Class Notes: Weeks 14-15 (1/24/11-2/4/11)

*General caution: When describing something which has the qualities of works within a literary period but is not written within the literary period, don’t capitalize: romantic versus Romantic *

Medievalism and Allegory:

Medieval Literature:

• texts written during Europe’s Middle Ages: c. 500-1500 C.E.
• religious texts predominated, but there were secular texts
• famous texts:
• Beowulf
• The Canterbury Tales
• Bible-based “Mystery Plays”
• society = paramount over individual
• many texts not attributed to specific authors-thought of themselves as conduits for passing down tradition rather than innovators
• creative = insult
• heroes in text often support social order
• Dante’s works = on border of Medieval + Renaissance lit.

Allegory:

• type of extended metaphor
• objects and persons within text represent meanings that lie outside of text
• one-to-one correspondence between representer and represented
• representations must work together to create unified message
• falls down when trying to appeal to wrong audience
• example: Animal Farm
• Medieval Allegory:
• allegory became hallmark of medieval lit.
• commonly represented:
• abstract qualities-e.g. envy, truth, gluttony
• personified events-e.g. death
• social institutions (e.g. Church)
• prominent persons (e.g. monarch) were
• usually concerned with important matters-e.g. meaning of life and death and route to salvation (or damnation)
• sometimes used for satirical purposes

Famous Medieval Allegories:

• Everyman (Medieval play):
• enduring figure “Everyman”-represents all of humankind
• Everyman figure = form of allegory
• modern texts: character who is unnamed or given vague and general personal characteristics
• when settings seem “mythic” or has fairytale quality or is somehow out of the time

• More on Everyman:

o written near end of 15^th century

o probably translation from Flemish play Elckerlijk (1495)-although there is a possibility that it is the other way around

o 4 surviving copies: 2 fragmentary

o best surviving example of morality play

§ evolved side by side w/ mystery plays

§ composed individually, not in cycles

§ allegory to dramatize moral struggle Christianity envisioned in every individual

o plot development:

§ Everyman is informed by Death of his approaching end

§ play shows hero’s progression from despair and fear of death to “Christian resignation that is the prelude to redemption”

· first deserted by false friends: casual companions, kin, wealth

· falls back on Good Deeds, Strength, Beauty, Intelligence, Knowledges-assist him in making his Book of Accounts

· when he dies, everything deserts him except for his Good Deeds

o grim point = we can take with us nothing we have received, only what we have given

• Dante’s Inferno

Dante’s Divine Comedy:

• some argue that it is the epic that most perfectly codifies, articulates, and promotes the traditional Western worldview-allegorical depiction of the Western cultural mind
• three-part epic written in terza rima: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
• entire plot takes place in a week’s time
• three beasts and their allegorical representations:
• leopard: self-indulgence
• lion: violence
• wolf: maliciousness
• ghost of Virgil appears at the request of Beatrice to guide Dante out of the wood
• pagan who is a permanent resident of Limbo-the first circle of hell
• allegorically represents both logical reasoning and the highest achievements of the pagan past-poem is warning us that “reason” can only bring us so far toward God-faith must carry us the rest of the way
• Gates of Hellàthree divisions of hell:
• “circles of hell” within each level
• lower the level, worse the sins
• at the very center = Lucifer (the Devil)
• other side of the earth = island mountain Purgatory
• Gates of Purgatoryàseven circular terraces
• each one is one of the “Seven Deadly Sins”
• once the sin is corrected, they can move upward-closer to God
• at summit = Garden of Eden
• Dante sees Beatrice here
• Beatrice guides Dante into concentric spheres of Paradise
• each of these nine spheres of heaven is populated by a separate group of souls-divided into a hierarchy based on their ability to love God
• at the end, Dante sees God himself:
• embodied by three equal circles of light: “three in color, one in circumference”
• poetic reference to the Holy Trinity
• dominance of circle
• valued as an ordered and eternal universe
• no beginning or end
• “center point” = ideal place to conceive of as “God’s realm”—hub of His power, equidistant from all other points in the circle

Archetypal and Mythological Criticism:

• study of connections among apparently disparate texts in order to understand how individual text is faithful to and how it deviates from common patterns
• common patterns = “archetypes”
• plot, character, setting, symbolic object, etc. that we see repeated over and over with its core meaning unchanged
• literary reflections of experiences widely shared by humanity
• reflect deeply embedded patterns in the human mind
• important people:
• James Frazer-noticed that myths tend to have striking similarities from culture to culture
• Carl Jung-Swiss psychiatrist who speculated that reason for recurring patterns in myth might be an underlying structure of the human mind
• “collective unconscious”
• Joseph Campbell-developed “Hero’s Journey” archetype and ”monomyth”-one myth so pervasive that it unifies almost all other mythology
• separation, road of trials, return
• Northrop Fyre-developed all these ideas into a working school of literary criticism
• essentially one story being told over and over
• vast majority of texts should be approached through Archetypal Criticism
• refer to diagram with Romance at the top, then in clockwise order: Tragedy, Irony (at bottom), Comedy

terms used by Archetypal and Mythological critics:

• narrative pattern: culturally learned expected sequence of events in storytelling; ideal form-may not match any real-world text perfectly
• romance: hero starts at high pointàhits low pointsàback at high point; reinforces value of the culture
• tragedy: hero starts at high pointàgets stuck at low point; often takes place in the realm of fate
• comedy: hero starts at low pointàrises up to high point; endorses values of society
• reward is usually materialistic and related to love
• common ending = marriage
• irony: hero starts at low pointàends at low point; parodies of romances
• condemn values of society
• tend to be latest in culture
• meaningless quest in meaningless world
• displacement: dressing up the same story to intrigue the audience

General Trends in the History of Western Literature (refer to chart):

• narrator has lost power over time; less omniscient
• Gods and Fateàmoneyàcelebration of common manàantiheroes
• breakdown of rules and rigid structure
• Renaissance: very structured, specific forms
• postmodernism: anything goes

The Novel:

• any extended fictional narrative almost always in prose
• 19^th century: flowering of the English novel as an instrument portraying middle-class society
• Jane Austen-novel of manners
• Scott-historical novel
• Victorian novelists: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope-vast fictional worlds with abundance of social types and intricate melodramatic plots
• most critics consider anything under 50,000 words a novella
• novel is always fiction, but not always in prose-some are written in poetry

New Literary Terms (these look GOOD on the AP):

• forms of repetition (term and example):
• anaphora: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go onto the end” (repetition of “We shall” at the beginnings of neighboring clauses
• antistrophe: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child” (repetition of “as a child” at the end of successive phrases)
• anadiplosis: “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” (repetition of the end of one sentence to the beginning of another)
• diacope: “We give thanks to Thee, O God, we give thanks…” (repetition with only a one or two-word interruption)
• epizeuxis: “Words, words, words” (repetition in immediate succession)
• polysydenton: repetition of conjunctions in a series of coordinate words, phrases, or clauses
• forms of parallelism:
• antithesis: “To err is human; to forgive, dine” (clear, contrasting relationship between two ideas)
• forms of inversion:
• anastrophe: “This is the forest primeval” (inversion of ordinary Western order of words)
• chiasmus: “He knowingly lied and we followed blindly.” (reversal of structure in two connected clauses-in this case, difference placement of adverbs)
• antimetabole: “I know what I like, and I like what I know” (repetition of words in successive clauses in transposed grammatical order

Homework:

• Read Heart of Darkness.

Overall Connections:

• The first thing I think of when I think of the beginning of the English novel is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It’s no wonder that we’re going to be reading this soon as part of our study of the novel.
• Heart of Darkness makes so many references to Dante’s Inferno. In particular, he brings up Garden of Eden references early on with the allusion to the snake.
• It seems like Dante really employed the “power of three,” as we read in the Foster summer assignment. I wonder if rule of three started with him or existed earlier.
• “The Odyssey” is a very good example of the “Hero’s Journey” archetype.
• The many productions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet we saw are reminiscent of displacement. The modern one, especially, dressed the story up in its own cultural taste, resulting in slight variations which intrigue the audience. Now that I have watched Apocalypse Now though, I think it is definitely a much better and true example of displacement.