Literature
According to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), literature is the "art of verbal expression" (verbal being understood as "that which refers to the word, or uses it") and, therefore, encompasses both written texts (written literature) and spoken or sung texts (oral literature). In a more restricted and 'neotraditional' (since the first literary works were composed to be sung or recited), it is writing that has artistic merit and that privileges literariness, as opposed to ordinary language with a less aesthetic and more practical intention. The term literature also designates the set of literary productions of a language, a nation, an era or even a genre (Greek literature, 18th century literature, fantastic literature, etc.) and the set of works that they deal with an art or a science (medical, legal literature, etc.). It is studied by literary theory.
The concept of literature has changed over time because it is partially subjective; in its generic sense it is the set of any written or oral production of a nation, era or genre and, in its restrictive sense, it is considered that it must have an aesthetic or intellectual value.
Literature is one of the Fine Arts and one of the oldest forms of artistic expression, characterized, according to the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, by “verbal expression”. That is to say, it achieves its aesthetic purposes through the word, both oral and written. However, it is never easy to justify what is and what is not literature, since this is a historically constructed concept. Thus, it was revised and redefined numerous times over time, and there are many possible definitions.
One of the unique features of literature is its use of language, which is often called the “literary language,” and which differs from ordinary or everyday usage. His particular use of language pursues beauty and self-reflection, not only through the use of tropes and rhetorical figures, but also through a particular sense of rhythm.
To this, in addition, must be added the permissions that fiction gives: situations, images and stories coming from the imagination or from reality itself, but filtered through subjectivity.
Literature is a field of study in itself: it serves as an object of study for literary theory and literary criticism, as well as for philology and history of literature. On the other hand, one can also speak of literature in a sense not linked to art, but referring to an organized set of knowledge and texts around a theme: “medical literature” or “technical literature”, for example.
Literature
See main article: History of literature and History of modern literature
Until the 17th century, what we now call "literature" was designated as poetry or eloquence. During the Spanish Golden Age, poetry was understood as any literary invention, belonging to any genre and not necessarily in verse, meaning three fundamental types of "poetry / literature": the lyrical (characteristic of singing, in verse), the epic (characteristic of narrative, in long verse or prose) and the dramatic (in dialogue). At the beginning of the century XVIII the word «literature» began to be used to refer to a set of activities that used writing as a means of expression. In the middle of the same century, Lessing published Briefe die neueste Literatur betreffend, where "literature" is used to refer to a set of literary works. At the end of the XVIII century, the meaning of the term «literature» specialized, restricting itself to literary works of recognized aesthetic quality. This concept can be found in Marmontel's work, Eléments de littérature (1787), and in Madame de Staël's work, Of literature considered in relation to social institutions.
In England, in the 18th century, the word "literature" did not just refer to writings of a creative nature and imaginative, but it included the set of writings produced by the educated classes: they fit in it from philosophy to essays, passing through letters and poetry. It was a society in which the novel had a bad reputation, and it questioned whether it should belong to literature. That is why Eagleton suggests that the criteria for defining the corpus of literature in 18th century England were ideological, circumscribed to the values and tastes of an educated class. Street ballads, romances, and dramatic works were not allowed. In the last decades of the 18th century a new demarcation of the discourse of English society appeared. Eagleton tells us that the word "poetry" arises as a product of human creativity in opposition to the utilitarian ideology of the beginning of the industrial era. Such a definition is found in the work A Defense of poetry (1821) by Shelley. In Romantic England, the term "literary" was synonymous with "visionary" or "creative." But it was not without ideological overtones, as in the case of Blake and Shelley, for whom it became a political ideology, whose mission was to transform society through the values that they embodied in art. As for the prose writings, they did not have the strength or the roots of poetry; society regarded them as a vulgar, uninspired production.
Literature is defined by its literariness
In search of the definition of the concepts «literature» and «literary», the discipline of the theory of Literature arose, which begins by delimiting its object of study: literature. There is no unequivocal definition of the term, since it will depend on the literary critic who defines it, as well as on the time and context that defines it. However, the first scholars who concerned themselves with the study of this discipline are the so-called Russian formalists.
At the beginning of the XX century, Russian Formalism was interested in the literary phenomenon, and inquired about the features that define and characterize said literary texts, that is, on the literariness of the work. Roman Jakobson states that literature, understood as a literary message, has particularities in such a way that they make it different from other discourses; This special interest in the form is what Jakobson calls the «poetic function», whereby the issuer's attention falls on the form of the message (or, what amounts to the same thing, there is a «will to style» or to stylize the language by the writer). Indeed, there are certain linguistic productions whose primary function is to provide literary pleasure, a delight of an aesthetic nature, produced by beauty, in relation to Aristotelian thought. Language would combine in its simplest elements two types of elements: redundancies, recurrences or formal rhythmic repetitions and semantic content, that is, analogies, on the one hand, and on the other, deviations from the norm, to move away from common language, cause strangeness, renew: the so-called anomaly; In this way, the imagination and memory are impressed and attention is drawn to the form of the message, its peculiar expressive form. Of both tendencies, the rhythmic or repetitive one is popularizing, and the second, on the contrary, has an aristocratic bias.
The literary language would be a stylized one with a particular transcendence, destined for durability; very different from the expressions of the language in common use, intended for immediate consumption. Literature, on the other hand, traditionally requires sustainable support: The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha could not have been written if the books of chivalry had not existed before.
Wolfgang Kayser, in the middle of the XX century, proposes changing the term «Literature» to that of Belles Lettres, differentiating them from speech and extraliterary texts, in the sense that literary-poetic texts are a structured set of phrases that carry a structured set of meanings, in which the meanings refer to realities independent of the that speaks, thus creating its own objectivity and unity.
The term literature and its adjectives
Raúl H. Castagnino, in his book What is literature?, investigates the concept and how it extends to realities such as writing, history, didactics, public speaking and criticism. According to Castagnino, the word literature sometimes acquires the value of a collective name when it names the set of productions of a nation, era or trend; either it is a theory or a reflection on the literary work; or it is the sum of knowledge acquired through the study of literary productions. Other concepts, such as Verlaine's, point to literature as something superfluous and stuffy, necessary for pure aesthetic creation. Later, Claude Mauriac proposed the term "alliterature" as opposed to "literature" in Verlaine's derogatory sense. All these specifications make literature a proposal that depends on the perspective from which it is approached. Thus, Castagnino concludes that the attempts to delimit the meaning of «literature», rather than a definition, constitute a sum of limiting and specific adjectives.
If literature is considered according to its "extent and content", literature could be universal, if it encompasses the work of all times and places; if limited to the literary works of a particular nation, it is National Literature. The productions, generally written, of an individual author, who, being aware of being an author, creator of a literary text, usually signs his work, are part of educated literature, while anonymous productions are the result of the community and transmission oral, sometimes collected later in writing, make up the corpus of popular or traditional literature.
Depending on the “object”, literature will be mandatory if it seeks general rules and principles; «historical-critical» if the focus of your study is genealogical; «compared», if the examination of works by different authors, periods, themes or historical, geographical and cultural contexts is attended simultaneously; "committed" if it adopts militant positions vis-à-vis society or the state; "pure" if it is only proposed as an aesthetic object; "ancillary", if its purpose is not aesthetic pleasure but is at the service of extraliterary interests.
According to the «expressive means and procedures», Castagnino proposes that literature has verse and prose as forms of expression and its achievements are manifested in universal literary genres, which are found, more or less developed, in any culture; "lyrical", "epic" and "dramatic". Lyrical manifestations are those that express personal feelings; epic, those that constitute the expression of a collective feeling manifested through narrative modes, and dramatic, those that objectify individual feelings and problems, communicating through direct dialogue. To these classic literary genres we should also add the didactic.
The theorist Juan José Saer postulates that literature is fiction; that is to say that everything we read as literature has no direct reference in the real world. The literary only exists in relation to the text in which it appears. But literature, paradoxical as it may seem, is profoundly true: its authenticity depends on recognizing itself as fiction and talking about reality from there. Saer further asserts "that truth is not necessarily the opposite of fiction," and that when we opt for the practice of fiction we do not do so with the shady purpose of misrepresenting the truth. As for the hierarchical dependence between truth and fiction, according to which the first would have a greater positivity than the second, it is, of course, on the level that interests us, "a mere moral fantasy."
The literary phenomenon has always been in constant evolution and transformation, in such a way that the criteria for belonging to a work of literature can vary throughout history, as the concept of «literary art» varies.
From this point of view, literature is an art. An artistic rooted activity that takes advantage of language as a medium, the word that becomes alive through writings. Therefore, it is an activity that does not discriminate gender, or motives, or themes.
Barthes: literature as writing practice
For Barthes, literature is not a corpus of works, nor is it an intellectual category, but a writing practice. As writing or as a text, literature is out of power because in it a displacement of language is taking place, in which three powers take effect: accommodation of many knowledges (mathesis), representation (mimesis) and play of signs. (semiosis). As literature is a sum of knowledge, each knowledge has an indirect place that makes possible a dialogue with its time. As in science, in whose interstices literature works, always behind or ahead of it: "Science is vast, life is subtle, and it is to correct this distance that we are interested in literature."
On the other hand, the knowledge that literature mobilizes is neither complete nor final. Literature only says that it knows something, it is the great mortar of language, where the diversity of sociolects is reproduced, constituting a limit language or zero degree, achieving from literature, from the exercise of writing, an infinite reflection, an act of signs.
Tzvetan Todorov: Beginning of a modern categorization
It is necessary to study literariness and not literature, Tzvetan Todorov pointed out, before the appearance of the first modern trend in literary studies: called Russian formalism. This group of intellectuals redefined the object of investigation, this did not aim to replace the transcendent approach. Instead, it would be studied, not the work, but the virtualities of the literary discourse that have made it possible. In this way, literary studies might one day become a science of literature, something to which literary theory aspires.
Sense and interpretation: To access literary discourse we must learn it in concrete works. How to isolate then in the field of analysis? Two aspects are then defined: meaning and interpretation. The meaning is the possibility of entering into correlation with other elements of that same work and in its entirety. On the other hand, the interpretation is different, depending on the personality of the critic and his ideological position, it also varies according to the time and context of production of the work, in other words, the element is included in a system, which is not the of the work, but of the critic-reader.
M. A. Garrido Gallardo: The term “literature”
In the wake of Barthes and Todorov, Miguel Ángel Garrido Gallardo updates the definition of the term: Art of the word as opposed to other arts (painting, music, etc.). Currently, it is its strong meaning, which was born at the end of the XVIII century and is enshrined in the work of Mme. De Staël, De la Littérature (1800). 2. Art of the word as opposed to the functional uses of language. It corresponds to the demarcation between creation writings (“poetry” in the etymological sense) and other writings that claim a separate status as scientists. In a strict sense, as a work of creation with language, the term literature is the word of the XIX and XX to signify said reality. It used to be called poetry. Its continuation in the cyber world of the XXI century is called cyberliterature and it is no longer literature: it has different communicative conditions. In any case, today, literature continues to be a very important cultural phenomenon, as it keeps the materials of "poetry" in a state of vigilance and survives and continues, side by side with "cyberliterature", in a state of good health..
Aesthetics
Literary Theory
See main article: Literary Theory
A fundamental question of literary theory is "what is literature?" - although many contemporary literary theorists and scholars believe, or that "literature" cannot be defined, or that it can refer to any use of language.
Literary Fiction
See main article: fiction
Literary fiction is a term used to describe fiction that explores any facet of the human condition and may involve social commentary. It is often considered to have more artistic merit than genre fiction, especially the more commercially oriented types, but this has come into question in recent years, with serious study of genre fiction within universities.
The following, from award-winning British author William Boyd on the short story, could be applied to all prose fiction:
[the stories] seem to respond to something very deep in our nature as if, as long as its narrative lasts, something special had been created, some essence of our experience would have been extrapolated, some temporary meaning would have been made of our common and turbulent journey to the tomb and oblivion.
The best in literature is recognized annually by the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is awarded to an author from any country who, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, has produced "in the field of literature. literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction "(original Swedish: den som inom litteraturen har producerat det mest framstående verket i en idealisk riktning).
Relation between Literature and psychology
Some researchers suggest that literary fiction may play a role in an individual's psychological development. Psychologists have also been using literature as a therapeutic tool. Although there was already a history of the fertile relationship between Social Psychology and Literature, originating above all from the Sociology of Literature or the Sociology of the Novel, it is especially from the 80s on when the approximation between Social Psychology and Literature becomes essential and necessary, as a consequence, on the one hand, of the dissolution by postmodern thought of the boundaries between scientific and non-scientific discourses, and, on the other hand, of the great importance that the New Social Psychology attaches to discourse analysis, the study of narrative discourse and Rhetorical Social Psychology. One of the most important effects of the influence that Wittgenstein's work has had in recent decades on All of his Philosophical Investigations, has been to open the door definitively to the so-called linguistic turn, which, as Tomás Ibáñez points out, has contributed to drawing new conceptions about the nature of knowledge and, above all, new ways of conceiving the very nature of language which, among other things, has gone from describing reality to constructing it or, more specifically, to constructing realities. The importance that texts of literature have for the psychosociological analysis of reality comes from the fundamental thesis from Lucien Goldman's book according to which the true authors of cultural creation are social groups and not isolated individuals.
If the social and economic transformations that our society has undergone have powerfully influenced the emergence and development of both Literature and Psychology itself, this has taken place through at least two ways: on the one hand, through through the changes it has produced in writers, as particularly sensitive members of the social groups to which they belonged; and, on the other hand, through the changes that they produced in the group of members of those same social groups, thus preparing them to read the works of their intellectual “vanguard”, who were the writers. But, in a clearly dialectical relationship, reading itself accelerated the transformation of the mentality of people and social groups at each historical moment.
In 1997, the writer Juan José Millas convinced the publishing house Siruela to publish Freud's clinical cases as clinical reports. This writer is of the opinion that the clinical history is a literary genre. Millás recognizes in Freud a powerful literary vein, because in the writing of his clinical cases, the maxim of all good stories is fulfilled: confusion and clarification. According to Millás, clinical cases, and especially those of Freud, are pure literature.
In an interview with Freud, the interviewer asked him if he shared the idea that psychoanalysis had given new intensities to literature. And Freud said:
"I also received much from literature and philosophy. Nietzsche was one of the first psychoanalysts. Thomas Mann and Hugo Von Hofmannsthak owe us much. And Arthur Schnitzler runs a path that is largely parallel to my own development. He poetically expresses what I try to communicate scientifically"
Of the more than four hundred terms and ninety strictly Freudian concepts, the Oedipus complex is precisely the central concept, the heart of the theoretical body of the research and analysis method created by him. Complex, or knot, that he listened to, analyzed and interpreted in his clinical practice, as in reading a story from the Greek classics: Oedipus by Sophocles.
As it often happens that one reading refers to many other readings, the second most important reading for Freud was Shakespeare's Hamlet. This is how he writes to his friend and German doctor Wihelm Fliess:
"An idea has crossed my mind, that the edysical conflict set at the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles could also be in the heart of Hamlet. I do not believe in a conscious intention of Shakespeare, but rather that a real event prompted the poet to write that drama, and that his own unconscious allowed him to understand the unconsciousness of his hero."
This triptych is completed by Dostoevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov. If in Oedipus the King he discovers the universal of the unconscious disguised as destiny, in Hamlet it will be the guilty inhibition and in The Brothers Karamazov the patricidal desire.
In 1912 Freud and his disciples created a magazine for the publication and dissemination of the application of psychoanalysis to the spiritual or cultural sciences. At first they thought of calling it Eros and Psyche, but they ended up naming it after a novel that caused a sensation among the psychoanalytic world of the time: Imago, by Swiss writer Carl Spitteler, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919.
If Freud resorts to the figurative language of art and literature, it is to try to overcome the limits of scientific language. Hence, he sometimes uses the literary text as a clinical case and other times, when due to professional ethics he cannot use the cases from his private clinic.
Insights from psychologist Abraham Maslow help literary critics understand how characters in literature reflect their personal culture and history. The theory suggests that literature helps an individual to strive for personal fulfillment.
Literary genres
See main article: Literary Genre
Literary genres have been changing according to the time and the cultural zone. It has already been commented in the introduction that traditionally three genres were established as basic, which started from the imitation and description of nature. From the first arises the dramatic genre (tragedy drama comedy), from the second the lyrical (poetry) and from its fusion, the epic. Benedetto Croce (1886-1952) represented the change in perspective: each work is a singular and individual vision of the world; it belongs to a genus by external aspects. Today, the classical division is generally accepted, but as an expression of three fundamental human attitudes and as an aid -with the addition of subdivisions- for the classification of works.
According to the expressive means and procedures, Castagnino proposes that literature has verse and prose as forms of expression and its achievements are manifested in universal literary genres that are more or less developed in any culture: lyric, the epic and the dramatic. The lyrical manifestations are those that express personal feelings; the epics are constituted in expression of a collective feeling manifested through different narrative ways; and the dramatic ones, those that objectify feelings and individual problems by communicating with a direct dialogue. To these classic literary genres we should also add the didactic genre. The literary phenomenon has always been in constant evolution and transformation, in such a way that the criteria of belonging or not of a work to literature can vary throughout history, as the concept of "literary art" varies.;.
Most traditional classifications, therefore, also attend to the form of writing (oral literature assimilates to the corresponding genre). The first great genre is poetry, which encompasses all works written in verse. It was the first type of literature, since precisely the rhetorical resources of the verse distanced it from ordinary language. By opposition, there is the prose that includes the language without metrics, and the theater, in the form of a dialogue that is represented for an audience. The theater has two main subgenres depending on the theme and style of the play: tragedy and comedy (if it is sad and elevated, or if it tries to make people laugh).
In parallel, the so-called oral literature of popular tradition is maintained, composed of legends, stories, myths, songs and fairy tales. Children's literature and youth literature are divided according to the age of the recipients, but they maintain all the genres of adult literature.
According to the type of text, the main genre is narrative, which includes all works whose main purpose is to tell a story. Within this genre, the novel, the short story, the fable, the epic, among others, stand out. Lyric texts, on the other hand, try above all to convey emotions.
If the text does not deal with a fictional subject but a reflection on the real world, it is called an essay. The sermon is a variant addressed orally to an audience. Within this group, there are also writings intended to record the life of a person or historical events, such as chronicles, biography or personal diary.
Comics are a genre that mixes text and illustrations and can deal with any topic. The plot is usually broken down into bullet points, which function as paragraphs. It is one of the most modern genres in the history of literature.
Poetry
See main article: Poetry
In a brief definition, poetry refers to the genre of works written in verse. In the "traditional" sense, poetry is "the art of expressing, of translating in a concrete way, one's own spiritual content, through words arranged according to certain metric laws". to prose and is identified with the art of composing verses. However, in modern times, metrical composition is not considered essential for the creation of poetry. The modern conception of poetry emphasizes its subjectivity, in particular, the subjectivity of each poet who knows how to infuse his world, with emotion and energy, the vibrations of his soul. Thus, poetry pursues the purpose of moving the reader's mind, exalting fantasy, and capturing emotions and feelings.
Prose
See main article: prose
By contrast, prose is "what is opposed to poetry". Modernly, the prose work is one that does not reach the fullness of artistic expression or that responds only to practical purposes. Traditionally, the narrative is associated with prose, but there can be narrative poems and prose texts of a non-narrative nature, such as the essay, the description, etc. The words are grouped without following the laws of metrics, since they imitate the fluency of oral speech. It is the most natural way of writing and, therefore, in addition to literature, it appears in the media, notices, laws and other documents. Despite this character that is closer to speech, it was the last literary style to appear, since the first literary writings used the verse precisely to mark the artistic character and facilitate its memorization.
Theater
See main article Theater and Playwriting
Theater should not be confused with drama. The theater is the stage representation of the dramatic work. The dramatic genre includes works designed to be performed on stage and before an audience. Thus, the dramatic genre corresponds to the written text of scenic art. The theater constitutes an organic whole of which its different elements form an indivisible part. These elements, however, each have their own characteristics and rules and, depending on the time, the personality of the director or other circumstances, it is common for one or the other to be given greater relevance within the set. These elements are:
- The text. Dramatic works are written in dialogues and in the first person, in which there are the actions that go between parentheses (called the language of the bindings). In Western tradition, the text - the dramatic work - has always been considered the essential part of the theatre, called the art of the word.
- The director. The personality of the director as a creative artist in his own right was consolidated, as noted above, at the end of the nineteenth century.
- The actors. The techniques of performance have varied enormously throughout history and not always uniformly.
Other elements such as the sets -the environment in which a dramatic performance takes place, the set design, the lighting or the costumes.