LITERARY CRITICISM:

1
LITERARY CRITICISM

• Love, Desire and Class
• General Introduction
• 2007 Fall

2
Outline

• A prelude Love Story
• General Questions
• What is Romantic Love and whats wrong with it?
• Course Outline at a glance Section I
• Three Traditional Love Poems one Contemporary
  Song
• Reference
• Readings for next week

3
Love Story By Andy Williams

• Where do I begin to tell a story of how great a
  love can be
• the sweet love story that is older than the sea
• the simple truth about the love she brings to me
• Where do I start
• With her first hello
• she gave a meaning to this empty world of mine
• There'd never be another love another time
• She came into my life and made the living
  fineshe fills my heart

4
Love Story By Andy Williams (2)

• she fills my heart with very special thingswith
  angel songs,with wild imaginingsShe fills my
  soul with so much lovethat anywhere I go I'm
  never lonely.With her along who could be
  lonelyI reach for her handit's always there

5
Love Story By Andy Williams (3)

• How long does it last
• Can love be measured by the hours in a day
• I have no answers now but this much I can say
• I know I'll need her till the stars all burn away
• and she'll be there (underline added)

6
Is this a poem? What kind of Love is described
here?

• It depends. ? Some poetic elements repetition,
  rimes. But what is poetry?
• A fine combination of sound (rime, rhythm,
  meter, etc.) and sense (figurative language,
  irony, personification, etc.)? No.
• Shocking us into a new awareness? No.
• Instead, it is a straightforward celebration of a
  romantic love which falls in the tradition of
  Romantic love.

7
Examples?

• Romeo and Juliet?
• ????????
• Madame Bovary?
• The Bridges of Madison County
• Rousseau?

8
Examples? Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• Married to Therese Levasseur, whom, greatly
  inferior to him but dearest to him, he does
  not desire or love at all. (Hunt 304)
• chronically inconsistent
• Sees as his true love Sophie dHoudetot -- "I
  kissed her. What a kiss! But that was all"-
• "The light of every virtue adorned in my eyes the
  idol of my heart to have soiled that divine
  image would have been to destroy it I told her
  a hundred times that, if it had been in my power
  to gratify myself, if she had put herself at my
  mercy of her own free will, except in a few short
  moments of madness I should have refused to
  purchase my own happiness at such a price. I
  loved her too well to wish to possess her (qtd
  Hunt 305)"

9
What is Romantic Love? Is it a Natural or
Universal Sentiment?

• Romantic passion is a complex multifaceted
  emotional phenomenon that is a byproduct of an
  interplay of biology, self, and society.
• The desire for union or merger
• Idealization of the beloved
• Exclusivity (e.g. always, never)
• Emotional dependency on or powerful empathy and
  concern for the beloved.
• Intrusive thinking about the love object (Cf.
  Jankowiak 4-5)

10
Is it natural?

• natural in the biological or evolutionary
  senses
• cultural human invented ritual.
• e.g. Kiss see clips
• Natural -- for mammals started with feeding
  memorable for procreation purposes
• Cultural -- Many kinds Part of many rituals

11
Whats wrong with it?

• Nothing wrong as an emotional or biological need,
  but
• Romantic love is not Love.
• It is apparently a powerful feeling that seems to
  be unique and eternal, but actually --

12
Romantic love is

• A cultural product with a lot of conventions
  (some plot elements or ways of rationalization)
• e.g. to ignore or overcome its transience
• carpe diem (seize the day) liebestod (love and
  death)
• Part of the tradition of idealized love (e.g.
  courtly love, Platonic love, neo-Platonic love,
  Romantic love). Idealization can lead to

13
Romantic loves Idealization can

• involve objectification of women whose actual
  feelings are ignored and subjectivities denied
• Hide realities of inequality, commodification or
  the narcissistic nature of our desire.
• Turn to fear, hatred or self-sacrifice because
  it is so powerful but probably one-sided. (e.g.
  femme fatal)
• Not innocent Be used to support rigid laws of
  gender oppression (e.g. chastity). The
  canonical love poems are not exempt from some
  ideology of love.

14
Romantic Love in the Romantic/Victorian Period.

• Passionately in love strong sexual inhibition
• Romantics
• Being demonstratively sentimental, melancholic,
  tempestuous or tearful.
• Goethe and Beethoven frequently in love
• Women angels in the house (weak, fearful,
  anxious to lean on and be dominated by a strong
  man.)
• Victorian society pinnacle of Romantic love,
  from which S. Freuds theory arises.

CORSETS AND CRINOLINE (????? )
15
Women in the Victorian Age

• Hysteric objects for psychoanalytic studies
• Pre-Raphaelite women in paintings

portrait of Augustine Ecstasy
Beata Beatrix 1864-70 
16
Women in the Victorian Age

• Mrs. B her imagined lovemaking consists of
  lying in each others arms all night and kissing.
  
• She was somewhat shocked and disgusted by the
  experience of the wedding night. It seemed to
  her that her husband approached her with the
  violence of an animal. . . Coitus, though
  incomplete, took place some seven times on that
  first night . . . For two months subsequently
  there was great pain during intercourseShe
  eventually discovered that her husbands
  abstinence from marital intercourse was due to
  infidelity. (Havelock Ellis qtd in Hunt 338)

17
Love in the Modern Age?
                                                
               Edward Munch, Eye in Eye, 1894 
contrasts sharply with conventional
"love-at-first-sight" images popular in the
19th-century (p. 55) 

• Ah, love, let us be true
• To one another! for the world, which seems
• To lie before us like a land of dreams,
• So various, so beautiful, so new,
• Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
• Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.
• Matthew Arnold (18221888) from "Dover Beach"

18
Today?

• In English language love going out with
  someone, seeing someone involved, in a
  relationship.
• After two sexual revolutions (1920s, 1960s)
• Hollywood films of Romantic love
• In Taiwan ?????(??????? )?????

19
Course Outline

• Traditional Love Poems New Critical Reading and
  Beyond
• Love and Desire Psychoanalysis
• Love and Bread Marxism
• Love in Culture Cultural Studies
• Note we are not limited to the topic love, nor
  can we exhaust it.

20
New Critical Readings and Beyond

• New Criticism close reading practical
  criticism the Text and Text Only approach.
  Form and content united into an organic whole.
• Beyond
• Discussing the social context(s) it fails to see.
• Challenging its underlying beliefs? liberal
  humanism.

21
Selected Love Poems

• Shakespeare Sonnet 130 My mistress' eyes are
  nothing like the sun
• Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet (1591?)
• John Donne To his Mistress Going to Bed
• Leonard Cohen Im Your Man

22
Sonnet 130

• Thesis Instead of seeing his lover as a
  beautiful goddess and in absolute or unrealistic
  terms, the speaker describe his mistress and
  define his lover in relative terms in order to
  finally confirm his love.
• Two kinds of comparison
• Worse (comparative more) e.g. less red, worse
  than perfume, less pleasing than music? yet he
  loves it
• Unlike (? More real) e.g. eyes, breasts, hair,
  walk.
• As rare but the truest -- his love and his
  language.

23
Sonnet 130 -- Context

• Seen as a sequence Sonnet 127 to 152
• bitter and wry reflections on the poets sexual
  entanglement with a womanwho is, in turn,
  entangled with the youth at the expense of
  Shakespeares relations with both of them.
• Match the sardonic, misogynistic flavour of the
  early Jacobean court. . . (Jacob 36)

24
Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet

• Thesis The youngsters court or stay coy with
  misplaced conceits which combines the spiritual
  and sexual love in the courtly love tradition.
  
• Juliets Hands ? shrine Juliet, a saint.
• Romeo lips pilgrims ? a palmer (pilgrim) with
  palms
• Witty twist with let lips do what hands do
  What? Pray ? kiss

25
Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet -- Context

• The play
• Before the sonnet (their first conversation), 
  Romeo, like Byron in "She Walks in Beauty,"
  compares Juliet to light or jewels at night and
  describes her as the first "true beauty hes
  seen.
• Romeo goes to the ball to find his girlfriend
  Rosaline, but not Juliet. 
• 2. The film(s) signs of impetuosity and sexuality

26
To his Mistress Going to Bed

• Thesis As the speaker uses witty conceits to ask
  the lady to strip herself, the ideology of
  platonic love is challenged but not that of sex
  as male battle and conquer.
• Witty challenge of Platonic love
• Combine the spiritual (e.g. heaven, chime) and
  sensual, but see the latter as more important or
  at least the same with the former.
• Puns with sexual connotations labour, standing,
  still can stand so nigh, hairy diadems,
  flesh upright

27
To his Mistress Going to Bed

• 3. Spiritual and natural images showing the
  sensual as something better and natural
• -- girdle as heavens zone, (body as a far
  fairer world)
• -- body as flowery meads as content of mystic
  books
• -- souls unbodied bodies unclothed
• -- fools who stop at breast plate or gems
  (traditional poets?)
• -- innocence birth clothes

28
John Donne in Context

• Unsolved contradictions between Dr. Donne and
  Jack Donne
• Neo-Platonic Love in Renaissance Its governing
  ambiguity things and persons in the world are
  to be loved only for the sake of a spiritual
  beauty that transcends them, and yet the
  beautiful cannot be appreciated unless we love
  its manifestations in matter (Singer 195.) 
• Christianity (from being a Catholic to an
  Anglican prelate),
• Neo-Ovidian (anti-idealistic) artificial and
  self-conscious in their defense of sexual
  pleasures (Singer 196)

29
John Donne in Context

• e.g. Valediction Forbidding Mourning unlike
  dull-sublunary lovers, separation of the bodies
  does not hurt the union of true lovers souls.
• The Extasie, -- implies that love is a
  religious experience,
• Flea sex is a religious experience

30
Im Your Man Close Analysis

• postmodern parody/collage of traditional and
  contemporary images of love and masculinity
  (courtly romance, painting, fairy tales and
  Valentine )

31
Courting the Lady

32
Wedding

33
Mannered Courtship ? Wolf Desire Underneath

34
Love as something opportunist

35
Christ? Virgin Mary? Or . . . ?
36
Im Your Man -- Context

• Canadianism parodied
• Signs of the Canadian The Group of Seven, Riding
  the Timber, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)
  and the maple leaf.

37
Reference

• Romantic Passion A Universal Experience? Ed.
  William Jankowiak. Columbia University Press,
  1995.
• The Natural History of Love. Morton Hunt. New
  York Anchor, 1994.
• Nature of Love, Vol. 2 Courtly Romantic.
  Irving Singer. University of Chicago Press,
  1998.
• A beginner's guide to critical reading an
  anthology of literary texts. Richard Jacobs.
  London New York Routledge , 2001.

38
Readings for next week

• Chap 2.
• Formalism
• EB Browning Sonnets 26 43
• Mary Shelley The Trial of Love