What Does the Literary Work Represent

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CHAHDI Chadi School of Arts and Humanities MEKNES-MOROCCO Master Programme: Communication in Contexts Fall Semester 2014 “Approaches to Criticism” S. 8 Instructor: Prof. Kh. AMAR “WHAT DOES THE LITERARY WORK REPRESENT?”

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1- Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author 2- Denis Donoghue’s Epireading and Graphireading 3- A. D. Nuttall’s Opaque and Transparent Criticism

Transcript of What Does the Literary Work Represent

Page 1: What Does the Literary Work Represent

CHAHDI Chadi

School of Arts and HumanitiesMEKNES-MOROCCO

Master Programme: Communication in ContextsFall Semester 2014

“Approaches to Criticism” S. 8Instructor: Prof. Kh. AMAR

“WHAT DOES THE LITERARY WORK REPRESENT?”

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Outline

1. Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author

The Author

The Scriptor

The Reader

2. Denis Donoghue’s Epireading and Graphireading

a) Epireadingb) Graphireading

3. A. D. Nuttall’s Opaque and Transparent Criticism

a) Opaque Languageb) Transparent Language

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1. Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author

The Author is thought to be the author-God of his text, as a father of his child. He nourishes his text by his existence before and after it. By his power of original imagination, he genuinely creates a work of literature. o Yet, in modern thought, “to give a text an

Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

o Thus, there must come the death of the author.

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1. Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author

The Scriptor has no past. He is rather “born simultaneously with the text”. His task is merely to to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. In fact, that is why “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.”

He rather represents “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of cultures.”

It is by the birth of the Reader, the text comes to life. It is to this Reader that all texts are directed. All readers must be critical to what they read.

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2. Denis Donoghue’s Epireading and Graphireading

a) Epireading:

With Denis, I come to birth…“Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person.” – Freud.

Epireading happens when I read the voice of this absent person. It is more about when I hear my voice in him. When I get deep inside the book, beyond its printed words, I move

from the illusion of absence to the illusion of presence. I in fact imagine the absence of imagination.

Thus, without me, the epireader, the text does not exist in the presence.

It is me who translates the words in the text into acts and gestures.

Anything I read comes between me and the absent person; that is the attitude of Personism.

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2. Denis Donoghue’s Epireading and Graphireading

a) Graphireading:

Notes on: Textuality vs Orature

1.Graphireading is premised upon eurocentrism as it sees no reconciliation between logocentrism and deconstruction.

1.It sees that the word, the print, the telos, the text, is cool, is the real; while the oral, the folklore, is non-real. This is to justify certain prejudiced graphireading practices or attitudes for that matter.

1.The print is the origin of existence, history, and civilization. In fact, the print and centre are linked together. Likewise, graphireading says the same things.

1.The word is visual, seen

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2. Denis Donoghue’s Epireading and Graphireading

a) Graphireading:

5. In this regards, Barthes “rejects the privilege of the point of view” because it “turns the one who stations himself there into an autocrat.” Thus, the author is criticising the bourgeois system of thinking which is static, hegemonic, allowing no "unofficial" thinking.

5. Bourgeois system allows no difference; it treats its people as consumers; interpretation is just a procedure to maintain the bourgeois status quo. In other words, interpretation in this sense is a procedure, a means, to an end, that is, to rule over the people and encourage them to consume commodity.

5. The graphireader ignores the world in favour of the text.

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3. Anthony David Nuttall’s Opaque and Transparent Criticisma) Opaque Language

• “It is external formalist, operating outside the mechanisms of art and taking those mechanisms as its object.”

• “It throws upon the screen of critical consciousness all the formal devices of a work in such a way that the eye is arrested by them.”

• This looks like real criticism.• There is “explicit reference to the artifice of the work; it takes

as its province the artist’s distinctive disposition of forms, the mechanisms of representation, evocation, enchantment.”

e.g. 1 “In the opening of King Lear folk-tale elements proper to narrative are infiltrated by a finger-grained dramatic mode.”

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3. Anthony David Nuttall’s Opaque and Transparent Criticisma) Opaque Language

e.g. 1 “In the opening of King Lear folk-tale elements proper to narrative are infiltrated by a finger-grained dramatic mode.”

• “The Opaque group explanation is generally sought in terms of what happens in other works of art, or elsewhere in the present work.”

• There is severe separation of critic and reader in the Opaque approach. The critic knows the tricks “that fools the audience” (technical or critical appreciation), but he excluded from entranced appreciation.

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3. Anthony David Nuttall’s Opaque and Transparent Criticismb) Transparent Language

o “It is internal, realist, operating within the ‘world’ presented in the work…Formal characters are, like windows, transparent.”

o This sentence “passes shamelessly into the world mimetically proposed in the work of art, and discusses elements of that world as though they were people or physical objects.”

o Though Transparent criticism is attacked in virtue of its infusing art with reality, Knights states that “if no inferences whatever are allowed, certain negative conclusions can be drawn” (e.g. If we don’t mimetically confound art with reality, we have to assume that Hamlet has no legs because didn’t mention them).

e.g. 2 Cordelia cannot bear to have her love for her father made the subject of a partly mercenary game.

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3. Anthony David Nuttall’s Opaque and Transparent Criticismb) Transparent Language

e.g. 2 Cordelia cannot bear to have her love for her father made the subject of a partly mercenary game.

“It is very hard indeed to describe a novel without referring to the things which are described as happening in it. It is similarly hard to describe a picture without occasionally looking through the arrangement of colour as if it were a window and allowing ourselves to notice, as it might be, the face, the raised hand, the distant tower.”

Thus, Nuttall prefers Transparent criticism.