Literary Criticism

Meaning and Origin

Meaning

• It is a broad term which can really refer to any discourse on the subject of literature.

• It is perhaps most widely used to refer to the evaluative activity of literary critics or reviewers who pass judgment on works of literature in newspapers and magazines.

• It is this meaning of “literary criticism” which predominates outside academic study, and is one which is tied closely to its etymology.

Origin

• “Criticism” derives from the Greek word ”krinein” meaning “to judge”, and the idea of evaluation has always been inherent in the term.

• The noun “kritikos” meaning a “judge” of literature has a very long history and was in use as early as the 4th century B.C.

Literary Criticism

• The term “literary criticism”, however, tends to be used rather differently within modern academic circles and while its usage here retains an idea of “judgment”, it is often judgment in the sense of “analysis” rather than “evaluation”, e.g., a descriptive work of literary history- perhaps an account of how the genre of the novel emerged- could still be termed “criticism, even if it did not seek to assess in any qualitative sense the literary work under investigation.

Literary Criticism

• “Literary criticism”, in this sense, is another way of saying “literary analysis’ and in this sense, it of course remains a very wide term encompassing an array of different types of analysis.

• Criticism in this academic sense, can of course involve qualitative evaluation, but it is important to recognize that it need not necessarily do so

• It is probably obvious, then, that the academic use of criticism does not carry the ideas of “negative assessment” or “condemnation” which are associated with the term in general discourse. Many non-academics might assume that a book called Wordsworth: A Critical Study was a lengthy discussion of all that is wrong with Wordsworth, but this is unlikely to be the case.

Criticism and Theory

• “Literary theory” can also be seen as an aspect of “literary criticism”, but there is a distinction between these two terms- and not only as to clarify the types of works we refer to as “criticism” later. “Theory” an d criticism are usually treated as separate categories in literary degree courses.

• There are often separate courses on “Literary Theory” and “The history of Criticism”

Criticism and Theory

• It is perhaps best to distinguish criticism from theory by saying that they have different objects of investigation. The object of investigation in “literary criticism” is typically a particular literary work or agroup of literary works.

• The object of investigation in “literary theory” can vary, but to generalize we can say that it involves the way in which we might think about a literary work or group of literary works.

Criticism and Theory

• To use an analogy from industrial products we might say that “Theory” is the tertiary enterprise generating the tools used in the business of criticism. The tools in this case are conceptual- they are patterns of thought that underlie the approach of criticism

Criticism and Theory

• Although this distinction purifies the categories any extended reading of works of theory and criticism will show that there are many overlaps between the two. A theory can not emerge from a vacuum and new directions can be sparked off through critical analsis and will then be tested and further explored through critical analysis.

• Primarily critical works may well involve long passages of theoretical discussion and refinement. Overlaps aside, as a working definition of “literary criticism”, we can say it refers to studies which aim to analyze particular literary works or groups of works.

• Note that is not to say that “literary criticism” and “practical criticism” are the same thing. Whereas “practical criticism” refers to analysis based upon the close reading of a text with minimal attention to biographical, historical, or other “extrinsic’ details, concerning the text, ‘literary criticism” is used in a broader sense and can describe an array of approaches which do draw on extrinsic information.

• Critics have been asking more or less the same questions about works of literature since the time of Plato and up till the twentieth century:

• What is the nature of art?

• What is the function of art?

• What is the role of the artist?

• In the linguistic equation of the famous literary theorist Roman Jacobson the act of communication involves:

• sender______>message_____>receiver

• Literary criticism in such structural approach studies the underlying code of language

Different Approaches in Criticism

• The formal approach studies form or structure without any consideration to content (the intrinsic approach as opposed to the extrinsic).

• The structural approach studies the under

lying code or rules of language.

• The ideological approach places the literary work into its socio-political context.

Russian Formalism

• Formalist approach emerged from ithe meetings and discussions of the Opajaz group in Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle.

• In 1914 Viktor Shklovsky wrote “The Resurrection of the Word”:the manifesto of the school

• They were dissatisfied with the existing positivist forms of literary studies.

• Shklovsky, Eichenbaum,Roman Jakobson

• It has a connection with a variety of more \recent theoretical movements

• Parisian Structuralism establishment of a poetics distinct from other disciplines

• RF represents the earliest systematic attempts to put literary studies on an independent footing and to make the study of literature an autonomous and specific discipline

A rejection of 19th century genetic approach

• Formalist theory rigorously excludes the non –literary: Life and art are two mutual opposites.

• A rejection of 19th century genetic approach: biography ,history, philosophy ,sociology , ethnography made the specificity of literature swamped by adjacent disciplines

• A justification of the independent existence

of literary studies (not the how but what the subject matter of literature really is).

Exclusion of the mimetic and expressive definitions of literature.

• Exclusion of the mimetic and expressive definitions of literature.

• Literature seen as an expression of personality of the author leads to biography

• Poetry as ”thinking in images” leads to epistemology and psychology

• The solution for the problem of definition of literature is a differential, oppositional one.

Defamiliarization

The set of differences were found in the concept of defamiliarization or making strange.

Art defamiliarizes things that have become habitual or automatic

Walking is automatically performed and perceived

A dance is awalk constructed to be felt

The Differential Principle

• Everyday language is made strange in poetry• Poetic language differs from practical language

not because of strange vocabulary , but because its formal devices ,e.g., rhyme and rhythm act on ordinary words to renew our perception of them and of their sound texture in particular

• The question of defamiliarization becomes focused on the issue of language

• Later it is extended to cover non-linguistic issues modeled on its original linguistic formulation

literature as "organized violence committed on ordinary speech

• Roman Jakobson described literature as "organized violence committed on ordinary speech." Literature constitutes a deviation from average speech that intensifies, invigorates, and estranges the mundane speech patterns. In other words, for the Formalists, literature is set apart because it is just that: set apart.

literature as "organized violence committed on ordinary speech

• The use of devices such as imagery, rhythm, and meter is what separates "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns (Nabokov Lolita 9)", from "the assignment for next week is on page eighty four."

• Literature by forcing us into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more perceptible

The Business of Literary Studies

• The business of literary studies is to analysze the differences implied in the opposition between practical and poetic language, relying on the concept of defamiliarization to bring those differences into focus.

• Literary studies would not operate on the inherent qualities of literature (there are inherently poetic themes)

Literariness as the object of Literary Studies

• Therefore, it is the quality of literariness that gives a scientific status to the study of literature ,and is the object of literary studies. (jakobson)

• Literariness made RF scientific and systematic• As Tynianov puts it :”It is vital for us to turn our

back on academic eclecticism …and on the tendency to turn the study of literature and language from a systematic science back once more into a miscellany of episodic and anecdotal essays”.

literariness and form

• The synonym of literariness and form is a feature of the first phase of RF

• “Art as technique” and the ‘device as sole hero” are principles which the development of the opposition between automatization and defamiliarization altered

• The Habitual/made strange opposition became located into literature and not between literature and non-literature

Art as Technique

• In “Art as Technique” : form and order can themselves become powerful automatizing factors,e.g., literariness of poetic rhythm will derive from poetic rhythm.

• If disordered rhythm becomes a convention, it would be ineffective as a device because it will lose the function of defamiliarization.

Modernism

Modernism• A revolutionary movement in all creative

arts began at the end of the 19th century as a result of the traumatic effect of World War I on Europeans

• Modernism in art is characterized by disorder, fragmentation, patterns of allusion, symbol, and myth

• Examples: Futurism and Formalism

FUTURISM

• In the 1920's and 1930's the term Futurism was loosely used to describe a wide variety of aggressively modern styles in art and literature

• Futurism was the first deliberately organized, self-conscious art movement of the twentieth century. It quickly spread to France, Germany, Russia and the Americas, appealing to all who had tired of romanticism, decadence and sentimentality, desirious of something more vigorous and robust, something in keeping with the Machine Age.

• Speed, noise, machines, transportation, communication, information...and all the transient impressions of life in the modern city intoxicated Marinetti and his followers. They despised tame, bourgeois virtues and tastes, and above everything else, loathed the cult of the past.

Avante-garde

• Avante-garde (French pronunciation: [avɑ̃M ɡard]) means "advance guard" or "vanguard".The adjective form is used in English, to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics.

• Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism.

Excerpt from Marinetti's free verse poem To a Racing Car[13]

• Vehement god from a race of steel,Automobile drunk with space,Trampling with anguish, bit between your strident teeth!O formidable Japanese monster with forge,Nourished with flame and mineral oils,Hungry for horizons and sidereal prey,I unleash your heart to the diabolical vroom-vroomAnd your giant radials, for the danceYou lead on the white roads of the world.Lastly I loosen your metal reins and you soar,Drunkenly, into freedom-giving Infinity!...

New Criticism

• When in the 1920’s the New Criticism first emerged in public it was limited to a small group of professors and students at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee). In only two decades its principles, values and proceedings were to become so pervasive and so much embedded in the study of literature, that they were almost equated with the very nature and essence of the critical art.

• The term New Criticism became established as the name of the School after John Crowe Ransom, one of its founders, published a collection of essays bearing that title, in 1941. In one of them, “Wanted: An Ontological Critic”, he announced that it was time to identify a powerful intellectual movement which deserved to be called “a new criticism”.

• The intention implicit in this name is obviously polemical: indeed the New Critics felt it was time to do away with the traditional approaches, which laid emphasis only on the historical, social, biographical or psychological contexts, on the moral or philosophical implications, or still on the textual-linguistic specific factors.

• In other words the traditional critics took into account extra-textual considerations and/or separated the form of the art object from its meaning, refusing to regard the work as an integrated art-form.

• Some of these concerns are similar to those of the Russian formalists, but between the two critical schools there are also important differences.

• The New Critics’ activity, their formalism never severed all connections with what is outside the form of the literary text.

• The New Critics were first the members of an informal group of literary discussion, around the poet-scholar J. C. Ransom and his students Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks.

• Ransom was editing The Fugitive, a poetry magazine which published mostly traditionally-patterned verse, and championed a conservative ideology, later on to be defined as Southern Agrarianism.

• In the 1930s other critics associated with them (such as T. S. Eliot,I. A. Richards, W. Empson,R. P. Blackmur, and R. Wellek, while the New Critical principles spread in most universities, in literary circles and journals.

• By 1955 the current had completely lost its innovative image and was regarded by many as a dying trend.

• The moderately revolutionary spirit of the New Criticism is not a pure product of the formalist 20th century. Some of its roots lie in the aesthetics of Kant and Coleridge, which was based on a theory of imagination emphasizing the concepts of harmony and poetic wholeness.

• Besides, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant insisted that aesthetic pleasure is purely disinterested: as a “free approval”, it is indifferent to the real existence of the contemplated thing. The New Critics are also indebted to the paradoxical Kantian notion of “purposeless finality”: in the same treatise the German philosopher maintained that those things which we like and consider beautiful seem to have been meant for the satisfaction of our needs and desires, although there is no rational evidence that there has been a purposeful intelligence to have produced them.

The organic principle

• In his Biographia Literaria, the English Romantic poet Samuel T. Coleridge propounded the organic principle as the constitutive definition of the poem: the whole is in every part, and every part can be found in the whole. The poem is that species of composition characterized, unlike works of science, by the immediate purpose of pleasure, and also by special metric and phonetic arrangements; it produces delight as a whole and this delight is compatible with the distinct gratification generated by each component part, which harmonizes with the other elements.

Coleridge’s concept of Organicism

• T. S. Hulme, a 20th century English thinker, elucidated Coleridge’s concept quite graphically in his Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art: unlike mechanical complexity, vital or organic is that kind of complexity “in which the parts cannot be said to be elements as each one is modified by the other’s presence, and each one to a certain extent is the whole. The leg of a chair by itself is still a leg. My leg by itself wouldn’t be.”[

•   Actually the idea of organicism had been first highlighted in Aristotle’s Poetics, but the Stagirite had focused on plot, which acquired with him an almost immaterial, transcendental quality, and not on poetic language, not on figures and style.

Primary Imagination

• In Coleridge’s view, expounded in Biographia Literaria, a great poem is the product of both the primary imagination (a superior intuitive power, similar to the Kantian Vernunft, which conceives of the oneness of universals, like truth or beauty, and characterizes the creative poetic genius), and of the secondary imagination (the faculty, similar to the Kantian Verstand, possessed by every human being who intuitively realizes the oneness of an object or concept).

Secondary Imagination

• The secondary imagination “dissolves, disperses, scatters, in order to re-create” [4] the material of the primary imagination; it represents creation as against vision.

Contextualism

• Another important principle which the New Critics borrowed from Coleridge’s poetic is contextualism. The English poet viewed the poem as a product of the form-creating man; it had an independent existence, within the organic system of mutual relationships among the terms that made up the context of the poem. Thus the poem was regarded outside any and all non-poetic contexts.

I. A. Richards

• If the New Critics overlooked the psychological component in the critical doctrine of the English critic I. A. Richards, they took over in various forms his distinction between the symbolic and the emotive language, as well as that one between statements (conveyed by science), and pseudo-statements (conveyed by poetry, which impresses not through the “truth” it contains, but through its structural coherence).

Metaphor and Irony

• Richards’s emphasis on metaphor as a constitutive element of language, and on the determining role of irony and tension in poetry was also extremely influential with the New Criticism. High poetry is characterized, according to him, by a balanced poise - an equilibrium of opposite factors always in a state of tension; irony, for instance, brings them into the poem as contending, complementary impulses.

Impersonal Theory of Poetry

• Likewise T. S. Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry’, as he himself called it in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”,had an important impact on the New Critical thought. In the writing of poetry, Eliot contends, there is a great deal which must be conscious and deliberate. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

The Objective Correlative

• However, there is one way of expressing emotion in the form of art: it is by finding an “objective correlative”, that is, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which will become the formula of that particular emotion. So, when the “external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience” are presented in the work of art, the emotion is “immediately evoked” (145). The well-known New Critical concept of “fallacy”, referring to the traditional critics’ erroneous emphasis on what is creation and interpretation and not on the text as such, owes a great deal to Eliot’s views above.

Conservative Ideology.

• Eliot’s“Tory” social and religious views, his emphasis on the decadent condition of the current Western world, and his preaching a return to myth, to a “unified sensibility” and wholeness of being, made his doctrine largely converge with the Southern Agrarians’ conservative ideology.