Dictionary Of World Literature - Criticism, Forms, Technique

A table of contents arranged by theoretical method and a second arranged by key texts offer the reader alternative pathways through the volume and a general introduction, which traces the history and importance of literary theory, complete the introductory material. In each of the following chapters,the authors provide a clear presentation of the theory in question and notes towards a reading of a key text to help the student understand both the methodology and the practice of literary theory. The texts used for illustration include: Every chapter ends with a set of questions for further consideration, an annotated bibliography and a supplementary bibliography while a glossary of critical terms completes the book.

Derived and adapted from the successful foundation textbook, Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide, Introducing Literary Theories is a highly readable, self-contained and comprehensive guide that succeeds in making contemporary theory easily understandable. An overview of the theoryNotes towards readings of canonical literary textsQuestions for further considerationAn annotated bibliographyA supplementary bibliography.

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Critical Theory and the Literary Canon by E. Dean Kolbas Call Number: Kolbas stakes out new territory in assessing the war over literary canon formation, a subject that contemporary polemicists have devoted much ink to. Throughout this succinct manuscript, Kolbas ranges through the sociology and politics of culture, aesthetic theory, and literary theory to develop his point that texts not only must should be situated in the historical and material conditions of their production, but also evaluated for their very real aesthetic content.

One reason the is an important issue, Kolbas contends, is that the canon is not simply enclosed in the ivory tower of academia; its effects are apparent in a much wider field of cultural production and use. He begins by critiquing the conservative humanist and liberal pluralist positions on the canon, which either assiduously avoid any sociological explanation of the canon or treat texts as stand-ins for particular ideologies. Kolbas is sympathetic to the arguments of Bourdieu et.

Dictionary Of World Literature - Criticism, Forms, Technique : Joseph T Shipley :

Ultimately, he argues that critical theory, particularly the arguments of Adorno on aesthetics, offers the most fruitful path for evaluating the canon, despite the approach's clear flaws. The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied. The E-mail Address es field is required. Please enter recipient e-mail address es. The E-mail Address es you entered is are not in a valid format. Please re-enter recipient e-mail address es. You may send this item to up to five recipients.

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This is one reason why the essence of most poetry and great prose is so resistant to translation quite apart from the radically different sound patterns that are created in other-language versions. The translator must project himself into the mind of the original author; he must transport himself into an entirely different world of relationships between sounds and meanings, and at the same time he must establish an equivalence between one infinitely complex system and another. Since no two languages are truly equivalent in anything except the simplest terms, this is a most difficult accomplishment.

Certain writers are exceptionally difficult to translate. There are no satisfactory English versions, for example, of the Latin of Catullus , the French of Baudelaire , the Russian of Pushkin , or of the majority of Persian and Arabic poetry. On the other hand, the Germans insist that Shakespeare is better in German than he is in English, a humorous exaggeration perhaps.

But again, Shakespeare is resistant to translation into French. His English seems to lack equivalents in that language. The very greatest translations may become classics in their own right, of enduring literary excellence the King James Version of the Bible , appearing in , is an outstanding example , but on the whole the approximate equivalence of most translations to their originals seems to have a very short life.

The original work remains the same, of lasting value to its own people, but the translation becomes out of date with each succeeding generation as the language and criteria of literary taste change. Nothing demonstrates the complexity of literary language more vividly. Yet the values of great literature are more fundamental than complexity and subtleties of meaning arising from language alone. Works far removed from contemporary man in time and in cultural background, composed in a variety of languages utterly different from one another in structure, have nevertheless been translated successfully enough to be deeply moving.

The 20th century witnessed an immense mass of the oral literature of preliterate peoples and of the writings of all the great civilizations translated into modern languages. Translations of these literatures often distorted the original stories and, at best, captured only their essence. However, without these translations, such stories would most likely be forever lost. The craft of literature, indeed, can be said to be in part the manipulation of a structure in time, and so the simplest element of marking time, rhythm , is therefore of basic importance in both poetry and prose.

Prosody, which is the science of versification, has for its subject the materials of poetry and is concerned almost entirely with the laws of metre , or rhythm in the narrowest sense. It deals with the patterning of sound in time; the number, length, accent , and pitch of syllables; and the modifications of rhythm by vowels and consonants. In most poetry, certain basic rhythms are repeated with modifications that is to say, the poem rhymes or scans or both but not in all.

Since lyric poetry is either the actual text of song or else is immediately derived from song, it is regular in structure nearly everywhere in the world, although the elements of patterning that go into producing its rhythm may vary. The most important of these elements in English poetry, for example, have been accent, grouping of syllables called feet , number of syllables in the line, and rhyme at the end of a line and sometimes within it.

Other elements such as pitch, resonance , repetition of vowels assonance , repetition of consonants alliteration , and breath pauses cadence have also been of great importance in distinguishing successful poetry from doggerel verse, but on the whole they are not as important as the former, and poets have not always been fully conscious of their use of them. The rhythms of prose are more complicated, though not necessarily more complex, than those of poetry.

The rules of prose patterning are less fixed; patterns evolve and shift indefinitely and are seldom repeated except for special emphasis. So the analysis of prose rhythm is more difficult to make than, at least, the superficial analysis of poetry. The craft of writing involves more than mere rules of prosody. First, the literary situation has to be established. The reader must be directly related to the work, placed in it—given enough information on who, what, when, or why—so that his attention is caught and held or, on the other hand, he must be deliberately mystified, to the same end.

Aristotle gave a formula for dramatic structure that can be generalized to apply to most literature: Nevertheless, the scheme does provide a norm from which there is infinite variation. Neoclassical dramatists and critics, especially in 17th-century France, derived from Aristotle what they called the unities of time, action, and place.

This meant that the action of a play should not spread beyond the events of one day and, best of all, should be confined within the actual time of performance. Nor should the action move about too much from place to place—best only to go from indoors to outdoors and back.

There should be only one plot line, which might be relieved by a subplot, usually comic. These three unities—of time, place, and action—do not occur in Aristotle and are certainly not observed in Classical Greek tragedy. They are an invention of Renaissance critics, some of whom went even further, insisting also on what might be called a unity of mood. Great early novels such as the Chinese Dream of the Red Chamber ; first published in English and the Japanese Tale of Genji early 11th century usually develop organically rather than according to geometrical formulas, one incident or image spinning off another.

The 19th century was the golden age of the novel , and most of the more famous examples of the form were systematically plotted, even where the plot structure simply traced the growth in personality of an individual hero or heroine. The latter 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed an attack on old forms, but what the new writers evolved was simply a new architecture. Novelists such as Joseph Conrad , Ford Madox Ford , Virginia Woolf , and, in his later period, Henry James developed a multiple-aspect narrative, sometimes by using time shifts and flashbacks and by writing from different points of view, sometimes by using the device dating back to Classical Greek romances of having one or more narrators as characters within the story.

This technique, which was first perfected in the verse novels of Robert Browning , in fact reached its most extreme development in the English language in poetry: The content of literature is as limitless as the desire of human beings to communicate with one another. The thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands, since the human species first developed speech have seen built up the almost infinite systems of relationships called languages. A language is not just a collection of words in an unabridged dictionary but the individual and social possession of living human beings, an inexhaustible system of equivalents, of sounds to objects and to one another.

Its most primitive elements are those words that express direct experiences of objective reality, and its most sophisticated are concepts on a high level of abstraction. Words are not only equivalent to things, they have varying degrees of equivalence to one another. Eventually a language comes to be, among other things, a huge sea of implicit metaphors , an endless web of interrelated symbols.

As literature, especially poetry, grows more and more sophisticated, it begins to manipulate this field of suspended metaphors as a material in itself, often as an end in itself. Thus, there emerge forms of poetry and prose, too with endless ramifications of reference, as in Japanese waka and haiku, some ancient Irish and Norse verse, and much of the poetry written in western Europe since the time of Baudelaire that is called modernist.

By the time literature appears in the development of a culture , the society has already come to share a whole system of stereotypes and archetypes: Literature may use such symbols directly, but all great works of literary art are, as it were, original and unique myths. The subject matter of literature is as wide as human experience itself. Myths, legends , and folktales lie at the beginning of literature, and their plots, situations, and allegorical metaphorical narrative judgments of life represent a constant source of literary inspiration that never fails.

This is so because mankind is constant—people share a common physiology. Even social structures, after the development of cities, remain much alike. Whole civilizations have a life pattern that repeats itself through history. Egyptian scribes, Japanese bureaucrats , and junior executives in New York City live and respond to life in the same ways; the lives of farmers or miners or hunters vary only within narrow limits. Love is love and death is death, for a southern African hunter-gatherer and a French Surrealist alike.

Joseph Twadell Shipley

So the themes of literature have at once an infinite variety and an abiding constancy. They can be taken from myth , from history, or from contemporary occurrence, or they can be pure invention but even if they are invented, they are nonetheless constructed from the constant materials of real experience, no matter how fantastic the invention.

As time goes on, literature tends to concern itself more and more with the interior meanings of its narrative, with problems of human personality and human relationships. This can be presented explicitly, where the characters talk about what is going on in their heads, either ambiguously and with reserve, as in the novels of Henry James, or overtly, as in those of Dostoyevsky. Literature, however, is not solely concerned with the concrete, with objective reality, with individual psychology , or with subjective emotion. Some deal with abstract ideas or philosophical conceptions.

Much purely abstract writing is considered literature only in the widest sense of the term, and the philosophical works that are ranked as great literature are usually presented with more or less of a sensuous garment. In short, most philosophical works that rank as great literature do so because they are intensely human.

Sometimes the pretense of purely abstract intellectual rigour is in fact a literary device.

Throughout literary history, many great critics have pointed out that it is artificial to make a distinction between form and content, except for purposes of analytical discussion. The issue is, indeed, usually only raised at all by those critics who are more interested in politics, religion, or ideology than in literature; thus, they object to writers who they feel sacrifice ideological orthodoxy for formal perfection, message for style.

But style cannot really be said to exist on paper at all; it is the way the mind of the author expresses itself in words. Since words represent ideas, there cannot be abstract literature unless a collection of nonsense syllables can be admitted as literature. Even the most avant-garde writers associated with the Cubist or nonobjective painters used language, and language is meaning , though the meaning may be incomprehensible.

At the other extreme, the style of the early 20th-century American novelist Theodore Dreiser —bumbling, clumsy, dogged, troubled—perfectly embodies his own attitudes toward life and is, in fact, his constant judgment of his subject matter. Sometimes an author, under the impression that he is simply polishing his style, may completely alter his content. As Flaubert worked over the drafts of Madame Bovary , seeking always the apposite word that would precisely convey his meaning, he lifted his novel from a level of sentimental romance to make it one of the great ironic tragedies of literature.

Yet, to judge from his correspondence, he seems never to have been completely aware of what he had done, of the severity of his own irony. Literature may be an art, but writing is a craft, and a craft must be learned. Talent, special ability in the arts, may appear at an early age; the special personality called genius may indeed be born, not made.

But skill in matching intention and expression comes with practice. They wrote spontaneously whatever came into their heads; but they wrote constantly, voluminously, and were, by their own standards, skilled practitioners. There are certain forms of literature that do not permit such highly personal behaviour—for instance, formal lyric poetry and classic drama.

These structures are, however, quite simple and so cannot be said to determine the content. Yet their plays, and the poetry in which they are written, differ completely. Corneille is intellectually and emotionally a Neoclassicist—clear and hard, a true objectivist, sure of both his verse and the motivations of his characters. Racine was a great romantic long before the age of Romanticism.

Introductions to Literary Criticism and Theory

His characters are confused and tortured; his verse throbs like the heartbeats of his desperate heroines. He is a great sentimentalist in the best and deepest meaning of that word.

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Verse on any subject matter can of course be written purely according to formula. The 18th century in England saw all sorts of prose treatises cast in rhyme and metre, but this was simply applied patterning. Works such as The Botanic Garden [2 vol. Neoclassicism , especially in its 18th-century developments, confused—for ordinary minds, at any rate—formula with form and so led to the revolt called Romanticism. A similar revolution in taste was taking place all over Europe and also in China where the narrow pursuit of formula had almost destroyed poetry.

Each had his own personal form. Time passes and the pendulum of taste swings.

All form in literature is expressive. All expression has its own form, even when the form is a deliberate quest of formlessness. The automatic writing cultivated by the surrealists, for instance, suffers from the excessive formalism of the unconscious mind and is far more stereotyped than the poetry of the Neoclassicist Alexander Pope.

Form simply refers to organization, and critics who attack form do not seem always to remember that a writer organizes more than words. Thus, his organization stretches far back in his mental process. Form is the other face of content, the outward, visible sign of inner spiritual reality. In preliterate societies oral literature was widely shared; it saturated the society and was as much a part of living as food, clothing, shelter, or religion.

Many tribal societies remained primarily oral cultures until the 19th century. In early societies the minstrel might be a courtier of the king or chieftain, and the poet who composed liturgies might be a priest. But the oral performance itself was accessible to the whole community. With the invention of writing this separation was accelerated until finally literature was being experienced individually by the elite reading a book , while folklore and folk song were experienced orally and more or less collectively by the illiterate common people.

Elite literature continuously refreshes itself with materials drawn from the popular. Almost all poetic revivals, for instance, include in their programs a new appreciation of folk song, together with a demand for greater objectivity. On the other hand folk literature borrows themes and, very rarely, patterns from elite literature. Many of the English and Scottish ballads that date from the end of the Middle Ages and have been preserved by oral tradition share plots and even turns of phrase with written literature. A very large percentage of these ballads contain elements that are common to folk ballads from all over western Europe; central themes of folklore, indeed, are found all over the world.

Whether these common elements are the result of diffusion is a matter for dispute.