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I'm writing an English rendition of a Farsi passage. There's a word I'm hunting for which means methods of literary styles of writing.
I came across with the word "system" in a "Farsi to English Dictionary", which in my opinion fits the passage.
I checked some dictionaries for special meanings of system in literature and found nothing. Is the word used in literature with an especial meaning? Are there any other meaning used in literature?
I think I'd go with style. It's a word that gets used in far too many different senses and contexts, but it seems to fit here.
Regarding system, I found these references:
If a literary system is the environment in which a piece of text comes into being, then literary forms are the building blocks of that environment. These forms are idiomatic ways of writing, authorial tricks that have built up over the years and codified themselves into common practice, tools with which to make meaning. Taken in aggregate, they form a system of rhetoric, a literary system.
and, from Poetics Today vol. 11 no.1, Spring 1990, the following sample of horrifying academese:
The "Literary System"
1. The Extension of the "Literary System"
Admittedly, the term "system" is tricky because of its so many uses. When we talk about "the system of literature" (or the "literary system"), one may easily be misled by the vernacular use of "system" in such expressions like "the political system," which vaguely denotes "the assumed complex of political activities." The use of this term in such current expressions is clearly a-theoretical: no commitment is made thereby to any specific theoretical approach towards investigating this "system." In polysystem theory, however, the term is already a commitment to the concept of "system" in (dynamic) functionalism, i.e., the network of relations that can be hypothesized for a certain set of assumed observables ("occurrences"/"phenomena").
I consider that passage a clear demonstration of the difference between "poetics" and "poetic". Also a crime against language.
