Literary Criticism:

1. Literary Criticism: Conclusion & New Beginnings What is Literary Criticism? Critical Perspectives= 1. Finding different Contexts An Example: “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” Critical Perspectives = 2. Being engaged in some critical issues. Beginnings . . .

2. Literary Criticism Appreciation • to Understanding Analysis from a certain perspective Understanding Interpretation Understanding can never be presupposition-less. Understanding must involve using some framework(s) or perspectives--conscious or unconscious.

3. Literary Criticism • to Understanding The Course Literary Criticism tries to make you aware of or use different perspectives and frameworks to look at a literary text, yourself and your world.

4. What is it about? Do you like it? Why? What else does it mean from a certain perspective or in some context(s)? 由賞析到批評理論: a Hermeneutic Circle 閱讀、了解 欣賞 分析、詮釋 What does it mean? And how? 文學批評 理論化 How are its meanings produced?

5. How to position a text in its contexts? 社會、歷史 Political Unconscious 社會機構 印刷、出版者／ 行銷者 作者／父母 讀者 The Unconscious Text // Self

6. How to position a text in its linguistic contexts? Semiotics: Jakobson’s six factors in speech Context/Soceity, History = Intertexts Message AddresserAddressee Author ContactReader Code/ Signifier  Text Signs Signification process

7. How to position a text in its social contexts? 主要意識形態 文學史；文類 作者／讀者 ISA 學 院 書 局 行銷 Base 文學生產方式； 生產關係； Althusser’s idea of social formation • Relative autonomy; mediation (媒介); over-determination Superstructure 文學 作 品 文學 作 品

8. How to position a text in its discursive contexts? Romantic Discourse as an example Angel and Whore binaries in Traditional Lit. French Revolution Blake Wordsworth Coleridge 1. The Poet’s Imagination & Emotion but not reason; 2. Human nature// Nature 3. Treatment of Peasants & Women Keats Shelley Byron Organicism: Lawrence; New Criticism Pre-Raphaelite Paintings

9. Wordsworthian Discourse rise of capitalism: book market Literary Reviews against 1. W’s language -- of the lower classes 2. W’ssubject matter: passion W's prefaces and supplementary essays: set up his poetry as an independent discipline, Coleridge's glosses, Shelley's defense Keats' letters Wordsworth’s Poems: Lyrical Ballads (1798; 1802; 1815) etc. -- Need of money; -- Cut out Coleridge’s part to “suit the common taste”;

10. A slumber did my spirit seal (New Crit: Pattern/Tension made with sounds, syntax, tense, verse form, repetition, etc.) A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could notfeel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, noforce; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

11. Biographical studies • Lucy Poems: Composed in Germany; most of them written in the winter of 1798-99 • Lucy’s identity: • a creation of the poet's imagination. • Wordsworth's feeling of affection for his sister. Coleridge wrote of this poem in a letter of April 1799: "Some months ago Wordsworth transmitted to me a most sublime Epitaph ... whether it had any reality, I cannot say.--Most probably, in some gloomier moment he had fancied the moment in which his Sister might die."

12. Psychoanalytic Studies • 1. Wordsworth’s desire to be both dead and alive (to re-live his mother’s death). • 2. The "Lucy" poems have been described as an attempt by Wordsworth to "kill" his improper feelings for his sister. • In1802, Wordsworth married his childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy did not attend the ceremony; she was crying on her bed.

13. Textual Studies • Part of “The "Lucy Poems" as most modern editors treat them. • Wordsworth himself never printed them together in any editions of his poetry. Modern editors ought to reconsider their practice.

14. Marxist Approach: Lucy as a peasant girl? • The time of his writing: a legacy of 900 pounds; need to attract his readers. • The 1802 Preface: about describing the rustics--can "surpass the original" occasionally, and that the object of his description is not actually individual persons, but "general and operative truth" (256-57).

15. I A Slumber my spirit sealed =dead No human fears= inhuman, all-knowing [her death] She = a thing? =dead; non-human Deconstruction: I/She/Thing Undecidability Rolled . . . With rocks, and stones, and trees. • Earthly years • Motion; Force • Hears, Sees

16. Critical Perspectives 2: Critical Issues • What is a text/self composed of? • How do we read a text or ourselves in relation to the surrounding signs, ideologies, discourse, economic relations as well as the other kinds of power relations? • What are the implications in the use of the words “self,” “character,” “subject” and “subject position”?

17. Critical Perspectives 2-2: Critical Issues Related • Language: "[S]igns are arbitrary, conventional, & differential." binary opposition transcendental signified deconstruction, diff rance & signification • myth ideology discourse Orientalism or cultural imperialism • Social formations (economic determinism or discursive formation? ) • postcolonial writings

18. End of the course = Beginnings . . . of Critical Thinking • For further studies: • Be ready for facing frustrations in reading difficult primary texts; get a dictionary, handbook or Chinese articles to help; • For further thinking: • Methodologies? Keep on reading critically. • Keep the key words/issues in mind as you read and/or think. Always try to relate, contextualize and map. • Raise critical questions about the text, about ourselves and our society.