books
the teleology of poetics in medieval kashmir
p this book examines the revolution in sanskrit poetics initiated by the ninth century kashmiri anandavardhana . anandavardhana replaced the formalist aesthetic of earlier poeticians with one stressing the unifunctionality of literary texts arguing that all components of a work should subserve a single purpose the communication of a single emotional mood rasa . attention was redirected from formal elements toward specific poems viewed as aesthetically integrated wholes thereby creating new literary critical possibilities . p anandavardhana s model of textual coherence along with many key analytic concepts are rooted in the hermeneutic theory of the mimamsakas vedic exegetes . like anandavardhana the mimamsakas made the unifunctionality of texts their most basic interpretive principle . p while anandavardhana s teleological approach to textual analysis gained rapid acceptance among the kashmiri poeticians another aspect of his theory became controversial . he argued that rasa and certain other poetic meanings can not be conveyed by recognized semantic processes and therefore postulated a new semantic function dhvani suggestion to account for them . the controversy over this suggestion rapidly became the central topic in poetics to the exclusion of teleologically based criticism . while dhvani ultimately gained universal acceptance among sanskrit poeticians the conflict over its existence ironically marginalized anandavardhana s preferred approach to poetic analysis .
hardcover harvard university press 2009 isbn13 9780674032736 isbn10 067403273x
abridged n isbn 13 9780674032736 number in series 1 number of pages 470 publisher harvard univ pr release date 62135769600000 series title harvard oriental series