Experiments in Criticism

Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale

This is the second in a series of posts about Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1390s).

PLOT/THEME/RHETORIC

Plot: The knight tells a classic chivalric romance about the battle two cousins (Arcite and Palomon) have for the same woman: the Duke’s sister-in-law Emily. Because the two cousins were political exiles, neither can fulfill their desire of wooing Emily. To make matters worse, they turn on each other because they are rivals for Emily’s love. Eventually, the two fight with the victor getting Emily’s hand in marriage. Arcite wins but soon after dies. The tale ends with Palamon marrying Emily.

Theme: The Duke Theseus provides a long speech at the end with a possible theme: the existence of divine providence over human affairs. Given the heartache and woe that occupies most of the poem, this feels like either a redemptive or pollyannish reading. Because the tale is set in Ancient Greece (though with Roman gods), the tale could also offer an assessment of that society. The three gods that receive prayers are Mars (war), Venus (love), and Diana (chastity). Only Diana rejects the prayer, importantly the one offered by Emily. Love and War each answer their supplicants prayers.

Rhetoric: The story is a chivalric romance. This genre features an aristocratic character embarking on a journey of trial, exile, and return. The two knights here–the royally-born Arcite and Palamon–undergo significant trials and exiles. Arcite gets the “return” of martial victory before succumbing to his battle wounds. Palamon gets the “return” of requited love when he marries Emily.

Chaucer’s tale comes from Boccaccio’s The Decameron. In fact, the tale is largely an English translation of that Italian tale. A hilarious rhetorical gesture made by the knight deserves a small comment. The knight’s tale is very long in comparison to Chaucer’s other tales, yet the knight keeps saying things like, “if it nere to long to heere” (if it were not too long to hear) or “it were al to longe for to devyse” (it would be too long to describe). My initial reaction was: “Wasn’t this thing long enough NOW?” But in comparison with Boccaccio’s version of the story, the knight’s tale IS significantly shorter.

Covenantal Shakespeare

Today, I read Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). The play is all about succession and the relationships between fathers and their children.

It made me think that I should focus my interpretive efforts on what I’ll call Covenantal Shakespeare, a survey of Shakespeare’s great tragedies through the themes of the covenant. The syllabus would look this way.

Sovereignty: Julius Caesar (1599)…the tragedy about who is “god” in Roman society: the emperor, the republic, or some deity.

Hierarchy: Richard II (1595)…the tragedy about hierarchy in a Christian kingdom and what is and is not the proper way to depose a king

Ethics: Hamlet (1601)…the tragedy about whether or not you should avenge your father’s murder

Sanctions: Macbeth (1606)…the tragedy about the consequences of capturing the throne the wrong way

Succession: King Lear (1606)…the tragedy about the importance of kingdom transition

My goal: think through the theological ramifications of the covenant for five specific works. In the process, I would move from providing notes for each play to offering arguments for a group of works.

I’ll be posting drafted sections of this each Friday.

Pride and Prejudice Volume 2

This is the second in a series of posts on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

PLOT/THEME/RHETORIC

Plot: Volume 1 ended with Elizabeth declining a proposal and Jane’s hopes for one dissolving. Volume 2 has at its center Elizabeth declining another proposal, this one from Mr. Darcy, while discovering why Jane’s proposal never happened.

Theme: While Volume 1, focused on pride (a person’s incorrect self-interpretation), Volume 2 focused on prejudice (the incorrect interpretation of others). Specifically, Elizabeth realizes she judge Wickham as amiable because he was handsome and judged Darcy as insufferable because of his initial reaction to her.

Rhetoric: The narrative still revolves around dialogue and commentary from the narrator, but this volume introduces a convention of older novels: the letter. At the center of this volume is Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth. We’re told that Elizabeth reads every sentence multiple times, and in the sentence’s words, she confronts a vision of the letter’s writer she had never seen before. We do too.

Anatomy of Criticism: Polemical Introduction

Northrop Frye wrote Anatomy of Criticism in 1957 as a prolegomena. He wanted to write about Spenser’s Faerie Queene but felt himself having to explain position after position until he discovered he was 10,000 feet in the air taking a broader look at the systematic study of literature. The books introduction is the prolegomena to the prolegomena.

In this essay, Frye asserts:

Literary criticism matters. It’s not just parasitic.
Literary criticism must be systematic and progressive.
This systematic study shouldn’t care about: authorial intention, evaluation, and disciplinary cross-breeding. That is, criticism isn’t limited to what an author meant, whether or not the poem is good, or what the principles of some political or religious program say it should be.

Perhaps most interesting is Frye’s hypothetical “handbook of literature” (13) which simultaneously shows that literary criticism as a systematic study should be possible and that we are woefully ill-equipped to write it. Consequently, he describes a three-page handbook with lots of blank space.

No Neutrality: Critical Terms for Literary Study

This is the first of a series of weekly posts on the book Critical Terms for Literary Study.

The Preface and Introduction to Critical Terms for Literary Study make one thing clear. You can’t be neutral in literary study. I agree.

The Preface and Introduction also reject the idea that “divine fiat” has anything to do with what these terms mean or how you can use them. I disagree.

Here are the details…

The preface argues that the essays in the book’s second edition have two message.

“All interpretations of cultural practice rest upon powerful assumptions and commitments…the goal of raising consciousness about everyday culture cannot be achieved unless these terms of interpretation themselves are examined critically.” (ix)

If you replaced “cultural practice” with “the world” and “critically” with “biblically”, you would have a sentence written by Cornelius Van Til. Yes, we should be epistemologically self-conscious in our literary and cultural interpretation and in our theology. By what standard, though? The next statement gives us a hint.

2. “Any interpretation that proceeds without examining such terms will reproduce cultural and political assumptions rather than question them.” (ix)

Fair enough. But why is this good or bad? On its own, this standard leads to scholars who are always learning and questioning but never coming to a knowledge of truth. The point is questioning? How will we know if the reproduced assumptions are worth damaging or not? The Introduction doesn’t answer these questions, but it does try to explain what the stakes of interpretation are.

3. “What holds these various and often combative programs and schools of thought together…is a shared commitment to understanding how language and other systems of signs provide frameworks which determine how we read, and more generally, how we make sense of experience, construct our own identity, produce meaning in the world.” (1)

Notice how the stakes are viewed completely in human terms. It matters how WE read. It matters how WE make meaning of experience (of this world alone, no doubt), how WE construct OUR identity, and how WE make meaning. As the Introduction demonstrates, we get to question God, but God never gets to question us. Given the prior statement about “reproducing assumptions,” you would think that starting with God might yield some different questions. This book’s god is history.

Biblical Presuppositions: The Imagination

A biblical view of literature begins with a proper view of God and man. I’ve been mulling over the ramifications of the doctrine of Creation for literary study, but I will sketch that out next week.

While reviewing John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, I was struck by the following passages.

The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue

This is the first of a series of posts on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1390s).

PLOT/THEME/STYLE

Plot: the opening of this frame narrative is pretty simple. Thirty-one pilgrims meet in an inn on their way to Canterbury, the destination of a religious pilgrimage to visit St. Thomas A Becket’s grave. The narrator, himself a pilgrim, describes each of the pilgrims and explains the story contest the pilgrims will have on their journey.

It’s become clear to me that plot involves character, so it’s worth mentioning here that rather than getting a lot of plot, we get lots of character description. The narrator promises to describe how he told them apart, what social class they belonged to, and what kind of clothes they each wore. He follows through on this promise. We get proper names for some characters (the limitour is Huberd!), and we get some sense of how much each of these characters need spiritual regeneration.

Macbeth

This post is about Shakespeare’s play Macbeth.

PLOT/THEME/STYLE

Macbeth comes billed as a tragedy, and it lives up to its billing. Pulled from historical chronicles, the play’s protagonist is a medieval Scottish nobleman who wants to become king. After witches prophesy that he will be king, Macbeth makes their prediction come true by killing the Scottish king with the help of his wife. This only takes up two of the play’s five acts. The remainder of the play examines what happens to a man who gains a kingdom and loses his soul and end with his wife’s suicide and his own death in battle.

The titles of Shakespeare’s comedies don’t highlight characters. Instead they focus on the play’s subject or theme: Midsummer Night’s Dream, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, or As You Like It. The title of Shakespeare’s tragedies always name the central character: Romeo + Juliet, Julius, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, etc. Macbeth’s meaning, then, is tied up with its protagonist. How does a man go from recognizing that he can’t murder someone because of the consequences both on earth and in the afterlife to declaring that life is a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? Our analysis of the play’s worldview and meaning should help us answer that question.

Pride and Prejudice, Vol. 1

This is the first of three posts about Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813).

Method: I’m going to start with the presupposition of the Trinity–the three persons in one of the godhead-as the basis for my evaluation of the book. If you read intro handbooks on lit, the interpretive process can seem rather arbitrary. I don’t think interpretation is arbitrary, and I’m serious when I see I want my interpretation of literature to be indebted to the library.

All this is to say: look for 3s: grammar, logic, rhetoric…plot, theme, style…historical interpretation, mythic interpretation, rhetorical interpretation….and count on the source of those 3s ultimately being the trinity.

So, where do we start?

This Site: An Introduction

Over the next three years, I hope to write four literature courses for a Christian homeschool curriculum. I want this curriculum to be self-consciously Christian, built up on clear Biblical presuppositions. I can’t write this curriculum yet. This blog will record my experiments in Christian criticism as I prepare for this work.

The site’s name is an homage to C.S. Lewis’s excellent book, An Experiment in Criticism. In it, Lewis asserts that the real difference in literary experience comes not from the books one reads but from readers themselves. Lewis makes this point with wit and good taste and a joie de vivre that always makes me want to go and read more. I hope that my writing comes complete with that kind of joy, not just dry-as-dust instruction.

My plan for the blog is this:

MONDAYS: Work through the basic doctrines of scripture that literary study must acknowledge and be built upon. These posts will include reviews of and engagements with works of theology I am reading in this season of preparation.

TUESDAYS: Work through Christian responses to the terms found in the University of Chicago’s Critical Terms for Literary Study. There is no better source for seeing the ways in how keywords are defined by secular literary critics and providing a point-by-point contrast with Biblical presuppositions. I know I will probably ask more questions than I can answer, but I think this will give me a clear way to see how a committed Christian approach to literature differs from a secular one.

WEDNESDAYS: Work through the basic insights from general handbooks of literature written by both Christian and secular scholars.

THURSDAYS: Offer interpretations of works of narrative fiction: from Tolstoy to Tolkien. Here I will begin applying the insights I’ve made in the first three days to the interpretations of actual novels and short stories.

FRIDAYS: Offer interpretations of drama: everything from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Strindburg.

SATURDAYS: Offer interpretations of narrative and lyric poetry: from Homer and Virgil to Dante and Donne.

My goals for the literary criticism I write are to (A) glorify God and (B) more fully explain how literature provides a means of enjoying Him.

The standard defense of literature is that it instructs and delights. That’s certainly what scripture does. The best literature does it too, and literary criticism is more than a handmaiden in that work. If the best literature uses human imagination to participate in God’s redemption of the world, then literary criticism is the means by which the good news of that work is announced.