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KELOMPOK 4

Sanjaya
Daniel Sibarani

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120705028

Putri Juniarti

120705032

Dini Andiani

120705036

Gayatri Ofisowina

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1. How to differentiate the three major schools of comparatists (the French,


the American, the Russian)?
The American School:
The American school came as a reaction against the French school.
It's main aim was to depoliticize comparative literature by going beyond the
political borders of literary texts.
It is mainly based on universalism and interdisciplinarity.
It is has mainly two fields of study:
Parallelism:
It does not give importance to the link of causality.
It gives no importance to influence. There is a possibility of dealing with literary
texts not being in contact of whatsoever kind but having similar contexts or
realities.
If influence exists between literary texts, the importance does not lie in the
influence itself but rather in the context. If the context does not allow for
influence to be effective, influence will never take place in the first place.
Intertextuality:
It is the reference of a given text to another text.
New texts are superposed on old texts.
New texts (Hypertexts) are always read under the light of old texts (Hypotexts).
Literature is a continuous and an ongoing process of reworking and refashioning
old text.
Old texts turn into some sort of raw materials used for the creation of new ones.
The French and Russian School:
The French school sets conditions on both the studied literary texts on the one
hand as well as on the relationship of influence between them on the other hand.
It is also obsessed with terminology and makes distinction between influence,
reception, borrowing and imitation. Comparatists of the French School also

distinguish between direct / indirect influence, literary / non-literary influence,


positive / negative influence.
All the conditions set by the French school has led the discipline of comparative
literature to a dead end.
Because it obsessed itself with the link of causality, more investigations were
made outside the texts instead of dealing with the texts themselves. The
discipline lost its track and failed to meet the purposes it has set for itself at the
beginning mainly when it comes to defeating nationalism. Instead of eliminating
it, it has accentuated it.

The fields of study of comparative literature according to the French


school:
1. Literary Schools and Genres
2. Ideological Echoes
3. Image Echoes
4. Verbal Echoes
5. Human Models and Heroes
2. Please discuss how comparative literature becomes both an academic
discipline and critical system.
Comparative literature as an academic discipline has an approach that covers
aspects of themes (1), (2) type/form, (3) movement/trend, (4) literary
connectedness with other artistic disciplines and media, and (5) the history of
literary theory. Furthermore, Clements mention basics review that was made as a
step from the comparison of literature namely, (1) the starting point of the genre
and form, (2) the starting point of the period, flow, and influence, and (3) the
starting point themes and myths.

Historicism

Historicism is literature read with history, especially cultural history.


For Literature classes, the main impact of historicist study of literature
may be text selection.

In formalist literary studies, texts are typically restricted to "creative


writing" or "belles-lettres": poetry, fiction, drama, with occasional
autobiographies and essays. Following the mid-20c prestige of New
Criticism, these texts are usually read as autonomous or stand-alone
works expressing universal human values.

In historicist literary studies, creative-writing genres continue to


dominate reading lists, but historical, economic, legal, and
government documents may also be read as literary texts. For
example, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin might be read
with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Instead of independent or
autonomous literary texts expressing their own unique meanings,
texts are read together, intertextually.

How literature and history may interact through historicism:


A literary text may be related to history then or now.

History then may illuminate the historical motive, evolution, and


meaning of a past text's features . . . how the text had meaning for
readers then. For example:
o A study of Puritanism in the 1600s creates a context for
Hawthorne's fiction in the 1800s (e.g., The Scarlet Letter, "The
Minister's Black Veil").
o Knowledge of Slavery and Abolition informs antebellum
literature written by Frederick Douglass or Harriet Beecher
Stowe
o The forms and scenes created by the Jazz Age (1910s-20s)
affect F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing of The Great Gatsby, "Winter
Dreams"

OR, instead
of
merely reflecting history, literature
may shape history then or now. In this sense, literature is history.
Most of our knowledge of the past comes through writing or other records.
Writing shapes our idea of later reality.

Stories of the Revolutionary War (suffering, sacrifice, honor, liberty)


create expectations of struggle, sacrifice, valor, and triumph
centuries later.

The Pilgrims' Thanksgiving dinner with American Indians becomes a


fantasy of White-Indian harmony repeated or imagined on later
phases of the frontier.

Immigrant narratives model or inspire American Dream narratives


for earlier immigrant descendants.

Slave narratives and other minority literature may generate an


alternative history of America beyond the American Dream /
immigrant narrative.

Tarzan becomes Africa (until African writers emerge to counter that


description)

The Scarlet Letter or The Crucible represents the Puritans. How else
do we know them?

OR, the survival or appeal of a particular story may illuminate our


present history. What about us now responds to an event or story from
earlier in history? (while ignoring other stories?)
Positivism

Concept that only scientific knowledge is the true knowledge of the world
perceived through senses (the observable phenomenon). In the original
Comtean usage, the term "positivism" roughly meant the use of scientific
methods to uncover the laws according to which both physical and human
events occur, while "sociology" was the overarching science that would
synthesize all such knowledge for the betterment of society. "Positivism is
a way of understanding based on science"; people don't rely on the faith
of god but instead of the science behind humanity.
SainteBeuves descriptive comparative literary criticism was meant to
establish a database of human character types and thereby lay the
groundwork for a future science of morals. Scherer, on the other hand,
was mainly interested elaborating inductive hypotheses on the causal
determination of individual life and literary history by various social and
physiological factors.
Patriotism

Patriotism is, generally speaking, emotional attachment to a nation which


an individual recognizes as their homeland. This attachment also known
as national feeling or national pride, can be viewed from different features
relating to one's own nation, like ethnic, cultural, political or historical
aspects. It is a set of concepts closely related to those of nationalism. The

excess of patriotism in the defense of a nation is called chauvinism. The


example is Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Electicism

Eclecticism is a conceptual approach that does not hold rigidly to a single


paradigm or set of assumptions, but instead draws upon multiple theories,
styles, or ideas to gain complementary insights into a subject, or applies
different theories in particular cases. It refers to the practice of consulting
a wide diversity of witnesses to a particular original. The practice is based
on the principle that the more independent transmission histories are, the
less likely they will be to reproduce the same errors. What one omits, the
others may retain; what one adds, the others are unlikely to add.
Eclecticism allows inferences to be drawn regarding the original text,
based on the evidence of contrasts between witnesses.

Realism

Literary realism is part of the realist art movement beginning with mid
nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal), and Russian literature
(Alexander Pushkin) and extending to the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. Literary realism, in contrast to idealism, attempts to
represent familiar things as they are.Realist authors chose to depict
everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of using a
romanticized or similarly stylized presentation. Literary critic Ian Watt,
however, dates the origins of realism in United Kingdom to the early 18thcentury novel.
Characteristic:

Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective


presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at
the expense of a well-made plot
Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical
choices are often the subject.
Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and
motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to
their social class, to their own past.
Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests
and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. (See Ian Watt, The Rise
of the Novel)
Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the
sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.
Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be
comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.

Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt


authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century
progresses.
Interior or psychological realism a variant form.
In Black and White Strangers, Kenneth Warren suggests that a basic
difference between realism and sentimentalism is that in realism,
"the redemption of the individual lay within the social world," but in
sentimental fiction, "the redemption of the social world lay with the
individual" (75-76).

Utilitiarianism

Utilitarianism is the idea that the worth of an action is determined


exclusively by it's usefulness in maximizing utility (or minimizing negative
utility). Different utilitarian schools have different definitions of 'utility'.
Peter Singer and many contemporary utilitarians are preference
utilitarians, they believe that utility (or 'good') is the maximization of one's
preference. Jeremy Bentham and the classical utilitarians were hedonists,
they defined utility as happiness (Bentham did not make a distinction
between 'lower' and 'higher' pleasures, all pleasures were equal in quality
to him and differed only in terms of quantity, that is, intensity and
duration). Most people claim to be opposed to utilitarianism despite the
fact that they employ utilitarian reasoning in at least some scenarios. For
many utilitarians, an act is right when it is useful in bringing about a good
end (something with intrinsic value). For Bentham and Mill these intrinsic
goods (things every rational person values) are pleasure and happiness.
Although these terms are often interchangeable, we can distinguish
hedonistic utilitarianism (Bentham) from eudaemonistic utilitarianism
(Mill). Other utilitarians include friendship, health and knowledge among
the intrinsic ends that utilitarianism ought to bring about.
The theory of utilitarianism has been criticized for many reasons. Critics
hold that it does not provide adequate protection for individual rights, that
not everything can be measured by the same standard, and that
happiness is more complex than reflected by the theory. Mill's essay
represents his attempt to respond to these criticisms, and thereby to
provide a more complex and nuanced moral theory.
New Criticism

In addition to William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, New Criticism first


developed in mainly in America through the work of displaced Southern
critics like Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crow Ransom,
who established a movement known as "The Fugitives" that gave New
Criticism its philosophical motivation in seeking refuge from 1940s-50s
post-war cultural materialism in a kind aesthetic-religious embrace of
literature as a source of cultural integrity. In England, at Cambridge, I. A.

Richards and his student, William Empson, developed the importance of


ambiguity and other rhetorical "tropes" for packing additional meanings
into literary language. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., wrote the last "canonical"
statement of New Criticism's methods that added an important test of
"meaning" (the "horizon of interpretation") and a crucial separation of
"meaning," which does not change and is the product of competent
reading, from "significance," which does change and is the product of
interpretation. For a list with dates of publication of NC's "Bible" articles
and books, click here. For specific essays and books, see Tyson's reading
lists on 164-5.
New Critical methods can work with any work of literature, but they
are especially effective at explaining works like lyric poems in which
meaning is very densely packed in elliptical sentences or phrases, i.e.,
sentences in which words are simply left out for economy and to force
readers to supply them. For this reason, many New Critics call all
literature "poems," including works in prose. They treat novelists' word
choices with as much careful scrutiny as those of a sonneteer. These
same close-reading methods work well for longer works, like novels, epics,
romances, and major dramas, but the analyst must select numerous
passages for close reading to demonstrate that an interpretive pattern is
widely distributed in the work, rather than being a local exception.
Phenomena, Actions, and Interpretive Practices New Criticism Opposed as
Irrelevant to Literary Criticism-author's intention

biographical fallacy

genetic fallacy

reader's
response

impressionism

relativism

heresy of paraphrase

poem as artifact
poem as meaning

paraphrase

affective

vs.

Attributes of poems' language ("figures") you should seek by "close


reading" in "objective" or "intrinsic criticism" (New Criticism)-irony

ambiguity

paradox

denotation

implication (vs.
inference)

connotation

image

symbol (image with metaphor


or
simile
literal and figurative (image
with
only
meaning)
figurative meaning)

Note that irony, ambiguity, and paradox are only a few of the poetic
figures which a New Critical reading might discover implying thematic
connotations implied in a poem, but in the early history of New Criticism,
they were the most commonly discovered strategies by which poems
resolved their tensions into themes of universal significance.

What are the attributes of a good verbal object (AKA "poem")?-timelessness

autonomy

organic unity

complex tensions (often


embodied in figurative resolution of tensions in
universal significance
language,
producing a theme
connotations)
Review of the NC methods at work in Cleanth Brooks, "The Motivation of
Tennyson's Weeper," The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of
Poetry (N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1947, rpt. 1975).
New Criticism -- Methods:
A. From parts to an organic whole
1. finding the tensions and conflicts, ambiguity, paradox, irony
2. connotation and denotations
3. poetic elements: metaphor, simile, personification, prosody,
4. narrative elements: tone, point of view, narrative structure
B. whole--a. What--s it about? b. your thesis

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