00253--Edmaund Burke

Edmaund Burke

On a superficial view we may seem to differ very widely from each other in our reasonings, and no less in our pleasures; but, notwithstanding this difference, which I think to be rather apparent than real, it is probable that the standard both of reason and taste is the same in all human creatures.

[A Philosophical Inquiry In to the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke]

With Edmund Burke there is a shift from an ontological, mimetic and objective approach to literature to an epistemological, pragmatic and subjective approach.  Ontology means in Greek ‘the study of being’.  Ontology concerns itself with determining the essence of things whether that essence being natural or supernatural.  Mimetic theories are those that are concerned with the relationship between the poem and the universe.  Mimetic theories are ontological in their approach because they are interested in what the poem is.  For them poem is an imitation.  Aristotle’s goal to define precisely the proper nature and essence of a well constructed plot makes it an ontological concern. 

The Platonic-Aristotelian debate over mimesis is really a debate over the ontological status of a work of art. They both are asking ‘what’s a poem’.  According to Aristotle a poem possesses its own substance and integrity’.  For, Plato poem is just a shadow.  The debate is again over the ontological status of a poem.  Although the neo-classical theory is partly pragmatic because it is concerned with the response of the audience, it still works within a philosophical framework that is essentially ontological; the theorists are still trying to figure out what a poem is.

The rules of decorum laid down by Horace, Dryden and Pope are less concerned with audience’ response than with what a poem should.  Even Longinus who does define the sublime partly in terms of its effect, is actually concerned with the actual, physical, metaphorical and linguistic qualities of a sublime poem.  Neo-classical theorists are interested in audience response but the audience’s response functions as only one criterion of what makes a work of art great.  They are still more interested in the thingness of a poem.  When contrast ontology with epistemology (study of knowing).  Epistemology is concerned not with the thingness of things but with how we know and proceed with that thingness.

Pragmatic theories in their purest form are epistemological because we are interested in how the audience knows, receives and perceives what they are looking at.  Epistemological theorists seek to explore not just whether or not a poem pleases.  They want more than that.  They want to study the mental processes by which that pleasure is perceived and known. 

For the true epistemological pragmatist beauty does not so much define a quality that inheres in a given poem or painting.  As it describes a certain kind of mental response that are created within the mind of the person who experiences that poem otr painting.  Being only interested in the painting is ontological, whereas the interest in the mental response to that painting is epistemological.  For an epistemologist beauty does not reside in the painting but beauty is in the very way one percieves that painting.  Beauty resides in the mind.

At the core of all epistemology and any theory that is epistemological we have got to make a distinction between subject and object.  In Burke and German philosophy a subject is a conscious self that percieves.  An object is an unconscious thing that doesnot percieve but is rather percieved.  When epistemologists define their response to art as purely subjective what they mean is that the experience of art has nothing to do with the poetic object but exists wholly in the mind of the subject.  This philososophicsl use ofb the word ‘subjective’ shouldn’t be confused with its modern use to signify a person’s relativistic belief.  Philosophically speaking if we speak of an aesthetic response we mean an epistemological, pragmatic and subjective response.   Aestheticians want to set up standards for these subjective responses. 

Burke’s Enquiry

In his work, A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke lays the groud work for understanding how we percieve both art and greater world around us.  For Burke the ground work and means of all perception is the senses.  Burke can be called an empiricist- knowledge comes through senses or experience.  He believes that all of us have equal access to sense perception.  The senses are the great originals of all our ideas.  Therefore it is possible to arrive at a universal principle of judgement, -eventhough judgement is subjective- because it all happens via the senses and we all have access to the senses.  Therefore we can set down universal standards of judgement.  Universal-subjective seems to be a paradox but Burke believes that fixed laws are possible in aesthetics, literary criticism and the like.    

From universal sense experience to universal principle of taste

According to Burke all people percieves external objects in the same way.  We all recognise that sugar issweet and tobacco is bitter.  We find more natural pleasure in sweet that in the bitter.  Habits can make you prefer tobacco to sugar.  But habits can never abolish our knowledge that tobacco is not sweet and sugar is not bitter.  The senses are the base.  The power of imagination and judgement are based on senses.  Senses are at the botttom, radiating out of senses are imagination and judgement.  Imagination is also called sensibility.

According to Burke imagination or sensibility takes the raw material offered it by sense perception and then recombines that material in a new way.  Although the imagination can be quite inventive it cannot produce anything new.  It can only vary what is given it by the senses.  So whatever affects our imagination powerfully, whatever brings us pleasure or pain must have similar effect on all men.  Though it is a huge assumption it is central to Bruke and the epistemological aesthetic project.  If so we all should take pleasure and pain in the same things.  Therefore though we perceive things separately somehow we all perceive them the same. 

Both imagination and judgment are based on senses.  Imagination is linked primarily to immediate perceptions and has about it an almost child like quality.  Imagination is direct, intuitive and child like.  Judgment is a higher critical faculty that is closely linked to reason.  Judgment is gained through an increasing understanding brought about by a long close study of the object of sensation.  Still the judgment rest in the senses and therefore judgment also share common nature.  Based on judgment and imagination there is ‘taste’ or ‘aesthetic taste’.  Since taste is based on imagination and judgment which are based on the senses taste too must be common to all men.  But there are exceptions according to Burke.  If our imagination or judgment is bad or deficient it will affect our taste.  For Burke there are some people whose natures are blunt and cold.  These people are deficient in imagination or sensibility.  Sometimes these people have weakened their imaginative facilities through hedonism or avarice.   If our imagination is blunted we will end up suffering from a lack of taste.  That is to be distinguished from people that are deficient in judgment.  If one is deficient in judgment one will have bad taste.  Lack of taste or no taste is the result of deficiency in imagination.

Taste according to Burke differs from person to person not in kind but in degree.  The principles of taste operate the same in all men, but the end result may not be the same.  Some men due to a keener sensibility (imagination) or greater knowledge and discernment have a fuller or more refined sense of taste.  Burke is at the same time democratic and highly elitist.

Imagination tends toward synthesis whereas judgment tends toward analysis.  Imagination brings things together; it discovers and even creates unity in the midst of differences. Judgment is more analytical.  It discerns subtle distinction in what appears to be uniform.  Although burke asserts that sensibility is essential to taste Burke finally gives preferences to judgment as the true foundation of taste. 

The sublime and the beautiful

  Burke defines the sublime and the beautiful in totally epistemological terms.  For Burke beautiful and sublimity are not qualities of the object rather they are faculties of perception that can be categorised.  The sublime and the beautiful is something that happens in the observer, not in the painting or the poem.  Burke defines sublime as that which inspires in us feeling of terror (1992, p340).  Sublimity is defined by the impact that has on us by the way we percieve it subjectively and epistemologically.  Dark, gloomy and massive objects invoking us an overwhelming feeling of power and infinity.  Terror produces within us a mental, emotional response that Burke calls astonishment.  The sublime has this effect on us.  In that moment everything is suspended and our mind is totally filled by an object or thought.  For Burke, the sublime  is not only experienced through our eye and our ear it is also experienced through the senses of taste, smell and touch.  There are such things as sublime sounds or sublime taste.  We can percieve the sublime through all the fiv of our senses.

Indeed such sublimity is a mental experience, it manifests itself in our body by causing our hands to clench and our musceles to construct.  To be sublime there cannot be actual terror; if we were really in danger that is not the sublime but that is just terror.  On the other hand the beautiful is that which inspires in us sentiments of tenderness and affection.  So whereas the sublime is more masculine and is closely allied to pain the beautiful is more feminineand is linked to pleasure and love.  Beauty like sublimity can be percieved by all the senses.

The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. And this may arise from a natural weakness of understanding; (in whatever the strength of that faculty may consist), or, which is much more commonly the case, it may arise from a want of a proper and well-directed exercise, which a:lone can make it strong and ready. Besides, that ignorance, inattention, prejudice, rashness, levity, obstinacy, in short, all those passions, and all those vices, which pervert the judgment in other matters, prejudice it no less in this its more refined and elegant province. These causes produce different opinions upon everything which is an object of the understanding, without inducing us to suppose that there are no settled principles of reason.

[A Philosophical Inquiry In to the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke]

00250--RASA/Indian Aesthetics/Literary Term

Indian aesthetics has borrowed highly from the myths and legends related to Krishna.  Krishna is the archetypal rasika . Indian philosophers  emphasis on the importance of rasa in understanding and appreciating the arts in general, and the theatre arts in particular. 

1.      The rasa theory was originally formulated by BHARATHA in his treatise NATYASHASTRA.

2.      Rasa is not of one kind but of many, it is the total of many ingredients.  Guna or Value is one of the ingredients.

3.      From  BHARATHA  onwards the term signified the aesthetic pleasure or thrill, invariably accompanied with joy that the audience/spectator/reader, experience while witnessing/hearing the enactment or reading of a drama or poem.

4.      In Sanskrit aesthetics, the term employed initially in the context of drama and later poetry.

5.      For BHARATHA the main purpose of dramatic performance is to create and enact the rasas.  He clarifies his point by using an analogy: just as rasa (flavor) issues from the combination of many spices, herbs and other dravyas, so does rasa in drama, as it comes from the combination of many bhavas.

00224--What distinction does Coleridge make between FANCY and IMAGINATION? [English Literature free notes]

Imagination for Coleridge is the creative faculty possessed by poets.  This shaping power of imagination enables the poet to configure the work as a unified whole.  Both primary and secondary imagination—the former is involuntary where as the latter is a conscious form—have the same faculty of recreation.  Fancy on the contrary is made of memory emancipated from the order of time and space, modified by the empirical phenomenon of the will.  Coleridge makes poetic genius identical with imagination, and poetic talent with fancy.

00212—Central issues/concerns of Postcolonial studies [Post-colonialism/Postcolonial literature] [English Literature free notes]

The central issues are:
1. The rejection of the “master narrative” of Western imperialism,
2. Concern with the construction of the colonial and postcolonial subject, and,
3. Disestablishing the Eurocentric norms of literary and artistic values.

1.    The colonial other is marginalized and subordinated in the master narrative where the central power is western imperialism.  Traditionally, the Eurocentric notions regulated the art and literature.  But here there is a revolution. The master narrative is replaced by a counter-narrative.  By doing this the colonial cultures fight their way back into a world history manipulated by Europeans.

2.     Postcolonial studies are also concerned with the categories of by means of which this subject conceives itself and perceives the world within which it lives and acts. The colonial subject=Subaltern.  Subaltern is a British word stands for a low ranked military personnel. Sub=under. Alter=other. (Latin) Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak is an important work in this field. 

3.    The main agenda of post colonialist thinkers is to destroy the centre that holds the power (here it is Eurocentric norms) so that both the colonial and postcolonial writers can come under one umbrella. 

00198--Dissociation of Sensibility [T.S.Eliot]

 The best 3 books for Literary terms are :

1. A Glossary of Literary Term  [M.H.ABRAMS]

2.THE PENGUIN DICTIONARY OF LITERARY
TERMS AND LITERARY THEORY

3.  The Concise Oxford Dictionary of
Literary Terms

The phrase was used by T. S. Eliot in his essay The Metaphysical Poets. The relevant and self- explanatory passage is:

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza" and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

'We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which would devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two more powerful poets of the century Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress. Eliot contended that modern poets like Corbibre and Laforgue had 'dissociation avoided the of sensibility'. Certainly they had a considerable influence on Eliot, and the combined effect of the influence of Hopkins, Yeats, Pound and Eliot has been potent.

00197--Psychoanalytical (literary) Criticism [Freud-sexuality-the id-the ego-the super ego-parapraxis-repression-Freudian slips-libido-Oedipus complex-taboo-dream work-latent dream content-manifest dream content]]

"The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech" [Freud]

Freud employed the method of “reading” to understand the unconscious or the hidden psyche of the patients who visited his clinic.  It was mainly done by making the patient speak.  By interpreting his/her words the diagnosis was carried out.  So words were the key to the psyche of a person.  Psychoanalytic criticism adopts this method to interpret a text. Psychoanalytic criticism argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author.   Here a literary work is seen as a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze a particular character created by the author within a literary work , but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's psyche.  Lacan is another important figure in Psychoanalytic criticism who said “Unconscious is structured like language”.  Here we will see only the theories of Freud that paved the path for the Psychoanalytical Criticism.  Lacan started from where Freud stopped.

                                                ONE

Language is the medium through which unconscious expresses its desires.

Freud emphasized that language concealed, revealed or modified hidden desires, anxieties and fears.  LANGUAGE IS THE MEDIUM THROUGH WHICH UNCONSCIOUS EXPRESSES ITS DESIRES.

Freud’s point was that desire does not express easily because culture does not allow or facilitate it, and we need to pay attention to language and other forms of symbolic expressions—gestures, sounds, facial expressions, writing—to discover it. 

This way Freud was exploring the link between the language and the unconscious; a move that was to become the core of both Psychoanalytic practice and criticism.  FREUD EXPLORED THE LINK BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS.

            Literary texts allow the unconscious to express itself.  This was Freud’s insight.  THE MECHANISMS OF UNCONSCIOUS, OF DESIRES AND FEARS ALSO REQUIRED AND ACQUIRED A LANGUAGE OF THEIR OWN.

                                                TWO

                             SEXUALITY

Since society is the drive that is most subject to the social and cultural norms of control, classical Freudian theory emphasizes the role of the individual’s sexuality in making of an unconscious.

Sexuality is most controlled by the society.  Individual’s sexuality builds the unconscious, and it unconscious builds the subjectivity, and subjectivity builds the human psyche.

                        The structure of the human psyche  

a.    The Super-Ego;

Is what can be called our conscience.  It is drawn from social settings and cultural codes.  It does influence the way the conscious works. 

b.    The Ego [conscious mind]

Is the conscious mind, which we work with, use and most aware of.  It mediates between ID and SUPER-EGO.

c.     The Id;

This is an area of instincts, dreams, desires and all that does not come to the fore in our consciousness.  This is the unconscious. 

                                         

                                       

                                    THREE

         PARAPRAXIS [Freudian slips]

                                          Freud proposed that the human psyche has an area into which go all those desires and fantasies that cannot be expressed.  The area is UNCONSCIOUS; because we are not aware of its existence. 

Repression = is the process through which certain desires, especially sexual, are pushed into the unconscious so that they do not influence our daily lives and our conscious mind.  [The concept of repression according to Freud is the CORNERSTONE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS.] 

However, what is repressed does not always stay repressed.  The unconscious emerges in particular moments as images, dreams, jokes and even art.  These jokes are known as Freudian slips or Parapraxis.    

  For literary criticism this  (the emergence of the unconscious in the form of art, dreams, jokes, images) is an important insight.  Freud was proposing that ART DRAWS UPON THE UNCONSCIOUS for its themes and images.

 

FOUR

                    TWO PRINCIPLES

All human life, for Freud, is caught in the tensions generated by two principles.  They are:

1.      THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE, and,

2.      THE REALITY PRINCIPLE.

The Pleasure Principle is one where all our acts are governed by the need to attain pleasure and avoid ‘un-pleasure’.  All acts are for pleasure.

The Reality Principle enables us to understand that our pleasure cannot all be fulfilled the way we want them, and, therefore, inspire us to seek other routes of attaining pleasure.   

Five

 Libido

Sexuality is the primary ‘drive’ in our subjectivity according to Freud.  He termed this the libido. What gets repressed primarily is the sex drive.

An individual’s sexual identity is, hence, partly the result of expression of desires and partly the condition caused by a repression of the same.

In order to explain the sexual identity or libido of a person Freud developed the idea of the OEDIPUS COMPLEX.

            Six

 The Oedipus Complex

Step 1.  The problem with sexual desires begins with the (male) child’s dependency on the mother.  Love for the mother is a dominant theme in child’s psyche.

Step 2.  Soon the child sees his father as a rival for the mother’s love.  The father restricts the child’s expression of love through a threat (a threat that the child imagines) of castration. 

Step 3.   The child therefore begins to develop fantasies of killing his father so that he (the child) will have no rivals for his mother’s love.  This fantasy is what Freud famously called the Oedipus Complex.

Step 4.  Soon the child sees the father as possessing the greater authority in the relationship (child-mother-father).  This marks the shift in affiliation; the child now seeing the father as the source of all power and desire, shifts his focus to the father.

Step 5.  The desire for the mother is shut away in the unconscious when the child accepts the law that “you shall not make love to your mother”.  This law becomes the threshold of the conscious-unconscious. 

Seven

 Taboo

For Freud the Oedipus complex is the source of all repressed desire, the emblem of all that is repressed because even love is antagonistic in nature.  The Oedipus complex enabled Freud to argue that all desire, repression and anxiety are based on the CONDITION OF PROHIBITION or what he termed Taboo.

The child never really overcomes the complex, but merely shuts it away.

Eight

 Dreams and Unconscious

Freud described dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, arguing that dreams provide us with the best understanding of the repressed desires in us.  Dreams are codes, presenting themselves as complex images so that the repressing force is bypassed.

For Freud [this is the link to psychoanalytic criticism] dreams are a language, the language of the unconscious and of repressed desires.  This language is termed DREAM WORK.

Nine

 Dream Work

Dream work has two central dimensions:

a.     LATENT DREAM CONTENT : IS THE ACTUAL CONTENT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS THAT SEEKS EXPRESSION

b.     MANIFEST DREAM CONTENT: IS THE EXPRESSION OF THE CONTENT IN THE FORM OF IMAGES OR EVENT IN ONE’S DREAM

Freud argued that the latent dream content undergoes four process or stages—the dream work—before it expresses itself in the manifest dream. They are:

1.      Condensation: the latent content is condensed in the manifest dream.

2.      Displacement: here the latent dream content works as association, and then is expressed in complex images.

3.      Representation and Representability: the language of the dream often uses complex images that have no apparent basis in reality.

4.      Secondary Revision: the dreamer himself/herself interprets the dream, but revises it in the process.

Ten

 Conclusion

To conclude, at this point it becomes clear that  for Freud;

a.     Art and dreams are both means of expressing desires.

b.    Art and dreams are mechanisms of avoiding the censorship that prohibits desire or its expression.

c.      Art and dreams bypass consciousness when they express the repressed desires.

end

00196--What is Post-Colonial Reading?

Post-Colonial Reading is an approach (that includes the reading and rereading of texts) toward texts of both metropolitan and colonial cultures to draw deliberate attention to the deep and inexorable effects of colonization on literary production; anthropological accounts; historical records; administrative and scientific writing. It is a form of deconstructive reading most usually applied to works emanating from the colonizers (but may be applied to works by the colonized) which demonstrates the extent to which the text contradicts its underlying assumptions (civilization, justice, aesthetics, sensibility, race) and reveals its (often unwitting) colonialist ideologies and processes.