Thursday, September 29, 2016

Describing literary form, a quick note

It seems there’s growing interest in (mere) description among literary critics. I, of course, am interested in description as well. Have been for a long time.

Particularly the description of form.

What I’m wondering is if that’s ALL there is to describe.

Can you describe meaning? You can translate it in various ways, summary, paraphrase, and interpretation chief among them. But I don’t see how you can actually DESCRIBE meaning.

Oh, you can describe semantic structure. But that’s a rather different thing. To do that you need a model in which to represented (hypothecated) semantic structure.

But if literary form is all you can describe, does that mean that the whole text is, in some way, form?

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