ENGL-575 Lecture Notes for Sept. 12

I hate arriving late at class. Yesterday, I was 30 minutes late and surprised it wasn't more. I've already told my professors of my circumstances, and it is none of the other students' business. But they all give me that "who the hell are you look" which makes me grab the first seat available. Why is that one the one right in front of the door in the front row?

I don't know how long I can keep this schedule up either. I'm not getting enough sleep, and now I'm trying to leave the house around 5:30am. It ended up being 5:45 this morning and I got to work at 6:40am. But when I left at 6am yesterday, I just barely got to work on time.

The rest of this post is me trying to make sense of my lecture notes. Feel free to skip it. I tried talking out loud about it, and Chad thought we were having an actual discussion about literature and literary theory. Threatening to enroll him in the class finally stopped that last night. So this is my second attempt.

Barthes

One theory is creator/slueth. Author = producer of text, the creator. Reader = consumer of text, the slueth.

Barthes view point: think about the work as a text and use the signifiers to interact and create meaning.

Text without an author, read the text and produce a different experience of the text (each and every time read). Barthes was writing about hypertext literature before hypertext.

Trying to liberate literature from decrypting.

Critics - looking for the author's hidden meaning.

What happens to the critics's purpose when all your looking at is just the text?
1). Look at themselves and their reading experience.
2). Differen set of skills put into analysis.
3). All readers become critics and the difference between writers and critics disappears.
4). Frees criticism to become creative.

We get meaning for the content of the story.
Barthes - look for meaning in the sounds of the words. Text is open to the context of the reader's life. Reader produces the text; text produces the reader.

Aethestic view
Judeo-Christian - applies meta-physical concepts to text, Barthes says there's nothing beyond the text.

Structuralism - what is language?
A word has meaning because it says it's not another word.
Closed system

Barthes interested in how words interplay with each other.

How can you communicate when communication depends on common definitions?

We have all internalizied the system of language.

Model of lit. studies = production of knowledge.

I can produce the pleasure of the text and share that and create a text to explain it which can be read by someone else who can create their own response.

Theory produces knowledge but destroys the simple pleasure of reading. Barthes proposes that this theory kills that joy. How do we open up criticism to play?

We move away from the idea of "the work" we're moving away from hierarchy to democracy.

Bakhtin

When reading, we look for the voice of the author either as a narrator or as a character - putting the author in control. Bakhtin suggests that it's crazy to look for that.

Different tongues - heteroglossia, different voices.

Bakhtin's theory is a more abstract theory, but well practiced since he had to curtail language to save his own head.

Language supporting the status quo = normative language
Language is open ended

Poetry strives for a unitarian/monological language.
Novel allows the non-normative language or subsets of language to be embraced and orchestrated.

Social role of poetry = establish and enshrine the language and values of the ruling class.
Social role of the novel = embraces variety of language and competing world views and gives us a picture of a certain moment of time.

Tolstoy awareness of response, aware of the compteing world view and the response it will have on the reader. All these bits of lnaguage are in conversation with each other and yor response as a reader.

Looking for the historical background and world view behind the writing of the novel including political and socio-economical moments. Read a novel to find the conflicts behind it and the way any part of the novel is a response to it.

Barthes - just have fun with the text

Dickens
The idea of a gentleman - born or made?
The new order that is coming, is it good or bad?

Dickens's style is the way he combines all the languages to create his novel.

When I make an assumption about the text, I'm making a counter-assumption at the same time, so my assumption is shaped by the counter-assumption.

dialectic
monoletic
heteroglossia
carnivalesque

Bakhtin in the era of globalization?

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