Thursday, March 21, 2013

Paper 5 MA English Literature Mumbai University


All these essays can be found in David Lodge's 20th Century Literary Criticism. The book is a wonderful investment for any serious reader/writer, due  to many other essays by important writers and philosophers.
A) CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC CRITICISM

Aristiotle - Poetics

William Wordsworth - Preface to The Lyrical Ballads

Matthew Arnold - Function of Criticism



Key Concepts in Classical Criticism

1) Concepts of Order and Discipline.

2) The importance of Decorum

3) View of Reality



Key Concepts in Romantic Criticism

1) The emphasis on Imagination

2) Experimentation with new forms and themes

3) View of Reality



B) Formalism and Marxism

Victor Shklovsky - Art as Technique

Terry Eagleton - Marxism and Literary Criticism

Louis Althusser - The Ideological State Apparatus


Key Concepts in Formalism

Varieties of Formalism

Cultural Background of American Formalism

Cultural Background of Russian Formalism


Key Concepts in Marxism

The concepts of culture, language, literature and ideology

Cultural Theory

Literary Theory


C) Modernism and Post-Modernism

Ortega Ye Gasset - The Death Of The Novel

Ihab Hassan - The Post Modern Turn

Frederic Jameson - Postmodernsim and Consumer Society



Key Concepts in Modernism

1) The Modernist concept of the relationship between the self and the society

2) Experimentation in Forms and Themes - its pervasiveness in the other art forms

3) The value of wholeness, harmony and radiance



Key Concepts in Postmodernism

1) Incredulity towards all metanarratives

2) Revisioning the concepts of representation, subjectivity and official histories

3) Text as a tissue of quotations from various sites of culture



D) Feminism Postcolonialism and Reader Response

Toril Moi - Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory

Franz Fanon - Pifalls of National Consciousness

Stanley Fish - Is There a Text In This Class



Key Concepts in Feminism

Femininity as a linguistic construct

Central Theory or playful pluralism, feminist critique and gynocriticism

Queer Theory - problematising compulsory heterosexuality



Key Concepts in Post Colonialism

1) Strategies used in postcolonial discourse to subvert the value system of the coloniser which was paraded as universal.

2) Narrating nations (Homi Bhabha) and reacting to historical catalepsy (A Memmi)

3) Moving from a re-active to pro-active position



Key Concepts in Reader Response

1) Concepts of horizon of expectation, interpretative communities

2) The performance of the reader in the construction of the meaning of the text

3) Multiplicity of meanings due to life-to-text interactions







Friday, March 1, 2013