SPN 305: Introducción
a Estudios Literarios - Otoño 2014
Hoja de Trabajo: 5. Retórica, Poética y Poesía
1.Poetics: the attempt to account for the literary effects
by describing the conventions and reading operations that make them possible. (70)
2.Rhetoric: the study of the persuasive and expressive resources
of language, the techniques of language and thought that can be used to
describe effective discourses. Aristotle separated rhetoric from poetics,
treating rhetoric as the art of persuasion and poetics as the art of imitation
or representation. (70). Medieval and Renaissance traditions, assimilated the
two: rhetoric became the art of
eloquence and poetry (science it
seeks to teach, to delight, and to move) was a superior instance of this art. In
the 19th century, rhetoric came
to be seen as artifice divorced from the genuine activities of thought or of
poetic imagination and fell into disfavor. In the late twentieth century rhetoric has been revived as the study
of the structuring powers of discourse.
3. Poetry is
related to rhetoric: it is language that makes abundant use of figures of
speech and language that aims to be powerfully persuasive. (70)
4. In contrast to Plato, who excluded poets from his ideal
republic, Aristotle asserted the value of poetry by focusing on imitation
(mimesis) rather than rhetoric. He argued that poetry provides a safe outlet
for the release of intense emotions. (70-71)
5. Literary theory has been much concerned with rhetoric,
and theorists debate the nature and function of rhetorical figures. A
rhetorical figure has generally been defined as an alteration of change from ‘ordinary’
usage.
6. In the past, theorists’ definitions: a trope turns or alters the
meaning of a word (as in a metaphor)
and a figure arranges words
to achieve special effects such as alliteration
(the alliteration of a consonant), apostrophe
(addressing something that is not regular listener), and assonance (the repetition of a word). Recent theory rarely distinguishes
tropes and figures. They are fundamental structures, not exception and
distortions. Traditionally the most important figure has been the metaphor. A
metaphor treats something as something
else (calling Verónica a queen, or my love a big river). Metaphor is thus a
version of a basic way of knowing: we know something by seeing it as something. For example: ‘Life is a journey’. (72)
7. For Roman Jakobson, metaphor and metonymy are the two
fundamental structures of language. Metonymy moves from one thing to another
that is contiguous with it, as when we say ‘the Crown’ for ‘the Queen’. (72-3). Other theorists add synecdoque
and irony to complete a list of ‘four master tropes’. Synecdoque is the substitution of part
for whole: ‘ten hands’ for ‘ten workers’.
It infers qualities of the whole from those of a part and allows the parts to represent
wholes. Irony juxtaposes appearance
and reality; what happens is the opposite of what is expected. (73)
8. Literature depends on rhetorical figures but also on
larger structures, particular literary genres…For readers, genres are sets of
conventions and expectations in a text. (73). Greeks: three broad classes
according to who speaks: poetic or lyric,
where the narrator speaks in the first person, epic or narrative, where the narrator speaks in his own voice but
allows characters to speak in theirs, and drama,
when the characters do all the talking. Another way is to focus on the relation
of speaker to audience: In epic,
there is oral recitation: a poet directly confronting the listening audience. In
drama, the author is hidden from the
audience and the characters on stage talk. In lyric, -the most complicated case-, the poet, in singing or
chanting, turns his back on his listeners, so to speak, and speaks to himself
or to someone else. To these three elementary genres, we can add the modern
genre of the novel, which addresses the reader through a book. (74).
9. Epic and tragic drama were in ancient times and in the
Renaissance: the crowning achievements of literature, the highest accomplishments
of any aspiring poet. The invention of the novel brought a new competition onto
the literary scene, but between the late 18th century and the mid 20th
century, the lyric, a short non-narrative poem, came to be identified with the
essence of literature. Theorists treat now lyric less an expression of the poet’s
feelings and more associated with imaginative work on language making poetry a
disruption of culture rather than the main repository of values. (74-75)
10. Literary theory that is focused on poetry debates, among
other things, the relative importance of different ways of viewing poems: a
poem is both a structure made of words (a text) and event (an act of the poet,
ab experience of the reader, and event in literary history). 75
11. Lyric poetry, is utterance overheard…Lyrics, then, are
fictional imitations of personal utterance…The dominant mode of appreciation of
poetry has been the focus of the complexities of the speaker’s attitudes, on
the poem as the dramatization of thoughts, and the feelings of a speaker whom
one reconstructs. (76)
12. The extravagance of poetry includes the aspiration to
what theorists since classical times have called the ‘sublime’, relation to
what exceeds human capabilities of understanding, provokes awe or passionate
intensity, gives the speaker a sense of something beyond the human (77).
13. The foregrounding and making strange of language through
metrical organization and repetition of sounds is the basis of poetry…(80)… The
interpretation of poems depends not just on the convention of unity but also on
the convention and significance the rule is that poems, however slight in
appearance, are supposed to be about something important. (81)
Los poemas
que me impresionan son los que hablan de la condición humana como los del
peruano César Vallejo. Hay algo transcendental en varios de sus poemas como el
de “Masa” que resume de varias maneras lo dicho por el autor en (11). La conexión
con el performance y la lectura de este tipo de poemas siempre me ha interesado
como un efecto hacia una audiencia que busca compartir esos momentos de
transcendencia humana.
Aquí un enlace:
Términos literarios
Poetics: The
general principles of poetry or of literature in general, or the theoretical
study of these principles.
Poetry: Language
sung, chanted, spoken, or written according to some pattern of recurrence that
emphasizes the relationships between words on the basis of sound as well as
sense.
Rhetoric: The deliberate
exploitation of eloquence for the most persuasive effect in public speaking or
in writing.
Genre: The French
term for a type, species, or class of composition. A literary genre is a
recognizable and established category of written work employing common
conventions as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it for another
kind.
