scholarly journals Genre Theory and Historicism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E Underwood ◽  
NovelTM Research Group

Genre is a word whose time has come — and gone — and might now, perhaps, be coming back again. Debates about particular literary kinds have been common in literary criticism since Aristotle's Poetics, but they acquired a new intensity and reflexivity in the third quarter of the twentieth century, as structuralists and post-structuralists struggled to redefine the concept of genre itself. From Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) through Jacques Derrida's "Law of Genre" (1980), genre theory gave scholars a way to connect literary works to durable cultural patterns — or challenge the possibility of that connection.

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-318
Author(s):  
Virginia Jackson

Abstract As a response to Paul Fry’s essay “The New Metacriticisms and the Fate of Interpretation,” this essay asks a few questions: (1) Isn’t “metacriticism” what the twentieth century meant by literary criticism? (2) Why is modern literary criticism so defensive when it comes to lyric poetry? (3) What happens when the historical situation of a lyric literalizes apostrophic address? The answer to the first of these questions is yes. The answer to the second question depends on the critic, but this essay points out that defenses of lyric began in the early nineteenth century, so modern lyric theory continues a long tradition. The white male supremacist foundation of those defenses informs definitions of lyric poetry as utterance overheard, as solitary self-address. Fry is right that historical poetics attempts to rock that two-hundred-year-old foundation. The answer to the third question is that many poets have also rocked that foundation over those two centuries. The essay ends by interpreting an apostrophic ode written and published by George Moses Horton in 1828. Horton’s enslavement in North Carolina literalized the figurative situation of address that has come to define lyric reading.


Literatūra ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-85
Author(s):  
Aušra Jurgutienė

 In the article I discuss how deconstruction (Jacques Derrida and other Yale School participants) came to Lithuanian literary criticism  and how it changed habits of humanitarian thinking during the three decades after independence. The most unusual and radical deconstruction critique of essentialist metaphysical thinking, new terminology (inter-text, elimination of center, footprint, writing, difference, blinding, labyrinth narrative, guest / enemy, etc.) and new strategies for interpreting texts were very important for Lithuanian humanities liberated from Soviet ideology.  Literary critics have noticed and discussed the undoubted connection between postmodernist literature and its deconstructive reading.We can find three tendencies in the deconstructive criticism of Lithuanian literature. The first tendency is the interpretation of general theoretical concepts of deconstruction, second tendency - searching the deconstructive features in literary works and the third tendency of criticism, expanding its own self-criticism and self-irony, is discussing chrestomathic and structuralist interpretations of the literary works or deconstructing icons of Soviet culture. We know very well, that many feminist, postcolonial, historiographic, anthropological, or interdisciplinary researches of literature cannot escape the effects of deconstruction. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (01) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Nia Hailiyati

This study discusses the use of developed terms of literary criticism in the Arab. literature always experiences renewal in terms of science because literary criticism is a cultural product that often interacts with the conditions of the surrounding world, one of which is the terms of literary criticism which is the criterion in its use, so that raises the question, what are the terms of the Arabic literary criticism that are developing now? the purpose of this study is to find out the terms of literary criticism that developed in contemporary times as balancing the transformation of the ever expanding world of external literature. The method used in this research is library research, which is by collecting library data related to terms in Arabic literature. The finding in this study is that in contemporary Arabic literature there are three phenomenal terms, first the inner experience of poets (writers), the second organic unity and the theme in literary works, the third form of poetry.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


Hamlet has long been recognized as concerned with fundamental philosophical issues about identity, responsibility, intimacy, mourning, and agency. How is the play’s address to these issues structured by its distinctively powerful literary-dramatic form and language? What might philosophy have to learn from its mode of address? Is such learning affected by Hamlet being not merely literature, but literature designed to be embodied and voiced on a stage? And what light, in turn, might attention to philosophical themes cast on the play’s development and interest, in other words, does literary criticism gain or lose when tempted to employ literary works as gateways enabling abstract reflection? This book brings together a team of leading literary scholars and philosophers who were invited to probe philosophical dimensions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Authors diverge in what they focus on: what is shown by Hamlet’s words, what is shown by Hamlet (despite his words), what is shown by Hamlet, what is shown by Hamlet’s interpreters. “Philosophy in literature” does not, accordingly, possess a consistent meaning throughout this volume. Some essays inquire into Hamlet’s own insights. Others assess the significance of philosophy’s literary-dramatic framing by this play. Still others trace the philosophically relevant underpinnings exposed by historical transformations in Hamlet’s reception. Subjectivity, knowledge, sex, grief, self-theatricalization—these are but some of the topics examined in overlapping ways in the emerging symposium.


Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.


Author(s):  
Matthew Hobson

This chapter provides a brief introduction to how the historiographical development of Roman studies, since mid-twentieth century decolonization, has altered our understanding of the developments which took place in North Africa following the destruction of Carthage in 146 bce. The reader is introduced to literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources of evidence, which have traditionally been used to argue for either cultural change or continuity. After an initial examination of the immediate aftermath of the Third Punic War, Roman land appropriation and taxation, the focus is on sources of evidence usually described as “Punic,” “neo-Punic” or “Late Punic,” covering the spheres of municipal institutions, language use, and religious and funerary rituals. The vibrant multiculturalism and regional diversity of the Mediterranean and especially North Africa, both before and after the Roman conquest, is the dominant theme. This is used to shift emphasis away from grand explanatory paradigms based on essentialist identity categories, and toward a more nuanced picture of the complex and multivariate processes of cultural development and integration.


Author(s):  
Marek Korczynski

This chapter examines music in the British workplace. It considers whether it is appropriate to see the history of music in the workplace as involving a journey from the organic singing voice (both literal and metaphorical) of workers to broadcast music appropriated by the powerful to become a technique of social control. The chapter charts four key stages in the social history of music in British workplaces. First, it highlights the existence of widespread cultures of singing at work prior to industrialization, and outlines the important meanings these cultures had for workers. Next, it outlines the silencing of the singing voice within the workplace further to industrialization—either from direct employer bans on singing, or from the roar of the industrial noise. The third key stage involves the carefully controlled employer- and state-led reintroduction of music in the workplace in the mid-twentieth century—through the centralized relaying of specific forms of music via broadcast systems in workplaces. The chapter ends with an examination of contemporary musicking in relation to (often worker-led) radio music played in workplaces.


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