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Description
Flashcards by Lisza Neumeier, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Lisza Neumeier
over 7 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| The Sonnet Shakespearean/English sonnet vs. Petrarchan/Italian sonnet rhyme scheme? how many lines? theme? | |
| Quatrain German | Vierzeiter |
| literary theories quote about theoretical interpretations can we analize a text without any knowledge about literary theories? | there is no such thing as a nontheoretical interpretation!!!!! We may not be aware of the theoretical assumptions that guide our thinking, but those assumptions are there nevertheless. [...] the interpretations of literature we produce before we study critical theory may seem completely personal and natural, but they are based on beliefs—beliefs about literature, about education, about language, about selfhood—that permeate our culture and we therefore take for granted.” (4) |
| literary theories Can we mix literary theories? | “Critical theories are not isolated entities, completely different from one another, separable into tidy bins, like the tubs of tulips, daffodils, and carnations we see at the florist. It would be more useful to think of theories, to continue the metaphor, as mixed bouquets, each of which can contain a few of the flowers that predominate in or that serve different purposes in other bouquets.” (5) |
| Close reading -Pope's opening moves (4) -Pope's core questions | • Pope’s opening moves – Notice – Pattern – Contrast – Feeling • Pope’s core questions – What is it about? – What kind of text is it? – Who is addressing whom? – Where and when is the text located in place and time? – How precisely is it done? – Why do you think it was written – and why do you respond as you do? – What if the text were changed? > What? Who? When? Where? How? Why? What if? |
| author-oriented approaches (historical) reality as context text-oriented approaches reader-oriented approaches other texts as context diagram | |
| text-oriented approaches | New Criticism Formalist/structuralist approaches Poststructuralism/Deconstruction |
| New Criticism | -close reading (mostly of poems and short stories) -Intentional Fallacy & Affective Fallacy --> find meaning only in the words on the page -focus on unity of literary works & how individual elements contributed to a unified whole (key terms: abiguity, paradox, irony, connotation, poetic imagery) -study poetry as aesthetic objects (rather than historical documents) -not concerned with politics or history If you are given a short literary text and asked to respond to ‘the words on the page’ (without further information) then [the] approach [of New Criticism is] being adopted.” (Pope 136) |
| Russian Formalism // Functionalism This flashcard: Formalism next one: Functionalism | Formalism: -Literariness of literature --> What makes literature literary? (text-centered) -focus on language and devices -goal to establish general principles and theories and to identify underlying rules -key terms: foregrounding/backgrounding, defamiliarization |
| Functionalism | -historicized Formalist notions: particular structures and effects at particular historical moments -literature and art are historical and subject to change “If you are mainly concerned with the literary devices and structures of a text, your approach is broadly ‘formal’. If you then ask about the main effects and significance of these devices, your approach becomes more ‘functional’.” (Pope 140) |
| Brecht's Epic Theatre | -against realist traditions that encourage empathy and identification -Marxist political orientation -'defamiliarization' and 'laying bare of the devices' > alienation effect, making-strange effects (Verfremdungseffekte) These encourage reflection and critical view |
| Structuralist Approach | -Ferdinand des Saussure & structural linguistics -focus on the underlying structures (structuralism): langue/parole: structure of language vs. individual utterances (or in literature: structure of short stories vs. individual short story) -study the ''conventions that make literary works possible; it seeks not to produce new interpretations of works but to understand how they can have meanings and effects that they do'' (structure of genres, structure of nar) also in anthropology, film studies |
| Post-Structuralist Approach // Deconstruction quotes | “impossibility of describing a complete or coherent signifying system, since systems are always changing” • “teasing out of warring forces of signification within a text” (Barbara Johnson), “to reveal the complex operations of the ideologies of which the text is constructed” (Tyson 259) |
| Deconstruction | “Deconstruction is most simply defined as a critique of the hierarchical oppositions that have structured Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body, literal/metaphorical, speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, form/meaning. To deconstruct an opposition is to show that it is not natural and inevitable but a construction” (Culler 127) – goal: give it a different structure and functioning |
| Post-Structuralist Approach // Deconstruction What do we ask? | – What are the main contrasts and tensions, especially the binary oppositions, through which the text seems to operate? Which of these are preferred? – Are there any larger ‘narratives’ which the text seems to draw on or contribute to? |
| Reading with/against the grain | “Reading with the grain thus implies seeing what the author [the text] intended us to see, while reading against the grain implies seeing something the author [the text] didn’t intend, something of which he or she [it] was unaware.” (Tyson 7) > resistant reading > e.g. The Time Machine’s dystopian (post-)capitalist future vs. The Time Traveller’s ambivalent towards the future working class (i.e. the new species of man – the Morlocks) |
| Reader-oriented approaches | Phenomenology Reception Aesthetics Reader-Response Criticism |
| Reader-Response Criticism What does it look at? two beliefs | how readers produce meaning when reading a text > active role – “reader‐response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted (ausgelassen) from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature.” (Tyson 170) |
| Reader-Response Criticism sample questions | – How, exactly does the text’s indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit) function as a stimulus to interpretation? (e.g. What events are omitted or unexplained? What images might have multiple associations?) – What does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about the critics who interpreted that text and/or about the reading experience produced by that text? |
| (Historical) reality as context (approaches) | Marxist approaches New Historicism/Cultural Materialism Feminist/Gender Studies approaches |
| Marxist Approach(es) what? authors | “For Marxism, literature does not exist in some timeless, aesthetic realm as an object to be passively contemplated. Rather, like all cultural manifestations, it is a product of the socioeconomic and hence ideological conditions of the time and place in which it was written, whether or not the author intended it so. Because human beings are themselves products of their socioeconomic and ideological environment, it is assumed that authors cannot help but create works that embody ideology in some form.” (Tyson 66) Karl Marx, Louis Althusser |
| Marxist approach diagram economic base & ideological superstructure | economic base & ideological superstructure: “how certain organisations of labour and materials affect and are affected by institutions” (law, religion, education, media, state) -to interpret cultural products is to relate them back to base |
| Marxist approach diagram | |
| Marxist Approach(es) Sample questions | – Does the work reinforce (intentionally or not) capitalist, imperialist, or classist values? – How might the work be seen as a critique of capitalism, imperialism, or classism? – Is the work ideologically conflicted? – How does the literary work reflect (intentionally or not) the socioeconomic conditions of the time in which it was written and/or the time in which it is set, and what do those conditions reveal about the history of class struggle? |
| New Historicism (US) / Cultural Materialism (UK) author? | New Historicism: “[...] literary texts are cultural artifacts that can tell us something about the interplay of discourses, the web of social meanings, operating in the time and place in which the text was written. And they can do so because the literary text is itself part of the interplay of discourses, a thread in the dynamic web of social meaning.“ – focus is not on accuracy or how true to historical facts a text is (≠ traditional historical criticism) New Historicism & Cultural Materialism share a number of similarities, but the latter is more politically oriented (a form of Marxist analysis) Michel Foucault |
| New Historicism (US) / Cultural Materialism (UK) | – How does the literary text function as part of a continuum with other historical and cultural texts from the same period? – How does the text promote ideologies that support and/or undermine the prevailing power structures of the time and place in which it was written and/or interpreted? – What does the literary work suggest about the experience of groups of people who have been ignored, underrepresented, or misrepresented by traditional history? |
| Post-Colonial Approach | -European colonization and its aftermath -“[...] postcolonial criticism seeks to understand the operations—politically, socially, culturally, and psychologically—of colonialist and anticolonialist ideologies.” (Tyson 418) --> hegemony of Western discourses (Eg. Orientalism) and the possibilities of resistance --> formation of colonial and post-colonial subjects/identities |
| Post-Colonial Approach Sample questions | -How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression? -What does the text reveal about the problematics of postcolonial identity? -What does the text reveal about the poiltics/and or psychology of anticolonialist resistance. -What does the text reveal about the operations of cultural difference in shaping our perceptions of ourselves, others and the world in which we live? |
| Minority Discourse | • Literatures of ethnic minorities, e.g. African-American, Latino/a, Chicano/a, Asian-American, Native American writing • cultural traditions (and their relationship to the traditional canon) |
| Feminist Theory | -feminist criticism examines the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social and psychological oppression of women -sex/gender: male/female - masculine/feminie (One is not born a woman, one becomes one. Simone de Beauvoir) -binary opposition of man/woman -gynocriticism (feminist criticism concerned with women authors and the representation of women's experience) |
| gynocriticism | feminist criticism concerned with women authors and the representation of women's experience |
| Feminist Theory Sample questions | -What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politcally, socially or psychologically) of patriarchy? How are women portrayed? -How is the work 'gendered'? -What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics tell us about the operations of patriarch? |
| Queer Theory | • “[...] the word queer is used to indicate a specific theoretical perspective. [...] However, for queer theory, categories of sexuality cannot be defined by such simple oppositions as homosexual/heterosexual. [...] queer theory defines individual sexuality as a fluid, fragmented, dynamic collectivity of possible sexualities.” (Tyson 336) -the marginal is used to analyze the cultural construction of the centre, i.e. heterosexual normativity |
| Queer Theory sample questions | -How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in the texts that are apparently heterosexual? -How might the works of heterosexual wirters be reread to reveal an unspoken or unconscious lesbian, gay or queer presence? -What does the work reveal about the operations of heterosexism? -How does the literary text illustrate the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual? |
| Author oriented approaches | Biographical approaches Psychoanalytical approaches (Queer theory) |
| Psychoanalytic Approach | -Mode of interpretations as well as theory about language, identity and the subject -Metalanguage/technical vocabulary -family, sexuality, relationships, death -key terms: (un-)conscious, condensation, displacement, deire, ego, id, super-ego, represseion, lack, uncanny, Oedipus complex, dreams |
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