Semester 1 – Literary Criticism & Theory

Aristotle's Poetics Classical

🔹 Introduction

Aristotle's Poetics is considered the earliest and most influential work of literary theory in the Western world. Written around 335 BCE, it focuses on the nature of poetry (especially tragedy and epic), its elements, and its effects on the audience. While Plato had accused poets of being liars who imitate appearances (shadows of reality), Aristotle defended poetry by arguing that it imitates not just appearances but universal truths about human nature.

🔹 Key Concepts

🔹 The Six Elements of Tragedy

Aristotle defines tragedy as having six parts, arranged in order of importance:

🔹 Definition of Tragedy

Let us break this definition down:

• Imitation of a serious action — Tragedy deals with important human events (not comedy or trivial matters)
• Complete and of a certain magnitude — It must have a beginning, middle, and end; it must be of adequate length
• Through pity and fear — The audience must feel these two emotions. Pity = sympathy for the hero's suffering. Fear = because we see ourselves in the hero.
• Catharsis — The emotional "cleansing" or relief that the audience feels after experiencing these intense emotions

🔹 The Tragic Hero

Aristotle describes the ideal tragic hero as a man who:

• Is good but not perfect — neither entirely virtuous nor entirely evil
• Is of high social standing — a king, nobleman, or person of importance
• Falls due to a Hamartia (tragic flaw) — not by accident, but through his own error in judgment
• His fall produces Peripeteia (reversal of fortune) and Anagnorisis (recognition/discovery)

🔹 Unity of Action (The Three Unities)

Aristotle stressed one unity — Unity of Action (the plot must be a single, unified whole). Later Neo-classical critics added Unity of Time (action in one day) and Unity of Place (one location), but these are not from Aristotle — they were added by later critics.

🔹 Aristotle vs Plato

🔹 Critical Analysis

Aristotle's Poetics remains foundational, but it is not without limitations. His focus on plot over character has been questioned by modern critics — many great works (like psychological novels) focus on inner character development. His theory is based primarily on Greek tragedy and may not apply universally. Feminist critics note the male-centered nature of the tragic hero. Postcolonial critics question the universality of these classical frameworks.

Aphra Behn – Preface to The Lucky Chance Restoration

🔹 Introduction

Aphra Behn's Preface to The Lucky Chance (1686) is one of the earliest and most powerful feminist literary statements in the English language. In this preface, Behn defends herself against critics who attacked her play for being "immodest" or "obscene." Her central argument is simple but revolutionary: if the same work were written by a man, no one would object. She demands equal treatment for women writers and asserts her right to the same creative freedom as male authors.

🔹 Key Arguments in the Preface

1. Double Standard Argument: Male playwrights write the same kind of content, yet only Behn is accused of immodesty. She asks: why is it acceptable for men but not women?
2. Claim to Equal Creative Rights: "I value fame as much as if I had been born a Hero." She asserts that women's desire for literary recognition is equal to men's desire for military glory.
3. Critique of Readers' Prejudice: Readers bring their gender bias to the text. They read her work differently because she is a woman.
4. Defense of the Play's Content: She argues that what critics call "obscene" in her writing is no different from what is celebrated in male-authored works.

🔹 Significance of Aphra Behn in Literary History

• Virginia Woolf wrote about Behn: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
• Behn pioneered the concept that women had a right to literary production and recognition
• Her work anticipates modern feminist literary theory by three centuries

Coleridge – Biographia Literaria Romanticism

🔹 Introduction

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817) is one of the most important documents of Romantic literary theory. In it, Coleridge discusses his own poetic development, his relationship with Wordsworth, and his theory of the imagination. His most famous contribution to literary criticism is the distinction between Primary Imagination, Secondary Imagination, and Fancy, and the concept of Organic Unity.

🔹 Imagination vs. Fancy – The Central Theory

This is perhaps the most exam-important concept in Coleridge. He distinguishes between three levels:

🔹 Organic Unity

Coleridge argues that a great poem is like a living organism — all its parts work together in a unified whole, just as all the organs of the body work together. This idea is called Organic Unity.

• In a great poem, form and content are inseparable — the way something is said is as important as what is said
• Every word, image, and rhythm contributes to the whole — nothing can be removed without damaging the entire poem
• This contrasts with mechanical unity — the strict application of external rules (like the Neo-classical unities)

🔹 Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Coleridge coined this famous phrase in the context of his contribution to Lyrical Ballads. His poems (like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) dealt with supernatural subjects. He argued that the poet's task is to give these supernatural events enough human truth and emotional reality that readers willingly suspend their disbelief and accept the fictional world.

🔹 Coleridge on Wordsworth

In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge also critiques Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction. While Wordsworth said poets should use "the language really used by men" (common rural language), Coleridge disagrees. He argues that no language is more natural than any other, and that poetic language requires something more than mere rural dialect. This disagreement is itself an important part of Romantic critical debate.

T.S. Eliot – Modern Criticism Modernism

🔹 Introduction

T.S. Eliot's critical essays, particularly "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), represent a major shift in literary criticism. Eliot moves away from Romantic criticism (which focused on the poet's personality and emotion) toward an impersonal theory of poetry. His famous concepts — the Objective Correlative, the impersonality of the poet, and the relationship between tradition and originality — have shaped modern literary criticism profoundly.

🔹 Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Part 1: What is Tradition?

Eliot argues that "tradition" is not simply following old patterns passively. It involves a historical sense — an awareness of the entire literary tradition from Homer to the present. A poet must write with a consciousness of the past. No poet writes in isolation; every poem exists in relation to all previous literature.

Part 2: The Impersonality of the Poet

Eliot's most famous and controversial idea: Poetry is not the expression of personality; it is an escape from personality. The poet's mind is like a chemical catalyst — it facilitates a reaction without itself being changed. Good poetry is produced when the poet depersonalizes their emotions and transmutes them into something universal.

The Objective Correlative

This is Eliot's most famous critical concept, introduced in his essay "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919).

Example: If a poet wants to express grief, they should not simply write "I am very sad." Instead, they should present specific images, situations, or events that create grief in the reader — a grey morning, an empty chair, the smell of rain. These are the "objective correlatives" of grief.

Eliot's Criticism of Hamlet: Eliot famously criticized Shakespeare's Hamlet as an "artistic failure" because Hamlet's excessive emotion (his "disgust") has no adequate objective correlative — no external cause in the play that adequately explains or justifies the intensity of his emotion. This criticism is controversial but influential.

🔹 Criticism vs. Creation

Eliot believed that the great poet must also be a great critic. He argued that "the perfect critic" and "the perfect poet" are not opposites — both require intelligence, sensitivity, and historical awareness. The poet must be self-critical, constantly examining and refining their work.

🔹 Eliot's Concept of Dissociation of Sensibility

In "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), Eliot argues that in the 17th century, a "dissociation of sensibility" occurred in English poetry — thought and feeling became separated. The Metaphysical Poets (Donne, Herbert) could still feel their thought and think their feeling. But after them, poets either thought (Milton, Dryden — "reflective") or felt (Romantic poets) — but rarely both together.

Structuralism Theory

🔹 Introduction

Structuralism is a theoretical approach that emerged in the mid-20th century, drawing on the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure. It seeks to find the underlying structures or systems that govern meaning in language, literature, culture, and society. The central idea: meaning is not created by individual elements but by the relationships between elements within a system.

🔹 Structuralism in Literary Study

Structuralists applied Saussure's linguistic model to literature. Key structuralists in literary theory include:

• Vladimir Propp: Analyzed Russian folktales and found that all share the same narrative structure — 31 basic narrative functions and 8 character types. This was applied to all storytelling (including Bollywood films, which follow very similar patterns).
• Lévi-Strauss: Applied structuralism to myths — all myths, across cultures, work through binary oppositions (nature/culture, good/evil, male/female).
• Greimas: Developed a model of narrative "actants" (functional roles in narrative).
• Roland Barthes (early): Applied structuralism to literature and popular culture in Mythologies — showed how everyday things carry ideological meanings.

🔹 Limitations of Structuralism

• It is ahistorical — ignores the historical context of texts
• It risks reducing everything to formulas — missing the unique qualities of individual works
• It has been criticized for being Eurocentric in its assumptions
• The belief in stable, fixed structures was challenged by Poststructuralism

Poststructuralism & Deconstruction Theory

🔹 Introduction

Poststructuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s as a critique and extension of Structuralism. While Structuralism believed in fixed, stable underlying structures, Poststructuralism argues that there are no stable structures — meaning is always deferred, unstable, and context-dependent. The most important poststructuralist thinkers are Jacques Derrida (Deconstruction), Roland Barthes ("Death of the Author"), and Michel Foucault (Power/Knowledge).

🔹 Derrida and Deconstruction

🔹 Roland Barthes – "The Death of the Author" (1967)

This is one of the most famous essays in all of literary theory. Barthes argues that when a text is written, the author's intentions, biography, and psychology should be irrelevant to the interpretation of the text.

• Traditional criticism tried to explain texts by referring to the author's life and intentions — "What did Keats mean by this?" presupposes the author's meaning is the correct meaning
• Barthes argues: the text has no single, authoritative meaning locked inside the author's head
• Instead, the text is a "tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture" — every text is made of fragments of other texts (intertextuality)
• The birth of the reader must come at the cost of the death of the Author — meaning is created by the reader, not by the author

Michel Foucault – Power, Discourse & the Author Poststructuralism

🔹 Introduction

Foucault's contribution to literary theory comes mainly through two concepts: Discourse (how knowledge and power intersect) and the Author Function (what it means to say something is "by" an author). His work builds on, but also differs from, Barthes's "Death of the Author."

🔹 Discourse and Power/Knowledge

Key ideas about Power/Knowledge:

• Power is everywhere — it is not owned by one person or institution; it circulates through all social relationships
• Power produces knowledge — those who hold power define what counts as "knowledge" and "truth"
• Knowledge produces power — having knowledge gives power. Medical discourse, legal discourse, literary discourse — all are forms of power
• Foucault studies how institutions (prisons, hospitals, schools) exercise power over bodies and minds through discourse

🔹 "What Is an Author?" (1969)

In this famous essay, Foucault engages with Barthes's "Death of the Author" but goes further. He asks: what work does the concept of "author" actually do in our culture?

Foucault identifies different types of discourse founders: transdiscursive authors like Marx and Freud don't just write texts — they establish entire new ways of thinking (discursive fields) that shape all subsequent work in that field.

Freud & Psychoanalytic Criticism – Lionel Trilling Psychoanalysis

🔹 Introduction

Psychoanalytic literary criticism applies the theories of Sigmund Freud to the reading of literature. Freud's model of the human psyche — the unconscious, the id/ego/superego, repression, the Oedipus complex, and dream-work — has been tremendously influential in understanding how literature works and what it reveals about human psychology. Lionel Trilling's essay "Freud and Literature" (1940) is a key text that maps the relationship between Freud's ideas and literary criticism.

🔹 Freud's Model of the Mind

🔹 The Artist and Neurosis (Freud)

Freud believed the artist is someone who, like the neurotic, is unable to satisfy desires in reality. But unlike the neurotic, the artist finds a way to satisfy desires through the creation of art — a process called sublimation. The artist transforms unacceptable desires into socially valued creative work.

🔹 Trilling's "Freud and Literature"

Trilling examines Freud's relationship to literary theory from three angles:

1. Freud's View of Literature: Freud himself used literary works to illustrate his theories (Hamlet for the Oedipus complex, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex for the same). But he also had a somewhat limited view — seeing literature primarily as symptom of the writer's psychology.
2. Freud as Humanist: Trilling argues that Freud's true importance for literary criticism lies not in his specific theories but in his general vision of the human mind — the mind as complex, contradictory, driven by forces we do not fully understand. This is compatible with great literature's vision of human complexity.
3. Literature and the Unconscious: Trilling argues that great literature has always known what Freud "discovered" — that human beings are driven by unconscious forces, that repression shapes behavior, that sexuality and aggression are fundamental to human life. Shakespeare's characters are "Freudian" before Freud.

Marxism & Literature – Terry Eagleton Marxism

🔹 Introduction

Marxist literary criticism applies the ideas of Karl Marx (and later Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and others) to the study of literature. Its central questions: How does literature reflect or reinforce the economic and social conditions of the society that produces it? Whose interests does literature serve? How does it naturalize or challenge ideological assumptions?

🔹 Base and Superstructure

🔹 Ideology and Literature

Ideology, in the Marxist sense, is the system of ideas, beliefs, and values that serves the interests of the ruling class while appearing "natural" and universal. Literature is one of the key ways in which ideology is transmitted and naturalized.

• When a Victorian novel celebrates individualism, marriage, and property, it is naturalizing the values of the bourgeois (middle class) order
• When literature portrays the poor as either criminals or victims of their own faults, it is reproducing ruling-class ideology
• Marxist criticism "reads against the grain" — it looks for what literature suppresses, what class struggles are hidden or distorted

🔹 Eagleton's Contribution

Terry Eagleton in Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) offers an accessible introduction to Marxist critical concepts and their application to literature:

1. Literature and History: Eagleton argues that literature cannot be understood in isolation from its historical and social context. A text's meaning is always partly determined by the historical conditions of its production.
2. Form and Content: Eagleton (drawing on Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács) argues that literary form is not neutral — the form of a novel, the structure of a poem, embodies ideological assumptions. Realism, for instance, tends to naturalize existing social arrangements.
3. The Author's Class Position: The class background of the author shapes what they can and cannot see in society. A bourgeois author may write sympathetically about the working class but still "see" them through bourgeois eyes.
4. Literature as a Site of Struggle: Literature is not simply an ideological tool of the ruling class — it can also be a site of resistance, contradiction, and critique. Great works often exceed the ideology of their authors and reveal social contradictions.

Feminism & Literary Criticism – Simone de Beauvoir Feminism

🔹 Introduction

Feminist literary criticism examines how gender shapes literature — both the production of texts (who writes, who is published, who is read) and the content of texts (how women are represented, what values are encoded). Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) is the theoretical foundation from which most feminist literary theory develops.

🔹 The Second Sex – Key Ideas

🔹 The Concept of "The Other"

De Beauvoir draws on Existentialist philosophy (especially Sartre's concept of the Other) to argue that in patriarchal society:

• Man is defined as the Subject — the norm, the absolute, the default human being
• Woman is defined as the Other — defined in relation to man, as his opposite, as lacking what he has
• This othering is not natural — it is produced and maintained by patriarchal systems of power, culture, and ideology
• Literature has been a key site through which women have been constructed as "Other"

🔹 Feminist Literary Criticism – Schools and Methods

🔹 Kate Millett – Sexual Politics

Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) is a landmark feminist text that analyzes how patriarchy operates through literature. She reads works by Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence and shows how they glorify male dominance and female submission — and how this is presented as "natural." This approach — analyzing how male authors represent women — is called "images of women" criticism.

🔹 Virginia Woolf and Women's Writing

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) — though not on the syllabus directly — is foundational. Woolf argues that women need economic independence ("£500 a year") and a private space to write. Her analysis of how women have been excluded from education, literary canon, and economic independence anticipates de Beauvoir's analysis.