Bilirubin posted:

I was wondering if there was a similar "how to lit crit" thread somewhere around here, or if we could post some links to help STEM ignoramuses like me out when approaching literary criticism.

A human heart posted:

i'm a stem guy

A human heart posted:

and i read the big smart man books

A human heart posted:

and i vote

Bilirubin posted:

Well, yeah, sorta. I never had the course distribution to spend on literary theory. I had to devote pretty much every waking hour to reading in my discipline for several years, and I read and write in it daily, and so it took me many years to get my head back around to the idea of reading for fun and relaxation too. I did only a few lit courses during my undergrad, a two semester-long "great books" class (not really lit crit but more general cultural education), and as a freshman I, a know it all, took a 4th year course on The Modern Novel which I failed because of the beginning of Chapter 3 (or 4 I forget off the top of my head) of Ulysses stopping me dead. Presumably this course employed theory but I realized I was in way too much over my head but instead of dropping I the class I dropped acid and ignored my situation

I am now starting to work my way through those novels I missed in that class and would appreciate a better grounding in critical theory. My wife got a ton in both her women's studies course as well as her advanced legal theory courses later, so I got a little of the idea behind Foucault and Derrida through osmosis.

CestMoi posted:

Lex Neville posted:

did you do translation studies Sham?

Bilirubin posted:

Something from the bottle wake in QQCS that struck me was both a comment on Marxist vs. post-structuralist criticism and a mention Franchescanado made of a basic film criticism thread in CineD. Whereas I don't watch much film but do read I was wondering if there was a similar "how to lit crit" thread somewhere around here, or if we could post some links to help STEM ignoramuses like me out when approaching literary criticism.

I have a passing familiarity with French Theory but would be very interested in a discussion of theory for approaching texts

Thanks and god bless

FilthyImp posted:

At the risk of outing myself as a Junior College Eng101 adherent with no graduate courses under my belt...

How To Read Literature like a Professor will cover the New Criticism style of analysis that's been en vogue in US Schools for the last, like, 40 years, You can use that as a springboard if you feel out of your depth when people refer to Shower = Rebirth = Baptism tropes in novels.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Yes. Trying to translate anything at all while keeping track of all the different axes of denotative and connotative meaning a professor is going to be reading for is a nerve-racking experience.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I generally recommend Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory as the intro to lit crit, for two reasons:

1) It contains decent summaries of all the important schools, and

2) It inevitably pushes the reader towards the absolutely correct position that only Marxist critique is worthwhile

Failing that, The Pooh Perplex is still funny.

chernobyl kinsman posted:

i actually have been thinking that a nice, welcoming lit crit thread might be fun. unfortunately im a medievalist so i dont have to know any theory, and mel's a post-structuralist so he's wrong about everything

quote:

well, en vogue in high schools; in academia New Criticism has been kind of a dirty word for the last few decades, which is unfortunate

Bilirubin posted:

I mean yes I can just google but a discussion board is for discussion after all

chernobyl kinsman posted:

oversimplifying throughout, but: New Criticism is extremely focused on aesthetic concerns, i.e., a text's actual formal beauty, how and why pleasure is produced by the reading of texts, and so on. later generations have reacted against this for a number of reasons, among which is the recognition that our ideas of beauty are culturally and temporally bound (rather than absolute). more importantly, though, starting in the late 60s there was a huge push towards what might loosely (and slightly antagonistically) be called "political criticism", which includes the schools that you may have heard of (marxist, feminist, post-colonial, etc). among other things, this includes the idea that everything is political and that both works of literature themselves and the study of them is political (which is of course true). under those kinds of lenses, the New Critical work on aesthetics - divorced as it tried to be from political concerns - began to be seen as naive at best, masturbatory in the middle, and actively complicit in the propagation of dominant ideologies at the expense of marginalized groups at worst. timothy aubry has a somewhat heated article about this in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and he's also written a book arguing that aesthetic concerns and most New Critical methodology never really went away. he could probably be considered a member of the New Formalist school which sprung up about ten years ago, which tries to rehabilitate the New Critics, and with which I have strong sympathies

some of that's probably wrong, i don't care, i'm a medievalist and we think all theory after Aquinas is masturbation

V. Illych L. posted:

walter benjamin is god

chernobyl kinsman posted:

well, en vogue in high schools; in academia New Criticism has been kind of a dirty word for the last few decades, which is unfortunate

MockingQuantum posted:

I can't add much beyond saying thanks for the info and that I'd definitely be in favor of a welcoming lit crit thread, though I'm too unschooled to contribute much to it.

Bilirubin posted:

That book that Hieronymus recommended just above a few posts would be a good place to start--I'm into the preface (having read the ANniversary and 2nd edition prefaces first) and its a good introduction to those of us with no background in theory. A thread would be a good place for us to ask questions about what we encounter too.

Or hell, a Lets Read of it might be in order if there are more of us

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I generally recommend Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory as the intro to lit crit, for two reasons:

1) It contains decent summaries of all the important schools, and

2) It inevitably pushes the reader towards the absolutely correct position that only Marxist critique is worthwhile

Failing that, The Pooh Perplex is still funny.

chernobyl kinsman posted:

some of that's probably wrong, i don't care, i'm a medievalist and we think all theory after Aquinas is masturbation

chernobyl kinsman posted:

theres a fair amount of lit crit thats really engaging and interesting reading for the non-specialist (none of the stuff written by frenchmen). i would highly recommend cleanth brooks' the well-wrought urn for anyone who likes reading, even if you dont find the idea of High Theory interesting. its one of the foundational works of the New Critical school, and it works by taking individual poems (which are helpfully provided in the appendix, and all of which are very good and accessible) and then applying a focused close reading to each of them. its never very abstract; it always remains rooted in the actual poem that you've just read

i mean it's 70 years old so it's not gonna give you the cutting edge of lit crit but its really good and might really improve your enjoyment of lit by giving you some great tools to approach it with

mdemone posted:

Now reading Eagleton's theory book. This only makes my backlog larger and I'm already behind pace for the year, you loving fuckers.

Edit: aw gently caress it's really good

chernobyl kinsman posted:

some of that's probably wrong, i don't care, i'm a medievalist and we think all theory after Aquinas is masturbation

Foul Fowl posted:

it's good but eagleton is a big time marxist and it really shows. if his description of something sounds interesting, there's no substitute for going to the source and reading it. i think his description of derrida and post-structuralism has caused some pretty irreparable harm to the english understanding of it, for example, because eagleton wants derrida to be political and teleological in a way that he really isn't.

Foul Fowl posted:

it's good but eagleton is a big time marxist and it really shows. if his description of something sounds interesting, there's no substitute for going to the source and reading it. i think his description of derrida and post-structuralism has caused some pretty irreparable harm to the english understanding of it, for example, because eagleton wants derrida to be political and teleological in a way that he really isn't.

Peel posted:

speaking of getting into lit things:

I've been illiterate in poetry for a long time and recently took action against that by reading a historical survey, and my rough favourites from the big names were Yeats/Eliot/Pound. Is a good place to go from there besides 'other modernists'? Earlier poets who they take after or later poets who take after them.

Peel posted:

I've been illiterate in poetry for a long time and recently took action against that by reading a historical survey, and my rough favourites from the big names were Yeats/Eliot/Pound. Is a good place to go from there besides 'other modernists'? Earlier poets who they take after or later poets who take after them.

Georgia Dusk posted:

The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
The setting sun, too indolent to hold
A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,   
Passively darkens for night’s barbecue,

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,   
An orgy for some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,   
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,
And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,
Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill   
Their early promise of a bumper crop.

Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile
Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low   
Where only chips and stumps are left to show   
The solid proof of former domicile.

Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,   
Race memories of king and caravan,
High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,
Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.

Their voices rise . . the pine trees are guitars,   
Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . .   
Their voices rise . . the chorus of the cane
Is caroling a vesper to the stars . .

O singers, resinous and soft your songs
Above the sacred whisper of the pines,
Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

FilthyImp posted:

What did you think of Whitman or Emily Dickinson? Slightly before the modernists. Is there anything in particular you enjoyed and want more of???

I like to boost Jean Toomer's Cane though it is a mix of prose and verse. It captures something sublime.

Sample:

quote:

Late summer, and at midnight
I smelt the heat of the day:
At my window over the hotel car park
I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake
And watched a young crowd leave the discothèque.

Their voices rose up thick and comforting
As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up
That evening at dusk—the slimy tench
Once called the doctor fish because his slime
Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

A girl in a white dress
Was being courted out among the cars:
As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs
I felt like some old pike all badged with sores
Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

drat, link to more like that?

I tend to post Seamus Heaney when it's Poetry Time:

quote:

Banking Coal

Whoever it was who brought the first wood and coal
To start the Fire, did his part well;
Not all wood takes to fire from a match,
Nor coal from wood before it’s burned to charcoal.
The wood and coal in question caught a flame
And flared up beautifully, touching the air
That takes a flame from anything.

Somehow the fire was furnaced,
And then the time was ripe for some to say,
“Right banking of the furnace saves the coal.”
I’ve seen them set to work, each in his way,
Though all with shovels and with ashes,
Never resting till the fire seemed most dead;
Whereupon they’d crawl in hooded night-caps
Contentedly to bed. Sometimes the fire left alone
Would die, but like as not spiced tongues
Remaining by the hardest on till day would flicker up,
Never strong, to anyone who cared to rake for them. 
But roaring fires never have been made that way.
I’d like to tell those folks that one grand flare
Transferred to memory tissues of the air
Is worth a like, or, for dull minds that turn in gold,
All money ever saved by banking coal.

quote:

November Cotton Flower

Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,

Failed in its function as the autumn rake;
Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take
All water from the streams; dead birds were found
In wells a hundred feet below the ground—

Such was the season when the flower bloomed.
Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed
Significance. Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:

Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

quote:

Face

Hair—
silver-gray, 
like streams of stars, 
Brows—
recurved canoes
quivered by the ripples blown by pain, 
Her eyes—
mist of tears
condensing on the flesh below
And her channeled muscles
are cluster grapes of sorrow
purple in the evening sun
nearly ripe for worms. 

toanoradian posted:

I've tried to read Pooh Perplex's sequel, the Postmodernist Pooh, but it's far too difficult for me. Maybe I should revisit it. Is Pooh Perplex easier?

Bilirubin posted:

So would Harold Bloom fall into this school, as sort of a creaky last remnant? He certainly has a romantic idea of what the academy should be and what I have read of him seems to firmly square with this idea of textural aesthetics being front and center

toanoradian posted:

Can you explain what Aquinas' theory is?

J_RBG posted:

But what about Dante!!!!!!!