Making literary studies matter more

2020

Literature conveys human ideas, thoughts, emotions, feelings and experiences artistically. The use of distinctive grammatical, semantic, and stylistic conventions make the language of literature a field-based register. Based on these presumptions, this article aims to elucidate the deviant features that are prevalent in the literary texts. To obtain the objective, I have employed qualitative content analysis that calls for interpreting the extracts from the authentic literary discourses. The main findings are related to the five-fold features such as grammatical, semantic/lexical, graphological, prosodic, and ornamental, which create markedness of the literary register. These findings reveal that the litterateurs use figures of speech to beautify the presentation of feelings and ideas. This implies that the readers, the writers, and the material producers (like curriculum designers and textbook writers) should be aware of the marked features of the literary texts.

2020

The Pluralist, 2019

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023

Language and Literature, 2010

This essay offers a review of Literature, Science and the New Humanities by Jonathan Gottschall. The author challenges the field of literary studies to rethink long-held assumptions about the nature of knowledge and human nature. In particular, what appear to be dominant tendencies in the field have strongly resisted the inclusion of findings from biology and genetics specifically. This resistance is tied to a view that scientific methods do not apply to the study of literature, and that radical social-constructivist theory presents a general alternative to the traditional methods of scientific inquiry. A proposal is made to incorporate recent advances in the cognitive sciences into the analysis of literature. Specifically, concepts drawn from evolutionary psychology might be especially useful in the analysis of narrative themes.

IDEAS: JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LITERARY STUDIES, 2023

Literary studies in the new millennium are described as "post-theoretical," which implies a paradigm shift from the deconstructive linchpin of capital-t Theory, to a more socially, politically and environmentally engaged, future-oriented, and reparative drive in our discipline. There is a change of attention from the relativist epistemology of poststructuralism to realist ontology in the new fields of study such as posthumanism and new materialism. Post-theory holds two concurrent attitudes toward Theory: acknowledgement and critique. On the one hand, it is indebted to the legacy of Theory and forms discursive practices in relation to it; on the other hand, it is critical of Theory's antiessentialism or lack of ethos, and reassesses its foundational axioms with contemporary ontological anxieties and motives. Ours is a chaotic century with manifold problems such as terrorism, war, economic crisis, COVID-19 pandemic, climate changes, oil and water crises, Anthropocene, consumerism, migration, digitalisation, and the question of democracy, etc. This sense of emergency, and its representations in literature, eventually, calls for "character" (essential, mental and moral vision, ethos) and genuine critique (evaluation) from the academics in humanities. This paper aims to offer an outline of the network of practices in literary studies as well as their ethical and aesthetic allegiances with this demand for "character" in mind.

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Language and Literature, 2018

A tendency by literary stylisticians to overlook the role of the author in the generation of literary meaning has been a significant source of tension between linguistic approaches to literariness and other practices in the discipline, such as text-editing and literary biography. Recently, however, efforts have been made to close this gap, with a branch of stylistics, cognitive poetics, claiming to have developed a new and empirical method of integrating an appreciation of authorial imagination and creativity into the study of readers’ responses to the language of literary texts. We examine these claims critically, testing the grounds of assertions about scientific rigour in relation to demands about model testing and falsifiability associated with the scientific study of literature more generally. We then explore how some other methodologies, technologies and insights associated with this last branch of the discipline might be brought to bear on the topic of authorial intention, wi...