Formalism (New Criticism)

& Some More Love Poems and Stories

Central QuestionsCan anything “human” transcend time and space (be eternal and universal) for you? (Love, masterpieces, maternal love, friendship, humanity?) Are we ultimately free? Is our subjectivity unified or fragmentary? What is culture/literature? How is it related to our daily life? Can we resist commercial culture through cultivating our “artistic” sensibility? Do you feel nostalgic about “a certain historical period”?What are the values in reading literature? Is it the finest example of culture? How do we read a poem/text? What do we look for? The author’s ideas? How they reflect his/her life or the social-historical movements? How we feel about it? “The” meanings conveyed through both form and content? Or the ways a text responds to its time consciously or unconsciously?

Liberal Humanism

Traditional Approaches

Outline

New Criticism: Key WordsTheoretic Basis: – Matthew Arnold: Culture vs. Anarchy– Organic Whole & (T. S. Eliot) Objective Correlative

New Criticism: major assumptions & methodsRomantic story and Victorian love poems in the context

of the Victorian vs. Modern Views of Love

Reference and Assignments

Literature as a profession; a Religion

and the only solution to worldly chaos.

from idealism & repression to disunity and franker views of the body and desire)

Key Words

New Criticism defined 33Ideals of New Criticism:

Autonomy (34) & Liberal HumanismOrganic unity 33Component (1): Objective Correlative (Eliot) (chap 2 33)Component (2): Paradox, irony, ambiguity and tension

Against:Intentional Fallacy; Affective Fallacy; Heresy of Paraphrase (New Critics) (40)

See also p. 43

Theoretical Basis (1)M. Arnold: Culture vs. Anarchy

Culture: – “the best that has been thou

ght and said” –universal and timeless

– Involves intellectual refinement and sensibility, disinterested pursuit of goodness, spiritual activity

e.g. Hellenism: Greek culture e.g. Poetry—interpreter of life

Anarchy: caused by capitalism and middle-class Protestantism. Philistinism: self-centered, materialistic

– note: Philistine--( 昔 )巴勒斯坦西南岸之居民，庸俗的人

Bertens 2-5

Arnold (2): Art’s Timelessness & Liberal Humanism

The “ultimate” autonomy and self-sufficiency of the subject (Bertens 6) we are essentially free. Likewise, literature, or its universal values, is not constrained by its time and space. Still relevant today:– e.g. “Isn’t it true that many of us, at least at some point in our

life, want to see literature as a high-minded enterprise by and for sensitive and fine-tuned intellectuals that is somehow several steps removed from the trivial push and pull or ordinary life?”

– 與古人心靈交會– We choose to be who we are today and we will be responsibl

e for it.

Theoretical Basis (2)Textual Autonomy = Organic Unity

the poet‘s mind as a catalyst ( 觸媒 )Experience CO2+ 葉綠素 光合作用

Organic whole

objective correlatives (33)

New Criticism: Major Assumption (2) – organic wholeness

organic unity: (33)– all of its elements (form and content, poetic

elements, tensions) form a “single unified effect.”

– all parts of a poem are interrelated and interconnected, with each part reflecting and helping to support the poem's central idea. ...allows for the harmonization of conflicting ideas, feelings, and attitudes, ...

objective correlative 客觀對應物 (T.S. Eliot)

An external object used to convey the writer’s feeling, which is elevated to a universal level in writing so that the same feelings can be evoked in the reader. “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” (“Hamlet and His Problems”)

objective correlative: e.g. 客觀對應物 (T.S. Eliot)

e.g. Images of coldness in Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” e.g. “. . . the sun was white, as though chidden of God ”

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”“Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized( 乙醚麻醉 ) upon a table”

In a Station of the Metro THE apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

( Are they objective or subjective?)

T. S. Eliot: his Value Judgment

dislikes PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY and Tennyson—too emotional for him.

e.g. “Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” (ODE TO THE WEST

WIND )Favors “metaphysical poetry,” which unites emotions and wits. What comes after 17th century poetry is a dissociation of sensibility. finds ‘organic unity’ in literature

New Criticism: Major Assumptions (Bertens 21-23 )

A poem is an autonomy ( 獨立個體 ), its meanings decided by itself alone, but not by the author’s intention or the reader’s emotional responses to it.

Intentional Fallacy ( 意圖謬誤 40), Affective Fallacy ( 感情謬誤 )

Poetry offers a different kind of truth (poetic truth) than science, conveyed through its dense language which cannot be translated.

Heresy of Paraphrase

New Criticism: Methodology

New Criticism’s synonyms = objective criticism, practical criticism,

textual criticism, close readingthe "text and the text alone" approach

New Criticism on Poetry (chap 2 34-42; Bressler 44 - 45)

1. Pay close attention to the text’s diction: its meanings (connotation and denotation) and even its etymological roots.

a. Its figurative language 比喻語言（明喻、暗喻、擬人法、頓呼法）

2. Study its form or pattern; e.g. a. Traditional or free or open form b. Sound pattern （ prosody 詩律） ; Image Pattern, Symbolic str

ucture, elaborate conceit p. 39c. structure and patterns; e.g. oppositions in the text (paradox, ambi

guity, irony p. 39)3. In other words, do a close reading of all the poetic/narrative ele

ments and try to find out it unifying meaning (from Parts to an Organic Wholeness) ref. questions on pp. 35, 37

Parts Diction (Denotations,

connotations & etymological roots)

AllusionsProsodyRelationships

among the various elements

WholeThemes

Pattern; tension

ambiguities, paradox,

contradictions

New Criticism: Methodology (1) Poetry

Parts Point of view, dialogue, setting, Plot CharacterizationRelationships

among the various elements

WholeThemes

pattern, tension, ambiguities, paradox,

contradictions

New Criticism: Methodology (1) Narrative

Romantic/Victorian love storiesin the context of the Victorian vs. Modern Views of Love

• “The Trial of Love”• Mary Shelley • Sonnets 26 and 43 • EBB: her Life and her Marriage • Paintings: female and male desire and end of love

“The Trial of Love”—Questions (1)

How do you divide the story into the beginning, middle and end? And where are the turning points?What do you think about the story and the different moments of choice? the choices – of love by Angeline and Ippolito – of the vow of silence and separation for one year – of love for Faustina (A’s) – of not breaking the vow when meeting the lover – of writing the letter for Faustina (A’s) – of expressing his love for Faustina (F’s) – of believing that love is sacred and immutable.

“The Trial of Love”—Plot and Turning Points

Beginning: background + section (1) A leaves the convent to go see F(*of A’s love for Faustina) two possibilities for a near future flashback (* of love between Angeline and Ippolito; of the vow of silence and separation for one year) section (2) A goes back to the convent, meeting I on the road (*of not breaking the vow when meeting the lover) Middle: section (3) F goes to visit A and goes back with A section (4) frightened by a buffalo, rescued by I I injured; F’s story (of being rescued by her cavalier); A’s action and repression (p. 16) section (5) I recovers and join F in the saloon, A refrains from visiting them section (6) F’s invitation becomes more urgent A. feel uncertain visits the villa without seeing I *writing the letter for FaustinaClimax and Denouement/Ending: section (7) A goes to the villa to find F with the letter (* I arranges his marriage with Faustina) retreat in shock letter about how I receives the letter section (8) the unhappy couple and A believes that love is sacred and immutable.

“The Trial of Love”—Questions for Pattern

Character Relationship: How is Angeline contrasted with Faustina in their personalities and backgrounds? How about Ippolito? (e.g. 12, pp. 15-16) In what ways is Angeline a typical 19th century angel? Is she just an angel? What role does she take?

Structure and Plot: Where do you start to see ironies? After the turning point aren’t the characters weaving stories (or lies) about their experience? Whose stories follow the pattern (or ideologies) of Romantic love?

Language: As a 19th-century story, the descriptions of personal emotions are mostly external (that of eyes, lips, etc.) Do you find any images typically Romantic? (e.g. 10)

Trial of Love: Manifold Ironies

Thesis: The story presents Romantic but inconstant love ironically, while the final irony is on the heroine (or the author) who still believes in love’s eternity.

A. Romantic love criticized:-- Faustina’s egotism and her stereotypical story 15, 16. -- A also has her romantic idea (16)-- All rush into love; only the man gets a chance to be inconstant,

and the woman gets a “cavalier servant” (22). B. Situational ironies –who is blind?

– For A, it is F; e.g. 16, 18. – For us, it is A, who does not see the two’s relationship deve

lop (e.g. p. 11, 15,16, 17, 19—21!)

Trial of Love: Ironies on Angeline

A typical self-sacrificing angel who represses herself unsuccessfully and could not always sacrifice herself:

– takes the role of a mother (to replace her mother) – thinks she writes the letter for F, but actually for herself (19)– Despite her repression, she cannot help having feelings and

desire -- mixture of feelings (pp. 13, when meeting I on the road); vent her grief onto I’s father

– cries on her way to the saloon; keeping a false hope even when receiving the letter.

“The Trial of Love” in Context

A story less successful than Frankenstein? – Shelley contributed it to The Keepsake for 1835, after she be

comes a widow neglected by her friends and Percy Shelley's relations, with a young son to feed, clothe, and house.

– The Keepsake: enormously popular with the buying public but just as widely reviled in precisely the literary circles to which Shelley by rights belonged

– In practical terms, the Keepsake writer's assignment is to produce an interesting, compact narrative that provides some degree of intersection with the subject of the engraving, which was usually chosen by the editors before the tale had been commissioned.(O'Dea)

“The Trial of Love” in Context (2)

The engraving: a “light-haired woman points vaguely both to [a letter on the floor] and to the dark-haired woman”; a man’s hat and cloak on the table. The story Shelley fleshes out suggests the complexity of Angeline’s feelings. The missing ‘mother’ –in Frankenstein as well as in this story.

EBB’s sonnets: Questions

What are the main ideas of Sonnet 26 and 43?Are they “good” poems from the standard of New Criticism? What do you think about EBB’s modes of love? Note: sonnet forms– English (Shakespearean) sonnet: Quartrain (abab c

dcd efef) couplet (gg)– Italian (Petrarchan): Octave (abbaabba ) and Sestet

(cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce.)

Sonnet forms

Italian: two parts -- "The octave bears the burden; a doubt, a problem, a reflection, a query, an historical statement, a cry of indignation or desire, a Vision of the ideal. The sestet eases the load, resolves the problem or doubt, answers the query, solaces the yearning, realizes the vision.“English: the final couplet -- a commentary on the foregoing, an epigrammatic close. (source: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sonnet.html )

Sonnet 26I lived with visions for my companyInstead of men and women, years ago,And found them gentle mates, nor thought to knowA sweeter music than they played to me.But soon their trailing purple was not freeOf this world's dust, their lutes did silent grow,And I myself grew faint and blind belowTheir vanishing eyes. Then THOU didst come—to be,Beloved, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,As river-water hallowed into fonts 聖水盆 ),Met in thee, and from out thee overcameMy soul with satisfaction of all wants:Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.

Sonnet 26: More Questions

What pattern(s) can you find from this sonnet?Is it an Italian sonnet or Shakespearean sonnet? How does the sonnet form help convey the idea? (Where do you find the break?) What about the other poetic techniques such as the use of metaphor, repetition (“thee”) and punctuation? How about the ending: what does “man” mean? Is this line ironic or paradoxical?

Sonnet 26 (1)Thesis: 1. The speaker expresses the great changes that happen to her after the lover ‘comes’ to her through the arrangement of sounds and 8-6 Italian sonnet structure.Form: – two part (before-after) structure; broken by “THOU”’s ar

rival in the middle of line 8. – Nasal sounds associated with visions, and explosives wit

h the lover. Content: – Personification: visions as they; – Vision and Dreams cannot compare with God’s gift—yo

u (closer than “they”). Ambiguities: “wants,” “God’s gifts”; what “overcame” her with satisfaction?

Sonnet 26 (2)

Men’s dream – male’s dream of domination or male version of love “thou” or what “overcame” her with satisfaction – sexual pleasure, imagined in the past as visions and songs “river-water hallowed into fonts” “wants” – female desire for sex or self-fulfillment “God’s gift”– female’s own body.

Sonnet 43 How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sightFor the ends of Being and ideal Grace.I love thee to the level of everyday'sMost quiet need, by sun and candle-light.I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.I love thee with the passion put to useIn my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.I love thee with a love I seemed to loseWith my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,I shall but love thee better after death.

我的愛比山高、比海深？

海枯石爛至死不渝？

Sonnet 43 Thesis: The speaker expresses both through form and content how love is both boundless and limited. Form:– Italian, but with only 4 rhymes; intertwining rhymes; – Repetition of words; – Emotional, long lines not limited by the form; breaks in the

middle of two lines; Meaning in tension: – Paradox between uncountable love and countable ways; – between boundless love and finality of life. (freely, purely vs.

loss and death)– between the spiritual and eternal (open or long vowels) and the

everyday life (short and stressed syllables).

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1): A Distinguished Poet

A comfortable childhood, when she preferred reading to social life. Very well-read, mostly self-educated. Writes her first poem at the age of four; At the age of six, she received from her father for "some lines on virtue penned with great care" a ten-shilling note enclosed in a letter addressed to "the Poet-Laureate of Hope End." In 1850, the year when Wordsworth died, she was mentioned frequently as a possible successor of the Poet Laureate.

E. B. Browning (2) : the Conventional and Unconventional

The plot of Romantic Love The father did not allow them to get married (being against the idea of marriage). (Why? …) Threatened with lung disease, lived in a darkened room with few visitors (after her brother’s death by drowning).Browning in January 1845 wrote a letter which began, "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett." Married before elopement. (still following the Victorian moral codes)Her elopement with Browning “cured her invalidism.”

More famous and accomplished than Browning during her lifetime; they lived on her money; RB becomes productive ‘after’ her deathReasons for the father’s objection: mixture of blood

E. B. Browning (3) : Critical Reception of EBB as a poet

Victorians –saw her as a major poet, good enough to be considered for laureatship;Great inspiration for Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti Later critics – see her as an adjunct to her husband

Contemporary feminists readings: “Aurara Leigh”: Aurora, who aspires to be a poet, is courted with a marriage proposal by her cousin Romney. Rejecting his offer she proclaims her own `vocation'. -- a feminist versionSonnets: ideas of writing love poems appeared in her notebooks well before she met RB.

“While Robert Browning is famous for being a poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is famous for being a poet with a romantic life story” (Beard 67)

Her sonnets

Different from the Renaissance sonnets because she talks mostly about her own love (and doubts—possibly including the sexual aspects), but not her lover.

E. B. Browning (3) : love & desire

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)The physical sources of desire is presented with metaphors: (Kern 91-92)– She hears “footsteps of the soul” and waits with “trembling

knees.” – The hand of love is “soft and warm” and brings “souls to

touch” – Her heart opens wide to “fold within the wet wings of thy

dove”– Her own pulse and her beloved’s “beat double”

E. B. Browning (3) : desire

Exchange of a lock of hair: – R. Browning “Give me . . . so much of you—all precious t

hat you are—as may be given in a lock of your hair—I will live and die with it.”

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)– “. . .from my poet’s forehead to my heart . . . [I] lay the gift where nothing hindereth; Here on my heart, as on thy brow, to lack No natural heat till mine grows cold in death.”(Sonnet 19 qtd Ker

n 345)

A Broader Context

Victorian and Modern Views of Love – Some More Examples

Female DesireNude With a Dog 1861-61 (later dated 1868)

Gustave Courbet

Innocence, implied sexuality

Female Desire

Nu a la pantoufle a carreaux (1917 Naked with the slipper with squares) http://www.pyb.com.au/ptcds/pcres/focus/schiele.htm

Egon Schiele (Austria : 1890 - 1918)

KNEELING NUDE, 1918http://www.donagrafik.com/WUK_KATALOG/HTML/31_e.html

Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) (French) "Phryne before the Areopagus“ 1861 http://www.kingsgalleries.com/1024x768/galleries/gerome/expanded/picture-12.htm

Male Desire

Male Desire

S. Dali The Great Masturbator 1929

Male Desire

(For your reference) The Great Masturbator -- The main subject in it is a large, soft, terrorized head, livid and waxlike, with pink cheeks; the closed eyes are embellished by very long eyelashes. A tremendous nose is leaning on the ground. The mouth, replaced by a decaying grasshopper crawling with ants, opens in the middle of a head finished off with ornamentation in the 1900 style. …Fantasy of a woman stronger and dominating—fear of castration? (source)

S. Dali The Great Masturbator 1929

Victorian Views: Ending in conflict

While the Victorian were acutely aware of conflict, they were less willing than the moderns to see it as intrinsic to love or as having a constitutive function. In art they displaced conflict onto fictitious characters, often onto femme fatales in distant, ancient, or imaginary places. (Kern 373)The other solution – joining in death. (sometimes quite literally; e.g. Wuthering Heights; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems)

V. Ending

Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) Aurora Leigh's Dismissal of Romney- (The Tryst) 1860 http://freespace.virgin.net/k.peart/Victorian/hugheslove.htm

The lovers composed, with reasons (the book) clearly given.

M. Ending

Edward MunchAshes (1894)

Both lovers frustrated, in a mess.

Reference

Literary Theory: The Basics. Hans Bertens. NY: Routledge, 2001. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 2nd Ed. (Bressler, Charles E. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999.) TEXTS AND CONTEXTS - INTRODUCING LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE STUDY. Adrian Beard. Routledge, 2001.The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns. Stephen Kern. Harvard UP, 1992. Gregory O'Dea. "'Perhaps a Tale You'll Make It': Mary Shelley's Tales for The Keepsake.” Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after" In Frankenstein, edited by Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Teaneck, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997: 62-78.

Readings for next week

“Psychoanalytic Criticism” chap 3: to p. 53 "Eveline" by James JoyceReview of “Araby” if you have read it before.