Literary Communication as Dialogue
Responsibilities and pleasures in post-postmodern times
Selected papers 2003-2020
| Åbo Akademi University
As traced by Roger D. Sell, literary communication is a process of community-making. As long as literary authors and those responding to them respect each other’s human autonomy, literature flourishes as an enjoyable, though often challenging mode of interaction that is truly dialogical in spirit. This gives rise to author-respondent communities whose members represent existential commonalities blended together with historical differences.
These heterogeneous literary communities have a larger social significance, in that they have long served as counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity, and more recently to postmodernity’s well-intentioned but restrictive politics of identity. In post-postmodern times, their ethos is increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentsia can now seem rather dated.
Some of the papers selected for this volume develop Sell’s ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers, ranging from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early modern period, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Dickens, Pinter, and Rushdie.
These heterogeneous literary communities have a larger social significance, in that they have long served as counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity, and more recently to postmodernity’s well-intentioned but restrictive politics of identity. In post-postmodern times, their ethos is increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentsia can now seem rather dated.
Some of the papers selected for this volume develop Sell’s ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers, ranging from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early modern period, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Dickens, Pinter, and Rushdie.
[FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures, 14] 2020. xii, 425 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
Series editor’s preface
|
ix
|
Acknowledgements
|
xi–xii
|
Introduction
|
1–14
|
Chapter 1. Postmodernity, literary pragmatics, mediating criticism: Meanings within a large circle of communicants
|
15–38
|
Chapter 2. What is literary communication and what is a literary community?
|
39–44
|
Chapter 3. Gadamer, Habermas, and a re-humanized literary scholarship
|
45–53
|
Chapter 4. Sir John Beaumont and his three audiences
|
55–83
|
Chapter 5. Dialogicality and ethics: Four cases of literary address
|
85–110
|
Chapter 6. Encouraging the readers of tomorrow: Books and empathy
|
111–115
|
Chapter 7. Dialogue versus silencing: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
|
117–158
|
Chapter 8. Cultural memory and the communicational criticism of literature
|
159–183
|
Chapter 9. Herbert’s considerateness: A communicational assessment
|
185–191
|
Chapter 10. In dialogue with the ageing Wordsworth
|
193–208
|
Chapter 11. A communicational criticism for post-postmodern times
|
209–228
|
Chapter 12. Review: Till Kinzel and Jarmila Mildorf (eds). Imaginary dialogues in American literature and philosophy: Beyond the mainstream
|
229–235
|
Chapter 13. Political and hedonic re-contextualizations: Prince Charles’s Spanish journey in Beaumont, Jonson, and Middleton
|
237–257
|
Chapter 14. Where do literary authors belong?: A post-postmodern answer
|
259–275
|
Chapter 15. Honour dishonoured: The communicational workings of early Stuart tragedy and tragi-comedy
|
277–304
|
Chapter 16. Dialogue and literature
|
305–325
|
Chapter 17. Ben Jonson’s Epigram 101, “Inviting a Friend to Supper”: Literary pleasures immediately tasted
|
327–358
|
Chapter 18. Literature, human commonalities, and cultural differences: Stability and change
|
359–379
|
Chapter 19. Two opposed modes of communication between Dickens and his readers
|
381–396
|
References
|
397–420
|
Index
|
421–425
|
References
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MS Rawlinson B
183.
British Library
Additional MS
33,392.
Harleian MS
6917.
MS Stowe 960.
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(1994) “Literary gossip, literary theory,
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linguistics, history, eds Roger
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(1999) “
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(2001) “Communication: A counterbalance to
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D. Sell, A humanizing literary pragmatics: Theory,
criticism, education: Selected papers
1985–2002 (Amsterdam 2019), 327–342)).
(2001) “How much should history weigh?
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history: Discourse of war and conflict, eds Ina Biermann and Annette Combrink (Potchefstroom: Potchefstroom University), 274–93 (revised as Chapter
6, “
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mediation,” in Roger
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(2001) “Waistlines: Bowling, Orwell,
Blair”, in Language, Learning, Literature: Studies Presented to Håkan
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8, “Orwell’s Coming Up For Air and the communal negotiation of
feelings,” in Roger
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literature as
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(2004) “Blessings, benefactions and bear’s
services: Great Expectations and communicational narratology,” The European Journal of
English Studies 8: 49–80 (revised as
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Subjects
Literature & Literary Studies
BIC Subject: DSB – Literary studies: general
BISAC Subject: LAN009030 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Pragmatics