Staging as an Anthropological Category
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4270854 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Wolfgang Iser (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 877 |
| Publication date | 1992-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/469175 |
| OpenAlex | W2325481839 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 2 |
IF WE TRY to fathom the historical necessity of the literary medium, a medium that no longer monopolizes the field of entertainment and leisure and is now dwarfed by the competition of the visual media, we shall have to penetrate beyond its former, widely accepted forms of legitimation: its autonomy, its mimetic reflection of social conditions, and even its generative force in constituting reality, as enlightened Marxism (Kosik) would have it.' What then comes into focus is the anthropological equipment of human beings, whose lives are sustained by their imagination. Literature, then, also has a substratum, albeit one of a rather featureless plasticity that manifests itself in a continual repatterning of the culturally conditioned shapes human beings have assumed. As a medium of writing, literature gives presence to what otherwise would remain unavailable. It has gained prominence as a mirror of human plasticity at the moment when many of its former functions have been taken over by other media. If literature permits limitless patternings of human plasticity, it indicates the inveterate urge of human beings to become present to themselves; this urge, however, will never issue into a definitive shape, because self-grasping arises out of overstepping limitations. Literature fans out human plasticity into a panoply of shapes, each of which is an enactment of selfconfrontation. As a medium, it can show all determinacy to be only illusory. It even incorporates into itself the inauthenticity of all the human patternings it features, since this is the only way it can give presence to the protean character of what it is mediating. Perhaps this is the truth through which literature counters the awareness that it is an illusion, thereby resisting dismissal as mere deception. If literature reveals that human plasticity is propelled by the drive to gain shape without ever imprisoning itself in any of the shapes
Sociology · Anthropology · Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics · Literature, Culture, and Aesthetics · Themes in Literature Analysis
| Citations per year | 0.06 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1995 - 2015 (21) |
| Highly cited | No |