Pub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1000
Jonathan D Culler
The term poetics designates both a field of study and the practice of a particular author or group of authors. Aristotle’s Poetics, the most important work of literary theory in the Western tradition, undertakes to describe in systematic fashion the major forms of literature, the components of each, and how these elements contribute to the effects desired. Aristotle proceeds on the assumption that there is a comprehensive structure of knowledge attainable about poetry, which is not the experience of poetry, but poetics. Such a poetics treats literature as an autonomous object of knowledge, whose major genres or forms it seeks to analyze. This is an explicit poetics; but we also speak of the poetics implicit in the work of an individual writer, or of a group of writers, or of the literature of an era, as in The Poetics of Dante’s Paradiso, or even The Poetics of Postmodernism, which focus on the characteristic techniques, compositional habits, and ways of treating subjects in the literary practice under consideration. As the latter title indicates, the term poetics is used even when the literature treated does not include much poetry. Poetics can be distinguished from literary history, in that it focuses on literature as a system of possibilities rather than as a historical sequence or a practice in history, although categories from poetics will be important for any study of the evolution of literature. In literary theory, poetics is set apart for concentrating on intrinsic characteristics of literature as a system, as opposed to treating it as a phenomenon to be explained in social, historical, economic, or psychological terms. Poetics is particularly distinguished from hermeneutics or interpretation, in that it does not attempt to determine the meaning of literary works but asks how they function: What are characteristics of different literary genres and their constituents? How do their various elements work together to produce the effects they do for readers? Many contributions to the theory of literature can be seen as contributions to poetics, insofar as they try to explain the nature of literature and describe some of its major forms, even if they are presented as arguments about the literary practice of a particular period or literary mode. Western poetics begins with Aristotle, whose poetics is based on drama: literature is defined an imitation of action, in which plot is central. In Chinese and Japanese cultures, by contrast, foundational poetics have been drawn from lyric poetry and have focused on affect and expression rather than on representation. In the history of Western poetics mimesis has remained fundamental, despite changes that, from time to time, treat literature as the expression of the experience of the author or the attempt to create certain experiences for the reader.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.999
Harry Lönnroth
Philology—from the Greek words philologi’ā < philos “friend” and logos “word”—is a multi-faceted field of scholarship within the humanities which in its widest sense focuses on questions of time, history, and literature—with language as the common denominator. Philology is both an academic discipline—there is classical philology, Romance philology, Scandinavian philology, etc.—and a scholarly perspective on language, literature, and culture. The roots of philology go back all the way to the Library of Alexandria, Egypt, where philology began to evolve into a field of scholarship around 300 bce. In Alexandria, the foundations of philology were laid for centuries to come, for example as regards one of its major branches, textual criticism. A characteristic feature of philology past and present is that it focuses on texts in time from an interdisciplinary point of view, which is why philology as an umbrella term is relevant for many fields of scholarship in the 21st century. According to a traditional definition, a philologist is interested in the relationship between language and culture, and by means of language, he or she aims to understand the characteristics of the culture the language reflects. From this point of view, language is mainly a medium. In the analysis of (mostly very old) texts, a philologist often crosses disciplinary borders of different kinds—anthropology, archaeology, ethnology, folkloristics, history, etc.—and makes use of other special fields within manuscript studies, such as codicology (the archaeology of the book), diplomatics (the analysis of documents), paleography (the study of handwriting), philigranology (watermarks), and sphragistics (seals). For a philologist, texts and their languages and contents bear witness to past times, and the philologist’s perspective is often a wide one. The expertise of a philologist is the ability to analyze texts in their cultural-historical contexts, not only from a linguistic perspective (which is a prerequisite for a deep understanding of a text), but also from a cultural and historical perspective, and to explain the role of a text in its cultural-historical setting. In the course of history, philologists have made several contributions to our knowledge of ancient and medieval texts and writing, for example. In the 2010s, the focus in philology is for example on the so-called New Philology or Material Philology and digital philology, but the core of philology remains the same: philology is the art of reading slowly.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.1163/2589-7993_eeco_sim_00000702
Michelle P Brown
The codex occupies an iconic role in Western culture. Usually narrowly applied to the folded book form of the age of print, it owes its origins and development to pre-print manuscript culture. As early as the 1st century ce, the Roman poet Martial was recommending that his readers buy the new codex form. But then, as now, publishers were slow to retool, and the ancient scroll technology continued until the 4th century, when the codex, initially the preserve of the underclasses (notably the early Christians, who valued it for its portability and cross-referencing suitability), achieved popularity as the focus of Christianity, a religion of the book. Wax tablets—the less formal medium of the day—continued in use for drafting of text and image and for informal purposes into the early 20th century. From the 5th century onward the use of decoration and paratextual features such as punctuation served to help navigate and articulate the text and images, illustrated the narrative, or explored the multivalent meaning of text through image. Both men and women, religious and secular, wealthy or poor, figured in the production of medieval books, as authors, makers, and users. Documentary evidence and that detected within the books themselves gives a picture of the ways in which literary works were composed, captured in writing, published, disseminated, and accessed. Each manuscript is unique, but together they provide a portal into a thousand years of thought.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-30DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1140
Anna Poletti
This entry develops a definition of literature as an identity technology by bringing together theories of identity formation as a process of identification and introjection, with thinking about reading as a materially grounded process in which readers encounter identities in the form of characters and narrators. The essay critically situates the terms “identity” and “technology” in the study of literature, media, and culture in order to argue that at the linguistic, symbolic, and material level, literature can be used as a means for inscribing and reinscribing identity at the individual and collective level. Drawing on ways of reading literature from autobiography studies and queer theory, this article is about how to read and think about literature as a mechanism through which identity is formed, negotiated and renegotiated, inscribed, and made public. The case studies utilized in this entry are the opening and closing essays of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s important work of literary theory, Tendencies. Sedgwick’s theorization and enactment of reading as a generative, queer practice is brought together with a close reading of her reflections on her own identity and the variety of techniques she uses to situate to her reader to elucidate the utility of thinking literature as a technology used in the ongoing work of identity.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.982
A. Ensslin
In a generic, medium-nonspecific sense, hypertext refers to a compositional format characterized by nodes, links, and networks that allow readers multiple choices and different pathways through textual and/or multimodal components. The largest informational hypertext network is the World Wide Web. Within literary studies, hypertext theory relates to literary in the sense of primarily narrative and poetic uses of hypertext as a composition technique and metatextual principle aided by specific technologies such as hypertext editing software and HTML (Hypertext Mark-Up Language). In its contemporary, medium-specific meaning, hypertext refers to interactive networks of digital documents and media connected by hyperlinks that give rise to multilinear readerly pathways through texts and, thus, highly versatile and personalized narrative and poetic experiences. Literary hypertext theorists have traced the beginnings of hypertext in the nonlinear proto-hypertexts of medieval scripture and early scientific texts displaying numerous glosses and footnotes, thus affording multilinear reading trajectories. While hypertext theory first emerged against the backdrop of late poststructuralist thought and early, pre-web, standalone hypertexts produced by the so-called Storyspace School from the late 1980s onward, more recent, early-21st-century waves of electronic literature and digital fiction scholarship have established the field of hypertext criticism and related areas of digital fiction and poetry research through a large corpus of systematic close analyses, as well as empirical reader-response studies, applied socio-psychological research, and educational uses. Aided by the growth in popular hypertext and game design platforms such as Twine in the second decade of the 21st century, hypertextual writing has become a mainstream form of literary game production and interaction, which has moved hypertext and its theorization from a scholarly-elitist niche to a mainstream form of creative and critical engagement.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1024
P. Hitchcock
For literary theory, discipline is caught tantalizingly between its meaning as a verb and as a noun. Since the work of Foucault, in particular, one is accustomed to thinking of discipline as a structure and process of power. Individual disciplines, of course, tell their own story, but their specific constellations in education offer a snapshot of priorities (social, economic, and cultural) that are symptomatic well beyond their putative subject matter. The idea of training in knowledge goes back to the ancient world, whose models still maintain an influence in the present, although this may well depend on cultural precedents within particular languages and histories. In general, disciplines emerged in modernity and are overdetermined in a number of ways, including but not limited to: transformations in thought (the Renaissance, for instance); formations of state (that can provide an institutional infrastructure); and economic imperatives (knowledge more literally as an accumulation axiom in capitalism, for instance). Disciplines remain indices in the production and maintenance of human subjects, but there are many kinds of challenges (within disciplines, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, etc.) that presage a rethinking of what disciplines are and can be in the present.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1103
J. Chandler
“Sentiment” is a term that signifies differently in its different English forms (sentiments, sentimental, sentimentality, sentimentalism), and these forms themselves signify differently at different times and in different languages. In French, whence it derives, the verb sentir means “to feel” or “to sense,” and a relatively clear distinction can be made in that language between sentir and penser (“to think”), and likewise between un sentiment and une pensée. In English, however, especially in the 18th century when the notion of the sentiment became central to empiricist moral philosophy, the term tends to straddle thought and feeling. In the accelerated development of the concept in the work of David Hume and his friend Adam Smith, sentiment might best be understood as feeling reflected in thought, which later figured centrally in William Wordsworth’s account of the poetic process. Even before Wordsworth, Laurence Sterne had deployed the recently coined English adjective sentimental, and he exploited this new understanding to develop a new and massively influential mode of ambivalence in fiction. Such an understanding also helped to underwrite the fully elaborated 1795 theoretical intervention of the Anglophile German writer Friedrich Schiller, who had to invent the German adjective sentimentalisch from the Anglo-French term. Schiller distinguished the sentimental mode in poetry from the naive on the dual grounds, already established in British writings on the subject, that the sentimental involved “mixed feelings” born of an act of “reflection.” Even as this more technical understanding of the sentimental mode was being developed, however, critique of “sentimentality” in a strictly pejorative sense was underway. In modernist literary theory, certainly, much energy is mobilized around this critique, as is clear from a foundational work in the institution of “practical criticism” by I. A. Richards at Cambridge, who produced a full taxonomy of the forms of sentimentality, a deviant kind of emotional responsiveness he opposed to another, which he called “inhibition.” The modernist intolerance of what it called “sentimentality” would be taken up as part of a broader and more programmatic critique of commercialized culture under capitalism in later work by Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno and by Jean Baudrillard.
“Sentiment”这个词在不同的英语形式中有不同的含义(Sentiment, sentimental, sentimentality, sentimentalism)，这些形式在不同的时间和不同的语言中也有不同的含义。在它的起源法语中，动词sentir的意思是“感觉”或“感觉”，在法语中，sentir和penser(“思考”)之间可以做出相对明确的区分，同样，unsentiment和une penssamae之间也是如此。然而，在英语中，尤其是在18世纪，当情感的概念成为经验主义道德哲学的核心时，这个词往往跨越了思想和感觉。在大卫·休谟和他的朋友亚当·斯密的作品中，这一概念得到了加速发展，情感最好被理解为反映在思想中的感觉，这后来在威廉·华兹华斯对诗歌过程的描述中占据了中心地位。甚至在华兹华斯之前，劳伦斯·斯特恩就使用了最近创造的英语形容词“多愁善感”，他利用这种新的理解，在小说中发展了一种新的、影响深远的矛盾心理模式。这种理解也有助于支持亲英的德国作家弗里德里希·席勒(Friedrich Schiller)在1795年全面阐述的理论干预，他不得不从英法术语中发明德语形容词sentimentalisch。席勒将诗歌中的感伤模式与天真模式区分开来，这是基于双重理由的，这在英国关于这一主题的著作中已经确立，即感伤包含了一种源于“反思”行为的“复杂情感”。然而，即使对情感模式的这种更技术性的理解正在发展，对“多愁善感”的严格贬义的批评也在进行中。当然，在现代主义文学理论中，围绕这种批评调动了大量精力，这一点从剑桥大学i·a·理查兹(I. a . Richards)的“实践批评”机构的基础工作中可以清楚地看出，理查兹对多愁善感的形式进行了完整的分类，他反对另一种异常的情感反应，他称之为“抑制”。在法兰克福学派理论家马克斯·霍克海默、t·w·阿多诺和让·鲍德里亚后来的作品中，现代主义者对所谓的“感性化”的不容忍将被作为对资本主义下商业化文化更广泛、更程序化的批评的一部分。
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Pub Date : 2020-03-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.403
Yomaira C. Figueroa
Junot Díaz is a Dominican American award-winning fiction writer and essayist. For over twenty years his work has helped to map and remap Latinx, Caribbean, and American literary and cultural studies. Since his collection of short stories, Drown, debuted in 1996, Díaz has become a leading literary figure in Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and diaspora studies. His voice is critically linked to the legacy of Latinx Caribbean literary poetics reaching back to the 1960s (including Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, 1967). Díaz’s work is likewise transnational and diasporic, often reflecting the lived experiences of working-class immigrant populations of color in northeastern urban centers. Within a broader scope, Díaz’s writing is tied to feminist African American and Chicana literary traditions, with Díaz citing the influence of writers such as Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros in his writing practice. His 2007 award-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in fiction and catapulted him into literary superstardom. Díaz followed that success with his 2012 collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her, which was a finalist for both the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2012, Díaz was conferred the MacArthur Fellows Program Award, commonly known as the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and in 2017, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2019, he was the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the fiction editor at the renowned literary magazine the Boston Review. Over the course of his professional writing career, Díaz has published numerous nonfiction essays and political commentaries, and coauthored opinion editorials on immigration and reflections on Caribbean and US politics. His short story “Monstro,” published in 2012, further rooted Díaz in the genres of science fiction and Afrofuturism. “Monstro” was understood to be a teaser for a now discarded novel of the same name. The simultaneous publication of the English-language Islandborn and Spanish-language Lola in 2018 represented the author’s first foray into the genre of children’s literature. Like much of Díaz’s literary oeuvre, the children’s books chronicle the experiences and memories of Afro-Dominicans in the diaspora through the perspective of a child narrator. Díaz is one of the founders of Voices of Our Nation (VONA), a summer creative writing workshop for writers of color where he helps aspiring writers to workshop their fiction. Díaz’s fiction and nonfiction writings have catalyzed work in literary, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx studies, prompting renewed discourses on literary representations of masculinity, gender, sexuality, intimacy, sexual violence, dictatorship, immigration, disability, Dominican history, race and anti-blackness, anti-Haitianism, decolonization and radical politics, and diaspora and bel
朱诺Díaz是多米尼加裔美国获奖小说作家和散文家。二十多年来，他的工作有助于绘制和重新绘制拉丁，加勒比和美国的文学和文化研究。自从他的短篇小说集《淹死》于1996年出版以来，Díaz已经成为拉丁裔、非裔拉丁裔和散居侨民研究领域的领军人物。他的声音与拉丁加勒比文学诗学的遗产密切相关，可以追溯到20世纪60年代(包括皮里·托马斯的《沿着这些卑鄙的街道》，1967年)。Díaz的作品同样是跨国的和散居的，经常反映东北城市中心有色人种的工人阶级移民的生活经历。在更广泛的范围内，Díaz的写作与女权主义的非裔美国人和墨西哥裔文学传统有关，Díaz引用了托尼·莫里森和桑德拉·西斯内罗斯等作家在他的写作实践中的影响。2007年，他的获奖小说《奥斯卡·瓦奥短暂奇妙的一生》为他赢得了普利策小说奖，并使他一跃成为文学超级明星。在此之后，Díaz在2012年推出了短篇小说集《你就是这样失去她的》，该书入围了2012年美国国家图书奖小说类和2013年安德鲁·卡内基小说类优秀奖章。2012年，Díaz被授予麦克阿瑟研究员计划奖，俗称麦克阿瑟“天才奖”，并于2017年入选美国艺术与文学学院。2019年，他是麻省理工学院(MIT)的拉奇和南希·艾伦写作教授，也是著名文学杂志《波士顿评论》的小说编辑。在他的职业写作生涯中，Díaz发表了大量的非小说类文章和政治评论，并与人合著了关于移民的意见社论，以及对加勒比和美国政治的反思。他在2012年出版的短篇小说《怪物》(Monstro)进一步扎根于科幻小说和非洲未来主义的Díaz。《怪物》被认为是一部现已废弃的同名小说的预告片。2018年，他同时出版了英语版《岛裔》和西班牙语版《洛拉》，这是他首次涉足儿童文学流派。像Díaz的许多文学作品一样，这些儿童读物通过儿童叙述者的视角，记录了散居海外的非裔多米尼加人的经历和记忆。Díaz是“我们国家之声”(voice of Our Nation, VONA)的创始人之一，VONA是有色人种作家的夏季创意写作工作坊，他在那里帮助有抱负的作家创作他们的小说。Díaz的小说和非小说作品催化了文学、拉丁裔和非裔拉丁裔研究的工作，推动了关于男性、性别、性、亲密、性暴力、独裁、移民、残疾、多米尼加历史、种族和反黑人、反海地主义、非殖民化和激进政治、散居和归属感等文学表现的新话语。
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Pub Date : 2020-03-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1005
B. Hodge
Semiotics refers to an intellectual tradition that deals with processes of making and interpreting meaning in all kinds of text, in all modes. However, semiotics was never integrated into mainstream disciplinary structures. Because of this marginal status semiotic tendencies flourished outside and between the major disciplines. As a discipline semiotics seems small, vulnerable and out-of-date. But as a broad intellectual tradition semiotics can be seen as a meta-theory which encompasses literary theory. This second perspective makes semiotics more useful for literary readers, and hence is emphasized in this chapter. Semiotics’ value is enhanced when it is seen as a complex, heterogeneous field with fuzzy boundaries and productive entanglements with literary objects and theories. “Semiotics” comes from Greek semeion (sign, omen, or trace), something that points towards important, often hidden meanings. Signs in this sense go beyond words and verbal media. This scope gives “semiotics” a radically disruptive quality. Western culture in the modern era has been based on the primacy of words as carriers of all meaning and thought. Semiotics is the site of a radical challenge to this dominance. Semiotics sees signs and meanings everywhere, in every mode, not just in words. The changing media of literature in the present and past raise many semiotic issues for literary theory. Poetry always carried meanings through sound as well as words. Drama needs to be performed. Film and multimedia carry the role of print fiction in new contexts. In the multimedia 21st century, literature has gone beyond writing, and its theories need a semiotic dimension. Semiotics has a divided history, with two founding fathers. Peirce emphasized complexity and flow, and Saussure emphasized structure. Before 1960 structuralism dominated, but by the end of the 20th century post-structuralism prevailed. Semiotics went underground, but left traces everywhere of the intellectual revolution it participated in. It helped to trigger the turn to meaning across the social sciences and celebrated the irreducible complexity and diversity of forms and meanings in literature and life in the modern world.
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Pub Date : 2020-03-31DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1086
Alison Shonkwiler
Realism is a historical phenomenon that is not of the past. Its recurrent rises and falls only attest to its persistence as a measure of representational authority. Even as literary history has produced different moments of “realism wars,” over the politics of realist versus antirealist aesthetics, the demand to represent an often strange and changing reality—however contested a term that may be—guarantees realism’s ongoing critical future. Undoubtedly, realism has held a privileged position in the history of Western literary representation. Its fortunes are closely linked to the development of capitalist modernity, the rise of the novel, the emergence of the bourgeoisie, and the expansion of middle-class readerships with the literacy and leisure to read—and with an interest in reading about themselves as subjects. While many genealogies of realism are closely tied to the history of the rise of the novel—with Don Quixote as a point of departure—it is from its later, 19th-century forms that critical assumptions have emerged about its capacities and limitations. The 19th-century novel—whether its European or slightly later American version—is taken as the apex of the form and is tied to the rise of industrial capitalism, burgeoning ideas of social class, and expansion of empire. Although many of the realist writers of the 19th century were self-reflexive about the form, and often articulated theories of realism as distinct from romance and sentimental fiction, it was not until the mid-20th century, following the canonization of modernism in English departments, that a full-fledged critical analysis of realism as a form or mode would take shape. Our fullest articulations of realism therefore owe a great deal to its negative comparison to later forms—or, conversely, to the effort to resuscitate realism’s reputation against perceived critical oversimplifications. In consequence, there is no single definition of realism—nor even agreement on whether it is a mode, form, or genre—but an extraordinarily heterogenous set of ways of approaching it as a problem of representation. Standard early genealogies of realism are to be found in historical accounts such as Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and György Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel, with a guide to important critiques and modifications to be found in Michael McKeon’s Theory of the Novel. This article does not retrace those critical histories. Nor does it presume to address the full range of realisms in the modern arts, including painting, photography, film, and video and digital arts. It focuses on the changing status of realism in the literary landscape, uses the fault lines of contemporary critical debates about realism to refer back to some of the recurrent terms of realism/antirealism debates, and concludes with a consideration of the “return” to realism in the 21st century.
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