LITERARY CRITICISM:

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LITERARY CRITICISM

• Love, Desire and Class
• General Introduction

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Outline

• A prelude Love Story
• What is Romantic Love and whats wrong with it?
• Course Outline at a glance Section I
• Three Traditional Love Poems one Contemporary
  Song
• Reference
• Readings for next week

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Love Story By Andy Williams

• Where do I begin to tell a story of how great a
  love can be
• the sweet love story that is older than the sea
• the simple truth about the love she brings to me
• Where do I start
• With her first hello
• she gave a meaning to this empty world of mine
• There'd never be another love another time
• She came into my life and made the living
  fineshe fills my heart

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• she fills my heart with very special thingswith
  angel songs,with wild imaginingsShe fills my
  soul with so much lovethat anywhere I go I'm
  never lonely.With her along who could be
  lonelyI reach for her handit's always there

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• How long does it last
• Can love be measured by the hours in a day
• I have no answers now but this much I can say
• I know I'll need her till the stars all burn away
• and she'll be there (underline added)

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Is this a poem?

• It depends. ? Some poetic elements repetition,
  rimes. But what is poetry?
• A fine combination of sound (rime, rhythm,
  meter, etc.) and sense (figurative language,
  irony, personification, etc.)? No.
• Shocking us into a new awareness? No.
• Instead, it is a straightforward celebration of a
  romantic love which falls in the tradition of
  Romantic love.

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What is Romantic Love? Whats wrong with it?

• The desire for union or merger
• Idealization of the beloved
• Exclusivity (e.g. always, never)
• Emotional dependency or powerful concern for the
  beloved. (Cf. J. 5)
• Nothing wrong, but Romantic love is not Love.
  It is apparently a powerful feeling that seems to
  be unique and eternal, but actually --

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Romantic love is

• A cultural product with a lot of conventions (or
  some plot elements)
• e.g. to deal with its transience
• carpe diem (seize the day) liebestod (love and
  death)
• Part of the tradition of idealized love (e.g.
  courtly love, Platonic love, neo-Platonic love,
  Romantic love).

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Romantic love is

• Problematic because it is powerful and seemingly
  natural and thus disguises realities of
  inequality, commodification or the nature of our
  desire. Sometimes it (true love) can even be
  turned into rigid laws to support or justify some
  gender oppression.
• Victorian society pinnacle of Romantic love,
  from which S. Freuds theories arises.

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The problems with both the song and the ideas of
R. L.

• Both can be deceiving.
• The canonical love poems are not exempt from
  some ideology of love.

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Course Outline

• Traditional Love Poems New Critical Reading and
  Beyond
• Love and Desire Psychoanalysis
• Love and Bread Marxism
• Love in Culture Cultural Studies
• Note we are not limited by this topic.

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New Critical Readings and Beyond

• New Criticism close reading practical
  criticism the Text and Text Only approach.
  Form and content united into an organic whole.
• Beyond
• Discussing the social context(s) it fails to see.
• Challenging its underlying beliefs? liberal
  humanism.

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Selected Love Poems

• Shakespeare Sonnet 130 My mistress' eyes are
  nothing like the sun
• Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet (1591?)
• John Donne To his Mistress Going to Bed
• Leonard Cohen Im Your Man

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Sonnet 130

• Thesis Instead of seeing his lover as a
  beautiful goddess, the speaker describe his
  mistress and define his lover in relative terms
  in order to finally confirm his love.
• Two kinds of comparison
• Worse e.g. less red, worse than perfume, less
  pleasing than music? yet he loves it
• Unlike (? More real) e.g. eyes, hair, walk.
• The truest -- his love and his language.

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Sonnet 130 -- Context

• Seen as a sequence Sonnet 127 to 152
• bitter and wry reflections on the poets sexual
  entanglement with a womanwho is, in turn,
  entangled with the youth at the expense of
  Shakespeares relations with both of them.
• Match the sardonic, misogynistic flavour of the
  early Jacobean court. . . (Jacob 36)

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Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet

• Thesis The youngsters court or stay coy with
  misplaced conceits.
• Juliets Hands ? shrine Juliet, a saint.
• Romeo lips pilgrims ? a palmer (pilgrim) with
  palms
• Witty twist with let lips do what hands do
  What? Pray ? kiss

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Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet -- Context

• The play
• Before the sonnet (their first conversation), 
  Romeo, like Byron in "She Walks in Beauty,"
  compares Juliet to light or jewels at night and
  describes her as "true beauty."
• Romeo goes to the ball to find his girlfriend
  Rosaline, but not Juliet. 
• 2. The film(s)

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To his Mistress Going to Bed

• Thesis As the speaker uses witty conceits to ask
  the lady to strip herself, the ideology of
  platonic love is challenged but not that of sex
  as male battle and conquer.
• Witty challenge of Platonic love
• Combine the spiritual and sensual, but see the
  latter as more important or at least the same
  with the former.
• Puns with sexual connotations labour, standing,
  still can stand so nigh, hairy diadems,
  flesh upright

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To his Mistress Going to Bed

• 3. Spiritual and natural images showing the
  sensual as something better and natural
• -- girdle as heavens zone, (body as a far
  fairer world)
• -- body as flowery meads
• -- souls unbodied bodies unclothed
• -- fools who stop at breast plate or gems
  (traditional poets?)
• -- innocence birth clothes

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John Donne in Context

• Dr. Donne and Jack Donne
• Neo-Platonic Love in Renaissance Its governing
  ambiguity things and persons in the world are
  to be loved only for the sake of a spiritual
  beauty that transcends them, and yet the
  beautiful cannot be appreciated unless we love
  its manifestations in matter (Singer 195.) 
• Christianity (from being a Catholic to an
  Anglican prelate),
• Neo-Ovidian artificial and self-conscious in
  their defense of sexual pleasures (Singer 196)

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John Donne in Context

• e.g. Valediction Forbidding Mourning unlike
  dull-sublunary lovers, separation of the bodies
  does not hurt the union of true lovers souls.
• The Extasie, -- implies that love is a
  religious experience,
• To his Mistris Going to Bed sex is a religious
  experience

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Im Your Man Close Analysis

• postmodern parody/collage of traditional and
  contemporary images of love and masculinity
  (courtly romance, painting, fairy tales and
  Valentine )

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Courting the Lady

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Wedding

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Mannered Courtship ? Wolf Desire Underneath

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Love as something opportunist

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Christ? Virgin Mary? Or . . . ?
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Im Your Man -- Context

• Canadianism parodied
• Signs of the Canadian The Group of Seven, Riding
  the Timber, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)
  and the maple leaf.

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Reference

• Romantic Passion A Universal Experience? Ed.
  William Jankowiak. Columbia University Press,
  1995.
• Nature of Love, Vol. 2 Courtly Romantic.
  Irving Singer. University of Chicago Press,
  1998.
• A beginner's guide to critical reading an
  anthology of literary texts. Richard Jacobs.
  London New York Routledge , 2001.

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Readings for next week

• Chap 2.
• Reading for meaning practical criticism and new
  criticism
• EB Browning Sonnet 26 - I lived with visions for
  my company
• Barbara Allen
• R. Browning Porphyrias Lover and