Issues in literary criticism

1. Issues in literary criticism The Beginning Reading and Readers The Author The Text and the World The Uncanny

2. The Beginning

3. John Milton’s Paradise Lost How many beginnings do we have in this poem? Why is the opening sentence in this poem not a true beginning? OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flow'd Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.

4. John Milton’s Paradise Lost • The first disobedience is a reference to the original sin and man’s descendance to the earth. • The speaker asks God for the heavenly muse. The moment of asking might be the assumed beginning for writing the poem. This is paradoxical in the sense that the origin of the poem, inspiration, comes after the beginning of the poem. • ‘Regain the blissful seat,’ marks the beginning of the new age or life. The age of restoration is the beginning of a new age and an extension of another.

5. John Milton’s Paradise Lost • The real beginning of the story has already taken place when ‘The shepherd’ taught the children of Israel the story about eating from the fruit of knowledge in the Old Testament. So, Milton just asks for a second-hand muse. • The poet holds back the main verb of the sentence ‘Sing’ until the sixth line. • The last line indicates another beginning because it is the first time such a theme is attempted in prose or poetry.

6. The beginning of Dante’s poem The Divine Comedy • The beginning of Dante’s poem The Divine Comedy is also an example of the paradox ‘the beginning is not a beginning’. • He starts in the middle using a literary device called ‘Medias res’. “Nowadays in the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the straightway was lost.” (Translation for the opening sentence in The Divine Comedy) • There are three middles at the beginning of this poem: the middle of our life, the middle of the dark wood, and the middle of a narrative.

7. The beginning of Dante’s poem The Divine Comedy • As The Divine Comedysuggests, there is no absolute beginning—only strange originary middles. No journey, no life, no narrative ever really begins: all have in some sense already begun before they begin. • Give other examples from your life on the paradox ‘the beginning is not a beginning’.

8. The beginning as both an entrance and a barrier to texts “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE” ― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huck Finn

9. The beginning as both an entrance and a barrier to texts • This strange or ironic entrance to The Adventures of Huck Finn creates an obstacle for the reader. It comically tells him/her that he/she should not read this narrative; the reader will be punished otherwise. • In literature, the beginning should be unequivocal and clear, but such a peritext makes the beginning rather a barrier that hinders a smooth reading process.

10. Peritexts • Preitexts are parts of a literary text that precede the its beginning. They are some parts that give some background information about a literary work, such the cover page, content page, dedication, etymology, titles, subtitles, epigraph, introduction, notices, and other similar texts. • They are an entrance and barrier to the beginning… how? • One of the ways in which a text multiples its beginning is by preitexts.

11. T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land I. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

12. T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land • The peritexts create many hurdles here • The title, like all titles, is uncertainly poised between the inside and the outside of that poem. • The next hurdle is a tribute in Italian to Ezra Pound. Moreover, Pound’s tribute is part of Dante’s Purgatorio. In this sense, the tribute of Pound is a part and not a part of that poem. • The subtitle ‘The Burial of the Dead’ is a sentence from the Anglican burial service, adding another barrier to the text. • How does Eliot displace the beginning of his poem?

14. Readers and Reading

15. Reading • The act of reading a literary text is not as simple as it is thought. It is a process that ends up with evaluations and conclusions that might be true for a group of people, but false form the viewpoint of others. • In other words, every homogeneous group of people has their own way to approach the text and to judge others’ writings or readings.

16. Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelly The paradoxical point about this poem is that any reading for the poem should identify many different acts of reading in the same poem. Who reads what? Does the text read for the reader or does the reader read the text? I met a traveler from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

17. Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelly • How many readings? • The sculptor reads the face of the king. • The traveler reads the inscription on the statue. • The narrator ‘I’ who listens to , or understands to the tale. • The real reader who reads the poem. • How many readers are there in the text? Allegory of reading: it is a term coined by Paul de Man to suggest that it is not only a poem which can be read but also a poem tells sub-textual stories about reading.

18. Different Readings • Russian formalists stressed that a critical reading of a text equals an act of identifying the structure, literary techniques, and defamiliarization elements of a particular text. • New critics highlight that only complex texts, where reading involves thinking of meaning, can be read, and the act of reading means resolving a set of ambiguities, paradoxes, and tensions without any reference to anything outside the text.

19. Different Readings • Some critics like Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, and Michael Riffaterre prioritized the relationship between the text and the reader during an act of reading. • Other postcolonial critics like Edward Said are concerned with the issues of ethnicity and race a text communicates. • How can we tell that a particular reading is valid?

20. Back to Ozymandias… • The new critics said that Ozymandiasis ‘unreadable’ because it is an extremely clear and direct poem, advancing to a predetermined end by means of one firmly held image. • How can this assumption be challenged? • Dismissing the poem by new critics in this way is odd in the sense that irony, ambiguity, and paradox are key elements for new criticism.

21. Back to Ozymandias… ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ • This line is ironic in the sense that the king speaks with hubris or excessive pride, but we, as readers, know that this is absurd. • Second, it can be read as ironic from Ozymandias’ point of view: knowing that even he will die, Ozymandias inscribes these words for future generations, reminding us that even the greatest of us will be forgotten in time.

22. Back to Ozymandias… • These conflicting ironies create both ambiguity and paradox. The ambiguity is identifying which reading is more valid and the paradox appears because the inscription appears to say two conflicting things. • Therefore, new critics should have appreciated Shelley’s poem.

23. The text is buried until a reader pulls the meaning out. • Some critics laid much emphasis on the reader’s contributions to determining the meaning of texts. They agreed that the meaning of a text is created through the process of reading. • So, a certain quality or meaning of a literary text simply lies there in the text waiting for a reader or critic to come along and pull it out. • The meanings of a text rely, in a dynamic way, on the work of the reader. Critics who promote such assumption attempted to plot the process of reading and the role of the reader.

24. The text is buried until a reader pulls the meaning out. • Norman Holland and David Bleichare interested in how a particular individual responds to texts, and concerned with exploring ways in which such responses can be related to those individuals’ identity themes. (Personal or subjective criticism) • Stanly Fish argued that any individual reader is necessarily part of a community of readers who they approach texts according to the conventions of their interpretive community.

25. The text is buried until a reader pulls the meaning out. • Wolfgang Iser argued that there is a gap between the text and the reader. • The text is concretized, given a shape or meaning through the process of reading. • Neither the text nor the reader should be studied in isolation. Rather, the text produces certain gaps or blanks that the reader must attempt to complete.

26. The Author

27. Main questions • Do literary texts have real authors? • Does the process of reading dictate that the author of a text is dead?

28. The opening of The Catcher in the Rye • “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” • ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

29. The opening sentence in The Catcher in the Rye • The most important word in the opening sentence may indeed be the word ‘it’. • It is emphatic, yet ambiguous and equivocal word. • The ambiguity of it corresponds to another kind of uncertainty. It prompts the reader to question, ‘Who is speaking?’ or ‘Who is writing?’

30. The opening sentence in The Catcher in the Rye • How can you resolve the ambiguity? • The literary game is set in motion by this opening sentence has to do with the relationship between fiction and truth: novel or autobiography. • The author might be referring to the real life of David Copperfield, and ‘it’ here refers to an autobiographical text about a real person. Still, real-life incidents are organized in a form of a novel, and in this sense, there is a metafictional dimension, as the novel refers to another fictional text.

31. The opening sentence in The Catcher in the Rye • On the other hand, the pronoun ‘it’ may refer to the same novel, The Catcher in the Rye, then it is a metafictionabout itself. • Yet, all of this provokes a question, ‘who is speaking?’. Do we have a real or fictional speaker? Or is, in a second thought, the author or the antecedent of ‘I’ is a present-absent absent—a haunting ghost that exists but does not appear in the text?

32. Reader-author relationship • If present, the author NOT does speak to readers through a telephone. • They communicate with each other through one-way channel or a sort of linguistic tele-link. So, the author is absent-present, both there and not there. Paradox! • The author, in other words, is not so much an actual author at all: rather, he/she is part of the reader’s personal projection, or his/her ideas shaping the image of an absent author.

33. Reader-author relationship • In a second thought, the author might be dead, even if he/she is alive. • The idea of the death of the author was introduced by the poststructuralist Roland Barthes in 1967. It is also much appealing to the new critics who declared that readers involving authors in literary texts do an error of judgment called ‘intentional fallacy’. • Explain how the concept of the author is paradoxical.

34. Reader-author relationship • If readers assume that the author is alive and his/her ideas may be equated to the meaning of the text, readers go wrong. • In this sense, the figure of the author does not exist in a literary text—he/she is absent or dead.

36. The Text and the World

37. Main questions • Does the text represent the real world? • Do we have real characters in literature? • Can literary texts do things to the world as well as describe it?

38. Text-world dichotomy • The relationship between literary texts and the world has been a central problem since Plate banished poets from the Republic for allegedly misrepresenting the world. • Shall critics assume a distinction between literature and the world? • Literary texts can be seen as mimesis or imitation of the world. They ONLY hold a mirror up to nature. • So, literary texts are not, in essence, part of the world. Yet, text-world dichotomy is a vampire that will never lie down.

39. Text-world dichotomy • However, the poststructuralists undermine the very terms of text-world dichotomy. • They question, “Should not we say that texts are parts of our world? How can an act of reading not be part of the world? Is there a world without such acts?

40. Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress • Had we but world enough and time, • This coyness, lady, were no crime. • We would sit down, and think which way • To walk, and pass our long love’s day. • …. • Now, therefore, while the youthful hue • Sits on thy skin like morning dew, • And .9owhile thy willing soul transpires • At every pore with instant fires, • Now let us sport us while we may, • And now, like amorous birds of prey, • Rather at once our time devour The reader encounters a problem of presentation while reading this poem: the problem of the relationship between the text and the world.

41. Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress • Should we read the poem as really a poem of seduction? • Is the speaker the same as the poet? OR • Should we understand that the speaker is a fictional construction and the ‘real’ addressee is another reader?

42. Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress • The poem can be seen as something separate from the real world and real people. It is fictional dramatization of seduction. Thus, the poetic attempt at seduction does only take place between a fictive women and an imaginative speaker—it only takes place in literature. • Regardless of being real or fictional, To His Coy Mistress is a performative text—it performs an act not as much of sexual as of textual seduction. It tries to entice us to read and read and to draw us into another world—a world of reading that is both fictional and real.

43. The text is the world • Language is the only gate for the real world. • Everything human that happens in this world is mediated by language • There is no access, for example, to Marvell’s poem except through the language of the poem. • There is no reading of To His Coy Mistress that is not dependent on the poem’s language: the world the poem describes can be seen through the telescope of the text.

44. The text is the world • Jacques Derrida, “There is nothing outside the text.” • More accurately, ‘There is no outside the text.’ • So, the text is a world that exists on its own. • Derrida suggests that there is no access to the real world except, in the broadest sense, through language. So, the world of a text is created through the text itself.

45. The text is the world • The language, in a broad sense, is not simply verbal but may include everything that works as a system of signs. Even without words, for example, seduction is an affair language—there is the language of eyes, gestures, touch, and a complex olfactory system of signs and so on. • Derrida and other theorists of deconstruction then regard the text and world opposition as untenable if also perhaps unavoidable. • In conclusion, the text in itself is a world.

46. The Uncanny

47. Literature is uncanny! • The uncanny has to do with the sense of strangeness, mystery, eeriness. It particularly concerns with the unfamiliarity which appears at the very heart of the familiar, or else a sense of familiarity which appears at the very heart of the familiar. • The uncanny is not just a matter of the weird or spooky, but it has to do more specifically with the disturbance of the familiar. • What is paradoxical about the uncanny?

48. Literature is uncanny! • The uncanny has to do with how ‘literary elements’ and reality seem to merge with one another. • Uncanniness could be defined as occurring when ‘real’, everyday life suddenly takes on a disturbingly ‘literary’ or ‘fictional’ quality. • Literature itself can be defined as a discourse of uncanny.

49. Examples of the uncanny • You walk into a room in a house you have never visited before and suddenly you have the sense that you have been there before and that you even seem to know what will happen next. (Déjà vu) • When you are, for example, in a public place and you catch sight of someone whom you think looks rather disturbing, and then you realize you have caught sight of this person reflected in a window or a mirror and that person is yourself. (doppelgänger)

50. Examples of the uncanny • You walk into a room in a house you have never visited before and suddenly you have the sense that you have been there before and that you even seem to know what will happen next. (Déjà vu) • When you are, for example, in a public place and you catch sight of someone whom you think looks rather disturbing, and then you realize you have caught sight of this person reflected in a window or a mirror and that person is yourself. (doppelgänger)