ENGL 390 - History of Criticsm

literary criticsm

premised from a perspective, grounded on logic, and motivated by desire

• place to stand on, tools to bear on it, what it’s attending to

• will want something different from the text depending on how it’s engaged with

4 High-Level Approaches

Historicizing: situating a text in its along its path; how might differences be tied to their history

De-historicizing: practical application/deploying ideas encountered in critical practice, how other writers might approach a text

Analyzing: engaging with as primary objects of scrutiny rather than as aids to other analysis; close reading

Synthesizing: where and how writers are in dialogue with one another

Tradition and the Individual Talent (T.S. Eliot)

• poet should aim for “extinction of personality”: distinction between art and artist, seeing work only for itself

• past is altered by new writing

• must read within tradition context to know a breach in tradition

• simultaneous order: there’s change, but nothing is lost; reconfigured, but everything retained

• only knowing something because the past knew it first

The Republic Book VII & X (Plato)

Theory of Forms

• cave allegory: manifest reality vs ideal/real reality

• process of getting from material reality to ideal world is enlightenment/philosophy/reasoning

• intrinsically painful to be pulled from your reality, blinded by light

Literary Mimesis

• imitative artists make a copy of a copy of the ideal; getting further from the ideal

• artist isn’t representing process of creating the “chair”

• deception: turns attention from evaluating chair to the effects of the chair on the viewer

The Poetics (Aristotle)

working out the conventions of what belongs in what genre

practical guide to debating the merits of a work of art in the schema he’s laid out; how to engage in critical conversations

tragedies: have everything epics do plus music and spectacle; have vividness both when read and acted; do job much shorter than epic

6 Parts of the Tragedy (The Poetics (Aristotle))

Plot: imitation, action essential to tragedy

Character: revealing a person’s habit of moral choice

Thought: statesmanship and rhetoric, point to make/message

Language/Diction: extremely structuralist, mix both basic and elevated diction (not brutish; not over the top)

Spectacle: mode of imitation; sensory effects

Music: sets apart read epic with staged drama

Elements of Structure (The Poetics (Aristotle))

wholeness: needs beginning/middle/end

magnitude: go as big as possible while still being graspable/comprehensible

unity: all parts should advance the plot in some way; skip the fluff and subplot

universality: what anyone (including viewer) might do; focusing on something that could happen to the viewer

vs. particular: history

complexity: reversal + recognition

• reversal: change from one state of affairs to the opposite; reversal of fortune

• recognition: MC recognizes reversal in deep sense/understanding what has happened; creating pity and fear

• suffering (pathos): reversal has to move in direction of increased, profound suffering

• want audience to pity MC, and fear the fate could be them; then feel catharsis (imitation of the emotion)

• hamartia: missing mark/making mistake that leads to tragic fate

Elements of a Good Character (The Poetics (Aristotle))

Be Good: morally good/good choices; evoke more pity/fear

Appropriate: gender essentialism, intentions/incentives make sense

Life-like: circumstances could be viewers’ own

Consistent: understand how the the character’s mind works

On Christian Teaching (Augustine)

criticism for biblical interpretation; influential analysis in giving literature a scriptural attention

how meaning is transmitted textually; signification and its ambiguity

• pov: wants challenge;

• logic: good to fight through depth for meaning;

• desire: meaning at end and pleasure of journey

Ambiguity (On Christian Teaching (Augustine))

cons: higher stakes textually; what they dictate their moral instruction on

pros: more pleasant to learn from imagery + meanings won from difficulty + obscures work from ridicule of impious

in approaching ambiguity:

• acceptance of inevitability

• describe where originates and how it works

• make it systematic and practical

Types of Signs (On Christian Teaching (Augustine))

1. Natural Signs: don’t intend to convey meaning but do anyway (ex. smoke implies fire)

2. Given Signs: conscious effort to put meaning into world; intentionality; third party (sign, giver, receiver) (ex. facial expressions)

some given signs are without entire control; ambiguity

Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas)

the nature of text is to be slippery; but in word of God is to be infallible

new understanding that not all meaning might not be readily available; new enterprise for finding hidden meaning

4 Types of Interpretation: Literal, Allegorical, Tropological, Anagogical

4-Fold Method: 1. frame binary yes/no question; 2. offer all arguments in support of no; 3. then contrary argument; 4. then yes position responding to all nos

4 Types of Interpretation (Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas))

1. Literal: what it actually means

2. Allegorical: something in old testament helps understand the new testament; pairing; corrospondance between the two

3. Tropological: reading that provides moral message/instruction

4. Anagogical: “to elevate”; elevation towards mystical/end of times/all of world understood through revelation

The Book of the City of Ladies (Christine De Pizan)

proto-feminism; textual problem from begging to end in the world; caring about where women stand

Platonic dialogue; essay ideas emerging from conversations with Ladies of Reason/Rectitude/Justice; Christine not only idle interlocutor but also provides her own thoughts and builds off what she learns

Field of Letters: spacialization of letters in field form; geography of human enterprise in the form of a space we can live in

The Defence of Poesy (Sir Philip Sydney)

direct dialogue with both interlocutor and Plato; working in relationship with antiquity; reproducing the tradition in dialogue; stand on tradition of the ancients

poetry is to teach and delight

poet doesn’t deal with the world as is, but creates a new world, so doesn’t make truth claims

fusion of the philosopher and historian; abstract + concrete + particular + general are reconciled

Greek vs Roman Poet (The Defence of Poesy (Sir Philip Sydney))

Greek: poiein; “the makers; a craftsperson; poem is a craft; centers on the creation of the thing

Roman: vates; diviner/prophet; more about how the person we see as a poet sees/thinks

poet doesn’t only imitate world as is, but makes another world; making things (Greek); frames in a divine way (Roman)

making instead of imitation; counter to denegration of imitation; pseudo-divine creativity

cannot make truth claims because creates second nature

Argument in 6 Phases (The Defence of Poesy (Sir Philip Sydney))

1. Situating poetry in relation to “nature”

2. Defining poetry

3. Situating poetry in relation to other “arts”

4. Anatomizing the “parts” and discussing questions of genre

5. Identifying and answering objections to poetry

6. Addressing practical/technical matters

Poet vs Historian vs Philosopher (The Defence of Poesy (Sir Philip Sydney))

moral philosopher: too abstract and too general; macroscopic

historian: isn’t abstract/conceptual enough; producing record of particularities

poet: image of what philosopher merely describes, takes abstract and makes material + concrete, gives generalities particular manifestations, and gives universality to the details of historian; closes gap + bridges

An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (John Dryden)

mediation between modernity they’re immersed in and antiquity they’re inheriting

an essay/to attempt (irony to use the French term and be against them); a whole discourse marching along; full tradition rising above to make a good shot at something (instead of a final word)

first manifestation of the model of the “Great Man”

• true greatest has to be in original act of creativity, someone coming in and claiming something and rising victorious in that creativity

calls Jonson “correct”, whereas Shakespeare is the “greater wit”

• Jonson follows technical tradition;

• Shakespeare builds onto the snowball, breaks from tradition

Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place (Pierre Corneille)

make ancient rules agree with modern pleasures

• negotiated positions between overbearing ancient authority and modernity trying to respectfully bury out from under that authority; flexibility for the good of the piece

1. Action (Aristotle): only one action; wholeness; everything builds off each other
   (Corneille): redefine complete action; unified action is only when presentation establishes pleasant suspense through linked/multiple actions; come together to create coherent whole

2. Time (Corneille): come as close as possible to real time; if have to jump, jump between acts; act 5 is allowed to accelerate

3. Place (Corneille): how far characters can travel within the time constraint

Critique of Judgment (Immanuel Kant)

aim: establish subject universality of the judgment of beautiful and sublime; whether something is beautiful is reflective/subjective, not determinative

Cognitive Judgements: object is as it is; determinative; made through reason

• good

Aesthetic Judgements: how object presents to us; reflective; made through taste

• empirical: agreeable

• pure: beautiful

• taste: ability to judge object by means of liking/unliking devoid of all interest

3 Desires (Critique of Judgment (Immanuel Kant))

Good: matter of reasoning; what we should desire; for something (useful), or in itself (morally); interested

Agreeable: what gratifies us; pleasing to subjective experience; physically desire; interested

Beautiful: purely disinterested and free; necessarily formal; universal; recruits not senses but taste

• Purposiveness without Purpose: implies a purpose but without one

Beauty vs. Sublime (Analytic of the Sublime (Immanuel Kant))

Beautiful: finite; bounded in some form; quality

Sublime: infinite; which is the last perceptable form after something is stripped of all interest; excessive quantity

• contrapurposive: works against mind’s desire to make sense of world/exhibit it into a concrete impression

• experience within the mind of the perceiver

• mathematical sublime

• dynamically sublime

Mathematical Sublime (Analytic of the Sublime (Immanuel Kant))

the experience of inadequacy itself, both the pleasure and the displeasure

• not just very, but absolutely large

• try to comprehend (understand) what we apprehend (experience)

• try to reach for infinite, but our faculties are inadequate, so we approximate with mathematical concepts

• awe of mind’s own inability to understand an experience; mind coping with being overwhelmed

• cognitive disharmony

• “I can’t get my head around this”

Dynamically Sublime (Analytic of the Sublime (Immanuel Kant))

involves fearfulness, but not actually afraid

• a vocation/call to use our faculties, but still inadequacy of our own powers

• disinterested, from a place of safety, so we can apprehend what in us pulls us towards the sublime, which is what’s fearful

• “I can’t get my head around this, but I am being called to it.”

Laocoon (Gotthold Lessing)

stylizing: simplified, conformed, not about realist representation, conformed within conventions to capture something

• truth and expression is art’s first law; mimetic fidelity is also important

“pregnant moment”: call to create imaginative space, gives free range to imagination; (ex. moment right before the climax) breaking free of the barrier of temporality because the viewer imagines the next moment

Verbal vs Visual Art (Laocoon (Gotthold Lessing))

verbal: temporal; sequence of actions; unfold over time

• personification in capital letters

• invisible expressed in words

visual: spatial; one moment; bodies/objects; present all at once

• personification in another body/object

• invisible has to add another body to obscure the original body (stylize); the viewer concludes negation/absence

Bodies: true subjects of painting; bodies following after each other is action; action is subject of poetry

• painting can imitate actions by suggestion through bodies

• poetry can depict bodies by suggestion through actions/of movement

Intrusion of art forms on each others’ territory

• ekphrases in poetry to create spatial sense; wants to close mimetic gap; moment of illusion

• Shield of Achilles attempting temporal story

On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Friedrich Von Schiller)

concerned with how to live philosophically/morally in the contemporary moment

moral and aesthetic should not be separate

• beauty/aestheticism = forms of morality/value/truths

• contemporary problems are remedial through high/fine art

• living in an age when “material needs reigns supreme”

• utility in a sort of conflict with aesthetic

Ancient mind viewed as a whole vs. contemporary human sense/intellect viewed as separate

• society get complicates/diversifies enough that human enterprise can specialize

fragmented psyche: spirit of speculation and practical spirit

Spirits (On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Friedrich Von Schiller))

spirit of speculation: models world through conceived laws based on subjective conditions of its own perceptual and conceptual faculties; lose sight of sense for sake of form; can’t discern subtleties/particularities; leads ultimately to a cold heart

practical spirit: judge all experiences by one particular fragment of experience, wanting to make its rules apply to all others; cannot survey the whole; leads to a narrow heart

want a return to wholeness and fuse the spirit of speculation and practical spirit together

• put fragmented psyche back together through fine art

Responsibility of Artist (On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Friedrich Von Schiller))

artist has to be a “child of his age”

• make the world a better place by living separately from our times

• don’t be a product of your time, otherwise you’ll be an expression of your time; unable to do any good change for your time

• social responsibility of the art to fix what’s broken

• be positioned in opposition to your present moment

A Vindication of the Right of Woman (Mary Wollstonecraft)

women embody what misogynists say they are because men cultivate that ignorance in them

women are trained to be agreeable/pleasant to men; while men are taught virtues

• women missing the teaching of virtues; disorderly education instead of orderly; no systematic curriculum

• learning only what’s emerging in present moment; so can’t specialize

• simply product of current moment; can’t improve the moment

individual education: proposes doing education before the body matures; establish this knowledge when child is at most plastic

Soldiers and Women (A Vindication of the Right of Woman (Mary Wollstonecraft))

• women’s education is no better than that of a soldier’s (commonness is the problem)

• gleam knowledge from muddy scraps; product of the world

• taught to serve and please; like officers, meant to be attentive and “dancing”

• blind submission to authority