Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory: Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History (Literary and Cultural Theory)

The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse by either highlighting the extra literary generative forces or by focusing on the intrinsic study of literary works. Rhetoric chiefly places emphasis on the verbal effects of discourses whereas literary history predominantly examines the temporal succession of the literary systems or of the literary institution. The author focuses on the three sections: poetics, rhetoric, and literary history and provides an introductory study on the subject of reference. Cover Table of Contents 0. The Reference and the Study of Literature 1. Poetics 1.1. The acceptations of the term and the object of the discipline 1.2. Poetics in antiquity 1.2.1. Plato and the objection to poetry 1.2.2. Aristotle, the father of poetics 1.2.3. The poetics of the Latin space. Epistle to the Pisos 1.2.4. The poetics of the Latin world. The treatise On the Sublime 1.3. The survival of poetics during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 1.4. Between mimesis and poiesis. The 18th century 1.5. Poetics in the age of Romanticism 1.5.1. Wordsworth and Coleridge, the precursors of the poetics of Modernity 1.6. Modern Poetics 1.6.1. Russian Formalism 1.6.2. New Criticism 1.6.3. The Prague Linguistic Circle (1926–1948) 1.6.4. Roman Jakobson 1.6.5. Structuralism 1.6.6. Semiotics 1.6.7. The mathematical poetics 1.7. Conclusions 2. Rhetoric 2.1 The glory and oblivion of a millenary discipline 2.2 Rhetoric in Antiquity 2.2.1. Greek rhetoric 2.2.2. Latin rhetoric 2.2.3. Asianism 2.3. Another type of rhetoric: sacred rhetoric 2.3.1. Sacred rhetoric in Romanian culture 2.4. Rhetoric in the centuries which were not favorable to it 2.5. The rhetorical system and some essential matters related to rhetoric 2.6. The specificity of rhetoric and its reference 2.7. Modern rhetoric and its two directions 2.7.1. The philosophic neorhetoric 2.7.2. Linguistic neorhetoric 2.8. Conclusions 3. Literary History 3.1. The identity of the literary history and its relations to criticism and literary theory 3.2. The beginnings of the discipline; the 19th century 3.3. The conception of literary history in the 20th century 3.4. Extrinsic and intrinsic 3.5. Classification – the privileged method of classical literary history 3.6. Literary history: a discipline of continuity? 3.7. Diachronic and synchronic 3.8. Reasoning – between relativism and absolutism 3.9 The narrative literary history 3.10. Revisions of the subject of literary history 3.11. Conclusions 4. The Variable Reference Bibliography "The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse. Rhetoric places emphasis on the verbal effects of discourses and literary history examines the temporal succession of the literary systems"-- Provided by publisher