Dr. Fidel Fajardo-Acosta's

World Literature Website

 

Literature: An Introduction

Read: Understanding Literature (click here)

Outline of Main Issues

• What is literature?
  • Medium: language
  • Content: ideas
  • Purpose: entertainment and persuasion
    
• Literature as a rhetoric engaging the human senses, desires, and emotions and conveying ideologies and ideological messages
  
  
• Symbolism, indirectness, figurality of literary representation
  • Layers of meaning: literal and symbolic
  • Ideological meaning generally beyond the literal
    
    
• Literary creation: conscious and unconscious
  • Dreams and stories
  • Authors' awareness and unawareness of ideas in literature
    
    
• Sources of literature
  • Direct: author's ideas, personal experiences, feelings, desires
  • Indirect: ideologies; culture and society; historical circumstances; patronage; human aims, aspirations, and desires
  • Overdetermination: multiple causes and sources
    • Complexity of authors, cultures, and historical situations
    • Representation of multiple ideologies in literary texts
    • Possibility of contradictory ideas within a single text
      
      
• The readers and audiences of literature
  • Encounter of readers, texts, and authors
  • Ideologies and historical circumstances of readers, audiences
  • Influence of readers on the understanding of literature
    
    
• Interpretation: the art of explaining the meaning of literature, recovering the ideas embodied in the symbols of literature
  • Possibility of multiple meanings due to overdetermination
  • Need for close, attentive reading of the text
  • Need to understand author's life, historical context
  • Need for awareness of readers' and interpreters' biases and ideological preferences
  • Objective v.s. subjective interpretation
  • Variable value of different interpretations

 

© 2001 by Fidel Fajardo-Acosta, all rights reserved