426H Crítica literària

[esborrany]

https://www.britannica.com/art/literary-criticism

Antiguetat
PLATÓ i la crítica de la poesia a la República, inspiració divina, no ajudaria a guiar-se per la raó.

ARISTÒTIL a la Poètica: El poeta tràgic imita la naturalesa i causa emocions de terror i pietat en el públic que, queden alleujades en el procés de catarsi. The ends of tragedy, as Aristotle conceived them, are best served by the harmonious disposition of six elements: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. Thanks to Aristotle’s insight into universal aspects of audience psychology, many of his dicta have proved to be adaptable to genres developed long after his time.

[la literatura havia de ser útil o instructiva o beneficiosa]

Longinus sobre el Sublim

EDAT MITJANA

Such Church Fathers as Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome renewed, in churchly guise, the Platonic argument against poetry.
Even such an original vernacular poet of the 14th century as Dante appears to have expected his Divine Comedy to be interpreted according to the rules of scriptural exegesis.

RENAIXEMENT

Es recupera la Poetica d’Aristòtil. . Classicism, individualism, and national pride joined forces against literary asceticism. Thus, a group of 16th-century French writers known as the Pléiade—notably Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay—were simultaneously classicists, poetic innovators, and advocates of a purified vernacular tongue.

Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (1595) vigorously argued the poet’s superiority to the philosopher and the historian on the grounds that his imagination is chained neither to lifeless abstractions nor to dull actualities.

NEOCLASSICISME
Criticism of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in France, was dominated by these Horatian norms. French critics such as Pierre Corneille and Nicolas Boileau urged a strict orthodoxy regarding the dramatic unities and the requirements of each distinct genre, as if to disregard them were to lapse into barbarity.

A Anglaterra es va imposar menys ja que Shakespeare no s s’ajustava a cap regla.

Al s.XVIII Amb l’aparició de la novel·la, els lectors de la burgesia no valoraven el seguiment estricte de normes. El nacionalisme, les arrels de cada país afavorien la diversitat i originalitat.
Historical consciousness produced by turns theories of literary progress and primitivistic theories affirming, as one critic put it, that “barbarous” times are the most favourable to the poetic spirit. The new recognition of strangeness and strong feeling as literary virtues yielded various fashions of taste for misty sublimity, graveyard sentiments, medievalism, Norse epics (and forgeries), Oriental tales, and the verse of plowboys. Perhaps the most eminent foes of Neoclassicism before the 19th century were Denis Diderot in France and, in Germany, Gotthold Lessing, Johann von Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller.

EL ROMANTICISME

Romanticism, an amorphous movement that began in Germany and England at the turn of the 19th century, and somewhat later in France, Italy, and the United States, found spokesmen as diverse as Goethe and August and Friedrich von Schlegel in Germany, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, Madame de Staël and Victor Hugo in France, Alessandro Manzoni in Italy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States. Romantics tended to regard the writing of poetry as a transcendentally important activity, closely related to the creative perception of meaning in the world. The poet was credited with the godlike power that Plato had feared in him; Transcendental philosophy was, indeed, a derivative of Plato’s metaphysical Idealism. In the typical view of Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.”
Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), with its definition of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and its attack on Neoclassical diction, is regarded as the opening statement of English Romanticism.
Romantic criticism coincided with the emergence of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy, and both signalled a weakening in ethical demands upon literature. The lasting achievement of Romantic theory is its recognition that artistic creations are justified, not by their promotion of virtue, but by their own coherence and intensity.

FINALS DEL S XIX

Les esperances de canvi de la il·lustració i la revolució francesa es van veure frustrades per la política i la realitat del capitalisme industrial. L’escriptor ja no era serà missatger de l’absolut. O bé serà un notari de la realitat, denunciant-la, o un creador de l’art per l’art. [ja que el món no evoluciona per si sol cap a l’utopia, o el descrivim i denunciem, o bé mirem de refugiar-nos en la bellesa].

In some hands the idea of creative freedom dwindled to a bohemianism pitting “art for its own sake” against commerce and respectability. Aestheticism characterized both the Symbolist criticism of Charles Baudelaire in France and the self-conscious decadence of Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in England. At an opposite extreme, realistic and naturalistic views of literature as an exact record of social truth were developed by Vissarion Belinsky in Russia, Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola in France, and William Dean Howells in the United States. Zola’s program, however, was no less anti-bourgeois than that of the Symbolists; he wanted novels to document conditions so as to expose their injustice.
Post-Romantic disillusion was epitomized in Britain in the criticism of Matthew Arnold, who thought of critical taste as a substitute for religion and for the unsatisfactory values embodied in every social class.

Hermenèutica i l’explicació del text com a ciència
Comença a partir dels estudis bíblics [ja no postulem què ah de ser sinó que expliquem perquè és com és]
Primitivism and Medievalism had awakened interest in neglected early texts; scientific Positivism encouraged a scrupulous regard for facts; and the German idea that each country’s literature had sprung from a unique national consciousness provided a conceptual framework. The French critic Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature (published in French, 1863–69) reflected the prevailing determinism of scientific thought; for him a work could be explained in terms of the race, milieu, and moment that produced it. For other critics of comparable stature, such as Charles Sainte-Beuve in France, Benedetto Croce in Italy, and George Saintsbury in England, historical learning only threw into relief the expressive uniqueness of each artistic temperament.

SEGLE XX

Bibliographic procedures have been revolutionized; historical scholars, biographers, and historians of theory have placed criticism on a sounder basis of factuality. Important contributions to literary understanding have meanwhile been drawn from anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Debats: Most of the issues debated in 20th-century criticism appear to be strictly empirical, even technical, in nature. By what means can the most precise and complete knowledge of a literary work be arrived at? Should its social and biographical context be studied or only the words themselves as an aesthetic structure? Should the author’s avowed intention be trusted, or merely taken into account, or disregarded as irrelevant? How is conscious irony to be distinguished from mere ambivalence, or allusiveness from allegory? Which among many approaches—linguistic, generic, formal, sociological, psychoanalytic, and so forth—is best adapted to making full sense of a text?

Ens interssa la psicologia de l’autor? En podem prescindir i limitar-nos a les paraules? (Umberto Eco Opera Aperta, Roland Barthes)

Hi ha hagut escoles que llegeixen el text en funció de paràmetres de fora la literatura, la psicologia sexual de l’autor o personatges, la presència d’arquetipus, l’acceptació o denúncia d’injústicies socials, de desigualtat envers la dona …
The sociology of Marx, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, the mythological investigations of Sir James George Frazer and his followers, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Claude Levi-Strauss’s anthropological structuralism, and the psychological models proposed by Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung have all found their way into criticism. The result has been not simply an abundance of technical terms and rules, but a widespread belief that literature’s governing principles can be located outside literature.

Per a uns la literatura ja no ens diu res sobre el món, aquest discurs pertocaria a la ciència. Ens limitarem a estudiar com actúa sobre la psique humana [com si fos una Penfield] Some of the most influential modern critics, notably I.A. Richards in his early works, have accepted this value order and have confined themselves to behavioristic study of how literature stimulates the reader’s feelings. A work of literature, for them, is no longer something that captures an external or internal reality, but is merely a locus for psychological operations; it can only be judged as eliciting or failing to elicit a desired response.

Other critics, however, have renewed the Shelleyan and Coleridgean contention that literary experience involves a complex and profound form of knowing. In order to do so they have had to challenge Positivism in general. Such a challenge cannot be convincingly mounted within the province of criticism itself and must depend rather on the authority of antipositivist epistemologists such as Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer, and Michael Polanyi. If it is now respectable to maintain, with Wallace Stevens and others, that the world is known through imaginative apprehensions of the sort that poetry celebrates and employs, this is attributable to developments far outside the normal competence of critics.

As literary scholarship has acquired an ever-larger arsenal of weapons for attacking problems of meaning, it has met with increasing resentment from people who wish to be nourished by whatever is elemental and mysterious in literary experience.