MA English - Literary Criticism Syllabus

Department of Media Studies

Christ College (Autonomous), Bangalore

Subject: MA in English with Communication Studies Credits: 4

Paper Title: Western Aesthetics (Plato to New Critics) Total Hours: 60

Paper Code: MEL133 Max Marks: 100

The selection provides a comprehensive account of intellectual traditions and critical movements from Plato to the New Critics.

Objectives

· To explore the various currents, pressures, and directions in contemporary criticism as aspects of the cultural present and as an ongoing conversation with intellectual precursors and earlier traditions of literary study.

· To enable readers to build their own sense of the map of modern literary critical practice.

Module I 20 hrs

Concepts of Criticism and Aesthetic Origins:

Mimesis: Ancient Greek Literary Theory

Mimesis

Fiction and falsehood

The audience

Catharsis

Expressivity: The Romantic Theory of Authorship

Expression

Confession

Composition

Inspiration

Imagination

Interpretation: Hermeneutics

The defence of non-theoretical understanding

Art and truth

Do texts have ‘objective’ meanings?

Gadamer’s Defence of Reading as Freedom

Value: Criticisms, Canons, and Evaluation

The origin of canons

The test of time: reputation and value

For and against literary value judgements

The containment of literature and the preservation of value

Postmodernism and the retreat from value

Module II 20 hrs

Criticism and Critical Practices in the Twentieth Century:

Literature and the Academy

Criticism incorporated

A brief prehistory

Modernism and the purification of criticism

Criticism decentred

I.A. Richards

Intellectual contexts: Cambridge philosophy

The meaning of meaning

Principles of literary criticism

Practical criticism

Critical legacies

T.S. Eliot and the Idea of Tradition

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ - then and now

F.H. Bradley – the historical sense

Impersonality – the closet Romantic

Literary and socio-political hierarchies

Legacies: theory

Legacies: poetry

Anthropology and/as Myth in Modern Criticism

‘Myth’ and ‘reason’

Varieties of Modernist mythopoeia

Literary anthropology

Structuralism and the break up of Modernist mythopoeia

Myth and the marvelous

F.R. Leavis: Criticism and Culture

Leavis’ cultural criticism

Leavis and scientific management

Leavis’ literary criticism

Marxist Aesthetics

Marx before Marxism

Art, authorship, ideology

Base and superstructure

Marxism, realism, typicality

Art, antiquity, and modernity

Marxism since Marx

Module III 20 hrs

William Empson: From Verbal Analysis to Cultural Criticism

Verbal analysis

Cultural criticism

Contra clerisies: moral criticism

The example of Empson

The New Criticism

Origins

Methods and characteristics

Influence and legacy

Testing pattern

Mid-semester

Sections	A	B
No. of Questions in each Sections	3	3
No. of Questions to be answered	2	2
Marks for each question	10	15
Maximum marks for each Section	20	30
Total Marks : 50

End-semester

Sections	A	B
No. of Questions in each Sections	6	6
No. of Questions to be answered	4	4
Marks for each question	10	15
Maximum marks for each Section	40	60
Total Marks : 100

Required Texts:

1. Literary Theory and Criticism An Oxford Guide; Ed. Patricia Waugh
2. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; Ed. Vincent B. Leitch