Week 3 Flashcards
Friedman’s Criticism of Poe’s Deductive Definition of the Short Story
The short story is a very flexible and multi-faceted genre
Two approaches to genre:
1) the inductive approach = descriptive
2) the deductive approach = prescriptive
- Deductive approaches as well as all too narrow and exclusive essentialist genre definitions are problematic
- Inductive approaches: check sets of similarities and differences; are more inclusive
What role does genre play?
“Literary genres are not given or stables entities, but highly malleable forms or sets of conventions that tend to change their shape in different historical, cultural, aesthetic and commercial contexts”
(Michael Basseler, in Basseler/Nünning, ch. 3: “Theories and Typologies of the Short Story”, p. 40)
Frow, 2010, p. 1: genres play an important role in organizing verbal and non-verbal discourse and they “contribute to the social structuring of meaning”.
Who is EA Poe?
Poe = canonical American author; pioneer and practitioner of the short story
Complex literary legacy: American popular culture, including the detective story, science fiction, and the gothic or sensational tale
Influence on Modernism, e.g. on Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolists/Aestheticists “art for art’s sake”
Poe is valued today both for his acute representation of extreme psychological states and for the ways in which his poetry and tales speak to the darker side of nineteenth-century American culture whose limits he probed.
What are Poe’s theoretical and aesthetic ideas?
Fundamental incompatibility between beauty and truth
i.e. Poe assaulted the American union of the aesthetic and the moralistic
Poe’s subversion of the didactic was informed by Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790) ‘the work of art pleases for its own sake’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: the distinction between fancy and imagination
“The Philosophy of Composition”, EA Poe (1846)
Poe discards the Romantic organic metaphors for poetry which envisage artistic creation as a process of spontaneous growth, of genius and inspiration.
He redirects critical attention onto technique, to art as a clever illusion which the artist controls like a mathematical or mechanical problem.
“The Philosophy of Composition”: a hoax? Did Poe develop his ideas exclusively to entertain the masses?
“Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement…”
“I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect.”
i.e. events and tone of a story are chosen according to the vivid effect they produce/support
Poe’s dissection of the processes by which a literary text is developed and completed: “Most writers––poets in especial––prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy––an ecstatic intuition…”
BUT: there is no ecstatic intuition that leads the writer
i.e. writing literature is about detailed and rational planning
Neither accident nor intuition have played a role when writing “The Raven”:
“…the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem”
“If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression––for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.”
i.e. the most important artistic element is totality, or unity of effect
A poem like “The Raven” “excites the reader intensely by elevating the soul…and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief.”
importance of brevity
Beauty as sole province of a poem
Beauty is not a quality but an effect
Poetry is elevation of the soul
Prose is satisfaction of intellect (truth) and excitement of heart (passion)
“Beauty…excites the sensitive soul to tears.”
The tone of beauty = sadness; melancholy as the most legitimate poetical tone
“The Raven” is a poem of melancholy
The most melancholy topic is death
“…the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world––and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”
“originality…is by no means a matter of…impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought…”
one locale – complexity – suggestiveness – undercurrent of meaning
“Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales”, EA Poe (1842)
Pure essay/mere prose versus tales proper –– tale proper = polished
The length of a poem should not exceed what might be perused in an hour.
A poem/a short tale too brief may produce a vivid, but never an intense or enduring impression.
“Without a certain continuity of effort––without a certain duration of repetition or purpose––the soul is never deeply moved. There must be the dropping of the water upon the rock.
“Were I called upon, however, to designate that class of composition which, next to such a poem as I have suggested, should best fulfil the demands of high genius…I should unhesitatingly speak of the prose tale as Mr. Hawthorne has here exemplified it. I allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. … During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control.”
Hawthorne is infinitely too fond of allegory, and can never hope for popularity so long as he persists in it (his spirit of “metaphor run-mad”).
“Twice-Told Tales”, EA Poe (1847)
Hawthorne:
Mannerism
Extraordinary genius
“the privately-admired and publicly-unappreciated man of genius”
Marked idiosyncrasy of Mr. Hawthorne himself
“The ‘peculiarity’ or sameness, or monotone of Hawthorne, would…suffice to deprive him of all chance of popular appreciation. … I allude to the strain of allegory which completely overwhelms the greater number of his subjects….”
“Without a certain continuity, without a certain duration or repetition of the cause, the soul is seldom moved to the effect. There must be the dropping of the water on the rock. There must be the pressing steadily down of the stamp upon the wax.”
“Were I called upon, however, to designate that class of composition which, next to such a poem as I have suggested, should best fulfil the demands and serve the purposes of ambitious genius, … I should speak at once of the brief prose tale.”
“The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons analogous to those which render length objectionable in the poem. As the novel cannot be read at one sitting, it cannot avail itself of the immense benefit of totality. Worldly interests, intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, counteract and annul the impressions intended. But simple cessation in reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out his full design without interruption. During the hour of perusal, the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. A skilful artist has constructed a tale. He has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but having deliberately conceived a certain single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events, and discusses them in such tone as may best serve him in establishing this preconceived effect.”
“one pre-established design”
“The Poetic Principle”, EA Poe (1850)
A long poem does not exist since the elevation of soul is transient: it can only last for 30 minutes, not more (psychal necessity)
unity (= totality of effect or impression) is a vital requisite in all works of art
A poem/short prose tale should be judged according to the effect it produces
A very short poem never produces a profound or enduring effect: “There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.”
“the heresy of The Didactic”
The object of poetry is NOT truth or a moral, but beauty.
The poem per se is “written solely for the poem’s sake.”
The unquenchable thirst for beauty belongs to the immortality of Man.
A poem = the wild effort to reach the Beauty above: “Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle…to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry––or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods––we find ourselves melted into tears––we weep then… through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.”
Through poetry, through music we attain brief glimpses of eternal Beauty.
Romantic hierarchy of the arts: music is at the top
In music “the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles––the creation of supernal Beauty.”
the Poetry of words = The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): British poet, critic, and philosopher of Romanticism
- Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination, see chapter 13 of his Biographia Literaria (1817): Coleridge attributes this reordering function of the sensory images to the lower faculty he calls fancy = a mechanical process which receives the elementary images and, without altering the parts, reassembles them into different spatial and temporal order from that in which they were originally perceived.
- Imagination produces a much higher kind of poetry, dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create. Coleridge’s imagination is able to “create” rather than merely reassemble, by dissolving the mental pictures and unifying them into a new whole. The faculty of imagination assimilates and synthesizes the most disparate elements into an organic whole, a newly generated unity.
In what way was Poe influenced by Kant?
The world of the human mind (cf. Kant):
- Prose: Pure Intellect, Taste, Moral Sense, Truth, Duty
- Poetry: Beautiful&Sublime, Poetic Sentiment, elevating excitement of the soul, an immortal instinct, human aspiration for Supernal Beauty
Summary of Poe’s ideas
It was not Poe’s interest to objectively describe the features of the short story genre, but rather to propagate what he thought the poetic ideal of his own writing and literature in general:
- normative and prescriptive theory / deductive approach
- aesthetics of effect
- importance of brevity and unity of effect and impression
- It needs a central idea and a carefully constructed plot that leads to a certain climax or dénouement.
- importance of suggestiveness and complexity
Poe did NOT use the term short story, but talked of “tales proper,” “tales of effect,” or “short prose narrative.”
Poe believed in a hierarchy of genres: the rhymed poem stood at the highest level, only equaled by the short story (or short prose narrative)
Poe ascribed different effects and ideas to his two favored genres:
- rhymed poem conveys beauty
- the short story’s realm is that of truth and emotions such as passion, horror etc.
- Deductive definitions of the short story follow two of Poe’s principles. The first is that the desired singleness of effect can only be achieved by a work which is short enough to be read at a single sitting––say, a few hours, or fifty to seventy-five pages. And the second is that if everything is so constructed to answer to the end, then the end controls the beginning and the middle.
- It has never seemed to me that a novel lacks singleness of effect simply because it cannot be read at one sitting. … The only thing on a common-sense level that distinguishes novel reading from short story reading is that the reader is bound to recall more of the details in the short story than in the novel, mainly because of the way memory works in relation to quantity and duration.
Effects of brevity: because a short story takes less time to read…it may make less of an impression on us in the long run than a novel, simply because we spend less time with it.
Typologies of the Short Story
Typologies are concerned with defining different types of short stories
They seeks to differentiate various forms of subgenres of the short stories
Basseler suggests differentiating four main groups of typological studies of the short story:
1) studies which classify short stories mainly according to their content, using subject-oriented criteria (thematic approach: story of adolescence, the story of marriage…);
2) studies which classify short stories mainly according to their deviations from other narrative genres, such as tale, sketch, essay, novel etc.;
3) studies which classify short stories with regard to their subject matters in relation to (or combination with) certain narrative modes or techniques;
4) studies which classify short stories with regard to their formal structures.
(Michael Basseler, in Basseler/Nünning, ch. 3: “Theories and Typologies of the Short Story”, p. 50)
