Edebiyat Kuramı

The Open Yale Courses Series

by Paul H. Fry, Ayşe Demir (Translator), İbrahim Tüzer (Translator)

40 yılı aşkın süredir Yale Üniversitesinde ders veren Paul Fry, Önsöz, 26 müstakil bölüm, Ek ve Notlar’dan oluşan kitabında edebiyat kuramının hemen hemen tüm meselelerine temas ediyor.
Yorumlama ve Okumanın İlk Yansımaları, Metin ve Yapı, Yazar (Okur) ve Ruh, Toplumsal Bağlam ve Kuramın İyi ve Kötü Tarafları adını vererek bir araya topladığı bölümlerinde bir metni içerden ve dışarıdan kuşatan tüm unsurları örneklerle açıklamaya çalışıyor.
Bu örnekler kimi zaman Dünya Edebiyatı’nda klasik duruma gelmiş anlatılardan kimi zaman da daha az bilinen metinlerden oluşuyor. Kimi zaman da film ve şarkılar, ilgili teori ele alınırken örnek olarak söz konusu ediliyor.
Kitabın sonuna Stefan Esposito tarafından eklenen Yorumlama Biçimleri: Edebiyat Kuramında İleri Okuma Rehberi adlı bölüm ise tam bir kılavuz niteliği taşıyor. Kitabın yazıya geçirilmesinde de çok büyük emeği olan Esposito, Paul Fry’ın kitap boyunca ele aldığı kuramların daha temelli kaynaklarını işaret ederek meraklıları için kuramsal bir bibliyografya sunuyor.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Literature, Literary Criticism, Theory, Writing, Criticism

552 pages, Paperback

First published June 24, 2008

About the author

Paul H. Fry is the William Lampson Professor of English and has taught at Yale since 1971. He received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph. D. from Harvard. His primary areas of specialization are British romanticism, the history of literary criticism, contemporary literary theory, and literature in relation to the visual arts.
He was Director of Graduate Studies in the English department for nine years and Master of Ezra Stiles College for seven. Since 2008 he has been Director of Graduate Studies in English again. He served as member and Chair of the Region II Committee for the Mellon Fellowships in the Humanities for twenty-five years. Among his more unusual publications are numerous short essays on painting and exhibition reviews for ArtNews and an article on aesthetics in the Philoctetes Journal, a periodical for the study of the imagination sponsored by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the 2011 winner of the Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teaching Award offered by the Kennedy Center for the Arts. His lecture course, "Introduction to Literary Theory," can be viewed on OpenYale. He is Executive Co-Chair of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and its national counterpart, the Yale National Initiative, in which he has led summer seminars for seven years. He began life as a painter and hopes to come full circle.

Reviews

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

After p. 110

Decades ago I began reading hermeneutics. Then I stopped. Gadamer wrote endlessly about "the" reader - quite as if there were only one such creature on the planet. I thought: I read; therefore, I am a reader. But I was/am most decidedly not Gadamer's reader. So I concluded that Gadamer was writing autobiography of a kind that I didn't find particularly interesting.

But all those theorists of literature kept making so much noise. The 1980's were particularly unpleasant in that it was very difficult at that time to ignore the intrusions - especially if one subscribed to NYRB, which I did then. Perhaps they still do. I wouldn't know. I allowed my subscription to expire, and I moved on.

Nonetheless, I dabbled again, sometime in the 1990's, if I recall correctly, and found that the situation still reminded me very much of my introduction to radio frequency communications engineering - the source of my livelihood. I had concluded that one was either born knowing RF comm engineering or that one passed through some sort of ritual initiation at the conclusion of which one simply knew. No RF engineer ever learned anything. They simply knew. Of course, no RF engineer I ever met could - or can - explain anything. They hadn't learned, so they couldn't explain. In one particularly memorable moment, I asked a noted professor of electrical engineering to present a concept from a different perspective or point of departure because I couldn't follow the reasoning he had just deployed. His response was to repeat his remarks word for word - but more loudly. In that instant, or rather, after I stopped choking on suppressed laughter, I realized - he has no understanding of his field - none. He manipulates equations. He's not an engineer. He's an accountant. Years passed - and I found square one on my own. Or more correctly, I found my square one.

So since then I always search for books that begin at the beginning, those books that state the fundamental concepts, ideas, questions that define a field of inquiry - and in sequence, that present first the very first "thing" one needs to know and understand, square one, then the second "thing" and the relationship of "thing" one to "thing" two, then the very first complex "thing" that represents an plausible implication or defensible inferrence from things one and two, i.e. "thing" three, and so on. They are rare indeed.

And Fry's book may or may not be such a book. I'm not sure. After 100 pages, I'm tempted to say - no. But then again, there is a square one in this book, I think - for me at least, and that is Saussure. The Russian Formalists represent square two, the New Critics = square three, maybe. And so on. But Fry's lectures (Open Yale) don't follow this sequence. Fry's sequence makes no sense to me at all. If I hadn't rearranged the material in my own mind, and then written out a sequence that I can understand, I would still be wondering why all the cacophonous jargon and needlessly obscure neologisms occupy pages between two covers of the same book. So I, for one, have had to grapple with this material - an effort I was not willing to expend decades ago. I had no reason. Today it's not so hard. I even enjoy it - now that I know to look for square one, to recognize it when I see it, and to accept that square one may not even be present at all.

I also know that at page 200 or when I finish this book, my sense of square one may well have changed. And I also understand that I would read this book a second time with the experience of a first reading already absorbed - as it were. And so I might land on a different square one. And I might also dust off other volumes that I've been carting about for thirty years and find that Fry hadn't presented the REAL square one at all. At least I will have the sense that I can begin to navigate my own way through this needlessly obscure literature. A shaman's mysteries, and the RF engineer's - are are his livelihood, after all.

After p. 200
If Fry's book - so far - represents an accurate survey of the field, then I'm tempted to believe today, at this moment, that a theory of literature doesn't exist - just as I've suspected for many years now.

What we have on the one hand is a great deal of speculation about the nature of language, semiotic systems and speech - all quite interesting, and on the other we have various approaches, more or less interesting, to the interpretation of texts - any text as far as I can tell, Johnson's Dictionary, Blackstone's Commentaries, King Lear, advertising copy for Super Bowl Sunday, the Yellow Pages, whatever. But what I don't see - yet - is any systematic account of (1) how individuals employ language/semeiotic systems or certain expressive capabilites of those systems to generate various categories of texts, (2) the particular segment in the universe of all possible texts that intelligible texts occupy, i.e. what distinguishes intelligible texts from unintelligible texts (intelligible to whom? when? where?), and (3) the tiny, tiny spec in a spot in that segment, perhaps, where one might find intelligible, literary texts, assuming, of course, that one can even recognize a "literary text" if one happened upon a specimen. [What, by the way, is the atomic weight of one molecule of "literature"?]

What I think today, at this moment, is that one assigns texts to a category called "literature" because one harbors particular preferences, and one wishes to assert or impose those preferences upon other people - in the extreme, of course, a theory of literature can represent, in certain circumstances, an act of coersion or extortion. So I suspect that any theory of literature, assuming that it exists, is, in the limit, displaced autobiography. I mean by this that anyone who posits a theory of literature is only attempting to convey/assert personal likes, dislikes, preferences, for which one may offer reasons, of course, even if one formulates that theory and those reasons in the language of an imperial rescript.

I'm reminded here of a bit of my own biography. As a toddler I was attracted to bright, shiney rocks. I found mica absolutely fascinating. I dug and dug in my backyard, collected and collected, washed and scrubbed my specimens. Eventually my Uncle Jim gave me one of his empty cigar boxes, and I only put my bits of mica in that box, entirely segregated from quartz, which I also liked, but not so much. And then my mother suggested that I make a label for my box, and so I took crayons in hand, and printed out a label, i.e. a text, with one word, MICA, decorated the borders of the label with elaborate arabesques of many colors, and pasted it to the lid of my cigar box, now filled with my very favorite bits of mica. And I was quite pleased with myself - as were my mother and Uncle Jim.

So as far as I can tell "literature" is just that sort of text. It refers to nothing in particular. Its meaning varies. Its meaning derives from the specimens that one person or another, who lives(d) in a particular time and place, chooses to place in an otherwise empty box.

At End.
In his last lecture Fry discloses his definition of the domain of "theory". That definition excludes about 50% of the material he presented in his lectures. Hermeneutics isn't theory, it turns out. So why do about 175 pages of hermeneutics appear in this volume? And he provides no justification for the topics and issues that delimit, in his view, the proper scope and subject of "theory." And what happened to literary theory? "Theory of literature" appears only on the title page - and never in any lecture, so I suppose an editor/publisher created that title for purposes Fry does not disclose. And there's no point in wondering why that might be the case.

There's no end to my befuddlement.

But all this takes me back decades to a similar experience, when I spent one extremely unpleasant year as a graduate student at Princeton - before moving on to another university of equal stature where I was equally unhappy, where I earned a degree, not because I wanted it particularly, but because I really couldn't think of anything else to do with myself. In both renowned research institutions, I was absolutely appalled by the slipshod, incoherent, unintelligible, insulting lectures that acclaimed academics delivered to undergraduates. I could NOT believe my ears. And so now I can't decide whether I'm seeing another instance of that syndrome in Fry's book or whether "theory" is simply a pointless muddle - just as Fry presents it.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Paul Fry's book Theory of Literature is bad for two reasons. One reason is that it is based on transcripts of Fry's lectures at Yale where he is speaking extemporaneously, so the book takes you down a lot of winding paths of assumed knowledge. The other reason it's bad has to do with the state of literary theory, I think. Here's some commentary on each in turn.

You could imagine what it would be like to sit in Fry's class and hear such a learned professor speak on literary theory in class, making reference to figures not covered in the reading and find insightful ways to apply any given literary theory to the most ordinary of works, just to show you that literary theory can work for just about anything. The work Fry keeps referencing is Tony the Tow Truck, an extremely short children's book, and Fry shows his students how they could do a hermeneutic reading of it, a Marxist reading, a queer theory reading, and so on. All fine.

All that said, at the end of the day, I couldn't help but feel that most of the content of each chapter on each literary theory was mighty fluffy. Underneath all the references and the attempts at application, there was not much substance to the theories. The question was also never raised as to whether some of the basic assumptions of literary theory are true, and that of course leads any serious scholar down a number of blind alleys.

Let me try to give you some sense of what I mean. It is just assumed, without justification, that there is language on the one hand and speech and writing on the other. Language is somehow this autonomous thingamabob that 'speaks through us,' through our speech and our writing. First off, I don't even know what that could mean. That obviously can't be a literal claim. And second, even assuming a difference between language and speech/writing is probably a false distinction.

Mainstream linguistics assumes that language in the vernacular sense of the word 'language', like English, Mandarin, French, or what have you, is really an artificial construct. What there is instead is this internal recursive system (a 'grammar,' if you'd like) in the noggin of an individual speaker, and what we call English, Mandarin, French is just the overlap or statistical amalgamation of the sorts of words and expressions that our internal grammar orders. You won't find anything like that claim in this book because literary theory essentially operates independently of mainstream linguistics, which is absurd. And if you assume that a language is really something independent of human beings, you can begin to make all sorts of false claims.

As for the problem with the state of literary theory itself--in addition to the problem of operating independent of linguistics--what is said in literary theory that is meaningful might very well be novel and true but it does not need such faux-technical language to make it possible. For example, you can talk meaningfully about interesting features of language, like the fact that there is something about the way that syntax or grammar has to function in real-time, in the use that actual speakers make of it, that limits the kinds of sentences or expressions that can be produced. That's a peculiar feature, and here you can see why. It's possible to say, for instance, "Eagles that can fly swim." Somehow, we know intuitively, without having to understand the mechanics of it, that 'swim' is the verb that refers to eagles and that 'that can fly' is a clause modifying 'eagles.' And it's somehow perfectly grammatical and understandable. Yet we can have a sentence like this: "The horse that ran past the barn fell." In that case, something about the separation between "The horse" and "fell" makes this sentence difficult to understand, even though there is nothing really that wrong with the grammatical structure.

Those sorts of syntactic/grammatical problems are curiosities and have to be investigated seriously. Theorists like Jacques Derrida, referenced in Fry's book, are interested in the 'time-lag' of sentence construction and calls this juxtaposition of phrases and clauses 'differance'. But good luck getting any serious analysis out of that.

There are also other social aspects of literary theory that I think are important, important in the sense of what it means to be a person. African American studies, queer theory, and post-colonialism are a few such examples. But what can be said meaningfully in any of those areas can be said simply, in a way that your grandmother ought to be able to understand it all. There's no reason to use jargon if the jargon doesn't add anything.

Here is a plain example of how jargon does nothing for you. I cite Judith Butler, quoted in Martha Nussbaum's critical essay on Butler. See if you can make sense of it, and more than that, consider if this kind of obscurity is helping anyone in the world deal with the very real and concrete problems of people being marginalized on account of their gender or sexuality.

What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? Is the act of presupposing the same as the act of reinstating, or is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject reproduces the conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability that belongs to those conditions, specifically, to the exigencies of their renewal.

And another:

Such questions cannot be answered here, but they indicate a direction for thinking that is perhaps prior to the question of conscience, namely, the question that preoccupied Spinoza, Nietzsche, and most recently, Giorgio Agamben: How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? Resituating conscience and interpellation within such an account, we might then add to this question another: How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social "being"?

As a general rule, I think any critique or real social problems ought to be written about or spoken about in plain vernacular. If you can put it simply for everyone, why not? If you can't say it very simply, you might not have much to say at all.

[Saba Houmani]

Unfortunately I am going to have to cite pages 141 and 142 like crazy for the rest of my life

[for-much-deliberation ... · Rating 5 out of 5]

went through this course chapter by chapter together with recordings from the lectures... great series...

[Celil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Herhâlde geçtiğimiz yılın en büyük edebiyat olaylarından biridir bu çeviri. Hece'yi bu bakımdan kutlamak lazım. Ara ara dönüyorum buradaki derslere. Tam olarak ne zaman bitiririm bilemiyorum. Zira, öyle doğrusal bir okuma yaparak bu kitabı bir kenara atmakla, hem kitaba, içeriğe hem de kendinize yazık etmiş olacaksınızdır. Kapaktaki gibi uzun ama dumanlı bir okuma istiyor sizden... Ben de uzun ama dumanlı okumalar dilerim... :)

[Lee Webster · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I could give this book a zero... I would. i had tor read this for my "Survey of Literary Theory" class, and I can't tell you one thing I learned from this book. It made me more confused. Sorry, not sorry.

[Aziz Hayri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edebiyat konusunu yani edebiyat nedir ne işe yarar gibi sorulara cevap bulmak için okuduğum bir kitap. Kitabı bitirince kafamdaki bazı sorular cevap buldu ama o sorular zalmadı. Aksine yenileri eklendi. İkinci hatta üçüncü defa ve daha dikkatli okunmam gereken kitaplardan biri diye düşünüyorum.

[Tadzio · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish Paul Fry were my grandpa so he could read different interpretations of Tony the Tow Truck to me every night

[Textuaphile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure if I can really rate this, since I'm not really knowledgeable on this whole area. Also I didn't really read it, I just listened to the youtube lecture series, which is the equivalent of an audiobook so I think that counts. I found it very mind expanding, and made me want to think more about how stories work, and how those questions relate to other philosophical questions. I think the most interesting question is of the author. In what sense can an author be an authority on their own work? Can they even be an authority on their own intention of their work? Is the concept of intentionality too translucent to subsist in any meaningful way? Tell me what you think!!!! :)

[Emre Akaltın · Rating 1 out of 5]

Çevirisi çok kötü, editoryal olaraksa berbat bir iş. Milyonlarca yazım hatası, mantık hatalarına varacak kadar büyük anlatım bozuklukları. Orijinalinin nasıl olduğundan çok emin değilim. Türkçe edisyonu beni epeyce soğuttu kitabın içeriğinden.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear, level-headed introduction to most critical schools.