Category: English 206 (Page 1 of 2)

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.

He complains

at my scent and does not think

I comprehend, but I speak

English. I speak Dutch. I speak

a little French as well, and

languages Monsieur Cuvier

will never know have names.

The fact behind these lines is that she is not only as smart as him, but even smarter, but he treats her like an animal. How can language be used a device to create differences and false superiorities between groups of people?

For the library assignment, I chose to study Elizabeth Bishop, and the different analysis and critique of her work we can find in our own library. The first piece I selected, called Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature by Angus Clearhorn highlights the relationship that Elizabeth Bishop had to music, and how that influenced her work. The author goes on to write about how, from the sounds of the sea to Brazilian sambas, Elizabeth Bishop’s works were full of sound, most importantly the sound above all else being the voice of not only the poet, but of the reader as well. This analysis of her work helps one understand the rhythm of her poetry, and even why she rhymes when she does. The second piece I discovered was called Elizabeth Bishop and Translation by Mariana Machova, where the author wrote on the impact that literal translation from one language to another can affect a text, as well as the meaning behind the kind of language Bishop uses in her text. Machova results in the conclusion translation is adaption of themes and words, but also that a certain type of poetry can be analyzed through translation, providing a unique outlook as Machova pushes back on the idea that all writing is, in essence, translation from the mind to words, as she feels that is best left to philosophy. Next, in Elizabeth Bishop and the New Deal: Queer Poetics and the Welfare State in Key West. by Eric Strand, he states that Bishop highlighted the role of a poet in society, as well as reimagining the poet’s relationship with the national government, concluding that, had Bishop been able to publish a certain volume of Florida poems titled Bone Key, that those writings might have been some of the strongest support for Roosevelt’s New Deal by any writer of the time, a fascinating fact that truly pulls back the mist on Bishop’s life and opinions. In Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore : The Psychodynamics of Creativity by Joanne Feit Diehl is a very interesting dive into the so-called literary mother of Bishop in Marianne Moore, and how she had a remarkably complex relationship with Moore ranging between envy and gratitude, further highlighting how Moore not only influenced her writing but her thinking as well. The book Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop by Anne Stevenson quite literally looks at five pieces by Elizabeth Bishop, and then critically analyses each one, as well as providing both a timeline of her life as well as maps of the regions she lived in, truly helping illustrate a good understanding of her life.

Sources Cited

Cleghorn, Angus. Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature. Palgrave Pivot, 2019.

Diehl, Joanne Feit. Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore: The Psychodynamics of Creativity. Princeton University Press, 1993.

MACHOVA, MARIANA. Elizabeth Bishop and Translation. LEXINGTON Books, 2019.

Stevenson, Anne. Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop. Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2006.

Strand, Eric. “Elizabeth Bishop and the New Deal: Queer Poetics and the Welfare State in Key West.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 68, no. 2, 2022, pp. 199–224., https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-9808104.

From the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, the final line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”(Pgh. 5, Lns. 9-10) has made many a critic confused, annoyed, and even disappointed, for in this poem otherwise devoid of a lesson, there is one large, encompassing statement tacked right on the end, to provide closure for the whole piece. For the new critics, that was unacceptable. But that is where Cleaneth Brooks steps in. In the piece Keat’s Sylvan historian by Cleaneth Brooks, he attempts to redefine those final lines into a more substantial statement as opposed to a simply a blanket lesson with no true deeper significance. For example, he clearly states that perhaps the meaning behind these lines does not and can not be simply defined, as the “very ambiguity of the statement…ought to warn us against insisting very much on the statement in isolation, and to drive us back to a consideration of the context in which the statement was set.” (Pg. 141) However, he goes on to write that that does not necessarily mean that by pouring over the writings of Keats we will find the answer to the last lines, as “our specific question is not what did Keats the man perhaps want to assert here about the relation of beauty and truth; it is rather: was Keats the poet able to exemplify that relation in this particular poem”, can its true meaning really be found? (Pg. 141) As Brooks goes on to articulate, one could examine the urn as merely a character, and compare the lines “spoken” by the urn as similar to “Ripeness is all”, the closing lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear, or perhaps the urn, or sylvan historian, is reciting ideas that “may be characterized as ‘tales’-not formal history at all” and as such merely stories that aren’t meant to be taken deeper at all. (Pg. 143) He goes on to conclude the piece by proposing that perhaps, “best of all, we might learn to distrust our ability to represent any poem adequately by paraphrase”. (Pg. 152) As he says, such a distrust is healthy, and truly since one can’t exactly find one solid conclusion from this poem, perhaps its greatest meaning is in its ability to convey a vast unknown, but not just any unknown where one can hunt for the answers, but an unknown that can never be known. After reading Brook’s piece, one could think, “how does this guy’s input help? Why do I need his opinion? I can do critical analysis myself.” While it’s true one can draw whatever interpretation one wants from Keats’ poem, one not only gets a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of this poem by looking at another perspective, but a deeper understanding of how one analyses not only poetry but literature as a whole, creating a more expansive reservoir of knowledge and analysis than one had prior to reading this piece, thus shaping our thinking to grow as opposed to hold stagnant as to where we are in the moment.

“hope—a new constellation waiting for us to map it, waiting for us to name it—together” That is a truly powerful and enlightening way to look at a better future, as not only something we can obtain, but moreover something that is waiting for us to simply realize it. How do the themes of the two inaugural poems compare and contrast?

“Because being American is more than a pride we inherit” As the poem goes on further to describe the complexities of America, this line stuck out because so often we think of America into a few, boiled down things that are easy to think about, not the baggage with it. What does it truly mean to be an “American”?

“But how could Arthur go, clutching his tiny lily, with his eyes shut up so tight and the roads deep in snow?” Here, the teller can’t quite understand that Arthur is dead, and is worried about the practical nature of his “passing on”. How can an author capture the grieving process of someone other than themselves, especially someone’s process so complicated such as a child’s?

“My sympathies are with the criminals
rather than with the victim, and I will not handle
this case” This statement by Sherlock Holmes really changes the way one thinks about the stereotypical “Sherlock Holmes” story, and makes one remember that he is supposed to be a real person, not simply a stereotype or one dimensional figure. How does it change the idea of a detective novel, if the detective sympathizes with the killer?

“Ah, happy, happy boughs! that leaves cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu” It speaks to the frozen nature of the urn, how the seasons will never change upon it nor the leaves drop. What deeper meaning could be behind the usage of Spring as the season here?

“Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody. As for her letters, they were all bills.” It is an incredibly powerful statement, how she has cut herself off entirely from all other people, and her only relations are her bills, and while appears sad, she may have fully intended for it to be that way. What is exactly meant by “perfectly” here?