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Forerunners
Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards TERM 2
Matthew Arnold
DEFINITION 2 Philosophy and religion would be replaced by poetry in modern society and who held that culture could mount a humanistic defense against destructive anarchy of urban, industrialized societies. Profound, reverential regard for literary works themselves, concern with "the text itself". Literary works as icons of human value. TERM 3
T.S. Eliot
DEFINITION 3 The writer must have historical sense (sense of traditio of the writing they situate themselves) and depersonalization. TERM 4
I.A. Richards
DEFINITION 4 'practical criticism' led in time to the practices ofclose reading( sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read), what is often thought of as the beginning of modern literary criticism, Father of New Criticism TERM 5
American New Critics
DEFINITION 5 close reading, particularly ofpoetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object, Cleanth Brooks, John Crow Ransom
Cleanth Brooks
New Criticism, practical essay TERM 7
John Crowe
Ransom
DEFINITION 7 Lit/Criticism is the work of "professionals", New Criticism TERM 8
Moral Formalism
DEFINITION 8 F.R. Leavis, "valuation was the principal concern of criticism", "must ensure that English literature should be a living reality operating as an informing spirit in society, and that criticism should involve the shaping of contemporary sensibility" TERM 9
F.R. Leavis
DEFINITION 9 "criticism and philosophy are quite separate activities and the business of the critic is to attain a peculiar completeness of response to enter into possession of the given poem", concerned with the text itself, not theory. " valuation was the principal concern of criticism", " must ensure that English literature should be a living reality operating as an informing spirit in society, and that criticism should involve the shaping of contemporary sensibility" TERM 10
Russian Formalism
DEFINITION 10 Seek "scientific" description of specific literariness of literary language, "defamiliarizaiton", Mikhail Bakhtin, " exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches"
Structuralism
Goal of literary study: discover and describe underlying system that generates specific works of "literature". Specific works themselves of less interest., Ferdinand Saussure, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov TERM 17
Ferdinand Saussure
DEFINITION 17 Structuralist, linguistic form is arbitrary, and therefore all languages function in a similar fashion, a language is arbitrary because it is systematic in that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Also, all languages have their own concepts and sound images (or signifieds and signifiers), languages have a relational conception of their elements: words and their meanings are defined by comparing and contrasting their meanings to one another TERM 18
Roland Barthes
DEFINITION 18 Structuralist, concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be viewed alonglinguisticlines, Functions are the elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an action, and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality. TERM 19
Tvetan Todorov
DEFINITION 19 Structuralist, "system of literary narrative described in terms of syntactic rules of language TERM 20
Marxist Theories
DEFINITION 20 notion of history as dialectical progression, Hegel, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, Antonio Gramsci
Hegel
Marxist TERM 22
Theodor Adorno
DEFINITION 22 Frankfurt School TERM 23
Frankfurt School
DEFINITION 23 raditional Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development ofcapitalistsocieties in the twentieth century, literary works did not aspire to the formal coherence and progressive content valued by Lukacs, sought, by distancing and estranging reality, to prevent the easyabsorptionof new insights or co-option of the art work by consumer society TERM 24
Louis Althusser
DEFINITION 24 "Structuralist Marxist", art not simply a form of ideology, imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, imaginary consciousness helps makes sense of the world, but also masks or represses the real relationship to it. TERM 25
Pierre Macherey
DEFINITION 25 "Structuralist Marxist", regards text as a production in which disparate materials are worked over and changed in the process. Materials are not "free implements". Text is never fully aware of what it is doing.
Woolf
Feminist theorist, concerned with women's material disadvantages compared to men, argues women's writing should explore female experience in its own right and not form a comparative assessment of women's experience in relation to men's. TERM 32
De Beauvoir
DEFINITION 32 Feminist theorist, recognizes vast differences between the interests of the two sexes and in its assault on men's biological, psychological, as well as economic, discrimination against women. TERM 33
Millet
DEFINITION 33 2nd wave feminist, Ideological indoctrination as much as economic inequality is the cause of women's oppression. Women perpetuate the attitudes as well, Exposes "oppressive representations of sexuality in male fiction. TERM 34
Showalter
DEFINITION 34 2nd wave feminist, while there is is no fixed or innate female sexuality or female imagination, there is nevertheless a profound difference between women's writings and men's, and that whole tradition of writing has been neglectedbymale critics TERM 35
Cixous
DEFINITION 35 French feminist, calls for women to put their 'bodies' in their writing, woman must uncensor herself and throw of her guilt, but rejects theory.
Kristeva
French Feminist, Woman is the silence or incoherence of the pre-discursive: she is the 'other,' which stands outside and threatens to disrupt theconscious(rational) order of speech. TERM 37
Irigaray
DEFINITION 37 French Feminist, patriarchal oppression of women is founded on the type of negative constructions associated with Freud's theory of female sexuality
