Category Archives: Literary Criticism

Egalitarianism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Egalitarianism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Egalitarianism (from French égal, meaning “equal”) is a trend of thought that favors equality among living entities. Egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status, according to The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[1] The Cultural theory of risk holds egalitarianism as defined by (1) a negative attitude towards rules and principles, and (2) a positive attitude towards group decision-making, with fatalism termed as its opposite.[2] According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term has two distinct definitions in modern English.[3] It is defined either as a political doctrinethat all people should be treated as equals and have the same political, economic, social, and civil rights[4] or as a social philosophy advocating the removal of economic inequalities among people or the decentralization of power. Some sources define egalitarianism as the point of view that equality reflects the natural state of humanity.[5][6][7]

Didacticism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Didacticism is a philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature and other types of art. The term has its origin in the Ancient Greek word διδακτικός (didaktikos), “related to education/teaching,” and signified learning in a fascinating and intriguing manner.

Didactic art was meant both to entertain and to instruct. Didactic plays, for instance, were intended to convey a moral theme or other rich truth to the audience. An example of didactic writing is Alexander Pope‘s An Essay on Criticism (1711), which offers a range of advice about critics and criticism. An example of didactism in music is the chant Ut queant laxis, which was used by Guido of Arezzo to teach solfege syllables.

Around the 19th century the term didactic came to also be used as a criticism for work that appears to be overly burdened with instructive, factual, or otherwise educational information, to the detriment of the enjoyment of the reader (a meaning that was quite foreign to Greek thought). Edgar Allan Poe even called didacticism the worst of “heresies” in his essay The Poetic Principle.

Didacticism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

 

Ulysses (novel) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Episode 14, Oxen of the Sun

This chapter is remarkable for Joyce’s wordplay, which seems to recapitulate the entire history of the English language. After a short incantation in Irish, the episode starts with latinate prose, Anglo-Saxon alliteration, and moves on through parodies of, among others, Malory, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Defoe, Sterne,Walpole, Gibbon, Dickens, and Carlyle, before concluding in a haze of nearly incomprehensible slang.

via Ulysses (novel) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Literary theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature.[1] 

However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes which are of relevance to the way humans interpret meaning.[1] 

In humanities in modern academia, the latter style of scholarship is an outgrowth of critical theoryand is often called simply “theory.”[2] As a consequence, the word “theory” has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Many of these approaches are informed by various strands ofContinental philosophy and sociology.

via Literary theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Intertextuality – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Intertextuality is the shaping of texts’ meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another.

The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined bypoststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966. 

Kristeva’s coinage of “intertextuality” represents an attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics—his study of how signs derive their meaning within the structure of a text—with Bakhtin’s dialogism—his examination of the multiple meanings, or “heteroglossia”, in each text (especially novels) and in each word.[2] 

For Kristeva,[3] “the notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of intersubjectivity” when we realize that meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated through, or filtered by, “codes” imparted to the writer and reader by other texts.

For example, when we readJames Joyce’s Ulysses we decode it as a modernist literary experiment, or as a response to the epic tradition, or as part of some other conversation, or as part of all of these conversations at once. This intertextual view of literature, as shown by Roland Barthes, supports the concept that the meaning of a text does not reside in the text, but is produced by the reader in relation not only to the text in question, but also the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process.

via Intertextuality – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Critical theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Critical theory is a school of thought that stresses the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism.

via Critical theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.