Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler

Author:Jonathan Culler [Culler, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory
ISBN: 9780192853837
Google: bUETiXv2O9kC
Amazon: 0199691347
Barnesnoble: 0199691347
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1997-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

Genres

Literature depends on rhetorical figures but also on larger structures, particularly literary genres. What are genres and what is their role? Are terms like epic and novel simply convenient ways of classifying works on the basis of gross resemblances or do they have functions for readers and writers?

For readers, genres are sets of conventions and expectations: knowing whether we are reading a detective story or a romance, a lyric poem or a tragedy, we are on the lookout for different things and make assumptions about what will be significant. Reading a detective story, we look for clues in a way we don’t when reading a tragedy. What would be a striking figure in a lyric – ‘the Secret sits in the middle’ – might be a minor circumstantial detail in a ghost story or work of science fiction, where secrets might have acquired bodies.

Historically, many theorists of genre have followed the Greeks, who divided works among three broad classes according to who speaks: poetic or lyric, where the narrator speaks in the first person, epic or narrative, where the narrator speaks in his own voice but allows characters to speak in theirs, and drama, where the characters do all the talking. Another way of making this distinction is to focus on the relation of speaker to audience. In epic, there is oral recitation: a poet directly confronting the listening audience. In drama, the author is concealed from the audience and the characters on stage talk. In lyric – the most complicated case – the poet, in singing or chanting, turns his back on his listeners, so to speak, and ‘pretends to be talking to himself or to someone else: a spirit of Nature, a Muse, a personal friend, a lover, a god, a personified abstraction, or a natural object’. To these three elementary genres we can add the modern genre of the novel, which addresses the reader through a book – a topic we’ll take up in Chapter 6.

Epic and tragic drama were in ancient times and in the Renaissance the crowning achievements of literature, the highest accomplishments of any aspiring poet. The invention of the novel brought a new competitor onto the literary scene, but between the late eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, the lyric, a short non-narrative poem, came to be identified with the essence of literature. Once seen primarily as a mode of elevated expression, the elegant formulation of cultural values and attitudes, lyric poetry later came to be seen as the expression of powerful feeling, dealing at once with everyday life and transcendent values, giving concrete expression to the most inward feelings of the individual subject. This idea still holds sway. Contemporary theorists, though, have come to treat lyric less as expression of the poet’s feelings and more as associative and imaginative work on language – an experimenting with linguistic connections and formulations that makes poetry a disruption of culture rather than the main repository of its values.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.