Field Of Literary Criticism Research Articles

Is the truthfulness of a proposition verifiable through access to reference corpora?

Abstract This paper reviews Louw’s (1993 and subsequent publications) deployment of reference corpora in the light of existing philosophical and linguistic milestones when it comes to the notion of the truthfulness of a proposition. Louw (William Ernest. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Mona Baker, Gill Francis & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair, 152–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) resorts to reference corpora in order either to explicate a rhetorical device (in Louw 1993, that of irony) or to attempt to reveal the true attitude of the speaker to his/her own proposition (including instances of insincerity). Using two methods (co-selection and wildcarding), an author’s collocational patterns in context are checked against those in the reference corpus, also in context. The frequent lexical variables of grammar strings are taken to represent that string’s corpus-derived subtext. Recently, Louw’s Contextual Prosodic Theory (CPT) has revealed the mechanism of prospection, whereby the grammatical pattern in the first line of a poem anticipates by its most frequent lexical collocates the themes in the remainder of the poem (Louw, Bill & Milojkovic, Marija. 2016. Corpus stylistics as contextual prosodic theory and subtext, 176–183. Amsterdam: John Benjamins). The philosophical background of Louw’s CPT is the works of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein (Louw, William Ernest. 2010a. Collocation as instrumentation for meaning: A scientific fact. In Willie van Peer, Vander Viana & Sonia Zyngier (eds.), Literary education and digital learning: methods and technologies for humanities studies, 79–101. Hershey, PA: IGI Global and subsequent works) and could be said to be in need of further explanation and illustration. The paper discusses Louw’s take on insincerity (1993) as the speaker’s attitude to the truthfulness of her own statement from the point of view of Frege’s Sinn/Bedeutung distinction, Russell’s logical language, and Wittgenstein’s attitude to the relationship between language and reality. Since prospection may be considered objective proof of the effectiveness of Louw’s approach, an instance of prospection from a poem by Brodsky is used to show that Wittgenstein’s concern for the truthfulness of propositions may be viewed as both the guarantor and the beneficiary of Louw’s views. Additionally, the paper presents an example of prospection in the first line of a novel, Don DeLillo’s White Noise. However, other grammatical patterns in the passage studied in this paper do not contain deviations from the corpus norm, which conforms to the existing commentary on DeLillo in the field of literary criticism. The paper concludes by stating that reference corpora used inductively (Louw, William Ernest. 2017. Uneasy humour as discovery: Collocation and empathy as Whewellian consilience. Studying Humour: International Journal 4) may shed light on the speaker’s attitude to the truthfulness of their own statement.

Riviste online e ipotesi di multimedialità, l’elefante e il castello

This article aims to propose a reflection on the impact of open access publications in the field of literary criticism and comparative literature. The case study proposed is the publishing experience of the Open Access Journal «Elephant & Castle».

РЕЦЕНЗІЯ НА МОНОГРАФІЮ М. ЗУЄНКО «МІФ У ЛІТЕРАТУРІ АНГЛІЙСЬКОГО БАРОКО»

The monograph “Myth in the Literature of English Baroque” by Dr Maryna Zuienko addresses important questions related to key mythopoetic paradigms in a range of lyrical, epic and dramatic literature written during the English Baroque, with a focus on works by writers such as John Milton, Francis Beaumont, George Herbert and John Bunyan. As such, it constitutes a valuable addition to the fi eld of literary criticism in Ukraine.

La construcción del significado en la experiencia estética

Based on the theoretical proposals of Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser in the field of literary criticism, this article states that the void is constitutive of every work of art, and therefore it is possible to consider the work of art, in its different possible forms, as a mixture of indetermination and explicit meaning. This allows to define a common mechanism of meaning formation that acts in the different artistic forms.

چه‌مكی ئه‌ده‌ب و ڕه‌خنه‌ی ئه‌ده‌بی‌ له‌تێڕوانینه‌كانی ( كامیل حه‌سه‌ن به‌سیر)دا.

ABSTRACT
 The current study entitled The Concept of Literature and Literary Criticism in Kamil Hassan Basirs’ Views” is a critical study that deals with Kamil Hassan Basirs’ literary views and criticism as far as theoretical basis is concerned. Therefore, the study revolves around what is called ( critical criticism). The purpose behind choosing his works is related to his well- informed knowledge regarding literature in general and criticism in particular. Furthermore, it serves to be a scientific reflection on the works of a treasury and outstanding critic in the country considering that his works have not been paid much attention within the field of literary criticism as well as in an academic setting.
 The aim behind this study is to review and evaluate, on one hand, Basirs’ views which have a remarkable position within literary essays in general and critical essays in particular. On the other hand, his views carry his own forms and distinguishing features. For this reason, the researcher has found it necessary to take his views into consideration under the concept critical criticism.
 The method of the study is analytical descriptive. It consists of two main parts. The first part sheds some light on Basirs’ views regarding poetry, poets and specifying the role and the participation of Kurdish literature in Kurdish society. The second part is devoted to the terms and concepts concerning criticism in Basirs’ viewpoints. It also studies the qualifications of the critic and the requirements of the scientific criticism. The paper ends with the conclusion in which some important points are concluded.

LEARNING FROM BRISBANE: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND THE PROMISE OF EMPATHY

Psychoanalysis has no shortage of theorists who see psychoanalysis as unique and who regard efforts to draw from academic disciplines as fanciful. Contemporary self psychology has been comparatively more receptive to adjacent disciplines. This paper discusses what self psychology can learn from the field of literary criticism about addressing the experience of political and social otherness. Using the debates arising from the 2017 Brisbane Literary Festival, it will explore how social, political, and cultural identities might affect our ability to understand the lives of those whose identities we do not share. It explores the historical reluctance of psychoanalysis to address issues of identity and otherness in theory and clinical practice, as well as the importance of the “relational turn” in overcoming these theoretical limitations. The paper will explore aspects of self psychology, including the empathic listening stance and specificity theory, that help the mental health profession avoid the central literary challenges raised in the Brisbane debates and will suggest that some of Kohut’s central ideas about selfobject experience may need to be revised or elaborated more fully to address the clinical and policy implications of engaging with political, social, and cultural otherness especially when it entails devaluation.

Antonio Candido: intérprete do Brasil

O objetivo da presente proposta é investigar a contribuição do pensador Antonio Candido como um intérprete do Brasil. Geralmente associado tão somente ao campo da crítica literária, Candido tem profícua produção na área do pensamento social brasileiro. Sua trajetória o habilita como um autor engajado e com um projeto de nação para o Brasil. As credenciais do autor são inúmeras, porém será dado destaque à sua produção no campo das ciências sociais, tais como, por exemplo, seu texto intitulado “Radicalismos”; o já clássico prefácio para o livro “Raízes do Brasil” de Sérgio Buarque de Holanda e sua tese de doutoramento “Parceiros do Rio Bonito”. A pesquisa irá conjugar fontes primárias com referenciais bibliográficos sobre o tema em questão.

O perigo da leitura literária: questões para o campo da psicanálise

Starting from a scenario composed of illustrations about the danger of reading in the field of social imagery, this paper, enrolled between psychoanalysis and literature, aims to highlight questions about the effects of literary reading. Of theoretical nature, the present work is based on considerations of literary criticism, on the one hand, and, on Freudian metapsychology, on the other. In the field of literary criticism, authors such as Jauss and Iser, who emphasize aesthetic reception and the effects of the text, support our hypothesis that the literary work requests the reader to a creative participation during reading. In the field of psychoanalysis, Freud supports our supposition that the aesthetic effect can also be thought from the problematic of the sublimation. Considering the implication of sublimation from the benign and iatrogenic consequences of literary creation, we questioned whether reading would serve as a remedy or poison for the reader.

READING THE DEAD WITH W.G. SEBALD

Subject to the ruthless accountancy of the neoliberal university, the humanities are under increasing pressure to make a case for why they count. This article focuses on how the field of literary criticism can advance a form of reading that destabilises neoliberalism’s bedrock: the autonomous subject. This form of reading requires closely scrutinising modes of literary interpretation that implicitly privilege the neoliberal account of ethics, which reduces responsibility to a matter of autonomous individuals calculating their culpability. In turn, this form of reading carefully attends to texts that invoke a model of Levinasian ethical responsibility which is constituted through our relations with others. Using W.G. Sebald’s work The Emigrants as a case study, I show how encounters with the deaths of others can invoke the relational indebtedness that is both inherent to the subject’s constitution and the basis of its responsibility for others. Through affirming a model of ethics founded on relationality and offering a mode of reading that can attend to such an ethics, literary criticism provides us with the opportunity to engage with our world anew. In the place of autonomous subjects, we discover creatures of relationality who emerge as indebted to, attuned to, and responsible for the living.

Deconstruction: A Cornucopia of Esoteric Meanings

This paper sets out to explore Deconstruction with view at clarifying its role in the field of literary criticism. As such, the paper traces the philosophical roots of deconstruction in the works of Frederick Nietzsche up to Jacque Derrida, among other contributors. The paper also dwells on the mechanism of deconstructive reading of text, especially its deviation from the structuralist approach. A particular emphasis is placed on the employment of deconstruction in the feminist canon, through paying attention to the deconstructive feminist views of notable feminist critics like Helen Cixous, Luce Irigary, among others. Finally, the paper surveys some of the critique made against the deconstructive approach and the defence made in return.

Poetry of the Chinese Diaspora: A Carnival Sense of the World

ABSTRACTThis essay examines poetry of the Chinese diaspora in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of literary carnival. At the heart of Bakhtin’s theory lies a vision of literature as comprising various forces in a process of constant shifts and movements that confront a canonical centre. Chinese diaspora poetry, long understood as a marginal literary production in North America, presents an interesting case for our examination of the epistemic preoccupations in the field of literary criticism. What we need in the study of Chinese diaspora poetry is a carnivalistic mode of thinking, or rather unthinking, which is not subject to aesthetic and ideological ‘assimilation from monologic positions.’ Starting from a marginal location, Chinese diaspora poetry has been undergoing a process in which it slowly legitimates the existence of its own styles against the limiting ideological horizons. Moreover, as the notion of carnival suggests, Chinese diaspora poetry itself is not pure or monolithic, but rather multivalent and polyglot; and for the same reason, a ‘carnival sense of the world,’ which accommodates heteroglossical and heterogeneous performances, inscribes a poetic affirmation of cultural difference that allows Chinese diaspora poets to achieve self-definition and self-validation.

Analysis on the Application of Intertextuality and Context Theory in Humorous Discourses

Intertextuality, although emerged in the field of literary criticism, attracts scholars’ much attention in discourse analysis in the field of linguistics. It has certain practical significance in analyzing law documents, advertisements, academic papers, news reports and other types of discourses. Humor, as a pervasive phenomenon in human society and an interdisciplinary research subject, has attracted scholars’ much attention from different fields. This paper aims to explore how intertextual resources are appropriately applied in humorous discourses. As intertextuality at the same time brings at least two contexts of each text, context theory will further help to analyze how intertextual relations in certain context lead to humorous effect.

Open Access e riviste: prime riflessioni. Il caso «Enthymema»

This article aims to propose a number of initial reflections on the impact of open access publications in the field of literary criticism and comparative literature.Starting from Paola Castellucci’s recent publication (Carte del nuovo mondo. Banche dati e Open Access, 2017), the article will discuss the concepts of “ownership” of the intellectual product and the editorial models of academic publications. These points for reflection are also “put to the test” for an Open Access online journal. The first publishing experience is «Enthymema» which opens the dialogue in the voice of its Editor-in-Chief, Stefania Sini.

Therapeutic Criticism

A therapeutic impulse could be said to stand behind two distinctive responses to ideological criticism that have formed in the field of literary criticism over the past few decades. The first response is best characterized as an ascesis that willfully reduces the methodological field; the second response promotes a sensitized understanding of critical subjectivity under duress, one in need of repair or mood enhancement. Michel Foucault's turn from the analysis of disciplinary power to practices of the self serves as the model for the first response, one that is modest, method based, and focused on the cultivation of ethos by the practitioner. The other model, more emphatically and avowedly therapeutic, is provided by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential turn from paranoid reading to reparative reading. Sedgwick's model crucially raises the broad question of how different critical methods imagine the relation between the lived experience of subjects and the larger systems they inhabit, which is of central interest to the genre of the novel as well. This essay aims to explore the relation between psychology and ideological or systems analysis in the history of criticism, paying particular attention to the new interest in D. W. Winnicott and to the divergent ideological affinities—liberal versus radical—of various psychological frameworks.

Women Writers of Gabon: Literature and Herstory. By Cheryl Toman.

In this new study Cheryl Toman contextualizes the historical, socio-cultural, and political settings that have delayed the visibility of Gabonese women's writing in the field of literary criticism. Taking us three decades back in time, Toman reveals the prevalence of women in the Gabonese literary scene through the fictional works of Justine Mintsa, Honorine Ngou, Sylvie Ntsame, and Angèle Rawiri, among others. Examining their novels, youth literature, and youth activism in their communities, Toman demonstrates the feminist vein in which these Gabonese women write. This is observed through daring themes (such as tribalism, prostitution, infertility, homosexuality, and third gender) that expose female characters having to negotiate complex issues of identity, sexuality, oppressive aspects of African tradition, and Westernization. These subjects are examined through critical readings of African feminism and Western radical feminism in order to expound the ways in which these writers provoke transnational and transcultural discussions on issues of race, gender, sex, and class. A very interesting segment of Toman’s study resides in a rare exploration of the role and importance of the Fang culture in Gabonese women’s writing. This extensive examination of a non-archival system of ephemeral and indecipherable transmissions from Gabon (and surrounding areas) echoes the notable work of performance studies scholar Diana Taylor, by stressing the ways in which the traditional ‘performatic repertoire’ (The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. xvii and 4) makes us move away from an imperialistic frame of reference that locates the material (tangible) at the top of the line of dominance of Western logic. The traditional repertoire is thus analysed as a valuable form of knowledge (stretching from oral tales of the Fang and myènè, Mvet (epic oral literature), Fang myth and spirituality, birth and funeral rituals); it allows Toman to contend that these authors proceed to a literary decolonization of the African francophone novel. By elucidating their feminist rewriting of the Fang traditions (conventionally dominated by men), Toman guides our appreciation of the works and critical thoughts of these Gabonese women writers. Her scholarship contributes to recent critical works in the fields of literary and cultural studies on Afro-Diasporic traditional practices, bringing to the fore what Jeannine Murray-Román termed ‘performance events as ekphrases’ (Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), p. 3). We also observe how the ‘performatic repertoire’ illustrates concerns and solidarity among various ethnic groups. Toman intersects genres and cultural and geographical boundaries by putting these Gabonese texts in rich conversation with the works of various critics and writers of the African Diaspora. For instance, the critical feminist dialogue with the works of Leopold Sedar Senghor (his poem ‘Femme noire’), Mabik-ma-Kombil (on storytelling), Werewere Liking (on the use of Bassa culture), and Berthrand Matoko (on issues of queerness) holds compelling comparative studies. While an in-depth conversation between Chantal Magalie Mbazoo-Kassa’s literary works with those of Mintsa and Rawiri would have been desirable, the book nonetheless remains a timely, much-needed, and resourceful study of Gabonese women's writing.

The Concept of Ideology in Marxist Literary Criticism

This paper attempts an exploration of the development of the Marxist literary theory in general and the concept of ideology in particular. Showing the significant role this theory plays in the field of literary criticism, the paper focuses on remarkable Marxist figures, explores their most notable works, and sheds light on their contributions to the theory and the field of literary criticism. For this purpose, the paper starts with basic Marxist principles of reading literature set by Marx and Engels and examines the changes that occurred with other critics, mainly Althusser, Jameson, and Eagleton in their attempts to show the importance of ideology in explaining literature and understanding its backgrounds, goals, and methods. Thus, the methodology will include an historical overview, shedding light on early Marxist perspectives, comparing and contrasting the contributions and adjustments added by remarkable Marxist thinkers, and illustrating by examples of literary texts and how they are seen and analyzed by these Marxist scholars.

Atlantic Aesthesis: Books and Sensus Communis in the New World

Atlantic AesthesisBooks and Sensus Communis in the New World Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (bio) I take the aesthetic to concern the formation of communities of sense—communities in which consensus about the value of sensory information (such as judgments regarding beauty) binds people together. This definition of the aesthetic draws on but departs from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who describes the aesthetic in terms of “sensus communis” or common sense. By “sensus communis” Kant does not mean common sense in its vernacular meaning so much as sensing in common—or shared sensation and, importantly, shared judgment regarding that sensation. For Kant, such judgments have universal validity: on my reading, however, the shared terrain of aesthetic value is one that creates community (as well as exclusions from it) rather than one that emerges from it.1 For this reason, the formation of a sensus communis should be understood as an ongoing process (rather than a singular event) and aesthetic judgment, in turn, must be understood as far from universal. This account of the procedural force of the aesthetic is one that leads me to choose the term aesthesis over aesthetic in my title: I use the term aesthesis to signal an activity (of judgment, of shared sensation and meaning making, of community formation) rather than to remark upon the quality of an object or experience. With respect to the early Atlantic world, this emphasis (on process) has particular relevance: from 1492 forward, the Atlantic world was a scene of violent encounter and contested community formation among indigenous Americans, Europeans, and enslaved Africans. The genocidal history of European settler colonialism in the Americas and the development of an Atlantic economy based on the stolen and coerced labor of enslaved Africans form the signal scenes of Atlantic history. But in the mix with the violence of imperial domination is a complex and varied history of material negotiations between peoples that took [End Page 367] place at the ragged edges of language and culture. In this history we find not just a “middle ground” (to draw on Richard White’s valuable account of temporary shared sovereignty between European settler colonials and native peoples), but something more robust and sustaining—the aesthesis of survivance, and the generative and creative force of aesthesis in the shadow of imperial violence.2 In what follows, I explore instances of what I describe as “aesthesis from below” in the Americas—aesthesis grounded in the material and sensate conditions of living in shared terrain—rather than aesthetics from above, or the imposition of a set of tastes that colonize subjects by way of bodily sentience and norms of civility.3 More complexly, I mean to suggest that the aesthetic is never wholly distinct from aesthesis—from the process by which sensation becomes a site of shared meaning and, conversely, the process by which sensation shears away from the constraints of collective sense into materiality as well. And thus aesthetics from above necessarily trades in aesthesis from below, despite claims (or allegations) to the contrary. What interests me, then, is the tipping point that the aesthetic names, or better put, the tipping itself involved in the process of aesthesis—an oscillation between the material and the formal, the ontic and the mimetic, the subjective and the collective. The stakes of this argument with respect to critical discussions of aesthetics and Atlantic literary studies are worth spelling out. The critical turn in the past three decades toward cultural and historicist studies largely set aside evaluative aesthetic modes of literary analysis. The “greatness” of a literary work (an evaluation that, in turn, defined a constrained canon of works judged to partake in such greatness) ceased to determine the worthiness of an object of study; rather, the cultural currency of literary texts and objects was itself the subject of attention. Two corollary developments were associated with this turn: first, a vastly expanded canon of texts became legitimate objects of study and second, aesthetic evaluation was cast as ideologically suspect—the servant of an elitist agenda aimed at abstraction from and obfuscation of the historical and political realities of the world.4 In the field of literary criticism, then, aesthetics are not infrequently associated...

The consistency and diversification in the literary research and criticism of the author Lê Đình Kỵ

Lê Đình Kỵ was a talented author born a great literary critic; his sharp sense and his free spirit intertwined interestingly to create his distinctively style. Although Lê Đình Kỵ made his most contributions to the field of literary criticism, it was the artist sense that integrated into his works. Being both a scholar and an artist, taking both the academic and literary approaches, Lê Đình Kỵ was able to “balance” well in literary studies. In regard to poetry criticism, the hidden artist inside Le was totally released. His exquisite talent was sublimated.

Giner de los Ríos, crítico literario

El artículo ofrece un repaso por las principales aportaciones de Francisco Giner de los Ríos en el ámbito de la crítica, la historia y la estética literarias, tarea que desempeñó fundamentalmente en la Revista Meridional de Granada entre 1862 y 1863 y en algunos periódicos de Madrid. Esos trabajos, sumados a otros posteriores, conformaron su primer libro, Estudios literarios (1866), que tuvo una segunda edición ampliada en 1876, con el título de Estudios de literatura y artes. Después de 1876, Giner de los Ríos abandonó los estudios literarios, aunque regresó a ellos poco después, cuando publicó sus «Cartas literarias» en El Pueblo Español. Esta nueva serie de textos apareció a finales de 1878 y principios de 1879, y suponen su última aportación a la crítica literaria. Entre los autores de los que se ocupa, destacan Ventura Ruiz Aguilera, a quien le dedica cuatro artículos, y Benito Pérez Galdós.

Indigenous Literatures

Indigenous Literatures Emma LaRocque, Professor One of the first classes I taught for the Department of Native Studies (in 1977) was a course called “Canadian Native Literature.” I well remember the Dean questioning whether we had sufficient literary material to justify teaching it. I argued then that it was just a matter of time before the field would blossom. It turns out that by the 1990s “the field” was bursting at the seams with new and seasoned Aboriginal authors producing novels, political commentaries, autobiographies, oral traditions, short stories, plays, poetry, and so forth. These works exuded indigeneity in their highly crafted resistance aesthetics, challenging old literary conventions and theorizing their own experiences and traditions, and inspiring a whole new generation of Aboriginal writers, as well as a whole new field of literary criticism, cultural production, and postcolonial theory-making. To understate a virtual literary revolution, Indigenous literatures have dramatically changed the literary, cultural, and theoretical landscape of English studies in Canada. Emma LaRocque, Professor Native Studies University of Manitoba Copyright © 2015 Association of Canadian College and University Teachers