PCCP Critics

Stanley Fish

interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing

Lucy Alford

attention is the dynamic force between reader, writer and text

Form is the only way of attending to the poem itself

Ellen Rooney

novels demand a reading that is “ineluctably inventive”

John Milton

rhyme as the “jingling sound of like endings”

Derek Atridge

metre is not a metronome…it is a quality of language

Michel Foucault

it is a matter of depriving the usbejct…of its role as originatior and of analysing the subejct and a varibale nad complex function of discourse

Rimmon-Kenan

diegesis=telling mimesis=showing but “language can only imitate language” so all showing is telling

Jonathan Culler

constitutes the object as the other subject

The embarrassment of apostrophe

Barbara Johnson

animating the inanimate, the dead

Life-giving force

Maryanne Dever

the paper is alive in its history and in its signifying potential

Raymond Williams

Structures of feeling—social experiences are still in process, so social forms only become social consciousness when they are lived

Structures of feeling: no generation speaks the language of its predecessors

Stephen Greenblatt

thinness: description of what you’re doing

Thickness: fuller sense of its significance, futher complicates simple action —thickness emphasises its textuality

A conjuring of reality is only a reality-effect

Culture is “an acted document”

Helene Cixous

write yourself. Your body must be heard

Virginia Woolf

there is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of a woman

Alice Walker

the stories i write, that we all write, are my mother’s stories

Susan Lanser

feminine narratology: existence of multuple texts

Fusing structuralist concerns with post-structuralist and feminist

Semiotic enough to be useful but…mimetic enough to seem relevant

Edward Said

Europe articulates the orient, not as puppet-master but as genuine creator

Fish’s interpretative community: the social and political interests entailed by elite culture as the interpretative community

Jacques Derrida

if one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified the word signifier itself ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept

There is alsways a difference between the name of the thing and the thing itself—the name is therefore arbitrary

F.W. Bateson

contextual reading results in the “Reconstruction of the human situation”

“The assertion of value judgements is the function of criticism” bc it allows you to set the poem in context as a responsible reading

Thomas Bronwen

the assumption that only those who make an overt contribution…can impose on it their voices and their perspectives”

Geoffrey Leech, Mick Short

Dialogue “bears the density of significance in building up the fictional world”

Jane Bennett

Human power is itself a kind of thing power”

Thing-power: “the moment when the object becomes the Other”

Saidiya Hartman

Critical fabulation: “Both tell an impossible story and to emphasise the impossibility of its telling”

Roland Barthes

myth is a type of speech chosen by history

It is a meta-language or a second-order signification

Its function is to distort not to make disappear

Language: speaks things metalanguage: speaks of things

Susan Sontag

style as “the signature of the artist’s will”

William Empson

the complex into the simple

Proust

the only paradise is the paradise lost

Isaiah

all flesh is grass

Said: Beginnings

the beginning…implicates the end

The beginning is an effort on behalf of continuity

Linda Hutcheon

parody is the literary shape taken on by social satire

Theodore Adorno

Methodically unmethodical

Michel de Montaigne

i describe not the essence but the passage