Formalism New Criticism

1
Formalism (New Criticism)

• Some More Love Poems and Stories

2
Central Questions

• Can anything human transcend time and space (be
  eternal and universal) for you? (Love,
  masterpieces, maternal love, friendship,
  humanity?)
• Are we ultimately free? Is our subjectivity
  unified or fragmentary?
  
• What is culture/literature? How is it related to
  our daily life? Can we resist commercial culture
  through cultivating our artistic sensibility?
  Do you feel nostalgic about a certain historical
  period?
• What are the values in reading literature? Is it
  the finest example of culture?
  
• How do we read a poem/text? What do we look for?
  The authors ideas? How they reflect his/her
  life or the social-historical movements? How we
  feel about it? The meanings conveyed through
  both form and content? Or the ways a text
  responds to its time consciously or unconsciously?

Liberal Humanism
Traditional Approaches
3
Outline
Literature as a profession a Religion and the
only solution to worldly chaos.

• New Criticism Key Words
• Theoretic Basis
• Matthew Arnold Culture vs. Anarchy
• Organic Whole (T. S. Eliot) Objective
  Correlative
  
• New Criticism major assumptions methods
• Romantic story and Victorian love poems in the
  context
  
• of the Victorian vs.
• Modern Views of Love
• Reference and Assignments

from idealism repression to disunity and
franker views of the body and desire)
4
Key Words

• New Criticism defined 33
• Ideals of New Criticism
• Autonomy (34) Liberal Humanism
• Organic unity 33
• Component (1) Objective Correlative (Eliot)
  (chap 2 33)
  
• Component (2) Paradox, irony, ambiguity and
  tension

• Against
• Intentional Fallacy
• Affective Fallacy
• Heresy of Paraphrase (New Critics) (40)
• See also p. 43

5
Theoretical Basis (1)M. Arnold Culture vs.
Anarchy

• Culture
• the best that has been thought and said
  universal and timeless
  
• Involves intellectual refinement and sensibility,
  disinterested pursuit of goodness, spiritual
  activity
  
• e.g. Hellenism Greek culture
• e.g. Poetryinterpreter of life

• Anarchy caused by capitalism and middle-class
  Protestantism.
  
• Philistinism self-centered, materialistic
• note Philistine--(?)??????????,????

Bertens 2-5
6
Arnold (2) Arts Timelessness Liberal Humanism

• The ultimate autonomy and self-sufficiency of
  the subject (Bertens 6) ? we are essentially
  free.
  
• Likewise, literature, or its universal values, is
  not constrained by its time and space.
  
• Still relevant today
• e.g. Isnt it true that many of us, at least at
  some point in our life, want to see literature as
  a high-minded enterprise by and for sensitive and
  fine-tuned intellectuals that is somehow several
  steps removed from the trivial push and pull or
  ordinary life?
• ???????
• We choose to be who we are today and we will be
  responsible for it.

7
Theoretical Basis (2)Textual Autonomy Organic
Unity

• the poets mind as a catalyst (??)

Experience
CO2???? ????
objective correlatives (33)
Organic whole
8
New Criticism Major Assumption (2) organic
wholeness

• organic unity (33)
• all of its elements (form and content, poetic
  elements, tensions) form a single unified
  effect.
  
• all parts of a poem are interrelated and
  interconnected, with each part reflecting and
  helping to support the poem's central idea.
  ...allows for the harmonization of conflicting
  ideas, feelings, and attitudes, ...

9
objective correlative ????? (T.S. Eliot)

• An external object used to convey the writers
  feeling, which is elevated to a universal level
  in writing so that the same feelings can be
  evoked in the reader.
• The only way of expressing emotion in the form
  of art is by finding an objective correlative
  in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
  chain of events which shall be the formula of
  that particular emotion such that when the
  external facts, which must terminate in sensory
  experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
  evoked. (Hamlet and His Problems)

10
objective correlative e.g. ????? (T.S. Eliot)

• e.g. Images of coldness in Hardys Neutral
  Tones
  
• e.g. . . . the sun was white, as though chidden
  of God
  
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• Let us go then, you and I,
• When the evening is spread out against the sky
• Like a patient etherized(????) upon a table
• In a Station of the Metro 
• THE apparition of these faces in the crowd 
• Petals on a wet, black bough.  
• (? Are they objective or subjective?)

11
T. S. Eliot his Value Judgment

• dislikes PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY and Tennysontoo
  emotional for him.
  
• e.g. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
• I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! (ODE TO
  THE WEST WIND )
  
• Favors metaphysical poetry, which unites
  emotions and wits.
  
• What comes after 17th century poetry is a
  dissociation of sensibility. ? finds organic
  unity in literature

12
New Criticism Major Assumptions (Bertens
21-23 )

• A poem is an autonomy (????), its meanings
  decided by itself alone, but not by the authors
  intention or the readers emotional responses to
  it.
• Intentional Fallacy
  (???? 40),
  
• Affective Fallacy (????)
• Poetry offers a different kind of truth (poetic
  truth) than science, conveyed through its dense
  language which cannot be translated.
  
• Heresy of Paraphrase

13
New Criticism Methodology

• New Criticisms synonyms
• objective criticism, practical criticism,
  textual criticism, close reading
  
• the "text and the text alone" approach

14
New Criticism on Poetry (chap 2 34-42 Bressler
44 - 45)

• Pay close attention to the texts diction its
  meanings (connotation and denotation) and even
  its etymological roots.
  
• a. Its figurative language ????(?????????????)
• 2. Study its form or pattern e.g.
• Traditional or free or open form
• Sound pattern (prosody??) Image Pattern,
  Symbolic structure, elaborate conceit p. 39
  
• structure and patterns e.g. oppositions in the
  text (paradox, ambiguity, irony p. 39)
  
• 3. In other words, do a close reading of all the
  poetic/narrative elements and try to find out it
  unifying meaning (from Parts to an Organic
  Wholeness) ref. questions on pp. 35, 37

15
New Criticism Methodology (1) Poetry
Whole Themes Pattern tension ambiguities,
paradox,
contradictions

• Parts
• Diction (Denotations,
• connotations
• etymological roots)
• Allusions
• Prosody
• Relationships
• among
• the various elements

16
New Criticism Methodology (1) Narrative
Whole Themes pattern, tension, ambiguities,
paradox, contradictions

• Parts
• Point of view,
• dialogue,
• setting,
• Plot
• Characterization
• Relationships
• among
• the various elements

17
Romantic/Victorian love storiesin the context
of the Victorian vs. Modern Views of Love

• The Trial of Love
• Mary Shelley
• Sonnets 26 and 43
• EBB her Life and her Marriage
• Paintings female and male desire and end of
  love

18
The Trial of LoveQuestions (1)

• How do you divide the story into the beginning,
  middle and end? And where are the turning
  points?
  
• What do you think about the story and the
  different moments of choice? the choices
  
• of love by Angeline and Ippolito
• of the vow of silence and separation for one year
  
  
• of love for Faustina (As)
• of not breaking the vow when meeting the lover
• of writing the letter for Faustina (As)
• of expressing his love for Faustina (Fs)
• of believing that love is sacred and immutable.
  

19
The Trial of LovePlot and Turning Points

• Beginning background section (1) A leaves the
  convent to go see F(of As love for Faustina) ?
  two possibilities for a near future? flashback (
  of love between Angeline and Ippolito of the vow
  of silence and separation for one year) ? section
  (2) A goes back to the convent, meeting I on the
  road (of not breaking the vow when meeting the
  lover)
• Middle section (3) F goes to visit A and goes
  back with A ? section (4) frightened by a
  buffalo, rescued by I ?I injured Fs story (of
  being rescued by her cavalier) As action and
  repression (p. 16)? section (5) I recovers and
  join F in the saloon, A refrains from visiting
  them ? section (6) Fs invitation becomes more
  urgent ? A. feel uncertain ? visits the villa
  without seeing I? writing the letter for
  Faustina
• Climax and Denouement/Ending section (7) A goes
  to the villa to find F with the letter ( I
  arranges his marriage with Faustina) ? retreat in
  shock? letter about how I receives the letter ?
  section (8) the unhappy couple and A believes
  that love is sacred and immutable.

20
The Trial of LoveQuestions for Pattern

• Character Relationship
• How is Angeline contrasted with Faustina in their
  personalities and backgrounds? How about
  Ippolito? (e.g. 12, pp. 15-16)
  
• In what ways is Angeline a typical 19th century
  angel? Is she just an angel? What role does
  she take?
  
• Structure and Plot
• Where do you start to see ironies?
• After the turning point arent the characters
  weaving stories (or lies) about their experience?
  Whose stories follow the pattern (or ideologies)
  of Romantic love?
• Language
• As a 19th-century story, the descriptions of
  personal emotions are mostly external (that of
  eyes, lips, etc.) Do you find any images
  typically Romantic? (e.g. 10)

21
Trial of Love Manifold Ironies

• Thesis The story presents Romantic but
  inconstant love ironically, while the final irony
  is on the heroine (or the author) who still
  believes in loves eternity.
• Romantic love criticized
• -- Faustinas egotism and her stereotypical
  story 15, 16.
  
• -- A also has her romantic idea (16)
• -- All rush into love only the man gets a chance
  to be inconstant, and the woman gets a cavalier
  servant (22).
  
• B. Situational ironies who is blind?
• For A, it is F e.g. 16, 18.
• For us, it is A, who does not see the twos
  relationship develop (e.g. p. 11, 15,16, 17,
  1921!)

22
Trial of Love Ironies on Angeline

• A typical self-sacrificing angel who represses
  herself unsuccessfully and could not always
  sacrifice herself
  
• takes the role of a mother (to replace her
  mother)
  
• thinks she writes the letter for F, but actually
  for herself (19)
  
• Despite her repression, she cannot help having
  feelings and desire -- mixture of feelings (pp.
  13, when meeting I on the road) vent her grief
  onto Is father
• cries on her way to the saloon keeping a false
  hope even when receiving the letter.

23
The Trial of Love in Context

• A story less successful than Frankenstein?
• Shelley contributed it to The Keepsake for 1835,
  after she becomes a widow neglected by her
  friends and Percy Shelley's relations, with a
  young son to feed, clothe, and house.
• The Keepsake enormously popular with the buying
  public but just as widely reviled in precisely
  the literary circles to which Shelley by rights
  belonged
• In practical terms, the Keepsake writer's
  assignment is to produce an interesting, compact
  narrative that provides some degree of
  intersection with the subject of the engraving,
  which was usually chosen by the editors before
  the tale had been commissioned.(O'Dea)

24
The Trial of Love in Context (2)

• The engraving a light-haired woman points
  vaguely both to a letter on the floor and to
  the dark-haired woman a mans hat and cloak on
  the table.
• The story Shelley fleshes out suggests the
  complexity of Angelines feelings.
  
• The missing mother in Frankenstein as well as
  in this story.

25
EBBs sonnets Questions

• What are the main ideas of Sonnet 26 and 43?
• Are they good poems from the standard of New
  Criticism?
  
• What do you think about EBBs modes of love?
• Note sonnet forms
• English (Shakespearean) sonnet Quartrain (abab
  cdcd efef) couplet (gg)
  
• Italian (Petrarchan) Octave (abbaabba ) and
  Sestet (cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce.)

26
Sonnet forms

• Italian two parts -- "The octave bears the
  burden a doubt, a problem, a reflection, a
  query, an historical statement, a cry of
  indignation or desire, a Vision of the ideal. The
  sestet eases the load, resolves the problem or
  doubt, answers the query, solaces the yearning,
  realizes the vision.
• English the final couplet -- a commentary on the
  foregoing, an epigrammatic close. (source
  http//www.english.upenn.edu/afilreis/88/sonnet.h
  tml )

27
Sonnet 26

• I lived with visions for my company
• Instead of men and women, years ago,
• And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
• A sweeter music than they played to me.
• But soon their trailing purple was not free
• Of this world's dust, their lutes did silent
  grow,
  
• And I myself grew faint and blind below
• Their vanishing eyes. Then THOU didst cometo
  be,
  
• Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
• Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the
  same,
  
• As river-water hallowed into fonts??? ),
• Met in thee, and from out thee overcame
• My soul with satisfaction of all wants
• Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to
  shame.

28
Sonnet 26 More Questions

• What pattern(s) can you find from this sonnet?
• Is it an Italian sonnet or Shakespearean sonnet?
  How does the sonnet form help convey the idea?
  (Where do you find the break?)
  
• What about the other poetic techniques such as
  the use of metaphor, repetition (thee) and
  punctuation?
  
• How about the ending what does man mean? Is
  this line ironic or paradoxical?

29
Sonnet 26 (1)

• Thesis 1. The speaker expresses the great
  changes that happen to her after the lover
  comes to her through the arrangement of sounds
  and 8-6 Italian sonnet structure.
• Form
• two part (before-after) structure broken by
  THOUs arrival in the middle of line 8.
  
• Nasal sounds associated with visions, and
  explosives with the lover.
  
• Content
• Personification visions as they
• Vision and Dreams cannot compare with Gods
  giftyou (closer than they).
  
• Ambiguities wants, Gods gifts what
  overcame her with satisfaction?

30
Sonnet 26 (2)

• Mens dream males dream of domination or male
  version of love
  
• thou or what overcame her with satisfaction
  sexual pleasure, imagined in the past as visions
  and songs river-water hallowed into fonts
  
• wants female desire for sex or
  self-fulfillment
  
• Gods gift females own body.

31
Sonnet 43
???????????

• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
• I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
• My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
• For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
• I love thee to the level of everyday's
• Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
• I love thee freely, as men strive for Right
• I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
• I love thee with the passion put to use
• In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
• I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
• With my lost saints,I love thee with the
  breath,
  
• Smiles, tears, of all my life!and, if God
  choose,
  
• I shall but love thee better after death.

???? ?????
32
Sonnet 43

• Thesis The speaker expresses both through form
  and content how love is both boundless and
  limited.
  
• Form
• Italian, but with only 4 rhymes intertwining
  rhymes
  
• Repetition of words
• Emotional, long lines not limited by the form
  breaks in the middle of two lines
  
• Meaning in tension
• Paradox between uncountable love and countable
  ways
  
• between boundless love and finality of life.
  (freely, purely vs. loss and death)
  
• between the spiritual and eternal (open or long
  vowels) and the everyday life (short and stressed
  syllables).

33
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1) A Distinguished
Poet

• A comfortable childhood, when she preferred
  reading to social life.
  
• Very well-read, mostly self-educated.
• Writes her first poem at the age of four
• At the age of six, she received from her father
  for "some lines on virtue penned with great care"
  a ten-shilling note enclosed in a letter
  addressed to "the Poet-Laureate of Hope End."
• In 1850, the year when Wordsworth died, she was
  mentioned frequently as a possible successor of
  the Poet Laureate.

34
E. B. Browning (2) the Conventional and
Unconventional

• The plot of Romantic Love
• The father did not allow them to get married
  (being against the idea of marriage). (Why? )
  
• Threatened with lung disease, lived in a darkened
  room with few visitors (after her brothers death
  by drowning).
  
• Browning in January 1845 wrote a letter which
  began, "I love your verses with all my heart,
  dear Miss Barrett."
  
• Married before elopement. (still following the
  Victorian moral codes)
  
• Her elopement with Browning cured her
  invalidism.

• More famous and accomplished than Browning during
  her lifetime
  
• they lived on her money RB becomes productive
  after her death
  
• Reasons for the fathers objection mixture of
  blood

35
E. B. Browning (3) Critical Reception of EBB as
a poet

• While Robert Browning is famous for being a
  poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is famous for
  being a poet with a romantic life story (Beard
  67)

• Contemporary feminists readings
• Aurara Leigh Aurora, who aspires to be a poet,
  is courted with a marriage proposal by her cousin
  Romney. Rejecting his offer she proclaims her own
  vocation'. -- a feminist version
• Sonnets ideas of writing love poems appeared in
  her notebooks well before she met RB.

• Victorians saw her as a major poet, good enough
  to be considered for laureatship
  
• Great inspiration for Emily Dickinson and
  Christina Rossetti
  
• Later critics see her as an adjunct to her
  husband

36
Her sonnets

• Different from the Renaissance sonnets because
  she talks mostly about her own love (and
  doubtspossibly including the sexual aspects),
  but not her lover.

37
E. B. Browning (3) love desire

• Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
• The physical sources of desire is presented with
  metaphors (Kern 91-92)
  
• She hears footsteps of the soul and waits with
  trembling knees.
  
• The hand of love is soft and warm and brings
  souls to touch
  
• Her heart opens wide to fold within the wet
  wings of thy dove
  
• Her own pulse and her beloveds beat double

38
E. B. Browning (3) desire

• Exchange of a lock of hair
• R. Browning Give me . . . so much of youall
  precious that you areas may be given in a lock
  of your hairI will live and die with it.
  
• Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
• . . .from my poets forehead to my heart . . .
• I lay the gift where nothing hindereth
• Here on my heart, as on thy brow, to lack
• No natural heat till mine grows cold in
  death.(Sonnet 19 qtd Kern 345)

39
A Broader Context

• Victorian and Modern Views of Love Some More
  Examples

40
Female Desire

• Nude With a Dog 1861-61 (later dated 1868)
• Gustave Courbet

Innocence, implied sexuality
41
Female Desire
Egon Schiele (Austria 1890 - 1918)

KNEELING NUDE, 1918 http//www.donagrafik.com/WUK
_KATALOG/HTML/31_e.html
Nu a la pantoufle a carreaux (1917 Naked with the
slipper with squares) http//www.pyb.com.au/ptcds/
pcres/focus/schiele.htm
42
Male Desire
Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) (French) "Phryne
before the Areopagus 1861 http//www.kingsgaller
ies.com/1024x768/galleries/gerome/expanded/picture
-12.htm
43
Male Desire

S. Dali The Great Masturbator 1929
44
Male Desire

• (For your reference) The Great Masturbator --
  The main subject in it is a large, soft,
  terrorized head, livid and waxlike, with pink
  cheeks the closed eyes are embellished by very
  long eyelashes. A tremendous nose is leaning on
  the ground. The mouth, replaced by a decaying
  grasshopper crawling with ants, opens in the
  middle of a head finished off with ornamentation
  in the 1900 style.
• Fantasy of a woman stronger and dominatingfear
  of castration? (source)

S. Dali The Great Masturbator 1929
45
Victorian Views Ending in conflict

• While the Victorian were acutely aware of
  conflict, they were less willing than the moderns
  to see it as intrinsic to love or as having a
  constitutive function. In art they displaced
  conflict onto fictitious characters, often onto
  femme fatales in distant, ancient, or imaginary
  places. (Kern 373)
• The other solution joining in death. (sometimes
  quite literally e.g. Wuthering Heights Dante
  Gabriel Rossettis poems)

46
V. Ending
The lovers composed, with reasons (the book)
clearly given.

• Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) Aurora Leigh's
  Dismissal of Romney- (The Tryst) 1860
  http//freespace.virgin.net/k.peart/Victorian/hugh
  eslove.htm

47
M. Ending

Edward Munch Ashes (1894)
Both lovers frustrated, in a mess.
48
Reference

• Literary Theory The Basics. Hans Bertens. NY
  Routledge, 2001.
  
• Literary Criticism An Introduction to Theory and
  Practice. 2nd Ed. (Bressler, Charles E.
  Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Prentice Hall,
  1999.)
• TEXTS AND CONTEXTS - INTRODUCING LITERATURE AND
  LANGUAGE STUDY. Adrian Beard. Routledge, 2001.
  
• The Culture of Love Victorians to Moderns.
  Stephen Kern. Harvard UP, 1992.
  
• Gregory O'Dea. "'Perhaps a Tale You'll Make It'
  Mary Shelley's Tales for The Keepsake.
  Iconoclastic Departures Mary Shelley after" In
  Frankenstein, edited by Syndy M. Conger,
  Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Teaneck,
  N.J. Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997
  62-78.

49
Readings for next week

• Psychoanalytic Criticism chap 3 to p. 53
• "Eveline" by James Joyce
• Review of Araby if you have read it before.