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Title: Literary Criticism:


1
Literary Criticism
  • Conclusion New Beginnings
  • What is Literary Criticism?
  • Critical Perspectives 1. Finding
    different Contexts
  • An Example A Slumber did my Spirit Seal
  • Critical Perspectives
  • 2. Being engaged in some critical issues.
  • Beginnings . . .

2
Literary Criticism
  • to Understanding

Appreciation
Analysis from a certain perspective
Understanding
Interpretation
Understanding can never be presupposition-less
. Understanding must involve using some
framework(s) or perspectives--conscious or
unconscious.
3
Literary Criticism
  • to Understanding

The Course Literary Criticism tries to make you
aware of or use different perspectives and
frameworks to look at a literary text, yourself
and your world.
4
???????? a Hermeneutic Circle
?????

??
?????
What does it mean? And how?
????
???
How are its meanings produced?
5
How to position a text in its contexts?
????? Political Unconscious ???? ??????/
???

??/??



?? The Unconscious
Text // Self
6
Semiotics Jakobsons six factors in speech
How to position a text in its linguistic contexts?
  • Context/Soceity, History
    Intertexts
  • Message
  • Addresser Addressee
  • Author Contact
    Reader
  • Code/
  • Signifier
  • ?
  • Text

Signs
Signification process
7
Althussers idea of social formation
How to position a text in its social contexts?
  • Relative autonomy mediation (??)
    over-determination

Superstructure
?? ? ?
?? ? ?
8
Romantic Discourse as an example
How to position a text in its discursive contexts?

Angel and Whore binaries in Traditional Lit.
French Revolution
Blake
Wordsworth
Coleridge
1. The Poets Imagination Emotion but not
reason 2. Human nature// Nature 3. Treatment
of Peasants Women
Byron
Keats Shelley
Organicism Lawrence New Criticism
Pre-Raphaelite Paintings
9
Wordsworthian Discourse
rise of capitalism book market

Literary Reviews against 1. Ws language -- of
the lower classes 2. Ws subject matter passion
W's prefaces and supplementary essays set up
his poetry as an independent discipline,
Coleridge's glosses, Shelley's defense Keats'
letters
Wordsworths Poems Lyrical Ballads (1798 1802
1815) etc.
-- Need of money -- Cut out Coleridges part
to suit the common taste
10
  • A slumber did my spirit seal
  • (New Crit Pattern/Tension made with sounds,
    syntax, tense, verse form, repetition, etc.)
  • A slumber did my spirit seal
  • I had no human fears
  • She seemed a thing that could not feel
  • The touch of earthly years.
  • No motion has she now, no force
  • She neither hears nor sees
  • Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
  • With rocks, and stones, and trees.

11
Biographical studies
  • Lucy Poems Composed in Germany most of them
    written in the winter of 1798-99
  • Lucys identity
  • a creation of the poet's imagination.
  • Wordsworth's feeling of affection for his sister.
    Coleridge wrote of this poem in a letter of April
    1799 "Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to
    me a most sublime Epitaph ... whether it had any
    reality, I cannot say.--Most probably, in some
    gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in
    which his Sister might die."

12
Psychoanalytic Studies
  • 1. Wordsworths desire to be both dead and alive
    (to re-live his mothers death).
  • 2. The "Lucy" poems have been described as an
    attempt by Wordsworth to "kill" his improper
    feelings for his sister.
  • In1802, Wordsworth married his childhood friend,
    Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy did not attend the
    ceremony she was crying on her bed.

13
Textual Studies
  • Part of The "Lucy Poems" as most modern editors
    treat them.
  • Wordsworth himself never printed them together in
    any editions of his poetry. Modern editors ought
    to reconsider their practice.

14
Marxist Approach Lucy as a peasant girl?
  • The time of his writing a legacy of 900 pounds
    need to attract his readers.
  • The 1802 Preface about describing the
    rustics--can "surpass the original" occasionally,
    and that the object of his description is not
    actually individual persons, but "general and
    operative truth" (256-57).

15
Deconstruction I/She/Thing Undecidability
  • I
  • A Slumber my spirit sealed dead
  • No human fears inhuman, all-knowing
  • her death
  • She a thing? dead non-human

Rolled . . . With rocks, and stones, and trees.
  • Earthly years
  • Motion Force
  • Hears, Sees

16
Critical Perspectives 2 Critical Issues
  • What is a text/self composed of?
  • How do we read a text or ourselves in relation
    to the surrounding signs, ideologies, discourse,
    economic relations as well as the other kinds of
    power relations?
  • What are the implications in the use of the
    words self, character, subject and subject
    position?

17
Critical Perspectives 2-2 Critical Issues
Related
  • Language "Signs are arbitrary,
    conventional, differential." binary
    opposition
  • transcendental signified
  • deconstruction, diff rance
    signification
  • myth ideology
    discourse
  • Orientalism or cultural
    imperialism
  • Social formations (economic determinism or
    discursive formation? )
  • postcolonial writings

18
End of the course Beginnings . . . of Critical
Thinking
  • For further studies
  • Be ready for facing frustrations in reading
    difficult primary texts get a dictionary,
    handbook or Chinese articles to help
  • For further thinking
  • Methodologies? Keep on reading critically.
  • Keep the key words/issues in mind as you read
    and/or think. Always try to relate,
    contextualize and map.
  • Raise critical questions about the text, about
    ourselves and our society.
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