(from OED, 3rd ed.)
1. a. The action of instituting or establishing; setting on foot or in operation; foundation; ordainment; the fact of being instituted. -- ADAM SMITH W.N. I. iv. (1869) I. 26 Before the institution of coined money..people must always have been liable to the grossest frauds and impositions.
Foundation: discriminating the literary, establishing it as a domain with its own phenomena, rules of operation, etc. Before, “literature” may have been associated with song, chanting, ritual, etc.
b. spec. The establishment or ordination of a sacrament of the Christian Church . . .
Literary: the act of reading, an experience with distinctive and unique properties; enlightening or spiritualizing the reader; the shared experience of such reading (group reading, etc.)
2. a. The giving of form or order to a thing; orderly arrangement; regulation. b. The established order by which anything is regulated; system; constitution.
Literary: discrimination of literary properties (sound, syntax, form, etc.), genres; the arts of criticism, rules of literary form
3. Establishment in a charge or position. a. Eccl. In Episcopal churches, the establishment of a clergyman in the office of the cure of souls, by the bishop or his commissary.
Literary: development of specialists, e.g., archivists, editors, teachers, professors, academies (Académie Française)
4. Training, instruction, education, teaching.
Literary: school and university courses
5. Usually in pl. a. Elements of instruction; first principles of a science or art. b. A book of first principles, an elementary treatise;
Literary: the elements of analysis, criticism; introductory textbooks for literature, fiction, etc., glossaries of literary terms
6. a. An established law, custom, usage, practice, organization, or other element in the political or social life of a people; a regulative principle or convention subservient to the needs of an organized community or the general ends of civilization. b. colloq. Something having the fixity or importance of a social institution; a well-established or familiar practice or object.
Literary: English courses required to graduate; examinations in literature; grading
7. a. An establishment, organization, or association, instituted for the promotion of some object, esp. one of public or general utility, religious, charitable, educational, etc., e.g. a church, school, college, hospital, asylum, reformatory, mission, or the like; as a literary and philosophical institution, a deaf and dumb institution, the Royal National Life-boat Institution, the Royal Masonic Benevolent Institution (instituted 1798), the Railway Benevolent Institution, etc. The name is often popularly applied to the building appropriated to the work of a benevolent or educational institution.
Literary: the university, English Department, course structures, minor/major; research institutions (Folger), special libraries (Austin); book prizes (Governor General Awards)
b. Often occurring, like INSTITUTE, in the designations of societies or associations for the advancement of literature, science, or art, of technical knowledge, or of special education.
Literary: e.g., Highgate Scientific and Literary Institution (est. 1839)
To institute, etc.
1. trans. a. To set up, establish, found, ordain; to introduce, bring into use or practice. (etc.)
. . . . . E.g., Highgate in 1839; but also:
founding of literary journals
founding of English Departments
awarding of literary prizes, e.g., Nobel prize
Author, book, publisher, editor
Reader, reviewer, journals
Historical: emergence of printed book; censorship, licensing; public sphere; reviews; book clubs
Author: genre (narrative, novel, play, etc.); literary style; readership, expectations, implied reader; implied author
Reader: codes; strategies of reading (Rabinowitz); context and purpose, entertainment vs. academic; cognitive; emotional
Rabinowitz: four main conventions: 1) rules of notice: sorting out from the multiplicity of the text what is likely to be important; 2) rules of signification: e.g., how to infer symbolic meaning, characters' psychologies; 3) rules of configuration: how to integrate particular features, so that certain forms of plot emerge, etc.; 4) rules of coherence: to read as though all in a text is relevant. (cf. Murfin 125-6)
Literariness: language (foregrounding); narrative (narrator, plot, protagonist, episodes); drama, poetry, essays; science fiction, romances, sub-literary?
Institutions, as in schools, universities, for transmitting scholarship on the literary, knowledge of conventions, etc., preferred ways of reading
Critical schools: historians, New Critics, structuralists, deconstructionists, feminists, ecocritics, etc.: models of literariness (or not!)
Critical approaches: (old) historical (diachronic), as in author influence (Milton's effect on Shelley, etc.); literary structures and genres (synchronic); intrinsic (formal); new historical; etc.
Institution of interpretation(s) - "the only game in town," Fish (Is There a Text, 1980: 355)
Natural vs. cultural (or both) - institution: sounds cultural, but may be founded on the natural -- consider law: "According to natural law ethical theory, the moral standards that govern human behavior are, in some sense, objectively derived from the nature of human beings." < http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/natlaw.htm> E.g., narrative?
Developmental issues: babytalk; Language in the Crib (Weir); folk tales; Harry Potter, etc.
Literature and the new media; the future of the book?
Literary experience --
So what is it?
Have we mentioned it yet?
Why do we need institutions to monitor it?
What will this course be about?
Document created January 13th 2005