| 1. |
- Pettersson, Anders, 1946-
(författare)
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Experience-oriented reading of literature versus literary criticism
- 2023
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Ingår i: Literatures of the world and the future of comparative literature. - Leiden : Brill Academic Publishers. - 9789004538498 - 9789004547179 ; , s. 172-181
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- It should be obvious that literary texts are written primarily for being read and experienced by an unspecified audience of interested readers, not primarily for being made the object of critical analysis or interpretation by professional critics. However, it is a common idea that literary critics are doing the same things as lay readers do, just doing it better. (Toril Moi, Aleida Assmann, and Peter Lamarque) I argue that this common way of thinking distorts our understanding of both the ordinary reading of literature and literary criticism. The ordinary reading of literature for the literary experience—what I call “experience-oriented reading”—is being cast as something simplistic and second-rate, while it is arguably the kind of reading that literature is intended for. At the same time, it must be wrong to portray the literary critic as essentially a reader. The specific role of the literary critic is not to read literature but to have interesting things to say about literature—a secondary activity, compared with experience-oriented reading, but naturally an important pursuit in its own right. Critics will of course have read the works on which they comment, but just reading does not make anybody a critic. Also, to describe critics as extra good readers is to give a far too simple image of the array of highly diverse activities and projects conventionally viewed as literary criticism.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Pettersson, Anders, 1946-
(författare)
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Europe
- 2022
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Ingår i: Literature. - Chichester : John Wiley & Sons. - 9780470671900 - 9781119775751 - 9781119775737 ; , s. 141-213
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Most of geographical Europe was inhabited by groups of people without writing, peoples known to us exclusively through archaeology or accounts by their southern neighbors. The oldest Greek literature preserved to our days consists of four epics. The Iliad (Ilias) and the Odyssey (Odysseia) are associated with the name of Homer, while the Theogony (Theogonia) and the Works and Days (Erga kai hemerai) are ascribed to Hesiod. Literary forms that combined music, movement, and words were also the starting point of Greek drama, perhaps the most original of all Greek literary creations. Alexander's wars became a watershed in Greek history and culture. Native Roman literary culture all but disappeared in the encounter with the Greeks. During the first century bce, Latin literature successively acquired a new set of native classics, and these writers were felt to stand comparison with the best Greek authors.
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| 4. |
- Pettersson, Anders, 1946-, et al.
(författare)
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Europe
- 2022
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Ingår i: Literature. - Chichester : John Wiley & Sons. - 9780470671900 - 9781119775751 - 9781119775737 ; , s. 596-669
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The chapter looks at Byzantine literature, Arabic literature in Europe, and literature in Latin. Then a series of sections are devoted to western European vernacular literature – the central, emergent European tradition. The chapter considers its early manifestations in drama, narrative poetry and prose, and lyric poetry. It moves on to traditions more peripheral during our period – to traditional Celtic and Germanic literature and to Slavic literature. The chapter describes some literary-sociological reflections concerning audiences, conditions of authorship, and text production, reflecting, among other things, on the importance of Johannes Gutenberg's invention of a new type of printing press toward the very end of our period. The cultures on the western, northern, and eastern fringes of Europe – Celtic, Germanic, Slavonic, and others – had poetic traditions of their own, but those were slowly being made obsolete by the new, Christian civilization spreading across all parts of Europe dominated by the Roman Catholic Church.
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| 5. |
- Pettersson, Anders, 1946-, et al.
(författare)
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General introduction : literature, history, world
- 2022
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Ingår i: Literature. - Chichester : John Wiley & Sons. - 9780470671900 - 9781119775751 - 9781119775737 ; , s. lxiii-lxxx
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)
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| 6. |
- Pettersson, Anders, 1946-
(författare)
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Introduction to Volume 1 : the world before 200 CE
- 2022
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Ingår i: Literature. - Chichester : John Wiley & Sons. - 9780470671900 - 9781119775737 - 9781119775751 ; , s. 1-6
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the first volume of Literature: A World History, the authors introduce and discuss the early literatures of the world, setting the end of that initial period to about 200 CE. With the spread of writing, oral texts of particular importance to their culture eventually began to be written down, and new written texts in prose and verse began to be produced. Well before 200 CE, major literary traditions in writing had evolved in many parts of Asia, in northern Africa, and in southern Europe. Humankind and its immediate ancestors stem from Africa, and hominins of different species successively spread from there. The volume concludes with a brief consideration of important similarities and differences between some of the literatures introduced.
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| 7. |
- Pettersson, Anders, 1946-
(författare)
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Literatures before 200 CE : concluding remarks
- 2022
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Ingår i: Literature. - Chichester : John Wiley & Sons. - 9780470671900 - 9781119775751 - 9781119775737 ; , s. 222-228
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In several cases, the literary cultures described in the first volume of Literature: A World History influenced each other more or less deeply. In particular, cultural and literary impulses going between western Asia, Egypt, and southern Europe have surfaced again and again in our history. Societies before 200 CE were of many different kinds, and literatures varied greatly in character and social function over that large time span. Purely oral literary cultures represent, themselves, a heterogeneous category. Oral literature no doubt also flourished in literary societies before 200 CE. The earliest fully developed systems of writing were difficult to use, and in societies like ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia writing and reading were typically performed by specially trained scribes. The Sanskrit literary tradition had a decidedly more religious character than its Chinese and Greco-Roman counterparts. The literary cultures themselves have comparatively little to offer of general reflection on the theory of literature.
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| 8. |
- Pettersson, Anders, 1946-
(författare)
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On the concept of world literature
- 2022
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Ingår i: World Literature Studies. - Bratislava : Slovak academy of Sciences. - 1337-9690 .- 1337-9275. ; 14:3, s. 12-23
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The expression “world literature” is currently being used in several ways: about various cul-turally and temporally inclusive bodies of literature and about various ways of studying such literature. In the article, special attention is devoted to the editorial concept of world literature in The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021), edited by Debjani Ganguly. Formula-tions about world literature sometimes cast it as a mind-independent entity, sometimes as a scholarly construction. It is argued that the choice between these alternatives is important, since it has significant consequences for the logic of thinking and reasoning about world literature.
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| 9. |
- Pettersson, Anders, 1946-
(författare)
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Comparative literature in Sweden
- 2021
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Ingår i: Comparative literature around the world. - Paris : Honoré Champion. - 9782745354693 - 9782745354709 ; , s. 95-103
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 10. |
- Pettersson, Anders, 1946-
(författare)
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Kafka's The Judgement : experience-oriented reading and literary criticism
- 2021
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Ingår i: Lessons from Kafka. - Praha : Filosofia. - 9788070076811 ; , s. 285-309
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The paper focuses on Kafka's short narrative The Judgement (Das Urteil, 1912). However, although the contribution may be of some interest for the understanding of this Kafka story and of Kafka's achievement in general, The Judgement is being discussed primarily as an illustrative example. The main point of the paper is to sketch an overall perspective on the ordinary reading of literature. it is commonly believed that interpreting critics and ordinary readers basically have to perform the same task: that of understanding the meaning of the text in question. The author argues that this view seriously misconstrues the activities of both critic and reader. He also discusses, in a more tentative fashion, what one is rationally justified to demand from ordinary readings of literature performed for the sake of understanding and experiencing a literary text.
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