What the Criticism and Period Questions Reward

The idea

The criticism and identification questions reward organized knowledge applied with care. English criticism, as this course has followed it, is a long argument about what literature is for. Sidney said poetry teaches and delights, answering Plato; Dryden argued about drama in dialogue and called satire the correction of vice; Johnson judged Shakespeare faithful to life, faults and all, and rejected the unities. Wordsworth located poetry in feeling recollected in tranquillity and in the language really used by men; Coleridge set imagination above fancy and named the willing suspension of disbelief; Shelley called poets legislators, and Keats praised living in uncertainty. Arnold made culture, the best that has been thought and said, a cure for the Philistines; Pater and Wilde answered with art for art's sake and the gem-like flame; Eliot demanded tradition and impersonality and an objective correlative, and Woolf a room of one's own. The twentieth-century schools followed: the New Critics read the text alone, named the intentional fallacy and attacked the heresy of paraphrase; feminist critics such as Gilbert and Gubar found the angel and the monster; postcolonial critics such as Said, Bhabha and Spivak read empire, hybridity and the subaltern. Each period, too, has a signature: Old English alliteration and kennings, Middle English spelling, the Elizabethan sonnet, the metaphysical conceit, the Augustan couplet, the Romantic inward turn, the Victorian monologue and the Modernist fragment. To answer these questions, read a critic for the claim and the turn, combine form, diction, subject and allusion to date a passage, and check names and periods before you choose.