Dr. Vijayalayan's Literature Notes

  A critical approach may be defined as a specialized mode of analysis, which is based on a detailed body of ideas or assumptions that constitutes its conceptual basis. There are many critical approaches available for consideration, of which three may be regarded as quintessential in character. These are the sociological, the psychological and the textual approach respectively. The reason as to why the three mentioned are identified as quintessential is because each provide a distinct analytic take on the literary work of art under scrutiny, via focusing on diverse aspects concerning the text. The idea becomes clear when we appraise the approaches separately, as it has been attempted below.   SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH       Sociological approach refers to a method of literary analysis in which the work of art is examined in relation to the sociopolitical context in which it was written. According to this approach, the sensibilities of an author is invar...

  Originally printed as a three part article in the periodical The Egoist in 1919, Tradition and the Individual Talent was published in its entirety the following year in the collection The Sacred Wood . Though disclaimed by Eliot himself in the latter part of his career as one of his most juvenile pronouncements, the work continues to remain ever popular, and contains one of his most important postulations namely the impersonal theory of poetry. This theory which has come to be identified as the cornerstone of Eliot’s critical corpus has two aspects to it, tradition and individual talent, both of which reinforce the conception of poetry as an autonomous objective phenomenon.   Tradition     According to Eliot, prior to taking up the endeavor of writing poetry, one must seek to acquire a sense or knowledge of two factors, poems by the past generations of poets and poems by those of the present. Obtaining this knowledge of poems by both past and present p...

  The Study of Poetry was originally published as an introduction to an anthology of poems entitled The English Poets edited by T. H. Ward brought out in1880. As the very title suggests, the main objective of Matthew Arnold in writing it is to come up with an authentic method for judging the real worth of a poem. However, prior to doing so, Arnold clarifies why such a method is needed by setting forth the greatness of poetry, its essential nature, the erroneous ways it could be misjudged, before eventually concluding by offering a succinct survey of English poetry.   Greatness of Poetry       Charles Darwin in his renowned book on the idea of natural selection cast an indelible shadow over the Biblical view that humanity was created by God. He proved with evidence that every species of this world basically typifies a product of evolution, and in this regard declared that human beings originated from apes. This incited an intense backlash between r...

      Lyrical Ballads refers to a poetic collection brought out in 1798, which consists of verses by the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The work carries a great deal of historical significance in that it is generally taken to mark the dawn of the Romantic Revival movement in English poetry. The historical significance attributed to the work basically emanates from the fact that the poems compiled in the collection were instrumental in initiating a paradigm shift with regard to how poetry was subsequently conceived and composed in England.   The Preface       The basic reason why Wordsworth affixed a Preface to Lyrical Ballads is to provide an elucidation of the avowed principles underlying the poems contained in the collection. This of course is warranted by the fact that the poems in it mark a conscious break with the neoclassical vein of writing poetry, which had conditioned the English public’s taste in poetry for...

Clarification       The word criticism is invariably used in everyday conversation in the meaning of censure or finding fault. After all, to criticise is essentially construed as an act of passing negative remarks on somebody or something. This however is a prevalent misconception. Criticism comes from the Greek ‘Kritikos’ meaning critic which in turn derives itself from ‘kritos’ meaning a judge. Criticism thus literally denotes judgement, which implies the idea of discerning both the positive and negative qualities with regard to the phenomenon under scrutiny. The reason as to why the term is employed in a predominantly pejorative sense, primarily comes down to the fact that as humans we tend to be relatively far more perceptive of the negatives than the positives while judging. Considering what criticism truly means, it naturally follows that literary criticism exemplifies the activity of deciphering and setting forth the merits and demerits of a literary work....