13
votes
Why don't modern critics like archetypes?
As someone who has struggled through an essay on characterization in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber using Jungian archetypes I may be able to shed some light on the issue.
The archetypal approach,...
- 584
11
votes
What is the "Intentional Fallacy"?
The Intentional Fallacy is the fallacy of defining the meaning of a work using the author's intentions:
The author intended their work to mean this, and so it means this.
However, this has problems:
...
- 7,079
10
votes
What is the "Intentional Fallacy"?
The intentional fallacy is a misnomer in that the fallacy is not committed intentionally, but rather it relates to intentions. The intentional fallacy is the fallacy of using authors' intentions in ...
- 6,243
9
votes
Accepted
Does Stanley Fish's essay How to Recognize a Poem When You See One devalue the interpretation of poetry?
tl;dr
No.
Clarifying the Question
(i.e., turning it into a different one I'd prefer to answer)
You ask:
If Fish is right in his observations, how do we go about saving the value of composed poetry? I ...
- 30.8k
9
votes
What is an inciting incident?
The reason for this confusion is that the Inciting Incident isn’t a real thing. Or at least, it isn’t a single specific thing.
When people talk about the Inciting Incident, they usually mean whatever ...
- 111
8
votes
Accepted
Is there such a thing as an unbiased text?
First, I have to ask: do you have a clear definition for bias? Think on this for a moment.
Let's look at some of the meanings given, for instance, by Merriam-Webster:
a : an inclination of ...
- 7,079
8
votes
How can poetry be defined?
This is a tough question.
Eliot, in particular, demonstrated the primacy of meter over rhyme in Four Quartets. (Rhyme is generally considered to be the primary mnemonic device, a critical element ...
- 4,283
7
votes
What aspects of Roman Ingarden's theory of literature does Stanisław Lem criticise and how?
Stanisław Lem criticizes Roman Ingarden's theory of literature in his essay The Philosophy of Chance (1968). Specifically, he takes issue with the idea that a literary work can be reduced to its ...
- 360
6
votes
Accepted
How much weight should we give authors' declarations of their intent after the fact?
The way that this question is worded implies a particular theory about how literature is interpreted (that is, it's a theory-laden question). The implicit theory seems to be that we interpret ...
- 60.7k
6
votes
Accepted
Academic who abandoned literary criticism and started writing novels?
After some more searching, I found that the academic and author I was looking for is Frank Lentricchia.
In literary theory and criticism he wrote, among other ones, the following books:
After the ...
- 48.4k
6
votes
Accepted
Did Harold Bloom ever criticise New Historicism for reducing literature to a footnote of history?
Harold Bloom certainly criticised New Historicism. In his book The Western Canon, he said:
Whatever the convictions of our current New Historicists,
for whom Shakespeare is only a signifier for the ...
- 74.4k
6
votes
Accepted
Is Jonathan Culler saying that literary theory is effectively the same subject as cultural studies?
tl;dr No. Cultural studies are focused on specific cultural phenomena, including literature. Theory is at a level of abstraction from those phenomena.
Culler makes the following statements here:
...
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6
votes
Accepted
Why is the 1820 Indicator version of La Belle Dame Sans Merci seen as more "politically correct"?
Fry relies on McGann, so in this answer I’m going to summarize McGann’s argument.
McGann starts with the observation that a commonly accepted editorial principle is that the editor should try to ...
- 60.7k
5
votes
What is the history of the universe/canon/word-of-god approach to literature?
Bentley’s edition of Milton
In 1732, Richard Bentley published an edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Bentley was master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and an eminent classical scholar, whose editions ...
- 60.7k
5
votes
What section of literary theory does "pure" analysis fall into?
"New Criticism" is an older form of literary criticism but it does focus on the "formal elements" of a piece. New Critics attempt to break down literature into four linguistic devices, paradox, irony,...
- 409
5
votes
What is the meaning of 'myopia' in literature studies?
All of the examples you give seem to be using the term "myopic" to mean focusing on something small, or very specific, while ignoring the larger view.
Like most who mutilate Chopin, he was ...
- 26.3k
5
votes
What evidence is there for the "recession of accent" theory?
TL;DR: The question remains open, with little progress having been made in the last century. Modern commentators on the issue mostly take a neutral or skeptical position, or suggest that the ...
- 60.7k
4
votes
Accepted
What are the major differences between Russian Formalism and New Criticism?
Russian Formalism was probably the first school in literary theory that looked at poetry and literature in general as true linguistic phenomena. One of its representatives, Viktor Shklovsky coined the ...
- 48.4k
4
votes
What do literary critics mean when they say a text is overdetermined?
Terry Eagleton's book Literary Theory: An Introduction (second edition, 1996) offers the following explanation (emphasis added):
The literary work continually enriches and transforms mere dictionary ...
- 48.4k
4
votes
Accepted
How is psychoanalysis relevant to the study of literature?
Peter Barry (Beginning Theory, fourth edition. Manchester University Press, 2017, p. 97):
Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis ...
- 48.4k
4
votes
What is literature?
What is literature? You'd think this would be a central question for literary theory, but in fact it has not seemed to matter very much.
These are the opening words of the second chapter, "What ...
- 48.4k
4
votes
Accepted
"Tragic" vs "Tragedy"
tl;dr
The distinction between "tragic" and "tragedy" made on the Owl Purdue page is extremely narrow and very specialized. The terms are used in a technical sense derived from ...
- 30.8k
4
votes
How do people learn to analyze literature?
If you're an undergraduate, I think you may be setting the bar too high.
Undergraduate programmes are there to help you learn the skills you will need if you were to take the subject forward into ...
- 23.2k
3
votes
What's the meaning of 'English studies of empirical studies' to be antihumanist?
The 5 word phrase you ask about, "English studies of empirical studies", is hard to parse when taken out of context, as you took it in the title of your question. The context "a larger suspicion in ...
- 4,310
3
votes
How much weight should we give authors' declarations of their intent after the fact?
How much weight you should give to an author's declaration about intended meaning or interpretation depends on the theory of literature you espouse. In a related question, I briefly discussed E. D. ...
- 48.4k
3
votes
What section of literary theory does "pure" analysis fall into?
Analysis of literary texts that is based purely on the text itself and not historical context, the author's biography etcetera is not so much a "section" of literary theory
but an approach practised ...
- 48.4k
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