Methodology module BSRS Oct 2008
Kati Launis: Culture
klaunis@utu.fi
Methodology module BSRS Oct 2008
Kati Launis: Culture
klaunis@utu.fi
University of Turku, Faculty of Humanities Culture and arts
SCHOOL OF HISTORY: Cultural History, Finnish History, General History
2. SCHOOL OF CULTURAL RESEARCH: Archaeology, Comparative Religion, Cultural Anthropology, European Ethnology, Folkloristics, Life Philosophy, Museology
3. SCHOOL OF ART STUDIES: Art History, Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, Finnish Literature, Media Studies, Musicology, Women's Studies
& School of Cultural Production and Landscape Studies (PORI)
& Schools of different languages and cultures (e.g. Russian Studies, Estonian language and culture…)
Tool box (basic concepts) of the literary research
theme: the basic, abstract idea of the novel/short story/poem?
subject: what is this novel telling us?
motive: are there some kind of frequent elements in the novel? What is the meaning of them?
plot: What kind of series of events is told in the novel?
characters: Who is the main character? How is he/she described?
narrator: Whos’s telling the story within the world of the story? First-person, second-person, or third-person narrator?
II From text to structure
Russian formalism: the form of fiction * school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s (e.g. Roman Jacobson)
* establishes the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature
* defines a set of properties specific to poetic language, recognizable by their "artfulness“
* Literature itself must constitute the object of inquiry of literary theory
* Literary facts have to be prioritized over the metaphysical commitments of literary criticism
III Tracing the meaning of the text
Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida):
meaning always runs away
Psychoanalysis:
developed by Sigmund Freud in 1890’s
the concept of unconsciousness – affecting all our acts (dreams)
literary studies e.g.: What are the unconscious motives of the figures or authors?
Reseption theory:
Hans-Robert Jauss in the late 1960s
The meaning of a text is created within the relationship between the text and the reader
IV Authors, texts and readers in a world
Marxist literary theory:
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
In literary studies: texts are produced in a specific social context at the specific moment
relationship between the fiction and ideologies (also the class position of the author)
Feminist literary theory
Feminist research is interdisciplinary: concepts are common in different disciplines
It’s also political: the aim of it is to change the world and the power relations between sexes
Gender: central category of research, the starting point of the analysis
Women Movements at the late 19th century
Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir – big names behind the academic feminist research
e.g. Ruth Robbins: Literary Feminisms (2000)
Contextualizing ”method”
Literature as
an important participant in the cultural, social dialogue of the time – a place where meanings are negotiated (constructed, analyzed, and criticized)
an active producer of cultural meanings, not only as their reflector
a kind of unique, historical mental ”archives” (different from for example the so called mainstream history writing) to study the written history of e.g. nation
Method: fictional works are studied in an inseparable connection to the discourses of their time
Close-reading of the research material in the context of the political and cultural discourses of the time
Cultural Studies
Early classics (from UK):
Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy (1957)
Raymon Williams: Culture and Society (1958)
E.P. Thompson: The Making of English Working Class (1963)
Cultural studies. Ed. by Lawrence Grossberg et al. (1992)
Works by Stuart Hall
-> the re-evaluation of the concept culture: everyday life (working, watching TV) is culture as well as Shakespeare’s dramas
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