English linguistics WS 25/26

Kapitel 1 (intro) / Kapitel 2 (basic questions/genre theory)

What do we study / name the 5 parts of literary criticism

1. Film/media studies

2. Cultural studies

3. Literary theory

4. Textual philology, editorial studies

5. Literary history

What was literature known by in the 15th century

Literature meant “knowledge acquired from reading or studying books (especially books associated with ‘humane learnin’)

ex: he was a person of infinite literature

What was literature known as by the 1800s?

Literature designated both fictional/imaginative and non/fictional writing

What was literature known as since the mid-19th century?

Literature was written work valued for superior or lasting artistic merit

What was literature known as since the 1960s?

Any kind of written communication

What is literature today? (4 parts)

1. broad understanding of literature as text

2. more restrictive understanding of literature as a particular type of text

3. literature (writing) vs. Literature (a body of specific and culturally valorized texts; an institution)

4. there is no single definitive definition of literature (Eagleton shows a number of conflicting approaches)

What are Terry Eagleton’s conflicting arguments for defining literature?

Name the 7 parts of the Model of Literary Communication

1. Author (sender)

2. Literary text (message)

3. Reader (receiver)

4. Language, Genre Conventions (Code)

5. Book, e-text (Channel)

6. Social Dissemination (publishers, education, media)

7. Context: historical / contemporary reality (literary text - aesthetically mediated reference- context)

Hermeneutics definition

Textual interpretation aiming at a full understanding of the whole

Hermeneutic circle definition

no understanding of whole without understanding parts / no understanding of parts without understanding whole (spiral: process of approximation)

What are the 4 methodological approaches to literature?

1. Text (Textual philology, rhetoric, formalism, structuralism)

2. Author (biographical studies, psychoanalysis)

3. Reader (Reception theory/history, reader-response criticism)

4. Context (queer / gender studies, feminism, historicism)