LITERARY THEORY：SOME TRACES IN THE WAKE

Here is a collection of fifteen papers bearing on some interesting issues or problems that a modern literary scholar may have often thought of. In this book, you will find critical, and often original, ideas about such things as modernism, postmodernism, wit, imagination, literariness, originality, and genre classification. You can consider, along with the author, such topics as the intentional fallacy, the circle of textualization, the linguistic spaces of poetry, the method of comparative literature, the death of the author, the concepts of work, text, and discourse, the reconciliation of mimetic and expressive theories, and the analogy between biotechnology and creative writing. These traces in the wake of literary theory can be very awakening and rewarding.

Alexander C. H. Tung is currently a professor of English at National Chung Hsing University and Chung Shan Medical University in Taichung, Taiwan. He is also the establisher and maintainer of the much-visited DGD English-Learning Website (dgdel.nchu.edu.tw). He has published quite a number of academic and creative works in English or in Chinese.
 

Preface i On “Modernism” as a Literary Term 1 The Value of Genre Classification 19 On the Originality of Literary Works 29 The Magic Mirror with a Magic Lamp: Towards a Reconciliation of Mimetic and Expressive Theories of Literature 41 When Comparative Literature Ceases to Compare 55 The Nature and the Locus of “Literariness” 71 The Dichotomy of Imagination 85 “The Intentional Fallacy” Reconsidered 93 The Circle of Textualization 109 The Four Linguistic Spaces of Poetry 143 Ⅰ. Poetry and Verbalization 143 Ⅱ. The Art of Poetry 145 Ⅲ. The Four Linguistic Spaces 147 Ⅳ. Linguistics and Poetics 156 Work, Text, Discourse: Literary Problems, Old and New 161 Is the Author “Dead” Already? 177 Ⅰ. The Rhetorical Nature of Theory and Criticism 177 Ⅱ. The Historical Statuses of the Author in the West 178 Ⅲ. The Author Facing Our Contemporary Theories 184 Ⅵ. Is the Author “Dead” Already? 189 From Romantic Movement to Postmodern Style: A Reflection on Our Fin-de-Siècle Art of Literature 193 I. A Dualistic History 193 II. The Classic/Romantic Contrast 194 III. The Modernist /Postmodernist Dichotomy 197 IV. From Romantic Movement to Postmodern Style 200 V. The Fin-de-Siècle Reflection 204 VI. The End 222 The Augustan “Wit” Re-examined 231 Biotechnology and Creative Writing 249 Life Science 249 Organic Form 250 The Text 251 The Code 255 The System 257 The End 258