| English 5340: Literary Criticism | Instructor: Luanne Frank |
| Office: 522 Carlisle | |
| Phones: 478-7794/ 272-2692 |
The subject matter proper of the present course is the criticism of the West from the time of Plato that of Pater. The course's central concern is thus, as its title indicates, "traditional" criticism. Its purpose is to focus on works constitutive and/or generative of the literary critical canon: those texts that, whatever the relative shifts in their reputation and usefulness in different periods, nonetheless remain, over time, undisputed routes to, determiners of, literary meaning. Theirs are those discursive structures and practices that serve with the greatest consistency - and resilience - as satisfactory structural and interpretive correlatives of "the literary work of art." They are the literary critical and/or philosophical works that have remained best able to provide the match, or "fit," - for the work of art - that constitutes its meaning, or from which its meaning can issue. They are those works on the basis of which the reader's imagination and understanding consistently find themselves best able to construct meaning.
If the course's purpose is to focus on the texts of the canon, some comment is in order about the nature of that focus. Will the course seek the nature, and an understanding, of these texts, out of a presumably neutral, proto-intellectual space that waits to be "conceptualized" (as a computer disc is "initialized") by the content and method of the texts? Will is articulate discursive structures that are themselves already in part functions of (and thus inside) the texts at hand but that also provide a means of approaching them (from the outside)?
The course's focus will be determined in part by all of these practices to the extent that they are possible. But particular emphasis will be placed on the assumption that neutral, proto-intellectual spaces (if there is only the "text") are hard to come by (both despite and because of the fact that author and reader share a language tradition and a culture) and that even a situation of understanding temporally adjacent to the author of any given text still fails to yield an understanding that can be described as infallible, or even "valid," as this word has been traditionally understood. A locus adjacent to the author is, to be sure, conceivable as neutral, since here the reader presumably shares or understands the writer's preconceptions and intentions and thus inhabits a space vis a vis his work that physical science might describe as "nothing": that is, there is no incoherence between reader's understanding and author's intention, and thus no pressure to shape the work "otherwise"; there is only infallible understanding. But this locus is still an ideal and not an actual, space - that is, it may be largely an illusory one. It fails to consider author and interpreter as themselves profoundly different texts, constituted, or shaped by, other predispositions, other texts (genetic codes, personal experiences, historical situations and forces).
In short, it will be assumed that an approach to any text is possible only with conceptual value added - that an understanding of any text, however much one might presume to guard against it, will be in part determined by where and what the interpreter (or interpretive text) is, NOW, historically. It will be assumed that, as Wilhelm von Humboldt put it, the present is "the invisible part of every fact." Note that this is to say: the interpretation is determined by all of the pertinent texts intervening between the NOW that is the interpreter and the object of his/her examination/understanding. That is, the interpreter sees the so-called "object text" never in its pristine condition, but only through the veils of time, experience, and other texts that can be thought of as both constituting the interpreter (or his/her views) and at the same time standing between him/her and the given object of comprehension. Thus the literary critical canon, however "thinkable" it might be in its pristinity, is actually approachable only in terms of the present - that is, with value added. The structures of our own knowing cannot be gotten rid of (nor need they be). And to the extent that they fit or seem to fit, or can be brought to fit the texts we read, they become a part of what we refer to as our 'understanding' of these texts. It is by means of them that we 'make the texts to mean.'
Again: these structures of our own knowing are part of the conceptual value added to any text. Thus, to become critically 'conscious' is to become aware of more than the structure and 'content' of the 'object' of our attention. It is also to become aware of the nature, provenance, form, and content of the structures of our own knowing, and of more, still, than this. It is also to become aware of their conditions of possibility - that is, of the structures behind the structures. To set out on this path of awareness is one of the purposes of the present course.
But the matter of textual interpretation being a function of a present articulated upon a past via intervening structures of understanding is worth still further scrutiny. For importantly, where and what the interpreter is historically, and thus part of the meaning of the text under examination, is not simply a question of textual interventions between the interpreter and target text, of veils of form and meaning hanging, as it were, between a subject and an object, between an interpreter and an interpretee. For, as is especially obvious if the text is a traditional one, what the interpreter him/herself is, historically, will also have been determined in some part, will have been constituted . . . by the text in question - by the very text, that is, that stands under examination - so that the interpreter is, him/herself, already in some part intellectually made of the interpretee. The text in question, in short, will have been already stitched into the fabric, or ground into the lenses, of the intellect examining it. It will - before the interpreter ever arrives at it (or can arrive at it) as object - have already become a part of the body of ideas - and of the language - of the interpreter, thus determining the nature and the particular conceptual capacities, of his/her thought. That is, before the interpreter ever arrives at the object as object, it will already have become part of him/her as subject.
(Thus it might be said that in engaging in a literary critical, or in any other, act of understanding, one is, to one extent or another - always - engaging in a sort of autoeroticism. This may have a bearing on the improbably weight of significance that the idea of "interpretation" continues carry, and on the herculean efforts currently being expended to keep interpretation, and its procedures and discoveries, open. Certainly what is in part at stake is the continued development of man as man, man being the only animal, according to Nietzsche, "whose nature has not been fixed.")
If where and what the interpreter is, then, historically, includes all of the significant, or distinctive, culture-determining texts that have brought into being the text in question; if what s/he encompasses are also the elements (or contents, or interpretations) of this text that have precipitated into the culture that determines the reader generally as a social being or specifically as a specialist; and if what the interpreter is is also those texts, as well, that have intervened between the text in question and the present of the interpreter, then all of the structures, or entities, constituting these inclusions are the legitimate foci of the concerns of literary criticism.
So, also, are the differences between the nature of the interpretee as it is already integrated into the interpreter on the one hand and as it stands outside him as the object of (and the objection to) an interpretation on the other. For the text that has been pre-assimilated to the structures of knowing of the interpreter (perhaps via its influence on, and function in shaping, the culture at large) is different, in important ways, from the same text that appears before the interpreter as an object for study. (If it were not different, or did not at least seem different, the interpreter would not perceive it as strange, and thus in need of interpretation.) Hence the nature of the text as it appears on the one hand, as assimilated to the structures of a culture, and then assimilated through that to the systems of belief and practice that constitute the social individual, and as it appears, on the other, in what, in contrast, seems its barefaced form, are both the concerns of criticism.
Thus the intent of the course will be to come to an understanding of the literary critical canon of the West 1) through readings of what can be only ostensibly 'the texts themselves' and then 2) through viewing of them in the context of intervening traditions and as transformed by them, to various ends. The contemporary issue of the texts in question will be of paramount significance, so that, for example, after reading Plato 'himself' on literature and a historical introduction to his work that articulates the tradition of Plato reception over time, we will consult significant contemporary understandings of him: Else (1987) and Fry (1985). For Aristotle, Else (1987) and Halliwell (1986); and for Lessing, Welbery (1985). For Kant, we will refer to the work of formalists, New Critics and structuralists, and for Hegel, to that of Nietzsche and post-structuralism, whereas for Nietzsche we will refer to Heidegger, post-structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis/literary criticism.
We will at all times link the work of the critic at hand with the literary critical methodologies it has spawned, or evolved into. Thus in reading Kant we also come to an understanding of the assumptions grounding formalism, New Criticism, and pre- and post- New Critical structuralism; in reading Longinus, Burke, Kant, Schiller, and Schlegel, we grasp the assumptions grounding a recently past and a contemporary preoccupation with apocalyptic and the sublime (Monk, Abrams, Weiskel, hertz, Bloom, Paley, Rolleston). In tracking a Kant-Schiller-Hegel continuum we arrive at an understanding of the American classical and modernist moralists Irving Babbit, Ivor Winters, and John Gardner, not to mention, perhaps surprisingly, the entire Frankfurt School (especially Adorno, Benjamin, and Habermas). And a Hamann-Herder-hegel-Nietzsche continuum yields an understanding of American (Yale) and European speculative, hermeneutic, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytic (to the extent that these can be separated) criticism (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, Bloom). Thus what the course in part becomes is a study of the organic development of Western Literary Criticism.
But its movement is not only forward. That is, it is not only a tracking of a progress. As it moves forward, it also looks backward, noting, for example, how the "appearance," or meaning, of predecessors, or precursors, is determined, changed, recreated, as the veils of new mindsets drop between them and their posterity. Thus an Elsian Plato is other than a Plotinion one, though he also appears to remain the same, and a twentieth-century, or Halliwellian, Aristotle radically different, traditional as he also seems to remain, from a Renaissance one.
Thus the course can be seen to operate at all times out of the assumption of a total criticism, one in which every entity, autonomous as it may seem if looked at in itself, is also in perpetual potential or actual articulation with every other. This total criticism is also always operating on itself. Thus "we" ostensibly stand aside, and study the canon in order to view it as it articulates the positions that determine, and from which we can reach, contemporary understanding; but the very standpoint in which we stand thus supposedly aside to do our viewing is, inevitably, already this contemporary understanding itself at work, or in process. Thus the criticism to which we are looking for an understanding of contemporary (or earlier) critical understanding, can only be seen out of a position itself already constituted by that understanding we are seeking to understand.
To repeat: the understanding we are seeking to understand is the understanding we are already operating (understanding) out of. In another idiom: what we are studying is how to drive the car we are already driving. Our understanding of how to drive is in part a function of the driving we are studying (ostensibly objectively, or from a point supposedly to the side). We read the canon out of that understanding an understanding of which we are looking for in the canon. In making such statements, here, we are not practicing sophistry. These are merely some among the suggestions afforded the aspiring or inevitable interpreter by contemporary hermeneutic, and hency literary critical, theory, which often successfully attempts to suspend 'objectivity,' (objective history, and objective understanding) in order to promote another - some say more scientific - version of understanding.
The course in this semester, it will thus be noted, is heavily philosophical. This has to do with the importance of philosophy's role in determining the nature, direction of flow, and strength of contemporary critical movements. Thus while we could consider literary criticism as a body of unambiguously certifiable literary critical texts, and look at each 'objectively' and 'in its own right,' we would be looking at criticism through eyes other than those of the present, which now wear the thickest of philosophical lenses. Literary critical understanding has become almost exclusively determined by the speculative philosophical tradition of Western Europe. Thus we, inhabiting our time, don philosophical spectacles as well, in order to be true to what is in fact now our own identity as critics. That is, while we use Wellek's History of Modern Criticism as a reference, we - as Wellek, writing in a period of so-called literary critical purism, could not - have allowed ourselves to become overtly philosophical - though not exclusively so.
Two thinkers, in particular, provide sets of assumptions that are precisely useful as a background of thought for the course. They are Hans Georg Gadamer and Michel Foucault, and I recognize that to bring them together in the same sentence linked by an isomorph - making 'and' is a felonious act. I mention them thus, nonetheless, since it is they who have articulated, most massively and effectively, the general insights - semiotic, hermeneutic, and (what Foucault's promoters refer to as) post-hermeneutic - that inform contemporary understanding in the human sciences (or liberal arts), of which literary criticism is one. They do not appear on the syllabus, but we will name their work - in the form it takes in Truth and Method and The Order of Things - as a comprehensive exploration and presentation of the sorts of presumptions that, in general, inform the course.
The former (Gadamer) finds understanding to be comprehensible horizontally; he finds its nature linearly, historically, dialectically articulated and coherent (though his version of understanding is profoundly metaleptic). The later (Foucault) finds a linear, or horizontal understanding of understanding profoundly incoherent, and so invokes essentially static structure, archaeology, and verticality as metaphors rendering it cognitively apprehendable. The importance of these texts asserted, it should also be said that the course is amply accessible without a familiarity with them, although a familiarity does offer a useful background of ideas.
An assumption guiding the choice of readings in the course is that identifiable systems of thought inform the work of literary critics, and that these enabling systems are an important means of comprehending a given criticism. If there is a question of choice, therefore, we choose where possible readings that disclose the foundations of the criticism rather than the events of its superstructure. We choose a work from the criticism's informing tradition, from a figure whose thought best represents the informing system, that is. A single work may provide both an account of the groundwork and an example of a critical monument, or foundation and superstructure (Schlegel and Schiller are cases in point). Where not, we choose the more purely philosophical over the more purely critical.
Thus rather than read Schleiermacher (earlier) or Croce or Dilthey (later) the course chooses Hegel, since although his work is philosophy proper (while the writings of the others are more overtly literary critical/or critical-historical), it may be more important than theirs in revealing the grounds of thought in the system of which their discourse is a part and in determining the nature of contemporary literary critical discourse.
Since part of Hegel's purpose is to argue the end of metaphysics as a basis for thought, and thus understanding, his work becomes crucial to all subsequent attempts to understand the nature of understanding. It becomes one of the chief informants of humanistic thinking of a materialistic, as opposed to an idealistic, sort, after his time. Though it does not, after all, bring metaphysics to an end, it does determine its post-Hegelian course and much ensuing thought that either seeks to perpetuate metaphysics or to do away with it: thus Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, for example.
Readings for the course are organized in three lists (or columns) below, labelled 'Primary,' 'Secondary,' and 'Tertiary.' Each entry in the column labelled 'Primary' represents the focus of study for a single segment of the course (usually one week). Entries in the 'Secondary' column represent the segment's second order of concern, and those in the 'Tertiary,' the third. The three-column listing allows us to make other distinctions as well, however, so please read this explanation in its entirety before interpreting the columns. All of the entries for a given segment are closely related in ways that make reading them together especially useful. Their relationships are of several types. In addition to order of reading, primariness most often indicates chronological priority, though not always. Also, most often, the secondary and tertiary titles comment on the primary ones, though not always. Thus, as you read the columns, you may note certain traditional, chronology- and history-based expectations being violated.
Note that the same text may appear in different columns - Primary, Secondary, Tertiary - at different stages of the course continuum. Note too that all of the columns - Primary and Secondary and Tertiary - in fact contain titles usually only considered primary in an absolute sense (foundational), just as all of them contain titles usually considered secondary (in the sense that they are "about" so-called primary texts). Thus so-called foundational texts appear first in the Primary, then in the Secondary and Tertiary columns; and apparently merely-secondary texts appear in the Primary. The lists may thus seem contradictory. Beyond the apparent contradiction, however, this pattern of distribution may suggest an essential secondariness for every text; or a potential primariness for every text (every text can be primary if viewed from the angle of a particular concern); or an essential doubleness to every text (both primary and secondary) - or tripleness. Some of these possibilities will become clear below; others will disclose themselves as the course progresses.
We have noted that in addition to order of reading, appearance of a given title in the list of secondary or tertiary texts indicates a specific and identifiable relationship between it and the primary text, and that two of these relationships are chronological priority and "aboutness." The relation of aboutness may be one of description, of explanation, or of understanding (or all these) - apparently a relationship of effect. Further, however, appearance of a text in the secondary column may indicate a relationship of cause, or of constitutivity to the primary text (however illogical or a-logical this latter possibility may seem for the moment, especially if the primary text inhabits a chronological priority). Or it may indicate opposition, or some other relationship. A text that precedes another in absolute historical chronology, or time of origin, appearing at the outset, for example, as primary, but that then appears again as secondary or reference, is a text that will be seen to have been revised by and thus have become secondary to, if read across, the very text for which it was earlier considered the cause. Such a view is not considered invalid. The later text often functions as a sort of magnet for content previously latent in a text that precedes it.
The predecessor text may have stood initially in a generative or provocative (provoking its existence) capacity to the text to which it is now listed as secondary; but the very text it spawned will have come to act in a recreative capacity to its parent. In the act of being born out of its parent text, the secondary text also gives birth - or rebirth - to it. That is, the relationship "generator-generated" is no longer the only one that pertains. The relationship need not be merely one-way. After the birth of the secondary text the two texts can come to exist in more than a parent-child connection; they also, and/or rather, can exist in a - or many - fuller intertextualities. (The child comes to call the father not "Father," but by his father's name.) Or the child can become father of the parent (this has happened, notably, with Heidegger and Nietasche, Derrida and Heidegger, and, to name a more obscure but not insignificant example, with Welbery and Lessing).
I am not speaking here of the obvious fact that secondary texts are always in some capacity revisionary of primary ones. I mean rather, in part, that the revision itself confers a new, and a new sort of, life on the revised. That this can be so becomes especially clear in the case of one text's successful "destruction" of another. After and beyond its having been refuted by a subsequent text, a primary or "destroyed" one can come to live again in a way that encompasses its destroyer and the texts the latter has given rise to. An ostensibly refuted text can thus enjoy a life far more complex than its initial one. This continues until all of its velcro - all the live ideas that link it to other live texts - wears out.
By indicating this sort of connection, the columns attempt to encompass several of the possible relationships - of hermeneutic circularity or spirality, of intertextuality, of metalepsis, and so forth, almost ad infinitum - that texts can bear to one another.
(Titles of contemporary critical-theoretical - historical & psychoanalytical - works, which appear in the final segments of column three, are not included in the bibliography of assigned and supplementary texts.)
All texts in Bold are assigned readings, whether in the column labelled primary or secondary. Note that some texts in each column are assigned (and thus in bold). Non-bold Primaries and Secondaries should be examined briefly. Non-bold Tertiaries, if they have not been assigned and read previously, can be examined briefly as supplementary material, consulted for understanding of primary and secondary texts, remembered as influences on or influenced by primary and/or secondary texts, or, if they have been read previously, kept especially in mind in the context of the primary text in whose connection they appear. (This is not to suggest that given texts that fail to appear on the lists wherever they might be expected do not articulate with whatever other present or absent texts they call to mind.) Additional texts of special pertinence appear in the bibliography. Still others appear on the reserve lists. For an explanation of the lists below, see the comments following them.
| PRIMARY TEXTS | SECONDARY TEXTS | TERTIARY TEXTS (for others See bibliography & reserve) |
| Plato: Ion, Phaedrus, Republic, Symposium, Timaeus | ||
| Fry: "Method in Interpretation," in The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory | ||
| Else: Part I: Plato and Aristotle on Poetics ("The Earlier Dialogues," "The Republic," "The Later Dialogues.") | ||
| Aristotle: Poetics | ||
| Else: "Mimesis," in Plato and Aristotle on Poetics | ||
| Fry: "Aristotle as Oedipus: Form and Recognition In the Poetics," in The Reach of Criticism | ||
| Halliwell: Aristotle's Poetics ("Aristotle's Aesthetics I, Aristotle's Aesthetics 2," "Mimesis." ) | ||
| Longinus: On the Sublime | ||
| Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful | ||
| Hipple, "Joseph Addison" and "Edmund Burke," in The Beautiful, The Sublime, and the Picturesque. . . | ||
| Fry: "Longinus at Colonus: The Grounding of Sublimity," In The Reach of Criticism | ||
| Rolleston. Narratives of Ecstasy | ||
| Kant. Critique of Judgment | ||
| Schiller. "On the Sublime" | ||
| Hegel. Intro. To the Berlin Aesthetics Lectures | ||
| Paley: Ch. 1: Apocalyptic Sublime | ||
| Weiskel: The Romantic Sublime | ||
| Horace: On Poetry | ||
| Lessing: Laocoon | ||
| Lessing: Laocoon | ||
| Horace: On Poetry | ||
| Wellbery: Lessing's Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason | ||
| Kant: First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment | ||
| Analytic of the Beautiful (from the Critique of Judgment) | ||
| Crawford: Kant's Aesthetic Theory | ||
| Jean Paul: Pre-School for Aesthetics | ||
| Schaper: Studies in Kant's Aesthetics | ||
| Kemal: Kant and Fine Art | ||
| Herder: Essay on the Origin of Language | ||
| "On Cognition and Sensation" | ||
| Philosophy of History (selections) | ||
| Hamann: "Metakritik" | ||
| Kant: Critique of Pure Reason | ||
| Schlegel: Dialogue on Poetry & Literary Aphorisms | ||
| Hegel: Philosophy of Spirit; Introduction to the Berlin Aesthetics Lecs. | ||
| [Sapir]/Whorf: "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior To Language" | ||
| Hamann: "Metakritik" | ||
| Herder: Philosophy of History | ||
| Kant: Critique of Pure Reason | ||
| Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil | ||
| Schiller: "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" | ||
| "On the Sublime" | ||
| Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man | ||
| Kant: Critique of Judgment | ||
| Hegel: Intro to Berlin Aesthetics Lecs. | ||
| Schlegel: Dialogues on Poetry and Poetics | ||
| Rolleston: Narratives of Ecstasy | ||
| Hegel: Introduction to the Berlin Aesthetics Lectures of the 1820's | ||
| Karelis: Preface to the Introduction to the Berlin Aesthetics Lectures | ||
| Croce: Aesthetic as a Science of Expression | ||
| Sussman: The Hegelian Aftermath | ||
| [Fichte: Reden and die Deutschen] | ||
| Schelling: System of Transcen- Dental Idealism | ||
| Desmond: Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics | ||
| White: Metahistory | ||
| Lacan: Language of the Self | ||
| Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil | ||
| Genealogy of Morals | ||
| Thus Sprach Zarathustra | ||
| Freud: Interpretation of Dreams | ||
| Lacan: Ecrits | ||
| Derrida: Spurs | ||
| Deleuze/Guattari: Anti-Oedipus | ||
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