Where do writers of fiction get their ideas? Clayton Koelb here takes issue with those who regard inspiration or imitation as primary forces influencing literary invention. He finds that another ...mechanism, which he calls "rhetorical construction," underlies much fiction and some nonfiction as well.
Rhetorical construction, Koelb says, is a way of producing writing out of reading. The rhetorical writer begins by discovering an interpretive crux in a familiar text-a passage from the Bible, for example, or a commonplace expression-and then proceeds to imagine a fictional situation in which all the meanings of the passage, contradictory though they may seem, may be realized. According to Koelb, "inventions of reading" do not stop with the discovery of the eternal and inevitable deconstructibility of language; they somehow generate an urge to put language back together through the invention of a fictional world. Among the texts he discusses are writings by Boccaccio, Rabelais, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hawthorne, Hans Christian Andersen Nietzsche, Kafka, Calvino, and Flannery O'Connor.
Few would deny that comparative literature is rapidly moving from the periphery toward the center of literary studies in North America, but many are still unsure just what it is. The Comparative ...Perspective on Literature shows by means of twenty-two exemplary essays by many of the most distinguished scholars in the field how comparative literature as a discipline is conceived of and practiced in the 1980s.
Nearly all of them published here for the first time, the essays discuss and themselves reflect significant changes at the core of the field as well as evolving notions as to what comparative literature is and should be. The volume editors, Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes, have included essays that address the scope and concerns of comparative literature today, historical and international contexts of the field, and the relationship of literary criticism to other disciplines, as well as affording comparative perspectives on current critical issues.
This student guide to Franz Kafka guides readers through their first encounters with Kafka and introduces the problems involved in reading his texts, the nature of his texts from the key novels and ...novellas to letters and professional writings, his life as a writer and different approaches to reading Kafka.
I will now return to a matter that I mentioned in the opening chapters but put off treating in detail: the lethetic mode of reading. When we read lethetic texts as they seek to be read, we are of ...course reading in the lethetic mode, but the mode is not applicable only to such texts. We may, in principle, read anything as if we did not believe it, no matter what the author appears to want from us. There is nothing to prevent us from imagining any text to be nothing but a set of signifiers controlled only by the
My subject, then, is the function of disbelief as an integral part of the process of reading literature. It is evident, however, that we do not always apply disbelief to all literary texts, nor, when ...we do, do we apply it always in the same way. We have reasons for not believing texts, and the usual reason we would give, surely, is that these texts are untrue. Since the relationship between disbelief and untruth is not necessarily self-evident, it is appropriate now to explain why I see the two as indissolubly connected and to indicate what I understand that connection
