zkouška - otázky

d from the sum of social experience and a society is created from this pattern – it could be taken from the contemporary society and put in another time (future) and place; important part is the experience of isolation, self-exile
( there are 2 main kinds of personal novel as well:
personal-descriptive novel – documentary (society is an aspect of characters)
a general way of life is there, but often highly personalized, interest in an individual portrait rather than a country
personal formula
a particular pattern is abstracted like in social formula and now not societies, but human individuals are created from the pattern; they také only one person seriously (Joyce´s Portrait of the Artist)
at the centre of the realist novel was this whole view = we are people and people within society
Williams offers these 4 types (soc.desc., soc.formula, pers.desc.,pers.formula) as a way of beginning a general analysis of the contemporary novel
He speaks about the abandonment of the realist balance and after that about the crisis as he sees it…

What is the crisis in its general nature?
( certain clarifying factors:
the realist novel needs a real community of persons linked by one kind of relationship (work, friendship or family) with many interlocking kinds /vzájem.spojení/ - it is hard to find a community of this sort – the links between persons in most contemporary novels are relatively single, temporary, dicontinuous
a change in society ( a change in literary form
a new definition of realism may be the way to break out of the deadlock /mrtvý bod/ and find a creative direction
the contemporary novel has both reflected and illuminated the crisis of our society /odráží i objasňuje, osvětluje/
any new realism will be different from the tradition and will comprehend the discoveries in personal realism (which are the main 20th century achievement)
the old, naive realism is in any case dead, because it depended on a theory of natural seeing which is now impossible
we could suppose that realism was a simple recording process
The old static realism of the passive observer is just an old convention. When it was discovered that man lives through his individual interpretation of the material world outside him, this was thought to be a basis for the rejection of realism; only a personal vision was possible.
The individual inherits an evolved brain, which gives him his common human basis. He learns to see through this inheritance and through the forms which his culture teaches. But since the learning is active and the world is changing, new acts of perception, interpretation and organization are necessary = this is human growth, but the essential growth is in the interaction in the individual´s effort to communicate what he has learned to make a new reality.
Reality is continually established, by common effort, and art is one of the highest forms of this process.
Failures and breakdowns are possible ( may become characteristic
The achievement of realism is a continual achievement of balance and the ordinary absence of balance can be seen as both a warning and a challenge. Any effort to achieve a contemporary balance will be complex and difficult, but the effort is necessary, a new realism is necessary, if we are to remain creative.


15) Wystan Hugh Auden’s role of a poet

born 1907, is generally recognized as the most distinguished of the English poets who emerged (objevil se) in 1930s.
the author of a good book should remain anonymous, for it is to his work, not to himself, that admiration is due. A genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has comleted it and starts to think about the next one. If he thinks about his past work at all, he is more likely to remember its faults than its virtues.
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
When a successful author analyses the reasons for his success, he underestimates the talent he was born with, and overestimates his skill in employing it.
He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but only by those whose judgement he respects.
It seems to a poet as if there were two people involved, his conscious self and a Muse whom he has to woo (vábit) or an Angel with whom he has to wrestle. His role is as important as Hers.
To keep his errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a practical housewife, a logician,a monk, etc.
the poet is a father of a poem; it’s mother is a language. Rhymes, metres, stanza forms, etc., are like servants.
writer who has genuine original talent is more interested in playing with words than saying something original.
writer who, like all men, has his personal weaknesses and limitations, should be aware of them and try his best to keep them out of his work no writer can ever judge exactly how good or bad a work of his may be, but he can always know, whether something he has written is authentic or a forgery. (padělek) There are certain subjects which he should never touch.
the integrity (celistvost, jednota, čestnost) of a writer is threatened by appeals to his social conscience, his political or religious convictions.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.



AJLITV – 16) Sontag´s reasons against interpretation


Sontag´s work “Against Interpretation” – it is less novel than it seems at first sight, links with the aesthetics of Symbolism are clear = the title essay of her first collection of essays

Project of interpretation!!!!! The habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them – it sustains the fancy that there is such a thing as the content. Interpretation = a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code. It means plucking a set of elements (X, Y, Z,…) from the whole work.

History: Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the realistic view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. The interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to modern demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics. Int. presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of readers – it seeks to resolve the discrepancy.
Plato – the value art is debious, Aristotele – disputes Plato´s idea, art has a certain value – it is a form of therapy
Western consciousness – we have learned to call form is separated off from sth we have learned to call content, - content is essential – form is accessory.
Modern times – the main feature of the mimetic theory persists – content still comes first. Art as representation of an outer reality in favour of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. The effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities, hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability.
Freud – manifest content – must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning - latent content – beneath. Marx – social events like revolutions and wars, Freud – the events of individual lives. All are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to M and F, these events only seem to be intelligible.
Hermeneutics – the art or science of interpretation, especially of scripture.

Interpretation violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a metal scheme of categories.

Int does not always prevail. Flight from interpretation = a feature of modern painting. To avoid interpretation – art may become parody, become abstract, decorative or non-art. The flight from interpretation seems particularly a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content – since no content – there can be no interpretation.

Revolution in poetry – turning away from content in the old sense. Pragmatic avant-gardism – experiments with form at the expense of content, it is not only defence against the infestation of art by interpretations.

Literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem, play novel or story into sth else.

Cinema – the most alive, the most exciting and important of all art forms – films have not been overrun by interpreters due to the newness of cinema as an art. They were understood as a part o mass culture.

What is needed? – more attention to form in art, a descriptive vocabulary for forms.

Transparence = is the highest, most liberating value in art and criticism, it means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Our culture is based on excess, on overproduction, conditions of modern life (material platitude) – the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. It is important to recover our senses, we must learn to see more, to hear more and to feel more.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make words of art – our own experience more rather than less real to us.

The function of criticism should be show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.


17/ No difference between art and joke? – Kermode

Kermode compares ▪ older modernism = “palaeo-modernism”, which is experimental but still continuous with tradition, still form-creating
and ▪ “neo-modernism, which is the anti-art of contemporary avant-garde , which – inspired by Dadaism and Surrealism – attempts a total break with tradition.
Neo-modernists ▪ seek impersonality
▪ experiment with chance and random
▪ refuse order as a differentia of art
“Work of art is what the perceiver observes in what has been culturally established as a
perceiver’s space. This can be anything…”
→ they use e.g. so called ready-mades (objects, or even situations, taken from
everyday life and signed as woks of art); some of these manifestations of the neo-modernist
theory were pleasing, and indeed funny.
On the other hand some neo-modernists push the protest against the “old” art to the point where it is a protest against the seriousness of the palaeo-modernist protest and where the
difference between art and joke is obscure as that between art and non-art.
Kermode himself believes that there is a difference between art and joke, while
admitting that it has sometimes been difficult to establish one. He says that he would want to
call certain works of this kind jokes, if only because however satisfying they may be, they do
not seem sufficient in respects of the needs which what is called art has usually sufficed.

18 – Crane The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the history of ideas

This essay concern with using /or misusing/ the history of ideas in the historical interpretation of literary works. This is shown on some pieces of criticism of Swift’s ‘Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms’. Crane also adds his own theory about Swift’s satirical argument in that work.

Criticism of the fourth Voyage since 1920s, 1930s:
-they want to correct the misunderstanding of Swift’s purpose in the Voyage
-they want to defend Swift from the charge of misantrophy
-they should show what Gulliver is made to say about human nature and what Swift wanted his readers to believe about human nature → two different and incompatible things → they should draw clear line between what is both Swift and Gulliver and what is only Gulliver ►►► the new interpretations differ in emphasis and detail, but they agree that Gulliver is only in part a reliable spokesman for his creator’s satire and that he also one of the targets of that satire. Swift wanted his readers to take much more critical view than Gulliver does of ‘the virtues and ideas of these exalted Houyhnhnms’ and much less negative view of human possibilities. He doesn’t want us to think as Gulliver.

Swift’s primary purpose – ‘vex the world rather than divert it’
In Swift’s time there was a belief that man is par excellence ‘rational creature’ → question what is truly ‘rational creature’ and what not → on one side there are wholly rational beings that have ‘unhuman’ characteristics and on the other side there are such good characters as Don Pedro or Gulliver ►►► it leads at first to shock and then to pride in being man /which was Swift trying to produce/.
But there was no proof of it → defenders tried to supply this proof by relating the Voyage to its presumed background in the intellectual and religious concerns of Swift and his age. They agreed on three points:
-Swift’s main design was to uphold what they described as the traditional of orthodox conception of human nature → man is inseparable complex of good and evil, reason and passion, spiritual soul and human body
-Houyhnhnms and Yahoos are allegorical embodiments of these two parts of man’s constitution
-Swift developed his defence of the orthodox view by directing his satire against those contemporary doctrines who see man only as a Yahoo or a Houyhnhnm /Swift wanted to embody in the life of these creatures, along with certain admittedly admirable qualities, the rationalistic errors of the neo-Stoics, the Cartesians and the deists/
The hypothesis is a possible one, in the sense that it is consistent with some of the things we know about Swift apart from the Voyage. But it is just hypotheses not fact.
No attention was paid to the possibility that there were other traditions of thought about human nature → problem of ordinary historians is making prepositions about Swift’s thoughts apart from Gulliver and about thought of Swift’s age. ►►► The fact that the Voyage was written by Swift at a particular moment in the general history of man defines the region in which Swift may look for intellectual stimuli and materials → it gives reader a ‘reading list’, but it can never tell him how to use the list.
In Kathleen Williams’ Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise is the current historical theory of Swift’s intentions in the Voyage argued most fully → different point of view of the matter – period in intellectual history is obviously no longer an indefinite aggregate of happeningsˇ it is a definite system of happening /something like the plot of the novel in which a great many diverse characters and episodes are unified by a principal action or theme/ ►►► historian can legitimely use his formula for this as a confirmatory premise in arguing the meanings and causes of individual works produced at that age.
Whatever else may be true of the Voyage, one question is kept uppermost in it from the beginning, for both Gulliver and the reader – what sort of animal man, as a specie, really is /it is question that Gulliver brings with him into Houyhnhnmland/. → the central issue – Is man, or is he not, correctly defined as a ‘rational creature’?
What causes Gullivers misanthropy? What changes his love into antipathy?
-it is not increasing in his knowledge of human beings, but recognition that these facts are wholly incompatible with the formula for man’s nature which he has taken for granted ( Crane can’t find anything that forces us to look at Houyhnhnms and Yahoos in any other way than Gulliver /two species, not personified abstractions/
-he is pushed much further in the same misanthropic direction by the questions and comments of his Houyhnhnm master → a reduction to absurdity of man’s pretensions to
the character of a rational creature
→ a demonstration of the complete parity in
essential nature between man and the Yahoos
/there is one difference – men are possessed of
at least a ‘small pittance’ of reason → some
in greater degree than others/
( Crane can’t see no clear signs in the text that this qualification is intended to set men apart as athird species for either Gulliver or the reader
►►► new definition of man
more ‘civilized’ variety of Yahoo
irrational ‘disposition’ which motivates his
habitual behaviour → capacity of reason is
only an acquired attribute that can be lost
Satisfactory historical explanation would have to account for Switf’s patent assumptions.
Was there a body of teaching that could have supplied Swift with the particular scheme of ideas? → There were old-fashioned textbooks in logic in which there were definitions of ideas which the Voyage tried to discredit /’man is a rational animal’ – always as the obviously correct formula for man’s distinctive nature/. These textbooks also could have suggested him the basic principle on which the inverted animal world of Houyhnhnmland was constructed. It was influenced by Neoplatonist Porphyry.
Porphyry, opposing man as the only species of ‘rational animal’ to the brutes, needed a specific instance, parallel to man and he chose the horse. Most Englishman of Swift’s time knew Porphyry’s thought → the inverting was shock for them. But had this Swift in mind?

What does the orientalism of E. Said represent? How does it affect contemporary literary criticism?
What does Said understand by crisis in orientalism?
Explain the terms: wordliness of the text, textuality as understood by M. Foucault and also by E. Said.
What is U.Ecco’s criticism of the Russian Formalists in Casablanca? Culr movie4s and Intertextual collage? How do you understand the term cult movie as interpreted by U.Ecco?
What is U.Ecco’s attitude to pop-culture as it is expressed in his publications Apocalittici e integrati from 1964?
Can you sum up the political and ideological connotations of the modernist versus postmodernist debate as expressed by F. Jameson?
terms: stereoscopic thinking, historicism, resistance, meditation (Jameson)
What is the relationship between writing and …… sacrifice in the process of the disappearance of the author in the essay by M. Foucault?
Mention some of the most significant aspects of the detective genre and the types as presented by Todorov?
Parody / travesty by Bachtin, Bachtin and Todorov in common?
Lacan’s reproach to the theory of Saussure, Lacan’s two principles
C.S. Lewis’ division of periods
R.Williams – realism (novel)
W.H. Auden’s role of a poet
W.H. Auden’s poetry
Susan Sontag’s reasons against interpretation
No difference between art and joke? Kermode
Crane – parallel to Swift
3 dramas




1a. What does the orientalism of E. Said represent?
“Orientalism” - a discourse of the west about the east
ź a western style of dominating and having authority over the Orient
ź a huge body of texts have been accumulated since the renaissance
ź Orientalism deals with the Orient, makes statements about it, teaches it, rules over it
ź An Oriental = someone who lives in the Orient with a feeling of Oriental fatalism
ź Orient is something that must be encountere d, dealt with, Europeans can realize their project there, everything can be put into practice there - its foreignness can be translated, its meanings decoded, its hostility tamed
ź West believes that it its prerogative to rule and own the world = hegemon ism, possessing minorities, the western people are the best, Europocentrism, racism
ź The west is a spectator, a judge of every Oriental behaviour, the European is a watcher, he tours the Orient
ź Orientalists plotted Oriental history, character and destiny

1b. How does it affect contemporary literary criticism?
ź a very innovative person, he introduces Palestine as it is (however, in his homeland, he was criticised to be more American-like author)
ź The question of identity was the crucial point of his ideas - he influenced other scholars
ź Identity = a construct created during our life, we do not come to this world with it, it is an artificial construct, created by pressure from society, family
ź Identity is like a text that can be read and interpreted, it is a process not the state!
ź The world is textually constructed
ź The meaning + worldliness + the network of connections = the identity of the text
ź The world and the text are connected by linkage (text itself is neutral, that is why the text has to be linked with world!)
ź The text is bound with the reality of the world (This Said´ s ideas are in contradiction with the whole post-modernist theory!)
ź The paradox of identity because people migrate from place to place, globalization, mixing cultures = identity side by side multiculturality
ź He is a founder of post-colonial discourse = self-criticism about colonialism, how colonizers influence inhabitants in colonie