Literature on ‘Literary Mode’: Tracing Generic Markers in Oedipus Rex, Othello and Duchess of Malfi

Abstract

“Literature is a matter of intentionality; the mode of appropriation by our consciousness. A text has only literary potential, which must be activated by the reader for literature to happen” (Barthes). In his essay, From Work to Text, Barthes argues that the relation between the writer, reader and observer is changed by movement from work to text. A work assumes the quality of text on performing the event of reading. Extra conceptual resources of language is the primary feature on the basis of which a literary work can be identified. Literature works on the basic principle of extra conceptuality. It is the system by which a word can get multiple interpretations, in contrast to the concept of conceptuality, whereby a specific word is attributed to an abstract concept by means of shared convention.