Theory & criticism

Question 1

What does it help us do?

Answer 1

Encourages us to think differently, to understand the interconnectedness of things, to find the story behind the story

Question 2

Russian Formalists

Answer 2

1. Victor Shklovsky
2. Roman Jakobson
3. Boris Tomashevsky
4. Boris Eichenbaum

Question 3

What did the Russian formalists consider literature

Answer 3

Not as a window on the world but as something specifically literary characteristics that make it literature as opposed to philosophy or sociology or biography

Question 4

Key term Russian formalists

Answer 4

‘Defamiliarisation’ - Literature presents objects from such an unusual perspective and in such unconventional and self-conscious language that our habitual, ordinary, rote perceptions of those things are disturbed

Question 5

1887 professor of history at oxford Edward Freeman

Answer 5

‘We are told that the study of literature “cultivated the taste, educates the sympathies and enlarges the mind”. These are all excellent things only we cannot examine tastes and sympathies. Examiners must have technical and positive information to examine.’

Question 6

Literature has to be studied along w language or else it wouldn’t be an academic study at all (oxford English contains strong element of historical language study)

Answer 6

Freeman 1887 ‘what is meant by distinguishing literature from language if by literature is meant the study of great books, and not mere chatter about Shelley’

Question 7

When was English course finally set up at oxford

Answer 7

1894. Strong historical language study - Anglo-Saxon, gothic, middle English

Question 8

Cambridge English 1920s

Answer 8

1. IA RICHARDS (pioneered ‘practical criticism’)
2. WILLIAM EMPSION
3. FR LEAVIS

Question 9

Matthew Arnold

Answer 9

19th century critic said the true business of criticism is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’

Question 10

Continuity in literature, Pope

Answer 10

‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’

Question 11

Keats on influencing / political literature

Answer 11

‘We distrust literature which has a palpable design upon us’

Question 12

Earliest work of theory

Answer 12

Aristotle’s ‘poetics’ (4th century BC) about the nature of literature itself. First ‘reader-centred’ approach to literature abt how tragedy affected the audience; Pity + fear + catharsis

Question 13

Ovid’s definition of literature

Answer 13

Mission is ‘docere delectando’ - to teach by delighting

Sir Phillip Sidney develops in ‘apology for poetry’, quotes Horace that ‘a poem is a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight’

Question 14

Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry

Answer 14

1821. Sees poetry engaged in what 20th century Russian critics called ‘defamiliarisation’

Poetry ‘strips the veil of familiarity from the world… it purged from our inward sight the film of familiarity’

Question 15

Tradition & the Individual talent

Answer 15

1919 essay puts forward notion of impersonality (distinction between writer (person in work) and the author (Eliot))

Question 16

Eliot’s major critical ideas

Answer 16

1. Dissociation of sensibility (sep thought and feeling)
2. Notion of poetic ‘impersonality’
3. Notion of the ‘objective correlative’

Question 17

Saussure key quotes on words as signified / signifier

Answer 17

‘Both parts … are psychological’

‘The linguistic sign unites, not a Thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image’

Question 18

Barthes Mythologies

Answer 18

Chains of signs which become a signifier e.g Romans’ ‘fringe, sweat, close ups’, adverts and luxury brands (semiological chains)

Question 19

Define Language (Saussure)

Answer 19

A system of signs that expresses ideas

Question 20

What is semiology

Answer 20

A science that studies the life of signs with society

Question 21

‘The bond between the signifier and the signified is

Answer 21

Arbitrary’

Question 22

Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage

Answer 22

The moment in which the child forms an identity (or ego) as distinct from the basic (id) or idealised projected image of the self called the imago.

Characterised by recognition of his own image in the mirror

Question 23

Parapraxis

Answer 23

When you mean one thing but say your mother

Question 24

Foucault examines

Answer 24

The relationship between power and knowledge. Looks at institutions that enable power to be maintained like prisons, schools, the justice system

Question 25

Foucault power quote

Answer 25

‘Power is expertises rather than possessed’ - discursive power at play in all relationships

Question 26

Foucault’s on the body

Answer 26

‘The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations gave an immediate hold upon it; they invest it… the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body’

Question 27

The Panopticon

Answer 27

‘Induce[s] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that adheres the automatic functioning of power’

Question 28

The History of Sexuality

Answer 28

Foucault notes how certain types of bodies, sexuality and sexual acts are vilified in order to produce regularised and productive bodies (a trick - a way of making some kinds of sexuality seem natural and others as aberrations)

Question 29

chronotope definition

Answer 29

literally ‘time-space’
- developed by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) to refer to the ‘inseparable unity’ of time and space invoked by a narrative, or the setting viewed as a patio-temporal whole

Question 30

Dates Bakhtin

Answer 30

1895-1975