SPN 305: Introducción a Estudios Literarios -Otoño 2014
Hoja de Trabajo: 2. ¿Qué es Literatura y
realmente importa?
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(1) What
is literature? has not been central because: (a) since theory intersects with
linguistics, philosophy, or history for example, why we should worry whether a
text is literary or not; (b) “literariness”
can be found in non-literary texts (for example historical intelligibility is
literary narrative). 18-19
(2) So
the question is: what distinguishes literature from non-literature works? What
we call literature is scarcely two centuries old. Prior to 1800 literature
meant ‘writings’ or ‘book knowledge’. The
modern Western sense of literature as imaginative writing can be traced to the
German Romantics of the late 18th century. And then we think of
non-European cultures, it becomes more difficult to define literature. 20-21
(3) Literature,
we might conclude, is a speech act or textual event, that elicits certain kinds
of attention… We have two perspectives: We can think of literary works as
language with particular properties or features and we can think of literature
as the product of conventions and a certain kind of attention. 27-28
(4) Five
points theorists have made about literature (you take two previous perspectives)
·
Literature
as the foregrounding of language: Literature is language that ‘foregrounds;
language itself: makes it strange, thrusts it at you...When a text us framed as
literature, we are disposed to attend to sound patterning or other sorts of
linguistic organization we usually ignore. 28-29
·
Literature
as the integration of language: Literature is language in which the various
elements and components of the text are brought into a complex relation. 29
·
Literature
as fiction: The literary work is a linguistic event which projects a
fictional world that includes speaker, actors, events, and implied audience…We
can relate Hamlet to the world in
different ways at several different levels. The fictionality of literature
separates language from other contexts in which it might be used and leaves the
work’s relation to the world open to interpretation. 31-32
·
Literature
as aesthetic object: For Kant, the aesthetic is the name of the attempt to
bridge the gap between the material and the spiritual world. A literary work is
an aesthetic object because with other communicative functions, it engages
readers to consider the interrelation between form and content. 33. A good
story is tellable, strikes readers or listeners as ‘worth it’. 34
·
Literature
as intertextual or self-reflexive construct: A work exists between and
among other texts, through its relations to them. To read something is
literature is to consider it as a linguistic event that has meaning in relation
to other discourses: for example, a poem that plays on possibilities created by
previous poems or a as a novel that puts on stage and criticizes the political
rhetoric of the day. 34. Literature is a practice in which authors attempt to
advance or renew literature and thus it always implicitly a reflection of literature
itself. 35
(5) What
theorists have done since the 1990s is to reflect on literature as a historical
and ideological category, on the social and political functions that something
called ‘literature’ has been thought to perform. 36
(6) The
structure of literary works is such that it is easier to take them as telling
us about ‘the human’ in general than to specify what narrower categories they describe
of illuminate…In their particularity, novels, poems, and plays decline to
explore what they are exemplary of at the same time that they invite readers to
become involved in the predicaments and thoughts of their narrators and
characters. 37
(7) Benedict
Anderson argues, in Imagined Communities,
that works of literature –particularly novels- helped to create national
communities by their postulation of and appeal to a broad community of readers
of the same language. 37
(8) Literature
encourages solitary reading…But..literature has historically been seen as dangerous:
it promotes the questioning of authority and social arrangements. Plato banned
poets from his ideal republic because they could only do harm…By promoting
identification across divisions of class, gender, race, nation, and age, books
may promote ‘fellow-feeling’ that discourages struggle, but they may also
produce a keen sense of injustice that makes progressive struggles possible. Read:
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
(9) Literature
is the noise of culture as well as its information. It is an
entropic/fragmentary force as well as cultural capital. It is writing that
calls for a reading and engages readers in problems of meaning. 41
Comments
La literatura
es una creación compleja y diversa de grupos culturales y generalmente
perteneciente a las ideas de nación de sus ciudadanos. Me intereso bastante lo
que Anderson habla del papel de la literatura en la formación de la idea de nación
entre los habitantes en ella. En el caso de Los
Ríos Profundos de José María Arguedas vemos a Ernesto, el personaje
adolescente y principal, en sus luchas identitarias para adentrarse a un mundo
hostil en el mundo andino y bilingüe (castellano-quechua)
del sur peruano. Aquí el narrador nos transporta a una idea de nación que es
marginada en la nación peruana. Asimismo me intereso las ideas estéticas de
Kant en cuanto a la literatura. El nos dice que como arte la literatura
intersecta el mundo material y el mundo espiritual de la obra y al final del
lector. Esta intersección puede generar reflexiones y acciones en los lectores.
Una adaptación de la novela para el teatro se convierte en una intervención de
la literatura como objeto artístico en acción inmediata con la audiencia.
Literary Terms:
1.
Foregrounding: Giving unsual prominence to one
element or property of a text, relative to other less noticeable aspects..poetry
deviates from everyday speech and from prose by using metre, surprising
metaphors, alliteration, and other devices by which its language draws
attention to itself.
2.
Literariness: The
sum of special and formal properties that distinguish literary texts from
non-literary texts…The leading Formalist Roman Jakobson declared in 1919 that ‘the
object of literary science is not literature but literariness, that is what makes a given work a literary work’.
3.
Prose: The
form of written language that is not organized according to the formal patterns
of verse, although it will have some sort of rhythm ans dosme devices of
repetition and balance, these are not governed by a regularly sustained formal
arrangement, the significant unit being the sentence rather than the line.
4.
Verse: 1.
Poetry, ad distinct from prose…The technical requirements of rhythm and metre
are present while poetic merit may or may not be. 2. A line of poetry. 3. A
poem.
Materiales en Youtube
Writer
Mario Vargas Llosa on the Importance of Literature
The importance of literature
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