Important Trends in 20th century Literary Theory and Cultural Studies (MAD 1321, MAD 2210)
dr. Tóth Sára
miklosne.tothsara@gmail.com, saratoth.pbworks.com
Required reading:
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness.
Flannery O’Connor: “View of the Woods”
The purpose of the course (lectures and seminars combined) is to familiarize students with the
developments of classical literary theory and some of the mainstream 20th century trends. Besides
theroetical essays, students are expected to read the literary excerpts (mostly poems) with the
accompanying study questions on the handouts and one short novel.
Recommended literature for different approaches:
1. 09.17. Introduction: literature, literary criticism, literary theory
Eagleton: „What is Literature?” In Eagleton 1-14. p.
Jim Meyer: „What is Literature?”
2. 09.24. Different approaches to literature (M.H. Abrams); beginnings of literary theory
M. H. Abrams: Orientation of Critical Theories (L1)
Book X, Plato’s Republic [available online]
Aristotle: Poetics [available online])
3. 10.01. From Renaissance to Romanticism
Sir Philip Sidney: Apology for Poetry [available online]
P. B. Shelley: The Defence of Poetry [available online]
Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Lying [available online]
4. 10.08. New Criticism and its antecedent New Classsicism
T. S. Eliot: „Tradition and Individual Talent” [available online]
Cleanth Brooks: „Keats’ Sylvan Historian”
„The heresy of paraphrase”, „The language of paradox” L1
Wimsatt and Beardsley: The intentional fallacy L1
5. 10.15. Russian Formalism and Structuralism
Viktor Shklovsky: Art as Technique (RR)
Rimmon-Kenan: Narration: levels and voices (Chapter 7)
6. 11.05. Archetypal criticism: Northrop Frye
„Theory of archetypal meaning” 141-158 AC
„Theory of mythos: introduction”158-162 AC
„The mythos of summer: romance” 186-206 AC
training week and autumn break
7. 11.12. Reader’s Response
Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author (L2)
W. Iser. The reading process: a phenomenological approach (L2)
Stanley Fish: Interpreting the Variorum (L2)
8. 11.19. Psychoanalitical criticism
Terry Eagleton: Psychoanalysis. In Literary Theory, 131-168
9. 11.26. Postructuralism
Peter Brooks: An Unreadable Report
10. 12.03. Feminist criticism
Elaine Showalter: Feminist criticism in the wilderness (L2)
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: „The Madwoman in the attic.” (RR)
11. 12.10. Ethical criticism, neomarxism, cultural studies, postcolonialism
Terry Eagleton: „Political criticism.” In Literary Theory, 169-189.
Stuart Hall: „The Rediscovery of ’Ideology” (RR)
Edward Said: Orientalism (RR); Freedom from domination in the future (??)
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'"
12. 12. 17.In-class test
Jungian approach:
Colleen Burke: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Metaphor of Jungian Psychology
http://www.ljhammond.com/phlit/burke.htm
Feminist approach:
Serpil Oppermann: „Feminist Literary Criticism: Expanding the Canon as Regards the Novel”
(Chapters II and III: compulsory up until the sentence: „But it is powerfully challenged and
re-adjusted by feminist literary criticism.” Chapter I on literary history is strongly
recommended but not compulsory) http://warlight.tripod.com/OPPERMANN.html
(for a feminist, but completely different approach see: Carole Stone and Fawzia Afzal-Khan:
Gender, Race and Narrative Structure: A Reappraisal of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness".
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pursuits/afzalstone.html)
Poststructuralist approach:
Peter Brooks: An Unreadable Report: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In Reading for the Plot
(Harvard UP 1984), 238-263. Available at: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
Postcolonialist approach:
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'"
http://images.schoolinsites.com/SiSFiles/Schools/AL/HartselleCity/HartselleHigh/Uploads/F
orms/Achebe_An_Image_of_Africa.pdf
TEST
written for both groups, consisting of
- questions based on the material of my lectures (handouts) and inviting short answers
- an exercise of assigning quotations from different critics/theorists to one of the approaches to
literature as defined by M. A. Abrams
- questions based on three theoretical essays (for MAT students) and four essays (for MAD
students*) you have chosen to read for the term (you can choose any of the underlined titles)
- short essay which applies one specific approach to a specific work (Heart of Darkness) we have
discussed
* two theoretical essays from my underlined titles, and two from your seminar
Recommended literature:
Anthologies in the Department Library
V. B. Leitch: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W. W. Norton, 2010.
Lodge, David (ed.) 20th Century Literary Criticism. Longman, 1972. (L1)
Lodge, David (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader. Longman, 1988. (David Lodge and Nigel
Wood, 2008. (L2)
Rivkin, Julie-Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell, 1998. (RR)
Availability of critical essays outside the anthologies
Sir Philip Sidney: Apology for Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/1.html
Cleanth Brooks: Keats’ Sylvan Historian: History without footnotes.
http://www.mrbauld.com/keatsurn.html
Cleanth Brooks: „The Heresy of Paraphrase.” In The Well-Wrought Urn. New York: Harverst, 1947.
http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~rlbeebe/heresy.pdf
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'" Massachusetts Review.
18. 1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, background and Sources Criticism. 1961.
3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough, London: W. W Norton and Co., 1988, pp.251-261
http://images.schoolinsites.com/SiSFiles/Schools/AL/HartselleCity/HartselleHigh/Uploads/Forms/Ache
be_An_Image_of_Africa.pdf
Jim Meyer: „What is Literature? A Definition Based on Prototypes.” Work Papers of the Summer
Institute of Linguistics, Univ. of North Dakota Session. Vol. 41. 1997.
http://www.und.edu/dept/linguistics/wp/1997Meyer.PDF
Peter Brooks: An Unreadable Report: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In Reading for the Plot (Harvard UP
1984), 238-263. Available at: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
Introduction to Modern Literary Theory: useful site with links: http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm
Longer theoretical works:
In the Department Library:
Adams, Hazard. The Interests of Criticism. An Introduction to Literary Theory. Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1969.
Mohanty, Satya P. Literary Theory and the Claims of History. Postmodernism, Objectivity,
Multicultural Politics. Cornell Univ. Press, 1997.
Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism, New Jersey, Princeton UP, 1957. (http://northropfryetheanatomyofcriticism.blogspot.com/)
Selden, Raman. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1985.
Selden, Raman. Practicing Theory and Reading Literature. Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1989.
Elsewhere
Davies, Todd F. and Womack, Kenneth (ed.) Mapping the Ethical Turn. Virginia University Press,
2001.
Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory. Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1983. Available at: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
Wayne Booth: The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961.
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1980.
Toril Moi: Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London-New York: Methuen, 1985.
Rimmon-Kennan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. London, New York: Routledge,
1983.
1- LITERATURE AND LITERARY STUDY
1. What is literature? Examples
a) see separate handout (1, 2, 4)
2. A famous relativist standpoint (see Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory, first
chapter)
i) imaginative writing in the sense of fiction – writing which is not really true
usually people include much more under the heading of literature
distinction between fact and fiction (dubious in itself)
b)
Mona Lisa
Walter Pater
She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the vampire, she has been dead many times,
And learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep seas,
And keeps their fallen day about her;
And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants:
And, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy,
And, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary;
And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
And lives only in the delicacy
With which it has moulded the changing lineaments,
And tinged the eyelids and the hands.
(ed. by W. B. Yeats)
"The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a
thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are
come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the
deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would
they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts
and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine
and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the
middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of
the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead
many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their
fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the
mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the
sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing
lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten
thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as
wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might
stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea." (Walter Pater: The
Renaissance. London, 1893. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980, pp. 98-99.)
ii) it uses language in a particular way –- a kind of writing which represents
„organized violence against ordinary speech” (Russian formalist Roman Jakobson)
transforms and intensifies ordinary language
deviates systematically from everyday speech
emphasis on form at the expense of content (content: merely the occassion
for a formal exercise)
literariness: not an eternally given property, it is functional: can be found in
literary texts but also in many places outside them
much ordinary speech is full of literary devices; whereas a realistic novel is
not necessarily
so it is the context that tells me that it is literary, the language itself has no inherent
properties or qualities that distinguish it from other type of discourse
Dogs must be carried on escalators
iii) literature: non-pragmatic discourse, it serves no practical purpose, it is to be
taken as referring to a general state of affairs
„my love is like a red red rose”: a way of talking about a woman, but not
about any particular, real life woman
What about more programmatic literature (Orwell?)
„some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness
thrust upon them” –
literature = not a set of inherent qualities displayed by certain kinds of writings from
Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, but a number of ways people relate themselves to
writing
functional terms, not ontological (weed = what you don’t want in your garden!)
literature: what people define as „good” writing (szépirodalom = belles letres)
literature: a highly valued kind of writing
value = whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according
to particular criteria and for special purposes
3. A linguist’s definition, based on prototypes (Jim Meyer)
the criterial approach and the prototypical approach
criterial (checklist) approach: a list of criteria is established, and all need to
be met
prototype approach: focuses on an established prototype, a particularly good
example of the word, to which other examples of the word bear some
resemblance: a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
crisscrossing
Prototypical literary works exhibit the following characteristics:
 are written texts
 are marked by careful use of language (such as creative metaphors, wellturned phrases, elegant syntax, rhyme, meter)
 are in a literary genre (poetry, prose fiction or drama)
 are read aesthetically
 texts which invite the readers to consider many interpretations (shades of
meaning) without the assumption that they will find the sole correct one
summary:
Literature is a term used to describe written or spoken material. Broadly speaking,
"literature" is used to describe anything from creative writing to more technical or
scientific works, but the term is most commonly used to refer to works of the
creative imagination, including works of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction.
many
4. The study of literature „Criticism can talk, but all the arts are
dumb.”(Northrop Frye)
literary studies = literary criticism (in the broadest sense) = irodalomtudomány
a branch of study concerned with defining, classifying, expounding and
evaluating of literature.
Greek word: krino=to judge
a) Literary History (=irodalomtörténet)
A study of literature in a chronological order
(New Historicism)
b) Literary Criticism
Theoretical criticism = Literary Theory
Practical criticism: study of works of art in isolation (=irodalomkritika)
concerns itself with the discussion, analysis and often evaluation of literary
works (Dryden, dr Johnson, T. S. Eliot)
c) Literary Theory: a study of the nature and function, the principles of literature,
its categories and criteria.
not another method: philosophical and abstract
„you cannot apply a theory, because theory is theoretical; when you apply it,
it becomes literary criticism, and there, inevitably, different theories mingle
literary theory: rather than providing simply another
method for the study of literary works, it asks about the
nature and function of literature and the literary
institution. Rather than supplying us with yet more
sophisticated ways of tackling canonical texts, it
inquires into the very concept of canonicitiy. Its aim is
not just to help us see what literary works mean; or how
valuable they are, instead it queries our more
commonsensical notions of what it is to „mean” in the
first place, and poses questions about the criteria by
which we evaluate literary art. (Eagleton)
5. Traditional philology (study of texts and the transmission of texts)
Texts studied as philological documents:
* how does text reflect the morality and ideology of the age or of the author
(message!) by examining the genesis of the work
* stress on the life of the author and his/her historical context
meaning: 1. What did the author intend to say 2. What language did the
author use 3. What was his historical context?
* treat literature as science: accumulation of evidence, tracing causes and
effects in literary relations
Philip Swallow was the first to speak. He said the function of criticism was to assist in the function of
literature itself, which Dr Johnson had famously defined as enabling us better to enjoy life, or better to
endure it. The great writers were men and women of exceptional wisdom, insight, and understanding.
Their novels, plays and poems were inexhaustible reservoires of values, ideas, images, which when
properly understood and appreciated, allowed us to live more fully, more finely, more intensely. But
literary conventions changed, history changed, language changed, and these treasures too easily became
locked away in librarires, covered with dust, neglected and forgotten. It was the job of the critic to …
bring about the treasures into the light of day. Of course, he needed certain specialist skills to do this. a
knowledge of history, a knowledge of philology, of generic convention and textual editing. but above
all he needed enthusiasm, the love of books. it was by the demonstration of this enthusiasm in action
that the critic forged a bridge between the great writers and the general reader. (David Lodge: Small
World, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985, p. 317
2 DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO LITERATURE (M. H. ABRAMS)
BEGINNINGS OF LITERARY THEORY (Plato, Aristotle)
I. M. H. Abrams: “Orientation of Critical Theories”
1. Four main ’elements’ that crucially participate in the ’total situation of a work of
art’ (seen as a kind of communication)
1
2.
3.
4.
the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action,
not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these
emotions. (Ch. 6)
Sir Philip Sidney: Apology for Poetry
Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word
[Greek], that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak
metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end,—to teach and delight
purpose of poetry: to promote virtue!!!!!!!!
Poets’ competitors: moral philosophers and historians
„Poet performs both: coupleth the general notion with the
particular example
2. Possible orientations of critical theories:
i) mimetic: explanation of art as essentially an imitation of aspects of the universe
main criterion: How true is it to nature?
iii). expressive: artist becomes the major element generating both the artistic
product and the criteria by which it is to be judged
increasing attention to author, quality and degree of his genius, his mental
power
“poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquillity” (Wordsworth)
first representative: Plato: Book X of the Republic
work of art: imitation of an imitation
criterion: How sincere? How genuine? How spontaneous? (Poet born and
poet made)
Aristotle: Poetics:
turning point in the assessment of poetic, literary language
For Plato: philosophy, propositional language: primary,
poetry – didactic
For the Romantics: metaphorical language of the imagination is primary;
creative, and not imitative; in touch with Platonic ideas.
Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic: poetry, and the music of the flute
and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation.
They differ, however, from one: another in three respects,--the medium, the objects, the
manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct. … There is another art which
imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse--which, verse, again,
may either combine different metres or consist of but one kind--but this has hitherto been
without a name. (Ch. 1)
ii) pragmatic: criticism which is ordered towards the audience; looks at the work
chiefly as a means to an end, an instrument for getting sg. done
conceives of a poem as something made in order to achieve certain effects in
an audience
Plato: a) work of the artist is not useful in society
b)„Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up”
activating the the passions which upset the rule of reason in us.
Aristotle: theory of catharsis
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a
certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament,
iv). objective: regards the work of art in isolation from all external points of
reference
analyses it as an object in itself, its formal characteristics, its structure
attention to internal internal relations
work of art exhibits „purposiveness without purpose”; beauty =disinterested,
without regard to utility (Kant)
isolated from external causes and ulterior ends (art for art’s sake)
Plato and Aristotle: reading exercise
1. Plato on language and poetry (from Book X of Republic)
View of language:
In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colours of the
several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other
people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks
of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he
speaks very well --such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. And
I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets
make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
What is Plato’s opinion about poetic devices?
a)
Well then, here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say
--for no one else can be the maker?
There is another which is the work of the carpenter?
And the work of the painter is a third? Yes.
Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the
bed, and the painter? …..
God … created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only. Shall we, then, speak of Him as the
natural author or maker of the bed? Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by the natural process of creation He
is the author of this and of all other things. …..
And what shall we say of the carpenter --is not he also the maker of the bed? Yes.
But would you call the painter a creator and maker? Certainly not.
Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed?
I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make.
Good, I said; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature an imitator?
Certainly, he said.
b)
Then, I said, we must put a question to Homer; not about medicine, or any of the arts to which his
poems only incidentally refer: we are not going to ask him, or any other poet, whether he has cured
patients like Asclepius, or left behind him a school of medicine such as the Asclepiads were, or whether
he only talks about medicine and other arts at second hand; but we have a right to know respecting
military tactics, politics, education, which are the chiefest and noblest subjects of his poems, and we
may fairly ask him about them. 'Friend Homer,' then we say to him, 'if you are only in the second
remove from truth in what you say of virtue, and not in the third --not an image maker or imitator --and
if you are able to discern what pursuits make men better or worse in private or public life, tell us what
State was ever better governed by your help?
c)
If you consider, I said, that when in misfortune we feel a natural hunger and desire to relieve our sorrow
by weeping and lamentation, and that this feeling which is kept under control in our own calamities is
satisfied and delighted by the poets;-the better nature in each of us, not having been sufficiently trained
by reason or habit, allows the sympathetic element to break loose because the sorrow is another's; and
the spectator fancies that there can be no disgrace to himself in praising and pitying any one who comes
telling him what a good man he is, and making a fuss about his troubles; he thinks that the pleasure is a
gain, and why should he be supercilious and lose this and the poem too? Few persons ever reflect, as I
should imagine, that from the evil of other men something of evil is communicated to themselves. And
so the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the sight of the misfortunes of others is with
difficulty repressed in our own. ……
And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure,
which are held to be inseparable from every action ---in all of them poetry feeds and waters the
passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind
are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.
Homework: What are Plato’s three main objections to poetry?
Exercise in class: To which of Abrams’ four categories would you assign these
excerpts from Plato?
2. Aristotle’s Poetics
Homework: the questions under each section
Exercise in class: To which of Abrams’ four categories would you assign these
excerpts from Aristotle?
a)
I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each; to
inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts
of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry.
Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles which come first.
Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic: poetry, and the music of the flute and of the
lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however,
from one: another in three respects,--the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in
each case distinct.
There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse-which, verse, again, may either combine different metres or consist of but one kind--but this has
hitherto been without a name. (Ch. 1)
b)
Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First,
the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other
animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest
lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the
facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when
reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The
cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in
general (Ch. 4)
c)
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in
language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate
parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper
purgation of these emotions. (Ch. 6)
Question: What is the difference between Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about how
tragedy affects the audience?
d)
the Plot is the imitation of the action: for by plot I here mean the arrangement of the incidents. By
Character I mean that in virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents.
But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but
of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now
character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse.
Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as
subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the
chief thing of all
if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and
thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however
deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents. Besides which, the most
powerful elements of emotional: interest in Tragedy Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and
Recognition scenes--are parts of the plot. (Ch. 6)
Question: How does Aristotle define the plot? Which is more important in tragedy:
plot or character? Why? What are the most powerful elements of the plot?
e)
Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the Unity of the hero. For infinitely various are
the incidents in one man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of
one man out of which we cannot make one action. Hence, the error, as it appears, of all poets who have
composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind. They imagine that as Heracles was one
man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity. But Homer, as in all else he is of
surpassing merit, here too--whether from art or natural genius—seems to have happily discerned the
truth. In composing the Odyssey he did not include all the adventures of Odysseus--such as his wound
on Parnassus,or his feigned madness at the mustering of the host--incidents between which there was
no necessary or probable connection: but he made the Odyssey, and likewise the Iliad, to centre round
an action that in our sense of the word is one. As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is
one when the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action
and that a whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or
removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no
visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole.
Question: Which important prerequisite of the good plot is described here?
3. Critics throughout the ages
Exercise in class: To which of Abrams’ four categories would you assign these
excerpts?
These be they [the poets the author praises], that,as the first and most noble sort, may justly be termed
"vates;" so these are waited on in the excellentest languages and best understandings, with the foredescribed name of poets. For these, indeed, do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and
teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which, without delight they would fly as
from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved; which being
the
noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed (Sir Philip Sidney)
’The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.’ … ’Nothing can please
many, and please long but just representations of general nature.’ Shakespeare exhibits the eternal
’species’of human character, moved by ’those general passions and principles by which all minds are
agitated.’
But it is Shakespeare’s defect that ’he seems to write without moral purpose.. He makes no just
distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the
wicked.. It is always a writer’s duty to make he world better, and justice is a virture independent of time
and place.’(Dr Johnson on Shakespeare)
“poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected
in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually
disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually
produced and does itself actually exist in the mind”
(Wordsworth: Preface to
the Lyrical Ballads
On the whole, Genius has privileges of its own; it selects an orbit for itself; and be this never so
eccentric, if it is indeed a celestial orbit, we mere stargazers must at last compose ourselves; must cease
to cavil at it, and begin to observe it, and calculate its laws. (Carlyle)
The poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds (P.
B. Shelley)
In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing a
structure of words for its own sake, and the sign values of symbols are subordinated to their importance
as a structure of interconnected motifs. Wherever we have an autonomous verbal structure of this kind,
we have literature.(Northrop Frye)
II. FROM RENAISSANCE TO ROMANTICISM
Answers to Plato: The tradition of defence
Book X of the Republic (why he would exclude poets)
philosopher operates with three categories:
1. eternal and unchanging Ideas/forms
2. world of sense (reflecting no. 1)
3. shadows, images in water, and the fine arts
The work of the artist, being three times removed from „reality” (as Plato
conceives it), is the imitation of an imitation, therefore useless and also
liable to deceive simple people.
Sir Philip Sidney: Apology for poetry: reading exercise
answer to Stephen Gosson: The School of Abuse, 1579 (Puritan objection to
literature, mainly theatre)
homework: Read the excerpts below and answer the following questions:
1. In what way does his view of imitation differs from Plato’s?
2. How does Sidney argue for the usefulness of literature (especially for its
ethical/moral use)?
3. What does he think about the poet’s relationship with society and society’s
values?
4. Which of his arguments come from Christian theology?
POETIC IMAGINATION
Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word [Greek], that is to say, a
representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this
end,—to teach and delight.
they [=poets] which most properly do imitate to teach & delight: and to imitate, borrow nothing of what
is, hath been, or shall be, but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of
what may be and should be. These be they that as the first and most noble sort, may justly be termed
Vates: so these are waited on in the excellentest languages and best understandings, with the fore
described name of Poets.
The Physician wayeth the nature of mans body, & the nature of things helpful, or hurtful unto it. And
the Metaphysic, though it be in the second & abstract Notions, and therefore be counted supernatural,
yet doth he indeed build upon the depth of nature. Only the Poet disdaining to be tied to any such
subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature in
making things either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in
nature: as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chymeras, Furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in
hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the
Zodiack of his own wit. Nature never set foorth the earth in so rich Tapistry as diverse Poets have done,
neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the
too much loved earth more lovely: her world is brazen, the Poets only deliver a golden.
…. give right honor to the heavenly maker of that maker, who having made man to his own likeness,
set him beyond and over all the workes of that second nature, which in nothing he sheweth so much as
in Poetry; when with the force of a divine breath, he bringeth things foorth surpassing her doings: with
no small arguments to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam, since our erected wit maketh
us know what perfection is, and yet our infected wil keepeth us from reaching unto it
Now for the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth: for as I take it, to lie, is to affirm that
to be true, which is false.
USE OF LITERATURE
(„the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action”: so Sidney asks who will win the
the title of the best teacher: moral philosophers, historians or poets?)
The Philosopher therefore, and the Historian, are they which would win the goal, the one by precept,
the other by example: but both, not having both, do both halt. For the Philosopher setting down with
thorny arguments the bare rule, is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath
no other guide but him, shall wade in him till he be old, before he shall finde suffiecient cause to be
honest. For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and generall, that happie is that man who may
understand him, and more happie, that can apply what he doth understand. On the other side, the
Historian wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of
things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. Now
doth the peerless Poet perform both, for whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he gives a
perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general
notion with the particular example.
the Philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned onely can understand him, that is
to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the Poet is the food for the tenderest stomacks, the
Poet is indeed, the right popular Philosopher.
So then the best of the Historian is subject to the Poet, for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever
counsel, policy, or war, strategem the Historian is bound to recite, that may the Poet (if he list) with his
imitation make his own; beautifying it both for further teaching, and more delighting as it please him:
having all from Dante’s heaven to his hell, under the authority of his pen.
LITERATURE: EYE-OPENER
the Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he representeth in the most
ridiculous & scornful sort that may be: so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such
a one. Now as in Geometry, the oblique must be known as well as the right, and in Arithmetick, the odd
as well as the even, so in the actions of our life, who seeth not the filthinesse of evil, wanteth a great
foil to perceive the beut of virtue.
yet nothing can more open his eyes, then to see his own actions contemptibly set forth. So that the right
use of Comedy, will I think, by nobody be blamed; and much less of the high and excellent Tragedy,
that openeth the greatest wounds, and sheweth forth the Ulcers that are covered with Tissue, that
maketh Kings fear to be Tyrants, and Tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours, that with stirring the
affects of Admiration and Commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak
foundations guilden roofs are builded:
ABUSE OF LITERATURE
But what! shall the abuse of a thing make the right use odious? Nay, truly, though I yield that poesy
may not only be abused, but that being abused, by the reason of his sweet charming force, it can do
more hurt than any other army of words, yet shall it be so far from concluding that the abuse should
give reproach to the abused, that contrariwise it is a good reason, that whatsoever, being abused, doth
most harm, being rightly used—and upon the right use each thing receiveth his title—doth most good.
Do we not see the skill of physic, the best rampire to our often-assaulted bodies, being abused, teach
poison, the most violent destroyer? Doth not knowledge of law, whose end is to even and right all
things, being abused, grow the crooked fosterer of horrible injuries? Doth not, to go in the highest,
God’s word abused breed heresy, and his name abused become blasphemy? Truly a needle cannot do
much hurt, and as truly—with leave of ladies be it spoken—it cannot do much good. With a sword thou
may kill thy father, and with a sword thou may defend thy prince and country. So that, as in their
calling poets the fathers of lies they say nothing, so in this their argument of abuse they prove the
commendation.
Summary
- Mimetic view (speaking picture), but not quite in Plato’s sense:
It is a sort of imitation that selects and beautifies: creates “another” “golden”
nature; the purpose of imitation: to teach and delight
- Literature is effective in teaching morality because it unites abstract moral teaching
with particular examples (didactic!)
- language: metaphorical language („speaking picture”) not merely decorative, but
useful
- arguments from Christian theology: emphasis on creativity being a mark of the
divine image; divine inspiration of art
Shelley: The Defence of Poetry: Plato turned upside down: reading exercise
a) All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. “The mind is its own
place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” But poetry defeats the curse which
binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own
figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a
being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It
reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our
inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to
feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it
has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the
bold and true words of Tasso—“Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. (from
Shelley’s Defence of Poetry)
Question: Which poetic faculty/activity replaces „imitation” in Shelley’s description of poetry’s role?
Here is a more obvious description by Coleridge:
he imagination then I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I hold
to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the
finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an
echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will; yet still as identical with the primary
in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate...it struggles to idealize and unify. It is
essentially vital, even as all objects are essentially fixed and dead. (Coleridge: Biographia
Literaria)
b) The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold: by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and
power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them
according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.
c) A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a
story [=history, real life] and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other
connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions
according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is
itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a
certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within
itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human
nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the
poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful
applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes 1 have been called the moths of just
history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and
distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
(d) But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations
must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or
dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the ancient armor or the
modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The
beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its
form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in
which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most
barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of
their conceptions in its naked truth and splendor; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit,
etc., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for mortal ears.
e) (Poetry) transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is
changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy
turns to potable gold2 the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of
familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.
(Shelley: The Defence of Poetry (excerpts)
1
Abstracts, summaries.
Alchemists aimed to produce a drinkable (potable) forms of gold tha twould be an elixir of life, curing
all diseases.
2
Questions:
The imaginative/creative activity of the poet is governed by certain high principles.
Collect all the expressions which may refer to these „higher” order. List synonyms
for whatever the poet is in touch with? How does this remind us of Platonic notions?
Find examples for the Platonic dualities of finite/infinite; temporary/eternal;
appearance/reality, matter/spirit (and for the metaphors used)!
Summarize with your own words what it is that poetry actually does, according to
Shelley?
Summary:
a revolutionary turning point in the assessment of poetic, literary language
For Plato: philosophy, propositional language: primary, poetry – didactic
For the Romantics: metaphorical language of the imagination is primary; creative,
and not imitative; or if imitative, it is in touch with Platonic ideas
Perception = creation; role of poetry/literature = to recreate the world, to rewrite,
renew the boring, familiar picture of reality
Role of the poet: prophetic
Oscar Wilde: The ultimate Romantic
Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to
life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that
have influenced us.
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art
from The Decay of Lying
4- MODERN OBJECTIVE THEORIES: MODERN CLASSICISM AND NEW
CRITICISM
I. Modern classicism, symbolism, imagism
T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot: “that which is to be communicated is the poem itself,
and only incidentally the experience and the thought that have gone into it”
*impersonality of art, importance of tradition, precision of form
* work of art: to “present an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant
of time” (imagism)
Symbolism: poem is an evocative structure of words: does not state anything, but
by means of its internal relations it evokes a special mood = poem itself
II. New Criticism (1940-50) (Cleanth Brooks, Wimsatt and Bearsdley, A. C.
Ransom, René Wellek)
basic tenet: autonomy of the work of art
i) to separate work of art from human mind / author : The Intentional Fallacy
„If the poet suceeded in doing it, then the poem shows what
he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the
poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go
outside the poem – for evidence of an intention that did not
become effective in the poem”
„We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem
immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at
all, only by an act of biographical inference”
„the meaning of words is the history of words, and the and
the biography of an author, his use of a word, and the
associations wich the word had for him are part of the
word’s history and meaning”
difference between „author psychology” („private evidence”) and poetic
studies: „writing the personal as if it were poetic.”
intentionalist school: sincerity, fidelity, spontaneity, authenticity,
genuineness, originality
New Criticism: integrity, relevance, unity, function, maturity, subtlety,
adequacy
(excerpts taken from Wimsatt and
Beardsley’s essay)
to separate work of art from recipient: The Affective Fallacy = confusion
between the poem and its result
pragmatic approach: not about what the work of art IS but what it
DOES to the reader
against emotional relativism: poetry is a discourse about the emotive
quality of objects, and the emotions correlative to the objects of
poetry are contemplated as a pattern of knowledge
(see Wimsatt and Bearsdley)
ii) meaning is determined by the text (a sequence of signs) and nothing else
text is a public object to be judged publicly
the sequence of signs determines the response (objective!) =
autonomy/immanence of meaning
iii) „dramatic propriety”: work of literature considered as unity (main criterion
of value: coherence)
iv) „heresy of paraphrase”: meaning cannot be abstracted from the language
itself
you can’t translate a poem into prose
(even if we do it every day: it is difficult to justify; deconstruction is a
necessary outcome: whenever you interpret, explain, it will be a different
language, thus necessarily a misinterpretion)
v) emphasis on paradox:
„to show that the common was really uncommon”
too aspects of paradox: irony and wonder (surprise)
surprise, revelation which puts the tarnished familiar world in a new
light
irony (things are not as they seem)
example:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
And, happy melodist, unweari-ed
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Forever piping songs forever new
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Forever panting, and forever young
Though winning near the goal---yet, do not grieve;
All breathing human passion far above
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue
(From John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn, second and third stanza)
Questions
i) The first four lines speak of music. What are the other two areas in which the
same paradox appears?
ii) This is how the speaker addresses the Grecian urn: „Thou, unravished bride of
quietness”. What is the connection between the „unravished bride” and the
maiden of the penultimate line?
iii) Is the notion of deathless, time-defying beauty altogether positive? Find
counter-evidence in the stanza.
Can you detect (perhaps unconscious) irony in this poem? How
sharp distinction between scientific and poetic language:
scientific language: to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations
poetry: tendency disruptive – terms constantly modifying each other
„paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet’s language. it is a language in
which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And I do not mean
that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming,
something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not use a
notation at all – as the scientist may properly be said to do so. The poet, within
limits, has to make up his language as he goes.” (Brooks: The language of
paradox)
METHOD: close reading: their invention (műelemzés: in Hungary Arany J first)
focus: on the internal relations of the text, on the uniqueness of the work (poetic
figures: paradox, ambiguity, irony, imagery
III. Exercise in Close Reading
John Donne: „Canonization”: lovers are metaphorically identified with saints,
hermits who renounced the world in order to live for love. „The hermitage of each is
the other’s body”, they die in each other and for the world, but in each other they
paradoxically regain a more intensive world. And their story (the poem) will gain
them canonization; approved as love’s saints, other lovers will invoke them.
In „Canonization” profane love is treated as it were divine love. Here Donne does
the opposite. In either cases we can say that he takes both love and religion
seriously, and paradox is his inevitable instrument.
„Donne’s imagination seems obsessed with the problem of unity; the sense in which
the lovers become one – the sense in which the soul is united with God. Frequently,
as we have seen, one type of union becomes a metaphor for the other. It may not be
too far-fetched to see both as instances of, and metaphors for, the union which the
creative imagination itself effects. For that fusion is not logical; it apparently violetes
science and common sense; it welds together the discordant and the contradictory.”
(Brooks: The Language of Paradox)
JOHN DONNE: Holy Sonnets, XIV.
1Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
2As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
3That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
4Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
5I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
6Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
7Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
8But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
9Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
10But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
11Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
12Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
13Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
14Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
1. After the first reading describe briefly the theme of the poem, its type of address.
Try to identify to central drama of the poem by considering lines 9-10.
2. Find examples for the following poetic devices: contrast, parallel, intensification,
metaphor, and paradox.
3. Why can we regard metaphor and paradox particularly suitable devices to express
the relationship between „man” and God?
5 RUSSIAN FORMALISM AND STRUCTURALISM
I. Russian formalism
what the work says cannot be separated from how it says it – importance
of form, structure
’Baring the device’: to draw attention to one’s art
purpose: to establish a ’science’ of literature: of formal effects (devices,
techniques)
„the literary”: transforms raw material (facts, emotions, stories) into
literary works
’defamiliarisation’: literary devices ’defamiliarise’ our perception of
reality
"What," it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat
like a Guinea?" O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, `Holy, Holy,
Holy is the Lord God Almighty.' I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative eye any more than I
would Question a window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger."
(Craig Raine: A Martian Sends a Postcard Home)
II. Structuralism
derived from linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure: system of language =
differences between possible elements within it
in literature: images do not have a “substantial” meaning, only a
“relational” one.
structuralist analysis – underlying set of laws or deep structures by which
signs are combined into meanings
in narrative: Vladimir Propp: The Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928)
DESCRIPTIVE: no evaluation or interpretation
structuralist: only charts and compares or links one structure with
another.
III. Narratology: basic terms and categories
study of basic mechanisms and procedures which are common to all acts of
story-telling
(Aristotle: 3 key elements in plot:
a sin or fault in a character (hamartia)
a ‘recognition’ or ‘realization’ (anagnorisis)
a ‘turn-round’ or ‘reversal’ of fortune (peripeteia)
1. Story/plot (sujet/fabula) distinction (Russian formalism)
story: chronological sequence of events as they are supposed to have happened
plot: artistic selection and arrangement of events aiming to emphasise (usually
causal) relationships between incidents as well as to elicit a particular kind
of reaction in the reader (such as surprise or suspense).
anachrony: chronological deviation of the plot from the story.
analepsis / flashback / retrospection
prolepsis / flashforward / anticipation /foreshadowing
E ← N ulterior, retrospective
E ≈ N simultaneous
N → E anterior (cf. prophecies, curses, prophetic dreams)
I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief might waken a
preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over
me with strange pity. This idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realised:
with all my might I endeavoured to stifle it--I endeavoured to be firm. Shaking my hair from
my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room; at this moment a
light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some
aperture in the blind? No; moonlight was still, and this stirred; while I gazed, it glided up to
the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light
was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn: but then,
prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the
swift darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat
thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings;
something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated, broke down; I rushed to the door
and shook the lock in desperate effort
2. Narrator types, Narrative viewpoint
Questions (criteria) to distinguish between main types of narrators:
1. Is there a person who consciously selects and narrates the events?
2. Is the narrator involved in the story as a character? If yes, as the main
character?
3. Does the narrator have unlimited knowledge
of the internal mental processes (thoughts, feelings) of other
characters,
of events remote in space or time (especially in the future)?
4. Does the narrator intrude into the text with comments (interpretations,
judgements, generalisations)?
The most important types of narrators:
1st person protagonist-narrator: consciously narrates, involved as
the main character
1st person observer-narrator: consciously narrates, involved as a
secondary character
3rd
limited (external)
person narrator: consciously narrates, not
involved as a character, knowledge limited usually to external
happenings (shows no insight into minds)
3rd person intrusive (‘classic’) omniscient narrator: consciously
narrates, not involved as a character, unlimited knowledge of external
and internal happenings with insight into minds and past as well as
future, with much authoritative narratorial commentary
3rd person non-intrusive/‘objective’ omniscient narrator:
consciously narrates, not involved as a character, unlimited
knowledge of external and internal happenings with insight into minds
and past as well as future, but without much authoritative narratorial
commentary
no (conscious) narrator → direct interior monologue/stream-ofconsciousness texts: (trying to achieve effect of) direct unmediated
presentation of processes in character’s mind
A "Well! You have come here to be educated, and taught a useful trade," said the red-faced gentleman
in the high chair.
"So you'll begin to pick oakum to-morrow morning at six o'clock," added the surly one in the white
waistcoat.
For the combination of both these blessings in the one simple process of picking oakum, Oliver bowed
low by the direction of the beadle, and was then hurried away to a large ward: where, on a rough, hard
bed, he sobbed himself to sleep. What a noble illustration of the tender laws of England! They let the
paupers go to sleep!
Poor Oliver! He little thought, as he lay sleeping in happy unconsciousness of all around him, that the
board had that very day arrived at a decision which would exercise the most material influence over all
his future fortunes. But they had. And this was it: (Dickens: Oliver Twist)
B Miss Cathy rejected the peace-offering of the terrier, and demanded her own dogs, Charlie and
Phoenix. They came limping and hanging their heads; and we set out for home, sadly out of sorts,
every one of us. I could not wring from my little lady how she had spent the day; except that, as I
supposed, the goal of her pilgrimage was
Penistone Crags; and she arrived without adventure to the gate of the farm-house, when
Hareton happened to issue forth, attended by some canine followers, who attacked her train.
They had a smart battle, before their owners could separate them: that formed an
introduction. Catherine told Hareton who she was, and where she was going; and asked him
to show her the way: finally, beguiling him to accompany her. He opened the mysteries of
the Fairy Cave, and twenty other queer places. But, being in disgrace, I was not favoured
with a description of the interesting objects she saw. I could gather, however, that her guide
had been a favourite till she hurt his feelings by addressing him as a servant; and Heathcliff's
housekeeper hurt hers by calling him her cousin.)
C Seven scarves held him in position. Two fastened his shins to the rockers, one his thighs to the seat,
two his breast an dbelly to the back, one his wrists to the strut behind. Only the most local movements
were possible. Sweat poured off him, tightened the thongs. The breath was not perceptible. The eyes,
cold and unwavering as a gull’s, stared up at an iridescence splashed over the cornice moulding,
shrinking and fading. (S. Beckett: Murphy, 1938)
D YES BECAUSE HE NEVER DID A THING LIKE THAT BEFORE AS ASK TO get his breakfast
in bed with a couple of eggs since the City arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with
a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he
thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul
greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments
she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a
bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathing-suits and lownecks
of course nobody wanted her to wear I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I
hope I'll never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated
woman certainly (Joyce: Ulysses)
Methods of representing the thoughts and utterances of characters in
narratives:
summary: character’s words are narrated entirely in narrator’s language [E.g.:
He was thirsty and bored.]
indirect discourse (ID): character’s words are ‘reported’ (without or with
reproducing aspects of the original style) and attributed to a speaker –
tenses, pronouns change, typically also idiosyncrasies. [E.g.: He felt he was
dying of thirst/very thirsty, and thought that the class was boring.]
free indirect discourse (FID): character’s words are ‘reported’, but not
attributed to a speaker; tenses, pronouns change, but features of original
style preserved. [E.g.: (God) He was dying of thirst. And what a bloody
boring class (it was), too.]
direct discourse (DD): character’s words are ‘quoted’ and attributed to a
speaker; tenses, pronouns, original style preserved. [E.g.: He thought, “God
I’m dying of thirst. And what a bloody boring class, too.”]
free direct discourse (FDD): character’s words ‘quoted’ but not attributed.
[E.g.: God I’m dying of thirst. And what a bloody boring class, too.]
What a nice evening we will have.
Maria thought, „What a nice evening we will have”.
Maria thought what a nice evening they would have.
What a nice evening they would have.
Oh, I'm burning! I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free;
and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? why does my blood rush
into a hell of tumult at a few words? I'm sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on
those hills. Open the window again wide: fasten it open! Quick, why don't you move?' 'Because I won't
give you your death of cold,' I answered. 'You won't give me a chance of life, you mean,' she said,
sullenly.
What would he think, she wondered, when he came back? That she had grown older? Would
he say that, or would she see him thinking when he came back, that she had grown older? It
was true. Since her illness she had turned almost white. Laying her brooch on the table, she
had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her.
She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it
were still untouched. June, July, August!
a) The beginning: The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an
interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a
joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide
seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished
sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was
dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom,
brooding mo- tionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
… And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, "followed the sea"
with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches
of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with
memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had
known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir
John Franklin, knights all, titled and un- titled--the great knights-errant of the sea.
Marlow: "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the
earth."
b) It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time
already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from
anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the
watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clew to the faint uneasiness
inspired by this narra- tive that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy nightair of the river.
c) "The other shoe went flying unto the devil-god of that river. I thought, By Jove! it's all over. We are
too late; he has vanished--the gift has vanished, by means of some spear, arrow, or club. I will never
hear that chap speak after all,--and my sorrow had a startling extravagance of emotion, even such as I
had noticed in the howling sorrow of these savages in the bush. I couldn't have felt more of lonely
desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life. . . . Why do you
sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd. Good Lord! mustn't a man ever-- Here, give
me some tobacco." . . .
primary (frame narrative)
secondary (embedded narrative)
single-ended, double-ended (frame situation is reintroduced at the end of
embedded tale)
There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow's lean face
appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated
attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in
the regular flicker of the tiny flame. The match went out.
"Absurd!" he cried. "This is the worst of trying to tell. . . . Here you all are, each moored with
two good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors, a butcher round one corner, a policeman round
another, excellent appetites, and temperature normal--you hear--normal from year's end to year's end.
And you say, Absurd! Absurd be--exploded! Absurd! My dear boys, what can you expect from a man
who out of sheer nervous- ness had just flung overboard a pair of new shoes.
IV. Case study: Heart of Darkness
1. Identify the narrator type / narrative viewpoint in HD.
2. How many narrative levels can we identify in HD?
3. What are some of the effects of the frame narration?
4. Compare the perspective of the frame narrator and that of Marlow? (For
example: how do they view the city of London at the beginning of the tale?)
Study each of the frame narrator’s comments. Can you detect any change of
perspective?
d) Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha.
Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Di- rector, suddenly. I
raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way
leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to
lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
3. Narrative levels:
6. Archetypal criticism (Northrop Frye)
1. Literary historical approach: first essay in AC:
If superior in kind (to other men
and to his environment
If superior in degree
If superior in degree to other men
but not his environment
If superior neither to other men nor
his environement
If inferior in power and intelligence
to ourselves
literary „modes”
hero is god
myth
hero is knight
hero is leader
romance
high mimetic mode (e. g.
Shakespeare’s tragedies)
low mimetic mode (realism:
comedy, Novel)
Satire and irony (e. g.
absurd)
Hero: one of us
antihero
-premedieval world: Christian/late classical, celtic/teutonic myth – Mythic mode
-middle ages : secular and religious saints – romance Romantic mode
-renaissance: tragedy, national epic – High mimetic mode
-middle class culture: comedy and novel – Low mimetic mode
-last hundred years – Ironic mode
MYTH displays the structural principles of the human imagination most clearly
(greatest degree of stylization, least imitative)
The less the power of action, the more realistic the work (Irony: least power of
action)
Five modes go around in a circle: at the lowest point of irony myth reappears
2. NF’s world of words: a polarized literary universe
„envelope of culture”: Building of a human world driven by desire and repudiation
Literature: grammar of human creation
Two basic aspects:
A) Images / imagery (key or tonality in music) (literature: static system of
images = meaning)
B) narratives (rhythm in music) (literature: a story told)
A) POLARIZED IMAGERY:
IMAGERY
apocalyptic
demonic
WHAT KIND OF WORLD
Images of fulfilment: paradise
Images repudiated: hell
analogical
Images: intermediate:
world of innocence
world of experience
WHICH MODE
mythic
ironic
romance/romantic
high mimetic
low mimetic
B) FOUR NARRATIVE CATEGORIES:
comedy and romance: the desired world – upward movement
tragedy and irony/satire: the world we do not want – downward movement
Characterization ot the two poles
Apocalyptic/Paradisal = a world of unity, a state of oneness and love
Ironical/Demonic = a world of bondage and alienation, split, detachment
Irony makes sense only if we suppose such a paradisal state of oneness
exists
the revelation of a paradisal state, a lunatic, loving, poetic world where all desires are
fulfilled. It is a world of individuals but not of egos, and a world where nature is no longer
alien but seems to be, in the medieval phrase, our “natural place.” It is one pole only: the
other pole is the imaginative hell explored in tragedy, irony, and satire. The hell world may be
described as the world of power without words, where the predominant impulse is to
tyrannize over others so far as one’s ability to do so extends. But it is the paradisal pole that
gives us a perspective on the hell world, or, in our previous figure, provides the norm that
makes irony ironic (from Frye, Words with Power)
3. Narrative and imagery (some details)
Both a) imagery and b) narrative in literature is organized by these two poles
A)
Apocalyptic imagery (examples): Christ, garden, city, sheepfold, symbols
of communion, love-making, the tree of life, light and (positive) fire
Demonic imagery (examples): isolated egos, tyrants, sacrificed victims
(pharmakos), cannibalism, tearing apart, beasts of prey and monsters,
deserts, rocks, mazes, wastelands, dungeon or prison
world that desire totally rejects: the world of the nightmare and the scapegoat, of
bondage and pain and confusion; the world as it is before the human imagination
begins to work on it and before any image of human desire, such as the city or the
garden, has been solidly established; the world also of perverted or wasted work,
ruins and catacombs, instruments of torture and monuments of folly. And just as
apocalyptic imagery in poetry is closely associated with a religious heaven, so its
dialectic opposite is closely linked with an existential hell, like Dante’s Inferno, or
with the hell that man creates on earth, as in 1984 (Frye. Anatomy)
(transitional images: see AC 151-158, see Figure 3)
B) Four basic forms of narrative:
Spring and summer: upward (comic) movement
Spring = comedy: a challenge or threat which is overcome to
yield social harmony
Movement from an obstructing society to a new and happy
one (Psychologically: removal of a neurosis or blocking
point)
Summer = romance
The major protagonist has to go through a QUEST (a
perilous journey
crucial struggle close to death
recognition scene, victory
(negative events followed by enlightenment)
Psychologically: search for fulfillment
Autumn and winter: downward (tragic) movement
Autumn = tragedy
The downfall of the hero!
human greatness and dignity VERSUS sinister forces the
paradox of the hero’s downfall
Winter = irony and satire
disappearance of the heroic
down all the time.
character deprived of power of action
Unidealized human existence
(see figure 1 and 2)
CASE STUDY: Heart of Darkness
1. Which of the four narratives can we associate HD with? Or which elements of the
four?
2. Imagery: apocalyptic, demonic or analogical?
3. Romance element (parody?) Is there a crucial struggle, a ritual death and a
recognition scene?
7. Reader-response theories, hermeneutics (Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur)
„Books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the readers the
meaning”
meaning: result of a dialogue between reader and text
biblical hermeneutics: original meaning addressed the original readers
What is the meaning for us? How does text address us?
The interpretive tradition is part of the meaning today
Criticizing formalist analysis: moments of the reader’s hesitation will disappear
interpretation has an experiential/temporal dimension
as reading progresses, reader structures and restructures the
meaning:
interpretive act creates both the form and the intention
Why do readers ever agree? interpretive communities: temporary stability
the theory of gaps/ gap-filling (Wolfgang Iser, Meir Sternberg)
As readers we have to answer a set of questions about the text we are reading
Indeterminacies, „gaps” in the text
Few of the answers are explicitly provided by the text
It is the reader who supplies them
Literary work = bits and fragments to be linked and pieced together
Work establishes a system of gaps that must be filled in
intricate networks – constant modifications in the light of additional
information
Every day, that’s the way
Jonathan goes out to play.
Climbed a tree. What did he see?
Birdies: one, two, three!
Naughty boy! What have we seen?
There’s a hole in your new jeans!
Question: How did the jeans get torn?
Reader: active role in constructing the world of the work, but gap-filling is not
automatic, hypothesis must be legitimated by text
The story of David and Batsheba 2 Samuel 11
In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king’s men and the
whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah.And David remained in
Jerusalem.
2 One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he
saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, 3 and David sent someone to find out about her.
The man said, “She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” 4 And David
sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. (Now she was purifying herself
from her monthly uncleanness.) Then she went back home. 5 The woman conceived and sent word to
David, saying, “I am pregnant.”
6 So David sent this word to Joab: “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” And Joab sent him to David. 7 When
Uriah came to him, David asked him how Joab was, how the soldiers were and how the war was
going. 8 Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and wash your feet.” So Uriah left the
palace, and a gift from the king was sent after him. 9 But Uriah slept at the entrance to the palace with
all his master’s servants and did not go down to his house.
10 David was told, “Uriah did not go home.” So he asked Uriah, “Haven’t you just come from a military
campaign? Why didn’t you go home?”
11 Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, [a] and my commander Joab
and my lord’s men are camped in the open country. How could I go to my house to eat and drink and
make love to my wife? As surely as you live, I will not do such a thing!”
12 Then David said to him, “Stay here one more day, and tomorrow I will send you back.” So Uriah
remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. 13 At David’s invitation, he ate and drank with him, and
David made him drunk. But in the evening Uriah went out to sleep on his mat among his master’s
servants; he did not go home.
14 In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah. 15 In it he wrote, “Put Uriah out in
front where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die. ”
16 So while Joab had the city under siege, he put Uriah at a place where he knew the strongest defenders
were. 17 When the men of the city came out and fought against Joab, some of the men in David’s army
fell; moreover, Uriah the Hittite died.
18
Joab sent David a full account of the battle. 19 He instructed the messenger: “When you have finished
giving the king this account of the battle, 20 the king’s anger may flare up, and he may ask you, ‘Why
did you get so close to the city to fight? Didn’t you know they would shoot arrows from the
wall?21 Who killed Abimelek son of Jerub-Besheth[b]? Didn’t a woman drop an upper millstone on him
from the wall, so that he died in Thebez? Why did you get so close to the wall?’ If he asks you this,
then say to him, ‘Moreover, your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead.’”
22 The messenger set out, and when he arrived he told David everything Joab had sent him to say. 23 The
messenger said to David, “The men overpowered us and came out against us in the open, but we drove
them back to the entrance of the city gate. 24 Then the archers shot arrows at your servants from the
wall, and some of the king’s men died. Moreover, your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead.”
25 David
told the messenger, “Say this to Joab: ‘Don’t let this upset you; the sword devours one as well
as another. Press the attack against the city and destroy it.’ Say this to encourage Joab.”
26 When Uriah’s wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him. 27 After the time of
mourning was over, David had her brought to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son.
But the thing David had done displeased theLORD.
1. Characterize the narrator (the style and tone of narration).Is there a presentation of
inner life/mind, opinion, feelings, is there a depiction of detail etc.? Anything
modern or ironic about it?
2. Gap in the exposition: verse 1 – What is the king doing at home?
3. Verse 2: With the ongoing battle in view, what makes the first statement ironic?
Characterize the style of the narration in the whole verse. What’s left out? There is
an incongruent comment as well. How do you explain it?
3. Uriah the Hittite Recalled to Jerusalem: 6-13 Why is Uriah summoned to
Jerusalem? Construct a few plausible hypotheses. POTENTIAL GAP FILLING.
4. Does Uriah know of his wife’s infidelity and pregnancy? What kind of character
results from the hypothesis that he doesn’t know it? What kind of character results
from the hypothesis that he knows about it?
5. What does David think that Uriah thinks? Verses 14-15
8. Psychoanalytical Criticism
Libido not simply sexual drive, but a positive energy, a creative power
Psychoanalysis and literature
1. Neurosis and the artist as neurotic (Freud)
repression of the ’pleasure principle’ by the ’reality principle’
too much of this → NEUROSIS
humans = neurotic animals
imaginative activity is a release of suppressed unconscious desires: it
includes child’s play, dreams, daydreaming, literary activity
artists / poets are close to neurotics, art, literature = socially acceptable
daydreaming
2.. Literature/art and dreams in Freud and Jung
a) Freud’s dream theory (comparing literature to dreams IS a fruitful insight)
Dreams express unconscious wishes = the raw materials, the latent content
transformation by dreamwork = manifest content
Dreamwork techniques:
Condensation: Two or more latent thoughts are combined to make up one manifest dream image or
situation.
Displacement: Instead of directing the emotion or desire toward the intended person or object it is
transferred onto a meaningless / unrelated object in the manifest dream.
Symbolism: Where complex or vague concepts are converted into a dream image. For this, the mind
may use the image of a similar sounding (more recognisable) word instead or use a similar looking less
intrusive object.
Freud is interested in the dreamwork, to uncover how the dream was produced
psychoanalitical criticism: sg. similar: uncover the process by which the text was
produced
attending to evasions, ambivalences, points of intensity
b) Carl Gustav Jung
work of art is derived from the collective subconscious. Poets speak the
voice of humanity, expressing universal human desires.
Collective unconscious: a racial memory inherited by all members of
the human family and connecting moder man with his primeval
roots; manifested in the recurrence of certain images, stories, figures
(“archetypes”).
What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of
personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and
heart of mankind. The personal aspect is a limitation – and even a sin – in the realm
of art...... Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and
moulded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is
swept along on a subterranean current...
Jung: the father of humanistic and positive psychology.
interested in the second phase of human life, in human growth and
development
individuation: process of becoming aware of oneself, to achieve totality /
wholeness
layers of personality:
persona, mask = what we present to the outside world
conscious ego = the centre of consciousness
shadow = sum of all those aspects of our personality that we have disowned
anima/animus = female part of the soul of a man and the male part of the
soul of a woman
deep self / Selbst = a sense of unity, oneness with all life, with the entire
cosmos; the acceptance of life
ego has to descend into darkness (=unconscious) to experience his/her
shadow first, which is a necessary prerequisite for getting in touch with
one’s self / deep self
3. Jacques Lacan
a) Freud about childhood development
a materialist theory of the making of the human subject, the making of gender
distinctions
Oedipus-complex
How we are produced and constituted as gendered subjects
Transition from pleasure principle to reality principle
From family to society (incest!), from Nature to Culture
Beginning of morality, conscience and law – father’s prohibition of incest:
symbolic of all the higher authority to be later encountered
both boys and girls in love with mother (=pleasure principle)
b) Jacques Lacan: an original attempt to rewrite Freudianism
infant’s development:
at an early point no clear distinction between Subject and Object, itself and the
external world (Freud)
IMAGINARY = pre-Oedipal state
boundaries blurred between the body of mother and child – a merging of
identities
MIRROR STAGE
child physically uncoordinated
in the mirror finds a gratifyingly unified image of itself
image the child sees is an alienated image: the child „misrecognizes”
itself in it: finds in the image a pleasing unity which it does not actually
experience in its own body
ego = a narcissistic process by which we build up a sense of unitary
selfhood
in reality we misperceive and misrecognize ourselves
SYMBOLIC phase begins when the father disrupts this harmonious scene
he represents the Law = the social taboo on incest
The appearance of the father divides the child from the mother's body and
drives its desire underground into the unconscious.
the phallus (a symbolical penis) denotes sexual distinction
child has to accept distinct gender roles to become socialized
the child’s first discovery of sexual difference is parallel to his discovery
of language. And language is also a system of differences.
In IMAGINARY phase:
language and reality, signifier and signified are smoothly
synchronized (the child is identical with its image in the mirror)
but in SYMBOLIC phase
reality and its reflection no longer identical
sign presupposes the absence of the object it signifies
language is based on loss
also: learns that what gives a sign meaning is its difference from
other signs
social world, sexual world also based on LOSS and DIFFERENCE
this world: symbolized by the phallus, presence of father
child must take up a place in the family defined by sexual difference, by
exclusion (it cannot be its parent's lover) and by absence (it can never have the
mother’s body)
thus the child moves from the imaginary register to the „symbolic”
order.
from full imaginary possession to empty world of language
this subject is split between conscious ego and the unconscious or repressed
desire
language = an endless process of difference and absence: all we can do is
to move from one signifier to another, infinitely
this potentially endless movement from one signifier to another =
desire
to enter language means and endless chase after desire
unconscious is structured like a language:
both are in continual movement , activity of signfiers whose signifieds are
unaccessible because repressed! (unconscious is like a bizarre modernist text)
we never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we
mean
in literary criticism: psychoanalitical reading:
literary text may tell us something but show us its opposite
In reading this way we are constructing a „sub-text” for the work
a work’s insights are deeply related to its blindnesses; what it does not say
and how it does not say it may be as important as what it articulates
how a work is never quite identical with itself
9. Poststructuralism, 60s (deconstruction: Jacques Derrida, Paul de
Man)
but for a formalist, ambiguities ultimately make sense, they have meaningful
functions
deco: debunks the whole notion of reading as a decision-making process
texts can be used to support seemingly irreconcilable positions
= the deconstructive itch
a text can have intertwined, opposite discourses, threads of meaning
moments of great lucidity in reading, but always with its own blind spot requiring
further elucidation and exposure of error, and so on, ad infinitum
1. deconstructing meaning
every text has it own creative potential, meaning = infinite, always means more than
it is meant to mean, you can’t pin down the meaning
 because of the figurative potential of language
 the moment you feel you have grasped it, it slips out of your hands (=
differance = elkülönböződés)
words are not the things they name (Saussure), only arbitrarily associated with the
those things
word = deferred presence, words are part of a chain or system, they refer to other
parts of the system
(e.g. read)
so language is constituted by différance (to differ and to defer)
words are the deferred presences of the things they „mean”, their meaning is
grounded in difference
2. questioning unified meaning
center = unified structure
you approach the work from a certain vantage point
intuitive understanding functions as centre (a starting point and a limitation)
structuralism postulated a centre of meaning, and thus freezed the free play and
indeterminacies of a text
New Critics: assumed unified meaning – whatever you expect, you will find
to oppose two readings and declare one to be right and the other wrong is impossible
text says neither either/or nor both/and nor even neither/nor, while at the same time
not totally abandoning these logics either
both and neither
formalists: ambiguity, deconstruction: undecidability
text: different each time, depending on the „thread” we choose
deco = reading involving moments of terminal uncertainty, aporia, a reading
performed with full knowledge that all texts are ultimately unreadable
not about making the text mean whatever the reader wants; just the reverse!!!!
3. speech and writing
we assume that a text has a centre because in the past someone “said” it
speech: privileged
logocentrism = belief that in some ideal beginning were creative spoken words
spoken by an ideal, present God
these words can now be represented only in unoriginal speech or writing
Derrida: we cannot say that speech = present, obvious meaning
writing = absent, less reliable meaning
4. deconstructing binary oppositions
we tend to express our thoughts in terms of opposites:
black and not white
masculine and not feminine
a cause rather than an effect
beginning/end
conscious/unconscious
presence/absence
speech/writing
also hierarchies in miniature
deconstruction: find contradictions, inconsistencies reverse the hierarchy of binary
oppositions, (not really reverse, but undermine the notion of hierarchy altogether)
5. deconstructing origins
Plato’s bright realm of the Idea
Paradise of Genesis
Rousseau’s unspoiled nature
Myth written by collective human mind
sweeping the limit of the forest at each side and at the back of the house. The consciousness of there
being people in that bush, so silent, so quiet--as silent and quiet as the ruined house on the hill--made
me uneasy. There was no sign on the face of nature of this amazing tale that was not so much told as
suggested to me in desolate exclamations, com- pleted by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending
in deep sighs.
4. Does Marlow achieve his purpose? Do we really learn about K’s story, who
he was or why the meeting between them was so remarkable? Why does Peter
Brooks call HD „an unreadable report”?
6. deconstructing boundaries
„there is nothing outside the text”: we know the world through language, and the
acts and practices which constitute „the real world) are inseparable from the
discourses out of which they arise and as open to interpretation as any work of
literature
= deconstructing the world/text opposition
literary text = words that are part of and that resonate with an immense linguistic
structure in which we live and move and have our being
II. Case Study: Heart of Darkness (based on Peter Brooks’ essay: An
Unreadable Report)
„detective story gone modernist, a tale of inconclusive solutions to crimes of
problematic status” (Brooks)
1. According to T. Todorov every narrative has two orders such as those of the
crime story: 1) that of the crime = story 2) that of the reconstruction = plot. In
this perspective what is Marlow’s purpose?
„at the end of the journey lies not ivory, gold, or a fountain of youth, but the capacity
to turn experience into language: a voice”
2. Does Marlow have a well-defined purpose when he sets out?
"The manager came out. He did me the honor to take me under the arm and lead me aside. 'He is very
low, very low,' he said. He considered it necessary to sigh, but neglected to be consistently sorrowful.
'We have done all we could for him--haven't we? But there is no disguising the fact, Mr. Kurtz has done
more harm than good to the Company. He did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action.
Cautiously, cau- tiously--that's my principle. We must be cautious yet. The district is closed to us for a
time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suffer. I don't deny there is a remarkable quantity of
ivory--mostly fossil. We must save it, at all events--but look how precarious the posi- tion is--and why?
Because the method is unsound.'
'Do you,' said I, looking at the shore, 'call it "unsound method"?' 'Without doubt,' he exclaimed, hotly.
'Don't you?' . . . 'No method at all,' I murmured after a while. 'Exactly,' he exulted. 'I anticipated this.
Shows a complete want of judgment. It is my duty to point it out in the proper quarter.' 'Oh,' said I, 'that
fellow--what's his name?--the brickmaker, will make a readable report for you.' He appeared confounded for a moment. It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned
mentally to Kurtz for relief--positively for relief. 'Neverthe- less I think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,'
I said with emphasis. He started, dropped on me a cold heavy glance, said very quietly, 'He WAS,' and
turned his back on me. My hour of favor was over; I found myself lumped along with Kurtz as a
partisan of methods for which the time was not ripe: I was unsound! Ah! but it was something to have
at least a choice of nightmares.
"I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, I was ready to admit, was as good as
buried. And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable
secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen
presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night. . . .
„text = a repeated trying out of orders, all of which distorts what it claims to
organize”
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different
complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and
an unselfish belief in the idea --something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice
to. . . ."
3. How many layers of stories do we hear?
This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a
chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he
would say yes, and then he would remain; go off on another ivory hunt; disappear for weeks; forget
himself amongst these people--forget himself--you know.' 'Why! he's mad,' I said. He protested
indignantly. Mr. Kurtz couldn't be mad. If I had heard him talk, only two days ago, I wouldn't dare hint
at such a thing. . . . I had taken up my binoculars while we talked and was looking at the shore,
5. So what did Kurtz say? Collect phrases that refer to the elevated moment of
summing up wisdom at the deathbed. Where does this summing up come from?
Collect also references to uncertainty. What is the meaning of Kurtz’s life, what
is the meaning of the quest?
"However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did not. I remained to dream the
nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing
life is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from
it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have
wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable
grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without
glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of
tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such
is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a
hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pro- nouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I
would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had
some- thing to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning
of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole
universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the dark- ness. He had summed up--he
had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of
belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the
appalling face of a glimpsed truth --the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own
extremity I remember best--a vision of grayness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless
contempt for the evanescence of all things--even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to
have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been
permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And per- haps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the
wis- dom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in
which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not
have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry--much better. It was an affirmation, a moral
victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfac- tions. But it
was a victory! That is why I have re- mained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long
time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to
me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.
6. Who is the „soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal”? How does the last
sentence turn the whole passage unreliable?
LAST sentence! the soul = his Intended
echo which she hears is a pure fiction in blatant contradiction to that which
M hears in the same room with her: a lie which M is obliged to confirm as conscious
cover-up of the continuing reverberation of K’s last words (horror)
7. Can one accept the last cry „the horror, the horror” to be an adequate
summing-up?
It was impossible--it was not good for one either--trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst
the devils of the land--I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you?--with solid pavement
under your feet, surrounded by kind neigh- bors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately
between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums -how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him
into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a police- man--by the way of silence, utter silence,
where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whisper- ing of public opinion? These little
things make all the great difference.
Lord Jim: „The last word is not said.. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through
all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last
words, whose ring, if they could only be prononuced would shake both heaven and earth. There is
never time to say our last word—the last word of our love, of our desire, fatih, remorse, submission,
revolt.”
„certainly the summing-up provided by Kurtz cannot represent the kind of terminal
wisdom that Marlow seeks, to make sense of both Kurtz’s story and his own story
and hence to bring this narrative to a coherent and significant end… Kurtz’ final
articulation points to the unsayable dumbness of the heart of darkness and to the
impossible end of the perfect narrative plot.” (Brooks)
8. Why does Marlow insist on the cry being a moral victory?
9. How does Marlow’s meeting with the Intended confirm that it is not an
adequate one?
substitutability of names – alterability of stories
10. Was Marlow able to correct his „mistelling” (lie) the second time?
"I suppose you fel- lows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a bit," that we knew we were
fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive ex- periences.
No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence,
--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live,
as we dream--alone. . . ."
7.
10. Feminist literary criticism and theory
If men could menstruate
Whatever a "superior" group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an "inferior" group has
will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be
"stronger" than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said
to be "weaker." As the little boy said when asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, "Oh no,
that's women's work." Logic has nothing to do with oppression.
So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?
Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event:
Men would brag about how long and how much.
Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood. Gifts, religious ceremonies,
family dinners, and stag parties would mark the day.
To prevent monthly work loss among the powerful, Congress would fund a National Institute of
Dysmenorrhea. Doctors would research little about heart attacks, from which men were hormonally
protected, but everything about cramps. — • — \
Statistical surveys would show that men did better in sports and won more Olympic medals
during their periods.
Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation ("menstruation") as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat ("You have to give blood to
take blood"), occupy high political office ("Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle
governed by the planet Mars?"), be priests, ministers, God Himself ("He gave this blood for our
sins"), or rabbis ("Without a monthly purge of impurities women are unclean"). ..
From: Susan Ware: Modern American Women: A Documentary History (The Dorsey Press, Chicago,
Illinois: 1989)
against essentialism: The belief that sexuality and/or gender are determined by
essential features of an individual's biology or psychology. (theological
essentialism!)
 roots of patriarchal thinking: Bible and Plato/Aristotle
-- Adam was created first and NAMED Eve
…. the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of
the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib [j]
he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said,
"This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called
woman, ' for she was taken out of man."
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will
become one flesh. (Genesis 2, 21-24)
(for a feminist reading, see: Phyllis Trible: „Eve and Adam: Genesis 2−3
Reread” http://academic.udayton.edu/michaelbarnes/103-W05/RG4.htm)
-- biblical symbolism: God is predominantly male and the human
soul is female
If God is male, male is God (Mary Daly)
Platonic dualism
the dualism of form/substance, form/matter
form is active, it is what gives shape to matter = mater = nature
male = active, female = passive
What is feminism? (basic ideas)
(poststructuralist feminists) (Hélène Cixous)
Western thought is organized in dual, hierarchized oppositions
the female is always assigned to the lower scale in the hierarchy
„feminisms”,: „gender studies” (masculinity)
 we live in a patriarchal society (even today), male-centred culture:
women disregarded, restricted and oppressed
 feminine identity: construct of a male-centred society
„One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” (Simone de Beauvoir)
the universalisation of white, Western, middle class male
experience)
the concepts: woman, feminine: cultural constructs, the authors are men
(female body shaped by the taste and expectations of men)
differentiation of sex and gender:
sex is biological; gender = a cultural and social construct
MAN
WOMAN
form
matter
activity
passivity
sun
moon
culture
nature
day
night
Three different approaches to gender binaries:
1. assimilation: turn women into men: to win equal rights for them in a
men’s world; to encourage women to get rid of their „femininity” and
develop „masculinity”
2. reversal of the hierarchy: emphasise „feminine” „motherly” values
(spiritual feminism, jungians)
3. deconstruction of gender binaries: reject the dichotomy between
masculine and feminine (each person is singular, complex and fluid; to
say the person is a man or a woman is imprisonment, restriction
Feminist literary criticism and theory: several aims and approached
General summary:
In literary history: to discover unnoticed important authors, point out the exclusion of
women from traditional canons (in search of a specifically female literary tradition)
An example: from Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own
But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which
have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values
that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ’important’; the worship of
fashion, the buying of clothes ’trivial’. … This is an insignificant book because it
deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is
more important than a scene in a shop …
The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to
lift anything substantial from him successfully.
In literary analysis: to expose the explicit and implicit misogyny in male writing about
women, to study women’s portrayals, stereotypes
a basic contradiction: Women seek equality and recognition of their gendered identity,
which has been constructed by the very culture and ideology they are attacking!
to deconstruct gender identities is a utopian wish: always runs up against the fact that
patriarchy itself persists in oppressing women as women.
early period:
central problem (1960s, 1970s): how to unite political engagement with
„disinterested” academic criticism?
How to transcend the New Criticism (the literary text should be considered in itself,
isolated from society or politics)?
ground-breaking book:
Kate Millett: Sexual Politics (1969)
social and cultural contexts must be studied if literary works are to be
understood, nature of power relationships between the sexes
thesis: sexual politics = the process whereby the ruling sex seeks to
maintain and extend its power over the subordinate text.
no attention to form and structure
Mrs Dalloway (Mrs Dalloway), Mrs Ramsay (To the
Lighthouse) are traditional wives ( „Virginia Woolf glorified
two housewives”, Kate Millett)
woman-centred approach (women critics on women writers) (1980s)
women writers seen as part of a specifically female literary tradition or subculture
to define a distinctively female tradition in literature
women’s different literary perception has been shaped by society (not
biology)
important ancestor of this view: Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s
Own
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction
creative activity, thinking are not independent of physical and
material circumstances.
But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values
which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the
masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are
’important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ’trivial’. … This
is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a
drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in
a shop …
The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own
for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully.
women write differently: they have to establish their own tradition, find their
own linguistic medium, their own sentences
And there is the girl behind the counter too – I would as soon have her
true history as the hundred and fiftieth life of Napoleon or seventieth
study of Keats … All these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded
in her novels: explore the private sphere!
’Images of Women’ criticism (1970s)
study of female stereotypes in male writing (precursor: Mary Ellmann: Thinking
about Women)
aim: to raise consciousness, to link literature and „life”
the creation of „unreal” female characters are criticized
study of FALSE images of women, incorrect model of reality
the demand for realism and the demand to represent female role models
example: Elaine Showalter on Virginia Woolf:
„women have sat indoors all these millions of years, the very walls are
permeated by their creative force”
three major works
Ellen Moers: Literary Women (1976)
Elaine Showalter: A Literature of Their Own (1977)
rediscovery of forgotten or neglected female writers
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)
Jane Eyre: analysis of the symbols of suppressed passion
and rage
the red room, the fire, the colour red and Bertha =
Jane’s rebellious self which is uneasy about submitting
herself to a patronizing male (Rochester)
main thesis: „rage” of female authors expressed in these
novels in a surreptitious, hidden way
simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal
literary standards
French feminism (postmodern feminism)
-A critique of enlightment philosophy: which is masculine!
-Universalization of white, Western, middle class male experience
-The ideal of becoming fully rational, objective based on the duality of
mind-body
philosophers: by constructing a system, they seek to master and dominate
Hélène Cixous
ecriture féminine (feminine writing) opposed to this
to disrupt static binary oppositions
revels in the pleasure of the text
joyful celebration of liberating chaos
Luce Irigaray: le parler femme (womanspeak) -- the same contradiction: she also
ends up defining the feminine!
Julia Kristeva: to be discussed under psychoanalytical criticism
Case Study: Heart of Darkness in Feminist Literary Criticism
1. What arguments do you think a severe feminist critic would bring up against
Heart of Darkness?
2. There is a textbook case of the muted and oppressed female in HD? Which?
Describe Marlow’s attitude.
3. How do the above-mentioned binaries appear in HD? Considering the women
characters, think of further versions of the binaries such as: reason/instinct or
reason/passion, consciousness, unconsciousness; language/inarticulateness
Feminist analysis of Heart of Darkness: the women characters
The aunt
The men said 'My dear fellow,' and did nothing. Then--would you believe it?--I tried the women. I,
Charlie Marlow, set the women to work--to get a job. Heavens! Well, you see, the notion drove me. I
had an aunt, a dear enthusiastic soul. She wrote:'It will be delightful. I am ready to do anything, anything for you. It is a glorious idea. I know the wife of a very high personage in the Administration, and
also a man who has lots of influence with,' &c., &c. She was determined to make no end of fuss to get
me ap- pointed skipper of a river steamboat, if such was my fancy.
…… "One thing more remained to do--say good-by to my excellent aunt. I found her triumphant. I had
a cup of tea--the last decent cup of tea for many days --and in a room that most soothingly looked just
as you would expect a lady's drawing-room to look, we had a long quiet chat by the fireside. In the
course of these confidences it became quite plain to me I had been repre- sented to the wife of the high
dignitary, and goodness knows to how many more people besides, as an excep- tional and gifted
creature--a piece of good fortune for the Company--a man you don't get hold of every day. Good
heavens! and I was going to take charge of a two-penny-halfpenny river-steamboat with a penny
whistle attached! It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital--you know.
Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such
rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all
that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their
horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the
Company was run for profit.
"You forget, dear Charlie, that the laborer is worthy of his hire,' she said, brightly. It's queer how out of
touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like
it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces
before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the
day of cre- ation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
The knitters
"A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds,
a dead silence, grass sprouting between the stones, imposing carriage archways right and left, immense
double doors standing ponderously ajar. I slipped through one of these cracks, went up a swept and
ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and
the other slim, sat on straw- bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked
straight at me--still knitting with down- cast eyes--and only just as I began to think of getting out of her
way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and preceded me into a waiting-room. I gave my
name, and looked about. Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large
shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow
…."In about forty-five seconds I found myself again in the waiting-room with the compassionate
secretary, who, full of desolation and sympathy, made me sign some document. I believe I undertook
amongst other things not to disclose any trade secrets. Well, I am not going to.
"I began to feel slightly uneasy. You know I am not used to such ceremonies, and there was something
ominous in the atmosphere. It was just as though I had been let into some conspiracy--I don't know--
some- thing not quite right; and I was glad to get out. In the outer room the two women knitted black
wool feverishly. People were arriving, and the younger one was walking back and forth introducing
them. The old one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on a foot-warmer, and a cat
reposed on her lap. She wore a starched white affair on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and silverrimmed spectacles hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the glasses. The swift and
indifferent placidity of that look troubled me. Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were
being piloted over, and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She seemed
to know all about them and about me too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and
fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool
as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continu- ously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing
the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te
salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again--not half, by a long way.
"She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge.
Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some
struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself,
with an air of brood- ing over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step
forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draper- ies, and she stopped
as if her heart had failed her. The young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims mur- mured at my
back. She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance.
Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept
around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy em- brace. A formidable silence hung over
the scene.
The laundress
"'If she had offered to come aboard I really think I would have tried to shoot her,' said the man of
patches, nervously. 'I had been risking my life every day for the last fortnight to keep her out of the
house. She got in one day and kicked up a row about those miser- able rags I picked up in the
storeroom to mend my clothes with. I wasn't decent. At least it must have been that, for she talked like a
fury to Kurtz for an hour, point- ing at me now and then. I don't understand the dia- lect of this tribe.
Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day to care, or there would have been mis- chief. I don't
understand. . . . No--it's too much for me. Ah, well, it's all over now.'
Moreover, I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His
appearance was cer- tainly that of a hairdresser's dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he
kept up his appearance. That's backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt- fronts were
achievements of character. He had been out nearly three years; and, later on, I could not help ask- ing
him how he managed to sport such linen. He had just the faintest blush, and said modestly, 'I've been
teaching one of the native women about the station. It was difficult. She had a distaste for the work.'
This man had verily accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which were in applepie order.
The mistress
"The manager appeared silently in the doorway; I stepped out at once and he drew the curtain after me.
The Russian, eyed curiously by the pilgrims, was star- ing at the shore. I followed the direction of his
glance.
"Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border
of the forest, and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under
fantastic head- dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left
along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.
"She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with
a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the
shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot
on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of
witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of
several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnifi- cent; there was
something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly
upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own
tenebrous and passionate soul.
"She turned away slowly, walked on, following the bank, and passed into the bushes to the left. Once
only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thickets before she disappeared.
The Intended
"The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty draw- ing-room with three long windows from floor to
ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the
furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A
grand piano stood mas- sively in a corner, with dark gleams on the flat sur- faces like a somber and
polished sarcophagus. A high door opened--closed. I rose.
"She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. She was in
mourning. It was more than a year since his death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed
as though she would remember and mourn for ever. She took both my hands in hers and murmured, 'I
had heard you were coming.' I noticed she was not very young--I mean not girlish. She had a mature
capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad
light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure
brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was
guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful head as though she were proud of
that sorrow, as though she would say, I --I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves. But while
we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she
was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And,
by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me too he seemed to have died only yesterday--nay,
this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time --his death and her sorrow--I saw her
sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together--I heard them
together. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, 'I have survived;' while my strained ears seemed
to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper of his eternal
condemnation. I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I
had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. She
motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gently on the little table, and she put her hand
over it. . . . 'You knew him well,' she murmured, after a moment of mourning silence.
"'. . . Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?' she was saying. 'He drew men towards
him by what was best in them.' She looked at me with intensity. 'It is the gift of the great,' she went on,
and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the ac- companiment of all the other sounds, full of
mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard--the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees
swayed by the wind, the murmurs of wild crowds, the faint ring of incom- prehensible words cried from
afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness. 'But you have
heard him! You know!' she cried.
"She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them black and with clasped pale hands
across the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I
shall see this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her too, a tragic and familiar Shade,
resembling in this ges- ture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with power- less charms, stretching
bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She said suddenly very
low, 'He died as he lived.'
11. Cultural studies (New Historicism, Postcolonial criticism, Ethical
criticism)
I. General introduction (a turn in the 70s, 80s)
1. No distinction between literary and nonliterary
2. historicist (New Historicism)
disdain for literary formalism:
attention to the historical nature of literary works and examine them in their own
cultural, social, political context = to place the within the context of history
A work is a social and cultural construct shaped by more than one consciousness.
No discourse expresses unchanging, eternal truths
emphasis on ideology: the political disposition, unknown to an author himself, that governs
his work
An example: Louis Adrian Montrose, "Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender
and Power in Elizabethan Culture,"
Midsummer Night’s Dream reread as a fable of the restoration of male
governance.
Criticism:
„a school of interpretation predisposed to find the same themes in every work it reads and to
explain them always in the same terms” (D. G. Meyers: „The New Historicism in Literary
Study” – a sharply critical overview of the movement http://dgmyers.blogspot.hu/p/newhistoricism-in-literary-study.html
3. meaning and power (Neomarxist): no innocent text!
Meaning and truth are produced by the powerful and privileged
Study of culture = discourse analysis, study of the „signifying practices”
of a society;
Decon: no stable meaning; several meanings are possible
Meaning is a social production
Different kinds of meanings can be ascribed to the same events, therefore
„In order for one meaning to be regularly produced, it has to win a kind of
credibility, legitimacy or taken-for-grantedness for itself. That involves
marginalizing, downgrading alternative constructions”
(Stuart Hall, p. 1050.)
Purpose of analysis: uncover the underlying ideology
4. interest in the ethical implications of art
Wayne Booth: The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction
„poetry” VERSUS „rhetoric” or „didactic” literature – a misleading distinction
no stories are purged of teaching
when we read a book it is as if we were meeting a friend, a kind of
conversation with the „implied author” of the book
5. Interest in minority viewpoints (women, the poor, non-Europeans)
Postcolonial criticism:
concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who
were/are colonized.
Western colonizers controlling the colonized: how does this appear in literature, but also
economic, cultural, religious aspects
Very critical of the Eurocentric view
Questioning the role of the Western literary canon
Case Study I: Heart of Darkness
psychological need of Western people to „to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of
negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state
of spiritual grace will be manifest”
Heart of Darkness: „better than any other work that I know displays that Western
desire”
wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and
silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of
an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable inten- tion. It looked at you with a vengeful
aspect.
The two rivers:
Black people:
The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good
service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a
waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in
the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of
abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes,
"followed the sea" with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past
upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing
service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the
battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir
Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and un- titled--the great knights-errant
of the sea.
We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown
planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly,
as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs,
a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies
swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled
along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was
cursing us, praying to us, wel- coming us--who could tell? We were cut off from the
comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly
appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not
understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in
the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.
"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a
conquered monster, but there--there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was
unearthly, and the men were-- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the
worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They
howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the
thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and
pas- sionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would
admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a re- sponse to the terrible
frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you-- you so
remote from the night of first ages--could com- prehend.
Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword,
and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the
sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an
unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires
"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." …. "I
was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years
ago--the other day. . . . Light came out of this river since--you say Knights? Yes; but it is like
a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker--may
it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.
"True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood
with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery--a
white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there
was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling
an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast
country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.
"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when
vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence,
an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the
brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of
over- shadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves
side by side. The broaden- ing waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your
way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to
find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you
had known once--some where--far away--in another existence perhaps. There were moments
when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare
to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with
The fireman, “an improved specimen”:
And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved
specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to
look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat,
walking on his hind-legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He
squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity--and
he had filed teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and
three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and
stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange
witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because he had been instructed; and
what he knew was this--that should the water in that transparent thing disappear, the evil
spirit inside the boiler would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible
vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fear- fully (with an impromptu
charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck
flatways through his lower lip),
The gift of speech:
The Intended: “She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.”
'Will they attack?' whispered an awed voice. 'We will all be butchered in this fog,' murmured
another. The faces twitched with the strain, the hands trembled slightly, the eyes forgot to
wink. It was very curious to see the contrast of ex- pressions of the white men and of the
black fellows of our crew, who were as much strangers to that part of the river as we, though
their homes were only eight hundred miles away. The whites, of course greatly discomposed,
had besides a curious look of being painfully shocked by such an outrageous row. The others
had an alert, naturally interested expression; but their faces were es- sentially quiet, even
those of the one or two who grinned as they hauled at the chain. Several exchanged short,
grunting phrases, which seemed to settle the matter to their satisfaction. Their headman, a
young, broad- chested black, severely draped in dark-blue fringed cloths, with fierce nostrils
and his hair all done up art- fully in oily ringlets, stood near me. 'Aha!' I said, just for good
fellowship's sake. 'Catch 'im,' he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash
of sharp teeth--'catch 'im. Give 'im to us.' 'To you, eh?' I asked; 'what would you do with
them?' 'Eat 'im!' he said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail, looked out into the fog in a
dignified and profoundly pensive attitude
"Suddenly there was a growing murmur of voices and a great tramping of feet. A caravan had
come in. A violent babble of uncouth sounds burst out on the other side of the planks.
Can we separate Conrad from his narrator?
“Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.”
“A Conrad student informed me that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the
mind of Mr Kurtz.”
eliminates the African as human factor:
“Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing
Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?
But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of
Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues
to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates
this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can
be called a great work of art.”
“An offensive and deplorable book”
“Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the
dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination”:
West: deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need
for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa
Case Study II.
Felicia Hemans: Indian Woman’s Death Song
DOWN a broad river of the western wilds,
Piercing thick forest glooms, a light canoe
Swept with the current: fearful was the speed
Of the frail bark, as by a tempest's wing
Borne leaf-like on to where the mist of spray
Rose with the cataract's thunder.–Yet within,
Proudly, and dauntlessly, and all alone,
Save that a babe lay sleeping at her breast,
A woman stood. Upon her Indian brow
Sat a strange gladness, and her dark hair wav'd
As if triumphantly. She press'd her child,
In its bright slumber, to her beating heart,
And lifted her sweet voice that rose awhile
Above the sound of waters, high and clear,
Wafting a wild proud strain, her Song of Death.
Roll swiftly to the Spirit's land, thou mighty stream and free!
Father of ancient waters, roll! and bear our lives with thee!
The weary bird that storms have toss'd would seek the sunshine's calm,
And the deer that hath the arrow's hurt flies to the woods of balm.
Roll on!–my warrior's eye hath look'd upon another's face,
And mine hath faded from his soul, as fades a moonbeam's trace;
My shadow comes not o'er his path, my whisper to his dream,
He flings away the broken reed–roll swifter yet, thou stream!
The voice that spoke of other days is hush'd within his breast,
But mine its lonely music haunts, and will not let me rest;
It sings a low and mournful song of gladness that is gone,–
I cannot live without that light–Father of waves! roll on!
Will he not miss the bounding step that met him from the chase?
The heart of love that made his home an ever sunny place?
The hand that spread the hunter's board, and deck'd his couch of yore?–
He will not!–roll, dark foaming stream, on to the better shore!
Some blessed fount amidst the woods of that bright land must flow,
Whose waters from my soul may lave the memory of this wo;
Some gentle wind must whisper there, whose breath may waft away
The burden of the heavy night, the sadness of the day.
And thou, my babe! tho' born, like me, for woman's weary lot,
Smile!–to that wasting of the heart, my own! I leave thee not;
Too bright a thing art thou to pine in aching love away,
Thy mother bears thee far, young Fawn! from sorrow and decay.
She bears thee to the glorious bowers where none are heard to weep,
And where th' unkind one hath no power again to trouble sleep;
And where the soul shall find its youth, as wakening from a dream,–
One moment, and that realm is ours.–On, on, dark rolling stream!
Culture: pervaded by suspicion, no longer „universal human experience”
Can we as authors speak on behalf of others?
To what extent is our literary engagement biologically or culturally determined?
identity politics = political arguments that focus upon the self interest and
perspectives of social minorities
these group identities are defined in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual
orientation, or even condition (→ neurodiversity!!!)
One aim of identity politics: has been to empower the oppressed to articulate their
oppression in terms of their own experience
(this latter idea shows how i.p. is related to the problematic of representation in
literary texts: who can speak on behalf of whom?)
Felicia Hemans: Indian Woman’s Death Song
Commits an act of double jeopardy, first colonizing her subject and then placing her
subject in a colonized genre
complicated by the fact that she and her subject are both women; she assumes an
affinity with the Indian woman who in the poem is anglicized
She ennobles an act of violence, a form of conduct unsanctioned by English society
in order to valorize by proxy her own unspeakable desire
Hemans appropriates nonwhite culture as a filter for her own desperate voice
She speaks on behalf of a Native woman so that the Native woman can speak for her
Empathy potentially as dehumanizing as hatred or indifference
Ethical dilemma inherent in empathy: finding oneself either too close or not close
enough to the other – inherent in language itself
There is a conflict between self-expression and accurate portrayal of others
The issue: how to resolve the tension created by our joint impulses to individualize
their response to something and to identify with another’s response