The Study of Literature as a Systematic Disciplinary Practice. Elementary Subjects Center Series No. 7 (original) (raw)

Th eory of Literature

Th eory of Literature t h e ope n ya l e c ou r se s se r i e s is designed to bring the depth and breadth of a Yale education to a wide variety of readers. Based on Yale's Open Yale Courses program (http:// oyc .yale .edu), these books bring outstanding lectures by Yale faculty to the curious reader, whether student or adult. Covering a wide variety of topics across disciplines in the social sciences, physical sciences, and humanities, Open Yale Courses books off er accessible introductions at aff ordable prices. viii Contents Preface xi Marxist attention devoted to textual surface in En gland, with Simon Jarvis, Keston Sutherland, and others micro-reading in the spirit of found er J. H. Prynne, which has only reached American shores as yet in the shape of their promising students. Literary sociology is an emerging fi eld, but my discussion of John Guillory (and mention of Pierre Bourdieu in that context) is not supplemented by any discussion of the important work, for example, of the sociolinguist Michael Silverstein. A formative infl uence on Silverstein is the semiotics of C. S. Peirce; and it must be said that as neo-pragmatist views like those of Knapp and Michaels (discussed here) converge today with attention to the social and cultural circulation of literary knowledge and taste that is modeled on Jürgen Habermas's concept of the "public sphere" even more than on Bourdieu's concept of "habitus," something like a Peirceian tradition of the socially indexical sign has emerged in rivalry with the Saussurian tradition to which these lectures devote most of their attention. A general introduction to the Peirceian tradition has yet to be written, and I hope it will quickly appear. Th e reader will fi nd a few thoughts on this topic at the beginning of my twenty-fi ft h chapter. Th eories of the circulation of knowledge other than those of Foucault, discussed here, and Antonio Gramsci, mentioned in passing, have recently carried scholars into the interrelated fi elds of systems theory (notably Niklas Luhmann), history of media, remediation, and media theory (the classics in this fi eld being works by Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler), and more specifi cally within these last fi elds the history of the book (as in the work of Peter Stallybrass and David Kastan). All of this and more, then, remains to be covered in another course, and another book. Th e challenge of acknowledging my intellectual debts-my personal ones, I mean, as the written ones fi nd their way for the most part into the bibliographical essay-is overwhelming. I can name here only a few of the people whose conversation and teaching over the years have shaped my understanding of the subject, whether they knew it or not:

English Language and Literature

Lecture -16 The Augustans Age Hello, and welcome back to NP-TEL, The National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning, a joint venture of Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Science. As we are aware, these lectures offer students in the IITs and other engineering colleges, the role of humanities and social sciences is quite significant, in the curriculum of engineering students. Why literature; we may ask that why it is so important for the study of engineering. We think that a course on humanities and social sciences, sensitizes a student's vocabulary; not only that, and interface between society, between shared individual experiences and ultimately, the aesthetic proportions of sharing other experiences, and individual thoughts and ultimately, leads to a different interface of studies. Well, I am Krishna Barua. I have been teaching English at the department of humanities and social science at IIT, Guwahati, and we are presently, in the lecture series; language and literature, and this is module 3 after series title history of English literature, and we are in lecture 4 of this module titled, The Augustans age. Let us recap of what we have done in lecture 1. (Refer Slide Time: 01:55)

Language and Literature ISSN: (2394-1642) 1 | P a g e International Research Journal of Humanities

2016

English, being a language of knowledge construction and knowledge extraction, is a requisite for EFL learners in hi-tech digital era to learn and be skilled in, besides, to live with the expectations of the altered scholastic and corporate ethos in order to nurture, sophisticate and hone them. Language instructors also have to perform an arduous task planning various strategies and methodologies for EFL learners to make their teaching result-oriented. This paper explores the possibilities of improving skills of EFL learners through teaching critical appreciation of literature. In addition, it discusses the critical plan of judging literature and how an instructor assists EFL learners in selecting a specific literary genre to appreciate equipping them with characteristics of a good critic. Learning strategies are discussed which could be guided by the instructors to the learners to imply for successful language learning. In addition, the paper discourses how the language skills are i...

Literature Is Us and We Are Literature: Global and Universal Perspective

International Journal of Culture and History , 2023

This paper takes into view literature on a global scale and from throughout time to investigate what we can say about its general and specific relevance for human society. The issue raised here pertains not only to the relevance of literature per se, but specifically to the question of how it relates to us as human beings, defining us in endless ways. In order to illustrate the central points addressed in this paper, numerous examples from the Middle Ages to the modern world are drawn from, such as Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich (ca. 1190), Don Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor (1335), Bertolt Brecht's ballads, and Robert Frost's modern poetry. The conclusion emphasizes that the critical function of literature in all human societies cannot be overestimated. At the risk of preaching to the converted, here we are confronted with the ultimate challenge in the Humanities once again. Insofar as literature has always mirrored, or engaged with, the fundamental issues in human life, we can establish its function as life-determining in philosophical, religious, political, ethical, or moral terms.

What Can Literature Do? From Literary Sociocriticism to a Critique of Social Discourse

Yale Journal of Criticism, 2004

We need to return to the eternal question concerning the "being" and the specificity of literature, but this time we need to recast it. Instead of "What is literature?" 1 we might ask "What does literature do and, from that moment onward, what can literature do?" Ever since the Decadents and the Symbolists of the s, we have been offered the dull replies of aesthetes, which was:"Literature doesn't do anything, and it can't do anything, thank God!" Furthermore, according to the poetry of Edmond Rostand, which has made a comeback in contemporary literary commentary in the form of postmodern paraphrases, a thing is even more beautiful when it's useless. 2 What does literature do, what does it work on, and, at the end of the day, given what it does, what does it know? What does it know that is not known as well, or better, in other knowledge domains? 3 Does it know something about other sectors of language production, but in a mode that is specific to it, that is, with peculiar cognitive instruments? For instance, does it know something about knowledge that is permeated with images (Bildhaftigkeit), an idea that György Lukàcs employs to distinguish literature from scientific knowledge even as he situates both on the same level, thereby rendering one a complement to the other? To take on such questions is not the same thing as posing the following, seemingly related question:"What can literature be used for?" It is by no means an a priori that this literary knowledge, if there is such a thing, should be usable in a practical or a positive sense, nor that it should be redeemable for some purpose or another. With all due respect to Rostand and his Aiglon, such negative determinations are not to be synonymous with "useless." Text sociocriticism interrogates the work of textualization (the miseen-texte) even as it refuses "formal" aestheticism and nihilism that conma r c a n g e n o t   