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Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts

Sunday, January 16, 2011

2CEP- What Is Literature? by Terry Eagleton


WHAT IS LITERATURE
-Terry Eagleton
ABBREVIATIONS USED: lit= literature, lang= language


ABOUT TERRY EAGLETON:
- Still alive, from UK, Teaches at Cambridge, currently working on theology, comes from Marxist tradition.
-Raymond Williams influenced Eagleton. Williams is a key figure in culture studies. Eagleton differed from Williams, a general pattern in academic relations.


WHAT IS LITERATURE- General ideas
- Kant organized academics into disciplines
- Only 18th century Romantics, began trying to define lit.
- ‘Theory’ cannot have a single exception, because method means that all research should arrive at the same conclusion. Science does this best
- In Social Sciences, answers and conclusions are unimportant. The method or arriving at the conclusion is important, ie: how and why. ie: argumentation > conclusion


-Humanist vs Post Humanist
Post Humanists emphasize the varied ‘Positions of Author and Recipient’, and interactions of Speaker and Listener, Identity and Subject Position, Individual and Subject.
-Texts undergo cycles of relevancy
E.g.: Feminists loved, then hated, and are now re visiting Marx and his theory of labour. Environmentalists are referring to Marx’s idea on resources.


Broad topics argued by Eagleton, to define literature:
a-Imaginative writing?
b-Fact or fiction?
(His first 2 ideas, were Common Sense explanations of Literature. Common Sense is a literary concept from Plato till 1967, until Derrida broke it.)
c-Literature vs. Literature
d-Formalism (“organized violence committed on ordinary language”) (associated to Linguistics, Structuralism, Saussure). Formalism employed ‘scientific spirit (Pg 2)’: they relied on method and tried to be Objective. (Science can be falsified- Karl Popper) --Emphasis of Form/ Structure over Content -Importance of Devices
(Eagleton isn’t saying that the Formalists didn’t believe content was important. He says that Formalists believed that content isn’t the business of critics, but devices are)
e- Paradox: This estrangement from ordinary language (that the Formalists spoke of) brings us into a fuller possession of experience!
f- Norms?: Formalists identified lit. as a deviation from the norm (ordinary lang.). But what is the norm then?  Ordinary lang. itself differs across time and place. Slang doesn’t fit into this idea of the Formalists either.
g- Shift and Change: of time, place and context. (“context tells you it is literary but not the language”)
h- Making strange/ Matter of contrast (Pg 6)
i- Formalists think all lit = poetry, and thus prose is judged by the same scale as poetry.
j- “lit. may be at least as much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them.” .
k- “lit is a non pragmatic discourse with no immediate practical purpose, but referring to a general state of affairs” . But what about Orwell’s essays studied as literature? (Pg 7-8)
l- Points j. and k. imply that lit is not Objective, but is up to how a person decides to read a text and not the nature of what is written (see also Point g.). There is no essence of lit (pg 8 & 9).
m- “Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them” (pg 8-9).
NOTE- I have made no lecture notes for pages 10, 11, 12, 13
n- Ideology: there is no randomness (Pg 14) (In India, when we began to include texts by Indian authors in Lit sylabbus, we included Ananthamurthy, RK Laxman. They all happen to be upper class, Hindu, males while most students of Lit were women. Power is maintained and exercised.)
o- Lit is constituted of value judgments. There can be no absolute definition of it, and only definitions that are “according to xyz” (Pg 15)


NOTE/ DISCLAIMER- My notes are by no means comprehensive of Eagleton’s original text. I have only included the information given by Mr Pinto during his lectures and some broad arguements covered in the essay. And out of my lecture notes, only that which is (seemingly?) relevant has been put up here. You still have to break your own head over the essay:).

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Questions on the novel

Following are the questions IBA (FEP)students asked me on the novel in about 45 minutes. Of course they are going to find answers for their own question! It's really an intriguing list.

1. Who wrote the first novel? Where? When? Why?
2. When did the first novel come to existence?
3. Why do they call novel a novel?
4. What is the purpose of a novel?
5. Why do we have to study it?
6. Characteristics of a novel.
7. What are the different types of novels?
8. What is the relevance of novel?
9. What is the difference between a short story and a novel?
10. Why do we have different editions of a novel?
11. Structure of the novel.
12. Why is novel a popular genre?
13. Who are the target audience of a novel?
14. Why did the genre survive?
15. What makes a novel a classic?
16. Why do novels drag the narrative?
17. Why should we critically analyze a novel?
18. How to critically analyse a novel?
19. Which is the first most famous novel?
20. Why is detective fiction famous?
21. Limitations of the novel genre.
22. Were novels meant to entertain?
23. What is the length of a novel - min/max?
24. Why are novels so melodramatic?
25. What are the uses of a novel?
26. What motivates the novelist to write a novel?
27. How to write a novel?
28. Which is the longest novel in the world?
29. Which is the first bestseller in the world?
30. Has novel evolved?
31. What are the topics on which novels are written ?
32. Relation between print culture and the novel.
33. How does one interpret the depth of a novel?
34. Should you have antagonist at all in a novel ?
35. Why do people write novels?
36. Why do only the novels from England become famous?
37. What kinds of novels are popular?
38. How many novels have been written till date?
39. How far do novels help us understand an age?
40. When did novel become a hyped genre ?
41. Which is the worst-rated novel?
42. Which is the first novel written by an Indian?
43. Etymology of the word novel.
44. Most controversial novel.
45. Difference between an epic and novel.
46. When did interdisciplinary novel arise?
47. What are the different styles of writing a novel?
48. Do we approve novels made into movies?
49. What role imagination plays in writing a novel?
50. Politics of rating a novel.
51. Subject of a novel.
52. How do novels become bestsellers?
53. Role of novel in social movement and awareness?
54. Impact of novel on society.
55. Can you analyze author's personality by reading a novel?

Monday, July 28, 2008

'Structuralism and Literary Criticism' - Gerard Genette

Following is a note sent by Adarsh of III Year PSEng on the essay:

Ideas Dropped
:

Gerard Genette tries to establish differences between the following:

Bricoleur : makes use of things that are not meant for the purpose.
Engineer : makes use of things that are meant for the purpose.

Art critic : will not use a painting in the process of criticism of art.
Literary critic : only person to use the same thing (literature or writing) in the process of literary criticism.

Writer : questions the world/universe which is nothing but a 'sign' to him.
Critic : questions literature. The work, which is a sign for the writer is meaning for the critic; the view of the world is sign for the critic and meaning for the writer.
Thus, Structuralism is a method with literature as it's object. The essay tries to find the principles through which Structuralism could reach it's 'object' and thus offer itself as the 'fruitful' method (as compared to Formalism)

Genette establishes the difference between Formalism and Structuralism by citing limitations of the former and the importance of the latter.

Limitations of Formalism :

1. Only worried about word/sound/sentence. The sentence would thus be the largest form that Formalism is concerned with.
2. Unlike Structuralism, it only concerns itself with the 'codes' and not the 'messages.'
3. Content for them is not the concern.
4. Formalism treats literature as a dialect.


Importance of Structuralism :

1. Establishes the relation between the form and the message. It is concerned with the message too i.e, the bone structure.
2. Semantic phenomenon i.e, it attacks the meanings.
3. Larger unities of discourse. (systems)
System of Forms - Code
System of Meanings - Meaning
4. Study of structures wherever they occur.

Genette goes on to say that, Structuralism tries to conceive structures rather than perceive them. In other words, they think they are discovering, but are actually inventing.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Christ College BA Optional English Syllabus 2007 onwards

Optional English
COURSE STRUCTURE

Semester
SUBJECT CODE
SUBJECT TITLE
HOURS
MARKS
CREDITS
I
OEN 131
British Literature: Anglo-Saxon to Early Victorian
5
100
4
II
OEN 231
British Literature: Late Victorian to the Present
5
100
4
III
OEN 331
American Literature
5
100
4
IV
OEN 431
Postcolonial Literature
5
100
4
V
OEN 531
Introduction to Literary criticism & Literary Theory
5
100
4
OEN 532
Indian Literatures in Translation
5
100
4
VI
OEN 631
World Literatures
5
100
4
OEN 642 a
OEN 642 b
OEN 642 c
Cultural Studies,
English language teaching,
Articulating woman
5
100
4

CERTIFICATE COURSES
SUB CODE
SUBJECT TITLE
SEMESTER
HOURS
CREDIT
OEN 101
Cultural Studies
I
2
2
OEN 201
Translation Studies
II
2
2
OEN 301
Semiotics
III
2
2
OEN 401
Philosophy
IV
2
2