Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary Interpretation

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-187
Author(s):  
Mario Farina
Keyword(s):  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Philosophy Of Literature

Resonance in Dhvani Aesthetics and the Deleuzian Logic of Sensation

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Time Image

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.

WRITER’S INDIVIDUALITY IN THE LITERARY INTERPRETATION OF SOCIAL AND MORAL PROBLEMS

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
Bakhodir Kholikov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Moral Problems ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Mario Puzo

The article examines the question of writer’s individuality in the literary interpretation of social and moral problems etective novels on the examples of works "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo and "Shaytanat" by Tahir Malik. The article focuses on the study of the relationship between the reality of a work and reality of life in the context of the period. The comparative method was used in the process of understanding the content of these works, created in different periods

Relevance Theory and Literary Interpretation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Communicative Act ◽  
Sensorimotor Processes

This concluding chapter reflects in general terms on some aspects of relevance theory that have been fruitfully used in the analyses in this volume, and on some aspects of literary communication that have been seen by both supporters and critics of relevance theory as showing the need for modifications to the inferential mechanisms it proposes. After distinguishing comprehension (identifying the intended import of a communicative act) from interpretation (going beyond the intended import to draw one’s own conclusions), it discusses a range of stylistic and rhetorical effects—typically created by departures from expected syntax, lexis, or prosody—which provide tentative cues to ostension and therefore create greater expectations of relevance. It ends by considering how relevance theory might deal with the ‘non-propositional effects’ associated with images, emotions, and sensorimotor processes while remaining within the bounds of a properly inferential theory.

Relevance Across History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael Lyne
Keyword(s):  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Inferential Model ◽  
Carpe Diem

An ostensive-inferential model of communication offers useful tools for organizing our thinking about reading works from the past and practising historicist criticism. Robert Herrick’s ‘Corinna’s going a Maying’ is woven into the religious controversies of its time, but it also accesses more or less timeless traditions in poetry (pastoral; carpe diem). It looks backward into tradition, forward into posterity, and at its immediate context. In order to describe the poem’s different kinds of communication with readers at different temporal and cultural distances, it is useful to see its intentions, the different things it might communicate, and its implicatures as an ‘array’ (a term taken from Sperber and Wilson’s ‘array of implicatures’). A cognitive pragmatics of literary interpretation provides good ways of exploring how writers explore this multiple communication, how they use contemporary readers as a screen for posterity, and how they use posterity as a screen for the contemporary.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Siraganian
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Citizens United ◽  
Corporate Personhood ◽  
Authorial Intention ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Creative Writers

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely “speak” with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This book offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments (corporate intention, pro versus con), modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, the chapters analyze legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.

The foundations of literary rhetoric

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Reception Theory ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Basic Law ◽  
The Law

Chapter 7 deals with one of the most traditional aspects of rhetoric, namely literature. It describes a basic law of literary rhetoric which accounts for the increasing problematicity of literary language in novels, poetry, and drama. This chapter also explains the evolution of literary criticism. The fact that literature is less and less linear in its narratives, and is increasingly enigmatic (Joyce or Kafka) is accounted for by the law of auto-contextualization of the problematic in the fictional answers. This law encourages the reader to provide the meaning of the text, even when it is considered as impossible or equivocal and pluralistic. The four main schools of literary interpretation correspond to our four basic operators of rhetoric: Mimetic for =, Hermeneutics for ±, Reception Theory for + (the reader is the “plus” of the interpretation of the text), and Deconstruction for –.

Aesthetics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Forster
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Approach ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Individual Variability ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Philosophy Of Literature ◽  
Aesthetic Values

Aesthetics, or the philosophy of literature and art, was one of Herder’s main focuses. By valorizing these areas of culture (in comparison with others such as science and religion) and in several other ways he prepared the ground for German Romanticism. He also established many principles of great intrinsic importance: rejecting apriorism and systematization in aesthetics in favor of an empirical, non-systematic approach; insisting that arts such as sculpture and painting express meanings and therefore require interpretation; recognizing the central role of genre not only in literature but also in such arts; perceiving the deep historical, cultural, and even individual variability of literature and art in respect of semantic content, genre, moral values, and aesthetic values, plus the major implications this variability has for both interpretation and evaluation; developing a set of radical views concerning beauty; and emphasizing the importance of literature and art as means of moral pedagogy.

scholarly journals Hegel and Lukács on the Novel

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (02) ◽  
pp. 23-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Speight
Keyword(s):  
Significant Influence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
Philosophy Of Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Theory Of The Novel ◽  
Prose Literature ◽  
Georg Lukács

That Hegel was a significant influence on the young Georg Lukács'Theory of the Novelis a point few would dispute. Lukács himself insisted that the first part of TN represented his own transition from Kantian to Hegelian theory, and most critics have subsequently affirmed the importance of Hegel to Lukács' pre- (or, depending on one's view, proto-) Marxist argument inTN. Yet the two are in some ways strange to take together in the context of novelistic theory. Despite the profusion of novelistic literature in his own time and his own significant appropriation of it for the limning of essential moments of the development of the world-historical spirit, Hegel's officialAestheticshardly presents what one could claim to be an especially worked-outtheoryof the novel. TheAestheticstakes up literature in general primarily under the rubric of providing a theory of the genres ofpoetry— epic, lyric and dramatic — and what relatively few words Hegel actually devotes to the novel and prose literature in the lectures are tucked in corners: at the end of the discussion of the development of the epic, in the discussion of the historical form of the romantic, and in scattered comments elsewhere. As forTN, despite the strong connections some have drawn between Hegel and Lukács — Peter Demetz said that Lukács was ‘in a certain sense … the last Hegelian in the grand style’ (Demetz 1967: 215) — others have questioned whether Lukács' work should be regarded primarily as making a contribution to the philosophy of literature in the tradition from which Hegel writes.

Michael Harmel (1915-1974): A South African Communist and His Discourse

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Milan Oralek
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Private Correspondence ◽  
National Congress ◽  
Actual Contribution

<p>This thesis explores the life and work of a South African journalist, editor, and activist Michael Alan Harmel (1915–1974), a political mentor and friend of Nelson Mandela. A resolute believer in racial equality and Marxism-Leninism, Harmel devoted his life to fighting, with “the pen” as well as “the sword”, segregation and apartheid, and promoting an alliance of communists with the African National Congress as a stepping stone to socialism in South Africa. Part 1, after tracing his Jewish-Lithuanian and Irish family roots, follows Harmel from his birth to 1940 when, having joined the Communist Party of South Africa, he got married and was elected secretary of the District Committee in Johannesburg. The focus is on factors germane to the formation of his political identity. The narrative section is accompanied by an analytical sketch. This, using tools of close literary interpretation, catalogues Harmel’s core beliefs as they inscribed themselves in his journalism, histories, a sci-fi novel, party memoranda, and private correspondence. The objective is to delineate his ideological outlook, put to the test the assessment of Harmel—undeniably a skilled publicist—as a “creative thinker” and “theorist”, and determine his actual contribution to the liberation discourse.</p>

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