UGC-ASC-Mysore Refresher Course on ‘Indian Literature: Mapping the Contours’

1. UGC-ASC-MysoreRefresher Course on ‘Indian Literature: Mapping the Contours’ Lecture - I The Odyssey of Literary Criticism (from Socrates-Plato-Aristotle to the Present) A Prelude to the Understanding of Indian Poetics and Aesthetics By A.S.Dasan – UOM - Mysore 28th April, 2011

2. The Greek Trio’s Adventure set the tone for the next two millennia in Europe and the Mediterranean • Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is a sacred path, a holy quest towards truth, the eternal soul of knowledge; • ‘Knowledge is virtue’. • "The unexamined life is not worth living.“ • A good act is not good because gods say it is, but is good because it is useful to us in our efforts to be better and happier people.  This means that ethics is no longer a matter of surveying the gods or scripture for what is good or bad, but rather thinking about life. • . 

3. Plato: (437-347) was Socrates’ prized student  • Plato can be understood as idealistic and rationalistic, much like Pythagorus but much less mystical.  He divides reality into two:  On the one hand we have ontos, idea or ideal.  This is ultimate reality, permanent, eternal, spiritual.  On the other hand, there’s phenomena, which is a manifestation of the ideal.  • Phenomena are appearances -- things as they seem to us -- and are associated with matter, time, and space. • Phenomena are illusions which decay and die.  Ideals are unchanging, perfect.  • Poets are liars; They feign reality; Imagination leads to illusion: Poets are to be banished;

4. Aristotle (384-322): Plato’s prized studentborn in a small Greek colony in Thrace called Stagira;  son of a physician and served the grandfather of Alexander the Great.  • Scientist cum philosopher; founder of modern logic; • endlessly fascinated with nature; • His Metaphysics:  While Plato separates the ever-changing phenomenal world from the true and eternal ideal reality, Aristotle suggests that the ideal is found “inside” the phenomena, the universals “inside” the particulars. • What Plato called idea or ideal, Aristotle called essence, and its opposite, he referred to as matter.  • Matter is without shape or form or purpose.  It is just “stuff.” pure potential, no actuality. 

5. Aristotle • Essence is what provides the shape or form or purpose to matter.  Essence is “perfect,” “complete,” but it has no substance, no solidity.  Essence and matter need each other! • Essence realizes (“makes real”) matter.  • This process, the movement from formless stuff to complete being, is called entelechy, which some translate as actualization. • ‘Virtue is knowledge’.

6. The Traditions of Rhetoric • Greek Rhetoric. (Protagoras, Gorgias, Antihon, Lysias, Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle) • The Hellenistic Period and Roman Rhetoric. (Rhetorica, Cicero, Quintilian)

7. Greek and Latin Criticism During the Roman Empire • Horace (65-8 BC). • Longinus (First Century AD). • Neo-Platonism. (Plotinus, Macrobius, Boethius)

8. The Medieval Era • The Early Middle Ages. (St. Augustine) • The Later Middle Ages. (Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey de Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey de Vinsauf, IBN Rushd (Averroe), St. Thomas Aquinas) • Transitions: Medieval Humanism. (Giovanni Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan)

9. The Early Modern Period to the Enlightenment • The Early Modern Period. (Giambattista Giraldi, Lodovico Castelvetro, Giacopo Mazzoni, Torquato Tasso, Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Sir Philip Sidney, Torquato Tasso, Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard, Sir Philip Sidney, George Gascoigne, George Puttenham) • Neoclassical Literary Criticism. (Pierre Corneille, Nicolas Boileau, John Dryden, Aleancer Pope, Aphra Behn, Samuel Johnson) • The Enlightenment. (John Locke, Joseph Addison, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft)

10. The Earlier Nineteenth Century and Romanticism • The Kantian System and Kant’s Aesthetics. • G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) • Romanticism (I): Germany and France. (Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Germaine de Stael) • John Locke’s Theory • Romanticism (II): England and America. (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe)

11. The Later Nineteenth Century • Realism and Naturalism. (George Eliot, Emile Zola, William Dean Howells, Henry James) • Symbolism and Aestheticism. (Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde) • The Heterological Thinkers. (Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Matthew Arnold) • Marxism. (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Gyorgy Lukacs, Terry Eaglelton)

12. The Twentieth Century • Psychoanalytic Criticism. (Freud and Lacan) • Formalisms. (Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, John Crowe Ransom, William K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley, T. S. Eliot) • Structuralism. (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes) • Deconstruction. (Jacques Derrida) • Feminist Criticism. (Virginai Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Michele Barrett, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous) • Reader-Response and Reception Theory.(Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish)

13. Postcolonial Criticism • Frantz Fanon, • Edward Said, • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, • Homi Bhabha, • Aijaz Ahmed • Henry Louis Gate, Jr.

14. New Historicism • Stephen Greenblatt, • Michel Foucault • Literature should be studied and intrepreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic. • Based on the literary criticism of Stephen Greenblatt and influenced by the philosophy of Michel Foucault, New Historicism acknowledges not only that a work of literature is influenced by its author's times and circumstances, but that the critic's response to that work is also influenced by his environment, beliefs, and prejudices.

15. Crisis and Creativity • Today we face a dramatic crisis in modern thought and reality – a crisis of fragmentation: the whole existing prior to parts is negated, harmony preceding differences is denied, and the wholeness of the cosmos is seen as an illusion. We are in a Godless world, striving to possess ‘the apple of knowledge’ and living, of course, the consequences of eating the fruit, aren’t we?

16. Postmodern Trends • A little familiarity with the philosophical positions and theoretical perspectives of Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault and others could help us to understand whither goes postmodern thought and what is implied by emancipatory/counter education via critical theory and critical pedagogy. As an onslaught against classical times and Enlightenment epistemology, they aver that ‘solidification of old metaphors’ and sedimented beliefs construed as universal or foundational or transcendental source of existential meaning do not work any more. To them, truth or all knowledge is relative and objective knowledge is impossible.

17. Subjective Experience • Subjective experience of understanding matters: Differences ad infinitum are fine. Society in terms of multiple realities articulated as discourses – each with its own truths – matters. Grand narratives of history as if applicable to every situation or context are viewed with skepticism. Notions of linearity are dispensed with and local knowledges are affirmed as ‘discourses of power’.

18. Agnosticism • The absence of God is understood as more meaningful than the denial of God’s existence. Agnosticism, if not atheism, skepticism, yawning gap between belief and practice, crass materialism and utilitarianism, rather than humanitarianism, are more or less ubiquitous impacting upon our lives.

19. Heteroglossic Dialectics • It is an era that has transited or has made an exit from monoglossia to heteroglossia, The Babel Tower is an appealing idol in an ambience of heteroglossic dialectics and globalized Mammonization.

20. Cognitive Atheism • One result is the glorification of ‘cognitive atheism’ (E.D.Hirsch Jr.), viz. ‘all knowledge is relative’ – the perspective of human nature is not essentially the same in all times and places. <> Fallacies in historical reconstructions (Historicism) - fallacy of the inscrutable past and fallacy of the homogeneous past, and deconstructions (Post-structuralism) – fallacy of the homogeneous present-day perspective. • Cognitive atheism consists of an individualized angle of perception bordering on subjectivism. Is the meaning of a literary text objectively knowable and distinguishable from the significance attributed to that meaning by particular readers?

21. Postmodern Feminist Trends • Female Writing: Received knowledge is phallocentric – phallocultic and phallocratic, as feminist critics like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray would say vis-à-vis the large-scale silent and hidden suffering of women under phallocracy. • Women should learn to write themselves in order to ‘discover the singularity of their jouissance’ via écriture feminine (female writing).

22. Concluding Remarks • Against this backdrop, the odyssey of literary criticism starting from the Greek mimetic tradition of monoglossia seems to be moving like ‘a perne in a gyre’. • Global thought-movements tend to problematize essentialist notions/views because they are ideologically monological and hegemonic, and are vested with self-interest angularities that subjugate the existence of the Other. Centre – periphery relationship and legitimacy of all sorts of hegemony are challenged.

23. In the Midst of Strains and Stresses • Obsession with theorization has caused certain strains and stresses: undermines study of literature by questioning its very foundation – author as origin of a text’s meaning, objectivity of interpretation and focusing on the human centre. • Autonomy of the Text ushers in ‘jouissance’, (Cf. Barthes, Cixous) endless rapture and pleasure derived out of reading the text or born of infinitude of pluralism, or readings ad infinitum due to differences and deferences (Cf. Jacques Derrida). • Today, criticism is not merely ‘a library of secondary aids to understand and appreciate literary texts but a rapidly increasing body of knowledge in its own right’ (David Lodge). Therefore, it is inevitable that theoretical implications do have their impact upon literary criticism. Theoretical assumptions and ideological implications cannot be dispensed with.

24. Postcolonial Trends • Entering into the Third World, we have postcolonial perspectives which foreground the significance of the Other against the Imperial Self via and vis-a-vis culture studies, identity question, subaltern and diasporic voices.

25. Relevant Concerns and Questions • In the light of these trends, some relevant questions need to be asked: • What is Mimesis? Is it Representation or re-presentation? Is it linear or non-linear? • - Is there a text? Is it inter-textual? Is it part of culture study? • - Is meaning singular or plural or indeterminate? Is objectivity a myth? • - Who matters – the author or the reader or both? • - What does the reader do? Who is an ideal critic? • - Are most of these thought - movements hostile to humanistic pursuits? In terms of meaning and significance via hermeneutics and critical philosophy, can/should we defend the validity of universality of knowledge? • What role can Critical Pedagogy play? • What has Indian Poetics to offer?