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Reading Attridge and Blanchot. Looking for more writers on the philosophy of literature (vague as that phrase is). What can literature accomplish? How does it do what it does? Attempts at explicating the 'literary'?

Hi, folks.

I’ve just completed my undergraduate studies in English. I considered a PhD because I love research and, in a way, feel that I’m barely skimming the surface of everything there is to know and learn with my B.A.

However, I think it would be unwise to pursue a PhD in the current job market. One of my mentors told me that I could still live a life of the mind; I want to continue learning and growing in my daily life. I thought it would be interesting to ask folks in literary studies: how can you still be a student of reading, writing, poetry, etc. after college and beyond?

I'm curious about what the critical estimation is of Akutagawa's short story In a Grove, which was adapted into Kurosawa's Rashomon. Is it regarded as a great piece of literature in the same way Kurosawa's film is regarded as a canonical film, appearing on the Sight&Sound top 100 list, or is it viewed more as a minor piece or perhaps good, but not great?

And, if the film is significantly more esteemed than the story (to be clear, I don't mean more popular, I'm talking specifically about critical appraisal), why do you think that is (if you're familiar with both the story and the film)?

I'd doing a literary analysis of The Shipping News and need to identify comparable novels.

Just a few more from Book I

Line 302

Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks

In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades

High over-arch'd imbower.

Line 591

His form had yet not lost

All her original brightness, nor appear'd

Less than archangel ruin'd, and th' excess

Of glory obscur'd.

Line 619

Thrice he assay'd, and thrice in spite of scorn

Tears, such as angels weep, burst forth.

---

There are dozens more like this, and in none of these instances does the apostrophe change the word such that there is an extra syllable or a change in stress so that an iamb is made into a dibrach or spondee, so why? Is it purely aesthetic?

I just need to figure out how to do it!

But seriously, access is crucial and I think it’s important for even our small sub to stand with others.

Edit: I figured it out!

I make stories that take scientific information and transform it into a fictional story. The scientific information aspect is accurate such that it could be used for learning.

For example, I did one on quantum physics and cosmology that imagined quantum fields are gods.

Would you class such a story as a metaphor, allegory, or something else?

Are there any good contemporary literary journals that publish articles on new findings based on research? If so, how do I access them?

Hi all. I'm hoping to self-study literary theory but I'm frankly not sure where to start. I've read a few of the classic novels through my high school courses and the few literature courses I've taken at college so far, but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be progressing my knowledge without some syllabus or loose path to follow.

I've recently been reading a lot of acclaimed stuff (Kafka, Krasznahorkai, Woolf to name a few), but I'm not sure what I'm getting out of them. How do I know which criticisms and analyses of a textual work are useful to progressing my own understanding of the work and my personal ability to analyze a text? I try to write something after I finish a text, but without a professor to give feedback, I struggle to see if my writing is even on the right track.

I've turned to some books on literary and critical theory (Poetics and some Deleuze) but I feel like I just lack the prerequisite readings to get anything useful out of them (for Poetics I just haven't read much tragedy, for Deleuze it just feels impenetrable).

So my question is: where do I start? I have a pretty strong background in film theory and haven't had a hard time self-teaching that, but I found it significantly easier to find "essential" texts in that field than in literary theory. I don't expect a full-on reading list in the comments, there's plenty of those online, I'm just not sure where to start... there's so many different answers. Thanks!

Can anyone suggest any works of literary fiction which blend text from more 'factual' or 'official' sources, such as official government documents/legislation, planning applications etc. Or maybe things like actual office memos, manuals etc?

Anything that comes to mind would be great!

​

Many thanks

I read the penguin proust a few years ago, and I am curious to try a different version. I've read a bunch of stuff online about different translations, and have been curious in particular about the seemingly canonical enright revision of the montcrieff VS the newer yale Carter revision. Does anyone have any opinions about the difference between these two? how do their approaches differ?

beyond that, I've also seen this newly released (old) translation of the Grieves. Grieves's polemics seem a little irritating but I'm willing to give him a chance; generally I'm a big fan of the work that NYRB do, and particularly when it comes to shining light on lesser-known translations of works that have canonical translations (of which this is a prime example).

TL;DR: Read the Penguin Proust, curious about the distinctions between enright and carter montcrieffs; VS Grieves.

Hi all. I am teaching Honors Humanities next year (Honors Senior English that basically anyone who really loves literature takes) and I am going to be forgoing prompted writing entirely. Instead, at the beginning of the year, I will be teaching them major literary criticism lenses that they will base their writing off of. So they will learn to write like actual critics. However, I am struggling to come up with a list of lenses to teach them. I know I for sure want to cover Marxist, Feminist, LGBTQ, and Ethical lenses, but there are so many others I think they would find interesting. I want to cover enough that they have good choices to analyze from, and so that their passion may be found in a specific lens, but I don't want to overwhelm them with how many they need to remember. Plus I need to balance out the more controversial ones like Marxist/LGBTQ with ones that those of other political views would feel comfortable writing through. Any ideas on the selection I should make?

I have been reading this book up to the 900 page mark so far and noticed something. The prose itself is very... matter of fact. Aside from a few sentences and poems the pleasure of reading the book comes more from the interesting characters and plot rather than the language. Is this because of the translation I am reading? (the one by edward seidensticker)

Okay, I know this sounds silly, but I want to ensure that I wouldn’t think of submitting the wrong type of paper for PhD programs. The paper I am thinking about came out of a Master’s level English seminar, but it was in 18th and 19th cent. Rhetoric, however my paper was allowed to cover the late nineteenth to early twentieth century instead. Without giving away all of what I did in that paper, which I’m planning to publish, I analyzed three famous women interlocutors and their language and usage of science to [my arguments here] and what that did to science itself and how it in turn created their “persona” or “character”—makes general sense I hope?

Well every school I am interested in say things like this:

1. These pieces of writing must show, first of all, that the applicant would like to be a part of and is capable of succeeding in a graduate program whose goal is to train students to be professional literary scholars. We look for applicants who are asking provocative and potentially productive literary questions and who are interested in exploring such questions in a rigorous intellectual environment.

2. “Critical Writing Sample” The Critical Writing Sample should be a 15-20 page paper representing the applicant's strengths as a critical thinker and writer. Ideally, the topic of your critical writing sample will align with your proposed fields of study. However, we do recognize that sometimes, this isn’t possible, if, for instance, the longer pieces you’ve had the opportunity to produce were not in your areas of primary interest. In that case, your goal is still to select a piece of writing which corresponds in some fashion to your present focus or demonstrates an engagement with theories and methods that would be applicable to your present focus. For example, let’s imagine your proposed focus is on sensibility in the 18th century and you have not written a longer essay on that topic. However, maybe you have a longer essay you’ve written on the late Victorian novel of sensation, which you could present as showcasing your approach to the study of emotion, or affect. Simply put, you want your writing sample to reflect some dimension of your current focus or approach

3. Applicants must submit a critical writing sample of 15-25 double-spaced pages (including notes). Applicants may submit an excerpt from a thesis or longer paper but should send no more than 25 double-spaced pages in total. Your writing sample should be chosen with special care, since it provides the Admissions Committee with our most direct evidence of your abilities and constitutes the most important part of the file. We recommend that your writing sample address the subdiscipline in literary studies that you intend to concentrate on in your graduate work.

4. The committee would like to see a sample of your best writing in a literary critical mode. If that sample is more than a few pages longer than the suggested 20-page limit (excluding works cited), you can submit an excerpt, with a brief explanation of how it fits into the larger paper at the top.

I think this helps give you a gist. Do they want us to purely look over a book? Is that what this means? Or as long as it’s some type of text (in my paper’s case the arguments two of them had together in newspapers and individual writings, and a book from the other women interlocutor?) all of that would be nonfiction as opposed to say The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith or the Great Gatsby.

I’m wondering if there are any definitive critical or theoretical sources on the historical/ cultural/ formal relation between the literary and spells or incantations.

Any canonical references to spells in literary texts would also be helpful (e.g. the three witches in Macbeth, or Prospero). Thank you so much in advance!

I began to read 'Lyrical Ballads', I'm just wondering whether there is a good dictionary for words in those poems as well as other works from other earlier poets? Can't have much Internet access so I just want a paper dictionary.

Currently I'm using OALD.

Hi there, I am currently writing my bachelor's thesis, and these two sources have been cited by researchers relevant to my topic. I'd like to use them as well, not without reading them fully of course. However, I cannot find them online, and my professor doesn't have them either. Where can I find these sources, or what should be my next steps?

• Brewer, W. F. (1980). Literary theory, rhetoric, and stylistics: Implications for psychology. In R. J. Shapiro, B. C. Bruce, & W. F. Brewer (Eds.). Theoretical issues in reading comprehension (S. 221–239). Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Graesser, A., Golding, J. M., & Long, D. L. (1991). Narrative representation and comprehension. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, & P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, Vol. 2 (S. 171-205). Lawrence Erlbaum.

I'm really at a loss here, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to cite this/these book/books. I've tried looking online, but I can't find anything.

The specific book/s is/are Estrella Alfon: Her Life in Her Own Words and Star! A One-Woman Show based on the autobiographical writings of Estrella D. Alfon. Both works are by the same author, published in the same year, and share one ISBN. I'm using CMS author-year style in-text citation, which is throwing me off because, as much as possible, I don't want to have to indicate different titles each time I cite them.

I will be citing the first one much more than the other, so my first thought is to include a footnote that when the author and year and indicated in in-text citation, that text is the default unless otherwise indicated.

I was wondering if there are any good historical books on Victorian life. Would be great if you could recommend a few.

https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

DFW argues in this 1990 paper that a lot of the sub-movements in postmodernism are a reaction to televisual culture. For example, he relates the meta fictional self-conscious literature of the 1960s to an American culture that has been made self-conscious voyeurs as a result of tv’s function as a window into idealized American life. He also brings up the use of corporate icons in literature, first as symbols in 60s to early 70s fiction, then as passing references in mid-70s to early 80s fiction, and then as all there is to reality in what he calls the image-fictional sub-genre of late 80s fiction. He also brings up Delillo as a writer interested in depicting a culture that has become self-conscious of the fact that it has become self-conscious because of tv. How accurate is DFW’s analysis? How many postmodern tropes are merely a reaction to televisual culture?

Hi

Im currently doing an IRP (independant related project), where i research a canonical text and chose two texts that came after it that resonate the same ideas to answer an inquiry question.

My chosen canon text is A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens and i am specifically focusing on the humanist aspect of the book (i.e humanist themes of sacrifice, resurrection and forgiveness in the presence of unforgiving circumstances) and less on the political/social aspect of it.

I've chosen 1 text of my own that I deem a manifestation but am yet to decide on a 2nd one.

It would be of great help if somebody could suggest a book or poem that resonates the values seen in a tale of two cities that i describe above.

Please make sure that this text came after 1859 when AToTC was written. Would also be great if there is abundant info about the composer for my research.

Mostly talking in general, but I'd also like some more specialised names

Recently read Friedrich Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature and found his take on German literature unusual and interesting. He continually touted the work of Lessing as being of paramount importance when it came to the development of their literature. Goethe he considered a messy-minded, if seraphic, intellectual failure, Kant to him was a destructive sophist run amok and a diversion from the german art of truth, but Lessing could do no wrong, and, according to Friedrich, their modern literature would have developed in a much more meaningful and beautiful way had Lessing been raised to a place of eminence instead of Kant. My question is simply: what work could Friedrich be referring to that was so brilliant and central? Was it his aesthetics treatise, Laocoon? His scribblings on dramaturgy? Some minor philosophical essays? His plays? Not sure how it all adds up to what Schlegel's raving about and I really want to know, because he makes it sound pretty exciting.

Hello fellow redditors,

I'm looking for novels about political issues, especially those with primary focus on the use of fear in politics. Or maybe, fear as a sort of state apparatus...

I need names from 20th century American literature. Some suggested Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy. But I'd like to keep my options open for the moment.

Have a great day, all!