1 / 11

Abrams ’ Quaternity of Critical Approaches to Literature

Abrams ’ Quaternity of Critical Approaches to Literature. UNIVERSE. WORK. ARTIST. AUDIENCE. TCG, 2004-2012. WORK. i.e., the text itself, as artifact, and a supposedly objective analysis of purely aesthetic matters (think "textbook" literary terms);

grecot
Download Presentation

Abrams ’ Quaternity of Critical Approaches to Literature

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Abrams’ Quaternity ofCritical Approaches to Literature • UNIVERSE • WORK • ARTIST • AUDIENCE TCG, 2004-2012

  2. WORK • i.e., the text itself, as artifact, and a supposedly objective analysis of purely aesthetic matters (think "textbook" literary terms); • supposedly, too, the sole intrinsic approach, while all others are extrinsic; • e.g., Formalism (including New Criticism), various rhetorical & genre theories, Structuralism, & (to a great extent, even) Deconstruction

  3. ARTIST • i.e., the author (and his/her inner, inspired, self-expressive/emotive, soul-burning "LAMP"); • e.g., expressive (expressionist) criticism, biographical criticism, and much psychoanalytic criticism (which ponders the unconscious underpinnings of an author’s creativity)

  4. AUDIENCE • i.e., the reader(s); key terms here include "affective" and "pragmatic" (that is, how does the work move the reader, to emotional response, or even action?); • e.g., impressionistic criticism & various brands of reader-response theory (the latter usually a more concerted analysis of how/why readers respond as they do)

  5. UNIVERSE • i.e., the "world" (and culture) out there, "outside" the author/text/reader; • think the "real world" (as in art being a realistic or Platonic "MIRROR" [mimesis] of said world); or (more usually today): • historical-political worldviews/ ideologies/values-systems imposed on the text by the critic (e.g., feminism, Marxism, postcolonial & critical race theory, queer theory, & ecocriticism)

  6. Historical Time-Line (I) • Classical Greece—Plato: art as a reflection of his idealistic World of Forms (UNIVERSE); Aristotle: art as catharsis (AUDIENCE); Aristotle's genre prescriptions (WORK) • Medieval & Renaissance periods (heck, well into the 17th & 18th centuries)—not only various versions of Platonic mimesis (UNIVERSE) and Aristotelian catharsis (AUDIENCE), but a strong (Christian) moral-didactic emphasis (UNIVERSE)

  7. Historical Time-Line (II) • 19th-century Romanticism—both a new emphasis on the individual’s creativity (expressionism: ARTIST) and a comparable freedom for the critic to be subjective & “impressionistic” (AUDIENCE) • 19th-century Realism—Stendhal's mimetic notion of the novel as "a mirror carried along the road" (UNIVERSE)

  8. Historical Time-Line (III) • 1st half of the 20th century: • —highlighted, above all, by a new emphasis on the (form of the) WORK of art per se (New Criticism, Russian Formalism, structuralism) • —however, the late 19th- and early 20th centuries also included lots of (old-fashioned) biographical criticism (ARTIST) and (old-fashioned) historical criticism (UNIVERSE: that is, how does this author's work reflect the "world," the "reality," of his/her socio-cultural milieu?)

  9. Historical Time-Line (IV) • 1st half of the 20th century (continued): • —but also a new Freudian psychoanalysis of the ARTIST • —and also the rise of Marxist theory (UNIVERSE) and of reader-response theories (AUDIENCE)

  10. Historical Time-Line (V) • 2nd half of the 20th century: • —the climax of structuralism, and its contradictory spawn, poststructuralism (both WORK, at last) • —the climax of reader-response theories (AUDIENCE) • —the climax of Marxism, and the advent of other politically/culturally based agendas, like feminism, race studies, and postcolonial theory (UNIVERSE) • 1st half of the 21st century: the ultimate victory of Reality TV, 12-year-old MTV divas, and Kill Abdul: the Video Game!?

  11. Coda/Notes • Abrams' "quaternity" has been derived from— • Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. London: Oxford UP, 1953. • (see especially pages 6-7) • All misreadings thereof are the complete and utter fault of Thomas C. Gannon, U of Nebraska-Lincoln, Aug. 2004.

More Related