IRIS TUAN

112/04/20 1

+ Self-Introduction+ Syllabus+ Course Textbooks+ Course Requirements+ Assign Groups

112/04/20 2

課程簡介Literary theory: (1) Historical and Biographical Approaches

(2) The Formalist Approach(3) The Psychological Approach: Freud(4) Mythological and Archetypal Approaches(5) Feminisms and Gender Studies(6) Cultural Studies(7) Reader-Response Criticism(8) Dialogics(9) Structuralism(10) Poststructuralism, Including Deconstruction

補充 The contemporary theaters in the West and in Taiwan

112/04/20 3

+ 18-week teaching materials+ See the Syllabus

112/04/20 4

+ A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5th Edition. Wilfred L. Guerin 等五人著 .New York: Oxford Press, 2005.

+ 訂書：此堂課自願負責同學或大一班代+ 文訊雜誌社：王為萱+  10048 台 北市中山南路 11 號 6 樓+ TEL:02-33435419+ MAIL:mandybear_777@yahoo..com.tw

112/04/20 5

+ 1. Don’t be late. + (3 times count as an absence.)+ 2. Don’t be absent.+ (3 times absence will be dropped out)+ 3. Study hard.+ 4. May U All Pass & High Pass

112/04/20 6

+ 依學生人數而定分組，每週輪流報告+ 期末亦為小組口頭報告+ 報告時小組成員全部都上台，由小組中一人代表報

告，其餘人備詢回答問題+ 並以小組為單位繳交期中與期末各一份

Powerpoint+ 在口頭報告時，與 Powerpoint 首頁 , 註明小組中

每個人所分配負責的工作

112/04/20 7

+ 本課程介紹西方各種文學理論與流派+ 精讀五個名著+ 並從《經典解碼．文學作品讀法系列》叢書中精心

挑選章節，介紹西方文學各個流派與批評方法。+ 藉由學習此文學作品讀法的課，可學到如何用不同

的文學理論來詮釋解讀文學作品，實際了解理論、創作與閱讀三者之間的關係。

112/04/20 8

+ Attend all classes+ Participate in discussion+ Study hard+ Present well in 2 oral group

presentations+ Do well in exams+ Good luck!

112/04/20 9

+ I. Setting+ II. Plot+ III. Character+ IV. Structure+ V. Style+ VI. Atmosphere+ VII. Theme

112/04/20 10

+ I. First, a note on Traditional Approaches

+ II. Three Foundational Questions

112/04/20 11

+ Do we have an accurate version of what we are studying?1. General Observations

+ 2. Text Study in Practice

112/04/20 12

+ 1. An Overview of Genre+ 2. Genre Characteristics in Practice

112/04/20 13

+ Kenneth Burke called it—a “high class kind of gossip”

+ We are interested in: the “inspection of successive drafts, notebooks, the author’s literary habits in general” (Gibson 171).

112/04/20 14

+ Literature: part of the academic curriculum

+ It “taught” something+ It was a source of “knowledge”+ Discipline of criticism

112/04/20 15

+ In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag mounted a frontal attack on most kinds of contemporary criticism, which, she maintained, actually usurp the place of a work of art (13-23).

+ She concluded with the pronouncement that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

112/04/20 16

+ The Civil War era and wilderness terrain of Cold Mountain correspond to the setting of the work of literature:

+ (1) the antebellum South of Huckleberry Finn+ (2) Puritan Massachusetts in “Young Goodman Brown”+ (3) Cavalier England in “To His Coy Mistress”+ (4) the eleventh-century Denmark in Hamlet+ (5) the Deep South of the 1970s in “Everyday Use”+ (6) the arctic desolateness and constant rain of

Frankenstein.

112/04/20 17

+ The conflict (plot) involving protagonist and antagonist

+ E.g. Hamlet versus his uncle

112/04/20 18

+ The young moviegoers assess the roles of the actors.

112/04/20 19

+ A plot structure, the relatedness of actions, + the gradual buildup in suspense from a

situation full of potential to a climax and a resolution

+ E.g. Macbeth’s rise to be king of Scotland through foul and bloody means and the poetic justice of his defeat and death by one he had wronged.

112/04/20 20

+ The acting technique in a film may be realistic, as in Sean Penn’s in Mystic River, or it may be stylized, as in Johnny Depp’s in Pirates of the Caribbean.

21

+ Defined as the mood or feeling that permeates an environment, atmosphere is a further common ingredient in the two parts of our analogy.

112/04/20 22

+ The often rich and varied underlying idea of the action is the theme.

+ The basic ingredients of literature:+ (1) setting, (2) plot, (3) character, (4)

structure, (5) style, (6) atmosphere, and (7) theme.

112/04/20 23

+ 1. First, A Note on Traditional Approaches+ Literature is primarily art+ Widely divergent interpretive approaches

to literature

112/04/20 24

+ A. Textual Scholarship: Do we have an accurate version of what we are studying?

+ 1. General Observations+ Textual criticism+ James Thorpe in Principles of Textual Criticism, textual

criticism has as its ideal the establishment of an authentic text, or the “text which the author intended”(50).

112/04/20 25

+ Textual criticism-- studying the genesis and development of a piece of literature

+ As A. E. Housman says, textual criticism is the “science of discovering error in texts and the art of removing it”(2).

112/04/20 26

+ A. “To His Coy Mistress”+ The last word in this couplet:+ Now therefore, while the youthful hue+ Sits on thy skin like morning dew.+ Instead of “dew,” the first edition of the

poem had “glew,” which we now know is a dialectal variant of “glow,” although it was earlier thought to be another spelling of “glue,” a senseless reading in the context.

112/04/20 27

+ Besides questionable readings, there are a number of words whose meanings have changed over the years but that must be understood in their Elizabethan senses if the play is to be properly interpreted.

+ E.g. “O that this too too solid flesh would melt” (I. ii)

+ “solid” or “sully (to dirty, or make foul)—make different interpretations

112/04/20 28

+ Obsolete words in the story like “wot’st” (know), “Goody” (Goodwife, or Mrs.), and “Goodman” (Mr.) are defined in most desk dictionaries, and none of the other words has undergone radical semantic change.

112/04/20 29

+ Among Alice Walker’s earliest short fiction+ Publication in 1973+ Critical edition--Barbara T. Christian’s

Women Writers Series+ Including Major American Short Stories,

edited by A. Walton Litz

112/04/20 30

+ A minor point of spelling + In this handbook, the authors maintained

the dominant spelling “De Lacy.”

112/04/20 31

+ 1. An Overview of Genre+ First, a word about the fountainhead of

criticism+ Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century B.C.)+ Arthur miller’s Willy Loman can be tragic

when they stress plot rather than character or diction, or when they stress the mimetic role of literature.

112/04/20 32

+ Genre criticism– criticism of “kinds” or “types”

+ Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism+ E. D. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation+ Robert Scholes’s Structuralism in Literature

112/04/20 33

+ Different literary genres are judged according to different standards.

+ Hamlet: Revenge Tragedy Par Excellence+ The genre to which Hamlet belongs is drama.+ Aristotle’s description of drama as “imitated human

action”+ Tragedy: “serious action,” usually the downfall and

resultant misery or death of a person of significance

112/04/20 34

+ Hamlet, Prince of Denmark+ Melancholy by the recent death of his father and the

remarriage of his mother to her late husband’s brother+ The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears and reveals that he

was murdered.+ Arrange a traveling players to present a drama+ Characters: Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz,

Guildenstern, Laertes, the king, the queen, young Fortinbras of Norway

112/04/20 35

+ A short story+ A relatively brief narrative of prose fiction (ranging in

length from five hundred to twenty thousand words) characterized by considerably more unity and compression in all its parts than the novel—

+ In theme, plot, structure, character, setting, and mood.+ Characters: Goodman Brown, Faith, the Devil, etc.

112/04/20 36

+ A short story+ Author: Alice Walker+ She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color

Purple+ Characters: mother (Johnson), daughter

(Maggie), talented daughter (Dee), and a black man (Hakim-a-barber”

112/04/20 37

+ A novel, a long story involving characters in actions usually pointing to some kind of resolution.

+ The Gothic novel+ In 18th Century England+ Atmosphere of terror and horror brought

about by dark and foreboding settings, often in mysterious medieval castles

112/04/20 38

+ In the Gothic novel, characters tend to be one-dimensional, cardboard figures like black-hearted villains, pure and helpless maidens, and handsome and virtuous heroes.

+ A story within a story+ It begins in the frozen reaches of the polar

North.

112/04/20 39

Characters: Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, the monster, Elizabeth, and William.

Robert Walton, an English explorer, rescues the man, Victor Frankenstein, tells Walton the story of his life.

Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, invented a monster in his lab.

112/04/20 40

+ Call the approach genetic:+ A work is considered in terms of its

origins+ Criticism based on a close comparison of

texts has recently come under attack.

112/04/20 41

+ 1. 分好組+ 2. 買好教科書+ 3. 下週帶書來上課+ 4. 第一組學生準備下週報告+ 5. 其他全部同學 , 有空預習+ 6. Happy opening week!

112/04/20 42