Gerad Genette thinking activity

Gérard Genette was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.

Gérard Genette (born 1930) is a Frenchliterary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.

He is largely responsible for the reintroduction of a rhetorical vocabulary into literary criticism, for example such terms as trope and metonymy. Additionally his work on narrative, best known in English through the selection Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, has been of importance. His major work is the multi-part Figuresseries, of which Narrative Discourse is a section.

His international influence is not as great as that of some others identified with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss; his work is more often included in selections or discussed in secondary works than studied in its own right. Terms and techniques originating in his vocabulary and systems have, however, become widespread, such as the term paratext for prefaces, introductions, illustrations or other material accompanying the text, or hypotext for the sources of the text.

He gives a five types of narratives. 

(1) ordeor

(2) frequency 

(3) Duration

(4) mood

(5) voice

1) Order

Story arrangements like simple a murder occurs event -1 then the circumstances of the murder are revealed to a detective event -2 and finally the murder is caught event -3. Generally Savdhan India Tv serial following these type of Chronological.  Example is a CID serial. 

2) Frequency

The separation between an event and its narration allows several possibilities. 

An event can be occured once and be narrated once.

An event can be ocuured once and be narrated many times. Example is Ramayana serial. 

3) Duration

There are the two main elements of duration.

First is ten years passed but a short narrative time it mean they narrated in few seconds. Example is new mahabharat serial or kumkum bagaya serial. 

4) Mood 

Genette said narrative mood is dependent on the distance and perspective of the narrator, and like music, narrative mood has predominant patterns. It is related to voice. 

5). Voice

Narrator is narrates the story in outside or he is becomes the part of the story. 

Example : three midtakes of my life in govind's charachar. Or in mobydick esmaile's character. 

Northrop Frye thinking activity

Archetype literature: Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye, in full Herman Northrop Frye, Canadian educator and critic who wrote much on "Canadian Literature" and culture and became best known as one of the most important literary theorists of the 20th century.

1.What is Archetypal Criticism? What does the Archetypal critic do?

In literary Criticism the term " archetype" denotes recurrent narratives designs, patterns of actions, character- type, themes & images which are identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams and even social rituals.

Such recurrent items are held to be the result of elemental & universal forms or patterns in the human psyche, whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response from the attentive reader, because he or she shares the psychic archetypes expressed by the author.

2.What is Frye trying to prove by giving an analogy of "Physics to Nature" & "Criticism to Literature"?

Northrop Frye has given a very unique idea of Archetypal Criticism by comparing the human emotions or human Characteristics with the cycle of seasons.

●Each season is aligned with a literary genre:-

1.Comedy with SPRING

2.Romance with SUMMER

3.Tragedy with AUTUMN

4.Satire with WINTER.

 Spring :-

The spring season represents the Comedy. As per the genre of comedy is characterized by the birth of the hero, revival & resurrection. Spring also symbolizes the defeat of winter & darkness.

◆ Summer:-

The season of Summer indicates 

Romance because Summer is the culmination of life in the seasonal celendar, & the romance genre culminates with some short of triumph,usually marriage.

◆ Autumn:-

Autumn season signify the genre of Tragedy. As the autumn is the dying stage of the seasonal calendar that's why the Autumn is parallels to the genre of Tragedy, because the genre of Tragedy is known for the fall on demise of the protagonist.

◆ Winter:-

The season of winter denotes the satire genre because of it's darkness. It's a disillusioned & mocking form of the three other genres. It is notes for its darkness, dissolution, the return of chaos & the defeat of heroic figure.

3. Share your views of Criticism as an organised body of knowledge. mention relation of literature with his & philosophy.

Literature is central division of the Humanities, flanked on one side by History & on the other side by Philosophy.
Here we can say that history and philosophy are twin pillars of literature. History represents what was happened in past.Basically history is about past events & actions. While philosophy is about morality & ethics of life & literature.
Frye has used the word "Centrifugal" which means to go away from literature & find background to understand literature.
    So for the better understanding of literature readers have to refer framework of history & philosophy for the understanding of ethics.

4. Briefly explain inductive method with illustration of Shakespeare's Hamlet's Grave Digger's Scene.

Inductive method is journey which leads from specific to general. As we read some specific literary work & comes to a general conclusion, in this way we extend from specific outcome to general outcome.

    The best example of this method is grave digging scene from Hamlet. It is a specific scene & from that scene we come to some general conclusion.
    In that scene there were two grave diggers & they seemed in quite in harmony with their work. They were talking with one another & singing a song during the time of grave digging. They were also mocking on dead Ophelia & commented that whether she allowed to buried or not. Here we can see that they have no grief for deadly one.

5. Briefly explain deductive method with reference to an analogy to Music, Painting, Rhythm & Pattern. Give example of the outcome of deductive method.

Deductive method is a journey from general to specific.Music & Rhythm both are the form of an art. Music is a form of art which moves in time and Painting also is a form of art which moves in space. Music is rhythm and painting is a pattern. In a music we can understand the rhythm of it while in painting we can understand the pattern of it. Rhythm is a narrative form, while pattern is simultaneous mental grasp of verbal structure and it has meaning and significance. It provides a mental visuals. By listening some of the music we can't get everything, but when we see the visual images (paintings) ...we can get the actual idea of the patterns.

6. Refer to the Indian seasonal grid. If you can, please read small Gujarati, Hindi or English poem from the Archetypal approach & apply Indian seasonal grid in the interpretation.

According to Hindu scriptures, the 6 seasons are:-
1.Spring
2.Summer
3.Monsoon
4.Autumn
5.Pre-Winter
6.Winter

    Here poet talks about the 5 different seasons in this above poem through the student.

Five different seasons are:-
●Spring
●Summer
●Autumn
●Monsoon &
●Winter
In the very beginning of the stanza student talks about Spring season. He wanted to dance & also sing a song by seen the beauty of the spring.
The season of spring indicates the lots of happiness in nature or we can say that it brings a new life for nature as well as human life.
But here we can find a major difference between Western seasonal & Indian seasonal grid. In the Western world Spring symbolizes the defeat of winter & darkness while in the India Spring is symbolizes as the new life of Nature.

Mathew Arnold study of poetry

Write about the one idea of Mathew Arnold which you find interesting and relevant in our time. 

Ans.  'A study of poetry ' is a critical essay by Mathew Arnold. He gives definition of poetry that " Poetry is the criticism of life " .   It is true that poet is critic of life and this definition is a very relevant in our time.
He also  discussed the idea of disinterested or detachment.  .He says that the critic must be absolutely impartial without any prejudice or bias against or in favor of any particular author. Disinterested on the part of the critic implies freedom from all the prejudice,  personal and historical . 

2. Write about one idea of Mathew Arnold which you find out of date and irrelevant in our time. 

Ans.  Mathew Arnold 's idea about " Touch - Stone  Method "  is out of date and irrelevant in our time because Arnold's touchstone method is a comparative method of criticism.  This method is comparison and analysis as two primary tools for judging individual poet. Even a single  line or selected quotation will serve the purpose, if the other works moves us in the same way as these lines and expression do, then it is a great work otherwise not. so it is not appropriate in present time and it is not appropriate way to passing judgement on the bases of comparison with others because time and situation always changing...

T.S.Eliot:Tradition and Individual Talent

T.S.Eliot:Tradition and Individual Talent

About T.S.Eliot

T.S. Eliot, in full Thomas Stearns Eliot, (born September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died January 4, 1965, London, England), American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

1)                  How would you like to explain Eliot's concept of tradition? Do you agree with it?

>Yes, I am agree with the concept of tradition given by Eliot in his essay in which he points out that tradition is matter of much wider significance it can not be inherited and you must obtain it by great labour. We can know what is good and useful or bad by labour.

2) What do you understand by historical sense?

> "The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence".

   "This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional".

A historical sense is not just sense of history as a past but it is also an understanding of the present, the present is the unfolding of the past, As a writer one can must have the historical sense.

3) What is the relationship between "Tradition" and "Individual Talent" according to the poet T.S.Eliot?

2)     Individual talent is a part of tradition, They are like two sides of one coin. A writer while writing his work not only considers literature of his time but also the classical. Individual talent is a part of tradition as like a brick and building.

4) Explain. ''Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential  history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British museum".

> Eliot wants to say about this quote that all writers have absorb knowledge through the wide reading of whole tradition of his own nation like Shakespeare that he was not highly educated person but he had knowledge about his surrounding and history.

5) "Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry"

> In this line, he tried to explain that the honest criticism and the appreciation by any critic is of the work art and not of the writer. If we like any work of art it is the quality of that work we like not the poet's personality. E.g now a days people Criticise Tajmahal as a  creation of cruel ruler in other words, we can not judge it in terms of history or personality of maker, but we must see its art of creation.

6) How would you like to explain Eliot's theory of depersonalization? You can explain with the help of chemical reaction in presence of catalyst agent, platinum.

> T.S.Eliot gives an example of chemical process to explain his theory of depersonalization to create Sulphur dioxide, platinum is used as a catalyst, but when it is prepared we do not see platinum any more in the solution. Similarly, to create poetry, poet's mind works as a catalyst but we do not see his mind in his poetry.

7) Explain. "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality"

> In this quote Eliot does not deny personality or emotion to the poet only, he must depersonalize his emotions there should be an extinction of his personality. This impersonality can be achieved  only when poet surrenders himself completely to the work that is to be done.

8) Write two points on which one can write critique on T.S.Eliot as a critic; 

  A) "Tradition is a matter of much wider significance, it can't be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour".

 B) "Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry".

River and Tides

"Rivers and Tides"

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy OBE is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.

Andy Goldsworthy's art is supposed to fall apart. He creates large-scale outdoor sculptures and artworks out of natural materials like mud, wood, ice and stone in an attempt to imbue the physical world with a spiritual, ephemeral element. Director Thomas Riedelsheimer follows Goldsworthy as he constructs his art everywhere from upstate New York to his home village in Scotland, and questions the solitary artist about his inspirations, frustrations and artistic goals.

Points

            All like destruction

            Working with time

            Understand the Changes

            Color is expression of

Structuralism thinking activity

Structuralism and Literary Criticism: Gerard Genette

Gerard Genette: Structuralism and Literary Criticism

What is structuralism? How is it applied to the study of literature?

Structuralism (Structuralist Criticism): It is the offshoot of certain developments in linguistics and anthropology. Saussure’s mode of the synchronic study of language was an attempt to formulate the grammar of a language from a study of parole. Using the Saussurian linguistic model, Claude Levi-Strauss examined the customs and conventions of some cultures with a view of arriving at the grammar of those cultures. Structuralist criticism aims at forming a poetics or the science of literature from a study of literary works. It takes for granted ‘the death of the author’; hence it looks upon works as self-organized linguistic structures. The best work in structuralist poetics has been done in the field of narrative.

In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of West Side Storydid not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death.

The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed.

Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. 

Gerard Genette and Structuralistic Criticism

Gerard Genette writes at the outset in his essay ‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism’that methods developed for the study of one discipline could be satisfactorily applied to the study of other discipline as well. This is what he calls “intellectual bricolage[i]’, borrowing a term from Claude Levi-Strauss. This is precisely so, so far as structuralism is concerned. Structuralism is the name given to Saussure’s approach to language as a system of relationship. But it is applied also to the study of philosophy, literature and other sciences of humanity.

Structuralism as a method is peculiarly imitable to literary criticism which is adiscourse upon a discourse[ii]. Literary criticism in that it is meta-linguistic in character and comes into being / existence as metaliterature. In his words: “it can therefore be metaliterature, that is to say, ‘a literature of which literature is the imposed object’.” That is, it is literature written to explain literature and language used in it to explain the role of language in literature.

In Genette’s words, ‘if the writer questions the universe, the critic questions literature, that is to say, the universe of signs. But what was a sign for the writer (the work) becomes meaning for the critic (since it is the object of the critical discourse), and in another way what was meaning for the writer (his view of the world) becomes a sign for the critic, as the theme and symbol of a certain literary nature’. Now this being so, there is certain room for reader’s interpretation. Levi-Strauss is quite right when he says that the critic always puts something of himself into the works he read.

The Structuralist method of criticism:

Literature, being primarily a work of language, and structuralism in its part, being preeminently a linguistic method, the most probable encounter should obviously take place on the terrain of linguistic material. Sound, forms, words and sentences constitute the common object of the linguist and the philologist to much an extent that it was possible, in the early Russian Formalist movement, to define literature as a mere dialect, and to envisage its study as an annex of general dialectology.

Traditional criticism regards criticism as a message without code; Russian Formalism regards literature as code without message. Structuralism by structural analysis makes it possible to uncover the connection that exists between a system of forms and a system of meanings, by replacing the search for term by term analysis with one for over all homologies (likeness, similarity)”.

Major poets of victorian age

Peper 6 __nirali_rathod_ppt[1] from NiraliRathod2