Summary “An Introduction to Literary Studies” – Mario Klarer
Week 1
Lecture 1:
3 classic concepts in literary criticism:
1. Defamiliarization (Schlovsky, 1917) à cognitive estrangement. E.g. Inglan is a bitch
2. The Intentional Fallacy (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946) à Stephen King à asking what the
author may have meant.
3. The Affective Fallacy (Wimsatt & Beardsley) à Fredric Wertham à beginning and ending
with your initial emotional response
Chapter 1: What is literature? What is a text?
Literature is often referred to as the entirety of written expression, with the restriction that not every
written document can be categorized as literature in the more exact sense of the word.
Etymologically, the Latin word litteratura derives from littera (letter). The word text is related to
textile (fabric): just as single threads form a fabric, so words and sentences form a meaningful and
coherent text. The earliest manifestations are prehistoric cave paintings, which pass on encrypted
messages through visual signs. The spoken word is also a part of literature. Before writing was fully
developed, texts were passed on orally —> oral poetry consisted of texts stored in a bard or
minstrel’s memory from which the singers could recite upon demand. This has been revived by radio
and other sound carriers. While in the Middle Ages the visual component was stimulated (richly
decorated handwritten manuscripts), the visual element is disappeared or reduced nowadays. This
modern iconoclasm (hostility toward pictures) not only restricts the visual dimensions of texts but
also sees writing as a medium that can function with little connection to the acoustic element of
language —> this survived only in drama: combines acoustic and visual elements more than any
other literary genre.
Genre, text type, and discourse
The term genre usually refers to one of the three classical literary forms of epic, poetry, or drama.
Epic does not qualify as poetry, despite its verse form. The epic is a precursor of the modern novel
because of its structural features, such as plot, character presentation and narrative perspective
(modern terms: prose and fiction).
The term text type refers to highly conventional written documents, such as instruction manuals,
sermons, obituaries, advertising texts, catalogues and scientific and scholarly writing. It can also
include the three main genres and their subgenres. They do not fit into the canonical genre
categories.
Discourse is used as a term for any kind of classifiable linguistic expression. It has become a useful
denotation for various linguistic conventions that refer to areas of content and theme (e.g.
male/female, political, sexual, economic etc.).
The term genre applies primarily to the three classical forms of the literary tradition; text type is a
broader term that is also applicable to “non-canonical” written texts; and discourse is the broadest
term, referring to a variety of written and oral manifestations that share common thematic or
structural features.
Primary and secondary sources
Primary sources: denote the traditional objects of analysis in literary criticism, including texts from all
literary genres.
Secondary sources: applies to texts such as articles, book reviews, and notes all of which are
published primarily in scholarly journals.
,Festschrift: collections of essays published in honor of a famous researcher on one of his or her
research topics
Monographs: larger book-length treatises on a single theme
Since the interpretation of texts always contains subjective traits, secondary sources can only to a
certain degree apply and maintain objective criteria or the general validity of the thesis à this
idiosyncrasy can bes een as the main difference between literary criticism and the natural sciences.
You should be able to retrace every quotation or paraphrase to the primary or secondary source
from which it was taken.
Critical apparatus: the list of sources of a scholarly paper or monograph, including footnotes or
endnotes, providing comments on the main text or references to further secondary or primary
sources; a bibliography and possibly an index.
Text types Publication media
Monograph Book
Essay (article) Journal
Note Collection of essays
Book review Festschrift
Review article DVD, CD-ROM, Internet
Formal aspects Goals
Footnotes Originality
Bibliography Objectivity
Quotations Lucidity of arguments
Paraphrases Traceability of sources
Index General validity of thesis
In most cases, it’s easy to distinguish the difference between primary and secondary literature.
However, every literary period produces works that try to blur the boundaries: Giovanni Boccaccio
(1313-1375) added glosses to his epic Teseida, for example.
Essays discuss a well-defined, abstract, or theoretical topic in a literary style à became popular in
the 16th/17th century by Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. Essays exhibit the stylistic features
of primary literature, while simultaneously approaching topics and questions in a very scientific
manner.
Week 2
Lecture 2
Imagery: picture that poem creates in your mind
The building blocks of metaphorical language
The vehicle: a word or phrase used in such a way that is becomes the carrier of a meaning not usually
associated with it.
The tenor: the implied meaning that the metaphorical word or phrase (the vehicle) carries with it, in
the context of the work in which it appears.
Dead metaphors
A metaphor works on the level of equation: one thing is equated with another.
Explicit: you (tenor) numbskull (vehicle)!
Implicit: listen to your heart (vehicle)!
,Literary metaphors
Explicit: if music (tenor) be the food of love (vehicle), play on
Simile (similar): a simile is a comparison à one thing is like another
Personification: turn a not-living object into a living thing à it happens in order to relate/understand
abstract things.
Allegory: you can read it as a figurative narrative.
Tutorial 2
Literal -----------------------------|---------------|------------------------------------|
denotation simile metaphor symbolic (broadens the meaning)
(super fixed) (figurative)
Diction: choice of words of an author
‘Ode to the West Wind’
Seeds Wind Leaves
Dead bodies Enchanter Dead but present
Buried Cleanser Ghosts
uncontrollable
Chapter 2: Major Genres in Literary Studies
Poetry
Poetry is one of the oldest genres in literature and dates back to ancient Greek literature. It’s closely
related to the term lyric, which derives etymologically from the Greek musical instrument lyra (harp),
which points to an origin in the sphere of music. In the classical antiquity or the Middle Ages, poetry
was recited by a minstrel accompanied by a lyre or other musical instruments. The Greek word poieo
(to make, to produce) indicates that the poet is the person who makes verse.
The classical elements that distinguish poetry from prose are verse, rhyme, and meter.
Poetry is usually divided into two major categories:
Narrative poetry: includes genres, such as the epic long poem, the romance, and the ballad, all of
which tell stories with clearly developed and structured plots.
Lyric poetry: mainly concerned with one event, impression or idea.
Some of the precursors of modern lyric poetry can be found in Old English riddles and charms (cultic
and magic texts were common in that period) (famous charm: ‘Against Wens’). Riddles are
characterized by a playful approach to language (Exeter Book).
Onomatopoeia: verbal imitation of natural sounds.
In the Middle Ages, lyrical short forms, focusing on love, were also very popular; they were sung as
lyrics and accompanied by a musical instrument à closely related to the Provencal troubadours (11th
to 14th centuries), who influenced European lyric poetry, such as the German minnesong (Walther
von der Vogelweide, ‘Under the Lime Tree’).
The Old English period adopts ancient forms of poetry, such as:
The elegy: laments the death of a dear person
The ode: already known in classical antiquity and re-emerged in the Renaissance. It consists of
several stanzas with a serious, mostly classical theme.
Sonnet: has been used in poetry primarily to deal with the theme of ‘worldly love’.
Imagery derives from the Latin imago (picture) and refers to a predominantly visual component of a
text that can, however, also include other sensory impressions. It is often regarded as the most
, common manifestation of the ‘concrete’ character of poetry. This can be achieved on three distinct
but interrelated levels:
Verbal dimension Visual dimension Rhythmic-acoustic dimension
Diction Concrete poetry Rhyme and meter
Rhetorical figures Emblem Onomatopoeia
Theme
Verbal dimension
The concept of the narrator is usually referred to in poetry with the terms ‘voice’ or ‘speaker’. Since
poetry is often a medium for the expression of subjective, personal events the issue of the speaker is
central to the analysis of poems. The use of poetic language, more than the use of complex narrative
situations, distinguishes poetry from other literary genres. In contrast to philosophical texts, which
remain abstract in their expression, poetry tries to convey themes in a concrete language of images.
Images and concrete objects often serve the additional function of symbols if they refer to a meaning
beyond the material object (for example a cross).
Other stylistic figures include rhetorical figures, or figures of speech. These classified stylistic forms
are characterized by their ‘nonliteral’ meanings. Rhetorical handbooks distinguish more than 200
different figures, of which simile and metaphor are the most commonly used in poetry.
A simile is a comparison between two different things that are connected by ‘like’, ‘than’, ‘as’, or
‘compare’. Similes are also one of the main features of ancient epic poetry, like in The Iliad, which
contains long rows of similes.
A metaphor is the equation of one thing with another without actual comparison. The metaphor and
the simile juxtapose two elements: the tenor (the person, object, or idea) to which the vehicle (or
image) is equated or compared. For example: ‘Oh, my love is like a red, red rose,’ à ‘my love’ is the
tenor and ‘red rose’ is the vehicle. Rhetorical figures are often used in poetry because they produce a
‘nonliteral’ meaning and reduce abstract or complex tenors to concrete vehicles, which again
enhance the concrete character that poetry ought to achieve.
In order to achieve the renewal of poetry, a number of movements in the first two decades in the
20th century set forth their credos in manifesto-like statements. For example, imagism, which
continued the tradition of pictorial expression in poetry by stylizing the image as a key concept. This
literary ‘school’, which is closely associated with Ezra Pound, focused on the condensation of poetry
into powerful, essential images (IN A STATION OF THE METRO). The German word Dichtung (poetry)
was considered to mean the same as the Latin condensare (‘to condense’). According to Pound,
poetry should achieve the utmost clarity of expression without the use of adornment. He drew on
the Japanese poetic form of haiku, which also contains three lines and on a thematic level refers to
times of the day or seasons. These Japanese poems were rendered in adaptions of Chinese written
characters, which are more suitable for conveying the concrete and pictorial dimension that
fascinated the imagist poets. The Chinese ideogram, which combines writing and picture, greatly
influenced the imagists whose main goal was to present pure verbal images to their readers. They
intended to compensate for the lack of pictorial dimension in alphabetical writing by condensing
language as much as possible.
Visual dimension
Concrete poetry takes a step further toward the visual arts, concentrating on the poem’s shape or
visual appearance à also goes by the name ‘picture poem’ (Rabanus Maurus). Picture poems have a
long tradition, reaching from classical antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages and on to the Baroque age
(George Herbert’s ‘The Altar’ and ‘Easter Wings’ (1633)). Pattern poems were extremely popular with
the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century and a common feature of European poetry in the
Baroque age. Another variant of this pictorial inclination of poetry in the 17th and 18th centuries are
emblem books, which combine a few lines of poetry with an allegorical visual image rendered as an
engraved picture (Francis Quarles, Emblems (1635)). Modernist authors developed new and
Week 1
Lecture 1:
3 classic concepts in literary criticism:
1. Defamiliarization (Schlovsky, 1917) à cognitive estrangement. E.g. Inglan is a bitch
2. The Intentional Fallacy (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946) à Stephen King à asking what the
author may have meant.
3. The Affective Fallacy (Wimsatt & Beardsley) à Fredric Wertham à beginning and ending
with your initial emotional response
Chapter 1: What is literature? What is a text?
Literature is often referred to as the entirety of written expression, with the restriction that not every
written document can be categorized as literature in the more exact sense of the word.
Etymologically, the Latin word litteratura derives from littera (letter). The word text is related to
textile (fabric): just as single threads form a fabric, so words and sentences form a meaningful and
coherent text. The earliest manifestations are prehistoric cave paintings, which pass on encrypted
messages through visual signs. The spoken word is also a part of literature. Before writing was fully
developed, texts were passed on orally —> oral poetry consisted of texts stored in a bard or
minstrel’s memory from which the singers could recite upon demand. This has been revived by radio
and other sound carriers. While in the Middle Ages the visual component was stimulated (richly
decorated handwritten manuscripts), the visual element is disappeared or reduced nowadays. This
modern iconoclasm (hostility toward pictures) not only restricts the visual dimensions of texts but
also sees writing as a medium that can function with little connection to the acoustic element of
language —> this survived only in drama: combines acoustic and visual elements more than any
other literary genre.
Genre, text type, and discourse
The term genre usually refers to one of the three classical literary forms of epic, poetry, or drama.
Epic does not qualify as poetry, despite its verse form. The epic is a precursor of the modern novel
because of its structural features, such as plot, character presentation and narrative perspective
(modern terms: prose and fiction).
The term text type refers to highly conventional written documents, such as instruction manuals,
sermons, obituaries, advertising texts, catalogues and scientific and scholarly writing. It can also
include the three main genres and their subgenres. They do not fit into the canonical genre
categories.
Discourse is used as a term for any kind of classifiable linguistic expression. It has become a useful
denotation for various linguistic conventions that refer to areas of content and theme (e.g.
male/female, political, sexual, economic etc.).
The term genre applies primarily to the three classical forms of the literary tradition; text type is a
broader term that is also applicable to “non-canonical” written texts; and discourse is the broadest
term, referring to a variety of written and oral manifestations that share common thematic or
structural features.
Primary and secondary sources
Primary sources: denote the traditional objects of analysis in literary criticism, including texts from all
literary genres.
Secondary sources: applies to texts such as articles, book reviews, and notes all of which are
published primarily in scholarly journals.
,Festschrift: collections of essays published in honor of a famous researcher on one of his or her
research topics
Monographs: larger book-length treatises on a single theme
Since the interpretation of texts always contains subjective traits, secondary sources can only to a
certain degree apply and maintain objective criteria or the general validity of the thesis à this
idiosyncrasy can bes een as the main difference between literary criticism and the natural sciences.
You should be able to retrace every quotation or paraphrase to the primary or secondary source
from which it was taken.
Critical apparatus: the list of sources of a scholarly paper or monograph, including footnotes or
endnotes, providing comments on the main text or references to further secondary or primary
sources; a bibliography and possibly an index.
Text types Publication media
Monograph Book
Essay (article) Journal
Note Collection of essays
Book review Festschrift
Review article DVD, CD-ROM, Internet
Formal aspects Goals
Footnotes Originality
Bibliography Objectivity
Quotations Lucidity of arguments
Paraphrases Traceability of sources
Index General validity of thesis
In most cases, it’s easy to distinguish the difference between primary and secondary literature.
However, every literary period produces works that try to blur the boundaries: Giovanni Boccaccio
(1313-1375) added glosses to his epic Teseida, for example.
Essays discuss a well-defined, abstract, or theoretical topic in a literary style à became popular in
the 16th/17th century by Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. Essays exhibit the stylistic features
of primary literature, while simultaneously approaching topics and questions in a very scientific
manner.
Week 2
Lecture 2
Imagery: picture that poem creates in your mind
The building blocks of metaphorical language
The vehicle: a word or phrase used in such a way that is becomes the carrier of a meaning not usually
associated with it.
The tenor: the implied meaning that the metaphorical word or phrase (the vehicle) carries with it, in
the context of the work in which it appears.
Dead metaphors
A metaphor works on the level of equation: one thing is equated with another.
Explicit: you (tenor) numbskull (vehicle)!
Implicit: listen to your heart (vehicle)!
,Literary metaphors
Explicit: if music (tenor) be the food of love (vehicle), play on
Simile (similar): a simile is a comparison à one thing is like another
Personification: turn a not-living object into a living thing à it happens in order to relate/understand
abstract things.
Allegory: you can read it as a figurative narrative.
Tutorial 2
Literal -----------------------------|---------------|------------------------------------|
denotation simile metaphor symbolic (broadens the meaning)
(super fixed) (figurative)
Diction: choice of words of an author
‘Ode to the West Wind’
Seeds Wind Leaves
Dead bodies Enchanter Dead but present
Buried Cleanser Ghosts
uncontrollable
Chapter 2: Major Genres in Literary Studies
Poetry
Poetry is one of the oldest genres in literature and dates back to ancient Greek literature. It’s closely
related to the term lyric, which derives etymologically from the Greek musical instrument lyra (harp),
which points to an origin in the sphere of music. In the classical antiquity or the Middle Ages, poetry
was recited by a minstrel accompanied by a lyre or other musical instruments. The Greek word poieo
(to make, to produce) indicates that the poet is the person who makes verse.
The classical elements that distinguish poetry from prose are verse, rhyme, and meter.
Poetry is usually divided into two major categories:
Narrative poetry: includes genres, such as the epic long poem, the romance, and the ballad, all of
which tell stories with clearly developed and structured plots.
Lyric poetry: mainly concerned with one event, impression or idea.
Some of the precursors of modern lyric poetry can be found in Old English riddles and charms (cultic
and magic texts were common in that period) (famous charm: ‘Against Wens’). Riddles are
characterized by a playful approach to language (Exeter Book).
Onomatopoeia: verbal imitation of natural sounds.
In the Middle Ages, lyrical short forms, focusing on love, were also very popular; they were sung as
lyrics and accompanied by a musical instrument à closely related to the Provencal troubadours (11th
to 14th centuries), who influenced European lyric poetry, such as the German minnesong (Walther
von der Vogelweide, ‘Under the Lime Tree’).
The Old English period adopts ancient forms of poetry, such as:
The elegy: laments the death of a dear person
The ode: already known in classical antiquity and re-emerged in the Renaissance. It consists of
several stanzas with a serious, mostly classical theme.
Sonnet: has been used in poetry primarily to deal with the theme of ‘worldly love’.
Imagery derives from the Latin imago (picture) and refers to a predominantly visual component of a
text that can, however, also include other sensory impressions. It is often regarded as the most
, common manifestation of the ‘concrete’ character of poetry. This can be achieved on three distinct
but interrelated levels:
Verbal dimension Visual dimension Rhythmic-acoustic dimension
Diction Concrete poetry Rhyme and meter
Rhetorical figures Emblem Onomatopoeia
Theme
Verbal dimension
The concept of the narrator is usually referred to in poetry with the terms ‘voice’ or ‘speaker’. Since
poetry is often a medium for the expression of subjective, personal events the issue of the speaker is
central to the analysis of poems. The use of poetic language, more than the use of complex narrative
situations, distinguishes poetry from other literary genres. In contrast to philosophical texts, which
remain abstract in their expression, poetry tries to convey themes in a concrete language of images.
Images and concrete objects often serve the additional function of symbols if they refer to a meaning
beyond the material object (for example a cross).
Other stylistic figures include rhetorical figures, or figures of speech. These classified stylistic forms
are characterized by their ‘nonliteral’ meanings. Rhetorical handbooks distinguish more than 200
different figures, of which simile and metaphor are the most commonly used in poetry.
A simile is a comparison between two different things that are connected by ‘like’, ‘than’, ‘as’, or
‘compare’. Similes are also one of the main features of ancient epic poetry, like in The Iliad, which
contains long rows of similes.
A metaphor is the equation of one thing with another without actual comparison. The metaphor and
the simile juxtapose two elements: the tenor (the person, object, or idea) to which the vehicle (or
image) is equated or compared. For example: ‘Oh, my love is like a red, red rose,’ à ‘my love’ is the
tenor and ‘red rose’ is the vehicle. Rhetorical figures are often used in poetry because they produce a
‘nonliteral’ meaning and reduce abstract or complex tenors to concrete vehicles, which again
enhance the concrete character that poetry ought to achieve.
In order to achieve the renewal of poetry, a number of movements in the first two decades in the
20th century set forth their credos in manifesto-like statements. For example, imagism, which
continued the tradition of pictorial expression in poetry by stylizing the image as a key concept. This
literary ‘school’, which is closely associated with Ezra Pound, focused on the condensation of poetry
into powerful, essential images (IN A STATION OF THE METRO). The German word Dichtung (poetry)
was considered to mean the same as the Latin condensare (‘to condense’). According to Pound,
poetry should achieve the utmost clarity of expression without the use of adornment. He drew on
the Japanese poetic form of haiku, which also contains three lines and on a thematic level refers to
times of the day or seasons. These Japanese poems were rendered in adaptions of Chinese written
characters, which are more suitable for conveying the concrete and pictorial dimension that
fascinated the imagist poets. The Chinese ideogram, which combines writing and picture, greatly
influenced the imagists whose main goal was to present pure verbal images to their readers. They
intended to compensate for the lack of pictorial dimension in alphabetical writing by condensing
language as much as possible.
Visual dimension
Concrete poetry takes a step further toward the visual arts, concentrating on the poem’s shape or
visual appearance à also goes by the name ‘picture poem’ (Rabanus Maurus). Picture poems have a
long tradition, reaching from classical antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages and on to the Baroque age
(George Herbert’s ‘The Altar’ and ‘Easter Wings’ (1633)). Pattern poems were extremely popular with
the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century and a common feature of European poetry in the
Baroque age. Another variant of this pictorial inclination of poetry in the 17th and 18th centuries are
emblem books, which combine a few lines of poetry with an allegorical visual image rendered as an
engraved picture (Francis Quarles, Emblems (1635)). Modernist authors developed new and
