Literariness - key takeaways
- Literariness is a way of measuring the extent to which a text is literary.
- Literature can be any piece of writing, but specifically prose, poetry, and drama.
- There are three components of literariness: a distinct style, defamiliarisation, and the transformation of a normal experience.
- The three components are needed together to create literariness.
Full Answer
Is there such a thing as literariness?
It is now widely maintained that the concept of literariness has been critically examined and found deficient. Prominent postmodern literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts.
What are the components of literariness?
Such findings suggest a three‐component model of literariness involving foregrounded stylistic or narrative features, readers’ defamiliarizing responses to them, and the consequent modification of personal meanings.
What is a literary science?
The leading Formalist Roman Jakobson declared in 1919 that ‘the object of literary science is not literature but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary work’.
What is literary theory in literature?
"Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. Literary theory offers varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements of the text.
What does literariness mean in literature?
Thus, literariness is defined as being the feature that makes a given work a literary work. It distinguishes a literary work from ordinary texts by using certain artistic devices such as metre, rhyme, and other patterns of sound and repetition.
What are literariness three components of literature?
Such findings suggest a three‐component model of literariness involving foregrounded stylistic or narrative features, readers' defamiliarizing responses to them, and the consequent modification of personal meanings.
What are the criteria of literariness?
Rather, literariness at its most fundamental level is an outcome of our psychobiological inheritance that involves linguistic capabilities, feeling expression, and self-perception.
What is meant by Defamiliarization?
: to present or render in an unfamiliar artistic form usually to stimulate fresh perception.
How do you use Defamiliarization?
Like all such devices, defamiliarization draws the reader's attention to something you consider important in terms of affect. In other words, you use defamiliarization to shove the reader into a piece of text meaning and tell them “Here, look at this. It reveals a lot”.
What is foregrounding in stylistics?
In literary studies and stylistics, foregrounding is a the linguistic strategy of calling attention to certain language features in order to shift the reader's attention from what is said to how it is said.
How does Inter Literariness affect our interpretation of texts?
Interliterariness allow scholars to compare and understand various literatures. Interliterariness gives the all inclusive idea of writing and the investigation of writing with an ontological establishing and epistemological defense.
What is the basis of formalism?
Formalism holds that true meaning can be determined only by analyzing the literary elements of the text and by understanding how these elements work together to form up a cohesive whole. Formalist critics examine a text regardless of its time period, social/political/religious setting, and author's background.
What is the difference between Fabula and Syuzhet?
Fabula is the meat of the story while the syuzhet is the narration and how the story is organized. This specific screenplay structure employed by American cinema often utilizes original organization by showing the end first, and having the audience view how they got there.
What is an example of defamiliarization in literature?
For example, Tolkien's work “The Lord of Rings” may be considered in terms of defamiliarization usage. All characters of the story represent some archetypes of people; dwarfs are the laborers, the brave and hard-working class wishing to retain their right for freedom and free toil.
What is defamiliarization in English literature?
Defamiliarization, as defined by Shklovsky (1916), is a literary technique of making the familiar seem unfamiliar. Since after time we tend to become somewhat desensitised to our surroundings and language, describing things clearly through written language can be problematic.
What is defamiliarization in literary theory?
Defamiliarization is a literary technique in which the process of writing is itself focused on more than any particular plotline. This technique involves exploring the differences between literature and reality and is used by writers to help identify their efforts as the works of literary art that they are.
What is literariness in language?
Literariness was understood in terms of defamiliarization, as a series of deviations from ‘ordinary’ language. It thus appears as a relation between different uses of language, in which the contrasted uses are liable to shift according to changed contexts.
What is literary science?
The sum of special linguistic and formal properties that distinguish literary texts from non-literary texts, according to the theories of Russian Formalism. The leading Formalist Roman Jakobson declared in 1919 that ‘the object of literary science is not literature but literariness, that is, what makes a given work a literary work’.
What are the observable devices of literary texts?
Rather than seek abstract qualities like imagination as the basis of literariness, the Formalists set out to define the observable ‘devices’ by which literary texts—especially poem s—foreground their own language, in metre, rhyme, and other patterns of sound and repetition.
How does narrative literature affect social cognitive skills?
Reading narrative literature is discussed as an influencing factor on the development of social-cognitive skills. Transportability, which is the tendency to immerse into narrative worlds, has been proposed as a moderator within this relationship, with high-transportable individuals being assumed to profit more from narratives. The current study examines (1) whether a relationship exists between different dimensions of empathy and narrative reading in an adolescent sample, (2) whether this relationship remains intact when gender, age, IQ, trait openness to experiences, and real-life social network are statistically controlled, and (3) whether transportability moderates the relationship between narrative reading and empathy. The sample included 282 German adolescents (Grades 9-10, age 13-18 years) who completed questionnaires and IQ test. Results revealed significant relationships between different dimensions of empathy (empathic concern, perspective taking, personal distress, and fantasy) and narrative reading. However, after including the control variables in the model, the relationships-except for fantasy-were no longer significant. Only for empathic concern, transportability emerged as a moderator but in an unexpected direction, showing a closer relationship between reading and empathic concern for low-transportable students. Finally, our results indicated that transportability might be better conceptualized as a mediator between narrative reading and empathy.
What is the purpose of the National Reader Survey?
The National Reader Survey is a large online survey of Dutch readers with about 14,000 respondents; its purpose is to collect readers’ literary appraisal of texts. We asked readers to rate both read and unread novels on a scale of 1–7 for their literary and overall quality.
Abstract
It is now widely maintained that the concept of "literariness" has been critically examined and found deficient. Prominent literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts.
References (13)
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What is the difficulty of identifying and understanding what, if anything, is characteristic of the response to literature?
The difficulty of identifying and understanding what, if anything, is characteristic of the response to literature is also apparent in recent studies of discourse processing. In this section we will refer briefly to two important studies of narrative comprehension (Zwaan, Magliano, & Graesser, 1995; Trabasso & Magliano, 1996) and show their relation to the conception of literariness that we have proposed. Our aim is to suggest that, despite the technical sophistication of discourse processing theory (Graesser, Millis, & Zwaan, 1997), literariness involves processes that appear beyond the power of this approach to explain (cf. Miall & Kuiken, 1994b). These processes may include, but almost certainly go beyond, the particular "control processes" that Zwaan (1993, 1996) has proposed to account for the "inconsiderate" nature of literary texts.
What is foregrounding in literature?
Foregrounding, in contrast, appears to provide a significant point of departure for individual differences in response to a literary text, particularly since it evokes feeling. Feeling appears to implicate the reader's self concept and to provide a route to specific issues relating to the self, as well as to experiences or memories that may provide a new interpretive context following the moment of defamiliarization. Thus, while all readers appear to be sensitive to foregrounding in literary texts, their construals of its meaning often differ widely, as studies such as the "Mariner" set of protocols demonstrate.
