LITERATURE Introduction to Humanities

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LITERATURE Introduction to Humanities

• The Humanities Through the Arts
• F. David Martin Lee A. Jacobus

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Spoken language is the basic medium of literature.

• Literature is an art whose medium is language
  used to affect the imagination.
• Words themselves can evoke a response even when
  they are spoken independently of a grammatical
  setting, such as a sentence.
• Fiction writers and poets share many of the
  techniques of literature because their effects
  depend on universal language art.

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Subject matter, Artistic Form, and Content

• We can describe the subject matter and form,
• But we can only point to the content,
• For the content is being said.
• There is no other way of saying it,
• Because to change even one word changes the sound
  and changing the sound changes the meaning and in
  turn, the content.

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Subject Matter and Artistic Form

• The subject matter can be described a boys
  agony in face of his dying fathers
  submissiveness
• Much can be said about the form the way, the
  sounds are organized and how they relate to the
  sense.

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Literature as spoken language

• Treating literature as spoken language points up
  its relationship to other serial arts such as
  music, dance, and film.
• Literature happens in time.
• In order to perceive it, we must be aware of what
  is happening now, remember what happed before and
  anticipate what is to come.

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A Work of Literature

• A work of literature is, in one sense, a
  construction of separable elements like
  architecture.
• The details of a scene, a character or event, or
  a group of symbols can be conceived of as the
  bricks in the wall of literary structure.
• If one of these details is imperfectly perceived,
  our understanding of the function of that detail
  and, in turn, of the total structure - will be
  incomplete.

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The Literary Theme

• The theme (main idea) of a literary work is
  usually a structural decision, comparable to an
  architectural decisions.
• Decisions about the sound of the language, the
  characters, the events, the setting,
• Are comparable to the decisions regarding the
  materials, size, shape, and landscape of
  architecture.

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Literature as works of elements

• It is helpful to think of literature as works
  composed of elements that can be discussed
  individually in order to gain a more thorough
  perception of them.
• And it is equally important to realize that the
  discussion of these individual elements leads to
  a fuller understanding of the whole structure.

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Literary TermsThe Narrative and the Narrator

• The Narrative is a story told to an audience by a
  teller controlling the order of events and the
  emphasis those events receive.
• Most Narratives concentrate upon the events. But
  some narratives have little action.
• Sometimes the Narrator is a character in the
  fictionThe author controls the narrator and
  through the narrator leads the reader.
• And reveals depth of character through responses
  to action.

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Literary Terms

• The symbol, simile, metaphor, images, and diction
  (word choices) are the main details of literary
  language that we will examine.
• All these details are found in poetry, fiction,
  drama, and even the essay.

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Literary Terms

• Language has denotation a literal level where
  words mean what they obviously say,
• And connotation a subtler level at which words
  mean more than they obviously say.

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The Episodic Narrative

• The term episodic describes one of the oldest
  kinds of literature,
• Often used in epics, such as Homers Odyssey.
• The overall structure of the story centering on
  the adventures of Odysseus, but each adventure is
  almost a complete entity in itself.

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Narratives contd

• We develop a sense of the character of Odysseus
  as we follow him in his adventures, but this does
  not always happen in episodic literature.
• Often the adventures are not only completely
  disconnected from one another,
• but the thread that is intended to connect
  everything the personality of the protagonist
  (main character) is not strong enough to keep
  things together.

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The Organic Narrative

• The term organic implies close connectedness in
  the parts of the structure.
• The organic narrative connects every action and
  every character in subtle ways so that as the
  narrative unfolds,
• the reader is given more and more information
  about all the events of the story.

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THE QUEST NARRATIVE

• The quest narrative is simple enough on the
  surface a hero sets out in search of a valuable
  treasure that must be found and rescued at all
  cost.
• Such, in simple terms, is the plot of almost
  every adventure yarn and adventure film ever
  written.

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Quest Narrative contd

• Herman Melvilles Moby Dick, the story of Ahabs
  determination to find and kill the white whale
  that took his leg, is a quest narrative.
• It achieves unity by focusing on the quest and
  its object.
• The novel is centered on the question of good and
  evil. But as it progresses, the actions of the
  novel begin a reversal of values hallmark for
  quest narratives.

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The Quest Narrative

• The quest structure in Ralph Ellisons Invisible
  Man is so deeply rooted in the novel that the
  protagonist has no name.
• We know a great deal about him because he
  narrates the story and tells us about himself.
• He is Black, southern, and as a young college
  student, ambitious.

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Quest Narrative Contd

• His earliest heroes are George Washing Carver and
  Booker T. Washington.
• He craves the dignity and the opportunity he
  associates with their lives.
• But things go wrong. He is dismissed unjustly
  from his college in the south and must, like
  Odysseus, leave home to seek his fortune.

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Quest Narrative contd

• He imagines himself destined for better things
  and eagerly pursues his fate, finding a place to
  live and work up North, Beginning to find his
  identity as a black man.
• He discovers the sophisticated urban society of
  New York City, the political subtleties of
  communism, the pains of black nationalism, and
  the realities of his relationship to white
  people, to whom he is an invisible man.

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Quest Narrative contd

• Yet he does not hate the whites, and in his own
  image of himself he remains as invisible man.
• The novel ends with the protagonist in an
  underground place he has found and which he has
  lighted, by tapping the lines of the electric
  company, with almost 200 electric light bulbs.

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Quest Narrative contd

• Despite this colossal illumination, he still
  cannot think of himself as visible.
• He ends his quest with out discovering who he is
  beyond this fundamental fact he is invisible.
• Black or white, we can identify in many ways with
  this quest, for Ellison is showing us that
  invisibility is in all of us.

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THE LYRIC

• The lyric structure is virtually always a poem,
  primarily reveals a limited but deep feeling
  about something or event.
• The lyric is often associated with the feelings
  of the poet, although we have already seen that
  it is not difficult for poets to create narrators
  distinct from themselves and to explore
  hypothetical feelings.

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The Lyriccontd

• If we participate we find ourselves caught up in
  the emotional situation of the lyric.
• Poets can understand and interpret emotions
  without necessarily undergoing them.
• The lyric has feeling emotion, passion, or mood
  as basic in its subject matter.

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LITERARY DETAILS

• Literature with reference to structure, the
  overall order within every structure are details
  that need close examination in order to properly
  perceive the structure.
• Literature uses language to reveal meanings that
  are usually absent from daily speech.
• Image, metaphor, symbol and diction are central
  to literature of all genres.

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LITERARY DETAILSTHE IMAGE

• An image in language asks us to imagine or
  picture what is referred to or being described.
• Most images appeal to our sense of sight, but
  sound, taste, odor, and touch are often involved.
• One of the most striking resources of language is
  its capacity to help us reconstruct in our
  imagination the reality of perceptions.

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LITERARY DETAILSThe Metaphor

• Metaphor helps writers intensify language.
• Metaphor is a comparison designed to heighten our
  perception of the thing compared.
• Poets or writers will usually let us know which
  of the things compared is the main object of
  their attention.

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LITERARY DETAILS The Symbol

• The symbol is a further use of metaphor.
• Being a metaphor, it is a comparison between two
  things but unlike most perceptual and conceptual
  metaphors, only one of the things compared is
  clearly stated.
• The symbol is clearly stated, but what it is
  compared with (sometimes a very broad range of
  meanings) is only hinted at.

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LITERARY DETAILS Symbols contd

• For instance, the white whale in Herman
  Melvilles novel, Moby Dick, is a symbol both in
  the novel and in the mind of Captain Ahab, who
  sees the whale as a symbol of all the malevolence
  and evil in a world committed to evil.
• We may believer that the whale is simply a beast
  and not a symbol at all.

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LITERARY DETAILSSymbols contd

• Or, we may believe that the whale is a symbol for
  nature, which is constantly being threatened by
  human misunderstanding.
• Such a symbol can mean more than one thing.
• It is the peculiar quality of changing.
• Symbols are usually vague and ambiguous.

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LITERARY DETAILS Symbols contd

• The most important thing to remember about the
  symbol is that it implies rather than explicitly
  states meaning.

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LITERARY DETAILS DICTION

• Diction refers to the choice of words.
• Writing involves the choice of words, the term
  diction is usually reserved for literary acts
  (speech as well as the written word)
• Words chosen especially for their impact.
• To be, or not to be.
• The diction of a work of literature will
  sometimes make that work seem inescapable, as if
  there were no other way of saying the same thing.

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Diction contd

• The careful use of diction can sometimes aid a
  satirist, whose intention is to say one thing and
  mean another.
• So the careful use of structural diction can
  sometimes conceal a writers immediate intention,
  making it important for us to be explicitly aware
  of the diction until it has made its point.
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