MODULE: English Literature in the 20th Century

TUTOR: Prof. univ,dr. Sanda Berce

L2. What is Literature? What is reading Literature?
(1) There are five indispensable features/elements of Literature (as Institution):
- The AUTHOR (writer);
- The BOOK;
- The READER;
- The Language;
- The World.
(2) Literature is an expression of relationship between:
(a) Literature and AUTHOR = INTENTION;
(b) Literature and WORLD = REPRESENTATION (of the Real);
(c) Literature and READER = RECEPTION;
(d) Literature and LANGUAGE = STYLE (i.e style and value as judged
historically).
(3) Literature as an expression of relationships between itself and AUTOR, WORLD,
READER and LANGUAGE and set against history is defined by:
- VALUE;
- ORIGINALITY;
- LITERARY PERTINENCE.
----------------- as record of (A) the literary change/ development/dynamics in
history; (B) the aesthetic movement/ or trend; (C) change of Readers) i.e change
of taste).
What is Reading literature?
-

it is forming value judgments on basis of a relationship and negotiation

between:
(a) The Author/Writer;
(b) The Text (Book);
(c) The World;
(d) The Reader.

VALUE JUDGMENT is founded on:

1) The Readers INTUITION;
2) The personal/individual taste of the reader;
3) The standards of the age (fashion; cultural mentality; mentality/mindset).
Paul deMan, Blindness and Insight/1987: - erroneous reception of value is leading to
misreading, misinterpretation and misapprehension (It is not to see in a text, a statement
or a fragment and to interpret the WHOLE text beginning on an absence

II. Contemporary Theory of literature and literary studies (i.e

Comparative Media Studies apud Katherine N.Hayles, How We Think,
2012)
Faced with a particular kind of problem, [contemporary literary
studies] would not be confined to only one mode of address but could
think creatively about the resources, approaches, and strategies the
problem requires and choose the more promising one, or an
appropriate combination of two or more, for a given co fails to account
for what much of contemporary scholarship is about (postcolonial
studies, globalization studies, race and gender studies). Such a
curriculum is worlds away from the offerings of a traditional English
department, which typically focuses on periodizations(e.g. nineteenth
century prose), nationalities (British, American, Anglophone, etc.), and
genres (fiction, prose, drama). The difficulties of this kind of approach
are not only that it is outmoded and fails to account for what much of
contemporary scholarship is about (globalization studies, postcolonial
studies, race and gender studies, etc.)
It also focuses on content rather than problems, assuming that
students will somehow make the leap from the classroom exercise to
real-world complexities by themselves. To be sure, not every
intellectual exercise may be framed as a problem. The humanities have
specialized in education that aims at enriching a students sense of the
specificity and complexity of our intellectual heritage, including major
philosophical texts, complex literary works, and the intricate structures
of the theoretical investigations into language, society, and the human
psyche. Nevertheless, there must also be a place for problembased inquiry within the humanities as well as the sciences and
social sciences. Comparative Media Studies is well suited to this role
and can approach it through the framework of multiple literacies.
The implications of moving from content orientation to problem
orientation are profound. Project-based research, typical of work in the
Digital Humanities, joins theory and practice through the productive
work of making, Moreover, the projects themselves evolve within
collaborative environments in which research and teaching blend with
one another in the context of teams with many different kinds of skills,
typically in spaces fluidly configured as integrated classroom,
laboratory and studio spaces[] (8-9);
(b)As digital media, including networked and programmable desktop
stations, mobile devices, and other computational media embedded in
the environment, become more pervasive, they push us in the
direction of faster communication, more intense and varied information
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streams, more integration of humans and intelligent machines, and

more interactions of language with code. These environmental changes
have significant neurological consequences, many of which are now
becoming evident in young people and to a lesser degree in almost
everyone who interacts with digital media on a regular basis.
(c) The epigenetic changes associated with digital technologies are
reflected through the interrelated topics of reading and attention (i.e.
the idea that epigenetic changes in human biology can be accelerated
by changes in the environment that make them even more adaptive,
which leads to further epigenetic changes: the concept of
technogenesis, the idea that humans and technics have coevolved
together in a process called continuous reciprocal causation(Clark,
2008); it means that humans coevolved with the development and
transport of tools: Bipedalism coevolved with tool manufacture;
walking on two legs freed the hands, and the resulting facility with
tools bestowed such strong adaptive advantage that the development
of bipedalism was further accelerated in a recursive upward spiral
[p.10]);
(d)Learning to read complex texts (i.e close reading) has long been
seen as the special province of humanities, and humanities scholars
pride themselves on knowing how to do it well and how to teach
students how to do it. With the advent od digital media, other
modes of reading are claiming an increasing sharing of what counts
as literacy, including hyper reading and analysis through
machine algorithms (machine reading). Hyper reading, often
associated with reading on the web, has also been shown to bring
about cognitive and morphological changes in the brain. Young
people are at the reading edge of these changes, but pedagogical
strategies have not to date generally been fashioned to take
advantage of these changes. Students read and write print texts in
the classroom and consume and create digital texts of their own on
screens (with computers, iPhones, tablets, etc), but there is little
transfer from leisure activities to classroom instruction or vice
versa. A Comparative Media Studies perspective can result in
courses and curricula that recognize all three reading modalities
close, hyper-, and machine - and prepare students to understand
the limitations and affordances of each (11);
(a) Hyper reading, which includes skimming, scanning, fragmenting,
and juxtaposing texts is a strategic response to an informationintensive environment, aiming to conserve attention by quickly
identifying relevant information, so that only relatively few portions
of a given text are actually read. Hyper reading correlates, I
suggest, with hyper attention, a cognitive mode that has a low
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threshold for boredom, alternates flexibly between different

information streams, and prefers a high level of stimulation. Close reading, by contrast, correlates with deep attention, the cognitive
mode traditionally associated with the humanities that prefers a
single information stream. Focuses on a single cultural object for a
relatively long time and has a high tolerance for boredom. These
correlations suggest the need for pedagogical strategies that
recognize the strengths and limitations of each cognitive mode; by
implication, they underscore the necessity for building bridges
between them(12).

III. Reading samples:

(a) K. Hayles, 2012: Hyper reading, which includes skimming,
scanning, fragmenting, and juxtaposing texts is a strategic
response to an information-intensive environment, aiming to
conserve attention by quickly identifying relevant information, so
that only relatively few portions of a given text are actually
read.(12)
(b) K.Hayles, 2012: Close - reading, by contrast, correlates with deep
attention, the cognitive mode traditionally associated with the
humanities that prefers a single information stream. Focuses on
a single cultural object for a relatively long time and has a high
tolerance for boredom.(12)
(1) Henry James, Daisy Miller (1878):
At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly confortable hotel.
There are indeed, many hotels; for the entertainment of tourists is the business of the
place, which, as many travellers will remember, is seated upon the edge of a remarkably
blue lake - a lake that it behoves every tourist to visit. The shore of the lake presents an
unbroken array of establishments of this order, of every category, from the grand hotel
of the newest fashion, with a chalk white front, a hundred balconies, and a dozen flags
flying from its roof, to the little Swiss pension of an elder day, with its name inscribed in
German-looking lettering upon a pink or yellow wall, and an awkward summer-house in
the angle of the garden. One of the hotels, at Vevey, however, is famous, even classical,
being distinguished from many of its upstart neighbours by an air both of luxury and of
maturity. In this region in the month of June, American travellers are extremely
numerous; it may be said, indeed, that Vevey assumes at this period some of the
characteristics of an American watering-place. There are sights and sounds, which evoke
a vision, an echo, of Newport and Saratoga. There is a flitting hither and thither of
stylish young girls, a rustling of muslin flounces, a rattle of dance-music in the morning
hours, a sound of high-pitched voices at all times. You receive an impression of these
things at the excellent inn of the Trois Couronnes, and are transported in fancy to the

Ocean House or to Congress Hall. But at the Trois Couronnes, it must be added, there are
other features that are much at variance with these suggestions: neat German waiters,
who look like secretaries of legation; Russian princesses sitting in the garden; little Polish
boys walking about, held by the hand, with their governors; a view of the snowy crest of
the Dent du Midi and the picturesque towers of the Castle of Chillon.
I hardly know whether it was the analogies or the differences that were uppermost in the
mind of a young American, who, two or three years ago, sat in the garden of the Trois
Couronnes, looking about him, rather idly, at some of the graceful objects I have
mentioned. It was a beautiful summer morning, and in whatever fashion the young
American looked at things, they must have seem to him charming. He had come from
Geneva a day before, by the little steamer, to see his aunt, who was staying at the hotel Geneva having been for a long time his place of residence. But his aunt had a headache
his aunt had almost always had a headache and now she was shut up in her room,
smelling camphor, so that he was at liberty to wander about. He was some seven-andtwenty years of age; when his friends spoke of him, they usually said that he was at
Geneva, studying. When his enemies spoke of him said - but, after all, he had no
enemies; he was an extremely amiable fellow, and universally liked. What I should say,
simply, that when certain persons spoke of him they affirmed that the reason of
spending so much time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to a lady who
lived there a foreign lady a person older than himself. Very few Americans indeed
I think none had ever seen this lady, about whom there were some singular stories. But
Winterbourne had an old attachment for the little metropolis of Calvinism; he had been
put to school there as a boy, and he had afterwards gone to college there circumstances
which had led to his forming a great many youthful friendships. Many of these he had
kept, and they were a source of great satisfaction.
After knocking at his aunts door and learning that she was indisposed. He had taken a
walk about the town, and then he had come in to his breakfast. He had now finished his
breakfast, but he was drinking a small cup of coffee, which had been served to him on a
little table in the garden by one of the waiters who looked like an attach. At last he lit a
cigarette. Presently a small boy came walking along the path an urchin of nine or
ten.(7-9)
(2) Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, 2011 (Booker Prize):
I remember in no particular order:
- a shinny inner wrist;
- a steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is tossed into it;
- gouts os sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length
of a tall house;
- a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen
chasing torchbeams;
- another river, brad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind
exciting the surface;
- bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.
This last isnt something I actually saw, but what you end upo remembering isnt always
the same as what you have witnessed.

We live in time it holds us and moulds us but I never felt I understood it very
well. And Im not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist
elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary everyday time, which clocks and
watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more
plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach
us times malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally it
seems to go missing until the eventual point where it really does go missing, never to
return. Im not very interested in my schooldays, and dont feel any nostalgia for them.
But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have
grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into
certainty. If I cant be sure of the actual events anymore, I can at least be true to the
impressions those facts left. Thats the best I can manage. (3-4)
You get towards the end of life no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of
any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time
enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong? I thought of a bunch of kids in
Trafalgar Square, I thought of a young woman dancing, for once in her life. I thought of
what I couldnt know or understand now, of all that couldnt ever be known or
understood. I thought of Adrians definition of history. I thought of his son cramming his
face into a shelf of quilted toilet tissue in order to avoid me. I thought of a woman frying
eggs in a carefree, slapdash way, untroubled when one of them broke in the pan; then the
same woman, later, making a secret, horizontal gesture beneath a sunlit wisteria. And I
thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing
upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in
the dark.
There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest.
There is great unrest. (149-150)