di saat komitment yang telah d buat untuk saling menjaga hati dan saling setia tidak lgi d jalani oleh dy, apakah aku harus tetap setia dan diam seolah2 dy tdak melakukan penghianatan komitmen tsb????
apakah harus tetap bertahan dengan smua kebohongan itu????
apa harus merelakan hati tersayat2 melihat kenyataan apa yang dy lakukan d belakang qt hanya demi untuk tetap bsa bersama dy???
jawabanny TIIDAAAKKKK!!!!!
laki2 tdak hnya dy...meski hrus d akui kalo rasa sayang tu masih da, dan berat rasany hrus meninggalkan dan mengubur mimpi indah itu, lbih baik pergi tinggalkan impian semu itu untuk mencari tempat mengadu yang lebih..mencari mimpi yang lbih indah...
17 Januari 2011
5 Januari 2010
List of literary movements
List of literary movements
This is a list of modern literary movements: that is, movements after the Renaissance. These terms, helpful for curricula or anthologies, evolved over time to group writers who are often loosely related. Some of these movements (such as Dada and Beat) were defined by the members themselves, while other terms (the metaphysical poets, for example) emerged decades or centuries after the periods in question. Ordering is approximate, as there is considerable overlap.
These are movements either drawn from or influential for literature in the English language.
Amatory fiction
* Romantic fiction written in the 17th century and 18th century, primarily written by women.
o Notable authors: Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley
Cavalier Poets
* 17th century English royalist poets, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after Ben Jonson).
o Notable authors: Richard Lovelace, William Davenant
Metaphysical poets
* 17th century English movement using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religion.
o Notable authors: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell
The Augustans
* An 18th century literary movement based chiefly on classical ideals, satire and skepticism.
o Notable authors: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift
Romanticism
* 18th to 19th century movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to the Enlightenment.
o Notable authors: Victor Hugo, Lord Byron
Gothic novel
* Fiction in which Romantic ideals are combined with an interest in the supernatural and in violence.
o Notable authors: Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker
Lake Poets
* A group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District who wrote about nature and the sublime.
o Notable authors: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
American Romanticism
* Distinct from European Romanticism, the American form emerged somewhat later, was based more in fiction than in poetry, and incorporated a (sometimes almost suffocating) awareness of history, particularly the darkest aspects of American history.
o Notable authors: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Pre-Raphaelitism
* 19th century, primarily English movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter Raphael. Many were both painters and poets.
o Notable authors: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti
Transcendentalism
* 19th century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technology.
o Notable authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau
Dark romanticism
* 19th century American movement in reaction to Transcendentalism. Finds man inherently sinful and self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious force.
o Notable authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, George Lippard
Realism
* Late-19th century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns.
o Notable authors: Gustave Flaubert, William Dean Howells, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Frank Norris
Naturalism
* Also late 19th century. Proponents of this movement believe heredity and environment control people.
o Notable authors: Émile Zola, Stephen Crane
Symbolism
* Principally French movement of the fin de siècle based on the structure of thought rather than poetic form or image; influential for English language poets from Edgar Allan Poe to James Merrill.
o Notable authors: Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry
Stream of consciousness
* Early-20th century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without authorial presence.
o Notable authors: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
Modernism
* Variegated movement of the early 20th century, encompassing primitivism, formal innovation, or reaction to science and technology.
o Notable authors: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., James Joyce
The Lost Generation
* It was traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir A Moveable Feast. It refers to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression.
o Notable Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Waldo Pierce
Dada
* Touted by its proponents as anti-art, dada focused on going against artistic norms and conventions.
o Notable authors: Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters
First World War Poets
* Poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took place.
o Notable authors: Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke
Los Contemporáneos
* A Mexican vanguardist group, active in the late twenties and early thirties; published an eponymous literary magazine which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928-31.
Imagism
* Poetry based on description rather than theme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol."
o Notable authors: Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington
Harlem Renaissance
* African American poets, novelists, and thinkers, often employing elements of blues and folklore, based in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s.
o Notable authors: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Surrealism
* Originally a French movement, influenced by Surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict the unconscious rather than conscious mind.
o Notable authors: Jean Cocteau, Dylan Thomas
Southern Agrarians
* A group of Southern American poets, based originally at Vanderbilt University, who expressly repudiated many modernist developments in favor of metrical verse and narrative. Some Southern Agrarians were also associated with the New Criticism.
o Notable authors: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren
Oulipo
* Mid-20th century poetry and prose based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added challenge.
o Notable authors: Raymond Queneau, Walter Abish
Postmodernism
* Postwar movement skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity, irony, and word play.
o Notable authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Alasdair Gray
Black Mountain Poets
* A self-identified group of poets, originally based at Black Mountain College, who eschewed patterned form in favor of the rhythms and inflections of the human voice.
o Notable authors: Charles Olson, Denise Levertov
Beat poets
* American movement of the 1950s and '60s concerned with counterculture and youthful alienation.
o Notable authors: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey
Hungryalist Poets
* A literary movement in postcolonial India during 1961-65 as a counter-discourse to Colonial Bengali poetry.
o Notable poets:Chattopadhyay Shakti,Malay Roychoudhury,Binoy Majumdar
Confessional poetry
* Poetry that, often brutally, exposes the self as part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of human frailty.
o Notable authors: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath
New York School
* Urban, gay or gay-friendly, leftist poets, writers, and painters of the 1960s.
o Notable authors: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery
Magical Realism
* Literary movement in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic circumstances. Most often associated with the Latin American literary boom of the 20th century.
o Notable authors: Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Günter Grass, Julio Cortázar
Postcolonialism
* A diverse, loosely connected movement of writers from former colonies of European countries, whose work is frequently politically charged.
o Notable authors: Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka
Prakalpana Movement
* This ongoing movement launched in 1969 based in Calcutta, by the Prakalpana group of Indian writers in Bengali literature, who created new forms of Prakalpana fiction, Sarbangin poetry and the philosophy of Chetanavyasism, later spreads world wide.
o Notable authors: Vattacharja Chandan, Dilip Gupta.
This is a list of modern literary movements: that is, movements after the Renaissance. These terms, helpful for curricula or anthologies, evolved over time to group writers who are often loosely related. Some of these movements (such as Dada and Beat) were defined by the members themselves, while other terms (the metaphysical poets, for example) emerged decades or centuries after the periods in question. Ordering is approximate, as there is considerable overlap.
These are movements either drawn from or influential for literature in the English language.
Amatory fiction
* Romantic fiction written in the 17th century and 18th century, primarily written by women.
o Notable authors: Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley
Cavalier Poets
* 17th century English royalist poets, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after Ben Jonson).
o Notable authors: Richard Lovelace, William Davenant
Metaphysical poets
* 17th century English movement using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religion.
o Notable authors: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell
The Augustans
* An 18th century literary movement based chiefly on classical ideals, satire and skepticism.
o Notable authors: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift
Romanticism
* 18th to 19th century movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to the Enlightenment.
o Notable authors: Victor Hugo, Lord Byron
Gothic novel
* Fiction in which Romantic ideals are combined with an interest in the supernatural and in violence.
o Notable authors: Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker
Lake Poets
* A group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District who wrote about nature and the sublime.
o Notable authors: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
American Romanticism
* Distinct from European Romanticism, the American form emerged somewhat later, was based more in fiction than in poetry, and incorporated a (sometimes almost suffocating) awareness of history, particularly the darkest aspects of American history.
o Notable authors: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Pre-Raphaelitism
* 19th century, primarily English movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter Raphael. Many were both painters and poets.
o Notable authors: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti
Transcendentalism
* 19th century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technology.
o Notable authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau
Dark romanticism
* 19th century American movement in reaction to Transcendentalism. Finds man inherently sinful and self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious force.
o Notable authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, George Lippard
Realism
* Late-19th century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns.
o Notable authors: Gustave Flaubert, William Dean Howells, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Frank Norris
Naturalism
* Also late 19th century. Proponents of this movement believe heredity and environment control people.
o Notable authors: Émile Zola, Stephen Crane
Symbolism
* Principally French movement of the fin de siècle based on the structure of thought rather than poetic form or image; influential for English language poets from Edgar Allan Poe to James Merrill.
o Notable authors: Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry
Stream of consciousness
* Early-20th century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without authorial presence.
o Notable authors: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
Modernism
* Variegated movement of the early 20th century, encompassing primitivism, formal innovation, or reaction to science and technology.
o Notable authors: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., James Joyce
The Lost Generation
* It was traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir A Moveable Feast. It refers to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression.
o Notable Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Waldo Pierce
Dada
* Touted by its proponents as anti-art, dada focused on going against artistic norms and conventions.
o Notable authors: Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters
First World War Poets
* Poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took place.
o Notable authors: Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke
Los Contemporáneos
* A Mexican vanguardist group, active in the late twenties and early thirties; published an eponymous literary magazine which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928-31.
Imagism
* Poetry based on description rather than theme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol."
o Notable authors: Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington
Harlem Renaissance
* African American poets, novelists, and thinkers, often employing elements of blues and folklore, based in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s.
o Notable authors: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Surrealism
* Originally a French movement, influenced by Surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict the unconscious rather than conscious mind.
o Notable authors: Jean Cocteau, Dylan Thomas
Southern Agrarians
* A group of Southern American poets, based originally at Vanderbilt University, who expressly repudiated many modernist developments in favor of metrical verse and narrative. Some Southern Agrarians were also associated with the New Criticism.
o Notable authors: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren
Oulipo
* Mid-20th century poetry and prose based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added challenge.
o Notable authors: Raymond Queneau, Walter Abish
Postmodernism
* Postwar movement skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity, irony, and word play.
o Notable authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Alasdair Gray
Black Mountain Poets
* A self-identified group of poets, originally based at Black Mountain College, who eschewed patterned form in favor of the rhythms and inflections of the human voice.
o Notable authors: Charles Olson, Denise Levertov
Beat poets
* American movement of the 1950s and '60s concerned with counterculture and youthful alienation.
o Notable authors: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey
Hungryalist Poets
* A literary movement in postcolonial India during 1961-65 as a counter-discourse to Colonial Bengali poetry.
o Notable poets:Chattopadhyay Shakti,Malay Roychoudhury,Binoy Majumdar
Confessional poetry
* Poetry that, often brutally, exposes the self as part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of human frailty.
o Notable authors: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath
New York School
* Urban, gay or gay-friendly, leftist poets, writers, and painters of the 1960s.
o Notable authors: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery
Magical Realism
* Literary movement in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic circumstances. Most often associated with the Latin American literary boom of the 20th century.
o Notable authors: Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Günter Grass, Julio Cortázar
Postcolonialism
* A diverse, loosely connected movement of writers from former colonies of European countries, whose work is frequently politically charged.
o Notable authors: Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka
Prakalpana Movement
* This ongoing movement launched in 1969 based in Calcutta, by the Prakalpana group of Indian writers in Bengali literature, who created new forms of Prakalpana fiction, Sarbangin poetry and the philosophy of Chetanavyasism, later spreads world wide.
o Notable authors: Vattacharja Chandan, Dilip Gupta.
Critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two quite different meanings with different origins and histories, one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism. This has led to the very literal use of 'critical theory' as an umbrella term to describe theoretical critique.
Critical theory, in the sociological context, refers to a style of Marxist theory with a tendency to engage with non-Marxist influences (for instance, the work of Nietzsche and Freud).[1] This tendency has been referred to pejoratively by stricter Marxists as 'revisionism'. Modern critical theory arose from a trajectory extending from the nonpositivist sociology of Weber and Simmel, the neo-Marxist theory of Lukács and Gramsci, toward the milieu associated with Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. It is with this so-called 'Frankfurt School' of theorists that the term is most commonly associated: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas. With the latter, critical theory shed further its roots in German Idealism and moved closer to American Pragmatism.[2]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Two primary definitions
* 2 In social theory
o 2.1 Postmodern critical theory
o 2.2 Critical ethnography
* 3 In literary criticism
* 4 Language and construction
o 4.1 Language and communication
o 4.2 Construction
* 5 See also
o 5.1 Lists
o 5.2 Related subjects
o 5.3 Journals related and/or dedicated to Critical Theory
* 6 Footnotes
* 7 References
* 8 External links
[edit] Two primary definitions
There are two meanings of critical theory which derive from two different intellectual traditions associated with the meaning of criticism and critique. Both derive ultimately from the Greek word kritikos meaning judgment or discernment, and in their present forms go back to the 18th century. While they can be considered completely independent intellectual pursuits, increasingly scholars are interested in the areas of critique where the two overlap.
To use an epistemological distinction introduced by Jürgen Habermas in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), critical theory in literary studies is ultimately a form of hermeneutics, i.e. knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions. Critical social theory is, in contrast, a form of self-reflective knowledge involving both understanding and theoretical explanation to reduce entrapment in systems of domination or dependence, obeying the emancipatory interest in expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination.
From this perspective, much literary critical theory, since it is focused on interpretation and explanation rather than on social transformation, would be regarded as positivistic or traditional rather than critical theory in the Kantian or Marxian sense. Critical theory in literature and the humanities in general does not necessarily involve a normative dimension, whereas critical social theory does, either through criticizing society from some general theory of values, norms, or oughts, or through criticizing it in terms of its own espoused values.
[edit] In social theory
Main article: Frankfurt School
Critical theory was first defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of sociology in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory: Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Horkheimer wanted to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxian theory, critiquing both the model of science put forward by logical positivism and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. Core concepts are: (1) That critical social theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), and (2) That critical theory should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.
This version of "critical" theory derives from Kant's (18th-century) and Marx's (19th Century) use of the term "critique", as in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Marx's concept that his work Das Kapital (Capital) forms a "critique of political economy". For Kant's transcendental idealism, "critique" means examining and establishing the limits of the validity of a faculty, type, or body of knowledge, especially through accounting for the limitations imposed by the fundamental, irreducible concepts in use in that knowledge system. Early on, Kant's notion associated critique with the disestablishment of false, unprovable, or dogmatic philosophical, social, and political beliefs, because Kant's critique of reason involved the critique of dogmatic theological and metaphysical ideas and was intertwined with the enhancement of ethical autonomy and the Enlightenment critique of superstition and irrational authority. Marx explicitly developed this notion into the critique of ideology and linked it with the practice of social revolution, as in the famous 11th of his "Theses on Feuerbach," "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in certain ways; the point is to change it".[3]
One of the distinguishing characteristics critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer elabroated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the “pessimism” of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.[4] This ambivalence was rooted, of course, in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, in particular, the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.[5] For Adorno and Horkheimer state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional critical theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) and private property had been replaced by centralized planning and socialized ownership of the means of production.[6] Yet, contrary to Marx’s famous prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, critical theory was left, in Jurgen Habermas’ words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal; and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope."[7] For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.
In the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests, by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation. Though unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkeimer's thought presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.[8] Habermas dissolved further the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German Idealism, though his thought remains broadly Marxist in its epistemological approach. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action; the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called 'post-modern' challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his theory; thought which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy.
[edit] Postmodern critical theory
While modernist critical theory (as described above) concerns itself with “forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system,” postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems “by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 52). Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to the rapid transformation in social structures and as a result the focus of research is centered on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations.
Postmodern critical research is also characterized by what is called, the crisis of representation, which rejects the idea that a researcher’s work is considered an “objective depiction of a stable other” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). Instead, in their research and writing, many postmodern scholars have adopted “alternatives that encourage reflection about the ‘politics and poetics’ of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). For an example of postmodern critical work, see Rolling’s (2008) piece, entitled Secular Blasphemy: Utter(ed) Transgressions Against Names and Fathers in the Postmodern Era.
[edit] Critical ethnography
Main article: Critical Ethnography
Critical ethnography is "a type of reflection that examines culture, knowledge, and action...Critical ethnographers describe, analyze, and open to scrutiny otherwise hidden agendas, power centers, and assumptions that inhibit, repress, and constrain" (Thomas, 1993, pp. 2–3). While "conventional ethnography" "describes what is", critical ethnography "asks what could be"….Conventional ethnographers study culture for the purposes of describing it; critical ethnographers do so to change it" (Thomas, 1993, p. 4).
[edit] In literary criticism
Main article: Literary theory
The second meaning of critical theory is that of theory used in literary criticism ("critical theory") and in the analysis and understanding of literature. This is discussed in greater detail under literary theory. This form of critical theory is not necessarily oriented toward radical social change or even toward the analysis of society, but instead specializes on the analysis of texts. It originated among literary scholars and in the discipline of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, and has really only come into broad use since the 1980s, especially as theory used in literary studies has increasingly been influenced by European philosophy and social theory.
This version of "critical" theory derives from the notion of literary criticism as establishing and enhancing the understanding and evaluation of literature in the search for truth. Some consider literary theory merely an aesthetic concern, as articulated, for example, in Joseph Addison's notion of a critic as one who helps understand and interpret literary works: "A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation."[9] This notion of criticism ultimately goes back to Aristotle's Poetics as a theory of literature.
From the literary side, starting in the 1960s literary scholars, reacting especially against the New Criticism of the previous decades, which tried to analyze literary texts purely internally, began to incorporate into their analyses and interpretations of literary works initially semiotic, linguistic, and interpretive theory, then structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and deconstruction as well as Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and hermeneutics, and critical social theory and various other forms of neo-Marxian theory.
Thus literary criticism became highly theoretical and some of those practicing it began referring to the theoretical dimension of their work as "critical theory", i.e. philosophically inspired theory of literary criticism. And thus incidentally critical theory in the sociological sense also became, especially among literary scholars of left-wing sympathies, one of a number of influences upon and streams within critical theory in the literary sense.
Furthermore, along with the expansion of the mass media and mass/popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s and the blending of social and cultural criticism and literary criticism, the methods of both kinds of critical theory sometimes intertwined in the analysis of phenomena of popular culture, as in the emerging field of cultural studies, in which concepts deriving from Marxian theory, post-structuralism, semiology, psychoanalysis and feminist theory would be found in the same interpretive work. Both strands were often present in the various modalities of postmodern theory.
[edit] Language and construction
The two points at which there is the greatest overlap or mutual impingement of the two versions of critical theory are in their interrelated foci on language, symbolism, and communication and in their focus on construction.
[edit] Language and communication
From the 1960s and 1970s onward, language, symbolism, text, and meaning became foundational to theory in the humanities and social sciences, through the short-term and long-term influences of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, George Herbert Mead, Noam Chomsky, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and other thinkers in the traditions of linguistic and analytic philosophy, structural linguistics, symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, semiology, linguistically oriented psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Alfred Lorenzer), and deconstruction. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Habermas also redefined critical social theory as a theory of communication, i.e. communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap or intertwine to a much greater degree than before.
[edit] Construction
Both versions of critical theory have focused on the processes of synthesis, production, or construction by which the phenomena and objects of human communication, culture, and political consciousness come about. Whether it is through the transformational rules by which the deep structure of language becomes its surface structure (Chomsky), the universal pragmatic principles through which mutual understanding is generated (Habermas), the semiotic rules by which objects of daily usage or of fashion obtain their meanings (Barthes), the psychological processes by which the phenomena of everyday consciousness are generated (psychoanalytic thinkers), the episteme that underlies our cognitive formations (Foucault), and so on, there is a common interest in the processes (often of a linguistic or symbolic kind) that give rise to observable phenomena. Here there is significant mutual influence among aspects of the different versions of critical theory. Ultimately this emphasis on production and construction goes back to the revolution wrought by Kant in philosophy, namely his focus in the Critique of Pure Reason on synthesis according to rules as the fundamental activity of the mind that creates the order of our experience.
Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two quite different meanings with different origins and histories, one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism. This has led to the very literal use of 'critical theory' as an umbrella term to describe theoretical critique.
Critical theory, in the sociological context, refers to a style of Marxist theory with a tendency to engage with non-Marxist influences (for instance, the work of Nietzsche and Freud).[1] This tendency has been referred to pejoratively by stricter Marxists as 'revisionism'. Modern critical theory arose from a trajectory extending from the nonpositivist sociology of Weber and Simmel, the neo-Marxist theory of Lukács and Gramsci, toward the milieu associated with Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. It is with this so-called 'Frankfurt School' of theorists that the term is most commonly associated: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas. With the latter, critical theory shed further its roots in German Idealism and moved closer to American Pragmatism.[2]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Two primary definitions
* 2 In social theory
o 2.1 Postmodern critical theory
o 2.2 Critical ethnography
* 3 In literary criticism
* 4 Language and construction
o 4.1 Language and communication
o 4.2 Construction
* 5 See also
o 5.1 Lists
o 5.2 Related subjects
o 5.3 Journals related and/or dedicated to Critical Theory
* 6 Footnotes
* 7 References
* 8 External links
[edit] Two primary definitions
There are two meanings of critical theory which derive from two different intellectual traditions associated with the meaning of criticism and critique. Both derive ultimately from the Greek word kritikos meaning judgment or discernment, and in their present forms go back to the 18th century. While they can be considered completely independent intellectual pursuits, increasingly scholars are interested in the areas of critique where the two overlap.
To use an epistemological distinction introduced by Jürgen Habermas in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), critical theory in literary studies is ultimately a form of hermeneutics, i.e. knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions. Critical social theory is, in contrast, a form of self-reflective knowledge involving both understanding and theoretical explanation to reduce entrapment in systems of domination or dependence, obeying the emancipatory interest in expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination.
From this perspective, much literary critical theory, since it is focused on interpretation and explanation rather than on social transformation, would be regarded as positivistic or traditional rather than critical theory in the Kantian or Marxian sense. Critical theory in literature and the humanities in general does not necessarily involve a normative dimension, whereas critical social theory does, either through criticizing society from some general theory of values, norms, or oughts, or through criticizing it in terms of its own espoused values.
[edit] In social theory
Main article: Frankfurt School
Critical theory was first defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of sociology in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory: Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Horkheimer wanted to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxian theory, critiquing both the model of science put forward by logical positivism and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. Core concepts are: (1) That critical social theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), and (2) That critical theory should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.
This version of "critical" theory derives from Kant's (18th-century) and Marx's (19th Century) use of the term "critique", as in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Marx's concept that his work Das Kapital (Capital) forms a "critique of political economy". For Kant's transcendental idealism, "critique" means examining and establishing the limits of the validity of a faculty, type, or body of knowledge, especially through accounting for the limitations imposed by the fundamental, irreducible concepts in use in that knowledge system. Early on, Kant's notion associated critique with the disestablishment of false, unprovable, or dogmatic philosophical, social, and political beliefs, because Kant's critique of reason involved the critique of dogmatic theological and metaphysical ideas and was intertwined with the enhancement of ethical autonomy and the Enlightenment critique of superstition and irrational authority. Marx explicitly developed this notion into the critique of ideology and linked it with the practice of social revolution, as in the famous 11th of his "Theses on Feuerbach," "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in certain ways; the point is to change it".[3]
One of the distinguishing characteristics critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer elabroated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the “pessimism” of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.[4] This ambivalence was rooted, of course, in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, in particular, the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.[5] For Adorno and Horkheimer state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional critical theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) and private property had been replaced by centralized planning and socialized ownership of the means of production.[6] Yet, contrary to Marx’s famous prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, critical theory was left, in Jurgen Habermas’ words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal; and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope."[7] For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.
In the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests, by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation. Though unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkeimer's thought presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.[8] Habermas dissolved further the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German Idealism, though his thought remains broadly Marxist in its epistemological approach. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action; the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called 'post-modern' challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his theory; thought which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy.
[edit] Postmodern critical theory
While modernist critical theory (as described above) concerns itself with “forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system,” postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems “by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 52). Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to the rapid transformation in social structures and as a result the focus of research is centered on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations.
Postmodern critical research is also characterized by what is called, the crisis of representation, which rejects the idea that a researcher’s work is considered an “objective depiction of a stable other” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). Instead, in their research and writing, many postmodern scholars have adopted “alternatives that encourage reflection about the ‘politics and poetics’ of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). For an example of postmodern critical work, see Rolling’s (2008) piece, entitled Secular Blasphemy: Utter(ed) Transgressions Against Names and Fathers in the Postmodern Era.
[edit] Critical ethnography
Main article: Critical Ethnography
Critical ethnography is "a type of reflection that examines culture, knowledge, and action...Critical ethnographers describe, analyze, and open to scrutiny otherwise hidden agendas, power centers, and assumptions that inhibit, repress, and constrain" (Thomas, 1993, pp. 2–3). While "conventional ethnography" "describes what is", critical ethnography "asks what could be"….Conventional ethnographers study culture for the purposes of describing it; critical ethnographers do so to change it" (Thomas, 1993, p. 4).
[edit] In literary criticism
Main article: Literary theory
The second meaning of critical theory is that of theory used in literary criticism ("critical theory") and in the analysis and understanding of literature. This is discussed in greater detail under literary theory. This form of critical theory is not necessarily oriented toward radical social change or even toward the analysis of society, but instead specializes on the analysis of texts. It originated among literary scholars and in the discipline of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, and has really only come into broad use since the 1980s, especially as theory used in literary studies has increasingly been influenced by European philosophy and social theory.
This version of "critical" theory derives from the notion of literary criticism as establishing and enhancing the understanding and evaluation of literature in the search for truth. Some consider literary theory merely an aesthetic concern, as articulated, for example, in Joseph Addison's notion of a critic as one who helps understand and interpret literary works: "A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation."[9] This notion of criticism ultimately goes back to Aristotle's Poetics as a theory of literature.
From the literary side, starting in the 1960s literary scholars, reacting especially against the New Criticism of the previous decades, which tried to analyze literary texts purely internally, began to incorporate into their analyses and interpretations of literary works initially semiotic, linguistic, and interpretive theory, then structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and deconstruction as well as Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and hermeneutics, and critical social theory and various other forms of neo-Marxian theory.
Thus literary criticism became highly theoretical and some of those practicing it began referring to the theoretical dimension of their work as "critical theory", i.e. philosophically inspired theory of literary criticism. And thus incidentally critical theory in the sociological sense also became, especially among literary scholars of left-wing sympathies, one of a number of influences upon and streams within critical theory in the literary sense.
Furthermore, along with the expansion of the mass media and mass/popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s and the blending of social and cultural criticism and literary criticism, the methods of both kinds of critical theory sometimes intertwined in the analysis of phenomena of popular culture, as in the emerging field of cultural studies, in which concepts deriving from Marxian theory, post-structuralism, semiology, psychoanalysis and feminist theory would be found in the same interpretive work. Both strands were often present in the various modalities of postmodern theory.
[edit] Language and construction
The two points at which there is the greatest overlap or mutual impingement of the two versions of critical theory are in their interrelated foci on language, symbolism, and communication and in their focus on construction.
[edit] Language and communication
From the 1960s and 1970s onward, language, symbolism, text, and meaning became foundational to theory in the humanities and social sciences, through the short-term and long-term influences of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, George Herbert Mead, Noam Chomsky, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and other thinkers in the traditions of linguistic and analytic philosophy, structural linguistics, symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, semiology, linguistically oriented psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Alfred Lorenzer), and deconstruction. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Habermas also redefined critical social theory as a theory of communication, i.e. communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap or intertwine to a much greater degree than before.
[edit] Construction
Both versions of critical theory have focused on the processes of synthesis, production, or construction by which the phenomena and objects of human communication, culture, and political consciousness come about. Whether it is through the transformational rules by which the deep structure of language becomes its surface structure (Chomsky), the universal pragmatic principles through which mutual understanding is generated (Habermas), the semiotic rules by which objects of daily usage or of fashion obtain their meanings (Barthes), the psychological processes by which the phenomena of everyday consciousness are generated (psychoanalytic thinkers), the episteme that underlies our cognitive formations (Foucault), and so on, there is a common interest in the processes (often of a linguistic or symbolic kind) that give rise to observable phenomena. Here there is significant mutual influence among aspects of the different versions of critical theory. Ultimately this emphasis on production and construction goes back to the revolution wrought by Kant in philosophy, namely his focus in the Critique of Pure Reason on synthesis according to rules as the fundamental activity of the mind that creates the order of our experience.
Literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature.[1] However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes.[1] In the humanities, the latter style of scholarship is often called simply "theory." As a consequence, the word "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Most of these approaches are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy.
Contents
* 1 Literary theory and literature
* 2 History
* 3 Differences among schools
* 4 Schools of literary theory
* 5 See also
* 6 Notes
* 7 References
* 8 Further reading
* 9 External links
[edit] Literary theory and literature
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature?", though many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a "text." For some scholars of literature, "texts" comprises little more than "books belonging to the Western literary canon." But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to non-fiction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related field of cultural studies. In fact, some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like fashion or football riots, as "texts" to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be thought of as the general theory of interpretation.
Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many "schools" or types of literary theory, which take different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists, even among those listed below, combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive approach of Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).
Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include the Historical & biographical Criticism, New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism and French feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.
[edit] History
The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India (Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra), ancient Rome (Longinus's On the Sublime and Horace's Ars Poetica) and medieval Iraq (Al-Jahiz's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and ibn al-Mu'tazz's Kitab al-Badi),[2] and the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature.
The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure began strongly to influence English language literary criticism. The New Critics and various European-influenced formalists (particularly the Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.
In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities like Johns Hopkins and Yale) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge , and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as faddish or trendy obscurantism (and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars."
By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. As of 2004[update], the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less acrimonious (though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Nathan Parker with Andrew Costigan, may signal a resurgence of the controversy). Some scholars draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.
[edit] Differences among schools
The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds of literary theory are often radically different. Even finding a set of common terms to compare them by can be difficult.
For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.
Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, and the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.
In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.
For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.
Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.[3]
Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.
[edit] Schools of literary theory
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors. In many cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the authors were not primarily literary critics, but their work has been broadly influential in literary theory.
* Aestheticism- often associated with Romanticism a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed art for art's sake.
o Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom
* American pragmatism and other American approaches
o Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
* Cultural studies - emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
o Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory
* Comparative Literature - confronts literatures from different languages, nations, cultures and disciplines to each other
* Darwinian literary studies - situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
* Deconstruction - a strategy of close reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
o Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
* Gender (see feminist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of gender relations
o Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter
* Formalism
* German hermeneutics and philology
o Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach
* Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of class conflict
o Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
* Modernism
* New Criticism - which looked at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
o W.K. Wimsatt, F.R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren
* New historicism - which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
o Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser
* Postcolonialism - focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by western nations
o Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd
* Post-modernism - criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
o Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice Blanchot
* Post-structuralism - a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
o Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva
* Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) - Explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
o Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk
* Queer theory - examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
o Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Michel Foucault
* Reader Response - focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
o Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
* Russian Formalism
o Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
* Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) - examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
o Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurij Lotman, Antti Aarne, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of folklore
* Eco-criticism - Explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world.
* Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature.[1] However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes.[1] In the humanities, the latter style of scholarship is often called simply "theory." As a consequence, the word "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Most of these approaches are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy.
Contents
* 1 Literary theory and literature
* 2 History
* 3 Differences among schools
* 4 Schools of literary theory
* 5 See also
* 6 Notes
* 7 References
* 8 Further reading
* 9 External links
[edit] Literary theory and literature
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature?", though many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a "text." For some scholars of literature, "texts" comprises little more than "books belonging to the Western literary canon." But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to non-fiction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related field of cultural studies. In fact, some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like fashion or football riots, as "texts" to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be thought of as the general theory of interpretation.
Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many "schools" or types of literary theory, which take different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists, even among those listed below, combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive approach of Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).
Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include the Historical & biographical Criticism, New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism and French feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.
[edit] History
The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India (Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra), ancient Rome (Longinus's On the Sublime and Horace's Ars Poetica) and medieval Iraq (Al-Jahiz's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and ibn al-Mu'tazz's Kitab al-Badi),[2] and the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature.
The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure began strongly to influence English language literary criticism. The New Critics and various European-influenced formalists (particularly the Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.
In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities like Johns Hopkins and Yale) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge , and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as faddish or trendy obscurantism (and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars."
By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. As of 2004[update], the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less acrimonious (though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Nathan Parker with Andrew Costigan, may signal a resurgence of the controversy). Some scholars draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.
[edit] Differences among schools
The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds of literary theory are often radically different. Even finding a set of common terms to compare them by can be difficult.
For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.
Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, and the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.
In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.
For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.
Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.[3]
Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.
[edit] Schools of literary theory
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors. In many cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the authors were not primarily literary critics, but their work has been broadly influential in literary theory.
* Aestheticism- often associated with Romanticism a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed art for art's sake.
o Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom
* American pragmatism and other American approaches
o Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
* Cultural studies - emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
o Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory
* Comparative Literature - confronts literatures from different languages, nations, cultures and disciplines to each other
* Darwinian literary studies - situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
* Deconstruction - a strategy of close reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
o Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
* Gender (see feminist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of gender relations
o Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter
* Formalism
* German hermeneutics and philology
o Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach
* Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of class conflict
o Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
* Modernism
* New Criticism - which looked at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
o W.K. Wimsatt, F.R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren
* New historicism - which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
o Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser
* Postcolonialism - focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by western nations
o Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd
* Post-modernism - criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
o Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice Blanchot
* Post-structuralism - a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
o Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva
* Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) - Explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
o Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk
* Queer theory - examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
o Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Michel Foucault
* Reader Response - focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
o Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
* Russian Formalism
o Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
* Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) - examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
o Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurij Lotman, Antti Aarne, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of folklore
* Eco-criticism - Explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world.
* Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson
Vocabulary Teaching: Effective Methodologies
Vocabulary Teaching: Effective Methodologies
Naveen Kumar Mehta
naveennmehta(at)yahoo.co.in
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (New Delhi, India)
Introduction
Vocabulary is the first and foremost important step in language acquisition. In a classroom where students are not finding themselves comfortable with L2, language learning can be made interactive and interesting with the introduction of appropriate vocabulary exercises. This paper is an attempt to study and explore the various methodologies that can be incorporated in the teaching of vocabulary items in a language classroom.
Background
Patterns of Difficulty in Vocabulary
Robert Lado ( 1955) talked about patterns of difficulty in vocabulary teaching. He highlighted key issues related to words, the native language factor and about patterns. He even analyzed Spanish, French and Mexican patterns of difficulty in their respective vocabulary items. He stated that while dealing with vocabulary one should take into account three important aspects of words - their form, their meaning and their distribution - and one should consider various kinds of classes of words in the function of the language. He said that the forms, meaning distribution and classification of words are different in different languages. He revealed that these differences might lead to vocabulary problems.
Vocabulary and Anatomy
Visnja Pavicic (2003) dealt with a way to improve students' abilities to explore, store and usage of vocabulary items. He determined the role of vocabulary teaching and how a teacher could help their learners. He laid emphasis on self initiated independent learning with strategies, in which formal practices, functional practices and memorizing could be included. He said that the teacher should create activities and tasks to help students to build their vocabulary and develop strategies to learn the vocabulary on their own.
Teaching Vocabulary in English Language: Effective Methodologies
It is noteworthy to mention here that vocabulary items are imparted mostly by translation: either a list of words with their translation at the beginning of the lesson or the translation of the content having new words or glossaries at the very end. This is an erroneous practice as it leads to a state of confusion for the learners. On the teaching skills of vocabulary items, Frisby (1957) commented that "While the teacher is not, himself, concerned with the actual selection of vocabulary for text book purposes since practically all the books we use are based on limited vocabularies, it is important that he/she (the teacher) should know the principles, which underlie vocabulary selection". Thus it signifies that a language teacher should be innovative and proficient in the application of methodologies pertaining to teaching vocabulary items in a classroom situation. Following are the main methodologies for teaching vocabulary items in an English language classroom.
Listening Carefully
Caeful listening to the words may be a good option in teaching vocabulary items in a heterogenic classroom. "Let the students hear the word in isolation and in a sentence. If the sounds of the word have been mastered, the students will hear it correctly with two or three repetitions." (Robert Lado: 121) Slow pronunciation without distortion will help. Breaking the word into parts and building up to the whole word will also be helpful.
Pronouncing the Word
Pronouncing the word enables the students to remember it longer and identify it more readily when they hear or see it.
Methods of Grasping the Meaning
The teacher should try to get the meaning to the class without using translation. This is not preferable on the ground that translation may or may not provide the meaning of the word accurately and precisely. It is advocated as it enables the class to go without grasping the meaning of a word that they have learned to pronounce rather than to depend upon the translation.
Key Strategies in Teaching Vocabulary
Some of the key strategies to unfold the information and meaning of a new word to a class are as follows:
Definitions
Definitions in the target language may be very handy if they are expressed in terms that are better known or more easily guessed than the word that is defined. In this direction teachers and students can refer to authentic and reliable dictionaries.
Self-defining Context
The context makes the situation clear, and this in turn illuminates the meaning of the new word. This practice saves time and develops an intensive reading habit and better understanding.
Antonyms
When one member of a pair of opposites is understood, the meaning of the other can be easily comprehended. This helps the student to understand the different shades of meanings of a word.
Synonyms
A synonym may be used to help the student to understand the different shades of meaning if the synonym is better known than the word being taught. Synonyms help to enrich a student's vocabulary bank and provide alternative words instantly.
Dramatization
This method can be practiced at ease. It can win the favour of the students as learners like dramatizations and can easily learn through them. Many situations can be dramatized or demonstrated.
Examples
* Sing [Sing a song]
* Open [Open a book]
* Close [Close the book]
Pictures and Drawings
Pictures of many types and colours can be used successfully to show the meaning of words and sentence. Handmade pictures can also be used as there is no need to be very artistic.
Examples
* into [Raj goes into the circle.]
* in [Rahman is in the circle.]
Drawings can be used to explain the meaning of things, actions, qualities, and relations. A line drawing of a head, for example, provides many useful nouns and verbs.
Realia
Real objects or models of real objects are very effective and meaningful in showing meanings but in handling of real objects, a teacher must be practical and should not be superfluous.
Series, Scales, Systems
The meaning of words such as the months of the year, the days of the week, the parts of the day, seasons of the year, ordinal numbers, cardinal numbers, etc. that form part of well-known series can be made clear by placing them in their natural order in the series.
Parts of Words
The parts of complex and compound words may be more common than the words themselves. Separating such words into their component parts generally elaborates the meaning.
Illustrative Sentences
Most words have a variety of restrictions on their use. Systematic descriptions of these restrictions and idiomatic uses would be laborious and not very effective in teaching. It is better to give appropriate examples that elucidate the range and variation of usage.
Practice from Meaning to Expression
This is controlled practice in which the class does not create new uses or new contexts but simply recalls the ones presented. There are many types of practices for this purpose. Pictures, realia, context, and dramatization can be used. Series and systems can also be used.
Reading the Word
Reading words aloud is also very beneficial. It makes a learner familiar with the word and also improves pronunciations of the learners.
Writing the Word
It will enable the class to write the new word while the auditory memory is fresh, even if the objective is only to read. Writing or copying the word from the blackboard will give the student a chance to understand the grammatical aspect of the word such as noun, verb, adverb, adjective etc.
Shift of Attention
Under this practice, the teacher provides a context by description or through reading which elicits the use of the word. The learners should be asked to pay attention to and develop an attitude or a point of view which he defends or attacks.
Strategy for Special Types of Words
Specific techniques or special combinations of the above techniques may be applicable for particular groups of words.
Words That Are Easy to Learn
It has been seen that the words that are similar in form and meaning to the first language are easy to understand and comprehend. They should be taught for listening and reading rather than for speaking and writing.
Words of Normal Difficulty
Words of normal difficulty are best taught in contextual realms, such as food, clothing, sports, work, and so on. There are advantages to using a connected context illustrating the words that are to be taught. Additional words can be taught as alternatives to those chosen in the connected context. Practice can be controlled in varying situations by changing a key word or phrase.
Difficult Words
Some words and sets of words are especially difficult to understand. They have to be taught as special problems with the strategy determined by the particular problem in each case.
Conclusion
An efficient language teacher can use selected vocabulary activities or can use integrated activities. All this depends upon ability and level of understanding and interest of the learners. There is no sure fire remedy or method to enhance vocabulary in a day or two. A student's vocabulary bank can be enriched on a gradual basis and one should always show keen interest and enthusiasm in finding, learning and understanding new words.
Naveen Kumar Mehta
naveennmehta(at)yahoo.co.in
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (New Delhi, India)
Introduction
Vocabulary is the first and foremost important step in language acquisition. In a classroom where students are not finding themselves comfortable with L2, language learning can be made interactive and interesting with the introduction of appropriate vocabulary exercises. This paper is an attempt to study and explore the various methodologies that can be incorporated in the teaching of vocabulary items in a language classroom.
Background
Patterns of Difficulty in Vocabulary
Robert Lado ( 1955) talked about patterns of difficulty in vocabulary teaching. He highlighted key issues related to words, the native language factor and about patterns. He even analyzed Spanish, French and Mexican patterns of difficulty in their respective vocabulary items. He stated that while dealing with vocabulary one should take into account three important aspects of words - their form, their meaning and their distribution - and one should consider various kinds of classes of words in the function of the language. He said that the forms, meaning distribution and classification of words are different in different languages. He revealed that these differences might lead to vocabulary problems.
Vocabulary and Anatomy
Visnja Pavicic (2003) dealt with a way to improve students' abilities to explore, store and usage of vocabulary items. He determined the role of vocabulary teaching and how a teacher could help their learners. He laid emphasis on self initiated independent learning with strategies, in which formal practices, functional practices and memorizing could be included. He said that the teacher should create activities and tasks to help students to build their vocabulary and develop strategies to learn the vocabulary on their own.
Teaching Vocabulary in English Language: Effective Methodologies
It is noteworthy to mention here that vocabulary items are imparted mostly by translation: either a list of words with their translation at the beginning of the lesson or the translation of the content having new words or glossaries at the very end. This is an erroneous practice as it leads to a state of confusion for the learners. On the teaching skills of vocabulary items, Frisby (1957) commented that "While the teacher is not, himself, concerned with the actual selection of vocabulary for text book purposes since practically all the books we use are based on limited vocabularies, it is important that he/she (the teacher) should know the principles, which underlie vocabulary selection". Thus it signifies that a language teacher should be innovative and proficient in the application of methodologies pertaining to teaching vocabulary items in a classroom situation. Following are the main methodologies for teaching vocabulary items in an English language classroom.
Listening Carefully
Caeful listening to the words may be a good option in teaching vocabulary items in a heterogenic classroom. "Let the students hear the word in isolation and in a sentence. If the sounds of the word have been mastered, the students will hear it correctly with two or three repetitions." (Robert Lado: 121) Slow pronunciation without distortion will help. Breaking the word into parts and building up to the whole word will also be helpful.
Pronouncing the Word
Pronouncing the word enables the students to remember it longer and identify it more readily when they hear or see it.
Methods of Grasping the Meaning
The teacher should try to get the meaning to the class without using translation. This is not preferable on the ground that translation may or may not provide the meaning of the word accurately and precisely. It is advocated as it enables the class to go without grasping the meaning of a word that they have learned to pronounce rather than to depend upon the translation.
Key Strategies in Teaching Vocabulary
Some of the key strategies to unfold the information and meaning of a new word to a class are as follows:
Definitions
Definitions in the target language may be very handy if they are expressed in terms that are better known or more easily guessed than the word that is defined. In this direction teachers and students can refer to authentic and reliable dictionaries.
Self-defining Context
The context makes the situation clear, and this in turn illuminates the meaning of the new word. This practice saves time and develops an intensive reading habit and better understanding.
Antonyms
When one member of a pair of opposites is understood, the meaning of the other can be easily comprehended. This helps the student to understand the different shades of meanings of a word.
Synonyms
A synonym may be used to help the student to understand the different shades of meaning if the synonym is better known than the word being taught. Synonyms help to enrich a student's vocabulary bank and provide alternative words instantly.
Dramatization
This method can be practiced at ease. It can win the favour of the students as learners like dramatizations and can easily learn through them. Many situations can be dramatized or demonstrated.
Examples
* Sing [Sing a song]
* Open [Open a book]
* Close [Close the book]
Pictures and Drawings
Pictures of many types and colours can be used successfully to show the meaning of words and sentence. Handmade pictures can also be used as there is no need to be very artistic.
Examples
* into [Raj goes into the circle.]
* in [Rahman is in the circle.]
Drawings can be used to explain the meaning of things, actions, qualities, and relations. A line drawing of a head, for example, provides many useful nouns and verbs.
Realia
Real objects or models of real objects are very effective and meaningful in showing meanings but in handling of real objects, a teacher must be practical and should not be superfluous.
Series, Scales, Systems
The meaning of words such as the months of the year, the days of the week, the parts of the day, seasons of the year, ordinal numbers, cardinal numbers, etc. that form part of well-known series can be made clear by placing them in their natural order in the series.
Parts of Words
The parts of complex and compound words may be more common than the words themselves. Separating such words into their component parts generally elaborates the meaning.
Illustrative Sentences
Most words have a variety of restrictions on their use. Systematic descriptions of these restrictions and idiomatic uses would be laborious and not very effective in teaching. It is better to give appropriate examples that elucidate the range and variation of usage.
Practice from Meaning to Expression
This is controlled practice in which the class does not create new uses or new contexts but simply recalls the ones presented. There are many types of practices for this purpose. Pictures, realia, context, and dramatization can be used. Series and systems can also be used.
Reading the Word
Reading words aloud is also very beneficial. It makes a learner familiar with the word and also improves pronunciations of the learners.
Writing the Word
It will enable the class to write the new word while the auditory memory is fresh, even if the objective is only to read. Writing or copying the word from the blackboard will give the student a chance to understand the grammatical aspect of the word such as noun, verb, adverb, adjective etc.
Shift of Attention
Under this practice, the teacher provides a context by description or through reading which elicits the use of the word. The learners should be asked to pay attention to and develop an attitude or a point of view which he defends or attacks.
Strategy for Special Types of Words
Specific techniques or special combinations of the above techniques may be applicable for particular groups of words.
Words That Are Easy to Learn
It has been seen that the words that are similar in form and meaning to the first language are easy to understand and comprehend. They should be taught for listening and reading rather than for speaking and writing.
Words of Normal Difficulty
Words of normal difficulty are best taught in contextual realms, such as food, clothing, sports, work, and so on. There are advantages to using a connected context illustrating the words that are to be taught. Additional words can be taught as alternatives to those chosen in the connected context. Practice can be controlled in varying situations by changing a key word or phrase.
Difficult Words
Some words and sets of words are especially difficult to understand. They have to be taught as special problems with the strategy determined by the particular problem in each case.
Conclusion
An efficient language teacher can use selected vocabulary activities or can use integrated activities. All this depends upon ability and level of understanding and interest of the learners. There is no sure fire remedy or method to enhance vocabulary in a day or two. A student's vocabulary bank can be enriched on a gradual basis and one should always show keen interest and enthusiasm in finding, learning and understanding new words.
Storytelling in the EFL Speaking Classroom
Storytelling in the EFL Speaking Classroom
Xu Jianing
Suzhou Industrial Park Institute of Vocational Technology (Jiangsu Province, China)
jianing61 {at} yahoo.com.cn
Introduction
As English becomes increasingly important in various fields such as business, finance, industry and education, most Chinese students hope they can speak English fluently. However, from my observations and many EFL teachers' descriptions of their oral English classrooms, a considerable number of students are not responding actively in speaking exercises. How to motivate the students in EFL speaking classrooms has long been our concern. First of all, it is necessary to find out the main factors affecting their participation.
What Factors Are Discouraging the Students?
The Students Are Nervous and Afraid of Making Mistakes.
In China, to get high scores in the Higher Education Exam is nearly the only goal of the high school students. For some reason, there is no oral English test in the Higher Education Exam; thus speaking skills are often neglected. More over, since there are usually over 50 students in each class, the students have little chance to practice speaking in class. This leads to the result that the speaking skills of most students are comparatively lower than other skills such as listening, reading and grammar.
Secondly, the fear of "losing face" prevents the students from speaking English (Zhu, 2003). Face is still of great importance to most Chinese. On the one hand, it motivates people to work hard to win face; on the other, people tend to conceal their mistakes and weaknesses for fear of losing face. For many English learners, they believe if they make mistakes or fail to find suitable words to express themselves, they will lose face. To protect themselves from being laughed at, they are reluctant to speak English. So there is the vicious circle: the less they speak, the less they improve their speaking skills, and the more they are afraid of speaking.
The Topics Are Not Interesting.
The dominating oral English teaching materials in China focus on situational or/and communicative function (Chen 2004), aiming to enable students to cope, in the target language, with typical situations in school and work environments as well as in ordinary life. When "practical" is the prime principle, what the learners do most in the speaking classroom is to make dialogues according to the given situations or topics. However, students often complain that they have been repeatedly asked to introduce their families or schools; talk about their hobbies or majors; make dialogues on topics such as job interviews, meeting visitors or shopping. These "practical" topics and situations provide little space for the students to imagine and create; therefore, dialogues on these situational topics are hard to develop in depth and width. People tend to lose interest in what they learn if they find they make little progress.
Another problem with this kind of topic-based speaking training is you can't expect all the listeners to be interested in your hobby or major. Moreover, the other students in the classroom are talking about similar things, which could hardly offer anything new to each other. Consequently, the audiences in the speaking classroom are not very attentive and the speakers just make a perfunctory effort instead of getting involved, not even to mention enjoying it. To many of them, the job is just a job.
The Classroom Atmosphere Is Not Encouraging.
The effect of classroom atmosphere on language learning, especially an oral class, is obvious and immediate. A free and light-hearted atmosphere promotes communications, while a nervous and stiff atmosphere builds invisible obstacles in communications. Dialogues about daily life and routine work lack variation, do not sound enchanting, and are unlikely to create an animated classroom atmosphere.
Feedback of the Listeners Is Not Supportive.
According to my observations in speaking classes, apart from the factors mentioned above, the listeners' feedback also has a strong influence on the performance of the speakers. Very often, at the beginning of the performance, the speakers are confident and active when doing some dialogues or role play exercises. However, when the audience loses interest in the speakers, begin to talk to each other or just do whatever else instead of listening attentatively to the speakers, the speakers tend to, consciously or unconsciously, speed up or cut down their words, trying to flee back to their own seats as quickly as they can (students are often asked to present in the front of the classroom and face the class in order to build better communications since there are usually 40 to 50 students in each class). Even the slightest indifference or impatience indicated by the audience can be immediately felt by the speakers, which, in turn, greatly inhibits their passion to communicate. Of course, teachers can force the audiences to listen to the speakers but it is of no use blaming them. The most effective way is to offer the audiences something different and interesting!
Why Stories?
As we all know, stories have always played a significant role in children's growth. Stories not only help in stimulating children's imagination and understanding of the world, but also in developing children's language ability and appreciating literature (Aiex, 1988; Cooper, 1989; Koki, 1998; Zobairi & Gulley, 1989). It is just as Wright wrote, "Stories which rely so much on words, offer a major and constant source of language experience for children" (Wright, 1995).
The primary reason to recommend storytelling in the EFL speaking classroom is that stories are motivating and immensely interesting, can best attract listeners and promote communication. "The excitement and drama of storytelling provide a context that holds students' attention." (Cooter, 1991; Bla, 1998).
Secondly, stories are an enormous language treasure. For hundreds of years, thousands of stories have been created and passed down. Many old stories are regarded as the models of language and treasures of the culture, from which learners at various language levels and age groups can find suitable stories to read and tell. It would be a waste and pity if they are neglected in the course of EFL/ESL. In addition, stories are easily accessible; storybooks can be found in bookstores and borrowed from libraries or friends. Today, the most convenient and quickest way to find stories is from the Internet. “Storytelling …… costs nothing, is enjoyable, and can be used anywhere and at any time” (Zabel, 1991).
Thirdly, the lively atmosphere and real life environment created by stories encourages the students to talk and discuss with each other. When telling and listening to a story, the learners will easily be plunged into the plots and the scene and forget about themselves, which will, to a great degree, relieve their nervousness. Colon-vila (1997) also commented that storytelling helps EFL learners become more self-confident to express themselves spontaneously and creatively. However, teachers have not been zealous to use it in the classroom (Alvey, 1977).
Some students say that they have no time to meet with their partners and practice dialogues when they fail to do it well. Though sometimes it is just an excuse, nevertheless, storytelling helps solve the problem: partners are not indispensable to practice storytelling though it is better to have an audience.
To Whom to Use Stories?
Stories are often connected with children. In fact, they are not only loyal listeners; they also like to tell stories. The language classroom is just the place for children to share stories and show their language abilities. In China, there are various kinds of storytelling competitions in kindergartens and schools, attracting many children to participate. As long as the teacher gives proper instruction, children would be very pleased to learn storytelling in English. Besides, many stories can be adopted into short plays and children enjoy performing.
It should also be pointed out that stories are not only for children. There are many stories for EFL learners of different levels and ages. I have tried using stories in college English classrooms and found that even the poorest storyteller can be the center of attention.
How to Use Stories?
The following are just a few examples of using stories in the EFL speaking classroom arranged in the order of difficulty. At first, if the students are not confident in their speaking skills, it is recommended that the students be given enough time to prepare. As the students build their confidence and the classroom language environment becomes more free and active, the teacher could gradually increase the difficulty and make the game more versatile. To motivate and encourage the students, points and prizes are granted to good tellers and groups each time.
Warming Up
The students listen to some stories downloaded from the Internet and repeat as they listen. This gives them an opportunity to improve their pronunciation, stress and intonation. They are offered three stories each time and required to practice the one they like best. A competition is held every two weeks. When every student has learned to tell three to five stories naturally and expressively, they feel much more confident in telling stories in English than before.
Activity 1
Divide the students into groups and each group prepares a story. Each member of the group tells two to three sentences and the next one continues until the end of the story. The length of the story could gradually increase from two or three minutes to four or five minutes. Before the lesson, the students could divide their tasks in advance and practice their own parts. They could also be given a few minutes to practice in class the whole story if necessary. The teacher moves among the groups and chooses two or three groups to present their stories before the class. Because the students have enough time to prepare and they are working together, this helps them build confidence and create a lively and brisk atmosphere.
Activity 2
Ask each student to prepare a story (about two minutes long) in advance. Divide the students into groups with four to five members in each group and ask them to tell his/her story in the group. The best storytellers in each group win ten points and compete for the best storyteller of the class. The winner wins another ten points for each member of his/her group and the second best wins eight points and so on. Since the performance of each representative is connected to the score of everyone, the students will be greatly involved in the whole process and listen to the stories attentatively, which will in turn promote the performance of the storytellers.
To avoid the few best storytellers dominating the activity, the best storytellers will be arranged in the same group next time. They will have to work harder in order to win again. This will make the winners stronger and at the same time, increase the opportunities of others and promote the whole class participation.
Activity 3
Divide the students into four to five groups and each group is given an opening of a story and asked to finish the story in about 20 minutes. Then select one student from each group to tell their story in the class and the best one wins 10 points for their group.
To get everyone fully involved and avoid the liability that each group just asks their best storyteller to do the job, the storytellers are selected by drawing lots instead of being chosen by themselves. This also helps enliven the atmosphere of the classroom. So each group must work together to make the story as interesting as they can. An alternative way is to ask each member of the group to tell a part of the story and make a whole.
Activity 4
Ask each group to hand in an incomplete story and redistribute them among the groups. Give the students 20 minutes to read their stories and finish them. After each group presents their story, compare it with the original one. The most interesting one and the one closest to the original win.
Activity 5
The teacher gives the first sentence to the class and then each student adds one more sentence to make a whole story impromptu. Because there is no preparation and no body has any idea about what the next person will say and where the story is going, there are often lots of fun and surprises in the game.
This game is suitable to the classes with no more than 20 students. If there are too many students, the students will wait too long to make his/her sentence, which is likely to make the game sluggish; also, the students may not hear each other clearly and this will reduce the success of the game.
In the process of using stories, the teacher could, in different cases, choose to encourage the students to rewrite the stories, using their own language or ask them to keep the original language as much as they can. The former way encourages the students to understand the stories and adds their own characteristics to the stories and the latter prompts them to learn to use new words and expressions. Besides, pictures, movies and other materials would also be great help in storytelling. After a few months, the students’ speaking ability can be improved to considerable degree.
Conclusion
There are many ways to use stories in the oral English classroom. It is also advised to encourage the students to find more interesting stories and create different ways to use them. Besides, in the course of looking for, rewriting and completing stories, their reading, writing and imagination can be further developed; teamwork and friendship will become stronger by working in groups. So let stories be a member of your oral English class!
References
* Aiex, N. K. (1998). Storytelling : Its wide-Ranging Impact in the Classroom. [ED: 299 574]. Alvey, R.G. (1974). The Historical Development of Organized Storytelling to Children in the United States. Phd Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
* Chen, Xiaohua. (2004). Sun Yatsen University Forum, Vol.24 No.5
* Colon-vila, L. (1997). Storytelling in the ESL Classroom. Teaching K-8, 58-59.
* Cooter, 1991 in Adventures with Words, Black, 1998.
* Cooper, P. (1989). Using storytelling to teach oral communication competencies K-12. Paper presents in the Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication. Association (75#, San Francisco, CA). [ED: 314 798]
* Koki, Stan. (1998). Storytelling: the heart and soul of education. [ED: 426 398].
* Wright, A. (1995). Storytelling with children. Oxford University Press.
* Zable, M.K. (1991). Storytelling, Myths, and Folk Tales: Strategies for Multicultural Inclusion. Preventing School Failure, v36, nl, 32-34.
* Zobairi, N. & Gulley, B. (1989). The told tale: Oral storytelling and the young children. [ED: 319 517]
* Zhu, Hua. (2003). Journal of Liaoning Educational Administration Institute, Vol.20 No.9
Xu Jianing
Suzhou Industrial Park Institute of Vocational Technology (Jiangsu Province, China)
jianing61 {at} yahoo.com.cn
Introduction
As English becomes increasingly important in various fields such as business, finance, industry and education, most Chinese students hope they can speak English fluently. However, from my observations and many EFL teachers' descriptions of their oral English classrooms, a considerable number of students are not responding actively in speaking exercises. How to motivate the students in EFL speaking classrooms has long been our concern. First of all, it is necessary to find out the main factors affecting their participation.
What Factors Are Discouraging the Students?
The Students Are Nervous and Afraid of Making Mistakes.
In China, to get high scores in the Higher Education Exam is nearly the only goal of the high school students. For some reason, there is no oral English test in the Higher Education Exam; thus speaking skills are often neglected. More over, since there are usually over 50 students in each class, the students have little chance to practice speaking in class. This leads to the result that the speaking skills of most students are comparatively lower than other skills such as listening, reading and grammar.
Secondly, the fear of "losing face" prevents the students from speaking English (Zhu, 2003). Face is still of great importance to most Chinese. On the one hand, it motivates people to work hard to win face; on the other, people tend to conceal their mistakes and weaknesses for fear of losing face. For many English learners, they believe if they make mistakes or fail to find suitable words to express themselves, they will lose face. To protect themselves from being laughed at, they are reluctant to speak English. So there is the vicious circle: the less they speak, the less they improve their speaking skills, and the more they are afraid of speaking.
The Topics Are Not Interesting.
The dominating oral English teaching materials in China focus on situational or/and communicative function (Chen 2004), aiming to enable students to cope, in the target language, with typical situations in school and work environments as well as in ordinary life. When "practical" is the prime principle, what the learners do most in the speaking classroom is to make dialogues according to the given situations or topics. However, students often complain that they have been repeatedly asked to introduce their families or schools; talk about their hobbies or majors; make dialogues on topics such as job interviews, meeting visitors or shopping. These "practical" topics and situations provide little space for the students to imagine and create; therefore, dialogues on these situational topics are hard to develop in depth and width. People tend to lose interest in what they learn if they find they make little progress.
Another problem with this kind of topic-based speaking training is you can't expect all the listeners to be interested in your hobby or major. Moreover, the other students in the classroom are talking about similar things, which could hardly offer anything new to each other. Consequently, the audiences in the speaking classroom are not very attentive and the speakers just make a perfunctory effort instead of getting involved, not even to mention enjoying it. To many of them, the job is just a job.
The Classroom Atmosphere Is Not Encouraging.
The effect of classroom atmosphere on language learning, especially an oral class, is obvious and immediate. A free and light-hearted atmosphere promotes communications, while a nervous and stiff atmosphere builds invisible obstacles in communications. Dialogues about daily life and routine work lack variation, do not sound enchanting, and are unlikely to create an animated classroom atmosphere.
Feedback of the Listeners Is Not Supportive.
According to my observations in speaking classes, apart from the factors mentioned above, the listeners' feedback also has a strong influence on the performance of the speakers. Very often, at the beginning of the performance, the speakers are confident and active when doing some dialogues or role play exercises. However, when the audience loses interest in the speakers, begin to talk to each other or just do whatever else instead of listening attentatively to the speakers, the speakers tend to, consciously or unconsciously, speed up or cut down their words, trying to flee back to their own seats as quickly as they can (students are often asked to present in the front of the classroom and face the class in order to build better communications since there are usually 40 to 50 students in each class). Even the slightest indifference or impatience indicated by the audience can be immediately felt by the speakers, which, in turn, greatly inhibits their passion to communicate. Of course, teachers can force the audiences to listen to the speakers but it is of no use blaming them. The most effective way is to offer the audiences something different and interesting!
Why Stories?
As we all know, stories have always played a significant role in children's growth. Stories not only help in stimulating children's imagination and understanding of the world, but also in developing children's language ability and appreciating literature (Aiex, 1988; Cooper, 1989; Koki, 1998; Zobairi & Gulley, 1989). It is just as Wright wrote, "Stories which rely so much on words, offer a major and constant source of language experience for children" (Wright, 1995).
The primary reason to recommend storytelling in the EFL speaking classroom is that stories are motivating and immensely interesting, can best attract listeners and promote communication. "The excitement and drama of storytelling provide a context that holds students' attention." (Cooter, 1991; Bla, 1998).
Secondly, stories are an enormous language treasure. For hundreds of years, thousands of stories have been created and passed down. Many old stories are regarded as the models of language and treasures of the culture, from which learners at various language levels and age groups can find suitable stories to read and tell. It would be a waste and pity if they are neglected in the course of EFL/ESL. In addition, stories are easily accessible; storybooks can be found in bookstores and borrowed from libraries or friends. Today, the most convenient and quickest way to find stories is from the Internet. “Storytelling …… costs nothing, is enjoyable, and can be used anywhere and at any time” (Zabel, 1991).
Thirdly, the lively atmosphere and real life environment created by stories encourages the students to talk and discuss with each other. When telling and listening to a story, the learners will easily be plunged into the plots and the scene and forget about themselves, which will, to a great degree, relieve their nervousness. Colon-vila (1997) also commented that storytelling helps EFL learners become more self-confident to express themselves spontaneously and creatively. However, teachers have not been zealous to use it in the classroom (Alvey, 1977).
Some students say that they have no time to meet with their partners and practice dialogues when they fail to do it well. Though sometimes it is just an excuse, nevertheless, storytelling helps solve the problem: partners are not indispensable to practice storytelling though it is better to have an audience.
To Whom to Use Stories?
Stories are often connected with children. In fact, they are not only loyal listeners; they also like to tell stories. The language classroom is just the place for children to share stories and show their language abilities. In China, there are various kinds of storytelling competitions in kindergartens and schools, attracting many children to participate. As long as the teacher gives proper instruction, children would be very pleased to learn storytelling in English. Besides, many stories can be adopted into short plays and children enjoy performing.
It should also be pointed out that stories are not only for children. There are many stories for EFL learners of different levels and ages. I have tried using stories in college English classrooms and found that even the poorest storyteller can be the center of attention.
How to Use Stories?
The following are just a few examples of using stories in the EFL speaking classroom arranged in the order of difficulty. At first, if the students are not confident in their speaking skills, it is recommended that the students be given enough time to prepare. As the students build their confidence and the classroom language environment becomes more free and active, the teacher could gradually increase the difficulty and make the game more versatile. To motivate and encourage the students, points and prizes are granted to good tellers and groups each time.
Warming Up
The students listen to some stories downloaded from the Internet and repeat as they listen. This gives them an opportunity to improve their pronunciation, stress and intonation. They are offered three stories each time and required to practice the one they like best. A competition is held every two weeks. When every student has learned to tell three to five stories naturally and expressively, they feel much more confident in telling stories in English than before.
Activity 1
Divide the students into groups and each group prepares a story. Each member of the group tells two to three sentences and the next one continues until the end of the story. The length of the story could gradually increase from two or three minutes to four or five minutes. Before the lesson, the students could divide their tasks in advance and practice their own parts. They could also be given a few minutes to practice in class the whole story if necessary. The teacher moves among the groups and chooses two or three groups to present their stories before the class. Because the students have enough time to prepare and they are working together, this helps them build confidence and create a lively and brisk atmosphere.
Activity 2
Ask each student to prepare a story (about two minutes long) in advance. Divide the students into groups with four to five members in each group and ask them to tell his/her story in the group. The best storytellers in each group win ten points and compete for the best storyteller of the class. The winner wins another ten points for each member of his/her group and the second best wins eight points and so on. Since the performance of each representative is connected to the score of everyone, the students will be greatly involved in the whole process and listen to the stories attentatively, which will in turn promote the performance of the storytellers.
To avoid the few best storytellers dominating the activity, the best storytellers will be arranged in the same group next time. They will have to work harder in order to win again. This will make the winners stronger and at the same time, increase the opportunities of others and promote the whole class participation.
Activity 3
Divide the students into four to five groups and each group is given an opening of a story and asked to finish the story in about 20 minutes. Then select one student from each group to tell their story in the class and the best one wins 10 points for their group.
To get everyone fully involved and avoid the liability that each group just asks their best storyteller to do the job, the storytellers are selected by drawing lots instead of being chosen by themselves. This also helps enliven the atmosphere of the classroom. So each group must work together to make the story as interesting as they can. An alternative way is to ask each member of the group to tell a part of the story and make a whole.
Activity 4
Ask each group to hand in an incomplete story and redistribute them among the groups. Give the students 20 minutes to read their stories and finish them. After each group presents their story, compare it with the original one. The most interesting one and the one closest to the original win.
Activity 5
The teacher gives the first sentence to the class and then each student adds one more sentence to make a whole story impromptu. Because there is no preparation and no body has any idea about what the next person will say and where the story is going, there are often lots of fun and surprises in the game.
This game is suitable to the classes with no more than 20 students. If there are too many students, the students will wait too long to make his/her sentence, which is likely to make the game sluggish; also, the students may not hear each other clearly and this will reduce the success of the game.
In the process of using stories, the teacher could, in different cases, choose to encourage the students to rewrite the stories, using their own language or ask them to keep the original language as much as they can. The former way encourages the students to understand the stories and adds their own characteristics to the stories and the latter prompts them to learn to use new words and expressions. Besides, pictures, movies and other materials would also be great help in storytelling. After a few months, the students’ speaking ability can be improved to considerable degree.
Conclusion
There are many ways to use stories in the oral English classroom. It is also advised to encourage the students to find more interesting stories and create different ways to use them. Besides, in the course of looking for, rewriting and completing stories, their reading, writing and imagination can be further developed; teamwork and friendship will become stronger by working in groups. So let stories be a member of your oral English class!
References
* Aiex, N. K. (1998). Storytelling : Its wide-Ranging Impact in the Classroom. [ED: 299 574]. Alvey, R.G. (1974). The Historical Development of Organized Storytelling to Children in the United States. Phd Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
* Chen, Xiaohua. (2004). Sun Yatsen University Forum, Vol.24 No.5
* Colon-vila, L. (1997). Storytelling in the ESL Classroom. Teaching K-8, 58-59.
* Cooter, 1991 in Adventures with Words, Black, 1998.
* Cooper, P. (1989). Using storytelling to teach oral communication competencies K-12. Paper presents in the Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication. Association (75#, San Francisco, CA). [ED: 314 798]
* Koki, Stan. (1998). Storytelling: the heart and soul of education. [ED: 426 398].
* Wright, A. (1995). Storytelling with children. Oxford University Press.
* Zable, M.K. (1991). Storytelling, Myths, and Folk Tales: Strategies for Multicultural Inclusion. Preventing School Failure, v36, nl, 32-34.
* Zobairi, N. & Gulley, B. (1989). The told tale: Oral storytelling and the young children. [ED: 319 517]
* Zhu, Hua. (2003). Journal of Liaoning Educational Administration Institute, Vol.20 No.9
Syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek σύνταξις "arrangement" from σύν syn, "together", and τάξις táxis, "an ordering") is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish."
Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages. The term syntax is also sometimes used to refer to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such as logic, artificial formal languages, and computer programming languages.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early history
* 2 Modern theories
o 2.1 Generative grammar
o 2.2 Categorial grammar
o 2.3 Dependency grammar
o 2.4 Stochastic/probabilistic grammars/network theories
o 2.5 Functionalist grammars
* 3 See also
o 3.1 Syntactic terms
* 4 Notes
* 5 References
* 6 External links
[edit] Early history
Works on grammar were being written long before modern syntax came about; the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini is often cited as an example of a premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.[1] In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as "traditional grammar" began with the work of Dionysius Thrax.
For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a framework known as grammaire générale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of the same title. This system took as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and therefore there is a single, most natural way to express a thought. That way, coincidentally, was exactly the way it was expressed in French.
However, in the 19th century, with the development of historical-comparative linguistics, linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language, and to question fundamental assumptions about the relationship between language and logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as a most natural way to express a thought, and therefore logic could no longer be relied upon as a basis for studying the structure of language.
The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic (indeed, large parts of the Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from the Grammaire générale[2]). Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of "Subject – Copula – Predicate". Initially, this view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp.
The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as linguistics is concerned. For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the last two centuries, see the monumental work by Graffi (2001).
[edit] Modern theories
There are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. Many linguists see syntax as a branch of biology, since they conceive of syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human mind. Others (e.g. Gerald Gazdar) take a more Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system.[3] Yet others (e.g. Joseph Greenberg) consider grammar a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages. Some of the major approaches to the discipline are listed below.
[edit] Generative grammar
Main article: Generative grammar
The hypothesis of generative grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind. The goal of generative grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language (known as i-language). This model could be used to describe all human language and to predict the grammaticality of any given utterance (that is, to predict whether the utterance would sound correct to native speakers of the language). This approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Most generative theories (although not all of them) assume that syntax is based upon the constituent structure of sentences. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of a sentence, rather than its communicative function.
Among the many generative theories of linguistics, the Chomskyan theories are:
* Transformational Grammar (TG) (Original theory of generative syntax laid out by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures in 1957[4])
* Government and binding theory (GB) (revised theory in the tradition of TG developed mainly by Chomsky in the 1970s and 1980s).[5]
* The Minimalist Program (MP) (revised version of GB published by Chomsky in 1995)[6]
Other theories that find their origin in the generative paradigm are:
* Generative semantics (now largely out of date)
* Relational grammar (RG) (now largely out of date)
* Arc Pair grammar
* Generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG; now largely out of date)
* Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG)
* Lexical-functional grammar (LFG)
[edit] Categorial grammar
Main article: Categorial grammar
Categorial grammar is an approach that attributes the syntactic structure not to rules of grammar, but to the properties of the syntactic categories themselves. For example, rather than asserting that sentences are constructed by a rule that combines a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP) (e.g. the phrase structure rule S → NP VP), in categorial grammar, such principles are embedded in the category of the head word itself. So the syntactic category for an intransitive verb is a complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as a functor which requires an NP as an input and produces a sentence level structure as an output. This complex category is notated as (NP\S) instead of V. NP\S is read as " a category that searches to the left (indicated by \) for a NP (the element on the left) and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)". The category of transitive verb is defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object) to form a sentence. This is notated as (NP/(NP\S)) which means "a category that searches to the right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object), and generates a function (equivalent to the VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and produces a sentence).
Tree-adjoining grammar is a categorial grammar that adds in partial tree structures to the categories.
[edit] Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar is a different type of approach in which structure is determined by the relations (such as grammatical relations) between a word (a head) and its dependents, rather than being based in constituent structure. For example, syntactic structure is described in terms of whether a particular noun is the subject or agent of the verb, rather than describing the relations in terms of phrases.
Some dependency-based theories of syntax:
* Algebraic syntax
* Word grammar
* Operator Grammar
* Meaning-Text Theory
[edit] Stochastic/probabilistic grammars/network theories
Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based upon probability theory are known as stochastic grammars. One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a neural network or connectionism. Some theories based within this approach are:
* Optimality theory
* Stochastic context-free grammar
[edit] Functionalist grammars
Functionalist theories, although focused upon form, are driven by explanation based upon the function of a sentence (i.e. its communicative function). Some typical functionalist theories include:
* Functional grammar (Dik)
* Prague Linguistic Circle
* Systemic functional grammar
* Cognitive grammar
* Construction grammar (CxG)
* Role and reference grammar (RRG)
* Emergent grammar
In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek σύνταξις "arrangement" from σύν syn, "together", and τάξις táxis, "an ordering") is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish."
Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages. The term syntax is also sometimes used to refer to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such as logic, artificial formal languages, and computer programming languages.
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Early history
* 2 Modern theories
o 2.1 Generative grammar
o 2.2 Categorial grammar
o 2.3 Dependency grammar
o 2.4 Stochastic/probabilistic grammars/network theories
o 2.5 Functionalist grammars
* 3 See also
o 3.1 Syntactic terms
* 4 Notes
* 5 References
* 6 External links
[edit] Early history
Works on grammar were being written long before modern syntax came about; the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini is often cited as an example of a premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.[1] In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as "traditional grammar" began with the work of Dionysius Thrax.
For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a framework known as grammaire générale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of the same title. This system took as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and therefore there is a single, most natural way to express a thought. That way, coincidentally, was exactly the way it was expressed in French.
However, in the 19th century, with the development of historical-comparative linguistics, linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language, and to question fundamental assumptions about the relationship between language and logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as a most natural way to express a thought, and therefore logic could no longer be relied upon as a basis for studying the structure of language.
The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic (indeed, large parts of the Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from the Grammaire générale[2]). Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of "Subject – Copula – Predicate". Initially, this view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp.
The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as linguistics is concerned. For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the last two centuries, see the monumental work by Graffi (2001).
[edit] Modern theories
There are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. Many linguists see syntax as a branch of biology, since they conceive of syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human mind. Others (e.g. Gerald Gazdar) take a more Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system.[3] Yet others (e.g. Joseph Greenberg) consider grammar a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages. Some of the major approaches to the discipline are listed below.
[edit] Generative grammar
Main article: Generative grammar
The hypothesis of generative grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind. The goal of generative grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language (known as i-language). This model could be used to describe all human language and to predict the grammaticality of any given utterance (that is, to predict whether the utterance would sound correct to native speakers of the language). This approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Most generative theories (although not all of them) assume that syntax is based upon the constituent structure of sentences. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of a sentence, rather than its communicative function.
Among the many generative theories of linguistics, the Chomskyan theories are:
* Transformational Grammar (TG) (Original theory of generative syntax laid out by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures in 1957[4])
* Government and binding theory (GB) (revised theory in the tradition of TG developed mainly by Chomsky in the 1970s and 1980s).[5]
* The Minimalist Program (MP) (revised version of GB published by Chomsky in 1995)[6]
Other theories that find their origin in the generative paradigm are:
* Generative semantics (now largely out of date)
* Relational grammar (RG) (now largely out of date)
* Arc Pair grammar
* Generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG; now largely out of date)
* Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG)
* Lexical-functional grammar (LFG)
[edit] Categorial grammar
Main article: Categorial grammar
Categorial grammar is an approach that attributes the syntactic structure not to rules of grammar, but to the properties of the syntactic categories themselves. For example, rather than asserting that sentences are constructed by a rule that combines a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP) (e.g. the phrase structure rule S → NP VP), in categorial grammar, such principles are embedded in the category of the head word itself. So the syntactic category for an intransitive verb is a complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as a functor which requires an NP as an input and produces a sentence level structure as an output. This complex category is notated as (NP\S) instead of V. NP\S is read as " a category that searches to the left (indicated by \) for a NP (the element on the left) and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)". The category of transitive verb is defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object) to form a sentence. This is notated as (NP/(NP\S)) which means "a category that searches to the right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object), and generates a function (equivalent to the VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and produces a sentence).
Tree-adjoining grammar is a categorial grammar that adds in partial tree structures to the categories.
[edit] Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar is a different type of approach in which structure is determined by the relations (such as grammatical relations) between a word (a head) and its dependents, rather than being based in constituent structure. For example, syntactic structure is described in terms of whether a particular noun is the subject or agent of the verb, rather than describing the relations in terms of phrases.
Some dependency-based theories of syntax:
* Algebraic syntax
* Word grammar
* Operator Grammar
* Meaning-Text Theory
[edit] Stochastic/probabilistic grammars/network theories
Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based upon probability theory are known as stochastic grammars. One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a neural network or connectionism. Some theories based within this approach are:
* Optimality theory
* Stochastic context-free grammar
[edit] Functionalist grammars
Functionalist theories, although focused upon form, are driven by explanation based upon the function of a sentence (i.e. its communicative function). Some typical functionalist theories include:
* Functional grammar (Dik)
* Prague Linguistic Circle
* Systemic functional grammar
* Cognitive grammar
* Construction grammar (CxG)
* Role and reference grammar (RRG)
* Emergent grammar
Langganan:
Postingan (Atom)
