Hello people!
Sometimes it is necessary to change the subject, and thinking after an exam I have thought of reproducing some of the things studied, to simply spread or make you reflect or summarize concepts that may be of interest to some of you.
Today I am writing about a subject called Theory of Literature, over time we have seen that it was mainly about philosophers because most of the intellectuals who have been concerned with literature were also philosophers or thinkers, at least in the beginning, or always?...
Plato & Aristotle
I have therefore started with Plato and Aristotle, two great philosophers who had things in common but also many divergences. For example, Plato believed that there were two worlds, the world of ideas that could only be accessed with the soul and the sensible, visible or real world, which when the soul fell into a body it forgets and he thought that this world visible with the senses was reality when in reality it is only a copy, a shadow of the true one. Very transcendental and metaphysical.
Aristotle, on the other hand, did not believe that there was another ideal world from which physical things were derived, but that everything was in this real world, and that is what had to be studied, what it was and how the laws of causality that governed the functioning of reality worked.
And about literature, people did not talk about literature then but about poetry, and Plato used to speak badly of poetry, he did not focus on it, but he analyzed it around other ethical and metaphysical themes. He considered it false because the author was not usually present, because the dramatic genres (tragedy and comedy) allowed, in their performances, that the spectators identified with the action and with the characters, ceasing to be themselves. In addition, the poetry of his time said that it had moved away from the muses and gods, those who provide true inspiration, and was no longer linked to truth.
He did not appreciate the sophists for this either, because they did not care much about the truth, in fact they claimed that everything was relative, and they cared mainly about success, winning debates, influencing, persuading and making money.
On the contrary, Aristotle did not see the tragedy that was represented as so bad, because he said that it served, when they identified with the work, to free citizens from certain negative feelings, a catharsis.
Cicero
Then comes Latin thought, where Horace and above all, Cicero stand out, which focuses mainly on oratory or rhetoric, does not care much about poetry and seems to focus more on the formal or stylistic part of the text than on the content. That is why he talks a lot about rhetoric, the art of using language for persuasive purposes, and decorum, which is what is appropriate and convenient. He also talks about the three styles: simple, elevated and medium, and says that the orator is better than the poet because he at least tries to tell truths, to prove them and to convince others about them.
He also says that the good orator is one who knows how to use the three styles, and to say simple things in a simple way, elevated things with greater expressive tension and maximum embellishment and medium things in a balanced tone. What is appropriate.
Allegory
We move on to another era, the medieval era, where everything begins to revolve around spiritual truths. The literature of the world of Christianity focuses on sacred history, in which what they call allegory emerges, which conveys philosophical or religious truths, and may have a part of fiction but which conveys a deeper meaning, also true.
Descartes & Kant
Then comes the time of reason, with Descartes who thinks "I think, therefore I am" and considers that the object of interest must be the subject, methodical thought begins, autobiography and the self-reflective principle.
And Kant will agree on the importance of the subject, because he considers that everything that is outside the subject cannot be known by reason, they are simply representations of our sensitivity or imagination. He speaks of reason, of mind and how we create a reality that we mold based on space and time according to our understanding in a subjective way.
But what interests him most is knowing what is beautiful, the disinterested contemplation of an object that has to do with proportion, and the sublime, because they are not the same. Although both establish a point of collaboration between sensitivity and reason, in the sublime a conflict is created between reason itself and imagination, its description escapes understanding.
Hegel
Hegel speaks of the three main genres: drama, lyric and epic. And what is tragic, that contradiction that occurs in the man who does what he does guided by his instincts and circumstances, or does what he knows he has to do, what his ethical conscience tells him.
And he also has something that caught my attention: "the dialectic of the master and the slave" (that talks about how throughout history there have always been dominators and dominated, and the dominated was the conscience that gave in out of fear, preferring to live in servitude than to die, then it talks about who comes into contact with production, who depends on whom, and how the slave achieves self-awareness after being alienated from his own work).
The Russian Avant-garde
Then appear the formalists (Sklovski, Tinianov, Propp, Tomachevsky, etc.), the theorists of the Russian avant-garde, who already focused more on language in itself. Giving it an autonomous and self-contained value enough to sound, spelling and words. They consider that literary works should produce surprise or estrangement and concepts such as structure or construction, or system, appear to talk about literature and grammar, and in narrative they focused on what they called wonderful stories, where only the action or the function of the character was important, and not so much who performed it or how. They also begin to distinguish between types of novel such as the historical, the fantastic-scientific, the adventure, the popular, etc.
The Prague Circle
The members of the Prague Circle go further in this intellectualization of literature, they consider that the literary work is a functional system in which what matters is the intention of the one who speaks or writes. And like Saussure, they say that the phonologic level is the first and most essential one. They talk about linguistic functions, and Mukarovsky in particular gives the maximum importance to the aesthetic function that the texts have.
The Structuralism
And we finish with the structuralism, and mentalist structuralism in which the thinker Chomsky stands out, who speaks of the innate capacity of speech to create and understand sentences without having heard them before. It is something intrinsic to the person, the linguistic competence that grammar must describe and know how to explain.
Finally, Jakobson says that the word must be felt as such, by itself, not by replacing the object that is mentioned and that language is a system of connected subcodes whose reason for being lies in the different variety of functions that language performs. Here the concepts and ideas around literature, grammar, linguistics, stylistics and language become more complex.
FINAL
There are historical periods that I have skipped and that we have left out, but this is a summary of what this subject has been about throughout this semester. It seems strange, somewhat abstract and some parts are really, but it is good to be able to reflect on this, on what and how they thought before, and to know something more about something. Knowledge does not take up space and should always be interesting.
Bibliography: if you want to know more (and you know Spanish) I have studied the book:
"Historia de la Teoría de la Literatura" by Manuel Asensi Pérez.
Thanks for reading! Have an interesting and nice day.
The text is a recap done by me (based on the book mentioned above), by ©Duvinca and the lead image and the banners are made by me using Canva.com. And as there are so many complex concepts this time I have used Google Translator to avoid mistakes. - NOT AI -
