Understanding English Literature: Fictionality, Specialised Language, and Ambiguity - Prof, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

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What is English literature?

Literature?

English?

LITERATURE?

• Broad definition: Everything that has been written down in some form or another, i.e., all the written manifestations of a culture What about oral tradition (storytelling, myths, ritual speeches…)?
• Narrow definition: Criteria to demarcate “literary texts” from “non-literary texts” - Fictionality - Specialised language - Lack of pragmatic function - Ambiguity

Fictionality

• Boundaries between fact and fiction = often blurred
• Text: fictional or not = reader’s attitude towards it
• Readers are conditioned (educational and cultural norms) to approach texts in certain ways CONCLUSION: Fictionality is no longer an inherent feature of literary texts, but part of our expectations of what a literary text should be

Specialised Language

• Literary language = special, different from everyday language
• Poetic function of literary texts (Roman Jakobson): (Russian Formalists: defamiliarisation = literary texts make use of language in such a way that it becomes strange and unfamiliar in a given context
• In poetry: specific prosodic features and rhetorical devices

Specialised Language

Just around the corner,

An anxious-looking couple

Were standing close together,

Clutching plastic bags

Specialised Language

• Regular metrical pattern
• Alternating stressed and unstressed syllables Wheter a text is literary or not largely depends on the way we look at it and perceive its language

Specialised Language

All too often, humans who sit and stand pay the price of vertical posture. Sitting and standing combine with the force of gravity, exerting extra pressure on veins and tissues in and around the rectal area. Painful, burning hemorroids result. The first thought of many sufferers is to relieve their pain and their discomfort. Products, however, often used for this contain no anesthetic drug at all, or one too weak to give the needed pain relief, or only lubricate. But now, at last there is a formulation which provides pain-killing power, prolonged relief, on contact

Specialised Language

• Formalisation and rearrangement
• Sonnet: 14 lines (octave and sestet/two tercets) The way we read texts depends very much on the context in which we read them (information leaflet vs.poetry book)

Lack of Pragmatic Function

Literary texts gain their more specific and possible pragmatic function in the reading process

Ambiguity

General agreement: Literary texts = more ambiguous and thus, complicated, than non- literary texts non-literary texts = not open to interpretation

topic areas of literary studies Major concepts:

• Literary History
• Poetics and Genre
• Literary Theory

periodization

• No matter which names literary periods are given, they are selected according to shared criteria and features which are considered characteristic of the time
• A division into literary periods is useful for:
  • Understanding and discussion of connections between literary and socio-historical developments
  • Comparing texts within one period and also across periods