Theorizing Literature
Housekeeping
- Reading Quiz (5 minutes)
- Today we’ll go over our weekly online assignment (note your roles) and practice critical engagement with our readings!
- No class next week, but please take the time to read the instructions for Discussion Leaders and signing up to join a group.
The Art of Annotating Texts
- What are we trying to accomplish when we make marginal notes? What about highlights?
- What strategies did you use for annotating this week’s reading assignments?
- Types of Questions to consider:
- Structural — about how the text is organized; how the parts speak to the whole
- Knowledge — understanding basics pacing; narrator/poet; motivation; history
- Compression — looking for clarification, understanding words, ideas, plot
- Critical — question the logic of the text, talk back; laugh at its logic; present new ideas
- Investigative — questions that lead to more questions, probably some research down the line
- Marginal notes are not just for serious inquiry, though; they help you retain information, engage with the reading beyond consuming word jumbles, and actually enjoy your task. As such, you should write anything that may help you remember what you found compelling about this text–in whichever shorthand works for you.
- However, we’ll have some specific goals for our Weekly Annotations…
What is Literature, redux
- is literature bound by rules created by critics? Is literature anything that has an audience?
- Do we need theory to appreciate literature?
- Where do authors’ intentions fit? (some great budding New Critics in the forums!)
- “Readers are what makes literature”
LAUGHING by Dan Rhodes
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My girlfriend died laughing at one of my funny faces. Her friends were kind, and told me I shouldn’t feel guilty; that she would have wanted to die that way. They weren’t there as her musical laughter turned to chokes, grunts and her death rattle. When I stopped grieving I found a beautiful new girl to love. She died laughing at a joke I made about her feet. The next one passed away similarly. My last girlfriend didn’t die. She left me. She said we never had any fun together. That she wanted a man with a sense of humour.
As I picked them up, I found this stuck under the table. #TwitterFiction
From #TwitterFiction (continued…)
Discussion: Eliot and Wimsatt & Beardsley
Small group work: in groups of 3-4, write a short summary (about 5 sentences) of the W&B which could feature in an annotated bibliography. You might take some of the questions below into consideration.
- “We 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 it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes.”
- What prompted the author(s) to write this piece? What were they trying to accomplish?
- What ideas does the text reject? Which ones does it propose in their place?
- Where can we find the central argument of the work — that is, not just where the authors are responding to others’ ideas but actually proposing something new?
- “What is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or in the general science of psychology.”
- What do the authors have against “aesthetic criticism”? Why do they find this faulty?
- “All this, however, would appear to belong to an art separate from criticism‑to a psychological discipline, a system of self‑development, a yoga, which the young poet perhaps does well to notice, but which is something different from the public art of evaluating poems.”
- What is the contrast the writers pose between terms like “authenticity”; “sincerity”; “fidelity” AND “integrity,” “unity,” and “function”?
New Criticism (lecture slides)
Resumé
Razors pain you
Rivers are damp
Acids stain you
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful
Nooses give
Gas smells awful
You might as well live.
Ben Jonson. — WHY I WRITE NOT OF LOVE.
| SOME act of LOVE’S bound to rehearse, I thought to bind him in my verse : Which when he felt, Away, quoth he, Can poets hope to fetter me ? It is enough, they once did get 5 Mars and my mother, in their net : I wear not these my wings in vain. With which he fled me ; and again, Into my rhymes could ne’er be got By any art : then wonder not, 10 That since, my numbers are so cold, When Love is fled, and I grow cold. |
Next Week
- Read the Discussion Leader instructions and sign up for a date
In Two Weeks
- Read TiP Chapter 3, “Formalism”
- Read Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
- Read Ralegh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”
- Bring a poem to class that you think defies traditional close reading
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