New Critics (American) Are Important to Post-Colonial Theory

02/03/11

Two questions: post WWI litt... Do authors try to "defamiliarize" certain acts in modern litterature? Why was Jackobson popular in post-war France? Why did Jackobson's ideas, formalism, only become popular in the US through the French translation of his Russian text? Were there other factors? Was it just the right "time" for his work to become popular, and so it could have been written in any language? Was French more accessible? More "accepted"? Can we escape our linguistic constraints? Are we always trapped by our mother language? Or can we really adopt a new world view? Lecture: New critics (American) are important to post-colonial theory. A dominant school of criticism from 1930s to 1970s. Founders of the "close readings" Started with 19th century British thinkers, like Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). He has this idea that art provides moral sustanence. He develops an idea of art as universal, which is problematic. No economical or material factors should come into play with art. He has a very liberal humanistic point of view. T.S. Elliot: For him, litterature is a kind of repository of timeless values. He will try to define a canon, "what is the very best that litterature has produced" He believes that when a poet writes he doesn't express his personality, he expresses/focuses on the "medium" (?!) Elliot is a modernist poet who shared the idea that art restores wholeness and harmony in the world. The idea of a reconciliation of the opposite. Cambridge critics - Richards: Believes that art is a part of post WWI reconciliation. Many Cambridge school writers will work on poetry. Many of these ideas come into the New Critics The New Critics: They want to focus on the literary language. They're not interested in context. 2 interesting ideas: The intentional fallacy: the intention of the author; we can never recover the intention of the author. THe meaning is not in the intention of the author but in the word/verbal structure. The affective fallacy: the impact of the art impacts the readers in an affective way. The art provokes a reaction. They're very attentive to paradoxes, ironic structures, rhetoric, etc. All of these close readings are geared towards arriving at a universal truth. problematic becuase you assume that there are universal values and that every reader will have the same reaction. Another idea that comes out of this school is that of the critic. There is a strong opposition between the world of art and the world of science. New Critics do not like the language of science. Science denotes language, litterature evokes an elusiveness (!?) Fry's "Anatomy of Critiscism", 1957 Formalism: Around 1916, a group of literary critics is formed in Russia to study poetry and poetic language. The group is suppressed by Stalin in the 1920s. Why would some of the works become problematic to the Stalinist regime? Jackobson moves to Prague and joins a group called the "Czech structuralism" Jackobson is well-known in post-war France. The bulk of this work comes to the US in the 50's and 60's through the French translation. Formalists are much broader than the New Critics, they have larger ambitions, "what makes litterature litterature?" The idea of literary language being the key/being written to ordinary speech is problematic (!?) Narratology (!?) Jackobson will theorize the notion of the dominant (!?) Jackobson calls the defamiliarization "foregrounding the device": Idea is that there is one element that draws attention to itself while the other elements are downplayed. In Saussure you have a radicalization of the ideas of the formalist. Saussure - Wikipedia Detachment from reality (!?) He was itnerested in providing a systemic description of language. He says there is "langue" and "langage" One is very messy with different speakers, speech style, etc (langue). He has to eliminate diachrony and context to arrive at a structural definition of langauge. . He was interested in arriving at a structural definition of langauge. He will develop ideas about signs (signs are arbitrary, there is motivation in a sign) He defines the sign as signifier (acoustic form) signified (mental concept) (!?) In language there is just opposition. "Cat" has meaning because it is in opposition to "bat, rat, etc." Does language precede or follow subjectivity? For Saussure, language determines our concept. Language completely structures thought. He believes in linguistic determinism. In other words, language is who we are and it structures our thought. Your subjectivities are the product of language. Lévi-Strauss adopbs Saussure's ideas. Barthes uses Saussure too in his "Mythologies" Other important structuralists: Todorov, "the grammar of decamaron" and his theory of the "fantastic" Todorov Claude Brimout Girard Jenet Annotation vocale, enregistrée le 02/03/11 à 18:30:06 UTC-05:00