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Handout 1: Working with the Text

New Criticism & Structuralism

Poe was such a genius!


I. Criticism during the era of the Author (Romanticism) And a drunkard...and
an opium-user...
AUTHOR --> WORK --> LANGUAGE --> READER --> CONTEXT

- All about the author (biographical criticism extremely popular);


- Critics (very impressionistic considerations of the work) and scholars (experts in an authors life, comparison of
different manuscripts);
- Subjective, even gossipy (Emerson mockingly called Poe the Jingle man);
- No clear methodology;
- Even amateurish; What makes Poes The
Fall of the House of Usher
II. Formalism and New Criticism (1930s to 1960s) good literature?
AUTHOR --> WORK --> LANGUAGE --> READER --> CONTEXT

The Big Players:


I.A. Richards, William Empson, T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren.

Some big titles:


Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson); Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (Richards),
Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Penn Warren), The New Criticism (Crowe Ransom)

Big New Criticism Concepts:


o Reaction against Romanticism: established the study of literature as serious business;
o Made the field more democratic (you didnt need to be a specialist to understand poetry or fiction);
o There is nothing outside the text (author, context, reader are not important in the analysis of a work);
o Close reading/Explication: to understand and analyze a text, you only need to follow it as closely as possible;
o Literariness: what makes literature good literature;
o Big believers in the literary canon;
o The intentional fallacy: we couldnt care less about what the author intended, we are interested in the work;
o The affective fallacy: dont confuse the work with the effect it has upon you/ the reader;
o Some things that New Critics were interested in: irony, ambiguity, paradox;
o Images, tropes, symbols, themes, tones;

Big New Criticism Questions


What makes good literature good?
What role does irony play in the text?
What paradoxes appear in the text?
What recurring symbols, themes or tropes appear in the text?
How is the work ambiguous?
What meanings can we identify if we follow the work closely (line by line, for instance)?

How does The Fall of the


III. Structuralism (peak in 1960s, 70s)
House of Usher reflect on the
AUTHOR --> WORK --> LANGUAGE --> READER --> CONTEXT larger structures it belongs to?

The Big Players:


Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Northrop Frye, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tzvetan Todorov
Some big titles:
Structural Anthropology (Levi-Strauss), S/Z (Barthes), Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), Course in General
Linguistics (Saussure).

Big Structuralist Concepts


o Language is a system/code; the linguistic sign is made of a signifier and a signified and the relationship
between them is an arbitrary one (Saussure);
o A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie (Umberto Eco)
o Literature uses/is language --> its deep structures can be analyzed using linguistic methods (rise of semiotics
and semiology);
o Saussure: langue vs. parole (system of rules vs. actual utterances, Chomsky competence vs. performance);
o Culture also makes use of signs, so unlike new critics, structuralists are not only interested in literature, but
also in mythology and culture (even pop culture);
o Unlike new critics, structuralists are not interested in the structures of a single work, but in the larger
structures that apply to a whole range of works or cultural phenomena (think literary genres); They want to
observe the larger design is which all works fit (not observing closely like the New Critics, but standing back
from the work to see where it fits in the larger structures)
o For the structuralists, the author is dead; (If the new critics had started to kill him, the structuralists buried
him)
o The work itself is not important: what is important is analyzing the principles that govern all literature (and not
only literature); Structuralists like to examine literature in big batches;
o Work vs. text; Writing vs. Literature
o Text as tissue of many other texts (intertextuality);
o Subject vs. Person;
o Binary opposition;
o Genres, modes (parody, comedy, satire, tragedy etc);
o Birth of narratology;

Big Structuralist Questions


How does this text/ these texts illustrate the features of a larger genre? (i.e. detective fiction, gothic fiction, sonnet
etc.)?
What binary opposites can we find in the text (i.e. villain and victim, light and dark etc.)?
What common character types are to be found in the text (for instance: the damsel in distress, the femme fatale)?
What narrative structures can be identified in the text and how are those similar to narrative structures in other
texts?
What is the relationship between the language of the text and cultural milieu in which it was produced?
What are some of the double entendres (or double meanings) that can be identified in the text? (i.e. Shakespeares
Hamlet, Get thee to a nunnery!: monastery and brothel)
How can we make meaning of the text by analyzing its patterns (narrative, poetical...)?

Roland Barthes The Death of the Author


- we dont care about the author because writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin (Barthes,
Norton Anthology of Th.and.Crit., p. 1322);
- the only origin of writing is language itself (p.1324): it is language that speaks, not the author himself (p.1323)
- the narrative/ story can only begin to live when the author metaphorically dies;
- author is not an Author-Father or Author-God (p.1324), but a mediator, shaman or relator (p. 1322), scriptor
(p.1324);
- person vs. subject (author is not a person, but simply an I or a subject writing) (p.1323)
- work (a product) vs. text (a tissue of quotations p.1324);
- there is no one secret meaning in texts, but a plurality of meanings;
Northrop Frye Archetypes of Literature
- We need a systematic study of literature to be able to examine its larger patterns (p. 1307) and to totalize its forms;
- Criticism must be centripetal (from away to closer to literature), rather than centrifugal (taking us away from literature)
- Archetypal criticism allows us to analyze and categorize all literature, to make an inventory of all of its genres and
forms; (archetype, for him, --> recurring myth);

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