Literature parallax definition10/29/2023 For example, no matter how much you may love a certain book from your childhood (I love The Very Hungry Caterpillar) that doesn’t automatically make it literary, no matter how many times you’ve re-read it.įurthermore, the very idea that we should have an emotional attachment to the books we read has its own history that cannot be detached from the rise of the middle class and its politics of telling people how to behave. So… what’s the alternative? Well, we could just go with a descriptive definition: “if you love it, then it’s Literature!”īut that’s a little too subjective. On the other hand, a novel like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which was NOT received well by critics or readers when it was first published in 1851, has since gone on to become a mainstay of the American literary canon.Īs you can see, canonicity is obviously a problematic index of literariness. It was only in the closing decades of the twentieth century that the canon of Literature was opened to a greater inclusion of diverse authors.Īnd here’s another problem with that definition: if inclusion in the canon were our only definition of Literature, then there could be no such thing as contemporary Literature, which, of course, has not yet stood the test of time.Īnd here’s an even bigger problem: not every book that receives good reviews or a wins a prize turns out to be of lasting value in the eyes of later readers. The canon, however, has proved problematic as a measure of what “Literature with a capital L” is because the gatekeepers of the Western canon have traditionally been White and male. A work of literature becomes “canonical” when cultural institutions like schools or universities or prize committees classify it as a work of lasting artistic or cultural merit. “Literature” comes from Latin, and it originally meant “the use of letters” or “writing.” But when the word entered the Romance languages that derived from Latin, it took on the additional meaning of “knowledge acquired from reading or studying books.” So we might use this definition to understand “Literature with a Capital L” as writing that gives us knowledge-writing that should be studied.īut this begs the further question: what books or texts are worth studying or close reading?įor some critics, answering this question is a matter of establishing canonicity. So what makes a text literary or what makes a text “Literature with a capital L”? Conference for Antiracist Teaching, Language and Assessment.Fall 2023 Undergraduate Course Descriptions.Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS).Scientific, Technical, and Professional Communication Certificate.Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes. The Parallax View not only expands Žižek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Between his discussions of these three modes, Žižek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics-including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism. In The Parallax View, Žižek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which "nobody is home" in the skull, just stacks of brain meat-a condition Žižek calls "the unbearable lightness of being no one") and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. From this consideration of parallax, Žižek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism. Žižek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. The Parallax View is Slavoj Žižek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years Žižek himself describes it as his magnum opus. In Žižek's long-awaited magnum opus, he theorizes the "parallax gap" in the ontological, the scientific, and the political-and rehabilitates dialectical materialism.
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