西方文论 伊格尔顿

1、邵冰清,西方文论What is Literature? The rise of English,.What is literature?,Definition: Fiction? Fact? Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton Francis Bacon, John Donne, Bunyan,Definition,Russian critic Roman Jakobson:“Literature is an organized violence committed on ordinary speech.” Before 1917, Russian

2、 formalists, including Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson,Osip Brik, advanced the definition. Stalinism: Literature is a particular organization of language. It is a material fact which has its own specific laws, structures and devices.,Formalism,Literary work: arbitrary assemblage of devices, 1. cont

3、ent was merely the motivation of form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise. 2. the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique.,Formalism,Literary discourse estranges or alienates ordinary speech. making strange was the essen

4、ce of the literary. To think of literature as the Formalists do is really to think of all literature as poetry.(Technique),Definition,Literature is a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself. Literature cannot in fact be objectively defined. It leaves the definition of

5、literature up to how somebody decides to read, not to the nature of what is written. reader,Definition,any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. literature is a highly valued kind of writing Value? Variable Value is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by

6、 certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes.,Value Variable,Value is a part of ideology. Ideology: the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in. In Practical C

7、riticism (1929), the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards demonstrated just how subjective literary value-judgments could actually be.,.The Rise of English,In 18th century, the concept of literature : the whole body of valued writing in society. Criteria: the values and tastes of a particular social clas

8、s. In 19th century, Romantic period: creative or imaginative work.,Romantic Period,Background: uprising of middle class; economic take-off; utilitarianism becoming the dominant ideology; revolution and protests Literature becomes a political force. Its task is to transform society in the name of tho

9、se energies and values which art embodies.,Romantic Period,The word poetry no longer refers simply to a technical mode of writing: it has deep social, political and philosophical implications. In 19th century, William Morris harnessed this Romantic humanism to the cause of the working-class movement

10、.,Modern Aesthetics,From the work of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Coleridge, we inherit the ideas of symbol and aesthetic experience, and aesthetic harmony. Art is largely a product of the very alienation from social life. It is special and mysterious. The whole point of creative writing was that it was g

11、loriously useless.,Modern Aesthetics,Art was extricated from the material practices, social relations and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised to the status of a solitary fetish.,Symbolism,At the center of aesthetic theory at the turn of the eighteenth century is the semi

12、-mystical doctrine of the symbol. For Romanticism, the symbol becomes the panacea for all problems. The symbol fused together motion and stillness, turbulent content and organic form, mind and world.,Literature and Ideology,Literature is an ideology. It has the most intimate relations to questions o

13、f social power. By the mid-Victorian period, this traditionally reliable, immensely powerful ideological form, religion, was in deep trouble.,Literature and Ideology,English is constructed as a subject to carry this ideological burden from the Victorian period onwards. Matthew Arnold: The urgent soc

14、ial need is to Hellenize or cultivate the philistine middle class. This can be done by transfusing into them something of the traditional style of the aristocracy. Control and incorporate the working class.,Function,English helps to promote sympathy and fellow feeling among all classes. It would com

15、municate to them the moral riches of bourgeois civilization, impress upon them a reverence for middle-class achievements, and curb in them any disruptive tendency to collective political action.,Two means-Emotion,Literature works primarily by emotion and experience. Literature has become the opposit

16、e to analytical thought and conceptual enquiry. The pill of middle-class ideology was to be sweetened by the sugar of literature.,Two means-Experience,Experience is in its literary form a kind of vicarious self-fulfilment. The actually impoverished experience of the mass of people, an impoverishment

17、 bred by their social conditions, can be supplemented by literature.,Education,English as an academic subject was first institutionalized not in the Universities, but in the Mechanics Institutes, working mens colleges and extension lecturing circuits. F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley emphasized on

18、 solidarity between the social classes.,Transmission of moral values,The rise of English is more or less concomitant with an historic shift in the very meaning of the term moral. Arnold, Henry James and F. R. Leavis are the major critical exponents. F.R. Leavis: Literature is moral ideology for the

19、modern age.,Academic establishment,According to a Royal Commission witness in 1877, Literature might be considered a suitable subject for women . . . and the second- and third-rate men who . . . become schoolmasters. The rise of English in England ran parallel to the gradual admission of women to th

20、e institutions of higher education,Academic establishment,Literature acquired a masculine aspect as the century drew on. The era of the academic establishment of English was also the era of high imperialism in England. There was an urgent need for a sense of national mission and identity.,Academic e

21、stablishment,Literature was hardly able to compete on equal terms with the rigours of Greats or philology. But WWsignalled the final victory of English studies at Oxford and Cambridge.,Academic establishment,One of the most strenuous antagonists of English - philology - was closely bound up with Ger

22、manic influence. England happened to be passing through a major war with Germany, no self-respecting Englishman should be caught associating with philology. we owe the University study of English to a meaningless massacre.,English Studies,English was to be fashioned not by the patrician dilettantes

23、who occupied the early Chairs of Literature at the ancient universities, but by the offspring of the provincial petty bourgeoisie. No subsequent movement within English studies has come near to recapturing the courage and radicalism of their stand.,Stance,English was the supremely civilizing pursuit

24、, the spiritual essence of the social formation.,Scrutiny,Scrutiny was the title of the critical journal launched in 1932 by the Leavises. It devoted to the moral centrality of English studies, their crucial relevance to the quality of social life as a whole. That current has entered the bloodstream

25、 of English studies in England,Scrutiny,Scrutiny was not just a journal, but the focus of a moral and cultural crusade. hair-raisingly radical and really rather absurd; advocating for close reading. It was less a matter of seeking to transform the mechanized society which gave birth to this withered

26、 culture than of seeking to withstand it. It was doomed to fail from the start.,Leavises,They stressed the centrality of rigorous critical analysis, a disciplined attention to the words on the page. The quality of a societys language was the most telling index of the quality of its personal and soci

27、al life. Scrutiny boldly redrew the map of English literature in ways from which criticism has never quite recovered. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bunyan, Keats, T. S. Eliot,Leavises,They believed in essential Englishness-s a more modest, home-spun alternative to jingoism. Their task was to safeguard the v

28、itality of Shakespearian English from the Daily Herald, and from languages such as French.,T.S. Eliot,The literary map was in fact already being drawn elsewhere. All doctrines of a society which had lost collective belief and declined into an individualism.,T.S. Eliot,What Eliot was in fact assaulti

29、ng was the whole ideology of middle-class liberalism. Eliots own solution is an extreme right-wing authoritarianism: men and women must sacrifice their personalities and opinions to an impersonal order- Tradition,Tradition,A literary work can be valid only by existing in the Tradition. some poetry i

30、s Literature, depending on whether or not the Tradition happens to flow through it. Tradition asks you to be humble.,T.S. Eliot,Eliot advocated for authority, a few great families and a small elite of theological intellectuals. Poetry was not to engage the readers mind: it did not really matter what

31、 a poem actually meant. It worked on readers in more physical and unconscious ways.,T.S. Eliot,The Waste Land , 1922, the salvation of the West Fisher King potent images of birth, death and resurrection He wanted to revive in the reader a sense of common identity.,T.S. Eliot,He had affinities with R

32、ussian Formalism. Language should be stiffened up again. Emotions were messy and suspect, and should yield to the dehumanized mechanical world Middle-class liberalism was finished, and would be ousted by tougher, masculine discipline. Fascism,D.H. Lawrance,He shared with Eliot and Pound a contempt f

33、or liberal and democratic values. Criticize the inhumanity of industrial England Protest against capitalism But refused a political analysis of the system, like the liberal humanism of Leavis.,Leavis,Practical criticism - A method which spurned belle-lettristic waffle and was properly unafraid to ta

34、ke the text apart Close reading- Detailed analytic interpretation, attention on words on the page rather than contexts,Link btw Cambridge English and the American New Criticism,Cambridge critic I. A. Richards. Principle: scientific psychology Richards claims, modern science is the model of true knowledge. Poetry is an emotive rather than referential language. It simply organizes our feelings about it in satisfying ways.,The American New Criticism,It flourished from t