History

• Broad notion: intertextuality is the necessary quality of any text (literary or non-literary)

• narrow notion: intertextuality limmited to certain explicit and usually intentional refereces (mostly in literary text)

  • paratext (such as subtitle) -> Frankenstein

• Period from 15th to 17th century (1400-16XX)

• Historical period that followed the middle age

• Concept of “renaissance” only came to be retrospectively 19th century

  • named at beginning of modernit

  • age of discoveries and scientific revolution

• Birth of a new, modern spirit

  • scientific curiosity

  • artistic creativity

  • Man as self-aware individual

• ER emulated ancient traditions and Italian Renaissance

• ER coincided with the reformation -> cultural influece of protestantism

• Man as self-aware individual -> soliloquy, questioning motives

• artistic creativity (play within a play)

• scientific curiosity -> John Donne

• preoccupation with religion, religion vs. science

• reign of two stuart kings -> religious strife, violence (John Donne, the poetess hasty resolution, the hunting of the hare)

• multiple periods

  • The age of Tudors (until 1603 -> shakespeares Plays)

    • Growing population

    • economic growth

    • Ecouraging trade

    • Expansion of London

  • The reign of the first two stuart Kings (1603-1714)

    • civil war

    • religious strife (violent disagreement)

  • The commonwealth

    • fight between parliamentary forces and those against them

  • The restoration (1660)

    • expansion of colonial trade

    • stong anglican orthodoxy

• All art imitates reality

• Literature does not just copy reality, it creates alternative realities that could happen

• nature full of change and decay, art everlasting -> John Donne

• Through distance drama creates catharsis (both distance and identification with art needed for catharsis)

• Idea that poets want to be useful and/or entertaining

• Themes

  • unrequited love (from a man to a woman) -> love does not vanish anyways

  • Fixed set of metaphors -> blazon

• Structure

  • Octave: eight-line stanza

    • presentation and development of theme or argument, followed by volta

  • Sestet: six line stanza

    • resolution

• First quatrain

  • new idea

• secon quatrain

  • new (but related) idea

• third quatrain

  • new (but related) idea

• Couplet

  • Resoution, summary, generalization or argument aforementioned

• all in iambic pentametre

• Main themes

  • Transience of love and beauty

  • poetry conquers time

  • poet urges youth to marry and pass on his beauty

  • Often makes fun of Petrarchan sonnet and blazons

    -> John Donne makes fun of both, only agrees with “poetry conquers time”

• Conceit: elaborate figurative device (simile, metaphor, or other) intended to surprise and delight by its wit and ingenuity 

  • unusual imagery designed to surprise and to shock 

  • a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikeness 

• use of conceit 

• seeming spontaneity 

• use of colloquial terms  

• (sometimes) irregular metre 

• (pseudo-)logical arguments  

• keen interest in current scientific developments (“new philosophy calls all in doubt / [...] ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone”) 

• Mysteries: based on biblical stories

  • simple dramatic versions of biblical stories

  • Became so popular they were taken from church to places surrounding church to carts and peagan wagon on the streets of town

• Moralities: allegories of the battle of good and evil -> tragedy

  • for more educated folks

  • Used allegory or abstraction to dramatize the spiritual trials of average man -> figure of the “everyman”

  • personified vices and virtues compete for mans soul

• Interludes: short entertainments performed between acts of religious plays -> comedy

  • Performed by wandering minstrels at castels, fairs and markets 

  • juggling, dancing, music, storytelling, and short farcical pieces (Interludes) 

    
    

• Hamlet: Saxo Grammaticus “Gesta Danorum” -> medieval history of Denmark (12th/13th century) 

• Narrative is adapted by French author François de Belleforest for his Histoires tragiques 

• Multi-volume work modelled on the novelle of italian writer Matteo bandello -> inspired several of Shakespeares play (including Romeo and Juliet) 

• What the stories have in common 

  • Uncle kills father of the protagonist and marries his mother 

  • Son decides to avenge his fathers death, feigns madness and speaks in riddles 

• Differences: in Hamlet... 

  • New king is suspicious of the prince and fears for his life 

  • Send for hamlet to be killed, instead the messengers are killed  

  • Beautiful woman used to test the princes sanity 

  • Prince chides his mother for her relationship with his uncle 

  • Everyone is killed (inc. Hamlet), Hamlet never ascends to the throne 

  • The truth is revealed by a ghost (in Amleth, the murder is public knowledge, and the mother helps the son kill the king) 

  • There is a ghost and a play withing a play in hamlet 

  • Women are (treated) worse in Wills rendition 

  • The role of the play as demonstrating an essential truth 

• Play within a play also in Senecas “The Spanish Tragedy” 

• Central theme: Authenticity vs. Acting 

  • In terms of grief and being, Elsinore as a place where everyone perorms a role 

  • A revenge tragedy, like the Spanish tragedy by seneca (huge succes in Elizabethean times) 

    • One of the most popular Elizabethean plays

    • Gives rise to new egnlish drama: revenge tragedies

    • Victim (ghost), avenger (descendant), villain like in senecas play

    • Bloodthirsy scene

    • theme of madness

• Set in a wolrd whose institutions seem unable of unwilling to satisfy craving for justice

• Criminal usuall hidden/well protected -> revenge has to follow devious path

• bloodthirsty

• theme of madness

  -> also in death of a salesman

• derived from greek epos -> oration or song

• traditiona epics were recited (sometimes to music) by rhapsodes

• Content/plot

  • set in mythical heroic past

  • Gods interact with humans

  • Great issue at stakes

  • Centered on quasi divine figuer

  • Hero personifies virtues of national, religious or other significance (cultural ideals)

• Form

  • long narrative poem

  • conventional opening

    • statement of the subject

    • invocation of muse/epic questionBeginning of plot in media res

• Primary epics

  • 
    

• secondary epics

  • Written by single author

  • Written in deliberate imitation of primary or other secondary epic

  • Different idea of a hero

  
  

• Frontiersmen and -women shed their old identites as Eurpeans and beacame American through contact with the primitive wilderness of America

• foundational (and permanent) genre of American Literature -> frontier settlers being taken captive by “indians”

• Indians have little or no agency

• Martin Luther

• Sola Fide: salvation lies in faith rather than good behaviour

• Sola scriptura: the bible rather than the pope voice of god

• 1607/1608: group of Puritans belonging to separatists originally based in Nottinghamshire left for the Netherlands/Leiden 

• At the same time: foundation of Jamestown Country, first permanent English settlement in North America 

• 1620: Set sails to America to build puritan colony -> Plymouth Colony 

• William bradford governor of Plymouth Colony (1621 – 1657) 

• 1621: Peace treaty between Wampanoag and Plymouth Colony, in exchange for alliance against the Narragansett (peace lasted for 50 years) 

• 1630: Massachusetts Bay Colony settled by Puritans 

• King Philipps War/First Indian war/Narrangasett War: 1675-1678 

• Bloodiest war per capita in North American History 

• Started as rebellion agains English encroachment of native land and culture 

• 1691: two colonies are merged (Plymouth becomes part of Massacusetts Bay 

• Cultural US Myth that America is the promised land, parallels story of Hebrews escape from slavery in Egypt and their journey to a new land

• Modern definition:

  • wide variety of texts, only one thing in common: extended pieces of prose

  • Problem: length of novel varies greatly

  • Only thing they all seem to have in common

    • characters

    • plot

    • actions and incidents

    • prose

• Mikael Bathkins definition

  • constantly evolving genre

  • endlessly adaptable

• Novel vs. Roman

  • Roman: genre of chivalric romance from France

    • stories of adventure

    • Main motivation of the protagonist: religious faith, love, in the mood for adventure

    • non-mimetic

      • imopossible performances

      • miraculous contingencies

  • Novel

    • closer to reality

    • more familiar

    • represents intrigues in practice

    • follow Aristoteles idea of mimesis

Rise of middle class -> rise of literacy -> rise of the novel (and individualism: portestantism and capitalism)

• Novel as criticism and rejection of traditional values 

• Goal: adherence to individual experience and not representing and reinforcing formal conventions -> rejection of formal convetions 

• Formal realism defines the novel -> premise/primary convention, that novel is a full and authentic report of human experience 

• Favours originality: prefers original plots, not plots imitating folklore, mythology etc. 

• Particularity of description: novel has characters with own (everyday) names and distinct personalities 

• The novel defines its characters by reference to space and time 

  • illusion that the action takes place in an “actual physical environment” 

  • “past experience as the cause of present action” (i.e. the characters are rooted in the temporal dimension) 

• First generation

  • William Blake (1757-1827)

  • William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

  • Robert Southery (1774-1843)

  • last three “lake poets”

• Second generation

  • Lord Byron/George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)

  • Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

  • John Keats (1795-1821)

  
  

• from end of 18th century until middle of 19th century

• Growing interest in nature and scenery

  • Flight from the city/artificiality of civilization

• Childhood as innocence

• Emphasis on power of imagination and need for spontaneity in thought and expression

• Idea of natural genius

• The age of revolution -> twin upveal

  • Dual revolution

    • Political french Revolution

      • shift from monarchic-aristocratic to a more democratic, bourgeois system of government

    • Industrial revolution (british)

      • Gradual transition from largely agrarian, ofteh semi-feudal socioeconomic system to industrial capitalism

    • American Reolution (1765-1783)

• Choose incidents and situations from common life

• RElate and describe in a selection used by men

• Throw over them a certain colouring of imagination whereby ordinary things are represented in the mind in an unusual way

• Poetry takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity

• Any passion that is volutarily described produces a state of enjoyment, no matter how intense it is

• Poets task is to transfer own enjoyment to the reader

• Transcendentialism: primacy of spiritual and transcendental (that which transcends experience) over material and empirical

• Ralp Waldo Emerson

  • Self reliance as imperative

  • Authenticity and originality instead of conformity

  • Over-soul: divine manifests itself in everything and everyone

• Goths = germanic tribe who destroyed Roman empire -> connoatation of destriuctiveness, barbarous Renaissnace -> followed by Renaissance, rebirth of the destructed

• Whatever is medieval came to signify goth

• Middle of 18th century -> revival of gothic architecture

• middle ot 18th century

• Gothic art & architecture…

  • irregular

  • vast

  • indetermined

    -> BUT: triumph of rationalism over irrational fear

• Gothicis as a reaction to a century or more of rationalism and calssicism

• Setting

  • Caholic, feudal society

  • Pre-reformation and pre-enlightenment

  • Oppressive gothic structures

  • wild landscapes

• Themes and motifs

  • Powerful, tyrannical male figure

  • Female protagonist who is both damsel in distress and courageous heroine

  • Priesthood and monarchic institutions

  • Subterranean spaces

  • double

  • Discoveries of obscures family ties

  • Discontinous, tale within a tale

    • change of narrator

  • frequent theme: persecuted innocence

• Key theme in romantic literature 

• Quality of an object or experience that evokes a sense of awe, wonder or fear in the viewer or audience 

• Often contrasted with the beautiful, which is seen as pleasing and harmonious 

• Terror as a source of the sublime 

• The sublime as the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling 

• Emotions of pain as more powerful than emotions of pleasure 

• Two kinds of passion  

  • The sublime -> delight, mixed sense of pleasure -> passion related to self preservation (pain and danger) 

  • The beautfiul -> Affection, love, lust -> passion realted to society -> positive 

• Three most imporatnt features of sublime objects 

  • Terror 

  • Obscurity 

  • Power 

• Preference for suggestions over definition (theory > fact) 

• “nothing can strike the mind with its greatness... while we are able to percieve its bounds” 

• Terror stimulates, horror numbs the imagination T 

• Terror expands the sound, awakes the faculties to a high degree of life --> stimulates imagination, high expectation, anticipation of possible future events 

• Horror freezes, contracts, nearly annihillates (narrative indeterminacy) -> confrontation with actual events that overwhelm and temporarily suspend the imagination 

• Mystery of terror vs. Certainty of horror (graphic detail) 

• Different historical past

• The frontier experience with its inherent solitude and potenital violence

• Puritan inheritance

• Fear of Eurpoean subversion

• Anxieties about popular democracy (new experiment)

• Absence of “developed society” (no past)

• Very significant racial issues

• “turned his back” on American settings and used quasi-european settings

• Stories of “mobid introversion” employed stylized gothic items but divorced them from social or historical resonance so that they became symbolis motifs 

• Accoding to him, writers should strife for “unity of effects” -> alle elements of poem/story should work towards comon goal 

  • This can most effectively be achieved by texts that are short enough to be read in one sitting (without interruption, but long enough to make an impression on the reader 

  • Short prose narrative as superior to the novel -> Soul of the reader is at the writers control 

  
  

• Sometimes narrator is marked as fallible or unreliable by the “implied author” (implicit picture of a narrator who stand behind the scenes” 

• A reliable actor acts in accordance with the norms of the work (= implied authors norms), an unreliable narrator does not 

• Accordning to Wayne C. Booth unreliable narrators tend to be “less able to work out what’s going n around them than the reader” 

• The readers realization of the narrators unreliability is a result of a secret communion of the (implied) author and (implied/postulated) reader behind the narrators back 

• The unreliable narrator can fail in his role as a  

  • Reporteer (facts/events) -> misreporting, underreporting (narrator tells us less than he/she knows) 

  • Evaluator (ethics/evaluation) -> misevaluation/misregard/underregard -> narrators ethical judgement moves along the right track but does not go far enough 

  • Reader/interpreter (knowledge/perception) -> misreading, underreading (narrators lack of knowledge, perceptiveness or sophistication yields an insufficient interpretation of an event, character or situation) 

• Narrator fallibility (= circumstancial unreliability): 

  • N does not reliably report on narrative events because they are mistaken about their judgement or perception or are biased 

  • Readers regard mistakes as situationally motivated (external circumstances cause the narrators misperceptions) -> readers justify those failings of the narrator, do not blame the narrators intellect or ethics 

• Narrators untrustworthiness (dispositional unreliability)

  • Inconsistencies appear to be caused by ingrained behavioral traits or some current self interest 

  • Readers assume that another narrator would report the events more reliably, untrustworthyness is a distinct characteristic of the narrator 

• Queen Victoria

• Time of radical change -> industrialization

• Shift from way of life based on ownership of land to urban economy based on trade and manufacturing

• Worker fled from countryside to industrial towns in search of employment -> development of urban slums

• Widening gap between rich and poor

  • Rapid growth of cities and rise of industrial capitalism -> expansion of the middle class

  • Leading to creation of new middle class

  • Huge industrial working class of unskilled workers

• Population growth: 1837-1901 London population from 2 Million to 6

• London as uhb of world-wide network of transport, trade and communications

• Social (problem) novel: rise of socially concious fiction, depicting individual in relation to their (social) environment

• Work of fiction with prevailing social problems is dramatized through effects of characters -> Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (critique of how fallen women are ostracized), uncle toms cabin -> critique of slavery

• Darwin: Man himself is of animal descent (more closely related to some, more distantly to others)

• The acquisitions he has subsequently made have not succeeded in effacing the evidence

• Darwins evidence: (1859)

  • Bodily structure

  • Diseases and parasites

  • Reproduction

  • embyronic development

• Freud (1923)

  • Ego: instincts (sexual and violent)

  • Id: mediator

  • Super-Id: moral conscience, culture

• movement in the 19th and 20th century including

  • Symbolism

  • Impressionism

  • Futurism

  • Dadaism

  • Surrealism

• 1910-1930 as high modernism

• opposition of traditional form, formal experimentation -> every method is right

• Self-referenciality/narrative introversion

  • naturalistic art diesembles medium, modernist art calls attention to its artfulness

  • concentration on the medium

  • Works of modernist pros ““by turning in upon themselves, show the process of the novel’s making, and dramatize the means by which the narration is achieved.

• Perspectivism/interiority

  • Point of view, interior monologue, stream of conciousness

  • Subjetive time, non linearity

• Fragmentation and rearangement of natural for

• Multiperspective: character at least partially defined by how others see them

• two modernist maxims

  • Unparalleled complexity of urban life must be paralleld in literary form

  • unconcious life of the minds as important as the concious

• theory of relativity/Einstein -> every individual interprets and experiences the same event differently

• Rapid urbanization and technological advances

  • acceleration of transport and communication

  • New modes of experiece (overflow of stimuli)

  • New modes of representing experience in fiction

• The discovery of the unconcious -> emphasis on the pychological, notion of the divided self

• Sensations of our bodies and objects around us

• memories (and repression)

• thoughts of distant things

• Feelings of (dis)satisfaction, desires, aversion, and other emotional conditions

• Determinations of the will

• attempt to isolate in a short poem a significant moment from the flow of life

• Crystallize a fleeting experience with emphasis on its visual aspects

• without any overt moral or reflection attached

• Dreives from

  • french symbolism

  • Japanese Haiku

• “Sense of sudden liberation”, “sense of freedom form time and space limits” “sense of sudden growth”

• Recoginze IP

  • use of free verse (no regular metre or line length)

  • Unlike blank vers (unrhymed but metrical lines, usually iambic pentameter)

  • free choice of topics

  • Avioidance of muddy abstraction, attempts to find apt metaphors

  • Fragementation

  • Poetry is made as much from other poetry as from subjective feeling

• “What a beautiful day it was”

• Narrator disappears

• Tense shifted

• More mimetic than diagetic

• Fusion of voice of narrator and character

• fragmented and repetitive narrative structure convey distruptive and obssessive part of trauma

• i.e. Sylvia plath

• Attempt to distance self from atrocities of 20th century

• “taboo topics”

• Part of Postmodernism

• Focus on extreme personal experiences (like suicide, mental illness, trauma)