Important Trends in 20Th Century Literary Theory and Cultural Studies (MAD 1321, MAD 2210)
Important Trends in 20th century Literary Theory and Cultural Studies (MAD 1321, MAD 2210)
dr. Tóth Sára
, saratoth.pbworks.com
The purpose of the course (lectures and seminars combined) is to familiarize students with the developments of classical literary theory and some of the mainstream 20th century trends. Besides theroetical essays, students are expected to read the literary excerpts (mostly poems) with the accompanying study questions on the handouts and one short novel.
Assessment: one in-class test and essay, short quizes, one 2 page summary of an essay chosen from the underlined titles, active participation in class
1. 09.15. Introduction: literature, literary criticism, literary theory
Eagleton: „What is Literature?” In Eagleton 1-14. p.
Jim Meyer: „What is Literature?”
2. 09.22. Different approaches to literature (M.H. Abrams); beginnings of literary theory
M. H. Abrams: Orientation of Critical Theories (L1)
Book X, Plato’s Republic [available online]
Aristotle: Poetics [available online])
3. 09.29.From Renaissance to Romanticism
Sir Philip Sidney: Apology for Poetry [available online]
P. B. Shelley: The Defence of Poetry [available online]
Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Lying [available online]
4. 10.06.New Criticism and its antecedent New Classsicism
T. S. Eliot: „Tradition and Individual Talent” [available online]
Cleanth Brooks: „Keats’ Sylvan Historian”
„The heresy of paraphrase”, „The language of paradox” L1
Wimsatt and Beardsley: The intentional fallacy L1
5. 10.13. Russian Formalism and Structuralism
Viktor Shklovsky: Art as Technique (RR)
Rimmon-Kenan: Narration: levels and voices (Chapter 7)
65.10.1320. Archetypal criticism: Northrop Frye
„Theory of archetypal meaning” 141-158 AC
„Theory of mythos: introduction”158-162 AC
„The mythos of summer: romance” 186-206 AC
training week and autumn break
67.101.2010 Reader’s Response
Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author (L2)
W. Iser. The reading process: a phenomenological approach (L2)
Stanley Fish: Interpreting the Variorum(L2)
training week and autumn break
78. 11.107. Psychoanalytical criticism
Terry Eagleton: Psychoanalysis. In Literary Theory, 131-168
89. 11.1724.Postructuralism
Peter Brooks: An Unreadable Report
910. 11.242.01Feminist criticism
Elaine Showalter: Feminist criticism in the wilderness (L2)
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: „Plane Jane’s Progress.” (RR)
101. 12.018. Ethical criticism, neomarxism, cultural studies, postcolonialism
Terry Eagleton: „Political criticism.” In Literary Theory, 169-189.
Edward Said: Orientalism (RR); Freedom from domination in the future (??)
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'"
11. 12.08.New developments in cultural studies: human-animal studies, ecocriticism, transhumanism
J. M. Cotzee: The Lives of Animals (Lesson 3 and 4) in Elizabeth Costello. Eight Lessons. Secker, 2003.
122. 12. 15.In-class test
Required reading:
course kit material
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness.
Flannery O’Connor: “View of the Woods”
Recommended literature for different approaches:
Jungian approach:
Colleen Burke: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Metaphor of Jungian Psychology
Feminist approach:
Serpil Oppermann: „Feminist Literary Criticism: Expanding the Canon as Regards the Novel” (Chapters II and III: compulsory up until the sentence: „But it is powerfully challenged and re-adjusted by feminist literary criticism.” Chapter I on literary history is strongly recommended but not compulsory)
(for a feminist, but completely different approach see: Carole Stone and Fawzia Afzal-Khan: Gender, Race and Narrative Structure: A Reappraisal of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness".
Poststructuralist approach:
Peter Brooks: An Unreadable Report: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In Reading for the Plot (Harvard UP 1984), 238-263. Available at:
Postcolonialist approach:
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'"
Assessment
TEST, consisting of
- questions based on the material of my lectures (handouts) and inviting short answers
- an exercise of assigning quotations from different critics/theorists to one of the approaches to literature as defined by M. A. Abrams
- short essay which applies one specific approach to a specific work (e. g. Heart of Darkness) we have discussed
* A two-page summary of a theoretical essay chosen from the underlined titles. Deadline of submission: after the break
Recommended literature:
Anthologies in the Department Library
V. B. Leitch: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W. W. Norton, 2010.
Lodge, David (ed.) 20th Century Literary Criticism. Longman, 1972. (L1)
Lodge, David (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader. Longman, 1988. (David Lodge and Nigel Wood, 2008. (L2)
Rivkin, Julie-Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell, 1998. (RR)
Availability of critical essays outside the anthologies
Sir Philip Sidney: Apology for Poetry
Cleanth Brooks: Keats’ Sylvan Historian: History without footnotes.
Cleanth Brooks: „The Heresy of Paraphrase.” In The Well-Wrought Urn. New York: Harverst, 1947.
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'" Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, background and Sources Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, London: W. W Norton and Co., 1988, pp.251-261
Jim Meyer: „What is Literature? A Definition Based on Prototypes.” Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Univ. of North Dakota Session. Vol. 41. 1997.
Peter Brooks: An Unreadable Report: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In Reading for the Plot (Harvard UP 1984), 238-263. Available at:
Sandra M. Gubar: Plain Jane’s Progress. In Edith Gilbert – Sandra Gubar: Madwoman in the Attic. Available at:
Introduction to Modern Literary Theory: useful site with links:
Longer theoretical works:
In the Department Library:
Adams, Hazard. The Interests of Criticism. An Introduction to Literary Theory. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1969.
Mohanty, Satya P. Literary Theory and the Claims of History. Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics. Cornell Univ. Press, 1997.
Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism, New Jersey, Princeton UP, 1957. (
Selden, Raman. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1985.
Selden, Raman. Practicing Theory and Reading Literature. Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1989.
Elsewhere
Davies, Todd F. and Womack, Kenneth (ed.) Mapping the Ethical Turn. Virginia University Press, 2001.
Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory. Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1983. Available at:
Wayne Booth: The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961.
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1980.
Toril Moi: Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London-New York: Methuen, 1985.
Rimmon-Kennan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. London, New York: Routledge, 1983.
1- LITERATURE AND LITERARY STUDY
1. What is literature? Examples
a) see separate handout (1, 2, 4)
b)
Mona Lisa
Walter Pater
She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the vampire, she has been dead many times,
And learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep seas,
And keeps their fallen day about her;
And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants:
And, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy,
And, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary;
And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
And lives only in the delicacy
With which it has moulded the changing lineaments,
And tinged the eyelids and the hands.
(ed. by W. B. Yeats)
"The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea." (Walter Pater: The Renaissance. London, 1893. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980, pp. 98-99.)
2. A famous relativist standpoint (see Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory, first chapter)
i) imaginative writing in the sense of fiction – writing which is not really true
usually people include much more under the heading of literature
distinction between fact and fiction (dubious in itself)
ii) it uses language in a particular way –- a kind of writing which represents „organized violence against ordinary speech” (Russian formalist Roman Jakobson)
transforms and intensifies ordinary language
deviates systematically from everyday speech
emphasis on form at the expense of content (content: merely the occassion for a formal exercise)
literariness: not an eternally given property, it is functional: can be found in literary texts but also in many places outside them
much ordinary speech is full of literary devices; whereas a realistic novel is not necessarily
so it is the context that tells me that it is literary, the language itself has no inherent properties or qualities that distinguish it from other type of discourse
Dogs must be carried on escalators
iii) literature: non-pragmatic discourse, it serves no practical purpose, it is to be taken as referring to a general state of affairs
„my love is like a red red rose”: a way of talking about a woman, but not about any particular, real life woman
What about more programmatic literature (Orwell?)
„some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them” –
literature = not a set of inherent qualities displayed by certain kinds of writings from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, but a number of ways people relate themselves to writing
functional terms, not ontological (weed = what you don’t want in your garden!)
literature: what people define as „good” writing (szépirodalom = belles letres)
literature: a highly valued kind of writing
value = whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and for special purposes
3. A linguist’s definition, based on prototypes (Jim Meyer)
the criterial approach and the prototypical approach
criterial (checklist) approach: a list of criteria is established, and all need to be met
prototype approach: focuses on an established prototype, a particularly good example of the word, to which other examples of the word bear some resemblance: a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing
Prototypical literary works exhibit the following characteristics:
- are written texts
- are marked by careful use of language (such as creative metaphors, well-turned phrases, elegant syntax, rhyme, meter)
- are in a literary genre (poetry, prose fiction or drama)
- are read aesthetically
- texts which invite the readers to consider many interpretations (shades of meaning) without the assumption that they will find the sole correct one
summary:
Literature is a term used to describe written or spoken material. Broadly speaking, "literature" is used to describe anything from creative writing to more technical or scientific works, but the term is most commonly used to refer to works of the creative imagination, including works of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction.
many
4. The study of literature „Criticism can talk, but all the arts are dumb.”(Northrop Frye)
literary studies = literary criticism (in the broadest sense) = irodalomtudomány
a branch of study concerned with defining, classifying, expounding and evaluating of literature.
Greek word: krino=to judge
a) Literary History (=irodalomtörténet)
A study of literature in a chronological order
(New Historicism)
b) Literary Criticism
Theoretical criticism = Literary Theory
Practical criticism: study of works of art in isolation (=irodalomkritika)
concerns itself with the discussion, analysis and often evaluation of literary works (Dryden, dr Johnson, T. S. Eliot)
c) Literary Theory: a study of the nature and function, the principles of literature, its categories and criteria.
not another method: philosophical and abstract
„you cannot apply a theory, because theory is theoretical; when you apply it, it becomes literary criticism, and there, inevitably, different theories mingle
literary theory: rather than providing simply another method for the study of literary works, it asks about the nature and function of literature and the literary institution. Rather than supplying us with yet more sophisticated ways of tackling canonical texts, it inquires into the very concept of canonicitiy. Its aim is not just to help us see what literary works mean; or how valuable they are, instead it queries our more commonsensical notions of what it is to „mean” in the first place, and poses questions about the criteria by which we evaluate literary art. (Eagleton)
5. Traditional philology (study of texts and the transmission of texts)
Texts studied as philological documents:
* how does text reflect the morality and ideology of the age or of the author (message!) by examining the genesis of the work
* stress on the life of the author and his/her historical context
meaning: 1. What did the author intend to say 2. What language did the author use 3. What was his historical context?
* treat literature as science: accumulation of evidence, tracing causes and effects in literary relations
Philip Swallow was the first to speak. He said the function of criticism was to assist in the function of literature itself, which Dr Johnson had famously defined as enabling us better to enjoy life, or better to endure it. The great writers were men and women of exceptional wisdom, insight, and understanding. Their novels, plays and poems were inexhaustible reservoires of values, ideas, images, which when properly understood and appreciated, allowed us to live more fully, more finely, more intensely. But literary conventions changed, history changed, language changed, and these treasures too easily became locked away in librarires, covered with dust, neglected and forgotten. It was the job of the critic to … bring about the treasures into the light of day. Of course, he needed certain specialist skills to do this. a knowledge of history, a knowledge of philology, of generic convention and textual editing. but above all he needed enthusiasm, the love of books. it was by the demonstration of this enthusiasm in action that the critic forged a bridge between the great writers and the general reader. (David Lodge: Small World, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985, p. 317
2 DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO LITERATURE (M. H. ABRAMS)
BEGINNINGS OF LITERARY THEORY (Plato, Aristotle)
I. M. H. Abrams: “Orientation of Critical Theories”
1. Four main ’elements’ that crucially participate in the ’total situation of a work of art’ (seen as a kind of communication)
1
2.
3.
4.
2. Possible orientations of critical theories:
i)mimetic: explanation of art as essentially an imitation of aspects of the universe
main criterion: How true is it to nature?
first representative: Plato: Book X of the Republic
work of art: imitation of an imitation
Aristotle: Poetics:
Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic: poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one: another in three respects,--the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct. … There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse--which, verse, again, may either combine different metres or consist of but one kind--but this has hitherto been without a name. (Ch. 1)
ii)pragmatic: criticism which is ordered towards the audience; looks at the work chiefly as a means to an end, an instrument for getting sg. done
conceives of a poem as something made in order to achieve certain effects in an audience
Plato: a) work of the artist is not useful in society
b)„Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up”
activating the the passions which upset the rule of reason in us.
Aristotle: theory of catharsis
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. (Ch. 6)
Sir Philip Sidney: Apology for Poetry
Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word [Greek], that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end,—to teach and delight
purpose of poetry: to promote virtue!!!!!!!!
Poets’ competitors: moral philosophers and historians
„Poet performs both: coupleth the general notion with the particular example
iii). expressive: artist becomes the major element generating both the artistic product and the criteria by which it is to be judged
increasing attention to author, quality and degree of his genius, his mental power
“poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” (Wordsworth)
criterion: How sincere? How genuine? How spontaneous? (Poet born and poet made)
turning point in the assessment of poetic, literary language
For Plato: philosophy, propositional language: primary,
poetry – didactic
For the Romantics: metaphorical language of the imagination is primary; creative, and not imitative; in touch with Platonic ideas.