Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Alastair Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Family Resemblances ◽  
Modern Novels ◽  
Sister Arts

This introductory chapter provides a brief background of three schools of literary criticism: New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction. These three schools exposed serious concerns, emphasizing neglected aspects of literature. The chapters in this book focus on genre, realism, and relations with visual art. Concepts of genre figure in any sound literary theory. Meanwhile, chapters on realism demonstrate how the development of representation, far from being one of steadily improving verisimilitude, has gone through several distinct sorts of realism. They distinguish medieval and Renaissance realisms from the realism of pre-modern novels. Finally, chapters on visual art consider how conventions of visual art offer essential parallels with those of literature. The ‘sister arts’ display many family resemblances—obviously so in imagery, less obviously in their strategies of realism. The essays also look at emblems and emblematic poems.

scholarly journals NEW MATERIALISM: PROJECTIONS INTO LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-159
Author(s):  
Mariya Shymchyshyn
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Literary Theory And Criticism

The article considers the recent (re)turn to materiality in philosophy and theory, in particular, such schools as speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. They offer rethinking of objects and criticism of anthropocentric worldview. The attention to materiality privileges matter, body, and nature. Theorists of New materialism reject the binary oppositions (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, etc.) and insist on intra-action as a new materialist orientation. The author argues that the new materialist critique of conventional critique will be useful for literary theory and criticism. According to Latour, critique should be productive and collaborative. As far as critical judgments rely on thelogic of representation that in its turn is based on similarity, analogy and opposition they restrict the analytic enterprise. Moreover, it is necessary to rethink conventional practices of interpretation and explanation. In this context, K. Barad proposes to substitute these strategies with the practice of ‘diffraction’. In the second part of the article, the author analyzes Graham Harman’s article The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer:Object-Oriented Literary Criticism. We pay attention to Harman’s critique of New Criticism, New Historicism, and Deconstruction in their contrast to object-oriented philosophy. In his analysis of New Criticism, Harman figures out the taxonomic fallacy within this theory. He argues against the idea that only poetry has all the non-prose sense while other disciplines have the literal sense. His second argument against New Criticism problematizes the unity of all the elementsin a literary work. Harman outlines the assumptions of New Historicism and points out that it turns everything into interrelated influences. Instead, he argues that contextuality is not universal. In his criticism of Deconstruction Harman underlines that Derrida wrongly believes that ontological realism automatically entails an epistemological realism. In his turn, Harman insists that the thing is deeper than its interactions are.

Veiled Theory: The Transmutation of Anthropology in T. S. Eliot's Critical Method

Paragraph ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Trexler
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Institutional Framework ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Human History ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Historical Moment

While literary criticism is often seen as an unself-reflective forerunner to literary theory, this article argues that T.S. Eliot's theory of critical practice was a philosophically informed methodology of reading designed to create a disciplinary and institutional framework. To reconstruct this theory, it enriches theoretical methodology with intellectual and institutional history. Specifically, the article argues that Eliot's early critical theory depended on the paradigms of anthropology and occultism, developed during his philosophical investigation of anthropology and Leibniz. From this investigation, Eliot created an occult project that used spiritual monads as facts to progress toward the Absolute. The article goes on to argue that Eliot's methodology of reading was shaped by anthropology's and occultism's paradigms of non-academic, non-specialist reading societies that sought a super-historic position in human history through individual progress. The reconstruction of Eliot's intellectual and institutional framework for reading reveals a historical moment with sharp differences and surprising similarities to the present.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Romantic Capabilities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Ecological Design ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Contemporary Media

Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen’s novels and their imaginary country estates. Blake emerges from the study as an important theorist of how viral media can be used to undermine law, someone whose art deregulates through the medium of its audiences’ heterogeneous tastes and conflicting demands for wisdom. Scott’s novels are shown to have fostered a new experience of vision and understanding of frame that helped launch modern immersive media. Finally, Austenian realism is revealed as a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends.

Southern Enclosure as American Literature

Black Market ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 138-183
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
New Deal ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Paper Money ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Racial History

Set against the backdrop of Southern land grabs in the 1830s and again in the 1930s that were meant to sustain the cotton economy, this chapter studies the literary representation of the poor whites who were side-lined by the slave plantation’s expansion and modernization, and who were then remade into a national folk by literary elites. Facilitated by these Southern enclosures, the ambivalent canonization of poor whites as the nation’s folk would have a decisive and determining influence on the constitution—and the racial covenant—of American literature, and not only on its Americaness but also on its literariness. Slavery was the condition of possibility for this literature, but its role, along with that of the enslaved, was silenced. From frontier humor to the New Criticism, this chapter reveals a submerged racial history beneath the canonization of U.S. national literature, which was undertaken in the early twentieth century in U.S. literary criticism, explainingthe roleof New Deal photography, of paper money and paperwork, and modernism in literary style in the constitution of American literature as both discipline and object.

Cavell, Stanley (1926–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Theory Of Value

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell has held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University since 1963. The range, diversity and distinctiveness of his writings are unparalleled in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. As well as publishing essays on modernist painting and music, he has created a substantial body of work in film studies, literary theory and literary criticism; he has introduced new and fruitful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship with philosophy; and his work on Heidegger and Derrida, taken together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, have defined new possibilities for a distinctively American contribution to philosophical culture. This complex oeuvre is unified by a set of thematic concerns – relating to scepticism and moral perfectionism – which are rooted in Cavell’s commitment to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, as represented in the work of J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein.

The Pluralist Interpretation of Chinese Marxist Aesthetics in Contemporary European Scholarship

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Qilin Fu ◽  
Shubo Gao
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Variation Theory ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Universal Applicability

In Europe there have appeared several important collections on Marxist literary theory, such as Francis Mulhern’s Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992) and Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne’s Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996). However, Chinese voices are not included at all in these volumes. Maybe this lacuna results from a lack of awareness of Chinese Marxist aesthetics on the part of most European literary historians and critics. In this article, we seek to discuss the circumstances of European scholars’ contacts with Chinese Marxist aesthetics, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. Starting from the variation theory perspective proposed by Shunqing Cao we will discuss how European scholars read and misread what they perceived as the meaning and universal applicability of what was happening in China at the time. The discussion is divided into three parts: the utopian interpretation of the Chinese theory of revolution in France, the critical reception by Eastern European Marxists, and the sympathetic interpretation by sinologists such as the Dutch diplomat and literary scholar Douwe Fokkema.

Narratology in the Twenty-First Century: The Cognitive Approach to Narrative

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 924-930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Fludernik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
The Waves

Literary theory in the twentieth century was heavily influenced by linguistics. The structuralist model that set the waves of literary theories in motion originated in Saussurean linguistics and its Jakobsonian elaborations. One could argue that until the 1980s all literary theory, and all linguistics for that matter, was based on an analysis of langue, or the system of language or literature or text, to the detriment of parole, the practices, contexts, and negotiations of speakers, writers, and readers. The structuralist model, with its theoretical expansion of close-reading practices, already entrenched in the wake of the New Criticism, generalized the frame of mind that was soon to become the bogeyman of poststructuralist and cultural studies attacks. The formula could be summarized as No history, no ethics, no themes, no aesthetics, and no context—period.

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