Traditions in our discourse about literature
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:
Contents
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 fictional works can be (whether historical, poetic or poetic)
- 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 following the “streams [in which traditions] have spread” and led to an exchange of cultural knowledge
The history of our modern discourse of literature
was the topic of our Wintersemester’s lecture. The discussion of literature, we said, appropriated the established debates mentioned in order to find a more attractive topic and through that wider audience. Those who discussed literature adopted and reconfigures the debates of poetry, rhetoric, and fiction. The belles letters, the market of fashionable knowledge became the object of the new literary debate.
- Expertise Aristotle and his successors had provided in the fields of poetics went into the schools of modern “literary criticism”. It is manifest today especially in the schools of “New Criticism” and “Structuralism”
- Expertise Huet brought into our discussion went into the production of the first histories literature at the beginning of the 19th century. The 19th century histories split Huet's project with its international perspective into national projects designed to arouse political debates of the nations' individual "characters", cultures and historical developments. Huet's perspective is manifest today in schools from "New Historicism" to "Cultural Studies" which aim at discussing works in cultural contexts.
Literature
- Aristotle, The Art of Poetry, c 350 BC, translated into English by André Dacier (1705)
- Pierre Daniel Huet, History of Romances, 1670, translated into English by Stephen Lewis (1715)
