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LITERARY CRITICISM

ABOUT THE NOVEL

December 1, 2015
ARTISTIC VENTURES, LITERARY CRITICISM, READING

“A truly great novel is a story to the simple, a parable to the wise, a direct revelation of reality to the person who has made it part of his or her being.”

“The novel is a work of fiction in which the imagination and the intellect combine to express life in the form of a story; the imagination is always directed and controlled by the intellect. It is interested chiefly, not in romance and adventure, but in men and women as they are; it aims to show the motives and influences which govern human life, and the effects of personal choice upon character and destiny. Such is the true novel; and, as such, it opens a wider and more interesting field than any other type of literature.”

* * *

“The novel is the extended story of a group of individualized characters who are made to come alive in a normal background, and whose personalities interact on one another toward a specific outcome. The ultimate test of a true novel is its character drawing. In a good novel the incidents must be not only possible but probable; in a great novel, they must be inevitable.”

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From “The Writer’s Task,” An Address by Bernard Malamud, author, March 1959:

“It seems to me that the writer’s most important task, no matter what the current theory of man, or his prevailing mood, is to recapture his image as human being as each of us in his secret heart knows it to be, and as history and literature have from the beginning revealed it. At the same time, the writer must imagine a better world for men while he shows us, in all its ugliness and beauty, the possibilities of this. In re-creating the humanity of man, in reality his greatness, he will, among other things, hold up the mirror to the mystery of him, in which poetry and possibility live, though he has endlessly betrayed them. In a sense, the writer in his art, without directly stating it–though he may preach, his work must not–must remind man that he has, in his human striving, invented nothing less than freedom; and if he will devoutly remember this, he will understand the best way to preserve it, and his own highest value.”

   

PSYCHO-CRITICS: HOW LITERATURE WORKS

November 18, 2015
LITERARY CRITICISM, READING

In the study of literature, using the PSYCHOLOGICAL approach, one type of critic places emphasis upon subjective perception and emotional response to an aesthetic experience.

The “objects” of study are

the writer/author/artist

the work (characters/personae)

the reader/viewer and reactions/responses

in addition to the study of the creative process.

Literature helps us reveal ourselves to ourselves; yet literature often is expressing the author’s unconscious in symbolic terms without awareness. Images, connotations, desires, repressions become significant in a work.

HOW IT ALL WORKS (in a “perfect” situation):

The literary work is presented as a text. We use knowledge of the language to perceive the text as things we know in life/reality. Consciously we supply an intellectual meaning to the text by the process of abstraction.

We supply theme/meaning by thinking about the work as a separate entity: We reality test it. We experience the work by INTROJECTION, taking it into ourselves, feeling the nucleus of fantasy and the formal management of that fantasy as though it were our own. By ANALOGIZING, we bring to the work our own highly individualized fantasies.

Fantasies are not “good” or “bad”: only those that please or displease. So “good” now means that which pleases, and pleases for a long time.

However, MEANING is not there simply: it is something we construct for the text within the limits of the text. It is transforming unconscious relevancy to conscious relevancy.

So: “literary meaning” conveys an idea that all the details of the work are “about,” a “point” to which all the individual words, or events, or images in a literary work are RELEVANT.

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THE TRAGIC VISION

October 25, 2015
LITERARY CRITICISM
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“The universe seems secure only to those who do not question too far.” –Anon.

“What makes mankind tragic is not that [we] are victims of nature, it is that [we] are conscious of it.” –Joseph Conrad

Ideally, tragedy reveals simultaneously, in one complete action [or in a five-act play by Shakespeare] a person’s total possibilities and yet his or her most grievous limitations–all that she or he can do as creator of good, all that he or she does or fails to do, or cannot do, as creature of fate, chance, or that person’s own evil nature.

But is there truly a tragic vision, a consensus definition of “the tragic”?

One common element, a classic common element, seems always to be that there is present a sense of WASTE, or of what could have been.

Saying “That’s so tragic” is that it is not usually tragic, but an expression we have to use–to help us cope (like “She’s in a better place”).

The tragic vision explains what we bring down upon ourselves–that “pride”–that turns to…whatever.

An accident is sad; loss of life is sad; a suicide is sad. But not each event is “tragic.”

We see examples; we don’t need a theory. We just know, and then respond.

“A pox upon this house.”

Is the fault really in our stars?

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