Theory Flashcards
(14 cards)
What is mimetic theory?
Criticism that focuses on the relationship between the outside world and the work of art. These theories posited that poetry is a representation, imitation, a copy of the physical world.
What is rhetorical theory?
Criticism that focuses on the relationship between the work of art and the audience. These theories held that poetry must be shaped by both the poet’s talent and the rules of art. Popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance period.
What is expressive theory?
Criticism that examines the relationship between the work of art and the artist. Namely, the faculties of mind and soul that the artist brings to the creation.
What is formal theory?
Formal theories stresses the purely aesthetic relationship between the parts of literature, analyzing it as if it were music.
How did Sophists view literature?
Literature was a function of language
What are Artistotle’s four “causes”
Form, Material, Technique , Purpose
In what century did the reading public grow signficantly?
The reading public grew enormously in the eighteen century as formerly illiterate classes became avid consumers of literature
When did American poets begin experimenting with norm-defying diction?
Early twentieth century (excluding Emily Dickson e.g. “So Anthracite, to live? )
What is structuralism?
Deriving meaning is dependent upon various codes. These special symbol systems are systems based on differences. The activity of the linguist is to infer the rules of the langue from evidence of the parole.
What is New Criticism?
Consider texts as autonomous and “closed,” meaning that everything that is needed to understand a work is present within it.
What did New Critics focus their attention on?
New Critics focused their attention on the variety and degree of certain literary devices, specifically metaphor, irony, tension, and paradox.
What is deconstruction?
Meaning, as accessed through language, is indeterminate because language itself is indeterminate. Deconstruction refocuses attention on a work as open-ended, endlessly available to interpretation, and far beyond the reach of authorial intention.
What poets did the New Critics align themselves to?
T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound who view poetry as a means of communicating through image and symbols what prose cannot
What did the Chicago critics, or the Chicago school members emphasize?
evaluation of the author’s solutions to specific problems in the construction of a text. The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953).
