Realism was by no means a uniform or coherent movement; a tendency toward realism arose in many p... more Realism was by no means a uniform or coherent movement; a tendency toward realism arose in many parts of Europe and in America, beginning in the 1840s. The major figures included Flaubert and Balzac in France, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy in Russia, George Eliot and Charles Dickens in England, as well as William Dean Howells and Henry James in America. The most general aim of realism was to offer a truthful, accurate, and objective representation of the real world, both the external world and the human self. To achieve this aim, realists resorted to a number of strategies: the use of descriptive and evocative detail; avoidance of what was fantastical, imaginary, and mythical; adhering to the requirements of probability, and excluding events which were impossible or improbable; inclusion of characters and incidents from all social strata, dealing not merely with rulers and nobility; focusing on the present and choosing topics from contemporary life rather than longing for some idealized past; emphasizing the social rather than the individual (or seeing the individual as a social being); refraining from the use of el evated language, in favor of more colloquial idioms and everyday speech, as well as directness and simplicity of expression. All of these aims and strategies were underlain by an emphasis on direct observation, factuality, experience, and induction (arriving at g eneral truths only on the basis of repeated experience). In adopting the strategies listed above, realism was a broad and multipronged reaction against the idealization, historical retrospection, and the imaginary worlds seen as characterizing Romanticism. Naturalism was the ancient term for the physical sciences or the study of nature. Naturalism explicitly endeavors to emulate the methods of the physical sciences, drawing heavily on the principles of causality, determinism, explanation, and experimentati on. Some naturalists also drew on the Darwinian conception of nature and attempted to express the struggle for survival, as embodied in the connections between individuals and their environments, often portraying the physiologically and psychically determined dimensions of their characters as overwhelmed by accidental circumstances rather than acting rationally, freely, and heroically upon the world. Hence naturalism can be viewed as a more extreme form of realism, extending the latter's scientific basis still further to encompass extremely detailed methods of description, a deterministic emphasis upon the contexts of actions and events (which are seen as arising from specific causes), upon the hereditary psychological components of their characters, experimenting with t he connections between human psychology and external environment, and refusing to accommodate any kind of metaphysical or spiritual perspective. The theoretical foundations of naturalism were laid by the literary historian Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), in works such as his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863-1864), and by Émile Zola who first formulated its manifesto. Realism in Germany The term "realism" had been used in the 1820s but did not acquire any significant valency in literary strategy and criticism until the 1830s when a reaction started setting in against the predominating ideals of Romanticism. In Germany, a radical group called the Young Germans, whose prominent members included Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and Karl Gutzkow (1811-1878), voiced their opposition to the perceived reactionary Romanticism of Goethe and Schlegel. This group also rejected the ideal of aesthetic autonomy in favor of a realism that was politically interventional. The atmosphere in Germany, however, was not favorable tow ard liberalism. Liberal movements had already been curbed by the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, subjecting the universities to state control
Plato was the most celebrated disciple of Socrates. By his time the glory of Athenian art and lit... more Plato was the most celebrated disciple of Socrates. By his time the glory of Athenian art and literature, illustrated in the works of artists like Phidias and Polygnotus and writers like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, was on the wane, and their place was taken by philosophy and oratory, of which the chief priests were Parmenides, Empedocles, and Socrates, among the philosophers, and Gorgias, Antiphon, and Lysias, among the orators. Confronted with the decline in national character and the standards of social and public life, the philosophers in particular discussed a great variety of matters, of concern to the citizen and the state, applying the test of reason to each. Socratics heads them all by his dispassionate quest of truth, which often challenged many an established belief and convention. Among these general inquiries, the value of literature to society and its nature and functions also came in for their due share of consideration. His Observations on Style Plato lived in the age of oratory. He gives rules for the spoken language which could also be applied for the written word. A speaker must be thorough in the knowledge. He must be sure of what he has to say. It must impress the hearers. Next a speaker must be naturally gifted and he must be constantly in practice. His speech must follow a natural sequence. Finally a speaker must know the psychology of his audience.
Postcolonial (cultural) studies (PCS) constitutes a major intervention in the widespread revision... more Postcolonial (cultural) studies (PCS) constitutes a major intervention in the widespread revisionist project that has impacted academia since the 1960s-together with such other counter-discourses that are gaining academic and disciplinary recognition as cultural studies, women's studies, Chicano studies, African-American studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies. Postcolonial (mostly literary) studies is one of the latest "tempests" in a postist world replacing Prospero's Books (the title of Peter Greenaway's 1991 film) with a Calibanic viewpoint. The beginning of this new project can be approximately located in the year 1952, when the academy was still more attendant to works such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and in anticipation of Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero (1953). In other words, the project of validating modernism, a project so heavily indebted to "primitive" (other) cultures and, directly or indirectly, to colonialism, was on the verge of being institutionalized. In the meantime, the connection between colonialism, modernism, and structuralism has been fairly well established and has provoked a similar awareness of the considerably more problematic correlation between the postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial. It was precisely during this decade of the 1950s that a great shift occurred. This was the period of the end of France's involvement in Indochina (Dien Bien Phu), the Algerian war, the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya, the dethroning of King Farouk in Egypt. It was the time when Jean-Paul Sartre broke with Albert Camus for reasons intrinsic to colonial studies, namely, opposing attitudes toward Algeria. In 1950 Aimé Césaire's pamphlet on colonialism, Discours sur le colonialisme, appeared. Two years later, Fidel Castro gave his speech "History Shall Absolve Me," and Frantz Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks. In London the Faber and Faber publishing house, for which T. S. Eliot was a reader at the time, issued Nigerian Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinker, which led to "curiosity" about Anglo-African writing. It was the year the French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term "Third World," a term scrutinized ever since. Some see this term as derogative (mainly in the Englishspeaking world), while the term has becom e a staple in the French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking worlds.
From around the middle of the 18th century, many people in Britain began to think about childhood... more From around the middle of the 18th century, many people in Britain began to think about childhood in new ways. Previously, th e Puritan belief that humans are born sinful as a consequence of mankind's 'Fall' had led to the widespread notion that childhood was a perilous period. As a result, much of the earliest children's literature is concerned with saving children's souls through instruction and by providing role models for their behaviour. This religious way of thinking about childhood had become less influential by the mid-18th century; in fact, childhood came to be associated with a set of positive meanings and attributes, notably innocence, freedom, creativity, emotion, spontaneity and, perhaps most importantly for those charged with raising and educating children, malleability. Central to the change in how childhood was understood was the work of the philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Émile, or On Education (1762) not only rejects the doctrine of Original Sin, but maintains that children are innately innocent, only becoming corrupted through experience of the world. Émile is an invented account of an experiment in raising a boy using Rousseau's method. Instead of the heavy-handed instruction of earlier periods, Émile is allowed to develop naturally: in nature and following his own, naturally healthy instincts. This method, the philosopher concludes, preserves the special attributes of childhood, resulting in well-adjusted adults who will also be good citizens. Rousseau's ideas soon found their way into children's literature, perhaps most obviously in his disciple Thomas Day's popular Sandford and Merton (1783-89).
Post-colonialism and Art A discussion of postcolonial literature must first acknowledge the scope... more Post-colonialism and Art A discussion of postcolonial literature must first acknowledge the scope and complexity of the term "postcolonial." Temporall y, the term designates any national literature written after the nation gained independence from a colonizing power. According to this definition, all literature written in the United States after 1776 could qualify as postcolonial. Because the United States h as occupied the position of an economic and political world power since the nineteenth century, however, it is today regarded more as a historically colonizing force than as a former colony of Great Britain. Within this field of literary studies, "postcolonial" refers to those nations that gained independence between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the 1960's.
The aura created by the Freudian interpretations reached its zenith when the French Psychoanalyst... more The aura created by the Freudian interpretations reached its zenith when the French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (propelled into this arena by his reading of Freud and Salvador Dali) achieved a place in the literary critical canon. The linguistic, philos ophical and political scope of his discourse stirred the Western intelligentsia. His oeuvre reveals a great influence of Parisian figures like the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. He suggested a new back-to-Freudianism (Return to Freud) with a novel emphasis on the unconscious, as the nucleus of our being, which is the opus of his works. Lacan's Freudian reading primarily involves the realization that the unconscious is to be understood as intimately tied to the functions and dynamics of language. The central pillar of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is that "the unconscious is structured like a language", which he substantiates in the essay The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious. Lacan draws on Saussure and emphasizes that meaning is a network of differences. As there is a perpetual barrier between the signifier and the signified which is demonstrated with a diagram showing two identical lavatory rooms, one h eaded "Ladies" and "Gentlemen." This purport to show that same signifier may have different signifieds, so that the correlation between signifiers determines the meanings. Thus Lacan suggests an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier.
(470/469-399 bce), mentor of Plato and founder of moral philosophy, was the son of Sophroniscus (... more (470/469-399 bce), mentor of Plato and founder of moral philosophy, was the son of Sophroniscus (a statuary) and Phaenarete (a midwife). According to a late doxographical tradition, he followed for a time in his father's footstepsa claim regarded as apocryphal by most scholars despite the fact that Socrates traces his ancestry to the mythical statuary Daedalus (Euthyphro 11b8-9). He also describes himself as an intellectual midwife who, although himself barren, delivers young men of ideas with which they are pregnantan image generally believed to be Plato's middle-period description of Socrates rather than Socrates' description of himself. The husband of Xanthippeand later, according to some sources, of Myrtohe was the father of three sons, of whom two were still infants at the time of his death. Although intimately acquainted with Athenian intellectual and cultural life, he was mightily unimpressed with both. He had little interest in the philosophical ideas of his predecessors, he disputed the alleged wisdom and moral authority of the poets, he expressed deep misgivings about the truth of Homeric theology, he lamented the lack of virtue in public and private life, and he had a low opinion of the sophists who professed to teach it. He had an even lower opinion of the politicians, whom he denounced as panderers to public taste more interested in beautifying the city than in improving the citizenry. Contemptuous of the opinions of "the Many," he was an outspoken critic of democracy and exhorted his hearers to ignore the opinions of the ignorant and to attend only to the moral expert who knows about right and wrong (Crito 47c8-d3, 48a5-7). Indeed, among philosophers of classical antiquity, only Plato was more overtly anti-democratic. Notable for his powerful intellect, he was invincible in argument and, in Xenophon's awestruck phrase, "could do what he liked with any disputant" (Memorabilia 1.2.14-16). In Meno 79e7-80b2 he is compared to a stingray who numbs people's minds and reduces them to helplessness. In Apology 30e1-31a1 he describes himself more positively as a gadfly trying to awaken the great Athenian steed from its intellectual and moral slumber. Despite his reputation as the paradigmatically rational man, willing to act only in accordance with the argument best supported by Reason (Crito 46b3-6), he attached great importance to his customary sign (daimonion), which gave practical guidance in the form of periodic warnings. He attached comparable importance to dreams and oracles. Indeed, were it not for one particular and well publicized oracular pronouncement; he might never have attracted the attention with which he has been showered for the past 2,500 years.
Psychoanalytic criticism (emerged in the 1960s), the most influential interpretative theory among... more Psychoanalytic criticism (emerged in the 1960s), the most influential interpretative theory among the series of waves in the post war period is based on the specific premises of the workings of the mind, the instincts and sexuality, developed by the 19th century intellect, Austrian Sigmund Freud (who along with Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche, subverted the centers of Western society by boiling down the human individuality into an animalistic sex drive). Freud, greatly influenced by the psychiatrists Jean-Martin Charcot (an exponent in hypnosis) and Josef Breuer (pioneer of "talking cure") proposed his theoretical opus, the notion of the unconscious mind (disseminated in his significant works like The Ego and the Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Interpretation of Dreams, Totem and Taboo etc.), which proved fatal to the Enlightenment ideals, Auguste Comte's Positivism etc., the pivots of Western rationalism. This stream of criticism has become one of the most exciting and challenging areas of literary and cultural studies today.
(384-322 BC) 1. Disciple of Plato 2. Teacher of Alexander the Great. 3. Major Works: Poetics, Rhe... more (384-322 BC) 1. Disciple of Plato 2. Teacher of Alexander the Great. 3. Major Works: Poetics, Rhetoric Poetics, incomplete, 26 chapters 4. Mainly concerned with tragedy, which was in his day, the most development form of poetry. Disagreeing with much else that Plato said, Aristotle agreed that art was essentially Mimesis. But, he maintained, (good) art was neither useless nor dangerous, but rather natural and beneficial. 5. Crucial to Aristotle's defense of art is his rejection of Plato's Dualism. According to him Man is not an "embodied" intellect, longing for the spiritual release of death, but rather an animal with, among all the other faculties, the ability to use reas on and to create. 6. Rejection that Mimesis = Mirroring Nature Rejection of Plato's Rationalism We must study humans as we would study other animals to discover what their "nature" is. Look among the species; see who are the thriving and successful and in what activities do they engage? For Aristotle, this is how to determine what is and is not appropriate for a human and human society. According to him art is not useless. It is natural for human beings to imitate Any human society which is healthy will be a society where there is imitative art. Nothing is more natural that for children to pretend He thought that artistic production and training is a necessary part of any education since it uses and encourages the imaginative manipulation of ideas. Nothing is more natural than for human beings to create using their imagination. Nonetheless, the Poetics is the only critical study of Greek drama to have been made by a near-contemporary. It contains much valuable information about the origins, methods, and purposes of tragedy, and to a degree shows us how the Greeks themselves reacted to their theater. In addition, Aristotle's work had an overwhelming influence on the development of drama long after it was compiled. The ideas and principles of the Poetics are reflected in the drama of the Roman Empire and dominated the composition of tragedy in western Europe during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Archetypal theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth theory and crticism, ... more Archetypal theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth theory and crticism, has a distinct history and process. The term "archetype" can be traced to Plato (arche, "original"; typos, "form"), but the concept gained currency in twentieth-century literary theory and criticism through the work of the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, C. G. Jung (1875-1961). Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious (1916, B. M. Hinkle's translation of the 1911-12 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido) appeared in English one year after publication of the concluding volume with bibliography of the third edition of J. G. Fr azer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Frazer's and Jung's texts formed the basis of two allied but ultimately different courses of influence on literary history. Jung most frequently used "myth" (or "mythologem") for the narrative expression, "on the ethnological level", of the "archetypes," which he described as patterns of psychic energy originating in the collective unconscious and finding their "most common and most normal" manifestation in dreams. Thus criticism evolving from his work is more accurately named "archetypal" and is quite distinct from "myth" criticism. For Jung, "archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos", but he distinguishes his concept and use of the term from that of philosophical idealism as being more empirical and less metaphysical, though most of his "empirical" data were dreams. In addition, he modified and extended his concept over the many decades of his professional life, often ins isting that "archetype" named a process, a perspective, and not a content, although this flexibility was lost through the codifying, nominalizing tendencies of his followers. At mid-century, Canadian critic Northrop Frye (1912-91) introduced new distinctions in literary criticism between myth and archetype. For Frye, as William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks put it, "archetype, borrowed from Jung, means a primordial image, a part of the collective unconscious, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same kind, and thus part of the inherited response-pattern of the race". Frye frequently acknowledged his debt to Jung, accepted some of Jung's specifically named archetypes-" persona and anima and counsellor and shadow"-and referred to his theory as Jungian criticism (Anatomy 291), a practice subsequently followed in some hand books of literary terms and histories of literary crit icism, including one edited by Frye himself, which obscured crucial differences and contributed to the confusion in terminology reigning today. Frye, however, notably in Anatomy of Criticism, essentially redefined and relocated archetype on grounds that would remove him unequivocally from the ranks of "Jungian" critics by severing the connection between archetype and depth psychology: "This emphasis on impersonal content has been developed by Jung and his school, where the communicability of archetypes is accounted for by a theory of a collective unconscious-an unnecessary hypothesis in literary criticism, so far as I can judge". Frye, then, first misinterprets Jungian theory by insisting on a Lamarckian view of genetic transmission of archetypes, which Jung explicitly rejected, and later settles on a concept of "archetype" as a literary occurrence per se, an exclusively intertextual recurring phenomenon resembling a convention.
New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those tr... more New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those traditional "extrinsic" approaches that saw a text as making a moral or philosophical statement or as an outcome of social, economic, political, historical, or biographical phenomena. New Criticism holds that a text must be evaluated apart from its context; failure to do so causes the Affective Fallacy, which confuses a text with the emotional or psychological response of its readers, or the Intentional Fallacy, which conflates textual impact and the objectives of the author. New Criticism assumes that a text is an isolated entity that can be understood through the tools and techniques of close reading, maintains that each text has unique texture, and asserts that what a text says and how it says it are inseparable. The task of the New Critic is to show the way a reader can take the myriad and apparently discordant elements of a text and reconcile or resolve them into a harmonious, thematic whole. In sum, the objective is to unify the text or rather to recognize the inherent but obscured unity therein. The reader's awareness of and attention to elements of the form of the work mean that a text eventually will yield to the analytical scrutiny and interpretive pressure that close reading provides. Simply put, close reading is the hallmark of New Criticism.
(1554-1586) is often cited as an archetype of the well-rounded "Renaissance man": his talents wer... more (1554-1586) is often cited as an archetype of the well-rounded "Renaissance man": his talents were multifold, encompassing not only poetry and cultivated learning but also the virtues of statesmanship and military service. He was born into an aristocratic family, was eventually knighted, and held government appointments which included the governorship of Flushing in the Netherlands. He was involved in war waged by Queen Elizabeth I against Spain and died from a wound at the age of 32. His friends included the poet Edmund Spenser; he wrote a pastoral romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1581), and he was original in producing a sonnet cycle in the English language, influenced by the Italian poet Petrarch, entitled Astrophel and Stell a (1581-1582). Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (1580-1581) is in many ways a seminal text of literary criticism. It is not only a defense but also one of the most acclaimed treatises on poetics of its time. While its ideas are not original, it represents the first synthesis in the English language of the various strands and concerns of Renaissance literary criticism, drawing on Aristotle, Horace, and more recent writers such as Boccaccio and Julius Caesar Scaliger. It raises issuessuch as the value and function of poetry, the nature of imitation, and the concept of naturewhich were to concern literary critics in numerous languages until the late eighteenth century. Sidney's writing of the Apologie as a defense of poetry was occasioned by an attack on poetry entitled The School of Abuse published in 1579 by a Puritan minister, Stephen Gosson. As mentioned earlier, Sidney rejects Gosson's Protestant attack on courtly pleasure, effectively defending poetry as a virtuous activity for the aristocracy. Toward the beginning of the Apologie, Sidney observes that poetry has fallen from its status as "the highest estimation of learning. .. to be the laughingstock of children." He produces a wide range of arguments in defense of "poor Poetry," based on chronology, the authority of ancient tradition, the relation of poetry to nature, the function of poetry as imitation, the status of poetry among the various disciplines of learning, and the relationship of poetry to truth and morality. Sidney's initial argument is that poetry was the first form in which knowledge was expressed, the "first lightgiver to ignorance," as bodied forth by figures such as Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod, Livius, Ennius, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. And the first Greek philosophers Thales, Empedocles, Parmenides, and Pythagoras, he points out, expressed their vision in verse. Even Plato used poetic devices such as dialogue and descripti on of setting and circumstance to adorn his philosophy. Again, historians such as Herodotus have borrowed the "fashion" and the "weight" of poetry. Sidney concludes here that "neither philosopher nor historiographer, could at the first have entered into the gates of popular judgments, if they had not taken a great passport of poetry". His point is that an essential prerequisite of knowledge is pleasure in learning; and it is poetry that has made each of these varieties of knowledgescientific, moral, philosophical, politicalaccessible by expressing them in pleasurable forms. Sidney's second argument might be called the "argument from tradition" since it appeals to the ancient Roman and Greek conceptions of poetry and "stands upon their authorities". The Roman term for the poet was vates, meaning "diviner, foreseer, or prophet.. . .so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this part v: the early modern period to the enlightenment heartravishing knowledge". Sidney argues that this definition of the poet was quite "reasonable," as shown by the fact that the Psalms of David are a "divine poem," whereby prophecy is expressed in a poetic manner. Hence poetry does not deserve the "ridiculous. .. estimation" into which it has lapsed, and "deserveth not to be scourged out of the Church of God".
Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. Equally, the subsequent histo... more Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. Equally, the subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics has hardly comprised the cumulative unfolding of a coherent perspective. Rather, it has emerged, aptly, as a series of responses to concrete political exigencies. While these responses have sometimes collided at various theoretical planes, they achieve a dynamic and expansive coherence (rather than the static coherence of a closed, finished system) through both a general overlap of political motivation and the persistent reworking of a core of predispositions about literature and art deriving from Marx and Engels themselves. These predispositions include: (1) The rejection, following Hegel, of the notion of "identity" and a consequent denial of the view that any object, includin g literature, can somehow exist independently. The aesthetic corollary of this is that literature can only be understood in the fullness of its relations with ideology, class, and economic substructure. (2) The view that the so-called "objective" world is actually a progressive construction out of collective human subjectivity. What passes as "truth," then, is not eternal but institutionally created. "Private property," for example, is a bourgeois reification of an abstract category; it does not necessarily possess eternal validity. Language itself, as Marx said in The German Ideology: Part One, must be understood not as a self-sufficient system but as social practice. (3) The understanding of art itself as a commodity, sharing with other commodities an entry into material aspects of production. If, as Marx said, human beings produce themselves through labor, artistic production can be viewed as a branch of production in general. (4) A focus on the connections between class struggle as the inner dynamic of history and literature as the ideologically refracted site of such struggle. This has sometimes gone hand in hand with prescriptions for literature as an ideological ancillary to the aims and results of political revolution. (5) An insistence that language is not a self-enclosed system of relations but must be understood as social practice, as deeply rooted in material conditions as any other practice. To these predispositions could be added, for example, Engels' comments on "typicality," recommending th at art should express what is typical about a class or a peculiar intersection of ideological circumstances. One might also include the problem raised by Engels' granting a "relative autonomy" to art, his comments that art can transcend its ideological genesis and that superstructural elements are determined only in the "last instance" by economic relations: what exactly is the connection between art and the material base into which its constituting relations extend? Given the inconclusive and sometimes ambiguous nature of Marx's and
Reader-response criticism can be traced as far back as Aristotle and Plato, both of whom based th... more Reader-response criticism can be traced as far back as Aristotle and Plato, both of whom based their critical arguments at least partly on literature's effect on the reader. It has more immediate sources in the writings of the French structuralists (who stress the role of the perceiver as a maker of reality), the semioticians, and such American critics as Kenneth Burke (esp. his "Psychology and Form," which defined "form" in terms of the audience's appetite), Louise Rosenblatt, Walker Gibson (who developed the notion of a "mock reader"), and Wayne Booth. But reader criticism became recognized as a distinct critical movement only in the 1970s, when it found a particularly congenial political climate in the growing anti-authoritarianism within the academy. Calling it a movement, however, is misleading, for reader-response criticism is less a unified critical school than a vague collection of disparate critics with a common point of departure. That is, reader-response critics share neither a body of critical principles (as Marxist critics, for instance, do), nor a subject matter (as Renaissance critics do). Indeed, they barely share a name. "Reader theory" and "audience theory" are perhaps the most neutral general terms, since the more popular term "reader-response theory" most accurately refers to more subjective kinds of reader criticism, and "Reception Theory" most accurately refers to the German school of Reception kritik represented by Hans Robert Jauss. But these and other terms are often used indiscriminately, and the boundaries separating them are cloudy at best. What affinity there is among reader-critics comes from their rejection of the New Critical principle (most clearly enunciated in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's pivotal essay, "The Affective Fallacy") that severs the work itself from its effect and strongly privileges the former, treated in formal terms. Refusing to accept this banning of the reader, reader-critics take the existence of the reader as a decisive component of any meaningful literary analysis, assuming, as Michael Riffaterre puts it, that "readers make the literary event" (116). But once past that first step, there is little unanimity. Indeed, even the meaning of that first step has generated considerable debate, for different critics mean different things when they talk about "the reader."
Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective ... more Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing. Postmodernis m can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post-Second World War era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism. The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance. Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a. step further and deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism's use of lighthearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also employed pastiche, which is the imitation of another's style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not "real" but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do n ot easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple interpretations. The individual or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics and becoming merely the representative of an age or civilization, like Tiresias in The Waste Land.
Many Victorians passionately believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. ... more Many Victorians passionately believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. Literature provided models of correct behavior: it allowed people to identify with situations in which good actions were rewarded, or it provoked tender emotions. At best, the sympathies stirred by art and literature would spur people to action in the real world. The supporters of aestheticism, however, disagreed, arguing that art had nothing to do with morality. Instead, art was primarily about the elevation of taste and the pure pursuit of beauty. More controversially, the aesthetes also saw these qualities as guiding principles for life. They argued that the arts should be judged on the basis of form rather than morality. The famous motto 'art for art's sake' encapsulates this view. It meant prising the sensual qualities of art and the sheer pleasure they provide. 'Art for art's sake' became identified with the energy and creativity of aestheticismbut it also became a shorthand way of expressing the fears of those who saw this uncoupling of art and morality as dangerous. Aestheticism unsettled and challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture. As it percolated more widely into the general culture, it was relentlessly satirised and condemned. Although references to the 'aesthetic movement' are commonplace, there was no unified or organised movement as such. Critics still disagree about when aestheticism began and who should be included under its label. Some associate the movement with the Pre-Raphaelites, who were active from the mid-19th century. Their emphasis on sensual beauty and on strong connections between visual and verbal forms was certainly highly influential. Perhaps the most important inaugurating phase of aestheticism, however, occurred during the late 1860s and early 1870s.
Realism was by no means a uniform or coherent movement; a tendency toward realism arose in many p... more Realism was by no means a uniform or coherent movement; a tendency toward realism arose in many parts of Europe and in America, beginning in the 1840s. The major figures included Flaubert and Balzac in France, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy in Russia, George Eliot and Charles Dickens in England, as well as William Dean Howells and Henry James in America. The most general aim of realism was to offer a truthful, accurate, and objective representation of the real world, both the external world and the human self. To achieve this aim, realists resorted to a number of strategies: the use of descriptive and evocative detail; avoidance of what was fantastical, imaginary, and mythical; adhering to the requirements of probability, and excluding events which were impossible or improbable; inclusion of characters and incidents from all social strata, dealing not merely with rulers and nobility; focusing on the present and choosing topics from contemporary life rather than longing for some idealized past; emphasizing the social rather than the individual (or seeing the individual as a social being); refraining from the use of el evated language, in favor of more colloquial idioms and everyday speech, as well as directness and simplicity of expression. All of these aims and strategies were underlain by an emphasis on direct observation, factuality, experience, and induction (arriving at g eneral truths only on the basis of repeated experience). In adopting the strategies listed above, realism was a broad and multipronged reaction against the idealization, historical retrospection, and the imaginary worlds seen as characterizing Romanticism. Naturalism was the ancient term for the physical sciences or the study of nature. Naturalism explicitly endeavors to emulate the methods of the physical sciences, drawing heavily on the principles of causality, determinism, explanation, and experimentati on. Some naturalists also drew on the Darwinian conception of nature and attempted to express the struggle for survival, as embodied in the connections between individuals and their environments, often portraying the physiologically and psychically determined dimensions of their characters as overwhelmed by accidental circumstances rather than acting rationally, freely, and heroically upon the world. Hence naturalism can be viewed as a more extreme form of realism, extending the latter's scientific basis still further to encompass extremely detailed methods of description, a deterministic emphasis upon the contexts of actions and events (which are seen as arising from specific causes), upon the hereditary psychological components of their characters, experimenting with t he connections between human psychology and external environment, and refusing to accommodate any kind of metaphysical or spiritual perspective. The theoretical foundations of naturalism were laid by the literary historian Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), in works such as his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863-1864), and by Émile Zola who first formulated its manifesto. Realism in Germany The term "realism" had been used in the 1820s but did not acquire any significant valency in literary strategy and criticism until the 1830s when a reaction started setting in against the predominating ideals of Romanticism. In Germany, a radical group called the Young Germans, whose prominent members included Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and Karl Gutzkow (1811-1878), voiced their opposition to the perceived reactionary Romanticism of Goethe and Schlegel. This group also rejected the ideal of aesthetic autonomy in favor of a realism that was politically interventional. The atmosphere in Germany, however, was not favorable tow ard liberalism. Liberal movements had already been curbed by the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, subjecting the universities to state control
Plato was the most celebrated disciple of Socrates. By his time the glory of Athenian art and lit... more Plato was the most celebrated disciple of Socrates. By his time the glory of Athenian art and literature, illustrated in the works of artists like Phidias and Polygnotus and writers like Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, was on the wane, and their place was taken by philosophy and oratory, of which the chief priests were Parmenides, Empedocles, and Socrates, among the philosophers, and Gorgias, Antiphon, and Lysias, among the orators. Confronted with the decline in national character and the standards of social and public life, the philosophers in particular discussed a great variety of matters, of concern to the citizen and the state, applying the test of reason to each. Socratics heads them all by his dispassionate quest of truth, which often challenged many an established belief and convention. Among these general inquiries, the value of literature to society and its nature and functions also came in for their due share of consideration. His Observations on Style Plato lived in the age of oratory. He gives rules for the spoken language which could also be applied for the written word. A speaker must be thorough in the knowledge. He must be sure of what he has to say. It must impress the hearers. Next a speaker must be naturally gifted and he must be constantly in practice. His speech must follow a natural sequence. Finally a speaker must know the psychology of his audience.
Postcolonial (cultural) studies (PCS) constitutes a major intervention in the widespread revision... more Postcolonial (cultural) studies (PCS) constitutes a major intervention in the widespread revisionist project that has impacted academia since the 1960s-together with such other counter-discourses that are gaining academic and disciplinary recognition as cultural studies, women's studies, Chicano studies, African-American studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies. Postcolonial (mostly literary) studies is one of the latest "tempests" in a postist world replacing Prospero's Books (the title of Peter Greenaway's 1991 film) with a Calibanic viewpoint. The beginning of this new project can be approximately located in the year 1952, when the academy was still more attendant to works such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and in anticipation of Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero (1953). In other words, the project of validating modernism, a project so heavily indebted to "primitive" (other) cultures and, directly or indirectly, to colonialism, was on the verge of being institutionalized. In the meantime, the connection between colonialism, modernism, and structuralism has been fairly well established and has provoked a similar awareness of the considerably more problematic correlation between the postmodern, poststructural, and postcolonial. It was precisely during this decade of the 1950s that a great shift occurred. This was the period of the end of France's involvement in Indochina (Dien Bien Phu), the Algerian war, the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya, the dethroning of King Farouk in Egypt. It was the time when Jean-Paul Sartre broke with Albert Camus for reasons intrinsic to colonial studies, namely, opposing attitudes toward Algeria. In 1950 Aimé Césaire's pamphlet on colonialism, Discours sur le colonialisme, appeared. Two years later, Fidel Castro gave his speech "History Shall Absolve Me," and Frantz Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks. In London the Faber and Faber publishing house, for which T. S. Eliot was a reader at the time, issued Nigerian Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinker, which led to "curiosity" about Anglo-African writing. It was the year the French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term "Third World," a term scrutinized ever since. Some see this term as derogative (mainly in the Englishspeaking world), while the term has becom e a staple in the French-, German-, and Spanish-speaking worlds.
From around the middle of the 18th century, many people in Britain began to think about childhood... more From around the middle of the 18th century, many people in Britain began to think about childhood in new ways. Previously, th e Puritan belief that humans are born sinful as a consequence of mankind's 'Fall' had led to the widespread notion that childhood was a perilous period. As a result, much of the earliest children's literature is concerned with saving children's souls through instruction and by providing role models for their behaviour. This religious way of thinking about childhood had become less influential by the mid-18th century; in fact, childhood came to be associated with a set of positive meanings and attributes, notably innocence, freedom, creativity, emotion, spontaneity and, perhaps most importantly for those charged with raising and educating children, malleability. Central to the change in how childhood was understood was the work of the philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Émile, or On Education (1762) not only rejects the doctrine of Original Sin, but maintains that children are innately innocent, only becoming corrupted through experience of the world. Émile is an invented account of an experiment in raising a boy using Rousseau's method. Instead of the heavy-handed instruction of earlier periods, Émile is allowed to develop naturally: in nature and following his own, naturally healthy instincts. This method, the philosopher concludes, preserves the special attributes of childhood, resulting in well-adjusted adults who will also be good citizens. Rousseau's ideas soon found their way into children's literature, perhaps most obviously in his disciple Thomas Day's popular Sandford and Merton (1783-89).
Post-colonialism and Art A discussion of postcolonial literature must first acknowledge the scope... more Post-colonialism and Art A discussion of postcolonial literature must first acknowledge the scope and complexity of the term "postcolonial." Temporall y, the term designates any national literature written after the nation gained independence from a colonizing power. According to this definition, all literature written in the United States after 1776 could qualify as postcolonial. Because the United States h as occupied the position of an economic and political world power since the nineteenth century, however, it is today regarded more as a historically colonizing force than as a former colony of Great Britain. Within this field of literary studies, "postcolonial" refers to those nations that gained independence between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the 1960's.
The aura created by the Freudian interpretations reached its zenith when the French Psychoanalyst... more The aura created by the Freudian interpretations reached its zenith when the French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (propelled into this arena by his reading of Freud and Salvador Dali) achieved a place in the literary critical canon. The linguistic, philos ophical and political scope of his discourse stirred the Western intelligentsia. His oeuvre reveals a great influence of Parisian figures like the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. He suggested a new back-to-Freudianism (Return to Freud) with a novel emphasis on the unconscious, as the nucleus of our being, which is the opus of his works. Lacan's Freudian reading primarily involves the realization that the unconscious is to be understood as intimately tied to the functions and dynamics of language. The central pillar of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is that "the unconscious is structured like a language", which he substantiates in the essay The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious. Lacan draws on Saussure and emphasizes that meaning is a network of differences. As there is a perpetual barrier between the signifier and the signified which is demonstrated with a diagram showing two identical lavatory rooms, one h eaded "Ladies" and "Gentlemen." This purport to show that same signifier may have different signifieds, so that the correlation between signifiers determines the meanings. Thus Lacan suggests an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier.
(470/469-399 bce), mentor of Plato and founder of moral philosophy, was the son of Sophroniscus (... more (470/469-399 bce), mentor of Plato and founder of moral philosophy, was the son of Sophroniscus (a statuary) and Phaenarete (a midwife). According to a late doxographical tradition, he followed for a time in his father's footstepsa claim regarded as apocryphal by most scholars despite the fact that Socrates traces his ancestry to the mythical statuary Daedalus (Euthyphro 11b8-9). He also describes himself as an intellectual midwife who, although himself barren, delivers young men of ideas with which they are pregnantan image generally believed to be Plato's middle-period description of Socrates rather than Socrates' description of himself. The husband of Xanthippeand later, according to some sources, of Myrtohe was the father of three sons, of whom two were still infants at the time of his death. Although intimately acquainted with Athenian intellectual and cultural life, he was mightily unimpressed with both. He had little interest in the philosophical ideas of his predecessors, he disputed the alleged wisdom and moral authority of the poets, he expressed deep misgivings about the truth of Homeric theology, he lamented the lack of virtue in public and private life, and he had a low opinion of the sophists who professed to teach it. He had an even lower opinion of the politicians, whom he denounced as panderers to public taste more interested in beautifying the city than in improving the citizenry. Contemptuous of the opinions of "the Many," he was an outspoken critic of democracy and exhorted his hearers to ignore the opinions of the ignorant and to attend only to the moral expert who knows about right and wrong (Crito 47c8-d3, 48a5-7). Indeed, among philosophers of classical antiquity, only Plato was more overtly anti-democratic. Notable for his powerful intellect, he was invincible in argument and, in Xenophon's awestruck phrase, "could do what he liked with any disputant" (Memorabilia 1.2.14-16). In Meno 79e7-80b2 he is compared to a stingray who numbs people's minds and reduces them to helplessness. In Apology 30e1-31a1 he describes himself more positively as a gadfly trying to awaken the great Athenian steed from its intellectual and moral slumber. Despite his reputation as the paradigmatically rational man, willing to act only in accordance with the argument best supported by Reason (Crito 46b3-6), he attached great importance to his customary sign (daimonion), which gave practical guidance in the form of periodic warnings. He attached comparable importance to dreams and oracles. Indeed, were it not for one particular and well publicized oracular pronouncement; he might never have attracted the attention with which he has been showered for the past 2,500 years.
Psychoanalytic criticism (emerged in the 1960s), the most influential interpretative theory among... more Psychoanalytic criticism (emerged in the 1960s), the most influential interpretative theory among the series of waves in the post war period is based on the specific premises of the workings of the mind, the instincts and sexuality, developed by the 19th century intellect, Austrian Sigmund Freud (who along with Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche, subverted the centers of Western society by boiling down the human individuality into an animalistic sex drive). Freud, greatly influenced by the psychiatrists Jean-Martin Charcot (an exponent in hypnosis) and Josef Breuer (pioneer of "talking cure") proposed his theoretical opus, the notion of the unconscious mind (disseminated in his significant works like The Ego and the Id, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Interpretation of Dreams, Totem and Taboo etc.), which proved fatal to the Enlightenment ideals, Auguste Comte's Positivism etc., the pivots of Western rationalism. This stream of criticism has become one of the most exciting and challenging areas of literary and cultural studies today.
(384-322 BC) 1. Disciple of Plato 2. Teacher of Alexander the Great. 3. Major Works: Poetics, Rhe... more (384-322 BC) 1. Disciple of Plato 2. Teacher of Alexander the Great. 3. Major Works: Poetics, Rhetoric Poetics, incomplete, 26 chapters 4. Mainly concerned with tragedy, which was in his day, the most development form of poetry. Disagreeing with much else that Plato said, Aristotle agreed that art was essentially Mimesis. But, he maintained, (good) art was neither useless nor dangerous, but rather natural and beneficial. 5. Crucial to Aristotle's defense of art is his rejection of Plato's Dualism. According to him Man is not an "embodied" intellect, longing for the spiritual release of death, but rather an animal with, among all the other faculties, the ability to use reas on and to create. 6. Rejection that Mimesis = Mirroring Nature Rejection of Plato's Rationalism We must study humans as we would study other animals to discover what their "nature" is. Look among the species; see who are the thriving and successful and in what activities do they engage? For Aristotle, this is how to determine what is and is not appropriate for a human and human society. According to him art is not useless. It is natural for human beings to imitate Any human society which is healthy will be a society where there is imitative art. Nothing is more natural that for children to pretend He thought that artistic production and training is a necessary part of any education since it uses and encourages the imaginative manipulation of ideas. Nothing is more natural than for human beings to create using their imagination. Nonetheless, the Poetics is the only critical study of Greek drama to have been made by a near-contemporary. It contains much valuable information about the origins, methods, and purposes of tragedy, and to a degree shows us how the Greeks themselves reacted to their theater. In addition, Aristotle's work had an overwhelming influence on the development of drama long after it was compiled. The ideas and principles of the Poetics are reflected in the drama of the Roman Empire and dominated the composition of tragedy in western Europe during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Archetypal theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth theory and crticism, ... more Archetypal theory and criticism, although often used synonymously with Myth theory and crticism, has a distinct history and process. The term "archetype" can be traced to Plato (arche, "original"; typos, "form"), but the concept gained currency in twentieth-century literary theory and criticism through the work of the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, C. G. Jung (1875-1961). Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious (1916, B. M. Hinkle's translation of the 1911-12 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido) appeared in English one year after publication of the concluding volume with bibliography of the third edition of J. G. Fr azer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Frazer's and Jung's texts formed the basis of two allied but ultimately different courses of influence on literary history. Jung most frequently used "myth" (or "mythologem") for the narrative expression, "on the ethnological level", of the "archetypes," which he described as patterns of psychic energy originating in the collective unconscious and finding their "most common and most normal" manifestation in dreams. Thus criticism evolving from his work is more accurately named "archetypal" and is quite distinct from "myth" criticism. For Jung, "archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic eidos", but he distinguishes his concept and use of the term from that of philosophical idealism as being more empirical and less metaphysical, though most of his "empirical" data were dreams. In addition, he modified and extended his concept over the many decades of his professional life, often ins isting that "archetype" named a process, a perspective, and not a content, although this flexibility was lost through the codifying, nominalizing tendencies of his followers. At mid-century, Canadian critic Northrop Frye (1912-91) introduced new distinctions in literary criticism between myth and archetype. For Frye, as William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks put it, "archetype, borrowed from Jung, means a primordial image, a part of the collective unconscious, the psychic residue of numberless experiences of the same kind, and thus part of the inherited response-pattern of the race". Frye frequently acknowledged his debt to Jung, accepted some of Jung's specifically named archetypes-" persona and anima and counsellor and shadow"-and referred to his theory as Jungian criticism (Anatomy 291), a practice subsequently followed in some hand books of literary terms and histories of literary crit icism, including one edited by Frye himself, which obscured crucial differences and contributed to the confusion in terminology reigning today. Frye, however, notably in Anatomy of Criticism, essentially redefined and relocated archetype on grounds that would remove him unequivocally from the ranks of "Jungian" critics by severing the connection between archetype and depth psychology: "This emphasis on impersonal content has been developed by Jung and his school, where the communicability of archetypes is accounted for by a theory of a collective unconscious-an unnecessary hypothesis in literary criticism, so far as I can judge". Frye, then, first misinterprets Jungian theory by insisting on a Lamarckian view of genetic transmission of archetypes, which Jung explicitly rejected, and later settles on a concept of "archetype" as a literary occurrence per se, an exclusively intertextual recurring phenomenon resembling a convention.
New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those tr... more New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those traditional "extrinsic" approaches that saw a text as making a moral or philosophical statement or as an outcome of social, economic, political, historical, or biographical phenomena. New Criticism holds that a text must be evaluated apart from its context; failure to do so causes the Affective Fallacy, which confuses a text with the emotional or psychological response of its readers, or the Intentional Fallacy, which conflates textual impact and the objectives of the author. New Criticism assumes that a text is an isolated entity that can be understood through the tools and techniques of close reading, maintains that each text has unique texture, and asserts that what a text says and how it says it are inseparable. The task of the New Critic is to show the way a reader can take the myriad and apparently discordant elements of a text and reconcile or resolve them into a harmonious, thematic whole. In sum, the objective is to unify the text or rather to recognize the inherent but obscured unity therein. The reader's awareness of and attention to elements of the form of the work mean that a text eventually will yield to the analytical scrutiny and interpretive pressure that close reading provides. Simply put, close reading is the hallmark of New Criticism.
(1554-1586) is often cited as an archetype of the well-rounded "Renaissance man": his talents wer... more (1554-1586) is often cited as an archetype of the well-rounded "Renaissance man": his talents were multifold, encompassing not only poetry and cultivated learning but also the virtues of statesmanship and military service. He was born into an aristocratic family, was eventually knighted, and held government appointments which included the governorship of Flushing in the Netherlands. He was involved in war waged by Queen Elizabeth I against Spain and died from a wound at the age of 32. His friends included the poet Edmund Spenser; he wrote a pastoral romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1581), and he was original in producing a sonnet cycle in the English language, influenced by the Italian poet Petrarch, entitled Astrophel and Stell a (1581-1582). Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (1580-1581) is in many ways a seminal text of literary criticism. It is not only a defense but also one of the most acclaimed treatises on poetics of its time. While its ideas are not original, it represents the first synthesis in the English language of the various strands and concerns of Renaissance literary criticism, drawing on Aristotle, Horace, and more recent writers such as Boccaccio and Julius Caesar Scaliger. It raises issuessuch as the value and function of poetry, the nature of imitation, and the concept of naturewhich were to concern literary critics in numerous languages until the late eighteenth century. Sidney's writing of the Apologie as a defense of poetry was occasioned by an attack on poetry entitled The School of Abuse published in 1579 by a Puritan minister, Stephen Gosson. As mentioned earlier, Sidney rejects Gosson's Protestant attack on courtly pleasure, effectively defending poetry as a virtuous activity for the aristocracy. Toward the beginning of the Apologie, Sidney observes that poetry has fallen from its status as "the highest estimation of learning. .. to be the laughingstock of children." He produces a wide range of arguments in defense of "poor Poetry," based on chronology, the authority of ancient tradition, the relation of poetry to nature, the function of poetry as imitation, the status of poetry among the various disciplines of learning, and the relationship of poetry to truth and morality. Sidney's initial argument is that poetry was the first form in which knowledge was expressed, the "first lightgiver to ignorance," as bodied forth by figures such as Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod, Livius, Ennius, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. And the first Greek philosophers Thales, Empedocles, Parmenides, and Pythagoras, he points out, expressed their vision in verse. Even Plato used poetic devices such as dialogue and descripti on of setting and circumstance to adorn his philosophy. Again, historians such as Herodotus have borrowed the "fashion" and the "weight" of poetry. Sidney concludes here that "neither philosopher nor historiographer, could at the first have entered into the gates of popular judgments, if they had not taken a great passport of poetry". His point is that an essential prerequisite of knowledge is pleasure in learning; and it is poetry that has made each of these varieties of knowledgescientific, moral, philosophical, politicalaccessible by expressing them in pleasurable forms. Sidney's second argument might be called the "argument from tradition" since it appeals to the ancient Roman and Greek conceptions of poetry and "stands upon their authorities". The Roman term for the poet was vates, meaning "diviner, foreseer, or prophet.. . .so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this part v: the early modern period to the enlightenment heartravishing knowledge". Sidney argues that this definition of the poet was quite "reasonable," as shown by the fact that the Psalms of David are a "divine poem," whereby prophecy is expressed in a poetic manner. Hence poetry does not deserve the "ridiculous. .. estimation" into which it has lapsed, and "deserveth not to be scourged out of the Church of God".
Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. Equally, the subsequent histo... more Marx and Engels produced no systematic theory of literature or art. Equally, the subsequent history of Marxist aesthetics has hardly comprised the cumulative unfolding of a coherent perspective. Rather, it has emerged, aptly, as a series of responses to concrete political exigencies. While these responses have sometimes collided at various theoretical planes, they achieve a dynamic and expansive coherence (rather than the static coherence of a closed, finished system) through both a general overlap of political motivation and the persistent reworking of a core of predispositions about literature and art deriving from Marx and Engels themselves. These predispositions include: (1) The rejection, following Hegel, of the notion of "identity" and a consequent denial of the view that any object, includin g literature, can somehow exist independently. The aesthetic corollary of this is that literature can only be understood in the fullness of its relations with ideology, class, and economic substructure. (2) The view that the so-called "objective" world is actually a progressive construction out of collective human subjectivity. What passes as "truth," then, is not eternal but institutionally created. "Private property," for example, is a bourgeois reification of an abstract category; it does not necessarily possess eternal validity. Language itself, as Marx said in The German Ideology: Part One, must be understood not as a self-sufficient system but as social practice. (3) The understanding of art itself as a commodity, sharing with other commodities an entry into material aspects of production. If, as Marx said, human beings produce themselves through labor, artistic production can be viewed as a branch of production in general. (4) A focus on the connections between class struggle as the inner dynamic of history and literature as the ideologically refracted site of such struggle. This has sometimes gone hand in hand with prescriptions for literature as an ideological ancillary to the aims and results of political revolution. (5) An insistence that language is not a self-enclosed system of relations but must be understood as social practice, as deeply rooted in material conditions as any other practice. To these predispositions could be added, for example, Engels' comments on "typicality," recommending th at art should express what is typical about a class or a peculiar intersection of ideological circumstances. One might also include the problem raised by Engels' granting a "relative autonomy" to art, his comments that art can transcend its ideological genesis and that superstructural elements are determined only in the "last instance" by economic relations: what exactly is the connection between art and the material base into which its constituting relations extend? Given the inconclusive and sometimes ambiguous nature of Marx's and
Reader-response criticism can be traced as far back as Aristotle and Plato, both of whom based th... more Reader-response criticism can be traced as far back as Aristotle and Plato, both of whom based their critical arguments at least partly on literature's effect on the reader. It has more immediate sources in the writings of the French structuralists (who stress the role of the perceiver as a maker of reality), the semioticians, and such American critics as Kenneth Burke (esp. his "Psychology and Form," which defined "form" in terms of the audience's appetite), Louise Rosenblatt, Walker Gibson (who developed the notion of a "mock reader"), and Wayne Booth. But reader criticism became recognized as a distinct critical movement only in the 1970s, when it found a particularly congenial political climate in the growing anti-authoritarianism within the academy. Calling it a movement, however, is misleading, for reader-response criticism is less a unified critical school than a vague collection of disparate critics with a common point of departure. That is, reader-response critics share neither a body of critical principles (as Marxist critics, for instance, do), nor a subject matter (as Renaissance critics do). Indeed, they barely share a name. "Reader theory" and "audience theory" are perhaps the most neutral general terms, since the more popular term "reader-response theory" most accurately refers to more subjective kinds of reader criticism, and "Reception Theory" most accurately refers to the German school of Reception kritik represented by Hans Robert Jauss. But these and other terms are often used indiscriminately, and the boundaries separating them are cloudy at best. What affinity there is among reader-critics comes from their rejection of the New Critical principle (most clearly enunciated in W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's pivotal essay, "The Affective Fallacy") that severs the work itself from its effect and strongly privileges the former, treated in formal terms. Refusing to accept this banning of the reader, reader-critics take the existence of the reader as a decisive component of any meaningful literary analysis, assuming, as Michael Riffaterre puts it, that "readers make the literary event" (116). But once past that first step, there is little unanimity. Indeed, even the meaning of that first step has generated considerable debate, for different critics mean different things when they talk about "the reader."
Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective ... more Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing. Postmodernis m can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post-Second World War era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism. The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance. Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a. step further and deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism's use of lighthearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also employed pastiche, which is the imitation of another's style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not "real" but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do n ot easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple interpretations. The individual or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics and becoming merely the representative of an age or civilization, like Tiresias in The Waste Land.
Many Victorians passionately believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. ... more Many Victorians passionately believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. Literature provided models of correct behavior: it allowed people to identify with situations in which good actions were rewarded, or it provoked tender emotions. At best, the sympathies stirred by art and literature would spur people to action in the real world. The supporters of aestheticism, however, disagreed, arguing that art had nothing to do with morality. Instead, art was primarily about the elevation of taste and the pure pursuit of beauty. More controversially, the aesthetes also saw these qualities as guiding principles for life. They argued that the arts should be judged on the basis of form rather than morality. The famous motto 'art for art's sake' encapsulates this view. It meant prising the sensual qualities of art and the sheer pleasure they provide. 'Art for art's sake' became identified with the energy and creativity of aestheticismbut it also became a shorthand way of expressing the fears of those who saw this uncoupling of art and morality as dangerous. Aestheticism unsettled and challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture. As it percolated more widely into the general culture, it was relentlessly satirised and condemned. Although references to the 'aesthetic movement' are commonplace, there was no unified or organised movement as such. Critics still disagree about when aestheticism began and who should be included under its label. Some associate the movement with the Pre-Raphaelites, who were active from the mid-19th century. Their emphasis on sensual beauty and on strong connections between visual and verbal forms was certainly highly influential. Perhaps the most important inaugurating phase of aestheticism, however, occurred during the late 1860s and early 1870s.
Uploads
Papers by Tiyas Mondal