Literary Criticism and Linguistics
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Literary criticism is an endeavor that can be approached from a wide variety of points of view. Linguistics has been a major influence on twentieth-century literary theory and criticism and on particular schools of criticism, such as structuralism, post-structuralist psychoanalytics, and deconstructionist approaches. Literature is, of course, made up of words that create images, evoke symbols, and create connections between words, images and symbols. Linguistics has been an important influence as it explains the development of language, the relationships among words, modes of expression, and the relationship between language used and the psychological constructs and states of the speaker. Language remains one of the more mysterious of human activities, and how and why it develops as it does is only partially understood. Linguists have been much more successful at identifying variations in languages than in determining how and why language developed in the first place, and the variations in existing languages seem to show the specific need of the human being for expressions related to day-to-day life and interactions. Language changes over time, and in literary criticism this raises the need for a way of examining works from different time periods so as to understand the language of the time and to understand how language has changed. Indeed, literature embodies that change in a way that is evident and accessible in a way that the minute changes taking place all around
. . .
e but that the language does indeed come out of an individual head. There is a relationship between the thinking of that head and the words selected to convey meaning to others. This is a linguistic act and is related to the historical context of the time, to the traditions of the poem and of poetry in general, and to other language relations which govern discourse. The authors call for the poem to be, and they note how this is possible:
A poem can only be through its meaning--since its medium is words--yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant. Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant: what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and "bugs" from machinery. In this repect poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention.
Rhetoric is the oldest form of literary criticism in the West, and arguably rhetoric is at least partly a matter of the study of language and how it is applied so that linguistics has always been an element in criticism. Rhetoric is the method of teachin
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Intentional Fallacy, Lycidas Milton, Levi-Strauss Poststructuralism, , Indeed Derrida, Derrida Derrida, Derrida French, Blake English, FR Leavis, TS Eliot, literary criticism, structuralist approach, np np nd, np np, np nd, value judgments, human sciences, understand language, interpretive strategies, fish reader, discourse human sciences, village region compared, jacques derrida, writing means writing,
Approximate Word count = 2914
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Literary Criticism and Linguistics
|