《西方文论 伊格尔顿课件》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《西方文论 伊格尔顿课件（46页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、邵冰清,西方文论What is Literature? The rise of English,.What is literature?,Definition: Fiction? Fact? Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton Francis Bacon, John Donne, Bunyan,Definition,Russian critic Roman Jakobson:“Literature is an organized violence committed on ordinary speech.” Before 1917, Russian
2、 formalists, including Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson,Osip Brik, advanced the definition. Stalinism: Literature is a particular organization of language. It is a material fact which has its own specific laws, structures and devices.,Formalism,Literary work: arbitrary assemblage of devices, 1. cont
3、ent was merely the motivation of form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise. 2. the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique.,Formalism,Literary discourse estranges or alienates ordinary speech. making strange was the essen
4、ce of the literary. To think of literature as the Formalists do is really to think of all literature as poetry.(Technique),Definition,Literature is a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself. Literature cannot in fact be objectively defined. It leaves the definition of
5、literature up to how somebody decides to read, not to the nature of what is written. reader,Definition,any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. literature is a highly valued kind of writing Value? Variable Value is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by
6、 certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes.,Value Variable,Value is a part of ideology. Ideology: the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in. In Practical C
7、riticism (1929), the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards demonstrated just how subjective literary value-judgments could actually be.,.The Rise of English,In 18th century, the concept of literature : the whole body of valued writing in society. Criteria: the values and tastes of a particular social clas
8、s. In 19th century, Romantic period: creative or imaginative work.,Romantic Period,Background: uprising of middle class; economic take-off; utilitarianism becoming the dominant ideology; revolution and protests Literature becomes a political force. Its task is to transform society in the name of tho
9、se energies and values which art embodies.,Romantic Period,The word poetry no longer refers simply to a technical mode of writing: it has deep social, political and philosophical implications. In 19th century, William Morris harnessed this Romantic humanism to the cause of the working-class movement
10、.,Modern Aesthetics,From the work of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Coleridge, we inherit the ideas of symbol and aesthetic experience, and aesthetic harmony. Art is largely a product of the very alienation from social life. It is special and mysterious. The whole point of creative writing was that it was g
11、loriously useless.,Modern Aesthetics,Art was extricated from the material practices, social relations and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised to the status of a solitary fetish.,Symbolism,At the center of aesthetic theory at the turn of the eighteenth century is the semi
12、-mystical doctrine of the symbol. For Romanticism, the symbol becomes the panacea for all problems. The symbol fused together motion and stillness, turbulent content and organic form, mind and world.,Literature and Ideology,Literature is an ideology. It has the most intimate relations to questions o
13、f social power. By the mid-Victorian period, this traditionally reliable, immensely powerful ideological form, religion, was in deep trouble.,Literature and Ideology,English is constructed as a subject to carry this ideological burden from the Victorian period onwards. Matthew Arnold: The urgent soc
14、ial need is to Hellenize or cultivate the philistine middle class. This can be done by transfusing into them something of the traditional style of the aristocracy. Control and incorporate the working class.,Function,English helps to promote sympathy and fellow feeling among all classes. It would com
15、municate to them the moral riches of bourgeois civilization, impress upon them a reverence for middle-class achievements, and curb in them any disruptive tendency to collective political action.,Two means-Emotion,Literature works primarily by emotion and experience. Literature has become the opposit
16、e to analytical thought and conceptual enquiry. The pill of middle-class ideology was to be sweetened by the sugar of literature.,Two means-Experience,Experience is in its literary form a kind of vicarious self-fulfilment. The actually impoverished experience of the mass of people, an impoverishment bred by their social conditions, can be supplemented by literature.,Education,English as an academic subject was first institutionalized not in the Universities, but in the Mechanics In
