Greybeard
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Posted: Jun 27th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
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Here is a resource that I have found very helpfull.
I will share the title and give a synopsis...
Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism
Frye's systemization of literature begins with three aspects of poetry given by Aristotle in his Poetics: mythos (plot), ethos (characterization/setting), and dianoia (theme/idea). Frye sees works of literature as lying somewhere on a continuum between being plot driven, as in most fiction, and idea driven, as in essays and lyrical poetry.
Aristotle’s POETICS “Three Aspects of Poetry”
Mythos [PLOT]… Author focused… intimate first person narrative… direct discourse
Ethos [CHARACTER/setting]… Character focused… separated second person narrative… indirect/overheard
Dianoia [THEME/IDEA]… Message focused… distance third person narrative…subjective discourse
Melos- Elements dealing with the tone/music of the literature
Lexis- Diction (ear) Image (visual) aspects of the literature
Opsis- Elements dealing with the visual aspects of the literature
FIRST ESSAY: Theory of MODES
The Greek poet Hesiod described Five Ages of Man: “Classical Mythology”
“MYTH” “ROMANCE” “HIGH MIMETIC” “LOW MIMETIC” “IRONIC”
--OR—As I have labled them…
[Gods; Heros; Kings; Commoners; Clowns]
MIMETIC… from Mimic… Imitate
Yes, the ancient bard says that "Art imitates life," but if we apply Aristotle's notion of reversal (Poetics) then we also learn the "Life imitates art." At this moment we are confronted with the politics of art as propaganda.
TRAGIC: Concerned with the Hero’s separation from society
COMIC: Concerned with the Hero’s integration with society
Thematic:
Fictional and Thematic Modes by Age
Tragic/Mythic= Deals with the Death of GODS
Tragic/Romantic= Deals with the death of HEROS
Tragic/High Imitation= Deals with the Death of KINGS/nobles
Tragic/Low Imitation= Deals with the Death of COMMONERS
Tragic/Ironic Deals= with the Death of CLOWNS/weaks
Comic/Mythic= Acceptance into the society of the Gods
Comic/Romantic= Integration with the ideal/pastoral
Comic/High Imitation= Hero constructs own society
Comic/low Imitation= Elevation of the Common in status
Comic/Ironic= Rejoices in giving pain/punishment
Source of Authority/Mythic= SCRIPTURS
Source of Authority/Romantic= CHRONICALS
Source of Authority/High Imitation= NATIONALISM
Source of Authority/low Imitation=INDIVIDUALISM
Source of Authority/Ironic=DISCONTINUITY/NONLINIER
SECOND ESSAY: Theory of Symbols
Five levels of Symbolism, with each phase possessing it’s own foci of PLOT, CHARACTER and THEME
The phases are based on the four levels of medieval allegory, expanded by correlation with the five Ages of Man
[There were four categories of allegory used in the Middle Ages, originated with the Bible commentators of the early Christian era. The first is simply the literal interpretation of the events of the story for historical purposes with no underlying meaning. The second is called typological, which is connecting the events of the Old Testament with the New Testament; in particular drawing allegorical connections between the events of Christ's life;with the stories of the Old Testament. The third is moral (or tropological), which is how one should act in the present, the "moral of the story". The fourth type is anagogical, dealing with the future events of Christian history, heaven, hell, the last judgment; it deals with prophecies.]
Literal/Descriptive (Motifs and Signs): “The referent specific” and the “referent in general” “narrow & broad”
Formal (Image) “The sign imbedded in the motif” “inherent meaning”
Mythical (Archetype) “The form imbedded in the sign” “Common symbols throughout literature.”
Anagogic (Monad) “The Mythic imbedded in the type” “Transcendent Type, the infinite glimpsed in the finite”
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Greybeard
Jul 6th, 2007 at 12:16 am »
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What God desires is here [points to head] and here [points to heart] and by what you decide to do eveyday, either you will be a good man... or not.
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Greybeard
Warrior Member is offlineThe permanent identity informs the temporary ones
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Posted: Jun 27th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
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THIRD ESSAY: Theory of Myths
Modes and symbols together create the mythic expression of human desire, manifested in the Great Chain of Being. [The great chain of being is a classical and western medieval conception of the order of the universe, whose chief characteristic is a strict hierarchical system.]
Divine: The Ultimate fullfilment: God
The unfullfilled perversion: Devil/demons
Human: The Ultimate fullfilmen: Christ
The unfullfilled perversion: Anti-Christ
Animal: The Ultimate fullfilmen: Lamb
The unfullfilled perversion: The predator (Lion… or the serpant?)
Vegtable: The Ultimate fullfilmen: Tree of Life
The unfullfilled perversion: The 'haunted wood'
Mineral: The Ultimate fullfilmen: Jerusalem/City of God
The unfullfilled perversion: The Chateau D’If (Prison/grave)
The Mythic MODE: DIVINE… The Last Day: Apocalyptic Revelation (Heaven)
The Romantic MODE: HUMAN… The Immortal Ideal Human (Christ & Church)
The High MIMIC: ANIMAL… The Mortal Ideal Human (Saints)
The Low MIMIC: VEGETABLE… The Mortal Flawed Human (Sinners)
The Ironic MODE: MINERAL… The Last Day: The Condemned/Judged (Hell)
The cycle of Seasons applied… Spring (Comedy), Summer (Romance), Fall (Tragedy) Winter (Irony/Satire)
« Last Edited by
Greybeard
Jul 6th, 2007 at 12:10 am »
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What God desires is here [points to head] and here [points to heart] and by what you decide to do eveyday, either you will be a good man... or not.
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Greybeard
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Posted: Jun 27th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
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FORTH ESSAY: Theory of Genres
Melos- Elements dealing with the tone/music of the literature
Lexis- Diction (ear) Image (visual) aspects of the literature
Opsis- Elements dealing with the visual aspects of the literature
Rhetoric means two things: ornamental (opsis) speech and persuasive (melos) speech, and their interplay as manifested in lexis.
The relation between author and audience--is a further consideration.
Difference in genre relies not on topical considerations (science fiction, romance, mystery), nor in length (e.g. epics are long, lyrics are short), but in the radical of representation. As such, Frye proposes a total of four distinct genres:
· epos - Author speaks directly to audience (e.g. story telling, formal speech).
· fiction - Author and audience are hidden from each other (e.g. most novels).
· drama - Author is hidden from the audience; audience experiences content directly.
· lyric - Audience is "hidden" from author; that is, the speaker is "overheard" by hearers.
Drama lies halfway between epos and fiction, or more accurately, its diction must fit the setting and the character. Some characters may be melos-oriented, speaking in meter or with various rhetorical effects in song and banter. Others may be opsis-oriented, speaking more in prose and conveying ideological content. Most characters alternate according to the dramatic situation. Such a marriage of the appropriate language with the character and setting (ethos) defines a rhythm of decorum, the distinctive rhythm of drama.
Classical lyrical poetry often presents a shepherd speaking of his love; he is overheard by his audience. However, the distinctiveness of lyric comes more from its peculiar rhythm than from this radical of representation. Frye describes this rhythm as associative rather than logical and is the stuff of dreams and the subconscious. It is closely related to the chant, and though it is found in all literature, it is more apparent in certain kinds of literature than others. At this point Frye suggests a connection between the four historical modes and the four genres. In this sense, the lyrical is typical of the ironic age--just as the ironic protagonist has turned away from society, the lyrical poet makes utterances without regard to the audience.
Mimesis
Mimesis (μίμησις from μιμεîσθαι in its simplest context means imitation or representation in Greek.
History
Both Plato and Aristotle saw, in mimesis (Greek μίμησις, the representation of nature. However, Plato thought all creation was imitation, and so God's creation was an imitation of the truth and essence of nature, and an artist's re-presentation of this God-created reality therefore was twice-removed imitation.
Aristotle thought of drama as being "an imitation of an action", that of tragedy as of "falling from a higher to a lower estate", and so being removed to a less ideal situation in more tragic circumstances than before. He posited the characters in tragedy as being better than the average human being, and those of comedy as being worse.
Aristotle's most well known work on this subject is his Poetics.
Walter Kaufmann in Tragedy and Philosophy Ch.II suggests that we translate mimêsis in Aristotle’s Poetics as “make-believe”.
Michael Davis, a translator and commentator of Aristotle writes:
"At first glance, mimêsis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the ordinary features of our world are brought into focus by a certain exaggeration, the relationship of the imitation to the object it imitates being something like the relationship of dancing to walking. Imitation always involves selecting something from the continuum of experience, thus giving boundaries to what really has no beginning or end. Mimêsis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is contained within the frame is not simply real. Thus the more “real” the imitation the more fraudulent it becomes." (The Poetry of Philosophy p.3)
More recently Erich Auerbach, Merlin Donald, and René Girard have written about mimesis.
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What God desires is here [points to head] and here [points to heart] and by what you decide to do eveyday, either you will be a good man... or not.
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Greybeard
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Posted: Jun 27th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
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Mimesis in contrast to diegesis (Show & Tell)
It was also Plato and Aristotle who contrasted mimesis with diegesis. In diegesis it is not the form in which a work of art represents reality but that in which the author is the speaker who is describing events in the narrative he presents to the audience.
It is in diegesis that the author addresses the audience or the readership directly to express his freely creative art of the imagination, of fantasies and dreams in contrast to mimesis. Diegesis was thought of as telling, the author narrating action indirectly and describing what is in the character's mind and emotions, while mimesis is seen in terms of showing what is going on in characters' inner thoughts and emotions through his external actions.
Diegesis is multi-levelled in narrative fiction. Genette distinguishes between three "diegetic levels." The extradiegetic level (the level of the narrative's telling) is, according to Prince, "external to (not part of) any diegesis." One might think of this as what we commonly understand to be the narrator's level, the level at which exists a narrator who is not part of the story he tells. The diegetic level is understood as the level of the characters, their thoughts and actions. The metadiegetic level or hypodiegetic level is that part of a diegesis that is embedded in another one and is often understood as a story within a story, as when a diegetic narrator himself/herself tells a story.
What it does
In the arts, mimesis is considered to be re-presenting the human emotions in new ways and thus representing to the onlooker, listener or reader the inherent nature of these emotions and the psychological truth of the work of art.
Mimesis is thus thought to be a means of perceiving the emotions of the characters on stage or in the book; or the truth of the figures as they appear in sculpture or in painting; or the emotions as they are being configured in music, and of their being recognised by the onlooker as part of their human condition.
Some examples how mimesis works in the arts
In sculpture, mimesis mirrors the plasticity of an image an onlooker has with which he can empathize within a given situation. In Rodin's The Kiss, for example, the protective arms of the male and seeming trustfulness of the female figure enclosed within her partner's limbs, down to the stance of their feet, is a position all humans would recognize immediately in that the trust and truth that permeates the erotic element of the statue is that which is entailed in the relationship of any man and woman in a similar situation.
In Picasso's Guernica, the artist re-presents the destruction of life and the terror it causes in a way this kind of cubistic image lends itself to most dramatically. The fractured details of the composition, the tortured faces, the screams that may be almost audibly imagined, the terrified horse, the bull, the dismembered limbs: all these things help making the picture most memorable for the truth it brings to the observer. However, the face of the woman holding a light may be seen either as a face of stoic resignation throwing light on the devastation, or a face of luciferous evil swooping in malevolent satisfaction.
In Beethoven's "6th Symphony" (the Pastoral), music re-presents the various stages of a stay in the country, of a person's emotions and moods that are metamorphosed into movements of music most faithfully corresponding to these emotions. Thus, the pleasurable anticipation on arrival in the country; the various happy scenes of their associating with countryfolk; a shepherd's song; birdsongs; a storm and the thankfulness after it is over; all will be observed and recognised readily by the audience.
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What God desires is here [points to head] and here [points to heart] and by what you decide to do eveyday, either you will be a good man... or not.
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Greybeard
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Posted: Jun 27th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
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Literary criticism
Literary Criticism is primarily concerned with the Bible's literary forms, structures and themes. How does it function to accomplish its purpose? This involves identifying the type and use of the various literary genre such as narrative, poetic, apocalyptic, oratorical, wisdom, epistolary, etc. It includes evaluating the language of a text, looking at the words and their various meanings or shades of meaning and the patterns of meaning ranging from phrases to sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and sections. To analyze these, it is often necessary to examine the grammar of the original language, which includes the arrangement of words and how their forms are changed (inflection or accidence
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What God desires is here [points to head] and here [points to heart] and by what you decide to do eveyday, either you will be a good man... or not.
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Creative Writing Resource - (Read 271 Times)