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desire to emphasize difference between art and propaganda a writer's social class and its prevailing ideology (outlook, values, tacit assumptions, half-realized allegiances etc) have a major bearing on what is written by him as a member of that class w.r.t. content, obviously, but also form deals with history in a generalized way - speaks of conflict within classes and clashes of large historical forces, but rarely discusses the detail of a specific historical situation or relates it closely to the interpretation of a particular historical text Leninist Marxist criticism: 1930s - reaction throughout Soviet society; State began to exert direct control over literature and he arts as well as everything else influenced by Lenin's argument that "Literature must become Party literature ... Literature must become part of the organized, methodical, and unified labors of the social democratic party> Soviet Writers' Congress (1934) outlawed liberal views; new Len...

Textbook scribblings: self/other authority/powerlessness advanced/backward white/colored beauty/lack thereof (ugliness) science(scientific)/superstition(superstitious) civilized/barbaric Christian(religious)/pagan own systems of language/native systems of language An important and recurring binary of self vs other, where, as above, the former is privileged over the latter. If you recall from Marxism, ideology is a set of ideas and beliefs propagated by a certain section of society (the dominant one, that possesses authority). This is done through control over discourse. The point is, the colonizers and the colonized made sense of or learned to make sense of their "self", respectively, in relation to one another (as, say, superior/inferior). Basically the colonizers were creating an identity for the "other" and imposing it through control and authority. Notebook scribblings: Adopt phase: postcolonial writer who adopts the Western way of writing ...

Printable PDF Ch1.1   Ch1.2 Ch5 Ch8: Marxism Ch10: Postcolonial criticism Ch2: Structuralism Ch12: Narratology Ch12.ii: Aristotle vs Plato Ch3: Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction Ch6: Feminism Ch9: New historicism and cultural materialism Ch4: Postmodernism Ch13: Ecocriticism

Modernism was after WWI (1914-1918 and after). It was a series of cultural movements. There were systems in place that promised people that their needs would be fulfilled and that failed them. They were disillusioned, angry and anxious; and they expressed this through art, literature, architecture etc. This was the beginning of the avant-garde movement. Hemingway's zero endings Ezra Pound - "make it new" stream of consciousness impressionism self-reflexivity People began to question everything, including the existence of God. Modernists recognized that the old order had crumbled - they were happy that the old had given way to the new, but were deeply anxious about how to set up a new world order rejected certainty of Enlightenment Age thought (such as belief in experiments and rationality) - chaos and disorder was more real for them rejected the existence of an all-powerful creator saw traditional forms of art as outdated no fixed answer avant-garde:...

You no longer privilege only literary texts - you begin to recognize and appreciate other texts, such as annals, rituals, fashion etc, since they are also part of the era. There is no more foregrounding of certain texts over others, and there is equal importance given to co-texts. New Historicism opposes the exclusively text-based approach. There is no more isolation. Texts cannot exist in a vacuum. New Historicism borrows heavily from Marxism, as with the the proposition that every text is rooted in social relations, factoring power struggles, and material conditions of life. Stephen Greenblatt  started this; he first used the term. Here's some ppt points: parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts reaction to text-only approach which placed literature in a vacuum; it was a recovery of the referent textuality of history and historicity of texts: texts and co-texts old historicism saw history as objective, unchanging and which can be recovered easily new hist...

Notes and excerpts from Susan Gubar's introduction to 'Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century': (i) Feminist studies have multiplied into various forms of inquiry in which every category linked to gender has itself undergone critical redefinition. (The book was published in 2000.) Just as proponents of identity politics enlarged the meaning of the term "women" by combining such categories as race and sex with gender analysis, post-structuralist thinkers used gender analysis to display the instability of such categories as race and sex. (ii) That is, the terms race, sex, religion, and caste started out as fixed phrases w.r.t. gender, but considerations of gender quickly complicated their meanings. (iii) Gubar held the "passionate belief that the pedagogic function of feminist studies depends on abrogating scholarly ghettoization and that its future vitality hinges on our ability to bring gender into play with different sorts of difference...

1. Source Aristotle considered poetry as a product of skill or art, both of which are based on rational and intelligible principles Plato treated poetry as inspired, therefore irrational 2. Imitation Aristotle valued imitation as an enabler of learning. Furthermore since poetry is a representation of things that might happen in human lives, and universal situations of poetry are more philosophical than the particulars of a historical narrative, poetry gives us a more generalized understanding of human nature. Furthermore people delight in accurate imitations and they have cognitive value - they satisfy our natural desire to learn Plato believed that poets have no knowledge of what they imitate and hence their imitations are at a third remove from reality 3. Morally harmful Aristotle believed that poetry and tragedy engages out emotions and is therefore beneficial Plato believed that poetry stimulated emotions that ought to be suppressed

Comparison  - formalism, structuralism, linguistics, 'close reading' Saussure  - hilarious and very useful video New Criticism  - or 'Practical Criticism' Russian Formalism  - overview Phenomenology  - quick definition Narratology  - Google suggested this :') Psychoanalytic criticism  - overview, and  wiki page

Development of English studies: Ignore the confusing order in which this topic is presented in the textbook. Before the pointy UFO's (<^> <^> <^>) is in brief ( pages 11 through 16 ) and after them is in detail ( pages 21 through 35 ). In the beginning (first quarter of 19th century) the study of English was a Church monopoly. The two institutions, Cambridge and Oxford were separate and ran as monasteries, with ordained priests, Anglican communicant students etc, all the way until the 1820's A breakthrough happened in 1826 when a University College was founded for men and women of all religions or none at all - no biggie - that started offering English as a subject in 1828. (This was basically the study of English as a language, using literature only for examples) King's College is the beginning of Literature as we know it. F. D. Maurice, appointed Professor in 1840, laid down some of the principles of liberal humanism (he also believed that literat...

9-10 on 26 Nov, 2015 Narratology: draws from structuralism 1. nothing can be considered in isolation 2. every narrative is made up of units, combined using rules study of narratives - structure, why, mechanisms, procedures, how it makes meaning for you nature of story cultural practice difference between plot and story Narrative: the way in which you describe something, a recounting of events Bordwell: Narrative is a series of events bound by a cause-and-effect relationship, or a causal link Narrator:  anonymous, 1st person, 3rd person, "objective", subjective whoever does the recounting Narratee: to whom the recounting is done Aristotle: first person to give clear picture of narratology according to him, tragedy was superior to other epic forms because of spectacle (out of plot-character-thought-diction-song-spectacle) and because they're self-contained plot is the heart and soul of tragedy: hamartia (tragic flaw - jealousy, pri...

Tue, 5 Jan, 2016 read texts for covert desires and drives that motivate characters his psychological works "inaugurated" psychoanalytic criticism since, creativity and meaning, many artists realized, could be deeply embedded within the psyche, and, say, a painting unsuccessful repression - which means that repressed desires and memories found expression - through dreams, habits etc Freudian slips suggest that the unconscious also requires language - dreams, then, are basically metaphors For example, the Oedipus complex is a way of understanding male sexuality. Furthermore, fear of castration causes him to affiliate with the father (since the father is an un-overcomeable authority figure who establishes the law of kinship) and internalizes social norms. Real-life situation ice cream: id: Grab it ego: No man, we'll get in trouble superego: How about you ask first? Coz that's the right thing to do contribution of Freud was dream analysis (condensation, disp...

Structuralism claimed to be objective and scientific and that by being systematic, it would yield answers . However there were never any answers. Roland Barthes' 'The Death of the Author' became the turning point in structuralism. Death here is figurative - when the book is complete and published and the author no longer has any control over the book and how it is read and what meanings are drawn from his/her text. "The death of the author is the birth of the reader." Post-structuralism reveals that everything has a centre except for language. A centre is basically the structure, a point of reference - the Sun in the Solar System, Jupiter for all its moons, for instance. Language cannot have a centre. It is fluid and dynamic. This is the reason that one word may have more than one meaning. In structuralism: A specific domain of culture understood through a structure Modelled on language Relates literary texts to a larger structure (a particular genre) E...

things are not understood in isolation units combine with each other based on rules the world is made up of structures, made up of systems, made up of units structuralist analysis - interrelationship of units and rules -  meaning linguistics - a structuralist perspective: literary texts are made up of language, which is made up of words (units) and grammar (rules) 9 Nov 2015 structure is universal; content may differ - ex: Mad Libs Meanings are outside; attributed - human mind structures units and rules to give meaning focus on chickens (structures) not eggs (individual texts/ elements) everything is understood in terms of larger context structure remains constant - universal elements and their interpretations may differ based on sociocultural context no text has inherent, intrinsic meaning; meaning is attributed to it by us deeply rooted in linguistics (the science of language) Ferdinand de Saussure literature is made up of language (language is a signi...

Formalism: Russian formalism, Russian revolution, Bolshevik revolution etc emphasis on form focus on literariness of the text what is or isn't literature is also based on the language used: where "Frailty, thy name is woman" is poetic and literary, "you are a frail woman" is merely everyday speech looked for literary and poetic devices, rhyme scheme, diction, syntax et did not care about context making the stone stonier Victor Schlovsky: defamiliarization making that which is familiar to you, unfamiliar literature makes standard language defamiliarized to us for instance, "boy meets girl - fall in love - both die" sounds like a stupid plot but Romeo and Juliet is considered a literary masterpiece  Ian Mukarovsky: Foregrounding standard language (background) poetic language (in foreground) together become literary language still believed that context make reader digress from meaning of text  Roman Jakobsen: Literature is ...