Literacy
Literarity describes the degree of a work to be literary. The term literary as the specific language usage of literary texts is used in at least four different ways, which are not mutually exclusive.
Four ways of using the term
In their introduction in 2013, Tilmann Köppe and Simone Winko suggest four ways of using the term. The first usage relates to linguistic features of a syntactic, lexematic or stylistic nature. This expression of the term is based on the idea that a text is not just either literary or non-literary, but that it can be more or less literary. This use of the term is analogous to the concept of poeticity , the degree of poetic character that a work possesses. Secondly, literary is the designation of a type of text to which it belongs, insofar as texts can be distinguished from others in terms of classification based on such a peculiarity. Thirdly, literary denotes a certain mode of processing among readers. The focus is not primarily on the text, but on the linguistic form or structure of the text (Russian formalism). Fourth, literarity is used as a term for a literary research object.
word
The Latin adjective literaria , which was used in additions such as Res publica literaria and Historia Literaria in the 17th and 18th centuries , meant scientific or related to the scientific community .
The German formation of adjectives in literary terms, on the other hand, only gained importance in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the word literature was no longer defined only as everything that was written, but now also as a generic term for written art forms, literature in the narrower sense (poetry and novels).
Like many other technical terms, literacy was formed with the help of the German suffix -ität , which expresses a state or degree.
Differentiation of the concept of literature
The concept of literature has always been understood broadly, thus including, in addition to the art forms of literature, more or less all linguistic traditions ( scientific literature , sheet music , junk literature and similar terms). Up until the 18th century, every written text was a literary one; Oral texts or traditions were excluded according to this understanding of literature.
In the literary discussion of the 19th century, the delimitation of the art forms of literature became increasingly important: artistic qualities were referred to as literary qualities, and texts with a high degree of such qualities moved to the center of the discussion and thus of literary history . The focus was on capturing this artistic degree of a text, i.e. its literary nature, whereby fictionality , aesthetic form principles, self-referentiality and artistic autonomy as well as polysemy are considered characteristics of ( aesthetic ) literature in the narrower sense.
Today's scholarly discussion of literature arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the study of literature focused on the linguistic tradition of the individual nations .
As literature in this national form became the new state of discussion, two previously separate fields were merged: poetry , that is, the bound language set in verse, on the one hand, and the novel on the other. This new way of discussing literary questions was fruitful and led to the question of the level of art (poetry discussion) being carried over from poetry to the novel and at the same time the question of fiction and interpretation carried over from the novel to poetry ( Novel discussion).
The idea that literary texts are characterized by a certain use of language goes back - like the term literary theory - to representatives of the Russian formalism , which emerged in the years since 1915, was very influential until the end of the 1920s and provided new foundations for created the way of looking at literature. Of the other literary theories of the 20th century, the representatives of New Criticism in particular adhered to the concept of literarity and described it with terms such as ambiguity , paradox or emotive use of language . Later literary theories such as structuralism , empirical literary theory , reception research or cultural studies approaches generally no longer see what is specific to literature in its (artistic) language, but rather as the effect of its use by institutions, discourses , the reader, the literary field or simply as an attribution of what is believed to be. The more recent narrative theory also broke away from the concept of literarity in the second half of the 20th century. The traditional German (e.g. Käte Hamburger ) and American (e.g. René Wellek / Austin Warren) theory of literary prose with its restriction to fictional literary texts was replaced by approaches that made narrativity the subject of the investigation.
Poetry discussion
Traditional research in this area deals with deviations from normal usage. One tries to establish rules and everything that cannot be subsumed under them is used to explain a tension. Or a sound pattern is examined to determine what relation to the meaning might exist.
There is one line of research that continues the previous poetry debates with the help of poetic style analysis. She examines conventional meter measures as well as rhetorical figures and establishes a tendency towards an increasingly freer approach to the rules of poetry in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The meter became freer and the rhythm of the verse more flexible, so the form was increasingly determined by the author himself. The break with formal conventions became part of the artistic debate. The artist and his design of language remained in the center of interest.
Research that was less oriented towards tradition developed in the 20th century with Russian formalism and structuralism . According to this theory, literary character - independent of the historically evolved forms of language use - should be able to be demonstrated in the direct deviation from normal language use. In addition - according to this approach - in this non-historical, neutral linguistic perspective, differences between the flat, normal language and the presumably more complex, artistic use of language must be shown.
The repetition of salient features attracted research attention. Repetitions could be demonstrated in courses of action, on the phonetic, graphic, syntactic and semantic level, in meter , rhyme , rhythm and in rhetorical figures.
Breaches of the rules intensify the distance between literary and non-literary speech. Subjective language, i.e. the style of an individual author or a particular art movement to which the author assigns himself, can create a wide spectrum of unique linguistic features up to a new convention-bound way of speaking. The linguistic peculiarities of Expressionist literature are striking : They fall into the epoch that gave the most intense thought to the difference between normal and literary ways of speaking.
Novel discussion
The second area of criteria for the literary nature of texts comes from the discussion of novels in the second half of the 18th century, which in turn drew on the statements made by Pierre Daniel Huet in De Interpretatione (1661) and in the Traitté de l'origine des romans (1670) had published. Both works by Pierre Daniel Huet had pioneered the theological interpretation of the text in the novel and suggested that the same method could be extended to poetry.
Huet's question was about the use of fiction in the sense of fabricated stories in different cultures. The literary discussion, which between 1750 and 1830 focused on national linguistic works of art, took over Huet's questions. The simultaneous narrowing of the literary discussion to one's own language or nation created political explosiveness. The key question was: what does the fictional text tell us about the phase in the history of the nation in which it was written?
The question of what fictionality actually was gained weight. Novels that seemed particularly realistic raised the most interesting questions, since they pretended to imitate reality, but were recognizable as novels and thus inventions designed in terms of language. The research question was: What is the literary nature of a sentence if this sentence is considered literary in a novel, but is only considered a normal sentence outside the novel, for example in a newspaper?
The answers to this question were varied: On the one hand, the context seems to create the depth of meaning. The novel comes onto the market as a novel: In the subtitle it shows its genre, or blurbs indicate that a linguistic work of art is to be perceived as fiction. Viewed in this way, one and the same utterance can reflect the mere factual content of the words (factual text) as well as a deeper intention of an author in a larger context (novel).
The so-called improper speaking became the focus of research: Even if a reader does not know that a passage comes from a novel, he usually grasps this after a few sentences of the reading sample. The novel character of the text is continuously communicated with the text: the story should be perceived as exemplary, memorable, worth imitating or as a warning. Something that has lasted over time should be communicated - own motifs and materials in the texts provide further indications that a work of art is created in the tradition of other works of art.
Transmedia expansion of the term
Claudia Benthien has worked out four artistic strategies for the investigation of the connection between literature and visual culture and especially of literary nature in media art: writing and writing elements are poetically integrated, the voice is used and oral language is used in literary form, literary genres are adapted, and fourthly, concrete literary ones Works transformed.
literature
- Roman Ingarden : The literary work of art. 4th edition. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1972, ISBN 3-484-10037-0 .
- Roman Ingarden: On recognizing the literary work of art. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1968.
- Helmut Hauptmeier, Siegfried J. Schmidt: Introduction to empirical literature. Vieweg, Braunschweig and Wiesbaden 1985, ISBN 3-528-08597-5 .
- Jurij Lotman : The structure of literary texts. Translated by Rolf-Dietrich Keil. Fink, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-8252-0103-1 .
- Gerhard Pasternack, Claudia Thomé: On the problem of literary semantics , in: Peter Finke, Siegfried J. Schmidt (ed.): Analytical literature. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1984, pp. 142-174, ISBN 3-528-08571-1 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Tilmann Köppe and Simone Winko: Newer literary theories . An introduction. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2013. Table of contents ISBN 978-3-476-02475-6 , pp. 32–33.
- ↑ Katharina Philipowski: Literarity / Poeticity . In: Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag, Stuttgart2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , pp. 172-174, here p. 172.
- ↑ Katharina Philipowski: Literarity / Poeticity . In: Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag, Stuttgart2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , pp. 172-174, here p. 172.
- ↑ Katharina Philipowski: Literarity / Poeticity . In: Gerhard Lauer and Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Lexicon literary studies · Hundred basic concepts . Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-010810-9 , pp. 172-174, here pp. 173f.
- ↑ Reuven Tsur, Issues in the Instrumental Study of Poetry Reading , in: Journal of Literary Theory , Volume 9, Issue 1 (March 2015), pages 112-134.
- ^ Claudia Benthien: Literarität in der Medienkunst , in: Handbuch Literatur & Visuelle Kultur , edited by Claudia Benthien and Brigitte Weingart, de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, pp. 265–284.