Modern Western

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• Modern Western
• Literary Theory and Criticism

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Part 1

• Part 1 Introduction
• Concepts
• Criticism
• The reasoned discussion of literary
  works,an activity which may include some or all
  of the following procedures,in varying
  proportionsthe defence of literature against
  moralists and censors,classification of a work
  according to its genre,interpretation of its
  meaning,analysis of its structure and style,
  judgment of its worth by comparison with other
  works,estimation of its likely effect on
  readers,and the establishment of general
  principles by which literary works can be
  evaluated and understood.(Oxford concise
  Dictionary of Literary Terms)

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Part 1

• Literary Theory
• literary theory is speculative discourse
  on literature and on practice of literature.It
  may include reflections on or analysis of general
  principles and categories of literature,such as
  its nature and functionits relation to other
  aspects of culturethe purpose,procedures and
  validity of literary criticismrelation of
  literary text to their authors and historical
  contextsor the production of literary
  meaning.(Zhu Gang )

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• Modern
• historical period from Renaissance to 20th
  century
• 20th century
• Western
• Geographical meaningEurope and America
• Cultural meaningCultural community of develop
  capitalism countries,especially based on
  Christian tradition.
• Conclusion
• Modern western literary theory and
  criticism are reasoned activities of discussion
  about literature in Western world in 20th century.

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• Approaches,schools and groups
• Scientism Approaches
• Russian Formalism
• Anglo-American New Criticism
• Czech Structuralism
• French Structuralism
• Post Structuralism

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• Humanism Approaches
• Existentialism
• Psychoanalysis Criticism
• Phenomenological Criticism
• Hermeneutics Criticism
• Reader-Response Criticism
• Feminism Criticism

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• Historical Approaches
• Marxist Criticism
• New Historicism
• Cultural Studies
• Post-Colonial Criticism

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• Characters
• Theorizedalmost all of the schools of criticism
  have their particular theory.
• Adapting theories or principles from their
  disciplines.
• Understanding literature in terms of its
  relations to history,politics gender,social
  class,race,mythology or psychology.
• Critical tendencymany schools of criticism seek
  to influence on the social reality with in their
  historical context.

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• References and Further reading
• Handbook of critical Approaches to
  Literature(Third Edition),Wilfred.L.Guerin(ed).
• Literary Theory from Plato to BarthesAn
  Introductory History ,Richard.Harland,???????????
• Twentieth Century Western Critical Theories, Zhu
  Gang,??????????
• Selective Readings in 20th Century Western
  Critical Theory,???,????????,???????????
• Literary theory,Jonathan Culler,Oxford University
  Press,1997.
• A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary
  Theory,Roman Selden,Harvester Wheatsheaf,1989.

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Part 2

• Part 2 The New Criticism
• Times
• There are four periodsthe
  initiative(1910-1930),the formative(1930-1945),
  the dominant(1945-1957), and normalization(1960s
  to the present). If we take T.E. Hume, a British
  aesthetician, or American poet Ezra Pound as the
  initiator of the New Criticism, then this school
  started in the 1910s.But the New Criticism rose
  formally in the 1930s when some critics
  established their theory in America, and it
  became dominant criticism system in college and
  university English departments in the 1950s.

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• Members
• Founders
• I.A.Richards(1883--1981)
• T.S.Eliot(1888--1965)
• W.Empson.(1906--1984)
• Masters
• John Crowe Ransom(1888--1974)
• Allen Tate(1888--1979)
• Robert Penn Warren(1905--)
• Cleanth Brooks(1906--1994)
• W.K.Wimsatt(1907--1975)
• Rene Wellek(1903--1995)

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• Works
• I.A Richards
• Principles of Literary Criticism(1924)
• Practical CriticismA sturdy of Literary
  Judgment.(1929)
• T.S.Eliot
• Tradition and the Individual Talent.(1917)
• William Empson
• Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
• John Crowe Ransom
• PoetryA Note in Ontology.(1934)
• The New Criticism(1941)

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• Works
• Allen Tate
• Tension in Poetry(1938)
• Cleanth Brooks
• The Language of Paradox(1942)
• The Well-wrought Urn.(1947)
• Understanding Poetry.(1938,with Robert Penn
  Warren)
• Understanding fiction.(1943,with Robert Penn
  Warren)
• Understanding Drama(1945,with Robert B.Heilman)

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• Works
• W.K.Wimsatt
• The Verbal Icon(1954)
• The Intentional Fallacy(1946,with M.C. Beardsley)
• The Affective fallacy(1949,with M.C. Beardsley)
• R.Wellek
• Theory of Literature(1949,with Austin Warren)
• History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950(1986)

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• Ideas
• The New Critics read the individual work of
  literary art as an organic form.They articulated
  the concept that in an organic form there is a
  consistency and an internal vitality that we
  should look for and appreciate.
• One of the most salient considerations of the
  New Critics was emphasis on form,on the work of
  art as an object.

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• The New Critics sought precision and structural
  tightness in the literary workthey favored a
  style and tone that tended toward ironythey
  insisted on the presence within the work of
  everything necessary for its analysisand they
  called for an end to a concern by critics with
  matters outside the work itself--the life of the
  author,the history of his times,or the social and
  economic implications of the literary work.

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• Keywords
• Close reading
• A reading method that is the mark of the New
  Criticism, which takes work as a piece of
  textured literary art, and only read the work
  itself. Close reading begins with sensitivity to
  the words of the text and all their denotative
  and connotative values and implications, then
  looks for structures, patterns and
  interrelationships in the text.

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• Tension
• A reading strategy offered by Allen Tate in
  1938, that means a combination of extension and
  intension. It is also a New Critical standard for
  evaluating poetry and poets.
• Irony
• Irony involves a discrepancy between what
  is said and what is meant. To I. A. Richards
  irony is bringing opposites to form a balance,
  while C. Brooks suggested irony is the stability
  of a context in which the internal pressures
  balance and mutually support each other.

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• The intentional fallacy
• A particular term proposed by Wimsatt and
  Beardsley who argued that the design or intention
  of the author is neither available nor desirable
  as a standard for judging the success of a work
  of literary art, and that a literary work,once
  published,belongs in the public realm of
  language,which gives it an objective existence
  distinct from the authors original idea of it.

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Part 2

• The affective fallacy
• The affective fallacy is proposed by
  Wimsatt and Beardsley that means a confusion
  between the poem and its results(what it is and
  what it does), It begins by trying to drive the
  standard of criticism from the psychological
  effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and
  relativism.The outcome of either fallacy,the
  intentional or the affective,is that the poem
  itself,as an object of specifically critical
  judgment,tends to disappear.

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Part 3

• Part 3 The Psychoanalytical Criticism
• Times
• Started from 1900 when S.Freud published
  his The Interpretation of Dreams, then extended
  to present.There are two important stages in the
  course of psychoanalytical criticism development.
  First is the phase of Freud. Second is the phase
  of Jacque Lacan.

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• Members
• Founder
• Sigmund Freud(1856-1939)
• Adherent
• Melanie Klein(1882-1960)
• Ernest Jones(1879-1958)
• Marie Bonaparte
• Norman Holland(1927- )
• Jacque Lacan(1901-1981)
• Lionel Trilling(1905-1975)

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• Works
• S.Freud
• The interpretation of Dreams (1900)
• Creative writers and Daydreaming
• Jacque Lacan
• The four Fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis
  (1977)
• EcritsA Selection (1966)

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• E.Jones
• Hamlet and Oedipus(1910)
• Norman Holland
• The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968)
• Five Readers Reading (1975)
• Melanie Klein
• Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms(1946)
• Some theoretical conclusion regarding the
  Emotional Life of the infant

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• Freuds ideas
• Freud emphasized the unconscious aspects of the
  human psyche and provided convincing evidence
  that most of our actions are motivated by
  psychological forces over which we have very
  limited control.
• He demonstrated that,like the iceberg,the human
  mind is structured so that its great weight and
  density lie beneath the surface.

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• All human behavior is motivated ultimately by
  what we would call sexuality.Freud designates the
  prime psychic force as libido,or sexual energy.
• His another major premise is that because of the
  powerful social taboos attached to certain sexual
  impulses,many of our desires and memories are
  repressed.

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• Keywords
• Oedipus complex
• Freud borrowed this term from Greece classic
  Sophoclean tragedy in which the hero Oedipus
  unknowingly slew his father and married his
  mother.In psychoanalytical theory Oedipus
  complex derives from the boys unconscious
  rivalry with his father for the love of his
  mother.
• Unconsciousness
• A mental process that is structured beneath
  the surface consciousness,and has no easy access
  to consciousness,but must be inferred,discovered,a
  nd translated into conscious form in some special
  manners.

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• Libido
• Freud called by this name (Libido)the
  energy of those instincts which have to do with
  all that may be comprised under the word
  love.To Freud, loveconsists in sexual love
  with sexual union as its aim,but he did not
  separate from this either the self-love or love
  for parents and children, friendship and love for
  humanity in general, and also devotion to
  concrete objects and to abstract ideas.

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Part 4

• Part 4 Western Marxist Criticism
• Times
• Marxist Literary criticism can be divided
  into three periodsClassical Marxism,early
  Western Marxism ,Late Marxism.Early Western
  Marxism began with Georg Lukacs,then developed by
  Institute of Social Researchin university of
  Frankfurt, Germany,Late Marxism started from
  1960s and extended in the last years of the 20th
  century.

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• Members
• Founders
• Georg Lukacs (1885-1971)
• Antonio Gramsci(1891-1937)
• Adherents
• Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
• Thoedor W Adorno (1903-1969)
• Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
• Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
• Leo Lowenthal(1900-1993)

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• Later
• Louis Althusser (1918-1980)
• Raymond Williams (1921-1988)
• Terry Eagleton (1943-)
• Fredric Jameson (1934-)
• Jurgen Habermas(1929-)

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• Works
• Georg Lukacs
• History and Class Consciousness (1923)
• The Theory of Novel (1920)
• The Historical Novel (1962)
• The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1963)
• Antonio Gramsci
• Prison Notebooks (1977)
• T. W Adrono
• Aesthetic Theory (1970)
• Walter Benjamin
• Charles Baudelaire A Lyric Poet in the Era of
  High Capitalism (1973)

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• R. Williams
• Marxism and Literature (1977)
• Culture and Society (1958)
• T. Eagleton
• Criticism and Ideology (1976)
• Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)
• F.Jameson
• The Political Unconsciousness (1979)
• L. Althusser
• Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971)
• Leo Lowenthal
• On Sociology of Literature (1932)

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• Characters
• Western Marxism turned Marxist criticism into a
  cultural critique from the philosophical
  perspective.
• Interdisciplinarity is another feature of the
  Western Marxism.
• Researching many new fields which Marx and Engels
  had never studied through associated with other
  new theories in 20th century.
• Critical attitude towards new social problems
  emerged in the West world in 20th century.

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• Keywords
• Ideology
• Ideology is idea or belief come from social
  classes in their relations with each other.It is
  seen be rooted in the material conditions of the
  everyday life of classes,because classes are not
  equal,ideology is thought as a distorted
  representation of the truth,or false
  consciousness.

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• Hegemony
• The concept of hegemony was proposed by
  Italian Marxist theorist and activist Antonio
  Gramsci to understand how social groups organize
  their rule.He suggested that rule involves both
  domination and hegemony that is the organization
  of consent based on establishing the legitimacy
  of leadership and developing shared ideas,values,
  beliefs and meanings.

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Part 5

• Part 5 Feminism Criticism
• Times
• There are three phase in
  feminismfirst-wave (late 19th and early 20th
  century ),second-wave and post-modern feminism .
  Second-wave Feminist criticism developed since
  the womens movement beginning in the early
  1960s,and with womens studies programs growing
  in American higher education,Feminism criticism
  divided into many types in 1970s and
  1980s.E.Showalter identified four models of
  themThe biological, linguistic,psychoanalytic
  and cultural.

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Part 5

• Members
• Mary Wollstonecraft(1759-1797)
• Virginia Woolf(1882-1941)
• Simone de Beauvoir(1908-1986)
• Kate Millett
• Elaine Showalter(1941-)
• Toril Moi(1953-)
• Lillian Robinson

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Part 5

• Michele Barrett
• Sandra Gilbert
• Susan Gubar
• Helene Cixous(1937-)
• Jalis Kristeva(1941-)
• Luce Irigaray
• Barbara Smith
• bell hooks

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Part 5

• Works
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1791)
• Virginia Woolf
• A Room of Ones Own(1929)
• Simon de Beauvoir
• The Second Sex(1949)
• Kate Millett
• Sexual Politics(1970)

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• Elaine Showalter
• A Literature of Their Own(1977)
• Helene Cixous
• The Laugh of the Medusa(1975)
• Mary Eagleton
• Feminist Literary Criticism(1991)
• Sandra M.Gilbert and Susan Gubar
• The Madwomen in the Attic(1979)

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• Julia Kristeva
• The Revolution of Poetic Language(1984)
• Luce Irigaray
• This Sex Which Is Not One(1985)
• Sexes and Genealogies(1993)
• Judith Butler
• Gender TroubleFeminism and the Subversion of
  Identity(1990)
• bell hooks
• Feminist TheoryFrom Margin to Center(1984)

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• Ideas
• Feminist literary criticism is a political attack
  upon other modes of criticism and theory,and
  because of its social orientation it moves beyond
  traditional literary criticism.
• Feminists believe that our culture is a
  patriarchal culture,that is,one organized in
  favor of the interests of men.
• Feminist literary critics try to explain how what
  they term engendered power imbalances in a given
  culture are reflected,supported,or challenged by
  literary texts.

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• Feminist critics focus on absence of women from
  discourse as well as meaningful spaces opened by
  womens discourse.
• Feminist critics largely agree on a threefold
  purposeto expose patriarchal premises and
  resulting prejudices,to promote discovery and
  reevaluation of literature by women,and to
  examine social,cultural,and psychosexual contexts
  of literature and criticism.
• Feminist critics wish to make us act as feminist
  readersthat is,to createnew communities of
  writers and readers supported by a language
  spoken for and by women.

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• Keywords
• Gender
• There is an important distinction between
  sex and gender where sex describes biological or
  natural differences,while gender describes the
  social roles of masculinity and femininity,so
  gender is socially constructed.
• Patriarchy
• This was originally an anthropological
  term which describes a social system in which
  older men are entitled to exercise socially
  sanctioned authority over other members of the
  household or kinship group,both women and younger
  men.

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Part 6

• Part 6 Cultural Studies
• Times
• Cultural studies formally began with the
  establishing of Center for Contemporary Cultural
  Studies in Birmingham University in 1964, then
  this method spread all over the world ,and is
  also active today.

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Part 6

• Members
• Founders
• Raymond Williams(1921-1988)
• Richard Hoggart(1918-)
• Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993)
• Adherent
• Stuart Hall(1932-)
• Richard Johnson
• Ien Ang
• Tony Bennett
• John Fiske()

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Part 6

• Works
• Raymond Williams
• The Long Revolution(1965)
• Communications(1962)
• Technology and Cultural Form(1974)
• Culture(1981)
• The Country and the City(1973)
• Richard Hoggart
• The Uses of Literacy(1958)
• Edward Palmer Thompson
• The Making of the English Working Class(1968)

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• Stuart Hall
• The Popular Arts(1964,with Paddy Whamel)
• Resistance Through Rituals(1976,ed with
  T.Jefferson)
• Ien Ang
• Watching Dallas(1985)
• John Fiske
• Understanding Popular Culture(1989)
• Television Culture(1987)

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• Ideas
• In cultural studies the concept of culture has a
  range of meanings which includes both high art
  and everyday life.
• Cultural studies advocates an interdisciplinary
  approach to the study of culture.
• While cultural studies is eclectic in its use of
  theory,using both structuralism and more flexible
  approaches,it advocates those that stress the
  overlapping,hybrid nature of cultures,seeing
  cultures as networks rather than patchworks.

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• Keywords
• Culture
• The term cultureis chiefly used in three
  relatively distinct senses to refer to the arts
  and artistic activitythe learned,primarily
  symbolic features of a particular way of lifeand
  a process of development.In cultural studies this
  term specially refers to a particular way of
  life whether of a people,a period or humanity in
  general.

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• Popular Culture
• Popular culture is type of writing or other
  cultural product,which come into fashion in the
  mass and usually is seen as worthless and
  harmful.But in cultural studies the boundaries
  between popular culture and high culture are in
  the process of dissolving,because they think the
  forms of culture are constructed in social and
  historical context.Popular culture and high
  culture often share similar themes,and a
  particular text can be seen as high culture at
  one point in time and popular culture at
  another,more importantly,popular culture is a
  representation of a way of life within the period
  it emerges.