Eng 813 Literary Theory and Practical Criticism
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Twentieth Century Criticism: Traditions and Concepts
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development Online ISSN: 2349-4182, Print ISSN: 2349-5979 Impact Factor: RJIF 5.72 Received: 05-08-2018; Accepted: 12-09-2018 www.allsubjectjournal.com Volume 5 Issue 9; September 2018; Page No. 78-81 Twentieth century criticism: Traditions and concepts Bishnu Prasad Pokharel PhD. Lecturer, Nepal Sanskrit University, Bijauri, Nepal Abstract Literary theory involves questioning of the most basic assumption of literary study, speculative practice, accounts of desires and language. Theory has brought many ideas from other field of knowledge to engage in a discussion on humanities, art and literature and different issues like race, identity, mythologies, signs and many other issues that are not directly linked to literature. Theory has made literary discourse interdisciplinary by welcoming ideas from other discipline. So, literary theory is not something that has been developed in a vacuum but has arisen for the most part in response to the problems encountered by readers, scholars and critics in their practical contact with the text. It also provides excellent tools that can not only show us our world and ourselves through new and valuable lenses but also can strengthen our ability and with a good deal of insight. Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism, Post structuralism/ Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Reader Response, Colonialism and New Historicism are the major theories discussed in this article. Keywords: theory, criticism, defamiliarization, text, interpretation, gender, meaning, context Introduction with the revolution” (603). The twentieth century encountered intensification of Russian Formalism was a departure from the prevailing rationalization, urbanization, secularization, increasingly Romantic Symbolism and Futurism. -
Common Perspectives in Post-Colonial Indian and African Fiction in English
COMMON PERSPECTIVES IN POST-COLONIAL INDIAN AND AFRICAN FICTION IN ENGLISH ABSTRACT THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF Bottor of IN ENGLISH LITERATURE BY AMINA KISHORE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIIVI UNIVERSITY ALIGARH 1995 Abstract The introduction of the special paper on Commonwealth Literature at the Post Graduate level and the paper called 'Novel other than British and American' at the Under Graduate level at AMU were the two major eventualities which led to this study. In the paper offered to the M A students, the grouping together of Literatures from atleast four of the Commonwealth nations into one paper was basically a makeshift arrangement. The objectives behind the formulation of such separate area as courses for special study remained vaguely described and therefore unjustified. The teacher and students, were both uncertain as to why and how to hold the disparate units together. The study emerges out of such immediate dilemma and it hopes to clarify certain problematic concerns related to the student of the Commonwealth Literature. Most Commonwealth criticism follows either (a) a justificatory approach; or (b) a confrontationist approach; In approach (a) usually a defensive stand is taken by local critics and a supportive non-critical, indulgent stand is adopted by the Western critic. In both cases, the issue of language use, nomenclature and the event cycle of colonial history are the routes by which the argument is moved. Approach (b) invariably adopts the Post-Colonial Discourse as its norm of presenting the argument. According to this approach, the commonness of Commonwealth Literatures emerges from the fact that all these Literatures have walked ••• through the fires of enslavement and therefore are anguished, embattled units of creative expression. -
Applying Literary Theory: NEW CRITICISM
Applying Literary Theory: NEW CRITICISM Theoretical Underpinnings In a nutshell, New Criticism: emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." rejects attention to biographical and sociological matters. examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, between what a text says and the way it says it. attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical vocabulary. asserts that the goal of literature is not the pursuit of sincerity or authenticity, but subtlety, unity, and integrity--and these are properties of the text, not the author. functions under the assumption that the work is not the author's; it was detached at birth. The author's intentions are "neither available nor desirable" (nor even to be taken at face value when supposedly found in direct statements by authors). Meaning exists on the page, and on the page only. advocated for treating the text as separate from the author’s intentions and the readers’ impressions. To Apply New Criticism: 1. Start by examining the text for its form. In other words, how is it structured? What aspects of how it’s written—literary devices, organization, point of view, etc.—are most important to creating meaning within the text? 2. Choose one or two specific aspects of the text to focus on. Be sure your focus isn’t too broad! (For example, you might focus on blindness/vision as a motif, or choose a couple of motifs, or one or two types of imagery that pop up often…but you DON’T want to focus on motifs in general, symbolism in general, imagery in general…) 3. -
Postcolonialism
10 Postcolonialism The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination. Che Guevara, speech to the United Nations, December 11, 1964 he 1960s saw a revolutionary change in literary theory. Until this dec- Tade, New Criticism dominated literary theory and criticism, with its insistence that “the” one correct interpretation of a text could be discovered if critical readers follow the prescribed methodology asserted by the New Critics. Positing an autonomous text, New Critics paid little attention to a text’s historical context or to the feelings, beliefs, and ideas of a text’s read- ers. For New Critics, a text’s meaning is inextricably bound to ambiguity, irony, and paradox found within the structure of the text itself. By analyzing the text alone, New Critics believe that an astute critic can identify a text’s central paradox and explain how the text ultimately resolves that paradox while also supporting the text’s overarching theme. Into this seemingly self-assured system of hermeneutics marches philos- opher and literary critic Jacques Derrida along with similar-thinking scholar- critics in the late 1960s. Unlike the New Critics, Derrida, the chief spokesperson for deconstruction, disputes a text’s objective existence. Denying that a text is an autotelic artifact, he challenges the accepted definitions and assump- tions of both the reading and the writing processes. In addition, he insists on questioning what parts not only the text but also the reader and the author play in the interpretive process. -
43 Elaine SHOWALTER: 'TOWARDS a FEMINIST POETICS'
216 TWENTIETH·CENTURY LITERARY THEORY 43 ElAINE SHOWALTER: 'TOWARDS A FEMINIST POETICS' Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties. The first type is concerned with woman as reader - with woman as the con sumer of male-produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes. I shall call this kind of analysis the feminist critique, and like other kinds of critique it is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideo logical assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male constructed literary history. It is also concerned with the exploita tion and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film; and with the analysis of woman-as-sign in semiotic systems. The second type of feminist criticism is concerned with woman as writer - with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works. No term exists in English for such a specialised discourse, and so I have adapted the French term la gynocritique: 'gynocritics' (although the significance of the male pseudonym in the history of women's writing also suggested the term 'georgics'). -
A Brief Overview of Literary Criticism Literary Critical Theory Is a Tool That
A Brief Overview of Literary Criticism Woman Reading Book in a Landscape, Camille Corot Literary Critical Theory is a tool that helps you find meaning in stories, poems and plays. There are many different ways to interpret a novel or short story. When we read literature, we do so to learn more about: ● The human condition ● The experience of loss and death ● The structure of power in society and how it is implemented (including the issues that surround race and gender). ● The psychology of characters and individuals in general ● The sociology and history of cultures that produce specific pieces of literature Literary Theory helps us discover the things listed above in the books and stories we read. So how do you use theory to read a book? Before exploring, in brief, different theories, it is important to develop a reading strategy that will help you form ideas. You should keep a reading notebook and write down ideas and information as you read. Here is a checklist of things to notice: ● Title. How does it pertain to the story? Does it symbolize events or people in the story? ● Narration: Who is telling the story? How does the narrator approach the topic? ● Subject: What is the basic situation? What is happening to the characters and how are they reacting to events? ● Mood: What is the mood of the story, i.e. the emotional background? How is it expressed in the language and setting? ● Characters: What do the characters learn in the course of the story? What are their failings and how do they overcome them, or not? What is the main character’s desire? Is that desire ever fulfilled? How does the main character change? ● Character Interaction: How do the characters interact in the story? How do they communicate with each other? How do they handle conflict? ● Plot: What are the main events in the plot that lead the character to new insights, or to his or her failure? When you read a book, you can highlight the passages that strike you as significant. -
BEYOND IMITATION: the RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LITERATURE and SOCIAL REALITY AS IMPLIED in GEORG LUKÁCS's REFLECTION THEORY Dr
Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Vol.5, No.4, pp.26-37, May 2017 ___Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK (www.eajournals.org) BEYOND IMITATION: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LITERATURE AND SOCIAL REALITY AS IMPLIED IN GEORG LUKÁCS'S REFLECTION THEORY Dr. Ahmad Mohammad Abd Al-Salam and Amal Galal Mohammad Morsy Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Fayoum University ABSTRACT: Reflection is not a new concept in literary criticism. However, this concept reached its dialectic perfection at the hand of the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács (1885- 1971). Believing that Man is the focal point in every literary content, Lukács conceives Realism as the basis of all literary genres due to its significant role in solving Man's problems of alienation and the self- spilt caused by Capitalism, and it is, therefore, the best representation of his Reflection Theory. Reflection for Lukács is neither spontaneous nor photographic, but deliberate and conscious. In this process, the writer plays the role of the mediator between literature and the society. A great writer has, thus, to portray his characters and their struggle for self-realization objectively without imposing his political orientation. Through his typical characters and situations, the writer brings the reality in front of his readers' eyes so as to enable them to confront their troubles and think of change, and this is "intellectual and moral work" of the realist writer in Lukács's perspective. KEYWORDS: Reflection, Realism, Type, Totality, Reification. INTRODUCTION Georg [György] Lukács (1885-1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, critic, an aesthetic theorist and one of the prominent and active Hungarian politicians, especially during the 1919 and 1956 Hungarian revolutions. -
Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism and the Fiction of Social Form
University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism And The Fiction Of Social Form Natalie Amleshi University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Modern Literature Commons, and the Other History Commons Recommended Citation Amleshi, Natalie, "Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism And The Fiction Of Social Form" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3442. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3442 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3442 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Inhuman Power: Infrastructural Modernism And The Fiction Of Social Form Abstract E.M. Forster’s imperative to “only connect” has long been read as modernist slogan for the rarefied depth of authentic interpersonal intimacy. Reframing the historical co-emergence of literary modernism and modern social science, this project tells a different story—not of connections between exceptional humans, but of connections between persons and environments. The prevailing canons of modernism have not yet grasped the internal complexity of early-twentieth-century debates regarding the interdependence of human and nonhuman agency. Early-twentieth-century sociologists like Émile Durkheim grounded both the autonomy of human culture and the disciplinary authority of sociology on the premise of species exceptionalism—the independence -
The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry Free
FREE THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE: A THEORY OF POETRY PDF Prof. Harold Bloom | 208 pages | 03 Jul 1997 | Oxford University Press Inc | 9780195112214 | English | New York, United States The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry - Harold Bloom - Google книги Professor Bloom Yale; author of Blake's Apocalypse,and Yeats, interprets modern poetic history — the history of poetry in a Cartesian climate — in terms of Freud's "family romance After graduating from Yale, Bloom remained there The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry a teacher, and was made Sterling Professor of Humanities in Bloom's theories have changed the way that critics think of literary tradition and has also focused his attentions on history and the Bible. He has written over twenty books and edited countless others. He is one of the most famous critics in the world and considered an expert in many fields. In he became a founding patron of Ralston College, a new institution in Savannah, Georgia, that focuses on primary texts. Harold Bloom. Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its own long shadow of influence since it was first published in Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between tradition and the individual artist. Although Bloom was never the leader of any critical "camp," his argument that all literary texts are a response to those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory in this country. The book remains a central work The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry criticism for all students of literature and has sold over 17, copies in paperback since Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorably quotable, Bloom's book maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded-- neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics. -
The Sociology of Literature : Georg Lukács
KENNETH O'BRIEN B.A. (Honours) Social Sciences, University of Leicester, England, 1968. A THESIS SUBKITTED IN PAFtTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREEl?f;;NTSFOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology @ KENNETH OVBRIEN 1969 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Novenber, 1969 EXAMINING COMMITTEE APPROVAL DAVID BETTI SON Senior Supervisor JOHN MILLS Examining Committee JERALD ZASLOVE Examining Comit tee iii ABSTRACT ~ukscslwritings on the sociology of literature are presented and examined; and his theory that there is a direct relation between the "dialectic movement of history and the great genres of literature which portray the totality of history.n This definition of the literary process is acce~ted as an hypothesis. &The sociology of literature in North America and Europe is examined in the context of Lukbcsr ideas. It is concluded that the positivism of North American sociology of literature ignores the historical specificity of contemporary literary forms. Part of the explanation for the perspective of Kenneth Burke and Hugh Duncan is shown to derive from partial elements of the epistemology of the Classical Greeks and Hegelianism. Similarly Luk;csr philosophy of literary criticism are shown to be modifications on a rigidly Marxist econoniic determinism as well as Hegelian idealism. ~ukgcs'concept of literary realism -- in contemporary society as those forms of the novel which portray the specific problems of individuals and classes and the resolution of social contradictions within the "totality of the movement of historyn-- is examined in relation to the pracesses of capitalist development in Europe. It is zrgued that literature provides more than nextensions of social realityv, as Burke and Duncan imply. -
Teaching with New Critics
CLEaR , 20 17, 4(2), ISSN 2453 - 7128 10.1515/clear - 2017 - 0010 Teaching with New Critics Anton Pokrivčák Uniwersytet Technologiczno - Humanistyczny im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego w Radomiu , Poland [email protected] Abstract Anglo - American New C riticism was one of the most important moveme nts in t h e twentieth century literary theories. It stressed the objectivity of a literary work of art and claimed that literary critics as well as teachers should concentrate, p r i m a r i l y , on the text, its linguistic structures and the ambiguities of mean ing resulting from them , and only secondarily on the text´s extraliterary relationships. After the New Critics´ popularity in the early decades of the last century , in its second part they were refused as pure formalists, s u p p o s e d l y unable to see the real nature of a literary work in its social circumstances. The article attempts to reassess New Criticism as a movement which contributed significantly to the reading and teaching literature and claims that their importance has not diminished even in the twenty - first century. Keywords New Criticism, teaching literature, literary theory, close reading , f o r m a l i s m Introduction The twentieth century saw an unprecedented upsurge of literary theorizing. It was one of the results of the shift of paradigm in the perception of the stu dy and teaching of literature in academic space – from the nineteenth century´s understanding of literary studies as just one , not necessarily the most important, part of a more general philological context, to its establishment as an independent academic discipline. -
New Criticism and Metonomy As a Device to Determine Gothic Genre in Edgar Allan Poe’S the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
New Criticism and Metonomy as A Device to Determine Gothic Genre in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket New Criticism and Metonomy as A Device to Determine Gothic Genre in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Rizkian Hendra Ardianto English Literature, Faculty of Languages and Arts, State Unversity of Surabaya [email protected] Abstrak Cerita Gothic memiliki reputasi memberikan mimpi buruk kepada pembacanya. Cerita horor yang terdapat didalam cerita Gothic berhasil membuat para pecandu andrenaline tetap setia membuka lembar demi lembar halaman Gothic novel. Cerita Gothic yang kekuatan terbesarnya terletak pada bagaimana ia memberikan atmosfer yang menegangkan didalam cerita melalui seting yang suram dan terlantar dimana ia memfokuskan gaya penulisannya tersebut (mendeskripsikan atmosfer) pada symbol (metonymy). Dua pernyataan pada persoalan di pembelajaran ini: (1) Bagaimana Gothic dicerminkan di dalam novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket? dan (2) Bagaimana The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket dapat diidentifikasi sebagai novel Gothic? Keduanya sangat penting untuk memberikan informasi lebih lanjut tentang Gothic di dalam penelitian sastra. Penelitian ini tidak bisa lepas dari sejarah dan latar belakang kemunculannya. Fred Botting didalam penelitiannya tentang genre Gothic mengemukakan bahwa Gothic bisa dianggap sebagai reaksi terhadap era Pencerahan. Era ini telah membawa kesadaran di jaman ketidaktahuan. Pemikiran rational telah menggeser agama dalam menjelaskan alam semesta, dunia sosial, dan fenomena supranatural. Pada dasarnya Gothic menjadi jembatan didalam transisi antara Zaman Kegelapan ke Zaman Pencerahan. Itulah yang membuat Gothic memiliki peran penting di perubahan sosial masyarakat. Gothic yang memiliki banyak keutamaan seperti yang dijelaskan diatas telah berhasil mengundang masyarakat untuk mengetahui lebih banyak tentang cerita Gothic.