June
2006 paper 3
6.
Wrire
about Shakespearean Sonnets.
Shakespeare's
sonnets are 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare, dealing with themes such as the
passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. All but two of the
poems were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never
before imprinted. Sonnets 138 and 144had previously been published in a 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim. The quarto ends
with "A Lover's Complaint", a narrative poem of
47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme
royal.
The first 17 sonnets,
traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are ostensibly written to a young man
urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalise his beauty by
passing it to the next generation.[1] Other
sonnets express the speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness,
death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for
preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress;
and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments
of Greek epigrams referring to the "little love-god" Cupid.
The publisher, Thomas
Thorpe, entered the book in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1609:
he sonnets include a dedication
to one "Mr. W.H.". The identity of this person remains a mystery and
has provoked a great deal of speculation.
The dedication reads:
“
TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSUING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H. ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OUR.EVER-LIVING.POET.
WISHETH.
THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTURER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T.T.
”
8. What is a pastoral elegy?
The pastoral
elegy is a poem about both death and idyllic
rural life. Often, the pastoral elegy features shepherds. The genre is actually
a subgroup of pastoral poetry,
as the elegy takes the pastoral elements and relates them to expressing the
poet’s grief at a loss. This form of poetry has several key features, including
the invocation of the Muse, expression of the shepherd’s, or poet’s, grief,
praise of the deceased, a tirade against death, a detailing of the effects of
this specific death upon nature, and eventually, the poet’s simultaneous
acceptance of death’s inevitability and hope for immortality. Additional
features sometimes found within pastoral elegies include a procession of
mourners, satirical digressions about different topics stemming from the death,
and symbolism through flowers, refrains, and rhetorical questions1.
The pastoral elegy is typically incredibly moving and in its most classic form,
it concerns itself with simple, country figures. In ordinary pastoral poems,
the shepherd is the poem’s main character. In
pastoral elegies, the deceased is often recast as a shepherd, despite what his
role may have been in life. Further, after being recast as a shepherd, the
deceased is often surrounded by classical mythology figures, such as nymphs, fauns, etc.2.
Pastoral poetry was first
introduced by the Greek poet Theocritus in his Idylls. Set in the countryside,
his poems reflected on folk traditions and involved dialogue between shepherds.
This style of poetry was later adapted by the Roman poet Virgil, who frequently
set his poems in Arcadia.
Over time, the genre was adapted by a variety of different poets to include
various themes, including romance, drama, courtship, seduction, and death. One
of the most popular subgroups of pastoral poetry is the elegy, in which the
poet mourns the death of a friend, often a fellow shepherd5.
Eventually, pastoral poetry
became popular among English
poets, especially through Edmund Spenser’s “The Shepherd’s
Calendar,” which was published in 1579. One of the most famous examples of
pastoral poetry is John Milton’s “Lycidas.” Written in 1637, the poem is
written about Edward King, a fellow student of Milton’s who had died5. Adonais
by Shelley, mourning the death of keats (1821)has lines ,” I weep for Adonais - he is dead! Oh, weep for Adonais!
though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad
Hour, selected from all years To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: ‘With me Died Adonais; till the Future
dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto
eternity!11"
Arnold’s Thyrsis( 1865) mourns the death of his
friend Arthur Hugh Clough.
9. What is Negative Capability
by Keats?
The
Romantic1 poet John Keats (1795-1821) coined the
phrase 'Negative Capability' in a letter written to his brothers George and
Thomas on the 21 December, 1817. In this letter he defined his new concept of
writing:
I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of
being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason.
What
Keats is advocating is a removal of the intellectual self while writing (or
reading) poetry – after all:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need know
- Ode on a Grecian Urn,
lines 49-50
Throughout
his poetry and letters Keats proposes the theory that beauty is valuable in
itself and that it does not need to declare anything for us to know that it is
important. That is, beauty does not have to refer to anything beyond itself.
Keats believed that great
people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can
be resolved. Keats, as a Romantic, believed that the truths found in
the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be
understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in
uncertaint[y]" is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the
multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence. It relates to his
metaphor of the Mansion of Many Apartments.
It could be argued that Keats
explored this idea in several of his poems
§
La Belle Dame sans
Merci: A Ballad (1819)
§
Ode to a Nightingale (1819)
§
The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819)
§
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)
positive capability is a state
of intentional open-mindedness paralleled in the literary and philosophic
stances of other writers. In the 1930s, the American philosopher John
Dewey cited Keatsian
negative capability as having influenced his own philosophical pragmatism,
and said of Keats' letter that it "contains more of the psychology of
productive thought than many treatises." [2][3] Nathan
Scott, in his book Negative
capability; studies in the new literature and the religious situation,[4] notes
that negative capability has been compared to Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit, “the spirit of disponibilité
before What-Is which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be
their uncertainty and their mystery." Walter Jackson Bate, Keats's biographer, explored the
approach in detail in his 1968 work Negative
Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats.
Keats thought, in other words, that one of the things
that made Shakespeare so powerful was his ability to sublimate his own
individual assumptions and persona—that is, make himself a negative—and thereby
sympathetically enter into “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”—presumably both
metaphysical ones AND those of his psychologically bottomless
and complex characters (like Hamlet)—without running to any premature
and oversimplifying “rational” closures upon any of them.
In other words, Shakespeare was
the ultimate good listener; a man with an exquisitely
receptive ear for the fathomless and paradoxical depths of
BEING—metaphysical and material, as well as human.
10. Explain the significance of
Songs of Innocence title.
Songs of Innocence was the first of Blake's illuminated books
published in 1789. The poems and artwork were reproduced by copperplate
engraving and colored with washes by hand. In 1794 he expanded the book to
include Songs of Experience. The spellings, punctuation and
capitalizations are those of the original Blake manuscripts.
Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794)
juxtapose the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of
corruption and repression; while such poems as “The Lamb” represent
a meek virtue, poems like “The Tyger” exhibit
opposing, darker forces. Thus the collection as a whole explores the value and
limitations of two different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall
into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of
innocence first and then experience. Blake does not identify himself wholly
with either view; most of the poems are dramatic—that is, in the voice of a
speaker other than the poet himself. Blake stands outside innocence and
experience, in a distanced position from which he hopes to be able to recognize
and correct the fallacies of both. In particular, he pits himself against
despotic authority, restrictive morality, sexual repression, and
institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these separate
modes of control work together to squelch what is most holy in human beings.
The Songs
of Innocence dramatize the
naive hopes and fears that inform the lives of children and trace their
transformation as the child grows into adulthood. Some of the poems are written
from the perspective of children, while others are about children as seen from
an adult perspective. Many of the poems draw attention to the positive aspects
of natural human understanding prior to the corruption and distortion of
experience. Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity: for
example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the emotional power of
rudimentary Christian values, he also exposes—over the heads, as it were, of
the innocent—Christianity’s capacity for promoting injustice and cruelty. . In particular, he pits
himself against despotic authority, restrictive morality, sexual repression,
and institutionalized religion; his great insight is into the way these
separate modes of control work together to squelch what is most holy in human
beings.
The Songs
of Experience work via
parallels and contrasts to lament the ways in which the harsh experiences of
adult life destroy what is good in innocence, while also articulating the
weaknesses of the innocent perspective (“The Tyger,” for
example, attempts to account for real, negative forces in the universe, which
innocence fails to confront). These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms
of the repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and secrecy, all of which corrupt
the ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less
concerned with the
character of individual faith than with the institution of the Church, its role
in politics, and its effects on society and the individual mind. Experience
thus adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision while
compensating for some of its blindness.
These latter poems treat sexual morality in terms of the
repressive effects of jealousy, shame, and secrecy, all of which corrupt the
ingenuousness of innocent love. With regard to religion, they are less
concerned with the character of individual faith than with the institution of
the Church, its role in politics, and its effects on society and the individual
mind. Experience thus adds a layer to innocence that darkens its hopeful vision
while compensating for some of its blindness.
11. What is
Victorian dilemma?
"But during
the nineteenth century," Crook argues, "that dilemma was compounded
first by changing demands, secondly by advancing technology, and thirdly by the
whole phenomenon of historicism: the multiplication of stylistic choice. The
result was a crisis in confidence. In religion, literature
and philosophy the mid-Victorian period was an age of doubt. So too with
architecture: even the greatest Victorian architecture was shot through with
uncertainty. That uncertainty was the dilemma of style"
To be sure, some major Victorian literature was, as Crook claims,
"shot through with uncertainty." Both Alfred Lord Tennyson's In
Memoriam and The Idylls
of the King famously
center on religious doubt and its devastating effects on self and society, as
did novels of religious crisis from John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain to Mary Augusta Ward'sRobert Elsmere. But the poems of Christina
Rossetti, John Keble, John Henry Newman, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning,Coventry
Patmore, and Victorian England's many religious poets show certainty,
rather than the opposite, while the atheists, such James Thomson and A. C.
Swinburne, also have firm convictions. Even Matthew Arnold, who is often
described as embodying Victorian religious crisis, finds the crisis in what to
do after one has lost belief rather than in any uncertainty about belief
itself. As E. D. H. Johnson pointed out in his classic Alien
Vision of Victorian Poetry (1952)
12.
Role of nature in Wessex
novels by Thomas Hardy.
Some of the most powerful descriptive and poetic passages in
Thomas Hardy's novels involve the world of nature. His use of closely observed
detail when depicting nature and natural processes is perhaps unrivaled in
English fiction. One of his great strengths as a novelist is the way he
portrays the interaction of his characters with the natural world, which he
often characterizes as sentient; in many instances he even gives the natural
world human attributes. His characters can usually be seen in different
relationships to the natural world: Nature may be seen as merely decorative; it
can be seen as illustrative, ie. in harmony with the character (s) moods or
situation, in essence, a projection of the inner state of the character; it is
sometimes determinative of action, ie. the weather or natural features
influence the moods and behavior of the character (s); it may be a controlling
influence, causing characters to take action in some way; and finally, it can
itself be a main character, as Egdon Heath is in Return of the Native. This
paper will analyze passages taken from the following novels: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), a
Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the
Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), and
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). Nature in all its forms becomes a protagonist
in his work. Hardy saw nature as a sentient force with a definite personality;
by allowing his characters to interact with nature in his fictional countryside
of Wessex (the counties of Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset
and Devon), Hardy is able to add to his fiction a great sense of drama and a
profound vision of man in harmony with the natural world. It has been noted
that "Hardy instinctively unites nature and man, making the external
setting a kind of sharer in the human fate" (Howe; 23) and that he writes
so that "the landscape takes its place as an actor in the drama of human
life" (CH; 413). Perhaps no other writer, living or dead, had such an
understanding of nature and at the same time possessed the writing skill and
emotional depth to capture and convey this world in print.
Tess of the D'Ubervilles is filled with vivid descriptions of the
diary lands of England
and the melodramas of a few inhabitants. Tess Durbeyfield is a naive 16 year
old girl, the only sensible member of a poor family. After an accident which
takes their livelihood from them, her parents send her to a wealthy family whom
they believe are distant relatives. Instead of the answer to their prayers,
they push her into the lecherous arms of Alec D'Uberville. Tess returns home
changed and scandalized.
Tess realizes she can't stay with her parents but
must go out into the world alone. She finds work as a diarymaid in a nearby
town and falls in love with the son of a minister, Angel Clare. Knowing nothing
of her past, Angel begs her to marry him. Tess, so close to happiness, avoids
telling Angel her secret until it is too late. Things go from bad to worse...
13.What does the Thunder say?
the final section of The Waste Land is dramatic in both its imagery and its
events. The first half of the section builds to an apocalyptic climax, as
suffering people become “hooded hordes swarming” and the “unreal” cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London are destroyed,
rebuilt, and destroyed again. A decaying chapel is described, which suggests
the chapel in the legend of the Holy Grail. Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and
the rains come, relieving the drought and bringing life back to the land.
Curiously, no heroic figure has appeared to claim the Grail; the renewal has
come seemingly at random, gratuitously.
The scene then shifts to the
Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where
thunder rumbles. Eliot draws on the traditional interpretation of “what the
thunder says,” as taken from the Upanishads (Hindu fables). According to these
fables, the thunder “gives,” “sympathizes,” and “controls” through its
“speech”; Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the
thunder’s power. The meditations seem to bring about some sort of
reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting on the shore
preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his imminent death or at least
abdication. The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a
children’s song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final
chant of “Shantih shantih shantih”—the traditional ending to an Upanishad.
Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as “the peace which
passeth understanding,” the expression of ultimate resignation.
14.Significance of caves in
The passage to India
What happens to
Adela in the Marabar
Cave is the pivotal
moment in the novel, and yet the incident is never, on the literal level,
satisfactorily explained. It is clear that if she was assaulted, as she and all
the English believe, the culprit was not Aziz, who does not even find Adela
attractive and whose only desire was to entertain his visitors as well as he
could. Fielding considers that Adela may have suffered from a hallucination, a
theory that may be quite close to the mark. Perhaps in the case of Adela, the
Marabar cave she entered might symbolize the depths of the unconscious mind.
She admits to hearing the same mysterious echo that Mrs. Moore heard, and which
had such a catastrophic effect on the old lady's peace of mind. For these two
Westerners, the caves break down their conscious, carefully constructed
personalities and lay bare what is under the surface. Adela is a somewhat
reserved, even repressed character. She is intellectual and curious, but not at
home with her emotions, and her relationship with Ronny, who at this point is
her fiancée, is stilted and awkward. Before Adela enters the cave, she has
realized with a jolt that she does not love Ronny; she has also just asked Aziz
whether he has more than one wife. Perhaps as she steps into the cave, some of
her unconscious fears about love and marriage and sex are let loose, leading
her to imagine that she has been assaulted.
After the incident, from time to time she doubts whether
her accusation against Aziz is true, but she represses these doubts. But just
before the trial, the echo she has been hearing in her mind ever since the
incident finally goes away. Her mind is returning to normal. Then at the trial,
McBryde's logical, sequential questioning brings her back to the rational world
of facts and evidence. It also brings back a sense of justice and fairness that
had been obscured by her mental confusion. This enables her to see more clearly
again, and to retract her accusation. But the mystery is never really solved.
After the trial, Adela's vague statement to Fielding about the matter,
"Let us call it the guide" is unsatisfactory, as they both know. The
Marabar caves, and their effects on people, are part of the mystery of India, which
the Western mind cannot grasp.
The Islamic mosque and the Hindu temple present positive
images of the two dominant religions of India. The Caves draw out some of
the significance of Indian spirituality-Hindu rather than Islamic-that are
problematic for Westerners.
In chapter 2, the mosque at Chandrapore is viewed through
the sympathetic eyes of a devout Moslem. The mosque stimulates Aziz's loftiest
thoughts and allows his imagination to soar. It is also the place where Aziz
meets Mrs. Moore, and they strike up a friendship. The mosque therefore
suggests the possibility of understanding between people of different
religions. However, as the later chapters show, there are many powerful forces
that interfere with this worthy goal.
The Marabar
Caves represent the
mysterious depths of Indian spirituality, which cannot be grasped by
Westerners. The Caves signify a cultural divide, a kind of stumbling block that
negates all efforts to circumvent it. As such, it is in Part 2 of the book
("Caves") that the two communities, English and Indian, are driven
furthest apart.
Part 3 ("Temple")
presents the popular Hindu festival, Gokul Ashtami, celebrating the birth of
Lord Krishna. The descriptions of the temple, with its profusion of images of
the gods, is a marked contrast to the mosque depicted earlier, which is devoid
of images and possesses only the inscriptions of the ninety-nine names of God.
But just as the mosque was depicted as a place where cross-cultural friendship
might be established, so too is the Hindu temple, its chaotic appearance
notwithstanding. The festival that proceeds from the temple produces a wave of
good feeling that embraces even Aziz, the Moslem. It is also while the festival
is going on that Aziz and Fielding are reconciled.
.
The Readerly Text
Barthes argues that most texts
are readerly texts. Such texts are associated with
classic texts that are presented in a familiar, linear, traditional manner,
adhering to the status quo in style and content. Meaning is fixed and
pre-determined so that the reader is a site merely to receive information.
These texts attempt, through the use of standard representations and dominant
signifying practices, to hide any elements that would open up the text to
multiple meaning. Readerly texts support the commercialized values of the
literary establishment and uphold the view of texts as disposable commodities.
The Writerly Text
By contrast, writerly texts reveal those elements that the
readerly attempts to conceal. The reader, now in a position of control, takes
an active role in the construction of meaning. The stable meaning, or
metanarratives, of readerly texts is replaced by a proliferation of meanings
and a disregard of narrative structure. There is a multiplicity of cultural and
other ideological indicators (codes) for the reader to uncover. What Barthes
describes as “ourselves writing” is a self-conscious expression aware of the
discrepancy between artifice and reality. The writerly text destabilizes the
reader’s expectations. The reader approaches the text from an external position
of subjectivity. By turning the reader into the writer, writerly texts defy the
commercialization and commodification of literature.
Barthes & the Ideal Text
Barthes identifies the writerly
text as the dominant mode in modern mythological culture in which forms of
representation seek to continually blur the divisions between the real and the
artificial. He proposes that the ideal text blurs the distinction between the
reader and writer:
John Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Love it or hate it, no
contemporary student of philosophy can ignore John Locke's Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. Initially published in December of 1689, it has been one of the
most influential books of the last three centuries; in fact, it is not much of
a stretch to say that every subsequent philosopher has been touched by Locke's
ideas in some way. The unique importance of Locke's Essay lies in the fact that it is the first
systematic presentation of an *empiricist* philosophy of mind and cognition: a
theory of knowledge and belief based wholly on the principle that everything in
our mind gets there by way of experience. The first principle of an empiricist
philosophy of mind is often illustrated by the notion of a Tabula Rasa, or a
blank slate (an illustration Locke himself made famous in the Essay): at birth, our minds arrive into this
world completely empty, like a pure white sheet of paper, and it is only as
experience "writes" on this paper that ideas and thoughts begin to
form
Imagination and fancy
Fancy," in Coleridge's
eyes was employed for tasks that were "passive" and
"mechanical", the accumulation of fact and documentation of what is
seen. "Always the ape," Fancy, Coleridge argued, was "too often
the adulterator and counterfeiter of memory."59 The Imagination on the
other hand was "vital" and transformative, "a repetition in the
finite mind of the eternal act of creation." For Coleridge, it was the
Imagination that was responsible for acts that were truly creative and
inventive and, in turn, that identified true instances of fine or noble art.60
The distinction b/w Fancy and the Imagination :
The distinction made by Coleridge between Fancy
and the Imagination rested on the fact that Fancy was concerned with the
mechanical operations of the mind, those which are responsible for the passive
accumulation of data and the storage of such data in the memory. Imagination,
on the other hand, described the "mysterious power," which extracted from
such data, "hidden ideas and meaning." It also determined "the
various operations of constructive and inventive genius.
New Criticism was a highly influential school of Formalist criticism that flourished from
the 40s to late 60s.
New Criticism Occurred Partially in Response To:
·
Biographical Criticism that
understood art primarily as a reflection of the author's life (sometimes to the
point that the texts themselves weren't even read!).
·
Competition for dollars and
students from sciences in academia.
·
New forms of mass literature
and literacy, an increasingly consumerist society and the increasingly visible
role of commerce, mass media, and advertising in people's lives.
·
The text as an autotelic artifact, something complete with in
itself, written for its own sake, unified in its form and not dependent on its
relation to the author's life or intent, history, or anything else.
·
The formal and technical
properties of work of art.
·
The critic's job is to help
us appreciate the technique and form of art and the mastery of the
artist.
·
That the "Western
tradition" is an unbroken, internally consistent set of artistic
conventions and traditions going back to ancient Greece and continuing up to this
day, and that good art participates in and extends these traditions. Similarly,
criticism's job is to uphold these traditions and protect them from
encroachments from commercialism, political posturing, and vulgarity.
·
That there are a finite
number of good texts (a notion now often tied to "the canon" of texts
traditionally taught). The closer that a text comes to achieving an ideal
unity, where each element contributes to an overall effect, the more worthy it
is of discussion.
·
Studying literature is an
intrinsically edifying process. It hones the sensibilities and discrimination
of students and sets them apart from the unreflective masses.
·
That "cream rises,"
and works of genius will eventually be "vindicated by
posterity."
·
That there is a firm and fast
distinction between "high" art and popular art.
That good art reflects
unchanging, universal human issues,
Gynocriticism is the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition. Elaine
Showalter coined this
term in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics." It refers to a
criticism that constructs "a female framework for the analysis of women's
literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience,
rather than to adapt male models and theories" (quoted by Groden and
Kreiswurth from "Toward a Feminist Poetics," New Feminist Criticism ,
131). The work of gynocriticism has been criticized by recent feminists for
being essentialist, following too closely along the lines of Sigmund
Freud and New
Criticism, and leaving out lesbians and women of color. (Literary Terms)
Gynocriticism is the study of feminist literature written by female
writers inclusive of the interrogation of female authorship, images, the
feminine experience and ideology, and the history and development of the female
literary tradition.[1][2] During the late eighteen
hundreds and early nineteen hundreds respectively, Virginia Woolf and Simone de
Beauvoir began to review and evaluate the female image and sexism in the works
of male writers.[2] During the nineteen
sixties the feminist movement saw a reaction and opposition to the male
oriented discourse of previous years.[2] Most thoroughly developed
during the late seventies and early eighties, gynocriticism was a result of the
interrogative critiques utilised in post-structuralism and psychoanalysis.[1]
Bertolt Bretcht
Along with his contemporary Erwin
Piscator, Brecht created an influential theory of theatre—the epic
theatre—that proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to
identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but
should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the
action on the stage. Brecht thought that the experience of a climactic catharsis of emotion left an audience
complacent. Instead, he wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in
order to recognise social injustice and exploitation and to be moved to go
forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this
purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that
the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By
highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to
communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such,
was changeable.
One of Brecht's most important
principles was what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as "defamiliarization
effect", "distancing effect", or "estrangement
effect", and often mistranslated as "alienation effect").[65] This
involved, Brecht wrote, "stripping the event of its self-evident,
familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity
about them".[66] To
this end, Brecht employed techniques such as the actor's direct address to the
audience, harsh and bright stage lighting, the use of songs to interrupt the action, explanatory placards, and,
in rehearsals, the transposition of text to the third person or past
tense, and speaking the stage directions out loud.[67]
Inscape and instress in Hopkins
In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins
used two terms, "inscape" and "instress," which can cause
some confusion. By "inscape" he means the unified complex of
characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it
from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of
being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which
carries it whole into the mind of the beholder: The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots
of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's
"epiphanies," showing
it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape is also
fundamentally religious: a glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows us why God
created it. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/ . . myself it
speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. "
Hopkins occupies an important place in the poetic line that
reaches from the major Romantic poets, especiallyWordsworth and Keats,
through Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites to Hopkins, Pater, Yeats and the
symbolists, and finally to Ezra Pound and the Imagists. His insistence that
inscape was the essence of poetry ("Poetry is in fact speech employed to
carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake") and that
consequently, what he called "Parnassian" poetry (i.e., competent
verse written without inspiration) was to be avoided has much in common with
the aestheticism of Walter Pater (one of his tutors at Oxford) and the Art for Art's
Sake movement, and sounds very much like the theoretical pronouncements of the
Imagists of the early twentieth century.
Harold Pinter – anti-establishment writer
Harold Pinter, who has been
honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, is a child of the
mid-twentieth century. His is the strange case of a playwright of the Absurd —
one who believed that nothing was verifiable in this world, a playwright
accused of being a right reactionary by the left leaning playwrights of the
time — turning into one of the anti-establishment heroes of our times. He is
now a figure to whom we have looked instinctively over the last decade to come
out in favour of the peoples of the world, on the side of peace and humanity,
to speak out invariably and forcibly against war. He is a literary giant who
was in danger of receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace!
His hard hitting speeches
against the war in Iraq
show the characteristic spirit of Pinter the writer, pulling no punches, stark,
and frighteningly comic.
Addressing an anti-war
meeting at the House of Commons in 2002 Pinter is reported to have said, ‘‘Bush
has said: ‘We will not allow the world’s worst weapons to remain in the hands
of the world’s worst leaders’. Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That’s
you.’’ In his speech at the Imperial
War Museum,
in September 2004, he summed the whole issue succinctly: ‘‘Freedom, democracy
and liberation. These terms, as enunciated by Bush and Blair essentially mean
death ssentially mean death, destruction and
chaos.’’ This directness is apparent in his recent poetry, which has become
increasingly political: ‘‘The bombs go off/ The legs go off/ The heads go off’’
(‘‘The Special Relationship’’); ‘‘There are no more words to be said/ All we
have left are the bombs/ Which burst out of our head.’’ (‘‘The Bombs’’) But
this poet-actor-playwright-director burst into the theatrical/literary world
with a series of plays, beginning with The Birthday Party (1958), that left
audiences and critics bewildered.
Significance of local in
Dylan Thomas poetry
There is an organic connection between peoples and their native
soils. Men are shaped by their habitat and in turn shape it. Mountain and
water, field and hedge, house and farm, the design of implements, men and
women, interact from generation to generation, bequeathing language, mores and
skills. This is what we mean by culture. A small illustration must suffice. In
the Pennines a stream with many tributaries
which cuts deeply through the peat is called a "clough." It cannot be
called a "River' and to call it a "Rivulet" would be absurd. Nor
is it a "Beck" for a beck is a stream which runs over hard rock and
cuts a narrow channel. it is a "clough;" the word belongs to the
locale and the locale is perceived through the word. Thomas more than any other
was the poet of this organic connection. in its extreme form it is the burden
of all the early poems. here is a
significance in the fact that Yeats was Thomas' favourite poet. The long poems
of the early Yeats, The
Countess Cathleen andThe
Wanderings of Ossian among
others, are written in a liquid, melodious English, filled with impressionist
imagery. Yeats, deprived of Gaelic, but writing of the locale and ethos which
had shaped that language, was intuitively creating "Gaelic in
English." The same is true of Thomas; deprived of his native speech he was
writing "Welsh in English." This is not to be confused with
'AngloWelsh" - English spoken with a Welsh accent and idiom. Thomas'
father had ensured, by private elocution lessons, that Dylan and his sister had
neither, and neither occurs in the poetry. Rather it is a use of English as a
substitute language, a use which changes its diction and syntax. The changed
diction to produce pure vowels has already been mentioned. When Thomas
writes:
"We lying by seasand, watching yellow
And the grave sea, mock who deride
Who follow the red rivers, hollow
Alcove of words out of cicada shade,"
Marxist criticism
Marxist criticism
is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product of work
and whose practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as they
reflect, propagate, and even challenge the prevailing social order. Rather than
viewing texts as repositories for hidden meanings, Marxist critics view texts
as material products to be understood in broadly historical terms. In short,
literary works are viewed as a product of work (and hence of the realm of
production and consumption we call economics).
Marxism began with Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German
philosopher best known for Das Kapital (1867; Capital), the seminal work of the communist movement. Marx
was also the first Marxist literary critic, writing critical essays in the
1830s on such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and William Shakespeare. Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in
order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory
meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. As J. Hillis Miller, the
preeminent American deconstructor, has explained in an essay entitled
"Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure" (1976), "Deconstruction is
not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has
already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but thin
air."
Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly
influenced by the French philosopher on language Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who
coined the termdeconstruction, argues that in Western culture, people
tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions. Something is white but not black,
masculine and therefore not feminine, a cause rather than an effect. Other
common and mutually exclusive pairs include beginning/end,
conscious/unconscious, presence/absence, and speech/writing. Derrida suggests
these oppositions are hierarchies in miniature, containing one term that
Western culture views as positive or superior and another considered negative
or inferior, even if only slightly so. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to
erase the boundary between binary oppositions—and to do so in such a way that
the hierarchy implied by the oppositions is thrown into question.
Feminist criticism became a dominant force in Western
literary studies in the late 1970s, when feminist theory more broadly conceived
was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the early 1980s, feminist
literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is now
characterized by a global perspective.
French feminist criticism garnered much of its
inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal book, Lé
Deuxiéme Sexe (1949; The Second Sex). Beauvoir argued that associating
men with humanity more generally (as many cultures do) relegates women to an
inferior position in society.
The new historicism developed during the 1980s, largely in
reaction to the text-only approach pursued by formalist New Critics and the
critics who challenged the New Criticism in the 1970s. New historicists, like
formalists and their critics, acknowledge the importance of the literary text,
but they also analyze the text with an eye to history. In this respect, the new
historicism is not "new"; the majority of critics between 1920 and
1950 focused on a work’s historical content and based their interpretations on
the interplay between the text and historical contexts (such as the author’s
life or inte Reader-response
criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that explore and seek to
explain the diversity (and often divergence) of readers' responses to literary
works.
Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the
approaches inLiterature as Exploration (1938). In her
1969 essay "Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading," she summed up her position as
follows: "A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of
the text and experiences as relevant to the text." Recognizing that many
critics would reject this definition, Rosenblatt wrote, "The idea that a poem presupposes a reader actively involved
with a text is particularly shocking to those seeking to emphasize the
objectivity of their interpretations." Rosenblatt implicitly and generally
refers to formalists (the most influential of whom are the New Critics) when
she speaks of supposedly objective interpreters shocked by the notion that a
"poem" is cooperatively produced by a "reader" and a
"text." Formalists spoke of "the poem itself," the
"concrete work of art," the "real poem." They had no
interest in what a work of literature makes a reader "live through."
In fact, in The Verbal Icon (1954), William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley used the term affective
fallacy to define as erroneous the very idea that a reader’s response is
relevant to the meaning of a literary work.ntions
in writing the work).
Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by
some as marking the true beginning of contemporary reader-response criticism,
also took issue with the tenets of formalism. In "Literature in the
Reader: Affective Stylistics" (1970), he argued that any school of criticism
that sees a literary work as an object, claiming to describe what it is and
never what it does, misconstrues the very essence of literature and reading.
Literature exists and signifies when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force is an affective
one. Furthermore, reading is a temporal process, not a spatial one as
formalists assume when they step back and survey the literary work as if it
were an object spread out before them. The German critic Wolfgang Iser has
described that process in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett (1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976). Iser argues that texts contain gaps
(or blanks) that powerfully affect the reader, who must explain them, connect
what they separate, and create in his or her mind aspects of a work that aren’t inthe text but are incited by the text.
Neoclassical criticism
Being a writer as well as a critic, Dryden always wrote criticism
to some practical end concerning his own works. Much of his critical
work is to be found in prefaces to his own works. Besides,
he was a professional writer. He was not a nobleman writing for his pleasure:
he had to live from his work and in the age he wrote in this meant that he had
to find some patron or other to take him under his protection. He had to
flatter, and this explains not only the nature of his writing, but also
sometimes that of his criticism. Sometimes his reasoning is flawed by this need
to flatter. As in the critics we have studied up to now, we find in Dryden an
interest in the general issues of criticism rather than in a close reading of
particular texts (although he will provide one of the first of such readings,
that of Jonson's The Silent
Woman). He wants to rely on both authority and common sense, and often
seems at a loss when the two seem to go against each other. We
call Dryden a neoclassical critic, just as Boileau, although in fact there are
wide differences between them. Dryden meditates on the neoclassical rules,
which he feels to be right in the main, but then he also wants to find a
critical justification for the great tradition of English poetry, which lay
beyond those rules. It is to his credit that he thought over the principles of
French neo-Classicism and did not apply them mechanically to the English
letters. According to T.S. Eliot, Dryden's great work consists not so much in
the originality of his principles as in having realized the need to affirm the
native tradition, as opposed to the overwhelming French influence. His best-known
work, the Essay of Dramatic
Poesy, partly reflects this
tension in Dryden's commitments. Its dialogue form has often been criticised as
inconclusive, but actually, as in most dialogues, there is a spokesman more
weighty than the others. Dryden carries about his task with efficiency, stating
his own ideas but leaving some leeway for difference of opinion. Neander's
(dryden) overall statement on the rules is that they can add to the perfection
of a work, but that they will not improve a work which does not already contain
some degree of perfection or genius in it. And we may find writers like
Shakespeare, Dryden believes, who did not follow the rules but are nevertheless
obviously superior to any "regular" writer. Shakespeare disconcerts Dryden,
who recognises his superiority but is more at ease with Ben Jonson. In Dryden,
then, we find a "liberal" neoclassicist, although he is most coherent
when he is dealing with that which can be understood and reduced to rule. His
relaxation is to a great extent both a refusal to believe in the universal
application in the neoclassic principles and an inability to provide new and
more comprehensive principles. Because his most cogent statement on the rules
(following Rapin) is that
Dryden is not a great analyst of texts nor an important
literary historian, but some of his works are significant steps in the
development of both directions in criticism. Dryden's importance as a critic
comes from his place in history at the start of the long neoclassical era,
whose principles he helped determine; he contributed a great deal to raise the
standards of criticism and to define the role of the discipline.
Dryden says that they wholly
mistake the nature of criticism who think its business is principally to find
fault. Criticism , as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant a
standard of judging well; the chiefest part of which is to observe those
excellencies which should delight a reasonable reader.
Rhyme is for Dryden something more than a mere ornament. It
is a way of consciously controlling the process of composition: because of the
superior attention it requires, rhyme demands a greater consciousness on the
part of the poet, and less abandonment to the inspiration of his fancy.
Rhyme bounds and circumscribes the fancy. . . . the fancy
then gives leisure to the judgement to come in, which, seeing so heavy a tax
imposed, is ready to cut off all unnecessary expenses"
Dryden opposes Aristotle in
believing that the soul of a play is not to be found in its plot, but rather in
its author's language, in diction and thought. Dryden wants a literature
written in a pure language, one which is free from neologism and pedantry
alike. However, he accepts coinages from Latin. Like Swift whose complaints
will be much the same, he longs for an academy with an authority to decide on
linguistic matter. Dryden discusses character and
plot as technical difficulties faced by the writer, sometimes working one
against the other. This conception is very characteristic of British criticism.
We can compare it with E. M. Forster's account in Aspects of the Novel (1927), which describes how the plot
seems to lead the writer in one direction and the characters in a different
one. For both Forster and Dryden, it is the poet's art to respect both the decorum
of the characters and the causally necessary, natural solution to the plot. The
writer, Dryden says, is like a god to his characters, having prescience and
power of determination. But it is difficult to use them in a way altogether
convincing, working as a whole.
We may note that decorum and rule are for Dryden a means of
giving formal integrity to the work: that is, they are not only content, but
form as well; their aim is not to depict the world as it is, but to give unity
to the work. Dryden, like many later critics, is conscious of two different
tendencies present in a work: although he does not use these terms, we might
call them the mimetic tendency (the relationship between an element in the work
and reality) and the structural tendency (the coherence of the work imposing
its own conventions, the concern for formal integrity).
He opposes the strongly conventionalized characters and
plots of Roman comedies, asking for a wider imitation of nature, although he
also appreciates the advantages of patterning and of structural simplicity in
current French plays, and he believes some of Shakespeare's plays to be
"ridiculously cramped" with
incident. But the interest of the plot and the characters is also to be found
in variety and not simply in a well-defined structure. In variety we recognize
real life, and this is one of the advantages of the English approach to
dramatic art.
The three unities, Dryden observes, ought to be
followed in all regular plays. But he is tolerant enough with plays which are
moderately irregular.
In the Essay
of Dramatic Poesy, Crites
repeats the account of the unities given by Corneille (without his
qualifications on the difficulty of the enterprise). The unities aim at
verisimilitude; the space and time of representation must be as close as
possible to those of the feigned action. Any distortion must be supposed to
fall between the acts, plots have to begin "in medias res", narration
must be restricted to events simultaneous with the action if possible, etc.
In time we find that the coincidence of times works all
right in dealing with the precipitate events at the conclusion of a play, but
makes the complication seem artificial or else rely too much on narrative.
Dryden follows Corneille in showing how the unities of space
and time are mutually related, and regularity in one favours regularity in the
other. This may be helped through the "liaison des scènes." Place
(and time, too) remains the same inside each act,
In his definition of a play in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden says it is
a just and lively image of human nature, representing its
passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for
the delight and instruction of mankind
So, once again we meet a version of the Horatian ""productive
delight." Elsewhere
Dryden writes: these two ends may be thus distinguished. The chief end of the
poet is to please, for his immediate reputation depends on it. The great end of
the poet is to instruct, which is performed by making pleasure the vehicle of
that instruction; for poetry is an art, and all arts are made to profit. (Answer to Rhymer 148)
But he also says
that delight is the chief, if not the only end of poesy; instruction
can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it
delights,or that instruction is the end of tragedy,
but in comedy it is not so; for the chief end of it is
divertisement and delight, and that so much, that it is disputed . . . whether
instruction be any part of its employment.
Pope
Let such teach others who themselves excel
And censure freely, who have written well.
He defines the intellectual and moral characteristics of
the good critic. For instance, the critic must not pay excessive attention to
small faults; he must appreciate what is good, irrespective of its being old or
new , foreign or national. He must control his obsessions and not sacrifice his
judgement "to one loved folly "; he will seek to appreciate, rather
than to find fault; he will avoid the extremities of novelty and tradition,
etc. "Certainly what Pope recommends to the critic is superior to the
varieties of critical narrowness that he draws up for censure" (Adams 237).
In the third part of the essay, Pope points out the moral
virtues required in the critic. Knowledge is not sufficient: honesty is needed,
too, and humility in putting forward his judgement, taking care not to offend:
"Without good breeding truth is disapproved." A good critic must have
a sense of proportion, and know when to forbear criticising a great writer,
while foolish critics will assail him with importunities:
2.
Nay, fly to the altars, there they'll talk you dead
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Earlier on in the essay, the main advice given to the
critic is not to set his pride against the author; to try to understand first
the author's spirit and then judge accordingly. We must know a poet's culture,
religion, etc. before we attempt to judge him. The Augustan age was scarcely a
historically conscious period. It was given to the admiration of neoclassical
models as eternal standards, instead of seeing aesthetic conventions as
historically relative. Pope's observations in the Essay on Criticism and in his "Preface to
Shakespeare", although they do not amount to a historicist perspective,
show some degree of historical consciousness.
T hose rules of old discovered, not devised,
Are nature still, but nature methodized:
Nature, like liberty, is but restrained
By the same laws which first herself ordained.
And, as the Ancients were the ones who followed the rules
best, "To copy nature is to copy them." For Pope, there is no
possible difference between experience and imitation; here he is thoroughly
neoclassical in the narrowest sense. He sees culture (the rules) as a part of
nature, while the pre-Romantic writers of the XVIIIth century have a
primitivistic tendency; they see nature as something which man has alienated
himself from through culture. Nature and rule, nature and culture, nature and
manners, become then opposite terms. For Pope, nature and manners are nearly
synonymous.
Another piece of advice is to learn to judge the work as a
whole, and not its isolated parts; to appreciate the true merits of a work, and
not the superficial ornaments like good sound or a good style with no content.
The harmony between sound and sense finds in Pope's view its most finished
instance in the figure of imitative
harmony
