Framing Statement:
As an English major, literary criticism is inherent to my major. However, it is highly applicable in the world today as it fulfils the goals of the UNE English department as filling in for analytical skills, critical thinking, and the capacity to understand multiple perspectives, thus it is truly a key and informative course for all English majors to tackle.
Script:
Since the dawn of time, we have always had a need to communicate. As highly social beings, we communicate everyday through a variety of ways. It is inherent to the human experience. But in parallel, interpretation is required to make communication work. Without interpretation, communication is no more than a one-sided conversation. But also inherent in communication is an idea of theory, where one cannot say anything without having some form of specific idea and way of thinking, as that is the way we process things. Alongside that, each person who interprets has their own theories they work with, as their own thoughts will, to some degree, be different than the communicator. So when someone writes something there is inherently theory behind it, and when someone reads it there is theory behind it. Therefore, no reading or writing can ever be truly devoid of theory. Furthermore, theory is useful for interpreting things that we see and read, and can truly enhance everything we interpret in that way. That is the idea behind critical theory as it allows us to further understand the text that we are reading and trying to interpret. There are a plethora of different forms of critical theory, as there are many, many ways to work through a piece of writing, but I have selected two critical approaches highlighted in Robert Dale Parker’s book How to Interpret Literature that stand out to me in particular. The first theory put forward in the book is the theory of New Criticism. Now new criticism is an example of a theory that time has passed over. As Parker says, “new criticism is now the old criticism and the bogeyman that every later critical method defines itself against”. (Parker, Pg. 11) But in its time, new criticism was a fresh concept, as critical analysis in this way had not truly been articulated in this way yet. It was a revolution of writing. Prior to new criticism, writing was contextualized in regard to its history, looking at influences on the author and the construction of language before actually interpreting the piece as itself. New Criticism seeked to reshape that into a greater emphasis of the piece itself, adding more meaning to the text and laid down the very meaningful groundwork for literary interpretation today. For example, prior to new criticism, reading was simply about the merits and appreciation of the work, not so much about the criticism or pushback on the work. It was more or less taken at face value. But with the addition of the methods of new criticism, an emphasis was placed more on dissection of the work as opposed to merely looking for an overarching lesson in it, seeking to look at work in isolation instead of more in context. But inherently, it is a challenge to isolate a piece of work entirely from its influences and meaning, and that’s where the ideas of new criticism started to give. For example, a piece that truly irked new critics was the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats. While most of the poem can indeed be left up for critics to analyze in a vacuum in a sense, the last lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” caused new critics to grow upset. Why was there a lesson in a piece otherwise devoid of lesson? Another piece that could be similarly viewed this way would be The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a tragedy about triumph, loss, and unfulfilled hearts and lives ends with the statement “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Once more, a lesson-like statement “ruins” a piece full of interpretation. But if a simple lesson derails the entire process of criticism, then clearly the line of criticism is not willing to acknowledge certain aspects of the world that are taught without interpretation. Moving along, another line of criticism that is now often seen as outdated and unevolved is the line of criticism known as Structuralism, but this concept laid the groundwork for future criticisms to such a degree that Parker admits that “it is often hard to tell where structuralism ends and many of the later methods begin.” (Parker, Pg. 43)As opposed to new criticism’s view of looking at this in isolation, structuralism seeked to view things in comparison to other concepts, allowing one to view things in the way one might view up from down, warm from chilly and so on. Therefore, it is more about the concepts creating themselves as structuralism has a deep basis in the idea of the “death of the author”, or that no author can truly create all the ideas themselves, merely putting together the bits and pieces pre-established by ideas before them. With this structuralist lens, we are able to look at all literature and determine what it is exactly trying to get at, but also where it breaks the mold of those same conventions that all pieces of literature are bound to in one way or another. In the Sherlock Holmes novel The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton by none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, we read along as Sherlock Holmes uses his detective skills and chance encounters to determine the solution, but the twist is that Holmes and Watson observe the murder of Milverton, but choose not to act on it. In fact, when asked to help on the case of the man’s murder, Holmes replies that his “sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim” and refuses to take the case. (Doyle, Pg. 10) When one views this with an original structuralist lens, one finds that the simple binary comparisons are lacking. So, the structuralist position evolved to figure out how to deal with the complexities of the real literature difficulties that accompany these challenges. Personally, I do believe that, while new criticism structurally helps one interpret all literature, the evolution of these ideas found in structuralism is more applicable outside of class, as it furthers the idea of how things can be viewed in parallel to each other, and where conventional molds do get broken to recontextualize that as well. Through all these readings I have put forward, there are a plethora of different ways to define, criticize, and re-examine everything that has been and ever could be written. Even if one were to write simply the word “mortgage” alone on a page, there may be no context provided with it but there was an idea that went into that, and therefore there is theory and criticism behind writing the word “mortgage” alone on a page. Whether we like it or not, theory is inherent to communication, and is therefore inherent in every piece of reading and writing, and this has certainly been taught throughout this course to the extent where it appears to be a logical certainty to me.
Podcast itself:
Works Cited:
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton. Miniaturbuchverlag Leipzig, 2017.
Keats, John, et al. Ode on a Grecian Urn. Editions Koch, 2003.
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. Langara College, 2022.
West, Clare, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. Oxford University Press, 2013.
