English Literature

full rhyme between two or more words within the same line of verse, e.g. "And a clatter and a chatter from within [...]" (Swinburne, Itylus)

schematic representation of the sequence of end rhymes = rhyme scheme,

rhyming lines are indicated by identical lower case letters, e.g. aabb, abcabc, etc.; lines that don't rhyme are indicated by "x", e.g. axbaxb (two "x" doesn't mean that these lines rhyme!), if a line also has metrum, this is indicated by numbers, e.g.x4a3x4a3

subdivides a poem , end-rhymes link lines in verse, a new rhyme frequently marks the beginning og a new unit of meaning, rhymes also creates link between ryhming words by means of repetition on phonological level ( heighten contrast), =intratextual parallels, rhymes highlight coherence of text

abba/axxa

abab/xaxa

two lines aa

A stanza is sequence of lines that is visually marked off as a separate unit. A stanza consists of one or more verse sequences, and a poem consists of one or more stanzas

a5a5, pentameter (often iambic) line, end rhyme with following pentameter line, e.g. "An hour of quiet shortly shall we see;
Till then, in patience our proceeding be"
(Hamlet 5.1.291)

a seven-line, iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc

14 lines, 2 quatrains/1 octave (abba abba), 2 tercets/1 sestet (cde cde/cdc cdc). Functions of verse sequences: Presentation of a problem in the octave, the solution in the sestet, first line of sestet (line 9) as turning point

14 lines, 3 quatrains (abab cdcd efef), 1 couplet (gg). Specific functions of verse sequences: presentation of problem in 3 quatrains, solution in couplet

What new historicists do

• >  Juxtapose literary and non-literary texts

• >  Defamiliarise the canonical literary text, see it as new

• >  Close-reading of the historical text

• >  Focus on issues of state power, patriarchal structures, colonisation

• >  Influenced by Derrida (“reality is textualised”)

• >  Influenced by Foucault (“social structures determined by dominant discursive practices”) 

• > Stephen Greenblatt Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, 1980. 

Basic definition

— Attention to cultural history

— “historicity of texts and the textuality of history

”“a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non- literary texts, usually of the same historical period” 

•   Countermovement to New Criticism
  — New Criticism: work = self-contained, “nothing outside the text” 
• historical texts = co-text rather than con-text 
•  refuses to privilege the literary text 
  — not: “historical background” 
• Literary and non-literary texts inform each other 
  — “the textuality of history, the historicity of the text” (Louis Montrose) 

Historicist rather than historical: 

• Interested in history as represented in written documents 
• history-as-text
• historical events are lost, all that remains are texts 

What Marxist Critics do 

• >  Search for ‘covert’ content and relate it to Marxist themes: — Class struggle, capitalism, economics

• >  Relate the context of a work to the social class of the author — Assumption: the author is unaware of what he/she says in work

• >  Relate the work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is ‘consumed’ 

• >  Karl Marx (1818-1883) 

• >  Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) 

• >  Louis Althusser (and Etienne Balibar). Reading Capital. Trans. 1971 

Basic definition

• “Marxist literary criticism maintains that a writer’s social class, and its prevailing ‘ideology’ (outlook, values, tacit assumptions, half-realised allegiances, etc.) have a major bearing on what is written by a member of that class.” 

• >  Authors are formed by their social context 

• >  “Less historical” than new historicist or cultural materialist criticism (“class struggle” vs. historical documents)

What Psychoanalytic  Critics do

• >  Search for ‘covert’ content (unconscious) and privilege it as being what the work is “really” about.

• >  Attention to unconscious motives and feelings of both author and characters

• >  Demonstrate presence of classic psychoanalytic symptoms in a text

• >  “Psychic” context of literary work rather than social or historical context 

• >  Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

• >  Jacques Lacan

  Feminist psychoanalytic critics:

• >  Luce Iragaray

• >  Julia Kristeva 

Basic definition

“Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature.”

• >  the unconscious, repression, sublimation, displacement
  — e.g. repressed sexual urgesàsublimated as intense religious

  longing
  — e.g. sword as displaced rape (via phallic symbolism)

• >  Psyche as ego (consciousness), super-ego (conscience), id (unconscious)

• > Sexuality (e.g. Oedipal complex) 

What Poststructuralist Critics do

• >  “Read the text against itself” à expose meanings that are contrary to surface meaning

• >  Look at features of words
  — Sound similarities, etymology, dead metaphors

• >  Expose disunity rather than unity of the text

• >  Deconstruct their own readings by reading a passage over and over

• > Look for shifts, breaks, discontinuities 

• >  Roland Barthes. The Death of the Author. 1967. (1915-1980) – structuralismàpost-structuralism(?)

• >  Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) “there is nothing outside the text” 

Basic definition 

Structuralism (“language shapes the world”) 
<--
Post-structuralism
(“no fixed landmark beyond linguistic processing”), (“all is constructed, all can be deconstructed”)
--> Deconstruction 

What Feminist Critics do

• >  Rethink the canon, rediscovery of texts written by women

• >  Revalue women’s experiences

• >  Examine representations of women in literature

• >  Challenge representations of women as ‘other’, ‘lack’,

• >  Examine power relations, patriarchal structures

• >  Recognise the role of language in construction of gender

• >  Ask whether there is a ‘female language’

• >  Ask whether differences are biological (sex) or socially constructed (gender) 

• >  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

• >  Cixous, Hélène

• >  Luce Irigaray 

Basic definition

“The feminist literary criticism of today is the direct product of the ‘women’s movement’ of the 1960. This movement was, in important ways, literary from the start, in the sense that it realised the significance of the images of women promulgated by literature, and saw it as vital to combat them and question their authority and their coherence.” 

historically(medieval “palimpsest”): when an earlier text/older lower text (hypotext) on parchment is scraped off and a new text/upper text (hypertext) is written in its place; 

Genette: a text that cannot exist without an earlier text because it refers to  it directly or indirectly by adapting the story or major themes (--> Homer's Odyssey: Virgil's Aeneid, James Joyce's Ulysses)

Genette’s Palimpsests:core points
> Texts do not exist in isolation
> Instead, they are connected in diverse ways with other texts (context, co-text, intertextuality, metatextuality...)
> Hypertext + hypotext = palimpsestical relation
Conclusion:We need to be aware of the other texts “surrounding” any given text
We need to be aware of the categories by which we connect these texts, text do not exitst in isolation/text are always embedded in other textts / context
Subject of poetics: --> transtextuality(= architextuality + other transtextual relationship)/textual transcendence (=Erhabenheit) of the text(=all tat sets te text in a relationship, (obvious/concealead) with other text)
(-->is not the text to be considered in ist singularity(= critisism)
--> architextuality)
5 types of transtextual relationship: 
intertextuality,paratextuality,metatextuality,architextuality,hypertextuality

newer(upper text)hypertext and earlier(older,lower) hypotext

relationshipp uniting text B(hypertext) to an earlier text A (hypotext),not commentary
general notion of a text in the second degree : a text derived from anther preexistent text
But here text B is not speaking of text A at all but being unable to to exist without A, from which it originates through process of transformation, which it evokes more or less perceptibly without necessarily speaking of/citing it
hypertext is more considered properly literary work than is the metatext
different type of transformation: simple/direct transformation, complex indirect transformation( f.e imitation

commentary

unites a given textt to another, of which it speaks without necessaringly citing it, without summoning it,(without naming it)

how texts relate to each other: reference,
quoting(explicit), plagiarism(undeclared, borrrowing),references to tradition

relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts, the actual presence of one text within another ( allusion ..

eveything which surrounder the text ( bookcover, introduction),setting of the text (title, page, layout, etc.) --> how much to take into account? (e.g. are chapter titles part of the story?)

( secondary signals(allographic/autographic):(sub-,inter-)title, pre-/postfaces, notices, forewords,terminal/marginal/infrapaginal notes, epigraphs(engraved inscription),illustrations, blurbs(klappentext),book covers, dust jacket(Buchumschlag)

taxonomic(= classification, systematic) nature, silent /titular features, e.g. genre, self-declaration ("A Poem about Grief") determining the generic status of text is not the business of the text but that of the reader/critic/public

titular( Poems, Essays,The romance of the Rose) ,subtitular(A Novel, A story, Poemes appended to the title)

entire set of general or transcendent categories(types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres) from which emerges each singular text

Poetry (modern), Poems (Jahn)

Narrative (modern), Prose (Jahn)

Drama (modern) Plays (Jahn)

genre (drama,poetry,narrative),language, nation, aesthetic evaluation (high-brow, low-brow,popular, pulp fiction), social (children's,womens'sworking class literature), historical categories (classical,medieval,contemporary, ), time period(OE,ME,EME)media-related ( oral, written, audiovisual),relation to reality(realsitic, mimetic("imitating") vs. fantasty(anti-mimetic) literature), conventionality of mode of representation (traditidional vs innovative/experimental)  --> be able to recall three

genre =a set of constitutive conventions and codes, altering from age to age, but shared by a kind of implicit contract between writer and reader. The writer may play with these prevailing generic conventions and decide to deliberately not follow them. Conventions generate (for ther reader )a set of expectations that enable the reader to make the work intelligible(=verständlich), to relate it to the world as defined and ordered by codes in the prevailing culture/naturalize it, by relating it(the work) to the world as defined and ordered by codes in the prevailing culture.

a serious play in which the protagonist dies in the end

a humorous play with a happy ending

is the introduction of comic characters,
speeches, or scenes in a serious or tragic work, especially in dramas. Such elements were almost universal in Elizabethan tragedy ( Abrams)

a tragic (or near-tragic) episode in a comedy. Tragic relief often has the function of allowing the spectators
to empathize with a protagonist or to give them some breathing space between particularly hilarious scenes.”(Jahn)

Louis Montrose, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hayden White

“The Textuality of History and the Historicity of Texts” 
History is a narrative construct
Literature is embedded in the culture of the society that produces it

c. 800 - 1066

c. 1350 - 1476 (?)