BOOK REVIEW. HOW TO READ LITERATURE BY TERRY EAGLETON REVIEW-THE MACRO ASPECTS OF LITERARY CRITICISM

Terry Eagleton, the author of How to Read Literature, is a well-known British literary theorist, critic and public intellectual. He is a professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. Among his publications, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) is still the best one till nowadays. In How to Read Literature, Eagleton attempts to deal with the challenge of literary criticism at present. It is because students of literature often percept a literary work as what it says. The aspect of ‘literariness’ which is a work’s aesthetic form is not taken into account. A literary work, then, is a mere of writing that shares information to the readers as though a newspaper, text book or manual of computer does. Whereas, focusing on literary forms and directing our sensitivity to language (these are items mostly discussed in this book) can uncover a theoretical and political question of text (ix). What is meant by literary forms are all elements building a body of work such as “tone, mood, pace, genre, syntax, grammar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation and ambiguity (2).”

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Russian literary Formalism

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◽

10.4324/9780415249126-e060-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Carol Any

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Lived Experience ◽

Narrative Structure ◽

Literary Work ◽

Active Movement ◽

Poetic Language ◽

Literary Works ◽

Tristram Shandy ◽

Russian Literary ◽

Roman Jakobson

Russian literary Formalism, an active movement in Russian literary criticism from about 1915 to 1929, approached the literary work as a self-referential, formed artefact rather than as an expression of reality or experience outside the work. It asked the question, ‘How is the work made?’ rather than ‘What does the work say?’ Its founding assumption, that poetic language differs from the language of ordinary communication, spawned numerous investigations of what the Formalists called ‘literariness’ – the qualities that make a work artistic. This distinction between practical and poetic language also allowed the Formalists to argue that literature was an autonomous branch of human activity, evolving according to its own immanent laws rather than as a consequence or reflection of historical events. Proceeding from this theoretical model, the Formalists viewed literary works as responses to previous literature rather than to the outside world. In their literary theory and their interpretations of particular literary works, the Formalists were reacting to the predominant tendency of Russian literary criticism to draw direct correspondences between lived experience and the literary work. Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovskii, Boris Tomashevskii, Iurii Tynianov and other Formalists questioned accepted correspondences between life and art, casting doubt upon realist interpretations of Russian authors such as Gogol’ and Tolstoi, and examining the narrative structure of non-Russian works such as Tristram Shandy and O. Henry’s short stories. Their analyses showed how intonation, word order, rhythm and referential meaning interact within a literary work, and they argued that literary works are less a reflection of life than an attempt to refresh conventional perceptions. The influence of Russian literary Formalism is felt in more recent theoretical schools such as semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, feminist criticism and new historicism, in so far as all of these take account of the particular use of language in any literary work.

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TRANSLATION AS MENTAL INTERPRETATION ACTIVITY IN LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

Naukovy Visnyk of South Ukrainian National Pedagogical University named after K D Ushynsky Linguistic Sciences ◽

10.24195/2616-5317-2019-28-4 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 18 (28) ◽

pp. 43-53

Author(s):

Svitlana Gruschko

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Literary Work ◽

Cross Cultural ◽

Literary Translation ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Cultural Dimension ◽

Cultural Communication ◽

Original Text ◽

Cross Cultural Communication ◽

Cross Language

In the article the phenomenon of translation is regarded as mental interpretation activity not only in linguistics, but also in literary criticism. The literary work and its translation are most vivid guides to mental and cultural life of people, an example of intercultural communication. An adequate perception of non-native culture depends on communicators’ general fund of knowledge. The essential part of such fund of knowledge is native language, and translation, being a mediator, is a means of cross-language and cross-cultural communication. Mastering another language through literature, a person is mastering new world and its culture. The process of literary texts’ translation requires language creativity of the translator, who becomes so-called “co-author” of the work. Translation activity is a result of the interpreter’s creativity and a sort of language activity: language units are being selected according to language units of the original text. This kind of approach actualizes linguistic researching of real translation facts: balance between language and speech units of the translated work (i.e. translationinterpretation, author’s made-up words, or revised language peculiarities of the characters). The process of literary translation by itself should be considered within the dimension of a dialogue between cultures. Such a dialogue takes place in the frame of different national stereotypes of thinking and communicational behavior, which influences mutual understanding between the communicators with the help of literary work being a mediator. So, modern linguistics actualizes the research of language activities during the process of literary work’s creating. This problem has to be studied furthermore, it can be considered as one of the central ones to be under consideration while dealing with cultural dimension of the translation process, including the process of solving the problems of cross-cultural communication.

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César Hautot – ein naturalistischer Ödipus? Guy de Maupassants Hautot père et fils auf der Schwelle zur Psychoanalyse

Romanistisches Jahrbuch ◽

10.1515/roja-2018-0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 69 (1) ◽

pp. 184-197

Author(s):

Claudia Jacobi

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Literary Work ◽

Oedipus Complex ◽

Historical Process ◽

Literary Representation ◽

Short Novel ◽

Scientific Approach

Abstract Literary criticism has mentioned some affinities between Guy de Maupassant’s literary work and Freud’s psychoanalysis, without ever reflecting on Maupassant’s literary anticipation of the Oedipus complex. The latter is particularly evident in the short novel Hautot père et fils (1889), which has not received much attention to date. The article aims to illustrate some evident parallels between Maupassant’s literary representation of a father-son conflict and Freud’s scientific approach. In doing so, it does not intend to deliver a demonstration of the emergence of Freudian concepts from naturalistic fiction. It shall rather be considered as a literary case study, which illustrates the discourse-historical process of transformation from the physiological paradigm of naturalism to the psychological paradigm of the arising psychoanalysis.

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