Mls 3

Modern
Literary
Studies
Dr. Abdel-Fattah Adel
Part (3)

Class (3) Items
Quick Info
Main ideas
Key Terms and Concepts
Sample Analysis
Representative Readings

Part (3)
Objectives By the end of this part, you will be able to:
1. Explain the distinctive features of the reader-oriented and
rhetorical approaches.
2. Realize the importance of the reader-oriented and rhetorical
approaches.
3. Name the main critics in the reader-oriented and rhetorical
approaches.
4. Describe the main ideas of the reader-oriented and rhetorical
approaches.
5. Define the main concepts and terms used in the reader-
oriented and rhetorical approaches.
6. Compare some different aspects of the reader-oriented and
rhetorical approaches.
7. Analyze some representative writings of the reader-oriented
and rhetorical approaches.
8. Analyze sample analysis of the reader-oriented and rhetorical
approaches.

1. Answer the following questions:
1. Who are the main critics of Modern Rhetoric/ Phenomenology/ Reception Theory/
Reader Response Theory?
2. What are the main ideas of Modern Rhetoric/ Phenomenology/ Reception Theory/
Reader Response Theory?
2. Write about the following terms/concepts:-
1. Performative Utterances.
2. Stylistics.
3. Hermeneutics.
4. Horizon of Expectations.
5. The Implied Reader.
6. Transactional Reading.
3. Explain a sample analysis of:
1. Modern Rhetoric
2. Phenomenology
3. Reception Theory
4. Reader Response Theory
4. Write about the following critical works:
5. Comment on the following passages from:
1. “How To Do Things With Words” by
2. “The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" by
3. Being and Time by
4. Implied Reader by
5. Not so much a Teaching as an Intangling by
6. Interpretive Communities by
7. Literature as Exploration by
Part (3) Questions

Intro
•Reading
•Modern Rhetoric
•Phenomenology
•Reception Theory
•Reader Response
Theory

Language
and
Action • The dialogic structure of the literary text requires that
be taken into account.
• Rhetoric, the of language for readers,
and solicits a response from readers.
Two sides of the
equation of
reading:
the production of
language acts
known as rhetoric
the reception of
such acts in reading
and interpretation

Modern Rhetoric
• J. L. Austin (1911 - 1960)
• Kenneth Burke (1897 - 1993)
• Edwin Black (1929 - 2007)
• John Searle (1932 - )

Historical Rhetoric
In ancient Greece and Rome, language was recognized as an important feature of social and
political life. Training in how to think properly took the form of training in how to use language
effectively.
Logic
• the right use of such
mental processes as
induction and deduction
Rhetoric
• the use of forms to
give shape to
language and the
use of language to
make
argumentative
points and attain
emotional effects.

• One of the major intellectual
revolutions of the twentieth
century consisted of restoring
importance to the study of
language.
• Ernst Cassirer and Martin
Heidegger, were among the
first to argue for the centrality
of language to human
experience and to social
institutions.
Rise of Rhetoric

Rise of Rhetoric
•Language philosophers in England, such as Ludwig
Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, noted that human
knowledge takes place in language and that language
is central to human social activity.
•In conjunction with these intellectual movements
there arose a new interest in rhetoric on the part of
literary scholars in the mid to late twentieth century.

Modern Rhetoric
• The work of J. L. Austin, especially his seminal How
To Do Things With Words (1962), provoked an
interest in the way language acts to create
institutions, social bonds, emotional effects, and
modified realities.
• He described a class of what he called
"performative utterances," statements such as "I
pronounce you man and wife" or "I sentence you to
death" that make things happen in the world.
• The American philosopher John Searle, in his books
Speech Acts (1970) and The Social Construction of
Language (1995), played an especially important
role in furthering Austin's "speech act" theory.

Rhetoric and Literature
• Literary critics have used the theory to study how literary
language takes different forms like lies, promises, excuses,
etc.
• In the contemporary era, the study of the language of
literature, which is usually called "stylistics," blends with
the study of language in many other arenas of use.

Rhetorical Criticism
• Kenneth Burke’s works are central to
modern rhetorical theory:
• A Rhetoric of Motives (1950),
• A Grammar of Motives (1945),
• Language as Symbolic Action (1966)
• Among his influential concepts are
"identification", "consubstantiality",
and the "dramatistic pentad".

Rhetorical Criticism
• Edwin Black was a rhetorical critic best known for
his book Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in
Method (1965) in which he criticized the dominant
"neo-Aristotelian" tradition in American rhetorical
criticism as having little in common with Aristotle.
• Rhetorical scholars had been focusing primarily on
Aristotelian logical forms they often overlooked
important, alternative types of discourse.

Aristotle
• The Greek philosopher Aristotle noticed that a work of
literature is as remarkable for its effects as for its causes.
• Tragedy succeeds not so much for reasons of formal
perfection as for reasons of the emotional transformation
that it works on audiences.
• The turn in the tragic plot is also a turn of emotion in the
audience as, with the tragic hero, the audience moves from
blindness to recognition.
• Such recognition is both a moment of cognitive turning or
revelation and a moment of affective response and fellow-
feeling.

Decline of the Reader’s Role
• A sense of the importance of the contact between literary work and its
audiences was shunted aside by later aesthetic theories, especially
those developed under the auspices of Romanticism.
• They emphasized the genius of the writer or creator in bringing the
ideal and the real, the universal and the concrete, together in a work
of art.
• Attention shifted from the psychological and emotional link between
work and audience to the inner harmony or organic unity of the work
itself.
• These aesthetic theories were Platonic rather than Aristotelian, more
indebted to the idealism of Plato than to the realism of Aristotle.

Phenomenology
• Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938)
• Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)
• Roman Ingarden (1973 – 1970)
• Georges Poulet (1902 – 1991)
• Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 – 2002)

Restoring the Importance of the Reader
One was the historical school that in the eighteenth century
argued that to know the meaning of older texts, one had to
reconstruct the context in which they were originally
written. Who a work was addressed to in part determined
how it should retroactively be interpreted.
The other school was the philosophy of Imman-uel Kant, who
argued that knowledge is shaped by inner mental categories that
operate prior to any sense experience. One implication of this
argument was to shift attention toward the work of the observer
in constructing knowledge both of the world and of art.
Two schools of thought worked to resuscitate interest in
the role of the audience in literature.

Edmund Husserl
• The Kantian investigation of the role of the mind in
shaping knowledge of the world and, by implication,
shaping the perception of the work of art was
continued by Edmund Husserl at the beginning of the
twentieth century.
• His work on the phenomenology of knowledge
deepened an understanding of the operations of
consciousness in bringing to sensory experience an
ideational and presensory component that was a
feature of the mind itself.

Heidegger and Gadamer
• Other philosophers in the same tradition,
especially Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg
Gadamer, worked out a compromise between
the historicist position and the Kantian one.
• Knowledge, they argued, occurs in time and
history
• All knowledge is interpretation, a transfer of
meaning from one moment of history into
another that always inflects what is known with
the categories and assumptions of the later
moment.

Poulet and Ingarden
• The leap from these conclusions to an
understanding of the role of the reader's
cognition in the work of art was executed by
Georges Poulet and Roman Ingarden.
• The phenomenological literary criticism of
Poulet, especially his book Metamorphoses of
the Circle (1961), transferred to American
criticism a sense of the importance of the
reader's experience of a literary work.
• Ingarden's Cognition of the Work of Art (1968)
argued for an essential link between the work of
the audience and the work itself.

The Reception Theory
• Hans Robert Jauss
• (1921 -1997)
• Wolfgang Iser
• (1926 – 2007)

The Reception Theory
• Reception Theory refers to a historical application of the reader-oriented approach, emphasizing
altering interpretive and evaluative responses of generations of readers to a text.
• It focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the general public, over a
period of time in history, as they interpret the meanings of a text based on their respective cultural
background and life experiences.
• Since the linguistic and aesthetic expectation of readers change over the course of time, and since
later readers and critics have access to the text as well as its criticisms, there develops an evolving
historical tradition of interpretations and evaluations of a given literary work.
• According to Jauss, the reader approaches a text armed with the knowledge and experience
gained from interactions with other texts. These earlier texts arouse familiarity for the reader based
on expectations and rules of genre and style.
• Jauss describes it this way, 'a literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers
the same face to each reader in each period'.

Reader-Response
Criticism
• Stanley Fish (1938 - )
• Louise Rosenblatt (1904 – 2005)
• Norman N. Holland (1927 – 2017)

Reader-Response Criticism
• Reader-response shifted the focus from the text to the reader and argues that affective
response is a legitimate point for departure in criticism.
• Its conceptualization of critical practice is distinguished from theories that favor textual
autonomy (for example, formalism) as well as recent critical movements (for
example, structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction) due to its focus on the reader's
interpretive activities.
• Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real
existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation.
• Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in
which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance.
• The approach avoids subjectivity or essentialism in descriptions produced through its
recognition that reading is determined by textual and also cultural constraints.

Stanley Fish
• The US critic most responsible for disseminating the idea
that the reader's experience is as important as those
qualities inherent to the work itself was Stanley Fish.
• Fish argued, famously, that "there is no text in this class,"
by which he meant that the reader's experience takes
precedence over a description of the formal features of the
work and, in fact, constitutes those formal features.
• Is there a Text in this Class? (1980)
• Those features cannot be described except insofar as the
mind grasps them. Hence, they have no independent
existence apart from the reader's response to them.

The Reading Process:
Reading as a Transaction
• Rosenblatt was highly influential in literary and
critical theory, reading pedagogy, and education
since her first Literature as Exploration (1938).
• Rosenblatt took the pragmatist approach,
starting from the aesthetics of reading.
• For her, the reader brings to the text his or her
past experience and present personality. Under
the magnetism of the text, the reader crystallizes
out from the stuff of memory, thought, and
feeling a new order, a new experience.

Performative Utterances
In the philosophy of language and
speech acts theory, performative
utterances are sentences which not
only describe a given reality, but
also change the social reality they
are describing. The concept was
introduced by J. L. Austin.

Stylistics
Stylistics, study of the devices in languages
(such as rhetorical figures and syntactical
patterns) that are considered to produce
expressive or literary style.

Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is the theory
and methodology of interpretation. It
was initially applied to the
interpretation, or exegesis, of
scripture, and has been later
broadened to questions of general
interpretation to include written,
verbal, and non-verbal
communication.

Horizon of Expectations
The Horizon of Expectations refers to
the structure by which a person
comprehends, decodes and appraises
any text based on cultural codes and
conventions particular to their time in
history. They are historically flexible as
readers may interpret and value a text
differently from a previous generation.
The concept was introduced by Hans
Robert Jauss

The Implied Reader
An implied reader is a hypothetical
figure who is likely to get most of what
the author intended. When an author
writes a book or article they do so with
certain readers in mind and they believe
that those known as the implied reader
will understand or appreciate the
metaphors and ironies which the author
as written. The concept was introduced
by Wolfgang Iser.

Transactional Reading
Reading is considered a dynamic process
as a transaction between the reader and
the text, in which meaningful ideas arise
for readers from their own thoughtful
and creative interpretations. The
concept was introduced by Louise
Rosenblatt

Rhetorical Analysis
• Modern rhetoricians examine, for example, the
use of language in the discourse of medicine or
of economics.
• They are concerned particularly with the way
language contains embedded within it schemas
for understanding the world in a particular way.
• An important assumption of such discourse
analysis is that language shapes people's
perceptions of the world.

Reception of the Iliad
John Frow has noted that
Homer's Iliad changes remarkably
from one epoch to another, as
translators give shape to the
original that is usually inflected
with their own culture's concerns
and preoccupations.

Reception of
King Lear
• Reception Theory shows how a single work
can be remade by different moments of
history or interpreted differently by
differently located social agents.
• King Lear, for example, was produced for
many years with a happy ending that the
culture of the nineteenth century found
more appealing than its original tragic
conclusion.

Reader Response of King Lear
• While there may be an object called King Lear that exists independently in the world, its
very construction as an orderly narrative assumes certain capacities on the part of its
audience.
• They must be capable of recognizing the temporal structure of the play as a unity.
• It presupposes that the audience is capable of perceiving this display of literary signs as a
coherent order.
• Each person's reading will be shaped by mental operations that are idiosyncratic and
determined by that person's life history and sociocultural context, but some are universal
in character (and thus pretty much the same for everyone).
• The universal mental operations have to do with the ability to follow the logic of
temporal narrative and to recognize the different placements of characters in space from
scene to scene. The more socially and historically specific (and therefore variable) a priori
judgments vary according to gender (some women might read the play differently from
some men and find Goneril more attractive, for example, than Cordelia) or geography
(someone in a country suffering from tyrannical rulers might find the demise of Lear a
pleasing, rather than a tragic, resolution).

1. J. L. Austin
• How To Do Things With Words
2. Kenneth Burke
• The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle"
3. Martin Heidegger
• Being and Time
4. Wolfgang Iser
• The Implied Reader
5. Stanley Fish
• Not so much a Teaching as an Intangling
• Interpretive Communities
6. Louise Rosenblatt
• Literature as Exploration

The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle"
Kenneth Burke
The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" (1939) is an influential essay written by Kenneth Burke in
1939 which offered a rhetorical analysis of Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Much of
Burke's analysis focuses on Hitler's Mein Kampf ("my struggle").
Burke identified four tropes as specific to Hitler's rhetoric: inborn dignity, projection device,
symbolic rebirth, and commercial use. Several other tropes are discussed in the essay.

The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle"
Kenneth Burke
One trope is the idea of the common enemy. Without an enemy with a mindless
determination to destroy everything good and beautiful, all states struggle with the
economic and social problems of unemployment and poverty. The idea of a common
enemy is thus a symbol of the evil against which people must unite, and it distracts the
people from politically-inconvenient issues by relating all evils to the common rhetorical
enemy. We are born separate individuals and divided by class or other criteria and so
identification is a compensation to division. Human need to identify with or belong to a
group as providing a rich resource for those interested in joining us or, more importantly,
persuading us. To promote social cohesion, antithesis makes a simple balancing
statement, "We do this" but "They do that". The symmetry creates an expression of
conjoined opposites, which stigmatizes the latter and encourages the former to cohere by
doing only "this".

Being and Time
Martin Heidegger
Being and Time is the 1927 magnum opus of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key
document of existentialism. Being and Time had a notable impact on subsequent
philosophy, literary theory and many other fields. Though controversial, its stature in intellectual
history has been favorably compared with several works by Kant and Hegel. Heidegger maintains
that philosophers have misunderstood the concept of Being since Plato, misapplying it solely in
the analysis of particular beings. The book attempts to revive ontology through an analysis
of Dasein, or "being-in-the-world." It's also noted for an array of neologisms and complex
language, as well as an extended treatment of "authenticity" as a means to grasp and confront the
unique and finite possibilities of the individual.

The Implied Reader
Wolfgang Iser
Like no other art form, the novel confronts its readers with circumstances arising from their
own environment of social and historical norms and stimulates them to assess and criticize
their surroundings. By analyzing major works of English fiction ranging from Bunyan,
Fielding, Scott, and Thackeray to Joyce and Beckett, Wolfgang Iser provides a framework for
a theory of such literary effects and aesthetic responses.
Iser's focus is on the theme of discovery, whereby the reader is given the chance to
recognize the deficiencies of his own existence and the suggested solutions to
counterbalance them. The content and form of this discovery is the calculated response of
the reader -- the implied reader. In discovering the expectations and presuppositions that
underlie all his perceptions, the reader learns to "read" himself as he does the text.

The Implied Reader
Wolfgang Iser

Literature as Exploration
Louise Rosenblatt
Louise Rosenblatt's Literature as Exploration has influenced literary theorists and teachers
of literature at all levels. In Literature as Exploration, Rosenblatt presents her unique
theory of literature and focuses on the immense, often untapped, potential for the study
and teaching of literature in a democratic society. The author's philosophy of literature is
frequently cited as the first presentation of reader-response theory, but she differs from
her successors in emphasizing both the reader and the text. Her "transactional" theory of
literature examines the reciprocal nature of the literary experience and explains why
meaning is neither "in" the text nor "in" the reader. Each reading is "a particular event
involving a particular reader and a particular text under particular circumstances." And
teachers of literature, Rosenblatt argues, play a pivotal role in influencing how students
perform in response to a text.

Literature as Exploration
Louise Rosenblatt
Through the medium of words, the text brings into the reader's
consciousness certain concepts, certain sensuous experiences,
certain images of things, people, actions, scenes. The special
meanings and, more particularly, the submerged associations that
these words have for the individual reader will largely determine
what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the
work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs
and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a
particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a
never-to-be-duplicated combination determine his response to the
peculiar contribution of the text”

Mls 3

More Related Content

What's hot

Similar to Mls 3

More from Abdel-Fattah Adel

Recently uploaded

Mls 3