Reading Literature in Crisis

Question 1

Key Concepts

Answer 1

Reading
Literature
Crisis

Question 2

What is reading?

Answer 2

Recognising
Connecting
Interpretating
Judging
Understanding/non-understanding
Retracing
Tactical non-reading
Creating?

Question 3

Labour or Leisure

Answer 3

Act of production/consumption.
Do readers create something new in the act of reading OR simply absorb what’s there?
Possibility that reading can be a destructive act?

Question 4

Reader Response

Answer 4

Argued that the meaning is a fundamentally interactive process - literature come to life in the encounter between text and reader.
Can make some quite modest and uncontroversial claims (e.g Wolfgang Iser’s work).
At times is more radical (e.g Judith Fetterley/Stanley Fish’s works).
Can argue that there are as many meanings of a text as there are readers of it.

Question 5

English Literature

Answer 5

Simply means ‘writing’ and is a category that encompasses drama, poems and novels as well as other forms of written word

Question 6

Literature is…

Answer 6

Used in an evaluative sense to refer to pieces of imaginative writings that are deemed to be exceptionally valuable and worthy of preservation, study, debate and re-reading

Question 7

Study of Literature

Answer 7

Only relatively recently became possible to study.
Characterised by fierce controversies over what we read and how we read.

Question 8

Who decides what’s literature?

Answer 8

Authors
Individual readers
Institutions (e.g publishers, bookshops, libraries, exam boards…)
History or the ‘Test of Time’

Question 9

Canon

Answer 9

Term borrowed from Biblical Scholarship where there has been controversy over which ancient things that are the works of God.
Different Christian traditions and denominations have arrived at their own decisions about which texts are canonical or not.

Question 10

The question of the canon

Answer 10

A version of the canon debate can be found in literary studies.
Impossible to imagine the canon without some authors (e.g Shakespeare and Austen).
Is the canon a kind of exclusive members only club with a long waiting list?

Question 11

Shakespeare and Austen

Answer 11

Weren’t canonical authors when they were writing.
Canonical writers can have dim views of each others.
Tolstoy hated Shakespeare/Mark Twain hated Austen.

Question 12

Inside and outside the canon

Answer 12

Marginal texts can produce some of the sharpest test cases for what counts as literature.
Graphic novels are an emerging genre and its relationship with traditional literature is still being recognised.

Question 13

‘Fun Home’ by Alison Bechdel

Answer 13

Names of chapters are references to other famous authors (e.g James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde).
Example of intertextuality - the presence of one text in another.

Question 14

Crisis

Answer 14

A situation characterised by uncertainty, upheaval or danger.
Could also be a turning point - represents an opportunity or a moment when things begin to get better.

Question 15

Crisis in Literature

Answer 15

Unusual to encounter literature without any form of crisis.
Lauren Berlant (critic/theorist) floated the notion of ‘crisis ordinances’.
Crisis ordinances refer to the vulnerability or uncertainty that is woven into ongoing everyday experiences.

Question 16

Is crisis perceptible as…

Answer 16

Subject matter
Context
The level of form

Question 17

Literature engages with crisis by

Answer 17

Representing or framing it
Embodying it at a level of form or language
Accentuating it or downplaying it
Ignoring it - if possible

Question 18

Criticism and crisis

Answer 18

Crisis originates from the Greek word ‘krisis’ meaning decision.
Critic, criticise and criticism also comes from krisis.
There is a direct link between criticism and crisis.

Question 19

2 questions that dominate critical controversy

Answer 19

Should we read with a wide-angle lens or adopt a microscopic focus or textual detail?
Is it our job to appreciate the artistic qualities of writing or to look at the values that underpin literature?

Question 20

The hermeneutic of suspicion

Answer 20

A term for a certain distrust that characterises modern approaches to literature.
An approach that almost treats the text as the scene of a crime or cover up.

Question 21

Takeaways

Answer 21

Reader response theory
The canon
Intertextuality
The hermeneutic of suspicion