Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 232-237
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Normal Science ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
The Third ◽  
Important Message ◽  
Fredric Jameson

Let’s take a step back. In the introduction, I sought to demonstrate some of the ways in which formalism has become instinctive in literary criticism, using several different genealogies. The first briefly surveyed some current thinkers, including Franco Moretti, Caroline Levine, Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, who assert that formalism is constitutive of literary study and a distillation of the best elements of its scholarly history. The second looked at how formalism had emerged as a contrast to methods based on reading for the content and ideas of literary texts, considering first a trajectory up to the New Criticism and Cleanth Brooks’s diagnosis of the heresy of paraphrase and subsequently an arc away from it, one through Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida that maintained the suspicion of literary content. And the third looked at the scholarship that formed the ‘ethical turn’, which similarly refused to read for the moral thought in literature, preferring to emphasise the ethical effects of form. All the while, though, there has been a sort of normal science of literary criticism that largely refused the insistence on form and was willing to let its scholarship rest with attempts to bring authors into conversation with issues that the critics cared about. That school of criticism has never received the dignity of a formal title, and I concluded by suggesting that it deserved one. Moreover, I argued, the moral thought in Victorian narratives offered a useful example in this regard, since it is a literary tradition deeply concerned with communicating an important message, and subsequent traditions in moral philosophy offer useful resources for clarifying the ideas such authors had....

Double Thoughts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
De Man ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Coetzee’s interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature and philosophy is most evident in later fictions such as Elizabeth Costello. But as Andrew Dean argues in this chapter, this interest in moving across boundaries in fact originates much earlier, in Coetzee’s quarrel with the institutions and procedures of literary criticism. Coetzee used the occasion of his inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Cape Town (Truth and Autobiography) to criticize the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which literary texts are themselves blind. Influenced in part by such figures as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Coetzee posed a series of challenging questions about the desires at stake in the enterprise of literary criticism. Developing these thoughts, Dean explores the way in which Coetzee’s earlier fiction, including such texts as Foe (1986), is energized by its quarrelsome relationship with literary criticism and theory, especially postcolonial theory.

STEPHEN GREENBLATT, NEW HISTORICISM, AND CULTURAL HISTORY, OR, WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT INTERDISCIPLINARITY

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH MAZA
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Canonical Texts ◽  
Historical Practices

Michael Warner, a literary critic with a keen sense of history, wrote in 1987 that “New Historicism is a label that historians don't like very much because they understand something different by historicism. But nobody's asking historians….” This essay is an answer to questions nobody asked me, questions about interdisciplinarity and the differences between literary critical and historical practices. A return to historically informed literary criticism, which many critics still consider a dominant trend in the profession, emerged in the early 1980s following the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). Reacting as it did against the decontextualized abstractions of New Criticism and Deconstruction, the movement soon labeled New Historicism sought to breathe new life into canonical texts by relating them to non-literary texts and social practices of their day. This historicist inclination should have formed the basis for a coming together of the movement's practitioners with historians interested in literary representations. But no such merger has occurred: New Historicists evince little interest in the systematic, archivally based study of history, and historians have at best shown indifference to the work of Greenblatt and his followers.

Afterword: Turning Back to Literature

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 1087-1095 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Caruth
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Literary Writing ◽  
Literary Archive

Three times I rushed, and my heart urged me to hold her, and three times she flew from my hands like a shadow or even a dream.—Homer, The Odyssey 11.206–08.To speak of the future of literary criticism is always to speak of the future of literature, which is a mode of language and an institution whose very being essentially touches on the possibility and fragility of its own future. “The fragility of literature,” as Richard Klein suggests, “its susceptibility to being lost,” is at the heart of all literary writing, which emerges from the absence of a “real referent” and thus sustains itself through its reference to other texts, to the archive of literary writing that is made up of figures and other literary articulations that allow us to read. Klein reminds us, citing Jacques Derrida, that literary texts may always disappear: not only because they may be forgotten but also because they are susceptible to the erasure of the archive, to apocalyptic destruction, and to the collective loss of the knowledge of how to read—as a result of new modes of media saturation or, I would add, through the collapse of readability in the age of what Hannah Arendt calls “the modern lie” (“Truth” 253). The force and fragility of literature and of literary criticism are bound up with the possible disappearance of the literary archive, which we implicitly confront in reading literature and in pursuing its forms and thoughts as literary critics.

scholarly journals The Impact of Deconstruction on the Lithuanian Literary Criticism

Literatūra ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-85
Author(s):  
Aušra Jurgutienė
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Soviet Ideology ◽  
The Impact ◽  
New Strategies

 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. 

Literature in Our Time, or, Loving Literature to Bits

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Callus
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Paul Auster ◽  
Anne Michaels

In this essay Ivan Callus provides some reflections on literature in the present. He considers the tenability of the post-literary label and looks at works that might be posited as having some degree of countertextual affinity. The essay, while not setting itself up as a creative piece, deliberately structures itself unconventionally. It frames its argument within twenty-one sections that are self-contained but that also echo each other in their attempt to develop an overarching argument which draws out some of the challenges that lie before the countertextual and the post-literary. Punctuating the essay and contributing to its unconventional take on the practice of literary criticism is a series of exercises for the reader to complete, if so wished; the essay makes no attempt, however, to suggest that a countertextual criticism ought to make a routine of such devices. The separate sections contain reflections on a number of texts and writers, among them, and in order of appearance, Hamlet, Anthony Trollope, Jacques Derrida, The Time Machine, Don Quixote, Mark Z. Danielewski, Mark B. N. Hansen, Gunter Kress, Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses, W. B. Yeats, Kate Tempest, David Jones, Anne Michaels, Bernice Eisenstein, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Tim Parks, Tom McCarthy – and Hamlet again. The essay's length fulfils a performative function but also facilitates as extensive a catalogue of aspects of the countertextual in literature and elsewhere as is feasible or as might be dared at this stage.

TRANSLATION AS MENTAL INTERPRETATION ACTIVITY IN LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (28) ◽  
pp. 43-53
Author(s):  
Svitlana Gruschko
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Cultural Communication ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Cross Cultural Communication ◽  
Cross Language

In the article the phenomenon of translation is regarded as mental interpretation activity not only in linguistics, but also in literary criticism. The literary work and its translation are most vivid guides to mental and cultural life of people, an example of intercultural communication. An adequate perception of non-native culture depends on communicators’ general fund of knowledge. The essential part of such fund of knowledge is native language, and translation, being a mediator, is a means of cross-language and cross-cultural communication. Mastering another language through literature, a person is mastering new world and its culture. The process of literary texts’ translation requires language creativity of the translator, who becomes so-called “co-author” of the work. Translation activity is a result of the interpreter’s creativity and a sort of language activity: language units are being selected according to language units of the original text. This kind of approach actualizes linguistic researching of real translation facts: balance between language and speech units of the translated work (i.e. translationinterpretation, author’s made-up words, or revised language peculiarities of the characters). The process of literary translation by itself should be considered within the dimension of a dialogue between cultures. Such a dialogue takes place in the frame of different national stereotypes of thinking and communicational behavior, which influences mutual understanding between the communicators with the help of literary work being a mediator. So, modern linguistics actualizes the research of language activities during the process of literary work’s creating. This problem has to be studied furthermore, it can be considered as one of the central ones to be under consideration while dealing with cultural dimension of the translation process, including the process of solving the problems of cross-cultural communication.

scholarly journals Deictic Shifting in Greek Contractual Writing (I–IV AD)

Philologus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 164 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Author(s):  
Klaas Bentein
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person

AbstractMuch attention has been paid to ‘deictic shifts’ in Ancient Greek literary texts. In this article I show that similar phenomena can be found in documentary texts. Contracts in particular display unexpected shifts from the first to the third person or vice versa. Rather than constituting a narrative technique, I argue that such shifts should be related to the existence of two major types of stylization, called the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ style. In objectively styled contracts, subjective intrusions may occur as a result of the scribe temporarily assuming himself to be the deictic center, whereas in subjectively styled contracts objective intrusions may occur as a result of the contracting parties dictating to the scribe, and the scribe not modifying the personal references. There are also a couple of texts which display more extensive deictic alter­nations, which suggests that generic confusion between the two major types of stylization may have played a role.

The Intended Public of Demetrius's On Style: The Place of the Treatise in the Hellenistic Educational System

2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk M. Schenkeveld
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Educational System ◽  
First Century ◽  
Rhetorical Education ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third

Abstract: On Style, written by a certain Demetrius probably in the first century B.C., is an important witness to the rhetorical education of the third/second centuries B.C. It is a matter of long scholarly debate whether Demetrius intended his treatise to be a handbook of rhetoric or a work of literary criticism. Here it is argued that the public Demetrius writes his book for are pupils who have done the preliminary courses in rhetoric and have leamt to write progymnasmata. They now enter the final course on rhetoric and will compose the more difficult exercises, commonly termed declamationes.

Romantic Capabilities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Ecological Design ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Contemporary Media

Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen’s novels and their imaginary country estates. Blake emerges from the study as an important theorist of how viral media can be used to undermine law, someone whose art deregulates through the medium of its audiences’ heterogeneous tastes and conflicting demands for wisdom. Scott’s novels are shown to have fostered a new experience of vision and understanding of frame that helped launch modern immersive media. Finally, Austenian realism is revealed as a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends.

scholarly journals Dancing with Myriam: Creating and Staging a New Metaphor for the Process of Translation

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Paula Pratt
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
World Literature ◽  
African Women ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
North African ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Oral Interpretation ◽  
Doctoral Work ◽  
As Relationship ◽  
The Relationship

This article tells the story, and analyzes the development, of a “staged metaphor” for the translation process, from its chance inception over ten years ago, to the more recent revision and staging of the script. In 2005, I was teaching world literature at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, while also researching the writing of Irish and North African women. I chose to focus on those women writing in Irish, Tachelhit, Arabic, or French, whose work had been translated into English. I was initially inspired by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue,” which compares the "sending forth" of her writing to a potential reader, to the story of Moses being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter. My ultimate goal was to produce a chamber theatre play, based on the Irish and North African texts, which would dramatize a metaphor for the translation process. This was an outgrowth of my doctoral work, in which I had drawn on oral interpretation theorists, who see the performance of literary texts as an accepted means of doing literary criticism. Accordingly, I also expanded the project to include the observations of translation theorists, and I incorporated these into the creation of the script for a chamber theatre performance. After directing a staging of the script in Morocco in 2007, I realized that I needed to add more choreographed movement, and to incorporate the character of Moses’s and Myriam’s mother into the metaphor. The addition of dance, and the foregrounding of the relationship between Myriam and her mother, draws unapologetically on female relationships. It is my conclusion that the revised metaphor, with the addition of these elements, is validated by Yves Bonnefoy’s and Henri Meschonnic's depictions of “translation as relationship with an author,” and that, the metaphor does indeed “provide . . . fresh insights.”

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