Discussion on the novel (genre), Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights

• The novel

http://literatureiilv.blogspot.com.ar/2014/06/the-novel.html

• Framing

FRAME NARRATIVE: The result of inserting one or more small stories within the body of a larger story that encompasses the smaller ones. Often this term is used interchangeably with both the literary technique and the larger story itself that contains the smaller ones, which are called pericopes, "framed narratives" or "embedded narratives." The most famous example is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which the overarching frame narrative is the story of a band of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. The band passes the time in a storytelling contest. The framed narratives are the individual stories told by the pilgrims who participate. Another example is Boccaccio's Decameron, in which the frame narrative consists of a group of Italian noblemen and women fleeing the plague, and the framed narratives consist of the tales they tell each other to pass the time while they await the disease's passing. The 1001 Arabian Nights is probably the most famous Middle Eastern frame narrative. Here, in Bagdad, Scheherazade must delay her execution by beguiling her Caliph with a series of cliffhangers. FRAME STORY: See frame narrative. FRAMING METHOD: Using the same features, wording, setting, situation, or topic at both the beginning and end of a literary work so as to "frame" it or "enclose it." This technique often provides a sense of cyclical completeness or closure.

Source: https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_F.html

• Distancing effect (Brecht)

Alienation effect, also called a-effect or distancing effect, German Verfremdungseffekt or V-effekt, idea central to the dramatic theory of the German dramatist-director Bertolt Brecht. It involves the use of techniques designed to distance the audience from emotional involvement in the play through jolting reminders of the artificiality of the theatrical performance.

Source: http://www.britannica.com/art/alienation-effect

• Galvanism

In medicine, galvanism refers to any form of medical treatment involving the application of pulses of electric current to body tissues provoking the contraction muscles that are stimulated by the electric current. This effect was named by Alessandro Volta after his contemporary, the scientist Luigi Galvani, who investigated the effect of electricity on dissected animals in the 1780's and 1790's. Galvani himself referred to the phenomenon as animal electricity, believing that he had discovered a distinct form of electricity.

Source: http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/Definitions/galvanism.htm

• Cyborgs

The Cyborg Foundation

• Paradise Lost by John Milton

Paradise Lost: Study Guide

• Primitivism // Civilization/Barbarity

"The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling

Sobre Jeremy Button

El último confín de la tierra, Esteban Lucas Bridges

Brian Patten, Jackie Kay, Conceits & the Metaphysical Poets

Here are some of the things we mentioned in class while discussing Carol Ann Duffy and her poems.

• Brian Patten

http://www.brianpatten.co.uk/

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/brian-patten

http://literature.britishcouncil.org/brian-patten

• Jackie Kay

http://literature.britishcouncil.org/jackie-kay

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/jackie-kay

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/jackie-kay

• (Metaphysical) Conceit

"violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas" 1


On the conceit

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/130855/conceit#ref288176

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/conceit

http://literarydevices.net/conceit/


On the Metaphysical poets

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/377915/Metaphysical-poet


On John Donne & his poems

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/john-donne

http://www.bartleby.com/357/


"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne

Theatre of the Absurd

          Absurd, Literature of the. The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the sense that the human condition is essentially absurd, and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd. Both the mood and dramaturgy of absurdity were anticipated as early as 1896 in Alfred Jarry's French play Ubu roi (Ubu the King). The literature has its roots also in the movements of expressionism and surrealism, as well as in the fiction, written in the 1920s, of Franz Kafka (The Trial, Metamorphosis). The current movement, however, emerged in France after the horrors of World War II, as a rebellion against essential beliefs and values of traditional culture and traditional literature. This earlier tradition had included the assumptions that human beings are fairly rational creatures who live in an at least partially intelligible universe, that they are part of an ordered social structure, and that they may be capable of heroism and dignity even in defeat. After the 1940s, however, there was a widespread tendency, especially prominent in the existential philosophy of men of letters such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, to view a human being as an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe, to conceive the universe as possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning, and to represent human life in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning, as it moves from the nothingness whence it came toward the nothingness where it must end as an existence which is both anguished and absurd. As Camus said in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942),

In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile... This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.

          Or as Eugène Ionesco, French author of The Bald Soprano (1949), The Lesson (1951), and other plays in the theater of the absurd, has put it: "Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless." Ionesco also said, in commenting on the mixture of moods in the literature of the absurd: "People drowning in meaninglessness can only be grotesque, their sufferings can only appear tragic by derision."

          Samuel Beckett (1906-89), the most eminent and influential writer in this mode, both in drama and in prose fiction, was an Irishman living in Paris who often wrote in French and then translated his works into English. His plays, such as Waiting for Godot (1954) and Endgame (1958), project the irrationalism, helplessness, and absurdity of life in dramatic forms that reject realistic settings, logical reasoning, or a coherently evolving plot. Waiting for Godot presents two tramps in a waste place, fruitlessly and all but hopelessly waiting for an unidentified person, Godot, who may or may not exist and with whom they sometimes think they remember that they may have an appointment; as one of them remarks, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful." Like most works in this mode, the play is absurd in the double sense that it is grotesquely comic and also irrational and nonconsequential; it is a parody not only of the traditional assumptions of Western culture, but of the conventions and generic forms of traditional drama, and even of its own inescapable participation in the dramatic medium. The lucid but eddying and pointless dialogue is often funny, and pratfalls and other modes of slapstick are used to project the alienation and tragic anguish of human existence. Beckett's prose fiction, such as Malone Dies (1958) and The Unnamable (1960), present an antihero who plays out the absurd moves of the end game of civilization in a nonwork which tends to undermine the coherence of its medium, language itself. But typically Beckett's characters carry on, even if in a life without purpose, trying to make sense of the senseless and to communicate the uncommunicable.

          Another French playwright of the absurd was Jean Genet (who combined absurdism and diabolism); some of the early dramatic works of the Englishman Harold Pinter and the American Edward Albee are in a similar mode. The plays of Tom Stoppard, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and Travesties (1974), exploit the devices of absurdist theater more for comic than philosophical ends. There are also affinities with this movement in the numerous recent works which exploit black comedy or black humor: baleful, naive, or inept characters in a fantastic or nightmarish modern world play out their roles in what Ionesco called a "tragic farce," in which the events are often simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd. Examples are Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon's V (1963), John Irving's The World According to Garp (1978), and some of the novels by the German Günter Grass and the Americans Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and John Barth. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is an example of black comedy in the cinema. More recently, some playwrights living in totalitarian regimes have used absurdist techniques to register social and political protest. See, for example, Largo Desolato (1987) by the Czech Vaclav Havel and The Island (1973), a collaboration by the South African writers Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona.

          See wit, humor, and the comic, and refer to: Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (rev., 1968); David Grossvogel, The Blasphemers: The Theatre of Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet (1965); Arnold P. Hinchliffe, The Absurd (1969); Max F. Schultz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties (1980); and Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn, eds., Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama.

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Post-Modernism

• James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century

Preface:
http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/clifford_routes_preface.pdf

Chapter 5:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/anthropology/schildkrout/6353/client_edit/week6/week6--clifford.pdf

Chapter 7:
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic206050.files/Cultural_Theory_and_Cultural_Studies/Clifford_-_Traveling_Cultures.pdf

• Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity

http://english.360elib.com/datu/J/EM353297.pdf

Stream of Consciousness

     Stream of Consciousness was a phrase used by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind; it has since been adopted to describe a narrative method in modern fiction. Long passages of introspection, in which the narrator records in detail what passes through a character's awareness, are found in novelists from Samuel Richardson, through William James' brother Henry James, to many novelists of the present era. The long chapter 42 of James' Portrait of a Lady, for example, is entirely given over to the narrator's description of the process of Isabel's memories, thoughts, and feelings. As early as 1888 a minor French writer, Edouard Du jardin, wrote a short novel Les Lauriers sont coupés ("The Laurels Have Been Cut") which is a rather crude but sustained attempt to represent the scenes and events of the story solely as they impinge upon the consciousness of the central character. As it has been refined since the 1920s, stream of consciousness is the name applied specifically to a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator's intervention, the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character's mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations.

     Some critics use "stream of consciousness" interchangeably with the term interior monologue. It is useful, however, to follow the usage of critics who use the former as the inclusive term, denoting all the diverse means employed by authors to communicate the inclusive state and process of consciousness in a character. "Interior monologue" is then reserved for that species of stream of consciousness which undertakes to present to the reader the course and rhythm of consciousness precisely as it occurs in a character's mind. In interior monologue the author does not intervene, or at any rate intervenes minimally, as describer, guide, or commentator, and does not tidy the vagaries of the mental process into grammatical sentences or into a logical or coherent order. The interior monologue, in its radical form, is sometimes described as the exact presentation of the process of consciousness; but because sense perceptions, mental images, feelings, and some aspects of thought itself are nonverbal, it is clear that the author can present these elements only by converting them into some kind of verbal equivalent. Much of this conversion is a matter of narrative conventions rather than of unedited, point-forpoint reproduction, and each author puts his or her own imprint on the interior monologues that are attributed to characters in the narrative. (For the linguistic techniques that have been used to render the states and flow of consciousness, see Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Nanative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, 1978.)

     James Joyce developed a variety of devices for stream-of-consciousness narrative in Ulysses (1922). Here is a passage of interior monologue from the "Lestrygonian" episode, in which Leopold Bloom saunters through Dublin, observing and musing:

Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugar-sticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne, sucking red jujubes white.

     Dorothy Richardson sustains a stream-of-consciousness mode of narrative, focused exclusively on the mind and perceptions of her heroine, throughout the twelve volumes of her novel Pilgrimage (1915-38); Virginia Woolf employs the procedure as a primary, although not exclusive, narrative mode in several novels, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927); and William Faulkner exploits it brilliantly in the first three of the four parts of The Sound and the Fury (1929).

     Refer to nanatology and point of view, and see Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel (1955, rev. 1964); Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness the Modem Novel (1954); Melvin Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: A Study Literary Method (1955).


-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Modernism

-"The tradition of the new"
breaking with what came before (in order to do that, a tradition is needed)

-Mimesis      v.      Representation

-Role of the artist: someone who knows better
                            someone who illuminates the public

-Awareness of artifice

-Fragmentation

-Multiple perspectives

-"Strangled victim"

-isms: Futurism
          Dadaism
          Surrealism



Ortega y Gasset, José. "La deshumanización del arte".

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence.

Hypertextuality

• Hypertext(uality)

Links/Connections

Theodor Nelson (1981): docuverse
Gerard Genette: Palimpsests

• Transtextuality/Intertextuality

Relationship between texts

Gerard Genette

Julia Kristeva

• Transmedia

Henry Jenkins

Dramatic Monologue

     Dramatic Monologue. A monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person. In a play, when a character utters a monologue that expresses his or her private thoughts, it is called a soliloquy. Dramatic monologue, however, does not designate a component in a play, but a type of lyrìc poem that was perfected by Robert Browning. In its fullest form, as represented in Browning's "My Last Duchess," "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," "Andrea del Sarto," and many other poems, the dramatic monologue has the following features: (1) A single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment: the Duke is negotiating with an emissary for a second wife; the Bishop lies dying; Andrea once more attempts wistfully to believe his wife's lies. (2) This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker. (3) The main principle controlling the poet's formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker's temperament and character.

     In monologues such as "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" and "Caliban upon Setebos," Browning omits the second feature, the presence of a silent auditor; but features (1) and (3) are the necessary conditions of a dramatic monologue. The third feature—the focus on self-revelation—serves to distinguish a dramatic monologue from its near relation, the dramatic lyric, which is also a monologue uttered in an identifiable situation at a dramatic moment. John Donne's "The Canonization" and "The Flea" (1613), for example, are dramatic lyrics that lack only one feature of the dramatic monologue: the focus of interest is primarily on the speaker's elaborately ingenious argument, rather than on the character he inadvertently reveals in the course of arguing. And although Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (1798) is spoken by one person to a silent auditor (his sister) in a specific situation at a significant moment in his life, it is not a dramatic monologue proper, both because we are invited to identify the speaker with the poet himself, and because the organizing principle and focus of interest is not the revelation of the speaker's distinctive temperament, but the evolution of his observations, memories, and thoughts toward the resolution of an emotional problem.

     Tennyson wrote "Ulysses" (1842) and other dramatic monologues, and the form has been used by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other poets of this century. The best-known modern instance is T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915).

     See Benjamin Fuson, Browning and His English Predecessors in the Dramatic Monologue (1948); Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (1957); Ralph W. Rader, "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms," Critical Inquiry 3 (1976); and Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (1985, chapter 2, "The Dramatic Monologue").

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Marxist Criticism

     Marxist Criticism, in its diverse forms, grounds its theory and practice on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx (1818-83) and his fellowthinker Friedrich Engels, and especially on the following claims: 

     (1) In the last analysis, the evolving history of humanity, of its social groupings and relations, of its institutions, and of its ways of thinking are largely determined by the changing mode of its "material production", that is, of its overall economic organization for producing and distributing material goods. 

     (2) Historical changes in the fundamental mode of material production effect changes in the class structure of a society, establishing in each era dominant and subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political, and social advantage. 

     (3) Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology, that is, the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings perceive, and by recourse to which they explain, what they take to be reality. An ideology is, in complex ways, the product of the position and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant ideology embodies, and serves to legitimize and perpetuate, the interests of the dominant economic and social class. 

     Ideology was not much discussed by Marx and Engels after The German Ideology, which they wrote jointly in 1845-46, but it has become a key concept in Marxist criticism of literature and the other arts. Marx inherited the term from French philosophers of the late eighteenth century, who used it to designate the study of the way that all general concepts develop from senseperceptions. In the present era, "ideology" is used in a variety of non-Marxist ways, ranging from a derogatory name for any set of political ideas that are held dogmatically and applied rigorously, to a neutral name for ways of perceiving and thinking that are specific to an individual's race, or sex, or education, or ethnic group. In its distinctively Marxist use, the reigning ideology in any era is conceived to be, ultimately, the product of its economic structure and the resulting class-relations and class-interests. In a famed architectural metaphor, Marx represented ideology as a "superstructure" of which the concurrent socioeconomic system is the "base." Friedrich Engels described ideology as "a false consciousness," and many later Marxists consider it to be constituted largely by unconscious prepossessions that are illusory, in contrast to the "scientific" (that is, Marxist) knowledge of the economic determinants, historical evolution, and present constitution of the social world. A further claim is that, in the present era of capitalist economic organization that emerged during the eighteenth century, the reigning ideology incorporates the interests of the dominant and exploitative class, the "bourgeoisie," who are the owners of the means of production and distribution, as opposed to the "proletariat," or wage-earning working class. This ideology, to those who live in and with it, it is claimed, seems a natural and inevitable way of seeing, explaining, and dealing with the environing world, but in fact has the hidden function of legitimizing and maintaining the position, power, and economic interests of the ruling class. Bourgeois ideology is regarded as both producing and permeating the social and cultural institutions and practices of the present era—including religion, morality, philosophy, politics, and the legal system, as well as (though in a less direct way) literature and the other arts. 

     In accordance with some version of the views just outlined, a Marxist critic typically undertakes to explain the literature in any historical era, not as works created in accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as "products" of the economic and ideological determinants specific to that era. What some Marxist critics themselves decry as "vulgar Marxism" analyzes a "bourgeois" literary work as in direct correlation with the present stage of the class struggle and demands that such works be replaced by a "social realism" that will represent the true reality and progressive forces of our time; in practice, this has usually turned out to be the demand that literature conform to an official party line. More flexible Marxists, on the other hand, building upon scattered comments on literature in Marx and Engels themselves, grant that traditional literary works possess a degree of autonomy that enables some of them to transcend the prevailing bourgeois ideology sufficiently to represent (or in the frequent Marxist equivalent, to reflect) aspects of the "objective" reality of their time (see imitation). 

     The Hungarian thinker Georg Lukács, the most widely influential of Marxist critics, represents a flexible view of the role of ideology. He proposed that each great work of literature creates "its own world," which is unique and seemingly distinct from "everyday reality." But masters of realism in the novel such as Balzac or Tolstoy, by "bringing to life the greatest possible richness of the objective conditions of life," and by creating "typical" characters who manifest to an extreme the essential tendencies and determinants of their epoch, succeed—often "in opposition to [the author's] own conscious ideology"—in producing a fictional world which is a "reflection of life in the greatest concreteness and clarity and with all its motivating contradictions." That is, the fictional world of such writers accords with the Marxist conception of the real world as constituted by class conflict, economic and social "contradictions," and the alienation of the individual under capitalism. (See bourgeois epic, under epic, and refer to Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. 1970; the volume also includes Lukács' useful review of the foundational tenets of Marxist criticism, in "Marx and Engels on Aesthetics.") 

     While lauding nineteenth-century literary realism, Lukács attacked modernist experimental writers as "decadent" instances of concern with the subjectivity of the alienated individual in the fragmented world of our late stage of capitalism. (See modernism.) He thereby inaugurated a vigorous debate among Marxist critics about the political standing of formal innovators in twentieth-century literature. In opposition to Lukács, the Frankfurt School of German Marxists, especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, lauded modernist writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Beckett, proposing that their formal experiments, by the very fact that they fragment and disrupt the life they "reflect," effect a distance and detachment that serve as an implicit critique—or yield a "negative knowledge"—of the dehumanizing institutions and processes of society under capitalism. 

     Two rather maverick German Marxists, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, who also supported modernist and nonrealistic art, have had considerable influence on non-Marxist as well as Marxist criticism. In his critical theory, and in his own dramatic writings (see epic theater), Bertolt Brecht rejected what he called the "Aristotelian" concept that a tragic play is an imitation of reality with a unified plot and a universal theme which establishes an identification of the audience with the hero and produces a catharsis of the spectator's emotions. (See Aristotle, under tragedy and plot) Brecht proposes instead that the illusion of reality should be deliberately shattered by an episodic plot, by protagonists who do not attract the audience's sympathy, by a striking theatricality in staging and acting, and by other ways of baring the artifice of drama so as to produce an "alienation effect" (see under distance and involvement). The result of such alienation will be to jar audiences out of their passive acceptance of modern capitalist society as a natural way of life, into an attitude not only (as in Adorno) of critical understanding of capitalist shortcomings, but of active engagement with the forces of change. Another notable critic, Walter Benjamin, was both an admirer of Brecht and briefly an associate of the Frankfurt School. Particularly influential was Benjamin's attention to the effects of changing material conditions in the production of the arts, especially the recent technological developments of the mass media that have promoted, he said, "a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art." In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin proposes that modern technical innovations such as photography, the phonograph, the radio, and especially the cinema, have transformed the very concept and status of a work of art. Formerly an artist or author produced a work which was a single object, regarded as the special preserve of the bourgeois elite, around which developed a quasi-religious "aura" of uniqueness, autonomy, and aesthetic value independent of any social function— an aura which invited in the spectator a passive attitude of absorbed contemplation in the object itself. The new media not only make possible the infinite and precise reproducibility of the objects of art, but effect the production of works which, like motion pictures, are specifically designed to be reproduced in multiple copies. Such modes of art, Benjamin argues, by destroying the mystique of the unique work of art as a subject for pure contemplation, make possible a radical role for works of art by opening the way to "the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art." (A useful collection of central essays by the Marxist critics Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno is R. Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics, 1977.) 

     Since the middle of the present century there has been a resurgence of Marxist criticism, marked by an openness, on some level of literary analysis, to other current critical perspectives; a flexibility which acknowledges that Marxist critical theory is itself not a set of timeless truths but at least to some degree an evolving historical process; a subtilizing of the concept of ideology as applied to literary content; and a tendency to grant an increased role to non-ideological and distinctively artistic determinants of literary structures. 

     In the 1960s the influential French Marxist Louis Althusser assimilated the structuralism then current into his view that the structure of society is not a monolithic whole, but is constituted by a diversity of "nonsynchronous" social formations, or "ideological state apparatuses," including religious, legal, political, and literary institutions. Each of these is interrelated with the others in complex ways, but possesses a "relative autonomy"; only "in the last instance" is the ideology of a particular institution determined by its material base in contemporary economic production. In an influential reconsideration of the nature of ideology, Althusser opposes its definition as simply "false consciousness"; he declares instead that ideologies vary according to the form and practices of each mode of state apparatus, and that the ideology of each mode operates by means of a type of discourse which interpellates (calls upon) the individual to take up a pre-established "subject position"—that is, a position as a person with certain views and values which, in every instance, serve the ultimate interests of the ruling class. (See discourse under poststructuralism.) Within the particular social formation of literature, furthermore, a great work is not a mere product of ideology, because its fiction establishes for the reader a distance from which to recognize, hence expose, "the ideology from which it is born . . . from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes." Pierre Macherey, in A Theory of Literary Production (1966, trans. 1978), stressed the supplementary claim that a literary text not only distances itself from its ideology by its fiction and form, but also exposes the "contradictions" that are inherent in that ideology by its "silences" or "gaps"—that is, by what the text fails to say because its ideology makes it impossible to say it. Such textual "absences" are symptoms of ideological repressions of the contents in the text's own "unconscious." The aim of Marxist criticism, Macherey asserts, is to make these silences "speak" and so to reveal, behind what an author consciously intended to say, the text's unconscious content—that is, its repressed awareness of the flaws, stresses, and incoherence in the very ideology that it incorporates. 

      Between 1929 and 1935 the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, while imprisoned by the fascist government, wrote approximately thirty documents on political, social, and cultural subjects, known as the "prison notebooks." Gramsci maintains the original Marxist distinction between the economic base and the cultural superstructure, but replaces the older notion that culture is a disguised "reflection" of the material base with the concept that the relation between the two is one of "reciprocity," or interactive influence. Gramsci places special emphasis on the popular, as opposed to the elite elements of culture, ranging from folklore and popular music to the cinema. Gramsci's most widely echoed concept is that of hegemony: that a social class achieves a predominant influence and power, not by direct and overt means, but by succeeding in making its ideological view of society so pervasive that the subordinate classes unwittingly accept and participate in their own oppression. Gramsci's prison writings have become widely influential since they were published late in the 1940s, especially among literary and social critics, such as Terry Eagleton in England and Fredric Jameson and Edward Said in America, who concern themselves with the power of literary culture to intervene in and to transform existing economic and political arrangements and activities. See Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower, 1985; Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 1979. 

     In England the many social and critical writings of Raymond Williams manifest an adaptation of Marxist concepts to his humanistic concern with the overall texture of an individual's "lived experience." A leading theorist of Marxist criticism in England is Terry Eagleton, who has expanded and elaborated the concepts of Althusser and Macherey into his view that a literary text is a special kind of production in which ideological discourse—described as any system of mental representations of lived experience—is reworked into a specifically literary discourse. In recent years Eagleton has been increasingly hospitable to the tactical use, for dealing with ideology in literature, of concepts derived from deconstruction and from Lacan's version of Freudian psychoanalysis. Eagleton views such poststructuralist analyses as useful to Marxist critics of literary texts insofar as they serve to undermine reigning beliefs and certainties, but only as preliminary to the properly Marxist enterprise of exposing their ideological motivation and to the application of the criticism of literature toward politically desirable ends. 

     The most prominent American theorist, Fredric Jameson, is also the most eclectic of current Marxist critics. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Symbolic Act (1981), Jameson expressly adapts to his synthetic critical enterprise such seemingly incompatible viewpoints as the medieval theory of fourfold levels of meaning in the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye, structuralist criticism, Lacan's reinterpretations of Freud, semiotics, and deconstruction. These modes of criticism, Jameson asserts, are applicable at various stages of the critical interpretation of a literary work; but Marxist criticism, he contends, "subsumes" all the other "interpretive modes," by retaining their positive findings within a "political interpretation of literary texts" which stands as the "final" or "absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation." This last-analysis "political interpretation" of a literary text involves an exposure of the hidden role of the "political unconscious"—a concept which Jameson describes as his "collective," or "political," adaptation of the Freudian concept that each individual's unconscious is a repository of repressed desires. (See psychological and psychoanalytic criticism.) In any literary product of our late capitalist era, the "rifts and discontinuities" in the text, and especially those elements which, in the French phrase, are its "non-dit" (its not-said), are symptoms of the repression by a predominant ideology of the contradictions of "History" into the depths of the political unconscious; and the content of this repressed History, Jameson asserts, is the revolutionary process of "the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity." In the final stage of an interpretation, Jameson holds, the Marxist critic "rewrites," in the mode of "allegory," the literary text "in such a way that the [text] may be seen as the . . . reconstruction of a prior historical or ideological subtext"—that is, of the text's unspoken, because repressed and unconscious, awareness of the ways it is determined not only by current ideology, but also by the long-term process of true "History." 

     See sociology of literature, and for the Marxist wing of the new historicism, see cultural materialism under the entry new historicism. In addition to writings listed above, refer to: Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism (1950); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1960) and Marxism and Literature (1977); Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (1967); Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (trans., 1968); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (1969, trans. 1971); Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (1971); Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (1973); Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (1976) and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)—the latter is a useful introduction to Marxist criticism in general; Chris Bullock and David Peck, eds., Guide to Marxist Literary Criticism (1980); Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (1982); J. J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983); J. G Merquior, Western Marxism (1986); and the comprehensive survey, "Marxist Criticism," by Walter Cohen in Redrawing the Boundaries, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (1992). Various essays by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak assimilate Marxist concepts both to deconstruction and to the viewpoint of feminist criticism; see, for example, her "Displacement and the Discourse of Women," in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Mark Krupnick (1983). For a sharp critique of recent theorists of Marxist criticism, see Frederick Crews, "Dialectical Immaterialism," in Skeptical Engagements (1986); also Richard Levin, "The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism," in Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling, eds., After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, 1993. Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), write a poststructuralist challenge to the "master narrative" of Marxist theory.

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Reader Response Theory

     Reader-Response Criticism does not designate any one critical theory, but a focus on the process of reading a literary text that is shared by many of the critical modes, American and European, which have come into prominence since the 1960s. Reader-response critics turn from the traditional conception of a work as an achieved structure of meanings to the ongoing mental operations and responses of readers as their eyes follow a text on the page before them. In the more drastic forms of such reader-response criticism, matters that had been considered by critics to be features of the work itself (including narrator, plot, characters, style, and structure, as well as meanings) are dissolved into an evolving process, consisting primarily of diverse kinds of expectations and the violations, deferments, satisfactions, and restructurings of expectations, in the flow of a reader's experience. Reader-response critics of all theoretical persuasions agree that, at least to some considerable degree, the meanings of a text are the "production" or "creation" of the individual reader, hence that there is no one "correct" meaning for all readers either of the linguistic parts or of the artistic whole of a text. Where these critics importantly differ is (1) in their view of the primary factors that shape a reader's responses; (2) in the place at which they draw the line between what is "objectively" given in a text and the "subjective" responses of an individual reader; and as a result of this difference, (3) in their conclusion about the extent, if any, to which a text controls, or at least "constrains," a reader's responses, so as to authorize us to reject at least some readings as misreadings, even if, as almost all reader-response critics assert, we are unable to demonstrate that any one reading is the correct reading. 

     The following is a brief survey of some of the more prominent forms of reader-response criticism: 

The contemporary German critic Wolfgang Iser develops the phenomenological analysis of the reading process proposed by Roman Ingarden, but whereas Ingarden had limited himself to a description of reading in general, Iser applies his theory to the analysis of many individual works of literature, especially prose fiction. (For Ingarden, see phenomenology and criticism.) In Iser's view the literary text, as a product of the writer's intentional acts, in part controls the reader's responses, but always contains (to a degree that has greatly increased in many modern literary texts) a number of "gaps" or "indeterminate elements." These the reader must fill in by a creative participation with what is given in the text before him. The experience of reading is an evolving process of anticipation, frustration, retrospection, reconstruction, and satisfaction. Iser distinguishes between the implied reader, who is established by the text itself as one who is expected to respond in specific ways to the "response-inviting structures" of the text, and the "actual reader," whose responses are inevitably colored by his or her accumulated private experiences. In both cases, however, the process of the reader's consciousness constitutes both the partial patterns (which we ordinarily attribute to objective features of the work itself) and the coherence, or unity, of the work as a whole. As a consequence, literary texts always permit a range of possible meanings. The fact, however, that the author's intentional acts establish limits, as well as incentives, to the reader's creative additions to a text allows us to reject some readings as misreadings. (For an application of phenomenological analysis to the history of ever-altering reader-responses to a given text, see reception-theory.) 

     French structuralist criticism, as Jonathan Culler has said in Structuralist Poetics (1975), "is essentially a theory of reading" which aims to "specify how we go about making sense of texts" (pp. viii, 128). As practiced by critics such as Culler in the course of his book, such criticism stresses literary conventions, codes, and rules which, having been assimilated by competent readers, serve to structure their reading experience and so make possible, at the same time as they impose constraints on, the partially creative activity of interpretation. The structuralist Roland Barthes, however, in his later theory encouraged a mode of reading that opens the text to an endless play of alternative meanings. And the poststructuralist movement of deconstruction is a theory of reading that subverts the structuralist view that interpretation is in some part controlled by linguistic and literary codes, and instead proposes a "creative" reading of any text as a play of "differences" that generate innumerable and mutually contradictory, but "undecidable" meanings. 

     American proponents of reader-response types of interpretive theory often begin by rejecting the claim of the American New Criticism that a literary work is a self-sufficient object invested with publicly available meanings, whose internal features and structure should be analyzed without "external" reference to the responses of its readers (see affective fallacy). In radical opposition to this view, these newer critics turn their attention exclusively to the reader's responses; they differ greatly, however, in the factors to which they attribute the formation of these responses. 

     David Bleich, in Subjective Criticism (1978), undertakes to show, on the basis of classroom experiments, that any purportedly "objective" reading of a text, if it is more than an empty derivation from theoretical formulas, turns out to be based on a response that is not determined by the text, but is instead a "subjective process" determined by the distinctive personality of the individual reader. In an alternative psychoanalytic analysis of reading, Norman Holland accounts for the responses of a reader to a text by recourse to Freudian concepts (see psychoanalytic criticism). The subject matter of a work of literature is a projection of the fantasies—engendered by the interplay of unconscious needs and defenses—that constitute the particular "identity" of its author. The individual reader's "subjective" response to a text is a "transactive" encounter between the fantasies projected by its author and the particular defenses, expectations, and wish-fulfilling fantasies that make up the reader's own identity. In this transactive process the reader transforms the fantasy content, "which he has created from the materials of the story his defenses admitted," into a unity, or "meaningful totality," which constitutes the reader's particular interpretation of the text. There is no universally determinate meaning of a work; two readers will agree in their interpretation only insofar as their "identity themes" are sufficiently alike to enable each to fit the other's re-creation of a text to his or her own distinctive responses. 

     In his theory of reading, Harold Bloom also employs psychoanalytic concepts; in particular, he adapts Freud's concept of the mechanisms of defense against the revelation to consciousness of repressed desires to his own view of the process of reading as the application of "defense mechanisms" against the "influence," or threat to the reader's imaginative autonomy, of the poet whose text is being read. Bloom applies Freudian concepts in a much more complex way than Holland; he arrives, however, at a parallel conclusion that there can be no determinate or correct meaning of a text. All "reading is. . . misreading"; the only difference is that between a "strong" misreading and a "weak" misreading. See anxiety of influence. 

     Stanley Fish is the proponent of what he calls affective stylistics. In his earlier writings Fish represented the activity of reading as one that converts the spatial sequence of printed words on a page into a temporal flow of experience in a reader who has acquired a "literary competence." In following the printed text with his eye, the reader makes sense of what he has so far read by anticipating what is still to come. These anticipations may be fulfilled by what follows in the text; often, however, they will turn out to have been mistaken. But since, according to Fish, "the meaning of an utterance" is the reader's "experience—all of it," and the reader's mistakes are "part of the experience provided by the author's language," these mistakes are an integral part of the meaning of a text. (See "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," published in 1970 and reprinted with slight changes in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature, 1974, and in Is There a Text in This Class? 1980.) Fish's analyses of large-scale literary works were designed to show a coherence in the kinds of mistakes, constitutive of specific types of meaning-experience, which are effected in the reader by the text of John Milton's Paradise Lost, and by various essayists and poets of the seventeenth century. 

     Fish's early claim was that he was describing a universal process of the competent reading of literary texts. In later publications, however, he introduced the concept of interpretive communities, each of which is composed of members who share a particular reading "strategy," or "set of community assumptions." Fish, in consequence, now presented his own affective stylistics as only one of many alternative modes of interpretation, which his earlier writings were covertly attempting to persuade his readers to adopt. He also proposed that each communal strategy in effect "creates" all the seemingly objective features of the text itself, as well as the "intentions, speakers, and authors" that we may infer from the text. The result is that there can be no universal "right reading" of any text; the validity of any reading, however obvious it may seem to a reader, will always depend on the assumptions and strategy of reading that he or she happens to share with other members of a particular interpretive community. Fish's claim is that all values, as well as meanings, of a text are relative to the concept or scheme of a particular interpretive community; furthermore, that such conceptual schemes are "incommensurable," in that there is no standpoint, outside of any interpretive community, for translating the discourse of one community into that of another, or for mediating between them. (See Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, 1980; and for a concise exposition of philosophical critiques of Fish's claims for interpretive relativism and incommensurability, James Battersby, Reason and the Nature of Texts, 1996.) In a later book, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989), Fish analyzes, and defends, the role of the professional "interpretive community" of academic critics in literary studies; he also extends his views of literary interpretation into the domain of legal interpretation. 

     Since the early 1980s, as part of a widespread tendency to stress cultural and political factors in the study of literature, reader-response critics have increasingly undertaken to "situate" a particular reading of a text in its historical setting, in the attempt to show the extent to which the responses that constitute both the interpretation and evaluation of literature have been determined by a reader's ideology and by built-in biases about race, class, or gender. See Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Nanative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, 1987; and for feminist emphasis on the male biases that affect the responses of readers, Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (1978); and Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio Schweikart, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (1986). 

     A survey of a number of reader-response theories of criticism is included in Steven Mailloux's own contribution to this mode in Interpretive Conventions (1982); another survey from the point of view of deconstructive theory is Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism (1987). Anthologies of diverse reader-response essays: Susan Suleiman and Inge Crossman, eds., The Reader in the Text (1980); Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism (1980). Important early instances of a criticism that is focused on the reader: Walter J. Slatoff, With Respect to Readers (1970); Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978); Umberto Eco, The Role of Reader (trans., 1979). 

     In addition to the titles mentioned in this essay, the following are prominent exemplars of reader-response criticism: Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" (1967) and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972); Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968) and Five Readers Reading (1975); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978). For critiques of Fish's "affective stylistics": Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (1981); Eugene Goodheart, The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism (1984); M. H. Abrams, "How to Do Things with Texts," in Doing Things with Texts (1989).

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

The novel

     The credit for having written the first English novel of character, or "psychological novel," is almost unanimously given to Samuel Richardson for his Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Pamela is the story of a sentimental but shrewd young woman who, by prudently safeguarding her beleaguered chastity, succeeds in becoming the wife of a wild young gentleman instead of his debauched servant girl. The distinction between the novel of incident and the novel of character cannot be drawn sharply; but in the novel of incident the greater interest is in what the protagonist will do next and on how the story will turn out; in the novel of character, it is on the protagonist's motives for what he or she does, and on how the protagonist as a person will turn out. On twentieth-century developments in the novel of character see Leon Edel, The Modem Psychological Novel (rev., 1965).

     Pamela, like its greater and tragic successor, Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48), is an epistolary novel; that is, the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of letters. Later novelists have preferred alternative devices for limiting the narrative point of view to one or another single character, but the epistolary technique is still occasionally revived—for example, in Mark Harris' hilarious novel Wake Up, Stupid (1959) and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982). See Linda Kauffman, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (1992)

-Abrams, M. H. (1999). A glossary of literary terms (7th ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

To download  Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, click here.

To download Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding, click here: vol 1 & vol 2.

To download A Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams, click here.

Glossary: Poetic Foot

• Foot: The basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic meter. A foot usually contains one stressed syllable and at least one unstressed syllable. The standard types of feet in English poetry are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic (two unstressed syllables).

• Iamb: A metrical foot consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The words “unite” and “provide” are both iambic. It is the most common meter of poetry in English (including all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare), as it is closest to the rhythms of English speech. In Robert Frost’s “After Apple Picking” the iamb is the vehicle for the “natural,” colloquial speech pattern: 

"My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree 

Toward heaven still, 

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill 

Beside it, and there may be two or three 

Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. 

But I am done with apple-picking now. 

Essence of winter sleep is on the night, 

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off."

• Trochee: A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable. Examples of trochaic words include “garden” and “highway.” William Blake opens “The Tyger” with a predominantly trochaic line: “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright.” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is mainly trochaic.

• Dactyl: A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; the words “poetry” and “basketball” are both dactylic. Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is written in dactylic meter.

Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/foot

For another useful glossary on poetic foot, click here.