ltavsi.md

title	author
Notes on Literary Theory : A Very Short Introduction	Bharathi Ramana Joshi

What is Theory?

• Fields of study that have effects outside the field
• A critique of common sense

Foucault on sex

• Repressive Hypothesis: earlier periods repressed sex and moderns fought to liberate
• Theory: there was no liberation, but amalgamation of a wide range of anatomical, physical, social and psychological to give birth to the notion of sex
• Key characteristics of Foucault's theory analytical and speculative

1. Interdisciplinary
2. Analytical and speculative
3. Critique of common sense
4. Reflexive

What is Literature and Does it Matter?

• Difficult to answer because
  1. Need to distinguish between literary and non-literary works
  2. Need to provide argument to study literature
  3. What does it provide

Conventions of literature

• "Hyper-protected cooperative principle": readers assume the effort they put in to understand literature will be "worth it", i.e. they assume the writer is cooperating with them.

The nature of literature

1. Literature as the foregrounding of language - forces unusual attention
2. Literature as the integration of language
3. Literature as fiction - the relationship between the work and the real world is up to interpretation
4. Literature as aesthetic object
5. Literature as intertextual or self-reflexive construct - to read something as literature is to consider it as a linguistic event that has meaning in relation to other discourses

Functions of literature

• Historically, replacement for religion
• Literature is both an instrument to drive ideology and for its undoing

Paradox of literature

• Literature effects itself
• Need to answer "what is literature" so that literary theorists can promote what they take to be the most pertinent critical methods and to dismiss methods that neglect the most basic and distinctive aspects of literature

Literature and Cultural Studies

• Culture is an expression of the people and culture is an imposition on the people. Literature can therefore be studied to study a people and can also voice the oppressed.
• Why to study (i.e. arguments for literary theory) vs how to study (i.e. methods to employ in literary theory)

Language, Meaning, and Interpretation

• Three levels of meaning
  1. Meaning of a word
  2. Meaning of an utterance
  3. Meaning of a text

Saussure's theory of language

• A language is a system of differences
• "Its most precise characteristic is to be what the others are not"
• Sign = form (plane of sound) + meaning (plane of thought)
• Language is both the concrete manifestation of ideology (a framework for speakers to think in) and the site of its questioning/undoing

Poetics vs hermeneutics

• Poetics : concerned with attested meanings/effects and how they are achieved
• Hermeneutics : concerned with texts and seek to discover better interpretations (think legal documents/sacred texts)

Readers and meaning

• Literary work is a succession of actions upon the understanding of readers => interpretation of work is a story of that encounter

Meaning, intention, and context

• Meaning is given by the intent of the speaker
• Meaning is given by the language
• Meaning is given by the context
• Meaning is the experience of the reader
• "The Intentional Fallacy"
• It is simultaneously a property of the text and the experience of the subject
• Meaning is context bound, but context is boundless

Rhetoric, Poetics, and Poetry

• Rhetoric : study of persuasive and expressive resources of the language - techniques to construct strong discourses
• Poetic : art of imitation/representation
• Language is fundamentally figurative and what is considered literal are those figures whose figurative nature has been forgotten
• Metaphor : links by means of similarity
• Metonymy : links by means of contiguity
• Synecdoche : substitution of part for whole ("ten hands" == "ten workers")
• Irony
• Poem is both a structure made of text and an event in literary history
• Three distinct figures associated with a poem
  1. The poet
  2. The narrator (important to distinguish from the poet)
  3. Image of the poetic voice emerging from study of multiple poems by the same poet
• Lyrical poetry is utterance overheard
• Productive way to analyze poems : what are the situations that lead to this specific utterance?
• Paradox of lyrical poetry : the sublime
• Prefixing with 'O' (as in 'O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud') signifies the speaker embodying the spirit of poetry
• Frye's constituents of poem
  1. babble - exploiting non-semantic features of language (sound, rhythm, repeating letters etc) to produce charm

     This darksome burn, horseback brown,
     His rollrock highroad roaring down
     

  2. doodle - riddle the readers

     Pease porridge hot,
     Pease porridge cold,
     Pease porridge in the pot,
     Nine days old.
     

• Theories of poetry propose relations between semantic (what poems says) and non-semantic (how poem says) dimensions of language
• Poems are to be treated not as parts of conversation to be interpreted, rather an aesthetic whole/unity
• Russian Formalists : one level of structure of poem should mirror another
• Romantics, New Critics : analogy between poem and natural organisms, all parts should fit together harmoniously
• Post-structuralists : assert impossibility of poems practising what they preach
• Poetic imagination

Narrative

• Narrative structure example : calling clock's sound 'tick-tock' i.e. assigning a fictional structure to two physically same sounds
• Narratology/Theory of narrative : study of narrative structure and how these affect human perception

Plot

• Feature of narrative capturing notion of development
• Ending usually related to beginning
• Plot/story : material presented
• Events : plot/story : discourse

Presentation

• Who speaks? First person, third person etc
• Who speaks to whom? Narrator's audience is called narratee
• Who speaks when? During events, after events etc
• Who speaks what language?
• Who speaks with what authority? Unreliable narrator, self-conscious narration

Focalization

• Who sees? Distinct from who speaks!
  1. Temporal - benefit of hindsight etc
  2. Distance and speed
  3. Limitations on knowledge

What stories do

• Pleasure
• Desire to know
• Teach us about the world
• Increasingly suggest that identity must be sought in personal relations rather than through public action

Performative language

• Austin's Constative vs Performative as capturing the extent to which language performs actions rather than merely reporting upon them
  1. Constative : "The shop sells bananas"
  2. Performative : "I am going to buy bananas" (may be felicitous or infelicitous)

Performatives and literature

• Performatives imply that literature can effect the real world, an event/act
• Derrida's critique : would a performative utterance still work if it were not an iterable form?

Performativ-constative relations

• Aporia between constative and performative language
• The argument that the act of stating or describing is in fact performative must take the form of constative statements

Butler's performatives

• Theory of performative is model for thinking about crucial social processes with the following at stake
  1. Nature of identity and how it is produced
  2. Functioning of social norms
  3. Agency
  4. Relationship between individual and social change
• Obligatory repetition produces historical and social realities

Identity, Identification and the Subject

The subject

• Key questions about the self
  1. Is self given or made?
  2. Is self conceived in individual or in social terms?
• To be a subject at all is to be subjected to various regimes (psycho-social, linguistic, sexual)

Literature and identity

• Literature tries to answer questions about identity such as "how is identity formed?", implicitly or explicitly
• Paradox of identity : the identity of a character arises through their actions, but the identity was what caused actions in the first place.
• Explore how group demands restrict individual possibilities
• Literature is said to corrupt through mechanisms of identification