For Adrienne Rich, life as she knew it was an inventive thing that society told people was natural. For example, Viriginia Woolf was not able to go to college because she was a female, and society dictated that this was normal. To be heterosexual was the normal thing. If you were not heterosexual, you were not normal. However, do we not find homosexual and asexual creatures throughout nature? Why is it that it is pretty much our own species that have a problem with it and no other species? Below is a site I found that talks about Rich's theories.
When reading Brooks, we are introduced to the word heresy. Heresy is going against something sacred. For example, if you go to church, but you don't believe with what their views are. We are next introduced to the term heresy of a paraphrase. Well what does that mean? It means that paraphrasing poetry is a heresy. It is a heresy because the experience of reading the poem is what makes the poem. You cannot get the meaning of the poem through paraphrasing. We need to be able to see the whole structure of a poem. Brooks says, " The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balacing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings." Brooks is saying that a good poem is one thats structures harmonizes and balances. A good poem represents a unity. It pulls it all together.
Below is a video of Alfred Lord Tennyson and his poem "Tears, Idle Tears." Brooks says "When the poet is able, as in 'Tears, Idle Tears', to analyze his experience, and in the full light of the disparity and even apparent contradiction of the various elements, bring them into a new unity, he secures not only richness and depth but dramatic power as well."
Bakhtin introduces the idea of heteroglossia. Heteroglossia means many different tyoes of speech and languages. Different languages could include languages between professionals, trade, generation, and slang. When I think of trade language, I think about restaraunt language. As a server, I know that there are many words that someone who does not work in the restaurant buisness would not know. Bakhtin said that the novel is what ties all of these languages together in a way that works. It actually becomes a work of art. There is a good article about Bakhtin and his views at http://tinyurl.com/7d9h34h.
Bakhtin also discusses the term dialogical. He says that each and every word is already in a dialogue in which it already has a meaning surrounding it. It is hard to put our own meaning to it. Usually, people are never more than half successful at doing this. I never really thought about this until this class. It makes sense, though. Words are way older than we are, so there is really no way to use a word and be able to put only what we want to mean into it.
In "mimesis" Auerbach gives two different styles of reading. There is Greek, or Helenic, reading and there is Hebrew, or secular, reading. With Greek, it is precise. The present moment is all there is. There is nothing to interpret. The characters do not develop. However, with Hebrew, the reading lacks visual specifactions. But it shows more foreground and depth. The characters will develop. Auerbach said, "Let no one object that this goes too far, that not the stories, but the religious doctrine, raises the claim to absolute authority; because the stories are not, like Homer's, simply narrated "reality." Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseperable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with "background" and mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning." What he is saying is that secular reading always has another meaning, like in Dante. It has a deeper meaning beneath the surface.
John Crowe Ransom believed that criticism is a kind of anaylsis for literary technic. It is an uncovering of an art by which a writer achieves cobbled together metaphor, sound, and meaning. He believed that representation was just re-representation. For example, when you say to someone "guess just what happened to me?" Then you re-tell the story. One of my favorite quotes in Criticism, Inc. was when he said " the critic should regard the poem as nothing short of a desperate ontological or metaphysical manuevre. The poet himself, in the agony of composition, has something like this sense of his labors. The poet perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch. His poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, and qualitatively infinite." What Ransom is trying to tell us is that art is better than life. A poet captures art in language and language never fades. It will always be concrete and beautiful. The poem captures beauty and joy for forever. If we are having a bad day, art will still be beautiful. It will still be able to take our breath away and that is something that will never change.
Below is a great article on Ransom published by the Poetry Foundation
The video that I have put below is one of Ransom's poems. I thought it was a very beautiful, powerful, and sad poem.
