The Major Seminar

CRG for Thursday, January 29(PW 166-187)

Today's discussant: Ruth

You might start out today by considering the reading you did last week on romantic authorship. We read and talked about one notion of authorship as a way of providing expression to inner feelings. In this theory of authorship, the thought or emotion needs to find its way out, and then it’s alienated in the real world in the form of language.

New Critics weren’t so much interested in that process. Instead, they focused on the actual language—and, indeed, nothing more than the language—that constitutes a text. The point here is to understand that language works differently in different contexts, and thus we need to see how language functions in a literary work in particular.

•After you read the piece on New Criticism, find a couple uses of language—on the web, in a song, on TV, in your head—that are not purely functional, where the language calls attention to itself, or does something more than attempting to transparently communicate an idea.

The “intentional fallacy” is a new critical term, and it relates pretty much directly to the whole enterprise of new criticism. •Make sure you see how and why. (Why might people have wanted to rely on external evidence to arrive at an understanding of a literary text?)

Make sure you understand the cases against intentionalism. •Make a case for why it doesn’t matter what an author intended to write. In which cases might you say that it does matter what an author intended to say?

What does it mean, in point 6, to argue that “the literary work is a self-sufficient linguistic entity?  And in point 7, what is this bit about the “death of the author”?

•Understand the intentionalist responses.