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Role of Spectacle in Tragedy
Spectacle is one of the six components of tragedy, occupying the category of the mode of imitation.
Spectacle includes all aspects of the tragedy that contribute to its sensory effects: costumes, scenery,
the gestures of the actors, the sound of the music and the resonance of the actors' voices. Aristotle
ranks spectacle last in importance among the other components of tragedy, remarking that a tragedy
does not need to be performed to have its impact on the audience, as it can be read as a text.

Spectacle (opsis)
Refers to the visual apparatus of the play, including set, costumes and props (anything you
can see). Aristotle calls spectacle the "least artistic" element of tragedy, and the "least
connected with the work of the poet (playwright).
For example: if the play has "beautiful" costumes and "bad" acting and "bad" story, there is
"something wrong" with it. Even though that "beauty" may save the play it is "not a nice thing".
Spectacle is like a suspenseful horror film.

Summary
Aristotle now narrows his focus to examine tragedy exclusively. In order to do so, he provides a
definition of tragedy that we can break up into seven parts:
(1) it involves mimesis;
(2) it is serious;
(3) the action is complete and with magnitude;
(4) it is made up of language with the "pleasurable accessories" of rhythm and harmony;
(5) these "pleasurable accessories" are not used uniformly throughout, but are introduced in separate
parts of the work, so that, for instance, some bits are spoken in verse and other bits are sung;
(6 ) it is performed rather than narrated; and
(7) it arouses the emotions of pity and fear and accomplishes a katharsis(purification or purgation) of
these emotions.
Next, Aristotle asserts that any tragedy can be divided into six component parts, and that every
tragedy is made up of these six parts with nothing else besides. There is (a) the spectacle, which is the
overall visual appearance of the stage and the actors. The means of imitation (language, rhythm, and
harmony) can be divided into (b) melody, and (c) diction, which has to do with the composition of the
verses. The agents of the action can be understood in terms of (d) character and (e) thought. Thought
seems to denote the intellectual qualities of an agent while character seems to denote the moral
qualities of an agent. Finally, there is (f) the plot, or mythos, which is the combination of incidents and
actions in the story.
Aristotle argues that, among these six, the plot is the most important. The characters serve to advance
the action of the story, not vice versa. The ends we pursue in life, our happiness and our misery, all
take the form of action. That is, according to Aristotle, happiness consists in a certain kind of activity
rather than in a certain quality of character. Diction and thought are also less significant than plot: a
series of well-written speeches have nothing like the force of a well-structured tragedy. Further,
Aristotle suggests, the most powerful elements in a tragedy, theperipeteia and the anagnorisis, are
elements of the plot. Lastly, Aristotle notes that forming a solid plot is far more difficult than creating
good characters or diction.
Having asserted that the plot is the most important of the six parts of tragedy, he ranks the remainder
as follows, from most important to least: character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. Character
reveals the individual motivations of the characters in the play, what they want or don't want, and how
they react to certain situations, and this is more important to Aristotle than thought, which deals on a
more universal level with reasoning and general truths. Melody and spectacle are simply pleasurable
accessories, but melody is more important to the tragedy than spectacle: a pretty spectacle can be
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arranged without a play, and usually matters of set and costume aren't the occupation of the poet
anyway.

Q. 1. What didAristotle meanby "Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities" ?

Answer :
Aristotle is referring to Suspension of disbelief in character arts
(especially in the fantasy genre)

First a few definitions:


Probability is the likelihood of an event happening.
The sample space of all events that can happen in the universe represents the
"possibilities".
Believable is good drama, even if impossible
Probable Impossibility refers to a situation that is impossible to happen in the
real world, but is probable in the universe of imaginary events that is assumed to
exist.
This lets the reader/audience suspend her judgment concerning the impossibility of
the narrative.
In other words, create your own imaginary worlds
(with impossible events like fish raising families and being able to talk),
but within that create believable plots.(for example, Finding Nemo).
Being believable works better than being realistic
Improbable Possibility refers to a situation that is a possibility in the real world, but is
extremely unlikely. For example James Bond winning every poker game. Sure, it is possible
that someone can win every game, but it is extremely unlikely. This makes bad drama.

fictions (impossibilities) that seem plausible can make good drama, while not-impossible but
ridiculously unlikely actions make bad drama. He's drawing a fairly fine distinction in that
some things that didn't happen seem like they could have happened: you easily suspend
disbelief. Science fiction is most rife with this, and the stories that Aristotle cites as examples
(Oedipus, The Odyssey) have a tinge of the sci-fi to them.

Aristotle In his Poetics he describes a number of qualities useful, if not crucial, to the art
of drama. One of these is the idea of probability:

In general, the impossible must be justified by reference to artistic requirements, or to the higher
reality, or to received opinion. With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be
preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible. Again, it may be impossible that there should be men
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such as Zeuxis painted. Yes, we say, but the impossible is the higher thing; for the ideal type must
surpass the reality.
The key phrase in understanding the concept, I think, is the requirements of art.
If we were looking at the requirements of science I think the improbable would be hugely preferred
to the impossible. However, Aristotle believed that arts purpose was to represent a reality higher,
greater, or perhaps just more harmonious, than our own.
His example, Zeuxis, painted highly idealised portraits. For Aristotle this was ok, because it
represented reality in a way that was higher, or more perfect. Aristotle justified this by reference to
the action of the drama, where each action must bear a relationship of plausibility with objective
reality and with the previous events within the drama. It becomes more acceptable to a dramas
audience, he says, to introduce impossibility, such as a god, rather than an improbability,

Q2.
A commonplace is a rhetorical device developed by teachers like Aristotle, and has been used in
numerous applications in public speaking for many years. Ironically, the commonplace is less common now,
though youll still see references to commonplace books, which are quite different.
Even before Aristotle, the Sophists, a group of itinerant scholars traveling the various Greek city-states often
taught how to write and deliver speeches. They often performed such speeches for audiences to gain new
students, and were occasionally asked to speak on a specific topic with little preparation time. In order to
create material that sounded scholarly, they usually had prepared a number of themes or compositions that
could be easily adapted quickly to be performed at will.
Aristotle called these themes commonplaces, and by the term he meant no
derision. In fact he taught his students to create a variety of prepared themes, which could be delivered as
occasion required.

They generally took two forms: encomium or vituperation.


Encomiums praised something, usually something virtuous that affected most people, like different
emotions, or things like democracy. Vituperation criticized something considered evil.
Sentiment in both literature and rhetoric had begun to praise the truly extemporaneous, instead of the
prepared, and often dismissed commonplaces as something to be avoided because they sounded trite and
repetitious

Q3 . Art of Rhetoric .
Aristotles Art of Rhetoric is one of the first and most important textbooks for
speech production. Following Aristotle, the purpose of rhetorical speech consists
in persuading by argumentation. In this respect he defines rhetoric as the
faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any
subject whatever. (Rhetoric I, 1355b/14,2). Now, persuasion presupposes as
any perlocutionary act that the utterances have been understood by the
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audience, in short: it presupposes (text) comprehension.1 When analysing the
first three phases of rhetoric heuresis, taxis and lexis two features in particular
stand out on account of the role they play in argumentation: topos and metaphor,
which are treated in the heuresis and the lexis. 2 Metaphor works in a heuristic
and aesthetic manner, while topos operates in a heuristic and logical manner.
This difference is grounded in their respective characteristics, which will be
discussed in the second and third sections of this paper. In the fourth section it is
shown how metaphor and topos are based on common knowledge and how they
are used in rhetorical text production.

Q4. How to define Topos ?


In contrast to metaphor, topos is never explicitly defined by Aristotle. However, in
The Art of Rhetoric Aristotle calls topoi general features, which may be applied
alike to Law, Physics, Politics, and many other sciences that differ in kind, such as
the topic of the more or less (Rhetoric I, 1358a/21). Following CH. STETTER
(1997: 370),
the topos is a place of common belief, where orator and audience
meet each other.
In the techne rhetorike, the topoi bear a double function: on the one
hand, they are search locations, which the author has to come across in the
process of heuresis in order to find proper premises for structuring the
argumentation. Additionally, the term denotes its concrete realisation as the
premise of the so-called Rhetorical Syllogism.

Literary Device (Point of View ):Point of view is the perspective from which a story is narrated. Every story has a
perspective, though there can be more than one type of point of view in a work of literature. The most common
points of view used in novels are first person singular (I) and third person (he and she). However, there
are many variants on these two types of point of view, as well as other less common narrative points of view.

The term point of view (POV) refers to who is telling a story, or who is narrating.
The narrator of a story or novel can appear in three main ways: first person,
second person and third person.
Definition:
Point of view is the manner in which a story is narrated or depicted and who it is that tells the
story. Simply put, the point of view determines the angle and perception of the story
unfolding, and thus influences the tone in which the story takes place. The point of view is
instrumental in manipulating the readers understanding of the narrative. In a way, the point of
view can allow or withhold the reader access into the greater reaches of the story. Two of the
most common point of view techniques are the first person, wherein the story is told by the
narrator from his or her standpoint and the third person wherein the narrator does not figure in
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the events of the story and tells the story by referring to all characters and places in the third
person with third person pronouns and proper nouns.
First Person : This narrator is usually the protagonistof the story, and this point of view allows
the reader access to the characters inner thoughts and reactions to the events occurring. All of
the action is processed through the narrators perspective, and therefore this type of narrator
may be unreliable.
Second Person : This point of view either implies that the narrator is actually an I trying to
separate himself or herself from the events that he or she is narrating, or allows the reader to
identify with the central character. This was popularized in the 1980s series Choose Your Own
Adventure, and appears in the recent novel Pretty Little Mistakes by Heather McElhatton:
Third Person
This point of view definition uses he and she as the pronouns to refer to different
characters, and provides the greatest amount of flexibility for the author.
Significance of Point of View in Literature
The choice of the point of view from which to narrate a story greatly affects both the
readers experience of the story and the type of information the author is able to
impart. First person creates a greater intimacy between the reader and the story, while
third person allows the author to add much more complexity to the plot and
development of different characters that one character wouldnt be able to perceive on
his or her own.
Therefore, point of view has a great amount of significance in
every piece of literature. The relative popularities of different types of point of view
have changed over the centuries of novel writing. For example, epistolary novels were
once quite common but have largely fallen out of favor. First person point is view,
meanwhile, is quite common now whereas it was hardly used at all before the
20th century.

Example:
In the popular Lord of the Rings book series, the stories are narrated in the third person and all
happenings are described from an outside the story point of view. Contrastingly, in the
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popular teen book series, Princess Diaries, the story is told in the first person, by the
protagonist herself.
Definition of Stream of Consciousness (or Internal Monologue)
When used as a term in literature, stream of consciousness is a narrative form in which the
author writes in a way that mimics or parallels a characters internal thoughts. Sometimes this
device is also called internal monologue, and often the style incorporates the natural chaos
of thoughts and feelings that occur in any of our minds at any given time. Just as happens in
real life, stream-of-consciousness narratives often lack associative leaps and are characterized
by an absence of regular punctuation.
The term stream of consciousness first came about in 1890 when the philosopher and
psychologist William James used it in his book, The Principles of Psychology. He used it to
describe the natural flow of thoughts that, even while the different parts are not necessarily
connected, the brain does not distinguish one thought as strictly independent from the next.
May Sinclair was the first person, in 1918, to adapt the definition of stream of consciousness
to literature.
Difference Between Stream of Consciousness and Free Writing
The activity of free writing is a technique to remove inhibitions from creativity. Free
writing encourages a writer to get words down on paper without editing or worrying about
the product, knowing that most of it will not necessarily be all that interesting.
Stream of consciousness, on the other hand, is writing that has been
polished and has a purpose, even while giving the impression that it is somewhat random.
Authors who use the technique of stream of consciousness do so with intentions to guide the
character from one place to the next internally and not just let the characters thoughts go
haywire.
Significance of Stream of Consciousness in Literature
Stream of consciousness is a device that gained
popularity in twentieth-century literature. There are some examples of stream of
consciousness before this time, such as in the 1757 novel Tristam Shandy or Edgar Allen
Poes precursor style in The Tell-Tale Heart and other works. In general, however, its
considered a modern style.

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Stream of consciousness can be found in literature from different cultures and languages.
Stream of consciousness examples can be found in the works of French writer Marcel Proust,
Indian writer Salman Rushdie, Irish writer James Joyce, Italian writer Italo Svevo, Mexican
writer Roberto Bolao and contemporary American novelist Dave Eggers. Authors use stream
of consciousness to more closely follow a characters interior life. Stream of consciousness
gives a very direct view into the subtle and sometimes rapid shifts in the way a character
thinks while going about his or her day. This provides a very intimate relationship between the
reader and the character.

Examples of Stream of Consciousness in Literature


Example #1
I grow old I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
(The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot)
This is one of the early examples of stream of consciousness writing from the twentieth
century (it was published in 1915). T.S. Eliot explores his narrators inner life throughout the
poem, moving from one thought to the next quickly. The above excerpt shows several
different thoughts within the space of just a few lines. However, the use of stream of
consciousness in this poem belies a real depth of feeling, as the narrator seems to want to
make himself understood throughout the poem and struggles with that connection.
1) One of the characters in William Faulkners novel The Sound and the Fury is
Benjy, a cognitively disabled man. His section of the novel is written in a stream
of consciousness style, documenting Benjys sensory experiences of the world
without the advantage of being able to really understand them

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Definition of Symbolism
When used as a literary device, symbolism means to imbue objects with a certain
meaning that is different from their original meaning or function. Other literary
devices, such as metaphor, allegory, and allusion, aid in the development of
symbolism. Authors use symbolism to tie certain things that may initially seem
unimportant to more universal themes. The symbols then represent these
grander ideas or qualities. For instance, an author may use a particular color that
on its own is nothing more than a color, but hints at a deeper meaning. One
notable example is in Joseph Conrads aptly titled Heart of Darkness, where the
darkness of the African continent in his work is supposed to symbolize its
backwardness and the possibility of evil there .
There are also cultural symbols, such as a dove representing peace. The
American flag: The thirteen red and white stripes on the American flag
symbolize the original thirteen colonies, while the fifty stars are a symbol for
the fifty states.
The five Olympic rings: The primary symbol of the Olympics is the image of
five interlocking rings

Significance of Symbolism in Literature


Symbolism has played a large role in the history of literature. Symbols have
been used in cultures all around the world, evident in ancient legends,
fables, and religious texts. One famous example of symbolism is the story
of the Garden of Eden, in which the serpent persuades Eve to eat an apple
from the tree of knowledge. The serpent in this story represents wickedness
and the apple is a symbol for knowledge. Symbolism is equally important in
poetry, prose, and plays, as well as in all genres of literature, from science
fiction to fantasy to fiction for young adults (just think of Harry Potters scar
a symbol of his being the chosen one, as well as his ability to overcome
evil). When analyzing a piece of literature, examining the primary symbols
often leads to a greater understanding of the work itself.
Though the definition of symbolism most often relates to a literary device,
there was also a nineteenth-century literary movement called Symbolism.
The movement was chiefly based in France, Russia, and Belgium, and was
greatly influenced by the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Symbolists rejected
realism, and instead thought that truth could only be represented in an
indirect manner, i.e., through symbols. Famous symbolists were Charles
Baudelaire, Stphane Mallarm, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Ezra
Pound.

Examples of Symbolism in Literature

Nathaniel Hawthorne named his novel The Scarlet Letter after the central symbol of the
book.
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams takes its name from the most prevalent symbol
in the play.
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Q5 .

What is end of poetry according to Samuel Johnson ?

Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 [O.S. 7 September] 13 December 1784)

Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind,
but in one composition. Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous
characters, and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce
seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter.

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That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; but there
is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to
instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama
may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy cannot be denied, because it
includes both in its alterations of exhibition and approaches nearer than either to the
appearance of life, by eshewing how great machinations and slender designs may
promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general
system by unavoidable concatenation.

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It is objected, that by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted in their
progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by a due gradation of
preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the perfection
of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is received as true even by
those who in daily experience feel it to be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes
seldom fail to produce the intended vicissitudes of passion. Fiction cannot move so
much, but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it must be allowed that
pleasing melancholy be sometimes interrupted by unwelcome levity, yet let it be
considered likewise, that melancholy is often not pleasing, and that the disturbance of
one man may be the relief of another; that different auditors have different habitudes; and
that, upon the whole, all pleasure consists in variety.
When Shakespeares plan is understood, most of the criticisms of Rhymer and Voltaire
vanish away. The play of Hamlet is opened, without impropriety, by two sentinels; Iago
bellows at Brabantios window, without injury to the scheme of the play, though in terms
which a modern audience would not easily endure; the character of Polonius is
seasonable and useful; and the Grave-diggers themselves may be heard with applause.
The force of his comick scenes has suffered little diminution from the changes made by a
century and a half, in manners or in words. As his personages act upon principles arising
from genuine passion, very little modified by particular forms, their pleasures and
vexations are communicable to all times and to all places; they are natural, and therefore
durable; the adventitious peculiarities of personal habits, are only superficial dies, bright
and pleasing for a little while, yet soon fading to a dim tinct, without any remains of

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former lustre; but the discriminations of true passion are the colours of nature; they
pervade the whole mass, and can only perish with the body that exhibits them.
Narration in dramatick poetry is naturally tedious, as it is unanimated and inactive, and
obstructs the progress of the action. Shakespeare found it an encumberance, and instead
of lightening it by brevity, endeavoured to recommend it by dignity and splendour. His
declamations or set speeches are commonly cold and weak, for his power was the power
of nature; when he endeavoured, like other tragick writers, to catch opportunities of
amplification,
'SINCE THE END OF POETRY IS PLEASURE, THAT CANNOT BE UNPOETICAL WITH WHICH
ALL ARE PLEASED.' .

Q6. Lives of the Poets ?


1. " To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful

must be familiar to his imagination: he must be conversant with all that is awfully
vast or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the
minerals of the earth, and meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind
with inexhaustible variety: for every idea is useful for the enforcement or
decoration of moral or religious truth; and he who knows most will have most
power of diversifying his scenes, and of gratifying his reader with remote allusions
and unexpected instruction."

Samuel Johnson
2.

" It is a general rule in poetry, that all appropriated terms of art should be
sunk in general expressions, because poetry is to speak an universal
language. This rule is still stronger with regard to arts not liberal, or
confined to few, and therefore far removed from common knowledge."
Johnson: Dryden (Lives of the Poets)

3.

"The essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is variety. To write


verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and
settled rule -- a rule however lax enough to substitute similitude for
identity, to admit change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear
without disappointing it."
Johnson: Dryden (Lives of the Poets)

4.

Poetry
"It seems natural for a young poet to initiate himself by pastorals, which,
not professing to imitate real life, require no experience; and, exhibiting
only the simple operation of unmingled passions, admit no subtle
reasoning or deep inquiry."
Johnson: Pope (Lives of the Poets)

5.

Poetry; Similes
"A simile, to be perfect, must both illustrate and ennoble the subject; must
show it to the understanding in a clearer view, and display it to the fancy
with greater dignity; but either of these qualities may be sufficient to
recommend it. In didactic poetry, of which the great purpose is instruction,
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a simile may be praised which illustrates, though it does not ennoble; in
heroics, that may be admitted which ennobles, though it does not
illustrate. That it may be complete, it is required to exhibit, independently
of its references, a pleasing image; for a simile is said to be a short
episode."
Johnson: Pope (Lives of the Poets)

Q7. What is the main concept in "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" by William


Wordsworth?
In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wanted to express his theory of
poetry. The Preface is therefore a justification of that theory and of the themes
and styles of the poems in Lyrical Ballads.
One aspect of this theory was to use themes about common life (usually in rural
environments and situations involving a connection to nature). Thus, Wordsworth
wanted to explore how one could attain profound truths and sublime emotional
experiences via the imagination. In other words, this process is about
understanding the extraordinary while experiencing the ordinary.
Poetry is to be created out of these extraordinary/ordinary experiences. Poetry will
be the spontaneous overflow of emotion reflected in tranquility. The poet has an
experience and, reflecting on it later, can arrive at a deeper understanding about
that experience and about the act of reflection. The process of experience/feeling
and reflection is not just a method for poetic creation; it is also Wordsworth's
recommended method for experience in general.
Wordsworth wanted the style of Lyrical Ballads to stick with the common life
theme. He proposed to avoid personification and traditional poetic diction, favoring
instead more common (natural) language of people. In a sense, focusing on
feeling (lyrical) more than poetic form (i.e., a ballad),
Wordsworth shifts the focus from form to content. Although he was attempting a
less formalistic poetry in favor of a more natural (even more prose-like) poetry, he
did note that verse was the best form for conveying strong emotional content.

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I might perhaps include all which it is necessaryto say upon this subject by
affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions, either of passions,
manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and
the other in verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read
once.
One could easily argue that a poem (or a song) has a longer life in the memory
than a passage from a work of prose (i.e. a novel). This isn't just because a poem
tends to be a shorter work. It's also because of the cadence and rhythm, natural
mnemonic devices. In depicting poems about realistic, common people in rustic
environments, Wordsworth was rejecting the poetry of the past which tended to
treat kings, queens, and heroes in an overly regimented style. For Wordsworth,
real people were more relevant. More to the point, Wordsworth believed that
sublime emotions can be discovered in the experience and reflection of common
experiences.
In other words, it can be inspiring to identify extraordinary virtue in a poem about
an extraordinary hero whose exploits are unbelievable to the point of being
legendary. Wordsworth supposed that (his main concept) it would also be
inspiring, more relevant, and more rewarding to identify extraordinary virtue in a
poem about ordinary life.

Q8. brief summary to Wordsworth's Preface To Lyrical Ballads that defines


Wordsworth's idea of the poet, poetry and poetic language?

While Wordsworth is not setting out a complete poetic defense wherein he defines
his aesthetic
("I have therefore altogether declined to enter regularly upon this defence"),

it is true that in the Preface he does discuss his ideas of what the poet is, what
poetry is and, most importantly to Lyrical Ballads, what the language of poetry is.
Wordsworth first implies that a Poet is one who arranges language expressing
ideas in metrical form. This language he arranges is "in a state of vivid
sensation." In other words, it is emotional reaction to ideas or emotional
expressions of feeling.
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The Poet is one who "rationally" (i.e., reasonably) imparts the "vivid

sensation," or emotionalism, in metrical form to readers. In other words, in


Wordsworth's view, the Poet discerns vivid emotional states in people
around him and captures those emotional states in poetic meter and rhyme
("metrical arrangements") to "impart" this vision to the reader.

Wordsworth also has something to say about what a Poet is not.


This false Poet substitutes "feeling ..., philosophical language" with
"arbitrary and capricious habits of expression" that falsely accrues honor to
their poetic skill.
In other words, these anti-Poets turn their backs on the real language of everyday
expressions of emotion and invent "their own creations" of poetic language that
are artificial, the product of a whim, lacking philosophical importance, lacking
clarity. They think they become honored poets this way but really only "furnish
food" for poor taste that has no solid bearings and is "fickle."
Regarding Poetry, Wordsworth implies that Poetry is in part a matter of what is customary:
[The reader will] struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for
poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these [Lyrical Ballads] can be
permitted to assume that title.

More importantly though, Poetry is the outflowing of emotion--of sentiment--that


has been tempered by serious, "long," deep thought and that therefore describes
"objects" and "sentiments" that relate to "important subjects" of discussion.

Poetic language, according to Wordsworth--and this is one of the paramount


ideas in the Preface--is the language of common people speaking everyday
expressions and expressing everyday sensations of rural
(i.e., pastoral) people in an [idealized] rural life. Wordsworth says this language is
"more emphatic" having "greater simplicity" being "more accurately contemplated"
and "incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." In other
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words, commonplace, "low," "rustic" language is more intuitive, insightful, genuine,


sincere than is the contrived elegant language of Poets (or anit-Poets).
Importantly, Wordsworth concedes that this language must be
(1) filtered through the Poet's mind and
(2) cleaned up, "purified," of what is vulgar, crass, incorrect and offensive before
this shinning quality of greatness can show through.
Thus many critics, including Coleridge, have found great contradiction and fallacy
in Wordsworth's position on poetic common, low, language.
The language, ... [must be] (purified indeed from what appear to be its real
defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust)

Q9. Discuss Wordsworth's views on poetic diction in "Preface


to Lyrical Ballads".
Essentially, Wordsworth denied that there should be such a thing as a diction
specific to poetry. He thought that artifical poetic diction used by many writers
obscured the sentiment and feeling that ought to be the focus of poetry. Rather
than ornate, basically ornamental language, Wordsworth thought the diction of
prose and the diction of poetry should be the same:
It may be safely affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be,any essential difference
between the language of prose and metrical composition.
Wordsworth went even further, asserting that poetry ought to be written in

the "language really spoken by men," which would accentuate the


emotive power of the works by giving them more authenticity. In short, he
hoped to strip away what he saw as the pretensions and stuffiness of poetry
as it had been written by his predecessors, and his views on diction were
central to this project.

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Q10. Critically refers to atleast Three contradiction in wordsworth preface ?


OR
What are some ideas about poets and poetry proposed by William Wordsworth in his "Preface"
to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)?

Answer :In his "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth lays
out many of the ideas often associated with Romanticism in English poetry.
Among those ideas are the following:
1. an emphasis on the "real language" actually spoken by human beings,
especially human beings from the lower reaches of society. Wordsworth thus
rejects the kind of poetic language that had come to seem stale, artificial, and
unconvincing.
2. an emphasis on "vivid sensation," or heightened emotion and perception.
3. an emphasis on using poetry to provide "more than common pleasure."
4. an emphasis on "incidents and situations from common life."
5. an emphasis on using imagination to throw a certain coloring over
descriptions of such incidents and situations so that ordinary things should be
presented to the mind in an unusual way . . . in order to make these incidents
and situations interesting by tracing in them . . . the primary laws of our nature:
chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of
excitement.
6. an emphasis on [l]ow and rustic life, which often reveals essential human
nature more readily than the kinds of lives lived by the allegedly more
sophisticated persons of the upper classes.
7. an emphasis on the essential passions of the heart.
8. an emphasis on a plainer and more emphatic language than is usually found
among the highly educated
9. an emphasis on the ways human emotions are incorporated with the beautiful
and permanent forms of nature.
10. a rejection of the kinds of arbitrary and capricious habits of expression
traditionally used in conventional poetry

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11. an emphasis on poetry as a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings but also


on the poet as a person who has thought long and deeply:
12. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts,
which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings . . . .
13. an emphasis on the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when [it is] agitated by the
great and simple affections of our nature.
14. a rejection of the emphasis on abstract ideas and conventional personifications
that had characterized the poetry of the eighteenth century.
15. an emphasis on looking directly and steadily at whatever the poet tries to describe
and thus a rejection of falsehood of description.
16. an emphasis on a kind of poetic language that resembles the language of
common prose.
17. an emphasis on the poet as a man speaking to men that is, as a person who
can effectively articulate the kinds of thoughts and feelings experienced by most
human beings.

Q11. Terry eagleton views on Reflectionist Theory


?
The question of partisanship in literature is bound up to some extent with the problem of
how works of literature relate to the real world. Socialist realisms prescription that
literature should teach certain political attitudes assumes that literature does indeed (or
at least ought to) reflect or reproduce social reality in a fairly direct way. Marx and Engels,
interestingly, do not themselves use the metaphor of reflection about literary works,
although Marx speaks in The Holy Family of Eugne Sues novel being in some respects
untrue to the life of its times, and Engels could find in Homer direct illustrations of kinship
systems in early Greece.

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Nevertheless, reflectionism has been a deep-seated tendency in Marxist
criticism, as a way of combating formalist theories of literature which lock the
literary work within its own sealed space, marooned from history.
In its cruder formulations, the idea that literature reflects reality is clearly inadequate. It
suggests a passive, mechanistic relationship between literature and society, as though
the work, like a mirror or photographic plate, merely inertly registered what was
happening out there. Lenin speaks of Tolstoy as the mirror of the Russian revolution of
1905; but if Tolstoys work is a mirror, then it is, as Pierre Macherey argues, one placed at
an angle to reality, a broken mirror which presents its images in fragmented form, and is
as expressive in what it does not reflect as in what it does. If art reflects life, Bertolt
Brecht comments in A Short Organum for the Theatre (1948), It does so with special
mirrors. And if we are to speak of a selective mirror with certain blindspots and
refractions, then it seems that the metaphor has served its limited usefulness and had
better be discarded for something more helpful.

Q13. Centripetal Criticism Northrop Frye ?


NORTHROP FRYE THE ARCHETYPES OF LITERATURE

As such, Frye contends, in a vein similar to the New Critics that literary criticism must be put
on a systematic and scientific basis.
He dismisses as Pseudo-criticism all criticism with centrifugal tendencies, that is, which
diverts our attention away from the literary work itself.
He counts in this regard C literary criticism that masquerades as casual value-judgments,
ones that are not based on literary experience . . . but are . . . derived from religious or
political prejudice.
He is evidently thinking here of what the New Critic John Crowe Ransom calls the
Moralistic Approach To Literary Criticism Practised By The Humanists And The Marxists Alike );

literary criticism of the sort advocated by I. A. Richards that focuses on the


impact of literature on the reader
(the so-called affective fallacy against which Wimsatt and Beardsley famously warned); and

literary criticism that focuses on the author as the source of the literary work
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(the so-called intentional fallacy against which Wimsatt and Beardsley also famously
warned).
He dismisses in this regard all Sentimental Judgments that are
based either on non-existent categories or antitheses (Shakespeare studied life,Milton books)
or on a visceral reaction to the writers personality .

Evidently, Frye shares much in these three respects with the New Critics and their opposition
to moralistic, affective (reader-oriented) and intentional (author-oriented) approaches to
criticism.
In their place, Frye advocates a rhetorical or structural analysis of a work of art ,
an approach that is centripetal in thrust, rather thancentrifugal.
Another huge influence on Frye in this regard is Aristotles philosophy and literary
theory. Aristotle famously argued that to understand any natural or humanly-made
phenomenon,
it is necessary to ascertain the four conditions (causes) necessary to its
existence:
1. The Material Cause (the material of which something is made in the case of
art, the words and actions of humans and their natural and social environments
represented),
2. The Efficient Cause (the divine or human agent responsible for its existence
the artist or author),
3. The Formal Cause (what it is meant to be, what shape it is meant to have),
and
4. The Final Cause (to what end it exists, its ultimate purpose).
Frye is uneasy with emphasising the first two of these causes because each tends to be
centrifugal, that is, to lead the critic away from the literary work per se.
For example, the material cause of the work of art , for Frye consists in the
social conditions and cultural demands which produced it .
The quest to understand the material cause of literary works leads the critic outside of his
own discipline (i.e. the study of literature) and into the province of biography, socio-political
history and literary history.
Similarly, the quest to understand the efficient cause of the literary work
leads the critic to focus on the relationship between the writer and his / her work, rather than
the work itself.
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Alluding evidently to Freudian psychoanalysis, Frye cites in this regard what he terms the
Fallacy of Premature Teleology , the view that the critic should not look for more in the
poemthan the poet may safely be assumed to have been conscious of putting there .
Frye asserts that a kind of literary psychology connecting the poet with the poem is
unavoidable for revealing the failures in his expression, the things in him which are still
attached to his work as well as his private mythology, his own . . . peculiar formation of
symbols, of much of which he is unconscious .
However, Frye is of the view that criticism should not degenerate into mere biography for
the simple reason that this leads one away from the work in order to focus on the individual
responsible for it.

Q14. What is Centripetal Criticism ?


criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure
of independence from the art it deals with
.Criticism that is centripetal moves toward the meanings embedded in the text itself (usually
poems)like, what's going on with the actual words right there on the page?
The poem's rhyme scheme, alliteration, use of metaphor, and all of such things form
and inalienable part of centripetal criticism.
Centrifugal criticism asks about the outside context of a workusually a novel. What was the
social, political, and cultural context of, say, Moby-Dick
Centrifugal criticism also looks at the syntax and use of languagebut more for what it tells
you about relations among the characters, tone, and events of the narrative and less about
the aesthetic qualities of the words themselves.
As I say, "Criticism will always have two aspects, one turned toward the

structure of literature and one turned toward the other cultural phenomena that
form the social environment of literature"
Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to
some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and
participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be
the means of achieving the former. [From The Well-Tempered Critic]
Literature cultivates your "conscious life," giving you deeper insight into the use and value of
language.
Giabatista Vico :

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He actually championed the idea that philosophy had a huge debt to poetry and was
even derived from poetry. I call him "the first modern thinker to understand that all major
verbal structures have descended historically from poetic and mythological ones"

Q15. Fredriche Jameson module of Parody and


Pastiche ?
Pastiche and parody are both examples of INTERTEXCTUALITY.
Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates. Parody, pastiche, and the
shift from modernism to postmodernism are all terminological minefields.
According to Jameson, a major change in intertextual practices occurred in the 1950s. Instead
of parody, with its nuanced evaluations of past styles which still function as benchmarks even
when the styles are rejected or transformed, we get pastiche. In this practice, the ingrained
awareness of cultural history which marks parody has vanished.

A PARODY
is a work that mimics in an absurd or ridiculous way the conventions and style of
another work - in order to derive ridicule, ironic comment or affectionate fun.
Critics defines parody as any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive
imitation of another cultural production or practice .
Duchamp's parody of the Mona Lisa adds a goatee and moustache. Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
A PASTICHE is a medley of various ingredients; a hotchpotch, farrago, jumble . The term
denotes a technique employing a generally light-hearted tongue-in-cheek imitation of another's style;
although jocular, it is usually respectful (as opposed to parody, which is not).
Pastiche is prominent in popular culture. Many genre pieces, particularly in fantasy, are essentially
pastiches. George Lucas Star Wars series is often considered to be a pastiche of traditional science
fiction television serials or radio shows.
Parody
An imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialize an original work, its subject, author,
style, or some other target, by means of satiric or ironic imitation.

Pastiche
A work of visual art, literature, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more
other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates.
Example: The movie "Super 8" is a pastiche of 1980's adventure films, specifically imitating the style
of Stephen Spielberg's early career, because it celebrates and embraces the style unironically.
Pastiche and Parody are often confused because they both involve imitation, but the easiest way to
distinguish the two is this: Pastiche embraces the imitation through general affection for the source
material, whereas Parody is meant to mock and make fun of the source material.

Satire
Satire is a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies,
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abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals,
corporations, and society itself, into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its
greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon and as a tool to draw
attention to both particular and wider issues in society.

Q16. In what ways Feminine different from Female ?


Thus 'feminine' represents nurture, and 'female' nature in this usage, 'Femininity' is a cultural construct: one
isn't born a woman, one becomes one, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it
In Toward a Feminist Poetics
Showalter traces the history of women's literature, suggesting that it can be divided into three phases:
1. Feminine: In the Feminine phase (18401880), women wrote in an effort to equal the

intellectual achievements of the male culture, and internalized its assumptions about female
nature (New, 137).
2. Feminist: The Feminist phase (18801920 ) was characterized by womens writing that
protested against male standards and values, and advocated womens rights and values, including
a demand for autonomy.
3. Female: The Female phase (1920 ) is one of self-discovery.
Showalter says, Women Reject Both Imitation And ProtestTwo Forms Of Dependency

And Turn Instead To Female Experience As The Source Of An Autonomous Art,


Extending The Feminist Analysis Of Culture To The Forms And Techniques Of
Literature

The Marxist view of the necessary dialectical relationship between theory and practice also applies to
the relationship between female experience and feminist politics.If the confusion of female with
feminist is fraught with political pitlfalls. this is no less true of the consequcnces of the collapse of
feminine into female. Among many feminists it has long been established usage to make 'feminine'
(and 'masculine') represent social constructs (patterns of sexuality and behaviour imposed by cultural
and social norms), and to reserve 'female' and 'male' for the purely biological aspccts ofsexual
difference.Under patriarchy men will always speak from a different position than women,and their
political strategies must take this into account
Virginia Woolf believe A womens writing is always feminine; the only difficulty liwed in defining
what we means by feminine

The feminist struggle, she argues, must be seen historically and politically as a three tiered
one, which can be schematically summarised as follows:
1. Women demand equal access ( the symbolic order. Liberal feminism. Equality.
2. Women reject the male symbolic order in the name difference. Radical feminism.
Femininity extolled.
3. Women reject the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as mClaphysical
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Q17. What does Elliot means lemon squeezer school of

criticism ?

Write a note on New Criticism or the New School of Literary


Criticism.
Modern literary criticism has a bewildering variety. There are various modes and techniques, currents and
crosscurrents of criticism in vogue at present. Criticism has been influenced by new discoveries and researches in
the field of sciences, anthropology, sociology, psychology, Philosophy and linguistics.

New Criticism
By the late thirties both psychoanalytic and sociological criticisms had
lost much of their vogue, and many of the younger critics turned 'for guidance to a group that
has since come to be known as the New Critics. These New Critics are mainly the followers of
T. S. Eliot but they have also been deeply influenced by Coleridge, Henry James, Ezra Pound
and I. A. Richards. This New Criticism flourished in the forties and fifties. The most
important critics of this school were John Crowe Ranson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren,
and R. P. Blackmur.
The Chief Ideal Before The New Critics Was To Free Literature From
The Pressure And Competition Of Science. They asserted that content and form are separable
that 'the content of a poem could be located only in the specific dynamics of the form.' They
tried to read a poem as a poem and were anti-historical.
New Criticism was decidedly an American movement. But a reaction had set
against it under the leadership of Ronald S. Crane of the University of Chicago. The Chicago
School of Critics known as neo-Aristotelians insisted upon a return to questions of
design and structure.
The New Critics have been criticised by Lionel Trilling for neglecting the historical
sense.

While analysing a poem, a play or a work of literature, the New Critics very often
laid stress on ambiguity, irony, paradox and tension.
In fiction they stressed upon 'the point of view' and the metaphoric use of language.
Critics like Cleanth Brooks and William Empson indulged in elaborating their complexities of
interpretation without caring for the meanings imposed by history. In fiction, they laid
emphasis on symbolism. They contributed for the refinement of critical sensibility.
The New Critics treated all literary works as if they were lyrics. Sometimes they provided
monolithic readings that stiffen the poem into a moral allegory. In general, they seem to
believe that criticism can or should become an impersonal technique approaching the
precision of science.
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T. S. Eliot calls it 'the lemon-squeezer school of criticism."


According to T. S. Eliot , the function of criticism is the exposition and elucidation of art
and also correction of taste, and thereby promoting understanding and enjoyment of art.
A good critic must be impersonal and objective, and must not be guided by his inner
voice, but by authority outside himself. By this he meant tradition.
A critic must be learned not only in the literature of his own country but also in the literature
of Europe, from Homer to his own day. However, he must not judge the present by the
standards of the past, as the requirements of each age are different, and so the canons must
change from age to age.
Next, he should have a highly developed sense of fact. By this, Eliot does not mean
biographical or sociological knowledge, but knowledge of the technical details of a poem, its
genesis, its setting etc. It is these facts that a critic must use to appreciate a work of art.
However, Eliot is against the lemon squeezer school of critics.
Practitioners of poetry make the best critics. Such poet critics have a thorough knowledge and
understanding of the process of poetic creation, and so they are in the best position to
communicate their own understanding to the audience.
Again, comparison and analysis are the chief tools of a critic.
He must compare not to pass judgment but to elucidate the qualities of the work.
Throughout, the Publication of "The Function of Criticism. essay demonstrates the influences Eliot had on
the New Critics. While Eliot states early on that he failed to see why he was deemed by current literary
scholarship to have given birth to New Criticism (106), he also uses the essay as a platform from which to
proclaim a number of principles that are quite similar to those of the New Critics:
1.

the idea of the circumstances surrounding a work's creation as irrelevant

2.

the "danger . . . of assuming that there must be just one interpretation of the poem as a whole, [and] that
it must be right" (113)

3.

the lack of a need to assess the author's intent

4.

the unimportance of the "feelings" of the reader

5.

the limitation of literary criticism to the study of the literary object, i.e., the work itself

However, at the same time, Eliot takes the opportunity to disavow that school of criticism. He ridicules one
of the methods of New Criticism, known today as close reading, describing it thus:
The method is to take a well-known poem . . . without reference to the author or to his other work, analyse
it stanza by stanza and line by line, and extract, squeeze, tease, press every drop of meaning out of it that one
can. It might be called the lemon-squeezer school of criticism. . . . I imagine that some of the poets (they are all
dead except myself) would be surprised at learning what their poems mean . .
Eliot is here giving voice to one of the most common objections to New Criticism, namely that it removes all the
enjoyment from a work of literature by dissecting it. This essay strongly asserts that enjoyment is an important
component of the reading of literature. Eliot makes no distinction between "enjoyment and understanding,"
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seeing the two not "as distinct activitiesone emotional and the other intellectual. To understand a poem comes
to the same thing as to enjoy it for the right reasons" .
On the whole question of enjoyment, Eliot diverges from the general trend of New Criticism,
which primarily concerned itself with interpretation. Eliot further distances himself from the New Critics with
his implication of the possibility of misunderstanding a poem , an idea that the New Critics would consider
heretical.

Q18. Art is a substitute gratification

-FREUDs

Comment ?
Freud places art and pathology together as comparable strategies of
adaption,for artists and neurotics.In an Autobiographical Study Freud offers
a midecal diagnosis of how the imagination allows the libido

to

get

around the respective demands of reality. There ar passages in wchich


freud suggests Art is a substitute gratification and science a diversion.At
the end of the twenty third introductory lecture ,freud offered a brief
psychology of art.The Artist,he said,wants to attain honor,power,wealth,
and the love of women;but he lacks the means to reach theses
satisfactions.
Structure of art is vicarious itself.

Q19. EDWARD SAID ON GERMAN AND ANGLO FRENCH ORIENTALISM ?


Orientalism, the late Edward W. Saids magnum opus of literary criticism and polemic, is a
book that attracts both passionate adulation and vitriolic criticism. During his lifetime,
because of his persona as a public intellectual and his steady output of no-holds-barred critic
Orientalism, as defined by Said, is a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on
the Orients special place in European Western experience, and he notes that,
The Orient [is one of Europes] deepest and most recurring images of the Other.
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He continues, Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and
epistemological distinction made between the Orient and (most of the time) the Occident.
[9] Orientalism, as a body of produced knowledge, isand does not simply representa
considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do
with the Orient than it does with our world.
[10] It is a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has
been a considerable material investment.
[11] Said dots other definitions of what he means by Orientalism throughout the book, and
his belief in the connection between the production of knowledge and (state) power is far from
subtle: Orientalismis knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court,
prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing.
[12] Also, he states: Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and
limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine, and Orientalism was
ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the
familiar (Europe, the West, us) and the strange (the Orient, the East, them).

[13] Said claims that when not used to describe the whole of Asia, the term Orientwas
most rigorously understood as applying to the Islamic Orient.

[14] This claim is contrary to my own experience as an Oriental who clearly hails from
East Asian heritage. This claim is also interesting considering that British colonialism in
India predates similar involvement in the Islamic Middle East/Orient, to use Saids
terminology. Thus, it is somewhat strange to cut off the Orient at the Islamic (Central
Arab) Middle East and Egypt, excluding most of what lies east of Iraq and west of Egypt.
Finally, for Said, the Orientalist attitude toward the Oriental (subject) peoples was one of
condescension and superiority, as exemplified by the British viceroy Lord Cromer in late
nineteenth century Egypt, who believed that Orientals simply do not know what is best for
them and thus require European counsel and guidanceism

Q20. EDWARD SAID ON GERMAN AND ANGLO FRENCH ?


In the 1960s and 70s, a number of scholars began to pay careful attention to German cultural
constructions of the Orient in the literary and philosophical works from the Baroque period
to Romanticism.i However, with the publication of Orientalism (1978),

Edward Saids

analytical framework became, for good or ill, the dominant scholarly paradigm. In the wake
of the appearance of Saids volume, a decade or more passed before the scholarship on

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popular or academic Orientalism in Germany attempted to move beyond what Said had
intitially said on the subject.
The purpose of this essay is to consider the exceptionalism of German Orientalism, one that
employs imagery of the Orient for very different purposes than the French and British
variants.
The central question under consideration regards the utility of this imagery in the
tradition of German Orientalism. The construction of the idea of the Orient in German
thought and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I argue, did not
allow German thinkers to identify with the dominant powers of western Europe, but rather
with the Oriental Other. In other words, they were engaged in a process of self-Othering.
One hesitates to describe German Orientalism as being special in light of the imposing
tradition of arguments over the Sonderweg thesis.
New light might be shed on a different variant of Orientalism by comparing the German
phenomenon with Irish Orientalism, as described by Joseph Lennon: to study Irish writings
on the Orient ... is also to study Irish cultural narratives of antiquity, Celticism, and nation
The image of the Orient with which they identified was, of course, one of their own making.
To argue that these German thinkers identified with the oriental victims of western
imperialism is not to argue that they were, in reality, such victims. Nor is it to argue that this
identification came as a result of any genuine engagement with or understanding of the
Other with whom they sought to identify.
Self-Othering, as it is described below, was a curious rhetorical strategy which
involved two distinct forms or acts of Othering imaginative constructions of the
oriental Other with whom one could identify and the western imperial Other, against
whom one was seeking to construct an identity.ii Both the Indian and western European
Others could be made to serve as the ideal mirrors for thinkers who wished to see
themselves, and their country, at twice their natural size.
As a rhetorical strategy, self-Othering has some noteworthy historical precedents in
Michel de Montaignes essay On Cannibals and Bartolem de Las Casass Short
Account of the Destruction of the Indies, both composed in the sixteenth century.
Montaigne was writing in reaction to the devastation of the Wars of Religion in
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France, while Las Casas was issuing his condemnation of the inhumanity of Spanish
imperialism. Both authors, however, were taking advantage of the blank canvas that
had been provided by the New World in order to level their critiques of contemporary
European society.
The difficulty of dealing with German Orientalism begins, naturally enough, with
Said himself. In the Introduction to Orientalism, he wrote that despite the fact that by
about 1830 German scholarship had fully attained its European pre-eminence ... at no
time in German scholarship during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century could
a close partnership have developed between Orientalists and a protracted sustained
national interest in the Orient. There was nothing in Germany to correspond to the
Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa.
What German Oriental scholarship did, he continued, was to refine and elaborate
techniques whose application was to texts, myths, ideas, and languages almost literally
gathered from the Orient by imperial Britain and France. If there could be no
sustained national interest in the Orient; if there was nothing in Germany to
correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa, how then
did German Orientalism fit into Saids larger thesis? Said continued, what German
Orientalism had in common with Anglo-French and latter American Orientalism was a
kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture. This authority
must in large part be the subject of any description of Orientalism, and it is so in this
study. The German thinker of this era that Said pays the most attention to is Goethe,
whose role in what Schwab calls the Oriental Renaissance was, to be generous,
minimal.
One of the central contentions of Saids argument is the claim that the Orient has
helped define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience (Orientalism 12). In the case of numerous German Indophiles of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this speculation simply does not hold
true. The remarkable degree of identification of German thinkers with India has
already been suggested and verified in considerable detail with regard to Herder,
Adam Mller, and Joseph Grrres among others. In the following discussion I will
focus on the case of Friedrich Schlegel. With the publication of his
Indier

ber die Sprache und Weisheit der

[On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians] in 1808, Schlegel emerged as the

first serious student of Sanskrit and Indian thought in Germany. Schlegel is a


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particularly important figure since his arguments in that essay opened the door to the
establishment of Sanskrit studies and academic Indology in Germany. It is also worth
adding, though it will not come in for consideration here, that Schlegel, far more than
Herder before him, first introduced what we might call racial speculation into his

writings on Indiaa precedent with a painful legacy.


India first entered into Friedrich Schlegels thinking in the late 1790s, most
likely as a result of the extraordinary popularity of Georg Forsters translation of
Klidsas drama akuntal (1791), and the Indian themes developed in the work of
his close friend Novalis. Along with Novalis, Schlegels primary interest in this period
was the articulation of a strikingly bold conception of modern art and poetry, and it
was in this context that India first struck him as a source of inspiration. Schlegels
earliest interest in India was part of an aesthetic projectthe new bible or new
mythologywith only obliquely political implications. However, from the outset
Schlegel was concerned with establishing an affinity, even a deeper connection
between Oriental and German cultural traditions.

In hisGesprch ber Poesie [Dialogue on Poetry] (1799), he contended that after the fall of
the Roman Empire, European literature had been resuscitated by the heroic poetry of
the Middle Ages, a tradition that had its roots in the German people (KFSA II 296).
The wild energy of Gothic poetry was influenced, he claimed, by charming
fairytales of the Orient, an influence introduced by contact with Arab culture.
Occident-blogspot.com/ORIENTAL NOTES on GERMAN and FRENCH ORIENTALISM

Saids sharp focus only on British and French, and to a lesser degree American, Orientalism is
one of the key criticisms that is often raised about his approach in Orientalism. He defends his
decision, saying that he chose to focus primarily on British and French scholarship about the
Orient because those two countries took the first major steps in Oriental scholarship, and
that there scholarship was later elaborated upon by the Germans.
[18] Said argues that Germany lacked, [a] national interest in the Orient and thus was not an
example of Orientalism as he defines it.

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He did acknowledge/claim though that, what German Orientalism had in common with
Anglo-French and later American Orientalism was a kind of intellectual authority over the
Orient within Western culture.
[20] It is interesting here to note Saids rather generic use of the descriptive Western,
considering that he claims in Orientalisms new afterword that such a term refers to no stable
reality.
[21] Other critics have noted that Said is inconsistent in his use of the term Orient,
fluctuating between the position that it is a fiction and the position that it has been
misrepresented by the Orientalists.
In one of the more recent critiques of Orientalism, the British Orientalist and Arabist Robert
Irwin contends that Saids explanation decision to largely ignore German Orientalism is built
upon spurious claims. Despite Irwins often caustic tone throughout his book, which is part
criticism of Orientalism (and sometimes of Said himself) and part a history, quite fascinating
and overdue it must be said, of European Oriental Studies, he brings up some valid issues and
points to several errors of fact made by Said in the passage quoted from Orientalism above:
To Saids way of thinking, since Britain was the leading imperial power in modern times, it
follows that it must have been the leading centre for Oriental studies and, since Germany had
no empire in the Arab lands, it followed that Germanys contribution to Oriental studies must
have been of secondary importance. Butthe claim that Germans elaborated only on British
and French Orientalism is simply not sustainable. Consider the cases of [the German
Orientalists] Hammer-Purgstall, Fleischer, Wellhausen, Goldziher (Hungarian, but writing and
teaching in German), Nldeke and Becker. It is impossible to find British forerunners for
these figures. The reverse is much easier to demonstrate. We have seen how much Nicholsons
Literary History of the Arabs, Wrights Arabic Grammar, Lyalls translation of Arabic poetry,
and Cowans Arabic-English Dictionary explicitly owed to German scholarship. These works
are not marginal, but central to Arabic studies in Britain. Is it really possible that British
scholars were mistaken in their belief that they needed to follow German scholars of Arabic
and Islam? And why did Renan, whom Said believes to have been a major French Orientalist,
believe that Germans dominated the field? And what about the overwhelming pre-eminence of
German scholars in Sanskrit studies?

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[22] Said differentiates thus between British and French Orientalism: British Oriental
expertise fashioned itself around consensus and orthodoxy and sovereign authority; French
Oriental expertise between the [world] wars concerned itself with heterodoxy, spiritual ties,
eccentrics.
[23] His primary examples to support this view are the British Orientalist Sir Hamilton Gibb
and the French Catholic Orientalist Louis Massignon, whose book on the medieval Baghdadi
Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj is filled with Roman Catholic motifs. Irwin is critical of Saids
generalization of European Orientalism, and takes him to task for ignoring or glossing over
major Orientalist scholars who do not fit his paradigm, such as the pioneering American
scholar Marshall G. S. Hodgson and the Lebanese-British Arab Orientalist Albert Hourani.
Similarly, one could also bring up the Lebanese historian Philip K. Hitti, the founder of
Princeton Universitys Department of Near Eastern Studies, which is coincidentally where
Bernard Lewis holds an emeritus professorship. In the one brief, superficial reference to Hitti,
Said praises him for leading a department devoted to scholarship and teaching, as opposed to
the Harvard department Gibb was in, which, according to Said, took a more policy-oriented
approach.

[24]Irwin is also critical of Saids failure to substantively address either Russian or Latin
Orientalism. With regard to Russian scholarship, he remarks, if one wants to give full and
proper consideration to the relationship between Orientalism and imperialism, then one should
turn to Russia with its vast empire of Muslim subjects in the Caucasus and Central Asia. No
history of Orientalism can be regarded as serious if it has totally neglected the contribution of
the Russians.
[25] Saids neglect of Orientalist scholarship in Latin may, argues Irwin, explain why he has
such difficulty pinpointing a precise start date for Orientalism, as he ignores some of the
earliest European works, which were all written in Latin.
[26].Critics of Orientalism also take issue with Saids somewhat arbitrary and often unsure,
they argue, choice of dating with regard to the beginnings of Orientalism. Said himself
seems to settle on Napoleon Is arrival in Mamluk Egypt in 1798 as the start of a sustained
Orientalism. According to Said, Napoleon launched a full-scale Orientalist project while in

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Egypt where he sought to document information and connect with the locals as a defender of
Islam.
[27] Further, it is clear that Said sees Frances time in Egypt (1798-1801, though Bonaparte
himself secretly left in 1799) as a major milestone in the history of Orientalism: After
Napoleonthe very language of Orientalism changed radically. Its descriptive realism was
upgraded and became not merely a style of representation but a language, indeed a means of
creation.

Terry Eagleton: Understanding Brecht (May 1973)

Q21. EPIC THEATRE was primarily proposed by Bertolt Brecht who suggested that
a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her,
but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. Brecht
thought that the experience of a climactic catharsis of emotion left an audience complacent. Instead, he
wanted his audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognise social injustice and exploitation
and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this purpose,
Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of
reality and not reality itself. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to
communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable.

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Bertolt
Brecht
believed
that
whilst
theatre
provided
entertainment for the spectator it should also engage the
spectators reasoning rather than their feelings. Therefore,
he used a dialectic theatre that intellectually engaged his
audience through methods that echoed Marxs theory, namely
that man and society should be re-examined in order to
create an equal society.
The task of theatre is not to reflect a fixed reality, but to
demonstrate how character and action are historically
produced, and so how they could have been, and still can be,
different.

History
Epic theatre was a theatrical movement arising in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and
practice of a number of theatre practitioners who were responding to the political climate of the time through
the creation of a new political theatre.
Epic theatre was a reaction against popular forms of theatre, particularly the naturalistic approach pioneered
by Constantin Stanislavski. Like Stanislavski, Brecht disliked the shallow spectacle, manipulative plots, and
heightened emotion of melodrama;

Techniques
One of the most important techniques Brecht developed to perform epic theater is the Verfremdungseffekt,
or the "alienation" effect. The purpose of this technique was to make the audience feel detached
from the action of the play, so they do not become immersed in the fictional reality of the stage or
become overly empathetic of the character. Flooding the theater with bright lights (not just the stage),
having actors play multiple characters, having actors also rearrange the set in full view of the audience and
"breaking the fourth wall" by speaking to the audience are all ways he used to achieve the
Verfremdungseffekt.

As with the principle of dramatic construction involved in the epic form of spoken drama
amalgamated or what Brecht calls "non-Aristotelian drama", the epic approach to play
production utilizes a montage technique of fragmentation, contrast and contradiction,
andinterruptions.
Each scene, and each section within a scene, must be perfected and played as rigorously and
with as much discipline as if it were a short play, complete in itself. Without any smudges.
And without there being the slightest suggestion that another scene, or section within a scene,
is to follow those that have gone before

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Brecht used comedy to distance his audiences from the depicted events and was heavily
influenced by musicals and fairground performers, putting music and song in his plays.
Terry Eagleton argues that Bertolt Brecht regards any attempt to define the literary
work as spontaneous whole which reconciles the capitalist contradictions between
essence and appearance, concrete and abstract, individual and social whole, as a
reactionary nostalgia. (Eagleton, 2002, 65) The Hegelian and Marxist prints are very
obvious here in emphasizing the role of the dialectical struggle of the opposites to
generate a synthesis, which is usually left for the spectators themselves to formulate. The
issue of hegemony and consent in the Brechtian plays always provokes the audience to
find a synthesis out of this dialectical struggle between the thesis and anti-thesis, which is
usually a revolution.
Bertolt Brechts aggressive political idealism and determination in using art to pose
challenging questions about the conflicts between society and morality generated intense
controversy throughout his lifetime. Technically, by his late twenties, Brecht had begun to
visualize a new theatrical system that would serve his political and artistic sensibility. He saw
the stage as an ideological forum for leftist causes and wanted to create theater that depicted
human experience with the brutality and intensity of a boxing match. He rejected the
conventions of stage realism and Aristotelian drama, which offer empathetic identification
with a hero and emotional catharsis. Brecht did not want his audience to feel, but rather to be
shocked, intellectually stimulated, and motivated to take action against an unjust society and
to awaken them to social responsibility.

Such simplicity may be the effect of the fact that Brecht only insists on the base/superstructure
distinction as Terry Eagleton asserts in his Ideology: An Introduction. The statement as such is
manifested in the way Eagleton attempts to show Brecht as standing against the idea of
"selfhood" as "received". The "selfhood" as a consequence becomes the "ideological illusion"
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that is imposed on people's minds. The kind of "received identity" that Brecht describes is
actually the product of the superstructures.
Although Eagleton as the representative of so many other Marxists
underestimates Brecht's vulgar Marxism, the field of western Marxism itself- as enjoying a
more philosophically accomplished scholarship- is replete with contradictions that emerge in
the works of its well-known practitioners. The contradiction, on the other hand, might be one
of the important elements that bind the western Marxists due to the expanded topography of
the field itself.
The main contradiction in the field of western Marxism owes to the
Hegelian pedigree of its forefathers. According to Tony Bennett, the western Marxists see
Marx through Hegelian lens as an example we can turn to Lukacs whose treatment of the
Hegelian concept of "Totality" as the other to ideology proves to be quite idealistic . The
escape from idealism, however, seems to be a far-fetched dream of every Marxist, a dream
that has never come true.
The analysis of this play not only helps the reader to identify Brecht as an illuminating
rather than simplistic playwright but also introduces the bridge between Brecht's drama and
his Marxism. When analyzing works of Brecht, one does not have to do much to keep her
distance from the zone of complexity in that the dark times Brecht lived in demanded a
response that needed to be more "urgent" than complicated as Karen Leeder observes.

Q22. Johnson's comments on the three unities ?


Some critics have reservation about the norm of three unities in a
dramatic plot regarding the Aristotelian view. They accuse Shakespeare of
violating the norm at least at two regards. They find Shakespearean plays lacking
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the unities of time and place which had long been recognized by Critics and
dramatists as essential requirements. But Johnson thought a little bit other wise.
In his consideration Shakespeares history plays not come under the review of
this law of three unities because their very nature which essentially referred to a
chronological replacement of times and places. In other plays Shakespeare has
largely preserved the unity of action. His maintaining the structure of a dramatic
plot- providing a beginning, middle and an end serves for Shakespeares
awareness of the artistic necessity of plot construction. Very logically the
dramatist arranges the connection and coherence of the incidents which very
naturally finds a gradual development.
The historical background on the observance of three unities had the foundation
on two basic principles one suggested that without them no play can attain
credibility. But neither of the viewers had the reasonable support.
The classical unities, Aristotelian unities, or three unities are rules for drama derived from a passage
in Aristotle's Poetics. According to Johnson, the unities of time and place are

not essential for good play. They may add to the pleasure of beauty but
neglect may provide more. As the highest graces of a play intends to copy nature
instruct life, the observance of the unities of time and place becomes the product
of superfluous and showiness art.
Suspension of disbelieve is an essential for a good drama. Johnson admits the
awareness of the spectators disbelief, which is mostly sub-conscience and
suspended. In this regard Coleridge points out that several dramatic devices may
prove unnecessary of illusion. He argues that it the rejection of unities of time
and place is accepted then what is the use of dressing up after the medieval royal
customs. Coleridge can be refuted on certain grounds. Without this device a play
can rarely offer any real difficulty to the imagination which is only a winged
creature, not a snail. Here again Johnsons attack on the unities remains
one of the finest and wittiest things in his criticism. Later forms of
expressive arts, including movies, in the modern age have presented
the unworthiness of the device.

Johnson can be regarded to have a different out look among the neo-classical
scholars. Neo classical always seems to glorify academic values in critics
accepts Shakespeares violation of unities and also the mingling of tragic and
comic elements as liberating ideologies. In this regard Johnson is pioneer of
them who had the efforts to make intelligence liberated. Johnson is accused of
being
an outright dissenter against the neo classic rules and proprieties
but is also a signal in the world of criticism of the enhance of concept and
views.
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Johnson claims that with Shakespeare's histories, the unites of time, place, and action are largely
irrelevant since, in his plays, "the changes of action be so prepared as to be understood, that the
incidents be various and affecting, and the characters consistent, natural and distinct. No other
unity is intended, and therefore none is to be sought."
With his other works (comedies and tragedies), Johnson adds that Shakespeare sustains the
unity of action; even when the events are out of order or superfluous, Shakespeare does stick to
Aristotle's linear progression of having a discernible beginning, middle, and end.
In terms of time and place, the law of the unities states that for a play to be credible (believable),
the events of the play should be limited to a particular place and the time limited to 24 hours.
Otherwise, the audience will have trouble suspending disbelief (believing the events could
happen) which is to say the audience will have trouble forgetting that they are watching a play.
Johnson counters this by saying that all plays are plays:
The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last,
that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.
Therefore, these limitations based on being credible to the audience can not be applied. Johnson
also adds that the pleasure of watching theater is that it is fictional; it is not necessary that they
have to believe it could happen: "The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of
fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more."
Johnson adds that "the unities of time and place are not essential to a just drama . . . " and that
simply sticking to the rules does not make a drama good. That which makes Shakespeare's plays
"just" is how deeply they apply to human nature. This is perhaps the most significant praise in the
essay. For Johnson, there is something true and universal about Shakespeare's appreciation of
human nature and this is what makes him timeless. Johnson notes that: "This therefore is the
praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life . . . "
Johnson does fault Shakespeare for focusing too much on the convenience of the storyline,
therefore ignoring the use of his plays as instruction (showing how good could/should triumph
over evil). But overall, it is Shakespeare's ability to copy nature (art imitating life), being believable
or unbelievable, that makes any of Shakespeare's so called faults irrelevant.

Q23. Wordsworth: The Function of Poetry


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In the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth also discusses the


function of poetry.
The function of great poetry is "to please, to move, and to
transport."
The three functions of poetry fuse into an aesthetic pleasure with moral
elevation. However, the moral elevation far outweighs the aesthetic
pleasure. The moral function consists
first 'in the refinement of feelings',
second, 'in the knowledge of Man, Nature, and Human life',
and
3. third, 'in the power that makes life richer and fuller.'
1.
2.

"Truth, Grandeur, Beauty, Love and Hope,


And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith."
The reader of poetry emerges saner and purer than before. The
second great function of poetry is to enable us to look 'into the life of
things.' While science sharpens our intellect, poetry enriches our moral
insight. The moral force of poetry 'is felt in the blood, and felt along the
heart'. So Wordsworth says:
"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the
impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all
science."
Finally, poetry provides shelter and succor to the afflicted human
soul. It is a great force for good and welfare. Wordsworth's own object in
writing poetry was

'to console the afflicted; to add sunshine to day light by making


the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of
every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become
more actively and securely virtuous.'
Thus Wordsworth concludes that
'every great poet is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a
teacher or as nothing'. In this role poetry makes man "wiser,
better and happier"

Wordsworth's Theory of Poetry


If the publication of Lyrical Ballads marks the climax of the Romantic Revolt, it is because of its importance as a
gesture of revolt against the existing poetic practices. In his Preface to the second edition Wordsworth explained
in detail what his theories about new poetry were and what was to be looked for in his own poems. The immediate
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purpose of the Preface was to defend his poems against the charges of lowness and unpoeticalness that had
been made against both their subjects and their diction to use the words of Graham Hough. The overall intention
of Wordsworth was two-fold, that is, to relate poetry as closely as possible to common life, by removing it in the
first place from the realm of fantasy, and in the second by changing it from the polite or over-sophisticated
amusement to a serious art. .
According to him, poetry should be the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, not mere satisfaction of a
taste for imagery and ornament. Wordsworths aim in all this is to show that the poet is a man appealing to the
normal interests of mankind, not as a peculiar being appealing to a specialized taste. He says:
He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and
tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are
supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, who
rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighted to contemplate similar volitions
and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them
where he does not find them.
In his Preface Wordsworth made four claims:

1. first, to choose incidents and situations from common life;


2. second, to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language
really used by men;

3. third, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and,

4. last, above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly
though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature. The greater part of the Preface is
devoted to justification of the first two claims, and this has caused too much stress to be laid on
them while the fact remains that it is on the last two claims that the greatness of his poetry rests.
THE POETIC LANGUAGE of the eighteenth century was unreal, and its substance was far from being an
interpretation of the universal spirit of man. Wordsworth did inestimable service in insisting on a new and true
orientation. But he went too far; he said that rustic life and language were the simplest and purest being
elementary, in close touch with nature, and unspoiled by social vanity. The fact remains that the rustic has little
originality, few ideas, and makes almost no attempt to correlate them.
It is also true that Wordsworth proposed to prune it of peculiarities but, as Coleridge
observed, this would render it the same as the language of any other section of the community similarly treated.
Wordsworth also asserted that the language of poetry differs in no way from that of prose, with the single
exception of metre. This is the controversy that still rages and Wordsworths finest poetry does not show any
influence of this idea. Geoffrey H. Crump has stated categorically that
In his greatest poems he forgot his theories, or the poems are great enough to dwarf the

theories into insignificance, and in his later works he intentionally discarded them.
Wordsworth was a complete innovator who saw things in a new way. Those who approach his poetry for the first
time notice two peculiarities its austerity and its appearance of triviality. It is so in the case of those who fail to
see the quality of really human sympathy. Besides, Wordsworth himself is responsible for inviting this sort of
response, as he had no relish for the present. Shelley said about him that he was hardly a man, but a wandering
spirit with strange adventures and no end to them. The triviality of manner is the manner through which he could
convey the profoundest truths. While reading Wordsworths poems, it is impossible not to be struck by two things

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Q24. Structuralism and Post- structuralism-some practical differences ?


Structuralism
Post- structuralism
1
2

Parallels/Echoes
Balances

Contradictions/paradoxes
Shifts/Breaks in:
Tone
Viewpoint
Time
Person
attitude

3
4
5
6
7

Reflections/Repetitions
Symmetry
Contrasts
Patterns
Effect: To show textual unity and Coherence

Conflicts
Absences/Omissions
Linguistic quirks
Aporia
Effect:To show textual disunity

1) Structuralism is a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly

concerned with the perceptions and description of structures. At its simplest,


structuralism claims that the nature of every element in any given situation has
no significance by itself, and in fact is determined by all the other elements
involved in that situation. The full significance of any entity cannot be
perceived unless and until it is integrated into the structure of which it forms a
part. Structuralists believe that all human activity is constructed. It is not
natural or "essential". Consequently, it is the systems of organization that are
important.

2) Post-structuralism may be understood as a critical response to the basic

assumptions of structuralism. Structuralism studies the underlying structure


inherent in cultural products (such as tests), and utilizes analytical concepts
from linguistics, psychology, anthropology and other fields to understand and
interpret those structures. Although the structuralist movement fostered
critical inquiry into these structures, it emphasized logical and scientific
results. Many structrualists sought to integrate their work pre-existing bodies
of knowledge. This was observed in the work of Ferdinand De Saussure in
linguistics, Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, and many early 20 thcentury
psychologists.
The general assumptions of post-structuralism derive from
the critique of structuralist premises. Specifically, post-structuralism holds
that the study of underlying structures is itself culturally conditioned and
therefore subject to myriad biases and misinterpretations. To understand an
object (e.g. open of the many meanings of a text), it is necessary to study both
the object itself, and the systems of knowledge which were coordinated to
produce the object. In this way, post structuralism positions itself as a study of
how knowledge is produced.

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Q25. How Eliot Refutes Wordsworths Concept of emotion

recollected in Tranquility
Eliot expresses his anti romantic view of creative process in Tradition
and the Individual Talent. He disapproves of the romantic view of
poetry as a sentimental expression of subjective feelings. Accordingly he
rejects the emotive statement of Wordsworth-emotion recollected in
tranquility. Wordsworths formula involves three components for poetic
composition- emotion, recollection and tranquility.
Regarding the first component, Eliot puts forward his own theory of
emotion and feelings. He distinguishes between emotion and feeling. He
says hat emotion arises out of personal incident or situation of a poets
life. It is closely associated with a poets private life.
Feelings, on the contrary are only remotely or thinly associated with
personal situation. Feelings can be aroused by an image, a word or a
phrase. For example, the Ode of Keats contains a cluster of feelings which
have nothing particular to do with the Nightingale, but which the
Nightingale partly perhaps because of its evocative name and partly
because of its reputation, served to brig together.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of


personality.... It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the
condition of science....
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only
those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape
from these things....
The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality
without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to
know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the
present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what
is already living."
On the contrary, Coleridges Dejection is composed with the direct use of
emotion rooted in personal incident. The emotion of gloomy despair
conveyed in Coleridges poem is a working up of the poets similar emotion
evident in a phase of his personal life. Eliot asserts that a poem can be
composed either with emotion or with feelings. It is not always
necessary that poetry must originate from emotion. In this way
Eliot rejects the subjective emotionalism of Wordsworths theory.
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He further states that it is not for the emotions generated by


particular events of a poets life that a poet earns distinction.
Rather personal emotions are distilled, processed and transmuted
into what Eliot calls structural or art emotion, for which a poet
deserves consideration. And emotion achieves some degree of
impersonality. Thus Eliot depersonalizes the romantic magnification of
personal emotion in poetry. Poetry is not a medium to unleash raw
emotion in an artless, uncontrolled and undisciplined way. Hence
Eliot maintains that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion.
Rather it is a controlled, selective, pattered expression of
emotion. It demands some kind of some kind of masking and
distancing of personal emotion- a kind of artistic detachment, a
sort of decorum, some sort of veiling. This is what Eliot means by
an escape from emotion.

Eliot does not accept that poetry has always something to do with
recollection. In other words recollection is not an indispensable material
for poetry. Earlier Eliot observes that the more perfect the artist, the more
completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind
which creates. This statement implies that poetry is not completely
candid (frank) expression of the total personality of a poet. Rather it is an
expression of a significant aspect of life. And in creative process, there is a
great deal which is conscious and deliberate. Thus Eliot attaches
importance to intellect and rational faculty in addition to emotion and
feelings.

In one of his influential essays The Metaphysical Poets Eliot praises the
metaphysical poets for their unified sensibility, which results from
a fusion of emotion and intellect. Here too he recommends a unified
sensibility- a synthesis of emotion and intellect.

Then he refuses Wordsworths requirement of tranquility in creative


activity. He implies that the moment of composition is a heightened
moment of psychic activity and introspection. It is a moment of excitement
and concerted effect when the total mind strains to attain the desired
height. It is a stimulated state of mind when an intense, purposive intellect
brings feelings or emotions into new order. It can not be a relaxed, serene,
tension-free state. Wordsworths reference to tranquility implies a kind of
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passive effortlessness. As Eliot says it is not a passive attending upon


the event.

It is a moment or act of concentration- when al mental and emotional


faculties are intently occupied in performing a creative fat. Thus Eliot
refutes Wordsworths formula of creative process. I this way he manifesto
his anti-romantic, modern, classical standpoint..

Q26. Archetype as Bricks in the Literary Text (Frye)?


Archetype Definition

In literature, an archetype is a typical

character, an action or a situation that seems to represent such


universal patterns of human nature.
An archetype, also known as universal symbol, may be a character,
a theme, a symbol or even a setting. Many literary critics are of the
opinion that archetypes, which have a common and recurring
representation in a particular human culture or entire human race, shape
the structure and function of a literary work.
Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist, argued that the root of an archetype is in
the collective unconscious of mankind. The phrase collective
unconscious refers to experiences shared by a race or culture. This
includes love, religion, death, birth, life, struggle, survival etc. These
experiences exist in the subconscious of every individual and are
recreated in literary works or in other forms of art.
Archetypal literary criticism is a type of critical theory that interprets a
text

by

focusing

Greek arch,

on

recurring myths and

"beginning,"

archetypes

and typos,

(from

the

"imprint")

in

the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary work. As a


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form

of

literary

criticism,

it

dates

back

to

1934

when Maud

Bodkin published Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.


Archetypal literary criticisms origins are rooted in two other academic
disciplines, social anthropology and psychoanalysis; each contributed to
literary criticism in separate ways, with the latter being a sub-branch of
critical theory. Archetypal criticism was at its most popular in the 1940s
and 1950s, largely due to the work of Canadian literary critic Northrop
Frye. Though archetypal literary criticism is no longer widely practiced,
nor have there been any major developments in the field, it still has a
place in the tradition of literary studies

Origins
Frazer
The anthropological origins of archetypal criticism can pre-date its
analytical psychology origins by over thirty years. The Golden
Bough (18901915), written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir
James George Frazer, was the first influential text dealing with
cultural mythologies. Frazer was part of a group of comparative
anthropologists working out of Cambridge University who worked
extensively on the topic. The Golden Bough was widely accepted as
the seminal text on myth that spawned numerous studies on the
same subject. Eventually, the momentum of Frazers work carried
over into literary studies.
In The Golden Bough Frazer identifies with shared practices and
mythological beliefs between primitive religions and modern
religions. Frazer argues that the death-rebirth myth is present in
almost all cultural mythologies, and is acted out in terms of
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growing seasons and vegetation. The myth is symbolized by the


death (i.e. final harvest) and rebirth (i.e. spring) of the god of
vegetation.

As an example, Frazer cites the Greek myth of Persephone, who was


taken to the Underworld by Hades. Her mother Demeter, the goddess of
the harvest, was so sad that she struck the world with fall and winter.
While in the underworld Persephone ate 6 of the 12 pomegranate seeds
given to her by Hades. Because of what she ate, she was forced to
spend half the year, from then on, in theunderworld, representative of
autumn and winter, or the death in the death-rebirth myth. The other half
of the year Persephone was permitted to be in the mortal realm with
Demeter, which represents spring and summer, or the rebirth in the
death-rebirth myth.
Jung
While Frazers work deals with mythology and archetypes in material
terms, the work of Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss-born founder of analytical
psychology, is, in contrast, immaterial in its focus. Jungs work theorizes
about myths and archetypes in relation to the unconscious, an
inaccessible part of the mind. From a Jungian perspective, myths are the
culturally elaborated representations of the contents of the deepest
recess of the human psyche: the world of the archetypes .
Jungian analytical psychology distinguishes between the personal
and collective unconscious, the latter being particularly relevant to
archetypal criticism. The collective unconscious, or the objective
psyche as it is less frequently known, is a number of innate thoughts,
feelings, instincts, and memories that reside in the unconsciousness of
all people. Jungs definition of the term is inconsistent in his many
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writings. At one time he calls the collective unconscious the a priori,


inborn forms of intuition, while in another instance it is a series of
experiences that come upon us like fate. Regardless of the many
nuances between Jungs definitions, the collective unconsciousness is a
shared part of the unconscious.
To Jung, an archetype in the collective unconscious, as quoted from
Leitch et al., is irrepresentable, but has effects which make
visualizations of it possible, namely, the archetypal images and ideas ,
due to the fact they are at an inaccessible part of the mind. The
archetypes to which Jung refers are represented through primordial
images, a term he coined. Primordial images originate from the initial
stages of humanity and have been part of the collective unconscious
ever since. It is through primordial images that universal archetypes are
experienced, and more importantly, that the unconscious is revealed.
With the same death-rebirth myth that Frazer sees as being
representative of the growing seasons and agriculture as a point of
comparison, a Jungian analysis envisions the death-rebirth archetype as
a symbolic expression of a process taking place not in the world but in
the mind. That process is the return of the ego to the unconsciousa
kind of temporary death of the egoand its re-emergence, or rebirth,
from the unconscious .
By itself, Jungs theory of the collective unconscious accounts for a
considerable share of writings in archetypal literary criticism; it also predates the height of archetypal literary criticism by over a decade. The
Jungian archetypal approach treats literary texts as an avenue in which
primordial images are represented. It would not be until the 1950s when
the other branch of archetypal literary criticism developed.

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Frye
Bodkins Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, the first work on the subject of
archetypal literary criticism, applies Jungs theories about the collective
unconscious, archetypes, and primordial images to literature. It was not
until the work of the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye that
archetypal criticism was theorized in purely literary terms. The major
work of Fryes to deal with archetypes is Anatomy of Criticism but his
essay The Archetypes of Literature is a precursor to the book. Fryes
thesis in The Archetypes of Literature remains largely unchanged
in Anatomy of Criticism. Fryes work helped displace New Criticism as
the major mode of analyzing literary texts, before giving way
to structuralism and semiotics.
Fryes work breaks from both Frazer and Jung in such a way that it is
distinct from its anthropological and psychoanalytical precursors. For
Frye, the death-rebirth myth that Frazer sees manifest in agriculture and
the harvest is not ritualistic since it is involuntary, and therefore, must be
done. As for Jung, Frye was uninterested about the collective
unconscious on the grounds of feeling it was unnecessary: since the
unconscious is unknowable it cannot be studied. How archetypes came
to be was also of no concern to Frye; rather, the function and effect of
archetypes is his interest.
For Frye, literary archetypes play an essential role in refashioning
the material universe into an alternative verbal universe that is
humanly intelligible and viable, because it is adapted to essential
human needs and concerns .
There are two basic categories in Fryes framework, comedic and tragic.
Each

category

is

further

subdivided

into

two

categories: comedy and romance for the comedic; tragedy and satire (or
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ironic) for the tragic. Though he is dismissive of Frazer, Frye uses the
seasons in his archetypal schema. Each season is aligned with a literary
genre: comedy with spring, romance with summer, tragedy with autumn,
and satire with winter.
Comedy is aligned with spring because the genre of comedy is
characterized by the birth of the hero, revival and resurrection. Also,
spring symbolizes the defeat of winter and darkness. Romance and
summer are paired together because summer is the culmination of life in
the seasonal calendar, and the romance genre culminates with some sort
of triumph, usually a marriage. Autumn is the dying stage of the seasonal
calendar, which parallels the tragedy genre because it is, above all,
known

for

the

fall

or

demise

of

the

protagonist.

Satire

is metonymized with winter on the grounds that satire is a dark genre;


satire is a disillusioned and mocking form of the three other genres. It is
noted for its darkness, dissolution, the return of chaos, and the defeat of
the heroic figure.
Summer Romance. The birth of the hero. Autumn Tragedy.
Movement towards the death or defeat of the hero. Winter Irony/Satire.
The hero is absent. Spring Comedy. The rebirth of the hero.
The context of a genre determines how a symbol or image is to be
interpreted. Frye outlines five different spheres in his schema: human,
animal, vegetation, mineral, and water. The comedic human world is
representative of wish-fulfillment and being community centred. In
contrast, the tragic human world is of isolation, tyranny, and the fallen
hero. Animals in the comedic genres are docile and pastoral (e.g. sheep),
while animals are predatory and hunters in the tragic (e.g. wolves). For
the realm of vegetation, the comedic is, again, pastoral but also
represented by gardens, parks, roses and lotuses. As for the tragic,
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vegetation is of a wild forest, or as being barren. Cities, a temple, or


precious stones represent the comedic mineral realm. The tragic mineral
realm is noted for being adesert, ruins, or of sinister geometrical images
. Lastly, the water realm is represented by rivers in the comedic. With the
tragic, the seas, and especially floods, signify the water sphere.

Frye admits that his schema in The Archetypes of Literature is


simplistic, but makes room for exceptions by noting that there are neutral
archetypes. The example he cites are islands such as Circes
or Prosperos which cannot be categorized under the tragic or comedic.

Q27 . Said view on Difference between occident and orient ?


Significance of orient for occident ?
Occidental means Western Hemisphere (Americas), and Oriental means Eastern Hemisphere
(Asia).
Occidental are native people from the western hemisphere (Europe, North America, South
America).
Oriental are native people from the eastern hemisphere (the countries of Asia), although
"Oriental" is now largely consider an offensive word and the preferred word is "Asian." .
(Oriental Asia: Mostly people with slanted eyes Occidental Asia: Southwest people of Asia .Not Eastern and Western Hemispheres)

the difference between Oriental and Occidental Philosophy is that Oriental refers to Eastern
Philosophy and Occidental refers to Western Philosophy

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Q28. Post-Modernism as Cultural Dominant of our times ?


Post-Modernism is a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory,
philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture which are emerging from
and reacting to postmodernism. Another similar recent term is metamodernism. truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and selfreferential.
Post-Modernism marks an era of objectivity in the realms
of science
Postmodernism is a concept which appears in a wide variety of
disciplines or areas of study including art, music, film, literature,
architecture, and technology and nowadays has burst into popular
usage as a term for everything from rock music to the whole cultural
style and mood of recent decades.
Blackburn (1994) defined postmodernism as a reaction against a
nave confidence in objective or scientific truth.
Post-Modernism rejects the idea of progress in
utopian assumptions about evolution, social improvement and efforts in
education to produce reform. It denies the idea of fixed meanings, or any
correspondence between language and the world, or any fixed reality or
truth or fact to be the object of enquiry.
The postmodernist approach considers objectivity to be a veil that hides its
real nature of power; by stripping objectivity of its disguise, some
postmodernists seek liberation, while others
retreat to an aesthetic, ironic, detached, and playful attitude to
one's own beliefs and to the march of events.
Modernism and Postmodernism in a Nutshell
S
No.

Modernism

Postmodernism

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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

objective
rational
scientific
global
claims
positivist
utopian
central
the best
linear
generalizing
theoretical
abstract
unification

subjective
irrational
anti-scientific
local claims
constructivist
populist
fragmented
better
non-linear
non-generalizing
practical
concrete
diversity

COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF POSTMODERNISM


Despite the divergence among different usages of postmodern, one can find some
commonalities centering on Postmodernists. They:
1) Postmodernists are constructivists, in their view, there are no real foundations of
truth, for there is no truth, except what the group decides is truth. Postmodernism is
preference and truth is a social construct to be eliminated. Truth and persons are given
value only as the group values them.
2) Postmodernists are against Absolutism, they value relativism. Knowledge is not stable
and eternal as the history of science has shown us, it refers to probabilities rather than
certainties, better rather than the best.
3) Postmodernists reject theories because theories are abundant, and no theory is
considered more correct than any other. They feel theory conceals, distorts, obfuscates,
it is alienated, disparate, dissonant; it means to exclude order, controls rival powers. To
them inquiry must be approached pragmatically.
4) question the notion of expertise. The idea that some people (experts) know more than
others (non-experts) are not espoused. They believe that interaction between the
knower and non-knower is often best seen as a dialog in which there is mutual
influence than simple transmission of knowledge from one to the other. In fact, both
are involved in an interactive process of knowledge creation.
Dialog replaces monolog.
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5) Postmodernists reject global decisions. Since reality is culture dependent, changing


over time, as cultures do, and varies from community to community, knowledge is not
universal .We are cautioned to be careful with generalizations, because they can be
deluding.
Therefore, Postmodernists are intolerant of truth and values unless they
are considered local. Diversity is celebrated.
6) Postmodernists attack notions of reason and means-end thinking .The line
I feel; therefore, I am and what I feel is good replaces I think; therefore, I am.
Objectivism is replaced with subjectivism and this is the society `s whims which
rule scientific disciplines not physical laws.
7) use analytic strategy which is central to politics of postmodernism

HOW MODERNISM EVOLVES ?


It seems with the decadence of the Catholic Church and the end of the Aristotelian

logic and with the dominance of the Baconian inductionism and the emergence of the
Newtonian physics, the first foundations of modernism were laid.
Before the Renaissance, Europe was a theocratic society, in which God
was the center of the universe and the supernatural phenomena ruled the natural
phenomena and the ARISTOTELIAN DEDUCTIONISM was common, but when
Bacon put more emphasis on the role of observation, and when Newton discovered some
laws of the nature, man got proud of himself and found himself the center of the universe.
Believing he could find the ultimate truth, he left no room for God or for the supernatural
and reason. Rationalism and scientific method took over as the dominant
interpretations of life.
As in philosophy, the modern period was started by DESCARTES who believed
in exact and objective knowledge. He was a rationalist who believed in reason, thinking
that reason can grasp truths, independent of time and place.
The picture born in the Enlightenment gave rise to a civilization which
was founded on scientific knowledge of the world and rational knowledge of value, which
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placed the highest premium on individual human life and freedom, believing that such
freedom and rationality would lead to social progress through virtuous, self-controlled
work, and create a better material, political, and intellectual life for all.
Origin of Postmodernism in France
Postmodernism philosophy originated primarily in France during the 1960s and 1970s
and was greatly influenced by phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis,
Marxism, and structuralism.
These intellectual movements portrayed the human subject as alienated
in contemporary society, estranged from his or her authentic modes of experience and
being, whether the source of that estrangement was capitalism (for Marxism), the
scientific naturalism (for phenomenology), excessive repressive social mores (for
Freud), and bureaucratically organized social life and mass culture (for existentialism).
In fact, all rejected the belief that the study of humanity could be modeled on
(objectivity) or reduced to the physical science (reductionism); hence they avoided
behaviorism and naturalism. Unlike hard sciences, they focus not merely on facts but
on the meaning of facts for human subjects.
Another important factor in the development of postmodernism was the situations after
the Second World War which led to the decline of grand theories including Nazism,
Fascism, and finally Marxism. Lyotard (1984) argued that modern philosophies
legitimized truth-claims not on logical or empirical ground, but rather on the grounds
of accepted stories or metanarrative about knowledge of the world-- what
Wittgenstein termed as language games. He further argued that in our postmodern
condition, these meta-narratives no longer work to legitimize truth- claims. In a
way, he stressed the fragmentary and plural characteristics of reality, believing that
there is no universal truth and no grand theory is credible

Another strain of postmodernism refers to the radical changes of the society:


the end of the last vestiges of European colonialism after the Second World War, the
development of mass communications and a media culture and the shrinking of the globe by

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internal marketing, telecommunications, and intercontinental missiles which led to a


significant delegitimization of authority and to a more egalitarian society
a) Habermass (1975) crisis of legitimation is the recognition that every author
exercises authority that promotes an agenda, denies alternative views, and fails to
guarantee its own truth.
b) Edward Said (1978) found that colonized people were dehumanized, stereotyped, and
treated not as communities of individuals but as an indistinguishable mass about
whom one amasses knowledge.
c) Derrida (1976) denounced the Mercantilization Of Knowledge and the contrived
invisibility of the author, a presence behind the text exerting authority and influence
but protected from recognition and critique unless deconstructed. For postmodernists,
Habermass (1975) crisis of legitimation is the recognition that every author
exercises authority that promotes an agenda, denies alternative views, and fails to
guarantee its own truth.
d) Foucault (1973) examined how power is legitimized through complex social
structures and objected to discourses in which the privileges of one subject-- to tell
stories or decide what the topic is-- materially diminish the rights of other subjects. .
In his opinion, discourse is the medium through which power is expressed and people
and practices are governed.

Outside philosophical and scientific inquiry after the Second World War new
tendencies in art, literature, music and architecture emerged which critiqued
the bourgeois capitalist social order that carried the economic load of
modernity. To name a few developments: dissonant and atonal music,
impressionism, surrealism, and expressionism in painting, literary realism,
and the stream of consciousness novel emerged which seemed to open the
imagination to a subjective world of experience which was ignored by the
modern society and technology.

Were all Modernists either skeptical or reactionary in matters of Christian belief?


How can we express ideas of the sacred distinct from religious commitment?
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MYTHOPOEIA MYTHOPOEIC METHOD


:- >
Mythopoeia is a narrative genre in modern literature and film where a fictional
mythology is created by the writer of prose or other fiction. This meaning of the word
mythopoeia follows its use by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s. The authors in this genre integrate
traditional mythological themes and archetypes into fiction.

Alan Dundes argued that


"any novel cannot meet the cultural criteria of myth. A work of art, or artifice, cannot be
said to be the narrative of a culture's sacred tradition...[it is] at most, artificial myth."
Works of mythopoeia are often categorized as fantasy or science fiction but fill a niche for
mythology in the modern world, He did, however, use Star Wars as an example of the creation
of such fantasy worlds by which civilization will one day describe itself.[citation needed]
Without relevant mythology, Campbell claimed, society cannot function well
Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods argues that the experimental modernist
form of mythopoeia was directed towards expressing a range of poetic perspectives that fall
between material secularism and dogmatic religion. Modernist mythopoeia is a literary means
of eschewing the language of certainty while giving voice to the nature and function of
transcendence in a post-religious context. As a comparative study, Scott Freer offers fresh
readings on a range of key trans-Atlantic modernist texts, whilst considering their various
mythopoeic method or vision: Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarauthustra, T.S. Eliot's The Waste
Land, Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Hilda Doolittle's Trilogy, D.H. Lawrence's Birds, Beasts
and Flowers!, and Wallace Stevens' Harmonium.
The 'twilight' of modernist mythopoeia is the nuanced and complex way of a
godless aesthetic, for it accommodates various shades of secularity and religiosity and brings
an inconclusiveness to the mysteries of human existence to be embraced and poeticized. The
book is a timely addition to the 'post-secular' debate as well as to the 'return of religion' in
modernist studies.

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Imagism is a type of poetry that describes images with simple language and great focus.
It came out of the Modernist movement in poetry. In the early 1900s, poets abandoned the
old ways of writing poems and created a new movement in poetry called Modernism.
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored
precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It has been described as the most influential
movement in English poetry since the activity of the Pre-Raphaelites.[
1] As a poetic style it gave Modernism its start in the early 20th century,
[2] and is considered to be the first organized Modernist literary movement in the English
language.
[3] Imagism is sometimes viewed as 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any
continuous or sustained period of development.
[4] Ren Taupin remarked that 'It is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine,
nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain
time in agreement on a small number of important principles'.
[5] The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and
Victorian poetry, in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were
generally content to work within that tradition. In contrast, Imagism called for a return to
what were seen as more Classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy of
language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms. Imagists
use free verse.

Imagist publications appearing between 1914 and 1917 featured works by many of the most
prominent modernist figures, both in poetry and in other fields. The Imagist group was
centered in London, with members from Great Britain, Ireland and the United States.
Somewhat unusually for the time, a number of women writers were major Imagist figures.

A characteristic feature of Imagism is its attempt to isolate a single image to reveal its essence.
This feature mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde art, especially Cubism.
Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called "luminous
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details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an


abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single
image.

Pre-Imagism
Well-known poets of the Edwardian era of the 1890s, such as Alfred Austin, Stephen Phillips,
and William Watson, had been working very much in the shadow of Tennyson, producing
weak imitations of the poetry of the Victorian era. They continued to work in this vein into the
early years of the 20th century.[7] As the new century opened, Austin was still the serving
British Poet Laureate, a post which he held up to 1913. In the century's first decade, poetry
still had a large audience; volumes of verse published in that time included Thomas Hardy's
The Dynasts, Christina Rossetti's posthumous Poetical Works, Ernest Dowson's Poems,
George Meredith's Last Poems, Robert Service's Ballads of a Cheechako and John Masefield's
Ballads and Poems. Future Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats was devoting much of
his energy to the Abbey Theatre and writing for the stage, producing relatively little lyric
poetry during this period. In 1907, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Rudyard
Kipling.
The origins of Imagism are to be found in two poems, Autumn and A City Sunset by T. E.
Hulme. These were published in January 1909 by the Poets' Club in London in a booklet
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called For Christmas MDCCCCVIII. Hulme was a student of mathematics and philosophy; he
had been involved in the setting up of the club in 1908 and was its first secretary. Around the
end of 1908, he presented his paper A Lecture on Modern Poetry at one of the club's meetings

What is meant by Drama of Ideas ?


Best Answer: Modern drama under great influence of Ibsen: Great Norwegian dramatist, give
rise to the Comedy of Ideas.
Dramas ceased to deal with themes remote in time and place, real drama must deal with
emotions. Drama of ideas gave up melodramatic romanticism and pseudo-classical
remoteness, start treating the actual life, made drama a drama of ideas.
Important dramatist: George Bernard Shaw.
Drama of Ideas:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)

Revolutionary against past literary models, social conventions and morality.


Dealt with the problem of sex, youth.
Against romance, capitalism, parental authority.
Number of theories, slow actions and frequently interrupted.
Study of soul.
Inner conflict substituted the outer conflict.

Characters: Questioning, restless, dissatisfied, struggling against prejudice.


Drama of Ideas (or the drama of social criticism) in the real sense is a modern development.
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A number of contemporary problems and evils are subjected to


discussion and searching examinations and criticism in these plays. Thus in it, the structure
and characterization are of subordinate importance; its the discussion that counts.

Ibsen and then Shaw, Galsworthy and Granville Barker were the chief exponents of this
realistic drama of ideas.
To Shaw, drama was pre-eminently a medium for articulating his own ideas and
philosophy. He enunciated the philosophy of life force which he sought to disseminate
through his dramas. Thus Shavian plays are the vehicles for the transportation of ideas,
however, propagandizing they may be. Shaw wanted to cast his ideas through discussions.
Out of the discussions in the play
Arms and The Man Shaw breaks the idols of love and war.
The iconoclast Shaw pulls down all false gods which men live, love admire and adore. By a
clever juxtaposition of characters and dialogues,
Shaw shatters the romantic illusions about war and war heroes Shaws message is that war is no
longer a thing of banners and glory, as the nineteenth century dramatist saw it, but a dull and
sordid affair of brutal strength and callous planning out.

The dialogues of Bluntschli, Riana and Sergius go to preach this message


with great success. Here to quote Sergius who says,
War is a hollow sham like love.
One thing however be remembered that in Arms and The Man, Mr. Shaw does not, as some
imagine attack war. He is not Tolstoy an in the least. What he does is to denounce the
sentimental illusion that gathers around war. Fight if you will, says he but for goodness
sake dont strike picturesque attitudes in the limelight about it. View it as one of the
desperately irrational things of life that may, however, in certain circumstances be a brutal
necessity.

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Bluntschli

is the very mouth piece of the play that exposes the scourge

of war. There is a lot of learning in the disillusionment of Riana and Sergius. In the play he
has taken a realistic view not only of war and heroism but of love and marriage. He has taken
a realistic view of life as a whole. He has blown away the halo of romance that surrounds
human life as a whole. His message in this play is, therefore, the destruction not only of the
conventional conception of the heroic soldier but of the romantic view of marriage, nay, of life
as a whole. He pleads for judging everything concerning human life from a purely realistic
point of view. This is the message he conveys through the play, Arms and The Man.

The Golden Bough


The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion
(retitled The Golden Bough : A Study in Magic and Religion in its second edition)
is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish
anthropologist
Sir James George Frazer (18541941). It was first published in two volumes in 1890; in
three volumes in 1900; the third edition, published 190615, comprised twelve volumes.
The work was aimed at a wide literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications
as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes.
Frazer offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it
dispassionately as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective.
The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought was
substantial
The Golden Bough attempts to define the shared elements of religious belief and
scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, the scapegoat
and many other symbols and practices whose influence has extended into twentiethcentury culture. Its thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the
worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king. Frazer proposed that mankind progresses from
magic through religious belief to scientific thought.

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[4] This thesis was developed in relation to J. M. W. Turner's painting of The Golden Bough, a
sacred grove where a certain tree grew day and night. It was a transfigured landscape in a
dream-like vision of the woodland lake of Nemi, "Diana's Mirror", where religious
ceremonies and the "fulfillment of vows" of priests and kings were held.

Virginia Woolf, in an entirely different context, has brilliantly described the self-deluding effect of
this activity: Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and
delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size .

Is it possible to historicize literature ? Frye advocacy for universal


grammar of archetypes ?
Always historicize! exhorts contemporary literary critic Fredric Jameson. Few
students of literature and culture these days would find this admonition anything
more than common sense. Indeed, one might well wonder how can literature not
be seen as existing in history? But this common sense has only been common for
a short time, historically speaking.
The current ways of historicizing literature, of
understanding literature in relation to larger historical forces, have mostly
emerged since the 1970s. They arose from a number of different sources and
took a number of different forms. New forms of literary historicism fundamentally
reshaped how texts were interpreted, raised questions about how literary value
was determined in different eras, expanded the definition of what kinds of texts
counted as literature, discovered novel ways to place literary works in relation
to other kinds of written texts, applied literary critical methods to historical
documents, popular culture, and even to works of criticism themselves, asked
new questions about the cultural work done by literary texts, and rewrote the
canon of works deemed important enough to be read in literature classes. The
single most important factor in resurrecting the historical analysis of literary texts
was no doubt a wave of social movements in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that
reshaped the entire culture
In the nineteenth century the historical study of literature had taken two main
forms: a biographical approach focused on the lives of a set of great authors
(mostly male, mostly white), and a more technical, philological approach that
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sought to understand the historical evolution of words and literary forms. Literary
study was primarily the work of gentlemen (and a few ladies) with little interest in
the social implications of literature. In the early twentieth century two socially
conscious schools of criticism, Progressivism and Marxism, challenged these older
styles. Marxist critics took up the question of historicization by deepening this
critique of capitalism's control of society and literature. Marxist criticism in the
1930s took a variety of forms but all sought to understand the creation and
interpretation of literature as a social act fundamentally involved in shaping the
course of history.
The most common counter to these openly political ways of historicizing literature
was (and still is) the claim that literature was somehow above politics. This vague
charge was developed into a powerful argument with the rise of a group of
scholars who came to be known as the New Critics most notably John Crowe
Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, with the criticism of
T.S. Eliot much honored as an inspiration. These scholars solidified an antihistorical approach that dominated literary studies throughout the middle
decades of the twentieth century. The literary formalism of the New Critics
emerged from two quite different but mutually reinforcing forces. On the one
hand, there was a desire to professionalize literary study in academia by putting
it on a more objective, scientific footing reminiscent of the newly emergent social
sciences. On the other side, there was a consciously political move to suppress
the radical implications of Marxist styles of literary history. Several of the New
Critics were associated with the Southern agrarians, a group of authors critical
of modern capitalism via the rather different route of nostalgia for the preindustrial South.
The idea of timeless literature has been with us for some time, often attached
to the notion of the classics. But the idea of the classics is itself an historical
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concept, one emerging in the Renaissance when classical Greece and Rome
were rehistoricized as models for aesthetic creation.
While the New Criticism was immensely successful in institutionalizing itself as
the single proper mode of doing literary analysis from the late 1930s to the mid1960s, its dominance did not go unchallenged.Young critics emerging in the light
of the Civil Rights, Black Power, Chicano, Native American, women's, gay, and
other movements of the 1960s and 1970s began to reexamine deeply the ways in
which what passed as the canon of literary texts, and the styles of literary
analysis, left out both their own historical experiences, and their own ways of
experiencing the social power of the written word.

Metahistory took the literary analysis of critic Northrop Frye and


applied it brilliantly to history books. White demonstrated with
close formal analysis that historical writing was, after all, writing,
and as such subject to some of the same laws of form found in
fiction. What White called emplotment was the process by
which the wealth of historical detail on a given subject was turned
by the historian into a coherent story. Taking the story in history seriously he argued that close analysis revealed that
certain literary laws of form applied as well to historical writing.
He found, for example, that historical texts could be categorized
into four main types of plot tragic, comic, romantic, or satiric.
White showed how all historical analysis tended to gather facts
into stories utilizing one or more of these plots, and he argued
that the logic of this pattern was determined more by the
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ideology of the historian than by the nature of the historical


materials. (White's own analysis might best be considered a fifth
kind of plot, the ironic, that does not escape its own ideological
implications and evasions.) This did not mean that history was
just fiction, but it did mean that historical truth was inevitably
processed through linguistic conventions shared by fiction and
non-fiction.

One

might

have

thought

that

historians

would

welcome this effort to show that they too wrote in language, and
that they would come closer to historical truth if they took
account of the ways in which their narratives were shaped by
poetic rules similar to those found in literature. But few empiricist
historians embraced this analysis. Instead its influence blended
with a theoretical invasion from France that also used formalism
to blow apart formalism.

Northrop Frye Essay


Anatomy of Criticism
Critical Essays
Frye has exerted tremendous influence in the field of literary criticism and
in the area of education in literature and the humanities. This influence
derives mainly from his Anatomy of Criticism, a work in which Frye made
large and controversial claims for literature and literary critics.

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In Anatomy, Frye argued that judgments are not inherent in the critical
process. He further asserted that literary criticism can be "scientific" in its
methods and its results, without borrowing concepts from other fields of
study. Literary criticism, in Frye's view, can and should be autonomous in
the manner that physics, biology, and chemistry are autonomous
disciplines.
For Frye, literature is schematic because it is wholly structured by myth
and symbol. The critic becomes a kind of scientist, determining how
symbols and myth are ordered and function in a given work. The critic
need not, in Frye's view, make judgments of value about the work; a
critical study is structured by the fact that the components of literature,
like those of nature, are unchanging and predictable.
Frye believes that literature occupies a position of extreme importance
within any culture. Literature, as Frye sees it, is "the place where our
imaginations find the ideal that they try to pass on to belief and action,
where they find the vision which is the source of both the dignity and the
joy of life." The literary critic serves society by studying and "translating"
the structures in which that vision is encoded.

In Northrop Frye's text "Don't You Think it's Time to Start Thinking" he
makes a link between language and thinking.

Frye believes that in order to come up with the good idea in


the first place, we need the ability to articulate it beforehand.
He uses a comical example that until you have words to
describe it, you can't articulate whether the pain in your
stomach is gas or pregnancy. If you don't have the
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language, you might resort to pointing at your stomach or


saying pain and gesturing in some way.
Frye's point is that to think intelligently, we need to have an
intelligent grasp of vocabulary and language structures. To
think intelligently, we need to know what words can do and
how they work.
He takes this a step further. He adds that if we simply learn
the basics of language but do not attempt to learn how and
why words work in social situations, we merely learn to read
and write in order to become puppets:
. . . because society must have docile and obedient citizens.
We are taught to read so that we can obey the traffic signs
and to cipher so that we can make out our income tax, but
development of verbal competency is very much left to the
individual.
Frye refers to Orwell's novel 1984 in which society has been
brainwashed to speak as simply as possible. The less
articulate they are, the more easily the government can
wield power over them.
Frye adds that it has been deemed uncool, as an
adolescent, to speak articulately. This is obviously a
problem.

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Similar to today's media, Frye argues that society relies too


much on cliches and what we might call "stock responses"
and "sound bites." Note that in political debates and
discussions, candidates and pundits use repetitive phrases.
The problem is these phrases lack substance. They are
stock responses which means that many people use them
automatically, at any time, with no real thinking behind them.
"Let's make America great again." How many times have
you heard this phrase with no clarification? "Great" sounds
great but there is no thinking behind it. Such phrases are
used to pacify the public into nodding thoughtlessly. Frye
says this is a problem at all levels of education. His solution
is to put more focus and effort in educating students to think
critically precisely by teaching them to speak and write
critically. For Frye, thinking intelligently requires a strong
grasp of how language works, what it can do, and how it is
used (for good and bad) in social situations, in the media,
and so on.

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