I: LITERARY CRITICISM -RECENT TRENDS INTRODUCTION

Literary criticism in the 20^th century has'made huge intellectual advances, but in the process has become incomprehensible to the layman. What is the reason for this incomprehensibility? Post - Saussurean work on language has challenged the whole concept of realism. The French critic Roland Barthes has specifically proclaimed the death of the author. Lacan, Althusser, and Jacaques Derrida argued forcefully that the individual mind is not the source of meaning. Texts according to them are only' black mark on white paper'. 'The notion of a text which tells the truth, as perceived by the author whose insights are the source of the text's single and authoritative- meaning, is not only untenable but literally unthinkable'. The modern critical approaches, according to Helen Gardner run counter to empirical observation and common sense It therefore tends to alienate and exclude the common reader.

When one reads a literary text following the traditional approach he may put questions like what message does the author convey? Or what is the artistic achievement of the writer? According to traditional view the 'writer is conceived in Wordsworth's terms as a man speaking to men'. The traditional approach is based on the biography of the author and the critics intetpret texts with the help of certain incidents occurred in his lifetime. The intention of the author is the meaning of the text. Some traditional critics would interpret literature within a context of a philosophical thought of a period or group. Johnson's interpretations of Shakespeare and other poets are based on this technique.

Next we come across a few critics who don't belong to any particular school; but their ideas were explored and developed by later critics. They are T.S. Eliot, LA. Richards and W.P. Empson. The editors of critical texts call them' the transitionalists'.

Eliot established himself as a 'magisterially influential voice in English literary criticism'. He declared himself to be'a classicist in literature, an Anglo - catholic in religion, and a royalist in polities'. His provocative essays which are anti- romantic in both style and content, disdain 'close reading'. Eliot's criticism parallels his own poetry in an oblique but

revealing way. Eliot writes in one of his essays that his criticism was a by - product of his own poetry workshop. He says that meaning is to be found within the text and not outside it.' Tradition and Individual Talent' is a scathing attack on intentional fallacy. In 'the Function of Criticism' Eliot disposed of the affective fallacy. A number of Eliot's bewitching phrases, such as 'the dissociation of sensibility' and 'the objective correlative' have passed into the general currency of criticism.

LA. Richard's book 'Principles of literary criticism' set out to establish a theoretical frame work for criticism. Richards sees the methods of experimental science as the only sure means of attaining reliability in literary criticism. 'Fundamental to Richard's thinking is the distinction between the referential language of science and the emotive language of poetry. According to Richards, poetry belongs to a separate emotive dimension of language. Richards advises the readers of poetry that they should leam to read it aright. The readers should understand the fact that poets deal in varieties of pseudo-statements and not the truthful preposition. For Richards poetic truth is a matter of emotive transaction beyond all reach of logical critique.

W.P. Empson's 'The structure of complex words' was a full -scale rejoinder to LA. Richard's theories. He argued that we should not go too far towards emotional roots. 'Poetry should be accountable to all usual standards of rational prose sense. For Empson poetry is not emotive but cognitive. In 'Seven Types of Ambiguity', Empson investigated the multiplicity of meaning. Contemporary critics hold the view that meaning does not matter in poetry because it is appreciated 'as pure sound and the cultivation of a belief in so called 'atmosphere' vitiated much 19^lh century poetry. For Empson 'atmosphere' can only be a by-product of meaning and 'the attempt to manufacture it for its own sake is mistaken.

Another influential literary figure who changed the map of literary history was F.R. Leavis He does not belong to any school nor does he have any theory of his own. He defined criticism as the experience of one's own reading. He preached and practiced an approach to literature which advocated close attention to the text and encouraged sharp discrimination in evaluating what was read. Leavis follows Eliot in finding in the Metaphysical poets qualities which 20^lh century writers

desperately needed to recover. In his books, 'New Bearings in English poetry' and 'Revaluation' he assails the popular conventions of poetic evaluation. Leavis believed that some authors are better than others and establishing such preferences is the very life blood of Leavis's criticism.

f-reudian critics tend to demonstrate the general adherence of the text to universal psychological truths rather than consider specific characteristics. The most controversial aspect of psychoanalytic criticism is its tendency to interpret imagery in terms of sexuality. Following Freud'.s theory, the psychoanalytic critic tends to see all concave images (Ponds, flowers, cups etc) as female or yonic symbols and all images whose length exceeds their diameter (towards, mountain- peaks knives) as male or phallic symbols.

Marxist critics believe 'that literature is a social and material practice, related to other social practices and finally explicable only in these terms. 'For Marxism history does not form a single category or seamless whole. It is grasped rather, as a field of conflicting interests and forces. Lukacz in his essay 'The Ideology of Modernism' attacks the Modernist writers because they present man in a solitariness seemingly basic to the human condition. Man is seen as incapable of relationships with others. The Marxist critic's basic objection to modernism lies in its loss of the Aristotelian view of man as a social animal. For New critics every poem is a verbal icon a structure of in wraught rhetorical figures. They argued forcefully that the quest for author's intention has nothing to do with meaning. They consistently urged that there was no distinction between form and content and the texts cannot be understood as ideas weapped in emotion and meaning decorated with imagery.

Frye's archetypal criticism introduced a new chapter in the history of literary criticism. He defines archetypes as recurring images or symbols which connect one text with another and constitute a source of the intelligibility of the text. Frye does not study one phenomenon and then another in a compartmentalized fashion, but instead he looks for structural regularities 'Literature' Frye says, 'imitates not the world but the tot#l dreams of man.

Structuralism emerged as an intellectual movement in the 20^th century. It is difficult for us to define the term precisely; however we

etui giv^ « general aescription of the term. Things uannoi oe understood in isolation - they have to be seen in the context of larger structure of which they are part of. The task of structural analysis is to formulate the underlying system of conventions which enable cultural objects to have meaning.

Structuralism is not a method for producing startling interpretation. Jonathan Culler in his book 'Structuralist poetics' emphasizes the following points again and again.

1. Structuralism is not the one that discovers and assigns meanings.

2. Literary study does not focus attention on the individual work but
on the condition of meaning.

3. A literary study based on the possible relationship between literary
and linguistic study would grant new attention to the activity of
reading.

Post Structuralism is not a continuation or development of structuralism, it is a form of rebellion against it. The post-structuralists don't believe in the fixed intellectual reference points. Structuralists believed in the science of sign but the post-structuralists display the instability of signification. The post-structuralists make the question 'what the text means' completely irrelevant. They say that the texts refer to nothing beyond themselves. It is precisely in the form of auto critique that the post- structuralism manifests itself most characteristically.

Post - Structuralism prevents the formation of a stable meta-language
by a constant self subversion. The object. of deconstructing the text
(deconstruction means applied post-structuralism)is to examine the process
of its production not the private experience of the individual author but
the mode of production, the material and the arrangement in the work.
The aim is to locate the point of contradiction within the text.
Deconstructive commentary always consists in showing that the text
studied is internally contradictory. Composed of contradiction the text is
no longer restricted to one meaning, instead it becomes plural. '

UNIT -1

CRITICAL TERMS 1. Ambiguity

An ambiguity is a word or statement which is not clear and which can be understood in more than one way. In other words ambiguity is opposed to clarity. The use of a vague or equivocal expression instead of a specific reference in a sentence conveys more than one meaning. In the past ambiguity was considered to be a fault in style. But the modern criticism has turned it into a virtue. LA. Richards in his essay on the 'Two uses of language' argued forcefully that what is required of scientific language (ie. lucidity) is not necessarily demanded in poetry. It was W.P. Empson who gave a new shape and colour to this expression and popularized this concept in the field of literary criticism. Since Empson the term has come to be regarded as a defining linguistic characteristics of poetry.

Ambiguity is not a specific rhetoric or figurative device which may be chosen at a will. It is a natural characteristic of a language. Even in ordinary language ambiguity is common but we do not notice it, because context selects one of the alternative meanings. Ambiguity is of several kinds'.

1. Homophony - The convergence of unrelated meanings

in one form (bank, plane)

2. Polysemy - A scatter of more or less connected

meanings around one word (bachelor, record)

3. Syntactic ambiguity- e.g. Visiting relatives can be boring.

Verse tends to be more ambiguous than prose because it is less
redundant and context is inaccessible or irrelevant. Empson says that
ambiguity is a phenomenon of compression. Since we assume multiple
meanings in verse, we accept extra meanings. "The leaves'.' in
Shakespeare's sonnet 73 (yellow......... or none or few) are simultaneously

the leaves of the autumn metaphor and poet's writings -leaves of a book.

Multiple meanings must be justified by their inter relationship. Illustrating this point Roger. Fowler quotes a line from Shakespeare sonnet (Sonnet No.73)'Those boughs which shakes against the cold. Fowler explains that 'Shake is either passive, the boughs being ravaged by the cold wind or active and defiant the shaking of a fist, a gesture against approaching death. The diametrically opposed meanings capture the conflict between decay and energy which the poem embodies. Ambiguity in this usage resembles the New critics Rhetorical devices such as 'Tension' 'Irony', 'Paradox' etc.

2. Archetype

The term archetype means 'The original idea or model of something, of which others are copies. Critics use this term frequently in literary criticism. Northrop Frye with the help of this concept has turned literary criticism into a true science. He says that the poet is the only efficient cause of a poem but the poem having a form has a formal cause that is to be sought. On examination Frye finds this formal cause to be the archetype. What Frye calls total literary history moves from the primitive to the sophisticated. He holds the view that it is possible for us to regard literature as the complication of a relatively simple group of formulas that can be studied in a primitive culture. In the lfght of this possibility the search for archetype becomes a kind of literary anthropology, concerns with the way that literature is informed by pie literary categories as ritual, myth and folk tale.

Fryede scribe his own procedures as archetypal criticism. He defines archetype as recurring images or symbols which connects one text with another and constitute a source of the intelligibility of the text. In other words archetypal criticism highlights the inter textual elements of intelligibility and the recognition of similarities and differences between a text and all other texts we have read. An individual work should be grasped as part of a vast whole.

Among the prominent practitioners of various forms of Archetypal criticisms are Maud Bodkin, Wilson Knight, Robert Graves, Philip Wheel

Wright, Richard Chase and Joseph Campbell. In his 'The Anatomy of criticism Frye developed the archetypal approach into a radical and inclusive revision of the traditional grounds both of the theory of the literature and the practice of literary criticism. All these writers emphasis the underlying mythical patterns in literature, because the myths are closer to the elemental archetype.

3. Chorus

In ancient Greek Plays, the Chorus was a group of actors who used poetry and music to explain or give opinions on the action of the play. The Chorus represents the voice of a collective personality, commenting on events and interpreting the moral and religious wisdom of the plays. The term also denotes a band of dancers and singers at the festivals of the gods. According to Aristotle, Greek tragedy evolved from the choric song of the Dithyramb. 'In Aeschylus, it still has some direct influence on action'. With Euripides, who curtailed its function, it loses some of its mythic solemnity, but takes on a new lyrical beauty. In Post Euripidean tragedy, It apparently became more ornamental interlude. The classical type of chorus was never widely used by English writers but there is one tragic masterpiece which includes this feature - ie Milton's 'Samson Agonistes'. In 20^lh century T.S. Eliot made effective use of the classical chorus in his religious tragedy'Murder in the cathedral'. In Elizabethan tragedy, it is sometimes reduced to a single character . This character served as the author's vehicle for commenting on the play and for communicating to the audience, exposition about its subject, offstage events and setting. Interpretations of the nature and the function of the Chorus vary. A.W. Schelegal considered it 'the idealized spectator' Lowes Dickinson and Gilbert Murray, point out that through the chorus the poet could speak in his own person and impose upon the whole tragedy any tone he desired.

4 & 5 Connotation and Denotation

The connotation of a word means 'The secondary or accompanying" meaning which it commonly suggests or implies. In other words it means the figurative or the indirect meanings of the word. The denotation of a word is its primary meaning such as the dictionary ordinarily specifies. The word 'home' denotes the place where one lives but connotes privacy,

intimacy and coziness. The connotation of a word is only a potential i«.. of secondary meanings. The context of a word may evoke connotation. Poets typically establish contexts which bring into play some part of connotative as well as the denotative meanings of words. Quoting a few lines from George Herbert's poem, M.H. Abrams illustrates this point.

'Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky'.

The word bridal denotes a union between human beings-there it means the union of earth and sky. The metrical and verbal context in which the word occurs also evokes such connotation of 'bridal' as sacred joyful and ceremonial. Even the way a word is spelled may alter its connotation. Keats in his 'Ode to Nightingale ;

'Charmed magic casement, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn'

altered his original spelling of 'fairy' in order to convey the sense of antiquity. A good poet, according to Tate, is one who - fuses together the connotative and denotative aspects of language. Connotation means, suggestive, indirect, or figurative meaning whereas denotation means direct, straight forward or literal meaning. In a good poem the figurative significance does not invalidate the literal statement.

6. Expressionism

Expressionism is a label applied to the avant-garde literature,
graphics, architecture and cinema which appeared throughout the German
speaking world. Roger Fowler says that Vorticism is the closest equivalent
in England. The term was first applied to German painting and later to
literature and it gained rapid currency with visual arts. It was established
as a critical term in mid 1913. It is a blanket term and it does not
characterize a uniform movement propagating a definable set of ideas
commonly accepted goals. The central feature of expressionism is a radical
revolt against realism. «

Explaining the term. M.H. Abrams writes, "Instead of representing the world as it objectively is, the author, undertakes to express the inner experience by representing the world as it appears to his state of mind or

to that of one/ of his characters-an emotional, troubled or abnormal state of mind. Often the work implies that this mental condition is representative of anxiety ridden modern man in an industrial and technological society which is drifting towards chaos". The expressionist dramatist ignores time sequence makes a stylized dialogue distorted stage sets and gives much importance to lighting and sound effect. This mode of German drama had an important influence on the American theatre. Eugene O'Neill employs the expressionistic technique in two of his well known plays 'The Hairy Ape' and 'The Emperor Jones'. Though expressionism as a dramatic movement did not endure, it has had an important effect on the writing and staging of such plays as'Thornton Wilders"The skin of our teeth'and Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' as well as on more recent nonrealistic enterprises such as the theatre of the absurd.

7. Intentional Fallacy

If we interpret or evaluate a work by reference to the intention of the author in writing the work, it will be an error. Intentional fallacy identifies this error. In the essay 'The Intentional fallacy' Wimsatt and Beardsly argued that the author's intentions were not the proper concern of the critic. The intention of the author is irrelevant, because the meaning and value resides in the actual text. Any reference to the author's avowed or supposed purpose is in fact misleading, for it distracts us from the text to external matters about the author's biography and his psychological condition which we tend to substitute for the internal constitution of the work as such.

Modern exponents of objective criticism adopt this concept in their critical works. Though the author's stated intention has a privileged status, it does not have a determinate one as evidence, for it must be validated by reference to the text itself. Modern critics, particularly the structuralists attack the critical theory of Wimsatt and Beardsly saying that absolute objectivity in criticism is impossible to attain.

8. Comparative literature

The term comparative literature covers rather distinct field of study and groups of problems. It was Matthew Arnold who first used the term comparative literature in his essays. Matthew Arnold in one of his essays

writes "Every where there is connection, every where there is illustration, no single event or single. literature can adequately be comprehended except in relation to other or other literature".

Explaining the term Rernak says "Comparative literature is the study of literature beyond the confines of one particular country and the study of the relationships between literature in one hand and the other areas of knowledge and belief.

Comparative literature aims to "enhance awareness of the qualities of one work by using the products of another linguistic culture as an illuminating context". It also means studying some broad topic or theme as it is realized ('transformed) in the literatures of different languages. Fowler holds the view that comparative literature is closely associated with literary criticism. Illustrating this point Fowler says" The idea that a work of literature yields a richer significance when placed along side another, each serving as a way of talking about the other has more to do with the new criticism, and with Eliot's assertion that comparison and analysis are the chief tools of the critic than with traditional literary scholarship, since intrinsic criteria of value help to shape such comparisons".

The general distinction of comparative literature is that it is confined to the study of relationship between two or more literatures. The French method was confined to this sources and influences. This school has given much attention to such questions as the' reputation and penetration, the influence and fame of Goethe in France and England, of Carlyle and Schiller in France. But this conception of Comparative Literature has a flaw. No distinct system can emerge from the accumulation of such studies. 'There is no methodological distinction between a study of Shakespeare in France and a study of Shakespeare in 18^lh century England.

There is a world of difference between General Literature and Comparative literature. When one traces the development of essay since Bacon's day; he is in the field of general literature. It he compares Bacon's essay with Lamb's essay, he is in the field of Comparative literature. A scholar in Comparative literature has to bbilingual.

9. Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine. It means that 'man has complete free will but no given essence (principle) and has to define himself by his choices in a world without ultimate moral values. Existentialists believe that man can experience absurdity so intensely and consequent on this that there must be some inherent propensity to order and meaning within him.

Existentialist writers and thinkers do not share a unified understanding of this propensity. Sartre equates it with the human will shorn of all illusions and responsible only to itself. Camus locates it below the will, in the spontaneous potential of the personality. Heidegger refers to it as Sorge (care) and Kierkegaard identifies it with the soul. It is this propensity which saves men from nihilism and despair.

Sartre's famous dictum that 'existence precedes essence (Values, principles and morals) and it is considered to be the basic tenet of Existentialism. According to Fowler this statement of Sartre conveys two meanings. Existence is inherently meaningless, so that man has to create his own values, or that for each individual, there is a hidden meaning embedded in existence which by the exercise of his total personal resources he has to discover and live by.

According to Fowler there are two schools of Existentialism (1) Theistic and Crypto - theistic existentialism and (2) Agnostic and atheistical existentialism. The former one moves towards an inner-worldly mysticism where the experience of the Transcendent is discovered within and not apart from the world of man. The latter one moves towards an attitude of defiance which can turn into a social or explicitly ideological commitment, (Camu's socialism and Sartre's Marxism)

The British dramatist Samuel Beckett uses this philosophical doctrine in his plays. (Waiting for Godot)

10. Hermeneutics

The term Hermeneutics comprises the general theory and practice of interpretation and it was first specifically applied in the 17^lh century. The western hermeneutics while analyzing the biblical and the classical texts, tries to reach the meaning of the texts but they found it difficult because

the texts were obscured by cultural and historical distance. In theology Origen produced a triple explication through grammatical, ethical, and allegorical meanings. The protestant theologians tried to form an autonomous interpretation of scripture. Friderich Schleiernacher proposed a general hermeneutics that would underlie all specific interpretations and provide them with a system of understanding. He holds the view that an interpreter can understand an author better than he understood himself. William Dilthey produced a division between the explanation of the external objects in the natural sciences and the understanding of inner states in the human sciences. Hermeneutics applied to the latter. His concern is not so much to understand the text as to reconstruct the lived experience of its author.

Dilthey holds the view that such experience is intrinsically temporal, the interpretation must therefore assume temporal or historical character. The inner life of man finds its complete and intelligible expression in language and it is obvious that language plays a major role in literature. Dilthey gives literature an immeasurable significance. Literature is thus a privileged object for Hermeneutic study.

E.D. Hirsch separates meaning and significance and argues that significance is any relationship between meaning and something else. It is thus variable and the concern of criticism. Interpretation on the other hand deals with meaning; This does not change because it is intended by an author. It is seen as that part of the author which specifies or determines verbal meaning. Rorty says that hermeneutics is what we get when we are no longer epistemological.

11. Irony

Irony is a mode of discourse for conveying meanings different from and opposite to the professed or ostensible ones. Though there are several kinds of irony, they fall into two major categories, according to Roger Fowler, situational and verbal. Since the contexts of situational irony may be primarily social moral or meta physical, irony can be further classified as comic or tragic "In tragic irony the ostensible reasons for the heroes downfall, whether it be the anger of the *Gods or his own relentless pursuit of an ideal, are undercut by psychological explanations of a more mundane sort. Conrad's 'Lord Jim' is a good example of this.

Comic irony uses similar kinds of juxtaposition to describe and deflate the social aspirations of its protagonists. In both forms the

characters bring two conflicting and contrasting worlds in sharp focus.
Examples of such characters are Conrad's Marlow and P.G. Wodehouse's
Jeeves. The author's ironies will be completely missed if there are no

such characters. Some literary works exhibit structural ironies. Here the author introduces a structural feature which serves to sustain the duplicity

of meaning. One common device of this sort is the invention of a naive
hero or else a naive spokesmen whose invincible simplicity leads him to persist in putting an interpretation on affairs which the knowing reader

shares the implicit point of view of the authorial presence behind the

naive persona - just as persistently is able to alter and correct. One

example of the naive spokesman is Swift's insane rational economist

who makes the Modest proposal to convert the children of oppressed Irish

S into financial and gastronomical asset.

Verbal Irony is a statement in which the implicit meaning intended by the speaker differs from that which he ostensibly asserts. In speech it is possible to indicate by tone of voice. Let us take the word 'clever' in the sentence 'He is a clever chap'. The word is to be understood to mean'stupid'. In speech it is possible for us to convey this meaning by tone of voice but in writing we have to convey this sense obliquely. 'Irony is an art of indirection and juxtaposition relying for the success on such techniques as understatement, paradox, and other forms of wit in the expression of incongruities. Commenting on the term Irony Roger Fowler writes "Modern criticism has seen in the ambiguities of the ironic mode, a response to experience particularly sympathetic. Like symbolism, allegory and Metaphor, Irony provides a means for unifying the apparent contradiction of experience but is also uniquely able to assert - the world's diversity .

12. Metaphor

A metaphor is a correspondence between the world being described and the world of experience that can interpret, illuminate help us understand. A metaphor in poetry is like mapping in mathematics. A story or poem is about part of our experience. To understand it we must bring other experiences to bear upon the story.

In a simile a comparison between two distinctly different things is indicated by the word 'like' or 'as'. A simple example is Burn's "Oh my love is like a red, red rose". In a metaphor a word which in standard usage denotes one kind of thing, quality or action is applied to another, in the form of a statement of identity instead of comparison. In other words 'metaphor is substitution based on certain kind of similarity. If we change the sentence 'ships crossed the sea to' ships ploughed the sea (ploughed-metaphor)we have substituted ploughed for crossed, having perceived a similarity between the movement of a plough through the earth and of a ship through the sea. The difference between ships and plough is not suppressed. It is essential to the metaphor. Terence Hawkes says "Metaphor is not the fanciful embroidery of the facts. It is a way of experiencing the facts".

Metaphor denies us a literal sense, and so induces to make sense. Black argues that metaphor rather than just drawing our attention to some similarity already existing, create a new similarity. It is certainly the case that people can often find some aspect to the interpretation of a word in a metaphor that they may not be able to find in the word in isolation.

13. Pathetic Fallacy :

The term'pathetic fallacy', introduced by Ruskin'is a strong current in literary expression, especially in the literature of the romantic movement.

This is the attribution of human characteristics to inanimate nature. It is a

kind of metaphor which is found in expressions such as 'the cruel sea",

Ruskin holds the view that the term pathetic fallacy is derogatory, because

it applies to descriptions, not of the 'true appearances of things to us,' but

of the extraordinary or false appearances, when we are under the influence

of emotion or contemplative fancy. Two of his examples are the following

quotations.

"The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould,

naked and shivering, with his cup of gold".

and Coleridge's description in 'Christabel'

"The one red leaf, the last of its clan, '

That dances as often as dance it can".

According to Ruskin, these passages however beautiful are false and morbid. The inspired poets alone use pathetic fallacy properly. Ruskin argues that the poet who sees nature as having 'an animation and pathos of its own, does not commit the fallacy, but merely shows an instinctive sense' of the Divine presence. Modern critics would see in such an instinctive sense a fallacy rather than the perception of a truth. Commenting on Ruskin's statement, M.H Abram says 'Ruskin's contention would make not only his great romantic predecessors, but even Shakespeare "morbid" The term is now used as a neutral name for a common phenomenon in descriptive poetry.

"Modern criticism" says Roger Fowler 'treats the pathetic fallacy as a device with special effects on a reader's sensibility' (instead of a mode of expression revealing the writer's state of mind). On this view, logical and literal criteria are as inappropriate to the evaluation of this figure as they are to the evaluation of metaphor.

14. Platonism :

Plato in his 'Republic' banished the artists because they imitate the actual world and not the ideal (or the eternal ideas). Plato suggested ironically that the arts were lower than practical crafts. He said that it is better for us to make a chair than a painting of one. It was Plotinus the founder of Neo-Platonism, reinterpreted Plato stressing the visionary elements of the Republic. The Platonic artist is a philosopher who aspires to change the world by changing men's attitudes and values. What makes him an artist is "that idea or fore-conceit of the work and not... the work itself. "Platonism does not distinguish the arts by media; metaphors from state craft are used about poetry-'poets are the unacknowledged legislatures of the world". (Shelley). His views on love and beauty are some what mystical.

Beauty manifested in a single human body is not beauty and love

based on this beautiful human body is not at all real love. We must go

from the beauty of the body to the beauty of the mind until we arrive at

the Idea of 'beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting. The passjng

beauties of the body and of the entire world of sense are only distorted

I reflection of the ideal beauty. The Neo- Platonists developed the theory

; that all goodness, truth and beauty, in the sensible world are 'emanations'

(radiations) from the one or absolute wh > is ihe source of all being and value. "The Platonic lover reverences the physical beauty of his beloved only as a sign of the spiritual beauty that she shares all other beautiful woman, and regards her bodily beauty as the lowest rung on a ladder that leads up from sensual desire to the pure contemplation of heavenly beauty in god.

According to Roger Fowler Platonic criticism avoids classification of genres or of rhetorical figures. Platonist's view of language is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand they aspire towards a fixed "golden language' in which meter images, syntax will embody that essential harmony towards which creation strives. On the other hand a profound skepticism which pushes language to its limits, destroys and impoverishes it as if to prove its eternal enmity to the ideal. The Platonic theorist considers the words and the rhythm of a poem as a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

According to Yeats, Platonic literary history is repetition or circular a continual return to mythic figures and structures only incidentally clothed in the trappings of a particular culture. Platonism, according to Roger Fowler is the poet's poetics; more than any other theory it has been responsible for poetic self consiousness. This fact indicates its particular freedom and limitations; it may set the poet squarely at the center of his world, but it undermines the world's reality and solidity for him.

15. Traditional Criticism

What do we mean by the term 'Traditional criticism'? Literary critics from Sydney to Middleton Murray have some common characteristics. The label traditional critics is attached to all of them. There is a world of difference between the modern critical practice and the traditional critical approach.. A traditional critic would put questions like "What message does the author convey'? or what is the artistic achievement of the writer'? (According to traditional view the writer is conceived in Wordsworth's term 'as a man speaking to men'. The writer addresses a reader who is competent to understand what the author has written). A new critic would ask the question what message does the text

convey?. But a post structuralist would raise the point 'Does the text convey any message at all?.

"While examining a text, traditional critic would arrive at something anterior to it, the convictions of the author or his experience as part of that society, at that particular time'. To understand the text is to explain it in terms of the author's ideas, psychological state or social background. Books about authors often begin with a brief biography discussing the influence of the family, the environment or the society. The commonest way of writing about literature is to write a book about an author analyzing his works chronologically to show the developing skill with which the author's developing insights are expressed. In other words, the traditional approach is based on the biography of the author and the critics interpret texts with the help of certain incidents occurred in his life time. The intention of the author is the meaning of the text.

The aim of textual criticism is to establish an authentic text or to produce the text which the author intended. But it is not possible for us to find out the intention of the author (as revealed in the text) because, the text would have been corrupted from what the author wanted to say. The author's manuscript may contain omissions and errors in spelling and grammar. The author would have made several changes in his manuscript. Eliot has made several corrections in 'The Waste Land'. Dicken's 'Great Expectation includes two endings. Thomas Hardy made so many alterations in the four versions of the 'Return of the Native'. After a close scrutiny of textual criticism several scholars have come to the conclusion that it could not be treated as traditional approach, even though its aim is to highlight the intention of the author.

The biographical approach sees a literary work chiefly as a reflection of its author's life and times. Milton's poem 'On .His Blindness' could be understood best, when one reads his life story. He became totally blind when he wrote this poem. Another type of traditional approach is 'the moral philosophical' approach. Among its most famous followers are the commentators of the age of neoclassicism in English literature particularly Samuel Johnson. According to Johnson the function of literature is to teach morality and to probe philosophical issues. They would interpret literature within a context of a philosophical

thought of a period or group. One should understand existentialism, if he wants to read profitably Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Similarly Pope's, 'Essay on man' may be grasped only if one understands the meaning and the role of reason in 18^th century thought.

Critics who are hostile to traditional approach argue forcefully that

it has tended to be somewhat deficient in imagination, has neglected the

newer sciences, such as . psychology and anthropology and has been too

content with a common sense interpretation of material. 'But it has

nevertheless performed one valuable service' in avoiding cultism and
faddism, it has preserved scholarly discipline and balance in literary
criticism.

16. New Criticism

The term New Criticism was coined by J.E. Spingarn in 1910 in protest against the brutal pedantry of the American academic scene. The term is now used to refer specifically to the work of the American critics associated with the programme announced in John Crowe Ransom's book 'The New Criticism'. Taking clues from Eliot's criticism, Ransom developed a new theoiy - ie urging a new spirit of objectivity in criticism. The first attempt was to free criticism from the impressionism and the emotionalism of the amateur tradition. The new critics rejected the idea that a poem conveys a message (It was exactly opposite to that of traditional criticism). A poem should not mean but 'be', was Archibald Maclish's extreme statement of this position. Form and content are the two faces of the same coin. They consistently urged that there was no distinction between form and content, 'that the texts cannot be understood as ideas wrapped in emotions, or meanings decorated with imagery'. They believed that any change in the language will alter the content of the text. Tolstoy says that the content in its entirety can be expressed only by itself. In other words, it is impossible to paraphrase literary writing. (It is not possible for us to present the content of the text by using different words).

The New Critics eschew the biography of the author, ignores the social conditions at the time of its production, and do not give importance to its psychological and moral effects on the reader. The New Critics delivered a resounding blow to the traditional approach by arguing

that the quest for the author's intentions had nothing to do with the literary criticism. The intentions of the author were not be found outside the text in biography or in history. The New Critics hold the view that the poem, if it be a true poem is a simulacrum of reality. The poem is not a mere statement about experience, it is an experience. It was on this basis that the New critics consistently demanded a close and detailed attention to the formal properties of the text. The distinctive procedure of the New Critic is explication or close reading. The principles of the New Criticism are basically verbal. That is literature is conceived to be a special kind of language .

The distinction between literary genres is not essential in the New Criticism. The basic components of any work of literature, whether, lyric, narrative, or dramatic are conceived to be words, images .and symbols rather than character, thought and plot. The New Critics attempted to identity literariness of literature with one particular rhetorical device metaphor, irony, paradox ambiguity etc. Though the revolutionary thrust of the New Criticism had lost much of its force, it has left a permanent mark on the criticism of literature.

17. Structuralism

Structuralism is to be understood at two different levels- first as an intellectual movement in the 20^lh century; second as a particular set of approaches to literary studies. This intellectual movement began in France in the 1950's and is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss. It is difficult to boil structuralism down to a single bottom -line proposition but we can define the term to a certain extent. 'Things cannot be understood in isolation. They have to be seen in the context of larger structures of which they are part of. Structuralism challenges the everyday concept of reality. It starts from the proposition that the world is not made up of independent objects that are classifiable in absohu terms. "Things only exist in as much as we perceive them and the act ot perception is governed by several factors which make objectivity impossible; so to some significant extent we create what wg perceive. It follows that all we can know is the relationship between the observer and the thing observed".

Structures are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world, rather than objective entities already existing in the external world. Meaning or significance is not a kind of core or essence inside things. Structuralists believe that meaning is always outside and meanings are attributed to the things by the human mind, not contained within them. Roland Barthes defined structuralism as a method for the study of cultural artifacts derived from the method of contemporary linguistics, Structuralism has its roots in Saussurean linguistics. A good knowledge of Saussurean thinking is indispensable to grasp structuralist principles. The task of structural analysis is to formulate the underlying system of convention which enable cultural objects to have meaning for us. It is not hermeneutic - it is not a method for producing startling interpretations. It answers the questions how a literary work produces meaning.

Structuralists raise some pertinent questions. Critics postulate a profound relationship between the author and the text they deal with, but they ignore any such relationship between themselves and what they are writing. Structruralists focus attention on the relationship between the critics and the work they deal with. Commenting on this point Roland Barthes writes in his essay 'criticism as language' "that the text has no existence as an independent object exterior to the psyche and the history of the man who interprets it".

Jonathan Culler in his book 'Structuralist poetics' emphasizes the following points again and again.

1. Structuralism is not the one that discovers and assigns meaning.

2. Literary work does not focus attention on the individual work.
but on the condition of meaning.

3. A literary -study based on the possible relationship between
literary and linguistic study would grant new attention to the
activity of reading.

Structuralism leads us to think of the poem not as a self contained organism but as a sequence which has meaning only in relation to a literary system.

18. Post Structuralism

Is Post-Structuralism a continuation and development of structuralism or a form of rebellion against it ?. In one sense it is the latter. The Post - Structuralists accuse the structuralists saying that they have no courage to follow their own conviction. One of the major convictions of structuralists is that language does not record or reflect the world. In other words language is not a system which can make satisfactory representation of reality. The structuralists hold this view, but in practice they do the opposite; They treat language as arbitrary system. The Post Structuralists maintain that the consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty. They (post -structuralists) don't believe in fixed intellectual reference points which guarantee all meaning. Derrida exposed the weaknesses of structuralism. Structuralism depends upon structure and structures depend upon centers - and Derrida called into question the very idea of a stable center (Intellectual reference points ). This situation ie without a center or without intellectual reference points is called de centered universe.

Post Structuralism tend to see all knowledge - history, anthropology, literature , psychology etc as textual. This means that knowledge is not just composed of concept, but of word. How does post - structuralism differ from structuralism ? or what are the differences and distinctions between structuralism and post - structuralism ?

1. Structuralism derives from linguistics, whereas post-structuralism
derives ultimately from philosophy.

2. Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalization.
It aims for a detached scientific coolness of tone. The style is neutral.
But post structuralists writing by contrast tends to be much more
emotive. The tone is euphoric and the style is flamboyant and
showy.

3. Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language
in the sense that we do not have access to reality other than
through linguistic medium. Post - Structuralism punctures this
ambition. It does so by displaying the instability of language

system. (If we look upon the word 'chair' in the dictionary, we wil find different meanings).

4. Structuralism questions our way of structuring and categorizing reality and prompts us to break free of habitual modes of perception or catergorization, but it believes, that we can thereby attain a more reliable view of things. Post Structuralism distrusts the very notion of reason and the idea of the human being as an independent entity, but a product of social and linguistic force.

What are the salient features of post - structuralism?

a) The Post Structuralists make the question, what the text means
completely irrelevant. Riffeterre says that the texts refer to nothing
beyond themselves.

b) It is precisely in the form of autocritique that the post -
structuralism manifests itself most characteristically.

c) The word post - structuralism itself shifts the emphasis from any
single theory or meaning towards an unbound movement through
time and space.

d) It consists of a perpetual detour towards a truth that has lost any
status or finality.

e) Post - Structuralism prevents the formation of a stable meta
language by a constant self subversion.

f) Post Structuralist criticism, avoids becoming fixed, avoids becoming
an established method.

g) Post - Structuralism involves a critique of metaphysics (of concepts &
£ruth ), of the theory of the sign and the acknowledgement and
incorporation of psychoanalytic modes of thought. Some use the
term deconstruction instead of post - structuralism. In one sense it
is the synonym of post-structuralism, but in another sense it is
applied post - structuralism. The object of deconstructing a text is to
examine the process of its production, not the private experience of
the individual author, but the mode of production, the material and
the arrangement in the work. The aim of deconstruction is to locate
the point of contradiction within the text.

Deconstructive commentary always consists in showing that the text studied is internally contradictory. Composed of contradiction the text is no longer restricted to one meaning ; instead it becomes plural. According to Deconstaictive Procedure, critics should import meanings into the text, because texts have no determinate meanings of their own.

19. Feminism

The term 'Feminism' denotes that women should have the same rights, power and opportunity that men have and that the present situation should be changed to give equality with men. The feminist critics raise the issue how women have been represented in literature. One of the fundamental observations of feminist criticism is that the continuous tradition of literary studies have largely obscured women's work and women's perspectives . The feminist critics hold the view that the imaginative literature has misrepresented women through the ages. They are dissatisfied with the wider social and cultural situation. Raising their voice against male domination, they argue forcefully that women should not be treated as doormats or inferior species. Most feminists believe that the western culture is a patriarchal culture, ie one organized in favour of the interests of men. "Feminist literary critics try to explain how power imbalances due to gender in a given culture are reflected in literary texts". Women are not really inferior to men, but the age old dominance of men is mainly responsible for female subservience to men. 'The masculine is regarded as the very type of humanity and women is seen as relative to men'.

Feminist literary criticism is not just another critical approach. In
short feminism represents one of the most important social economic and
aesthetic revolutions of modern time. "Feminists examine the experiences
of women from all races and classes and cultures for example African,
American, Latina, Asian American, American Indian, Lesbian, handicapped,
elderly, and third world subjects". This richness (the experience of
women) exhibits inter disciplinary links and connects art to the diversities
of life. «

The main aims of feminist criticism are to expose patriarchal premises and resulting prejudices, to promote revaluation of literature by women, and to examine social, cultural and pshycho sexual contexts of

literature and literary criticism. Feminist critics therefore study sexual, social and political issues once thought to be "outside the study of literature".

Virginia wolf discussed in detail some of the problems, specific to the women writer in 'A Room of one's own'. She wrote that the lack of a 'room of the one's own and the lack of financial independence put a brake on women's ambition in literature. Feminist criticism has brought new pressure to bear on the analysis of texts at many levels, from the structure of sentence to the concept of character.

20. Reader Response Theory

Readers of literary text , from time immemorial have been considered to be the consumers of texts. No one in the past, thought that the critical term 'Reader response' warranted attention. Critics paid attention to authors only and declared that the writer made the reader as he made his characters. In the second half of the 20^th century a new trend emerged in the field of criticism. There was a reaction against new critical autonomy and consequently a new critical approach ushered in and it tended to use a dynamic rather than an affective orientation.

Henry James describing his own reading practice emphasizes the idea that the reader is an active figure rather than a mere affective target for experience. He has introduced a new theory in literary criticism. But Roland Barthes said "The goal of literary work is to make the reader no longer a consumer , but a producer of the text".

Two Critics Norman Holland and Harold Bloom study reading through psychology and psychoanalysis, but Holland uses the reader's identity theme to produce unified convergent readings, Bloom stages an Oedipal conflict which prompts misreadings that diverge from the authority of their predecessors. Riffaterre is a supreme example of convergent activity. Umberto Eco's work seems to offer both convergent and divergent emphases. One may notice the impact of deconstruction in divergent emphases. Fish also belongs to the school pf critics who consider a text in relation to its effect upon a reader. Like Riffarterre he believed in convergent activity. His own experience of reading had been the basis of his theorizing. His discussion of the reader in "Paradise

Lost" was a source of considerable excitement. He believed that the readers are participants in the construction of meaning. Fish holds the view that the reader's intuition is the new source of authority.

Roland Barthes in his provocative essay 'The death of the author" has reversed the traditional assumptions about the text and the author. 'The meaning of a text is volatile varying according to the different occasion of reading and without reference to an authority which will fix meaning'. The Death of the author means the liberation of the text from the authority of a presence behind it, which gives it meaning. To give a text an author is to impose a limit on the text. A text is £ multidimensional space in which a variety of writings blend and clash. I is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. The business of an author is to mix writings. The reader, not the author plays a major role in determining the meaning of the text. Barthes tantalizingly concludes the essay with the statement "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author".

21. Psychoanalysis

What is psychoanalysis ? It is the examination or treatment of some one who is mentally ill or depressed by asking theft) about their feelings and their past in order to discover hidden feelings which may be causing their condition Trilling in his essay on 'Freud and Literature' says that psychoanalysis is one of the culminations of the Romanticist literature of the 19^th century. Both Romanticist literature and psychoanalysis focus attention on the hidden element in man. For Wordsworth and Burke what was hidden and unconscious was wisdom and power. Freud associated hidden element with unconscious mind and applied the scientific method to study the unconscious.

The most basic of Freud's discoveries was that there does exist a large part of the psyche which is not under the direct control of the individual. In referring to this as the unconscious, Freud generated a paradox ; how can we know of the existence of the unknowable ? Freud says that we can understand it by three different ways; through dreams, through parapraxes (slips of the tongue) and through the technique of analysis. 'These phenomena demonstrate that memory is merely a filtering

which all the elements and rules are in theory simultaneously available to the user of language. His reorientation of linguistics (from diachronic to synchronic) conditions his treatment of the sign. While Saussure envisages an extension to the science of signs, Peirce begins with a generalized system, which he sees as a branch of logic. While Saussure works with binaristic, dyadic relations, Peirce puts everything in threes. The trindic description presents it as a mediation between two terms by a third. Modern critics reject Peirce terms. Peirce differs from Saussure in allowing a greater role for motivated linkage.

Saussure has exercised the greater influence than Peirce, while Peirce's logic was neglected, Saussure linguistic flourished. Saussurean linguistic was mainly responsible for the rise of structuralism. Structuralism and semiotics were often indistinguishable especially when semiotics concentrated on the production of meaning rather than its communication. Roland Barthes's 'Elements of Semiology' extends the Saussurean base, gives a greater role to motivation and expresses doubts about binarism Julia Kristeva uses psychoanalysis to enlarge the notion of the speaking subject in semiotics. The study of culture itself as a semiotic phenomenon was initiated by the work of Jan Mukarovisky and the Prague school.

23. Stylistics

Stylistics in not a critical theory, nor is it a method of critiquing theory. It is not an off shoot of any school of philosophy, nor is it merely a branch of linguistics. It is a particular approach which uses the methods and findings of the science of linguistics in the analysis of literary texts. Stylistics, according to many critics is the modern version of the ancient discipline known as 'rhetoric' which taught its students, how to structure an argument how to make effective use of figures of speech. Rhetoric in medieval times played an important part in training people for the church, the legal profession and political and diplomatic life. When once rhetoric was divorced from this vocational purpose it degenerated into a mechanical study of the mere surface features of language. Throughout the nineteenth century, rhetoric in this medieval sense was gradually absorbed into linguistics. At this time linguistics known as philology was almost entirely historical in emphasis. It involved studying the evolution of

language . In the Twentieth century there was a movement away from this historical emphasis. Critics focused attention on how language as a system is structured . Rhetoric emerged again with a new interest in literary style and its effects.

Ernest Cassirer and Claude Levi Strauss emphasized the importance of Saussurean linguistics and articulated that Saussurean linguistic ought to play the same renovating role for social sciences as the Nuclear science had played for the exact sciences. An attempt has been made to interpret a literary text using the linguistic description of the language of the text because linguistics is explicit comprehensive and systematic. Stylistics is not simply a study of style. It is a linguistic study of the language of the text. Stylistics relates the linguist's concern of linguistic description with the critics concern of aesthetic appreciation. The traditional approach ignored the linguistic description and the structuralists ignored the aesthetic aspect. Stylisticians integrate both.

The interpretation is not determined by the author's intention, nor does it depend solely on the text's structures. The validity of the interpretation is confirmed by the interpretive community that shares the interpretive strategy. Stylistics relates linguistics descriptions with literary insight. Stylisticians pay attention to the practical study of literary language. There are several linguistic theories and all these theories put forward different techniques and different procedures. If there is any single characteristic which unites these diverse enterprises in linguistics today it is a tendency to search for patterns and systems below the surface form of language, to search for the principle of meaning and language use which activate and control the code.

Stylistic approach does not mean looking at the text, but looking through the text to its significance. One major concern of stylistics is to check or validate intuition by detailed analyses. G.N. Leech says that stylistics is a dialogue between a literary reader and a linguistic observer in which insight not objectivity is our goal. Stylistic analysis does not replace the readers intuition, the click in the mind. It checks and validates intuition by detailed analysis. The purpose of stylistic analysis is to investigate how the resources of a language code are put to use in the production of actual message. "Stylistics is concerned with the patterning

of languages in literary texts and presupposed no artistic value. By investigating the way the language is used in text, it can shed light on those linguistic patterns upon which an intuitive awareness of artistic value depends". It provides a basis for aesthetic appreciation.

24. Meta Language

Meta language means secondary language ie the language of criticism. Criticism deals not with the world ; but with the linguistic formulations made by others - it is a comment on a comment. The language of the writer is called the primary language (The language of the critic -a secondary language or meta language.) Commenting on Meta language Roland Barthes writes "The critical activity must take two kinds of relationships into account' the relationship between the critical language and the language of the author under consideration and the relationship between the latter (language as object) and the world . Criticism is defined by the interaction of these two languages and so leaves a close resemblance to another intellectual activity, logic which is also entirely founded on the distinction between language as object and meta -language".

If criticism is only a meta language its task is not to discover forms of 'taith', but forms of validity. In itself a language can not be true or false, it is either valid or non-valid. It is valid when it consists of a coherent system of signs. The task of criticism is purely formal. It does not consist in discovering in the work or the author under consideration something 'hidden' or 'profound' or secret ; "but only in fitting together as a skilled cabinet maker, inter locks two parts of a complicated piece of furniture - the language of the day (Existentialism, Marxism or psychoanalysis) and the language of the author". Critical writing is tautological. The language of criticism is called meta language.

(Note : Extracts from Roger Fowler's 'Modern Critical Terms' and

M.H. Abram's 'A Glossary of Literary Terms' are used to define some critical terms.)