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In recent years, the interest in theory which has once been a moving force of academic research in the field of literary studies appears to have decreased. The status of theory, its relevance and appropriateness for the understanding of literature have been put into doubt. Faced with this observation, some critics have even suggested that we have now entered into a new era of research which can retrospectively be identified as the era "after theory". Against the background of such pronouncements and to a certain extent in opposition to them, the investigations proposed here wish to uphold the idea of the utility and indeed the need for theoretical approaches to literature. To appreciate the status of theory and its possible contribution to a deepened understanding of literature, it is useful not to focus exclusively on the distinction or supposed divide between literature and theory. Instead we should pay attention to what links and unites them. This common ground or common denominator of literature and theory consists in the dimension of language. Furnishing, so to speak, the intellectual material from which both domains of articulation are formed, language constitutes at once the key element of literature and a principal concern of theory.
"The golden age of cultural theory is long past" - with this statement, Terry Eagleton begins his puzzling reflections on the era "After Theory" - that's the title of his book, first published in 2001. If the invasion of literary and cultural theory has come to an end, as Eagleton suggests, theory will probably become a simple object of the history of ideas. But what theoretical implications accompany the discourse of a possible and even probable end of theory? In this so-called era after theory, literary criticism quickly decided to take new steps: the Anglo-American tradition of "Cultural Studies" attempted to replace the theoretical impact of French theory with a more empirical approach to literary texts. At the same time, good old philology raised its hand to oppose the topographical turn of cultural studies as well as the deconstructive turn against all forms of presence. [...] For Foucault, philology is nothing more than a part of the historical discourse of the nineteenth century, an old-fashioned term that lacks any impact on contemporary problems. For this and other reasons, Foucault showed little interest in more recent models of philology. But maybe instead of subscribing too easily to the notion that we live in an era after theory, where problems of literary theory are replaced by concepts of discourse and culture that no longer pay any attention to literature, what is called for is an investigation of the impact of philological understanding in the humanities.
It may indeed seem that while the late 1970s and early 1980s were the period when theory was successfully established in western academic discourse, we have now entered an era "after theory" in which not only 'cultural theory' has come to an end but also a specific culture of theory has vanished from our seminars, departments, and universities: a culture of reflection, abstraction, and self-referentiality that had been at the heart of the humanities from the very beginning. And yet, theory is not so easily abolished but rather stored and maintained within each individual reading of a literary text in spite of empirical trends such as DH or pessimistic manifestos. Therefore, in what follows, Nicolas Pethes is interested in an additional aspect of the textual resistance of theory against the institutional resistance to theory: the relation between theory and practice, that is: the question whether acting is also one of the many languages of theory.
Of the novelties introduced by digitization in the study of literature, the size of the archive is probably the most dramatic: we used to work on a couple of hundred nineteenth-century novels, and now we can analyze thousands of them, tens of thousands, tomorrow hundreds of thousands. It's a moment of euphoria, for quantitative literary history: like having a telescope that makes you see entirely new galaxies. And it's a moment of truth: so, have the digital skies revealed anything that changes our knowledge of literature? This is not a rhetorical question. In the famous 1958 essay in which he hailed "the advent of a quantitative history" that would "break with the traditional form of nineteenth-century history", Fernand Braudel mentioned as its typical materials "demographic progressions, the movement of wages, the variations in interest rates [...] productivity [...] money supply and demand." These were all quantifiable entities, clearly enough; but they were also completely new objects compared to the study of legislation, military campaigns, political cabinets, diplomacy, and so on. It was this double shift that changed the practice of history; not quantification alone. In our case, though, there is no shift in materials: we may end up studying 200,000 novels instead of 200; but, they're all still novels. Where exactly is the novelty?
We may consider narratology - the structural study of narratives - in two ways, each of them implying a slightly different 'before' and 'after'. First, this important endeavor in 20th century literary studies may be regarded as the study of a specific narrative 'logic', the formal structures that unite all narratives, fictional and factual, literary and non-literary. Secondly, narratology may be regarded as the study of specific 'texts' with specific cultural functions - storehouses of 'memory' on the one hand and, on the other, 'meaning-generating devices' integrating human action with time and place, ending up in cognition, identity, values, pragmatic norms, etc. In spite of the fact that both trends diminish the role of the specific medium of a given narrative, focusing instead on a general logic or on general functions, both of them refer 'de facto' to literature as a primary field of study; moreover, they are both children, twins one might argue, of the linguistic turn at the turn of the last century, and they both 'de facto' constantly refer to language as a primary field of study. This paradigmatic shift emphasized a specific medium and its specific logic in a general perspective without losing grip of the specificity. A lesson may be learned if we quickly repaint the history and perspective of this turn in a few broad strokes.
I shall take a look at a cluster of problems: the relation between fictional and actual worlds, between fictionality and narration, between action and rationality, between action and agent or subject, and between world, enunciation and subject in light of two important theoretical works, both from 1991. My choice of references is not entirely arbitrary: their basic approach shows certain similarities that underline the shortcomings of both in dealing with literature, in spite of the stimulating arguments they unfold. But they also show marked differences that allow us to develop their argument further. The books are Paisley Livingston's 'Literature and Rationality' and Marie-Laure Ryan's 'Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory'.
Verbal storytelling – in a sense broad enough to include all forms from casual conversation across oral folklore to written literature – seems to be a universal human activity and has thus been considered an evolutionary adaptation several times in the past few years. The fact that a particular trait is a species-wide universal, however, does not automatically make it an adaptation; it could also be a contingent universal, that is, a cultural behavior which notably relies on biological substrates and therefore emerges in similar fashions in all human cultures, times, and milieus. Yet verbal storytelling is not only universal but also distinct to our species. The uniqueness of a trait can indeed be indicative of a biological adaptation1 in that we have reason to assume that this trait emerged newly in the given animal lineage and thus might owe its existence to the process of natural selection. However, since verbal storytelling completely depends on language, that is, another uniquely human faculty, the uniqueness of storytelling is hardly surprising and cannot serve as a conclusive argument for considering storytelling itself to be a specifically selected trait. Storytelling could simply be a particular use of language (though we shall see below that the relationship between language and narration is a little more complicated). A third possible indication of a biological adaptation, however, is the fact that storytelling seems to be a notably self-rewarding activity. It occurs on a much larger scale than would seem justified by rational choice or other reasons. As fitness-enhancing behaviors should, as a rule, be intrinsically motivated under certain conditions, the unusually high frequency of storytelling might indeed be revealing of an innate preference for this behavior.
There has been a great deal of uproar about Darwinian approaches in literary scholarship. Statements range from enthusiastic prophecies of a new paradigm for literary studies to acrimonious scoldings of reductionism. Believing that the major challenge is first to find good questions to which evolutionary psychology might provide us with good answers, I outline and critically assess different veins of argumentation as revealed in recent contributions to the field. As an alternative to some simplistic mimeticism in present Literary Darwinism, I put forward the idea of evolutionary psychology as a heuristic theory that serves to resolve defined problems in interpretation and literary theory.
Whereas in traditional models of literary narrative we had to deal with typologies mainly (for instance, of "narrative situations"; see Stanzel 1971, 1984; Fludernik and Margolin 2004; Genette 1980), we now possess a systematic description of the imagination evoked by a text, which takes into account the quasi-ontological (see Bortolussi and Dixon 2003) status of its constituents. In this chapter I search for the cognitive functions that correlate with the text features of "voice" and "perception" and for how they bring about such a "layered" imagination in the reader. The aim is to explain how and why literary narratives can run properly in the human mind-which is another way of asking how humans could develop narrative discourse as a way of communication at all.
Throughout the humanities, greater attention is being paid at present to the category of translation. More than ever before, the tradition al understanding of translation as the (philological and linguistic) translation of text and language is being expanded upon. Increasingly, translation is being spoken about as cultural translation. Yet often the use of this term is merely metaphorical, or even downright inflationary.
It is no longer possible to ignore how crucial the processes of cultural translation and their analysis have become, whether for cultural contact or interreligious relations and conflicts, for integration strategies in multicultural societies, or for the exploration of productive interfaces between humanities and the natural sciences. The globalization of world society, in particular, demands increased attention to mediation processes and problems of transfer, in terms both of the circulation of global representations and "travelling concepts" and of the interactions that make up cultural encounters. Here, translation becomes, on the one hand, a condition for global relations of exchange ("global translatability"), and on the other, a medium especially liable to reveal cultural differences, power imbalances and scope for action. An explicit focus on translation processes something increasingly prevalent across the humanities may thus enable us to scrutinize more closely current and historical situations of cultural encounter as complex processes of cultural translation. Translation is opened up to a transnational cultural practice that in no way remains restricted to binary relationships between national languages, national literatures or national cultures.
It is no longer possible to ignore how crucial processes of cultural translation and their analysis have become, whether for cultural contact or interreligious relations and conflicts, for integration strategies in multicultural societies or for the exploration of productive interfaces between the humanities and the natural sciences. The globalisation of world society, in particular, demands increased attention to mediation processes and problems of transfer, in terms of both the circulation of global representations and 'travelling concepts' and of the interactions that make up cultural encounters. Here, translation becomes, on the one hand, a condition for global relations of exchange ('global translatability') and, on the other, a medium especially liable to reveal cultural differences, power imbalances and the scope for action. An explicit focus on translation processes— something increasingly prevalent across the humanities—may thus enable us to scrutinise more closely current and historical situations of cultural encounter as complex processes of cultural translation. Translation is opened up to a transnational cultural practice that in no way remains restricted to binary relationships between national languages, national literatures or national cultures.
'[C]ulture as text' initially proved to be a pivotal bridging metaphor between cultural anthropology and literary studies. Following an admittedly ambivalent career path, the concept of 'culture as text' has nevertheless continued to rise and has become an over-determined general principle, an emphatic key metaphor, even an overall "programmatic motto for the study of culture" […]. At first, this concept was still closely connected to ethnographic research and to the semiotic framework of interpretive cultural anthropology. However, since the end of the 1990s it has been utilised to encompass a much broader interdisciplinary horizon for the study of culture. 'Culture as text' advanced from being a conceptual metaphor for the condensation of cultural meanings to a rather free-floating formula frequently referred to in analyses within disciplines involved in the study of culture. Surprisingly, 'culture as text' has remained a consistent key phrase throughout the discourses concerned with the study of culture—even after the culture debate had long since turned away from the holistic understanding of culture implied by the formula.
Herder's concept of a national literature [...] serves as a differential category formulated in opposition to the concepts generated by universalistic rationalism and the Classicist aesthetics which is based on it, this being an aesthetics which is incapable of accommodating cultural difference. Thus Herder's concept is to be read – primarily as one looking for ways of conceiving cultural difference syncronically as well as diachronically.
This article investigates the function and reality of language in Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. How can one interpret the systems-theoretical assumption that language is based on communication? Luhmann describes language as a dynamic media/form relationship, which is able to couple the social and psychological system. This structural coupling, which constructs consciousness and language as two autonomous systems, raises problems if one defines language from a cognitive point of view. This article discusses these problems and aims to develop assumptions and questions within the systems-theoretical approach.
Taking as starting point some collective volumes since the year 2000 which aspire to provide new views on narratology, this essay discusses the problem of how to conceive the history of narratology in a way that is more enlightening than the linear narrative used so far to tell this story. It lists some aspects which are neglected by the usual narrative and favors a decentered conception of narratology’s development.
A glance at the current situation in literary criticism shows that narratology, pronounced dead twenty years ago, is remarkably alive and well. This fact has been noted repeatedly and with understandable self-satisfaction in the recent literature on research into narrative theory. Just how astonishing this rebirth is, however, becomes apparent only when we step back from literary criticism and the humanities to take a wider historical view of the developments in academic and theoretical circles that preceded it. The deeply symbolic year of 1968 marked the fall of the academic ancient régime. Partly in anticipation of this and partly in response to it, a number of new leading disciplines were raised to power in western Europe as sources of hope for the future. However much they may have differed from one another in political purpose (in theoretical circles or beyond), linguistics, political economy, psychoanalysis, and structuralist semiology—to name but a few of the superdisciplines of the time—clearly belonged to one and the same paradigm in terms of how they conceived of themselves: throughout, they sought to reveal universal, ahistorical regularities in human thought and action in their respective fields.
In his book "Fiction and Diction", Gerard Genette bemoans a contradiction between the pretense and the practice of narratological research. Instead of studying all kind of narratives, for Genette, narratological research concentrates de facto on the techniques of fictional narrative. Correspondingly, Genette speaks of a "fictional narratology" in the pejorative sense of a discipline that sets arbitrary limits on its area of study. In his objection, the narratology that literary scholars practice considers fictional narrative to be at least the standard case of any narrative. In other words, what is merely a special case, within a wide field of narratives, is here elevated to narrative par excellence. According to Genette, narratology does not omit the domain of non-fictional narratives from its investigations with any justification, but rather annexes it without addressing its specific elements.
What are possible ways in which this perspective, which Genette criticizes as truncated, can be set right? Can the problem, as outlined, simply be solved by expanding the area of study in narratological research? Or are there not, perhaps, important differences between fictional and nonfictional narratives which seem to encourage narratological research, understood as a fundamental discipline of literary study, under the heading of "fictional narratology"?
In order to come to an answer here, we will first discuss the problem of differentiating between fictional and non-fictional narratives, as well as the possibility of a connection between narrative and fictionality theory. Second, we will expand our considerations to encompass pragmatic and historical aspects of narratives in order to delineate the scope of our proposal.
These […] stories are chosen from anthologies with texts called 'urban legends' (sometimes they are also referred to as 'contemporary legends', or 'urban myths'). Bearing this name in mind, we tend to read these texts as 'Iegendary' narratives that relate ficticious stories of events which never happened. But what if somebody told you these stories as factual accounts of events that really happened to the friend of a friend: wouldn't you believe them to be true – or at least consider seriously the possibility of their truthfulness? Before entering in a discussion of this question, I want to introduce in more detail the kind of narrative I am seeking to analyze.
In the present context of the triumph of capitalism over real socialism, this article points out that, despite their ideological differences, both systems are bound to the same conception of history-as-progress. In contrast, it recalls Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, marked by the critique of progress in the name of a revolutionary time, which interrupts history's chronological continuum. Benjamin's perspective is used to study the conflict of temporalities among the Soviet artists in the two decades after the October Revolution: on the one hand, the anarchic, autonomous and critical time of interruption – which is the time of avant-gade –, on the other hand, the synchronization with the ideas of a progressive time as ordered by the Communist Patty; this is the time of vanguard, whose capitalist Counterpart is fashion.
Bakhtin and Dostoevsky shared the conviction that human life must be understood in terms of temporality. Both thinkers were obsessed with time’s relation to life as people experience it. For each, a rich sense of humanity demanded a chronotope of open time. In many respects, the views of Bakhtin and Dostoevsky coincide. Theologically speaking, one could fairly call them both heretics, as we shall see. Their differences reflect their different starting points. Bakhtin began with ethics, whereas Dostoevsky thought about life first and foremost in terms of psychology. For Bakhtin, any viable view of the world had first of all to give a rich meaning to moral responsibility. Dostoevsky could accept no view that was false to his sense of how the human mind thought and felt.
The Fugue of Chronotope
(2010)
As the survey by Nele Bemong and Pieter Borghart introducing this volume makes clear, the term chronotope has devolved into a veritable carnival of orismology. For all the good work that has been done by an ever-growing number of intelligent critics, chronotope remains a Gordian knot of ambiguities with no Alexander in sight. The term has metastasized across the whole spectrum of the human and social sciences since the publication of FTC in Russian in 1975, and (especially) after its translation into English in 1981. As others have pointed out, one of the more striking features of the chronotope is the plethora of meanings that have been read into the term: that its popularity is a function of its opacity has become a cliché. In the current state of chronotopic heteroglossia, then, how are we to proceed? The argument of this essay is that many of the difficulties faced by Bakhtin’s critics derive from ambiguities with which Bakhtin never ceased to struggle. That is, instead of advancing yet another definition of my own, I will investigate some of the attempts made by Bakhtin himself to give the term greater precision throughout his long life. In so doing, I will also hope to cast some light on the foundational role of time-space in Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialog as it, too, took on different meanings at various points in his thinking.
In this contribution we try to probe the generic chronotope of realism, which, judging from its astonishing productivity in the nineteenth century and the profound impact it has had on literary evolution and theory ever since, can be designated nothing less than a hallmark in the general history of narrative. Although we are primarily concerned with the description of the principles of construction underlying the realistic, “documentary”, chronotope, we would also like to touch upon some of its rather evident, but still somewhat under-discussed similarities with the genre of historiography. For, despite an abundance of what could be called “touches of realism” in a plethora of literary texts and genres (both narrative and poetic) since the very beginnings of literary history itself, the direct germs of realism as it developed into a particular narrative genre or generic chronotope during the nineteenth century may well be situated in “prescientific” historiographical works such as those of Gibbon or Michelet.
The aim of this introductory article [to the volume of the same title], firstly, is to recapitulate the basic principles of Bakhtin’s initial theory as formulated in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics” (henceforth FTC) and “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historic Typology of the Novel)” (henceforth BSHR). Subsequently, we present some relevant elaborations of Bakhtin’s initial concept and a number of applications of chronotopic analysis, closing our state of the art by outlining two perspectives for further investigation. Some of the issues which we touch upon receive more detailed treatment in other contributions to this volume. Others may offer perspectives for future Bakhtin scholarship.
This paper forms part of a larger, ongoing project, to investigate how certain narrative possibilities that seem to have crystallized for the first time in the ancient Greek novel have proved persistent and productive over time, undergoing subtle transformations during formative later periods in the history of the genre, notably the twelfth century (simultaneously in Old French and in Byzantine Greek) and the eighteenth (the time when, according to a narrower definition, the novel is said to originate). For the present, my more limited aim is to revisit the two main essays in which Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope (and of the “historical poetics” of the novel) are developed, and to extrapolate what seem to me to the most significant and productive lines of his approach, both in general, and with specific reference to the ancient Greek novel. I will then attempt simultaneously to apply and to modify Bakhtin’s model, in the light of a reading of Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and with reference to previous critiques. The final part of the paper examines how this approach can be productive for a reading of a much later text, often regarded as “foundational” for the modern development of the genre, especially in English, Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).
This edited volume is the first scholarly tome exclusively dedicated to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope. This concept, initially developed in the 1930s and used as a frame of reference throughout Bakhtin’s own writings, has been highly influential in literary studies. After an extensive introduction that serves as a ‘state of the art’, the volume is divided into four main parts: Philosophical Reflections, Relevance of the Chronotope for Literary History, Chronotopical Readings and Some Perspectives for Literary Theory. These thematic categories contain contributions by well-established Bakhtin specialists such as Gary Saul Morson and Michael Holquist, as well as a number of essays by scholars who have published on this subject before. Together the papers in this volume explore the implications of Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope for a variety of theoretical topics such as literary imagination, polysystem theory and literary adaptation; for modern views on literary history ranging from the hellenistic romance to nineteenth-century realism; and for analyses of well-known novelists and poets as diverse as Milton, Fielding, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Papadiamandis and DeLillo
"Finnegans Wake" has struck many of its exegetes as the epitome of the postmodern text. The oddity of James Joyce's last work has been and still is a provocation not only for literary criticism and theory but for every reader of the work. It provokes us to reflect on our preconceptions concerning such fundamental issues as reading, meaning and understanding. Due to this very quality, the work has been a fertile intellectual stimulus for an illustrious band of thinkers of the ―post-projects. Its singularity has provoked and facilitated the further development of theoretical frameworks beyond the confines of literary theory proper. This essay will trace the elaborate theoretical responses of Umberto Eco and Jacques Lacan to Joyce's grand literary arcanum. Eco's concept of the openness of modern works of art and Lacan's elaboration of his psychoanalytic concepts of the symptom and of the Borromean knot were inspired by their study of Joyce. As an extreme instance of literariness, Finnegans Wake thus constitutes an ideal opportunity to consider the scope and boundaries of the scholarly study of literary texts more generally.
This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of "time" with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design customized markup and text analysis tools that help to understand ‘‘how time works’’: more precisely, how narratively organised and communicated information motivates readers to generate the mental image of a chronologically organized world. The approach presented is based on the unitary model of time originally proposed by McTaggart, who distinguished between two perspectives onto time, the so-called A- and B-series. The first step towards a functional Humanities Computing implementation of this theoretical approach was the development of TempusMarker—a software tool providing automatic and semi-automatic markup routines for the tagging of temporal expressions in natural language texts. In the second step we discuss the principals underlying TempusParser—an analytical tool that can reconstruct temporal order in events by way of an algorithm-driven process of analysis and recombination of textual segments during which the "time stamp" of each segment as indicated by the temporal tags is interpreted.