Description as Intellectual Craft in the Study of Literature

Literature continues to generate controversies as to what it is and what it is for. That is one of the reasons for the proliferation of "literary theories." The notion is here placed between quotation marks because it does not mean the same thing to all the scholars in the field. Some regard it in the same way that theory functions in the sciences, where it focuses on the object it is associated with. For example, the atomic theory of matter is concerned with the internal constitution or the characterizing properties of matter. Others, however, are looking beyond the object towards the reader and the extra-textual environment. The approaches to literary studies which look beyond the individual work to outside phenomena are many and increasing all the time as new issues and concerns arrive on the social scene. Issues of climate change are fairly topical now; and criticism is already responding with such ideas as eco-criticism. The question of the identity of the literary object has to be kept in the front burner, so that it is not swamped by the many different interests which attach to literature from time to time. Bringing attention back to the literary work is the central concern of this paper; and we are doing this by way of the metaphors of perception often used with respect to the literary work as these suggest that the work is something to focus on, rather than to see through to something else. Finally, I elaborate the concept of integrity as an appurtenance of the literary text that attracts and holds the gaze.

European Journal of American Studies, 2020

Ronja Bodola, Guido Isekenmeier, eds. Literary Visualities: Visual Descriptions, Readerly Visualisations, Textual Visibilities De Gruyter, 2017. Pp. 283. ISBN: 9783110377941 Thomas Mantzaris This volume brings together a range of scholars in order to explore “literature’s productive engagement with and involvement in visual culture” (11) from the early-seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The aim of the editors Ronja Bodola and Guido Isekenmeier to cover a wide scope of literary practices...

critics, 2015

This is a series of informal notes on the structuralist method Lévi-Strauss used in Mythologiques. What’s essential to the method is to treat narratives in comparison with one another rather than in isolation. By analyzing and describing ensembles of narratives, Lévi-Strauss was able to indicate mental “deep structures.” In this comparing Lévi-Strauss was able to see more than he could explain. I extend the method to Robert Greene’s Pandosto, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I discuss how Lévi-Strauss was looking for a way to objectify mental structures, but failed; and I suggest that the notion of computation will be central to any effort that goes beyond what Lévi-Strauss did. I conclude by showing how work on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” finally led me beyond the limitations of structuralism and into cognitive science.

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, 2020

This essay considers the "descriptive turn" in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics, arguing that the history of Western poetry, from the Greeks to the present, offers through the category of epideixis a theory and practice of description that illuminates some of the methodological impasses of contemporary literary studies. Epideixis, a basic mode of pointing or linguistic ostension, confers value, often by way of praise or blame, without trying to persuade its audience with the practical immediacy of political or forensic rhetoric. Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, the essay suggests that praise constitutes a philosophically rigorous alternative to critique. This argument is exemplified via the work of Mark Doty, a contemporary poet of description-as-praise.

Open Review of Educational Research, 2017

This article is meant as a useful classroom methodology by which teachers of literature may give their students a coherent rubric for understanding literary meaning and exegesis which can incorporate most literary theories while addressing the basic-toadvanced concepts required of literary students. Also, it will provide a working methodology for the inclusion of certain evolutionary aesthetic concerns as part of understanding literature. Mixing Dante's 'Four Levels' with Rosenblatt's idea of 'transactional reading' and Dissanayake's four criteria for an evolutionary aesthetic model, this article yields a broad, powerful and common-sensical method of literary analysis by examining literature as a series of tensions (or what I will call 'the agon') between Dante's schema, Rosenblatt's efferent/aesthetic divide, between humans as natural and cultural beings, and the tension between literature's textuality and its contextuality.

1993