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"Ah--ha, that's great! I love it."
「本詩意境深遠，耐人尋味﹒」
Are these examples of literary criticism? No.
Objectives
Literary criticism is different from Literary
appreciation: the latter involves expressions of your
feelings and pleasure in reading, your likes and dislikes of
a text, while the former, as a formal training for
literature majors, requires both literary sensibility and
critical thinking. In other words, literary criticism
consists of careful analysis of literary texts with a
conscious use of some critical frameworks and methods and an
active engagement in their critical issues.
(For further details on what literary criticism is, please
view this animation.
(http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/video/animation/lit1.swf)
In this course, therefore, we will try to
improve our abilities in:
1. analyzing literary texts from more than
one critical perspective;
2. responding critically to the issues raised by the chosen
literary or
cultural texts;
3. placing, with the help of some critical theories,
literature and the
issues involved in a larger context, such as
those of the texts'
contemporary society, our society and our
lives.
In order
to have a sense of focus in the vast fields of critical
theories, we will choose Love, Desire and Class as
our major topics. The questions we discuss will be:
How does a text produce its meanings both
through form and content?
What do the texts we examine say about love,
desire and class differences?
Are there
meanings hidden in the texts and/or unknown to their
authors? If so, what are they and why?
The four critical
schools will be used to help us examine the texts' meanings
and hidden meanings from various perspectives:
· New Criticism (2 wks)-textual
meanings constructed through formal
unity, or with the assumptions of human
liberalism.
· Psychoanalysis (5 wks) -textual meanings driven or
repressed by
desires of the authors or society;
· Marxism (5 wks) -textual meanings of social
relations and
ideologies;
· Cultural Studies (4 wks)- textual meanings produced
in our culture
or global culture. |