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Lit Crit 101

You studied it at uni - formalism, structuralism, new criticism, new historicism, post-structuralism, Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism, etc – but maybe it’s been awhile.  No matter! Certain key points stay stuck in your head and clues are thrown in to help. Have a go, and you’re in the running to receive a 30-euro (£25 / $40) gift certificate to spend at Amazon; in case of a tie, a name will be drawn. Deadline: Dec. 15, 2011

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GOOD LUCK!

Name the theorist:

1. Keep your eyes close on that text!  this Southern poet was one of the first to emphasize. And his students – Alan Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren - took it to heart.


 

2. No, the object of poetry is not to instruct or make one morally better, this Romantic proclaimed.  It’s about pleasure and beauty and high-grade opium.


 

3. Write with “white ink,” women!


 

4. Jane Austen, George Elliot, Henry James – OK.   Laurence Sterne, Thomas Hardy – Not OK.  It’s all about valuation and the “training of sensibility.”

 

5. Archetypes, archetypes, archetypes! Jung, it’s not; anatomical, it is


 

6. Had the great idea to remove all authorial and contextual information from thirteen poems and then assign their interpretation to his undergraduates at Cambridge.  They bombed; he built on it. 


 

7. Going back to the beginning – it’s all about the Sublime.


 

8. Archaeology/episteme/genealogy – being mad is OK and not evolving from structuralism isn’t.


 

9. Think England, think Marx, think how much Martin Amis hates his guts.


 

10. Transformational grammar – No, dogs don’t communicate anything like people – Occupy Wall Street!


 

11. Know how anxious you get thinking about all those great poets who came before?  Intra-poetic relationships, ouch.


 

12. DEconstructionism.


 

13. Historically, she said, women have not always had the material conditions for literary production, like money, a room, a decent pen, Cadbury chocolate . . .  something like that.


 

14. Intentional fallacy/affective fallacy -  Beardsley and . . .


 

15.You know all those stereotypical images and myths of the Third (postcolonial) World that have conveniently justified Western exploitation and domination of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures and people?  Get over it, he said.


 

16. Langue/parole; signifier/signified – yes, he was a linguist, but Vladimir Propp, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss and others jumped all over it.


 

17. Our first great Western theorist, from whom we learned that it was OK to feel satisfied at the end after watching something like Oedipus the King or Reservoir Dogs.  Catharsis, pure and simple.