GUIDELINES:

The following quotations are taken from essays we have read, discussed, and/or been presented with in class. Read them carefully and recall the context in which these quotations originally appeared. For your midterm, I would like you to draw on these quotations as you develop a 4-6 page, well-written, critical essay on a primary text of your choosing (you may choose from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well as any and all metaphysical poem/s that has/have been assigned from your course text). Integrate at least 5-6 quotations from this handout in your own critical analysis.

As you develop your argument I need you to 1) demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of the various theoretical approaches to literature that we have discussed so far (New Criticism, Formalism, Psychoanalysis, Reader-Oriented Criticism, Structuralism); 2) identify and examine the various roles that readers, authors, narrators, and contexts play within literature; 3) assess how one (or a combination of several) critical approach(es) provide(s) meaningful, relevant, and appropriate insights and analytical strategies  for your own interpretation of the literary work of your choice(draw on the quotations below for your theory and criticism and draw on your primary work(s) for textual support).

Double-space your essay, use Times New Roman (Font 12, 1” margin all around, left-aligned), and include MLA in-text citations. The completed essay is due in my office (Robinson 202) on or before 5pm on Tuesday, October 16. We will not meet as a class on Tuesday, October 16, to give you time to work on the midterm.

 1. “The task of structural analysis…is to formulate the underlying systems of convention which enable cultural objects to have meaning for us….It asks…how the meanings of literary works are possible.” (Jonathan Culler, “Structuralism and Literature” 304)

2. “The real reader is invoked mainly in studies of the history of responses, i.e., when attention is focused on the way in which a literary work has been received by a specific reading public. Now whatever judgments may have been passed on the work will also reflect various attitudes and norms of that public, so that literature can be said to mirror the cultural code which conditions these judgments.” (Wolfgang Iser, “Readers and the Concept of the Implied Reader” 159)

3. “In the aesthetic orientation, the reader probably selects, out of many potential systems of limitations, an arc within which he seeks to synthesize all of the aspects of reference and feeling that the text evokes in him. He brings to this also a particular set of criteria for evaluating the soundness of his own performance. The more self-aware the reader, the more he will feel it necessary to critically scrutinize his own evocation of ‘the poem’ as a transaction between himself and the text.” (Louise M. Rosenblatt, “The Quest for ‘The Poem Itself’” 156)

4. A well-constructed plot should, therefore, be single in its issue, rather than double as some maintain. The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad. It should come about as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty, in a character either such as we have described, or better rather than worse. The practice of the stage bears out our view…. Now, the best tragedies are founded on the story of a few houses - on the fortunes of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and those others who have done or suffered something terrible. A tragedy, then, to be perfect according to the rules of art should be of this construction.” (Aristotle, “Poetics” 7.2)

5. It remains to speak of diction and thought, the other parts of tragedy having been already discussed. Concerning thought, we may assume what is said in the Rhetoric, to which inquiry the subject more strictly belongs. Under thought is included every effect which has to be produced by speech, the subdivisions being: proof and refutation; the excitation of the feelings, such as pity, fear, anger, and the like; the suggestion of importance or its opposite.” (Aristotle, “Poetics” 9.1)

6. “The Tempest promotes in its audience a kind of moral and imaginative athleticism, an intellectual fitness that much recent interpretation, by relaxing—or stiffening—into a single mode of reading, has evaded. The play’s epistemological sophistication is inconsistent with the baldness of a single-mindedly ideological interpretation. To listen to its language is to become deeply sceptical about the operation of all kinds of power—poetic, political, and critical too.” (Russ McDonald, “Reading The Tempest” 117)

7. “[The Tempest] instead of legitimizing an intrinsically oppressive hierarchical order, the play, while not dispensing with the hierarchical model of society, advances a leveling, horizontal ethic of interdependence and reciprocity.” (Tom McAlindon, “The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest” 336)

8. “The Restoration stage characteristically dimished the political utopianism associated with The Tempest, but it simultaneously seems to have rejoiced in dismantling the authority of the father.” (Kevin Pasque, “Caliban’s Masque” 740)

9. “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.” (Plato, “Ion” 4)

10. “Do you mean that a rhapsode will know better than the pilot what the ruler of a sea-tossed vessel ought to say?” (Plato, “Ion” 8)

11. “In [Oedipus Rex] our unspeakable, generally inchoate, fears are verbalized. The feared disastrous results of the foulness in the self are elaborated, intensified, dramatized. The play is a trip into the horrors of the self. The self yields to sickness.” (Natalie Crohn Schmitt, “Oedipus as an Exorcism” 254)

12. The tragedy of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles depends on what Oedipus does not see. Blindness is its most obvious theme, driven home by the final scene in which Oedipus takes the broach from his mother’s dead body and plunges it deep into his own eyes. Dynamically, the struggle shifts little by little from emphasis on a scourge without (the plague) to emphasis on a scourge within (Oedipus’ internal conflicts over not knowing either his fate or his identity).” (Benjamin Kilborn, “Oedipus and the Oedipal” 290)

13. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.” (T. S. Eliot, “Tradition” 4)

14. “The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.” (T. S. Eliot, “Metaphysical” 2)

15. “Through an examination of the poem itself, we can ascertain truths that cannot be perceived through the language and logic of science.” (Bressler, “Russian Formalism and New Criticism” 59)

16. “…human beings are basically bundles of desires called appetencies” (Bressler, “Reader-Oriented Criticism” 77)

17. “Divorcing a text from its social history, Frye maintains that there exists an overall structure or mythic development that explains both the structure and the significance of all texts.” (Bressler, “Psychoanalytic Criticism” 151)