Formalism (New Criticism)
& Some More Love Poems and Stories
Central Questions
Liberal
Humanism
Traditional
Approaches
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
author’s ideas? How they reflect his/her life or the socialhistorical 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
Outline
New Criticism: Key Words
Theoretic Basis:
Literature as a
profession; a Religion
and the only solution to
worldly chaos.
– 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.
from idealism &
Modern Views of Love
repression to disunity
and franker views of the
Reference and Assignments
body and desire)
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
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. Poetry—interpreter of
life
Bertens 2-5
Anarchy: caused by
capitalism and middleclass Protestantism.
Philistinism: selfcentered, materialistic
– note: Philistine--(昔)巴
勒斯坦西南岸之居
民，庸俗的人
Arnold (2): Art’s 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. “Isn’t 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?”
– 與古人心靈交會
– We choose to be who we are today and we will be
responsible for it.
Theoretical Basis (2)
Textual Autonomy = Organic Unity
the poet‘s mind as a catalyst (觸媒)
Experience
CO2+葉綠素 光合作用
objective correlatives (33)
Organic whole
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, ...
objective correlative
客觀對應物 (T.S. Eliot)
An external object used to convey the writer’s 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”)
objective correlative: e.g.
客觀對應物 (T.S. Eliot)
e.g. Images of coldness in Hardy’s “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(乙醚麻醉) 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?)
T. S. Eliot: his Value Judgment
dislikes PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY and Tennyson—
too 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
New Criticism:
Major Assumptions (Bertens 21-23 )
A poem is an autonomy (獨立個體), its
meanings decided by itself alone, but not by
the author’s intention or the reader’s
emotional responses to it.
Intentional Fallacy (意圖謬誤 40),
Affective Fallacy (感情謬誤)
Poetry offers a different kind of truth (poetic
truth) than science, conveyed through its
dense language which cannot be translated.
Heresy of Paraphrase
New Criticism: Methodology
New Criticism’s synonyms =
objective criticism, practical criticism,
textual criticism, close reading
the "text and the text alone" approach
New Criticism on Poetry (chap 2 34-42;
Bressler 44 - 45)
1.
Pay close attention to the text’s diction: its meanings
(connotation and denotation) and even its etymological roots.
a. Its figurative language 比喻語言（明喻、暗喻、擬人法、頓
呼法）
2. Study its form or pattern; e.g.
a. Traditional or free or open form
b. Sound pattern （prosody詩律）; Image Pattern, Symbolic
structure, elaborate conceit p. 39
c. 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
New Criticism: Methodology (1)
Poetry
Parts
Diction (Denotations,
connotations &
etymological roots)
Allusions
Prosody
Relationships
among
the various elements
Whole
Themes
Pattern; tension
ambiguities,
paradox,
contradictions
New Criticism: Methodology (1)
Narrative
Parts
Point of view,
dialogue,
setting,
Plot
Characterization
Relationships
among
the various elements
Whole
Themes
pattern, tension,
ambiguities,
paradox,
contradictions
Romantic/Victorian love stories
in 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
“The Trial of Love”—Questions (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 (A’s)
– of not breaking the vow when meeting the lover
– of writing the letter for Faustina (A’s)
– of expressing his love for Faustina (F’s)
– of believing that love is sacred and immutable.
“The Trial of Love”—Plot and Turning
Points
Beginning: background + section (1) A leaves the convent to go see
F(*of A’s 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; F’s story (of being
rescued by her cavalier); A’s action and repression (p. 16) section
(5) I recovers and join F in the saloon, A refrains from visiting them 
section (6) F’s 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.
“The Trial of Love”—Questions 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 aren’t 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)
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 love’s eternity.
A. Romantic love criticized:
-- Faustina’s 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 two’s relationship
develop (e.g. p. 11, 15,16, 17, 19—21!)
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 I’s father
cries on her way to the saloon; keeping a false hope even
when receiving the letter.
“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)
“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 man’s hat and cloak on
the table.
The story Shelley fleshes out suggests the
complexity of Angeline’s feelings.
The missing ‘mother’ –in Frankenstein as well
as in this story.
EBB’s 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 EBB’s 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.)
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.html )
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 come—to be,
Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river-water hallowed into fonts聖水盆 ),
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.
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?
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 “THOU”’s
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 God’s gift—
you (closer than “they”).
Ambiguities: “wants,” “God’s gifts”; what “overcame” her
with satisfaction?
Sonnet 26 (2)
Men’s dream – male’s 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
“God’s gift”– female’s own body.
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.
我的愛比山高、
比海深？
海枯石爛
至死不渝？
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).
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.
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 brother’s 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 father’s objection: mixture of blood
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)
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
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.
Her sonnets
Different from the Renaissance sonnets because
she talks mostly about her own love (and
doubts—possibly including the sexual aspects),
but not her lover.
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 beloved’s “beat double”
E. B. Browning (3) : desire
Exchange of a lock of hair:
– R. Browning “Give me . . . so much of you—all precious
that you are—as may be given in a lock of your hair—I
will live and die with it.”
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
– “. . .from my poet’s 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)
A Broader Context
Victorian and Modern Views of Love –
Some More Examples
Nude With a Dog 1861-61 (later dated 1868)
Gustave Courbet
Female Desire
Innocence,
implied
sexuality
Egon Schiele (Austria : 1890 - 1918)
Female Desire
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
Male Desire
Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) (French) "Phryne before the Areopagus“ 1861
http://www.kingsgalleries.com/1024x768/galleries/gerome/expanded/picture-12.htm
Male Desire
S. Dali The Great Masturbator 1929
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 dominating—fear of
castration? (source)
S. Dali The Great Masturbator 1929
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
Rossetti’s poems)
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/hugheslove.htm
M. Ending
Edward Munch
Ashes (1894)
Both lovers
frustrated, in a
mess.
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.
Readings for next week
“Psychoanalytic Criticism” chap 3: to p. 53
"Eveline" by James Joyce
Review of “Araby” if you have read it before.