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

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

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

閱讀、了解
What is it about?
Do you like it?
Why?
欣賞
分析、詮釋
文學批評
理論化
How are its meanings produced?
What does it mean?
And how?
What else does it mean from a certain perspective or in some context(s) ?

How to position a text in its contexts?
社會、歷史
Political Unconscious
社會機構
印刷、出版者／
作者 ／父母
行銷者
讀者
The Unconscious

How to position a text in its linguistic contexts?
Context / Soceity, History = Intertexts
Message
Addresser
Author Contact
Code /
Signifier

Text
Addressee
Reader
Signs
Signification process

How to position a
text in its social
contexts?

Relative autonomy; mediation ( 媒介 ); overdetermination
文學史；文類
書
局
行銷
文學
作
品
作者／讀者
ISA
學
院
文學 生產方式 ；
生產關係；
主要 意識形態
Superstructure
Base

How to position a
text in its discursive contexts?

French Revolution
Angel and Whore binaries in Traditional Lit.
Blake
Keats
Shelley
Wordsworth
Coleridge
1. The Poet’s Imagination &
Emotion but not reason;
2. Human nature// Nature Byron
3. Treatment of Peasants & Women
Pre-Raphaelite
Paintings
Organicism:
Lawrence; New
Criticism

 rise of capitalism: book market
W's prefaces and Wordsworth’s Poems: supplementary essays:
Lyrical Ballads set up his poetry as
( 1798; 1802; 1815 ) an independent discipline , etc.
Literary Reviews against
1. W’s language
-- of the lower classes
2. W’s subject matter : passion
Coleridge's glosses,
Shelley's defense
Keats' letters
-- Need of money;
-- Cut out Coleridge’s part to “suit the common taste”
;

A slumber did my spirit seal
(New Crit: Pattern/Tension made with sounds, syntax, tense, verse form, repetition, etc.)
A slumber did my spirit seal ;
I had no human fears :
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years .
No motion has she now, no force ;
She neither hears nor sees ;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course ,
With rocks, and stones, and trees .

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

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

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


The time of his writing: a legacy of
900 pounds; need to attract his readers.
 The 1802 Preface: about describing the rustics--can
"surpass the original" occasionally, and that the object of his description is not actually individual persons, but "general and operative truth" (256-57).


I

A Slumber my spirit sealed =dead

No human fears = inhuman, all-knowing
•Earthly years
•Motion; Force
•Hears, Sees

[her death]

She = a thing?
=dead; non-human
Rolled . . .
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

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


Language : "[S]igns are arbitrary, conventional,
& differential." binary opposition transcendental signified deconstruction, diff rance & signification
 myth ideology discourse
Orientalism or cultural imperialism

Social formations (economic determinism or discursive formation? )
 postcolonial writings

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