressions figuring as effective events could open a new space for the development of a literary theory of texts within recent debates on the »media of literature«.


1989 ◽  
Vol XLIII (3) ◽  
pp. 271-278
Author(s):  
MARY J. BAKER
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-82
Author(s):  
Anastasia Valerievna Sebeleva

This article proceeds from the fact that the problem of interaction and mutual influence is quite acute in literary studies. In this regard, the relevance of the research is due, firstly, to the correspondence to the priority direction of modern literary studies associated with the comparative analysis of the text, and secondly, to the need to disclose the deep theoretical and artistic content of creative communication of such artistic personalities of the XX century as M. Tsvetaeva and B. Pasternak, whose legacy still contains many lacunae. The methodological basis of the research is an integrated approach, including comparative-historical, historical-literary, comparative-typological, system-analytical and biographical methods, as well as the method of comparative studies, which allows to study literary analogies and connections of different national literatures, their refraction in the texts of the authors studied. Hermeneutics contributed to the mental comprehension of the analyzed texts, the mental processing of textual information. An important episode in the history of world poetry was the correspondence-dialogue of iconic poets for their time: M. Tsvetaeva and B. Pasternak. Correspondence is valuable not only because it shows us the life of poets in relation to time. The creative aspect of correspondence is very important. The rapprochement manifested in it and at the same time the repulsion was deeply creative and left deep traces in the legacy of all its participants. Poets, albeit to varying degrees, concentrated and passionately, sought to define for themselves the essence of life and poetry. In the course of the research, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that, firstly, the literary process is characterized by a systematic nature in which authors and their works are in certain relationships to each other. Secondly, the thirteen-year correspondence of M. Tsvetaeva with B. Pasternak was very significant for literature. Thanks to mutual communication, creative interaction, the poets created unique, emotionally deep works.


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