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Literary Criticism

Abirlal Mukherjee (Mukhopadhyay) 0 Comments

Literary Criticism

Definitions

  1. “Criticism is the play of the mind on the aesthetic qualities of literature, having for its objects an interpretation of literary values.” – Atkins
  2. “Is the work good or bad that is the critics domain” – Victor Hugo
  3. “Criticism is published analysis of qualities and characteristics of a work in literature of fine art” – Edmund Gosse ***
  4. Criticism is a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” Matthew Arnold
  5. Criticism is the play of mind on a work of literature and it consists in asking and answering rational questions about literature. – SM Schreiber.

Types of literary Criticism

  1. Legislative Criticism
  2. Judicial Criticism
  3. Theoretical Criticism
  4. Evaluative Criticism
  5. historical Criticism
  6. Comparative Criticism
  7. Descriptive Criticism
  8. Impressionistic Criticism
  9. Textual or Ontological Criticism
  10. psychological criticism
  11. sociological and marxist Criticism: 20th century. examines a work of art with reference to the social milieu of the author. Wilber Scott says, “Art is not created in a vacuum: it is the work not simply of a person, but of an author fixed in time and space, answering to a community of which he is an important, and articulate part.”
  12. Archetypal Criticism: totemic, mythological, ritualistic criticism.
    1. It interprets the text by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes.
    2. It was most popular during the 50’s and 60s, at the time of Carl Jung, a psychologist.

Schools of Criticism:

  1. Romantic School of Criticism
  2. Descriptive School of critiism
  3. Historical criticism
  4. Shakespeare Criticism

Greek and Roman critics and their works:

  1. Plato (427 BC-348)
    1. He is the father of English criticism – John Drydan said
    2. Plato said that poetry/Any artistic thing should be instructed.
    3. Plato attacked poets like Homar and Hesoid on the ground that they misinterpreted the Gods and Showed them as revengeful, lustful, cruel and as waging war among themselves. Thus according to Plato poetry misrepresents, thus poets are immoral. Thus we live in an unreal world. Imitation of immitation. Artistic works are twice removed from reality.
    4. Works:
      1. Republic
        Symposium
        Laws
        Gorgias
        Phaedrus
  2. Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)
    1. Born at Stagira, Macedonia
    2. at the age 18, got admitted to Plato’s academy
    3. Expert in: politics, drama, physics, medicine, psychology, history, logic, astronomy, ethics, mathematics, rhetoric.
    4. Plato is said to have remarked that his academy consisted of two parts – the body of his students and the brain of Aristotle.
    5. King Philip employed Aristotle the tutor of Alexander.
    6. Established a school ‘the Lyceum’ in Athens, nicknamed ‘Peripatetic School’ meaning the school of strolling philosophers. To this day, the philosophy of Aristotle is known as the Peripatetic system.
    7. Aristotle wrote 400 books covering almost all the aspects of human knowledge and human activity.
    8. Aristotle counters Plato saying Poetry brings about a catharsis of emotions and thus provided a certain kind of pleasure to the reader.
    9. Works:
      1. Alexander
      2. The Custom of Barbarians
      3. organon or The Instrument of Correct thinking
      4. Logic
      5. Ethics
      6. Psysics
      7. Metamorphosis
      8. Poetics
        1. It was a reply to Plato
        2. Tries to define different kinds of poetry: Epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry
        3. According to Aristotle tragedy came from the efforts of poets to present men as nobler or better than they are in real life. Comedy shows the lower type of a person, shows human worse than average.
        4. Defines poetry as a medium of imitation. Imitate life through character, emotion, or action.
        5. Poetry/art must delight.
        6. Definition of Tragedy:
      9. Rhetorics
  3. Longinus
    1. Works:
      1. On The Sublime
      2. First presented by Robertello, a modern critic in 1554
  4. Horace
    1. Works:
      1. Ars Poetica:
        1. Written in 19 BC
        2. Written in apistle dedicated to Lucious Pissos, also called Apsitle to Pissos
        3. The title was given by Quintillien’s famous work Instauratio Oratorio meaning Arts of Poetry.
        4. Translated Ben Johnson, posthumosly published.
      2. Epistles(Three Books)
      3. Satires(Two Books)
        1. criticised the epiqurian way of living life.
      4. Odes(Four Books)
        1. Deal with wine, women, religion, happiness, sacrifice
        2. Lord Alfred Tennyson praised Horace.
      5. Terms
        1. Ab Ovo: Story can be started From the beginning
        2. In Medias Res: story can be started From the beginning
        3. Picura Poesis: Poetry and painting are same thing
        4. Decorum: Horace believed in Aristotle’s to work on writing: collection, selection and arrangement theory. Appropriateness of writing. great thought must match great expectations. T.S Eliot also used the concept calling it unification of sensibility.
        5. Poetic License: poets have a license to innovate new words.
        6. Purple Patch: Unnecessary literary figures/divices in one paragraph.
        7. Carpe Diem: Last day of your life, live it like that. Found in ‘To His Coy Mistress’
        8. Utile Dulci: Literature must be useful and delightable.
        9. Deus Ex Machina: Euripidies coined the term, god as a machine. He called god always in his story. Horace criticized his unnecessary calling of God.
        10. Delectando/Pariterque Monendo: Literature is written for Happiness and Pleasure

Elizabethan Criticism

  1. George Gascoigne
    1. Works:
      1. Notes of Instruction
        1. First appeared in his work: The Posies of George Gascoigne, corrected, perfected and augmented by the Author 1575
        2. Considered to be the first English manual of versification.
        3. These notes were written on the request of Master Eduardo Donati
        4. The work concerns ‘The making of verse or hyme in English’. It discusses English verse and meter.
        5. Michel Mack stated that the book is almost a “Handbook written by a poet for other poets, offering practical advice for keeping audience entertained.”
        6. **Gascoigne also emphasises ingenuity and invention as qualities of a good poet. A poem must reflect Originality and inventions.
  2. William Webbe
    1. Works:
      1. Discourse of English Poetry Together with the Author’s Judgement Touching the Reformation of Our English Verse 1586
        1. The work was dedicated to his patron, Edward Sulyard.
        2. Webbe attempts a historical survey of poetry and also reviews poetry of his day.
        3. He abuses”This tinkerly verse, which we call hymn” as of barbarous origin and comments on the works of his contemporaries, expressing enthusiasm for Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calender and Phaer’s translation of Virgil.

George Puttenham

  1. The Arte of English Poesie 1589
    1. It is believed to be the most ambitious and comprehensive undertaking in Elizabethan criticism.
    2. Divided into three books:
      1. The first book contains a history of poetry and discusses diverse kinds of poetry. Puttenham specially mentions Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry, Earl of Surrey as the first reformers of our English metre
      2. The second book contains an account of 5 types of English verse structure: the Staffe, the Measure, Concord or Symphony, Situation and Figure
      3. The third book discusses figure of speech.

Philip Sidney

Works
  1. An Apology for Poetry / The Defence of Poesie
    1. Originally published in two different titles:
      1. The Defence of Poesie/ An Apology for Poetry
      2. The reason for the two different titles is the complicated publishing history.
      3. Three editions in 1595: the first appearence in 1595 was of William Ponsonby’s The Defence of Poesie, followed by Hery Olney’s publication of An Apology for Poetry. The third edition was also by Ponsonby
      4. a fourth edition brought out by Sidney’s sister in 1598
    2. It was partly written as a response to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse
      1. Gosson has stated that a man could employ his time more usefully than in Poetry, that is the ‘mother of lies’, it is immoral and Plato was right in banishing poets from his ideal commonwealth.
      2. Sidney defends saying that poetry alone teaches and moves virtue and therefore a man can not better spend his time than in it.
    3. Sidney says poetry id used from ancient days to communicate ideas by the philosophers like Plato and even historians.
    4. Sidney’s Apology is the first serious attempt to apply the classical rules to English poetry.
    5. Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry is a spirited defense of poetry against all the charges laid against it.

Thomas Campion
Samuel Daniel

Enlightenment Age

  1. John Dryden
  2. Alexander Pope
  3. Samuel Johnson
  4. Thomas Hobbes
  5. John Locke
  6. Glambattista Vico
  7. Edmund Burke
  8. Edward Gibbon
  9. Adam Smith

Romantic Critics

  1. William Wordsworth
  2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Roman Catholic

  1. George Eliot
  2. Friedrich Nietsche
  3. G.M Hopkins
  4. Henry James
  5. Matthew Arnold
  6. T.S Eliot
  7. I.A Richards
  8. Irving Babbit

 

Major Texts

  1. The Republic – Plato
  2. Book III
  3. Book X
  4. Poetics – Aristotle.
  5. On the Sublime – Longinus
  6. An Apology for Poetry – Sir Philip Sidney.
  7. An Essay of Dramatic Poesy – John Dryden.
  8. An Essay on Criticism – Alexander Pope
  9. Biographia Literaria – S.T. Coleridge
  10. Preface to Lyrical Ballads – William Wordsworth
  11. The Study of Poetry – Mathew Arnold
  12. Essays of T.S.Eliot
  13. Death of the Author Who is an Author? – Michel Foucault
  14. Structure, Sign and Play of Human Sciences – Jacques Darrida
  15. The Formation of the Intellectuals – Antonio Gramsci
  16. Resonance and Wonder (From Learning to Curse)- Stephen Greenblatt
  17. Imagined Communities – Benedict Anderson
  18. Cultural Identity and Diaspora (from Theorizing Diaspora)  – Stuart Hall
  19. The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora – Vijay Mishra
  20. ‘Introduction’ to Orientalism – Edward Said
  21. Can Subaltern Speak – Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak
  22. The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon
  23. Gender Trouble – Judith Butler
  24. Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis (The Ecocriticism Reader)

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Posted in English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, NTA UGC NET English Literature

About the Author: Abirlal Mukherjee (Mukhopadhyay)

Assistant Professor (Amity University), Digital Humanist
Ph.D in English (GITAM, India), M.A. and B.A. in English (B.C.C., B.K.U, India), P.G.D.E. -I by Research (B.C.U, UK), TESOL Prof. Certification (Arizona State University, USA)

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