Critica práctica literaria, Apuntes de Literatura inglesa

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CRÍTICA PRACTICA

LITERATURA ANGLESA

Laura Ramon Almarche. Group C.

Teacher: Claudia Alonso

• UNIT 1: PRE-CRITICAL RESPONSES TO THE SELECTED LITERARY WORK(S).............................................. - CRITICAL DEVELOPMENTS.................................................................................................................... - Introductory matters to the course.......................................................................................................
• UNIT 2: TEXT-ORIENTED APPROACHES................................................................................................. - WARM-UP DISCUSSION:....................................................................................................................... - General considerations associated to any sort of canon: the three A’s of canon formation............... - On textual scholarship.......................................................................................................................... - How editors prepare scholarly editions................................................................................................ - ‘Intentionalist’ and ‘Social Process’ theories of editing........................................................................
• UNIT 3: CONTEXTUAL APPROACHES..................................................................................................... - WHAT DO WE MEAN BY CONTEXTUAL APPROACHES?........................................................................ - THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE....................................................................................... - CONTEXTUAL APPROACHES: AN OVERVIEW OF PERSPECTIVES.........................................................
  • 3.1 MARXIST LITERARY CRITICISM: THE BASICS....................................................................................
    • Warm up: Marxism & literature.........................................................................................................
    • BASE & SUPERSTRUCTURE..................................................................................................................
    • LITERATURE & SUPERSTRUCTURE......................................................................................................
    • LITERATURE & IDEOLOGY...................................................................................................................
    • LOUIS ALTHUSSER’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE RELATION BETWEEN LITERATURE & IDEOLOGY......
    • PIERRE MACHERAY’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE RELATION BETWEEN LITERATURE & IDEOLOGY....
    • FORM & CONTENT..............................................................................................................................
    • GEORG LUKÀCS...................................................................................................................................
    • LUCIEN GOLDMANN...........................................................................................................................
    • PIERRE MACHEREY..............................................................................................................................
    • THE WRITER & COMMITMENT...........................................................................................................
    • THE REFLECTIONIST THEORY..............................................................................................................
    • THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER...............................................................................................................
  • 3.2 FEMINIST CRITICISM........................................................................................................................
    • HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF FEMINIST WAVES....................................................................................
  • 3.3 PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM: “FREUDIANISM”................................................................................
    • Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)...............................................................................................................
• UNIT 4: INTERTEXTUAL APPROACHES................................................................................................ - Warm-up............................................................................................................................................. - What do we mean by INTERTEXTUALITY?.......................................................................................... - FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE (1857-1913)............................................................................................. - MIKHAIL BAKHTIN (1895-1975).......................................................................................................... - BAKHTIN’S DIALOGISM IN LITERATURE.............................................................................................. - JULIA KRISTEVA (b. 1941)....................................................................................................................
  • 4.1 INTERTEXTUALITY & POSTMODERNISM..........................................................................................
    • Warm-up exercise: approaching postmodernism intuitively..............................................................
    • On the basics of POSTMODERNISM....................................................................................................
• UNIT 7: ACCESS TO PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES..................................................................
  • WHAT ARE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES?............................................................................
  • PRIMARY SOURCES.............................................................................................................................
  • SECONDARY SOURCES........................................................................................................................
  • Evaluating and distinguishing between primary and secondary sources:.........................................
  • On the legitimacy and authority of sources........................................................................................
  • A SURVEY OF DIGITAL RESOURCES.....................................................................................................
  • On Indexed Journals & Impact Factors...............................................................................................
• UNIT 8: A GUIDE TO SCHOLARLY WRITING.........................................................................................
  • What does (literary) scholarly writing consist in at a professional level?..........................................
  • Prompt papers and research papers...................................................................................................
  • THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD ESSAY is related with the notion of TRYING...................................

UNIT 1: PRE-CRITICAL RESPONSES TO THE SELECTED LITERARY WORK(S)  What is literary criticism?  What is the object of art?  How do you respond as a reader? Do you know what type of reader you are?  Do you think excessive criticism is detrimental to art? (Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” - 1964)  What is the difference between high art and low/popular culture and what does it have to do with (pre)critical response?  What do YOU understand by “pre-critical” response?  Is a pre-critical response desirable/necessary/essential for the interpretation of literature? IS IT INFERIOR TO OTHER FORMS OF RESPONSE?  Do theory and criticism expand or limit your interpretation of the written text?  Can KNOWING become as instinctive as FEELING? “The precritical response employing primarily the senses and the emotions is an indispensable one if pleasure or delight is the aim of art. Without it the critic might as well be merely proofreading for factual accuracy or correct mechanical form. It is said to underlie or even to drive the critical response.” (Guerin 2005: 6)  How do we balance the precritical with an educated response?

UNIT 2: TEXT-ORIENTED APPROACHES

From close reading to textual scholarship

WARM-UP DISCUSSION:  How important are surrounding factors such as biography, historical context, political inclinations, literary context, etc. for the interpretation of texts?  What do you think makes for a fair critical balance? How much should we focus on the actual literary piece?  What is New Criticism?  What is New Historicism? General considerations associated to any sort of canon: the three A’s of canon formation  Authority  who has the right to establish the canon? Is there a creative force behind the canon or is the canon self-created? Who has a say in what works are included and which are excluded?  Authorship  Does authorship influence the canon or are works isolated aesthetic pieces? Does the author’s background influence the impact and cultural relevance of the piece?  Authenticity  What makes a work of art ‘true’ (vs ‘false’)? “ The work of art is authentic by reason of its entire self-definition: it is understood to exist wholly by the laws of its own being, which include the right to embody painful, ignoble, or socially inacceptable subject-matters. Similarly, the artist seeks his personal authenticity in his entire autonomousness – his goal is to be as self-defining as the art/object he creates.” (Trilling 1970) “I have always held that any method which could produce the meaning of a work of literature was a legitimate method[...]I came to the conclusion that[...]The critic’s task was[...]to procure a viable meaning appropriate to the critic’s time and place. Practically, this meant employing not any one method in interpreting a work of art but every method which might prove efficient.” (Cargill, qtd. in Guerin 2005: 16) Think of the following texts: what critical frameworks have they stirred? What extra- textual factors have been important for their exegesis?

CLASS EXERCISE: adding critical frameworks to the pre-critical

response

 Close reading of Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”  What does “close reading” imply?  Why is the historical context relevant to the story?  How relevant is the setting?  Why would Hemingway’s biography and other literary pieces be of importance to interpret the story? On textual scholarship  What is textual authenticity?  How important and relevant is author intentionality? “Ordinary history of the transmission of a text, without the intervention of author or editor, is one of progressive degeneration.” (Thorpe 51)  What are we to do with texts generating alternative interpretations or authorial intents? (Dickens, Ellison, James…) How editors prepare scholarly editions  collation of the relevant manuscript and/or printed texts of the work to be edited  selection of a ‘copy-text’ on which the edition will be based  enmendation of the copy-text, and the provision of textual notes listing all significant enmendations  explanation (in an introduction and explanatory notes to the text) of the circumstances of authorship, publication, distribution and reception of the text, in its own historical period and subsequently (Owens 2010)

UNIT 3: CONTEXTUAL APPROACHES WHAT DO WE MEAN BY CONTEXTUAL APPROACHES?  Criticising a work as representing extrinsic realities (psychological, social, economic, political, cultural), and as reproducing ideological, moral, philosophical and religious world-views.  Includes a heterogeneous group of schools and methodologies that do not regard the text as self-contained, but as dependent on contextual matters (history, social & political context, nationality, gender, etc.) THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE  Text-oriented approach: concerned with the ‘materiality’ of texts, including editions of manuscripts, analyses of language and style, and the formal structure of literary works.

• philology
• formalism & structuralism
• new criticism
• rhetoric & stylistics
• semiotics & deconstruction  Author-oriented approaches: emphasis on the life of the author and the connections between the text and the biography of the creator.  Reader-oriented approaches: focus on the reception of texts by different audiences and the text’s general impact on the reading public.  Intertextual approaches: source studies, genre criticism, relations to other literary works and the media.  Contextual approaches: places literary texts against a background of historical, social or political developments while at the same time attempts to classify texts according to genres as well as historical periods.

CONTEXTUAL APPROACHES: AN OVERVIEW OF PERSPECTIVES

• Literary history
• Marxism
• Feminism & gender theory (Queer Theory, Masculinist Studies, etc.)
• Psychoanalysis
• New Historicism & Cultural Studies
• Postcolonialism
• Ecocriticism & Critical Animal Studies
• Performance Studies
• Ageing Studies
• Ethnic-oriented studies (African American, Asian American, diaspora, etc.)
• New Musicology Studies
• Comparative literature (can also be text-oriented, response-oriented, etc.) OVERLAPPING OF APPROACHES & PERSPECTIVES  INTERDISCIPLINARITY

 Proletariat = lower/working classes that under capitalism must sell their labor to earn a living, thus becoming alienated.  Ideology = the ideas, values and feelings by which men experience their societies and cultures at various times  Base and superstructure  Capitalism = socio-economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of labor force.  Historical materialism = based on idea that material condition and productive capacity of a society determine human consciousness and relations  Private property = owndership of means of production (* not to confuse with personal property) Warm up: Marxism & literature  Marxism and the sociology of literature  Marxism as a revolutionary way of understanding literature itself. It explains the literary work more fully paying attention to forms, styles and meanings through a new historical approach to the text. BASE & SUPERSTRUCTURE “The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, appear here as the direct efflux of men’s material behavior […] we do not proceed from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as described, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at corporeal man; rather we proceed from the really active man […]. Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.” (Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, 1845-1846)

“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)  Infrastructure = base: the economic structure of society, based on capitalist ‘forces’ and ‘relations’ of production  Superstructure: certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state determined by the infrastructure, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production.

• It also consists of certain ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ (political, religious, ethical, aesthetic, etc.)  that is, IDEOLOGY

Where does ART fit in?

• Art is part of the superstructure  to approach literature is to approach the social process of which it is a part.
• Literature is irreparably bound to the dominant way of seeing the world, the social mentality or ideology of an age.
• Marxist literary criticism is bound to fields such as sociology, economics & politics.

• In a way, it shows a man making sense of his experience in ways that prohibit a true understanding of his society, ways that are consequently false LOUIS ALTHUSSER’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE RELATION BETWEEN LITERATURE & IDEOLOGY
• Art cannot be reduced to ideology – what it has is a particular relationship to it
• Ideology signifies the imaginary ways in which men experience the world, which is the experience literature gives us – what it feels like to live in particular conditions, rather than a conceptual analysis of those conditions.
• Yet art does more than passively reflect an experience. It is held within ideology, but also manages to distance itself from it. Through that distance, it allows us to ‘feel’ and ‘perceive’ the ideology
• Through the experience of the situation provided by art, it moves us towards a fuller understanding of ideology (it moves us towards a ‘scientific knowledge’ of it) PIERRE MACHERAY’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE RELATION BETWEEN LITERATURE & IDEOLOGY
• Distinction between ILLUSION (=ideology) & FICTION
• By working on the illusion, the writer transforms it into something different, lending it a shape and structure
• It is by giving ideology a determinate form, fixing it within certain fictional limits, that art is able to distance itself from it, thus revealing to us the limits of that ideology.

FORM & CONTENT  In Marxism, content is prior to form  content has a historical determination over form  Trotsky: “The relationship between form and content is determined by the fact that the new form is discovered, proclaimed and evolved under the pressure of an inner need, of a collective psychological demand which, like everything else [...] has its social roots.”  does this mean that literature is absolutely determined by ideology?  Ian Watt’s shift from the aristocratic novel to new aesthetic conventions determined by capitalism  new concerns: individual psychology, realism, materialism GEORG LUKÀCS  Importance of the sense of ‘totality’ in the literary piece  Support of REALISM and its adherence to the TYPICALITY of character  TYPICALITY:  Also supported by Engels  A ‘typical’ or ‘representative’ character represents historical forces without ceasing to be individualized  Combination of typicality & individuality in character development  PROGRESSIVE ART: whatever the writer’s political allegiance, it realizes the vital ‘world-historical’ forces of an epoch which make for change and growth, revealing their unfolding potential in the fullest complexity.  The realist writer  disclosure of the essences or essentials of a condition, selecting and combining them into total form and fleshing them out in concrete experience.  In realism, there is a dialectic between art and form  form mediates between the concrete and the general, essence and existence, type and individual.  REALISM VS NATURALISM & FORMALISM

• ENGELS: “Realism to my mind implies, beside truth in detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances.” What does commitment imply and how is it to be carried out according to different Marxist views?
  • Notion of OBJECTIVE PARTIANSHIP THE REFLECTIONIST THEORY  Lukàcs’s search for critical undertakings and positive possibilities  Raymond Williams’s view on English Marxism THE AUTHOR AS PRODUCER
• Books as part of a capitalist industry
• Walter Benjamin’s understanding of authorial commitment and revolutionary stance

JOHN STEINBECK’S

OF MICE AND MEN (1937)

John Steinbeck

(Salinas 1902 – New York 1968)

• Wrote 16 novels, 6 non-fiction books & 5 collections of short stories
• 1962 Nobel Prize
• Upbringing in California ranches and farm settings
• Studies English Literature at Stanford University  does not graduate
• Hardships during the Depression  self-made-man enterprise, sometimes resorts to stealing food
• Friendship with biologist Ed Ricketts that influences some of his work with an ecocritical perspective.
• Married 3 times

• WWII correspondent
• Participates in a number of film scripts (with names such as Hitchcock and Kazan) and many of his works are adapted for the screen
• Wrote on numerous topics, but his most celebrated works deal with American society (especially working-class and especially in California).
• Allegedly leftist views, though some biographical details (possible involvement with the CIA during th Cold War, position on Vietnam, etc.) suggest a more complex position.
• Leftist displays: member of League of American Writers (communist inclinations), support of workers’ strikes in California, support of Soviet invasion of Finland, friendship with Lincoln Jeffers, support to Arthur Miller during McCarthyism, enmity with J. Edgar Hoover, etc.

Selection of Steinbeck’s most prominent works

• Cup of Gold (1929)
• The Red Pony (1933)
• Tortilla Flat (1935) DUST BOWL FICTION:
• In Dubious Battle (1936)
• Of Mice and Men (1937)
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
  • Cannery Row (1945)
  • The Pearl (1947)
  • A Russian Journal (1948)
  • East of Eden (1952)
  • The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
  • Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Of Mice and Men

Context

• 1930s America  Depression, Dust Bowl, New Deal
• Automation of agricultural force through machine power  search of labor force to support and handle machinery such as the combine
• Great migration of workers into America (Mexico  California)
• Farming industries begin to replace family farms  demand for cheap, seasonal labor force
• Agricultural wages at their minimum  strikes, rows