Literary Criticism An Introduction to Theory and Practice
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Highlights
to find answers to such questions as these: What is the basis of morality or ethics? What is the meaning of human history? Is there an overarching purpose for humanity’s existence? What are beauty, truth, and goodness? Is there an ultimate reality? Interestingly, our answers to these and other questions do not remain static, for as we interact with other people, with our environment, and with our own personal philosophies, we continue to grapple with these issues, often changing our ideas. But it is our answers that largely determine our response to a literary text. Upon such a conceptual framework rests literary theory. — location: 171
The reader and the text transact or interact, creating meaning, for meaning does not exist either solely within the reader’s mind or solely within the text, Rosenblatt maintains, but in the interaction between them. — location: 188
definition of the absurd
From the fifth century B.C. to the present, various critics such as Plato, Dante, Wordsworth, and a host of others have developed principles of criticism that have had a major influence on the ongoing discussion of literary theory and criticism. — location: 298
Aristotle contends that poetry is more universal, more general than things as they are. For “it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may. happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity.” — location: 368
Aristotle’s poet, with his emphasis on the universal, actually attains nearer to the ideal than does Plato’s. — location: 373
“through pity and fear” effect a catharsis—that is, by the play’s end, the audience’s emotions should be purged, purified, or clarified — location: 391
In addition, all tragic heroes must have a tragic flaw or hamartia that leads to their downfall in such a way as not to offend the audience’s sense of justice. — location: 389
When our intellects, our emotions, and our wills harmoniously respond to a given work of art, we know we have been touched by the sublime. — location: 433
Until Dante’s Comtnedia no secular work had employed these principles of symbolic interpretation. — location: 451
As the representative scholar, writer, and gentleman of Renaissance England, Sidney is usually considered the first great English critic-poet. His work An Apology for Poetry (sometimes called Defence of Poesy) is the “epitome of the literary criticism of the Italian Renaissance” and the first influential piece of literary criticism in English history. — location: 456
John Drvden more than any nther English writer embodies the spirit and ideals of neoclassicism, the literary age that follows Sidney and the Renaissance. — location: 472
To accomplish this goal, the critic must avoid becoming embroiled in politics or any other activity that would lead to a form of bias, for the critic mustview society^digintefc estedlv,” keeping aloof from the world’s mundane affairs. In turn, such aloofness will benefit all of society, for the critic will be able to pave the way for.hj^lxajlture—a prerequisite for the poet and for the writing of the best poetry. — location: 633
“More and more [human]kind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” — location: 627
Like Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth before him, Arnold was the recognized authority and leading literary critic of his day, and it is his theories and criticism that embody the major ideas of his era. — location: 692
Being formalists, the New Critics espouse what many call “the text and text alone” approach to literary analysis. — location: 764
Two British critics and authors, T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards, helped lay the foundation for this form of formalistic analysis. From Eliot, New Criticism borrows its insistence that criticism be directed toward the poem, not thej>oet. The poet, declares Eliot, does not infuse the poem with his or her personality and emotions, but uses language in such a w ay as to incorporate within the poem the impersonal fpplinp;*; and prnotinn<; rnmmon to all humankind. — location: 774
Poetry is not, then, the freeing of the poet’s emotions, but an e^age from them. Since the poem is an impersonal formulation of common feelings and emotions, the poem unites the poet’s impressions and ideas in some mystical or unseen way, producing a text that is not a mere reflection of the poet’s personal feelings. — location: 777
objective correlative: a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events or reactions that can effectively serve to awaken in the reader the emotional response which the author desires without being a direct statement of that emotion. — location: 790
It is this close scrutiny or “close rpading” of a text that has become synonymous with New Criticism. — location: 799
New Criticism begins by assuming that the study of imaginative literature is valuable; to study poetry or any literary work is to engage oneself in an aesthetic experience (the effects produced upon an individual when contemplating a work of art) th,cyLJ^nj££(^^ truth discoverable through an aesthetic experience, however, is distinguishable from the truth that science provides us. — location: 802
Pure water, says science, freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, not 30 or 31. Poetic truth, on the, other hand, involves the use of the imagination and intuition, a form of mystical truth that according to the New Critics is discernible only in pqetry. In the aesthetic experience alone we are cut off from mundane or — location: 806
Poetic truth, on the, other hand, involves the use of the imagination and intuition, a form of mystical truth that according to the New Critics is discernible only in pqetry. — location: 807
New Critics assert that ci poem has(£i)tolQgicaLstatus; that is, it possesses its own being and exists like any other object. In effect, a poem becomes an artifact, an objective, self-contained, autonomous entity with its own structure. — location: 812
Similarly, the poet’s mind serves as a catalyst for the reaction that yields the poem. During the creative process, the poet’s mind, serving as the catalyst, brings together the experiences of the author’s personality (not the author’s personality traits or attributes), into an external object and a new creation: the poem. It is not, then, the personality traits of the author that coalesce to form the poem, but the experiences of the author’s personality. — location: 825
poet is an organizer of the content of human experience. — location: 851
a poem’s beauty (form) and its truth (content) cannot be separated. — location: 862
New Critics maintain that a poem is not simply. a statem ent th at is either trnp o r false, but a bundle of harmonized tensions and resolved stresses, more like a ballet or musical composition than a statement of prose. No simple paraphrase can equal the meaning of the poem, for the poem itself resists through its inner tensions any prose statement that attempts to encapsulate its meaning. — location: 864
By analyzing the poem’s poetic diction, the student uncovers ambiguities and tensions — location: 923
within the poem. Such tensions, however, are resolved by the end of the analysis by discovering the poem’s organic unity and seeing how the various elements of the text support and enhance the poem’s central paradox. — location: 924
Browning thereby extends into the structure of the poem the central paradox of the Duke, who appears to be both calm and cultured but who is in reality an animalistic murderer who refuses to be restrained by society. — location: 1012
the reader brings to the text a vast array of ideas amassed jjir ough life’s experiencesTmcludmg previous literary exr .pprienrps, and^applies s u c o nformation to thp fpxL In so doing, the reader is no longer thepas’sive receiver of knowledge but becomgsaft-artivp participant in the creation of a text’s meaning. — location: 1091
Through this transactional experience, the reader and the text produce a new creation, a poem. For Rosenblatt and many other reader-response critics, a poem now becomes an event that takes place during the reading process or what Rosenblatt calls the aesthetic transaction. No longer synonymous with the word text, a poem is created each time a reader interacts with a text, be that interaction a first reading or any of countless rereadings of the same text. — location: 1105
The concerns, then, of reader-response critics can best be summarized in one question: What is the reading process? Overall, these critics concern themselves with the entire process of the literacy experience. — location: 1152
According to structuralist critics, a reader brings to the text a predetermined system of ascertaining meaning^a complex system of signs or codes like the sirens and the red light) and applies this sigrusystem directly jo the Je x tJJie text becomes important because it contains signs or signals to the reader that have established and acceptable interpretations. — location: 1174
Ph^^j^|nQlQgx is a modern philosophical tendency that emphasizes the perceiver. Objects can have meaning, phenomenologists maintain, only if an active consciousness (a perceiver) absorbs or notes their existence. In other words, objects exist if and only if we register them on our consciousness. — location: 1186
The true poem can exist only in the reader’s consciousness, not on the printed page. When reader and text interact, the poem and therefore meaning are created; they exist only in the consciousness of the reader. [Reading and textual analysis now become an aesthetic experience whereby the reader and the text combine in ihp rnnsqniisnp<^ of the reader andTreate the poem^Like — location: 1189
For these psychological or subjective critics, the reader’s thoughts, beliefs, and experiencesplav a greater part in shaping a work’s meaning than the actual textT Ledby Norman Holland and David Bleich, these critics assert that_we shape and find our self-identities in the reading propp^ W p impose~ uporT the text, theybelieve, our ideas, seeing ourselves within the text. — location: 1195
Because the term reader-response criticism allows for so much diversity in theory and methods, many twentieth-centurv srhook of rritirism. such as deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and New Historicism. declare their membership in this broad classification. — location: 1213
According to the contemporary critic Steven Mailloux, however, they all share a two^ step procedure which they then adapt to their own theories. All show (Tj> that a work ffives a reader a task or something to do a and ^2) the reader’s response or answer to that task. — location: 1206
As I look back at those problems, I see now that I usually reasoned myself into.a_mental corner first^Jhenjesponded with emotion. Believing that concentrated thought inevitably provided an answer, I elevated reason beyond its capabilities^ — location: 1277
Through his mastery of these codes and his ability (either consciously or unconsciously) to analyze and employ them correctly in a given situation, applicant A demonstrated his knowledge of structuralism. — location: 1310
structuralists— their studies being variously called structuralism, semiotics, stylistics, or narratology—believe that codes, signs, and rules govern all human social and cultural — location: 1389
practices, including communication. Whether that communication is the language of fashion as exhibited in the story at the beginning of this chapter, or the language of sports, education, friendship, or literature, each is a systematized combination of codes (signs) governed by rules. — location: 1391
Structuralists find meaning, then, in the relationships among the various components of a system. — location: 1396
Like our unconscious mastery of our language’s langue, we also master myth’s structure. Our ability to grasp this structure, says Levi-Straussf is innate. Like language, myths are simply another way we classify and organize our world. — location: 1429
Although individual texts must be analyzed, structuralists are more interested in the mjg-goverped_,svstem that underlies texts rather than in the texts themselves. How texts mean, not what texts mean, is their chief interest. — location: 1477
Trifles, then, discovered accidentally by the women, explain motive and method, even though the men have searched the entire house and barnyard, going about what even Mrs. Peters calls “important things.” — location: 1554
three major binary oppositions or tensions. — location: 1479
How the reader organizes the various binary operations found within the text but already existing in the mind of the reader will determine for that particular reader the text’s interpretation. — location: 1469
relationship between women and men—in — location: 1503
And the interpretations themselves, the poststructuralists posit, are just as creative and important as the text being interpreted. — location: 1568
It is this assertion (that truth or a core of metaphysical ideals can be definitely believed, articulated, and supported) that Derrida and deconstruction wish to dispute and “deconstruct.” — location: 1582
This Western proclivity for desiring a center Derrida names logocentrism: the belief that there is an ultimate reality or center of truth that can serve as the basis for all our thoughts and actions. — location: 1676
the searching for a transcendental signified, an external point of reference upon which one may bnild a concept or philosophy. — location: 1659
Since the establishing of one center of unity automatically means that another is decentered, Derrida concludes that Western metaphysics is based on a svstem jrf jnnary^ operations or conceptual oppositions. For each center, there exists an opposing center (God/humankind, for example). — location: 1683
Accordingly, Derrida coins the phrase metaphysics of presence to encompass ideas such as logocentrism, phonocentrism, the operation of binary oppositions, and other notions that Western thought holds concerning language and metaphysics. His objective is to demonstrate the shaky foundations upon which such beliefs have been established. By deconstructing the basic premises of metaphysics of presence, Derrida believes he gives us a strategy for reading that opens up a variety of new interpretations heretofore unseen by those who are bound by the restraints of Western thought. — location: 1701
The first stage in a deconstructive reading is to recognize the existence and the^operation of binary oppositions in our thinking. — location: 1706
When the hierarchy is reversed] says Derrida, we can examine those values and beliefs that give rise to both the original hierarchy and the newly created one. Such an examination will reveal how the meaning of terms arises from the differences between therru^ ™ =i ~ — location: 1712
The relationship between any binary hierarchy, however, is always unstable and problematic. It is not Derrida’s purpose simply to reverse all binary oppositions that exist in Western thought but fragjjp frp»<%far the nf^nfh {2]>rarchigs.and th ^ os^ b ilitX 0! Derrida uses the term supplement to refer to the unstable relationship between elements in a binary operation. — location: 1726
Basically, differance is Derrida’s “What if?” question. — location: 1741
When such a reversal of Western metaphysics’ pivotal binary operation occurs, two dramatic results follow. First: All human knowledge becomes referentiah — location: 1749
Second: We must also forgo closure; — location: 1753
Once we do away with the transcendental signified and reverse the presence/absence binary operation, texts can no longer have presence; that is, in isolation, texts cannot possess mpaning. Since ^ 11 meaning and knowledge is now based on differences, no text can simply mean one thing. Texts become intertextual. Meaning evolves from the interrelatedness of one text to many other texts. Like language itself, texts are caught in a j^ nam ic7jziintoxt-related interchange. — location: 1757
Since meaning is derived from differences in a dynamic, context-related, ongoing process, all texts have multiple meanings or interpretations. If we assert, as does Derrida, that no transcendental signified exists, then there can exist no absolute or pure meaning supposedly conveyed by authorial intent or professorial dictates. Meaning evolves as we, the readers, interact with the text, with both the readers and the text providing social and cultural context. — location: 1763
seek to overrule their own logocentric and inherited ways of viewing a text. Such revolutionary thinking decrees that they find the binary oppositions at work in the text itself. — location: 1771
These binary operations, then, restrict meaning, for they already assume a fixed interpretation of reality or of the universe. — location: 1774
Overall, deconstruction aims at an ongoing relationship between the interpreter (the rritir) apd thp text- By examining the text alone, deconstructors hope to ask a set of questions that continually challenges the ideological positions of power and authority that dominate literary criticism. And in the process of discovering meaning in a text, they declare that the criticism itself is just as valuable as the creative writing that is being read, thus inverting the creative writing/criticism hierarchy. — location: 1820
These somewhat uncontrollable emotions, Jung would claim, are the result of the stirring of an archetype via one of our senses in our collective unconscious. — location: 2034
Unlike Freud, who declared the unconscious to be chaotic and unstructured, Lacan decrees that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” And it is to Saussure that Lacan turns to find the structure of language. — location: 2057
“I wonder how it would seem never to have had any children around. No, Wright wouldn’t like the bird—a thing that sang. She used to sing.” In Mrs. Peters’ words, we find that the bird is symbolic of a child. — location: 2183
Agreeing with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the foremost nineteenth-century literary critics, that great minds possess both male and female characteristics, she believed that a female Shakespeare could achieve literary prominence in the twentieth century if women scholars, teachers, and critics would only pave the way. — location: 2273
Each of Showalter’s models is sequential, subsuming and developing the preceding model(s), as follows: — location: 2310
Women themselves must create an atmosphere that is less oppressive by contesting the long-held patriarchal assumptions concerning their sex. Since no female Aristotle has articulated a philosophy or coined a battle cry for women’s equality, all women must muster a variety of resources to clarify, assert, and implement their beliefs. — location: 2360
For too long the world’s peoples have been oppressed, suppressed, deluded or cajoled into believing that reality is simply the way things are. No, a thousand times no! If we can but for a moment remove the blinders placed upon our eyes, the plugs within our ears, and the walls encasing our thoughts placed there by the so-called upper classes of society, we will be free for the first time to examine how our own thoughts and allegiances have^een manipulated .so that many of us have actually accepted The values andbeliefs of a group of people_whose only goal is to keep us in our place by now and then pacifying us with a meager increase in salary. — location: 2489
We will be confronted with an understanding of ourselves and realize, perhaps foi^the first time, that our consciousness has been shaped bv social fmrl economic condi tions- and apart from society we cannot understand ourselve^And through our study of Marxism we will learn not only how to interpretour world but .also how to transform it from a_place populated by the Shaves’ and the ‘have nots’ to aclassless society where economics and its accompanying social relationships no longer determine our values and sense of self-worth. — location: 2496
New Historicism declares that all^historv is subjective, written by people whose personal biasgSLaffe-dt their intp rp rp ^tinn npth p pa<;fr — location: 2789
Disavowing the old historicism’s autonomous view of history, New Historicism declares that history is one of many discourses or ways of seeing and thinking about the world. By highlighting and viewing history as one of many equally impor^ tant discourses, such as sociology and politics, and by closely examining how all discourses (including that of textual analysis itself) affect a text’s interpretation, New Historicism proclaims that it provides its adherents with a practice of literary analysis that highlights the interrelatedness of all human activities, admits its own prejudices, and gives a more complete understanding of a text than does the old historicism and other interpretative approaches. — location: 2791
For Foucault, history is the complex interrelationship of a variety of discourses (the various ways—artistic, social, political, and so forth—in which people think and talk about their world). How these various discourses interact in any given historical period is not random but is dependent upon a unifying principle or pattern Foucault calls the episteme: through language and thought, each period in history develops its own perceptions concerning the nature of reality (or what it defines as truth) and sets up its own standards of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, in addition to its criteria for judging what it deems good or bad, and what group of people articulate, protect, and defend the yardstick whereby all established truths, values, and actions will be deemed acceptable. — location: 2846
Seen from this point of view, history is a form of power. Since each historical era develops its own episteme, it is, in actuality, the episteme that controls how that era and its people will view reality. — location: 2858
respond to their historical situation. — location: 2885
Overall, New Historicists posit the interconnectedness of all our actions. In our search to attach meaning to our actions, they believe that we can never be fully objective, for we are all biased by cultural forces. Only by examining the complex web of these interlocking forces or discourses that empower and shape culture, and by realizing that no one discourse reveals the pathway to absolute truth concerning ourselves or our world, can we begin to interpret either our world or a text. — location: 2892
For the New Historicist, the goal of interpretative analysis is really the formation and an understanding of a “poetics of culture,” a process that sees life and its sundry activities as being more like art than we think, more a metaphorical interpretation of reality than an analytic one. — location: 2896
New Historicists begin by assuming that language shapes and is shaped by the culture that uses it. By language, New Historicists mean much more than spoken words. For them, language includes discourse, writing, literature, social actions, and any social relationship whereby a person or a group imposes their ideas or actions upon another. — location: 2903
the New Historicist investigates three areas of concern: (1) the life of the author; (2) the social rules and dictates found within a text; and (3) the reflection of a work’s historical situation as evidenced in the text. Since — location: 2924
Emphasizing a particular moment or incident rather than an overarching vision of society, a New Historicist will often point out nonconventional connections, — location: 2940
This story, then, must not be considered the key that unlocks the supposedly Hawthornesque world view, but this tale must stand as a separate and complex entity for our examination. — location: 2970
If Hawthorne, then, refutes the Puritan idea of evil, then the pedagogue, who is Satan to Brown, is not likely to be Satan at all to Hawthorne, allowing us to see the two levels of understanding upon which the text operates— that of Brown’s and of Hawthorne’s. — location: 3059
Unfortunately, the Puritans attributed all that is feared or unfavorable to the devil instead of looking within themselves or their society for answers to their questions and their behavior. — location: 3073
Hawthorne’s use of ambiguity can now be explained as the intermediary between the seventeenth-century Puritan understanding of evil and the reader’s elevated understanding of the limitations of Puritan assumptions. — location: 3084
collective unconscious, which houses the cumulative knowledge, experiences, and images of the entire human race. According to Jung, people from all over the world respond to certain myths or stories in the same way not because everyone knows and appreciates the same story, but because lying deep in our collective unconscious are the racial memories of humanity’s past. These memories exist in the form of archetypes: patterns or images of repeated human experiences (such as birth, death, rebirth, the four seasons, and motherhood, to name a few) that express themselves in our stories, our dreams, our religions, and our fantasies. Occurring in literature in the form of recurrent plot patterns, images, or character types, these archetypes stir profound emotions in the reader because they awaken images stored in the collective unconscious, and thereby produce feelings or emotions over which the reader initially has little control. — location: 2025
Frye believes that all of literature comprises one complete and whole story called the monomyth. This monomyth can best be diagrammed as a circle containing four separate phases, with each phase corresponding to a season of the year and to peculiar cycles of human experience. The romance phase, located at the top of the circle, is our summer story. In this kind of story, all our wishes are fulfilled and we can achieve total happiness. At the bottom of the circle is winter or the anti-romance phase. Being the opposite of summer, this phase tells the story of bondage, imprisonment, frustration, and fear. Midway between romance and anti-romance and to the right of the circle is spring, or comedy. This phase relates the story of our rise from anti-romance and frustration to freedom and happiness. Correspondingly, across the circle is tragedy or fall, narrating our fall from the romance phase and from happiness and freedom to disaster. According to Frye, all stories can be placed somewhere on this diagram. — location: 2041
Known as gynocriticism (see the Historical Development section of this chapter for additional information), this female model of literary analysis offers four areas of investigation: 1. Images of the female body as presented in a text. Such an anatomical study, for example, would highlight how various parts of the female body, such as the uterus and breasts, often become significant images in works authored by women. 2. Female language. Such a concern centers on the differences between male and female language. Since we live in patriarchal societies, it would be fair to assume, say feminists, that our language is also male-dominated. Do women speak or write differently from men? Although there is little consensus on the answers to these questions, critics interested in this kind of investigation analyze grammatical constructions, recurring themes, and other linguistic elements. 3. The female psyche and its relationship to the writing process. Such an analysis applies the psychological works of Freud (whose theories most feminists wish to debunk) and Lacan to a text and shows how the physical and psychological development of the female evidences itself in the writing process through a variety of psychological stages. 4. Culture. By analyzing cultural forces (such as the importance and value of women’s roles in a given society), critics who emphasize this area of study investigate how society shapes a woman’s understanding of herself, her society, and her world. — location: 2382