A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style

Language ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 584
Author(s):  
Rene Wellek ◽  
Paul L. Garvin
Keyword(s):  
Literary Structure ◽  
Prague School

Literary System and Systemic Change: The Prague School Theory of Literary History, 1928–48

PMLA ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. W. Galan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Structure ◽  
Language History ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Structural Linguistics ◽  
Prague School ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Literary System

AbstractStructural linguistics is commonly held to be preoccupied with static language systems at the expense of language history. Yet in the 1920s the Prague Linguistic Circle resolved the structuralist dilemma of a system that ceases to act systemically the moment it undergoes a change. Language changes must be studied not in isolation but with regard to the whole system. No language system, however, is perfectly self-contained, nor can language changes be perfectly predictable, for language must adapt to concrete situations. Similarly, literary history appears largely systemic, but only a semiotic conception can explain its immanent development while simultaneously taking into account extraliterary influences. Prague structuralism thus studies both the internal, systemic changes of literary forms and the sociological aspects involved in their reception by the reading public. Finally, structural literary theory explains the role of individual artists, whose originality is seen as the dialectical antithesis to the systematic literary structure.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D. C. Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Future Study ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Folk Tales ◽  
Literary Structure ◽  
Early Christian

Approaching the Gospel according to Mark as unfinished notes, the author argues that literary critics do not “find” nuanced literary structure in the text. They produce it—not unlike what the Gospel according to Matthew does with the Gospel according to Mark. The author proposes a new methodological framework for future study of early Christian gospels. He points to an example from cultural history (Robert Darnton’s work on eighteenth-century French folk tales) and to possible projects in the digital humanities in order to begin to think about how to reconceptualize the process of gospel writing.

Continuity in Discontinuity: The Recurrent Motif of Cultural Autonomy in the Development of Czech Sociology of Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 174997552199963
Author(s):  
Marek Skovajsa
Keyword(s):  
Critical Mass ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Relative Autonomy ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
Heterogeneous Landscape ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Prague School ◽  
Art And Society ◽  
Recurrent Motif

This article analyses the development of the sociology of culture in Czechia. Its focus is on the sociology of the arts and cultural sociology, which, it is argued, are connected through the notion of the relative autonomy of cultural structures. While the Czech sociology of culture may have been rendered less dynamic by the lack of a critical mass of sociologists specialising in this area and by the country’s frequent political upheavals and its isolation from the international circulation of ideas, it has experienced moments of considerable vitality. Three periods in the development of the field are identified here, each of them marked by a movement toward a stronger and more sociologically adequate conceptualisation of cultural autonomy: (1) from the diffuse culturalism of the field’s founding figures to the functionalist theory of the interwar sociologist Inocenc Arnošt Bláha, whose view of the relationship between art and society was influenced by the work of the Prague School of Structuralism; (2) from the cultural reductionism of Marxist-Leninist theory after 1948 to the eclectic sociology of culture and the arts of the late socialist period; (3) from the demise of this transitional form of a sociology of culture in the 1990s to the increasingly internationalised but also heterogeneous landscape of the 2010s, which is constituted by a semi-institutionalised centre of cultural sociology at Brno and small groups or individuals in Prague and other academic locales. The thread of continuity in an otherwise discontinuous historical development is found in the recurrent motif of the relative autonomy of culture which the Czech sociology of culture absorbed through its exposure to art and literary theory.

Rheme before theme in the noun phrase

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 894-915
Author(s):  
Carlotta Viti
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
New Information ◽  
Prague School

Information structure in the noun phrase remains unexplored or limited to the study of the s-form and the of-form in English, which are interpreted from the perspective of the Prague School. Accordingly, the prenominal s-form is chosen if the possessor expresses old information; conversely, if the possessor expresses new information, the postnominal of-form is preferred. Ancient Greek, however, indicates that this is not the sole pattern attested. In our data, drawn from Herodotus, a postposed genitive refers to the topic of the immediately preceding clauses, and has no semantically compatible referent around it. Preposed genitives denote new or discontinuous participants, and are used in contrastive and emphatic contexts. In this case, the principle “rheme before theme” can be identified.

Telescopic Reiteration

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 401-420
Author(s):  
Margaret Mollett
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Literary Structure ◽  
Left Behind

A crucial aspect of an exegetical analysis of Revelation is to establish the literary structure of the book, one that is more than a conventional outline of chapters placed in the Introduction. There have been many attempts to identify such a structure, most proposals using implicit indicators such as the devices referred to by Ralph Korner as chiasm, recapitulation, reiteration, intercalation and encompassing. The Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels is a prime example of how the visions in Revelation 6–16 are read chronologically, each vision occurring on earth as a new event. Countering a linear, dispensational reading of the vision-texts, Ralph Korner gives a new dimension to the device of reiteration in the vision texts by suggesting a “Then …” and, “After this …” narrative that is based upon an objectively determined structure, one firmly grounded in the original audience’s historical and literary contexts.

‘Reading‘ and Directing the Play

1987 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 218-223
Author(s):  
Michael L. Quinn
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Original Function ◽  
Preceding Article ◽  
Production History ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
Prague School

A director's ‘reading’ of the play – the hierarchical implications of which were discussed by Peter Holland in the preceding article – normally begins with just that: a reading, of the printed or typewritten text. Here. Michael Quinn discusses the various factors through which this initial acquaintance becomes a stage production carrying the stamp of the resulting perceptions – some of which go unrecognized, as much by the director as by those who evaluate his work. These may vary from preconceptions (or a lack of them) about the writer himself to the prevailing modes of the director's own work, or from such imponderables as the ‘lingering’ effect of objects on stage whose original function has been fulfilled to the ‘intertextuality’ always present when a play has a previous production history. The author argues not for the impossible elimination of such influences, but for their proper recognition, so that the director may be better aware of the reasons behind the choices he makes in translating a ‘reading’ into a production. Michael L. Quinn has previously published essays on Brecht and Roman Jakobson, and is currently serving as a play-reader for the San Francisco Magic Theater while preparing his doctoral dissertation on the theatre semiotics of the Prague school.

The Case of the Missing Disciple: Abū l-Ḥasan al-Rustughfanī and the First Reception of al-Māturīdī’s Theology in Samarqand

Oriens ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-130
Author(s):  
Ramon Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Literary Structure ◽  
Bibliographic Information ◽  
Detailed Case

Abstract Despite recognition of Abū l-Ḥasan al-Rustughfanī (d. ca. 345/956) as the most important student of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944), a sustained treatment of his theological views has not hitherto appeared. One of the challenges that has been identified in prior studies is a lack of primary sources. To overcome this obstacle, I analyse manuscripts of “Bāb al-mutafarriqāt min fawāʾid” and “al-Asʾila wa-l-ajwiba,” two texts recording al-Rustughfanī’s theological responsa, locating them within available bibliographic information and discussing the question of literary structure. I then contextualise the material within the polemical milieu of mid-fourth/tenth century Samarqand, arguing that al-Rustughfanī is the earliest figure in the Samarqandī Ḥanafī kalām tradition to self-consciously adopt the full name ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa to express his theological identity. Finally, I provide an annotated theological overview of the main doctrines found in the texts with a detailed case study on divine speech and the Qurʾān, showing how al-Rustughfanī bridges the gap between al-Māturīdī’s rationalistic kalām and the Ḥanafī traditionalism of al-Ḥakīm al-Samarqandī (d. 342/953).

GENDER AS A DOMINANT DRIVING THE ENACTION AND (RE)FRAMING OF THE PERSPECTIVE IN LITERARY TRANSLATION

2021 ◽  
pp. 32-42
Author(s):  
K.I. Leontyeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Literary Structure ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Practical Concern ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
Research Findings

The paper explores cognitive mechanics of «doing» gender in literary translation and aims at providing a cognitive account of gender as both a function of the translator’s self and the translator’s practical concern, i.e. a meaning-making feature of the literary structure which is to be somehow relayed in the translator’s text. Having initially defined the notions «cognitive dominant» and «perspective», constitutive of the research framework, the author reflects on the instrumental role of gender, integrating biological, cognitive, sociocultural and discourse dimensions of the translator’s activity, as a meta-dominant of the translator’s cognition and discourse, which shapes 1) the translator’s phenomenological perspective, from which the text world is mentally construed and 2) strategic (re)framing of the narrative perspective in the translator’s text. A number of English-Russian translations are discussed to illustrate inherent dynamicity, fluidity, multiplicity, performativity and pervasiveness of gender as a dominant driving translation. Certain cognitive and aesthetic modes of doing and (re)framing gender in translation are distinguished as well. Overall, the research findings evince the urgent need for the translators to adopt and implement a gender-sensitive translation strategy, which is likely to considerably enhance the literary value of their translations.

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