Week 2 Flashcards
(10 cards)
What is Canadian literature?
has traditionally been discussed as (a) a branch of either its colonizer’s literature (i.e. British literature) or (b) subsumed under American literature.
Canada had been a French and British colony before the Confederation of Canada was created in 1867.
Late 19th-century works were mostly imitative of English Romantic works and it was not until the 1920s that a national literature emerged.
What are features of Canadian literature?
The variety of personal experience
Space (a huge, open country; an alien, sometimes hostile, environment)
Place (strong regional difference)
Race (First Nations, e.g. the Inuit; the French and English communities; the multicultural background)
The search for an identity (the need to escape from French and English colonialism and, more recently, from American cultural and economic supremacy).
What are the types or classes of literature?
3 large classes
Lyric (poetry)
Epic or narrative ( prose)
Drama
Histories of genre
Renaissance & 18th century: genres/poetic kinds = fixed literary types
Neoclassic critics insisted on the “purity” and proposed rules
In the course of the 18th century the emergence of new types of literary productions –– such as the novel –– helped weaken confidence in the fixity and stability of literary genres
Late 18th century and early 19th century:
Expressive orientation
Lyric displaces the epic and tragedy as the quintessential poetic type
Romantic period: a decreasing emphasis on the generic conception of literature was indicated by the widespread use of criteria (such as “sincerity,” “intensity,” “organic unity”, “high seriousness”) for evaluating literature
Big changes in the nineteenth century in the classification and ranking of the genres!
New Criticism of the mid-twentieth century: ruling concept of the uniqueness of each literary work, so genre ceased to play more than a subordinate role in the critical analysis and evaluation
Present time:
Genres are conceived to be more or less arbitrary modes of classification
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance: things which may be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all.
Genre
…all texts are strongly shaped by their relation to one or more genres, which in turn they may modify
Genre = a universal dimension of textuality. … genres actively generate and shape knowledge of the world
Genre = a set of cues guiding our reading of texts
Genre = a set of conventional and highly organized constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning. … No speaking or writing or any other symbolically organized action takes place other than through the shaping of generic codes…
Jacques Derrida, the post-structuralist philosopher, in “The Law of Genre” (1980) points out that “a text would not belong to any genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text, there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.” The law of genre is “a sort of participation without belonging”.
Austin Wright, “On Defining the Short Story: The Genre Question”
-There is ambiguity in the concept of genre itself. Most attempts to define genre confront obstacles. (Austin Wright)
-Tzvetan Todorov’s distinction between theoretical and historical genres (essentially the same as Friedman’s between deductive and inductive genres) is pertinent here.
-A theoretical genre is determined deductively, it is established by a congruence of characteristics derived from a system.
-A historical genre is discovered through induction, that is, by the observation of an existing body of works or characteristics which are seen to have recurred together.
It makes a difference whether a genre is conceived as a category of works OR a cluster of characteristics.
-Questions such as whether this or that work belongs to a genre are fruitless.
-If a genre is a cluster of characteristics, borderline and original works can be handled easily and naturally.
a work partakes of the short story and ways in which it does not. An inductive approach.
-inductive approach = a systematic search for common conventions
I would not expect all characteristics to be found in all works, but I would look for those that tend to recur, those that constitute what we expect to encounter when we sit down to read what we have been told is a short story. A flexible definition
Genre = one of the most important and helpful categories in literary history and literary studies in general
The term ‘genre’ is derived from the biological term genus, and refers to a group of literary works that share significant characteristics in term of content, form and/or function
Such ‘generic features’ or ‘generic conventions’ serve not only as a classificatory system for literary works, they are also important signposts for authors and recipients
Most critics agree that genres are constructs based on socio-cultural, literary and social consensus
Although in theory there is a system of distinct genres and types, the different kinds of texts actually form a continuum, with permeable and often blurred boundaries between various categories
Genres, just like literary periods, are not so much real objects as pragmatic constructs
“How to define the short story?”
… this question is as old as the practice of short story criticism.
Nobody seems to have answered it satisfactorily.
Norman Friedman: “Recent Short Story Theories: Problems of Definition”
In the humanities we probably cannot find the same kind of agreement people in the sciences should and can look for.
One of the main problems many short story critics have in trying to define the genre is: How can we talk about something before we know what we are talking about?
The standard textbook procedure is per genus et differentiam = we must locate the class in which the item to be defined belongs, and then we have to subdivide that class into at least two subclasses in order to distinguish the item to be defined from the adjoining or related items.
…the often ridiculed formula “A short story is a story that is short” is not so circular as it at first appears. Story (= narrative fiction in prose) is the genus, or class, in which the item to be defined belongs…shortness is the differentiating trait which allows to subdivide the class into at least two subclasses, according to length––short and long.
There are two approaches to genre theory, an inductive and a deductive one.
Austin Wright, “On Defining the Short Story: The Genre Question”
Wright’s Definition of the short story
1) The short story tends to be between five hundred words long and the length of Joyce’s “The Dead”.
2) It tends to deal with character and action in its fictional world.
3) This action tends to be externally simple, with few developed episodes and no subplots or secondary lines of action.
4) The short story tends to be more strongly unified that other short prose narrative forms. Unified here is a relative term: there is a minimum of waste and arbitrariness. One could call this intensity in the effect of sentences.
5) There is a preference in short stories for plots of small magnitude, plots of discovery, static or disclosure plots, Joycean epiphanies, and the like
6) There is the tendency, especially in modern stories, to leave significant things to inference.
What’s a deductive approach?
Deductive approaches
- If we assume that an a priori definition is needed to call the field of study into view, then we are proceeding deductively.
- The evidence is fitted to the definition.
- Problem: self-fulfilling prophesy
- Deductive approaches begin with a concept of what the short story is about and then deducing what consequences this concept must have with regard to the story’s shortness, subject matter, structure etc. …
- These scholars derive their approach…from Poe’s theories of the short story being read in one sitting…and of the singleness of effect
- The conclusions of critics following a deductive approach to the short story are based on the assumption that there is something inherent in short fiction other than shortness; this is what I have been calling an a priori assumption in that it causes us to rule out (or rule in) examples which common sense tells us belong (or do not belong).
- “It has never seemed to me that a novel lacks singleness of effect simply because it cannot be read at one sitting. … The only thing on a common-sense level that distinguishes novel reading from short story reading is that the reader is bound to recall more of the details in the short story than in the novel, mainly because of the way memory works in relation to quantity and duration.”
- Effects of brevity: because a short story takes less time to read…it may make less of an impression on us in the long run than a novel, simply because we spend less time with it.
What’s an inductive approach?
Inductive approaches -If we assume that we already have a working knowledge of what is included in the field of the short story, and that all we need is a way of conceptualizing it, then we are proceeding inductively. -The definition of the short story is fitted to the evidence. -Friedman is in favor of an inductive approach which helps to solve the problem of shortness pragmatically by including in the subclass of short story all those works of ‘narrative fiction in prose’ that are considered to be short by writers, the reading public, publishers, critics and scholars. We can then align this subclass side by side with the subclasses of novella and novel according to the same pragmatic distinctions and see if we can emerge with general specifications of length. … there always is and must be a certain amount of overlap at the edges in such cases. -The next step in the inductive process is to assemble a fair sample of what are generally considered to be short stories and to examine their traits simply as they appear in the sample, and then to compare these traits with those similarly derived from a fair sample of novellas and novels. -We always need not only controlling assumptions and definitions but also a guiding hypothesis. -The evidence corrects the assumptions, definitions, and hypotheses. -Mary Louise Pratt: Genres are no essences. -It is not enough to define the short story by only a single differentia (i. e. shortness). What is needed instead is a set of multiple differentiae––a scheme of further possible subdivisions––to be applied in various combinations so as to do justice to the variety of potentialities involved. -Short stories…are short in various ways and for various reasons. -The most completely inductive study of the short story …is Helmut Bonheim’s The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story (Cambridge 1982), which is based on the analysis of 600 short stories. -Perhaps there is no inherent difference, other than the external factor of length, between the short story, the novella, and the novel. Or perhaps…the differences have to be seen as a matter of degree rather than of kind.
What is Friedman’s conclusion?
- I do not really believe there is any such thing as the short story more specific than “a short fictional narrative in prose.”
- The point is, then, that within our fixed definition of the short story as a short fictional narrative in prose, we find a range of possibilities regarding the size of action, the manner of representation, and the nature of the end effect.
- We must be prepared to recognize the wide variety of possibilities that can fall under the heading of short fictional narrative in prose, and we must be careful to distinguish among features which are exclusive to the form, feature which are independent of the form, and those which are accidental and historically conditioned.
- We need a more inductive approach, then, based upon multiple distinctions, keeping the categories consistent, and observing the fundamental principle of suiting a definition to the facts rather than trying to suit the facts to the definition.
Who is Tzvetan Todorov?
Important works on literary theory, anthropology, semiotics, history, culture theory and more
Russian Formalism:
A “scholarly” approach to literature and literary theory: only the text is important
Search for specific properties of poetic language
