Reading Criticism and Identifying Periods

Unit eighteen ended on place and the moment of empire deciding the reading. This unit turns back across the whole course for method. Its governing idea is that criticism and identification questions reward organized knowledge applied with care: read a critic for the claim and the turn, and date a passage by combining clues, never by one alone. This first part moves in three steps: the critics the course has met, from Sidney through Arnold, Pater, Eliot and Woolf; then the twentieth-century schools, New Criticism, feminist and postcolonial, with two procedures for reading and testing a critic; and then the signatures of the periods, from Old English to the Romantics.

We begin by gathering the critics the course has met, in order, from Sidney to Woolf.

First, what the exam asks of criticism.

ENL 1801 The Criticism Question on This Exam

The exam asks you to comprehend excerpts of literary criticism and to recognize what major critics claimed. This unit gathers the critics the course has met, from Sidney to Eliot and Woolf, adds three twentieth-century schools, then turns to identifying periods and authors. Critics, schools, then identification. Read criticism as argument.

Sidney comes first.

ENL 1802 Sidney: Poetry Teaches and Delights

Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy, as unit six taught, answers attacks on poetry as immoral, especially Plato's banishing of poets. It argues that poetry teaches and delights, giving light through beauty, so that right thought leads to right action. To teach and to delight. Sidney answers Plato.

Two critics of drama.

ENL 1803 Dryden and Johnson: Judgment and Nature

Dryden's Of Dramatick Poesie debated drama in dialogue and held that satire's end is the correction of vice. Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare rejected the classical unities, argued that drama should be faithful to life, and still named Shakespeare's faults. A dialogue on drama; a preface on Shakespeare. Johnson praises and faults together.

The Romantic theory has two halves.

ENL 1804 Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Romantic Theory

Wordsworth's Preface defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" taking its origin "from emotion recollected in tranquillity," in the language really used by men. Coleridge's Biographia set imagination above fancy and named "that willing suspension of disbelief." Feeling recollected; imagination over fancy. Do not swap Preface and Biographia.

Two more Romantic claims.

ENL 1805 Shelley's Defence and Keats's Letters

Shelley's Defence of Poetry, answering Peacock, called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Keats, in a letter to his brothers, defined Negative Capability: being "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." Legislators; uncertainty. Keats's idea comes from a private letter.

Arnold made criticism a cure.

ENL 1806 Arnold: Criticism and Touchstones

Matthew Arnold's criticism, the course taught, defined culture as "the best which has been thought and said," spreading "sweetness and light" against the middle-class Philistines, and proposed touchstones from the world's best writing as measures of worth. Sweetness and light; touchstones. Arnold makes criticism a cure for society.

Some critics answered Sidney.

ENL 1807 Pater and Wilde: Art for Art's Sake

Walter Pater's Renaissance urged living intensely, "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame," and Aestheticism held that art should be beautiful rather than teach, "art for art's sake." Wilde spread the creed and tested it in Dorian Gray. Beauty over lesson. Aestheticism rejects Sidney's teaching aim.

Eliot reversed Wordsworth.

ENL 1808 Eliot: Tradition and the Objective Correlative

In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot argued that a poet writes with the whole tradition in mind and that poetry is impersonal. In his Hamlet essay he proposed the "objective correlative," objects or events that express an emotion. Tradition, impersonality, correlative. Eliot reverses Wordsworth's personal feeling.

Woolf as a critic.

ENL 1809 Woolf as Critic

Woolf's A Room of One's Own argues that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," and imagines Shakespeare's sister. The critic Paul Fry, in his Yale lectures, treats it as a starting point for twentieth-century feminist criticism. Money, a room, a lost sister. Attribute the reading to Fry.

Now the twentieth-century schools, and two procedures for any critical passage.

One school read the text alone.

ENL 1810 Close Reading and the New Criticism

The New Criticism, named from John Crowe Ransom's nineteen forty-one book, emphasized close reading of the poem as a self-contained object. Wimsatt and Beardsley called judging a poem by its author's intention "the intentional fallacy," and Cleanth Brooks attacked "the heresy of paraphrase." The text alone, read closely. The exam's reading questions use this method.

Another read how women are written.

ENL 1811 Feminist Criticism

Feminist criticism examines how literature represents women and how women have written. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, of nineteen seventy-nine, took its title from Jane Eyre and argued that women writers were confined to heroines who are either "angel" or "monster." Angel or monster. The title comes from Jane Eyre.

A third read empire.

ENL 1812 Postcolonial Criticism

Postcolonial criticism examines how literature represents empire and the colonized. Edward Said's Orientalism, of nineteen seventy-eight, critiqued Western depictions of the East; Homi Bhabha theorized hybridity; Gayatri Spivak defined the subaltern carefully. Fry's lectures trace a line from Said to Bhabha. Said, Bhabha, Spivak. Attribute each concept to its critic.

Here is the method for a critical excerpt.

ENL 1813 Reading a Critical Excerpt: Claim, Evidence, Turn

A critical excerpt is an argument, read in four steps. Find the claim, usually near the start or end. Find the evidence: quotations, comparisons or principles. Find the turn, the but or however where the critic answers an objection or rejects a common view, because questions test it. Identify the critic's assumptions: an Arnoldian values culture, a New Critic the text alone, a feminist critic the representation of women, a postcolonial critic empire. Then restate the claim in your own words and check each option against the critic's evidence, not your own view.

Here is the method for agreeing and disagreeing.

ENL 1814 Agreeing and Disagreeing With a Critic

Some questions ask what a critic would accept or reject. Restate the principle: for Wordsworth, poetry comes from feeling recollected; for Eliot, poetry is impersonal; for Arnold, culture is the best that has been thought; for Pater, art serves beauty, not lessons. Test each option: Eliot would reject a poem as personal confession; Sidney would reject poetry with no moral use. Watch for options that belong to another critic, since Wordsworth and Eliot both write about feeling but take opposite positions. Then choose what follows from the principle.

Now the signatures of the periods, the marks that date a passage on sight.

First, the oldest signature.

ENL 1815 The Signature of Old English

Old English verse, the course taught, uses lines of two alliterating half-lines split by a caesura, heavy stress rather than rhyme, and kennings such as whale-road for the sea. Its subjects are heroic: lords, warriors, exile and fate, with Christian and pagan mixed. Alliteration, caesura, kenning. Exam passages are in translation.

Next, the English after the Conquest.

ENL 1816 The Signature of Middle English

Middle English, from after the Conquest to about fifteen hundred, is readable with a gloss and full of French words and older spellings, as in "When that Aprilis, with his showers swoot." Chaucer's couplets and rhyme royal, romances, dream visions and the alliterative revival mark it. Old spellings, French words, Chaucer. Spelling points earlier than the sixteenth century.

The sixteenth century's marks.

ENL 1817 The Signature of Elizabethan Verse

Sixteenth-century verse favours the sonnet, Petrarchan and Shakespearean, sonnet sequences, pastoral lyrics and the stage's blank verse. Its diction uses thee and thou, and its themes include love, time and beauty, often through Petrarchan conventions. Sonnets, blank verse, Petrarchan love. The volta signals a sonnet's turn.

The seventeenth century's argument.

ENL 1818 The Signature of Metaphysical Verse

Metaphysical verse, from Donne, Herbert and Marvell, argues through far-fetched conceits, paradox and rough, speech-like rhythm, moving by "if," "but" and "therefore." The Cavalier poets, in contrast, wrote smooth, polished classical songs of love, wine and carpe diem. Conceit and argument. Carpe diem belongs to both schools.

The couplet's age.

ENL 1819 The Signature of Augustan Verse

Augustan verse, from Dryden through Pope, is written in closed heroic couplets with balanced halves, antithesis and a caesura, in polished, Latinate diction. It is often satirical and public, treating society, manners and reason, as in "What dire offence from am'rous causes springs." Closed couplets, balance, satire. Balance often carries mockery.

The inward turn.

ENL 1820 The Signature of Romantic Verse

Romantic verse turns to nature, the self and imagination, in lyrics, odes and blank-verse meditation, often moving from a scene to an inward reflection. Its diction aims at the language of common life, as in "I wandered lonely as a cloud," and it revives the ballad and the sonnet. Nature, feeling, the inward turn. The poem is about the mind.

This first part organized the knowledge. We recalled the critics in order: Sidney's teach and delight, Johnson's faithfulness to life, Wordsworth's feeling recollected and Coleridge's imagination, Shelley's legislators and Keats's uncertainty, Arnold's touchstones, Pater's flame, Eliot's impersonality and Woolf's room. We described the New Criticism, feminist criticism and postcolonial criticism. We read an excerpt for claim, evidence and turn. We tested whether a critic would accept or reject a statement by restating the principle. And we named the signatures from Old English alliteration to the Romantic inward turn. Part two carries the signatures forward and puts them to work.