Lec 1

Hypercanon - David Damrosch

  • process of literary institutions

Langston Hughes

Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness

Casey Motsisi

  • inspired by Hughes's work

What counts as a book?

  • Novels

  • Plays, short stories

Jean Toomer - Cane

  • poetry, short fiction, long story at the end

  • Racial oppression of the 1900s

What is a world?

Course Obj:

  • How do texts create world(s)

  • What is text saying, and how are they saying it

  • Convey ideas persuasively in writing in your voice

Types of Literary Worlds

  1. World of the Author

  2. World of the text

  3. World of literary form

World of Author

  • The general social and historical space within which the author lived in?

  • What are some features of the author’s world

    • author’s life

    • history, past, whats happening socially and their history

    • the language they use

    • culture of the area they lived in/surround themselves with

  • Ama Ata Aidoo

World of text

  • time and place

  • within the text/narrative

  • where take place and what time period

  • kind of people, plots, social units that it is representing

*World of form*

  • Diff forms have diff limitations and resources for world-making

  • compare world of haiku to world of drama

  • Haiku

    • an old pond a frog jumps in - the sound of water

      • Old pond by Matsuo Basho

      • What place and time depicted in this haiku?

      • season word : old pond

      • total unity created by arrangement of its references and by the generic necessities of season words, turning points, and syllabic length

  • Drama

    • defined by extension in space and time and by a relationship between medium (the bodies, the stage) and representation

      • position of actors on stage, costumes,

  • How forms creates/builds the world

Why it matters

  • what is relationship between literary world and real world

Literary/Aesthetic World

  • Always a relation to and theory of the lived world

  • a largely preconscious normative construct, a rearticulation, or even an active refusal of the world-norms of their age

  • No necessarily critical

  • rearticulated