Literary Criticism:

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Literary Criticism

• 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 . . .

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Literary Criticism

• to Understanding

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.
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Literary Criticism

• to Understanding

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.
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???????? a Hermeneutic Circle
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What does it mean? And how?
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How are its meanings produced?
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How to position a text in its contexts?
????? Political Unconscious ???? ??????/
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?? The Unconscious
Text // Self
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Semiotics Jakobsons six factors in speech
How to position a text in its linguistic contexts?

• Context/Soceity, History
  Intertexts
• Message
• Addresser Addressee
• Author Contact
  Reader
• Code/
• Signifier
• ?
• Text

Signs
Signification process
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Althussers idea of social formation
How to position a text in its social contexts?

• Relative autonomy mediation (??)
  over-determination

Superstructure
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Romantic Discourse as an example
How to position a text in its discursive contexts?

Angel and Whore binaries in Traditional Lit.
French Revolution
Blake
Wordsworth
Coleridge
1. The Poets Imagination Emotion but not
reason 2. Human nature// Nature 3. Treatment
of Peasants Women
Byron
Keats Shelley
Organicism Lawrence New Criticism
Pre-Raphaelite Paintings
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Wordsworthian Discourse
rise of capitalism book market

Literary Reviews against 1. Ws language -- of
the lower classes 2. Ws subject matter passion
W's prefaces and supplementary essays set up
his poetry as an independent discipline,
Coleridge's glosses, Shelley's defense Keats'
letters
Wordsworths Poems Lyrical Ballads (1798 1802
1815) etc.
-- Need of money -- Cut out Coleridges part
to suit the common taste
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• 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.

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Biographical studies

• Lucy Poems Composed in Germany most of them
  written in the winter of 1798-99
• Lucys 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."

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Psychoanalytic Studies

• 1. Wordsworths desire to be both dead and alive
  (to re-live his mothers 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.

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Textual Studies

• 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.

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Marxist Approach Lucy as a peasant girl?

• 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).

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Deconstruction I/She/Thing Undecidability

• I
• A Slumber my spirit sealed dead
• No human fears inhuman, all-knowing

• her death
• She a thing? dead non-human

Rolled . . . With rocks, and stones, and trees.

• Earthly years
• Motion Force
• Hears, Sees

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Critical Perspectives 2 Critical Issues

• 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?

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Critical Perspectives 2-2 Critical Issues
Related

• Language "Signs 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

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End of the course Beginnings . . . of Critical
Thinking

• 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.