Explorations in Poetics

This collection of essays presents a coherent, systematic, and comprehensive theory of the work of literature and its major aspects. The approach, which may be called "Constructive Poetics," does not assume that a work of literature is a text with fixed structures and meanings, but a text that invites the reader to evoke or project a network of interrelated constructs, complementary or contradictory as they may be. The work of literature is not just a narrative, as studies in narratology assume, but a text that projects a fictional world, or an Internal Field of Reference. Meanings in a text are presented through the evocation of "frames of reference" (scenes, characters, ideas, etc.). Language in literature is double-directed: it relates the Internal Field to External Fields and vice versa. The essays explore the problems of fictionality, presentation and representation, metaphor as interaction between several frames of reference, the theory of "Integrational Semantics" in literary and other texts, the meaning of sound patterns in poetry, and the question of "literariness." This theory and its specific aspects were developed by the author in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s and lay at the foundations of the Tel-Aviv School of Poetics. Revived now, it resonates with the current mood in literary criticism.

ISBN 0804755167   Pages 296 ISBN13 9780804755160 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Stanford University Press   Weight (grammes) 404 Imprint Stanford University Press   Published in Palo Alto Format Paperback   Height (mm) 228 Publication date 15 May 2007   Width (mm) 156 Library of Congress PN49   Spine width (mm) 3 DEWEY 808.1   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

1		Fictionality and fields of reference : a theoretical framework		1
2		Metaphor and frames of reference : with examples from Eliot, Rilke, Mayakovsky, Mandelshtam, Pound, Creeley, Amichai, and the New York Times		32
3		An outline of integrational semantics : an understander's theory of meaning in context		76
4		The structure of semiotic objects : a three-dimensional model		113
5		On presentation and representation in fiction		128
6		The meaning of sound patterns in poetry : an interaction theory		140
7		"Literariness" revisited : a contemporary manifesto		161
8		The structure of non-narrative fiction : the first episode of War and peace		174
		References to chapters 1-8		211
9		The elusive science of literature : remarks on the fields and responsibilities of the study of literature		215
10		A unified theory of the literary text		250

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