Concepte literare

~subiecte examen~

1. Defamiliarization and Formalism

Formalism:
- The study of art by analyzing and comparing form and style – the way objects are made and
their purely visual aspects
- Formalists claim that everything necessary to comprehending a work of art is contained within
the work of art
- The context for the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background and
the life of the artist, its conceptual aspect is considered to be of secondary importance
- Formalist currents gave identity and authenticity to the study of literature
There are 2 aspects of imagery:
- imagery as a practical means of thinking. as a means of placing objects within categories
- imagery as poetic, as a means of reinforcing an impression
Poetic imagery is:
- a means of creating the strongest possible impression
- only one of the devices of poetic language
Defamiliarization
- As our perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.
- The purpose of art is to transmit the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are
known (to make the stone stony)
- The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the
difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception, is an aesthetic end in
itself and must be prolonged
- After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and
we know it. but we don't see it-hence we cannot say anything significant about it
- Defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found
- The purpose of an image is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception
of the object — "it creates a vision of the object". Examples: the sexual act in the Decameron:
"scraping out a barrel", "catching nightingales", a series of plots, for example in Afanasyev's
Intimate Tales the entire story of “The Shy Mistress” is based on the fact that an object is not
called by its proper name – it is a game of nonrecognition

2. The nature of literature for the Russian Formalists

- Russian formalism is a 20th-century school of literary criticism.
- Formalists sought to make their critical discourse more objective and scientific than that of
Symbolist criticism
- Formalists analyzed the way in which literature, especially poetry, was able to alter artistically
or "make strange" common language so that the everyday world could be "defamliarized."
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 - They stressed the importance of form and technique over content and looked for the
specificity of literature as an independent verbal art.
- It attempted a scientific description of literature (especially poetry) as a special use of language
with observable features.
- Literature was no longer seen as a 'reflection' of the world.
- Tolstoy seems to present things as if he himself saw them in their entirety and did not alter
them.
- He makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object.
- He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening
for the first time.
- In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names
corresponding parts of other objects.
- For example, in "Shame", Tolstoy 'defamiliarizes' the idea of flogging in this way: 'to strip
people who have broken the law, to hurl them on the floor, and to wrap on their bottoms with
switches' and to lash about on the naked buttocks'. The familiar act of flogging is made
unfamiliar by both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing
its nature.

3. The function of criticism in Russian Formalism

- Russian formalists studied the various functions of 'literariness', which is a way to distinguish
literary language from ordinary language.
- The perception of disharmony in a harmonious context is important in parallelism
- The purpose of parallelism, like the general purpose of imagery, is to transfer the usual
perception of an object into the sphere of a new perception – that is, to make a unique
semantic modification.
- In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic
distribution of words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark – that is, we find material
obviously created to remove the automatism of perception.
- The author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatised perception.
- A work is created artistically so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect
is produced through the slowness of the perception.
- As a result, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to speak, in its
continuity.

4. Vladimir Propp's notion of form in fairy tales

- Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by
whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale
- There are two distinct types of structural analysis in folklore.
- In the first type, the structure of a folkloristic text is described following the chronological
order of the linear sequence of elements in the text as reported from an informant.

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 - The other type seeks to describe the pattern (usually based upon a binary principle of
opposition) which supposedly underlines the folkloristic text. The elements are taken out of
the given order and are regrouped in one or more analytic schema (paradigm)
- The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited.
- A tale often attributes identical actions to various characters
- A series of functions that provide structure to the story
- The sequence of events has its own laws.
- The short story too has similar laws as do organic formations – the theft cannot take place
before the door is forced
- The tale has its own entirely particular and specific laws.
- The sequence of elements is strictly uniform – freedom within this sequence is restricted by
very narrow limits which can be exactly formulated.
- The sequence of functions is always identical.

5. M. Bakhtin's theory of novelistic discourse

Five different stylistic approaches to novelistic discourse may be observed:
a) The author’s portions alone in the novel are analyzed, that is, only direct words of the author
more or less correctly isolated — an analysis constructed in terms of the usual, direct poetic
methods of representation and expression (metaphors, comparisons, lexical register, etc)
b) Instead of a stylistic analysis of the novel as an artistic whole, there is a neutral linguistic
description of the novelist's language.
c) In a given novelist's language, elements characteristic of this particular literary tendency are
isolated (be it Romanticism, Naturalism, Impressionism, etc).
d) What is sought in the language of the novel is examined as an expression of the individual
personality, that is, language is analyzed as the individual style of the given novelist.
e) The novel is viewed as a rhetorical genre and its devices are analyzed from the point of view of
their effectiveness as rhetoric.
- These works have the effect of covering up the major stylistic lines determined by the
development of the novel as a unique genre.
- The image of another's language and outlook on the world is typical of the novel.
- Language in the novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation.
Novelistic discourse is always criticizing itself.
- Bakhtin discusses the idea of parody. He spends a great deal of time going over the origin of
parody and its varying roles, all to conclude that the novel allowed the author to examine
language from "the point of view of a potentially different language and style."
- The classical greek trilogies followed by comedy
- The coexistence of several language, discourses
- Under conditions of the novel every direct word is made into an object, the word itself
becomes a delimited image, one that quite often appears ridiculous in this framed condition.

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 - The novel senses itself on the border between the completed, dominant literary language and
the extraliterary languages that know heteroglossia (the presence of two or more voices or
expressed viewpoints in a text or other artistic work)
- The novel either serves to further the centralizing tendencies of a new literary language in the
process of taking shape or — on the contrary — the novel fights for the renovation of an
antiquated literary language.

6. E.M. Forster's concepts regarding novels

- Pseudo-scholarship is the respect paid by ignorance to learning.
- That kind of scholar classes books before he has understood or read them: Classification by
chronology (ex: books written after or before 1848, the novel in the reign of Queen Anne, the
pre-novel, the novel of the future etc.), by subject matter ( ex: The literature of Inns beginning
with Tom Jones, The literature of Women's Movement beginning with Shirley. The literature of
Desert Islands – Robinson Crusoe, novels relating to industrialism, aviation, the weather etc.)
- What a pseudo-scholar says may be accurate, but all is useless because he is moving round books
instead of through them; he either has not read them or cannot read them properly.
- The novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
- The story is the fundamental aspect without which a novel could not exist, it is the highest factor
common to all novels.
- It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence and also the simplest and lowest of
literary organisms (novels).
- Qua story can only have one merit – it makes the audience want to know what happens next and
it can only have one fault — that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.
- People: we are concerned with the characters in their relation to the plot, the moral, their fellow
characters, atmosphere etc.
- We shall no longer expect them to coincide as a whole with daily life, only to parallel it.
We may divide characters into flat and round:
- Flat characters may be called "humorous"(17th c.) types or caricatures. They are easily
recognized whenever they come in by the reader's emotional eye. They are also easily
remembered by the reader, because they are not changed by the circumstances.
- Flat people are not in themselves as big achievements as round ones and they are best when they
are comic. A serious or tragic flat character is apt to be a bore.
- The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. It never
surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. By using it
sometimes alone, more often in combination with the other kind, the novelist achieves his task
of adaptation and harmonizes the human race with the other aspects of his work.
The point of view from which the story may be told:
- Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction says that the novelist can either describe the characters
from outside (as an impartial or partial onlooker) or he can assume omniscience and describe
them from within; or he can place himself in the position of one of them etc.

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- But what does indeed matter is the power of the writer to make the reader accept what he says.
For instance, Dickens in Chapter 1 of Bleak House is omniscient, in Chapter 2 he is partially
omniscient and in Chapter 3 he is even more reprehensible because he goes straight across into
the dramatic method and inhabits a young lady. Bleak house is all to pieces, but Dickens
bounces us so that we don't mind the shiftings of the view.
- The novelist must bounce us; that is vital.
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8. The nature of literature for New Criticism
- To make the poem or the novel the central concern of criticism has appeared to mean cutting it
loose from its author and from his life as a man.
- To emphasize the work seems to involve separating it from those who read it.
- The formalist critic is primarily concerned with the work itself. Speculation of the mental
processes of the author takes the critic away from the work into biography and psychology.
- The formalist critic makes two assumptions:
a) he assumes that the relevant part of the author's intention is what he actually got into his
work
b) he assumes an ideal reader ( instead of focusing on the varying spectrum of possible readings,
he attempts to find a central point of reference from which he can focus upon the structure
of the poem itself.)
- But there is no ideal reader.
- Finally, it is the strategy that all critics are forced to adopt: either we say that one person's
reading is as good as another's and equate those readings on a basis of absolute equality and
thus deny the possibility of any standard reading, or we take a lowest common denominator for
the various readings that have been made. These alternatives mean to split the ideal reader into
a group of ideal readers.

9. The purpose of criticism in New Criticism

- As consequences of the distinction just referred to, the formalist critic rejects two popular tests
for literary value:
a) the first proves the value of the work from the author's 'sincerity' (or the intensity of his
feelings as he composed it).
b) to trust someone's reading of a poem. But the intensity of his reaction has critical
significance only in proportion as we have already learned to trust him as a reader. Even so,
what it tells us is something about that person and nothing decisive about the poem.
- The critic may enjoy certain works very much, but a detailed description of his emotional state
on reading certain works has little to do with indicating to an interested reader what the work is
and how the parts of it are related.
- Not all criticism should be modest and analytic. The help which the critic gives to the practicing
artist can be only negative. His role is very modest.

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- A literary work can be analyzed in terms of the forces that have produced it, or it may be
manipulated as a force in its own right. It mirrors the past, it may influence the future. But the
reduction of a work of literature to its causes does not constitute literary criticism.
- Good literature is more than effective rhetoric applied to true ideas.

10. The Intentional Fallacy and the New Criticism

- “Intention” corresponds to what the author intended in a formula which more or less explicitly
has had wide acceptance.
- Intention = design or plan in the author's mind.
- It has obvious affinities for the author's attitude toward his work, the way he felt, what made
him write.
- A poem does not come into existence by accident.
- If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do.
- If the poet did not succeed, the critic must go outside the poem for evidence of an intention that
did not become effective in the poem.
- If a poem has a meaning and what the author says is relevant, then we can deduce the intention
of its poet.
- Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant.
- We ought to attribute the thoughts and attitude of the poem immediately to the dramatic
speaker and, if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference.
- It may be the case that an author intended to revise his work and write a better one, but it
follows that his former concrete intention was not his intention. “He's the man we were in
search of” says Hardy's rustic constable “and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For the
man we were in search of was not the man we wanted.”
- Allusiveness in poetry is one of several critical issues by which is illustrated the most abstract
issue of intentionalism.
- As a critical issue, allusiveness challenges and brings to light in a special way the basic premise
of intentionalism.
(The mermaid example)
- The mistake of claiming that you could know the author’s intention

11. The Affective Fallacy and New Criticism

- What the reader feels is not important; there could be 1000 interpretations
- The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins.
- The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it
does), a special case of epistemological skepticism, though usually advanced as if had stronger
claims than the overall forms of skepticism.
- It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem
and ends in impressionism and relativism.
- The outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of
specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.
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- Word means and what it suggests.
- Although the term 'quasi-dependent emotive meaning' is recommended by him for a kind of
emotive 'meaning' which is ‘conditional to the cognitive suggestiveness of a sign’, the main drift
of this argument is that ‘emotive’ meaning is something noncorrelative to and independent of
descriptive meaning. Thus, emotive 'meaning' is said to survive sharp changes in descriptive
meaning.
- Words with the same descriptive meaning are said to have quite different emotive 'meanings'.
For instance, 'Licence' and 'Liberty'. Stevenson believes to have in some contexts the same
descriptive meaning, but opposite emotive 'meanings'.
- Examples of affective theory: Plato's feeding and watering of passions, Aristotle's counter-theory
of catharsis, the infection theory of Tolstoy, the laughter theory of Max Eastman etc.
- An even more advanced grade of affective theory is that of hallucination. At this form of affective
theory is the least theoretical in detail, has the least content and makes the least claim on critical
intelligence, so, it is not a theory but a fiction or a fact – of no critical significance.
- The affective critic is today actually able to measure the “psychogalvanic reflex” of persons
subjected to a given moving picture: Herbert J. Muller in Science and Criticism points out that
'Students have sincerely reported an emotion at the mention of the word 'mother', although a
galvanometer indicated no bodily change whatever. They have also reported no emotions at the
mention of 'prostitute', although the galvanometer gave a definite kick'.
(Tennyson's 'Tears, idle tears' example. pg 23)
- The critic whose formulations lean to the emotive and the critic whose formulations lean to the
cognitive will in the long run produce a vastly different sort of criticism.
- The more specific the account of the emotion induced by a poem, the more nearly it will be an
account of the reasons for emotion, the poem itself, and the more reliable it will be as an
account of what the poem is likely to induce in other – sufficiently informed – readers. It will in
fact supply the kind of information which will enable readers to respond to the poem.
- The emotions correlative to the objects of poetry become a part of the matter dealt with
presented in their objects and contemplated as a pattern of knowledge.
- Poetry is a way of fixing emotions or making them more permanently perceptible when objects
have undergone a functional change from culture to culture or when they have lost emotive
value with the loss of immediacy. For instance, the murder of Duncan in Macbeth has become an
object of strongly fixed emotive value because of its symbols (the hoarse raven, the dagger in the
air, the bloody hands etc).
- Certain objects partly obscured in one age wax into appreciation in another, and partly through
the efforts of the poet. They do not arrive out of nothing.
(The pathos of Shylock example. pg 24)

12. The nature of literature for Structuralism

- Poetics deals primarily with the question, What makes a verbal message a work of art?

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- Because the main subject of poetics is the differentia specifica (specific differences) of verbal art
in relation to other arts and in relation to other kinds of verbal behavior, poetics is entitled to
the leading place in literary studies.
- Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with
pictorial structure.
- Since linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral
part of linguistics.
- Structuralists reconstructed the whole of literature as a system of signs and codes
- Structure is the basic principle of construction and it becomes the main object of investigation
- It is characteristic of structuralists to refer to the totality of literary texts and emphasize the co-
mentions which underlie all of them rather than choose as objects of investigation particular
works.

13. The function of criticism in structuralism

- Roman Jakobson was a promoter of modern structuralism.
- The terminological confusion of ‘literary studies’ with ‘criticism’ tempts the student of literature
to replace the description of essential values of a literary work by a subjective, critical verdict.
- The label 'literary critic' applied to an investigator of literature is as incorrect as ‘grammatical (or
lexical) critic’ would be applied to a linguist.
- Syntactic and morphologic research cannot be replaced by a normative grammar and likewise no
manifesto, imposing critics own tastes and opinions on creative literature, may act as substitute
for an objective scholarly analysis of verbal art.
- Structuralism underlines the importance of genre, that is, basic rules as how subjects are
approached about conventions of reading a theme, significance of language use etc.
- Through Structuralism, literature is seen as a whole. As literature is a system, no work of
literature autonomous; it is part of the larger structure of signification of the culture
- We can analyze in a feat the construction of meanings, through tropes or repetitions
- Structuralist literary critics attempt to identify the smallest meaningful units in a work and study
their ways of combination with a view to understanding them

14. The constitutive factors of a speech event for R. Jakobson

- Language must be investigated in all variety of its functions.
- In verbal communication the addresser (speaker) sends a message to the addressee (receiver)
- To be operative the message requires a context referred to, seizable by the receiver, and either
verbal or capable of being verbalized, a channel (oral communication, by telephone)
- It also requires a code fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee (in
other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message) — the language used.
- Finally, it requires a contact, a physical channel or psychological connection between the
addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication (vezi
schema din carte).
- Each of these factors determines a different function of language.
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- The verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function.
- The referential, 'denotative', 'cognitive' function is the leading task of numerous messages and
the auxiliary participation of the other function in such messages must be taken onto account by
the observant linguist. (3rd person)
- The emotive or 'expressive' function, focused on the addresser, aims a direct expression of the
speaker's attitude toward what he is speaking about. (1st person)
- It tends to produce an impression of a certain emotion whether true or feigned — therefore the
term 'emotive' has proved to be preferable to 'emotional'.
- This function is revealed in interjections and it flavours to some extent all our utterances, on
their phonic grammatical and lexical level. ( vezi exemplul cu actorul pg 25)
- The conative function is orientated toward the addressee and it finds its purest grammatical
expression in the vocative and imperative, which syntactically, morphologically and
phonemically deviate from other nominal and verbal categories (2nd person)
- The traditional model of language as elucidated particularly by Biller was confined to these three
functions – emotive, conative and referential – and the three apexes of this model: the 1st person
or the addresser, the 2nd person or the addressee and the 3rd person – someone or something
spoken of.
- There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong or to discontinue communication,
to check whether the channel works ("Hello, do you hear me?"), to attract or to confirm the
attention of the interlocutor. This set for contact or in Malinowski's terms phatic function, may
be displayed by a wasteful exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere
purport of prolonging communication.
- Phatic function is also first verbal function acquired by infants and it is typical of talking birds.
- There is a distinction between two levels of language :
a) object language speaking of objects.
b) metalanguage speaking of language.
- Metalanguage plays an important role in our everyday language. Whenever the speech is focused
on the code, there is a metalingual function (vezi exemplul, pg 26).
- Any process of language learning, in particular child acquisition of the mother tongue, makes
wide use of such metalingual operations.

15. The Poetic Function of language (Jakobson)

- Sonority provides certain meanings
- The set toward the message is the poetic function of language.
- Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining
function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent.
- In a sequence of two coordinate names, the precedence of the shorter name suits the speaker,
inexplicable for him, as a well-ordered shape of the message ( ex: Joan and Margery, not Margery
and Joan); ( vezi exemplul I like Ike, pg 27)
- When dealing to this function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the field of poetry and, on the
other hand, the linguistic scrutiny of poetry cannot limit itself to the poetic function.
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- The particularities of diverse poetic genres imply a differently ranked participation of the other
verbal functions along with the dominant poetic function.
- (vezi schema si exemplul cu copilul de la p.27)
- The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis
of combination.
- Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is
equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word
stress. as unstress equals unstress; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no
boundary
- For instance, without its two dactylic words the combination innocent bystander would hardly
become a hackneyed (banal) phrase; the symmetry of the three disyllabic verbs with an identical
initial consonant and identical final vowel added a splendour to the laconic victory message of
Caesar: 'Veni, vidi, vici'.
- Within a syllable the more prominent, nuclear syllabic part is opposed to the less prominent,
marginal, nonsyllabic phonemes. Any syllable contains a syllabic phoneme
- In Serbian epic songs, a manifestation of a tendency toward a uniform syllabic model is the
avoidance of closed syllables at the end of the line.
- The Italian syllabic verse shows a tendency to treat a sequence of vowels unseparated by
consonantal phonemes as one single metrical syllable.
- In some patterns of versification the syllable is the only constant unit of verse measure, and a
grammatical limit is the only constant line of demarcation between measured sequences,
whereas in other patterns syllables in turn are divided into more and less prominent and/or two
levels grammatical limits are distinguished in their metrical function, boundaries and syntactic
pauses
- Except for the varieties of the so-called 'vers libre' that are based on conjugate intonations and
pauses only, any meter uses the syllable as a unit of measure at least in certain sections of the
verse.
- In any accentual verse the contrast between higher and lower prominence is achieved by
syllables under stress versus unstressed syllables.
- In the quantitative ('chronemic') verse, long and short syllables are mutually opposed as more
and less prominent. This contrast is usually carried by a syllable nuclei, phonemically long and
short.
- In the Chinese metrical tradition the level tones prove to be opposed to the reflected tones as
long, tonal peaks of syllables to short ones, so that verse is based on the opposition of length and
shortness.
- The verse design is embodied in verse instances. Usually the free variation of these instances is
denoted by the rhythm.
- No doubt, verse is primarily a recurrent ‘figure of sound’
- In poetry any sequence of semantic units strives to build an equation and also anything sequent
is a simile. Where similarity is super induced upon contiguity, any metonymy is slightly
metaphorical and any metaphor has a metonymical tint.
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- Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, a corollary feature of
poetry. Not only the message itself, but also its addresser and addressee become ambiguous.
- Besides the author and the reader there is the 'I' of the lyrical hero or of the fictional storyteller
and the 'you' or 'thou' of the alleged addressee of dramatic monologues and epistles.
- The supremacy of poetic function over referential function does not obliterate the reference but
makes it ambiguous.
- The capacity for reiteration whether immediate or delayed, the conversion of a message, into a
lasting thing represent an inherent property of poetry.
- In referential language the connection between signans (signifier) and signatum (signified) is
based on their codified contiguity which is often confusingly labelled 'arbitrariness of the verbal
sign'. (vezi exemplul de la pg 30)

16. + 17. The metaphoric and the metonymic pole (Jakobson)

- Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some disturbance either of the faculty for selection
and substitution or for combination and contexture.
- The former affliction involves a deterioration of metalinguistic operations while the latter
damages the capacity for maintaining the hierarchy of linguistic units.
- The relation of similarity is suppressed in the former and the relation of contiguity (asezare intr-
o sintagma) in the latter type of aphasia.
- Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder and metonymy to the contiguity disorder.
- The development of a discourse may take place in two different ways: one topic may lead to
another either through their similarity or through the contiguity
- The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic
way for the second.
- In normal verbal behavior both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will
reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality and verbal style, preference is
given to one of the two processes over the other.
- In a well known psychological test, children are confronted with some nouns and told to utter
the first verbal response that come into their heads. In this experiment the response is intended
either as a substitute for, or as a complement to the stimulus.
- In the latter case, the stimulus and the response together form proper syntactic construction,
most usually a sentence.
- These two opposite types of reaction have been labeled as substitutive and predicative.
- To the stimulus hut the response was burn out; another, is a poor, little house. Both reactions are
predicative, but the first creates a purely narrative context, while in the second there is a double
connection with the subject hut: on the one hand, a positional (namely syntactic) contiguity and
on the other hand, a semantic similarity.
- The same stimulus hut produced the following substitutive reactions: the tautology hut; the
synonyms cabin and howl; the antonym palace and the metaphors den and burrow
- The capacity of two words, to replace one another is an instance of positional similarity and in
addition, all these responses are linked to the stimulus by semantic similarity (or contrast)
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- Metonymical responses to the same stimulus, such as thatch, litter, or poverty, combine and
contrast the positional similarity with semantic comicality.
- Since on verbal level – morphemic, lexical, syntactic and phraseological – either of these two
relations (similarity and contiguity) can appear, an impressive range of possible configurations is
created. Either of the two gravitation poles may prevail.
- In Russian lyrical song metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the
metonymic way is preponderant.
- The metaphoric process is found in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism.
Metonymy is predominant in the so-called 'realistic' trend which belongs to an intermediary
stage between the decline of Romanticism and the rise of Symbolism and is opposed to both.
- The realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the
characters to the setting in space and time. For instance, in the scene of Anna Karenina's suicide
Tolstoi’s artistic attention is focused on the heroine's handbag.
- The alternative predominance of one or the other of these two processes confined to verbal art.
The oscillation occurs in sign systems other than language.
- A salient example from the history of painting is the manifestly metonymical orientation of
cubism, where the object is transformed into a set of synecdoches; the surrealist painters
responded with a patently metaphorical attitude.
- The bipolar structure of a language and, in aphasia, the fixation on one of these poles to the
exclusion of the other requires systematic comparative study.
- The retention of either of these alternatives in the two types of aphasia must be confronted with
the predominance of the same pole in certain styles, personal habits etc. (p. 33)
- The Russian novelist Gleb Ivanovic Uspenskij in the last year of his life suffered from a mental
illness involving a speech disorder. His first name, Gleb Ivanovic, for him split into two distinct
names designating two separate beings: Gleb was endowed with all his virtues, while Ivanovic
became the incarnation of his vices.
- The linguistic aspect of this split personality is the patient's inability to use two symbols for the
same thing, and is thus a similarity disorder. Therefore it is bound up with the metonymical
bent.
- He had a particular inclination for metonymy. The metonymical style in Uspenskij is determined
by the prevailing literary canon of his time, late 19th century 'Realism'.
- In an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive question is whether the symbols and the
temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic 'displacement' and
synecdochic 'condensation') or on similarity ( Freud's 'identification' and `symbolism'.)
- The principles underlying magic rites have been resolved by Frazer into two types: charms based
on the law of similarity (`homeopathic' or 'imitative') and those founded on association by
contiguity( 'contagious magic')
- Similarity in meaning connects the symbols of a metalanguage with the symbols of the language
referred to. It connects a metaphorical term with the term for which it is substituted.
- When constructing a metalanguage to interpret tropes, the researcher possesses more
homogenous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy easily defies interpretation.
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 Therefore nothing comparable to the rich literature on metaphor can be cited for the theory of
metonymy.
- The principle of similarity underlies poetry and the study of poetical tropes is directed toward
metaphor.
- Prose, on the contrary, is forwarded essentially by contiguity.

21. The nature of literature for archetypal criticism.

The monomyth: The Hero and the God
- The nuclear unit of the monomyth is the formula: separation-initiation-return: Prometheus
ascended to the heavens, stole fire from the gods and descended. Aenaneas went down into the
underworld, crossed the dreadful river of the dead, threw a sop to the three-headed watch doe
Cerberus, and conversed, at last, with the shade of his dead father. He returned through the
ivory gate to his work in the world.
- Whether presented in the vast images of the Orient, in the narratives of the Greeks or in the
legends of the Bible, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit
above described: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-
enhancing return.
- In the Orient there was Gautama Buddha and his wonderful teaching of the Good Law, in the
Occident there was the Decalogue of Moses.
- The Greeks referred fire to the world-transcending deed of Prometheus.
- The Romans referred the founding of their world-supporting city to Aeneas, following his
departure from fallen Troy and his visit to the dreadful underworld of the dead.
- Everywhere the really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to
the world and what happens in the interval of the hero's nonentity, so that lie comes back - as
one reborn and filled with creative power.
- The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts, frequently honored by
his society, unrecognized or disdained.
- He or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency (in fairy tales
could be the lack of a certain golden ring or in apocalyptic vision the life of the whole earth can
be represented as fallen)
- The hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic microcosmic triumph and the hero of a myth a
macrocosmic triumph.
- Whereas the former (the youngest or despised child becomes the master of extraordinary
powers) prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the
means for the regeneration of his society as a whole
- Popular tales represent the heroic action as physical; the higher religions show the deed to be
moral.
- The cosmogonic cycle is presented in the sacred writings of all the continents and it gives to the
adventure of the hero a new turn: now it appears that the dangerous journey was not a labor of
attainment, but of reattainment, not discovery, but rediscovery.

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- The myth and ritual pattern has the ability to change shape while retaining its potency
(adaptability).
- This is a reconstructed model of the basic ritual form:
1. The indispensable role of the divine king;
2. The combat between the god and the opposing power.
3. The suffering of the God:
4. The death of the God:
5. The resurrection of the God:
6. The symbolic recreation of the myth of creation:
7. The sacred marriage.
8. The triumphal procession:
9. The settling of destinies.
10. The dying-rising-God constitutes one illustration of the great cycle of birth, death and rebirth
- Instead of disappearing, our myths have become more and more obsessed, as literature is too,
with the hermeneutics of expression, with the linguistic limits to mythicity itself.
- Literature and myth must exist on a continuum, by 'virtue of their function as language: myth
tends to a literary sense of narrative form, and fictions aspire to the status of myth. Only a
theory of fictions can cope with the meaning of both mythological and novelistic plots.

22. The function of criticism in archetypal criticism.

The keys
- The archetypal critic delivered from the repression of time and finds the explanation of a given
work in things written later, as well as earlier than the original piece.
- The contemplation of the Archetype pushes the critic beyond semantics. he finds himself
involved in anthropology and depth psychology
- The heroic figures will help us understand the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations,
powers, vicissitudes and wisdom
- The hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us
all. (vezi exemplul de la pg. 68)
- Many tales isolate and greatly enlarge upon one or two elements of the full cycle (test motif,
flight motif, abduction of the bride). Others string a number of independent cycles into a single
series (as in the Odyssey).
- The changes rung on the simple scale of the monomyth defy description.
- Imported materials are revised to fit local landscape, custom or belief, and always suffer in the
process.
- Differing characters can become fused, or a single element can reduplicate itself and reappear
under many changes.
- The outlines of myths and tales are subject to damage. Archaic traits are generally eliminated or
subdued. In the numerous retellings of a traditional story, accidental or intentional dislocations
are inevitable.

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- We cannot study the genre without the help of the literary social historian, the literary
philosopher and for the archetype we need a literary anthropologist.

23. N. Frye’s concept of literature and criticism

- An archetype should be not only a unifying category of criticism, but itself a part of a total form
- The search for archetypes is a kind of literary anthropology concerned with the way that
literature is informed by pre-literary categories such as ritual, myth and folktale.
- The relation between these categories and literature is one of descent, as we find them
reappearing in the greatest classics.
- This inductive movement towards the archetype is a process of backing up, as it were, from the
structural analysis ( as we back up from a painting if we want to see the composition instead of
brushwork)
- The literary anthropologist who chases the source of the Hamlet legend from the pre-
Shakespeare play to Saxo, and from Saxo to nature myths, is not running away from
Shakespeare: he is drawing closer to the archetypal form which Shakespeare recreated.
- In human life a ritual seems to be something of voluntary effort (hence the magical element in
it) to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle.
- In ritual we may find the origin of narrative, because a ritual is a temporal sequence of acts in
which the conscious meaning or significance is latent; it can be seen by an observer, but is
largely concealed by the participators themselves.
- The myth is the central informing power that gives archetypal significance to the ritual and
archetypal narrative to the oracle.
- The myth is the archetype, though we should say myth only when referring to narrative and
archetype when speaking of significance.
- Myth constructs a central narrative around a figure who is partly the sun, partly vegetative
fertility and partly a god or archetypal human being. This is the central myth of literature in its
narrative aspect.
- The myth has 4 phases:
1. The dawn, spring and birth phase. Myths of the birth of the hero, of revival and resurrection,
of creation and of the defeat of the powers of darkness, winter and death. Subordinate
characters: the father and the mother. The archetype of romance and of the most
dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry.
2. The zenith, summer, and marriage or triumph phase. Myths of apotheosis, of the sacred
marriage and of entering into Paradise. Subordinate characters: the companion and the
bride. The archetype of comedy, pastoral and idyll.
3. The sunset, autumn and death phase. Myths of fall, of the dying god, of violent death and
sacrifice and of the isolation of the hero. Subordinate characters: the traitor and the siren.
The archetype of tragedy and elegy.

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 4. The darkness, winter and dissolution phase. Myths of the triumph of these powers; myths of
flood and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero. Subordinate characters: the ogre and
the witch .The archetype of satire.
- If we want to see this myth as a pattern of meaning also, we have to start with the workings of
subconscious, in the dream.
- The human cycle of waking and dreaming corresponds closely to the natural cycle of light and
darkness. There is an antithesis; it in daylight that man is really in the power of darkness, a prey
to frustration and weakness; it is in the darkness of nature that the `libido' or the conquering
heroic awakes.
- Hence art seems to have as its final cause the resolution of the antithesis, the mingling of the
sun and the hero, the realizing of a world in which the inner desire and the outward
circumstance coincide.

24. The archetype of romance

- associated with summer, because it is the culmination of life in the seasonal calendar
- the romantic genre culminates with the same sort of triumph, usually a marriage
- the tales are marked by extraordinarily persistent nostalgia and a search for some kind of
imaginative golden age in time or space – have virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines who
represent ideals
Plot:
- dangerous journey and minor adventures
- ritual death: crucial struggle, a battle in which the hero or his enemy must die
- the exaltation of the hero
The hero:
- is supposed to be right and virtuous
- sometimes shows signs of divinity and the enemy has demonic qualities
Phases of romance:
1. Complete innocence (the birth of the hero, a flood of water imagery)
2. Youthful innocence of inexperience (pastoral world, youthful hero)
3. Completion of an ideal (the hero destroys the monster)
4. Happy society resists change (the hero’s society is assaulted by his enemy but he protects it)
5. Reflective or idyllic view (experience and adventure is contemplated)
6. Society ceases to exist beyond contemplation (tales told)

25. The archetype of comedy

- In the comic vision the human world is a community, or a hero who represents the wish-
fulfillment of the reader: The archetype of images, of symposium, communion, order, friendship
and love
- There is also marriage or some equivalent consummation
- The animal world is a community of domesticated animals, usually a flock of sheep, or a lamb or
a dove: The archetype of pastoral images.
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- The vegetal world is a garden, drove or park, or a tree of life, a rose or lotus: The archetype of
Arcadian images such as that of Shakespeare's forest comedies.
- The mineral world is a city, one building or temple or one stone, normally a glowing precious
one: The archetype of geometrical images – the 'starlit dome' belongs here.
- The unformed world is a river, traditionally fourfold, which influenced the religious image of the
temperate body with its four humors.
- Associated with spring
- Revival, resurrection
- The defeat of winter and darkness

26. The archetype of tragedy

- In the tragic vision the human world is a tyranny or anarchy, or an individual or isolated man,
the deserted or betrayed hero, the harlot, witch or other varieties of Jung's "terrible mother".
- The animal world is seen in terms of beasts and birds of prey, wolves, vultures, serpents, dragons
- The vegetal world is a sinister forest like the one in Comus or at the opening of the Inferno or a
heath of wilderness or a tree of death.
- The mineral world is seen in terms of deserts, rocks and ruins, or of sinister geometrical images
like the cross.
- The unformed world is represented by the sea, as the narrative myth of dissolution is so often a
flood myth. The combination of the sea and beast images gives us the similar water-monsters.
- Both form and content of tragedy, its architecture as well as its ideology, closely parallel the
form and content of myth and ritual pattern.
- The tragic protagonist undergoes his suffering at an aesthetic distance and only in the minds of
his audience. You participate in a ritual but you are a spectator of a play
- The tragedy reconstitutes the myth and ritual pattern in terms of its own needs.
- The actual death of the God, the symbolic recreation of the myth of creation, the sacred
marriage and the triumphal procession are elements which have been eliminated from tragedy.
The structure of the tragic form:
- The tragic protagonist engages in a conflict with a representation of evil and darkness.
- A temporary defeat is inflicted on the tragic protagonist but after shame and suffering he
emerges triumphant as the symbol of light and good over darkness and evil
- Associated with autumn because it is the dying phase of the seasonal calendar and it parallels
the tragedy which is known for the “fall” or demise of the protagonist
- There comes the point when the evil which the protagonist would not do, he does, and the good
which he would, he does not. In this moment we are made aware that the real protagonist of the
tragedy is the order of God against which the tragic hero has rebelled. In this manner is the
pride, symbolized and revealed, and it is this hybris which vicariously purged from us by the
suffering of the tragic protagonist.
- In Hamlet, the myth and ritual elements have not been completely assimilated in the tragedy:
The suffering of the tragic protagonist is neither altogether deserved nor altogether understood

17
 by him, the rebirth is not quite inevitable nor necessary, and the settling of destinies in the
person of Fortinbras is somewhat forced and mechanical.
- The genuine sense of tragic loss is somewhat vulgarized into regret: Hamlet has been too-
fascinating.

27. The archetype of satire

- associated with winter because it is a ‘dark’ genre
- it is noted for its darkness, dissolution, the return of chaos and the defeat of the heroic figure
- parodies romance by applying romantic mythical forms to a more realistic content, which fits
them in unexpected ways
- presents a place where reality rather than ideology is dominant
- satire is militant irony, where moral norms are relatively clear
- there is a wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, and an object
of attack
- humor is founded on convention; it demands agreement that certain things, as a wife beating
her husband in a comic strip, are conventionally funny
- the satirist attacks an individual who is a member of a larger group

33. The nature of literature for psychoanalytical criticism

- the poem, as text, is represented or seconded by what psychoanalysis calls the psyche
- a poetic text is not a gathering of signs on a page, but it is a psychic battlefield upon which
authentic forces struggle for the only victory worth winning, the divinating triumph over
oblivion
- poems are not things but only words that refer to other words, and so on, and those words refer
to still other language
- any poem is an inter-poem, and any reading of a poem is an inter-reading
- a poem is not writing, but rewriting
- for Vico, poetic language is always and necessarily a revision of previous language
- every poet is belated, every poem is an instance of what Freud called ‘retroactive meaningfulness’
- every poet is in the position of being 'after the Event' in terms of literary language
- his art is necessarily an offering and so he strives for a selection, through repression, out of the
traces of the language of poetry
- Vico: poetry is born of our ignorance of causes — if any poet knows what causes his poem, then
he cannot write it, or at least will write it badly; he must repress the causes
- Poetry, when it aspires to strength, is necessarily a competitive mode, indeed an obsessive mode,
because poetic strength involves a self-representation that is reached only through trespass,
through crossing a daemonic threshold
- since poetry does not go back to a truly divine origin, it is always at work imagining its own
origin, or telling a persuasive lie about itself, to itself

18
- to say that a poem's true subject is the repression of the antecedent poem is not to say that the
later poem reduces to the process of that repression
- on a strict Freudian view, a good poem is a sublimation, and not a repression
- poems are not psyches, nor things, nor renewable archetypes
- poems are defensive processes in constant change, poems themselves are acts of reading
- Thomas Frosch: a poem is a fierce debate with itself, as well as with precursor poems
- a poem is a dance of substitutions, a constant breaking-of-the-vessels
- Each literary work implies, for the writer, an act of self-discovery
- writing does not mean simply to allow a rush of thoughts to flow onto the paper, it means to
construct oneself as the subject of these thoughts

34. The function of criticism in psychoanalytical criticism

- the object of psychoanalytic literary criticism is the psychoanalysis of the author or of a
particularly interesting character in a given work; the criticism is very similar to psychoanalysis
itself
- critics may view the fictional characters as a psychological case study, attempting to identify
such Freudian concepts as the Oedipus complex, Id, ego and superego, and so on, and
demonstrate how they influenced the thoughts and behaviors of fictional characters
- the concepts of psychoanalysis can be deployed with reference to the narrative or poetic
structure itself, without requiring access to the authorial (?) psyche
- like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions,
psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences and so forth within what may well be a disunified
literary work
- the author’s own childhood traumas, family life, conflicts, fixations and such will be traceable
within the behavior of the characters in the literary work
- but psychological material will be expressed individually, disguised or encoded (as in dreams)
through principles such as:
symbolism – the repressed object represented in disguise
condensation – several thoughts or persons represented in a single image
displacement – anxiety located onto another image by means of association

35. The relevance of dreamwork for the study of literature

- condensation in dreams: each element in the content of a dream is ‘overdetermined’ by material
in the dream-thoughts; it is not derived from a single element in the dream-thoughts, but may
be traced back to a whole number
- these elements may not necessarily be closely related to each other in the dream-thoughts
themselves
- a dream-element is the representative of all this disparate material in the content of the dream -
another side of the complicated relation between the content of the dream and the dream-
thoughts: just as connections lead from each element of the dream to several dream-thoughts, so
as a rule a single dream-thought is represented by more than one dream-element
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- condensation, together with the transformation of thoughts into situations (‘dramatization’), is
the most important and peculiar characteristic of the dream-thought
- psychoanalytic criticism argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious
desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author’s own
neuroses
- one may psychoanalyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed
that all such characters are projections of the author’s psyche
- the text represses its real (or latent) content behind obvious (manifest) content. The process of
changing from latent to manifest content is known as the dream work and involves operations of
concentration and displacement. The critic analyses the language and symbolism of the text to
reverse the process of the dream work and arrive at the underlying content
- in the case of complicated and confused dreams with which we are now concerned,
condensation and dramatization are alone enough to account for the whole of the impression
that we gain of the dissimilarity between the content of the dream and the dream-thoughts - we
have evidence of the operation of a third factor
- the whole of the dream content is derived from the dream-thoughts and almost all the dream
thoughts are represented in the dream-content
- what stands out boldly and clearly in the dream as its essential content must, after analysis, be
satisfied with playing an extremely subordinate role among the dream-thoughts
- what, on the evidence of our feelings, can claim to be the most prominent among the dream-
thoughts is either not present at all as ideational material in the content of the dream or is only
remotely alluded to in some obscure region of it
- in the course of the dream-work, the psychical intensity passes over from the thoughts and ideas
to which it properly belongs on to others which in our judgment have no claim to any such
emphasis (dream-displacement)
- we assume as a matter of course that the most distinct element in the manifest content of a
dream is the most important one: but in fact (owing to the displacement which has occurred) it
is often an indistinct element which turns out to be the most direct derivative of the essential
dream-thought
- what is called dream-displacement might equally be described as 'transvaluation of psychical
values'
- this work of displacement or transvaluation is performed to a very varying degree in different
dreams
- there are dreams which come about almost without any displacement: these are the ones which
make sense and are intelligible
- there are dreams in which not a single piece of the dream-thought has retained its own psychical
value, or in which everything that is essential in the dream-thoughts has been replaced by
something trivial
- the more obscure and confused a dream appears to be, the greater the share in its construction
which may be attributed to the factor of displacement

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36. The strata of the psyche in Freud
- the separation of the observing agency from the rest of the ego might be a regular feature of the
ego's structure
- the observing is only a preparation for judging and punishing
- another function of the observing agency is our conscience, that we regularly separate from our
ego and easily set over against it
- there is an independent agency, whose functions are the conscience and self-observation (an
essential preliminary to the judging activity of conscience), which is called the ‘super-ego’
The super-ego:
• Enjoys a certain degree of autonomy
• Follows its own intentions
• Is independent of the ego for its supply of energy
• It is a severe and cruel agency and it has changing relations to the ego
- the melancholic attacks — during a melancholic attack, the super-ego becomes over-severe,
abuses the ego, humiliates it, threatens it with punishments, reproaches it for actions in the
remotest past
- the super-ego applies the strictest moral standard to the ego which is at its mercy
- our moral sense of guilt is the expression of the tension between the ego and the super ego
- morality functions as a periodic phenomenon
- the ego and the super-ego are themselves unconscious
- large portions of the ego and the super-ego are unconscious — the individual knows nothing of
their contents
- there is an extensive and important field of mental life which is withdrawn from the ego's
knowledge so that the processes occurring in it have to be regarded as unconscious
- we have come to understand the term 'unconscious' in a topographical or systematic sense as
well
- we have come to speak of a 'system' of the preconscious and 'system' of the unconscious, of a
conflict between the ego and the system Uncs
- this mental province called the id
The id
• Is alien to the ego
• Is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality
• It can be described only as a contrast to the ego
• We approach it with analogies: we call it chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations
• It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts
• It has no organization
• It produces no collective will
• The logical laws of thought do not apply in the id
• Contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other
• There is no recognition of the passage of time and no alteration in its mental processes is produced
by the passage of time
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- we can characterize the ego by examining its relation to the most superficial portion of the
mental apparatus, which we describe as the system perceptual-conscious
- this system is turned towards the external world, it is the medium for the perceptions arising
from there
- it is the sense-organ of the entire apparatus; it is receptive not only to excitation from outside
but also to those arising from the interior of the mind
The ego:
• That portion of the id which was modified by the influence of the external world
• It is adapted for the reception of stimuli and as a protective shield against stimuli
• It has the task of representing the external to the id
• In accomplishing this function, it must observe the external world, lay down an accurate picture of
it and put aside what is an addition derived from internal sources of excitation
• It replaces the pleasure principle with the reality principle by adding a postponement between a
need and an action
- what distinguishes the ego from the id is a tendency to synthesis in its contents to a combination
and unification in its mental processes
- the ego develops from perceiving the instincts to controlling them
- the ego stands for reason and good sense, while the id stands for the untamed passions
- yet, from a dynamic point of view, the ego is weak: it has borrowed its energies from the id, it
must carry out the id's intentions. it fulfills its task by finding out the circumstances in which
those intentions can be best achieved
- the ego serves three severe masters (the external world, the super-ego and the id) and does what
it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another
- these claims are always divergent and often seem incompatible and this is why the ego often fails
in its task
- if it is hard pressed, the ego reacts by generating anxiety

37. The pleasure principle

- it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental
processes; if such a dominance existed, the majority of our mental processes would have to be
accompanied by pleasure or lead to pleasure, while universal experience contradicts any such
conclusion
- there exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but that tendency is
opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so the final outcome is not always in harmony
with the tendency towards pleasure
- Fechner: a tendency towards an aim does not imply that the aim is attained and, in general, the
aim is attainable only by approximations.
Circumstances that prevent the pleasure principle from being carried into effect:
a) from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the
external world, the pleasure principle is inefficient and even highly dangerous

22
b) under the influence of the ego's instincts of self-preservation the pleasure principle is replaced
by the reality principle
- the pleasure principle persists as a matter of work employed by the sexual instincts, which are
hard to 'educate' and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in
overcoming the reality principle.
38. The reality principle
- does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it demands and carries into
effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining
satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step towards pleasure
- the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle can only be made responsible
for a small number of unpleasurable experiences
Another occasion of the release of unpleasure is to be found in the conflicts and dissensions that
take place in the mental apparatus while the ego is passing through its development into more
highly composite organizations.
-almost all the energy with which all the apparatus is filled with arises from its innate instinctual
impulses
-these impulses are not allowed to reach the same phases of development
-some instincts, incompatible in their aims and demands with the others, are held back at lower
levels of psychical development and cut off from the possibility of satisfaction; if they still succeed,
as can easily happen with repressed sexual instincts, to a direct or to a substitutive satisfaction, that
event is seen by the ego as unpleasure.
- Supposing that all the organic instincts are conservative, acquired historically and tend towards
the restoration of an earlier state of things, the phenomena of organic development must be
attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences.
- elementary living entity would have had no wish to change and, if conditions remained the
same, it would do no more that repeat the same course of life
- every modification imposed upon the course of the organism's life is accepted by the
conservative organic instinct and stored up for further repetition
- those instincts are not forces tending towards change and progress, they are merely seeking to
reach an ancient goal both by old and new paths
- if we take as a truth that everything living dies for internal reasons (becomes inorganic once
again, that being the earlier state of things), then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of
life is death' and that 'inanimate things existed before living ones'
- the attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a certain
force and the tension resulted endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way, the first instinct came
into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state.
- for a long time, living substance was being constantly created and easily dying, until external
influences obliged the still surviving substance to make more complicated detours before
reaching its aim of death.

23
 - The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts as it is more especially on
guard against increases of stimulation from within, which would make the task of living more
difficult.
(materia organica nu are in ea instinctul de a se schimba. Orice schimbare e integrata in logica
organismului, aceea de a ramane constant; repeta mechanic experienta anterioara schimbarii; orice
non-viu tinde, pana la urma, tot la non-viu)

39. The Oedipus complex and the study of literature

- the complexity of the problem is due to two factors: the triangular character of the Oedipus
situation and the constitutional bisexuality of each individual
- at a very early age the boy develops an object-cathnexis (concentration of mental energy) for his
mother, which originally related to the mother's breast and is the prototype of an object-choice
on the anaclitic model
- the boy deals with his father by identifying himself with him
- for a time, these two relationships proceed side by side until the boy's sexual wishes in regard to
his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them; from this the
Oedipus complex originates
- his identification with his father then takes on a hostile coloring and changes into a wish to get
rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother
- an ambivalent attitude to his father and an object-relation of a solely affectionate kind to his
mother make up the content of the simple Oedipus complex in a boy
- along with the demolition of the Oedipus complex, the boy's object-cathexis of his mother must
be given up
- its place may he filled either with an identification with his mother or an intensification of his
identification with his father, the latter being more normal. In this way the dissolution of the
Oedipus complex would consolidate the masculinity in a boy's character
- the outcome of the Oedipus attitude in a little girl may be an intensification of her
identification with her mother, a result which will fix the child's feminine character
- these identifications do not introduce the abandoned object into the ego, but this alternative
outcome may also occur and it is easier to observe in girls than in boys
- a little girl, after she has relinquished her father as a love-object, will bring her masculinity into
prominence and identify herself with her father (that is, with the object that has been lost)
instead of with her mother, if the masculinity in her disposition is strong enough

40. The mirror stage and the study of cultural representations

- even though he is at an age when he is outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence,
the child can already recognize as such his own image in a mirror
- the recognition is indicated in the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebnis, which Köhler sees
as the expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of intelligence
- this act immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he
experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected
24
 environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates - the child's own
body and the persons and things around him
- this event can take place from the age of six months
- the mirror stage is understood as an identification: the transformation that takes place in the
subject when he sees an image (imago)
- this assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor
incapacity and nursling dependence, is an example of the symbolic matrix in which the I is
precipitated in a primordial form, before language restores to it its function as a subject
- this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction,
which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone or which will only rejoin the
coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptotically
- the moment in which the mirror-stage ends inaugurates the dialectic that will henceforth link
the I to socially elaborated situations
- this moment brings the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the
other and turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual impulse is a danger, even
though it should correspond to a natural maturation (the normalization of which is dependent
on a cultural mediation)
- he term primary narcissism (libidinal investment characteristic of that moment) throws light on
the dynamic opposition between this libido and the sexual libido
- there is an evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the
I, the aggressivity it releases in any relation to the other
- at the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any
function other than the utilitarian one, existentialism must be judged by the explanations it
gives of the subjective impasses that have resulted from it
• a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison
• a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any
situation
• a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the sexual relation
• a personality that realizes itself only in suicide
- these propositions are opposed by all our experience, in so far as it teaches us not to regard the
ego as centered on the perception-consciousness system or as organized by the reality principle
- our experience shows that we should start from the function of meconnaissonce that
characterizes the ego in all its structures
- if the Verneinung represents the patent form of that function, its effects will remain latent, as
long as they are not illuminated by some light reflected on to the level of fatality
- we can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I and find there the
most extensive definition of neurosis

41. The nature of literature for reader-oriented criticism

- a literary work is not an object that stands by itself, that offers the same view to each reader in
each period
25
- it is like an orchestration that strikes resonances among its readers and that frees the text from
the material of words and brings it to a contemporary existence
- a literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely
new, but predispoes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, familiar
characteristics or implicit allusions
- it awakens memories of what was already read, brings the reader to a specific emotional attitude
and with its beginning arouses expectations for the 'middle and end', which can he maintained
intact or altered, reoriented or even fulfilled
- The objectiveness of a text is an illusion
- literature is a kinetic art, but the physical form it assumes prevents us from seeing its essential
nature
- there are no fixed texts, only interpretive strategies making them

42. The function of criticism in reader-oriented criticism

- finding the mechanisms for interpreting a text
- through the reconstruction of the horizon of expectations in the face of which a work was
created and received in the past, one poses questions that the text gave an answer to and thereby
discovers how the contemporary reader could have viewed and understood the work
- the recourse to a general ‘spirit of the age’ is avoided
- this approach brings to view the difference between the former and the current understanding
of a work
- the concept is the asking of the question what does this do?
- the execution involves an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the
words as they succeeded one another in time
- a reader's response to the fifth word in a line or in a sentence is the product of his responses to
words one, two, three and four
- the analyst must take into account all that has happened in the reader's mind at previous
moments, each of which was in its turn subject to the accumulating pressures of its predecessors
- the basis of the method is a consideration of the atemporal flow in the reading experience and it
is assumed that the reader responds in terms of that flow and not to the whole utterance
- in an utterance of any length, there is a point at which the reader has taken in only the first
word, and then the second, and then the third and so on, and the report of what happens to the
reader is always a report of what has happened to that point
- the method slows down the reading experience so that events one does not notice in normal
time are brought before our analytical attentions
- something not visible to the naked eye is made visible by the introduction of a searching
question – What does this do?
- the reader's activities— are at the center of attention; they are regarded not as leading to
meaning, but as having meaning

43. Jauss’ four thesis

26
- literary conventions
- the way in which we look at a text
- based on several reading norms

Thesis 1
- renewal of literary history demands the removal of the prejudices of historical objectivism and
the grounding of the traditional aesthetics of production and representation in an aesthetics of
perception and influence
- the historicity of literature rests not on 'literary facts', but rather on the preceding experience of
the literary work by its readers
R G Collingwood: 'History is nothing but the re-enactment of past thought in the
historian's mind' — this is even more valid for literary history
- a literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader
in each period
- it is like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and frees the text
from the material of words and brings it to a contemporary existence
- the dialogical character of the literary work establishes why philological understanding can exist
only in a perpetual confrontation with the text and cannot be allowed to be reduced to a
knowledge of facts
- the Perceval of Chretien de Troyes, as a literary event, is not historical in the same sense as the
Third Crusade
- it becomes a literary event only for its reader, who reads it with a memory of his earlier works
and who recognizes its individuality in comparison with these and other works that he already
knows, so that he gains a new criterion for evaluating future works
- a literary event has no unavoidable consequences; it can continue to have an effect only if those
who come after it still or once again respond to it
Thesis 2
- the analysis of the literary experience of the reader avoids psychology if it describes the
reception and the influence of a work within the system of expectations that arises for each work
in the historical moment of its appearance
- a literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely
new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of
reception by announcements, familiar characteristics or implicit allusions
- awakens memories of what was already read, brings the reader to a specific emotional attitude
and, from the beginning, it arouses expectations for the 'middle and the end', which can be
maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled ironically in the course of the reading
- a corresponding process of the continuous establishing and altering of horizons also determines
the relationship of the individual text to the succession of texts that forms the genre
- the new text evokes for the reader the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier
texts which are varied, corrected, altered or even just reproduced
27
- variation and correction determine the scope
- alteration and reproduction determine the borders of a genre-structure
Thesis 3
- the horizon of expectations of a work allows one to determine its artistic character by the kind
and the degree of its influence on a presupposed audience
- aesthetic distance: the difference between the given horizon of expectations and the
appearance of a new work, whose reception can result in a 'change of horizons
- it can be objectified historically along the spectrum of the audience's reactions and criticism's
judgment (spontaneous success, rejection or shock, scattered approval, gradual or belated
understanding)
- the way in which a literary work, at the historical moment of its appearance, satisfies, surpasses,
disappoints or refutes the expectations of its first audience provides a criterion for the
determination of its aesthetic value
- the distance between the horizon of expectations and the work. between the familiarity of
previous aesthetic experience and the 'horizontal change' demanded by the reception of the new
work, determines the artistic character of a literary work
- to the degree that this distance decreases, the work comes closer to a sphere of 'culinary' or
entertainment art — this does not demand any horizontal change, it fulfills the expectations
prescribed by a ruling standard of taste, in that it satisfies the desire for the reproduction of the
familiarly beautiful
- if the artistic character of a work is measured by the aesthetic distance with which it opposes the
expectations of its first audience, this distance can disappear for the later readers, to the extent
that the original negativity of the work has become self-evident and has entered into the horizon
of future aesthetic experience as a familiar expectation
Masterwork — their beautiful form that has become self-evident brings them dangerously
close to 'culinary' art, so that it requires a special effort to read them `against the gain' of
the accustomed experience
Thesis 4
- the reconstruction of the horizon of expectations enables one to pose questions that the text
gave an answer to, and thereby to discover how the contemporary reader could have viewed and
understood the work
- his approach avoids the recourse to a general 'spirit of the age'
- it brings to view the difference between the former and the current understanding of a work
- it raises to consciousness the history of its reception, which mediates both positions
- it calls into question the claims that in the literary text, literature is eternally present and that its
objective meaning, determined once and for all, is at all times immediately accessible to the
interpreter

44. The importance of the horizon of expectations in literary studies

- the coherence of literature as an event is primarily mediated in the horizon of expectations of
the literary experience of contemporary and later readers, critics and authors
28
- a corresponding process of the continuous establishing and altering of horizons determines the
relationship of the individual text to the succession of texts that forms the genre
- the new text evokes for the reader the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier
texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered or even just reproduced
- the horizon of expectations of a work allows one to determine its artistic character by the kind
and the degree of its influence on a presupposed audience
- the distance between the horizon of expectations and the work determines the artistic character
of a literary work:
- if the distance decreases, the work is closer to ‘culinary’ or entertainment art
- if it increases, for its first audience, it is experienced as a pleasing or alienating new
experience
- the reconstruction of the horizon of expectations, in the face of which a work was created and
received in the past, enables one to pose questions that the text gave an answer to, and thereby
to discover how the contemporary reader could have viewed and understood the work

45. St Fish's critical concepts

- the concept is simply the asking of the question what does this word, phrase, sentence,
paragraph, chapter, novel, play, poem do?
- the execution involves an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the
words as they succeed one another in time
- the analysis must be of the developing responses to distinguish it from the atomism of much
stylistic criticism
- reader's response to the fifth word in a line or sentence is the product of his responses to words
one, two, three and four
- the category of response includes any and all of the activities provoked by a string of words:
-The projection of syntactical and lexical probabilities
-Their subsequent occurrence or non-occurrence
-Attitudes towards persons or things or idea referred to
-The reversal or questioning of those attitudes
- in his observations on any moment in the reading experience, the analyst must take into account
all that has happened in the reader's mind at previous moments, each of which was in its turn
subject to the accumulating pressures of its predecessors
- the basis of the method is a consideration of the temporal flow of the reading experience, and it
is assumed that the reader responds in terms of that flow and not of the whole utterance
- in an utterance of any length, there is a point at which the reader has taken in only the first
word, and then the second, and then the third and so on, and the report of what happens to the
reader is always a report of what has happened to that point
- the method slows down the reading experience so that events one does not notice in normal
time are brought before our analytical attentions
- something not visible to the naked eye is made visible by the introduction of a searching
question – What does this do?
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The Case for Reader-Response Analysis
- Milton's sonnet example (p 117)
- a controversy that cannot be settled because the evidence is inconclusive
- yet, if that controversy is itself regarded as evidence, not of an ambiguity that must be removed,
but of an ambiguity that readers have always experienced, then it can be settled
- the judgment is blurred by a verb that can be made to participate in contradictory readings (the
lines first generate a pressure for judgment and then decline to deliver it)
- the pressure is transferred from the words on the page to the reader, who comes away from the
poem with the responsibility of deciding when and how often (if at all) to indulge in those
delights
- this transferring of responsibility from the text to its readers is what the lines ask us to do,
therefore what the lines mean
- the Variorum critics attempt to give responsibility back - the text does not accept it and remains
evasive ('not unwise' — impossibility of extracting from the poem a moral formula)
- the issue is not the moral status of 'those delights', but on the good or bad uses to which they
can he put by readers, who are left to choose and manage by themselves
Undoing the Case for Reader-Response Analysis
- to have the assumption that there is a sense that is embedded or encoded in the text and that it
can be taken at a single glance is to be committed both to a goal and a procedure
The goal: to settle on a meaning
The procedure: stepping back from the text and then putting together the significant units it
contains
- yet, the reader's activities are at once ignored (because the text is taken to be self-sufficient) and
devalued (because they are thought of as the disposable machinery of extraction)
- actually, the reader's activities are at the center of attention, regarded not as leading to meaning
but as having meaning
- the meaning they have is a consequence of their not being empty; they include:
- making and revising of assumptions
- rendering and regretting of judgements
- coming to and abandoning of conclusions
- giving and withdrawing of approval
- specifying of causes
- asking of questions
- supplying of answers
- solving of puzzles
- these activities are interpretive and a description of them will also be an interpretation
- the form of the reader's experience, formal units, and the structure of intention are one, they
come into view simultaneously and the questions of priority and independence do not arise
- the question is what produces them
- line endings are treated as a fact of nature
- yet, they exist by virtue of perceptual strategies rather than the other way around
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- historically, the strategy that we know as 'reading (or hearing) poetry' has included paying
attention to the line as a unit, but it is precisely that attention which has made the line as a unit
available will overcome the difficulty with concrete poetry not because he has learned to ignore
the line as a unit, but because he will have acquired a new set of interpretive strategies
- a reader that regards the line as a brute fact rather than as a convention
- what is noticed is what has been made noticeable, not by a clear and understanding glass, but by
an interpretive strategy

46. Fish's denial of the affective fallacy

- affective criticism leads one away from the 'thing itself (it focuses on the reader rather than on
the artifact)
- even if the reader's responses can be described with some precision, why bother with them, since
the more palpable objectivity of the text is immediately available
- the reply to this is simple: the objectivity of the text is an illusion and a dangerous one, because
it is so physically convincing
- the illusion is one of self-sufficiency and completeness
- a line of print or a page or a book is so obviously there — it can be handled, photographed or put
away — that it seems to be the sole repository of whatever value and meaning we associate with
it
- the great merit of kinetic art is that it forces you to be aware of 'it' as, changing object — and
therefore no 'object' at all — and also to be aware of yourself as correspondingly changing
- kinetic art does not lend itself to a static interpretation because it refuses to stay still and doesn’t
let you stay still either
- literature is a kinetic art, but the physical form it assumes prevents us from seeing its essential
nature
- the availability of a book to the hand, its presence on a shelf, its listing in a library catalogue
encourage us to think of it as a stationary object
- when we put a book down, we forget that while we were reading, it was moving (pages moving,
lines receding into the past) and that we were moving with it

47. Interpretive communities

- stability of interpretation
- variety of interpretation
- interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretative strategies not for
reading but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions
- these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is
read rather than the other way around
- if it is an article of faith in a particular community that there are a variety of texts, its members
will boast a repertoire of strategies for making them
- if a community believes in the existence of only one text, the single strategy its members employ
will be forever writing it
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- the assumption in each community will be that the other is not correctly perceiving the 'true
`text'
- the truth will be that each perceives the text (or texts) its interpretive strategies demand
- this is the explanation both for the stability of interpretation among different readers (they
belong to the same community) and for the regularity with which a single reader will employ
different interpretive strategies and make different texts (he belongs to different communities)
- the stability of interpretative communities is temporary — they grow larger and decline and
individuals move from one to another
- yet, they provide just enough stability for interpretive battles to go on and just enough shift and
slippage to assure that they will never be settled
- the notion of interpretive communities stands between an impossible ideal and the fear which
leads so many to maintain it
Ideal: perfect agreement – it would require texts to have a status independent of
interpretation
Fear: interpretive anarchy – it would only be realized if interpretation were completely
random
- interpretive communities are no more stable than texts because interpretive strategies are not
natural or universal, but learned
- this does not mean that there is a point at which an individual has not yet learned any; the
ability to interpret is not acquired
- what is acquired are the ways of interpreting, which can be forgotten, supplanted, complicated
or dropped from favor (`no one reads that way anymore'). When any of these things happens,
there is a corresponding change in texts, not because they are being read differently, but because
they are being written differently.
The only stability: interpretive strategies are being deployed
- there are no fixed texts, only interpretive strategies making them
What is it that utterers do?
- in the old model, they hand over readymade or prefabricated meanings, said to be encoded
- in the model of the author, meanings are not extracted but made and made not by encoded
forms, but by interpretive strategies
- what utterers do is to give hearers and speakers the opportunity to make meanings by inviting
them to put into execution a set of strategies
- those will only be directions to those who already have the interpretive strategies in the first
place
- an author hazards his projection not because of something 'in' the marks, but because of
something he assumes to be in the reader
- the existence of the marks is a function of an interpretive community, for they will be recognized
only by its members
- those outside that community will be deploying a different set of interpretive strategies and will
therefore be making different marks

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 - the only proof of membership in an interpretive community is fellowship, the nod of recognition
from someone in the same community

48. The nature of literature for Feminist criticism

- Emily Brontë has questioned death. Virginia Woolf life and Katherine Mansfield every day
contingence and suffering. Women do not contest the human situation, because they have
hardly begun to assume it
- this explains why their works lack metaphysical resonances and anger: they do not take the
world incidentally, they do not ask it questions, they do not expose its contradictions
- woman's desire for affirmation manifests itself in the aspiration toward literary' creation because
literature reveals a certain knowledge and sometimes the truth itself about an otherwise
repressed, nocturnal, secret and unconscious universe, because it redoubles the social contract
by exposing the unsaid
- women's desire to lift the weight of what is sacrificial in the social contract from their shoulders,
to nourish our societies with a more flexible and free discourse, one able to name the enigmas of
the body, the dreams, secret joys, shames, hatreds of the second sex
- Helene Cixous — I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man.
- it is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing and this is an impossibility which will
remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded
- women must write through their own bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that
will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes
The Feminine. Feminist and Female stages
1. Feminine
 from about 1840 to 1880
 Women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male
culture
 Distinguishing sign: the male pseudonym
2. Feminist
 From about 1880-1920
 Winning of the vote
 Women reject the accommodating postures of femininity
 They dramatise the ordeals of wronged womanhood
3. Female
 Ongoing since 1920
 Women reject imitation and protest
 They turn to female experience as a source of an autonomous art

49. The function of criticism in Feminist criticism

Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties:
1. concerned with woman as a reader (the feminist critique)

33
- its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and
misconceptions about women in criticism and the fissures in male-constructed literary history
- it is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience
- it is essentially political and polemical, with theoretical affiliations to Marxist sociology and
aesthetics
2. concerned with woman as a writer (gynocritics)
- its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity: linguistics and the problem of a
female language: the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary
history and studies of particular writers and works
- more self-contained and experimental, with connections to other modes of new feminist
research
- one of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented
- the critique also has a tendency to naturalise women's victimization, by making it the inevitable
and obsessive topic of discussion
- the program of gynocritics it to construct a female framework for the analysis of women's
literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt
male models and theories
- it begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history,
stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the nearly
visible world of the female culture
- the most natural direction for feminist criticism to take has been the revision and subversion of
related ideologies, especially Marxist aesthetics and structuralism, altering their vocabularies
and methods to include the variable of gender
- gynocritics is beginning to emancipate itself from the influences of accepted models and guide
itself by its own impulses
- the task of feminist critics is to find a new language, a new way of reading that can integrate our
intelligence and our experience, our reason and our suffering, our scepticism and our vision

50. Simone de Beauvoir's critique of sexual representation of gender

- what is a woman?
- the author says that a woman must say that she is a woman in order to define herself, thing
which does not apply to men, because it goes without saying that they are men
- the terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter or form
- a man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to
designate human beings in general
- a woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria
- the fact of being a man is no peculiarity
- a man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong
- man perceives his body as a direct and normal connection with the world
- the body of a woman is regarded as a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it

34
 Aristotle: 'the female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities'; 'we should regard
the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness'
St Thomas: a woman is an 'imperfect man', an 'incidental' being
- humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not
regarded as an autonomous being
- the woman is simply what man decrees
- she is called 'the sex', by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being
- she is defined with reference to man and not to herself
- women do not authentically assume a subjective attitude ('We')
- the women's effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation
- they have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have
only received
- women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit
- they have no past, no history, no religion of their own and no solidarity
- they live dispersed among the males, attached to certain men (fathers or husbands) more firmly
than they are to other women
- legislators, priests, philosophers, writers and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate
position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth
- the religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination
- since ancient times, satirists and moralists have delighted in showing up the weaknesses of
women
- female writers have questioned death, life and every day suffering
- women do not contest the human situation. because they have hardly begun to assume it — this
explains why their works lack metaphysical resonances and anger
- the restrictions that education and custom impose on woman limit her grasp on the universe
- what woman needs first of all is to undertake her apprenticeship in liberty

52. Representations of Ophelia in cultural history

- Ophelia is mentioned by Jacques Lacan as 'the object Ophelia' — that is, the object of Hamlet's
male desire
- Lacan admits that she is essential, but only because 'she is linked forever, for centuries, to the
figure of Hamlet'
- in French feminist theory, Ophelia confirms the impossibility of representing the female in
patriarchal discourse as other than madness, incoherence, fluidity or silence
- in comparison to Hamlet, Ophelia is a creature of lack: ‘I think nothing, my lord.’
- in Elizabethan slang, 'nothing' was a term for the female genitalia
- when Ophelia is mad, Gertrude says that 'Her speech is nothing' — her speech represents the
horror of having nothing to say in the public terms defined by the court
- another approach would be to read Ophelia's story as the female subtext of the tragedy, the
repressed story of Hamlet

35
- in this reading, she represents the strong emotions that the Elizabethans and the Freudians
thought womanish and unmanly
- when Laertes weeps for his dead sister, he says of his tears that 'When these are gone/ The
woman will be out' — that the feminine and shameful of his nature will be purged
- according to David Leverenz, Hamlet's disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated
into violent revulsion against women and into his brutal behavior towards Ophelia
- Ophelia does have a story of her own that a feminist criticism can tell: a history of her
representation
- while for Hamlet madness is linked with culture, for Ophelia, madness is a product of the female
body and female nature
- on Elizabethan stage, the conventions of female insanity were sharply defined
- Ophelia, dressed in white, enters, according to the directions of the 'Bad Quarto', 'distracted'
playing on a lute with her ‘hair down singing’.
- her speeches are marked by extravagant metaphors, lyrical free associations and 'explosive sexual
imagery'
- in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, (he stage direction that a woman enters with disheveled
hair indicates that she might either be mad or the victim of a rape; the disordered hair, her
offense against decorum, suggests sensuality in each case
- drowning too was associated with the feminine, with female fluidity as opposed to masculine
aridity
- the symbolic connections between women, water and death
- drowning becomes the truly feminine death in the dramas of literature and life
- water is the profound and organic symbol of woman
- clinically speaking, Ophelia's behavior and appearance are characteristic of the malady the
Elizabethans would have diagnosed as female love-melancholy
- from about 1580, melancholy had become a fashionable disease among young men, especially in
London, and Hamlet himself is a prototype of the melancholy hero
- women's melancholy was seen instead as biological and emotional in origins
- late Augustan stereotypes of female love-melancholy were sentimentalized versions which
minimized the force of female sexuality and made female insanity a pretty stimulant to male
sensibility
- actresses played Ophelia relying on the familiar images of the white dress, loose hair and white
flowers to convey a polite feminine distraction
- whereas the Augustan response to madness was a denial, the romantic response was an embrace;
the figure of the madwoman permeates romantic literature
- Charles Kemble: his Ophelia, in the mad scene, entered in a long black veil, suggesting the
standard imagery of female sexual mystery in the gothic novel
- Coleridge: Ophelia is a girl who feels too much, who drowns in feeling
- series of pictures done by Delacroix show a strong romantic interest in the relation of female
sexuality and insanity

36
- superintendents of Victorian lunatic asylums were also enthusiasts of Shakespeare, who turned
to his dramas for models of mental aberration that could be applied to their clinical practice
- the case study of Ophelia was one that seemed particularly useful as an account of hysteria or
mental breakdown in adolescence, a period of instability which the Victorians regarded as risky
for women's mental health
- where the women themselves did not willingly throw themselves into Ophelia-like postures,
asylum superintendents imposed the costume, gesture, props and expression of Ophelia upon
them
- the Victorian madwoman is very differently represented in the feminist revision of Ophelia
initiated by newly powerful and respectable Victorian actresses and by women critics of
Shakespeare
- in their effort to defend Ophelia, they invent a story for her drawn from their own experiences,
grievances and desires
- on the Victorian stage it was Ellen 'Ferry who led the way in acting Ophelia in feminist terms as
a consistent psychological study in sexual intimidation, a girl terrified of her father, of her lover
and of life itself
- her 'poetic and intellectual performance' also inspired other actresses to rebel against the
conventions on invisibility and negation associated with the part
- Terry was the first to challenge the tradition of Ophelia's dressing in emblematic white
- for the French poets, whiteness was part of Ophelia's essential symbolism; they call her 'blanche
Ophelia' and compare her to a lily, a cloud or a snow
- yet whiteness also made her a transparency, an absence that took on the colors of Hamlet's
moods and that made her a blank page to be written on by the male imagination
- although Irving (who was playing Hamlet) was able to prevent Terry from wearing black in the
mad scene, nonetheless actresses gradually won the right to intensify Ophelia's presence by
clothing her in Hamlet's black
- the Freudian interpretation of Hamlet had much to do with the re-sexualization of Ophelia
- Freud has traced Hamlet's irresolution to a Oedipus complex
- Ernest Jones argued that 'Ophelia should be unmistakably sensual, as she seldom is on stage. She
may be 'innocent' and docile, but she is very aware of her body
- Rebecca West has argued that Ophelia was not 'a correct and timid virgin of exquisite
sensibilities', but rather 'a disreputable young woman'
- since the 1960s Ophelia's madness is represented in more contemporary terms - her madness is
now in medical and biochemical terms, as schizophrenia. This is so in part because the
schizophrenic woman has become the cultural icon of dualistic femininity in the mid-twentieth
century
- R. D. Laing argued that schizophrenia was an intelligible response to the experience of
invalidation within the family network
- since the 1970s too we have had a feminist discourse which has offered a new perspective on
Ophelia's madness as protest and rebellion. For many feminist theorists, the madwoman is a
heroine, a powerful figure who rebels against the family and the social order
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 - in Melissa Murray's play Ophelia, Ophelia becomes a lesbian and runs off with a woman servant
to join a guerilla commune
- the alternation of strong and weak Ophelias on the stage, virginal and seductive Ophelias in art,
inadequate or oppressed Ophelias in criticism, tells us how these representations have
overflowed the text, and how they have reflected the ideological character of their times,
erupting as debates between dominant and feminist views in periods of gender crisis and
redefinition
- the representation of Ophelia changes independently of theories of the meaning of the play. for
it depends on attitudes towards women and madness
- the decorous and pious Ophelia of the Augustan age and the postmodern schizophrenic heroine
can be derived from the same figure; they are both contradictory and complementary images of
female sexuality
- there is no 'true' Ophelia for whom feminist criticism must unambiguously speak, but perhaps
0nly a cubist Ophelia of multiple perspectives

53. The stages of female identity in cultural history (E. Showalter)

Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties:
1. Concerned with woman as a reader (the feminist critique)
- with woman as the consumer 01 male-produced literature and with the way in which the
hypothesis of a female reader changes 0ur apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the
significance of sexual code
- its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and
misconceptions about women in criticism and the fissures in male-constructed literary history
- it is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience
2. Concerned with woman as a writer (la gynoeritique) – its subjects include the psychodynamics of
female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the
individual or collective female literary career; literary history and studies of particular writers
and works
- the feminist critique is essentially political and polemical
- gynocritics is more self-contained and experimental
- one of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented — we are not learning
what women have felt and experienced, but only what men have thought women should be
- the programme of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women's
literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt
male models and theories
- we can see patterns and phases in the evolution of a female tradition which correspond to the
developmental phases of any subcultural art – the Feminine, Feminist and Female stages
1. — during the Feminine phases, dating from about 1840-1880, women wrote in an effort to
equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture
-the distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym, introduced in England in the
1840s and a national characteristic of Fnglish women writers
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 2. — in the Feminist phase, from about 1880 to 1920, or the winning of the vote, women are
historically enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use literature
to dramatise the ordeals of wronged womanhood
3. — in the Female phase, ongoing since 1920, women reject both imitation and protest and
turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art
- representatives of the formal Female Aesthetic begin to think in terms of male and female
sentences, and divide their work into 'masculine' journalism and 'feminine' fictions
- John Stuart Mill: feminist criticism must 'emancipate itself from the influences of accepted
models and guide itself by its own impulses'
- we are moving. towards a two-tiered system of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ criticism, the higher
concerned with the 'scientific' problems of form and structure, the "lower' concerned with the
'humanistic' problems of content and interpretation
- and these levels are now taking on subtle gender identities and assuming a sexual polarity —
hermeneutics and hismeneutics
- while scientific criticism struggles to purge itself of the subjective, feminist criticism is willing to
assert the authority of experience
- experience is not emotion
- we must seek the repressed message of women in history, in anthropology, in psychology, and in
ourselves, before we can locate the feminine not-said, by probing the fissures of the female text
- the task of feminist critics is to find a new language, a new way of reading, that can integrate our
intelligence and our experience, our reason and our suffering, our skepticism and our vision

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