What is the Literary Institution
Overview
Notes on essay II now appended below
Reminder: look again at Institution notes
1. External
- Transmitters. Books, bookshops, libraries, publishers, magazines, reviews.
- Agents. Readers, booksellers, editors, reviewers, teachers.
- Institutions. Schools, universities, academies; book clubs; prizes.
2. Internal
The literary (literariness and beyond):
- aesthetic aspects (style, form, narrative modes, etc.; intrinsic)
- canon of "great" texts, origin and stability of now in question
- ideological aspects (author, period, social and historical aspects; extrinsic)
3. Historical
- Literary periods - in our course, specifically: Romanticism (figure of poet), Modernism (problem of consciousness) [+ postmodern in terms of changes in literary theory]
- Literary criticism: founded on assumptions and practices of Romantic and Modernist writers (Coleridge, Wordsworth; Woolf, T. S. Eliot, etc.); postmodern: cultural studies, feminism, etc.
4. Education
- Founding of English studies (depends where you look): dissenting academies in Britain, 1780s; American universities, 1840s; England, Cambridge, 1920s
- New Criticism, first technology of critical reading; varieties of post- theory; basic premises: conflict (e.g., Graff), social constructivism (e.g., Smith, Fish), dismantling the text (hermeneutics of suspicion)
Examples:
- "Tintern Abbey": 1798, innovative lyric, shifts attention to mind of poet; roots in Wordsworth's radical past (politics, the picturesque); participatory ethic, mind/nature; influential role in redefinition of the literary towards Romanticism; modern ideological criticism (Levinson, et al.), implicitly challenges Romantic conception of literature; one of the most frequently taught poems in English literature
- Heart of Darkness: 1899, stylistic concentration, unreliable narrator, exploration of mind, meaning "enveloping the tale . . . as a glow brings out a haze" (20), problem of consciousness; challenges Western assumptions about colonialism (and more?), and coherence of human personality; modern ideological criticism (Achebe, et al.), challenges Modernist conceptions of literature; one of the most frequently taught texts in English literature
Essay 2, due Apr 7. Choose your own topic, based on the work that has most interested you during the term. (1500 words)
Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. Civilized man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions. (Rousseau, Emile. Dent, p. 10)
Not only what are literary institutions, but what do they do? In whose interests are they? Who controls (or thinks he controls) them? How are they "instituted"; how do they evolve?
Some issues:
Literariness (or the aesthetic): does it exist; or can we only read in the light of the conventions we acquire?
Does education (school, university) foster literary experience or appropriate it?
The old paradigm of literary scholarship is in contention: why is it becoming cultural studies?
What is the canon, and who or what determines what is in it?
Where do the values come from that determine texts fostered by literary institutions (from publishers to universities)?
What control do literary institutions really have over reading and its purposes?
Why would (most) theorists wish to believe that literary value is secondary to, or contingent on institutions?
What relationship do "issues of national identity and national stereotyping" (Firchow) have to literary studies?
Document created March 3rd 2005 / updated March 28th 2005