DUMANIL-and-SANTIAGO.pptx report in English

Report

1. LITERARY THEORY FORMALISM AND READER RESPONSE THEORY Reporters: Joy B. Dumanil and Glydel D. Santiago

2. OUTLINE 1. FORMALIST READING OF LITERATURE A. Form B. Diction C. Unity

3. Reader-response theory 2. TYPES OF READER-RESPONSE THEORY A. Transactional Reader-Response Theory B . Psychological Reader-Response Theory C . Subjective Reader-Response Theory D . Affective Reader-Response Theory E. Social Reader-Response Theory 3. Conclusion

4. FORMALISM

5. FORM Forms contains all those organizational devices that create the total effect i.e. recurrences, repetitions, relationships, motifs. Form and content are inseparable. Form is created by how parts affect each other and fit together. Images gain significance and create form and unity by appearing more than once whether randomly or regularly. The point of view is also a shaping force. Formalists note whether the narrator is omniscient 3 rd person, first person or second person. Formalists note whether the form is traditional or not.

6. Formalist reading Formalist examine how individual elements of a text come together to create a work of art. They are concerned with inside relations as a text for them is ‘a self-contained entity’. They seek governing principles that allow a text to reveal itself. They make second reading and note repetition of words, images, patterns of sounds and multiple meanings in detail. They focus on form, diction and unity.

7. They note whether the events are in sequential fashion or flashback. They examine whether the ending of a work is surprising or satisfying – closed or open. They trace effects of meter rhyme, rhythm, sound patterns, visual patterns, similes and metaphors. Form is however, hard to be determined in modern works without guideposts. “ However, no form is also form.” It conveys the vision of a chaotic and meaningless world.

8. Diction Words are keys to meanings. They have denotations (literal meanings: lion: a brave person). Formalists look at these aspects and their etymology (origin and development). Scientists focus on directness and singularity of meaning and use denotation for practical purpose while poetry aims at ambiguity and richness through suggestive, evocative, compressed and multi-leveled language. Poetry has divergent meanings. Poetry has complexity resulting from multiple often conflicting meanings woven through 4 devices.

9. 1. Paradox – a statement that appears self-contradictory but represents the actual way the things are: - Lose life to gain it. Child is the father of man. Life’s spiritual and psychological realities are paradoxical in nature. 2. I rony – an event undermined by the context in which it occurs: 3. Ambiguity – a word or an image or an event generating two or more different meanings: Lack of clarity and precision lends richness, depth and complexity to a work. 4. Tension – a literary text is created by tension – linking together of opposites – the abstract and the concrete, the religious and the secular.

10. unity Unity – multiple meanings produced by the text must be resolved or harmonized. Organic unity must be established. “ if a work has unity, all of its aspects fit together in significant ways that create a whole “. Each element contributes to its totality and unifying effect.

11. Russian formalism New Critics and Russian Formalist are two groups who are distantly connected. The latter flourished in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1920s,and although the principles they formulated have some similarity to those of the New Critics , yet they are two separate schools. In fact, because the work of the Russian formalists was based on the theories of the Ferdinand de Saussure , the French linguist, they are probably more closely related to the structuralists , who were to garner attention in the 1950s and 1960s.

12. Saussure’s influence is seen, for example, in the Russian formalists 'argument that literature is a systematic set of linguistic and structural elements that can be analyzed. They saw literature as a self-enclosed system that can be studied not for its content but for its form. Russian formalist may be termed as early Structuralist .

13. READER-RESPONSE THEORY

14. “ The text itself”

15. “The reader makes implicit comments, fills in gaps, draws inferences, tests out hunches, and to do this means drawing on a tacit knowledge of the world and literary conventions in general”

16. Formalists had shifted the focus from the author to text. Reader Response Theorist (RRT onward) shift it to the Reader. “Different readers are free to actualize the work in different ways, there is no single interpretation which will exhaust its semantic potential.”

17. What is reader’s response? Actually if a tree falls in the forest and none is around there to listen it’s voice, does it make a noise? In the same way, if a text sits in a shelf in a bookstore and none is there around to read it, does the text have meaning? So the practitioners of RR theory advocate that a readers interaction with text gives the text its meaning. The text cannot exist without the reader. There are different schools of thought in RR theories. They are following:

18. Reader-response theory TYPES OF READER-RESPONSE THEORY A. Transactional Reader-Response Theory B . Psychological Reader-Response Theory C . Subjective Reader-Response Theory D . Affective Reader-Response Theory E. Social Reader-Response Theory

19. TRANSACTIONAL READER RESPONSE THEORY Louise Rosenblatt says – reader brings ‘an attitude’ – “some personal flavor or colouring of feeling.” Both the text and the reader are necessary for the production of meaning. A text serves as a blueprint and people respond in a personal way influenced by their feelings , associations and memories.

20. Louise Rosenblatt wrote influential books A. Literature as Exploration (1938) - transactional reading. B. The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978) – reciprocal relationship between the text and the reader. Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art (1938) regards literary works as organic wholes. The readers are supposed to fill the gaps to complete the harmony. Formalists reading is “a neutral event that occurs in an historical or cultural vacuum”. RRT “inevitably personal and intrinsically humans quality.

21. “It is a kind of experience valuable in and for itself and yet or perhaps, therefore, it can also have liberating and fortifying effect on the ongoing life of the reader” (Rosenblatt, 1938) Types of Reading Aesthetic – what occurs during the actual reading even itself. They can be transaction between the text and the reader only if the text is aesthetic. 2. Non-aesthetic (efferent) – material from experience (information, life)

22. Booth in The Rhetoric (1961) gives the concept of the implied author he says “However impersonal [an author] may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner.” In the same way an Implied Reader who is presumed image of the reader in writer’s mind while writing a literary work. Booth’s The Company We Keep (1988) introduced ethical criticism which examines interconnections between our lives and the literary work we consume.

23. Ethical value lies in poem or the reader. Of course the value is not there, actually until it is actualized by the reader. Nevertheless, of course. It could not be realized if it were not there, in potential in the poem (1998. p. 89) “ He makes of his reader, as he makes of his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader can find complete agreement ” (Booth, 1961).

24. PSYCHOLOGICAL READER-RESPONSE THEORY Norman Holland argues that the reader’s motives strongly influence the way he reads. Our interpretations reveal something about our psyche. We react to events in texts as we react to events in real life. Our goal of interpretations is to fulfill our psychological needs and desires. Interpretative process has three stages or modes that occur and recur as we read.

25. Affective stylistics A literary text is an event that occurs in time and comes into being as it is read. It is not an object that exists in space. It affects the reader when it is read line by line and word by word. A text is not an ‘objective, autonomous entity’. Stanley Fish asserts that a text’s meaning can be found by analyzing how it is structured and responded to.

26. Subjective reader-response theory For David Bleich , reader’s response are the text. He made distinction between real objects (physical-printed page) and symbolic objects (experience created by the reader-conceptual world created by his experiences and memories). All knowledge is subjective. The whole meanings lie in the mind of the Reader.

27. Social reader-response theory Fish revised his earlier views. He denied purely subjective responses and regarded them product of interpretive communities to which readers belong. The members of interpretive communities share the interpretive strategies and bring them to texts when they read. Interpretive strategies result from institutionalized assumptions of what makes a literary text. He wrote the name of linguists and told the students that the poem was written in metaphysical period. We find in a text what strategies put there.

28. CONCLUSION Transactional RR Theory analyses the transaction between reader and the text. Both are seen equally important. A reader can take an efferent stance based on determinant meaning and aesthetic stance based on indeterminacy of meaning. Affective Stylistics RR Theory examines the text in slow format in which each line or word is studied to determine how (stylistics) affects the reader in the process of reading.

29. Subjective RR Theory believes that reader’s responses are the text and all meanings of the text lies in the readers interpretations. Social RR Theory focuses on that a readers approach the text with interpretative strategies in which they belong. The Psychology RR Theory believes that how the reader’s motives strongly influence the way he reads. Our interpretations reveal something about our psyche. CONCLUSION

30. Important terms Denotation/Connotations Aesthetic/Efferent (non-aesthetic) Subjective author/actual author Implied Reader/Actual reader Determinant / In determinant meaning

31. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!