Transcript 08 Literary Genres

Literary Genres
Genres
to sort texts into categories
e.g., thriller, novel, song, landscape
descriptions of the above: to specify conventions
for readers: how to understand texts (lectures)
for authors: why to produce them (Ars Poeticas)
how to produce them
classification on the basis of
─ theme or topic: pastoral, 'whodunnit'
─ mode of address: direct: letters
to be overheard: most dramas
─ attitude or anticipated response: elegies, war poetry
other uses of genre
layout of library and bookshop shelves
creates expectations,
controls markets and audiences
(success → more, e.g., in Hollywood)
+ defeated expectations: collage, pastiche, irony
postmodernism as a celebration of genre
Elegy
In Gk and Roman literature: any poem using the
elegiac couplet
(dactylic hexameter + dactyilic pentameter)
Since the Renaissance: a sustained poetic
meditation on a solemn theme, particularly on
death
From: Ian Ousby, The Cambridge Guide to Literature
in English, Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Famous elegies
John Milton, Lycidas (1638)
pastoral elegy: classical + Christian traditions
(a Cambridge friend drowned in the Irish sea)
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/lycidas/
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821)
upon news of Keats’ death
from mourning to his immortality
Spenserian stanzas
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
rural life, human potential, mortality
poet’s death vs art; gentle gloominess
Shelley, Adonais
I weep for Adonais - he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!“
(first stanza only)
Spenserian stanza
Spenserian stanza: A stanza devised by Spenser
for The Faerie Queene, founded on the
Italian ottava rima. It is a stanza of
nine iambic lines, all of ten syllables except the
last, which is an Alexandrine. There are only three
rhymes in a stanza, arranged in
an ababbcbccrhyme scheme. Sidelight: The
longer length of the Alexandrines in the last lines
provides emphasis and a sense of closure to the
stanzas.
http://www.poeticbyway.com/gl-s.html
Thomas Gray, “Elegy written in a
country churchyard”
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
(first 3 stanzas only)
Elegiac stanza
Elegiac stanza: elegiac stanza, in poetry, a
quatrain in iambic pentameter with alternate
lines rhyming. Though the older and
more general term for this is heroic stanza, the
form became associated specifically with elegiac
poetry when Thomas Gray used it to perfection
in “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard”
(1751).
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1841
12/elegiac-stanza
Intertextuality
The semiotic notion of intertextuality introduced by Julia
Kristeva is associated primarily with poststructuralist
theorists. Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes:
a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a
text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other
texts (Kristeva 1980, 69). Uniting these two axes are
shared codes: every text and every reading depends on
prior codes.
Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem09.html
See Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach
to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1980
Allusion
a literary device that stimulates ideas, associations,
and extra information in the reader's mind with
only a word or two.
Allusion means 'reference'.
The reader must be aware of the allusion and must
be familiar with what it alludes to.
Allusions are commonly made to the Bible,
nursery rhymes, myths, famous fictional or
historical characters or events, and Shakespeare.