DEFINITION

Literature

Aristotle: art of mimesis, imitation or representation, whose function is to bring to the surface
and cure the human passions.

any kind of composition in prose or verse which has for its purpose the of act telling of a story
or the giving of pleasure through use of the imagination in words.

distinction between criticism and literary theory

theory

focuses on abstract methodological principles.

involves distance, perspective, framing, representation, interpretation; I

situatedness vis--vis its object.

rules are extracted from the discussion of the nature of texts and applied in further analyses of
texts.

is e removed from the artistic product, and much more independent to devise its own laws and
principles by relying on extra-literary disciplines such as psychology, history, sociology, and
especially linguistics.

is generally metacritical, reflexive and selfreferential

 Criticism

applies the principles derived by theory, but focuses on its object rather than on its own
method; it usually proceeds deductively.

more obviously referential, transparent and critical of its object rather than of itself

practical interpretation,the encounter between literature and theory.

4 different types of theories:

- the mimetic theories: focused on the relationship between the outside world and the work of
art.;
- the rhetorical, emphasized the relationship between the work of art and its audience

- expressive- stressed the relationship between the work of art and the
artist

- formal theories stressed the purely aesthetic relationship between the parts of a work of
literature, analyzing its themes or motifs

THE 19TH CENTURY

The Romantics

Romantic age - revolution, social and technological, philosophical and literary.

The French Revolution heartened and appalled the watching world. The rise of Napoleon and the
war with France cast a shadow over many idealistic libertarian movements in England.

- intellectual ferment: men and women with disturbing uncertainties

a new connotation for the concept of truth to nature: Nature is no longer primarily the principle
of simplicity It is the force which binds man to mother earth, which surrounds him with hills and
covers him with the sky. And what offends against it is the mill chimney and the steam engine,
factory labour and the city slum

At the beginning of the nineteenth century literary criticism is dominated by the Romantic
poets => the subtle correspondences between the human spirit and nature.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

- his critical considerations are consistently democratic and open-minded; denies the traditional
assumption that the poetic genres constitute a hierarchy

- he also rejects the principle of decorum. Poetry is the ultimate knowledge. The poet is
imparting the richness of his heart and giving pleasure to a human Being, who also responds with
his heart.
- chose to represent incidents and situations from common life => use of peasants, outcasts,
criminals, and idiot boys as subjects
 - to write in a selection of language really used by men, => there can be no essential
difference between the language of prose and metrical composition . The only criteria for the
selection, are true taste and feeling.

- the equivalence between the language of poems and prose language

is not one of vocabulary or of syntax,both forms of language originate spontaneously
- expanding the range of serious literature to include common people and ordinary things and
events,

- a poetry of sincerity rather than of artifice, expressed in the ordinary language of its time.

Percy Bisshe Shelley

- use of Platonic ideas: the poet, through imagination, comes directly into contact with true
reality, instead of simply imitating the reflections of those ideas

- the poet achieves moral good by stimulating and strengthening imagination. Poetry does not
teach morals directly, by providing examples of good behaviour; poetry is an instrument of moral
good and of self-knowledge.

- emphasise the relationship between poetry and society, and especially the role of the poet in
imposing a vision of the ideal order as apprehended by imagination.

- attempt to convey a sense of the significance of poetry, that joins the humanist spirit of the
Renaissance with the idealism of the Romantic age.
- many of his poems reflect his sense of the limits of certain knowledge and his refusal to let his
intuitions and hopes harden into a philosophical or religious creed.

- the hope in the ultimate redemption of life by love and imagination is not a certainty but a moral
obligation.

I. The Victorians
- the Victorian essay is a conversational, trying out an idea rhetorically in the discursive prose or of
putting over moral reflections.

- the age of religious controversies and of the conflict between science and religion on account of
Darwinism and scientific discovery.

- Utilitarianism had a considerable influence upon 19th-century thinking .

Matthew Arnold

- considered literature itself to be the type of culture.

- deplored the ugliness and unimaginative materialism of England, its lack of sweetness and light.

- English middle classes represented the hope of civilisation, and he set himself to educate them.

- humanist who devoted a large part of his life to demonstrating that an adequate literary culture
could and should play in society and to rescuing religion by propounding a liberal Christianity
based on a view of the Bible as poetry rather than as history or science
- the role of poetry as he sees it is to bring joy, to rejoice the reader, to convey a charm.

- Essays on Criticism - he sought in good writing: lack of adornments, the quality of high
seriousness, didacticism.

- Culture and Anarchy - his view of civilisation : conduct; intellect and knowledge; beauty; social
life and manners.

- the term culture - connotes the qualities of an open-minded intelligence, a full awareness of
humanitys past and a capacity to enjoy the best works of art, literature, history and philosophy

- history is cyclical, and a true intellectual atmosphere is the most effective way of curing the ills of
a sick society and of regenerating it.

- he views art as one possible salvation for an inhumane society

- touchstones- lines of poetry that supposedly exemplify the highest flights of creativity. When we
hear a line of poetry, Arnold recommends that we compare it immediately to those lines in
literature that are most sublime

Walter Pater (1839-1894)

- his work seemed more subversive in its quiet way than the head-on attacks against
traditional Victorianism made by the writers

- instead of recommending a continuation of the painful quest for Truth, assured his readers
that the quest was pointless. Truth, he said, is relative.; reminded his readers that life passes
quickly and that our only responsibility is to enjoy fully , to relish its sensations, especially those
sensations provoked by works of art.
 - in each of his essays he seeks to communicate what he called the special unique impression
of pleasure made on him by the works of some artist or write

- he defines the artist as the transcriber not of the world, but of his sense of it. His range of
subjects includes the dialogues of Plato, the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, the plays of
Shakespeare, and the writings of the French Romantic school of the 19th century.

- relevant are his discriminating studies of Wordsworth, Coleridge and his essay on the poetry of
William Morris

-the most great artists combine the qualities of both classical and romantic schools of art

III. The American Scene

Ralph Waldo Emerson

- pleads that the truth that the reader finds in a text is not intrinsic, lying dormant in it; rather,
the right kind of reading is the result of the truth that
readers bring with them.

- the scholars proper occupation is not reading but writing, which is a form of contemplation, of
truth seeking.

- the poet is defined as the individual who can transcend individuality, who through the
manipulation of symbols and figures understands best the highest truths about the relationship
between matter and spirit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
 the American romance is characterised by a relation to social experience, is nonreferential,
therefore better able to deal with dark and complex truths unavailable to realism, tends to use
mythic, allegorical and symbolist forms

The Early Twentieth Century;

Formalisms

I. Liberal Humanism
- the entire conception of the nature and function of literature,the relationship between literature
and reality, changed as a result of the general collapse of the old religious, philosophical,
psychological and scientific certainties.

-many of the most distinguished writers felt called upon to explain and justify their methods
and techniques.

II. Practical Criticism

I.A. Richards

- explores the relation between literature and life by bringing the new science of psychology to
bear upon the criteria and technique for judging literature.
- pleads for adopting the reliability and rigor of experimental science => achieved through
close attention to the text on the page.
 - the most important relationship is that between text and reader => the nature and kinds of
meaning that arise from that encounter => readers are given fragments of text taken out of any
context and required to comment on them.
- distinguishes four levels or kinds of meaning: sense, feeling, tone and intention, and
investigates the various sources of difficulty posed by criticism.

F.R. Leavis

- praises the art of concrete realisation

-established formal innovativeness, social engagement, and the capacity to address the moral
consciousness as the standards of quality in normative criticism or valuation.

- Leavisite School of literary criticism, coagulating around the periodical Scrutiny ,

- Leavis believed that the greatest quality of a literary work is its capacity to appeal to what is
deepest in us.

III. The American New Criticism

- started by critics educated at Cambridge,who then militated for the introduction of literary
criticism as a discipline in American universities.

- the analytical method proposed by this school - close reading

 - New Criticism rejects the reader-oriented formulation and resists theorising in favour of
direct involvement with the text.

-it focuses on the text on the page at the expense of any consideration of its author or of the
historical or literary context in which it was produced.

- their main concern is with those features of poetic language which make it poetic, as
contradistinct from prose => devices used by the author, how writers defamiliarise reality in order
to achieve the effect of literariness.
- New Critics:

- concern for traditional Christian and idealistic aesthetic values, but asserted the absolute
autonomy of the aesthetic.

- Mimesis -irrelevant to literary interpretation.

- focus on specific literary works as iconic and organically growing out of natural processes

- no interest in the latest developments in linguistics and semiotics; their approach to poetic
language is informed by rhetoric;

- stress on the text => concepts such as paradox, irony, ambiguity

- a specialised terminology that includes: unity, coherence, pattern, analogy, objective

correlative, symbol, tension, overlapping, discrepancy, contradiction,
 IV. Other Formalisms
Archetypal/ Anthropological/ Myth Criticism:

- consideration of the impact of various mythologies, myths, superstitions and mentalities on

literature and on the psyche of the writers

- the growth of meaning in a literary work is independent of the poets conscious intention.

The New York Intellectuals:

- Lionel Trilling : was a liberal and a critic. His central concern, is the sense in which literature
manifests ideas. His key argument against New Criticism is that concentration on the aesthetic
robs literature of its life within the world.

Neo-Aristotelianism/ The Chicago Critics:

- they reshaped the literature curriculum at the University of Chicago - a type of teaching based on
close reading, textual explication and aesthetics.

- the works power comes from the inferred sense of the whole, not from the parts; Language and
form are important only to the extent to which they are conducive to a sense of a concrete
whole.

The Second Half of the Century:

Structuralism and Post-Structuralisms
 I. Structuralism
- structuralist approach: everything we do that is specifically human is expressed in language.

- most of our daily activities depend on a variety of other codes: music, fashion, manners, body
language, the exchange of labour and goods for symbols (cash, cheques, stock certificates), the
exchange of women between families

- structuralism aims at the of organising principles which make symbols/ signs converge
towards a message. The message is not always immediately obvious but it is gradually disclosed
through a series of semiotic transformations performed by the reader.
Charles Sanders Peirce divided sign systems into three general types:
(1) iconic signs

(2) Indexes

(3) true symbols

(4)

Ferdinand de Saussure

- established that the special symbol systems of the natural languages are systems based on
differences.
-structuralism is not a set of beliefs, but two complementary practices: analysis and synthesis.
The structuralist analyses (i.e., divides) the products of human making into their smallest
significant component parts, then tries to discover how the parts fit together and function.

Roman Jakobson
 - model of the act of communication: A sender, having made contact with a receiver, sends a
message about some external context using a code. Most normal communication is referential,
i.e., it emphasizes the context. The emotive function of communication emphasizes the sender,
while the conative emphasises the receiver. The phatic function is that of establishing contact. The
metalinguistic function is to investigate the code that sender and receiver are both using to clear
up disagreements and ambiguities. Finally, the poetic function centres on the message qua
message s,

II. Poststructuralism(s)
- Structuralism - discover the inherent structure that contains the meaning of any narrative

- Poststructuralism: any structure that can be associated with a certain narrative is in fact put
there (invented) by the reader as part of the reading (i.e., interpretive) activity, and therefore
any number of different, even contradictory, meanings can be attached to any one text.

- the Grand Narratives or coherent worldviews (e.g. history, ethics, aesthetics, etc.) make room for
the little narratives of day-to-day existence. This fragmentation of discourse is replicated by the
multiplicity of perspectives and approaches in literary studies

Phenomenological and Existentialist Criticism

Philosophical criticism came from Europe to America in two waves: one in the 1950s, and the
second in the 1970s.x The first wave was responsible for phenomenological and existentialist
awareness
and philosophical and cultural criticism, as well as for the co-implication of subject (reader) and
object
(text).

Post-Structuralism/ Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida - the centre, the focal point of any structure as promoted by structuralism,
does not have concrete existence, and is therefore both inside and outside the structure it is
supposed to govern.

Deconstruction is often regarded as a faction of poststructuralism. Deconstruction reads texts

against the grain, revealing the instability of meaning and the arbitrariness of hierarchies and
preferences. It does not aim to reverse hierarchies but to
topple and replace them with radical doubt about their legitimacy. The confusions that
deconstruction unveils are those of the critical tradition, not of the text.

Marxist Criticism
- devalues and re-valorises literature: it rejects and discredits any notions of high literature and
canons, replacing them with the more generous notion of writing (which includes non-fiction
writing, such as biographies, periodical essays, diaries etc.), and endows it with political and social
power.

New Historicism/ Cultural Materialism

The greatest merit of New Historicism is to have recuperated the less visible stories of
marginalized ethnic and gender groups, and to have foregrounded the impact of ideology on the
way in which history is constructed.
 Cultural Studies
- it concerns itself with the meaning and practices of everyday life, and with the value attached to
various objects and practices in various cultures. Key focuses are power dynamics and cultural
knowledge, and the subtle relations established between them, especially in the wake of the
worldwide spread of capitalism, otherwise known as globalisation.

Ethnic Studies and Post-Colonialism

- an awareness of representations of the non-European as exotic or immoral Other;

- concern with language, and recuperation of the languages or dialects of the colonised; emphasis
on identity as doubled, or hybrid, or hyphenated, or unstable;

- stress on cross-cultural interactions. Ethnic studies dwell on the literary achievements of minority
groups in the United States, whereas Postcolonial studies analyse the productions of writers born
in the British colonies

Psychoanalytical Criticism
1) classical Freudian criticism: focus on the complex relations between desire and figuration,
which must needs involve an analysis of tropes; it proposes a dynamic model of the psyche, in
which the pleasure principle conflicts with the reality principle;

2) post-Freudian criticism.
2.1) Jungian criticism: the act of creation is an autonomous complex originating in
this unconscious, and the only decoding method is amplification, whereby
images of the personal unconscious are immediately extended to those of the
 collective;
2.2) ego-psychology: projection and counter-projection on the reader rather than
the author and shows how the literary work challenges and then reassures the
readers identity;
2.3) object-relations theory:the mother is transformed into parts

2.4) Lacanian criticism: the moments when that construction is an essentially

linguistic act. Language institutes loss, but it is also both a response to loss,
and an attempt to seize power over loss

2.5) Kristevian criticism:

2.6) schizoanalysis: desire is present from the start and it tends to one or the
other of two poles: a schizophrenic and a paranoiac one

2.7) psychoanalytic feminist criticism: to demonstrate that the feminine is to be regarded

not as a natural given, but as a construction;

Feminism and Gender Studies

Feminist studies are generally regarded as having evolved in three phases:

1) attack on male sexism;

2) investigation of literary works for representations of women;

3) literary, critical, psychosocial and cultural theory.

- two major phases: a humanistic one in the 1960s and 1970s, whose main achievement was to re-
write Western cultural history and to challenge male humanism by raising the issue of gender; and
a much more sophisticated second wave in the 1980s, which regards femininity alternatively as a
product of psychic process, a social construct, an effect of language.

Reader-Response Theory
- focusing on the psychology and sociology of an actual reader and the ways in which these modify
the outcome of the reading. - Stanley Fish - the reader is an informed reader, a hybrid between
the ideal reader and an actual living,