Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, fourth edition. New York:Ê Longman, ©1998.
self-conscious attention to the methods of understanding
definitions of literature
methods of reading
aim to discover what literary texts and literature itself mean as a whole
questions of differences
among texts
of value and discrimination w/in texts
Frye: seek "conceptual vantage point" to deal w/ :lit in terms ofÊ a specific conceptual framework
one ex:Ê grand archetypal patterns of significance
colonial history
institutional history
psychoanalysis
feminism
humanist myth - (Matthew Arnold, 1865) assumed lit teaches itself
to see the object as in itself it really is
but actually presupposes a conceptual framework
myth clear in case of educating a colonized people
West: prevailing crisis in the humanities
= historical interpretation
reads as internal & external decolonization
shift away from the mentality, worldview, and values that produced colonialism
=reshaping how intellectuals and others view the world
Eliot - like Whitman saw "culture as a construction of modern society [23]
Arnold argues that literature has come to define spirituals values that were formerly the province of religion
Why?:Ê West says "crisis" in the European age (1492-1945) and end of European dominance in world culture
Modernism in Anglo-Am world = Eliot
from early 20th c - Symbolists (Baudelaire, Mallarme, Valery)
or post WW I - Ulysses & The Waste Land (1922)
till mid-30s or WW II
Virginia Woolf in 1924 said "in or @ Dec 1910, human character changed" - all human relations have changed
masters-servants
husbands-wives
parents-children
so change in religion, conduct, politics & lit
antiromantic, antiexpressionistic
Modermism responded to historical dislocations
2nd industrial revolution
growth of democratic institutions
scientific and technological changes
conquering of world - European imperialism
Great War
loss of belief in traditional schemes such as Great Chain of Being
High modernism = @ loss, apocalypse, new beginnings [27]
modern spirit - positive and critical - refuses to take things on authority
New Criticism - explore forms - rational objectivity
autonomy of single literary wk
treat wk's form in manner analogous to empirical research
seek single correct interpretation
Tendency to insist when praising poet, on aspects in which he least resembles anyone else
but may find that the best of a poet may be those most influenced by ancestors
poet shoud writeÊ feeling whole of lit in simultaneous existence
significance in relation to dead poets & artists
"What happens when a new wk of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the wks of art that preceeded it.Ê The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them...."
new wk is judged by standards of the past - a comparison
the mind of the poet acts like a catalyst - mind is separate from man who suffers
poet has a medium not a personality to express
Mythological model to illustrate the morphology of literature:
birth (melodrama)
zenith (comedy)
death (tragedy)
darkness (ironic literature)
Art without criticism falls into 2 fallacies
1Ê tries to reach public thru popular art
see public taste as natural
underlying assumptions @ natural taste from Rousseau
2 conception of art as a mystery
assumes negative correlation bet merit of art and public acceptance
art cut off from society because it rejects criticism
suggest criticism has hardly begun
it uses research as source of facts
but should lead to theory, tradition, and systematic organizationÊ [44]
mathematics starts w/ #s but becomes a conception of a universe which contains the entire universe
(maybe the universe is not a mechanical structure but a series of mathematical formulas
literature exists in a verbal universe, which is not a commentary on life or reality, but contains life and reality in a system of verbal relationships." [48]
conception of a verbal universe - life and reality are inside literature, not outside it being described by it.
Life " should be for the critic only the seed-plot of literature, a vast mass of potential literary forms, only a few of which will grow up into the greater world of the verbal universe." [48]
Pure Mathematics' conclusions are related primarily to its own premises
Literature - also hypothetical possibilities
Poet says "let there be such a situation," & poetic truth, the validity of his conclusion, is to be tested primarily by its coherence w/ his orig postulate [49]
it's not enough to include some Black writers in the white canon - in a little ghetto of Black authors
Current cultural crisis beg w/ distinctive 20th c feature: decolonization of 3rd world [52]
changed conception of ourselves
unleashed attitudes, values, sensibilities
signalled the end of the European Age - 1492 to 1945
beg w/ emergence of US as major world power
enabled demystifying European cultural hegemony
and deconstructing European philosophical edifices
beg w/ emergence of US as major world power
1st major subcultures of Am non-WASP intellectuals
NY intellectuals
Abstract Expressionists
bebop jazz artists
=Ê challenge to Am male WASP cultural elite
assimilated Jews in Ivy League
New Critics preoccupation w/ paradox, irony, and ambiguity
60s - watershed
questioning by Am of color, women & New Left
1.Ê reception of Frankfurt School and Fr Marxisms
grappke w/ devastation, decline, and decay of European civilization
2.Ê revisi9oning of Am history in light of those on underside
3.Ê Popular culture -Ê influence on highbrow culture
establishment accommodates thru ideologies of pluralism
Idea that lit could or should be taught - rather than just enjoyed or absorbed as pt of the normal upbringing of gentlefolk - novel, no precedents
difficult to "reconstitute as a curriculum under more or less democratic conditions something that g-had previously been part of the socialization of a particular class" [58]
official goalÊ of literature department - transmission of humanism and cultural tradition
disagreements about how
"curriculum expressedÊ the faith that exposure to a more or less balanced array of periods, genres, and themes wd add up in the mind of the student to an appreciation of humanism and the cultural tradition" [64]
lesson of recent criticism that "no text is an island; that every wk of literature is a rejoinder in a conversation or dialogue that it presupposes but may or may not mention explicitly." [64]
goal of reinstating cultural uniformity
founder in 19th c emphasize
solidarity bet classes
cultivation of larger sympathies
instillation of nat'l pride
transmission of moral values
failed from beg
high lit culture was increasingly marginal to the commercial and corporate interests dominating modern life [65]
turn of c - imposition of a uniform canon of English lit
but broken into disconnected fragments
The problem for British literatureÊ is that they expected lit of other cultures to be like theirs and when it didnÕt fit it disturbed their theories, causing a move from formal criteria to historical studies