PERPETUAL PARADOXES: A NEW CRITICAL READING OF “THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE” AND “STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING”

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by R. Frost and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by W. B. Yeats are two of the most representative poems of these poets. Part of their universal appeal lies in their messages and their craftsmanship, and both the qualities relate to the New Critical conception of poetry. Since New Criticism as a literary theory, originating in the early twentieth century, seeks to explore poems through some central points of references in a close reading, this present study takes paradoxes as a central point of reference for a close reading of the two poems and attempts to unveil their poetic enigma by examining what tensions the paradoxes create through the speakers’ grappling with the dilemmas they are facing, how the paradoxes are being resolved or left unresolved, what similarities the two poems share in this regard, and what poetic unity the poems ultimately attain through the development of these paradoxes.

NEW MATERIALISM: PROJECTIONS INTO 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.

Coetzee's Writing Style in his Waiting for the Barbarians

The purpose of this article is to scrutinize Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to discover whether, while writing the novel, the author uses the Rhetoric Triangle. That is, he uses ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos deals with credibility, the trust the audience has in a speaker or writer. Pathos has to do with any text or scene that arouses emotions on the side of its audience or readers, and logos has to do with reasoning when it comes to depicting or writing work. After the investigation, which has been carried out through the New Criticism approach, it has been found out that Coetzee uses the Rhetoric Triangle in the novel. However, all the three components of the rhetoric triangle are not ubiquitous in the novel. Unlike logos and pathos, which are used several times throughout the novel, ethos is scarcely used.

An Analysis of Approaches to Teaching Literature

This study analyzes the approaches to teaching literature in terms of their major concerns in a literary text, the roles of teachers and students that these approaches demand while handling literary texts, and the limitations the approaches have. The data were gathered from existing theoretical and empirical literature and analyzed descriptively and critically. The study shows that the approaches to teaching literature acknowledge literary texts for their own purposes. For example, a language-based approach treats literature as one of the authentic sources of language teaching and learning to acquire better proficiency of language by students. Likewise, information-based and new criticism approaches regard literature as material to facilitate students to acquire the skills of appreciation. Response-based and other critical literary approaches support the analysis of literary texts using different critical lenses. Concerning the roles of students under the adoption of the aforementioned approaches to teaching literature, the reader-response approach could provide enough space for the students’ responses. The study emphasizes the use of multiple approaches for effective teaching learning of literature.

Symbolism in Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

This paper analysed Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber using New Criticism framework on symbolism. Comparisons of drinks, clothes, and colours paralleled the difference between Francis, a wealthy yet unconfident man, and Wilson, a man of masculinity. The next was the sitting positions of the characters in the car in which front seat symbolised authority and power whereas back seat inferiority and lack of confidence. Car symbolised protection, segregation, and power for Margot, whereas camp, and savannah foresaw Francis’ transformation from a wealthy person of comfort (camp) to a man of manly conviction signified with savannah offering wilderness. This transformation was also attributed to Francis’ overcoming obstacles symbolised with a lion and buffalos. Guns and rifles possessed by male characters indicated their dominance with Margot, the only female, practically left-out, except by the end of the story when she wielded a rifle shooting Francis dead.

The “Nature” of American Literature: Race, Place, and Textuality in John Crowe Ransom and Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“The ‘Nature’ of American Literature” explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom’s bid, in “Criticism, Inc.,” for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms “natural reading” and “natural writing,” Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom’s understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies.

Jan Mukařovský ressuscitado: o que resta hoje da Escola de Praga?

O ensaio apresenta um panorama amplo do estruturalismo tcheco tal como desenvolvido pela Escola de Praga, tomando como referência a obra de um de seus principais integrantes: Jan Mukařovský. O estudo também aborda a questão do descaso internacional no que se refere ao reconhecimento dos trabalhos da Escola, particularmente pela intelectualidade francesa. Na correlação da obra de Mukařovský com as teorias (literárias) mais recentes, contempla-se, em linhas gerais, entre outros, aspectos importantes do New Criticism, Pós-estruturalismo e Desconstrução.

Introduction

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.