Term
| “Literature, like the physical world, is ‘an inexhaustible source’ of new discoveries; and criticism, like physics, can be assumed to be a ‘totally intelligible’ science, an organized body of knowledge.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “Our first step, therefore, is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism: that is, talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowledge." |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “The poet’s task is to deliver the poem in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations, his desire for self-expression and all the other navel-strings and feeding tubes of his ego.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “The texture of any great work of art is complex and ambiguous , and in unravelling the complexities we may take in as much history and philosophy as we please, if the subject of our study remains at the center. If it does not, we may find that in our anxiety to write about literature we have forgotten how to read it.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “The myth is the central informing power that gives ______ significance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle. Hence the myth is ______.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism (archetypal) |
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Term
| “Hence art, which Plato called a dream for awakened minds, seems to have as its final cause the resolution of the antithesis, the mingling of the sun and the hero, the realizing of a world in which the inner desire and the outward circumstance coincide." |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “The importance of the god or hero in the myth lies in the fact that such characters, who are conceived in human likeness and yet have more power over nature, gradually build up the vision of an omnipotent personal community beyond an indifferent nature.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “Art deals not with the real but with the conceivable; and criticism, though it will eventually have to have some theory of conceivability can never be justified in trying to develop, much less assume, any theory of actuality.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “God for the critic, whether he finds him in Paradise Lost or the Bible , is a character in a human story and for the critic all epiphanies are explained , not in terms of the riddle of a possessing god or devil, but as mental phenomena closely associated in their origin with dreams.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “Patterns of imagery, on the other hand, or fragments of significance are oracular in origin, and derive from the epiphanic moment, the flash of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time...” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “In ritual, then, we may find the origin of narrative, a ritual being a temporal sequence of acts in which the conscious meaning or significance is latent: it can be seen by an observer, but is largely concealed from the participators themselves.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “This inductive movement towards the ______ is a process of backing up, as it were, from structural analysis, as we back up from a painting if we want to see composition instead of brushwork.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism (archetype) |
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Term
“Criticism, as a science, is totally intelligible; literature, as the subject of a science, is, so far as we know, an inexhaustible source of new critical discoveries and would be even if new works of literature ceased to be written. If so, then the search for a limiting principle in literature in order to discourage the development of criticism is mistaken.”
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “More important is the fact that every poet has his private mythology, his own spetroscopic band or peculiar formation of symbols, much of which he is quite unconscious.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “The texture of any great work of art is complex and ambiguous , and in unravelling the complexities we may take in as much history and philosophy as we please, if the subject of our study remains at the center. If it does not, we may find that in our anxiety to write about literature we have forgotten how to read it.” |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye-Archetypal Criticism |
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Term
| “We may perhaps go so far as to assert that the _________ structure of activity is mysterious to us just because it is universal—rather as the four-dimensional structure of space-time is mysterious because we cannot get outside it to look at it” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker (Trinitarian) |
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Term
| “We are arguing on the analogy of something perfectly familiar to our experience. The implication is that we find the three-fold structure in ourselves (who are the Book as Read) because that is the actual structure of the universe (which is the Book as Written), and that it is in the universe because it is in God’s Idea about the universe (the Book as Thought)” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| In fact the Idea—or rather the writer’s realization of his own idea—does precede any mental or physical work upon the materials or on the course of the story within a time-series” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| “Everything that is conscious, everything that has to do with form and time, and everything that has to do with process, belongs to the working of the Energy or Activity or Word” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| The _________ is “the means by which the Activity is communicated to other readers and which produces a corresponding response in them. In fact, from the reader’s point of view, it is the book” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker (Creative Power) |
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Term
| “He can, by an act of the intellect, distinguish the persons but he cannot by any means divide the substance. How could he? He cannot know the Idea, except by the Power interpreting his own Activity to him; he knows the Activity only as it reveals the Idea in Power; he knows the Power only as the revelation of the Idea in the Activity” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| “The creative act, that is, does not depend for its fulfillment upon its manifestation in a material creation” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| But once the Idea has entered into other minds, it will tend to reincarnate itself there with ever-increasing Energy and ever-increasing Power. It may for some time incarnate itself only in more words, more books, more speeches; but the day comes when it incarnates itself in actions, and this is its day of judgment” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| “The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which former streams of beauty, emotion, and reflection are directed. This view is adopted, and perhaps carried to excess, by writers like T.S. Eliot, some of whose poems are a close web of quotations and adaptations, chosen for their associative value; or like James Joyce, who makes great use of the associative value of sounds and syllables. The criterion is, not whether the associations are called up, but whether the spirits invoked by this kind of verbal incantation are charged with personal power by the magician who speeds them about their new business” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| Sometimes we feel that a critic or student of a man’s work has ‘read into it’ a good deal more than the first writer ‘meant.’ This, is, perhaps, to have a rather confined apprehension of the unity and diversity of the Power” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
“First: the Book as Thought—the Idea of the book existing in the writer’s mind"
“Secondly: the Book as Written—the Energy or Word incarnate, the express image of the Idea”
“Thirdly: the Book as Read—the Power of its effect upon and in the responsive mind” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| “Those who take this view of the drama practice a kind of artistic Gnosticism—they consider that it is beneath the dignity of the son to dwell in a limited material body, and postulate for him a body which a pure physical manifestation, retaining all the supernatural qualities of the divinity” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| “failure in the ghost is a failure in Wisdom—not the wisdom of the heart and bowels. The unghosted are not unintelligent, nor yet idle or unskilled; it is simply that there are certain things which they do not know and seem incapable of knowing. Under the terms of our analogy, failure in the ghost is the characteristic failure of the unliterary writer and the inartistic artist” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| “What he is trying to tell us is that the artist must not attempt to force response by direct contact with any response of his own; for spirit cannot speak to spirit without intermediary. To interpret sensibility to sensibility we must have, not only the controlled technique of the Energy ordering the material expression, but also the controlling Idea, without parts or passions that, moving all things, doth itself unmoved abide. There must, in all art, be this hard core or containing sphere (whichever metaphor is preferred) of the unimpassioned. Otherwise the response of the ghost to the son is uncritical, lacking any standard of self-measurement” |
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Definition
| Dorothy L. Sayers-The Mind of the Maker |
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Term
| “______ is a medical technique, a method of therapy for the treatment of mentally ill or distressed patients that helps them understand the sourse of their symptoms” |
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Definition
| Booker-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “According to this ‘tripartite’ model, the human psyche is not a single integrated entity, but in fact consists of three very different parts (‘id’, ‘superego’, and ‘ego’)” |
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Definition
| Booker-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “____ suggests that the dream-work is constructed through the operation of four basic processes: condensation. . .displacement. . .considerations of representability. . .and secondary elaboration” |
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Definition
| Booker-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “For ___, the creation of art, like dreaming, is largely a mechanism for the release of unconscious psychic energies” |
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Definition
| Booker-Psychoanalytic Criticism (Freud) |
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Term
| “Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In this way man overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually. No greater triumph of wish-fulfillment is conceivable. A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of women.” |
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Definition
| Freud-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “Something in man was bound to struggle against this subjection, for it is only with extreme unwillingness that he gives up his claim to an exceptional position. Man, as we know, makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the wishes that reality does not satisfy.” |
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Definition
| Freud-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “This discovery of Nature reacted on the conception of human life. The nature-myth changed into a human myth: the weather-goddesses became goddesses of Fate.” |
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Definition
| Freud-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “If we decided to regard the peculiarities of our ‘third one’ as concentrated in her ‘dumbness’, then psycho-analysis will tell us that in dreams dumbness is a common representation of death.” |
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Definition
| Freud-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “for we do not share the belief of some investigators that myths were read in the heavens and brought down to earth; we are more inclined to judge with Otto Rank that they were projected on to the heavens after having arisen elsewhere under purely human conditions.” |
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Definition
| Freud-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “It must strike us that this excellent third woman has in several instances certain particular qualities besides her beauty. They are qualities that seem to be bending towards some kind of unity” |
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Definition
| Freud-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “But we shall remember that there are motive forces in mental life which bring about replacement by the opposite in the form of what is known as reaction-formation; and it is precisely in the revelation of such hidden forces that we look for the reward of this enquiry” |
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Definition
| Freud-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “Man, as we know, makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the wishes that reality does not satisfy.” |
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Definition
| Freud-Psychoanalytic Criticism |
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Term
| “Essentially ____recommends that critics move through a poem in sequential fashion, looking for points at which unusual uses of language might provoke reactions on the pars of reader that go beyond the simple meaning of the sentences being read.” |
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Definition
| Booker, Reader-Response (Fish) |
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Term
| ____’s model: “familiar cultural material that helps readers orient themselves within the text.” |
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Definition
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Term
| “Among other things, ______’s focus on gaps in the text implies that there can be no single correct or final interpretation of a literary work, as these gaps can be filled in many different ways depending on interest, inclinations, and prior experiences of the reader.” |
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Definition
| Booker, Reader-Response (Iser) |
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Term
| “…readers bring their own ‘identity themes’, or characteristic patterns of interpretation and reaction, to literary texts and that their responses to literary texts are largely determined by the nature of these identity themes” |
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Definition
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Term
| “This ongoing identity determines the style with which the individual copes with her reality, especially how she interprets literary texts.” |
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Definition
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Term
| "No reading, however outlandish it might appear, is inherently an impossible one" |
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Definition
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Term
| Norman Holland (within Booker):"the true value of [Hamlet] is the way in which it allows the audience to 'create' the work by projecting into it audience identity and concerns." Holland says "each person has his own Hamlet" |
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Definition
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Term
| “Within this framework of contemporary critical debate, there would seem to be only two ways of answering this question: either there is a literal meaning of the utterance, and we should be able to say what it is, or there are as many meanings as there are readers and no one of them is literal.” |
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Definition
| Stanley Fish, Reader-Response |
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Term
| “The obviousness of the utterances meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context, rather it is because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have meaning.” |
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Definition
| Stanley Fish, Reader-Response |
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Term
| "The problem of how meaning is determined is only a problem if there is a point at which its determination has not yet been made, and I am saying that there is no such point.” |
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Definition
| Stanley Fish, Reader-Response |
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Term
| “In other words, while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy" |
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Definition
| Stanley Fish, Reader-Response |
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Term
| “It is only if there is a shared basis of agreement at once guiding interpretation that a total and debilitating relativism can be avoided.” |
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Definition
| Stanley Fish, Reader-Response |
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Term
| “Language does not refer to some external reality but only to itself, and the same can be said for all knowledge. Any link between language and reality is purely metaphorical” |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “_____’s project grows out of a fundamental challenge to the tradition of Western philosophy. . .. this philosophy is consistently informed by what he refers to as ‘logocentric’ or ‘metaphysical’ thinking – that is the notion . . . that there is an ultimate center and ground to philosophical truth. _____ notes that logocentric logic sees language as a reflection of some preexisting meaning or reality, whereas he believes that meaning is created in language” |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism (Derrida) |
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Term
| “But just as ____ sees no clear boundary between text and context, he also sees no absolute distinction between subject and world” |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism (Derrida) |
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Term
| “If there were such a space, a moment before interpretation began, then it would be necessary to have recourse to one mechanical and algorithmic procedure by means of which meaning could be calculated and in relation to which one could recognize mistakes. What I have been arguing is that meanings come already calculated, not because of norms embedded in the language but because language is always perceived, from the very first, within a structure of norms.” |
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Definition
| Stanley Fish, Reader-Response |
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Term
| “One of the essential features of a _________ reading is that it ‘consists, not merely in reversing or subverting some established hierarchical order, but in showing how its terms are indisociably entwined in a strictly undecidable exchange of values and priorities’” |
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Definition
| Booker quoting Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism (deconstructive) |
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Term
| “[_____] suggests that a fundamental ‘rupture’ in the history of the concepts of structure . . . this rupture, exemplified in the Nietszchaen critique of metaphysics and in the Freudian critique of the identity of consciousness, involved a new ability to conceive of structures based on principles of play, interpretation, and sign rather than on older notions of present, truth, and an ultimate center to all structures." |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism (Derrida) |
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Term
| “All texts are products of ‘intertextuality,’ of the sometimes subtle relationships among all texts” |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “Philosophical language, like literary language, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature, and as a result the traditional claim that philosophy provides a more direct expression of truth than literature does has no basis” |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “It is in this refusal of the materiality of the sign, this ineradicable nostalgia for a transcendental source of meaning anterior to and constitutive of all sign systems, that ____ finds the Western tradition most deeply marked by idealism” |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism (Derrida) |
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Term
| “This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, neither among elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “There is nothing outside of the text” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “______ relates his vision of texts as the result of intertextual connections to the process referred to by Levi-Strauss as bricolage, where the bricoleur is a sort of junk man who randomly collects odd bits and scraps without any particular plan and then uses those diverse materials as the need arises” |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism (Derrida) |
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Term
| “_____ has suggested that this attack on the totality of the book is central to his entire early project” |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism (Derrida) |
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Term
| “It is this opposition to ideas of wholeness, completeness, and unity that _________ differs most radically from the ideas of the New Critics." |
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Definition
| Booker-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “The perverse complexity of Walden’s rhetoric is intimately related to the fact that it is never possible to be sure what the rhetorical status of any given image is. And this is because what Thoreau has done in moving to Walden Pond is to move himself, literally, into the world of his own figurative language . . . the ground has shifted, but the figures are still figures” |
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Definition
| Barbara Johnson-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “Walden’s great achievement is to wake us up to our own losses, to make us participate in the transindividual movement of loss in its infinite particularity” |
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Definition
| Barbara Johnson-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “…the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “…everything became discourse—provided we can agree on this word—that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification.” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “…language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique.” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the texts of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arche.” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around.” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “As a turning toward the presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the thinking of freeplay of which the Nietzchean affirmation—the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation—would be the other side.” |
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Definition
| Derrida-Deconstructive Criticism |
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Term
| “For one thing, ____’s materialist stance implies that a change in material conditions can lead to change in the way humans think and therefore to important and sweeping social and political change. For another, _____’s emphasis on material conditions leads him to the conclusion that the economic system is the most fundamental aspect, of “base,” of any society, while all other aspects of society (culture, politics, religion, and so on) are parts of a “superstructure” whose characteristics are at least to some extent dependent on the nature of the base” |
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Definition
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Term
| “…_____ argues that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and that it will eventually collapse as part of the natural historical process. This process is for Marx a dialectical one in that he envisions history as proceeding through a series of conflicts between opposing ideas, the resolution of which leads to the development of a new historical stage. Indeed, dialectical thought is so central to _____’s work that his overall approach is often referred to a dialectical materialism. The dialectical oppositions that drive history forward are particularly associated with the conflicting needs of different social classes” |
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Definition
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Term
| “Closely aligned with the process of alientation is the phenomenon of “commodification.” For ______, a “commodity” is an article that is produced not for use but for exchange within the market system of cptalism. Because commodities are intended for sale rather than use, they are valued not for their function but for the price they can bring on the open market. In other words, they are judged not according to their “use value” but according to their “exchange value” |
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Definition
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Term
| “_____ sees realism as the only literary mode capable of representing the totality of society by revealing through its narrative form the underlying movement of history…._____ believes that the greatest realist literature, by embodying the forces in an epoch that enable historical change, is always progressive, regardless o the political leanings of the authors themselves” |
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Definition
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Term
| “_____…calls “reification,” or the conversion of all aspects of human life (including abstract concepts, social relations, and even humans themselves) into “things.” Reification is clearly related to commodification” |
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Definition
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Term
| “Thus bourgeois power resides principally in what Gramsci calls “hegemony,” in the ability of the bourgeoisie to obtain the (Gramsci),“‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production” |
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Definition
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Term
| “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincide with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production” |
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Definition
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Term
| “The division labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour. At the same time, through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals co-operating in definite kinds of labour” |
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Definition
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Term
| “The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production” |
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Definition
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Term
| “The production of ideas, of conception, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior” |
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Definition
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Term
| “We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premisses. Morality, religion, metaphysics, al the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” |
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Definition
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Term
| “Further, that the multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society, hence, that the ‘history of humanity’ must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange” |
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Definition
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Term
| “Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own: out of all such muck we get only the one inference that these three moments, the forces of production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction with one another, because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the fact, that intellectual and material activity—enjoyment and labour, production and consumption—devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of labour” |
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Definition
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Term
| “The originality of _____ criticism, then, lies not in its historical approach to literature, but in its revolutionary understanding of history itself |
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Definition
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Term
| “Literary works are not mysteriously inspired, or explicable simply in terms of their authors’ psychology. They are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the ‘social mentality’ or ideology of an age. That ideology, in turn, is the product of the concrete social relations into which men enter at a particular time and place; it is the way those class-relations are experienced, legitimized and perpetuated” |
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Definition
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Term
| “To write well is more than a matter of ‘style’; it also means having at one’s disposal an ideological perspective which can penetrate to the realities of men’s experience in a certain situation” |
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Definition
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Term
| “Any complete understanding of The Waste Land would need to take these (and other) factors into account. It is not a matter of reducing the poem to the state of contemporary capitalism; but neither is it a matter of introducing so many judicious complications that anything as crude as capitalism may to all intents and purposes be forgotten. On the contrary: all of the elements I have enumerated (the author’s class-positions, ideological forms and their relation to literary forms, ‘spirituality’ and philosophy, techniques of literary production, aesthetic theory) are directly relevant to the base/superstructure model. What ______ criticism looks for is the unique conjuncture of these elements which we know as The Waste Land” |
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Definition
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Term
| “______ criticism is not merely a ‘sociology of literature,’ concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the products of a particular history” |
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Definition
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Term
| “It is by giving ideology a determinate form, fixing it within certain fictional limits, that art is able to distance itself from it, thus revealing to us the limits of that ideology. In doing this, Macherey claims, art contributes to our deliverance from the ideological illusion” |
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Definition
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Term
| “Ideology is not in the first place a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live out their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them to their social functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole. In this sense The Waste Land is ideological: it shows a man making sense of his experience in ways that prohibit a true understanding of his society ways that are consequently false” |
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Definition
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Term
| “_______ literary criticism focuses on the relationship between literature and patriarchal biases in society and on the potential role that literature can play in overcoming such biases.” |
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Definition
| Booker-Feminist Criticism (Feminist) |
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Term
| “…seek to resist this submission to patriarchal law by exploring a different mode of discourse that arises not from the Symbolic but from the Imaginary Order, from that preverbal infantile stage of joyful fusion with the mother’s body” |
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Definition
| Booker-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| _____ – “the wholeness of the chora is disrupted, and the concept of difference, on which language depends, first enters the infant’s world” |
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Definition
| Booker-Feminist Criticism (Thetic) |
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Term
| _____ – “An essentially mobile and provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases" |
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Definition
| Booker-Feminist Criticism (Chora) |
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Term
| ______ – “…semiotic elements such as sound, rhythm, and melody disrupt the stability of the symbolic order…are absolutely essential for the creative use of language |
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Definition
| Booker-Feminist Criticism (symbolic order) |
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Term
| “To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to be identified as male” |
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Definition
| Booker-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history” |
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Definition
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Term
| “it would have been extremely odd, even upon this showing, had one of them suddenly written the plays of Shakespeare…declared it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare.” |
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Definition
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Term
| “…it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among laboring, uneducated, servile people. It is not born among the working class. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began…almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom?” |
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Definition
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Term
| “Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working class.” |
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Definition
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Term
| “any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at” |
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Definition
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Term
| “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves” |
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Definition
| Adrienne Rich-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “Man appears as, if not a dream, a fascination and a terror; and that the source of the fascination and the terror is, simply, Man’s power—to dominate, tyrannize, choose, or reject the woman” |
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Definition
| Adrienne Rich-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “Only at rare moments in that essay do you hear the passion in her voice; she was trying to sound as cool as Jane Austen, as Olympian as Shakespeare, because that is the way the men of the culture thought a writers should sound” |
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Definition
| Adrienne Rich-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “To be a human being trying to fulfill traditional female function in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination” |
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Definition
| Adrienne Rich-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “Yet I began to feel that my fragments and scraps had a common consciousness and a common theme, one which I would have been very unwilling to put on paper at an earlier time because I had been taught that poetry should be ‘universal,’ which meant, of course, nonfemale” |
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Definition
| Adrienne Rich-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “The awakening of consciousness is not like the crossing of a frontier—one step and you are in another country. Much of woman’s poetry has been the nature of the blues song: a cry of pain, of victimization, or a lyric of seduction” |
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Definition
| Adrienne Rich-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “What critics have done is to assume, for reasons shortly to be expounded, that the women writers invariably represented the consensus rather than the criticism of it” |
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Definition
| Nina Baym-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “Landscape is deeply imbued with female qualities, as society is; but where society is menacing and destructive, landscape is compliant and supportive |
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Definition
| Nina Baym-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “For the heterosexual man, these socializing women are also the locus of powerful attraction. First, because everybody has social and conventional instincts; second, because his deepest emotional attachments are to women” |
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Definition
| Nina Baym-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “To liberate _____from the text, or to make her its tragic center, is to re-appropriate her for our own ends; to dissolve her into a female symbolism of absence is to endorse our own marginality; to make her Hamlet’s anima is to reduce her to a metaphor of male experience” |
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Definition
| Elaine Showalter-Feminist Criticism (Ophelia) |
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Term
| “But from its historical beginnings, American literary criticism has assumed that literature produced in this nation would have to be ground-breaking, equal to the challenge of the new nation, and completely original” |
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Definition
| Nina Baym-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “Finally, I want to suggest that the _______ revision of Ophelia comes as much from the actress’s freedom as from the critic’s interpretation” |
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Definition
| Elaine Showalter-Feminist Criticism (feminist) |
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Term
| “There is no ‘true’ Ophelia for whom _____ criticism must unambiguously speak, but perhaps only a Cubist Ophelia of multiple perspectives, more than the sum of all of her parts” |
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Definition
| Elaine Showalter-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “For many feminist theorists, the madwoman is a heroine, a powerful figure who rebels against family and the social order; and the hysteric who refuses to speak the language of the patriarchal order, who speaks otherwise, is a sister” |
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Definition
| Elaine Showalter-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “Indeed, the acute sense of disgrace we associate with such a waste land may arise from the fact that, as much as the industrial revolution and the fall of God, the rise of the female imagination was a central problem for the twentieth-century male imagination” |
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Definition
| Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “Indeed, as the Oedipal paradigm through which Harold Bloom has analyzed literary history dissolved into a far more complicated complex, they ever more deeply understood the ramifications of what women also, though very differently, experienced: the incontrovertible fact that the once willing must had now become self-willing and, they feared, self-willed” |
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Definition
| Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar-Feminist Criticism |
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Term
| “The complex nature of _____’s own dialogic discourse sometimes leads to conflicting interpretations of his work, especially by critics who do not sufficiently appreciate the ‘both-and’ nature of dialogic thought.” This results in “some critics read ______ as an essentially Marxist thinker and others seeing him as a fundamentally anti-Marxist thinker. |
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Definition
| Booker-Bahktinian Criticism (Bahktin) |
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Term
| For _____, as for many structuralist and poststructuralist theorists, language is fundamentally multiple in its meaning. He characterizes this multiplicity as dialogic because in his view these multiple meanings arise from the fact that any utterance carries the traces of other utterances that have preceded it and that might come after it in response. |
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Definition
| Booker-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| On the surface, at least,_____’s carnival is a time of festive and exuberant celebration when normal social boundaries collapse and groups from different social classes and backgrounds meet and mingle freely in a mood of irreverence that runs directly counter to the cold, sterile, and humorless world of official medieval Catholicism. |
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Definition
| Booker-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| What we see of any Dostoevsky character is determined at least partially by the Other: Dostoevsky does not create and describe fully formed finalized characters; instead lets those characters evolve in dialogue with their author and with the other characters. Dostoevsky’s novels are this “polyphonic” because they are so fundamentally informed by dialogues among multiple consciousnesses. |
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Definition
| Booker-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| “This new notion of truth implies…that we should avoid coming to final conclusions about ____’s work; faced with a choice of competing interpretations, we must always choose both, as difficult and unsatisfying as that might be to our monological habits of thought.” |
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Definition
| Booker-Bahktinian Criticism |
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|
Term
| “_______’s carnival is a time of festive and exuberant celebration when normal social boundaries collapse and groups from different social background meet and mingle freely in a mood of irreverence that runs directly counter to the cold, sterile, and humorless world of official medieval Catholicism. The carnival is a time when normal rules and hierarchies are suspended, when boundaries are transgressed, and when the energies of life erupt without regard for conventional decorum.” |
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Definition
| Booker-Bahktinian Criticism (Bahktin) |
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Term
| Numerous critics of ____, however, have seen the medieval carnival as a highly unsatisfactory metaphor for revolution because the carnival was in fact an officially sanctioned event whose very purpose was to release potentially subversive energies in politically harmless ways and thus prevent revolution.” |
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Definition
| Booker-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| Almost every novel we mentioned above as being a classic representative of this generic type is an encyclopedia of all strata and forms of literary language. |
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Definition
| Bahktin-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| "This usually parodic stylization of generic, professional and other strata of language is sometimes interrupted by the direct authorial word (usually as an expression of pathos, of Sentimental or idyllic sensibility), which directly embodies (without refracting) semantic and axiological intentions of the author." |
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Definition
| Bahktin-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| Comic style is based, therefore, on the stratification of common language and on the possibilities available for isolating from these strata, to one degree or another, one’s own intentions, without ever completely merging them. It is precisely the diversity of speech, and not the unity of a normative shared language, that is the ground of style. |
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Definition
| Bahktin-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| A comic playing with languages, a story “not from the author” (but from a narrator, posited author, or character), character speech, character zones and lastly various introductory or framing genres are basic forms for incorporating and organizing ________ in the novel. |
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Definition
| Bahktin-Bahktinian Criticism (heteroglossia) |
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Term
| “An utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages’, two semantic and axiological belief systems.” |
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Definition
| Bahktin-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| “We puzzle out the story itself and the figure of the narrator as he is revealed in the process of telling his tale. If one fails to sense this second level, the intentions and accents of the author himself, then one has failed to understand the work.” |
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Definition
| Bahktin-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| “Every moment of the story has a conscious relationship with this normal language and its belief system, is in fact set against them, and set against them dialogically: one point of view opposed to another, one evaluation opposed to another, one accent opposed to another (i.e., they are not contrasted as two abstractly linguistic phenomena).” |
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Definition
| Bahktin-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| “If the novelist loses touch with this linguistic ground of prose style…then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre.” “The novel, when torn out of authentic linguistic speech diversity, emerges in most cases as a ‘closet drama,’ with detailed, fully developed and ‘artistically worked out’ stage directions (it is, of course, bad drama).” |
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Definition
| Bahktin-Bahktinian Criticism |
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Term
| _______’s focus on “systems of thought” and “discursive practices” rather than individual texts or accepted canons can provide guidance and inspiration. |
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Definition
| Booker-Foucauldian Criticism (Foucault) |
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Term
| He concludes his work with a call for political criticism. This criticism should begin with the recognition that “literature,” far from involving a special, transcendent kind of language use that sets it apart from the social and political world, is in fact simply a name for “certain kinds of writing within the whole field of what ________ has called ‘discursive practices,’ and that if anything is to be an object of study it is this whole field of practices rather than just those sometimes rather obscurely labeled ‘literature.’ |
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Definition
| Booker-Foucauldian Criticism (Foucault) |
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Term
| His project can be described as the development of a highly self-conscious history of thought involving a study not only of the evolution of various ideas but also of the constitution of those ideas by complex social and institutional forces-and by the work of historians like himself. |
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Definition
| Booker-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| Meanwhile genealogy (derived from Friedrich Nietzche’s Genealogy of Morals) refers to ______’s realization that the present is a product of history and that to understand the present, we need to know as much as possible about the past that has shaped us. Without establishing narrative connections, _______ thus explores the historical antecedents and discourses from the present, much as a genealogist traces the lineage of a family. |
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Definition
| Booker-Foucauldian Criticism (Foucault) |
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Term
| _____ looks at the distinction between madness and reason and concludes that this distinction, at least as we know it, is the product of specific historical occurrences in seventeenth-century Europe. _____ argues here that societies historically tend to define “proper” or accepted ideas or behavior through opposition to excluded images of Otherness. |
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Definition
| Booker-Foucauldian Criticism (Foucault) |
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Term
| governed by a common prevailing episteme, or characteristic attitude toward knowledge and the way it is obtained. |
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Definition
| Booker-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| Building on Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God, _____ proposes that we may now be on the brink of a new episteme that will bring the death of man as well by ending the historical “arrangements” that made the concept of man appear. |
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Definition
| Booker-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| _____argues that Western thinkers from the Stoics to the sixteenth century accepted a ternary model of the sign in which signifier and signified are held together by a third element, or “conjuncture,’ that effects a connection between words and things based on resemblance. |
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Definition
| Booker-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “Today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression.” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “What is a work? What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what elements is it composed?” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “To admit that writing is, because of the very history that has made possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent…the religious principle of the hidden meaning…and the critical principle of implicity significations, silent determinations, and obscured content.” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “One cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication…it is the equivalent of a description.” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “The author’s name…performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function…it establishes a relationship among the texts.” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture.” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “Discourses are objects of appropriation.” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “[The author function] does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual….These aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection…of the operations we establish as pertinent…” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “All discourses endowed with the author function do possess this plurality of self.” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning….he is a certain fuctional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses: short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free compositon, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction…the author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.” |
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Definition
| Foucault-Foucauldian Criticism |
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Term
| “A dual temporal focus—on the historical contexts of the author and of the critic—is central to _______method” |
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Definition
|
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Term
| "Reading is itself a culturally situated exchange.” |
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Definition
|
|
Term
| “the social and cultural contexts in which these writers lived and workd placed strict limitations on the kind of selves they could fashion." |
|
Definition
|
|
Term
| “Despite the large amount of available material, historical information is necessarily incomplete; we can never know everything there is to know about our own society, much less a society from hundreds of years in the past about which much detailed information will always have been lost” |
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Definition
|
|
Term
| “For _________, we can thus understand the real significance of literary texts only by paying close attention to the nature and implications of the cultural exchanges that bring these texts into being, while also remaining aware that the process of reading is itself a culturally situated exchange” |
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Definition
| Booker-New Historicism (new historicists) |
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Term
| “There can be no appeals to genius as the sole origin of the energies of great art” |
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Definition
| Booker quoting Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “Shakespeare’s works have a special energy precisely because they are so firmly embedded in their own historical context and because that context was a time of conflict, crisis, and fragmentation” |
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Definition
|
|
Term
| “Indeed, I believe that the most important effect of contemporary theory upon the practice of literary criticism, and certainly upon my practice, is to subvert the tendency to think of aesthetic representation as ultimately autonomous, separable from its cultural context and hence divorced from the social, ideological, and material matrix in which all art is produced and consumed” |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “History cannot be divorced from texutality, and all texts can be compelled to confront the crisis of undecidability revealed in the literary text” |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “…these impure terms that mark the difference between the literary and the non-literary are the currency in crucial institutional negotiations and exchange" |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “…history cannot simply be set against literary texts as either stable antithesis or stable background, and the protective isolation of those texts gives way to a sense of their interaction with other texts and hence to the permeability of the boundaries” |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “The possessed gave voice to the rage, anxiety, and sexual frustration that built up particularly easily in the authoritarian, patriarchal, impoverished, and plague-ridden world of early modern England” |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “The theater is not disinterested in the expression of the popular spirit, but the indelible mark of falsity, tawdriness, and rhetorical manipulation” |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “A consecrated object is reclassified, assigned a cash value, transferred from a sacred to a profane setting, deemed suitable to be staged” |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “In Shakespeare, the realization of the demonic possession is a theatrical imposture leads not to a clarification—the clear-eyed satisfaction of a man who refuses to be gulled—but to a deeper uncertainty, a loss of moorings, in the face of evil" |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “But if false religion is theater, and if the difference between true and false religion is the presence of theater what happens which this difference is enacted in the theater?” |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “He writes for the greater glory and profit of the theater, a fraudulent institution that never pretends to be anything but fraudulent, an institution that calls forth what is not, that signifies absence, that transforms the literal into the metaphorical, that evacuates everything it represents. By doing so it makes for itself a hollow round space within which it survives” |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| "The Requerimiento, then, forces us to confront the dangers inherent in what most of us would consider the central liberal tenet, namely the basic unity of mankind” |
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Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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|
Term
| “If it was immensely difficult in sixteenth century narratives to represent a language barrier, it is because embedded in the narrative convention of the period was a powerful, unspoken belief in the isomorphic relationship between language and reality” |
|
Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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Term
| “The Tempest utterly rejects the uniformitarian view of the human race, the view that would later triumph in the Enlightenment and prevail in the West to this day” |
|
Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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|
Term
| “Language is, after all, one of the crucial ways of distinguishing between men and beasts” |
|
Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
|
|
Term
| “Moreover, both intellectual and popular culture in the Renaissance had kept alive the medieval figure of the Wild Man, one of whose common characteristics is the absence of speech” |
|
Definition
| Greenblatt-New Historicism |
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|
Term
| “The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present” |
|
Definition
| Bhabha-Multicultural Criticism |
|
|
Term
| “The ‘beyond’ is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past…Beginnings and ending may be the sustaining myths of the middle years, but the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and resent, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.” |
|
Definition
| Bhabha-Multicultural Criticism |
|
|
Term
| "demonstrate the contemporary compulsion to move beyond; to turn the present into the ‘post’; or…to touch the future on its hither side” |
|
Definition
| Bhabha-Multicultural Criticism |
|
|
Term
| “For ____, ideological analysis provides an alternative to reading strategies based strictly on interpretation of a text’s meaning as the representation of some preexisting reality and allows an interrogation of the historical situation in which that text was produced. This most of reading thus potentially allows a comprehension of the different signifying practices at work in colonial texts rather than merely projecting Western modes of representation onto non-Western writing.” |
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Definition
| Booker-Multicultural Criticism (Bhaba) |
|
|
Term
| “…an emphasis on language and representation that points to an important focus in multicultural theory on the possibility that signification may operate according to fundamentally different principles in multicultural texts than in texts of the Western tradition.” |
|
Definition
| Booker-Multicultural Criticism |
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|
Term
| “_______ theorists have demonstrated the historical complicity of the canon and of literary studies of racism, imperialism, and the general cultural domination by Western Europe and North American of most of the rest of the world.” |
|
Definition
| Booker-Multicultural Criticism |
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|
Term
| “Given that this is what these five black authors are seeking to do, we are justified in wondering aloud if the sort of subjectivity that they seek can be realized through a process that is so very ironic from the outset. Indeed, how can the black subject posit a full and sufficient self in language in which blackness is a sign of absence?” |
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Definition
| Gates-Multicultural Criticism |
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|
Term
| “There is no such thing as a silent voice." |
|
Definition
| Gates-Multicultural Criticism |
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|
