Habib, Ch. 1, also Rivkin & Ryan Ch. 1
-How to relate the One and the Many (11)?

-What is normal and central versus unique, and does this entail an ethical difference (11)? That is, can we identify/posit something in humanity that is essentially unchanging and not local/relative?

-Can something termed the “aesthetic” be distinguished/isolated from moral/religious concerns, or even from Reason or realm of utility/value (13)?

-see summary of formalism, top paragraph p. 18 “In general . . . . of its author”, also Rivkin & Ryan’s first paragraph (LT 3) which speaks of literature having a “palpability of its own” that merits study, including representational devices that are what make literature literary and worthy of study

Are there unique truths conveyed only through literary language? (LT 3)

-defamiliarization as way that art confronts the problem of habituation, and also? “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” (Shklovsky) pp.19-20

-does literature ‘evolve’ or develop independently of other aspects of history/culture, and for instance therefore, is poetic language itself identifiable, a “kind of speech of its own?” (21)

-section on Bakhtin esp. important (21-25)
heteroglossia
dialogism
“Our utterance will in its very nature be dialogic: it is born as one voice in a dialogue that is already constituted; it cannot speak monologically, as the only voice, in some register isolated from all social, historical, and ideological contexts” (23).
Battle/conflict for meaning
Centripetal forces of unity versus centrifugal of dispersion
Understanding therefore also bound up with motivated agreement or disagreement
“poetry” as metaphor for centralizing/unitary instance of language use versus the novel’s dialogic genre that rejects any “concept of a unified self or unified world” (25)

-Jakobson, language’s poles of metaphor (relations of similarity/substitution) and metonymy (relations of contiguity, association) in competition

-section on The New Criticism (also described in LT as anti-scientific and interested in the nonrational dimension of art, p. 5)
Ransom
Wimsatt and Beardsley, including a “poem should not mean but be” because poetry does not depend upon our correct inference of intention
“the poem is an autonomous verbal structure which has its end in itself, which has no purpose beyond its own existence as an aesthetic object” (28)

Aim of close reading to elucidate the way “literature embodies or concretely enacts universal truth, what the New Critics called “concrete universals” (LT 6) so that poetic language can be both specific as well as general (urn is both an object and a metaphor) and that such art is not determined by material social and historical circumstances (LT 6)