ENG 110 Introduction to Literary Studies – Week 1

Text and Context

What is Literary Studies?
…what is it for, and how do we do it?
 What is the purpose of literature and
why do we read?
MORALITY/SOCIAL GOOD
PLEASURE INTELLECTUAL
DEVELOPMENT

EMPATHY
ESCAPISM

UNLOCK
KNOWLEDGE
MEANING

INTERPRETIVE
LITERACY SKILLS
 Aesthetics (OED)
Adjective:
concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty:the pictures
give great aesthetic pleasure
giving or designed to give pleasure through beauty:the law applies
to both functional and aesthetic objects

Noun:
a set of principles underlying the work of a particular artist or
artistic movement:the Cubist aesthetic

Origin: late 18th century (in the sense 'relating to perception by the
senses'): from Greek aisthētikos, from aisthēta 'perceptible things',
from aisthesthai 'perceive'. The sense 'concerned with beauty' was
coined in German in the mid 18th century and adopted into English
in the early 19th century.
 Ethics (OED)
Noun
[usually treated as plural] moral principles that govern a
person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity:
medical ethics also enter into the question
[usually treated as singular] the branch of knowledge that
deals with moral principles: neither metaphysics nor ethics
is the home of religion

The term ‘ethics’ has perhaps come to replace the idea

of ‘morality’ in the way we think about literary texts in
C20th and C21st.
 What is Literary Studies?
✎a discipline and a method
Disciplina - from the Latin term for
instruction.

By the medieval period discipline meant:

• the seven liberal arts, taught at University
• any subject taught at university
• branches of learning that proceed
methodologically (mathematics and logic)
• science

Liberal Arts:
• Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic)
• Quadrivium (Mathematics, Geometry,
Music and Astronomy)
• governed by Philosophy

Joseph J. Kockelmans, Interdisciplinarity and Higher Education

(Penn State Press, 1975), pp.16-17 From Herrad von Landsberg, Hortus Deliciarum, c. 1180
 Literary Studies and the
Renaissance Humanities
Renaissance Humanism (15th century Italy)

• studia humanitatis (the studies of humanity)

• this new curriculum included grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy

“… a) the concept of a unique, autonomous,

personal self, to be shaped through b) the study
of the language and literature of ancient Greece
and Rome, c) according to the perspectives of a
group of primarily literary academic disciplines.”

Proctor, Robert E. Defining the Humanities: How Rediscovering a Tradition Can Improve
Our Schools : With a Curriculum for Today’s Students (Indiana University Press, 1998),
p.13.
 Philip Sidney - the beginnings
of English literary criticism?
In 1580 Sidney writes the “Defense of Poesy” in response to Stephen Gosson’s attack
on the literary arts, and theatre.

“Poesy” he says “is an art of imitation,” it produces a speaking

picture, with this end, - to teach and delight.”

Poets “indeed, do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to

delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness
in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger;
and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are
moved: - which being the noblest scope to which ever any
learning was directed”
Literary Studies from the mid-C20th
Literary theory challenges the idea
that a "good" text (in aesthetic
terms) = "good" text (in moral
terms)

Some of the theoretical

schools/approaches we cover in this
module:
• New Historicism
• Psychoanalysis
• Marxism
• Feminism
• Deconstruction/Ethics
• Postcolonialism
 Morality or Ethics?
Stephen Tanner claims that ‘ethical’ has replaced the
term ‘moral’ in literary criticism (58)

“Unlike ‘moral,’ which suggests a universal and

unchanging foundation in human nature, ‘ethical’
suggests a constructed code appropriate for certain
groups or situations.” (58)
 What do Literary Critics do?
Critical Toolbox

Textual analysis – develop interpretive skills

Scholarship - critical material written by literary

scholars

Historical context

Theoretical frameworks – feminism, psychoanalysis

Always start and finish with the text