ORIGINS OF THE STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

   

   John Dryden: "Of dramatic Poesy"

   Alexander Pope

   Joseph Addison

   Samuel Johnson

   S. T. Coleridge: "Biographia Literaria"

   Charles Lamb

   William Hazlitt

   Thomas de Quincey

   

   Britain

   1870 Educational Act

   Darwin (1859), decline of religiosity

   Literature to replace cultural and spiritual void, a common denominator

   Increasingly more available, a subject suitable for women

   The USA

   Practical skills in English

   Since 1890s seen as a separate academic subject

   India

   English literature as a means of teaching the language, later to acquaint the colonized nation
   with a superior culture

   

   1. Matthew Arnold

   Fear of anarchy due to the loss of faith, new intelligentsia, literature as a store of values
   and traditions

   Precursor of cultural studies

   Touchstones

   "Culture and Anarchy"

   

   2. T. S. Eliot

   objective correlative

   issues of culture

   "The Sacred Wood and Other Essays"

   "The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism"

   

   3. Henry James

   novel criticism

   

   historicism

   

   Cambridge New Criticism -- after WWI

   I. A. Richards: practical criticism

   Strip away the context, close reading, literature reveals the state of culture, value of
   literature, fear of popular taste and culture

   F. R. Leavis and the Scrutiny circle

   Close reading, values, traditions of literature

   

   Marxism

   Relationship between culture and society, base and superstructure

   Progressive texts  - promote social change (social realist, non-realist distancing, formally
   experimental texts

   Non-progressive texts

   Ideology and its mechanisms

   Lukács, Brecht, The Frankurt School (Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno), "structuralist"
   marxism (Louis Althusser, Lucien Goldmann, Pierre Macherey)

   Terry Eagleton, Fréderic Jameson

   

   

   Structuralism and post-structuralism

   Structure, its units, their combinations and functions of the units and unit combinations

   How meanings are created in texts, how structures determine the meaning

   Slots and fillers

   

   1. The Geneva School -- Ferdinand de Saussure

   Sign -- signifier + signified

   Concept of difference

   Langue vs. parole

    - today see Noam Chomsky

   2. Russian Formalism (Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, Viktor Schklovsky,
   Tynjanov, Michail Bakhtin)

   3. The Prague Linguistic Circle (Jakobson, N. Trubetskoy, Jan Mukařovský)

   4.  Parisian Structuralism (Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan)

   Claude Levi-Strauss -- structural anthropology, binary oppositions

   5. Post-structuralism (Roland Barthes, Derrida, Michel Foucault, Frederic Jameson, Kristeva,
   Edward Said)

   6. Psychoanalysis

   Freudian criticism -- unconscious, free association, symbols

   Jacques Lacan -- relationship between identity and language, lack and difference

   7. Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man) -- free play of language and thought, meaning
   is always absent from the utterance, subversion of values attached to binary oppositions,
   instability of the formative structures of texts, language is self-referential

   (8) Feminist criticism -- question of gender equality, tries to redress the balance, studies
   women as writers and as readers, how women are presented in literature, female language,
   female experiences, female psyche

   Precursors: Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf

   Kate Millet, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigay, Elaine Showalter

   

   Hermeneutics and Reception Theory

   hermeneutical circle: part and the whole

   influence of phenomenology

   Wolfgang Iser: implied reader vs. actual reader

   Roman Ingarden

   Hans Robert Jauss

   Michael Riffatere

   Stanley Fish

   

   E. M. Forster: "Aspects of the Novel"

   David Lodge

   Harold Bloom

   Stanley Wells

   Frank Kermode