Special Form and Special Meaning in Literature
Nigel Fabb (University of Strathclyde)
Location: CURDS Seminar Room, 4th Floor, Claremont Bridge
Time/Date: 25th November 2009, 16:00 - 17:00
Abstract
Literature can be characterised both by 'special form' and 'special meaning'. Special form includes increased patterning and repetition, division into units such as rhyme, new kinds of generic identity such as 'being a sonnet', etc. Special meaning includes both 'ordinary meaning plus' (i.e., more metaphor, more ambiguity etc) and reported but often not paraphrasable kinds of 'supermeaning' (profound knowledge, the sublime, etc). Is this an accidental coincidence of special form and special meaning, or are there ways of finding a relation (perhaps a causal relation) between special form and special meaning? I'll be asking whether special form demands that texts be composed in a different way (following my recent article in the poetry journal PN Review), whether special form induces various kinds of epistemic illusion (ie. the possibility that changed modes of processing produce interpretive side-effects), whether the widespread literary device of pairing/parallelism is a way of producing hybrid concepts, and whether the forms and represented meanings of literary texts are able to stimulate forms of arousal in the nervous system which are experienced as contentful (i.e., as kinds of belief or certainty).
Drinks and nibbles with the speaker will be held after the seminar in the CRiLLS room.
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Dr SJ Hannahs
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Published: 22nd September 2009