Difference between revisions of "Traditions in our discourse about literature"

Revision as of 12:20, 31 May 2007

An awareness of different and not always compatible discourses pervades the field of literary studies: You cannot speak of a “first person narrator offering a monologue” referring to a poem. The first person narrator is “narratology”, the “monologue” dramatology”. Referring to a speech you can speak of an “exordium”, referring to a play you speak about the “exposition”.

The different discourses mix, yet do not completely mix within the discourse of literary criticism. A metaphor is rhetoric – it can, however, be found in a political speech, a commercial advertisement, a Shakespeare play, or a Hemmingway story etc.

The complex situation (how do I know what word to use in what context?) is the result of the complex history that created our modern discourse of literature:

The debate of literature

... till around 1750 the debate of “learning”, “scientific publications” – provided

• the institutions: i.e. literary journals, literary histories, the continuing academic and at the same moment public debate of publications, and
• the discursive modalities: literature is “discussed” in fundamentally scholarly debates in an exchange of competing judgments which have to be supported by arguments one can defend in a discussion

The debate of poetry

provided

• the perspective on (formerly “poetic” now “literary”) genres, their different means to delight and instruct audiences, their different aesthetics leading to different forms of perfection, their different rules
• the debate of the poet, his craftsmanship, his genius (if not madness) in creating works without a perfect knowledge of the art, his or her readiness to violate rules (while aiming at special effects in his or her works)
• the debate of the critic who has to develop a poetological expertise comprising both knowledge about the rules of poetry and taste to judge how they are achieved

The debate of rhetoric

provided

• an established analysis of the effectiveness of speech (whether verse or prose)

=The debate of fictions (and their deeper meaning)

…was traditionally located in the field of theological studies, where it was used to analyse and interpret biblical similes, stories and texts – it provided

• a complex set of interpretive modes reaching from the literal to the allegorical, anagogical, and moral sense of scripture
• – with Huet’s Treatise on the Origin of Romances – an approach to write histories of fiction in which fictions (whether historical, poetic or poetic) can be

• understood as formed by the different use people make of fictions in different cultures
• analysed as expressions of our changing (and more or less perfect) understanding of the world
• appreciated by us even if they affront our own taste if only we develop an understanding and appreciation of the tastes different cultures developed
• in grand narratives portraying the “streams [in which traditions] have spread” and crossed the borders of cultures.