Zusammenfassung Schlarb Amerikanistik

Literary History: Anglistik (British, Irish, postcolonial), Amerikanistik (American, Ethnic American literarture)

Literary Criticism: Analysis of Theme, Style, Structure, Cultural context, References, Author,...

Literary Theory: Philosophie of literature, open area of debate, approaches to reading and analysing literature (structuralism, new criticism, gender studies,..)

-Literature as mimesis (aesthetic imitation): Reference to reality or conceptions of reality

-Literature as entertainment or moral instruction (effect): entertainment value and intellectual stimulation, reflection and judgment -> can influence the readers

-Literature as depragmatized text

-Literature as authors subjective expression of their emotions and imaginations (production)

literature as an aesthetic object

•Matthew Arnold: “The best that has been known and said in the world.”

•Clifford Geertz: “... man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

•Stephen Greenblatt: “The concept of culture gestures toward what appear two opposite things: constraint and mobility.”

o Norms of behaviour, role models, beliefs, ...

o Cultural values and norms are confirmed by a system of praise and blame

o Movement, improvisation, experiment and exchange

o Cultural norms are not static and fixed but they are subject to change

Art and culture do not merely passively reflect a given culture, but they actively participate in the creation and perpetuation of culture

• Historical occurrences vs. the presentation of these occurrences (= literary history)

• Literary history functions as an orientation

• Literary histories always represent only a section of texts

• Literary histories are the result of a process of construction

• Literary histories do not offer an objective representation of the literary past, they produce models and narratives of this past with the assistance of literary-historical categories

• Language

• Nation

• Evaluation (high brow/low brow, popular literature, pulp fiction, ...)

• Sociological: children ́s lit, women ́s lit, working class lit

• Media-related: oral, written, audio-visual lit, performance poetry

• The narrator is not the author

• The text also constructs an author and a reader

• The world created by the narrator and perceived by the narratee is called diegesis

• Periodization subdivides the history of literature into a chronology of “ages” or phases

• What determines a period in literary history?

o Centuries, time periods

o Historical events, political leaders

o History of Art

o Assumptions

o Value

• Genre and Period are organizational category

• Genre and Period contribute to canon formation

• Genre

o Categorized based on features (form, language, nation, systems, medium, ...)

o Poetry, narrative, drama

o The novel: historical novel, Bildungsroman, romance, satire, ...

• Period

o Categorized based on time

o Time periods, historical events or influential people

• List of “good” literature

• Often defined as “classic”

• Worthy of being preserved

• Worthy of being passed on

• Has special value for a culture

• The canon has always been subject to revision and change

• Defined by: critics, book trade, book prices, book clubs, scholars

• Categorization based on value judgements

• Ethnic American Literature as its own literature

• Narrative = Story + Discourse

• Narrative = Narrator + Narratee

• Story:

o sequence of events, what happened?

o What is told?

o Chronological sequence of events

o Material for building the house

• Plot:

o Why did these events happen?

o Events of the story, related by cause and effect

o How the building material is pieced together

•Discourse:

o How is it told?

o The form of how something is told by whom to whom

o Narrative perspective

o Focalization

o Representation of consciousness

o Representation of time

o Plot

•“A narrative combines discourse, the form of how something is told by whom to whom, and story, the content of what is told.”

Something that consists of...

• An event that causes change, or

• A sequence of events, or

• A sequence of events linked by causality

Something that consists of “story” + “discourse”

• Something that brings together two logics of time: story-time and discourse-time

Something that has a narrator and a narratee

o Mode: narrator/reflector

o Person: first/third person

o Perspective: internal/external

o The first-person narrator shares the character ́s world and is involved in the world of the story

o Narrating I vs. the experiencing I

o The first-person narrator is involved in the fictional events either as a protagonist (I-as-protagonist) or as a peripheral character (I-as-witness)

o Limited access/knowledge

o Uncertain reliability

o Authorial narrator = outside and above the story world

o It neither has a name, nor body which could be depicted in the text

o Authorial narrator = omnipresent and omniscient, the authorial narrator can see into the future and read various character ́s thoughts

o Third-person omniscient narrator with an external perspective

➔ Psychological privilege: insight into all the character ́s inner thoughts, all knowing

➔ Spatial privilege: can be anywhere

➔ Temporal privilege: has control and insight into the past; present and future

o No visible narrator

o The narrator generally recedes so far in the background that the traces of the narrative transmission are barely noticeable

o The narrated world is presented from the perspective of a character who is involved in the action

o Readers get the impression that they share the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of a character, who serves as a subjective reflector of the fictional world

o Third-person, covert narrator, reflector

overt and covert narrator

▪ overt narrator: mediator

▪ covert: invisible narrator

homo-, auto- and heterodiegetic narrator

▪ homodiegetic: belongs to the story world

▪ autodiegetic: narrator is the protagonist of his story

▪ heterodiegetic: does not belong to the story world

embedded and frame narrative: intra-and extradiegetic narrator

▪ intradiegetic: in embedded narrative

▪ extradiegetic: in frame narrative

reliable and unreliable narration

▪ reliable: consistent, coherent, things check out

▪ unreliable: explicit contradictions within the narrator ́s comments

o internal focalizer: character-focalizer fixed vs. mixed/variable focalization

o external focalizer: narrator-focalizer (exclude feelings and thoughts)

o zero focalizer: unlimited view

• internal processes, high level of narrator participation

• Narrator uses his own words/languages to summarize the character ́s state of mind

• Narrated monologue, illusion of offering an immediate insight into the perceptions and internal processes of a character

• Questions, loose syntax, exclamation

• Quoted monologue, thoughts or feelings of a character that are quoted

without any obvious mediated distance, impression of complete immediacy of internal thoughts and processes

• Extensive use of first person and present tense (on-going thought)

• Plunges the reader directly into the mental processes of a character, no mediating instance

• Free direct thought

• Immediate insigh

• discourse time vs. story time

o scene

o stretch/slow-down

o summary/speed-up

o ellipsis/omission

o pause

• flashback and flashforward

• characters “enact” space

o flat or round

o static or dynamic

o transparent or opaque

• Simile: two things are openly compared with each other, introduced by “like” od “as” (-> conceit)

• Metaphor: a word or phrase is replaced by an expression denoting an analogous circumstance in a different semantic field

• Symbol: a concrete phenomenon which points to abstract, often more general and ambiguous meanings

• Personification: a concrete or abstract element is used as if it were alive or human

• Oxymoron: a paradoxical utterance that conjoins two terms that in ordinary usage are contraries

• Metonymy: replacement of one term with another to which it is ontologically, logically, or causally connected

• Synecdoche: pars pro toto: figure of speech in which one part stands for the whole, totum pro parte: a whole is used to refer to one part

• Anaphora: a word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses or lines

• Parallelism: the repetition of identical or similar syntactic elements (word, phrase, clause)

• Chiasmus: reversal of structures in successive clauses (a-b, b-a)

• Alliteration: a figure of speech in which consonants, especially at the beginning of words are repeated

• Assonance: the repetition of the same vowel sound in the stressed syllables of words in close proximity, while the consonants differ

• Onomatopoeia: the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it

• Continuous rhyme: aaaa bbbb

• Rhyming couplets: aa bb cc

• Alternate rhyme: abab cdcd

• Embracing rhyme: abba cddc

• Chain rhyme: aba bcb cdc

• Tail rhyme: aab ccb

• Free verse: no rhyme scheme or regular meter, rhythmic effects organized around word or sound repetitions or the rhythm created by a line break

• Full rhymes vs. half rhymes

o Full rhyme: night/delight, power/flower

o Half rhyme: reader/rider, forever/weather

• End-rhymes, internal rhymes, leonine rhymes

o Internal rhyme: I am here for a clink for a thundering drink

o Leonine rhyme: They took some honey, and plenty of money

• Masculine rhymes vs. feminine rhymes

o Masculine: street/meet, man/ban

o Feminine: training/complaining, slowly/holy

• End-stopped line

• Run-on line (enjambment)

• Caesura

• Lyric poem of fourteen lines

• The English or Shakespearean sonnet usually falls into three quatrains and one final couplet

• The rhyme pattern is most commonly abab cdcd efef gg

• The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet is divided into an octave rhyming abba abba and a sestet rhyming cdecde

• Measured arrangement of accent and syllables

• Scansion = marking of stressed and unstressed syllables -> poetry employs the stresses that occur naturally in language to construct regular patterns

• Poetic feet: basic unit of meter

• Dialogue = basic structure of drama

o Polylogue

o Line-by-line exchange, repartee

• Monologue, Soliloquy, Aside

o Monologue: long speech by one character (usually addressed to nobody on stage)

o Soliloquy: character alone on stage, explain inner feelings, motives

o Express a character ́s inner life

o Structural device: transition between scenes, connecting episodes on stage by narration

o introduction/prologue: providing context, time, place

• Aside

Character conception

• Flat and round characters

• Static vs. dynamic characters

• Type vs. individual

• Transparent vs. opaque characters

Major and minor characters

Antagonist and protagonist

• Dramatic personae

• Configurations of characters: pairs

Acts and scenes

• Linear development of the action vs. juxtaposition of scenes

Closed vs open form of drama

• Closed form

o Coherent story: beginning, development, solution

o Tragedy/comedy

o Five or three act structure

o Gustav Freytag ́s pyramid

• Open form

o Violates demand for unity of linear action, time and space -> episodic, fragmentary, loosely connected scenes, no solution

• A modern episodic drama that seeks to provoke objective understanding of a social problem through a series of loosely connected scenes that avoid illusion and often interrupt the action to address the audience directly with analysis or argument

• Narrator/stage manager: creates distance between audience and the

dramatic world and its characters, provides reflection on characters

• Meaning is less based on factual reality, but rather on texts, linguistic and cultural conventions

• Reading a text is not like cracking a nut, but peeling of an onion -> many different layers or looking a picture from different perspectives

• Instead of adding things up towards a definite, final result, readings tend to arrive at contradictory or indeterminate meanings

• Art as a social and historical fact

• Positivism records “positive” facts about the author ́s life and times which are considered the cause of his literary output

• Cause and effect principle

• Literature “reflects” society

• Pros:

o Sticks to the facts

o It grounds the ambiguous literary text in palpable facts

• Cons:

o Status and accessibility of facts: examines the text, compares and classifies it, but the problem here is that meaning always emerges from interpretation of objective facts

o Art mirrors reality: parallels between author ́s lie and work suggest cause and effect

o Neglect of aesthetic considerations

• Intrinsic approach: meaning of literature lies within the text itself

• Close reading: focus on the close study of texts

o New Critics considered each literary text an autonomous aesthetic object independent of authorial intention, historical circumstances, and its emotional effect upon the reader

o Intentional or affective fallacy

• Harmony and unity as ideals of art: aesthetic organisation of a text ́s elements into its organic whole

•Pros:

o Emphasis on close reading rather than historical knowledge

o Influence on the teaching of literature

• Cons:

o New Critics strive for unity within a text: ambiguous meanings, contradictions are subsumed under single categories that suggest unity where other critics would rather stress out irreconcilable contradictions in a text

o New Criticism avoids addressing the importance of readers and cultural contexts

• In structural linguistics, language is viewed as a structure or system working according to general laws -> Structuralism

• Saussure: synchronic approach -> How does language work

o Distinction between langue and parole

• Langue = socially shared set of abstract conventions

• Parole = the particular choices made by a speaker deploying a language, individual performance

• Composition of a text, its structure, its patterns

• How does a text function? (form vs. content)

• What are the fundamental semantic syntactic, rhetorical and aesthetic binary oppositions within a text?

• Deconstruction is a continuation and simultaneous rejection of Structuralism

• Derrida radicalizes Structuralism because he questions any relationship of language to the outside world

• Aims at deconstructing binary oppositions

• Identifies and analyses ambiguities and contradictions in arguments or images

• Looks for aspects in a text that question, disrupt, or undermine its main argument (blind spots, subversive information)

• Is a method on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period

• New historicism refuses to privilege the literary text, instead of a literary foreground and a historical background

• Since these historical documents are not subordinated as contexts, but are analysed in their own right, we should perhaps call them co-texts rather than contexts

• New historicism is indeed a historicist rather than a historical movement

• Historicity of texts: to suggest the historical specificity, the social and material embedding, of all modes of writing

• Textuality of histories: to suggest that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, to a material existence that is unmediated by the textual traces of society in question

• New historicists maintain that literature does not reflect a given historical moment but negotiates cultural concepts and values

Example: gendered discourse of the 1960s

• New Historicism: text-contemporary co-text

• Cultural Materialism: text –co-text from different time period

1.The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes

2.Organized activity on behalf of women ́s rights and interests

First Wave:

• Late 19th, early 20th century

• Suffragette movement

• Seeking equal rights (same vs equal)

Second Wave:

• 1960s to 1990s

• Diverse

• Focus on sexual politics (birthcontrol and free sexuality)

• Feminist theory

Third Wave:

• Form 1990s onwards

• Further diversification

• Focus on intersection of race and gender

• gender theory, queer theory

• pays attention to the history, style, themes, genres and structures of writing by women

• the psychodynamics of female creativity

• the trajectory of the individual or collective female career

• the evolution of laws of a female literary tradition

• canon revision/reconstruction

• Danger of essentializing (white heterosexual) women ́s experience

• Women of colour: critique of ethnocentrism, pay attention to differences (race, class, nation, age, ...)

• Intersectionality: race, class, gender as interlocking systems of power and oppression

• Lesbian feminism: critique of heteronormativity, emergence of gender studies and queer studies, LGBTQ studies

Gender as Performance

“If gender attributes and acts, the various way in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no pre-existing identity by which an act or attribute might be measured, there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.”

• Europe considered centre, norm

• (former) colonies = peripheries, inferior, etc.

• Reject the claims to universalism made on behalf of canonical Western literature and seek to show its limitations of outlook, especially its general inability to empathise across boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference

• Engage in a reassessment of the traditional relationship between the metropolis and the (former) colonies, between centre and periphery, between self and other, colonizer and colonized

• Focus on colonial oppression and on resistance to colonial oppression

• Focus on cultural displacements that followed colonial conquest (from a non-European perspective)

• Emphasize identity as doubled, hybrid or unstable and stress cross-cultural interaction -> they emphasize the hybrid cultural forms emerging out of colonial encounters and the patterns of interaction between colonizer and colonized (-> hybridity)

• The movement, migration or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland

• The term refers to voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their homeland into new regions

• E. g. the African Diaspora

• Race is a social construction and not a universal or essential category of biology

• Race has been used to define population groups, and by implication social subjects, in different ways at various historical moments

• The concept thus has anchored claims to social inclusion and exclusion, extending to social relations an apparent specificity otherwise lacking

• Ethnicity is a cultural concept centred on the sharing norms, values, beliefs, cultural symbols and practices -> shared cultural signifiers

• Ethnicity is a relational concept -> white Anglo-Saxons often use ethnicity to refer to other people, usually with different skin colour

1.It wants to first uncover and the criticize colonial attitudes or Western imperialism etc. in many European texts and culture (E. Said: Orientalism)

2.It wants to offer possibilities of describing emerging postcolonial literatures and cultures by examining strategies of articulating hybrid identities inherent in a text or cultural practice, or how these texts or practices reclaim an ethnic identity (strategies of resistance against colonization)

• Orientalism is not a study of the Orient /The East but a study of how the Orient has been represented (and studied) in Western culture

• Orientalism is

o A field of learned study, an academic discipline

o A field of study based on the geographical, cultural, linguistic and ethnic study called the orient

• interest of what happens in the cultural interaction between colonizer and colonized

• concept of hybridity: mixture

• new transcultural forms which are a result of colonization

the space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict

= reorientations in the study of culture

• part of a larger reconfiguration of critical analysis at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, often under the sign of the turn

Temporal perspective: evolutionary progress and history of progress

Vs.

Spatial perspective: global synchronicities and spatial political entanglements

•Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space: social formation or production of space -> social relations, lived social practices

• Critique of mapping of Empire

• I am talking about the way in which structures of location and geographical reference appear in the cultural languages of literature, history or ethnography, across several individual works that are not otherwise connected to one another or to official ideology of empire

Promotes a cross-disciplinary focus on and analysis of categories of space, place, border-crossing based on a new understanding of space as a relational category and as a result of social relations, practices and orders of knowledge

The new Mestiza draws attention to contact zones and in-between spaces, stressing the mobility and hybridity of cultural identities and moving away from nationalist frameworks in favour of such concepts as mestizaje

• Transnational American Studies is defined by its intellectually collaborative as opposed to ideological genesis, its transdisciplinary method and transnational thinking

• Leaves behind the national origin of references as an analytical tool and results in different strategies of analysis and intellectual shifts

• Transdisciplinary is a defining characteristic of Transnational American Studies scholarship that implies a collaborative methodology of different disciplines instead of interdisciplinary approaches that tend to preserve disciplinary boundaries

• In literary and cultural studies has problematized the dominance of verbal texts in the historical processes of constructing, transmitting and contesting cultural values, political ideologies and collective identities

• The new scholarly paradigm of Visual Cultural Studies calls for the conceptualization of the world in images and provides for an interdisciplinary agenda to reconsider the cultural work of visual representation

• W.J.T. Mitchell: vision is a mode of cultural expression and human communication as fundamental and widespread as language

• Counters the dominance of language and text

• Re-establishes visuality as a key component of culture

• Rejects the distinction of high and low, mass and elite ar

• Intermediality

• Scholars examine the relationship and interfaces between words/texts and images

• Ekphrasis: a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art

• Culture as performance (vs. culture as text), expressive dimension of culture

• Texts: stable, fixed, static vs. performance: dynamic, live, communal and collective

• Cultural performance

o Cultural events and processes vs. cultural texts

o Term first coined by Milton Singer

o Focus on aspects like immediacy, liveness, transience, community, corporeality

• Race, class, gender, ethnicity or sexuality -> + nature (environment, earth, planet) = central categories of cultural studies

• Environmental issues -> topics of academic investigation and of fictional treatments in film, literature and other media

• Ecological and ecocentric perspective on culture, society and literature -> ecofeminism, social or urban ecology, eco-Marxism, environmental justice activism and ecocriticism

• The study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment

• An earth-centred approach to literary studies

• The ecocentric wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they may appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place in a great many cultural space

• Seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis

Cultural Circulation – Ideas, values, and practices move within and across societies.

Material & Symbolic Exchange – Trade of goods, texts, beliefs, and ideologies.

Power Dynamics – Exchange often involves dominance, colonialism, and control.

Self-Fashioning – Identity is shaped through interaction with others.

Textual Transmission – Literature and discourse as vehicles of cultural exchange.

Negotiation of Meaning – Cultures evolve through adaptation and resistance.

Colonial Encounters – Asymmetrical exchanges between colonizers and indigenous peoples.

apron stage (picture)

picture frame stage: a stage which looks like it has a picture frame

The fourth wall is a theatrical concept referring to the invisible barrier between the actors on stage and the audience. It creates the illusion that the characters are in a self-contained world, unaware of being watched

Co-text refers to the surrounding words, sentences, or passages within a text that help determine the meaning of a particular word, phrase, or sentence. It is a key concept in linguistics and discourse analysis, closely related to context but specifically focused on textual elements.

Sex – Biological classification (male, female, intersex).

Gender – Social and cultural identity (man, woman, non-binary, etc.).

Intersectionality is a concept in social theory and activism that examines how different social identities (such as race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc.) overlap and interact to create unique experiences of privilege and oppression. It was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to highlight how Black women face intersecting forms of discrimination that are different from those faced by white women or Black men.

Regensburger Katalog, ZDB, MLA International Bibliography, Literature Online (LION), PIO, Nexis Uni

MLA quoting style is a method of citing sources in research papers, primarily used in the humanities. It involves incorporating in-text citations for direct quotes or paraphrases, and listing full source information in a Works Cited page. The style uses parenthetical citations (author and page number) and follows specific rules for formatting and presenting quotes.