What is literary/literariness. Sept 2008
(incorporating notes from students in previous classes)
Literariness. What makes literature literary? -- vs. ordinary discourse. E.g.:
A. Aesthetic
- Special types of language
- foregrounding: metaphors, alliteration, irony;
- imagery
- Other formal techniques, e.g., narrative
- point of view; foreshadowing; free indirect discourse
- Purposive selection of details -- become symbolic
- Coherence, boundedness
- Rules of genre
- Open to interpretation, e.g., literal, symbolic (polyvalence vs. monovalence convention)
B. Engagement
- See world through perspective of a character, intimacy with (e.g., empathy)
- Unavailability of fictional world, non-verifiable; yet reader has real emotions?
- Relation of reader to (fictional) narrator, author
- illusion of "being there" (transport)
C. Challenge to reader's world view
- World has moral meaning; raises questions of reader identity
- Feelings placed in a critical relationship to each other (.. catharsis)
- reader enlightened
- reader defamiliarization
D. Media
- Poems, novels, short stories, plays, essays . . . ??
- Not limited to books, writing -- films, etc.
E. Meaning
- Underlying meaning: universal, for all ages (the canon)
- Readers link their own experiences to text
- Medium for exchanging ideas
- Originality
- Appreciation may only emerge over time
F. Problems
- anything that can be read (literate = being able to read)
-- note a certain bias to narrative in this list. But Patrick Colm Hogan suggests all forms of literature including lyric poems are narrative... (e.g., Hogan 152-3).
Notes
- Foregrounding: see opening sections of this essay by Miall & Kuiken: http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/reading/foregrd.htm
- polyvalence convention: Siegfried J. Schmidt, e.g., Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literature (1982)
- transport: engagement in the world of a story; see Melanie Green paper
- Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (2003).
Are any of these features distinctive and exclusive to literature? or is literature characterized by a certain set of these features, none of which is defining in itself? -- see Wittgenstein on family resemblance (3rd para. in http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/blueandbrown/themes.html)
Document created September 9 2006 / Updated September 8th 2008