CRITICAL CLASS NOTES

I. New Criticism, Moral Formalism and F.R Leavis

II. Russian Formalism

III. Reader-Oriented Theories, Marxist Theory, and Structuralist Theories

IV. Poststructuralist Theories

V. Postmodenrnist and Postcolonialist Theories

a. The Loss of the Real: Jean Baudrillard b. Postcolonialism: Said and Spivak

VI.Postmodernism and Marxism: Jameson and Eagleton Feminist Theories

a. First-Wave Feminist Criticism: Woolf and de Beauvoir b. Second-Wave Feminist Criticism:
• 1. Millet and Sexual Politics
• 2. Showalter: Women's Writing and Gynocriticism
• 3. Black Women, Women of Color and Lesbian Literary Theories: Walker and Smith, Lorde and Carby, and Anzaldua and Castillo.

Notes on Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1966)

The actual text, Course in General Linguistics, was put together mainly fr om notes which de Saussure's students took of his three courses in general linguistics at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911, and the few personal notes of de Saussure himself which were found after his untimely death. Ferdinand de Saussure was one of the first to fit the results of piecemeal investigations into a coherent pattern by focusing his attention on the functional and structural side of human speech. His ideas comprise a wide range of topics: phonemics, the linguistic sign, opposition, value, synchronies, diachronics, etc. He is credited with laying the foundation for modern studies in historical and descriptive linguistics.

(1) Grammar: based on logic; scientific ~ detached: distinguished between correct and incorrect forms.
(2)Philological: existed earlier in Alexandria [brings up the dilemma of the "origins" of language, particularly English; this also extends to the notion of the "origins" of modern culture] *correct, interpret and comment upon written texts; *led to an interest in literary history, customs, institutions
(3)Comparative Philology: comparison between languages *Franz Bopp (1816): Sanskrit w/ German, Greek, Latin, etc. *1870: scholars began to seek out principles governing life of languages
(4)Lingrustics: origins in German &: Romance languages *Whitney (1875): The Life and Growth of Language Sub Sect Matter and Scope of Linguistics de Saussure makes the distinction between civilized and the savage, archaic and flowed languages [note: later critics will "attack" de Saussure for these bifurcations, suggesting a willful class structure is being developed within the elite academy; this will be even more poignant in New Historicism, Feminism and the Post-New Historicist world we now live in]

(l)What is Language:
(a)a social product of the faculty of speech,
(b)a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty;
(c)among all individuals that are linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up: all will reproduce--not exactly of course, but approximately--the same signs united with the same concepts.

(2)What Separates Language from Speaking: (a)what is social from what is individual; (b)what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental.


[note 1: according to de Saussure, language is passiveb assimilated by the individual, so aU def nitions of words are made in vain; note 2: this notion is also a point of contention trite all post-New Criticism scholars because de Saussure, critics suggests, sets up a problem concerning concepts of reality, objectivity, history and Ruth]


(c)whereas speech is heterogeneous, language is homogeneous; (c)language is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound images, and which both parts of the sign are psychological Nature of the Linguistic Sign
• (l)Sign, Signifier, Signified.

(a)The linguistic unit is a double entity, one formed by the association of two terms;
(b)The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image, the latter being the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our sense;
(c)The combination of concept and sound-image is called a sign;
(d)The term concept is called a signified;
(e) The term sound-image is called a signifier.
(2)Principle One: the Arbitrary Nature of the Sign
(a)The bond between signifier and signified is arbitrary; (b)Every means of expression used in society is based, in principle, on collective behavior or--what amounts to the same thing--on convention;
(3)Principle Two: the Linear Nature of the Signifier (alit represents a span;
(b)the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line. Immutability and Mutability of the Sign

• (l)Immutability


• (2)Mutability

(a)The signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to an idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it;
(b)Language always appears as a heritage of the preceding period;
(c)the arbitrary nature of the sign protects language form change;
(d)The multiplicity of signs necessary to form any language is a deterrent to linguistic change;
(e)The over-complexity of the system;
(f)Collective inertia toward innovation.
(a)Time is a great influence: the more or less rapid linguistic change of linguistic signs;
(b)the sign is exposed to alteration because it perpetuates itself;
(c)Change = a shift in the relationship between the signified and the signifier; (c)As it is a product of both the social forces and time, no one can change anything in it, and on the other hand, the arbitrariness of its signs theoretically entails the freedom of establishing just any relationship between phonetic substance and ideas.

From New Criticism, Moral Formalism and F.RLeavis to Reader-Oriented Theories, Marxist Theory, and Structuralist Theory An Introduction

A. New Criticism, Moral Formalism and F.R Leavis Oriains: Eliot. Richard and Empson

1. Matthew Arnold: Poetry will replace philosophy and religion; "Culture is the best that has been known and thought in the world." = according to Leavis, a humanistic defense against the modern's 'technologico-Benthamite' civilization of urban industrialization.
2. Characteristics: disinterested literary/textual analysis; obsession with the text itself; literary works as icons of human value deployed against the twentieth-century cultural barbarism; an 'objective,"scientific,' disinterested' criticism of the text.
3. Post-1960s critical revolution: a reaction against the New Critic; a demystification and dismantling of literature and its accompanying critical apparatuses.
4. T.S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919):
(a)emphasizes that writers must have 'the historical sense'--that is, a sense of the tradition of writing in which they must situate themselves;
(b)that this process reinforces the necessary 'depersonalization' of the artist if his or her art is to attain the 'impersonality' it must have if it is 'to approach the condition of science' "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." This is closely related to the notion of the 'image' which is central to the poetics of Ezra Pound, Imagism and Eliot's own poetic practice. New Criticism: is the (seemingly) anti-romantic thrust of Eliot's thinking (a new "classicism"); the emphasis on 'science, ' 'objectivity,' 'impersonality,' and the 'medium' as the focal object of analysis; and the notion of a 'tradition' of works which most successfully hold an 'essence' of human experience in their constituent 'medium.'


5. I. A. Richards, William Empson and, slightly later, F.R Leavis: Main proponents of the new English at Cambridge.

Richards: (background: aesthetics, psychology, semantics) Principles of Literary Criticism (1924): arguing that criticism should emulate the precision of science, he attempted to articulate the special character of literary language, differentiating the 'emotive' language of poetry from the 'referential' language of non-literary discourse. He followed with Science and Poetry(1916), where he irons this out, and the most influential, Practical Criticism (1929), in which he included examples of his students' attempts to analyze short, unidentified poems, showed how slack their reading equipment was, and attempted to establish basic tenets for the close reading of poetry.

Virtues: emphasis on very close reading; democratization of literary study in the classroom
.
Empson: (background: Richards pupil; he transferred from Mathematics to English); wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) astoundingly fast when still Richard's student. Emphasized ambiguity as the defining characteristic of poetic language, its vituoso feats of close, creative 'practical criticism' in action, and its detaching of literary texts from their contexts in the process of 'reading' their ambiguities.

6. Mord Formalism: F. R Leavis: criticism flowed from the journal Scrutiny (1932-53); Terry Eagleton's Literary Criticism (1983) is greatly influence by Leavis.

Leavis's influences: Matthew Arnold; T.S. Eliot; works: Education and the University(1943): particularly the essays, "A Sketch for an 'English School"' and "Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture"; The Great Tradition(1948) English Literature in Our Time and the University(1969) The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought(1975) Thought, Words and Creativity(1976)

Leavis believed that criticism and philosophy are quite separate activities and that the business of the critic is to 'attain a peculiar completeness of response [in orders to enter into possession of a given poem...in its concrete fullness.'

B. Russian Formalism

Overview

Like New Criticism, Russian Formalism emphasizes 'practical criticism' and the organic unity of the text; it too explores what is specifically literary in texts, and rejects the limp spirituality of late Romantic poetics in favor of a detailed and empirical approach to reading.

Russian Formalists: interested in method; more concerned to establish a 'scientific' basis for the theory of literature; considered that human 'content' (emotions, ideas and 'reality' in general) possessed no literary significance in itself, but merely provided a context for the functioning of literary 'device'. Formalists avoided the New Critics' tendency to endow aesthetic form with moral and cultural significance. They aimed rather to outline models and hypotheses (in a scientific spirit) to explain how the 'literary' is distinguished from and related to the 'extra-literary'.

Peter Steiner's three metaphors which act as generative models for the three phases of Formalism:
ul>(1)the "machine": literary criticism as a sort of mechanics and the text as a heap of devices;
(2) the "organism": organic phase which sees literary texts as fully functioning organisms of interrelated parts;
(3) the "system": tries to understand literary texts as the products of the entire literary system and even of the meta-system of interacting literary and non-literary systems.