Social Function Of Literature Research Articles

“A Most Important Instrument”: Women, Literature, and the Social Good in 1790s Dublin

ABSTRACT This essay addresses distinctions between Irish and British literary theory and writing on education to sketch an intellectual tradition in which women’s education and public roles were accepted, even promoted. This tradition informs Lady Morgan’s representation of intellectual women, particularly in her later writings, as “instruments” of social change. Eighteenth-century Irish arguments for women’s intellectual equality, at least one so prominent that it was repeatedly republished and excerpted in periodicals, aligned with nationalist arguments at the end of the century which prioritized widespread education as a foundation for progress, peace, and self-government. Irish literary theory around 1800, particularly in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, resonated with such concerns about the collective rather than the individual, stressing community and collaboration on terms consistent with Dublin circles’ practices. The social function of literature was also understood in collective rather than expressive terms and thus those who shape events are characterized by Morgan, Preston, and others as “instruments” rather than leaders. These intellectual trends and cultural practices provide a key context not only for Morgan’s later writings about women as politically active but also for a distinctive feature of Irish Romanticism more broadly: the centrality of women writers.

Reframing “Literature as Equipment for Living:” Kenneth Burke's Theory and the Social Function of Literature

This article delves into Kenneth Burke's seminal essay, "Literature as Equipment for Living," presenting a fresh perspective on literary criticism that underscores the pragmatic, societal, and political roles of literature. Burke posits that literature functions as an active agent, offering viable courses of action in response to worldly matters. Departing from traditional analyses of form and structure, Burke advocates for classifying works based on shared strategies for addressing situations. He contends that literature acts as a navigational tool, aiding in comprehension and interpretation of the world while urging readers to engage with texts for insights and inspiration in confronting life's challenges. Burke's viewpoint underscores the subjective nature of language, reflecting our individual experiences and perspectives on the world. His critical methodology advocates for a comprehensive and nuanced approach to literary critique, expanding the horizons of scholarly considerations.

Lucien Descaves on Trial: Naturalism, Sexual Politics and Patriotism in the Third Republic

Abstract: This article examines the 1890 trial of young Naturalist writer Lucien Descaves, in which he was charged with, and later acquitted for, "injures à l'armée" and "outrages aux bonnes mœurs" following the publication of his antimilitary novel Sous-Offs (1889). I argue that literary style dominates the trial, not least because one of its key figures was an Idealist novelist with a fervent hatred of Naturalism. The article situates the trial in the context of debates about the social function of literature in the Third Republic and, crucially, anxieties about the reading habits of the peuple . I show that the trial offers a privileged lens for understanding the pressure Naturalism was under at this point in the century, insofar as it brings together, and then stages in the form of debate, the many social and cultural flashpoints touched on by the novel and how they might be represented in fiction.

Powieść o formowaniu czy formująca? „Bildungsroman” w gorsecie czechosłowackiej normalizacji

The article discusses the variety of Bildungsroman novels for children and young adults in the context of Czech literature in the period of normalisation in the 1970s and 1980s. At the genesis of literature for an adult audience (understood as an autotelic creation) are the audience’s expectations, motives and attitudes. The construction of the literary character also corresponds to this. In the case of works for the non-adult audience, the social functions of literature are somewhat reversed. From its inception, literature for children and young people has been closely connected to its educational function — it has therefore fulfilled utilitarian functions. The author aims to show how the Bildungsroman, by its character, i.e., as a novel about the formation of a character, was quickly adopted by writers of this type of prose. Based on its schema, a variant of the late Socialist Realist Bildungsroman developed, not so much showing the formation of the main character as (on the basis of the protagonist) normalising some ideals for the young viewer. The normalising Bildungsroman also brought about a new type of character, whom — in his (now forgotten) article — Jaroslav Voráček called “the sanitary character.”

Sociological Aspects in Siti Nurbaya's Novel by Marah Rusli

There is a close relationship between literature and life because the social function of literature is how it involves itself in people's lives. The purpose of this research is to find out the sociology of literature, which examines it through three contexts, first, the social context of the author; second, literature as a mirror of society; third, the social function of literature in the novel Siti Nurbaya by Marah Rusli. The method in this research uses descriptive qualitative. In this case, the writer first describes the social context of Marah Rusli's novel Siti Nurbaya, then analyzes the content of the novel and then looks at the relationship between the problems in the novel, and then adjusts it to socio-cultural conditions. The results of the analysis show that Siti Nurbaya's novel, in terms of the author's social context, that in Siti Nurbaya's novel, is based on the bad experience of the author, Marah Rusli. Siti Nurbaya's novel reflects the many problems of society in Siti Nurbaya's era, such as polygamy, pride in nobility, customs in Padang, child sacrifices for their parents, and so on. Meanwhile, there is a social function of literature in the novel, which includes rebellion, literary works as entertainment, and entertainingly teaching something.

Literature as a Social Mirror and a Cultural Tool For Protest

In a letter to Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels confessed that he learned more from Honore de Balzac about the French society than from all the books of all the historians, economists and statisticians of the time put together. Literary art has always presenteditself as a social mirror, exposing the reflection of the society in which the writer was inserted, but to what actual extent can Literature reveal and interpret human behavior and society? To what extent can it expose, condemn, and be the engine of its transformation?As Bakhtin's conception argues, the social function of literature as a space for critical reflection, makes, particularly the works that bring the tendency of realistic theory, raise the analysis and weighting of the subject in relation to the society in which they areinserted. This, alongside with the obvious fact that literature is part of the culture of a given society and, therefore, it reveals social patterns that have been considered relevant, and which will help to decipher its mutations, progress and ways of manifesting culture, reveals the value of Literature as an instrument of the social sciences since it allows us to understand what the primary factors of a society are and how they affect it. In this paper I will explain in more detail how literature does then reflect the environment the author lives in and, therefore, its society, to the point where you can identify political, social, economic and several other factors, and use it as a tool to expose and protest many injustices, both if narrating the present or the past, as it is never too late to give a voice to the wronged.

Popcretos e a ressemantização icônica da poesia

O artigo discute as transformações ocorridas na poesia concreta paulistana a partir do contexto cultural dos anos 1960, quando a função social da literatura, em um país de passado colonial e em desenvolvimento, ganha força no meio cultural brasileiro. Nosso objetivo – por meio da leitura das reflexões de artistas que participaram do movimento, bem como de estudos críticos acerca do assunto – é explicitar as transformações do concretismo enfocando, sobretudo, os popcretos de Augusto de Campos. Essa obra não só demonstra um diálogo com seu tempo, mas também a antecipação de características do campo literário e artístico nacional em fins do século XX e início do XXI.

MODERNISASI PENDIDIKAN: POTRET DINAMIKA SOSIAL PENDIDIKAN PESANTREN DALAM NOVEL NEGERI 5 MENARA KARYA AHMAD FUADI

This research discusses the pesantren (Islamic boarding school) education system's reflection in the novel entitled Negeri 5 Menara. The research method used is qualitative in the sociology of literature approach. It is used to cover up the author's social context, literature as a reflection of society, and literature's social function. The study results in the author's social context show that author creativity is motivated by the author's experience and social construction of the author's ideology. In literature as a reflection of society, it described some similarities are found between Pondok Madani and Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor (PMDG) in implementing a modern education system. It shows that the novel is a representation of social conditions. Modernity in the education system at the pesantren includes jasus [spy], the strict of time discipline, discipline in dress, mudhaharah (speech in three languages), memorization of Arabic vocabulary, use of foreign languages (Arabic and English), a system of admission with selection, and extracurricular activities. In the social function of literature, there are several responses from readers in assessing the novel Negeri 5 Menara's benefits. The author's contribution in giving a message to readers is focused on the function of socio-educationalism.

Emotion in ethics, rhetoric, and the creative process: The tragedy of Coetzee’s woman warrior

ABSTRACTWhat is the social function of literature? What new relationships between the ivory tower and the surrounding world, between literature and ethics, are emerging? How do they affect the human/animal, male/female, reason/emotion binaries? Can literature transcend these simplistic dualisms and “transform consciousness by mobilizing” emotions? Can emotive criticism and early feminist theory help literature bridge the gap between the academy and applied ethics? These questions have been revived by the emergence of international research projects on emotions and animals (Bump 57–62, 79n1). One of the most important literary contributions to both projects has been Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. His protagonist, Costello, attempts a kind of academic activism that is inspired, but apparently ultimately defeated, by anger, an anger particularly obvious in Coetzee’s revisions of his manuscripts, published here for the first time. The revolt of Costello’s audience and Coetzee’s readers against his/her attempts to reveal and resolve some of the ethical failures of factory farming, “research” universities, and the climate crisis can be illuminated by Aristotle’s, Brecht’s, and Burkhert’s theories of tragedy.

Northrop Frye and American Fiction by Claude LeFustec

Reviewed by: Northrop Frye and American Fiction by Claude LeFustec Mervyn Nicholson Claude LeFustec. Northrop Frye and American Fiction. University of Toronto Press, 2015. 238 pp. $55.00. Tackling Big Americans Northrop Frye is so remote now that a kind of introduction is needed when discussion of Frye comes up. Claude LeFustec's study of Frye and American literature is unusual in its use of Frye. At one time, literary studies regularly drew upon the ideas of Northrop Frye, but that is not so common today. Frye's ideas—his concepts of imagination, myth, the social function of literature, archetype, metaphor, mode (literary history), genre, his approach to plot construction, and his study of cosmology—all were once familiar reference points. Then deconstruction swept all that away, as it also swept away structuralism and pretty much everything else. Beginning at Yale, the Vatican of English studies, deconstruction became suddenly hegemonic, the new law for everyone, especially graduate students. But power is fickle, and the New Historicism swept deconstruction away in turn—deconstruction in its more Neanderthal formations, of the "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" or "tout autre est tout autre" variety, at least. Gender and postcolonial studies surged along with New Historicism—a relief after the sameness of deconstruction in its extreme phase. But Frye's ideas have actually never had the proper hearing they deserve, because they were—are—caricatured and reduced to caricature. Something about Frye's ideas made academics uncomfortable from the beginning. One has the sense that he was driven out, not just left behind like an error that has been corrected. One area of Frye that has slowly made a comeback—or first arrival, since it never had much attention—is the late Frye, the Frye of his Bible [End Page 205] books in particular.1 And it is this Frye that Professor LeFustec is interested in and that she draws upon for her thoughtful discussion of work by canonic American novelists (Hawthorne, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Morrison). This Frye is the Frye of "interpenetration," "excluded initiatives," "otherness of spirit," and above all of "kerygma"—concepts that LeFustec draws upon. This late Frye sounds religious and deals with belief and responds, fairly directly, to the more nihilistic anxieties of postmodernism. I say that these parts of Frye sound religious, because in so many ways "religion" is a misleading category to attach to Frye's thought, and LeFustec notes her caution about the religion label. Frye knew a lot about religion, but he was not a "believer" in the usual sense (or an atheist in the usual sense). He was preoccupied, to borrow one of his titles, with "the secular scripture," not just with the "sacred" version thereof. Still, Frye's understanding of the divine is sort of the containing form of his entire project. When David Cayley asked him what his own "myth" was, he replied: "creation." The title of one of his late and most original books is Creation and Recreation. The divine is the power to create. Frye has to be understood by way of his reading of Blake, and hence Fearful Symmetry (his first book) is the primary text for understanding Frye generally. Frye's ideas evolved and expanded, but they did not deviate from the basic principles laid out in his earliest writing. Fearful Symmetry is essentially about the meaning of the word "God"—or the re-meaning of that word, in a radical, Blakean re-creation of how to understand the divine, what the divine is. In The Critical Path, Frye argues that the crisis of belief that develops in the nineteenth century—basically the focus of LeFustec's study—is a crisis about how to understand the language of belief and not about whether God exists or not or what doctrines are the right doctrines. Hence the "God" word does not mean an external being, a ruler, or magical/supernatural authority figure dwelling in a realm beyond our reality. God—the divine—is an aspect of ourselves, of human beings, of our experience in the world we live in. "God is not a sorcerer," as Paul Tillich puts it—God acts in and through human...

História, política e literatura na escrita epistolar de Júlio Cortázar

O objetivo do trabalho é mostrar como a prática epistolar de Júlio Cortázar pode ser compreendida como um espaço de criação de redes de sociabilidades intelectuais que permitem relacioná-las com a criação de espaços de discussão sobre projetos literários e editoriais e para reflexões político-culturais. As correspondências de Cortázar são importantes meios de veiculação de suas ideias políticas no período mais intenso de sua militância: as décadas de 1960 e 1970. Em suas cartas, Cortázar revela sua compreensão sobre o fazer literário, a função social da literatura, o papel do intelectual e ainda reflete sobre sua atividade literária, defende as revoluções e o socialismo e condena as ditaduras militares na América Latina. Enfim, suas cartas revelam um escritor comprometido com as grandes transformações literárias e políticas de seu tempo. Para compreendermos a correspondência de Cortázar como meio de construção de sociabilidades político-intelectuais, analisamos parte das correspondências compiladas nos três volumes organizados por Aurora Bernárdez e editados pela Alfaguara em 2000, são eles: Volume I (Cartas, 1937-1963); Volume II (Cartas, 1964-1968); e Volume III (Cartas, 1969-1983).Palavras-chave: Júlio Cortázar; correspondências; sociabilidades intelectuais; política; literatura

Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose ed. by Robert D. Denham

Reviewed by: Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose ed. by Robert D. Denham Mervyn Nicholson Robert D. Denham, editor. Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. 445 pp. $95. Engines of understanding Does literature have a social function? If so, what? Or—wait—that’s a stupid question. Literature must have a social function—otherwise, why would it exist—and in every culture in human history? But if literature has a social function, what is it? What is literature “for”? Then there is that other question: What is literature, anyway? If “literature” is a legitimate category, something that corresponds to a reality, then what characterizes it? Or is the category just a mystification, a kind of illusion? Academics are not that interested in these questions. But the questions are there, in the manner of the elephant in the room. In the manner of the elephant in the room, to ignore it just makes it more pressing, especially if you happen to make your living in the field. What is the social function of literature/ English studies? Why have English departments? After years of “austerity,” these are now “existential questions,” even if no one seems too interested. In fact, despite decades of New Historicism, no one knows much about the relation between trends in literary study and socio-economic-political [End Page 233] context. But at least one major figure spent a career on the “existential questions”: Northrop Frye. This collection offers plentiful evidence of Frye’s interest. But Frye himself is now an elephant in the room, someone who is there but not there—a strange figure, an outsider in literary/cultural studies, whose ideas are now rejected but were never really absorbed or digested. Frye is arguably the most original thinker Canada has produced.1 His impact from 1950 to 1975 was enormous. That influence screeched to a halt in the late 1970s. New Historicists would notice the timing—a critical historical moment: the end of the “golden age” of capitalism following World War II. Then followed stagnation. For about 90 percent of the population real wages today are what they were in the mid-70s, despite unprecedented gains in productivity.2 The 1 percent extracted unprecedented wealth. But for most, stagnation deepens—indebtedness balloons. In the postwar period, incomes grew; social democracy was normative, with provision of education and health care and infrastructure and spending on the arts as well as on university research. That was Frye’s period: a rebellious period in which words like “liberation,” “vision,” and “imagination”—Frye words—had actual social force. “The aim of education” he wrote, is “to make people maladjusted,” “to destroy their notions that what society” does makes “sense.”3 There remains a hardy group of “Frye specialists,” but it’s small and they tend to treat Frye as a humanist-philosopher—not someone whose ideas one builds upon or applies. In other words, not as a thinker to use, not as an approach for analysis more generally, in the way that one might use Bourdieu or Benjamin or Butler or Eisenstein. That is, they view Frye as an object of study rather than, as he would have preferred, as a method—as presenting a way of thinking. Their concern is naturally with questions like: Is he compatible with Derrida? (He’s not.4) Frye specialists produce [End Page 234] valuable work,5 but specialists tend to write for specialists. Meanwhile, the mainstream of English studies—if there is a mainstream—long ago decided that Frye and his “myth criticism” were wrong6 and has exiled him and his “myth criticism,” putting Frye in a category somewhat like Frazer or Spengler or possibly Jung—idiosyncratic intellectuals without real scholarly validity, despite flashes of brilliance. Still, the very fact that interest persists is significant. Economic stagnation, our New Historicist would notice, coincided with the tidal wave known as deconstruction, which swept through literary studies by the late 1970s. Then, equally suddenly, the New Historicism (soon indistinguishable from the old historicism, with sociological/gender adaptations) arrived, displacing deconstruction from its throne. Deconstruction continues to fascinate, thanks to a cohort of graduate students trained in its outlook, students who got...

Bespreken is zilver, verzwijgen is goud

Abstract Cooperations between Dutch Critics and Publishers during the Interbellum Period The promotional activities of publishers and the different practices of literary critics became closely intertwined in the Netherlands during the first half of the twentieth century. In this article, we focus on how these two types of actors worked together and responded to new possibilities on the changing book market. We are particularly interested in what critics experienced as limitations or possible threats to their independent statuses and their positions in the field. These may have been most pressing for critics who had contacts with many different media and organizations. Such a central position within a literary network seems to be a characteristic of the so-called ‘middlebrow’ critic. Middlebrow critics were actively concerned with the social functions of literature and emphasized the need for cultural mediation. Our analysis of the behaviour and position-takings of three critics, Herman Robbers, Roel Houwink and P.H. Ritter Jr., shows that in their relationships with publishers, they operated within a grey area between commercialism and idealism, in which the (traditional) boundaries of ‘independent’ and professional criticism were at the same time consolidated, stretched and negotiated.

The Swahili novel: challenging the idea of 'minor literature'

For more than fifty years a dynamic modern literature has been developing in the Kiswahili language. The political weight that Kiswahili carries as the emerging national and pan-national language of many East African countries places this literature, much of it in the form of novels, at the centre of heated literary debates on the social function of literature in the context of rapid global social change. This obsession with social issues relates to larger, all-pervasive political debates running through East Africa: in its press, its streets, its public and private places. The novels both record and provoke these debates.

Recovering Love’s Fugitive: Elizabeth Wilmot and the Oscillations between the Sexual and Textual Body in a Libertine Woman’s Manuscript Poetry

Recovering Love’s Fugitive: Elizabeth Wilmot and the Oscillations between the Sexual and Textual Body in a Libertine Woman’s Manuscript Poetry

Social and behavioural functions of literature in the nineteenth century

The nineteenth century was a time of profound change in Europe. Steam power and its applications transformed the landscape. Photography was invented. Medical discoveries improved people's life expectancy. Slavery was abolished. The prison system was reformed. Movements like socialism, communism and anarchism arose, and attention was given to the position of women. With so many things in flux, it was also a time of intense nervousness. New behavioral codes had to be developed. There was a strong moral sense, deemed necessary to steer the reforms into proper channels. But men and women were differently placed in this regard. Men could be both philanderers and respected reformers. A double standard was an accepted thing -for men, that is. Literature had a special role to play in this context. It engaged in fierce social debate, but it also served as a mainstay for the citizen in turbulent times. It taught the citizen of the new era how to behave. This article focuses on the complex social functions of literature in the nineteenth century, especially but not exclusively in the Netherlands.

Ética, literatura y educación ciudadana para un mundo global

The notion of the subject as the product of reciprocal recognition requires mechanisms enabling the movement from the strangeness to the recognition of the other. This movement is the core of every process of moral education, especially the process of educating citizens in universal terms. Literary narrative enables such movement from strangeness to recognition, as much through the generation of Aristotles’s empathic relationships, as through the process of critical reflection developed in Brecht’s aesthetics, Jauss’s social function of literature and critical hermeneutics. In virtue of these reasons, literature should play a central role in every process of educating citizens.

Putting Cato the Censor'sOriginesin Its Place

Abstract After reviewing current opinions about the social function of literature in second-century BCE Rome, I focus on two controversial fragments assigned to Cato the Censor's Origines. In the first, Cato portrays the ancestors in a convivial setting as they sing the praises and the manly deeds of famous men; in the second, he gestures towards the pontifex maximus' specialized use of writing and the functioning of the tabula as a locus of memory. By drawing on the field of performance studies, I identify the performative features inherent in both of these fragments and map out how these features inform the positioning of Cato in relation to the identity politics of his time, professionalism, and writing. The aim of this study is to return the Origines to its immediate socio-cultural purview, but working towards this aim will also entail a shift in perspective and a reassessment of our notions of “poetry” and “prose.” In fact, by stressing the performance dimension that underlies the genesis of the Origines as a text, this article will also expose the shortcomings inherent in the hyper-literary approaches that have been so far adopted.

Changes in the Social Function of Literature in Serbia, 1988-2000

Changes in the Social Function of Literature in Serbia, 1988-2000

The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory

ing about the social functions of literature. The Fictive and the Imaginary, the culmination of his reflections about the art of representation, does not explicitly engage the question of the politics of literature, and its emphasis on the value of play and the as if might seem to disengage the aesthetic experience from worldly concerns. What Iser means by play, however, is a profoundly important social activity that would facilitate productive uses of difference to create forms of community among decentered human beings whose dissonances and dislocations resist unification. As an instrument for staging various kinds of open-ended exploratory interactions, Iser's notion of literature offers a model of the emancipatory uses of power in the service of communicative democracy. The politics of Iser's theory of nonmimetic representation foregrounds the role of the as if in producing, questioning, and overturning different forms of life. The playful, nonteleological functioning of fictive acts of staging in turn makes possible the reciprocal but nonconsensual exchange of power on which democratic mutuality depends. The Fictive and the Imaginary engages the question of power in representation in order to affirm the liberating and community-building capacities of literature in a perpetually unstable, decentered world. It is thus an important response to the political challenges of our time. The Fictive and the Imaginary moves beyond Iser's earlier concern with reading to offer a general theory of textuality in the service of what he calls literary anthropology. Two questions drive this anthropology: Why do human beings seem to need fictions? And what does the capacity to make fictions reveal about the being of human being? Iser approaches these questions not by undertaking a transcendental phe nomenological reflection but by looking for patterns in several histori cally and culturally specific domains that he thinks provide especially illuminating examples of how human beings have made and thought