What Is Literature? Flashcards
What is the ‘hyper-protected cooperative principle’?
Communication depends on participants cooperating with each other and so saying relevant things.
Literature narratives are members of ‘narrative display texts’ (‘tellability’). What distinguishes lit texts from other narrative display texts is a process of selection, which means that the reader approaches them with assurance that the text is ‘worth it’. Thus, for works of literature the cooperative principle is hyper-protected.
What are ‘narrative display texts’?
Texts whose relevance lies not in the information they convey, but in the their ‘reliability’- entertains or has a point and therefore seems ‘worth-it’
Explain the hyper-protected cooperative principle as a definition of literature
As literature has undergone process of selection and been deemed ‘worth it’ by others, lit is a speech act/ textual event that elicits a certain kind of attention and what leads us to perceive a text as literature is that we find it in a context we identify as literary.
Define deictics
orientational features of language that relate to situation of utterance e.g. ‘now’, ‘ I’
Describe Kant’s idea of aesthetic objects
Objects that combine sensuous form (colors, sounds) with spiritual content (ideas). Combination of material and spiritual.
Describe ‘purposiveness without purpose’
While literature is made so parts work together towards an end (purposiveness to construction), the end is the work itself, not an external purpose.
Define intertextuality
Works are made out of other works, they are made possible my prior texts, which they take up, repeat, challenge and transform.
Work exists between and among other texts, through it’s relation to them.
Define self-reflexivity
Novels are essentially about novels, authors attempt to advance or renew literature and literature is always implicitly a reflection on itself.
Give six possible ways of attempting to define Literature
Hyper-protected cooperative principle
Foregrounds language, devices draw attention to itself
Integration of language, relations of reinforcement, contrast or dissonance.
Fiction, projects a fictional world in which deictics are internal.
Aesthetic object, combines material with spiritual.
Intertextual/self-reflexive, works made out of other works, always reflexion on itself.
La langue
In linguistic analysis, means ‘system of language’, the underlying system that makes parole (speech events) possible.
Parole
In linguistic analysis, means instances of speech/writing,, made possible by la langue (system of language).
Synchronic study
Studying language as a system at a particular time
Diachronic study
Studying historical changes to particular elements of language.
Hermeneutics
Starting with texts and asking what they mean - seeking new and better interpretations of text (favored by modern criticism)
Poetics
Starting with attested meaning and asking how this meaning is achieved (favored by linguistic model).
