Comprehensive Notes on Literary Theory and Hermeneutics

Hirsch, Gadamer, and the Significance of Paraphrase

• The Hirschian View of Interpretation: According to E. D. Hirsch in The Aims of Interpretation, understanding a text requires the reader to attempt to grasp it through paraphrase. This involves referring a verbal expression back to a thought.

• Determination of Meaning: Hirsch argues that understanding begins with the phrase, "What the author means to say is…" He contends that focusing solely on the text can lead to arbitrary results (e.g., "I ran out of gas" could absurdly be interpreted as "I raced out of a cloud of argon"). To establish "Validity in Interpretation" (the title of Hirsch's first book), one must look for authorial intent.

• The Practical Defense of Paraphrase: In academic settings, instructors often require students to "put things in their own words" to prove they understand. This act of paraphrase demonstrates an interpersonal meaning—a shared thought that is not merely the parrot-like repetition of words.

• Historical Context - "The Heresy of Paraphrase": Cleanth Brooks, a New Critic, famously opposed paraphrase in his essay "The Heresy of Paraphrase," arguing that reducing textual complexity to a paraphrase is a mechanical and lifeless exercise.

• Meaning versus Significance: Hirsch makes a controversial distinction:     * Meaning: What the author intended, which can be established with reliable paraphrase and philological evidence.     * Significance: The meaning of the text to us today, including historical adaptations or translations into our own terms.

• Gadamer’s Refutation: Hans-Georg Gadamer does not accept this distinction. He argues that because we enter a "merger of horizons" (the reader's horizon meeting the text's horizon), it is impossible to separate where meaning ends and significance begins.

Wolfgang Iser and the Phenomenology of Reading

• Foundations of Iser’s Thought: Wolfgang Iser is concerned with "the act of reading" (Der Akt des Lesens). His work is influenced by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and Roman Ingarden's study of the reader’s movement between sentences.

• The Konstanz School: Iser’s work at the University of Konstanz in the 1960s and 70s led to "reception history" or "the aesthetics of reception," influencing American critics like Stanley Fish.

• The Concept of "Gaps": Iser focuses on the "gaps" across which a reader must jump.

• The Spark Plug Metaphor: The relationship between reader and text is likened to a spark plug: the points of contact must be "gapped." Too much distance results in no spark (frustration/overstrain); too little results in a short out (boredom).

• Virtual Work: Iser claims that "the convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence." This work is "virtual" because it exists neither purely in the text's reality nor purely in the reader's disposition.

• Culinary versus Innovative Literature:     * Culinary: Fiction that is overly familiar and fulfills all expectations (e.g., nurse novels, "bodice rippers," or simplistic detective fiction). Iser dismisses this as "womblike and cozy" with no work for the reader.     * Innovative: Truly literary texts that violate expectations and force the reader to work hard to find meaning. Surprise is a key element of value.

Case Study: Tony the Tow Truck analyzed via Iser and Gadamer

• The Dialectic of Suspense: Even a toddler book like Tony the Tow Truck involves a tension between expectation and violation. For a toddler, the phrase "pulls up" might be a linguistic problem that requires "virtual work," similar to an adult reader encountering a complex term in 18th-century literature.

• Folkloric Tautology: For adults, the book seems "culinary" because it follows the rule of three (Neato, Speedy, and finally Bumpy). Osip Brik noted that "repetition in verse is analogous to tautology in folklore."

• Reciprocity and Morals: The ending, "Now that’s what I call a friend," provides a moral, but the reader must remain in suspense to find out which moral will be attached, similar to the moral at the end of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

New Criticism and the Intentional Fallacy

• The Yale School Leaders: W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley co-authored "The Intentional Fallacy," a foundational text of the Yale-centered New Criticism.

• Definition of the Poem: The New Critics view a poem as an independent, autonomous object. They discourage looking into the author's biography or letters to find meaning.

• The "Lemon Squeezer School": T. S. Eliot used this term for close reading, a painstaking process that drains the subject. However, this method was pedagogically revolutionary, making 50-minute classes engaging by revealing complex patterns in seemingly simple texts.

• Evidence in New Criticism:     * Category 1 (Public Domain): Words and shared language. This is legitimate evidence.     * Category 2 (Private Intent): What the author said in letters (illegitimate).     * Category 3 (Intermediate): Idiosyncrasies of authorial usage (e.g., Whitman's "camerado").

• Wimsatt’s Shocking Footnote: Wimsatt famously noted that the history of words after a poem is written may contribute relevant meanings. For example, in Akenside’s line "raised his plastic arm," the modern meaning of "plastic" (polymers/prosthetics) could reinforce the meaning of the creator living in an "Eternal Moment."

Aesthetic Judgment: Kant and the Purpose of Art

• Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790): Kant defines the faculty of "the judgment" as being distinct from the "understanding" (which seeks pleasure) and the "reason" (which seeks the good/moral).

• Disinterested Satisfaction: Aesthetic judgment is a state of mind where we view an object for itself, without a "reference to the faculty of desire." If we want to possess it or judge it morally, it is no longer an aesthetic experience.

• Purposiveness versus Purposeful:     * Purposeful: Practical utility (What can it do for me?).     * Purposive: Internal coherence and organization. An art object has an "inner purpose" but is not "purposeful" in the sense of being useful.

• Oscar Wilde’s Application: Wilde's claim that "All art is quite useless" is a radicalization of Kant. Art is uniquely useless because it does not serve instrumental needs, allowing the viewer to recognize their own freedom and disinterestedness.

• The "Nude" (Kenneth Clark/Ransom): John Crowe Ransom points out that we use the word "nyewd" (nude) to signal an aesthetic judgment rather than an appetitive or moral one (which would be "naked body").

I. A. Richards and William Empson

• I. A. Richards as Scientist: Richards, a Pavlovian psychologist, viewed reading as an experience based on "stimuli" and "needs."

• Scientific versus Emotive Statement:     * Scientific Statement: Verifiable or falsifiable declarations of fact.     * Emotive/Pseudo-Statement: Fiction and poetry. They are not "true," but they harmonize conflicting psychological needs. Richards famously claimed that "Poetry is capable of saving us" by performing the role formerly held by religion.

• William Empson’s Ambiguity: Empson, a student of Richards, wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity. He analyzed the "atmosphere" of literature through rigorous verbal analysis.

• The Macbeth Analysis: Empson analyzes Macbeth's "Light thickens, and the Crow / Makes Wing to th’ Rookie Wood." He identifies a "subdued pun" where the murderer Macbeth identifies with the solitary crow to distinguish himself from the crowd of rooks (social order).

Russian Formalism: Defamiliarization and Literariness

• The Struggle for Science: Russian Formalists, like Boris Eikhenbaum and Viktor Shklovsky, sought a systematic approach to literature. They moved away from hermeneutics toward "poetics."

• Defamiliarization (Ostranenie): Shklovsky argued that art exists to make things we have become "automated" to seeing seem strange again. The "roughening" of the verbal surface slows down perception.

• Literariness: The Formalists define the object of study not as literature but as "literariness"—the specific devices that make an utterance literary.

• Terminology:     * Plot versus Story: Plot is the constructedness of the events (how the work was made); Story is the sequence of events themselves.     * The Dominant: The element of a work that governs or "motivates" other devices.

• Literary Evolution vs. Modification (Tynianov):     * Evolution: Internal changes in literary forms as devices lose their defamiliarizing power and are replaced.     * Modification: Changes imposed from the outside (e.g., social factors or government mandates).

Saussure and the Science of Semiotics

• Foundational Context: Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics was compiled by his students.

• Semiotics Defined: The study of conventional communicative signs. Verbal language is one such system, but so are traffic lights, flags, and gestures.

• Key Distinction: Langue vs. Parole:     * Langue (Language): A static, virtual database of signs and rules existing synchronically (all at once).     * Parole (Speech/Utterance): The actual deployment of langue in real time (diachronically).

• Nature of the Sign:     * Signifier: The sound image (e.g., the word "arbor").     * Signified: The concept (e.g., the idea of a tree).     * The relationship between them is arbitrary and differential.

• Knowledge as Negative Recognition: Saussure argues that "in language, there are only differences." We know the sign for "red" because it is not-green and not-yellow. Value results from the simultaneous presence of other terms.

• The Red Light Example: A red light means "stop" only because of its negative relationship to green/yellow in a specific system. If the system changes (e.g., a red light on a reindeer’s nose or a Christmas tree), the signifier's meaning changes entirely.

Roman Jakobson’s Six Functions of Language

• The Communication Model: Jakobson identifies six components of any utterance, each corresponding to a linguistic function:     1. Addresser -> Emotive Function (Expression of speaker’s state).     2. Context -> Referential Function (Information/facts).     3. Message -> Poetic Function (The "set to the message itself").     4. Contact -> Phatic Function (Checking the circuit, e.g., "Hello?").     5. Code -> Metalingual Function (Defining terms, e.g., "What is a mare?").     6. Addressee -> Conative Function (Commands or influence over listener).

• The Poetic Function Definition: "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination." This means poetic language uses similarity/metaphor where normal speech uses sequence/metonymy.

• Aphasia and the Binary Poles: Jakobson identifies two types of language disturbance:     * Metaphor Pole: Similarity-based disorders.     * Metonymy Pole: Contiguity-based disorders.

Claude L

vi-Strauss and the Structural Study of Myth

• Myth as Science: L
  
  vi-Strauss argues that myth is a system that can be decomposed into "gross constituent units" (mythemes).

• The Oedipus Chart: He arranges the myth into four columns to find its structural meaning:     1. Overdetermination of blood relations (e.g., Antigone burying her brother).     2. Underdetermination of blood relations (e.g., Oedipus killing his father).     3. Denial of autochthony (e.g., killing monsters from the earth).     4. Confirmation of autochthony (e.g., characters who limp, indicating they are of the earth).

• Binary Synthesis: The myth tries to reconcile the contradiction between the belief that humans are born from the earth (autochthonous) and the knowledge that they are born from two parents (sexual reproduction).

Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

• The 1966 Hopkins Conference: Derrida’s lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play" served as the dethroning of structuralism and the launch of deconstruction.

• The Critique of the Center: Derrida argues that all systems of thought have relied on a "center" (God, Man, Logic) that is both inside the system (organizing it) and outside (untouchable by its rules). He calls these "Transcendental Signifieds."

• Differance (with an ‘a’): A neologism derived from the French verb diff
  
  rer, which means both "to differ" and "to defer." Meaning is never present in a single moment; it is always postponed.

• Writing vs. Speech: Derrida challenges "phonocentrism" (the favoring of voice over writing). He argues that voice is just a system of "writing on the ear."

• Supplementarity: A supplement adds to something that is already complete but also fills a gap in something that is not complete. Signs are perpetually proliferating through this "seminal adventure of the trace."

• Monstrosity: Derrida concludes by describing the emergence of an "unnamable" new way of thinking as a "terrifying form of monstrosity."