Explorations in PoeticsStanford University Press, 2007 - 282 pages This collection of essays, originally published at different times, presents a coherent, systematic, and comprehensive theory of the work of literature and its major aspects. The approach, which may be called "Constructive Poetics," does not assume that a work of literature is a text with fixed structures and meanings, but a text that invites the reader to evoke or project a network of interrelated constructs, complementary or contradictory as they may be. The work of literature is not just a narrative, as studies in narratology assume, but a text that projects a fictional world, or an Internal Field of Reference. Meanings in a text are presented through the evocation of "frames of reference" (scenes, characters, ideas, etc.). Language in literature is double-directed: it relates the Internal Field to External Fields and vice versa. The essays explore the problems of fictionality, presentation and representation, metaphor as interaction between several frames of reference, the theory of "Integrational Semantics" in literary and other texts, the meaning of sound patterns in poetry, and the question of "literariness." This theory and its specific aspects were developed by the author in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s and lay at the foundations of the Tel-Aviv School of Poetics. Revived now, it resonates with the current mood in literary criticism. |
Contents
Pound Creeley Amichai and the New York Times | 32 |
On Presentation and Representation in Fiction | 128 |
An Interaction Theory | 140 |
Copyright | |
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abstract aesthetic alliteration analysis Anna Pávlovna aspects basic chapter characters complex concrete connotation constructed context dialogue dimensions discussed domain elements Eveline Eveline's example ExFR External FR External FRs fictional world Field of Reference fr₂ frames of reference genre given text hand heterogeneous interaction interdependence Internal Field interpretation kind language linguistics literary criticism literary texts literary theory meaning merely metonymy Modernist poetry morphemes narrator nature norms novel object observation onomatopoeia onomatopoeic person philosophy plot poem poetics poetry point of view position possible presented reader reading Reconstructed Level referential grounding relations represented rhyme Roman Jakobson Russian Russian Formalism Russian Formalists scene science of literature segment semantic material semiotic sense sentence shifting situation sound pattern speaker specific speech story structure study of literature T. S. Eliot text continuum thematic theory tion Tolstoy truth value understanding unfolding utterances various whole words writer