The protoliterary : steps toward an anthropology of culture / K. Ludwig Pfeiffer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pfeiffer, K. Ludwig (Karl Ludwig)

Series:

Writing Science Series

Writing science

Writing science The protoliterary

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Theory (Philosophy).

Aesthetics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxv, 402 p. )

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, c2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an "anthropology" of symbolic media generally. Central to the author's argument is the proposition that the idea of literature--at least as it has been understood in the West since the eighteenth century--as the paradigm for artistic experience is both limited and limiting. In its place, the author offers a more general theory of aesthetic experience appropriate to a wide range of media (in the term's broadest sense) and geared toward performativity and bodily experience. The author develops the idea of the "protoliterary" as a cultural-aesthetic discourse prior to and external to the "literary" as traditionally conceived in Western aesthetics. Manifestations of the protoliterary tend to occur within forms of multimedia theatricalization in which suggestive images of the body loom large. The appeal of the protoliterary lies in its ability to function on both cognitive and somatic levels, thereby neutralizing such distinctions as self/society and reality/fiction. The author's argument is indebted to John Dewey's belief in a basic human need for aesthetic experience, a need that can be met in a variety of ways, from tattoos and scarification, through sports, parades, and cosmetics, to literature, opera, and film. From this basis the book theorizes a history of the development of separate, hierarchical arts in the West while suggesting that independent histories of single arts and artistic experience are no longer desirable or even possible. Although the genesis of particular forms of media are inextricably linked to specific historical, sociological, and technological conditions, their potential functions and effects are not tied to those conditions, nor should they be.

Contents:

Preface: Eight Assumptions

Introduction: Speculative Sketches

Critical Theory, Exegesis, Interpretation

Dimensions: Theoretical and Illustrative

First Exemplifications: The Novel and the Self-Therapy of the Medium

Wilhelm Meister: The Cultural Potentials and Failures of Theatricality

Joseph Andrews and Painting

The Bride of Lammermoor, Opera, and Madame Bovary

The Maltese Falcon: The Novel and the Film

Provisional Consequences

Theory: Trends, Past and Present

The Eighteenth Century: G.C. Lichtenberg and Media Analysis versus the Literary System

The Nineteenth Century: Systems, Play, and the Anthropological Return of Experience

Systems Theory: Implications, Historical and Otherwise

Games and Play

Experience and Play Again

Nietzsche

Images of Evolution

The Shrinkage of Fact and the Expansion of Performative Discourse

The Poietic-Poetic Dilemma: "Drama," "Audience," Representation

Tragedy and the Production of Social Realities

The Play as a Model Discourse: Oedipus, Knowledge, and Power

Spectacular Dynamics: Paradigms of Anthropological Import

Appearances: Shadowy Substances and Substantial Shadows

Between Sociology and Anthropology: Trends, Past and Present

Ambivalences of Western Spectacles

Japanese Theater and the West: A Quasi-Theoretical Outline

Spectacular Theater, Sumo, and the Labors of "Literature

Fragments of an Absent World Theater: "Baroque" and the Implicit Denial of Segment Culture

Other Histories, and Their Theory.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [324]395) and index.

ISBN:

9780585458366

0585458367

OCLC:

1490383663