Wednesday, 26 April 2023

the formation of literary studies as an academic

discipline

The establishment of literary studies as an academic discipline

SS
a- the reasons for the introduction of literary studies as a university subject
b- F.R. Leavis' conceptualisation of literary studies
c- F.R. Leavis's practical criticism (close reading) versus Rene Warren and
Austin Wellek's theory of literature
d- the di erence between criticism and theory
e- the di erence between theory of literature and literary theory

Austin Warren and Rene Wellek's construction of the theory of

literary studies

a- the aims of theory of literature

b- characteristics of a good theory
c- M.H. Abrams's classi cation of literary theories

Jonathan Culler's characterisation of (contemporarary) literary theory

a- the di erence between the aims of traditional and modern theory

b- characteristics of modern theory

definitions of the object of literary studies: what is literature?

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 I. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's de nition of literature
a- popular understanding of the notion of literature rejected by the two
theorists
b- Wellek and Warren's de nition of literature
2. Terry Eagleton's challenge to the de nitions of literature in Literary Theory.
An Introduction
3. the historical evolution of the concept of literature
a- the shift from the eighteenth-century to Romantic notion of literature
b- the deconstruction of the notion of literature in cultural studies
c- Jonathan Culler's de nition of the present-day understanding of the notion
of literature

ancient and early modern sources of literary and

cultural studies

ancient (classical) sources (Greek and Roman period)

a - literature
- the role of literature in public life of ancient Greece
- Aristophanes's The Frogs (405 BCE) as a literary critical text in the literary
(dramatic) form
- the subjects of the literary debate: the form and social functions of poetry
- the con ict between ancients and moderns
- di erences between old and modern models of tragedy: language, themes,
e ect upon the audience
b- philosophy

Plato's comments on poetry in his dialogues (Ion and The Republic)

- the concept of Socratic dialogue

- Plato's critique of poetry as knowledge in Ion and The Republic (the con ict
between poetry and philosophy)
-Plato's theory of Forms (Ideas) and the parable (allegory) of the cave as its
illustration (The Republic Book VII)

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 - Plato's theory of poetic mimesis (The Republic Book X)
- Plato's contribution to the narrative theory
- the distinction between mimesis and diegesis

Aristotle's The Poetics (350 BCE) (follow the links to particular

passages of the text of The Poetics)

- the notion of 'poetics' and examples of famous poetics

- the signi cance of The Poetics for literary studies
- Aristotle's legacy
• the in uence of The Poetics on narrative theory
• the in uence of The Poetics on formalisms
• the in uence of The Poetics on reader response criticism
- Aristotle's theory of mimesis and the notion of poetic truth
• kinds of mimesis (parts I-III)
• tragedy as an imitation of action (part VI)
• plot (mythos) as a means of imitation of action (part VII-VIII)
◦ de nition of the plot
◦ principles of plot construction
• di erences between history and poetry (historical truth and poetic
truth) - (part IX and part XXII)
• imitation as creation
◦ two kinds of errors in poetry (part XXV)

Plato's contribution to media studies

- Plato's critique of writing in Phaedrus (360 BCE)

- media turn in literary studies

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 rhetoric

i. de nition of rhetoric
ii. the role of rhetoric in a social life of democratic society
iii. three branches of rhetoric
iv. ve o ces/canons of rhetoric
v. Plato's and Aristotle's debate on the role and value of rhetoric
vi. two ancient literary-critical texts in uenced by rhetoric: Horace's Ars
Poetica and Pseudo-Longinus' On the Sublime
- Ars Poetica and On the Sublime as examples of poetics
- the ancient notion of the sublime (de nition, sources of the sublime, natural
and arti cial roads to sublimity)
- Edmund Burke's revision of the theory of sublime

philology

a- the rise of philology in the Library of Alexandria

b- the aims and methods of the ancient philology
c- the rise of the modern philology
i. the origin: "Phalaris controversy"
ii. Richard Bentley as a founder of modern philology and his methods of the
study of classics

the republic of letters

a- the de nition of the republic of letters

b- the aims and ideals of the republic of letters
c-the practices of the republic of letters

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 print culture

media studies and the concept of media shift

a- Marshall McLuhan as the father of media studies and his theory of the
in uence of media on human communication ('the medium is the message')
b- the periodization of the history of human communication
c- from print to digitality: the retribalisation

Elizabeth Eisenstein's description of print culture

a - hopes and fears accompanying the advent of print

b - the role of print in the modernisation of the world: the e ects of print
c - characteristics of print: 'typographic xity'
d- Adrian Johns's polemic against Eisenstein's theory of print
- Johns's theory of print as a discursive construct
e- Jonathan Franzen's perception of print and anxiety about the e ects of
digital technology

the influence of print on culture and knowledge

a- the rei cation and commodi cation of literature and knowledge

b- the decline of individual patronage and the rise of professional authorship
c - the e ects of the proliferation of books
d- the rise of copyright

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 the rise of public sphere and modern criticism

a- Jurgen Habermas's de nition of the public sphere

b- institutions of the public sphere: the coexistence of orality and print
c- undisciplined criticism: the genres of criticism
b- the rise of biographical criticism

Victorian theory of culture and criticism

Matthew Arnold's definition of culture in Culture and Anarchy (1869)

a. Arnold's de nition of culture

b. the opposition of culture and material civilisation
c. the concept of 'philistines'
d. the role of culture in social life

Matthew Arnold's theory of criticism in "The Function of Criticism at

the Present Time" (1865)

a. de nition of criticism
b. functions of criticism
c- characteristics of criticism

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 the evolution of cultural studies in the twentieth
century

The concept of culture in F.R. Leavis's "Mass Civilisation and

Minority Culture" (1930)

a- the de nition of culture vs. civilisation

b- the role of minority
c- the relationship between minority and masses

Raymond Williams's redefinition of culture in The Long

Revolution (1961)

a- three levels of culture: ideal, documentary and social

b- the ways of analysing each level of culture

John Fiske's redefinition of the purpose of cultural studies and

theory revolution

a- Harold Bloom's reaction to the reconceptualisation of literary

studies (interview) under the in uence of cultural studies

Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the relationship between culture and

power

a- the role of taste in social life

b- di erent types of cultural capital: economic, educational, social, cultural
c- the notion of symbolic systems and symbolic violence
d- the notion of habitus

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 Pierre Bourdieu: theory of the field of cultural production

a- the concept of the eld, kinds of elds and relationships between them
b- the logic of the eld of cultural production
c- the eld of literary production as “the economic world reversed”
d- cultural eld as a universe of belief
e- “the eld of restricted production” vs “the eld of large-scale production”
f- belief or the production of symbolic value

relations between knowledge, culture and power

Michel Foucault's theory of power

Discipline and Punish: characteristics of modern power

a) western civilisation as carcereal archipelago
b) the changing nature of punishments
c) the concept of docile bodies
d) the concept of panopticon and the nature of modern power: invisible,
di used, depersonalised
e) mechanisms of modern power: hierarchical observation, normalising
judgment, examination

History of Madness: the relationship of power and knowledge

a) the changing concept of madness: holy mystery, wise foolery, animality,

illness
b) madness as an ideological exclusion
c) the collusion of power and knowledge

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History of Sexuality: the relationship of power and discourse

a) repressive hypothesis
b) discursive explosion

the functions of inofficial culture: carnival and masquerade

1. Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of the carnival and the carnivalesque

a- characteristics of the carnival
b- social functions of the carnival
c- carnival vs carnivalesque
2. Terry Castle's theory of the masquerade
a- masquerade vs carnival (similarities and di erences)
B- characteristics of the eighteenth-century masquerades
c- matacritical function of masquerades
d- the time and the reasons for the demise of the masquerades

Michel de Certeau's theory of the relation between culture and

power

1. culture as a power struggle between producers and consumers of culture

2. consumption as secondary production
a) characteristics of consumption as secondary production
b) subversive uses of culture
c) the concept of poaching
4. similarities and di erences between the primary and secondary
production
5. the marginality of majority
6. similarities and di erences between Foucault's and Certeau's theories of
power
7. strategies vs tactics
8. reading as a secondary production

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 twentieth-century literary and cultural theories

formalisms

a- New Criticism
- Cleanth Brook's concept of a well-wrought urn
- W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's concepts of
- intentional fallacy
- a ective fallacy
b- Russian formalism
- the concept of literariness of the language
- Victor Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarisation
- the concept of 'laying bare the technique'
- theories of the narrative:
- the distinction between plot (sjuzet) and story (fabula)
- the distinction between free and bound motifs
- further development of Russian formalism:
- the exploration of the dynamic relationship between literature and society
- literature as a functioning system
- Mukarovsky's concept of the aesthetic function
- Jakobson's concept of the shifting dominant

structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction

a- Ferdinand de Saussure
- langue vs parole
- the concept of linguistic sign
- syntagm vs paradigm
b- Roman Jakobson's concepts of metaphor and metonymy
c- Roman Jakobson's functions of language
d- Roman Jakobson's de nition of poetic language
e- structuralist narratology

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 - Vladimir Propp's The Morphology of a Folk Tale
- Claude Levis Strauss The Structuralist Study of Myth
f- Roland Barthes as a poststructuralist
- the concept of the death of the author
- the concepts of the work vs text
- the concepts of the text of pleasure and texts of bliss, writerly
text and readerly text
g- deconstruction
- the concept of the centre
- binary opoositions and violent hierarchy
- logocentrism and phonocentrism
- di érance
- supplement

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