Introduction to Literature - Summary

o reception aesthetics/reader-response approaches (concerned with potential mean-ing inherent in text) o empirical reception studies approaches (concerned with actual impact on real readers)

Historical reality as context Sociological and Marxist approaches Feminist approaches New historicism Cultural materialism Other texts a s contexts Sources and influence studies Studies in intertextuality and intermediality

they enable us to identify and describe the characteristics of a literary text in a pre-cise way

they can be used to express the premises of literary analysis, define basic terminolo-gy and explain the aims of the investigation

they allow for a systematic classification of texts and their respective characteristics

they enable us to position texts within broader historical contexts

Fictionality (often indicated by textual signals, e.g. “Once upon a time...”) Ambiguity replaces clarity and allows for a variety of interpretations Deviation from everyday language, which causesdefamiliarisation. Dominance of poetic rather than referential function of language  Non-pragmatic discourse (literary texts usually neither serve an immediate purpose nor give direct instructions)