Intro to literary theory. Professor stroik When we say "close reading" what do we mean?

A search for emergent trends in syntax, vocabulary, images... All of these things pertain to the text itself. But some say we can't be text bound be ause of the limitations. You're merely language bound if you don't point outside of language itself. Stop looking at literature as a work, but as a text, or if you're really savvy a discourse. Leech and his team want to center on two questions: What is the history of intereptation itself? By situated language in a discourse we look at language as iteratureS. We will be looking at sets of assumption. What is literature? What is language? Where is language? We're often trapped in our experiences and assumptions, and often dissuaded from critical analysis of those. The assumption is that language is outside of us and that we must come into this external order to interpret. The value of a sound is. It's relationship to other things, it isn't intrinsic The speakers of language did not know the phonetic difference between f and v. Thus, the construct from which e early permutation of wolf/wolves comes was the same, pronounced both ways by the speakers. Elephones de phonemes Language contains strange relationships determined by social/cultural context. The society determines the linguistic structure and provides its denizens with that data for interpretation. By being socially constructed, this is a discourse of power that drives the creation of language. Culture determines language, language determines thought Multiple culture matrices. Your vocabulary gives you low order constructs with which to speak, but syntax creates more complex arrangements. Aristotles poetics - His theory of mind, portal of the senses, manipulation of sensory data moving toward something universal. The writer is mimetic , giving us a representational copy of reality that we decipher. Why does Aristotle want to point to tragedy to achieve the consequences hes most interested in? Tragedy, according to Aristotle, focuses on thought or action, as opposed to character, the domain of comedy. For aristotles theory of poetics, the difference here is catharsis, a sense of magnitude that completes the action in its structure. Comedy is usually trivialized in its plot, lacking resolvable unity. Tragedy involves believability in character for Aristotle, as well as learning as the ultimate end of these characters. Character is more particularized, so Aristotle focuses more on plot, actions, a universally applicable experience. How tragedy will achieve its function: should represent terrifying and pitiable events. Plato argued that poetry caused people to go more into themselves' become particularized, and disconnected from the communal good and ideals. Aristotle by contrast suggests that you move from the particular to the universal through catharsis in events. You must be catapaulted by this moment of emotionally overwhelming awareness into a more universally connected state. Bth Plato and Aristotle are considered to be mimetic theorists. For Aristotle, representation is a natural inclination from childhood, and that it is intrinsically delightful. Art is supposed to go beyond representation/simply mimetic dimensions, has a conceptual element that reconstructs the world based upon probability and possibility. We can be historians, but history will not

achieve this larger insight. The necessary and probabilistic have been taken out of symbols. Symbols are a wider version of the particular.

Horace and Longinus Horace may side more with Aristotle than Plato, connected by a concern with consistency and structure. This is so craft driven, however some of the social concerns smell of Plato. He isn't as confident as Aristotle that the output of poetic endeavors is TRUTH.