Institutional Forme

2020 ◽  
pp. 245-259
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Todd Knight
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Book History ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Aesthetic Sense ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores prospects for a reenergized history of the book amid the recent turn to a capacious formalism in literary studies that encompasses the sociopolitical reverberations of “form” in the traditional, aesthetic sense. The chapter argues that a key opening for book historians is the new formalists’ emphasis on the organizing power of institutions, something that book history implicitly engages in the course of its work but that literary criticism too often ignores or treats with hostility. Rereading D. F. McKenzie’s paradigm-setting proposals for a research program in the history of the book and using as a case-study that most literary of institutions, the library, I advocate a turn away from the field’s particularist mantra, “forms effect meaning,” toward McKenzie’s forgotten parallel claim that a sociology of texts “alerts us to the roles of institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and present.”

scholarly journals ‘De vraag is deze: waarom is een akademisch neerlandicus zulk een heel ander mens dan een nederlands letterkundige?’

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marieke Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Philosophical Argument ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The Public ◽  
Academic Position ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Abstract The interrelation of public and academic literary criticism often leads to controversy within the literary field, especially when writers obtain an academic position. As Jo Tollebeek showed in Mannen van karakter (2011) and Nico Laan in Het belang van smaak (1996), the competition between the academic and public discourse on literature is inherent to the history of literary studies. What are the criteria for distinguishing public and academic criticism?This question is examined for the period 1925-1935 by taking the professorship of the poet and critic Albert Verwey (1865-1937) as a case study. Verwey legitimated his academic position by referring to Shelley and the concept of ‘imagination’ as a special source of knowledge. By doing so he presented an artistic and philosophical argument for appointing a poet as a professor of literature. Additionally, ten years later, Verwey revealed that he accepted the position in order to change the way literature was represented by traditional historiography. How did the activities of the poet, critic and academic relate to each other? How did Verwey position himself within, or in between, the academic and the public discourse on literature? And why does Verweys positioning problematize the relation between academic and non-academic literary criticism?

Empire of Letters

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Ann Frampton
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Book History ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Manuscript Studies ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Moment

Empire of Letters studies representations of texts and media in Roman authors from Lucretius to Ovid (c. 55 BCE–15 CE) in order to demonstrate how ancient writers conceived of the world, their work, and their own identities through material forms of writing. Drawing together methods of interpretation from a wide variety of fields (including Greek and Latin philology, epigraphy, papyrology, manuscript studies, literary criticism, media theory, and book history) and uniting close readings of major authors with the careful analysis of the physical forms inhabited by ancient texts (papyrus bookrolls, waxed tablets, and monumental inscriptions in stone and bronze), Empire of Letters provides a new model for understanding the history of the book in antiquity. Putting the written word back at the center of Roman literary culture, this book redefines our understanding of the role of writing in the intellectual life of Rome at the moment of epochal transition from Republic to Empire.

FROM THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC-THEORETICAL RESEARCH OF ALISHER NAVOI’S HERITAGE(ON THE PAGES OF AZERBAIJANI LITERATURE AND LITERARY CRITICISM

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-152
Author(s):  
Almaz Ulvi Bi̇nnatova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Theoretical Research ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Systematic Research ◽  
History Of

The research work named “From the history of scientific-theoretical research of Alisher Navoi’s heritage (on the pages of Azerbaijani literature and literary criticism)” was grouped in several directions. In the systematic research within the sections named - 1. “The influence of Alisher Navoiy’s creativity on Azerbaijani literature”, 2. “The influence of Azerbaijani literature on the creativity of Alisher Navoiy”, 3. “Studying of Alisher Navoiy’s legacy in Azerbaijani literary studies

From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence

2021 ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
Stathis Psillos
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Pessimistic Induction ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Universal Gravitation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Shift

This chapter looks into the transition from the Cartesian natural philosophy to the Newtonian one, and then to the Einsteinian science, making the following key point: though the shift from Descartes’s theory to Newton’s amounted to a wholesale rejection of Descartes’s theory, in the second shift, a great deal was retained; Newton’s theory of universal gravitation gave rise to a research program that informed and constrained Einstein’s theory. Newton’s theory was a lot more supported by the evidence than Descartes’s and this made it imperative for the successor theory to accommodate within it as much as possible of Newton’s theory: evidence for Newton’s theory became evidence for Einstein’s. This double case study motivates a rebranding of the “divide et impera” strategy against the pessimistic induction introduced in the book Scientific Realism, which shifts attention from the (crude) evidence of the history of science to the (refined) history of evidence for scientific theories.

scholarly journals Thinking Through the History of the Book

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Howsam
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
Conceptual Category ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Form ◽  
Organic Change

An impressive body of meticulous scholarship in the history of the book has led scholars to reject outmoded models of revolutionary change and technological determinism, and instead to explore themes of evolution and organic change. Similarly, the old unitary and Eurocentric book history is being supplanted by a series of parallel narratives where the focus is on human adaptation of new technologies to newly felt needs and fresh marketing opportunities. The article suggests that the study of book history is a way of thinking about how people have given material form to knowledge and stories. It highlights some particularly ambitious recent arguments, and emphasizes research, theory and pedagogy as the means to a wider understanding. Rather than being an academic discipline, book history is identified as an “interdiscipline,” an intellectual space where scholars practicing different disciplinary approaches and methodologies address the same capacious conceptual category.

scholarly journals The Torah in Transition: Imitative Aspects from Codex to Database

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-128
Author(s):  
Emily R. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
New Technology ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
The People ◽  
Reading Technology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Digital Formats ◽  
Made In

Because the significance of a sacred text comes not only from its content but also its format and materiality, the rise of digital formats is especially a concern for the Jewish community, the ‘people of the book’ (Am ha-Sefer) whose identity is rooted in the Torah. Drawing together scholarship on the history of the book in its changing formats and an illuminative case study of the Jewish Torah in its digital iterations, the Jewish case presented here is instructive but certainly not unique. Despite dramatic changes in reading technology throughout history, readers have time and again used a new technology to perform the same functions as that of the old, only more quickly, with more efficiency, or in greater quantity. While taking advantage of the innovation and novelty which characterize digital formats, a concerted effort to retain much older operations and appearances continues to be made in this transition as well. The analysis in this article aims to further dispel the misguided notion of technological supersession, the idea that new reading technologies ‘kill’ older formats in a straightforward model of elimination.

Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Aesthetic Structure

How did “reading for the message,” a mark of shame among literary critics, yet in many ways an ordinary reading practice, become so marginalized? The origins of this methodological commitment ultimately are intertwined with the birth of literary studies itself . The influential aestheticist notion of “art for art’s sake” has several implications crucial for understanding the intellectual history of literary criticism in the twentieth century: most important was the belief that to “extract” an idea from a text was to dismiss its aesthetic structure. This impulse culminated in the New Critical contention that to paraphrase a text was a “heresy.” Yet this dominant tradition has always co-existed with practical interpretation that was much less formalist in emphasis. A return to the world of American literary criticism in 1947, when Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was published, shows this clearly: many now-forgotten critics were already practicing a form of criticism that emphasized literary content, and often overly rejecting Brooks’s insistence that reading for the content or meaning of a poem betrayed its aesthetic nature.

Cognitive Science and the History of Reading

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (2) ◽  
pp. 484-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Elfenbein
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Memory Span ◽  
Memory Representation ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Landscape Model ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Reading Processes ◽  
History Of

Cognitive psychologists studying the reading process have developed a detailed conceptual vocabulary for describing the microprocesses of reading. Modified for the purposes of literary criticism, this vocabulary provides a framework that has been missing from most literary-critical investigations of the history of literate practice. Such concepts as the production of a coherent memory representation, the limitations of working memory span, the relation between online and offline reading processes, the landscape model of comprehension, and the presence of standards of coherence allow for close attention to general patterns in reading and to the ways that individual readers modify them. The interpretation of Victorian responses to the poetry of Robert Browning provides a case study in the adaptation of cognitive models to the history of reading. Such an adaptation can reveal not only reading strategies used by historical readers but also those fostered by the discipline of literary criticism. (AE)

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