Més enllà de la interpretació

Sobre l'operació de la interpretació en les diverses escoles crítiques. Centrat en qüestionar el supòsit que la interpretació és l'únic objectiu de la crítica literària

Flaubert’s Provocation

Madame Bovary, which was scandalous in its own day for its focus on the adultery of a provincial woman, has had a strange, complex fate. Flaubert remade the image of the novelist, as pure artist, for whom style was all that mattered, and disrupted novelistic technique, in ways that critics and writers have found exemplary, treating this as the novel novelists cannot overlook; yet for readers Madame Bovary is not a “book about nothing” but provides a searing portrait of provincial life and of the condition of women. The vividness and complexity of the character Flaubert created here made Emma a type: a sufferer of “Bovarysme.” Flaubert’s revolutionary notion that a trivial subject was as good as a noble subject for a serious novel was taken to be connected to the democratic notion that every human subject is as worthy as another and allowed to have desires. Yet, while promoting Emma as a valid subject of literature, equal to others, Flaubert writes against the attempt to democratize art, to make it enter every life, and renders trivial the manifestations of this subject’s desires, while making her an exemplary figure

La teoría crítica hoy

Recent publications argue about whether theory is dead but the proliferation of theoretical discourses and their diffusion creates a situation in which it is difficult to say what theory in the US has become. Nonetheless, it is possible to make some pertinent observations: the return of aesthetics has been accompanied by a decline in the importance of psychoanalysis. Two major developments are singled out: first, the revival of narratology, sometimes in connection with cognitive science, at other times in the form on an “unnatural narratology” that focuses on the myriad forms of strangeness in narrative; second, various versions of the so-called “post-human”, including ecocriticism, Human-animal studies, object-oriented ontology and speculative materialism.En publicaciones recientes se ha discutido sobre si la teoría ha muerto, sin embargo la proliferación de discursos teóricos así como su difusión generan una situación en la que no resulta fácil decir en qué se ha transformado la teoría en los Estados Unidos. No obstante, es posible hacer algunas observaciones pertinentes: el retorno de la estética ha estado acompañado por una disminución de la importancia del psicoanálisis. Podemos destacar dos líneas de desarrollo principales: en primer lugar, el renacer de la narratología, en unas ocasiones en conexión con las ciencias cognitivas, en otras con la forma de una “narratología antinatural”, centrada en las innumerables formas de extrañeza de la narrativa; en segundo lugar, las distintas versiones del denominado “posthumano”, que incluyen la ecocrítica, los estudios animalistas, la ontología orientada a los objetos y el materialismo especulativo

Semiotic Consequences

This paper outlines the semiotic perspectives of Saussure and Peirce and the points at which these quite different theories intersect. It considers the implications of these points of intersection for literary studies and uses the example of Oedipus Rex to illustrate the semiotic character of acts and facts

Om negativiteten i den moderne poesi

Om negativiteten i den moderne poes