The Aims And Methods Of Scholarship In Modern Languages And Literatures Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures A collection of essays cannot convert us into able scholars, of course. For that we need much learning, the capacity to deal creatively with knowledge, and a certain amount of good luck. But we also need a discipline to help us shape our material into the form of useful contributions, and that discipline ultimately derives from a recognition of the aims and methods of scholarship. These essays discuss four forms of scholarship - linguistics, textual criticism, literary history, and literary criticism. In each case, the writer offers his ideas about fundamental questions facing the modern scholar: the range of purpose open to him, the basic problems confronting him, the presuppositions underlying his work, the methods and procedures available to him. Of the various themes which run through these essays, either by direct statement or by implication, it seems to me that there are two which ought to be kept in mind while considering the propositions set forth in each essay. One theme, reiterated over and over again, is the interdependence of these four forms of scholarship. The partitioning of scholarship into these essays is a convenient division of functions, not of people; each essay is about a character istic type of study, not about a separate band of scholars living apart from the rest of the learned world. All literary scholars, these essays assert, need at least an elementary grasp of all four forms, and they cannot work effectively without being able to use the relevant evidence which can be - or has been - gained through each of those modes of inquiry. Any given literary problem may turn out to involve all of them, anti a scholar can treat his problem with complete reliability only if he exploits all sources of understanding. The individual scholar generally finds, it is true, that he has more interest and greater skill in one mode of study than in another. But what the professor of scholarship needs, if he wants his work to be adequate, is the ability to follow any promising approach that may lead to a sounder understanding of the topic on which he happens to be engaged. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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In Interpretive Conventions, Steven Mailloux provides a general introduction to reader-response criticism while developing his own specific reader-oriented approach to literature. He examines five influential theories of the reading process—those of Stanley Fish, Jonathan Culler, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, and David Bleich. He goes on to argue the need for a more comprehensive reader-response criticism based on a consistent social model of reading. He develops such a reading model and also discusses American textual editing and literary history.

This is a study of the politics, the commerce, and the aesthetics of heritage culture in the shape of authors' manuscripts. Draft or working manuscripts survive in quantity from the eighteenth century when, with the rise of print, readers learnt to value 'the hand' as an index of individuality and the blotted page, criss-crossed by deletion and revision, as a sign of genius. Since then, collectors have fought over manuscripts, libraries have curated them, the rich have stashed them away in investment portfolios, students have squeezed meaning from them, and we have all stared at them behind exhibition glass. Why do we trade them, conserve them, and covet them? Most, after all, are just the stuff left over after the novel or book of poetry goes into print. Poised on the boundary where precious treasure becomes abject waste, litter, and mess, modern literary manuscripts hover between riches and rubbish. In a series of case studies, this book explores manuscript's expressive agency and its capacity to provoke passion--a capacity ever more to the fore in the twenty-first century now that books are assembled via word-processing software and authors no longer leave in such quantity those paper trails behind them. It considers manuscripts as residues of meaning that print is unable to capture: manuscript as fragment art, as property, as waste paper. It asks what it might mean to re-read print in the shadow of manuscript. Case studies of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen--writers from the first great period of manuscript survival--are interspersed with discussions of William Godwin's record keeping, the Cairo genizah, Katie Paterson's 'Future Library' project, Andy Warhol's and Muriel Spark's self-archiving, Cornelia Parker's reclamation art, and more.