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LITERARY CRITICISM:

LITERARY CRITICISM: . Love, Desire and Class General Introduction 2007 Fall. Outline. A prelude “ Love Story ” General Questions What is Romantic Love and what ’ s wrong with it? Course Outline at a glance; Section I Three Traditional Love Poems & one Contemporary Song Reference

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LITERARY CRITICISM:

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  1. LITERARY CRITICISM: Love, Desire and Class General Introduction 2007 Fall

  2. Outline • A prelude “Love Story” • General Questions • What is Romantic Love and what’s wrong with it? • Course Outline at a glance; Section I • Three Traditional Love Poems & one Contemporary Song • Reference • Readings for next week

  3. Love Story By Andy Williams Where do I begin to tell a story of how great a love can be the sweet love story that is older than the sea the simple truth about the love she brings to me Where do I start With her first hello she gave a meaning to this empty world of mine There'd never be another love another time She came into my life and made the living fineshe fills my heart

  4. Love Story By Andy Williams (2) she fills my heart with very special thingswith angel songs,with wild imaginingsShe fills my soul with so much lovethat anywhere I go I'm never lonely.With her along who could be lonelyI reach for her handit's always there

  5. Love Story By Andy Williams (3) How long does it last Can love be measured by the hours in a day I have no answers now but this much I can say: I know I'll need her till the stars all burn away and she'll be there (underline added)

  6. Is this a poem? What kind of Love is described here? • It depends.  Some poetic elements: repetition, rimes. But what is poetry? • A fine combination of sound (rime, rhythm, meter, etc.) and sense (figurative language, irony, personification, etc.)? No. • Shocking us into a new awareness? No. • Instead, it is a straightforward celebration of a “romantic” love which falls in the tradition of “Romantic love.”

  7. Examples? • Romeo and Juliet? • 梁山伯與祝英台？ • Madame Bovary? • The Bridges of Madison County • Rousseau?

  8. Examples? Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Married to Therese Levasseur, whom, greatly inferior to him but “dearest” to him, he does not desire or love at all. (Hunt 304) • “chronically inconsistent” • Sees as his true love Sophie d’Houdetot -- "I kissed her. What a kiss! But that was all"- • "The light of every virtue adorned in my eyes the idol of my heart; to have soiled that divine image would have been to destroy it … I told her a hundred times that, if it had been in my power to gratify myself, if she had put herself at my mercy of her own free will, except in a few short moments of madness I should have refused to purchase my own happiness at such a price. I loved her too well to wish to possess her“ (qtd Hunt 305)"

  9. What is Romantic Love? Is it a Natural or Universal Sentiment? “Romantic passion is a complex multifaceted emotional phenomenon that is a byproduct of an interplay of biology, self, and society. • The desire for union or merger; • Idealization of the beloved; • Exclusivity; (e.g. always, never) • Emotional dependency on or powerful empathy and concern for the beloved. • Intrusive thinking about the love object (Cf. Jankowiak 4-5)

  10. Is it natural? • “natural”– in the biological or evolutionary senses; • “cultural”– human invented ritual. • e.g. Kiss – see clips • Natural -- for mammals; started with feeding; memorable for procreation purposes • Cultural -- Many kinds Part of many rituals

  11. What’s wrong with it? Nothing wrong as an emotional or biological need, but— • Romantic love is not “Love.” • It is apparently a powerful feeling that seems to be unique and eternal, but actually --

  12. Romantic love is A cultural product with a lot of conventions (some plot elements or ways of rationalization); • e.g. to ignore or overcome its transience: • carpe diem (seize the day); liebestod (love and death) • Part of the tradition of idealized love (e.g. courtly love, Platonic love, neo-Platonic love, Romantic love). Idealization can lead to …

  13. Romantic love’s Idealization can • involveobjectification of women whose actual feelings are ignored and subjectivities denied; • Hide realities of inequality, commodification or the narcissistic nature of our desire. • Turn to fear, hatred or self-sacrifice because it is so powerful but probably one-sided. (e.g. femme fatal) • Not innocent: Be used to support rigid laws of gender oppression (e.g. chastity). The “canonical” love poems are not exempt from some “ideology” of love.

  14. Romantic Love in the Romantic/Victorian Period. Passionately in love + strong sexual inhibition Romantics: • Being demonstratively sentimental, melancholic, tempestuous or tearful. • Goethe and Beethoven– frequently in love; • Women: angels in the house (weak, fearful, anxious to lean on and be dominated by a strong man.) Victorian society – pinnacle of Romantic love, from which S. Freud’s theory arises. CORSETS AND CRINOLINE (硬襯布襯裙 )

  15. Women in the Victorian Age • Hysteric objects for psychoanalytic studies • Pre-Raphaelite women in paintings portrait of Augustine: Ecstasy Beata Beatrix 1864-70 

  16. Women in the Victorian Age • “Mrs. B” her imagined lovemaking consists of lying in each other’s arms all night and kissing. • “She was somewhat shocked and disgusted by the experience of the wedding night. It seemed to her that her husband approached her with the violence of an animal. . . Coitus, though incomplete, took place some seven times on that first night . . . For two months subsequently there was great pain during intercourse…She eventually discovered that her husband’s abstinence from marital intercourse was due to infidelity.” (Havelock Ellis qtd in Hunt 338)

  17. Love in the Modern Age? Edward Munch, Eye in Eye, 1894  contrasts sharply with conventional "love-at-first-sight" images popular in the 19th-century (p. 55)  Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) from "Dover Beach"

  18. Today? • In English language: “love”–“going out with someone,”“seeing someone”“involved,”“in a relationship.” • After two sexual revolutions (1920’s, 1960’s) • Hollywood films of Romantic love • In Taiwan: 《人間四月天》(許我一個未來吧 )﹐《藍色大門》

  19. Course Outline • Traditional Love Poems: New Critical Reading and Beyond • Love and Desire: Psychoanalysis • Love and Bread: Marxism • Love in Culture: Cultural Studies Note: we are not limited to the topic love, nor can we exhaust it.

  20. New Critical Readings and Beyond • New Criticism: close reading; practical criticism; the “Text and Text Only” approach. Form and content united into an “organic whole.” • Beyond: • Discussing the social context(s) it fails to see. • Challenging its underlying beliefs liberal humanism.

  21. Selected Love Poems • Shakespeare: Sonnet 130“My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun” • Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet (1591?) • John Donne “To his Mistress: Going to Bed” • Leonard Cohen “I’m Your Man”

  22. Sonnet 130 • Thesis: Instead of seeing his lover as a beautiful goddess and in absolute or unrealistic terms, the speaker describe his mistress and define his lover in relative terms in order to finally confirm his love. • Two kinds of comparison: • Worse (comparative “more)– e.g. less red, worse than perfume, less pleasing than music yet he loves it; • Unlike ( More real) e.g. eyes, breasts, hair, walk. • As rare but the “truest” -- his “love” and his “language.”

  23. Sonnet 130 -- Context • Seen as a sequence: Sonnet 127 to 152 • bitter and wry reflections on the poet’s sexual entanglement with a woman—who is, in turn, entangled with the youth at the expense of Shakespeare’s relations with both of them.” • Match the sardonic, misogynistic flavour of the early Jacobean court. . . (Jacob 36)

  24. Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet • Thesis: The youngsters court or stay coy with misplaced conceits which combines the spiritual and sexual love in the ‘courtly love’ tradition. • Juliet’s Hands  shrine; Juliet, a saint. • Romeo: lips = pilgrims  a palmer (pilgrim) with palms • Witty twist with “let lips do what hands do” What? Pray  kiss

  25. Courting sonnet in Romeo and Juliet-- Context • The play: • Before the sonnet (their first conversation), Romeo, like Byron in "She Walks in Beauty," compares Juliet to light or jewels at night and describes her as the first "true beauty“ he’s seen. • Romeo goes to the ball to find his girlfriend Rosaline, but not Juliet. 2. The film(s) –signs of impetuosity and sexuality

  26. “To his Mistress: Going to Bed” • Thesis: As the speaker uses witty conceits to ask the lady to strip herself, the ideology of platonic love is challenged but not that of sex as male battle and conquer. • Witty challenge of Platonic love: • Combine the spiritual (e.g. heaven, chime) and sensual, but see the latter as more important or at least the same with the former. • Puns with sexual connotations – labour, standing, “still can stand so nigh”, “hairy diadems,”“flesh upright”

  27. “To his Mistress: Going to Bed” 3. Spiritual and natural images showing the sensual as something “better” and “natural”: -- girdle as heaven’s zone, (body as a far fairer world) -- body as flowery meads; as content of mystic books -- souls unbodied = bodies unclothed -- fools who stop at breast plate or gems (traditional poets?) -- innocence = birth clothes

  28. John Donne in Context • Unsolved contradictions between Dr. Donne and Jack Donne • Neo-Platonic Love in Renaissance–Its governing ambiguity: “things and persons in the world are to be loved only for the sake of a spiritual beauty that transcends them, and yet the beautiful cannot be appreciated unless we love its manifestations in matter (Singer 195.) • Christianity (from being a Catholic to an Anglican prelate), • Neo-Ovidian (anti-idealistic): “artificial and self-conscious in their defense of sexual pleasures” (Singer 196)

  29. John Donne in Context • e.g. “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” – unlike “dull-sublunary lovers, separation of the bodies does not hurt the union of ‘true’ lovers’ souls. • “The Extasie,” -- implies that love is a religious experience, • “Flea” sex is a religious experience

  30. I’m Your Man: Close Analysis postmodern parody/collage of traditional and contemporary images of love and masculinity (courtly romance, painting, fairy tales and Valentine )

  31. Courting the Lady

  32. Wedding

  33. Mannered Courtship  Wolf Desire Underneath

  34. Love as something opportunist

  35. Christ? Virgin Mary? Or . . . ?

  36. I’m Your Man -- Context • Canadianism parodied • Signs of the Canadian: The Group of Seven, Riding the Timber, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the maple leaf.

  37. Reference • Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? Ed. William Jankowiak. Columbia University Press, 1995. • The Natural History of Love. Morton Hunt. New York: Anchor, 1994. • Nature of Love, Vol. 2: Courtly & Romantic. Irving Singer. University of Chicago Press, 1998. • A beginner's guide to critical reading : an anthology of literary texts. Richard Jacobs. London ; New York : Routledge , 2001.

  38. Readings for next week • Chap 2. • “Formalism ” • EB Browning Sonnets 26 & 43 • Mary Shelley “The Trial of Love”

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