Literary criticism

Realistic Theories
David hume Human behaveor passion not reason
Absolutist critic One thouvy only
John Dryden The father of english criticism after Sheksbeer
John Locke In the light of plisopher to create new , stucture of socirty
Plato's academy Let one know enter here who is not engmantt
Literary criticism Work of art
Sublimity It's the echo of the greatest
John locke's idea Everything even Christianity under absorvtion
Immanuel Kant Humans would be acting crowedr out of tear or hope of reword

Wordworth '
Immanuel Kant
The poetics → arstitle ‫وش سوا وش عمل مو وين مات وين حيا‬
Literary Criticism
-Literary Criticism: The act of studying, analyzing, interpreting, evaluating and enjoying a work of art.
-Matthew Arnold ( a nineteenth-century literary critic) describes literary criticism as "A disinterested endeavor to learn
and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”
-Arnold would argue, this discipline attempts to formulate aesthetic and methodological principles on the critic can evaluate
a text.
-a term derived from two Greek words, krino, meaning "to judge" and krites, meaning "a judge or jury person." A literary
critic, or kritikos, meaning a "judge of literature."
-The first recorded such judge is the fourth century BCE teacher Philitas, who arrived in Alexandria in 305 BCE to tutor
a child who would become King Ptolemy II.

-Literary criticism is not usually related to something that a work of art. Without the work of art, the activity of criticism
cannot exist.
-When analyzing a text, literary critics ask basic questions as about the philosophical, psychological, functional, and
descriptive nature of the text itself:

-Does a text have only one correct meaning?

• Is a text always didactic;

-Types of criticism and critics:

Traditionally, literary critics Involve themselves in either theoretical or practical criticism.
Theoretical criticism: formulates the theories , principles and tenets of the nature and value of art.
Practical criticism ( applied criticism): applies the theories and tenets of theoretical criticism to a particular work.
Practical critic: defines the standards oftaste and explains, evaluates , or justifies a partilcular piece of literature.
The absolutist critic: distinction between the practical critic who posits only one theory or set of a critic may use when
evaluating a literary work.
The relatvisitic critic: one uses various and contradictory theories a text, the basis for kindle critic or form of criticism is
literary theory, without theory practicalc riticism coudn't exist

What is literary theory

• Intertextuality: establishing relationships between different literary texts in order to understand them by looking at allusions,
quotations, symbols .
• the word (theory , Derived from the Greek word theoria, the word theory means a "view or perspective of the Greek stage."
a view of life, an understanding of why we interpret texts the way we do.
The Reading Process and Literary Theory:

• Rosenblatt declares relationship between the reader and the text is not linear, but transactional; is a process or event that takes
place at a particular time and place.
-The reader and the text transact-not simply interact creating meaning, for meaning does not exist solely within the reader's mind or
the text.
- interpretation of a text ( Rosenblatt calls the poem), readers bring their own past transactions to the text ( some critics call fore
structure and live through a process of handling new situations, new attitudes, new personalities, new conflicts in value.
-They can reject, revise, or assimilate into the resource with which they engage their world."
• Because no literary theory can account for all the various factors ,and readers all have different literary experiences, there can exist
no metatheory ,no single overarching literary.
• There is no single correct literary theory.
-The valid and legitimate questions asked about a text by the various literary theories differ.
-each theory focuses primarily on one element of the interpretative process, in practice different theories may address several areas of
concern in interpreting a text.

• Text-Based Theory (Formalist): stresses the work , believing that the text alone contains all the necessary information to arrive
at an interpretation. This theory isolates the text from its historical or sociological setting and concentrates on the literary forms
found in the text, such as figures of speech (tropes), word choice (diction), and style.
• Context Based Theory (Marxism, Feminism, Psychoanalytic) attempts to place a text in its historical, political, sociological,
religious, and economic settings. By placing the text in historical perspective.
• Reader-Response theory: its chief concern toward the text's audience. It asks how readers emotions and personal backgrounds
affect each reader's interpretation of a particular text.
• the primary focus is psychological, linguistic, mythical, historical, or from any other critical orientation, each literary theory
establishes its own theoretical basis. Different literary theorise and theorists may all study the same text, but being in different
seats.

What is literature :
• Derived from the Latin littera, meaning "letter," .
• Literature is defined by Others as Art. this, mistakenly, equates it with imagination and fiction.
•Aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that deals with the concept of the beautiful, Theorists such as Plato and Aristotle declare
that the source of beauty; other critics, such as David Hume, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
• literary work is an esthetic form that tells a story describing and detailing a variety of human experiences.
 Plato
PLATO (C. 427-347 BCE):
• "all of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato.“ (Alfred North Whitehead)

• Plato's ideas, expressed in his lon, Crito, the Republic, Lotos, including the concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness;
the nature of reality, the structure of society; the nature and relations of being (ontology) ,questions about how we
know what we know (epistemology); and ethics and morality.
-Plotinus ( reintroduced Plato's ideas to the Western world) known as Neoplatonism.

• The core of Platonic thought resides in Plato's doctrine of Essences. Ideas. or Forms. Ultimate reality, he states
is spiritual. This spiritual realm, what Plato calls The One, is composed of "ideal" forms.
It is these ideal forms that give shape to our physical world because our material world is nothing more than a
shadow, a replica of the absolute forms found in the spiritual realm. In the material world, we can, therefore,
recognize a chair as a chair because the ideal exists in this spiritual realm and preceded the existence of the
material chair. Without the existence of the ideal chair , the physical chair, is nothing more than a shadow or
replica representation, imitation, reflection of the ideal chair, could not exist.

• Plato established his Academy (the name of the school he founded in 387 BCE) which lays the foundation of
philosophy, above its door he wrote: ‘ "Let no one enter here who is not a geometer" (a master of geometry one
skilled in formal logic and reasoning).

• If ultimate reality rests in the spiritual realm, and the material world is only a shadow or replica of the world of
ideals, then according to Plato and his followers, poets (those who compose imaginative literature) are merely
imitating an imitation when they write about any object in the material world. Plato declares that a poet's craft is
"an inferior who marries an inferior and has inferior offspring".
because the poet is one who is now two steps removed from ultimate reality. These imitators of mere shadows,
contends Plato, cannot be trusted .

• Plato, poetry is a copy of a copy: meaning that poetry itself is an object that describes another object both of
them are merely copies of the real images or absolutes that exist in the spiritual realm.

• poets are untrustworthy and their works can no longer be the basis of the Greeks' morality or ethics. For
example: In the Iliad, for example, the gods lie and cheat and are one of the main causes of suffering among
humans.
In the Republic, Plato ultimately concludes that the poets must be banished from Greek society.
In a later work, Laws, Book VIII, he made a conditional acceptance of moral, loyal and good poets.
ARISTOTLE (384-322 BCE) &Longinus (first century CE)
Aristotle and his Lyceum:
- literary criticism's morality began with Plato, the elements work began with Plato's famous pupil, Aristotle, Rejecting
some of Plato's beliefs about the nature of reality, Aristotle opts for a detailed investigation of the material world.
- Aristotle founded the Lyceum, a school of scientific and philosophical thought and investigation in 335 BCE .
- Lyceum is also known as the Peripatetic School of Athens, taking its name from the Greek word peripatein, meaning
walk.
The Poetics: '
• Applying his scientific methods to the study of literature, Aristotle answers Plato's accusations against poetry in a
series of lectures known as the Poetics.
• the Poetics is an esoteric work one meant for private circulation to those who attended the Lyceum.
•Th Poetics remains one of the most important critical influences on literary theory and criticism.
• Aristotle's Poetics has become the cornerstone of Western literary criticism.
• By writing a definition of tragedy, Aristotle began in the Poetics a discussion of the basic components of a literary
work that continues to the present day.
• Poetics, reveals Aristotle's purpose because in Greek the word poetikes means "things that are made or crafted."
Like a biologist, Aristotle dissects tragedy to discover its constituent or crafted parts.
• Aristotle agrees with Plato that all the arts are imitations. the art of poetry exists because people are imitative
creatures who enjoy such imitation.
• Plato contends the aesthetic pleasure poetry is capable of arousing can undermine the structure of society and all its
values, Aristotle strongly disagrees.
• His disagreement is basically concerning the nature of imitation itself: Whereas Plato decrees that imitationis two
steps removed from the truth or realm of the ideal , Aristotle contends that poetry is more universal, more general
than things as they are.
• In Aristotle's view, not all imitations by poets are the same because "writers of greater dignity the noble actions
heroes [tragedy], the less dignified sort of writers actions of inferior men[comedy]“: "Comedy," writes Aristotle, "is an
imitation of base men [...] characterized not by every kind of vice but specifically by the ridiculous,' .
• Aristotle focuses his attention on tragedy because he sees it as a nobel form of art.
Catharsis = the purging of emotions of pity and fear from the audience
• “Tragedy : is an imitation of a noble and complete action, having the proper magnitude; it language that enhanced
by the kinds of linguistic adornment, applied separately in the various parts of the play; it is presented in dramatic,
not narrative form and achieves, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents”
When placed in context with other ideas in the Poetics, this complex definition highlights Aristotle's chief contributions
to literary criticism:
1. Tragedy, or a work of art, is an imitation of nature that reflects a high form of art in exhibiting noble characters
and noble deeds, the act of imitation itself giving us pleasure.
2. Art possesses form, is, tragedy, unlike life has a defined beginning, a middle and an end.
3. In tragedy, concern for form given to the characters of the drama because the tragic hero must be a man.
4. The tragedy must have an emotional effect on its audience through pity and fear, the audience's emotions should
be purged, purified, or clarified.
5. The universal not the particular should be stressed. Unlike history that deals with what happens, poetry or tragedy
deals with what could happen.
6. The poet must give attention to diction or language, but expressed through language is more important.

LONGINUS (FIRST CENTURY CE)

• his date of birth and national origin remain controversial.
-Longinus (sometimes referred to as Pseudo-Longinus) take an important place in literary history for his treatise on
the Sublime, s the first literary critic to borrow from a different literary tradition [Hebrew] .
-He is the first comparative critic in literary history.
-Unlike Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, Longinus concentrates on single elements of a text , he is the first critc to define
a literary classic.
Longinus defines the sublime as "the echo of greatest of spirit”, he did not use the word the sublime in its modern
sense but meant “elevation”, “a certain distinction and excellence in composition”.
• He identifies its five key elements:
1) the power of forming great conceptions;
2) vehement and inspired passion;
3) the due formation of figures, such as word order and appropriate audience;
4) noble diction
5) dignified and elevated composition.
The significance of Longinus's On the Sublime:
• Until the late seventeenth century, few people considered Longinus's On the Sublime important or had even read it.
• By the eighteenth century, its importance was recognized, and the treatise was quoted and debated by most public
authors. Emphasizing the author (possess a great mind and a great soul) , the work itself (a text composed reader to
high thoughts), and the reader's response (the reaction of a learned audience in large part determines).
•Longinus's critical method foreshadows New Criticism, reader-oriented criticism, and other schools of twentieth-century
criticism.
John Lock & Francis Bacon
Early life and education:
• John Locke was born in the small English village of Wrington, in Somerset, on August 29, 1632.
• One of the first modern philosophers, Locke combined the rational, deductive theory of René Descartes and the
inductive scientific experimentalism of Francis Bacon and the Royal Society.
• He produced one of the most significant and influenFal bodies of social and politcal philosophy of the modern era.
• When Locke earned his B.A. he decided to begin the three years of study required for the master of arts degree.
Locke’s influence in the popularity of Secularism in England:
• Locke concluded to tradition and trusting emotional were the two principal causes of human error;Royalists and
Puritans, As a philosopher of the empirical and rational method of the scientific search for knowledge, he had few
peers.
•For Oxford, it hard years as the political fortunes of the Royalist and Parliamentarian , interest in toleration , He
thought religious zealots, such as most Puritans, had proved dangerous to society’s peace and security, while Catholics
were always suspect because their allegiance to the pope could too easily make them traitors.
• Locke think about the concept of natural law, idea that it incorporated a moral code that was knowable to rational
beings, it dated back to the Greek Stoics and adopted by medieval Christianity as the law of God. The idea of natural
law in the Renaissance interests for a new theory of government.
•none of Locke’s important works were published until late in his life. In A Letter Concerning Toleration (published
1689), He argued that toleration of the latter was necessary.
After Toleration:
• He moved toward a theory that explained all knowledge as the result of experience.
• Locke was certain that people were born with minds empty of any knowledge and that the mind’s only links with the
external world were through the senses.
• Locke made a clear distinction between knowledge by reason, which can be empirically demonstrated, and faith or
opinion, which he thought was ungrounded fantasy
• Locke’s was a view of human nature radically different from what Christian theologians had proposed. There was no
place in Locke’s scheme for original sin or to evil; human behavior came from thought that was learned and influence of
reason and observation.
Significance:
• His essays on toleration were a major contribution , Concerning Human Understanding created a new image of human
nature substantiated by empirical observation.
• Definition of liberty. Later, Enlightenment philosophers expanded Locke’s ideas to create new visions of how a society
should be structured and the ways in which progress could be achieved.
Francis Bacon:
• was born at York House in London in1561 and died in 1626.
• Bacon was a politician, jurist, royal councillor, natural scientist and essay writer , around Queen Elizabeth and
King James I.
• The first to use the English language instead of Latin for a philosophical treatise .
• He is becoming Lord Chancellor and Baron Verulam.
• Novum organum published in the same year, contains Bacon’s argument for a “new logic,” the discovery of a
finite number of “natures” or “forms” lying at the base of the natural world.
• He wrote: “On Dissimulation” or “On Plantations,”.
• The Two Books of Francis Bacon: of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Humane (1605),
the Latin version De augments scientiarum 1623; best known as Advancement of Learning .
• In his last, unfinished work, New Atlantis , posthumously published in 1627, Unlike Locke, Bacon argues that
there is no conflict between the free pursuit of scientific exploration and the dogmas of the Christian religion.
 -John Locke is supporter of equal right with a governed society .
-He supported the natural right of man ( the right of life, liberty and property each government should
secure these rights for it nation.
-He supported the toleration of another ( alternative ) religious beliefs.
- Before there is a goverment the and a nation , man lives in a slate of nature where he is guided by
The law nature as God intended ( natural law ) l
-God is the ( creator, he died not grant superiorty to any individual.
- He discards the nation of royal superiority or noble. He established general equality for all, The slate of
nature is one of equality.
- No one, neither single Person nor, churches, nor even have any title to invade the civil right of each
other person or religion.
- He sees that human mind is a sort of blank at bi slate birth that develop over the through the use of
sense, and throughlessans taught by the society me live in

John
Royalists Puritans
deductive adherence emotional Empirical = experiment
Inductive
Francisbacon Descartes to tradition conviction

Immanuel Kant
Early life:
• Immanuel → 18th century ( the age of Reason ) that emphasized the use of scientific inquiry and reason and was
associated with Locke, Descartes and other.
• Kant is considered by many to represent the culmination of modern philosophy and is the crucial transition figure
between the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century.
How can humans be a part of deterministic physical reality and yet have free will?
• His work reflects the Enlightenment's view of reason as a source of morality. He builds on the idea of natural law ,
the substantal part of his philosophy focused on religion and morality.
His Philosophy: The Critique of Pure Reason:
• Kant did his most original and important work quite late in his life. His project of critical philosophy began with The
Critique of Pure Reason, 1838 on which he worked between 1775 and 1781.
•Kant viewed the whole history of metaphysical inquiry as a series of failures to establish truths of first principles
concerning God, human freedom, and immortality.
• Kant reasoned that the certainty of science rested on the purity of its truths.
• He called Apriori [the knowledge that is independent of the senses] it does not need human senses to prove it.
• Humans are not immediately in touch with things as they are in themselves.
•He called this knowledge posteriori [depends on the senses] What one has no experience of, including the nature and
existence of God and the fate of the soul, one can access only by faith.
•Kant’s analysis of morality, all immoral actions are irrational because they violate the CI.
• His moral philosopher is that of freedom. Without human freedom, moral responsibility would be impossible if a
person could not act, then his morality has no moral worth .

-Why did Kant think that morality consists of categorical imperatives?

Sense CI tells us what we ought to be done objectively not what ought to be done if one has certain sense - based
desires. They are objective and universal practical laws legis by reason. So CI is a rule formulated by Kant stating that
one must do what one expects others to do in a similar situation.
- CI= are commands you must follow, regardless of your desires and motives . It identifies actions you ought to follow
or take regardless of whether doing so enables us to get any thing or satisfy our desires or promote our happiness.
-Hypotretical imperative → are moral commands that are condition on personal desire or motive → the apply to
sorneone who wishes to allain certain ends.
-Human would be acting rather out of fear or hope of reward. Thus individuals would lose the opportunity to manifest
goodwill, which Kant called the only thing in the world which can be taken as good without qualification.
-Apriori knowledge = doesn't need human sense to prove it ( independent of the senses ) → derived from experience.
-Posteriori knowledge =( dependent, on the sense ) → what one has → there are things that one the existance of God,
the fate of soul → there are things that one can only access by faith.
Eg → we want → a person ought to keep a promise she had made even she no longer want to keep it.
Eg→ is that of lying → there is a perfect duty to tell the truth, we must never lie 'even if it seems that lying would
brines about better consequences than telling the truth.
Eg → I must drink something to quenchry my thirst / I must study to pass the exam.
David Hume & John Dryden
David Hume:
• Scottish philosopher, philosophical writings on sentiment and the passions undermined.
Early life :
• David Hume went to University and after three years of study he left without taking a degree, spent the next
three years reading the Greek and Roman classisc.
David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature:
• The most important aspect of Hume’s program was an assault upon the primacy of reason in human affairs.
-Hume said in his famous dictum, “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to
any other office than to serve and obey them.” proposes that “custom” and the “passions” lead humans to act,
not reason.
- Hume’s attempt to construct a theory of perception based on sense impressions rather than innate ideas.
- Hume believed in the existence of the objects of perception, he realized that he could not prove that they
existed.
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals:
-Hume extended his common-sense approach to morality with the publicationof An Enquiry Concerning the
Principles of Morals in 1751.
- Hume changed the concept of “sympathy” in to one of “benevolence a common idea in the eighteenth
century.”
- Hume contrasts the principle of “benevolence” to that of “self- love,” and, he asserts, “I hate or despise him,
who has no regard to any thing beyond his own grafitication and enjoyments.”
The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:
- In the form of a Socratic dialogue with four speakers: Pamphillus (the narrator), Cleanthes (a Deist), Demea (an
orthodox believer), and Philo (a skeptic).
-The subject of the dialogue is the “science of natural religion,” which is based on scientific evidence and
reasoning rather than revealed or institutional religion.
- Cleanthes advances the argument from design as proof of God’s existence and nature. This argument is rejected
by both the orthodox Demea and the skeptical Philo. Pamphillus acts as a sort of referee and states, “I cannot but
think that Philo’s principles are more probable than Demea’s, but those of Cleanthes approach still nearer to the
truth.”
Significance:
-David Hume was a man of the eighteenth century the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason.
-John Passmore summed up Hume’s achievement when he wrote that “He [Hume] is pre-eminently a breaker of
new ground: a philosopher who opens up new lines of thought, who suggests to us an endless variety of
philosophical explorations.”
Hume's moral philosophy
- his position in ethics is best known for asserting
1 - reason alone can't be motive to the will , but neither reason the is slave of the passion.
2- moral distincation are not derived from reason.
3- moral distinction are derived from the moral sentiment. Feeling of approval (praise) or disappval (blame).
4- while some virtues and vices are natural, other are artificial.
John Dryden:
• was born in the village rectory in Northamptonshire,
• is a poet laureate (The first to be appointed at this position in England). He is the official poet of the rotal household
who was formerly expected to write poems, songs for royal events in Britain.
• He is also a dramatist and critic.
• He embodies the spirit and ideals of the Neoclassical period, the literary age that follows Sidney and Renaissance.
• Dr. Samuel Johnson, attributes to Dryden "the improvement, perhaps the completion of our meter, the refinement of
our language.
• The most prolific writer of the Restoration (the name given to that period of English literature from 1660 to 1700),
Dryden excelled in all genres, including literary criticism.
Dramatic theory:
• says one critic, Dryden "brought literary criticism out of the church and into the coffee house".
-In dryden's criticsm , it is possible to examine literary work and proplem on their won terms, free from the felt need
to justify literature on a religious nature.
• He was bound to explore the relation of literature to the larger concerns of life
• T. S. Eliot, the great twentieth-century poet and essayist, asserts that Dryden wrote “the first serious literary
criticism in English by an English poet."
• Dryden's lasting contribution to literary criticism is “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy”
-An essay of dramatic poesy has 4 debaters:
Crites Lisideus Nearder= Dryden himself
Eugenics He's the only one who holds
Favored the classical favored modern Favor the French drama
drama. He believed that it of the 17th century. the views of Dryden. He
dramatists. But criticized doesn't diminish the argument
is a imitation of life( both the faults in the classics. He say that it has s
classical and Non classical unities, never mix that are contrary to his own
He says that classical view.
favored rules and drama is not divided into tragical, with comedy,
unities(time, place, action) and they adhere to -He favor modern drama
acts/ lacks originality and (shakespear) but doesn't blame
but modern dramatists are based on myths or poetic justice ( reward
just shadows because they for virtue and the other.
miracles -He talk about the superiority
borrowed from classics punishment for vices
of the Elizabethans.(imitation of
life).
What are the main points of “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy” ? -He said that tragicomedy is
1. The language or diction of a play, with the concluding emphasis being placed the best form for drama
on "proper" speech. (sadness and joy are set side
2. Issues of decorum, whether violent acts should appear on the stage, with the by side) soit is closest to life .
final speaker declaring it would be quite "improper" -Subplots onrich drama as the
3. The differences between the English and French theaters, with the English drama French has only one plot single
winning out for its diversity, its use of the stage, and its Shakespearian tradition.
4. The value of rhymed as opposed to blank verse in the drama, with rhymed verse
the victor-although Dryden later refused this position and wrote many of his
tragedies in blank verse. Dryden sides with politesse clarity, order, decorum,
elegance, cleverness, and wit as the controlling characteristics of literary works.
Significance:
• First, he develops the study of literature in and of itself, not obsessing over its moral and theological worth.
• Second, he creates a natural, simple prose style .
• Third, by making use of a variety of critical perspectives-from Greek to French- .
• Fourth, advocates for the establishing of objective principles of criticism.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• English poet and literary critic.
• wrote several of the finest lyric poems in the English language and is considered one of the most brilliant of literary
critics.
• As a speculative religious thinker, he had a seminal influence on many of the great minds of the nineteenth century.
• was an intellectually precocious child, with an early love of books and study. He was enthralled by [orientalists].
• Coleridge’s first major poem, “The Eolian Harp,” and started a short lived journal called The Watchman.
• William Wordsworth , one of the most famous friendships in literary history , Wordsworth found his conception of his
own poetic through his conversations with Coleridge.
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the greatest of all of his poems , was published in a joint collection with
Wordsworth entitled Lyrical Ballads .
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s literary criticism and theory have remained influential for more than a century and a half.
• Coleridge’s philosophical thought was central to the English Romantic movement.
• overcome the ultimately false division between subject and object. Coleridge’s later work is characterized by an
attempt to reconcile this “dynamic philosophy” with orthodox Christianity.
• Coleridge’s later religious writings elaborated an unusual, subjective approach to Christian belief , analyzed the
relation between reason and faith.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
• Born in Cockermouth, Cumberlandshire, and raised in the Lake District of England.
• known as a Romantic Poet.
• Launched the Romantic Age in English literature, with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when they published the
Lyrical Ballads.
The Emergence of the 19th century Romanticism:
• By the close of the eighteenth century, the world had several major political rebellions, among them the American and
French Revolutions.
• the eighteenth century valued order and reason, the enineteenth-century world view intuition as a proper guide to
truth.
• The eighteenth-century mind likened the world to a great machine , but in the nineteenth century, the world was
perceived as a living organism that was always growing.
• For the rationalistic mind of the eighteenth century, the city includes the centers of art and literature and set the
standards of good taste.
• In contrast, the emerging nineteenth-century citizen saw rural places as fundamental.
• Devaluing the empirical and rationalistic methodologies of the last century, the nineteenth-century thinker believed that
truth could be attained by the core of our humanity or our natures.

Wordsworth Contribution to Romantic Poetry:

• Wordsworth met Samuel T. Coleridge and In 1798 they published Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems in beginning of
British romanticism.
•Wordsworth wrote most of his best poetry, including Poems in Two Volumes: The Excursion , Miscellaneous Poems , The
Prelude.
• Wordsworth chooses "language really used by people" everyday speech.
• focus of poetry's subject and language.
• A passion filled imagination become the central characteristic of poetry.
• Wordsworth redefines poetry itself: "For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.".
• Wordsworth redefines the role of the poet: "The poet is no longer the preserver of civilized values or proper taste,
but he is a man speaking to men: a man [...] , who has a greater knowledge of human nature."
• Poetry, is unlike biology or one of the other sciences , it not something that can broken down into parts, but with the
imagination and feelings. Intuition, not reason , reign.
• Wordsworth writes, "I have one request to make of my reader ,that in judging these poems he would decide by his
own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgement of others." Wordsworth hopes
that his readers' opinions of his poems will not depend on critics . Wordsworth want his readers to rely on their own
feelings and their own imaginations .
• the expressive school, emphasizes the individuality of the artist and the reader's right to share in this individuality.
• Wordsworth lays the foundation for English Romanticism and broadens the scope of literary criticism and theory for
both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Lyrical balled → preface → wordsworth's definition of poetry

The starting poem by Coleridge → first poem → the rime of the ancient mariner
William Wordsworth → last poem → tintern abbey

18 centuey 19 century
-Valued order and reason. -Intuition is a proper guide to truth.
-Liked the world to a great machine. - the world is like a living organism.
- the city housed the cent res of art - rural life is a way to discore your innerself

Wordsworth poem:
Two volume → the excursion
→ mis cellaneano poem
→ the prelude
Stream of Consciousness
• Coined by William James, The phrase is useful when it is applied to mental processes.
• Is a style or technique of writing that tries to capture the natural flow of a character's extended thought process,
often by sensory impressions, incomplete ideas, unusual syntax, and rough grammar.
• Stream of consciousness writing is associated with the early 20th- century Modernist movement.
• The term “stream of consciousness” originated in psychology before literary critics began using it to describe a
narrative style that depicts how people think.
• Is used in fiction and poetry, but the term has also been used to describe plays and films that attempt to visually
represent a character's thoughts.

Understanding Stream of Consciousness:

• Stream of consciousness writing allows readers to “listen in” on accharacter's thoughts. it's the use of language to
mimic the "streaming" nature of "conscious" thought , can be written in the first person and the third person.
Stream of Consciousness in Literary History:
• The term “stream of consciousness” originated in the 19th century, when psychologists coined the term to
describe the constant flow of subjective thoughts, feelings, memories, and all people experience.
• In the early 20th century, literary critics began to use “stream of consciousness” to describe a narrative technique
by writers like Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Many of these writers were
interested in psychology and the "psychological novel," in which writers spend much time describing the characters’
thoughts, ideas, as describing the action of the plot.

Stream of Consciousness vs. Interior Monologue:

• In interior monologue, unlike in stream of consciousness, the character's thoughts are often presented using
traditional grammar and syntax, and usually have a clear logical progression from one sentence to the next and one
idea to the next.
•Interior monologue relates a character's thoughts as coherent, fully formed sentences, as if the character is talking
to him or herself.
• Stream of consciousness, the actual experience of thinking , is not an attempt to relay a character's thoughts, but
to make the reader experience those thoughts in the same way that the character is thinking them.
•matter the consciousness of one or more characters; that is, the consciousness serves as a screen on which the
material in these novels is presented.
• "Consciousness" should not be confused with words which denote more restricted mental activities, such as
"intelligence" or "memory."
• Consciousness indicates the entire area of mental attention, Stream-of-consciousness fiction differs from all other
psychological fiction that concerned with those levels that are more inchoate than rational.

Psychoanalytic Criticism
• Sigmund Freud is a Viennese neurologist and psychologist who became the foremost investigator of the unconscious
and its activities after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900.
• Freud lays the foundation for a model of how our minds operate.
• The Interpretation of Dreams : Hidden from the workings of the conscious mind, he believes the unconscious, plays a
large part in how we act, think, and feel.
•According to Freud, discovering the content and the activity of the unconscious is through our dreams. In the
conscious and unconscious, we shape ourselves and our world.

Psychoanalytic criticism:
• Freud became the leading pioneer of psychoanalysis, a method of treating emotional and psychological disorders.
• Psychoanalytic criticism: It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and worry of
the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses.
• Psychoanalytic criticism can exist side by side with any other critical method of interpretation. Because this approach
attempts to explain the hows and whys of human actions without developing an aesthetic theory.
Models of the Human Psyche
1- Dynamic Model: it asserts that our minds are consists of the conscious (the rational) and the unconscious (the
irrational).
2- Parapraxes or Freudian slips: through unhurt actions as failures of memory or misreading of texts , and it reveal our
true intentions .
3- Economic Model: -pleasure principle's aim is a relief from pain.
-the reality principle is need for societal standards regulations on pleasure
3-Typographical Models: an earlier version of three parts, the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.
-The conscious is the mind's direct link to external reality.
-preconscious is the storehouse of memories , that conscious part of the mind allows to brought to consciousless.
-unconscious is repressed hungers, images, thoughts and human nature.
4-the structural model: divides into three parts: the id, the ego, the superego.
-the id is an irrational , unknown and unconscious part of the psyche.
-The ego is a rational, logical and waking part of the mind.
-the psyche, the superego, acts like an internal censor, to make moral judgments in light of social pressures, and
serves to protect society and us from the id.

Oedipus Complex
•Is one of Freud's most significant contributions not only to psychoanalytic criticism but also to all literary criticism in
general. Freud borrows the name from the play Oedipus Rex, written by the Greek dramatist Sophocles.
• In this play, Oedipus, the protagonist, is prophesied to kill his father and marry his mother. His attempts to defy the
prophecy fail, and the foretold events occur as predicted.
• Freud asserts in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis , during the late infantile stage (somewhere between
ages three and six), all infant males possess a romantic attachment to their mothers.

Literature and Psychoanalysis:

•For Freud, the unresolved conflicts that give rise to any neurosis constitute the stuff of literature.
•He belived a work of literature, is the external expression of the author's unconscious mind.
•literary works must be treated like a dream, applying psychoanalytic techniques to texts to uncover the author's
hidden motivations, repressed desires, and wishes.
Marxism
Background and definition:
• Marxism flourished in the 19th century.
• It is a body of doctrine established by Karl Marx, hence the name Marxism , and to a lesser extent by Friedrich
Engles, It is a social, political, and economic philosophy that examines the effect of capitalism on labour.
• It examines the struggles between social classes: the bourgeoisie (capitalists) and proletariat (workers) and expects a
revolution by the proletariat against capitalism.
• In literary criticism, Marxism is used within the contextual framework or context-based theory.
• Marxist literary theory has its roots in the nineteenth-century writings of the German social critic and philosopher Karl
Heinrich Marx (1818-1883).
• Most critics believe that Marx said little about the relationship of his ideas to literary theory.
• Marxist literary criticism does not develop until the twentieth century , using Marx's philosophical assumptions.
• Marx and Engels articulate their views on the nature of reality in two works: The German Ideology and The Communist
Manifesto.
-In The German Ideology, they develop what known as dialectical materialism, a core belief of Marxism.
-In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels assert that the capitalistsor of the bourgeoisie, have successfully
enslaved the working class or the proletariat.
•Both Engels and Marx assert that consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.
•A person's consciousness is not shaped by any spiritual entity.
•To Engels and Marx, our ideas and concepts about who we are and who we are becoming are fashioned in everyday
interactions and in the language of real life.
•Engels and Marx argue that the economic means of production within a society, call the base-both and controls all
human institutions and ideologies including all social and legal institutions, political and educational systems, religions,
art.
•Marx and Engels assert as a society progresses in its economic mode of production from a feudal system to a more
market-based economy, the actual process for producing, distributing, and consuming goods becomes more complex.
•This differentiation inevitably divides people into different social classes , the desires and expectations of the various
social classes clash lead to a radical change in the economic base of society.
•According to Marx and Engels, four historical periods developed as a result of these forces: feudalism, capitalism,
socialism, and communism.
•Das Kapital by Marx, about the view of history that has become the basis for twentieth and twenty-first-century
Marxism, socialism, and communism.
• The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital develop a theory of history, economics, politics, sociology, and
metaphysics.
• The employers (the bourgeoisie) have the economic power and there by gain social and political control of their
society.
• Coined by the French rationalist philosopher Destuttde Tracy in the late eighteenth century,the word ideology
referred to the "science of ideas " as opposed to metaphysics.
•Consciously and unconsciously, the ruling class will force its ideology on the proletariat, also called the wage slaves.
•In such a system, the rich become richer, while the poor become poorer and more and more oppressed.
•From Marx's point of view, the working classes fail to see who they really are in such i society: an exploited,
oppressed class of people.
•The link between the Marxism of its founders and literary theory resides in Marx's concept of history and the
sociological leanings of Marxism itself.
•Marx believed that the history of a people is directly based on the production of goods and the social relationships
that develop from this situation.
• Marxism Known today as the traditional historical approach.

Marxist Theorists Today:

• Since the 1960s Marxist criticism has been dominated by Fredrich Jameson and Terry Eagleton.
• Jamson wrote The Political Unconscious and Post modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
• the most influential contemporary Marxist criticis the British scholar Terry Eagleton, works, including Marxism and
Literary Criticism. Literary Theory: An Introduction (2008), and On Evil (2010).
• Eagleton holds that literature is a product of an ideology, which is itself a product of history. This ideology is a
result of the actual social interactions that occur between people in definite times and locations.
• From the mid-1970s to the present , Marxism continues to challenge the bourgeois concerns of its literary counter
parts through the voices of a variety of Marxist critics.
•Critical movements and theories such as structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, New Historicism, cultural materialism,
and postcolonialism have all examined Marxism's basic tenets and share some of its social, political, and revolutionary
nature.
• Present-day Marxism borrows from these contemporary schools of criticism and has now devlop into differient
theories, that there no longer exists a single school of Marxist thought.
• Common to all these Marxist positions, is the assumption that Marx believes that change for the good in society is
possible if we will but stop and examine our culture through the eyes of its methods of economic production.
POSTCOLONIALISM
‘The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and Latin America rise to meet a
new life and right to self-determination’ Che Guevara, speech to the United Nations,December 11, 1964

• The 1960s saw a revolutionary change in literary theory. New Criticism dominated literary theory and criticism.
•New Critics paid little attention to a text's historical context or to the feelings, beliefs, and ideas of a text's
readers , a text's meaning is tied to ambiguity, irony, and paradox found within the structure of the text.
• For people of color living in Africa or Americas, for Native Americans, for females and a host of others, the
traditional answer: silence. Live quietly, work quietly, think quietly , deny yourself, and all will be well.
• But many have not been quiet , Writers and thinkers, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gabriel García Márquez,
Carlos Fuentes, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Judith Butler, They believe that an individual's view of
life, of values, and of ethics.
•They assert a different perspective, a point not of the culture, but one to view the world and its peoples: They
speak for not one culture, but many; not one cultural perspective, but a host; not one interpretation of life, but
countless.

POSTCOLONIALISM: "THE EMPIRE WRITES BACK":

• Postcolonialism: a set of theories in philosophy and various approaches to literary analysis that are concerned with
literature written in English in countries that were or still are colonies of other countries.
• Postcolonial studies excludes literature that represents British or American view points and focuse on colonized or
formerly colonized cultures in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America, and other places, remained outside, the
white, male, European cultural, political, and philosophical tradition.
• Early in its development, postcolonialism was referred to as "third world" or "Commonwealth” literature, terms
present day critics dub pejorative (represents disapproval).
• What postcolonialism and postcolonial theorists do is to investigate what happens when two cultures clash and one
of them with its accessory ideology.

Historical Development:
•postcolonialism develops from a four-thousand-year history of strained cultural relations between colonies in Africa
and Asia and the Western world.
•During the nineteenth century, Great Britain emerged as the largest colonizer and imperial power.
•By the middle of the nineteenth century, terms such as colonial interests and the British Empire were widely used
both in the media and in government policies and international politics.
• British people were biologically superior
• Such beliefs directly affected the ways in which the colonizers treated the colonized , using its political and economic
strength.
•Great Britain, the chief imperialist power of the nineteenth century, dominated her colonies, making them produce and
then give up their countries' raw materials in exchange for what material goods the colonized desired or were made to
believe they desired by the colonizers.
• Forced labor of the colonized became the institution of slavery , Often the colonizers explan their inhuman treatment
of the colonized by European religious beliefs.
• By the early twentieth century, England's political, social, economic, and ideological domination of its colonies began to
disappear, a process known as decolonization.
• After independence, India was divided in to twonations,the India Union and Pakistan.This partitioning what scholars dub
the "Great Divide" led to ethnic conflict of enormous proportions between India and Pakistan. once called third-world
countries.
Tracing Postcolonial Writings, Theory and Fiction:
• Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a work that highlights the tensions or binary oppositions of white
versus black, good versus evil, and rich versus poor.
• In postcolonialism gained the attention of the West with the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism.
• Postcolonialism refers to a heterogeneous field of study in which even its spelling provides several alternatives: post-
coloninism, postcoloninism, or post/colonial.
• Many of postcolonialism's adherents suggest there are two branches.
-The first views postcolonialism as a set of diverse methodologies that possess no unitary quality,as Homi K.Bhabha and
Arun P. Murkherjee.
-The second views postcolonialism as a set of cultural strategies "centered in history" includes those critics as Edward
Said, Barbara Harlow, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
•Postcolonialism's concerns become evident when we examine the various topics discussed in one of its most prominent
texts, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader , edited by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin.

ASSUMPTIONS:
Nicholas Harrison asserts in Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory, and the Work of Fiction (2003),
"Postcolonial theory is not a 'type' of theory in the same sense as deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis or feminism.
All postcolonialist critics believe the following:
• European colonialism did occur.
• The British Empire was at the center of this colonialism.
• The conquerors dominated not only the physical land but also the hegemony or ideology of the colonized peoples.
• The social, political, and economic effects of such colonization are still being felt today.
• At the center of postcolonial theory exists an inherent tension among three categories of postcolonialists:
(1) those who have been academically trained and are living in the West,
(2) those who were raised in non-Western cultures but now reside in the West,
(3) those subaltern writers living and writing in non- Western cultures.

Frantz Fanon:
• one of the earliest postcolonial theorists, Born in the French colony of Martinique, fought with the French in World
War II, satlled in France after the war to study medicine and psychiatry. Fanon provides postcolonialism with two
influential texts: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.
Edward Wadie Said:
He wrotes Orientalism. A Palestinian-American theorist and critic, was born in Jerusalem, where he lived with his family
until the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, at which time his family became refugees in Egypt and then Lebanon. Educated at
Princeton and Harvard Universities. Said taught at Johns Hopkins University, as a professor, he authored a variety of
texts.
In Orientalism: Said chastises the literary world for not investigating and taking seriously the study of colonization or
imperialism.
Homi K. Bhabha
• one of the leading postcolonial theorists and critics, Born into a Parsi family in Mumbai, India, received his
undergraduate degree in India and his master's and doctoral degrees from Oxford University. Having taught at several
prestigious universities, including, Princeton, Dartmouth, and the University of Chicago, Bhabha is currently a professor at
Harvard University. In works such as The Location of Culture.
the colonized observes two views of the world: that of the colonizer (the conqueror) and that of himself or herself, the
colonized (the one who has been conquered).
• One of Bhabha's major contributions to postcolonial studies is his belief that there is always ambivalence at the site of
colonial dominance. When two cultures commingle, the nature and the characteristics of the newly created culture
changes each of the cultures. This dynamic, interactive, and tensionpacked process Bhabha names hybridity
METHODOLOGY:
• Like many schools of criticism, postcolonialism uses a variety of approaches to textual analysis. Deconstruction,
feminism, Marxism, reader-oriented colonial theories in their criticism.
• Postcolonialists are quick to point out that they do indeed make value judgments about cultures, people, and texts.
•Postcolonial critics give such texts a close reading noting particularly the text'slanguage. Such analysis questions the
taken for granted positions usually held by the Western mindset.
•all postcolonial criticism is united in its opposition to colonial and neo-colonial hegemonies and its concern with the
best way(s) to create a just and true decolonized culture and literature.

Tradition and the Individual Talent

• Thomas Stearns Eliot, the most influential poet of the first half of the twentieth century, is best known for his
poems: The Waste Land, Four Quartets, and 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Born and educated in the United
States, Eliot moved to London and lived there for the remainder of his life.
• it is Eliot’s most important essay , the most influential English- language literary essay of the twentieth century ,
His landmark 1920 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which served as the foundation of literary criticism
then outlines the importance of tradition in the creation of art.
It explores two main topics:
1- the relationship between the tradition that is, works already pre-existing in a national or even multicultural body of
literature and any one poet (that is, “the individual talent”),
2- the relationship between the poet as a person and the poet as a creative intellect.
First: the relation between the tradition and the individual talent:
•The famous quote “No poet ,no artist of any art,has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is
the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.... The existing monuments [of art] form an ideal order
among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them”,
-discusses how modernist artists and poets destroyed or rejected traditional methods of representation or traditional
literary forms; rather, the modernism talk with past literature and art in many ways.

Eliot’s view of tradition as necessarily European rather than American:

•Eliot’s view that America lacked a rich tradition in both his allusive style and his fascination with pure British culture
(he assumed British citizenship and joined the Anglican church).
•T. S. Eliot, as an American, insists that literature can find its greater purpose in the traditions of a land which he did
not belong.
•Eliot's preoccupation with the "mind of Europe" is the direct consequence of both his conscious attempt to escape a
confused American tradition and his unconscious subjection to America's "melting pot" of Western civilization.
•The opening gambit of “Tradition”: “In English writing we seldom speak of tradition".
•For Eliot, Americanism represented the demise of pure culture and the art that related to it. E. A. Mowrer's he
labeled Americanism as a "malady" that threatened to Europe. Eliot is not the only critic to place Americanism in this
context.
•Eliot, found comfort in the Puritan tradition.
•Nations such as France and Russia, achieved their tradition through an "organic fusion" and "unconscious identity,"
now Americans existed merely as a collection of immigrants.
•for Eliot , no amount of Americanization would create the same orignal sense of tradition. Just as Eliot saw the
European past being altered by the present.

Second: the relationship between the poet as a person and the poet as a creative intellect:
•A romantic notion contuine to this day among readers that poets souls in their poetry. This idea is derived from
William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as ‘The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ in Lyrical Ballads.
•Wordsworth’s idea seems clear: Poetry is an expression of personal emotions that can no longer be contained by the
poet unless he expresses them in his poetry.
•Eliot considers the degree and quality of separation between that living poet as a fully rounded person (calls a bit
too colorfully—the “man who suffers”)
•Eliot participated in what would later become known as the impersonal school of poetry.
•Eliot insists that the individual talent writes best when it writes not for the expressing itself as a personality, but for
the shaping that tradition.