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Modern Literary Studies Dr. Abdel-Fattah Adel

Part (3)

Class (3) Items

Quick Info

Main ideas

Key Terms and Concepts

Sample Analysis

Representative Readings

Part (3) Objectives By the end of this part, you will be able to:

1. Explain the distinctive features of the reader-oriented and rhetorical approaches.

2. Realize the importance of the reader-oriented and rhetorical approaches.

3. Name the main critics in the reader-oriented and rhetorical approaches.

4. Describe the main ideas of the reader-oriented and rhetorical approaches.

5. Define the main concepts and terms used in the reader- oriented and rhetorical approaches.

6. Compare some different aspects of the reader-oriented and rhetorical approaches.

7. Analyze some representative writings of the reader-oriented and rhetorical approaches.

8. Analyze sample analysis of the reader-oriented and rhetorical approaches.

1. Answer the following questions: 1. Who are the main critics of Modern Rhetoric/ Phenomenology/ Reception Theory/

Reader Response Theory?

2. What are the main ideas of Modern Rhetoric/ Phenomenology/ Reception Theory/ Reader Response Theory?

2. Write about the following terms/concepts:- 1. Performative Utterances. 2. Stylistics. 3. Hermeneutics. 4. Horizon of Expectations. 5. The Implied Reader. 6. Transactional Reading.

3. Explain a sample analysis of: 1. Modern Rhetoric

2. Phenomenology

3. Reception Theory

4. Reader Response Theory

4. Write about the following critical works:

5. Comment on the following passages from: 1. “How To Do Things With Words” by 2. “The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" by 3. Being and Time by 4. Implied Reader by 5. Not so much a Teaching as an Intangling by 6. Interpretive Communities by 7. Literature as Exploration by

Part (3) Questions

Intro

•Reading

•Modern Rhetoric

•Phenomenology

•Reception Theory

•Reader Response

Theory

Main Ideas

Language and

Action • The dialogic structure of the literary text requires that

be taken into account.

• Rhetoric, the of language for readers, and solicits a response from readers.

Two sides of the equation of

reading:

the production of language acts

known as rhetoric

the reception of such acts in reading and interpretation

Modern Rhetoric

• J. L. Austin (1911 - 1960)

• Kenneth Burke (1897 - 1993)

• Edwin Black (1929 - 2007)

• John Searle (1932 - )

Historical Rhetoric

In ancient Greece and Rome, language was recognized as an important feature of social and political life. Training in how to think properly took the form of training in how to use language effectively.

Logic

• the right use of such mental processes as induction and deduction

Rhetoric

• the use of forms to give shape to language and the use of language to make argumentative points and attain emotional effects.

Decline of Rhetoric

• One of the major intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century consisted of restoring importance to the study of language.

• Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, were among the first to argue for the centrality of language to human experience and to social institutions.

Rise of Rhetoric

Rise of Rhetoric

• Language philosophers in England, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, noted that human knowledge takes place in language and that language is central to human social activity.

• In conjunction with these intellectual movements there arose a new interest in rhetoric on the part of literary scholars in the mid to late twentieth century.

Modern Rhetoric

• The work of J. L. Austin, especially his seminal How To Do Things With Words (1962), provoked an interest in the way language acts to create institutions, social bonds, emotional effects, and modified realities.

• He described a class of what he called "performative utterances," statements such as "I pronounce you man and wife" or "I sentence you to death" that make things happen in the world.

• The American philosopher John Searle, in his books Speech Acts (1970) and The Social Construction of Language (1995), played an especially important role in furthering Austin's "speech act" theory.

Rhetoric and Literature

• Literary critics have used the theory to study how literary language takes different forms like lies, promises, excuses, etc.

• In the contemporary era, the study of the language of literature, which is usually called "stylistics," blends with the study of language in many other arenas of use.

Rhetorical Criticism

• Kenneth Burke’s works are central to modern rhetorical theory:

• A Rhetoric of Motives (1950),

• A Grammar of Motives (1945),

• Language as Symbolic Action (1966)

• Among his influential concepts are "identification", "consubstantiality", and the "dramatistic pentad".

Rhetorical Criticism

• Edwin Black was a rhetorical critic best known for his book Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (1965) in which he criticized the dominant "neo-Aristotelian" tradition in American rhetorical criticism as having little in common with Aristotle.

• Rhetorical scholars had been focusing primarily on Aristotelian logical forms they often overlooked important, alternative types of discourse.

Reader-Oriented Criticism

Aristotle

• The Greek philosopher Aristotle noticed that a work of literature is as remarkable for its effects as for its causes.

• Tragedy succeeds not so much for reasons of formal perfection as for reasons of the emotional transformation that it works on audiences.

• The turn in the tragic plot is also a turn of emotion in the audience as, with the tragic hero, the audience moves from blindness to recognition.

• Such recognition is both a moment of cognitive turning or revelation and a moment of affective response and fellow- feeling.

Decline of the Reader’s Role

• A sense of the importance of the contact between literary work and its audiences was shunted aside by later aesthetic theories, especially those developed under the auspices of Romanticism.

• They emphasized the genius of the writer or creator in bringing the ideal and the real, the universal and the concrete, together in a work of art.

• Attention shifted from the psychological and emotional link between work and audience to the inner harmony or organic unity of the work itself.

• These aesthetic theories were Platonic rather than Aristotelian, more indebted to the idealism of Plato than to the realism of Aristotle.

Phenomenology

• Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938)

• Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)

• Roman Ingarden (1973 – 1970)

• Georges Poulet (1902 – 1991)

• Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 – 2002)

Restoring the Importance of the Reader

One was the historical school that in the eighteenth century argued that to know the meaning of older texts, one had to reconstruct the context in which they were originally written. Who a work was addressed to in part determined how it should retroactively be interpreted.

The other school was the philosophy of Imman-uel Kant, who argued that knowledge is shaped by inner mental categories that operate prior to any sense experience. One implication of this argument was to shift attention toward the work of the observer in constructing knowledge both of the world and of art.

Two schools of thought worked to resuscitate interest in the role of the audience in literature.

Edmund Husserl

• The Kantian investigation of the role of the mind in shaping knowledge of the world and, by implication, shaping the perception of the work of art was continued by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the twentieth century.

• His work on the phenomenology of knowledge deepened an understanding of the operations of consciousness in bringing to sensory experience an ideational and presensory component that was a feature of the mind itself.

Heidegger and Gadamer

• Other philosophers in the same tradition, especially Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, worked out a compromise between the historicist position and the Kantian one.

• Knowledge, they argued, occurs in time and history

• All knowledge is interpretation, a transfer of meaning from one moment of history into another that always inflects what is known with the categories and assumptions of the later moment.

Poulet and Ingarden

• The leap from these conclusions to an understanding of the role of the reader's cognition in the work of art was executed by Georges Poulet and Roman Ingarden.

• The phenomenological literary criticism of Poulet, especially his book Metamorphoses of the Circle (1961), transferred to American criticism a sense of the importance of the reader's experience of a literary work.

• Ingarden's Cognition of the Work of Art (1968) argued for an essential link between the work of the audience and the work itself.

The Reception Theory

• Hans Robert Jauss • (1921 -1997)

• Wolfgang Iser • (1926 – 2007)

The Reception Theory

The Reception Theory

• Reception Theory refers to a historical application of the reader-oriented approach, emphasizing altering interpretive and evaluative responses of generations of readers to a text.

• It focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the general public, over a period of time in history, as they interpret the meanings of a text based on their respective cultural background and life experiences.

• Since the linguistic and aesthetic expectation of readers change over the course of time, and since later readers and critics have access to the text as well as its criticisms, there develops an evolving historical tradition of interpretations and evaluations of a given literary work.

• According to Jauss, the reader approaches a text armed with the knowledge and experience gained from interactions with other texts. These earlier texts arouse familiarity for the reader based on expectations and rules of genre and style.

• Jauss describes it this way, 'a literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period'.

Reader-Response Criticism

• Stanley Fish (1938 - )

• Louise Rosenblatt (1904 – 2005)

• Norman N. Holland (1927 – 2017)

Reader-Response Criticism

• Reader-response shifted the focus from the text to the reader and argues that affective response is a legitimate point for departure in criticism.

• Its conceptualization of critical practice is distinguished from theories that favor textual autonomy (for example, formalism) as well as recent critical movements (for example, structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction) due to its focus on the reader's interpretive activities.

• Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation.

• Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance.

• The approach avoids subjectivity or essentialism in descriptions produced through its recognition that reading is determined by textual and also cultural constraints.

Stanley Fish

• The US critic most responsible for disseminating the idea that the reader's experience is as important as those qualities inherent to the work itself was Stanley Fish.

• Fish argued, famously, that "there is no text in this class," by which he meant that the reader's experience takes precedence over a description of the formal features of the work and, in fact, constitutes those formal features.

• Is there a Text in this Class? (1980)

• Those features cannot be described except insofar as the mind grasps them. Hence, they have no independent existence apart from the reader's response to them.

The Reading Process: Reading as a Transaction • Rosenblatt was highly influential in literary and critical theory, reading pedagogy, and education since her first Literature as Exploration (1938).

• Rosenblatt took the pragmatist approach, starting from the aesthetics of reading.

• For her, the reader brings to the text his or her past experience and present personality. Under the magnetism of the text, the reader crystallizes out from the stuff of memory, thought, and feeling a new order, a new experience.

Key Terms and Concepts

Performative Utterances

In the philosophy of language and speech acts theory, performative utterances are sentences which not only describe a given reality, but also change the social reality they are describing. The concept was introduced by J. L. Austin.

Stylistics

Stylistics, study of the devices in languages (such as rhetorical figures and syntactical patterns) that are considered to produce expressive or literary style.

Hermeneutics Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation. It was initially applied to the interpretation, or exegesis, of scripture, and has been later broadened to questions of general interpretation to include written, verbal, and non-verbal communication.

Horizon of Expectations

The Horizon of Expectations refers to the structure by which a person comprehends, decodes and appraises any text based on cultural codes and conventions particular to their time in history. They are historically flexible as readers may interpret and value a text differently from a previous generation. The concept was introduced by Hans Robert Jauss

The Implied Reader

An implied reader is a hypothetical figure who is likely to get most of what the author intended. When an author writes a book or article they do so with certain readers in mind and they believe that those known as the implied reader will understand or appreciate the metaphors and ironies which the author as written. The concept was introduced by Wolfgang Iser.

Transactional Reading

Reading is considered a dynamic process as a transaction between the reader and the text, in which meaningful ideas arise for readers from their own thoughtful and creative interpretations. The concept was introduced by Louise Rosenblatt

Sample Analysis

Rhetorical Analysis

• Modern rhetoricians examine, for example, the use of language in the discourse of medicine or of economics.

• They are concerned particularly with the way language contains embedded within it schemas for understanding the world in a particular way.

• An important assumption of such discourse analysis is that language shapes people's perceptions of the world.

Reception of the Iliad

John Frow has noted that Homer's Iliad changes remarkably from one epoch to another, as translators give shape to the original that is usually inflected with their own culture's concerns and preoccupations.

Reception of

King Lear • Reception Theory shows how a single work

can be remade by different moments of history or interpreted differently by differently located social agents.

• King Lear, for example, was produced for many years with a happy ending that the culture of the nineteenth century found more appealing than its original tragic conclusion.

Reader Response of King Lear

• While there may be an object called King Lear that exists independently in the world, its very construction as an orderly narrative assumes certain capacities on the part of its audience.

• They must be capable of recognizing the temporal structure of the play as a unity.

• It presupposes that the audience is capable of perceiving this display of literary signs as a coherent order.

• Each person's reading will be shaped by mental operations that are idiosyncratic and determined by that person's life history and sociocultural context, but some are universal in character (and thus pretty much the same for everyone).

• The universal mental operations have to do with the ability to follow the logic of temporal narrative and to recognize the different placements of characters in space from scene to scene. The more socially and historically specific (and therefore variable) a priori judgments vary according to gender (some women might read the play differently from some men and find Goneril more attractive, for example, than Cordelia) or geography (someone in a country suffering from tyrannical rulers might find the demise of Lear a pleasing, rather than a tragic, resolution).

Representative Readings

1. J. L. Austin

• How To Do Things With Words

2. Kenneth Burke

• The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle"

3. Martin Heidegger

• Being and Time

4. Wolfgang Iser

• The Implied Reader

5. Stanley Fish

• Not so much a Teaching as an Intangling

• Interpretive Communities

6. Louise Rosenblatt

• Literature as Exploration

The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" Kenneth Burke

The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" (1939) is an influential essay written by Kenneth Burke in 1939 which offered a rhetorical analysis of Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Much of Burke's analysis focuses on Hitler's Mein Kampf ("my struggle").

Burke identified four tropes as specific to Hitler's rhetoric: inborn dignity, projection device, symbolic rebirth, and commercial use. Several other tropes are discussed in the essay.

The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" Kenneth Burke

One trope is the idea of the common enemy. Without an enemy with a mindless determination to destroy everything good and beautiful, all states struggle with the economic and social problems of unemployment and poverty. The idea of a common enemy is thus a symbol of the evil against which people must unite, and it distracts the people from politically-inconvenient issues by relating all evils to the common rhetorical enemy. We are born separate individuals and divided by class or other criteria and so identification is a compensation to division. Human need to identify with or belong to a group as providing a rich resource for those interested in joining us or, more importantly, persuading us. To promote social cohesion, antithesis makes a simple balancing statement, "We do this" but "They do that". The symmetry creates an expression of conjoined opposites, which stigmatizes the latter and encourages the former to cohere by doing only "this".

Being and Time Martin Heidegger

Being and Time is the 1927 magnum opus of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key document of existentialism. Being and Time had a notable impact on subsequent philosophy, literary theory and many other fields. Though controversial, its stature in intellectual history has been favorably compared with several works by Kant and Hegel. Heidegger maintains that philosophers have misunderstood the concept of Being since Plato, misapplying it solely in the analysis of particular beings. The book attempts to revive ontology through an analysis of Dasein, or "being-in-the-world." It's also noted for an array of neologisms and complex language, as well as an extended treatment of "authenticity" as a means to grasp and confront the unique and finite possibilities of the individual.

The Implied Reader Wolfgang Iser

Like no other art form, the novel confronts its readers with circumstances arising from their own environment of social and historical norms and stimulates them to assess and criticize their surroundings. By analyzing major works of English fiction ranging from Bunyan, Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray to Joyce and Beckett, Wolfgang Iser provides a framework for a theory of such literary effects and aesthetic responses.

Iser's focus is on the theme of discovery, whereby the reader is given the chance to recognize the deficiencies of his own existence and the suggested solutions to counterbalance them. The content and form of this discovery is the calculated response of the reader -- the implied reader. In discovering the expectations and presuppositions that underlie all his perceptions, the reader learns to "read" himself as he does the text.

The Implied Reader Wolfgang Iser

Literature as Exploration Louise Rosenblatt

Louise Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration has influenced literary theorists and teachers of literature at all levels. In Literature as Exploration, Rosenblatt presents her unique theory of literature and focuses on the immense, often untapped, potential for the study and teaching of literature in a democratic society. The author's philosophy of literature is frequently cited as the first presentation of reader-response theory, but she differs from her successors in emphasizing both the reader and the text. Her "transactional" theory of literature examines the reciprocal nature of the literary experience and explains why meaning is neither "in" the text nor "in" the reader. Each reading is "a particular event involving a particular reader and a particular text under particular circumstances." And teachers of literature, Rosenblatt argues, play a pivotal role in influencing how students perform in response to a text.

Literature as Exploration Louise Rosenblatt

Through the medium of words, the text brings into the reader's consciousness certain concepts, certain sensuous experiences, certain images of things, people, actions, scenes. The special meanings and, more particularly, the submerged associations that these words have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text”

Class (3) Items

Quick Info

Main ideas

Key Terms and Concepts

Sample Analysis

Representative Readings

1. Answer the following questions: 1. Who are the main critics of Modern Rhetoric/ Phenomenology/ Reception Theory/

Reader Response Theory?

2. What are the main ideas of Modern Rhetoric/ Phenomenology/ Reception Theory/ Reader Response Theory?

2. Write about the following terms/concepts:- 1. Performative Utterances. 2. Stylistics. 3. Hermeneutics. 4. Horizon of Expectations. 5. The Implied Reader. 6. Transactional Reading.

3. Explain a sample analysis of: 1. Modern Rhetoric

2. Phenomenology

3. Reception Theory

4. Reader Response Theory

4. Write about the following critical works:

5. Comment on the following passages from: 1. “How To Do Things With Words” by 2. “The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" by 3. Being and Time by 4. Implied Reader by 5. Not so much a Teaching as an Intangling by 6. Interpretive Communities by 7. Literature as Exploration by

Part (3) Questions