Theoretical Essays Flashcards
What is the general argument of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Shakespeare’s sister’?
History is full of suppressed women and literature could be so much more bountiful if the uneducated and outcast members of society had been given equal opportunity. Gifted women would have been almost punished for their gift and this would lead them to lose their health and sanity, driving them to suicide.
2 quotes from Shakespeare’s sister
“Genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among laboring, uneducated, servile people.”
“A suppressed poet, a mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out … crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”
What is the general argument of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Chloe liked Olivia’?
Modern female authors are exploring the characters of females for one of the first times in the history of literature. In literature, relationships between women are too simple. Female characters are always portrayed in their relation to men, from the perspective of men. As women were dominated and controlled it became impossible for men to see them from any other perspective than that of a lover.
4 quotes from Chloe Liked Olivia
“Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.”
“Suppose that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women …how literature would suffer!”
“Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”
“Love was the only possibly interpreter”
What is the general argument of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Androgyny’?
Men’s writing is direct and straightforward, indicates freedom of mind, portrays confidence in himself. However, men’s writing is dominated by the “I” which overshadows everything else (including the female characters). The mind contains both the female and the male and men are only writing with the male, to write well one needs to use both sides, an androgynous mind. Women will go unsatisfied with the works of men who use only the male.
2 quotes from Androgyny
Men’s literature has never been “thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked”
“Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father”
What is the general argument of The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes?
When a piece of literature has been written, it doesn’t belong to the author anymore . Writer and creation are unrelated. Bartes thinks that the context of the author’s life should never be considered when analysing literature, that the works should exist in isolation from the author. “To give a text an author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text”.
4 quotes from the Death of the Author
“Writing is … the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”
“It is language which speaks, not the author.”
“To give the text an author is to impose a limit on that text”
“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
What is the general argument of Tradition and the Individual Talent by T.S Eliot?
Criticism and the ‘historical cannon’ are a necessary part of writing. Tradition should not be ignored or scorned, nor should it be blindly followed but appreciated, learnt from and understood.
3 quotes from Tradition and and Individual Talent.
“Criticism is as inevitable as breathing”
We should write “with a feeling that the whole of literature has a simultaneous existence”
“Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry”
Four quotes from Preface to Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde
“To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.”
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.”
“It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
“All art is quite useless.”
