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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

 

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