From text to work

Comparative Literature Studies, 2018

Drawing on a number of histories of literary studies from the U.S., Britain and France, this paper re-examines the debates on the institutional self-definition of the subject.

One prominent philosopher, Peter Lamarque, has presented a view of the ontology of literary works1 which takes them to be robust entities consisting of a variety of parts including their history of production, and the various interpretations made of the text, as well as the "text-type" (2009). Gregory Currie (1991) suggests that "plot, character, narrative structure, style and genre" (338) are part of the work, and if we take 'work' to mean loosely the same thing as 'narrative' in Currie's (2010), then he holds them to be "intentional-communicative artefacts" (6). However, these views seem to me not to adequately account for and represent the role that literary works play in the metaphysics of our world as entities which are interpreted by people through a variety of means. Thus, I set forth a novel view of the position that literary works hold in the metaphysics of the world,2 which recognizes the importance of interpretation as a distinct, diverse, and complex activity done to literary works. I will argue that literary works stand in one-to-one relations with one or more entities in the world outside the work, and that the strength of these relations varies in accordance with how tightly the work and the entity are tied to one another.The most significant views of the ontology of literary works have either explicitly made interpretation part of the work, or have, at best, implied that it might be distinct from the work. These views seem not to adequately account for the role literary works play in our world as entities which are interpreted through a variety of means. Thus, I set forth a view of the metaphysical position that literary works hold in the world which recognizes the importance of interpretation. I argue that literary works stand in one-to-one relations with one or more entities in the world outside the work. I suggest that understanding literary works in this way allows us to recognize the importance of interpretation to our human interaction with literary works.

Philosophy and Literature, 2013

This article examines Jean-Paul sartre's concept of committed literature as a manifestation of the tendency in Western modernity of conceiving literature as a form of praxis anchored in work. Discussing an alternative idea of engagement formulated by maurice Blanchot, roland Barthes, and albert camus, the essay develops a notion of exhausted literature that questions the prioritization of work and action in predominant models of commitment. Exhaustion is proposed as a politically and ethically motivated literary strategy of suspending the group-forming morality which, as a product of modern valorization of work and action, has accompanied literature of verisimilitude, activity, and oriented time.

Sofia Philosophical Review, Vol. XIV, No. 2,, 2021

The purpose of this article is to establish 'Concept Work' as a distinct philosophic approach to literature and as a general function of philosophy. Philosophic literature is understood as those literary works which (1) establish, articulate, or elaborate concepts; (2) allow readers to create concepts through their engagement with the text; and (3) allow readers to develop their conceptual skills through this engagement. Both philosophy and philosophic literature 'work with concepts'; such concept work is meaningful as a form of conceptual self-therapy and for its own sake regardless of its external impact. The philosophic value of a literary text, and the subsequent literary expansion, is founded upon the linguistic mastery of working with concepts in relation to the text. Concepts are not limited to a single literary work and may be reworked in response to other texts or repossessed for other philosophic projects; the reader of literature, as a potential philosopher, may continuously exceed and extend the literary text through his concept work.

Margit Sutrop, The Death of the Literary Work, Philosophy and Literature, Volume 18, Number 1, April 1994, pp. 38-49, 1994

Curiously, there has been a lot of discussion about the death of the author but the death of the literary work has hardly been resisted. It has been taken for granted that literary work closes itself on a signifed, that the work is closed, finished object which hides its meaning. In this article I show that there are good reasons to doubt this claim. In the first part of the article I argue that the literary work has lost its content because the notion of the text has has such an important extension. Many reader-oriented critics are convinced that every text has its meaning only in reading. As the meaning is produced, assembled and constituted in the reading process, it is always subjective, individual, plural. The literary work becomes the victim of the text and will be sidelined. In the second part of the article I will compare the phenomenological literary theory of the Polish aesthetician Roman Ingarden and the reader-response theory (reception aesthetics) of the German literary theorist Wolfgang Iser. I will focus on how Iser will make an important extension of the notion of the text - in the spirit of Barthes- at the same time giving the notion of the literary work a totally new content.

It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work which owes at least

Drawing upon Hillway’s three types of research, this paper seeks to take a look at the nature and scope of literary research. It focuses on early works on the subject: Altick (1950, 1963), Sanders (1951), and Bateson (1972) – to demonstrate how some facts lying there can be uncovered through a slightly different reading of these texts. It highlights the similarities that make literary criticism, literary research, and literary scholarship synonymous, if not the same. It ends by mentioning briefly the approaches and methods of literary research.