Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History

172 Pages·2017·0.846 MB·English

by  Felea, Alina Silvana

50
Literary and
The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history
and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The Cultural Theory
aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse by
either highlighting the extra literary generative forces or by focusing
on the intrinsic study of literary works. Rhetoric chiefly places emphasis
on the verbal effects of discourses whereas literary history predomi-
nantly examines the temporal succession of the literary systems or of
the literary institution. The author focuses on the three sections: poet- Alina Silvana Felea
ics, rhetoric, and literary history and provides an introductory study on
the subject of reference.
Aspects of Reference
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Alina Silvana Felea is Lecturer at the Faculty of Letters of the Transil- v
vania University of Brasov. She is a member of the Department of Lit- Sil
erature and Cultural Studies. Her fields of interest are literary theory, a
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rhetoric and theories of fiction. li
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LCT 50_272939 Felea AM_HCA5 PLE.indd 1 01.09.17 09:42
50
Literary and
The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history
and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The Cultural Theory
aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse by
either highlighting the extra literary generative forces or by focusing
on the intrinsic study of literary works. Rhetoric chiefly places emphasis
on the verbal effects of discourses whereas literary history predomi-
nantly examines the temporal succession of the literary systems or of
the literary institution. The author focuses on the three sections: poet- Alina Silvana Felea
ics, rhetoric, and literary history and provides an introductory study on
the subject of reference.
Aspects of Reference
y
r in Literary Theory
o
e
h
T
y
r
a
er Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History
t
i
L
n
i
e
c
n
e
r
e
f
e
R
f
o
s
t
c
e
p
s
A
a ·
e
el
F
a
n
a
Alina Silvana Felea is Lecturer at the Faculty of Letters of the Transil- v
vania University of Brasov. She is a member of the Department of Lit- Sil
erature and Cultural Studies. Her fields of interest are literary theory, a
n
rhetoric and theories of fiction. li
A
LCT 50_272939 Felea AM_HCA5 PLE.indd 1 01.09.17 09:42
50
Literary and
The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history
and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The Cultural Theory
Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory
aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse by
either highlighting the extra literary generative forces or by focusing
on the intrinsic study of literary works. Rhetoric chiefly places emphasis
on the verbal effects of discourses whereas literary history predomi-
nantly examines the temporal succession of the literary systems or of
the literary institution. The author focuses on the three sections: poet- Alina Silvana Felea
ics, rhetoric, and literary history and provides an introductory study on
the subject of reference.
Aspects of Reference
y
r in Literary Theory
o
e
h
T
y
r
a
er Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History
t
i
L
n
i
e
c
n
e
r
e
f
e
R
f
o
s
t
c
e
p
s
A
a ·
e
el
F
a
n
a
Alina Silvana Felea is Lecturer at the Faculty of Letters of the Transil- v
vania University of Brasov. She is a member of the Department of Lit- Sil
erature and Cultural Studies. Her fields of interest are literary theory, a
n
rhetoric and theories of fiction. li
A
LCT 50_272939 Felea AM_HCA5 PLE.indd 1 01.09.17 09:42
LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY
General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga
VOLUME 50
LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY Alina Silvana Felea
General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga
Aspects of Reference
VOLUME 50 in Literary Theory
Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the
Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is
available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the
Library of Congress
ISSN 1434-0313
ISBN 978-3-631-72939-7 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-72940-3 (E-PDF)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-72941-0 (EPUB)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-72942-7 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/b11505
© Peter Lang GmbH
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Frankfurt am Main 2017
All rights reserved.
Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH.
Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York ·
Oxford · Warszawa · Wien
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any
utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to
prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions,
translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in
electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
www.peterlang.com
Table of Contents
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the
0. The Reference and the Study of Literature .......................................... 7
Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is
available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
1. Poetics ............................................................................................................... 15
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
1.1. The acceptations of the term and the object of the discipline ............ 15
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the
Library of Congress 1.2. Poetics in antiquity ................................................................................... 18
1.2.1. Plato and the objection to poetry ................................................... 18
1.2.2. Aristotle, the father of poetics ......................................................... 21
1.2.3. The poetics of the Latin space. Epistle to the Pisos ........................ 26
1.2.4. The poetics of the Latin world. The treatise On the Sublime ....... 30
1.3. The survival of poetics during the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance ............................................................................................... 34
1.4. Between mimesis and poiesis. The 18th century ..................................... 37
1.5. Poetics in the age of Romanticism ......................................................... 42
ISSN 1434-0313 1.5.1. Wordsworth and Coleridge, the precursors of the poetics of
ISBN 978-3-631-72939-7 (Print) Modernity .......................................................................................... 44
E-ISBN 978-3-631-72940-3 (E-PDF)
1.6. Modern Poetics ......................................................................................... 47
E-ISBN 978-3-631-72941-0 (EPUB)
1.6.1. Russian Formalism ........................................................................... 49
E-ISBN 978-3-631-72942-7 (MOBI)
1.6.2. New Criticism ..................................................................................... 54
DOI 10.3726/b11505
1.6.3. The Prague Linguistic Circle (1926–1948) .................................... 58
© Peter Lang GmbH 1.6.4. Roman Jakobson ............................................................................... 62
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften 1.6.5. Structuralism ..................................................................................... 65
Frankfurt am Main 2017 1.6.6. Semiotics ............................................................................................ 69
All rights reserved. 1.6.7. The mathematical poetics .................................................................. 76
Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH.
1.7. Conclusions ............................................................................................... 79
Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York ·
Oxford · Warszawa · Wien 2. Rhetoric ............................................................................................................ 83
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any 2.1 The glory and oblivion of a millenary discipline .................................. 83
utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to 2.2 Rhetoric in Antiquity ............................................................................... 86
prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, 2.2.1. Greek rhetoric .................................................................................... 87
translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in 2.2.2. Latin rhetoric ..................................................................................... 91
electronic retrieval systems. 2.2.3. Asianism ............................................................................................. 95
This publication has been peer reviewed. 2.3. Another type of rhetoric: sacred rhetoric .............................................. 96
2.3.1. Sacred rhetoric in Romanian culture ............................................. 98
www.peterlang.com
5
2.4. Rhetoric in the centuries which were not favorable to it .................... 98
2.5. The rhetorical system and some essential matters
related to rhetoric ................................................................................... 102
2.6. The specificity of rhetoric and its reference ........................................ 107
2.7. Modern rhetoric and its two directions ............................................... 108
2.7.1. The philosophic neorhetoric ......................................................... 109
2.7.2. Linguistic neorhetoric .................................................................... 112
2.8. Conclusions ............................................................................................. 115
3. Literary History .......................................................................................... 119
3.1. The identity of the literary history and its relations to criticism
and literary theory .................................................................................. 119
3.2. The beginnings of the discipline; the 19th century ............................. 122
3.3. The conception of literary history in the 20th century ....................... 124
3.4. Extrinsic and intrinsic ........................................................................... 126
3.5. Classification – the privileged method of
classical literary history ......................................................................... 129
3.6. Literary history: a discipline of continuity? ........................................ 130
3.7. Diachronic and synchronic ................................................................... 137
3.8. Reasoning – between relativism and absolutism ............................... 141
3.9 The narrative literary history ................................................................ 143
3.10. Revisions of the subject of literary history .......................................... 145
3.11. Conclusions ............................................................................................. 151
4. The Variable Reference ............................................................................ 155
Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 159
6
0. Th e Reference and the Study of Literature
In the sum of present-d ay discourses, of both exact and humanistic sciences, au-
thentication and confirmation by reference to a definite and essentially verifiable
fact has not only become a necessity but an obligation. Nowadays, a book without
exact bibliographical references is susceptible to being considered unscientific or
even superficial. Quoting from memory and evoking ideas are undoubtedly very
widely used but once the quotation marks occur in the text, the bibliographical
reference (page, publishing house, place of publication) becomes obvious. What is
currently a very reasonable practice (and I have chosen only one example among
many others) is however symptomatic for revealing a general prerequisite which
is characteristic for our age, namely that of stability and cognitive certainty, of
accuracy regarding the source that has to be named, not disregarded. On the other
hand, an equally powerful trend is the one represented by antirealist theories and
the view according to which neither thought nor language contain “representa-
tions” of reality since the truth is construed by contemporary anti-r ationalism
as a mythologizing and oppressive value. The ancestral (also pejoratively termed
mythical) need to understand and describe the real and its fundamentals, to estab-
lish its distinctions, value systems, norms and regulations, is considered useless,
similarly to what the Sceptics and the Stoics once believed when referring to the
impossibility of having any certainty regarding the surrounding reality. Richard
Rorty – to give but one example – is a renowned representative of analytic phi-
losophy and contemporary American pragmatism who claimed that a genuinely
interesting philosophy is the one that manages to replace one “vocabulary” with
a more pertinent one in relation to the present moment. The same thing would
nowadays happen to truth or objectivity, hollow notions, devoid of meaning,
which by no means implies that there are no longer values worthy of being taken
into consideration and important for human beings and society.1
To give up or not to give up the search for “evidence”
Moreover, we could easily notice that paradoxically, the large amount of informa-
tion available to us – we are far more cognitively rich than our ancestors – does
not help us in becoming more anchored in the surrounding reality. Probably it is
1 These are the values that are constantly promoted by the pragmatist tradition: liberty,
tolerance, solidarity, etc.
7
this very informative variety as well as the consciousness of multiple determina-
tions that we resort to and which bear the guilt for what Toma Pavel termed “the
severance of the ego from its own biography.”2 It is a sort of inability to comfort-
ably inhabit our ego, to acknowledge or define our own identity. That does not,
however, prevent us from searching for it with the prospect of certitude.
Disorientation is also visible at the macro- level of society. With reference to the
observation made by Bernard Williams regarding the existence of two seemingly
antagonistic trends nowadays, Pascal Engel raises a pertinent question: “On one
hand, there has never been so much distrust of the values of rationality, scientific
progress, truth, and objectivity, either in advanced intellectual circles or in the
media and society in general. On the other, never has the impression that we are
being deceived by the authorities (political and scientific), that are supposed to
guarantee precisely these values, and the need for trust been so great. Why, if we
no longer believe in truth, is there such a longing for it?”3 Hence, the eager search
for evidence, the natural and legitimate urge to understand what is around us
and what defines us, continues to manifest itself strongly. It is, however, true that
vocabulary modifies itself as it varies.
Reference and reality
We thus have the very eloquent example of the notion of reference. The theories on
how we “refer to” various aspects have been altering and have obviously developed
from 1960 onwards. Reference seemed to be another term for reality; therefore not
once have the two notions been confused. Nevertheless, however alluring their as-
sociation may be, reference is not equivalent to reality! As an illustration, one may
consider the reference of the terms “dragon” and “ubiquity.” The former would
be endowed with a physical yet fictional existence, therefore non-c onformant to
our experience of the physical world. The latter would entail a non-p hysical and
fictional existence. Hence it is not in accordance with our experience of the non-
physical world. Consequently, once more, the terms “referent” and “real” are not
transposable4 even though their affiliation or resemblance is more than obvious.
Nevertheless, whether one places reality under scrutiny or the issue of refer-
ence is being debated, the process of defining them nowadays is not a smooth and
2 See the series of lectures given by Toma Pavel in 2006 at Collège de France.
3 Pascal Engel and Richard Rorty, A quoi bon la vérité? (Paris: Editions Grasset &
Fasquelle, 2005), pp. 13–14.
4 See Georges Lavis, “Le texte littéraire, le référent, le réel, le vrai,” Cahiers d’analyse
textuelle, no. 13 (1971), p. 11.
8