Open Yale Courses

ENGL 300: Introduction to Theory of Literature

Lecture 16 - The Social Permeability of Reader and Text << previous session | next session >>

Overview:

In this first lecture on the theory of literature in social contexts, Professor Paul Fry examines the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Hans Robert Jauss. The relation of their writing to formalist theory and the work of Barthes and Foucault is articulated. The dimensions of Bakhtin's heteroglossia, along with the idea of common language, are explored in detail through a close reading of the first sentence of Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice. Jauss's study of the history of reception is explicated with reference to Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and the Broadway revival of Damn Yankees.

Reading assignment:

Jauss, Hans Robert. "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 981-88

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Heteroglossia in the Novel." In The Critical Tradition, pp. 588-93

Class lecture:

Transcript
html
Audio
mp3
Video
medium bandwidth
low bandwidth
high bandwidth

Resources:

Handout: Passages from Bakhtin and Jauss [PDF]

Yale University 2009. Some rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated on this page or on the Open Yale Courses website, all content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0)