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Summary Lit M3/I
WS 05/06
Sessions I/II, M. Bridges: OE Literature/Oral Culture
Orality: 4th, 5th, 6th centuries: Legends were passed on orally.
Oral cultures can be defined as harmonizing, aggregative, conservative, holistic.
Storytelling is an act of transmitting knowledge about the origin of the group, it passes on
knowledge of a collectivity (morals, believes…), usually transmitted through long narratives
(like Beowulf). Storytelling constitutes the history of the group. Because the stories are
always transmitted orally, they change over time, depending on who tells it to whom…
Mnemotechnics (recurring patterns, poems etc.) are used to remember the stories/songs. Linefillers (semantically neutral expressions) are used to shed time to think.
Transitional Literacy: Moving towards literacy, where only a few members of society are
literate.
Literacy: The majority of the members of a society are able to read and write.
Literacy came together with Christianity. First, only the cleric was able to read and write, it
was a specialized technology. The critical spirit (logic and syllogism) and alterity (the
awareness that things happen outside yourself) arose also with literacy.
Structural amnesia: Ability to forget the details that have become ancient and to replace them
by details that represent the society at the present time. Details are made contemporary.
(Example: Caedmon’s Hymn in Beowulf; in songs/poems thou becomes you.
No individual authors/poets: for the AS time we only have two names: Caedmon and
Cynewulf. There was also no notion of a fixed, authorative text. For example in Beowulf and
Andreas, there are 160 passages the two poems have in common. This also has to do with the
oral culture. All the manuscripts are from around the 11th century, but are evidence of an oral
existence before that time. This explains similar passages, just as type scenes. The audience is
waiting for these moments, for example when a warrior steps off a boat, the sun shining on his
armour.
Formula for OE poetry: A group of words that is regularly employed under the same metrical
conditions to express a given (essential) idea.
Features an OE story must have: Type scene, formula and synonyms!
Session III, W. Senn: Shakespearean Problems: Text, History and Theory
The historical Shakespeare was born in 1564, died in 1616 (Elisabethan Age). His work was
for each generation since part of dramatic work.
Historical Background:
- 1642: Civil War in England. The Puritans closed all theatres, there were no public
performances.
- 1649: King Charles executed
- 1660: The monarchy was restored, Charles’ son was crowned king. This is called the
Restoration Period. During this time, Shakespeare’s plays came back into the
playhouses.
Shakespeare:
- was a cultural institution in every generation
- had a contract with the King to produce about two plays a year (during 1590-1610)
- was dehistoricized and unversalized (made into a contemporary for every period)
-
his company played at the Globe Theatre, of which he was a shareholder
every play underwent censorship
Shakespeare’s texts:
- Two actors of his company collected his plays and published them in the Folio (1623)
and the Quarto. The Folio contains all 37 plays of Shakespeare, the Quarto 20 of them.
- His writing may have been influenced by public taste and the playhouse
- Plays were not considered literature at the time. How did the plays go to print, who
wrote what (some of the works were collaborations), etc. are questions that arise. In
many cases it is not clear if it was Shakespeare who wrote the passages.
- The Quarto texts sometimes differ from the Folio edition. There were additions made
later and pirated editions were also published.
- It is impossible to reconstruct the original version of Shakespeare.
Major works: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear …
Session IV,C. Gertsch: Renaissance/ Humanist Approach/New Historicism
European Renaissance: 1300-1500 (the New Historicists preferred to call the period “Early
Modern”, because they looked at the practices as new practices instead of reborn practices).
Humanism: Man – not God – is the measure of all things. Man is looked at as a superior
creature and the individual is appreciated (portraits of famous individuals became popular!).
The Humanists focus on human dignity and the glorification of the human being as such.
The universe constitutes of:
- God and the angels
- Macrocosm (the physical universe)
- Body Politic (the state)
- Microcosm (man)
The English Renaissance: (1530-1660)
- less influenced by classical antiquity, rather by Italian writers (most important poet of
the Italian Renaissance: Francesco Petrarcha)
- Elizabethan Period (1588-1603): Geographic expansion and trade flourished, scientific
discoveries were made, the Copernican system was introduced.
- Catholicism vs. Protestantism (Anglian Church). The pope had great influence on the
English royals.
- 1585: War between England and Spain, the Spanish Armada was defeated.
- Queen Elizabeth: Iconicized, she was extremely popular, the first of Europe’s cult
figures. She was well educated, even wrote poetry and music.
Humanist approach to Literature:
- A literary work is universal and timeless
- It speaks the truth (or is, at least, not lying on purpose)
- It is self-contained
- It needs interpretation by a critic
- It has a pedagogical purpose (it teaches a moral lesson)
Anti-Humanist Movements:
- Psychoanalytic Criticism
- Marxist Criticism
-
1950s and 1960s: Structuralist schools
1970s and 1980s: Post-Structuralist schools (gender studies, New Historicism …)
New Historicism: Literature and History are equal to each other. The reader has to be a
literary critic and a historian at the same time. It is traitorous to try and reconstruct the past as
it really as, it can’t be grasped, only an interpretation can be made.
The Historicist Movement is, therefore, interested in history as text (historiography). The
historical events themselves are forever lost for us. Ultimately no difference between fictional
and historical text, historiography and literature are closely related
L. Montrose:
Textuality of History: Historical facts and events are always mediated through text.
Historicity of Texts: Texts acquire their own history and thus turn into historical fact.
Inaugural motif: An event, which is reported to take place, is transformed into an inaugurating
moment by its characterization (initializing a process)
Transitional motif: The reader holds his expectations about the significance until some
terminating motif is provided (events which are transitional in a process)
Terminating motif: Indicates the apparent end or resolution of a process or situation of
tension.
Session V, C. Gertsch: Elizabethan Sonnets
Features of the sonnet:
- 14 lines
- Usually in iambic pentameter (standard in English poetry)
- Distinction between Italian (Petrarchan) and English (Shakespearan) sonnet
- Italian sonnet: 2 quatrains, volta, two tercets, enclosing rhyme scheme
- English sonnet: 3 quartrains, volta, couplet, alternating rhyme scheme
- Very popular in English Renaissance
- Most sonnets have a logical development, they are not impulsive but highly
intellectual (says C. Gertsch…)
- Spencer, Sydney and Shakespeare are famous for their sonnets, Shakespeare wrote
154 in total
- The sonnet is usually dedicated to a beautiful lady; the love is not fulfilled
(Shakespeare’s sonnets are mostly addressed to a man or to a dark lady, which was
very unusual.)
Features of the conceit:
- type of poetic metaphor, where it may be a brief metaphor or form the framework of
an entire poem
- designates an ingenious of fanciful notion/conception, usually expressed through
analogy
- Petrarchan conceit: found in love poems and sonnets; the subject is compared
extensively and elaborately to some object (such as a rose, a ship etc.)
- Metaphysical conceit: highly intellectual analogies
Metaphor:
- a trope
- implied analogy (identifying one object with another, ascribing to the first object one
or several qualities of the second)
- Tenor: the idea which is expressed
-
Vehicle: The image by which the idea is conveyed
Sir Phillip Sydney: Astrophil and Stella, 29:
- Structure: Italian sonnet
- Conceit: The first quartrain is the vehicle level. The entire poem consists of one single
simile. The poem is about the relationship between lord and lady, she sells her body in
order to keep her heart intact.
- Couplet (conclusion): the lover is enslaved because he is in love and she only wants to
give her body (with other words she simply wants to get laid…)
Session VI, W. Hölbling: Guest Lecture
Session VII, M. Bridges: The Nomadic Subject
Famous literary works from that period: Mandeville’s Travels (mid 14th century), Margery
Kempe’s “Book” (early 15th century), William Langland’s “Piers Plowman”
→ These three authors have in common that they deconstruct their narrative, they deauthorize
themselves (the author is not in control), their identity is detached from community
(travelling)
Historical Background:
- plague (demographic consequences)
- religion: premature reformation (Lollard Movement disempowering the church, e.g.
the aristocracy claimed the land of the church back…)
- peasant’s revolt.
- Writers celebrated this period in its instability, mobility…
- People who travelled around (especially women) were considered “not serious”
Nomadic Subjects:
- preposterous, nomadic, peripatetic (Peripatetic subject: moving around all the time)
- deconstruction, dislocation
- centripetal (movement towards the center), centrifugal (movement away from the
center)
-
Jerusalem was considered the center (navel) of the Christian world; however, it is
deconstructed, the world becomes deprived of a center (it is a place where things once
were, but they are not there anymore (e.g. relics), it is an empty place)
The Travel of Sir John Mandeville:
- travels, moves around
- dichotomy of the “self and other” (other dichotomies are male/female, east/west etc.)
- women in his narrative are never desirable, nothing the author wants to possess
- Mandeville believes that Jerusalem is the center of the universe, but he gives us two
locations, namely the cross with the inscription and also the grave
- After Jerusalem, Mandeville moves to other oriental places and finds something
positive to say about every community, which was also very unusual at that time
- In the conclusion, Mandeville brings his book to the Pope, who believes it to be
authentic because he had already read about all those things
- The work ends with the conventional prayer (which is actually a contract with the
reader, since he was a pilgrim and the readers now pray for him in order to get their
own resolution. But Mandeville is not fulfilling his part of the deal, because he never
actually went on that pilgrimage!)
Session VIII, G. Rippl: Gender Studies/Feminist Criticism
Basic oppositional pairs: sex v. gender/ female v. feminine/ male v. masculine
Sex refers to biological or genetic differences between men and women.
Gender has until recently referred to the psychological, social and cultural aspects of maleness
and femaleness.
Feminism is a political position.
Feminist criticism is a specific kind of political discourse: a critical and theoretical practice
committed to the struggle against patriarchy and sexism, not simply a concern for gender in
literature.
Femaleness is a matter of biology and, thus, nature.
Femininity is a set of socially and culturally defined characteristics. Femininity is a cultural
construct: one is not born a woman, one becomes one, as Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
puts it. According to feminists, patriarchy has developed a whole series of feminine
characteristics such as sweetness, modesty, subservience, humility, etc. which now define
femininity in a normative, essentialist way.
Simone de Beauvoir: One is not born, one BECOMES a woman. Gender, in this sense, is in
no way a stable identity of locus of agency, it is rather an identity constituted in time.
Many critics consider masculinity and femininity as a metaphysical binary opposition.
However, as the work of the French feminist Hélène Cixous has made clear, this binary
oppositional pair is not an innocent one. It triggers a long list of binary oppositions that is
heavily saturated with patriarchal values:
Man – Woman
Male – Female
Masculinity – Femininity
Activity – Passivity
Culture – Nature
Day – Night
Head – Emotions
Logos – Pathos
There exist different types of feminism, such as materialist feminism, cultural feminism,
French feminism, psychoanalytic feminism etc.
Copy notes from someone!!!
Session IX, G. Rippl: The Puritan Legacy: Early American Writing
Puritans: Members of religious groups in the 16th and 17th centuries, who wanted to make
church ceremonies simpler, focussed on God’s word and not on the hierarchy of the Bishop. It
is a stricter form of Protestantism, which focussed also on the bible and a good, Christian life.
They believed that in the Bible, a set of rules for all problems of life can be found.
Max Weber’s “Protestantische Arbeitsethik”: Puritanism is strongly connected with Weber’s
theory that Calvinism (If you’re successful in this world, you will be successful in heaven)
leads to financial success and a life of hard work. Puritans believed in predestination, they
believed that there are a “selected few” who can go to heaven. They then used hard work as a
means of pleasing God.
Solafidismus: Financial success as a sign of God’s grace.
Puritanism was taken up by the trading class (merchants). Thrift, sobriety and industry were
respected by merchants and manufacturers and Puritanism offered them a theological
justification for these qualities (Weber: Geist des Kapitalismus).
Boston, Massachusetts:
Because the puritans were not welcome in Britain anymore, they settled to America (Pilgrim
Fathers). Under the pressure of the wilderness in America, Puritanism grew fiercer and darker
(led to the Salem Witchcraft Trials).
1st group of settlers: Pilgrims from Plymouth came on the Mayflower in November. They
were separatists, disapproved of the Church of England.
2nd group arrived in 1630, they were the Puritans who wanted to purify the Church of England
Members of both groups believed that in order to become a Puritan, you have to have an
experience with God, a conversion.
Important writers of the Colonial Age:
- John Smith: “A description of New England”
- William Bradford: “History of Plymouth Plantation”
- Cotton Mather: “Magnalia Christi America”
- Mary Rowlandson: “Narrative of the Captivity…”
(All historical works, they were very important at that time. Bibliographies and diaries (e.g.
Anne Bradstreet) which taught a moral lesson were also very popular.)
Puritan Literature:
- self-questioning/ self-reflecting (diaries, formulated as moral lessons)
- sermons and theological works were also very important (Increase Mather etc)
- Poetry: Only piet poetry, it always has to have a lesson taught to the reader.
- Novel, plays etc. were considered devil’s work
Key terms/ key notions:
- God’s mercy and infinite grace
- Bible
- Puritans rejected humanist culture, felling it to be a lure toward damnation. They
began to restrict to an almost frenzied examination of the Bible and of their inner life
(while Europe had the Renaissance..)
- Iconoclasm: During the 17th century, the Puritans destroyed many decorations in
English churches. They believed in the word and condemned paintings and statues as
devilish distractions.
- Chief of sinner’s temptations
- COPY THE REST OFF THE FOLDER
Typology: Important term for interpretations of the Bible. For Puritans, the type of the Old
Testament (persecuted people) were “forerunners” for themselves. Whatever happens is
interpreted in the large frame of typology. The Puritans believed that they were God’s chosen
people.
Session X, C. Gertsch: New Historicism, Renaissance, Literary Historical
Classification
Michel Foucault: He refused to look at history as a chronological evolutionary process; no
historical event has, in his opinion, a direct cause.
Why is it possible that the kind of language we use can be used?
Key terms:
- Power: Power is located in our – unconscious – use of language
- Discourse: “mental set” and ideology which encloses the thinking of all members of a
given society.
- Discursive practices: Language practices which represent particular interests as the
general truth.
- Hegemony: Strategies (e.g. discursive practices) by which a dominant culture
maintains its dominant position.
New Historicists, New Historicism:
- anti-establishment movement
- Literary texts and non-literary (co-) texts: the borderlines between the two are erased.
- Institutional power and the individual: Focus attention (within both text and co-text)
on issues of state power (hegemonic practices) and how it is maintained through
discursive practices.
- Historiography: Reject the western tendency to write history from the top down (e.g.
political history)
- New Historicism has become a social science
- Historical events became “literary works”, the writer gives them the meaning. (History
is, like everything else, simply written by someone.)
John Donne, Elegy XVIII: Love’s Progress
- the purpose of love; the right way of loving (in a sexual sense)
- “one who does not love right, is like someone who goes to sea only to become
seasick”
Romantic poetry: part of the Romantic movement of European literature during the 18th and
19th centuries.
Augustan poetry: poetry that flourished during the reign of Caesar Augustus as Emperor of
Rome. It was explicitly political. In English literature, Augustan poetry is a branch of
Augustan literature and refers to the poetry of the 18th century, specifically the first half of the
century. This poetry was political and satirical.
War poet: this term was first used during and after WWI. A number of poets writing in
English had been soldiers, and had written about that experience.
Victorian era of Great Britain: this era is considered the height of the British industrial
revolution and the apex of the British Empire. It is often defined as the years from 1837 to
1901, when Queen Victoria reigned.
Realism: Realism is a mid-19th century movement, which started in France as a reaction to the
idealism of Romanticism. The realists were influenced by Charles Darwin’s discoveries in the
origin of species.
Modernist Literature was at its height from 1900 to 1940, and featured authors such as James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka. It is
the literary form of modernism, not to be confused with modern literature!
Session XI, W. Senn: Neoclassicism – Augustan Age/ Poetry as Discourse
Augustan Age: Late 17th, early 18th centuries. Reign of King George I. He compared
himself/England to the Roman Empire, especially in the early 18th century. Age of Reason
(1600-1800), Enlightenment.
1660: Restoration of the Monarchy, after a short term of Republic. Literature, and culture as a
whole, was now influenced by the French art and culture (especially poetry). Literature and
Art represent an ideal/finished totality (this idea comes from ancient, classical literature). Up
to the 17th, 18th centuries, literature was only poetry. Poetry was considered the noblest of all
the three genres.
Mimesis: The imitation of classics (Aristotle, Homer etc. who imitated nature; “the truth lies
in nature”)
Neo-classical Age: Emphasis on literature and art from the classic period. The ideal was a
plain, direct style, in order to give direct access to reality, to its subject. Transparency as a key
term.
Discourse: Propagated by Michel Foucault. Discourse is not the same as language, which is
the subject of the study of linguistics. Discourse is, in a linguistic sense, the way sentences
connect.
Discourse after Foucault: A set of rules which have to do with the distribution of power. (e.g.
What and in what form can be said in a certain society? What is worth talking about?)
Discourse is, then, the way in which dominant groups (the church etc.) in the society define
“the truth”. Discourse regulates questions like “Is education suitable for women?”, it
regulates, this kind of social issue.
Discursive formations: The way one can write about a topic (e.g. sex, death etc.)
Foucault: “What is an author?” For him, an author corresponds to the principle of grouping
discourse. When a new text is produced, the already existing discourses are regrouped, there
is no such thing as the invention of a new text.
Literary discourse can take into itself all the other discourses (e.g. legal matters, medical
discourses in literary discourse, in a novel, a poem etc.)
Every great literary work is inscribed in a larger discourse; it produces a more thorough
understanding (after Easthope).
Easthope: Poetry as Discourse: The author as product; in original meaning, he is pre-given.
Thomas Sprat: 1667: The sentence is merely the sum of its component words (Rationalism). It
is simply the vehicle of the matter.
During this period, poetry had to be written in a language that is plain and direct. Rhetoric in
complex rhyme schemes, tropes etc. are avoided, because they draw attention away.
Heroic couplets used in the Augustan Age, because this rhyme scheme is very simple.
Pope, “The Rape of the Lock” (1714):
- mock heroic poem
- the guy cuts off a lock of a woman’s hair (“quest”
- written in the style of a heroic epic
- satire
- Belinda is compared to the sun in an extended simile
- Belinda is turned into an object, she loses her female authority. She actually makes
herself into an object by making herself beautiful to attract the gazes of all men.
(Gender aspect of the poem).
Syntagm: Paradigms form up syntagmatic chain (like a necklace made of beads)
Paradigm: in every utterance we make, we chose a paradigm.
Session XII, W. Senn: Neoclassicism – Age of Sensibility/ History of the
Novel
Writers in the 18th century:
Richardson: Radical Feminist (“honorary woman”), “founder” of the modern novel.
Fielding: chauvinist; macho writing, “founder” of the modern novel.
Daniel Defoe: wrote private histories (author of Robinson Crusoe)
The Novel: is the dominant genre. It wasn’t always clearly defined, sometimes nobel,
romance and history were referred to as the same thing.
→Fielding and Richardson, the “founders” of the modern novel, always wanted to keep the
distance to novels and romance, because a novel was regarded as untrue fiction. So the two
authors wrote “history”.
18th century novel:
- was written for the middle class
- Gender: female characters etc. (What the middle class, among them many women, was
interested in!)
- Fielding: “Joseph Andrews”, a comic novel
- Richardson: “Pamela”, a modern psychological novel, that consists of letters from
Pamela to her parents (introspection, self-analysis)
Pamela:
- lower middle class girl
- She resists the boy who pursues her (she keeps her virginity and chastity), and because
of this he proposes to her in the end.
- Virtue became limited to the sexual realm (chastity was very important so girls could
be traded at a high price on the market).
- Richardson wanted to preserve the credibility of the text, so he chose the form of
letters
- “Written to the moment”
Fielding/ “Joseph Andrews”:
- well educated man
- playwright/ theatre manager
- set up first police force in London
-
First work: parody of “Pamela” (he ridiculed Richardson’s writing). The girl in
Fielding’s work is called “Shamela”.
Joseph: brother of Pamela (also chaste and virtuous); very dominant narrator figure.
Fielding inverts the story of Richardson
Journey through England (panoramic view of English society, with its corruption etc.)
Chastity for Fielding: controlling any kind of appetite, not merely the sexual one.
Neo-classical view of nature
Fielding does not pretend that his novel is the truth (in contrast to Richardson). He
chooses an extradiagetic narrator, a narrator that is outside the story. Through this, a
space is crated between the narrator and the events in the novel.
(Lecture notes from Senn in the folder on the presence shelf!)