Study Of Literary Texts Research Articles

The Occupation of Form: (Re)theorizing Literary History

If we were to start a journal today and name it, say, American Literary History, what kind of journal would it be? That is not a rhetorical question, but a very real one. However, it is not the purpose of this essay to answer that question fully, or with any confidence of landing on the “right” answer. Rather, I pose the question not only as a way to get us to think about the idea of writing an American literary history today, but also to compare and contrast that activity to the inaugural ethos and spirit of American Literary History 20 years ago. More precisely, I want to ask if that ethos might be perpetuated today, under our specific historical conditions and bearing in mind not only the persistence of certain questions that were present at the founding of this journal, but also questions that have arisen subsequently. The historical moment in literary studies 20 years ago could be characterized as the burgeoning of “theory”; the ethos of the founding of American Literary History included to no small degree not only a receptivity to new critical and theoretical perspectives, but also the belief that these perspectives could themselves serve as vehicles for retrieving elements that had been effectively banished from the study of literary texts. One could legitimately call these elements individual and social history.

\"Shaking the dead Geranium\" - Creating an experiential contect for the study of literary text: A descriptive and critical-reflective account

\"Shaking the dead Geranium\" - Creating an experiential contect for the study of literary text: A descriptive and critical-reflective account

A remainder that spoils the ear

This paper explores the potentialities opened by the Lacanian concept of voice as object in the study of literary texts: is not the literary voice, by definition, silent, since we hear it with our eyes? Through examples taken among modernist writers, we shall see different modalities of voice: how, in a chapter of Ulysses dedicated to the ear, “Sirens”, Joyce puts the Other’s discourse and its excess of significance to silence, through a particular binding of voice to letter. Katherine Mansfield’s stories centre on an epiphanic moment of suspension which always ends in a trickle of voice uttering the impossibility of finding a signifier for femininity. In Conrad, the ‘acousmatic’ voice is indissolubly associated with a spot of time, a blind spot in the picture which betrays the authority of established models or ideals. Voice, then, is more than ever what is at stake in modernity insofar as its presence foregrounds epistemological uncertainty and the lack of guarantee in human utterances. It is most often the vehicle for recording and transmitting affects like anxiety, joy, bliss, horror which can be the hallmark of a writer’s style.

Typological and Structural Authenticity in Reconstruction: The Timber Roofs of Church of the Pieve in Cavalese, Italy

In case of exceptional or accidental destructive events (e.g., earthquakes, floods, fire), the advisability of completely reconstructing a vanished artifact may be questionable. Among the possible approaches for reconstruction, the so-called philological method allows the complete reading of the whole building. Analogous to the study of literary texts, this method is based on the analysis of the “architectural language” of a building that is its form and its technical characteristics as well as its structural behavior. This case study concerns reconstruction of the timber roof of the Church of the Pieve in Cavalese (Italy), destroyed during a fire on March 29, 2003, for which the philological approach has been chosen. The design process consisted of two important phases: first the determination of the precise form of the original roof, by considering different kinds of evidence, then the introduction of necessary modifications, to meet the present-day structural standards. Such design choice, far from being a simplistic solution, involved the participation of different experts and a thorough multidisciplinary investigation.

The Writer as Composer: The Place of Composing in New South Wales English Syllabuses

Since 1996 all three New South Wales English Syllabuses (1996, 1999, 2002) position creative writing as an essential component of the curriculum content. While this is not a particularly radical situation for the lower years of schooling, it is a significant shift in the post-compulsory secondary school curriculum (Years 11-12). The previous English syllabuses for these years (1982, 1988) embraced a conception of the subject English based firmly in the study of literary texts while this new syllabus constructs th esubject English in terms of ‘responding to’ and ‘composing’ texts. This paper examines the ways in which ‘composing’ is constituted in the new syllabuses with particular emphasison the Years 7-10 English Syllabus (2002) and the Stage 6 English Syllabus (1999) - Standard, Advanced and Extension 2 courses. It demonstrates how composing is positioned within a production paradigm that valorizes compositions that display knowledge of textual forms and features for specific contexts, values compositions that are responses to existing texts and marginalizes the role of the author as explorer and creator in the composing process. Finally, it poses the question: Why should this matter to those of us who teach in tertiary writing programs? And offers some tentative answers.

Entre Clio e Calíope: a construção da narrativa histórica em Os sertões

Este artigo focaliza a complexa aliança entre a história e a ficção em Os sertões a partir de novas teorias sobre a textualidade da história e de novas metodologias de abordagem do texto literário, como o ‘novo historicismo’. Após uma sinopse dessas teorias e metodologias, examina os processos de construção da narrativa de Os sertões, demonstrando como o texto é marcado pela interpenetração do sistema que informa o cientista com o que rege o artista. À medida que o arcabouço intelectual e científico importado da Europa se mostra insuficiente para registrar a realidade brasileira, o texto euclidiano começa a deslizar entre a história e a ficção. A conclusão: apenas interstícios entre história e ficção Euclides consegue localizar aquela verdade que, desde a ‘Nota preliminar’, afirmava ser seu objetivo principal.

Techniques of Persuasion in Julius Caesar and Othello

The article is an analysis of the rhetorical techniques of persuasion in Antony's speech to the Roman mob, and Iago's persuasion of Othello in the temptation scene. The analysis is based on the Gricean maxims of the Co-operative Principle, and the Politeness Principle in normal conversation. These models are all quite accessible to literary readers of Shakespeare's text. This is an attempt to find a middle ground between close textual analysis of a philological kind and the broader polemical vistas of cultural materialism. The writer believes that English studies is fundamentally concerned with the close study of literary texts.

Forward‐looking Thoughts: the study of literary texts at GCSE

(1993). Forward‐looking Thoughts: the study of literary texts at GCSE. Cambridge Journal of Education: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 65-76.

History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages

The study of literary texts appears at the moment to stand at a decisive juncture. Trends in critical thinking over the last decades have questioned the possibility of recovering a text's historical meaning. At the same time, there is a newly insistent plea for a return to "history" in the interpretation of literature. Before a rapprochement can occur, however, we need to have a clearer understanding of how both historians and critics understand "history" and of the ways in which postmodernist thought positions history and the role of the historian with respect to issues of literary interpretation at the forefront of contemporary critical debate. One thing is clear: the paradigms that have governed historical and literary study since the nineteenth century no longer hold unquestioned sway. The confident, humanist belief that a rational, "objective" investigation of the past permits us to recover "authentic" meanings in historical texts has come under severe attack in postmodernist critical debate. At stake in this debate are a number of concepts traditionally deployed by historians in their attempts to understand the past: causality, change, authorial intent, stability of meaning, human agency and social determination. What place, then, does history have in a postmodern theoretical climate? What, if anything, can the historian contribute to the reconfiguration of both theoretical concerns and interpretive practices signaled by the very notion of postmodernism? My purpose here is to explore some of the issues in question from the historian's point of view, paying particular attention to trends in literary criticism that suggest a reawakened interest in history.

Personal Librarian: a Tool for the Literature Classroom

A text retrieval program for IBM-compatible microcomputers, Personal Librarian (formerly known as SIRE), is reviewed for its relevance to undergraduate study of literary texts in the classroom. In addition to supporting the standard text retrieval functions, with searches for words and collocates, support of Boolean operators, and a proximity operator for collocates, retrieved documents are rank ordered according to their estimated relevance to the query. Personal Librarian also allows searches that use a whole document as a query term and an Expand command which produces a thesaurus of collocates unique to the text base being studied. In this way the program enables the user to progress from word occurrences to the level of themes and ideas. These facilities will make the software particularly useful in supporting classroom discussion of texts, where suggestiveness and a fairly intuitive set of search pathways are more important than close linguistic analysis. In introducing students of English and other literatures to the computer as a medium for the analysis of texts, there is a need for computer software that will enable rapid searching and retrieval of a text base. A range of text retrieval packages has been created, and many are now available for a microcomputer, but so far few have found a regular place in the undergraduate curriculum. For classroom use, where the focus of attention is on the content of a text rather than on its linguistic or computational dimensions, there is need for a program that is simple to understand and use, but powerful enough to enable different search strategies to be implemented and the results of searches to be viewed immediately on screen. Personal Librarian, a program available for IBM-compatible microcomputers, meets this basic need; it also provides some facilities to support text retrieval which are unique, and specially suited to work in the humanities classroom. Until recently the only program explicitly designed to meet such a need was WordCruncher. a brief account of the advantages of WordCruncher will help to set Personal Librarian in context. Almost no prior training is required to make effective use of WordCruncher at a first attempt. A student introduced to the program can choose a text (or 'book') from the 'bookshelf, shown when the program is first called up, can go from there to a screen containing an alphabetical list of all the words in the text, and by choosing a word can call up all instances of the use of the word in a window where the search word is highlighted. Given that students approach a text with some understanding, with questions they wish to ask, WordCruncher provides a highly efficient tool for focusing on the vocabulary of a text.

The Audience within the Object

Literary criticism of the last decade has developed a new emphasis: the study of a work's reader alongside the more traditional study of literary texts. Some critics have suggested that literary works imply and project an audience. Drawing upon this body of criticism, as well as upon social commentary and advertising theory, this article attempts to demonstrate how composition textbook advertisements suggest, project, and perhaps even create an audience. Examining a series of composition textbook advertisements from 1982 to 1987 in addition to a number of works of art, this article proposes four different audience-related elements of the ad-object: context (the extrinsic circumstances that the advertisement connotes); genre (the kind of text or object the advertisement masquerades as); borrowings (the sources that the ad-object draws upon); and reflexivity (the image of the viewer mirrored by the advertisement). Each of these, while not entirely discrete, serves to imply and project certain features of the viewing audience. The article's conclusion speculates on the nature of this audience projected by the contemporary composition textbook ad and how this image is important to us as consumers of the ads and purveyors of the products they promote.

The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism

Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labeling as a critic because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, I think we need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least since 1908, when Freud published his essay on Creative Writers and Day-dreaming, and if the enterprise has recently been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched bedfellows-or perhaps I should say playmates. The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic ciriticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance of the author

Introductory Remarks on African Humanities

This issue of the African Studies Review is devoted to research in the African humanities. The appearance of new approaches to the study of literary texts, oral traditions, and the popular arts has inspired us to assemble this collection. Recently, the African humanities have been neglected as an important area in which new empirical and theoretical advances have been made for the study of oral texts, art, and performance.The articles in this collection by Robert Cancel, David Coplan, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and V. Y. Mudimbe were presented at the Conference on Popular Arts and the Media in Africa held at the University of California, San Diego from May 17-19, 1982. This conference was sponsored by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. We would like to thank the Joint Committee for their support of this conference and our initial efforts to develop a research synthesis for the African humanities.This collection begins with V. Y. Mudimbe's commentary on the nature of African art and the limitations of research models used to study it. He questions the role and position of African arts, especially visual arts, in the post-colonial world. He suggests that the time has passed where most of these works can be judged simply as self-enclosed cultural referents, isolated from the effects of the last two hundred years of history. The process of “aesthetization” that he describes is one which, in various transformations, informs each of the papers that follow. When Fanon suggested that to take on a language is to “take on a world,” he foreshadowed the ideas that acknowledge the development of Africa's humanities in a context of cultural interchange with other world traditions. This is not to accept the Victorian pronouncements that credited all African achievements to various forms of Western influence. Rather, it is a movement towards the view that African culture, always fluid and dynamic, has been responsive to all manner of influences, both local and foreign.

Empirical sociology of literature as a non-textually oriented form of research

The study of literary texts and also current studies in the sociology of literature do not constitute a form of empirical research. This paper makes a plea for a non-textually oriented sociology of literature. In this type of literary research, it is argued, problems can be formulated in a precise way and the solutions which are suggested to these research problems can be tested. The sociology of literature as it is propounded here, focuses on the way in which literary institutions distinguish literary texts according to their type and to their quality. The final section of this paper comprises the testing of four hypotheses about different aspects of the qualitative ranking of literary texts by a number of literary institutions.

An Essay on Method in Applied Psychoanalysis

The author attempts to evaluate critically the application of psychoanalysis to literature by examining problems of method and the assumptions psychoanalysts unwittingly make about texts they are about to interpret. The special advantages of psychoanalysis over other interpretive systems are discussed, and several examples of the possible use of psychoanalysis in the study of literary texts are presented.

Sports in the Ancient World

The sports competitions which have taken on such importance in the life and world of today are connected, over the centuries, with the ideas and customs of the Greek people. The Greek heritage still manifests itself in the collective and individual sports today, and our contemporaries were not mistaken in recognizing this fact. After an interval of 1500 years a new series of Olympic Games began, reviving those pan-Hellenic games which, every four years, gathered athletes and crowds from all over the Greek world at Olympia. It is of utmost interest to study closely the similarities, relationships, and differences which exist between our ways of competing and the ways in which our distant forebears competed. Such a study is enthralling and requires the simultaneous use of all the auxiliary disciplines such as ancient history, the study of literary texts, the study of inscriptions, and archeology.