ENGLISH 119 - Draft
ENGLISH 119 - Draft
1. Write a 3-page paper on Literary Criticism and the importance of studying it.
2. The literary theories covered for the prelim are biographical, historicism comprising old
historicism and new historicism, and psychoanalytic theory.
3. Read “The Use of Force” by William Carlos Williams and as critics write three questions
each using the different literary lenses:
For a human being, literature opens a door that has never been opened
before. It enjoys the privilege of taking a person by the hand and having a
delightful journey into the author’s mind on how he tells a story and provides
narrative in detail with the intent to persuade and conquer our present belief
system. It may also serve as a bridge to a new perspective where one can take
such information as a subjective truth amongst the complexities the world offers.
It serves as an affirmation to current principles we possess and a resolution to
the vagueness we would likely encounter. It may serve its distinct purpose
encompassing the reader’s interpretation and pensive approach to a writer’s
indisputable idiosyncrasies.
To further seek the importance of literature, one may find it fascinating to
study Literary Criticism.
Literary criticism asks what literature is, what it does, and what it is worth.
The work itself is placed in the center because all approaches must deal,
to some extent or another, with the text itself.
Formalism and deconstruction are placed here also because they deal
primarily with the text and not with any of the outside considerations such
as author, the real world, audience, or other literature. Meaning, formalists
argue, is inherent in the text. Because meaning is determinant, all other
considerations are irrelevant.
Deconstructionists also subject texts to careful, formal analysis;
however, they reach an opposite conclusion: there is no meaning in
language.
A historical approach relies heavily on the author and his world. In the
historical view, it is important to understand the author and his world in
order to understand his intent and to make sense of his work. In this view,
the work is informed by the author's beliefs, prejudices, time, and history,
and to fully understand the work, we must understand the author and his
age.
An intertextual approach is concerned with comparing the work in
question to other literature, to get a broader picture.
Reader-Response is concerned with how the work is viewed by the
audience. In this approach, the reader creates meaning, not the author or
the work.
Mimetic criticism seeks to see how well a work accords with the real world
(is it accurate? correct? moral? ).
Then, beyond the real world are approaches dealing with the spiritual and
the symbolic--the images connecting people throughout time and cultures
(archetypes). This is mimetic in a sense too, but the congruency looked
for is not so much with the real world as with something beyond the real
world--something tying in all the worlds/times/cultures inhabited by
humans.
The Psychological approach is placed outside these poles because it can
fit in many places, depending how it is applied:
(1) Historical if diagnosing the author himself
(2) Mimetic if considering if characters are acting by "real world" standards
and with recognizable psychological motivations
(3) Archetypal when the idea of the Jungian collective unconscious is
included
(4) Reader-Response when the psychology of the reader--why he sees
what he sees in the text--is examined.