Lecture 11: Criticism and Theory

English 140
Summer Session B, 2012
UC Santa Barbara

Literature […] could serve to place in cosmic perspective the petty demands of working people for decent living conditions or greater control over their own lives, and might even with luck come to render them oblivious of such issues in their high-minded contemplation of eternal truths and beauties.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

Magic(al) Realism

  • A literary form that maintains a reliable and objective narrative form while incorporating fabulous and fantastical events.
  • The term was initially applied to a trend in German fiction in the 1950s.
  • However, it is now more commonly associated with certain authors in Central and South America.
  • Often, the magical elements are figures for the incredibly complex and phantasmagorical political realities of the contemporary world.

A few views on why we study literature

  • Literature as repository of cultural values.
  • Literature as (semiotic) object of analysis.
  • Literature as object to be deconstructed.
  • Literature as instantiation (and constructor) of ideology.

The memory of great men (115): The Teaching of Literature as Humanism

He was fighting for higher stakes now than just his professional reputation: He had become by default the champion of literature itself, and he mounted an aggressive counterattack on behalf of the canon. (102; ch. 6)
They want to teach our children that Africans invented the airplane! […] Show me the Shakespeare of the Hottentots, and I’ll put him on my syllabus! (103)
Consider the function of an English department […] its central function, the purpose at its very heart, is to hand down the tradition of prose, poetry, and drama in the English language from one generation to the next. (111)

Beauty and truth. All the rest is bumper stickers: The poet’s view

A poem can’t ever just be a poem, it has to enlighten, it has to empower. It must represent the Hottentots in the most flattering fucking light. It must transgress the hegemonic fucking discourse. In other words, a poem must do fuck all, shouts the Coogan, but what it does best! (146; ch. 8)
You’ve the soul of a Jesuit torturer, every fucking one of you. It’s the hallmark of your parasitical profession. Blindness and insight, isn’t that it? We’re the blind bastards, and you’ve got all the insight. You set yourself up as little paper gods, and you judge everybody. (149; ch. 8)