Literariness - Models, gradations, experiments

The deepest crises cannot destroy the universal model of literariness. It maintains its appeal for participants in literary communication as a «contradictory» model. This thought recurs in many epochs. Literariness involves suspending the formal or logical norms of contradiction (lex contraditionis). In everyday speech, it is not permissible for «A» to simultaneously be «not-A»; in literary structures this is the norm. This is both in the ideas, and in the tensions between the artificiality and naturalness of speech, the structure and the chaos of the plot, experimentation and revitalization of tradition, objective observation and a biased vision of the world, its visibility and invisibility, expressibility and inexpressibility, and a realistic and an imaginative focus. Executions of this model are gradative.

List of contents

Contents: The limits of literature - The structure of the literary work - Artistic genres - Paraliterature - Structuralism - Semiotics.

About the author

Edward Balcerzan is a literary theorist, translator, poet, essayist, and professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznä. He is a correspondent for the Polish Academy of Sciences, Honorary Doctor of Szczecin University and scholar of Polish and Russian poetry of the 20th century. His fields of work are literary theory and translatology.

Report

«Balcerzan's study will prove a valuable addition to the libraries of all those with a serious interest in literary theory.»
(Barry P. Scherr, The Polish Review Vol. 63, No. 4, 2018)

Product details

• Authors: Edward Balcerzan
• Assisted by: Aleksander Fiut (Editor), Soren Gauger (Translation), Gauger Soren (Translation)
• Publisher: Peter Lang
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.01.2016
• EAN: 9783631647370
• ISBN: 978-3-631-64737-0
• No. of pages: 363
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 24 mm x 210 mm
• Weight: 560 g
• Series: Studies in Modern Polish Literature and Culture; Studies in Modern Polish Literature and Culture
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies