BDSL-Klassifikation: 03.00.00 Literaturwissenschaft > 03.06.00 Literaturtheorie
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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.