Pub Date : 2021-02-23DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1099
Woosung Kang
Thing is a categorically indeterminate and comprehensive concept that cannot easily be pinned down to any single or specific meaning. It has a long history of heterogeneous significations, from material objects, through legal issues, to supersensible noumena. For modern philosophies of subjectivity, things are reducible to that which is available for human thinking and acting. Things are represented as objects for the subject in the form of presence-at-hand, and this representational relationship forms the basic structure of the world in modernity. Under the capitalist system of commodity exchanges, moreover, this anthropocentric relationship with things undergoes what is called reification or fetishism, which turns all things human into relations between objects. The objectification of things makes it possible for humans to dominate the world, but fetishism in turn dominates human beings as mere objects. Heidegger’s attempt to deconstruct this objectification reverberates with the Marxist critique of capitalist commodification, and in literature, with the modernist endeavor to overcome reification. These efforts to secure the thingness of the thing are linked to the early 21st century’s efforts to re-establish non-humanistic relations with things and the world. Recently, under the banner of an “ontological turn,” there has been an explosion of interest in things, motivated in particular by growing concerns about anthropocentrism. Indeed, in the face of unprecedented technological change and hyper-digitalization, a new relation between human and nonhuman is desperately required. New ontologies thus try to build a non-hierarchal, object-oriented, monistic universe of hybrids, quasi-objects, and assemblages, such that human beings become only a part of the parliament of things.
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Queer theory describes a network of critiques emerging from a legacy of activism and looking ahead to utopian futures. The analytical tools queer theory provides as a mode of close reading and critique makes it a relevant contemporary approach to literary theory. Beyond reading for queer characters and desires in texts, queer theory is a tool for seeing below the superficial, and supporting unconventional readings that deconstruct normative assumptions. The activist roots of queer theory in the 1969 Stonewall Riots places drag, trans issues, class, race, violence, gender, and sexuality at the heart of queer theorizing. Subsequent work engages topics such as temporality, ecology, geography, and diaspora through the analysis of culture and politics, but also literature, film, music, and other media. Queer theory attends to both the rhetorical power of language and the broader structures of knowledge formulation. As feminist epistemology asks whose knowledge matters and who creates knowledge, queer theory asks whether knowledge matters and whether naturalized knowledge is constructed. Textual or discursive construction of knowledge is a key theoretical approach of queer theory with important implications for literature. Queer theory embraces a multidisciplinary and diverse set of influences, methodologies, questions, and formats. The critiques can be applied to help deconstruct naturalized epistemic frameworks around topics notably including, language, gender, sexuality, history, the subject, universality, the environment, animals, borders, space, time, norms, ideals, reproduction, utopia, love, the home, the nation, and power. Queer theory empowers novel readings of the world, and worldly readings of the novel, opening up new ways of viewing life and text.
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Textual studies describes a range of fields and methodologies that evaluate how texts are constituted both physically and conceptually, document how they are preserved, copied, and circulated, and propose ways in which they might be edited to minimize error and maximize the text’s integrity. The vast temporal reach of the history of textuality—from oral traditions spanning thousands of years and written forms dating from the 4th millenium bce to printed and digital text forms—is matched by its geographical range covering every linguistic community around the globe. Methods of evaluating material text-bearing documents and the reliability of their written or printed content stem from antiquity, often paying closest attention to sacred texts as well as to legal documents and literary works that helped form linguistic and social group identity. With the incarnation of the printing press in the early modern West, the rapid reproduction of text matter in large quantities had the effect of corrupting many texts with printing errors as well as providing the technical means of correcting such errors more cheaply and quickly than in the preceding scribal culture. From the 18th century, techniques of textual criticism were developed to attempt systematic correction of textual error, again with an emphasis on scriptural and classical texts. This “golden age of philology” slowly widened its range to consider such foundational medieval texts as Dante’s Commedia as well as, in time, modern vernacular literature. The technique of stemmatic analysis—the establishment of family relationships between existing documents of a text—provided the means for scholars to choose between copies of a work in the pursuit of accuracy. In the absence of original documents (manuscripts in the hand of Aristotle or the four Evangelists, for example) the choice between existing versions of a text were often made eclectically—that is, drawing on multiple versions—and thus were subject to such considerations as the historic range and geographical diffusion of documents, the systematic identification of common scribal errors, and matters of translation. As the study of modern languages and literatures consolidated into modern university departments in the later 19th century, new techniques emerged with the aim of providing reliable literary texts free from obvious error. This aim had in common with the preceding philological tradition the belief that what a text means—discovered in the practice of hermeneutics—was contingent on what the text states—established by an accurate textual record that eliminates error by means of textual criticism. The methods of textual criticism took several paths through the 20th century: the Anglophone tradition centered on editing Shakespeare’s works by drawing on the earliest available documents—the printed Quartos and Folios—developing into the Greg–Bowers–Tanselle copy-text “tradition” which was then deployed as a method by which to edit later text
{"title":"Textual Studies","authors":"M. Byron","doi":"10.1093/sq/29.4.482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/29.4.482","url":null,"abstract":"Textual studies describes a range of fields and methodologies that evaluate how texts are constituted both physically and conceptually, document how they are preserved, copied, and circulated, and propose ways in which they might be edited to minimize error and maximize the text’s integrity. The vast temporal reach of the history of textuality—from oral traditions spanning thousands of years and written forms dating from the 4th millenium bce to printed and digital text forms—is matched by its geographical range covering every linguistic community around the globe. Methods of evaluating material text-bearing documents and the reliability of their written or printed content stem from antiquity, often paying closest attention to sacred texts as well as to legal documents and literary works that helped form linguistic and social group identity. With the incarnation of the printing press in the early modern West, the rapid reproduction of text matter in large quantities had the effect of corrupting many texts with printing errors as well as providing the technical means of correcting such errors more cheaply and quickly than in the preceding scribal culture.\u0000 From the 18th century, techniques of textual criticism were developed to attempt systematic correction of textual error, again with an emphasis on scriptural and classical texts. This “golden age of philology” slowly widened its range to consider such foundational medieval texts as Dante’s Commedia as well as, in time, modern vernacular literature. The technique of stemmatic analysis—the establishment of family relationships between existing documents of a text—provided the means for scholars to choose between copies of a work in the pursuit of accuracy. In the absence of original documents (manuscripts in the hand of Aristotle or the four Evangelists, for example) the choice between existing versions of a text were often made eclectically—that is, drawing on multiple versions—and thus were subject to such considerations as the historic range and geographical diffusion of documents, the systematic identification of common scribal errors, and matters of translation.\u0000 As the study of modern languages and literatures consolidated into modern university departments in the later 19th century, new techniques emerged with the aim of providing reliable literary texts free from obvious error. This aim had in common with the preceding philological tradition the belief that what a text means—discovered in the practice of hermeneutics—was contingent on what the text states—established by an accurate textual record that eliminates error by means of textual criticism. The methods of textual criticism took several paths through the 20th century: the Anglophone tradition centered on editing Shakespeare’s works by drawing on the earliest available documents—the printed Quartos and Folios—developing into the Greg–Bowers–Tanselle copy-text “tradition” which was then deployed as a method by which to edit later text","PeriodicalId":207246,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature","volume":"141 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134479711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-23DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1068
K. Hirschkop
The concept of “heteroglossia” was coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in an essay from the 1930s. Heteroglossia was the name he gave for the “inner stratification of a single national language into social dialects, group mannerisms, professional jargons, generic languages, the languages of generations and age-groups,” and so on, but it was not simply another term for the linguistic variation studied in sociolinguistics and dialectology. It differed in three respects. First, in heteroglossia differences of linguistic form coincided with differences in social significance and ideology: heteroglossia was stratification into “socio-ideological languages,” which were “specific points of view on the world, forms for its verbal interpretation.” Second, heteroglossia embodied the force of what Bakhtin called “historical becoming.” In embodying a point of view or “social horizon,” language acquired an orientation to the future, an unsettled historical intentionality, it otherwise lacked. Third, heteroglossia was a subaltern practice, concentrated in a number of cultural forms, all of which took a parodic, ironizing stance in relation to the official literary language that dominated them. Throughout his discussion, however, Bakhtin wavers between claiming this heteroglossia exists as such in the social world, from which the novel picks it up, and arguing that heteroglossia is something created and institutionalized by novels, which take the raw material of variation and rework it into “images of a language.” Interestingly, from roughly 2000 on work in sociolinguistics has suggested that ordinary speakers do the kind of stylizing and imaging work Bakhtin assigned to the novel alone. One could argue, however, that heteroglossia only acquires its full significance and force when it is freed from any social function and allowed to flourish in novels. According to Bakhtin, that means that heteroglossia is only possible in modernity, because it is in modernity that society becomes truly historical, and languages only acquire their orientation to the future in those circumstances.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-23DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1118
Angus Nicholls
The term daemonic—often substantivized in German as the daemonic (das Dämonische) since its use by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early 19th century—is a literary topos associated with divine inspiration and the idea of genius, with the nexus between character and fate and, in more orthodox Christian manifestations, with moral transgression and evil. Although strictly modern literary uses of the term have become prominent only since Goethe, its origins lie in the classical idea of the δαíμων, transliterated into English as daimon or daemon, as an intermediary between the earthly and the divine. This notion can be found in pre-Socratic thinkers such as Empedocles and Heraclitus, in Plato, and in various Stoic and Neo-Platonic sources. One influential aspect of Plato’s presentation of the daemonic is found in Socrates’s daimonion: a divine sign, voice, or hint that dissuades Socrates from taking certain actions at crucial moments in his life. Another is the notion that every soul contains an element of divinity—known as its daimon—that leads it toward heavenly truth. Already in Roman thought, this idea of an external voice or sign begins to be associated with an internal genius that belongs to the individual. In Christian thinking of the European romantic period, the daemonic in general and the Socratic daimonion in particular are associated with notions such as non-rational divine inspiration (for example, in Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder) and with divine providence (for example, in Joseph Priestley). At the same time, the daemonic is also often interpreted as evil or Satanic—that is: as demonic—by European authors writing in a Christian context. In Russia in particular, during a period spanning from the mid-19th century until the early 20th century, there is a rich vein of novels, including works by Gogol and Dostoevsky, that deal with this more strictly Christian sense of the demonic, especially the notion that the author/narrator may be a heretical figure who supplants the primacy of God’s creation. But the main focus of this article is the more richly ambivalent notion of the daemonic, which explicitly combines both the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritages of the term. This topos is most prominently mobilized by two literary exponents during the 19th century: Goethe, especially in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Notebooks and in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Both Goethe’s and Coleridge’s treatments of the term, alongside its classical and Judeo-Christian heritages, exerted an influence upon literary theory of the 20th century, leading important theorists such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Angus Fletcher, and Harold Bloom to associate the daemonic with questions concerning the novel, myth, irony, allegory, and literary influence.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-23DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1089
L. Marcus
The topic of rhythm in literary theory draws both on discussions of poetry and prose and on much broader currents of thought in the natural sciences and philosophy. In Western thought, rhythm was a central focus of attention in ancient Greece, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when theorists and practitioners of literature and the other arts often referred back to classical models. This is also the case in more recent theorizing of rhythm in the context of everyday life in advanced modern or, as some would say, postmodern societies. Nietzsche, who constantly circled around the term and with frequent direct and metaphorical references to dance, is in many ways the central figure in these discussions. He was massively influential after his death in 1900, both in Germany and more widely, for example, in Britain and North America, and he was taken up again, along with Heidegger, in much French thought after World War 2. Contemporary debates around rhythm and its relation to meter continue to refer to classical Greece, and in Chinese and Indian thought there is a similar continuity of attention to issues of rhythm.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-23DOI: 10.1002/9781118300916.wberle009
H. Tucker
An enumeration of generic qualities will define epic less helpfully than will an assessment of its behaviors. Among major literary kinds, epic offers the most long-standing and globally distributed evidence of the human habit of thinking by means of narrative. What it cherishes is the common good; what it ponders are the behaviors and values that forward or threaten collective welfare. What it reckons are the stakes of heroic risk that any living culture must hazard in order to prosper, by negotiating core identities with margins and adjusting settled customs to emergent opportunities; and it roots all these in the transmission of a tale that commands perennial attention on their account. Such dialectics underlie epic’s favorite narrative templates, the master plots of strife, quest, and foundation; and they find expression in such conventions as the in medias res opening and suspended closure; the epic invocation, ancestral underworld, superhuman machinery, and encyclopedic simile; the genre’s formal gravitation towards verse artifice and the lexical and syntactic mingling of old with new language. The genre steadfastly highlights the human condition and prospect, defining these along a scale of higher and lower being, along a timeline correlating history with prophecy, and along cultural coordinates where the familiar and the exotic take each other’s measure.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-22DOI: 10.4135/9781446221280.n209
Claire Colebrook
The concept of the rhizome was first articulated in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, published in French in 1975 and translated into English in 1986. Here the term emerges from a reading of Kafka’s description of movements in his novels and short stories, but it is also tied to a mode of reading and of composition. In Mille Plateaux (1980), translated into English as A Thousand Plateaus in 1987, the term has both a broad reference towards modes of thinking and analyzing that are nonhierarchical and decentered, and a more specifically literary sense of styles of writing. In A Thousand Plateaus, the term is introduced in order to describe a mode of composition that is distinct from the book, and a theory of language that is opposed to a basic structure, logic, or grammar from which variations develop. Languages and dialects do not emerge from a central grammar; instead, everything begins with variations of sound and sense. There is no universal grammar; every language has its distinct mode of growth. It is therefore illegitimate to talk of grammar “trees,” and far better to think of variation without a center. Rather than a linear development or progression, a rhizomatic text is composed of multiple points of entry. A rhizome is a lateral, decentered, proliferating, and interconnected web of relations and is therefore unlike the hierarchical (root, branch, offshoots) model of a tree.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-22DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.971
S. Burrows, Michael Falk
The article offers a definition, overview, and assessment of the current state of digital humanities, particularly with regard to its actual and potential contribution to literary studies. It outlines the history of humanities computing and digital humanities, its evolution as a discipline, including its institutional development and outstanding challenges it faces. It also considers some of the most cogent critiques digital humanities has faced, particularly from North American-based literary scholars, some of whom have suggested it represents a threat to centuries-old traditions of humanistic inquiry and particularly to literary scholarship based on the tradition of close reading. The article shows instead that digital humanities approaches gainfully employed offer powerful new means of illuminating both context and content of texts, to assist with both close and distant readings, offering a supplement rather than a replacement for traditional means of literary inquiry. The digital techniques it discusses include stylometry, topic modeling, literary mapping, historical bibliometrics, corpus linguistic techniques, and sequence alignment, as well as some of the contributions that they have made. Further, the article explains how many key aspirations of digital humanities scholarship, including interoperability and linked open data, have yet to be realized, and it considers some of the projects that are currently making this possible and the challenges that they face. The article concludes on a slightly cautionary note: What are the implications of the digital humanities for literary study? It is too early to tell.
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Pub Date : 2020-12-17DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1252
Ross Posnock
Like cosmopolitan, sophistication is a fighting word in American culture, a phrase that discomfits, raises eyebrows. It is not who we are, as President Obama used to say, for it smacks of elitism. Whereas the first word has had a stormy modern history—Stalin, for instance, used cosmopolitan as a code word for Jew—sophistication has always kept bad company, starting with its etymology. Its first six letters saddle it with sophistry, both tarred with the same brush of suspicion. Sophistry was a form of rhetoric that attracted the enmity of Socrates and Plato, with repercussions deep into the 17th century. In 1689, when John Locke said rhetoric trafficked in error and deceit, he was echoing the Greeks who tended to dismiss the art of persuasion and eloquence in general as sophistry, morally debased discourse. In the West, rhetoric, sophistry, and sophistication are arraigned as a shared locus of antinature: empty style, deceptive artifice, effeminate preening. They all testify to the deforming demands of social life, the worldliness disdained by Christian moralists, starting with Augustine, as concupiscence. This is the fall into sin from the prelapsarian transparency of Adam and Eve’s spiritual union of pure intellection with God, the perfection of reason that permits transcendence of the bodily senses. The corporeal senses and imagination dominate when man gives himself over to the world’s noise and confusion and is distracted from self-communion in company with God. Given that sophistication’s keynote is effortless ease, from the point of view of Augustinian Christianity such behavior in a basic sense violates Christian humility after the fall: with man’s loss of repose in God comes permanent uneasiness, inquiétude as Blaise Pascal and Michel de Montaigne put it, a chronic dissatisfaction and ennui that seeks relief in trivial divertissement (distraction), convictions that Montesquieu, Locke, and Tocqueville drew on for their root assumptions about how secular political institutions shape their citizens’ psyches. American Puritanism is in part an “Augustinian strain of piety,” as Perry Miller showed in his classic study, The New England Mind, hence suspicious of any distraction from worship of God. Puritans banned theaters two years after the nation was founded. Keeping vigilant watch over stirrings of New World worldliness, they permanently placed sophistication in the shadow of a double burden: Christian interdiction on top of the pre-Christian opprobrium heaped on sophistic rhetoric. Only by the mid-19th century does sophistication finally shed, though never definitively, sophistry’s fraudulence and deception and acquire positive qualities—worldly wisdom, refinement, subtlety, expertise. The year 1850 is the earliest positive use the Oxford English Dictionary lists, instanced by a sentence from Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography: “A people who . . . preserve in the very midst of their sophistication a frankness distinct from it.”
和世界主义者一样，世故在美国文化中是一个好斗的词，一个令人不安、令人侧目的词。正如奥巴马总统过去常说的那样，这不是我们，因为它带有精英主义的味道。尽管“世故”这个词在现代史上经历了一场风暴——例如，斯大林曾用“世界主义者”作为犹太人的暗号——但“世故”这个词的词源却一直与坏伙伴为伴。它的前六个字母都带有诡辩的色彩，两者都带有同样的嫌疑。诡辩是一种修辞形式，引起了苏格拉底和柏拉图的敌意，其影响一直持续到17世纪。1689年，当约翰·洛克说修辞是错误和欺骗的交易时，他是在附和希腊人的观点，希腊人倾向于将说服和雄辩的艺术视为诡辩，是道德败坏的话语。在西方，花言巧语、诡辩和世故被指责为共同的古董:空洞的风格、欺骗的技巧、娘娘腔的打扮。它们都证明了社会生活的扭曲需求，即从奥古斯丁开始的基督教道德家所鄙视的世俗，即贪欲。这是从堕落前亚当和夏娃与上帝的纯粹理智的精神结合的透明堕落到罪恶的，理性的完美，允许超越身体的感官。当人把自己交给世界的喧嚣和混乱，从与上帝的自我交流中分心时，肉体的感觉和想象就占据了主导地位。鉴于世故的基调是毫不费力的轻松，从奥古斯丁基督教的观点来看，这种行为在基本意义上违背了堕落后基督教的谦卑:随着人类对上帝失去安宁，随之而来的是永久的不安，正如帕斯卡尔(Blaise Pascal)和蒙田(Michel de Montaigne)所说，这是一种长期的不满和厌倦，人们在琐碎的消遣中寻求解脱，孟德斯鸠、洛克(Locke)和托克维尔(Tocqueville)的信念是他们关于世俗政治制度如何塑造公民心理的根本假设。美国清教在某种程度上是一种“奥古斯丁式的虔诚”，正如佩里·米勒在他的经典研究《新英格兰人的思想》中所显示的那样，因此对任何分散对上帝崇拜的行为都持怀疑态度。美国建国两年后，清教徒禁止了剧院。他们对新世界世俗化的躁动保持警惕，永远把世俗化置于双重负担的阴影之下:基督教的封锁，加上前基督教的谴责和诡辩的修辞。直到19世纪中期，世故才最终摆脱了诡辩的欺诈和欺骗，获得了积极的品质——世俗的智慧、精致、微妙和专业知识。1850年是牛津英语词典列出的最早的肯定用法，例如利·亨特的自传中的一句话:“一个人……在他们的世故之中保持一种不同于世故的坦率。”
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