domingo, 31 de julio de 2022

Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos: Darwin sobre la evolución humana

En este artículo sobre teoría narrativa evolucionista releemos y comentamos algunos textos y nociones clave de la teoría de Charles Darwin, en El origen de las especies y El origen del hombre, a la luz de la sociobiología cognitiva contemporánea.

 

Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos: 

Darwin sobre la evolución humana

https://doi.org/10.17613/w22w-ev03

 

Author(s):
José Angel GARCÍA LANDA (see profile)
Date:
2009
Group(s):
Anthropology, English Literature, Environmental Humanities, Narrative theory and Narratology, Philosophy
Subject(s):
Evolution (Biology), Anthropology, Narration (Rhetoric)--Psychological aspects, Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882, Prehistoric peoples, Ecology
Item Type:
Article
Tag(s):
Narrativity, narratology, charles darwin, Palaeoanthropology, Human evolution, Humanity, Sociobiology, Evolutionary narratology, Evolutionism
Permanent URL:
https://doi.org/10.17613/w22w-ev03
Abstract:
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________ This is a paper in evolutionary narrative theory, in which I reread and comment some key texts and notions from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and The Descent of Man in the light of contemporary cognitive sociobiology.
Notes:
First published 2009 (preliminary version in 'Vanity Fea' and 'Ibercampus'; revised version in SSRN (2012) DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2136181

 

 


 

 

También aquí:

 

_____. "Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 16 April 2009.*

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2009/04/grandiosa-secuencia-de-acontecimientos.html

         2009

_____. "Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos (Darwin sobre la evolución humana)." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 28 April 2009.*

         http://www.ibercampus.es/articulos.asp?idarticulo=14452

2013

_____. "Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos: Darwin sobre la evolución humana." Humanities Commons 31 July 2022.*

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:47487/

https://doi.org/10.17613/w22w-ev03

2022

 

 Versión revisada:

 

_____. "Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos: Darwin sobre la evolución humana ("That Grand Sequence of Events": Darwin on Human Evolution)." Social Science Research Network 29 August 2012.* DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2136181

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2136181

2012

Human Cognition in Evolution and Development eJournal 4.32 (14 Sept. 2012).

http://hq.ssrn.com//Journals/IssueProof.cfm?abstractid=2136181&journalid=1314112&issue_number=32&volume=4&journal_type=CMBO&function=showissue

         2013

http://www.ssrn.com/link/Human-Cognition-Evolution-Development.html (29 Aug. 2012).

         2013

History of Western Philosophy eJournal 5.34 (3 Sept. 2012).*

http://hq.ssrn.com//Journals/IssueProof.cfm?abstractid=2136181&journalid=950374&issue_number=34&volume=5&journal_type=CMBO&function=showissue

2013

http://www.ssrn.com/link/History-of-Western-Philosophy.html (29 August 2012).*

2013

Philosophy of Science eJournal 5.46 (7 Sept. 2012).*

http://hq.ssrn.com//Journals/IssueProof.cfm?abstractid=2136181&journalid=950426&issue_number=46&volume=5&journal_type=CMBO&function=showissue

2013

http://www.ssrn.com/link/Philosophy-Science.html (29 Aug. 2012).*

2013

         Sociobiology eJournal 29 Aug. 2012.*

         https://www.ssrn.com/link/Sociobiology.html

         2017

_____. "Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos: Darwin sobre la evolución humana." Academia.edu 25 August 2012.*

         http://unizar.academia.edu/JoséAngelGarcíaLanda/Papers/1891152

         2012

_____. "Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos: Darwin sobre la evolución humana." ResearchGate 1 August 2013.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253236641

         2013

_____. "Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos: Darwin sobre la evolución humana." Humanities Commons 31 July 2022.*

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:47487/

https://doi.org/10.17613/w22w-ev03

2022

_____. "Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos: Darwin sobre la evolución humana." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 31 July 2022.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2022/07/grandiosa-secuencia-de-acontecimientos.html

         2022

_____. "Grandiosa secuencia de acontecimientos: Darwin sobre la evolución humana." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 4 Jan. 2023.*

         https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/grandiosa.pdf

         2024


 —oOo—

 

Refoto

 

Refoto

Kiss me Kate @ BBC Proms

viernes, 29 de julio de 2022

Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour ~ Truth & Lies

Refoto

 

Refoto

MACARENA OLONA DEJA LA POLÍTICA POR "RAZONES MÉDICAS"

















Más cosas del Expediente Royuela








Acerca de "El Paraiso Perdido" de John Milton | Joan Curbet



Curbet, Joan. (U Autónoma de Barcelona). "Acerca de "El Paraiso Perdido" de John Milton." Video lecture. (John Milton: Su vida, su obra, su tiempo, 2). YouTube (Fundación Juan March) 28 July 2022.*

https://youtu.be/1hVVDEfXUPo

         2022

jueves, 28 de julio de 2022

Verdades de las buenas

 La verdad como cebolla:

Fernández Cabal, Agustín Joel. (U de Santiago de Compostela). "¿Existe la verdad?" The Conversation 27 July 2022.*

         https://theconversation.com/existe-la-verdad-187116

         2022

 

Y es cierto que a veces la verdad te hará llorar.  Le pongo este comentario al artículo:

 

La verdad es que hay muchas verdades, y que rara vez coinciden plenamente. La verdad es la coincidencia, siempre parcial y provisional, de algunas de esas verdades. Si hay mucha coincidencia, normalmente nos hallamos no ante una verdad sino ante una trivialidad, o quizá una consigna repetida (estos últimos años ha pasado mucho eso, en particular con las supuestas verdades de "la ciencia" que tampoco son únicas ni simples excepto cuando se invocan como 'shibboleths'). Una buena verdad es difícil de lograr, no evidente, y por eso normalmente no muy extendida ni compartida. Y suele imponerse como una iluminación frente a una falsedad que antes nos nublaba la vista. Y puede ser algo que descubre uno mismo, pero normalmente aparece como una revelación o desvelamiento compartido con otros. Si son muchos a repartir, empero, ya no queda casi nada. Las verdades son iluminaciones alcanzadas o compartidas, y consensos forjados. Y las verdades de unos muchas veces son falsedades o escándalos para otros, aunque sean verdades de las buenas, es decir, de las que compartimos nosotros. 

 

Qué es la verdad

 

—oOo—

Theme Time Radio Hour, Episode Five - Coffee (Bob Dylan)

Carlos Cuesta,el apocalipsis climático,una agenda letal de Sánchez contra la propiedad y la libertad

REFLEXIONES ACTUALES DE DON ALBERTO ROYUELA, SANTIAGO ROYUELA, JUAN MARTÍNEZ Y FERNANDO PRESENCIA









miércoles, 27 de julio de 2022

Bob Dylan — Shadow Kingdom

Χάρις Αλεξίου - Από το 1972 έως το 2000 (by Elias)

Refoto

 

Refoto

Amplia comedia, cruel teatro

Creo que fue Horace Walpole el que sentenció que "el mundo es una tragedia para los que sienten, y una comedia para los que piensan." Al parecer, según nos cuenta Carlos García Gual, a Jean de La Fontaine habría que incluirlo entre estos últimos, pues sus fábulas enseñan una filosofía un tanto cínica, escéptica, desengañada e irónica en cuanto a las motivaciones humanas, o, digamos, las de los animales parlantes. El fabulista mismo parece tener pocas motivaciones al margen de esta observación irónica de los demás....

Esa despreocupación respecto a las riquezas, los honores y las obligaciones habituales de la vida fue la más notoria virtud de La Fontaine. En el mundo conflictivo y bestial que representan las fábulas de los animales parlantes, la ambición, la vanidad y el afán de venganza son los motivos constantes de la feroz lucha por la vida. Como en la Francia de su época, como en el mundillo cortesano de París, ésos son los motivos de la lucha por la vida: la ambición, la vanidad, las rivalidades que hacen de la sociedad un cruel teatro de peleas y desdichas, Eso es lo que impulsa a unos y otros en su continua refriega cotidiana y lo que trae consigo tantas desgracias y desastres. El mundo es así, y triunfar en él requiere practicar esos engaños y adecuarse a esas violencias. 

Pero quien, como nuestro fabulista, no tiene afán de medro ni lucro, quien no ambiciona ni está ávido de honores, no tiene por qué sentirse entrampado en ese juego de pasiones y astucias. Puede observar el juego desde su retiro, sin tomar partido ni recibir los golpes de unos y otros. Como se aconseja al final de la fábula de El hombre y la serpiente, una de las más amargas del repertorio, para evitar la cólera de los poderosos, el prudente sabe "hablar de lejos o bien callarse". Y quien observa así el espectáculo de la vida puede incluso divertirse con el espectáculo. "Una amplia comedia de cien actos diversos / y cuya escena es todo el universo."

 

            (Carlos García Gual, "El epicureísmo de La Fontaine y la moral de las fábulas." In García Gual, La luz de los lejanos faros: Una defensa apasionada de las humanidades. Barcelona: Planeta-Ariel, 2017. 206-19; 217).

 

—oOo—

ΧΑΡΟΥΛΑ ΑΛΕΞΙΟΥ - ΟΙ ΜΕΓΑΛΥΤΕΡΕΣ ΕΠΙΤΥΧΙΕΣ 1990 - 1999

martes, 26 de julio de 2022

Los 3 retrovisores

 

Los 3 retrovisores

El totalitarismo democrático del Estado moderno

 Dos pasajes que señalan los elementos de totalitarismo que va adquiriendo el Estado moderno, ya sea abiertamente en un régimen fascista, chino o nacional-socialista, o bien de modo "amable" y más insidioso, en las democracias liberales :

Uno de Serrano Súñer, comentando que gran parte del totalitarismo nazi o fascista no les venía necesariamente a esos regímenes de su idearios autoritarios, sino ya de por sí de su mera cualidad de estados modernos:

Ces déviations réconnues, il faut dire également qu'une grande partie des vices que l'on impute aux systèmes totalitaires et fasciestes sont propres à l'État moderne, quelque soit son caractère. Et nous les rencontrons dans l'État libéral aussi bien que dans l'État socialiste ou dans l'État autoritaire. L'État-Léviathan de Hobbes n'a pas été inventé par Hitler ou par Mussolini, et les doctrines sur l'indépendance du pouvoir politique et sur la souveraineté illimitée, base de l'étatisation sociale, furent formulées quatre siècles avant que ne se soit publié Mein Kampf. L'État totalitaire a eu la sincérité de proclamer un principe qui se trouvait impliqué dans touts les systèmes politiques depuis la Renaissance: césarisme, absolutisme, ou autre. Quand l'État, dans les régimes les plus libéraux, monopolise l'enseignement universitaire ou soumet la vie municipale à une rigide uniformité, il ne fait qu'anticiper sur la nationalisation des assurances ou des banques. Ce qui arrive, c'est que l'étatisation ou "statalisation" de la vie sociale s'est trouvée accrue sitôt que le progrès matériel a mis aux mains de l'humanité des moyens de production et de circulation des idées et des richesse[s] dont l'existence ne pouvait être soupçonée à l'époque d'initiation du libéralisme. Le libéralisme n'est que l'âge de la machine à vapeur, alors que le fascisme est celui de la radio, de la rotative, du cinématographe, de la conquête de l'air et de l'énergie atomique. Des forces physiques sont apparues, susceptibles de se convertir en forces morales, et que l'État moderne ne pouvait laisser au pouvoir des particuliers, sous peine d'être menacé dans sa propre existence.

            (Ramón Serrano Súñer, Entre les Pyrenées et Gibraltar: Notes et réflexions sur la politique espagnole depuis 1936. (Bibliothèque du Cheval Ailé). Ginebra: Constant Bourquin – Les Éditions du Cheval Ailé, 1947. (P. 303-5).


Encuentro que este pasaje resuena armónicamente con este otro de Jano García en El rebaño, su libro sobre la plandemia de control ideológico biempensante, "marxismo cultural" de mascarilla morada, y de corrección política virtuosa que nos asola con especial intensidad estos últimos años:

Algunos creen que como Gramsci aspiraba a convertir Italia en una república comunista de de corte soviético a través de la disciplina política, el orden, la organización social y la implementación de un sistema que pudiera ser infinito, la hegemonía cultural actual se centra en eso. Nada más lejos de la realidad. La hegemonía cultural opta por controlar a la población a través de luchas sociales impostadas y peligros inminentes de los que el Estado debe salvarnos, al mismo tiempo que apuesta por un sistema económico "capitalista" que, por supuesto, también pasa por la intervención estatal generando precariedad laboral, altas cargas impositivas y economías de pura supervivencia en el reino zombi que vive conectado a sus dispositivos móviles para expulsar su frustración. Una fusión que consste en que la "derecha financiera" compra el marco mental de la "izquierda antisistema" y la izquierda compra el sistema de la oligarquía derechista. ¿Acaso no le resulta curioso al lector que las conferencias contra el capitalismo estén patrocinadas por los propios bancos? ¿Por qué los antisistema occidentales consiguen obtener repercusión gracias a las subvenciones del sistema? ¿Por qué los supuestos rebeldes ocupan puestos de gran responsabilidad en el ámbito político y mediático? ¿Acaso el pensamiento alternativo real cuenta con la misma capacidad de influencia? Las respuestas son obvias.

En la nueva hegemonía, cuando un dogma queda caduco porque ya no se es capaz de anestesiar al pueblo, se sustituye por uno nuevo para que nunca falte pienso que pueda ser consumido. Encontramos un ejemplo evidente en la cuestión relativa a los homosexuales. En cuanto comenzó a aburrir a la población, el dogma fue sustituido por una larga lista de minorías para que tomaran el relevo. Es el win-win definitivo de un arsenal de cinismo, oligopolios, capitalismo subvencionado, cortoplacismo político y destrucción de los valores que auparon a Occidente. Te doy el problema y también la solución.

La hegemonía cultural dominante promueve la alogocracia presentando una visión maniquea de opresores/oprimidos, de buenos/malos, solidarios/insolidarios, redefine la democracia a su antojo utilizándola como coartada para la imposición, inventa una neolengua que se transmite con facilidad para determinar los límites de pensamiento, promueve las entidades colectivas sobre el individuo, la deconstrucción del viejo mundo y, por supuesto, la utilización de dogmas que sean fácilmente defendibles desde una perspectiva puramente emocional y no racional. Adriano Erriguel (o quien se esconde tras su nombre) recurre con acertado criterio a la obra La producción de la ideología dominante de los sociólogos Luc Boltanski y Pierre Bo[u]rdieu, que señalaban:

La filosofía social de la fracción dominante de la clase domannte ya no se presenta como defensora, sino como crítica frente al estado existente de cosas, lo que le permite acusar de conservadurismo a todos los que se resisten al cambio. El poder ya no teme la crítica; por el contrario, la moviliza: hay que cambiar constantemente —o parecer que se cambia— en todos los órdenes de la vida. (Adriano Erriguel, Pensar lo que más les duele, Madrid: Homo Legens, 2021, p. 130).

Y eso hace exactamente la alogocracia bajo la hegemonía cultural actual. Transformándose o, en ocasiones, haciendo como que se transforma, consigue mantener la agitación política y neutralizar los verdaderos riesgos que podrían poner en peligro su poder, que no es otro que la movilización ciudadana de forma masiva. El individuo libre, designado como el gran enemigo, se halla rodeado de colectivos que se adueñan de la vida social y económica, convirtiendo cualquer reclamación de mayor libertad en una amenaza para la sociedad. así, ya no se trata de luchar contra el Estado o los poderes económicos, sino contra esos individuos libres a los que se debe silenciar acusándolos de realizar actos micromachistas, racistas, negacionistas y sexistas en su vida cotidiana. De esta forma, seguro que siempre quedará alguien que falta por ser reeducado y justificará el sistema establecido. Abordaremos en el capítulo dedicado al feminismo, otro de los grandes fenómenos que se utiliza para mantener viva la hegemonía cultural, cómo se hace pasar la excepción como norma. Los dogmas son removidos sin interrupción, a través del hecho aislado para transferir un sensación de peligro inminente que permita garantizar la continuidad del mensaje y su hipervisibilidad.

La hegemonía cultural preponderante expide certificados oficiales de moralidad y dignidad. No importa si tus actos contradicen tus palabras, si has sido agraciado con un certificado oficial podrás retyorcer el discurso la cantidad de las veces que consideres oportunas porrque la verdad es la que indica el mainstream. Bajo esta hegemonía pudes clamar por el respeto de todas las culturas al mismo tiempo que criminalizas la cultura occidental; señalar que no se debe juzgar a las personas por su raza o sexo, pero considerar peligrosos a los hombres blancos; menospreciar a la clase política pero, a su vez, pedir mayor presencia del Estado; insultar a los católicos mientras defiendes las prácticas del islam radical; exigir respeto por la elección de cada individuo, pero querer imponer a todo un país una moral; rasgarte las vestiduras por la libertad de expresión y dos días más tarde exigir la censura de aquellos que no comparten tu punto de vista. Esta lista de incongruencias es propia de la alogocracia que responde a la política de la cancelación. Todo es respetable, excepto si no piensas como yo. Se trata de seducir para posteriormente imponer, sustituyendo la racionalidad por un moralismo de bajo nivel que pueda ser com prendido por todos los segmentos sociales.

        (Jano García, El rebaño: Cómo Occidente ha sucumbido a la tiranía ideológica. Madrid: Espasa, 2021. 5ª ed. 2022)

                                                            —oOo—




      

 

 

 

 

Staline et l'impérialisme Russe selon Serrano Súñer

 

Staline est le génie qui a su pousser jusqu'au terme de son destin messianique le peuple russe. L'U.R.S.S. a été et n'est avant tout qu'un vaste impérialisme, depuis son origine même, ou peu s'en faut. Le marxisme, avec tous ses ressorts mystiques et économiques, lui a servi à établir l'unité politique du pays, que les Tzars ne surent point créer par l'autocratie et la religion. Contre l'incapacité de la démocratie de Kerensky, le communisme russe a triomphé, en contradiction flagrante avec les canons fixés par Marx, sans que se soient posées aucunes des conditions ou des circonstances qu'il avait prévues, car, la Russie étant, au dernier temps des Tzars, le pays industriellement le plus arriéré d'Europe, le phénomène de la concentration ouvrière ne s'y était encore produit. D'une culture inférieure, en possession d'une technique rudimentaire, le peuple, comme un immense troupeau, paissait les vastes zones inarticulées de la Russie. Deux guerres perdues — la russo-japonaise et la première mondiale — la corruption et le favoritisme autour de la médiocrité des politiciens patronnés para la tzarine, furent les facteurs qui permirent à une minorité audacieuse et convaincue, dirigée par un homme qui savait ce qu'il voulait — Lénine — de monter à l'assaut du pouvoir, en étouffant l'anarchie démocratique et le doctrinarisme creux d'un Kerenski.  Mais, si Lénine était sincèrement, intégralement et fanatiquement marxiste, son réalisme le porta bien vite, par-dessus les utopies, sur les sentiers que lui ouvraient son instinct d'animal reévolutionnaire et son sens du gouvernement. De là l'essai et l'établissement de la nouvelle économie (la Nep), saluée, avec un optimisme hâtif, par le capitalisme occidental comme une rectification de la trajectoire communiste, pendant que lui la qualifiait simplement de saut en arrière, pour en mieux faire deux en avant, car il n'entendait point renoncer à son idéal. A sa mort, la lutte entre Trotsky, le plus intellectuel et le plus brillant des hommes de la Révolution, et Staline, le camarade vaillante et obscur de la minorité, se résoud en faveur de ce dernier, qui implante la plus inflexible des dictatutres; et c'en est fait désormais de l'idéalisme. L'unique finalité devient le pouvoir et l'expansion.

 

Serrano Suñer, Ramón. Entre les Pyrenées et Gibraltar: Notes et réflexions sur la politique espagnole depuis 1936. Traduit de l'espagnol par un ami de l'auteur. (Bibliothèque du Cheval Ailé). Geneva: Constant Bourquin – Les Éditions du Cheval Ailé, 1947.* (Cover: Entre les Pyrenées et Gibraltar: Dix ans de politique espagnole. Par Serrano Suñer – Ancien ministre des Affaires étrangères d'Espagne) - p. 330.


—oOo—

 

Oops I Did It Again

 

Oops I Did It Again

🔴#ENVIVO/EL MUNDO AL ROJO:publican los nombres de los funcionarios a sueldo de la metamafia de Mena

Refoto

 

Refoto

Me citan en Kurdistán

 

Me alegro de que esté la cosa más tranquila por allí, que hasta tengan tiempo de leer mis viejos escritos desperdigados por las redes. Peores cosas han visto en Kurdistán.


Omar, Ameen Abdulqader, and Drakhsan Ali Baker (both Dpt. of Kurdish Language, School of Languages, U of Duhok, Kurdistan region, Iraq). " بەرجەستەبوونا تەکنیک و ئاماژەیێن میتا ڤەگێرانێ د رۆمانێن مرۆڤێ بەلەچەک و رەشکۆ دا"  ("Embodiment of Meta-Translation Techniques and Meta-Translation Signs in the novels of Marw Balechek and Rashko") The Journal of Duhok University 25.1 (2022): Section Humanities and Social Science.*

         https://doi.org/10.26682/hjuod.2022.25.1.14

         https://journal.uod.ac/index.php/uodjournal/article/view/1575

         2022

         Online at Academia.*

         https://www.academia.edu/92557305

         2022

 

 

 

 Lo citado son estas Notes on Metafiction.

 

 

 

—oOo—

DIRECTO CON ÁLVARO ARTEAGA, DENUNCIANTE DEL EXP. ROYUELA REPRESALIADO POR EL JUEZ GADEA

martes, 19 de julio de 2022

Bill Evans Greatest Ballads - The Ultimate Bill Evans Playlist

Salmanticensis

Me citan, o citaban, en este artículo sobre representación y ficción de la Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. Lo citado es mi libro sobre Acción, Relato, Discurso, que también fue publicado en Salamanca, no en la Pontificia.

 

 

García Jalón de la Lama, Santiago. (Chair of Hebrew Philology, U Pontificia de  Salamanca). "Literatura e historia." Salmanticensis 52 (2005): 421-47.  Online at the Internet Archive.* (Mimesis).

         https://web.archive.org/web/20200322084305/https://summa.upsa.es/high.raw?id=0000029748&name=00000001.original.pdf

         2022

 

—oOo—

En la Tormenta Perfecta por negar la realidad

 

Hors-saison

Hors-saison

Una reivindicación del Alzamiento Nacional del 18 de julio

 

lunes, 18 de julio de 2022

Bob Dylan — 28 June, 1984 / Barcelona

LOS NOMBRES DE LOS FUNCIONARIOS A SUELDO DE LA ORGANIZACIÓN NARCOTERRORISTA

Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour ~ The Bible



Dylan, Bob, et al. "Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour ~ The Bible." (Theme Time Radio Hour, with your host, Bob Dylan, Episode 19, 6 Sept. 2006). YouTube (nightly moth) 2 Dec. 2020.*

https://youtu.be/7EmsUT_Dbns

         2022

 

—oOo—

Eliane, in memoriam

Con Eliane

🔴 La FASCINANTE HISTORIA del Hijo de BIDEN

Playa n Cangas

 

Playa n Cangas

⚫ Lo que DEBES SABER de las Piedras más Famosas🔥 más allá de los Cuentos

domingo, 17 de julio de 2022

Bob Dylan at Salt Lake City

 

Narratología y Complejidad

Me envía John Pier su artículo sobre Complejidad:

"Complexité / Complexity." Réseau des narratologues francophones - Glossaire du RéNaF 10 July 2022.*

         https://wp.unil.ch/narratologie/2022/07/complexite-complexity/


Que aparce en este blog de narratología, uno de los muy pocos que hay:

Réseau des Narratologues Francophones – Pôle de Narratologie Transmédiale. (R. Baroni).*

https://wp.unil.ch/narratologie/

2022

Por cierto, entre las publicaciones de la bibliografía aparece este libro, al que contribuí con un capítulo, "In Hindsight", una de mis últimas publicaciones internacionales:

Grishakova, Marina & Maria Poulaki, eds. Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

Una anécdota. Dando fin a la redacción de este capítulo, en el patio interior de la cafetería El Jardín, de Bueu, noté en directo cómo mi cerebro tocaba techo como un cohete de feria en la bóveda cósmica de la complejidad, y descendía, ya sin combustible intelectual, apagado y echando humo negro, hacia ocupaciones más a ras de tierra.

 

—oOo—

 

Vox sobre la prohibición la prostitución

Domingo Villar in memoriam (2)

Domingo Villar in memoriam




_______

No es el de Villar el único asesinato que ha habido en la novela negra:







sábado, 16 de julio de 2022

KATY BALBER, EX RESPONSABLE DE ATENCIÓN A AFILIADOS DE VOX CÁDIZ

Tesis norteamericana sobre enseñanza del teatro donde me citan

 Tesis norteamericana sobre enseñanza del teatro donde me citan:

Broomer, Ramona. "Meeting Myself as a Scholarly Practitioner: A Self-Study Exploring the Process of Integrating Instructional Technology into Introductory Theater Courses." Ph.D. diss. Duquesne University, 2021. Online.*

https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1964

         2022


SNA 16/7/22

 

Covid – Breve historia de una histeria

GRAN SEMANA DE VOX QUE ESTÁ A 4 PUNTOS DEL PSOE

Refoto

Refoto

viernes, 15 de julio de 2022

English Criticism, 1900-1950: Notes from René Wellek's 'History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950'

Notes from René Wellek's A History of Modern Criticism: 11750-1950. Vol. 5. English Criticism, 1900-1950 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986). Handwritten notes taken by José Angel García Landa, c. 1995.

Preface to vols. 5&6

vii- Minimal interchange in the 20th century. The Americans and English are ignored (by Continental European critics). But Marx and Freud influence them, even if "actual literary critics from the Continent remained virtually unknown." Except Croce for Spingarn and Collingwood. Contacts between England and America are close, with interchange of scholars. But criticism develop quite separately: Bloomsbury group vs. leftists and muckrakers.

 

Introduction to volumes 5 and 6. Method and scope

xvi- History without a thesis is impossible (vs. Crane and Saintsbury). Cf. Hegel's history of philosophy, vs. previous doxographies: for Hegel, "the history of a subject depends closly on the concept one has of the subject".

xvii- Criticism is an isolatable subject (vs. Croce & Auerbach); "criticism is any discourse on litrature. It is thus closely circumscribed by its theme." A causal conception of ideology is not applicable, as an element of freedom remains; 

xviii- a work is the necessary condition of another, but does not cause it. There is a seamless relationship between criticism and related activities: aesthetics, literature, etc.

xix- But criticism is bracketable. There are persistent questions all through the history of criticism, which have to be thought anew always. 

xx- We need to assume that an understanding of previous ages is possible (with Dilthey, etc.). "We have to find a way of thinking of an internal history of criticism."

xxi- The History of Criticism is not the same as cultural history; it does not merely place critics as representatives of a period or a trend; it has a point of view.

xxii- An evolutionary history of criticism is impossible. But Wellek opposes Kuhn's paradigms: an Aristotelian model replaced by Kan & Herder and then by Eliot...? Wellek rejects this incommensurability. There is a continuity, a growing core of agreement.


1 - SYMBOLISM IN ENGLISH

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

1- Yeats developed a Symbolist theory of his own. A weird system of the world, but a striking unity in his theory of poetry.

2- Romantic definition of art as "a traditional statement of a certain heroic and religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius but never abandones." Cf. The Celtic Twilight (1893), folk traditions, vs. England and industrialism.

3- —and vs. the "muddy torrent of shallow realism" (Yeats). He edits Blake and tries to make sense of his symbolism. "Art is not a 'a criticism of life' but a 'revelation of hidden life'." He moves between Neoplatonism, Emerson, and Jung. Or: "our minds giving a little, creating or revealing for a moment what I must call a supernatural artist"; macrocosm mirrored in the microcosm of the poet's minor creation. 

4- The poet as a priest celebrating a ritual. Yeats's symbolism is at times apocalyptic. He is little literested in criticism of resources, and is often vague. "A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence", inherent or arbitrary and emotional / intellectual (contemporaries are hopelessly intellectual); he opposes allegory. 

5- Are symbols created or discovered? This is ambiguous. Sometimes a humbler assumption: the symbol as an invocation or suggestion. 

6- Three levels: suggestion, arbitrary construction, and genuine symbolism as vision. He bridges the gap between the sensuous and the spiritual. 

7- Art turns from the mirror to the lamp (Yeat's expression). He favours impersonality, and opposes plot and naturalistic scenery; pro lyricism, vs. comedy and  character types. Yeats: "tragedy is passion alone, and rejecting character it gets form from motives, from the wandering of passion, while comedy is the clash of character."

8-11: Yeats embraces extreemes and finds they are compatible. A Hegelian, pro unity of being in traditional cultures, forfeited by modern civilization, Specialization of man as a deterioration. Literature is gounded on Freedom, God, Immortality. The fading of these leads to the fading of literature. 

12- Yeats never fully accepted modernism; he is anchored in an earlier conception of poetry.



Arthur Symons (1865-1945)

13- The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900), an influential book but not high criticism.Poetry is always symbolist, but today consciously so. 

14-15: "Symbolism  is  'a revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic tradition'"; it is "an endeavor to disengage the ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists." It is "a kind of religion." There are omissions, errors.... Symons uses few critical tools, and often surrenders the critical task: it is impossible to analyze a good poem. At first he was pro "decadence" as "an intense self-consciousness". Yeats converted him to symbolism, and learnt about the French in turn. Symons is OK as a critic of English poetry (The Romantic Movement in English Poetry, 1909). 

16- He values the "visionary" aspect of Romanticism and (not seeing any contradiction) "art for art's sake";

17- "the book is the last prominent display of metaphorical criticism dominated by a concept of poetry as the intense moment." (Wellek opposes impressionism). Symons's later criticism is scrappy and marred by pathological obscurantist obsessions.


George Moore (1852-1933)

18- Impressions and Opinions (1891); Moore knew the Symbolists before Symons. Sketchy and poorly informed.

19- "An Irishman must fly from ireland if he would be himself" (Hail and Farewell), but he participated in the Irish literary renaissance. Criticism in his late works. Pro pure poetry, as poetry free from thought, ideas, morality, propaganda: it is free from personal emotion, a poetry of things and not of feelings. "The poet creates outside of his own personality". Vs. blighting, the subjective taint. (An Anthology of Pure Poetry, 1924). "Moore wants not descriptions but images, pictorial clarity, the visual world he was seeking as a novelist and critic of novels." 

20- From Zola he turned to Balzac and Turgenev. Avowals & Conversation in Ebury Street, critical dialogues.Violent prejudices and contradictions, easy dismissals.

21- Vs. Fielding, but pro Sterne; vs. Thackeray, pro Dickens, in spite of his 'waste'. Vs. Charloter Brontë 6 Hardy, vs. James, "lost in trifles."

22- Moore is insensitive to what smacks of romanticism. Impressionistic, he trusts only his sensibility. Criticism is only "the story of the critic's soul" (Confessions of a Young Man, 1888; 367-8).



2. ACADEMIC CRITICS

23- "In the early twentieth century criticism found a home in the universities", differentiating itself from journalism. The 'man of letters' who combines both of them disappears. Academic criticism already in Blair and Wharton. "But none of the important critics of the early nineteenth century taught in the university." Arnold becam Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. The teaching of literature expands through the 19th c.,

24- but "the teaching of English literature either meant antiquarian factual literary history . . . or was an unsystematic, often preachy or gusty commentary on men and books." "Oxford and Cambridge hold out longest." John Churton Collins pro divorcingh literature and philology, and vs. the upholders of classical education: hope in imitating their methods and standards.


Walter Raleigh (1861-1922) and Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944)

Q-C and Raleigh pro appreciation and praise, vs. technical scholarship. They created a type. Vs. pedantry and novelty. "Walter Raleigh's Letters reveal a crudity of feeling and expression one would not have expected from the erstwhile aesthete who wrote a precious little book on Style (1899). Ashamed of being a critic. Coarse and flippant judgements. Amateurishness, but learning (e.g. The English Novel, 1894). Milton (1900) finds him of the devil's party; Wordsworth (1903) is "a true visionary", etc. Shakespeare (1987) stresses Sh's irony and detachment.

Quiller-Couch is gentler but he shares Raleigh' distaste for criticism. Vs. "all general definitions and theories" (On the Art of Writing 18), vs. German scholarship, vs. Croce and Spingarn; "All critical discernment, or taste, is relative" (Studies in Literature, 1919, 22, 29; 3:208). "No book can mean the same to any two men" (SL 3:211). Vague ideas of poetry approaching to the Platonic harmony of nature, etc.

28- They set a tone, but are of little critical worth. At least they are tolerant. Their influence waned in front of I.A. Richards.


A.C. Bradley (1851-1935)

Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), great and influential (except in the 30s); Leavis vs. Bradley. Bradley is indebted to Hegel and other Germans, e.g. Freytag. German discussion of the tragic was unknown at the time in England. England was Aristotelian (catharsis); 

29 - Schelling  "was the first to break with this tradition and to look for the tragic in the dialectic of freedom and necessity." Bradley a monist: the finite is a partial manifestation of the infinite; metaphysics informs his aesthetics. Evil is inevitable (an attempt at isolating finitude) since all part is an imperfect image of the whole. "Tragedy is an image of the world drama . . . a defense of the world order." A collision of forces, of the tragic hero vs. the order of the universe; ultimately he perishes. "We feel that this spirit, even in the error and defeat, rises sublimely into ideal union with the power that overwhelms it" (Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 1909: 292);

30- "mere passive suffering cannot be tragic"; the hero must be responsible, free. "Pure chance would destroy tragedy"; madness too, Bradley favours a "strict connection between act and consequence." The hero need not be moral, but sublime, he becomes infinite. Catastrophe as a mysterious justice. He diminishes death as unimportant, the world is all spirit (idealism). Souls vs. the infinite —> character.

32- Bradley on reconstructing hidden aspects in character (cf. Stanislavski); OK, but he sometimes confuses art and life; ridiculed in L. C. Knights's malicious How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933). Bradley does rather "whimsical mental experiments,

33- . . .  rhetorical devices to make us realize the different characters and situations more clearly." He is not unaware of the stage, as is often argued.

34- "Still, Bradley does belong, after all, to the tribe of Lamb, who would rather read Shakespeare than hear him performed." He accepts, though, things effective on state but not necessarily for the plot, unperceived inconsistencies, etc. He emphasized he criticized from the tragic point of view, not the psychological one. He was the first to appreciate the 'spatial' qualities of Shakespeare's plays (G. Wilson Knight). His interest is wider than character: imagery, language... A poetry of life ("Poetry for Poetry's Sake"); he refutes in advance these accusations. 

Empson (verbal interest) agrees with Bradley's emphasis on the need of coherence of character and action; interest in motivation, not merely metaphor. Bradley does not seek a "spatial pattern" like G. Wilson Knight. He defines tragedy as "a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate" (Shakespearean Tragedy 11-12); analysis using Aristotle through "Freytag's streamlined modernization."

36- "On the whole B. was wary of finding symbolism and allegory in Shakespeare." He is more interested in "a description of the presumed emotional reaction of the audience, which, when Bradley seems uncertain of its universality, is stated often bluntly as his own personal reaction."

38- Shakespeare's blemishes are (as Samuel Johnson found) unimportant. Tragic emotions are "stirred only when such beauty or nobility of character is displayed as commands unreserved admiration or love; or when, in default of this, the forces which move the agents, and the conflicts which result from these forces, attain terrifying and overwhelming power." Shakespare was unable to dethrone Falstaff: "There is truth in this." Lear's cosmic pessimism is causeed by reasons "outside the dramatic nexus"; —an aesthetic flaw? No, there is redemption at the end ("vs. Kott").  "Religion denies that real life  . . . is the whole and final truth; and this is just whant poetry, which asserts nothing, nevertheless suggests (Bradley, The Uses of Poetry, 1912).

30- Bradley pro the infinite suggestion of poetry; tragedy "forces the mystery on us." Touching infinity —> importance of Wordsworth as a mystic, sublime and visionary. Visionary feeling as "The intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or breaking into the customary 'reality' . . . At its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity, melts in rapture into the infinite being" (134).

Wordsworth equivalent to Hegel in his treatment of infinity (in fact with the idealists). Nature is not the mere "outward world" in Wordsworth and Sheleey. Bradley opposes Arnold in this respect. Romanticism as "the great ideal movement" parallel to German philosophy (both are the roots of Bradley). 

The stated ambition of Bradley's criticism is to make us share the author's imaginative conception of his work [equivalent to intention? JAGL]. Bradley raises what Wellek calls "the most burning question of recent criticism: is there or is there not a correct interpretation? There are, indubitably, many incorrect ones." 

Bradley influenced Middleton Murry's Keats and Shakespeare, 1925.

 

Elton, Ker, Grierson and Garrod

Ranging from 1855 to 1960. 

Elton (1861-1945), "The Meaning of Literary History"; Modern Studies (1907). Pro comparative literature and international knowledge. Criticism as a fine art, "like friendship". Vs. analysis of impersonal forces. 

A Survey of English Literature (1730-1880), 1912-32. Expository, OK. Emphatic, unabashed comparisons between writers. 

44- "a tempered, subdued romantic, basically Victorian taste". He notes the ebb and decadence of English literature after praising the "intensely ethical, exalted and didactic temper" of the Victorian age. The English Muse (1935), A Sheaf of Papers (1922), Essays and Addresses (1939). 

In "The Nature of Literary Criticism" he argues the independence of all works, "inner harmony" as the only canon of value, but he admits "a harmony between discords". Pro ranks and values in literature, and pro "defining once more the virtue of the classics."

Ker

45- Epic and Romance (1896), Teutonic epic vs. Romance romance. Ways of telling, feudal vs. courtly. Also an idealized theorist.

46- "On the Philosophy of Art" (1883). Art is an end in itself, creates independent and inexhaustible objects, which remain indifferent to change and history.  Ker assumes nevertheless a Hegelian succession of periods. Art is historic, but alive forever. Elsewhere:

46-47- "Art and literature are living things which assert themselves against the historian and cannot be made into a mere matter of narrative" (of a methodological literary history). Wellek: "This view has not, to my mind, been refuted." 

47- Ker: "The poem as an individual thing is all form; and what is not form is not poetry" —Crocean, but he recognizes the need for a history of forms. The study of literature is a compromise between emphasizing the work or its belonging to a school. "He remained a historian in spite of his ambition to become a critic . .  . Ker did not develop any analytical tools to satisfy his own ambition" of studying the work itself; "he could not emancipate himself from the basically eclectic, indiscriminately tolerant Victorian taste, its basic historicism." 

 

Grierson (1866-1960)

He edited the metaphysicals, he sees in them a "peculiar blend of passion and thought, feeling and ratiocination" (Eliot reviewed him in his essay on 'The Metaphysical Poets'). He deals above all in the history of ideas. Critical History of English Poetry (with J. C. Smith, 1946) is bad, with an unfair estimate of the moderns. Wellek: "Bad poetry is bad poetry as great poetry is great poetry, whatever its age and whatever our particular sensibility" (Wellek vs. literary history).

 

Garrod (1878-1960)

A Raleighian, his criterion is liking, vs. transcendental questions. But rigorous in textual scholarship. He also appreciates organic unity in the work, and the verdict of ages as proof of genius.

52- Garrod favours an eclectic approach, accepts all methods, and opposes criticism as the self-expression of the critic. He emphasizes the communal participation in art and criticism. Garrod: "The public acts the play, and in a sense it writes it." He thinks of poetry as atemporal. He accepts universality (and he dismisses Jane Austen as narrow); vs. "realism"; but: poetry shows the object in its individuality—he can't decide on a final answer. 


3 - THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP

55- Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, J.M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Desmond MacCarthy, E.M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West. Basis: G. F. Moore's Principia Ethica: "by far the most valuable things which we know or can imagine are certain states of consciousness, which many be roughly described as the pleasure of human intercourse, and the enjoyment of beautiful objects." Timeless states of contemplation, aesthetic approach to life. But also social compromise and individual emancipation.

56- Vs. scientism. Vs. anti-romanticism, A& vs. impersonality and moralism"; a "cliquish self-conscious superiority", but separate figures.

Roger Fry (1866-1934) and Clive Bell (1881-1964)

Fry: View of art as communication, a communal product, but subjective reaction. Art is in the main self-contained and has internal principles of development. 

57- Art has no connection with morals or sex. He advocated post-Impressionism, "constantly argued for the rejection of both realistic and impressionistic art, accpeting even the logical conclusion in abstact or non-representational art." Frye: "All the essential aesthetic quality has to do with pure form"; "as poetry becomes more intense the content is entirely remade by the form and has no separate value at all." Special art-emotion exists, but no pure art: "The aesthetic emotion has greater value in highly complicated components than in the pure state." Frye educated the public in the new art, and developed a new vocabulary for painting (from Wölfflin) - Vision and Design, 1920.

58- Bell (Art, 1913) had greater impact; invents "significant form" —Not form that means something beyond formal relations, points to a reality, expresses or conveys an emotion—rather mere aesthetic exaltation—Vs. representation. We become aware of the universal in the particular. Vs. historicism. Art is appreciated in itself, emphasis on the present moment. Opposed by Shaw.

Lytton Strachey (1880-1932)

Biographies; Eminent Victorians (1918). As a critic, after Pater; tolerant historicism, skeptical of theory, neoclassical in spirit. Landmarks in French Art (1912) , pro 18th-c. in England and France; he accepts the conventions of the couplet, or of Restoration comedy, as preconditions. —"In vacuo" - praises Boswell's absurdity as the condition of his consummate art. Pro detachment in critic, "the antithesis of the bestial". He introduces the stock market image in literature (rising and falling reputations, etc.). He recognizes several critical sttandards; too tolerant for Wellek: "Strachey is thinking in therms of a history of sentiment (...) His criticism can be thought of as the exemplification of such a historical scheme."

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

65-66-  Impressionist? No: Personal, metaphorical and whimsical criticism, but a Moorean realist, rather aims at grasping an object. Although she thinks criticism must share "the excitement, the adventure, the turmoil of creation". In favour of poet-critics, but nevertheless assigns a limited and even humble mission to criticism, it teaches how to read. 

67- Pro interest in works apart from their author. Art is rooted in its age even if it transcends it. Vs. Art pour l'art. Woolf on the readers of Sidney's Arcadia: "Each has to read differently, with the insight and the blindness of his own generation. Our reading will be equally partial"; "Writing is a method of communication" - "To know whom to write for is to know how to write" (Woolf). Alliance between writers and readers.

68- Woolf "Sketches a story of the economic support of English literautre" but "She is rather concerned with the writer's declared or implied attitude to his reader." Obscurity is seen as despising the public. She shows different reactions to the same work But Wellek argues that "There is ... a structure of determination which prevents arbitrariness." Woolf rejects judging a novelist with simple morality.

69- "She wants to master the 'perspective', understand 'how the novelist orders his world'"—his "vision." Sidney has forgotten his relationship to his characters in Arcadia, who speaks.

70- On Sterne: obsessed with his own mind, not an analyst of other people (the simple, eccentric, erratic); Woolf: "In no other book are the characters so closely dependent on the author. In no other book are the writer and the reader so involved together." 

71- Woolf is warm to Jane Austen in spite of her narrowness and her fear of passion; cool to Scott, critical of George Eliot and Meredith. George Eliot's heroines "bring out the worst in her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic and occasionally vulgar" (Woolf). She underrates George Eliot and overrates Emily Bronte's mysticism.

73- (Wellek is impatient with her metaphorical criticism): "She forgives all the shortcomings and failures of Hardy, 'the greatest tragic writer among English novelists." Similar sympathy for Conrad. Woolf has a preference for the universally human, for the power of generalizing, for characters who have

74- "something symbolical about them which is common to us all"; "Imagination is at its freest when it is most generalized." (Cf. Johnson and Wordsworth). Moore and Gissing write only about themselves. On James she is curiously divided: "The horror of The Turn of the Screw is tame and conventional" (Woolf); in Maisie, characters live in a vacuum. She appreciates his rendering of the past and his sanity, but he is "vulgar, a snob, an American". 

75- But she admires him for his design (not for plot or character); "She seems to be describing her own procedures". She rejects Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, encumbered by "bushels of fact" (she overshoots her mark); Vs. their conventional use of conventions & conventional characters; she advocates a new novel.

76- "Virginia Woolf proclaims the end of realism and phophesies the age of a novel of sensibility." She is not satisfied with Dorothy Richardson; we are inside another mind, OK, but "distressingly near the surface ... never, or only for a tantalizing second, in the reality which underlies these appearances." 

77- Woolf: "We read Mr. Lawrence as one reads Mr. Bennett—for the facts and for the story"; but actually he disturbed her, "Rapture of physical being" is OK, but Lawrence is too moralistic; Woolf pro ridding art of preaching. Joyce's Ulysses: a failure, diffuse, tricky, stunty, pretentious, egotistic. 

78- Woolf eventually thought that the new novel had failed to keep its promise. She classifies novelists: 'Truth-tellers', 'Character-mongers', 'Poets', 'Psychologists', 'Romantics', 'Satirists and Fantasists'. Inevitability of mimesis: balance between "the power of bringing us into close touch with life" and "style, arrangement, construction." She does not care for the term 'form'—pro "emotion" and "process of reading." 

79- —> the containing principle she calls "art." This balance is at the root of many of her critical judgements of novelists. On Forster's Aspects of the Novel: He neglects language, distrusts beauty. Fiction is parasitic from life... His concepts are too traditional. Woolf: "If the English critic were less domestic, less assiduous to protect the rights of what it pleases him to call life, the novelist might be bolder too. He must cut adrift from the eternal tea-table ... The story mighw wobble, the plot might crumble; ruin might seize upon the characters. The novel, in short, might become a work of art" (The Moment and Other Essays). But she insists on coherence—no ambiguity—one type of reality—> but see her own fiction! Another criterion: the contrast of national types and traditions; she is acutely aware of the class character of 19th-c. fiction. 

80- Remedy vs. the limits of English fiction: the Russian novel—large, sane, sincere and profound ("The Russian Point of Viw")—She is unfair to the English, unreal about the Russians; sweeping generalizations; she is best on the criticism of particular Russian authors. 

81- Turgenev, for Woolf, wrote and rewrote to clear the truth of the unessential, But Dostoesky would say that everything matters. Pro Turgenev's fiction organized around one central Character. She defends inconclusive endings in Chekhov. 

Male vs. Female is another source of preoccupation for Woolf—& the condition of women writers.

82- Sometimes she wants a femininet literature, or attackes the "sentence made by men" as pompous. On Dorothy Richardson: "She has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own use a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." But ultimately Woolf can contradict herself and say "a writer has no sex", a writer does not lay stress on sex, or that stress upon the sex of a writer is irritating and superflous. Like Coleridge, she favours the androgynous mind. 

She is mainly interested in the novel and in biography. Rhyme is "childish" and dishonest. "Modern poetry shirks contest with life and is absorbed by the self"—pro poets going out of themselves. Modern poetry is vulgar, coarse, ugly, and obscure.

83- "Again and again she voices her preference for the novel and the drama because they require the writer to enter into other people's minds." Advice to critics, too: "Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice." There are no laws in art, no conventions. Vs. moral criticis: pro Lamb, Pater... "The essay should give pleasure", no facts, no dogmas. Some fierce attachment to an idea as backbone. 

84- As in Coleridge, the critic must seem to bring to light what was there beforehand, not imposing anything extraneous. Criticism is not creation but "an interpretation."

Not an important contribution—but she singles out her author and stamps his personality-


E.M. Forster (1879-1970)

Aspects of the Novel (1927), Abinger Harvest (1936), Two Cheers for Democracy (1951).

85- He upholds aestheticism even more extremely than the rest at Bloomsbury.  "I believe in art for art's sake ... A work of art—whatever else it may be—is a self-contained entity, with a life of its own imposed on it by its creator. It has internal order. It may have external form." "A poem points to nothing but to itself." Self-supportive universe, expressly contrasted to the disorder of society. Criticism's aim: 1st, to consider the object in itself; 2nd, in its relations (cf. in phenomenology: the work of art vs. the art object). He unnecessarily rejects the historicity of the work of art in Aspects. Pro seeing literature beyond time (Eliot). Lif in time is inferior to life in values, etc. A preference for space in the simple geographical sense—uncritical, irrelevant view. On his "aspects": 

86- "He loosely mixes an analysis of the strata of a novel with an attempt at a typology of the novel." He minimizes story and plot; interested above all in characters (his best pages), our knowledge, and the illusion of power. "Forster's metaphor of 'flat' versus 'round' has deservedly become established as a fortunate formulation" (Huxley before him). He endorses James's 'exit author', though half-heartedly; for Wellek it is not clear why a writer can't speak about his characters. 

Forster is oddly silent on language, and gives and unsatisfactory typology of novels. Disappointing, though occasionally OK. He appreciates Woolf: she and Joyce are the only innovators on form; and sympathizes with her rejection of naturalis. 

88- "Ultimately we must conclude that Forster, in spite of the apparent advocacy of 'art for art's sake', applies standards of realism to literature and to his own novels. He cannot get away from them as a novelist." Woolf is "a poet" for him, but did not wholly avoid the pitfall of aestheticism, boring to read... "a central deficiency of Forster's criticism, his refusal to think clearly about the creative process, the status of the work of art and its function." "As a good empiricist he disparages theory and criticism. Aesthetic theories are 'beds of Procrustes'." Forster: "The claim of criticism to take us to the heart of the Arts must be disallowed." Criticism is not creation. Forster gestures towards love or affection as standards of criticism—or 'bouncing'! He is enclosed in the tradition of the critical realist, he is narrower and has less force than Lytton Strachey or Virginia Woolf.


Desmond MacCarthy (1878-1952)

Criticism (1932). 

89- "the most conservative critic of the group." Arnoldian, moralistic; the aim of the writer is to "create or suggest a rational coherent ideal" of life. Pro Santayana. Critic as a "creature without a spiritual home" (Sainte-Beuve); his "first obligation is to permit himself to be absorbed in the vision of a writer" (MacCarthy). The psychology of the reader is a part of the critic's subject: the critic must replace the historical perspective, etc. Even impreessionism is accepted at times—making us feel what he felt. MacCarthy vs. Leslie Stephen as "the least aesthetic" of critics. "But in most of his writings, MacCarthy is himself a moralist who judges from an ideal of a sane but somewhat gloomy and disillusioned view of life." Pro Proust, who attempts to turn aesthetic into religious experience; "probably a vain hope" (MacCarthy). MacCarthy rejects obscurity, mysticism and Catholicism. Vs. irrationalism and experiment in Modernism. 

90- D.H. Lawrence is "a religious prophet who was mistaken for a pornographer"—but his mysticism is nonsense to those who believe in civilization for the sake of sanity (i.e. MacCarthy himself). There is some truth in Lawrence's criticism of modern civilization, though. MacCarthy vs. psychoanalysis, vs. stream-of-consciousness, etc. Virginia Woolf is criticized as impressionistic. Joyce is a prodigious talent but also "a frightened enslaved mind. Much of Ulysses is cold, nasty, small and over-serious" (MacC). Stream-of-consciousness is a new convention, artificial as any other. Vs. G. Stein, vs. "patterns of words" like coloured pebbles—pro what makes literature valuable to man. 

MacCarthy is vague on poetry: he can't discuss technique. He uses comparison to achieve his effects—one writer vs. another. As a theatre critic, Ibsen and Chekhov are best for him: realism and symbolisml 

91- "poetry can help us do one thing which religion helps us to do, to live life spirtually, that is, intelligently and disinterestedly" —but it is not a complete substitue. 

MacCarthy is a minor, appealing figure.


4. THE NEW ROMANTICS

92- John Middleton Murry, D.H. Lawrence and G. Wilson Knight "restore romantic or at least irrationalist attitudes which are still with us today."


John Middleton Murry (1889-1957)

92-" Murry revives the romantic concept of poetry as implying 'some sort of Pantheism'" ...  a belief in the unity of the world he often calls 'organic'. 

93- Struggle for 'soul-making' as every man's task —to apprehend and accept the universe.Art, poetry, convey a truth inexpressible in rational terms —emphatically not thought. "A test of authenticity is an affirmative answer to the question whether its meaning 'could be conveyed to us by no other means'."The root is in emotion; the quality depends on that of the emotion. But he mistrusts 'sincerity' as a standard.  Poetry is incommensurable with biography.

94- "Emotions must be 'symbolized in the objects which aroused them'"; cf. the objective correlative. Metaphor as a 'mode of apprehension', not a comparison. The poet must construct a whole, guided by a predominant passion —he gestures at Transcendentalism. 

95- MM aims at a metaphysics of poetry, the play particularity/universality —a universal accessible only through the particular. The poem shows a perfection, a unity we must apprehend in the world; "Religion and literature are branches of the same everlasting root."

96- Criticism is a part of poetic activity, it must justify it, an exalted view. Poetry must give an ideal of the good life (cf. Aristotle) but an ideal which has to be aesthetic; MM: "Art is autonomous, and to be pursued for its own sake, precisely because it comprehends the whole of human life" (Aspects of Literature, 1920). Criticism is "a personal affair", but the critic "must seek laws for his own impressions."An ideal of communion as method. The critic: "the more he can lose himself, in the object, the more himself he is" (MM, Discoveries, 1924).  The critic is the instrument through which the objective pattern of the book declares itself.

97- "He (MM) aims at a synthesis of objective and subjective criticism, of self-assertion and submission, of the personal and the impersonal." English literature is always romantic, it relies on an "inner voice" —but Murry wants to be something more than intuitive, and attempts to reconcile in an individual being intuition and intelligence. Attacked by many. 

He likes Eliot but rejects many of his views (on the critic as a poet, etc.). But he does not see in Eliot a true classic in his poetry, and a s a critic he effects (MM) "a prodigious intellectual subtlety to produce the effect of a final futility."

100- "Eliot and Murry disagreed on the issues of relgiion, socity, and sex but they were not so far apart in criticism as the disagreement may indicate." 

101- MM vs. Wilson Knight, who imposes "a dangerous, because empty, schematism on Shakespeare"; pro Coleridge & Bradley. Vs. Richars' concern with the nervous system, which leaves the work out of reckoning. Vs. Empson, who, who sees parts instead of wholes, and obscures rather than explain. Leavis is for MM an honest but obtuse dogmatist, hidebound by his theories. MM vs. New Critics, who focus (MM) on "complexity, intensity, scholasticism and concentration os a narrow range of subject-matter".

MM's reputation rests on his monographic studies. F. Dostoevsky (1916) sees D. as a visionary, disregards realism, is wholly spiritual. Russian literature as the fulfulment of English Romanticism's spiritualism.

105- Keats and Shakespeare (1925). MM pro 'negative capability', impersonality as a road to personality. Keats is greater than his achievement, and MM overdoes the transcendental & mystical element in Keats (over the aesthetic). 

106- Shakespeare (1931) also on negative capability.

107- "Ultimately Murry can only point to what he considers poetry", vs. Milton, outside of English tradition. Vs. Wordsworth; fails to describe Coleridge's disintegration. Pro Hardy & Clare. 

Cool or hard on his contemporaries. Favorite poet: Baudelaire. Vs. Flaubert: "The invention of 'Art' has done no good to art" (Countries of the Mind, 1922).

111- Pro Proust: La Recherche "is essentially the story of its own creation" (a forecast). Ulysses is both "a work of genius" and "a gigantic aberration, the last extravagance of romanticism" 

112 - "curse of nimiety, of too-muchness that hangs over the whole" - Comic talent.

MM on Lawrence: he distrusts his tone and doctrine, but is "incomparably the most important writer of his generation". MM refuses to share his anti-intellectualism, and judges him with the standard of serenity and good sense. He is revolted by Lawrence's "intensity of loathing for woman in the sexual relation".

114- Son of Woman (1931) emphasizes MM's two shortcomings as a critic: his excessive involvement with the man and the doctrine behind the books which distorts his usually sound literary judgment".

115- MM's "Belief in the cognitive value of literature and in criticism as valued judgment" (Wellek pro both - he decries their absence in present-day criticism).

 

 

D. H. Lawrence  (1885- 1930)

116- Lawrence, "the most extreme irrationalist", "releases us from the horrid grip of the evil-smelling old Logos"; he favours (L) "phallic consciousness" or "dark gods", which are for Wellek "so many metaphors for the subconscious, the instinctive, the utttely spontaneous and intuitive." A radical critic of society now. Pro impressionistic criticism—the critic must be 

117- "emotionally alive in every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in essential logic, and then morally very honest." Pro knowing and admitting what we feel. The novelist is a total man, unlike the scientist or the poet. "The novel can help us 'to live as nothing else can'" (Phoenix, 1972). "The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered" . Vs. overt moralizing, which is as if "the novelist put his thumb on the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection." L wants conscious purpose, but is against unconscious predilection: "every work of art adheres to some system of morality. But if it be really a work of art, it must contain the essential criticism on the morality to which it adheres." Vs. pornography. Vs. "craving for form", pro a loose organic form.

118- "We need an apparent formlessness, definite form is mechanical". Every work has its own form which "has no relationships with any other form"; vs. old ego in character, pro inteterminacy.

119- Lawrence rejects the absorbed self-consciousness of Joyce and other modernists. It is the old masquerading as new. Characters must be "quick", have a relatedness to everything else in the novel; he favours the instinctual man or woman. Witers are "phallic worshippers" who think they are Jesuses. "This sense of the double bottom, of the subtext, the latent meaning, pervades all of Lawrence's criticism. He is one of the unmaskers, convinced that the conscious intention of the artist may run counter to his deep-felt allegiances" (cf. Schlegel, or Engels). Lawrence: "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it" (Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923); "The artist who writes as a somnambulist in the spell of pure truth as in a dream is contravened and contradicted by the wakeful man and moralist who sits at the desk" (The Symbolic Meaning, 1964).

120- Symbol as a complex of emotional experience —vs. allegory. Symbols can't be invented, they are based on accumulated experience and the hidden self. Another version of the "dissociation of sensibility" —Lawrence sets his primaeval wholeness in Atlantis, in Mexico, Etruria, the English countryside before industrialization. There has been a decay of wholesome sexuality; it is already morbid in Shakespeare. Lawrence: "Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the Brontës are all post-mortem poets". Swinburne and Wilde tried "to start a revival from the mental field" (Phoenix). Lawrence sees himself as destined to restore the original unity of man; mind/body or male/female are poles within the individual (an idea from Otto Weininger).

121- Lawrence allegorizes books, discusses the adequacy of characters in themselves... —a breakdown of literary art for Wellek.  He rejects Dostoevsky's angelism and his pure introversion (Lawrence is wrong-headed here for Wellek). 

122- Lawrence on Hardy: He is not tragic, Lawrence rejects his stance: "There is a lack of sternness, there is hesitating between life and public opinion which diminishes the Wessex novels from the rank of pure tragedy". 

But tragedy is too introverted for Lawrence anyway, too mental. Hamlet: terror of sex. 

123- "In spite of all of Lawrence's revulsion against his time, he remained a Utopian, full of messianic hope, and disapproved of tragedy." He reduces the discussion of Hardy's characters to his own schematic sexual typology. Vs. Sue & pro Arabella in Jude the Obscure. Lawrence confuses fiction and reality, and uses fiction to illustrate a theory.

124- Preposterous national generalizations. Lawrence: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer". Monster beasts. An intellectual impulse to annihilate life in Americans. Pro the society of the true man in Cooper, deeper than sex, a germ of the future.

125- Lawrence opposes in American literature "love" as spiritual love, without sex: vs. Poe, Dante, and Petrarch. 

126 - The Scarlet Letter as legendary myth, based on human archetypes (Mother goddess-devil, and a Dostoevskian Dimmesdale). 

He detects a perverse allegorization in Melville. Vs. Whitman:

127- "The rejection of romantic merging with nature and the universe is an old theme of Lawrence." His American Literature "had an impact far beyond its claim to literary criticism". It appealed because of its anti-Idealism and its anti-Puritanism, but it is distorted and subjective as criticism, it ignores critical standards.  His criticism is directed to his own work.


6. G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985)

128 - Coming from the whole tradition which interprets literature as myth, ritual and symbol; from Fraser's Golden Bough, "though Fraser himself was a good positivist who refused to read Freud" —and the classicist Gilbert Murray Also in line with Colin Still and Caroline Spurgeon on Shakespeare. Wilson Knight separates interpretation from criticism. 

120- The "spatial approach" sees the work as a pattern; pro identifying the book's "atmospheric quality", "the omnipresent and mysterious reality brooding motionless over and within the plays movement" (Wilson Knight). "The spatial, that is, the spiritual, quality uses the temporal, that is, the story, lending it dominance in order to express itself more clearly." Wilson Knight rejects concern for intentions, sources or character (vs. ethical criticism) —pro an artistic ethic (The Wheel of Fire, 1930). 

130- Universal symbols in Shakespeare —with a basic opposition tempest/music. Wilson Knight's interpretation is not verbal but spatial "Its first interest is the structure, the pattern, the body of the work in question almost irrespective of the exact language used" (Wilson Knight, "The New Interpretation", 1953) —vs. judgement, vs. criticism.

131- "Knight does not understand that even the simple selection of his symbols is an act of value judgement and that, in practice, hi himself has constantly judged and ranked." He ranks plays, and Spiritualism as the cener of literature (he believes in ghosts). 

132- He accepts that poetry is temporal; interpretation develops space (unlike Wyndham Lewis's atemporality). Unhistorical; he aims at an eternal world of art, of symbols and myths. A conception that the world is divided in dualisms which are abolished in immortality, mystery, etc. But "Knight has done pioneering work in making us read Shakespeare's plays as poems, rejecting the realistic prejudices  of the time and stage and seeing the work, the whole row of plays, as a totality which shows an inner evolution." 

Often perverseand extravagant in detail; e.g. for him Hamlet is evil, vs. a healthy court; also in Othello & Macbeth.... 

A taste for metaphoric criticism. Tjhe ñstory is not only realistic, but mythic; lands of romance are achieved, paradisal visions, quests of love...

136- Wilson Knight collects words of special significance which give the atmosphere of a play. He was a pro-Crown, royalist patriot during World War II. 

The Starlit Dome: Studies in the Poetry of Vision (1941). 3 books on Byron - a Promethean, Shakespearean figure, sex + politics. Wilson Knight's later works are eccentric, the early ones are influential on critics such as L.C. Knights, R. Heilman, and Northrop Frye.


Herbert Read     (1894-1968)

138- Read was a "romanticist in literature, an anarchist in politics and an agnostic in religion" (vs. T.S. Eliot). Eclectic and productive. Sincerity. 

139- Best: The True Voice of Feeling (1953), on Romanticism. Art as an expression of personality (≠ character). Irrational: Creation is unconscious (he used Freud, Jung). Earlier: a feeble psychoanalytic defense of Wordsworth and Shelley. Later: an organic aesthetic, derive from Coleridge.

140- "At times Read replaces the classical + romantic dichotomy with the imagistic versus metaphorical"—which cuts across. Pro obscurity in poetry: "A poem has a necessary and eternal existence: it is impervious to reason, and if it has no discoverable meaning it has unmeasurable power" (Read, Collected Essays in Literary Criticism, 1938). But he is not an obscurantist in practical criticism. Not technical: he looks for mind and rhetoric. Reads Tristram Shandy as psychological fiction. 

141- Social aim of literature: The integration of man, in both Freud and Marx. Vs. Lessing, there is "only one imagination"; vs. Descartes' dualism, pro Kierkegaard. 

142- Utopian schemes to make art an essential part of human happiness.

 

 

Christopher Caudwell     (1907-1937)

Pseudonym of St. John Sprigg, killed in Madrid. "Illusion and Reality (1937) is considered the first important document of English Marxism." Marxist frame and rhetoric, but an irrational core - he follows Richards. Art as primitive ritual. "In the collective festival where poetry is born, the phantastic wrold of poetry anticipates the harvest and, by so doing, makes possible the real harvest." Necessity to bring that reality into being, to give strength. Wellek: "Poetry and production, illusion and reality, are united as they would be again in the Socialist Utopia."

142- "Caudwell's attempts to draw parallels between the stages of economic development (primitive accumulation, the industrial revolution) and the phases of English poetry are crude and insensitive", e.g. Keats "is the first great poet to feel the strain of the poet's position in this state of the bourgeois illusion, as a producer for the free market."  

Romance and Realism (1970): more literary criticism, less ideology. Not successful, not sophisticated; he doesn't synthesize his influences of physics (Einstein, Heisenberg), psychology, sociology, economics  & literary history.


5. THE INNOVATORS

144- "The great change in the theory and practice of English criticism was accomplished by T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and their disciples F.R. Leavis and William Empson in the twenties and thirties."- "The doctrines of the innovators were prepared, at least as polemical pronouncements and slogans, before the First World War by T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis." All outsiders, "They should not be called an avant-garde, as only Ezra Pound was an organizer."  Reaction vs. late Victorian tradition (vs. Swinburne and the Pre-Raphalites). Georgians too.

145- "'Imagism' was the new slogan in 1912 and 'vorticism' in 1914." Theory is trite: the poet is to create visual images without rhetoric; precision of observation. "But an effect can be achieved only by metaphor and analogy. Free verse is recommended as a break with tradition." Vorticism is analogous to German expressionism.  These are literary coteries, not theories. "Modernist" was never used by them, this comes later. Derived from "modo," Latin for 'today'. Cf. ancient disputes of the ancients and moderns, or classical vs. romantic. Baudelaire pro "modernity"; the "ephemeral and fleeting beauty of modern life". Also, the Naturalists or Darío call themselves modernists. Etc. "I can only guess that Eliot avoided the term because of the danger of confusion". 

146- Wellek vs. "modern/postmodern" ("What is after 'today'?").

 

T. E. Hulme     (1883-1917)

Speculations (1924), hailed by Eliot, and Futher Speculations (1955 - earlier papers).

146- An obscure role in the origins of Imagism. Hulme accepts Bergson in toto, he translated and published his Introduction to Metaphysics. Vs. Russell's pacifism. He influences Eliot & Pound, thogh they minimize him, perhaps rightly. Hulme's renown is "totally out of proportion to the quality and originality of his writings on literary matters." 

147- He was aware of anti-Romanticism in France and of phenomenology in Germany: Dilthey, Husserl, Lipps...

148- "Superior reportage."  "His adherence to the philosophy of Bergson cannot be reconciled with the abstract classicism Hulme's taste demanded."

149- The paper "Modern Art and Its Philosophy" (1914) is an "abstract" of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction und Einfühlung (1908). Incompatible with Bergsonism.  Emphatic, organic, vitalistic art vs. abstracting, geometrical, perfectivist art. Hulme pro abstraction: Greek Renaissance & German classics.

150- "Romanticism and Classicism": "Romanticism is conceived to be simply optimistic liberalism, belief in progress, and so on, just the theories that the great Romantics hated most." Spilt religion. He recommends fancy in a simplistic way. Pro finite and dry beauty; visual, concrete language. "But then suddenly an astonishing attempt is made to recruit Coleridge and Bergson into the camp of this 'classicism'." Superficial interpretation of Coleridge's "organic" (he does not consider imagination). This is a manifesto, not literary history. 

151- "Lecture on Modern Poetry". "I have a reverence for tradition", he says—a personal taste, vs. the metaphysical claims of poetry. "What poetry is after is the precise image", something like impressionism in painting. Wellek: "The differentia between poetry and prose is not meter but imagery". Hulme: "Regular meter to this impressionistic poetry is cramping, jangling, meaningless, and out of place. Into the delicate pattern of images and colour, it introduces the heavy, crude pattern of rhetorical verse."  Images live in poetry, are dead in prose, "in journalistic English."  Sincerity is measured by the number of images (!). 

"Notes on Language and Style." - "Poetry is neither more nor less than a mosaic of words, so great is exactness required for each one." It must be metaphorical: "Never, never, a simple statement. It has no effect." Analogy, Romantic correspondences and symbolism. Hulme is similar to the 19th-c. aestheticists: poetry for the poet, "all theories are toys." As in Eliog, in Hulme taste is is for the image, "the classicism only an ideological superstructure." And "that is not incompatible with Bergson".


Ezra Pound    (1885-1972)

152- Praised by Eliot. Repudiation of the past and appeal to a new selective tradition. Aim of criticism: to reject what is not worth reading, to counsel the reader and draw attention to the best. 

153- Criticism to be based on personal judgment. Vs. repeating accepted opinions. Vs. Sainte-Beuve and vs. the biographical approach to criticism. He admires Remy de Gourmont: cosmopolitanism,

154- vs. national literatures, vs. American "learneries"; pro "A universal standard, which pays no attention to time or country —a a Weltliteraturstandard" (Letters); the history of English poetry as "a history of successful steals from the French" (In Future 2 (1917)). He emphasizes the role of transalaators in history; unearths them in the Elizabethan age. Poetry is "always the same, the changes are superficial" (Egoist 2 (1915)), "all ages are contemporaneous" (The Spirit of Romance, 1910). He minimizes criticism when  not by poets and directed to creation. Pro manifestos:

155- "Don't"; "direct treatment of the thing", "composing in the sequence of the musical phrase". "Imagism": Image ≠ visual picture: "An 'image' presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Not clear. Changed to 'Vorticism' (= English Expressionism) —which breaks with the visual completely; but both 'image' and 'vortex' are slogans (or ideograms). All defend the technique of montage, e.g. in the Cantos. Wellek vs. a transcendent interpretation of Pound's criticism. "Pound is obviously a totally unphilosophical and untheoretical mind: he never pretends to such knowledge".

156- Vs. Aristotle as a 'director' (!). - Pound as a naive realist, even sensualist.  Vs. formalism, 'cuisine', but he was very careful himself, at risk of hyposthatizing form. But at times he relates emotion & form: "poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emotions" (The Spirit of Romance; cf. Eliot's 'objective correlative' (Prose)." Pro 'accurate art" as moral art, pro Naturalists. At times he favours Art for Art's Sake, with no immediate value, which just exists.

157- But this is abandoned when considering the broad linguistic, moral, and social effects of literature. Insistence on colloquial, living language, directness; vs. emotion: pro objectivity. 

158- Kinds of poetry: melopoeia (sounds), phanopoeia (images), logopoeia (thoughts, intellectual dance). Wellek: "the distinctions do roughly correspond to the main strata of a work of art." Pound's amateurish metrics. He plays down the role o structure at large in favour of texture (cf. Cantos). His 'theory' justifies "a very dogmatic taste which cannot be argued about, since Pound lacks analytical skill and critical vocabulary." 

159- Elementary, simplistic; unexplained divisions into good/bad poems; simplicity, vs. rhetoric, clarity vs. Fogginess. Vs. Virgil. How to Read (1931), ABC of Reading (1934). Pro Cavalcanti; pro Cid, Seafarer, Beowulf, Villon, vs. Elizabethans; pro Chaucer (vs. bombastic embroidery of language). 

160- Vs. Milton, his pet aversion. Vs. his language and religion. Eliot argues vs. Milton, while Pound merely asserts his case, vs.18th  c., vs. the Romantics. Insults and nicknames given to poets he doesn't like. Pro Landor & Browning & Whitman. 

Pound was estranged from Eliot later, vs. his caution, "the method of increasingly guarded abstract statement", and vs. his religion. Pro the "hardness of outline" in Gautier and the later Yeats (Pound was his secretary). 

166- Less interested in prose. Vs. passions; pro Henry James and James Joyce. Vs. the late James too, but he appreciates his opposition of cultures and his 'feel' of character and place. Pro James Joyce as "free from sloppiness", a definer, non-Irish, a classic, he admires his range. But vs. the Odyssey parallel in Ulysses and hidden meanings. Versus Finnegans Wake, a "diarrhea of consciousness". 

Winters: Pound as "a barbarian on the loose in a museum". Guide to Kulcher (1938), cranky. Cocksureness, managed to achieve his intention, "a revolution in taste" (Wellek). Pound was a generous supporter of new writing. Vs. English provincialism, through an erratic selection of other literatures.

169- "Pound (and T. S. Eliot) broke resolutely with the rhetorical tradition and defined a new taste: in the novel, for the objective novel of Flaubert, James, and Joyce; in poetry, for direct, simple, often visual, prosaic, or apparently prosaic verse."

 

Wyndham Lewis     (1882-1957)

169- Similar to Hulme, Eliot, Pound, Joyce... He shared their French type of anti-Romanticism; vs. Rousseau and Bergson, vs. progress and history. Pro classical art: severe, hard, even coarse; Cubism, Vorticism.  He founded Blast (1914-15). Manifestoes, wild generalizations; vs. Marinetti, pro "Primitive Mercenaries in the Modern World".

170- The Lion and the Fox, 1927, a Machiavellian interpretation of Shakespeare (the prince combines the lion + the fox). Impassibility of Shakespeare, like a "public executioner", an adversary of life (!).  Lewis himself was always self-destructive, and made enemies of his friends. "All of Lewis's later criticism of his contemporaries can be described as invective, satire, and even personal abuse".

Time and Western Man (1927): Decline of the West through its concern with time and interospection. Versus the 'internal method': "the eye is supreme"; pro satire. He attacks all his contemporaries as decadent.

Lewis vs. irrationalism, primitivism, vs. sentimentality. E.g., vs. Joyce  as culmination of both naturalism and psychological fluidity. 

Lewis favours the independence and freedom of the artist; a distate of the present. Pro satire, pro the visual and concrete, vs. psychology.

174- Men without Art (1933): vs. Eliot's idea of classical impersonality and vs. Richards's 'disbelief' and 'pseudo-statements'.  Lewis sees Richards as a new Art for Art's sake. Pro Orwell's Animal Farm, 1984,  and Camus. In Lewis, dreary polemics hide sharp formulations. He quarrelled with everyone save Eliot.


6. T. S. Eliot  (1888-1965)

176- "T. S. Eliot is by far the most important critic of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world." He effects a shift in taste. His theory of poetry "is much more coherent and systematic than most commentators and Eliot himself have allowed." Impersonal poetry; unified sensibility required in creation culminates in objective correlative; there is a historical dissociation of sensibility; a defense of tradition and commmon speech, concept of belief / ideas in poetry - "all these are crucial critical matters for which Eliot found memorable formulas, if not always convincing solutions." He denies having an aesthetic theory.

177- A genuine conviction that ultimate questions are beyond the reach of the intellect and that attempts to define poetry must fail. But "essentially his theories can be treated as having a clear, coherent pattern, though some internal contradictions periss." Eliot: "The true critic is a scrupulous avoider of formulae: he refrains from statements which pretend to be literally true. He finds fact nowhere and approximation always. His truths are the truths of experience rather than calculation" (Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, 1963).  

178- He holds his criticism is "a by-product of my private poetic workshop" (On Poetry and Poets, 1957), that his theorizing is "epiphenomenal of [his] taste" (To Criticise the Critic, 1965). Not true: "Eliot's taste is often in little relation to his theory." He promotes distinuishing what we like and what we ought to like (Essays Ancient and Modern, 1936). He opposes the scholar to the practical critic: interpreting the work in its context vs. what use it is for us (poets) now. "But making criticism serve only termporary ends while scholarship serves the permanent seems a specious conclusion based on a false dichotomy. It pervades Eliot's refelction in criticism."  

179- Three kinds of criticism for Eliot: creative criticism (Symonds and Pater); it does not count, they are "incomplete artists"; historical criticism, OK (but limited?); it is not lit. crit.; "the only genuine criticism is that of the poet-critic who is "criticising poetry in order to create poetry" (The Sacred Wood, 1920). "Later he merely asked the critic to have some experience in writing poetry." The only exception is Aristotle. For Eliot, "The important critic is the person who is absorbed in the present problem of art: and who wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear on these problems" (The Sacred Wood) - This is unduly restrictive. He rejects both interpretation and judicial criticism. Interpretations: "instead of insight, you get a fiction." Instead he favors merely supplying the reader with facts he would have missed  (Selected Essays):

180- "qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret...  for interpretation the chief task is the presentation of individual facts which the reader is not assumed to know" (Selected Essays). Skepticism about the possibility of a single or permanent interpretation: "every interpretation, along perhaps with some uttely contradictory interpretation, has to be taken up and reinterpreted by any thinking mind and by every civilization" (Knowledge & Experience...). Interpretation is "a necessay evil, a makeshift, a compensation for an imperfection" Judgment is forbidden: "The critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgments of worse and better" (The Sacred Wood). The critic "must simply elucidate; the reader will form the correct judgement for himself." Not literal: he seeks rather "to protest against subjective and arbitrary interpretation and against the dogmatic ranking of authors." The aim of criticism is also "The return to the work of art with improved perception and intensified, because mor conscious enjoyment" (The Sacred Wood). For Wellek, "The interdiction of judgment and ranking is completely belied by Eliot's practice. Ranking, judging, was the secret of his success and appeal as a critic" (e.g. the Elizabethan dramatists in Selected Essays). 

181- Eliot subordinates criticism to creation. Vs. autotelic, creative criticism; all "implies a concept of the meaning of the work of art as something left to the reader, something indeterminate and even loose" (Wellek). Eliot: "A poem may appear to mean different things to different readers, and all of these meanings may be different from what the author thought he meant"; "The reader's interpretation may differ from the author's and be equally valid—it may even be better" (On Poetry and Poets, 1957). Cf. the doctrines of impersonality, the opposition to the intentional fallacy, etc. "Eliot is right in not wanting to lose this accrual of meaning", but the problem of correctness remains; Wellek warns against shirking it.

182- He runs vs. his own theory of a tradition of Judgment Day to poets [!!], of an "absolute poetic hierarchy" (Eliot) that we must assum. Cf. Garland for John Donne, ed. T. Spenser, 1930). Eliot does not define his actual critical practice—changes of taste, definition of classics, description of crative process. The work for art is for Eliot "something between the writer and the reader; it has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the writer is trying to 'express' or of his experience of writing it, or the experience of the reader or the writer as reader" (Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933). The poem "in some sense, has its own life .. .  the feeling, or emotion, or vision resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet" (The Sacred Wood, 1928). Poetry is not to be evaluated by reference to the poet's experience. The origin of the poem "has no relation to the poem and throws no light upon it" (On Poetry and Poets). Creation cannot be explained by anything before it: biographical criticism is irrelevant. Poetry is not necessarily related to the poet's feelings, it may be remote from them. 

183- Poetry is for Eliot an escape from personality, a transmutation of material; the poet is a mere catalyst, totally passive.  Wellek opposes these extreme formulations: there is always a personal element in poetry:"in practice, Eliot's criticism uses often a standard of personality" with the pattern emerging from the work itself, e.g. in the case of Shakespeare. 

184- He uses personality (unifying) as a criterion of value! At times, he gives a cathartic interpretation of the crative process, etc. In general, he favours a kind of impersonality; the poet "out of intense personal experience, is able to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make of it a general symbol" (On Poetry and Poets). Poetical emotion is complex and general, concrete and precise; Eliot vs. irrational, vague and indistinct "feeling". 

185- Creation in art and in life. Often contradictory passages on this in Eliot, obscure. Is poetry purely emotional?  Cf. eliot's "behavioristic" modification of Bradley: "In this dissertation Eliot rejects psychology and epistemology completely and dissolves the cogito, awareness, self-consciousness", pro undissociated sensibility, pro "immediate experience", vs. division subject/object. 

186- "The poet becomes the man who returns to this original immediate experience, to a unified sensibilty, by objectifying his feeling". Feeling = object. Sensibility split up at the start of decadence of English poetry, and it can be restituted. But feeling in poetry is not personal feeling. 

187- Emotion seizes an object to express itself, not to express the poet. Ideas must become feeling: "actually Eliot ... exploits the ambiguity of the term 'sensibility'  and conceives this fusion of thought and feeling as equivalent to a fusion of thought and sensation".  "The metaphysical poets represent this fusion to perfection" . . . "The poet is must both feel and sense his thought" Emphasis on perception, on vision: Dante renders his idea "in terms of something perceived" (The Sacred Wood). The poetry of unified sensibility satisfies Eliot's and man's yearning for wholeness and integrity.

188- "Dissociation of sensibility" is suggested by De Gourmont's analysis of Laforgue's mind in Promenades littéraires. The Metaphysicals think and feel; in the 18th c. poets think; Romantiss, by reaction, only feel. Confusion of thought and feeling in the late 19th c.; now Eliot calls for a reintegration. Wellek doubts as to all this process. There are precedents in the 18th or 19th century, etc. Eliot vs. poetry being knowledge. The poet is not a philosopher. 

189- The better poet uses ideas which are not his own. Truth is seen as statica and impersonal; the poet can't feel his own ideas. The truest philosophy is the best material. (?). "Art with the later Eliot is considered a preparation for religion", like Virgil guiding Dante (On Poetry and Poets). Earlier, Eliot stood for the autonomy of art; late Eliot advocates a double standard of criticism: artistic on the one hand, and moral-philosophical-theological on the other. "In an age like our own ... it is the more necessary ... to scrutinize works of imagination with explicit ethical and theological standards. The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards, though we must reemmeber that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards" (Essays, Ancient and Modern) ——>

190 - Wellek, critical: "as if morality and theology were ingredients merely added to minimal aesthetic value". Truth means for Eliot the Catholic tradition, he rates philosophies; "To accept Eliot's dichotomy of 'greatness' and 'artness' means giving up an organic point of view establishing a new divorce of form and content."  Ealry Eliot accepted not having to believe a poet's ideas to enjoy him: "You are not called to believe in Dante's philospohocal and theological views", for there is a difference between philosophical belief and poetic assent (Selected Essays). For Wellek, "a modest and sound generalization from the empirical fact tht we are not always able to reach the state of disinterested contemplation that poetry demands." Later, vs. Shelley: (Eliot:) "When the doctrine, belief or 'view of life' presented in the poem is one which the mind of the reader can accept as coherent, mature and founded on the facts of experience, it interposes an obstacle to the reader's enjoyment whether it be one that he can accept or deny, decry or deprecate" (On Poetry and Poets). 

191- But for Wellek "coherence is an aesthetic as well as a logical criterion ... the maturity of a work of art is its inclusiveness, its awareness of complexity, and .... the correspondence to reality is registered in the work itself. An incoherent, immature, 'unreal' poem is a bad poem aesthetically." Eliot pro "wisdom", union of form and content, feeling and intellect (—vague). The problem of belief depends on the reader "It is not susceptible of a theoretical solution" (Wellek).  "Sincerity" is linked to this. Eliot sees that it can reflect our enjoyment; for Wellek, "a standard of sincerity seems quite beyond investigation, proof, or use". Later, Eliot divorces the beliefs of the man and beliefs as poet, and prefers "genuineness" (On Poetry and Poets), not psychological. 

192- For Wellek "Strength of belief has no relation to successful art"; "Eliot is a mucho more satisfactory critic when he forgets about sincerity, the mare's nest of 'belief' and the mysterious creative process, and turns his attention resolutely to the work  of art as a describable object, a symbolic world which is amenable to analysis and judgment." "He found the the term 'objective correlative' for this symbolic world which he thought as continuous with the feelings of the poet, objectifying and patterning them"—only appears in "Hamlet" literally. Cf. Santayana's definition of 'correlative objects' (Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 1900). Eliot's discussion of Hamlet is obsucre: excessive emotion forces the objective correlative for Hamlet? Inexpressible? How do we know then? Why is his mother's marriage not a sufficient motivation? Why does Eliot oppose the excessive reaction of a tragic hero? The application to Shakespeare of the problem seems perverse. 

193- Wellek pro Vivas: We cannot determine the emotions of a playwright form the play. But Wellek finds the notion of objective correlative useful: "the right kind of devices, situations, plots, and objects which motivate the emotion of a character in a play or a novel or even, as Eliot used it more broadly, simply as the 'equivalent' of the author's emotion, the successful objectivation of emotion in a work of art" [Lots of emotion still in Eliot's use - JAGL]; "Eliot in approaching a work of poetry thinks of it, first of all, as language"; the poet preserves and develops language (On Poetry and Poets). The language of poetry must not "stray too far from the ordinalry everyday language which we use and hear" (On Poetry and Poets). 

194- Eliot pro Dryden, Dante, but pro "some standard of correct poetic diction, neither identical with, nor too remote from current speech" (On Poetry and Poets).

 



 

To be continued

 

 

 

 

 


Mi fotoblog

Mi fotoblog
se puede ver haciendo clic en la foto ésta de Termineitor. Y hay más enlaces a cosas mías al pie de esta página.