Reading Of Literary Texts Research Articles

European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance.

Political issues and events have always acted as a catalyst on thought and art. In this pioneering study, Larry J. Reynolds argues that the European revolutions of 1848-49 quickened the American literary imagination and shaped the characters, plots, and themes of the American renaissance. He traces the impact of the revolutions on Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau, showing that the upheavals abroad both inspired and disturbed. Extraordinarily well informed and creative treatment of the influences of the 1848-49 European revolutions on writers of the American Renaissance. . . . The book is especially effective in providing a historical context for reading major writings. It demonstrates influences at work at a number of levels and presents historical narrative and subtle readings of literary texts with equal clarity. Highly recommended.- Choice

Pious Impostures and Unproven Words: The Romance of Deconstruction in Nineteenth-Century America.

Pious Impostures and Unproven Words applies deconstruction to nineteenth-century American romances and to the concept of the traditional liberal arts education. Offering new readings of such American classics as The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn, this volume shows that deconstruction is not necessarily antagonistic to traditional readings of literary texts. By establishing a clear relationship between deconstruction and the concept of a liberal arts education, Pious Impostures reveals that though deconstruction (as such) is 'new,' its most useful and usable tenets reach all the way back to the Bible and clearly overlap certain medieval and romantic ideas. Contents: Preface; Introduction; The Fact/Fiction Hierarchy Revisited; Errors of Truth: Deconstruction in The Scarlet Letter; The Subversive Lie of Expedient Truth in Pierre: Or The Ambiguities; Real Lies and Fictitious Truths in Huckleberry Finn.

On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-Understanding

In this remarkable blend of sophisticated philosophical analysis and close reading of literary texts, Richard Eldridge presents convincing argument that literature is the most important and richest source of insights in favor of historicized Kantian moral philosophy. He effectively demonstrates that only through the interpretation of narratives can we test our capacities as persons for acknowledging the moral laws as formula of value and for acting according to it. Eldridge presents an extensive new interpretation of Kantian ethics that is deeply informed by Kant's aesthetics. He defends revised version of Kantian universalism and Kantian conception of the content of morality. Eldridge then turns to literature armed not with any a priori theory but with an interpretive stance inspired by Hegel's phenomenology of self-understanding, more or less naturalized, and by Wittgenstein's work on self-understanding as ongoing narrative-interpretive activity, stance that yields Kantian results about the universal demands our nature places on itself. Eldridge goes on to present readings of novels by Conrad and Austen and poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge. In each text protagonists are seen to be struggling with moral conflicts and for self-understanding as moral persons. The route toward partial resolution of their conflicts is seen to involve multiple and ongoing activities of reading and interpreting. The result of this kind of interpretation is that such literature literature that portrays protagonists as themselves readers and interpreters of human capacities for morality is primary source for the development of morally significant self-understanding. We see in the careers of these protagonists that there can be genuine and fruitful moral deliberation and valuable action, while also seeing how situated and partial any understanding and achievement of value must remain. On Moral Personhood at once delineates the moral nature of persons; shows various conditions of the ongoing, contextualized, partial acknowledgment of that nature and of the exercise of the capacities that define it; and enacts an important way of reading literature in relation to moral problems. Eldridge's work will be important reading for moral philosophers (especially those concerned with Kant, Hegel, and issues dividing moral particularists from moral universalists), literary theorists (especially those concerned with the value of literature and its relation to philosophy and to moral problems), and readers and critics of Conrad, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen.

Personal resonance to literature: A study of remindings while reading

The theory is proposed that the feeling of personal resonance when reading literary texts arises when the reader is reminded of personal experiences from the past in which the reader had an active role. Also it is argued that readers' appreciation of literary texts can be better understood in terms of mobilization of such empirical self-knowledge than in terms of general knowledge of texts and routine sequences of action. The theory does not presuppose any vaguely defined concept of ‘self’ or invoke special mental entities to account for the phenomenon of personal resonance but deals only with the structure of a person's knowledge of past experience. An experimental study is presented, comparing remindings while reading a short-story and an expository text of equal length by means of a novel method of ‘self-probed retrospection’. It was found that the texts elicited an equal number of remindings, but in the remindings elicited by the literary text, the subject was more often an actor than an observer or receiver of information. In the memories elicited by the expository text the reader was most often a passive receiver. Furthermore, remindings occurred more often in the beginning of the texts than in the end, most pronounced in the literary text.

Information Processing and the Reading of Literary Texts

CONTROVERSY in modern literary criticism focuses not so much upon arguments about literary meaning as it does upon arguments about the legitimacy of differing critical methods and the kinds of evidence to accept in the interpretive process leading to meaning. But such arguments have remained essentially irreconcilable. No single position can ever be demonstrated correct or incorrect for the simple reason that no generally accepted standard of proof exists which can serve as the basis for impartial judgment. Adherents to different schools of critical inquiry derive their support not from their ability to point to some incontrovertible evidence in their favor, but rather from the rhetorical strength of their argumentation, the posited appropriateness of their examples, and often the volubility of their members. While this may be the tradition of scholarly inquiry in the humanities, it would seem to have reduced modern critical theory to an ideational combat zone in which the energy of discussion is expended more often in defending various sectors of the critical landscape than in direct attempts to confront the issue of how literature is understood.

The School of Hawthorne by Richard H. Brodhead (review)

Studies in American Fiction251 the non-fictional An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport (1980). Thus, one of the most admirable purposes achieved by Klinkowitz's book is that it is useful (a good Vonnegutian aim achieved by a good Vonnegut scholar). But what is more valuable in the service of these authors is that Klinkowitz's interpretations so often make one want to read or re-read many of the novels he discusses. If one has forgotten, for example, just how fine NinetyTwo in the Shade is, Klinkowitz will remind one of its power and evocativeness. Klinkowitz is working in a critical mode here that has almost no parallel in current scholarship concerning contemporary fiction. Books on the recent American novel have tended to be techmque-cum-thematic studies. That is, the techniques of the writers are tied to certain, usually epochal themes such as modernism or post-modernism, self-begetting or self-awareness, the wasteland or the garden, radical innocence or radical experience, inform or exploded form. If the metaphor of the mirror (as propounded in M. H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp) occurs in recent criticism of fiction, it is as a "silverless mirror" such as we find in Charles Caramello's excellent Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self and Postmodern American Fiction, a study that amply illustrates the tendencies noted. But there is a growing list of American critics who are, for whatever ideological reasons, concerned with realism or traditional mimesis in fiction or literature in general, including Gerald Graff, Eric Sundquist, Fredric Jameson, and a few others. By and large, however, such critics have not addressed themselves to specific contemporary American fictionists as Klinkowitz has. Thus Klinkowitz is, perhaps, once again the canary in the coal mine, testing the critical air, as he had been with Literary Disruptions. So if Klinkowitz's new book (which might have been called "The Novel of New American Manners") looks curiously like something out of the past, perhaps one should look more closely, for it may be that in it we are also seeing the future, both of our fiction and our criticism of it. Northern Illinois UniversityJames M. Mellard Brodhead, Richard H. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. 254 pp. Cloth: $24.95. Richard Brodhead's The School of Hawthorne is an important contribution to American literary history. Its assessment of Hawthorne as "the only American author always to have been part of our significant past" (p. 8) is perspicacious, lucid, provocative, and timely, part of the current critical enterprise of investigating the process of canon formation as a result of cultural mediation. Brodhead offers fresh and complex readings of Hawthorne's work as it was appropriated by Melville, Howells, and James. Carefully examining each of their evolving careers, he discusses the various ways these writers assimilated Hawthorne as they defined their own vocations and wrote their own fiction. When earlier versions of two of the ten chapters appeared in print (those on Melville and on Howells), I praised them (in American Literary Scholarship 1982) as perceptive and instructive analyses of how those writers perceived and appropriated Hawthorne. The revised versions ask and answer even larger questions about these writers' changing selfconceptions in the context of America's emerging literary traditions and attitudes toward high culture. Judging canons as "changing cultural constructions," Brodhead traces the consequences of canonical status. Hawthorne provides an example of how canons are formed and changed, and of "intraliterary" transmission of influence. Brodhead is a careful reader and an astute critic who carefully builds and supports all of his arguments. His 252Reviews readings of literary texts are rich and fresh and his speculations about Hawthorne's influence are provocative. Yet occasionally I have problems with specific interpretations as well as generalizations about Hawthorne's canonization and its effects. Examining a literary relationship mediated by friendship, Brodhead treats Hawthorne as an "enabler" for Melville both as a role model ("the writer gifted to know and speak hidden truths," p. 31) and a literary model. He traces Ahab's monomania to such obsessives as Chillingworth and Ethan Brand; he believes Pierre "organizes itself around the kind of action Melville links with Hawthorne" (p. 39...

Cognitive Processes in Reading Literary Texts: The Influence of Context, Goals and Situations

Is literary meaning amenable to an explanation within the cognitive paradigm of psychology? A convention-oriented explanation exists as opposed to an autonomous ontology of meaning. The central difficulty of explanation is its lack of empirical bases. The hypothesis that encoding—which is action and goal specific—and retrieval are activated by specific conventions and caused by different types of elaboration and inference is tested. The dependent variables were studied in a 2 × 2 free recall experiment. The hypothesis mentioned was tested in a 2 × 2 × 2 recognition experiment. The results for a cognitive conception of literary meaning are significant. The methodological and theoretical consequences are discussed.

L'effondrement des sphères dans l'Éducation sentimentale de Flaubert

« Les affaires publiques le laissèrent indifférent, tant il était préoccupé des siennes. » Description de Frédéric Moreau le jour du « Dix-huit Brumaire » de Louis Napoléon (2 décembre 1851).La question que j'aimerais examiner à travers une lecture de l'Éducation sentimentale de Flaubert est celle de l'interaction entre les niveaux documentaire, idéologique et critique, dans les rapports que le roman entretient avec la société et l'histoire. Cette question (ou cet ensemble de questions) ne peut certes épuiser l'interprétation du sens du roman, mais elle permet de poser une série significative d'interrogations relatives à la problématique d'une lecture politique et historique. Je me propose aussi de ne pas commencer par un classement hiérarchique de ces dimensions mais plutôt par une étude de leurs interactions — étude souvent négligée ou délibérément rejetée lorsqu'on présuppose l'existence d'une hiérarchie des niveaux, voire la suprématie plus ou moins grande d'un niveau sur les autres. J'envisage également de considérer les questions de forme dans le fonctionnement du texte non comme des fins autonomes en soi mais comme des éléments significatifs (aussi problématiques soient-ils) dans le cadre d'une interprétation politique et historique.

Repetition and death in Shelley's ‘Epipsychidion’: A post‐structuralist reading

Summary In response to the criticism frequently levelled against contemporary literary theory, that it disregards and devalues the literary text, this article attempts to show how post‐structuralism can feasibly be employed, vis‐a‐vis Shelley's ‘Epipsychidion’, as a strategy of reading literary texts without detracting from their enjoyment. The article first examines a few key concepts and their ramifications that together constitute the theoretical field in terms of which a post‐structuralist reading can be engaged in. While the concepts examined ‐ difference, displacement, desire, and figuration ‐ are common to most post‐structuralist writers, the importance given to, as well as the particular use of, a given concept naturally varies considerably. Having staked out the theoretical field in a necessarily cursory manner, the article offers a reading of ‘Epipsychidion’ that attempts to illustrate the poem's preoccupation with its own discursive mode. The reading attempts to show that although the poem endeavours to transcend its status as language and in so doing escape the limitations imposed on it, this endeavour must inevitably fail.

The Defense of the Incompetent Reader

T HE TERM as used by literary critics and historians is in part a modification of the notion of developed by linguists. However, the theoretical abilities attributed to the competent reader of literature are often very broad. They include not only basic abilities, such as the ability to distinguish prose from verse, fiction from nonfiction, but critical abilities as well, such as the ability to distinguish good literature from bad literature. In the following, I will argue that the critical utility of the concept of literary is only obscured by the specious appeal to the origin of that concept in linguistics. The study is in two parts. The first deals with the linguistic definition of and the attempt by Jonathan Culler to transfer the linguistic notion of to literary studies. The second approaches the problem of literary from a different perspective. Its focus is not on the competent reader, but on the incompetent reader-on whose theoretical existence our notions of the competent reader must depend, and on whose real existence much of our recent literary criticism seems to depend. I refer to two technical senses of the word competence as used in literary studies: (1) The extension of Noam Chomsky's notion of linguistic into the area of literary studies. Competence in this sense stands in opposition to performance; it represents a literary knowledge that makes any literary performance (including critical interpretation) possible. (2) Literary as a reader's expectations, or what Culler calls the set of conventions for reading literary texts (see below). This literary can be historical. Or, it can be what is required of the modern reader or critic in order for him to produce legitimate interpretations of historical or contemporary

De Rol Van Het Lezen In Het Vertaalonderwijs

A good translation from Dutch into a foreign language subsumes a variety of linguistic adjustments at the level of text and syntax. The nature of these linguistic adjustments depends on the linguistic characteristics of the text type to be translated. The linguistic characteristics of a text type can vary enormously from the source language to the target language. An analysis of three German translations of one and the same Dutch text reveals that it is very difficult to describe and formalize the nature of the linguistic adjustments and that, in consequence, they can scarcely be taught in a systematic way. This calls for an eclectic and pragmatic approach to the teaching of translation with ample consideration to be given to the reading of literary texts. Only in this way, can the apprentice translator become sufficiently well acquainted with the FL to be able to make text type decisions quickly and easily.

From Semiotic to Discursive Intertextuality: The Case of "Madame Bovary"

Over past twenty-odd years, semiotics has established itself as a powerful, rigorous and at times elegant technique for close reading of literary texts. Until recently, of course, semiotic undertaking tended to remain within text itself, leaving issue of relation between literature and society to more traditional kinds of criticism-whether of liberal or Marxist kind. In last several years, however, semiotics has begun to make some tentative moves towards coming to grips with social contextuality of literature. On one hand, some Marxist academics have attempted to use semiotics to support a critique of ideology; Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious is most interesting and successful example of this. On other hand, there has been a movement from within semiotics itself to try to define a text's social existence through elaboration of a concept of intertextuality. One of most prominent contemporary literary semioticians is Michel Riffaterre, whose recent work, which seeks to define in a methodologically fruitful way, illustrates this change in emphasis. Following a line of investigation originally suggested by Jonathan Culler,' Riffaterre argues literary texts can best be understood as specific actualizations of cultural presuppositions.2 Culler's definition of presupposition-as that which must be revealed by another, or by an effort of didoublement: of thinking from of view of other-is heavily tinged with a Hegelianism Riffaterre rejects, substituting more Kantian (or Chomskian) formulation of presuppositions as simply the implicit conditions of an explicit statement. The advantage of Riffaterre's redefinition is it guides him to look for sets of conditions rather than Culler's less easily delimited point of view. In any given instance conditions governing statements will constitute a system, and it is this system of presuppositions which Riffaterrean student of intertextuality hopes to be able to disengage from sociolect.

THE PROBLEM OF INFERRED MODALITY IN NARRATIVE

In a lecture On the 'Nature of Visions ', given in 1912 Oskar Kokoschka makes the radical phenomenological claim that 'Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed with visions'. I wish to take this view as a point of departure for a critique of a narrow, though precise, d e f i n i t i o n of meaning as found in a current theory of language and juxtapose to it a broader definition of meaning as required for the reading of literary texts and, more generally, all cultural - historical exchange.

The Importance of the Act of Reading

The question of the importance of reading is addressed by considering the ways in which experience itself is read through the interaction of the self and the world. Through examining memories of childhood, it is possible to view objects and experiences as texts, words, and letters and to see the growing awareness of the world as a kind of reading through which the self learns and changes. The actual act of reading literary texts is seen as part of a wider process of human development and growth based on understanding both one's own experience and the social world. Learning to read must be seen as one aspect of the act of knowing and as a creative act. Reading the world thus precedes reading the word and writing a new text must be seen as one means of transforming the world.

Aanvullen Van Ontbrekende Informatie - Over Het Lezen Van Literaire Teksten

Linking and integrating different parts of information in texts have frequently been the object of the psychology of reading. A lot of attention has been spent on how people infer and how they supply incomplete information. Experimental research, however, mostly has been restricted to causal and final connections in short and simple informative or narrative text samples. But in longer and complexer texts of different sorts the possibilities of connections as well as the functions of concealed information may differ, demanding different kinds of reading strategies and processes. In literature the concealing of information and even discon-nectedness have become sanctioned literary techniques. The theory of literary reception as founded by Ingarden and Iser have made the "undetermined spots" ("Unbestimmtheitsstellen") one of its fundamentals and have drawn consequences from it for the reading of literary texts. In an experiment on reading expectations with different age groups between 14 and 22, it could be shown that the perception of informational connections over longer distances and that supplying missing links increased with age. The younger subjects were reading more "linearly", mostly only using the information just read. They were less able to use or modify more remote information or to anticipate later possibilities than the older subjects. This was demonstrated with a detail from one of the short stories used in the experiment. For making such findings available for teaching aims, two types of further experimental research are necessary. It must be traced which effects different variables such as the kind of the relationship between parts of the text, the form of presentation of informational parts, temporal distance, the influence of context, have on the processing of connections. Secondly methods should be designed and tested for effectuating and speeding up the development of the processing activities.

Cognitive Mapping and the Understanding of Literature

During the past twenty years, much of the impetus for theoretical speculation in literary studies has come from non-literary disciplines. Yet, despite the intensity of this activity and the polemics associated with it, there has been relatively little attempt to elaborate a generally comprehensible explanation of how the writing and reading of literary texts relate to the more universal problem of how people orient themselves in the world where they are obliged to live. What is needed is a plausible epistemological model capable of integrating information and methodological strategies from various disciplines without contradicting the best available knowledge about how the human mind actually operates. Such a model should not be bound to the terminology or problem-setting techniques of a single discipline, nor should its applicability be restricted to the characteristic mental behavior of a single culture or ideology. The need to address this problem is particularly acute at a time when politically and intellectually conservative forces are threatening to discredit the genuine theoretical advances of the 1960's and 1970's by attacking their excesses and their limitations.' Although pluralism offers a tempting solution to the dilemma of competing interpretations, it too is ultimately unsatisfying, because, if people are to conceptualize their world and act in it, they must either choose among alternative explanations or synthesize a new one.2 A more promising point of departure might well be a serious consideration of cognitive function and its relationship to the creation and comprehension of literary texts.3 Any involvement with literature is necessarily embedded within the larger context of all human activity, and it seems plausible to assume that the same mental operations which allow people to make sense of their physical environments are also called upon when they seek to understand the verbal universes they encounter in literary texts. Furthermore, there is an undeniable carryover of information from lived experience to literature, and from literature to lived experience.4 To avoid the contradictions inherent in drawing absolute boundaries between the world of words and the

Reading in a Foreign Language: A Many Splendored Thing

ABSTRACT Reading literary texts for comprehension in a foreign language is a problem facing many teachers. This article deals with an experimental approach to reading in which the assigned text was supplemented by tapes and mimeographed sheets to provide a multi‐skill format. In a classroom situation, it was found that the experiment helped students to comprehend better and appreciate the story, while at the same time enriching their vocabulary and improving their listening comprehension.