Literary Communication as Dialogue

2020-11-15 Language Arts & Disciplines

Author : Roger D. Sell
Release : 2020-11-15
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 575/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Literary Communication as Dialogue by : Roger D. Sell

Download or read book Literary Communication as Dialogue written by Roger D. Sell. This book was released on 2020-11-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The Ethics of Literary Communication

2013-09-25 Language Arts & Disciplines

Author : Roger D. Sell
Release : 2013-09-25
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 682/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Ethics of Literary Communication by : Roger D. Sell

Download or read book The Ethics of Literary Communication written by Roger D. Sell. This book was released on 2013-09-25. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viewing literature as one among other forms of communication, Roger D. Sell and his colleagues evaluate writer-respondent relationships according to the same ethical criterion as applies for dialogue of any other kind. In a nutshell: Are writers and readers respecting each other’s human autonomy? If and when the answer here is “Yes!”, Sell’s team describe the communication that is going on as ‘genuine’. In this latest book, they offer new illustrations of what they mean by this, and ask whether genuineness is compatible with communicational directness and communicational indirectness. Is there a risk, for instance, that a very direct manner of writing could be unacceptably coercive, or that a more indirect manner could be irresponsible, or positively deceitful? The book’s overall conclusion is: “Not necessarily!” A directness which is truthful and stimulates free discussion does respect the integrity of the other person. And the same is true of an indirectness which encourages readers themselves to contribute to the construction and assessment of ideas, stories and experiences – sometimes literary indirectness may allow greater scope for genuineness than does the directness of a non-literary letter. By way of illustrating these points, the book opens up new lines of inquiry into a wide range of literary texts from Britain, Germany, France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, and the United States.

Literature as Dialogue

2014-08-15 Language Arts & Disciplines

Author : Roger D. Sell
Release : 2014-08-15
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 890/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Literature as Dialogue by : Roger D. Sell

Download or read book Literature as Dialogue written by Roger D. Sell. This book was released on 2014-08-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it that some texts achieve the status of literature? Partly, at least, because the relationship they allow between their writers and the people who respond to them is fundamentally egalitarian. This is the insight explored by members of the Åbo literary communication network, who in this new book develop fresh approaches to literary works of widely varied provenance. The authors examined have written in Ancient Greek, Táng Dynasty Chinese, Middle, Modern and Contemporary English, German, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. But each and every one of them is shown as having offered their human fellows something which, despite some striking appearances to the contrary, amounts to a welcoming invitation. This their audiences have then been able to negotiate in a spirit of dialogical interchange. Part I of the book poses the question: How, in offering their invitation, have writers respected their audiences’ human autonomy? This is the province of what Åbo scholars call "communicational criticism". Part II asks how an audience negotiating a literary invitation can be encouraged to respect the human autonomy of the writer who has offered it. In Åbo parlance, such encouragement is the task of "mediating criticism". These two modes of criticism naturally complement each other, and in their shared concern for communicational ethics ultimately seek to further a post-postmodern world that would be global without being hegemonic.

Literature as Communication

2000-01-01 Language Arts & Disciplines

Author : Roger D. Sell
Release : 2000-01-01
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 979/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Literature as Communication by : Roger D. Sell

Download or read book Literature as Communication written by Roger D. Sell. This book was released on 2000-01-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers foundations for a literary criticism which seeks to mediate between writers and readers belonging to different historical periods or social groupings. This makes it, among other things, a timely intervention in the postmodern culture wars, though the theory put forward will be of interest not only to students of literature and culture, but also to linguists. Sell describes communication in general as strongly interactive, as very much affected by the disparate situationalities of sending and receiving, yet as by no means completely determined by them. Seen this way, men and women are both social beings and individuals, capable of empathizing with sociohistorical formations which are alien to them, sometimes even to the extent of changing their own life-world. By treating literary activity as communicational in this same dynamic sense, Sell radically modifies the main paradigms of twentieth-century literary theory, casting much new light on questions of genre, interpretation, affect and ethics.

Communicational Criticism

2011 Language Arts & Disciplines

Author : Roger D. Sell
Release : 2011
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 284/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Communicational Criticism by : Roger D. Sell

Download or read book Communicational Criticism written by Roger D. Sell. This book was released on 2011. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Further developing the line of argument put forward in his Literature as Communication (2000) and Mediating Criticism (2001), Roger D. Sell now suggests that when so-called literary texts stand the test of time and appeal to a large and heterogeneous circle of admirers, this is because they are genuinely dialogical in spirit. Their writers, rather than telling other people what to do or think or feel, invite them to compare notes, and about topics which take on different nuances as seen from different points of view. So while such texts obviously reflect the taste and values of their widely various provenances, they also channel a certain respect for the human other to whom they are addressed. So much so, that they win a reciprocal respect from members of their audience. In Sell's new book, this ethical interplay becomes the focus of a post-postmodern critique, which sees literary dialogicality as a possible catalyst to new, non-hegemonic kinds of globalization. The argument is illustrated with major reassessments of Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Dickens, Churchill, Orwell, and Pinter, and there are also studies of trauma literature for children, and of ethically oriented criticism itself.

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