Subject collection: Literary Studies (221 titles, 1971–2015)

Following Peirce in his non-reductive understanding of the theory of signs as a branch of aesthetics, this book reconceptualizes the processes of literary creation, appreciation and reading in semiotic terms. Here is a carefully developed theory of what sort of criteria serve to distinguish apposite from inapposite readings of literary works-of-art. Given Peirce's triadic account of signification, it enlarges Aristotle's view of mimesis as expressive making into an understanding of literary works as deliberatively designed sign-systems belonging to Peirce's eighth class of signs. In parallel with Bakhtin's account of the dialogical nature of literary work (and its success in exposing misreadings of Dostoyevsky), this work categorizes in precise theoretical terms what is wrong with the non-dialogical readings which treat Plato's dialogues as doctrinal tractates. As a study in literary theory finally, and on the basis of apt distinctions between exhibitive, active, and assertive judgments, this book re-demarcates and distinguishes the discipline of literary criticism from that of literary theory, and both of these from the work of literary creation itself.

Signs, Dialogue and Ideology illustrates and critically examines — both historically and theoretically — the current state of semiotic discourse from Peirce to Bakhtin, through Saussure, Levinas, Schaff and Rossi-Landi to modern semioticians such as Umberto Eco. Ponzio is in search of a method to construct an appropriate language to talk about signs and ideology in this “end of ideology” era. Ponzio aims at an orientation in semiotics based on dialogism and interpretation by calling attention to the widespread transition from the semiotics of decodification to the semiotics of interpretations of signs which are not constrained by the dominant process of social reproduction. To this end the author draws on the literature on 'dialogue', 'otherness', 'linguistic work', 'critique of sign fetishism', and 'interpretative dynamics'. Critique of identity and critique of the subject reaffirm the 'objective', the material, the signifiant, the interpreted sign, the opus; i.e. the 'Otherness' as opposed to the expectation of exhaustiveness in the creation and interpretation of sign products.

The era of Russian Symbolism (1892-1917) has been called the Silver Age of Russian culture, and even the Second Golden Age. Symbolist authors are among the greatest Russian authors of this century, and their activities helped to foster one of the most significant advances in cultural life (in poetry, prose, music, theater, and painting) that has ever been seen there. This book is designed to serve as an introduction to Symbolism in Russia, as a movement, an artistic method, and a world view. The primary emphasis is on the history of the movement itself. Attention is devoted to what the Symbolists wrote, said, and thought, and on how they interacted. In this context, the main actors are the authors of poetry, prose, drama, and criticism, but space is also devoted to the important connections between literary figures and artists, philosophers, and the intelligentsia in general. This broad, detailed and balanced account of this period will serve as a standard reference work an encourage further research among scholars and students of literature.

Culture is studied in this collection, not merely as a set of products, but in terms of the involvement of individuals and groups in the making and using of such products. A wide range of activities, from the reading and writing of poetry to watching soccer on television, is surveyed by an international group of scholars from diverse disciplines: cultural history, literary studies, sociology. Topics include the social distribution of cultural activities, populism and elitism in modern aesthetics, the nature of cultural competence and the channels through which it is acquired, the impact of electronic media on traditional modes of culturalinvolvement, the role of public institutions such as churches, schools, and libraries in stimulating participation, and the relationship between cultural participation and socialization.

In Romantic Drama, three dozen comparatists join forces for a supranational, crosscultural reexamination of the deep paradigm shifts appearing around the start of the nineteenth century which revolutionized drama as a literary art within the enormous civilization constituted by Europe and her overseas extensions. Romantic pronouncements on the canon and poetics of drama, the symptomatic subject-matters treated by Romantic playwrights, the structural means by which they expressed their view of the world, and regional peculiarities are illuminated from multiple perspectives. The volume aspires to skirt the pitfalls of simplistic genetic or teleological thinking. It does not treat Romanticism as a limited “period” dominated by some construed singular master-ethos or dialectic; rather, it follows the literary patterns and dynamics of Romanticism as a flow of interactive currents across geocultural frontiers. Finally, this involves recognizing the Romantic heritage in literary phenomena reaching into our own times. Thus the Romantic celebration of imagination, creation of a theater of the mind, experience of intertextuality, dissolving of generic boundaries, and embrace of “myth” as a challenge to older “history” figure among the important topics, as do Romantic foreshadowings of Symbolist, Existentialist, and Absurdist drama.This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer.romanticism.pdf

Drawing largely on Propp's and Greimas' work on the narrative, this book is aimed at consolidating and extending their views through a series of concrete applications. The volume offers a critical examination of narrative structure in terms of its two basic syntactic units or sets of operations, namely the “eventual or dynamic configurations corresponding to communication or to contract or, more general, to the structure of exchange.” Because of the emphasis it lays on the logical frame underlying the syntagmatic dimension of the story, the book contributes to an integrated descriptive model deliberately centered on “narrative semiotics as a branch of descriptive poetics.” The discussion of value in its social and legal context brings to light the links between the theory of narrative and its anthropological sources. This book shows that a strict concern with story logic requires a reevaluation of the basic premises of semiotic theory and raises important epistemological questions about its evolution.

Reassessing the theoretical usefulness of the “high/low culture” perspective often found in writings on Romantic theater, this book shows how this dichotomy has obscured the centrality of melodrama as a dominant mode of Romantic expression in post-revolutionary France. The book focuses on Victor Ducange's production (1813-33) in order to reveal melodrama's aesthetic and political contribution to the Romantic movement during the Restoration. The restructuring of the theatrical field after 1830 is analyzed to account for the break between Hugo's Romantic drama and the melodrama and for melodrama's subsequent reputation as a “popular” genre.

Lorca's poetry is founded upon a complex symbolical system of recurring motifs. This book analyses a number of those motifs as poetic signs through a contextual reading of Libro de poemas (1921) and Diván del Tamarit (1940) as the initial and final stages of Lorca's career. The sexual and religious crisis voiced in Libro de poemas achieves poetic articulation through the sign of the star, while the betrayal of childhood's fairytale is evidenced in the sign of the moon. Diván del Tamarit exemplifies the trancelike writing of the poetry of “opening up one's veins” as an activity developing between the desire for a word that will capture plenitude and the word's impenetrability to fix an impulse that, in itself, resists any determinacy.

This volume is a collection of original contributions in the field of feminist critical theory which reflect upon past practices and suggest new strategies and directions for future work. The articles are presented in two non-exclusive, interactive sections: “Theorizing Feminist Criticism” and “The Feminist Writing Subject”. They offer different points of entry into the familiar debates that have dominated feminist literary criticism for over a decade. The contributions stage negotiations with literary critical and feminist theory which are productive of different perspectives and new strategies for reading and writing.

In Gorbachev's Russia and outside of it the strength and scope of Russian nationalism is currently a subject of strenuous scholarly debate. The many and varied forms national ideology takes in Russian literature are the subject of this collection of essays. Over the past two hundred years Russians have used their literature to express both conformist and nonconformist views on the relationship between the individual and society and on Russian national destiny. Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Grossman, Tvardovsky, Rasputin, Zinovyev and others have taken diverse stands in regard to Russian nationalism, and their points of view are explored in this book. Several chapters offer suggestive overviews of nationalism's role in literature. The influence of Stalinist mentality on nationalism is also explored, as are the overt expressions of nationalist sentiments in the conditions of Gorbachev's glasnost. This book offers a rare insight into the present Soviet Russian literary scene, and it will help refocus future studies of Russian literature.

Israel Pelletier argues that Trois contes demands a different kind of reading which distinguishes it from Madame Bovary and other Flaubert texts. By the time he wrote this late work, Flaubert's attitude toward his characters and the role of fiction had changed to accommodate different social, political, and literary pressures. He constructed two opposing levels of meaning for each of the stories, straight and ironic, which produced a more fruitful way of addressing some of his concerns and assumptions about langauge and illusion. Included in this study are a provocative feminist reading of Un Coeur, an assessment of Saint Julien as Flaubert's attempt to come to terms with his originality as a writer, and an interpretation of Hérodias as an autobiography of the writing process.

The papers in this book respond to the public debate over literary canons, in the United States, and elsewhere, by placing the political-ideological aspects of the conflict inside perspectives derived from comparative literature. Canons are seen by most of the contributors as based on democratic and communal intentions or choices inevitable filtered through and colored by historical experiences and social biases.An examination of the canonical process over many centuries reveals both the impressive durability of its elements and the amazing flexibility of its outlines. The careful individual analyses, as well as the thought-provoking general contributions in this volume agree that the democracy of play is one of the strongest bonds uniting the human race. “Canons or canons”, the contributors argue, are based on it and reflect the intimate interdependence of cultural and intellectual matters with the workings of society as a whole. Contributors Charles Altieri, Lilian R. Furst, Michael G. Cooke, Robert Royal, Roger Shattuck, Rosa E.M.D. Penna, Glen M. Johnson, Yves Chevrel, Raymond A. Prier, Peter Walker, Christopher Clausen, Virgil Nemoianu.

Establishing the notion of reasonable foolishness and foolish reason as a generic principle of the old French farce, Boucquey's study examines the interdependencies among four key mimetic phenomena: the demented universe of the Feast of Fools festival, the genre of the farce, Bruegel's representation of the world, and the euphoric comedies of triumphant madness created by Moliere. This reinterpretation of French farce according to the principle of a topsy-turvy world reveals the link of madness that unites the four modes of production studied, from textual linearity, through representational surface, to theatrical three-dimensionality. Of pluralist conception, the book's eclectic critical apparatus draws readily on foundations as diverse as historicism, semiotics, structuralism, Foucauldian theory, iconography, Derridean textualization, and etymology.

This study of the fictional themes and techniques of Michel Tournier reveals his profound radicalism as a social critic and novelist despite the seeming conventionality of his works. Guided by Tournier's essays and interviews, Petit examines his fiction in light of plot sources, philosophical and anthropological training, and his belief that fiction should change the world. Close study of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Le Roi des aulnes, Les Météores, Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, and La Goutte d'or, as well as the short fiction in Le Coq de bruyère and Le Médianoche amoureux, shows Tournier's revolutionary conception of plot structuring as he develops key themes, whether religion, sensuality, or prejudice, in more than twenty years spent reconceiving the nature of fiction.

Amadei-Pulice examines the conflict between Lope's dramatic formula (comedia) and the new polytechnic formula that in the hands of Calderon merged dramatic poetry with visual and auditory effects (comedia de teatro). The author places the Spanish baroque theater within the wider context of a revolution in the theory of representation, signs, and meanings that took place at the beginning of the seventeenth century and marked the appearance of a new dramatic style: the stile rappresentativo. Special attention is given to the techniques and applications of perspectival scenery, stagecraft, optics, and the creation of visual and sound effects contributed by the Florentine melodramma. The highlighting of Italian dramatic theory and practice reveals that Calderon was an innovator and creator of a new concept in theater.

Applying recent European and Anglo-American feminist scholarship to the problems of gender representation, Charnon-Deutsch challenges the prevailing idea that the 19th-century Spanish novel is woman centered. The author's examination of novels by Valera, Pereda, Alas, and Galdos demonstrates that these works are instead a complex exploration of male identity. Decoding the gender ideology of women's roles, discourse, and representations, Charnon-Deutsch uncovers in the novels multiple configurations of androcentricity as well as voyeuristic tendencies, which she interprets as a means of mastering what is threatening to the male psyche.

Malcolm K. Read employs a psychoanalytic model which sees civilization as a manner of instinctual renunciation in this analysis of selected texts from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on their moments of silence and contradiction, he demonstrates that certain attitudes toward the body expressed in these texts have a basis, albeit unconscious, in a motivation which is ultimately political. The central topics, deeply intertwined thematically and theoretically, relate to the nature and development of language; to the Baroque art of Gongora and Quevedo; to Feijoo's defense of the rationalist subject set against Torres Villarroel's subversion of the same; and to the neo-classical aesthetics of Luzan and Arteaga. The result is an interdisciplinary approach that challenges traditional assumptions in both literary criticism and linguistic historiography.

Margitic's critical edition of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid (1637) provides scholar and student with a complete, accurate resource for the study of this famous play. The original text is reproduced, with subsequent variants indicated in footnotes. The book begins with an introduction which examines the play's genesis, sources, successive modifications, critical reception, and stage fortune as well as thematic and dramatic structure, and concludes with a bibliography. Three appendices contain texts contemporary with Le Cid which comment on the work. The first two include Corneille's comments on his masterpiece and his list of Spanish sources (accompanied by French translations). The final appendix presents a selection of particularly important documents that formed part of the Querelle du Cid. All the texts are amply but not excessively annotated. A comprehensive glossary follows the appendices.

It has often been claimed that the aim of semiotics is to establish a general theory of systems of signification. However, as Jean-Claude Coquet notes in a recent collection of essays, what distinguishes one school of semiotics from another is the initial definition given of sign. If, for certain semioticians, the sign is first of all an observable phenomenon, for the Paris School it is first of all a construct and this point of departure has crucial theoretical and practical consequences. The essays appearing in these two volumes are representative of recent work carried out by members of this semiotic school. Essays in Volume I study problems more closely related to theoretical issues, while Volume II focuses more specifically on various fields of application.

A semiotic analysis is made of the six major plays by Eugene O'Neill and an attempt is made to yield a systematic analysis towards humanistic interpretations of texts. Theoretical interpretations are enriched with discussions of the plays. Technical matters such as the segmentation of the text are specified in appendices. Six semiotic dimensions have been studied: motifs, theatrical semiotic systems, their use in communicational functions, role function of the dramatis personae, their levels of awareness, and aristotelian divisions.

This study views the pervasive ambiguity of Chretien's romances as a positive quality and focuses on the techniques used in Yvain to encourage reflection. An adversative structure informs this romance, setting up a disconcerting rhythm of false belief and reversal which forces the reader/listener (like the hero) to question all that meets the eyes and ears. Grimbert's discussion ranges broadly and authoritatively over subjects from narrative omniscience and reliability ... to character, to rhetoric and the duplicity of language”. Norris J. Lacy, French Review 63.2 (1989).

Aunque en Italia la imitación como ejercicio literario formaba ya parte integrante de la preceptiva poética, para los escritores castellanos del siglo XVI representaba una manera nueva de aproximarse tanto a los clásicos greco-latinos como a los italianos más recientes. La imitatio enlaza a España con la actualidad circundante, y el renacimiento literario que resulta de su práctica queda delineado no sólo por su contexto geopolítico sino por su dinámica interna. El Cinquecento italiano tiene su base en la excelencia literaria que habían logrado anteriormente Petrarca y Boccaccio en el Trecento; la participación de España en esa misma excelencia coincide, en parte, con una visión del país como poder político universal.

The traditional gulf between the theory and practice of literature and the various areas subjoined under anthropology has hindered the development of some very fruitful perspectives in the realm of poetics and the general theory of literature (particularly in its narrative forms). Poyatos' initial idea of literary anthropology as the study of people and their cultural manifestations through their national literatures - without doubt the richest source of documentation of human life-styles and the most advanced form of our projection in time and space and of communicating with contemporary and future generations - has been enriched by the thoughts of a multi-cultural group of scholars from both anthropology and literature who at a first symposium on the subject attempted to define this area leaving the way open to many more research possibilities.

This is the first collaborative international reading of irony as a major phenomenon in Romantic art and thought. The volume identifies key predecessor moments that excited Romantic authors and the emergence of a distinctly Romantic theory and practice of irony spreading to all literary genres. Not only the influential pioneer German, British, and French varieties, but also manifestations in northern, eastern, and southern parts of Europe as well as in North America, are considered. A set of concluding “syntheses” treat the shaping power of Romantic irony in narrative modes, music, the fine arts, and theater – innovations that will deeply influence Modernism. Thus the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach elaborated in the twenty chapters of Romantic Irony, as lead volume in the five-volume Romanticism series, establishes a significant new range for comparative literature studies in dealing with a complex literary movement.

This volume is part of a book set which can be ordered at a special discount: https://www.benjamins.com/series/chlel/chlel.special_offer.romanticism.pdf

Many of the fundamental ideas of the classical Prague School have guided or inspired much of the interdisciplinary post World War II research in linguistics, literary theory, semiotics, folklore and the arts. The Prague School promoted a humanistic and functional Leitmotiv of language as an open, flexible, adaptable, and abstract system of systems used by human beings to communicate. This hommage to the Prague School presents papers in five areas of research:- Prague School phonology and its theoretical and methodological implications, — The Prague School and functional discourse analysis, — The Prague School and aspects of literary criticism, — The sociological and ethnographical concerns of the Prague School, — The Prague School's semiotic approach to the arts.