LITERARY CRITICISM
> teach or entertain
> to know: savoir (analyse/study) or connaître
(experience)
FORMALISM (FORM > CONTENT)
> poetics (analysis of form)
> literariness
> fabula (raw material) & syuzhet (organization)
> Cleanth Brooks: formalism assumes successful
translation of author intention
NEW CRITICISM (FORM = CONTENT)
> autotelic artifact, objective
> T.S. Eliot: objective correlative
> Wimsatt & Beardsley
- verbal icon
- intentional and affective fallacies
- heresy of paraphrase
> organic unity, close reading
> paradox, irony, ambiguity
> conflict and tension resolution
> chief paradox/key idea
READER RESPONSE (SUBJECTIVITY > OBJECTIVITY)
> Henry James’ house
> Plato (passion) and Aristotle (pity, fear)
> rhetorical criticism: devices eliciting
reaction/interpretation
> I.A. Richards
- pseudo-statements
- appetencies
- collected life experiences
*acceptable worldview, psychological health
> Louise M. Rosenblatt
- reader + text —> meaning, new creation
- transactional experience, aesthetic transaction,
literacy experience
- efferent (informative) and aesthetic (experiential)
reading
> Gerald Prince (Structuralism)
- narratology
- narratees (real, virtual, ideal readers)
> Hans Robert Jauss (Phenomenology): horizon of
expectations
> Wolfgang Iser (Phenomenology): implied and actual
readers
> Norman Holland (Subjective)
- primary identity
- identity theme
- private world
*acceptable fantasies, psychological health
> David Bleich: collective meaning
> Stanley Fish
- interpretive community
- affective stylistics/reception aesthetics
STRUCTURALISM
> philology
> mimetic theory
> Ferdinand de Saussure: structural linguistics
- building blocks of sentence: phonemes, morphemes,
words, syntax
- semiotics, semantics
- langue & parole
- synchronic & diachronic approaches
- paradigm & syntagm
- sign = signifier / signified
- signs: arbitrary, conventional, differential
> Claude Levi-Strauss: mythemes, intertextuality
> Roland Barthes: binary opposition
> Vladimir Propp: narratology & narratemes
> Paul Vehilainen: 5 point system (lack, quest, helper,
trial, reward)
> Todorov & Genette: grammatical clause basic
interpretive unit (grammar of narrative)
> Jonathan Culler
- literary competence (internal rules for interpretation)
- theory of reading (unified, thematically significant,
reflection)
*study parole to illuminate langue
DECONSTRUCTION
> Jacques Derrida
- transcendental signified
- metaphysics of presence: logocentrism, binary
opposition, phonocentrism
- erasure: absence of definitive meaning
- arche-writing: language, precedes speech &
language
- grammatology: science of language, origin of writing
*consciousness presupposes language
*language is reflexive, not mimetic
*challenge ideological powers
FEMINISM (FREE FROM BIAS; DEVELOP OWN
DISCOURSE)
> patriarchy, phallocentrism
> Judith Fetterley: resisting reader
> Virginia Woolf
- Shakespeare’s sister, A Room of One’s Own
- male & female characteristics
> Simone de Beauvoir
- male definition of human, the Other
- secondary/nonexistent female
> Kate Millett
- sexual politics
- sex at birth; gender a social construct
> Elaine Showalter
- historical phases of female writing: feminine, feminist,
female
- gynocriticism: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic,
cultural