Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. Second edition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.

Flores's Notes

“Introduction”

3          Important to understand precursor criticism whose legacy still prevails/common—for example, “liberal humanism,” which presents itself as apolitical appreciation of great literature—accordingly, such literature expresses “human nature” as fixed, constant

5          injunction/advice to become a slow reader:--make reading meditative, reflective, personal—SQ3R: Survey the whole chapter; set yourself Questions; Read and mark up the whole piece; close book and Recall what you’ve read and jot down summary points/answers; wait for a day, then Review initially from memory

7          Be patient; believe oneself intellectually capable of understanding; evaluate and determine what is useful

9          take stock/review your experience/study of literature-what do you find most valuable/significant in literature, in your study of literature? key developments?

Chapter 1: “Theory before ‘theory’-liberal humanism

12-13   Brief history of the rise of English studies; in 1840 F.D. Maurice argued that the study of English literature connects readers to what is “fixed and enduring” in their own national identity

15-16   I.A. Richards’ Practical Criticism (1929)—close, precise reading of text isolated from history/context—also F.R. and Q.D. Leavis developed Scrutiny of literature largely independent from language studies, historical considerations, and philosophical questions—the ‘project’ of theory from the 1960s is to re-establish connections between literary study and these fields

17-20 Top ten tenets of liberal humanism

            1. good literature timeless, transcendent, speaks to what is constant in human nature

            2. literary text contains its own meaning (not in subordinate reference to a socio-political, literary-historical, or autobiographical context)

            3. text therefore studied in isolation without ideological assumptions or political conditions—goal of close verbal analysis to ‘see the object as in itself it really is’ (Matthew Arnold pace Kant)

            4. human nature unchanging—continuity valued over innovation

            5. individuality as essence securely possessed by each ‘transcendent subject’ distinct from forces of society, experience, and language

            6. purpose of literature to enhance life in non-programmatic (non-propagandistic) way

            7. form and content fused organically in literature

            8. ‘sincerity’ resides within the language of literature, noted by avoidance of cliché or inflated style so that the distance/difference between words and things is abolished

            9. ‘showing’ valued over ‘telling’—concrete enactment better than expository explanation

            10. criticism should interpret the text unencumbered by theorizing, by preconceived ideas—must trust instead to direct, empirical, sensory encounter text (Lockean legacy)

21-31   Barry reviews key critics/moments in history of criticism: Aristotle, Sidney, Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley (including concern over what distinguishes/typifies/ literary or poetic language; Shelley anticipates Russian formalists’ emphasis on ‘defamiliarization”: for Shelley, poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world” (24)—his criticism also anticipates Freudian notion of mind made up of conscious and unconscious elements—Keats’s ‘negative capability”

Also work of George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Henry James.

Practical criticism track (Arnold, Eliot, Leavis) of close reading

Other track through James is ideas-led, deals with big questions of structure, effects, nature of literary language, relation of literature to politics, gender?

26        Arnold feared with decline of common belief in religion that society needed literature to enable the middle classes debased by materialism and philistinism to recognize “the best that has been known and thought in the world” via canon of great works—goal to attain pure, disinterested knowledge, and employ past touchstones to evaluate present works

28        Eliot’s idea of poetic ‘impersonality’ expressed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—anti-Romantic sense of tradition speaking through and transmitted by the poet; idea of the “objective correlative” also flawed

29        Leavis combined Johnson’s moralism with Arnold’s social vision and anti-theoretical practice

30        Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) combines close reading with recognition that language is very slippery—void of linguistic indeterminacy that anticipates post-structuralism

30        Richards’s practical criticism; American “New Criticism”

32        Barry sketches a liberal humanist/Leavisite response Poet’s “The Oval Portrait” that emphasizes the poem’s moral content—perhaps the artist’s hubris

33        review/preview of transition to theory via Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, structuralist, poststructuralist, new historicist and cultural materialism, postcolonialist and postmodern theories

Some recurrent ideas in critical theory (34-36):

            1. Many notions that we habitually regard as fixed and reliable essences (gender identity, individual selfhood, literature itself) are fluid, unstable, socially constructed, contingent, provisional categories upon which no overarching absolute truths can be established. Contemporary critical theory critiques such premises of essentialism.

            2. All thinking affected and largely determined by ideological commitments—no mode of inquiry is disinterested, not even one’s own (Barry notes that this premise introduces risk of relativism that may undercut one’s argument).

            3. Language conditions and limits what we see—all reality is a linguistic/textual construct

            4. No fixed, definitive, definite readings/meanings—all texts are webs of contradiction with no final court of appeals to render judgment

            5. Distrust of grand, totalizing theories/notions, including notion of “great books” that are somehow identifiably great regardless of a particular socio-political context; likewise, concept of a “human nature” that transcends race, gender , class is untenable, and can be shown to have the effect of marginalizing other categories of identification/affiliation when some general “human nature” is invoked, appealed to

Summary:

Politics is pervasive,

Language is constitutive,

Truth is provisional,

Meaning is contingent,

Human nature is a myth.