Department of Media Studies
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:
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:
- Literary Theory and Criticism An
- The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; Ed. Vincent B. Leitch
