Literary Theory

1. Literary Theory • Dichotomizing Ordinary Language and Literary Language

2. Ordinary Language Literary Language

3. Meaning determinate ever-changing

4. Ambiguity problem goal

5. Surface form means to end end

6. Domain universals particulars

7. Analysis necessary;

8. try to complete interference;

9. never exhaust

10. Purpose communication expression

11. Rationality rational irrational

12. Truth correspondence coherence

13. Disciplines linguistics; cognitive psychology; artificial intelligence; sociology; anthropology literary criticism; poetics' rhetoric; stylistics; literary history; aesthetics

14. Anti-Realism • Graff: literature defamiliarizes reality; criticism defamiliarizes literature

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

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

17. 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

18. Tallis: degrees of realism • Meyer L. Abrams (The Mirror & the Lamp)

19. Freund, 1987, p. 2: subversion of triangle by focusing on audience • Reader Response History

20. return to reader • resee language as power • I. A. Richards (1929)

21. 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

22. technical v. critical remarks • Jonathan Culler: structure => theory of reading (Freund, p. 79) • Stanley Fish: interpretive community

23. 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

24. stories as recountings of events

25. summaries as desired end points

26. the main idea • Impoverished view of author-reader relationship

27. presence of author/reader

28. dynamic relationship

29. multiple roles

30. 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

31. Romantic (focus on author; author's meaning)

32. Mid-1700s • breakdown of patronage system • commercial printing • large reading public • mass education/standardization

33. 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

34. => 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

35. Anti-realism: Self-sufficient world; not mere representation

36. Wellek & Warren: The statements in a novel, in a poem, in a drama are not literally true => not logical propositions

37. Coleridge: That willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith

38. Wimsatt & Beardsley: intentional fallacy; affective fallacy

39. 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

40. Susan Peck McDonald, Robert Scholes, Terry Eagleton: literary theory

41. Hayden White, Allan Megill: history

42. David Klemm: theology

43. Mark Kelman, Catherine McKinnon: law

44. diversity: special devices linked to key questions in each field

45. Ethnography (M L Pratt)

46. cover (Stephen Tyler in India)

47. ethnography as science

48. Malinowski quote, p. 27

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

50. travel writing: narration/description