T.S.Eliot & John Crowe Ransom

"In English writing we seldom speak of tradition", "The past isn't dead, not even past".

      For Eliot, tradition is the basic element of the poem; and an excellent poet is the capable of broadening the tradition within the pome. His poem presents the recur of the times to express the poet is thinking about the past in the present.

Burnt Norton

(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

I

                                            Time present and time past 

                                            Are both perhaps present in time future,
                                            And time future contained in time past.
                                            If all time is eternally present
                                            All time is unredeemable.
                                            What might have been is an abstraction
                                            Remaining a perpetual possibility
                                           Only in a world of speculation.
                                           What might have been and what has been
                                           Point to one end, which is always present.
                                           Footfalls echo in the memory
                                           Down the passage which we did not take
                                           Towards the door we never opened
                                           Into the rose-garden. My words echo
                                           Thus, in your mind.
                                           But to what purpose
                                           Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
                                           I do not know.
                              
                               (http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/eliot_burnt_norton.htm)

Virginia Woolf & Doris Lessing

Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. 
A Room of One's Own
The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

"a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"

"In the first place, to have a room of her own..was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble"

                           
               The echo from Woolf's A Room of One's Own

                                                                                          -----Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing 

It is a story about a middle aged woman who has been from happiness to madness in her marriage, eventually gone to devastate. In 1960's, the society still restrains women to limit their living space. The main character Susan was happy with her husband and 4 kids in their family. However, they both start to doubt the real meaning of life. Since the husband has a affair, Susan changes from "it still under the control" to be irritable of her life. She starts to feel the emptiness and laking of freedom in her marriage. She wearies of the role of sustainer and comforter. The question of her decision of marriage is intelligent and fulfillment strikes her inner feeling. She finds out her identity through the self-discovery. Finally, she refuses to regress to the old self and to abdicate self-knowledge and self role, thus she remains the true to the authentic self. However, she choose to kill herself, which claims a means of resisting of crushing, culturally enforced image of woman and of posting a new politics of identity. The story denounces the devastating consequences of the restrictions to women in that era. 

W.E.B. Dubois & Zora Neale Hurston

(1868- 1963) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a noted scholar, editor, and African American activist. Du Bois was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP -- the largest and oldest civil rights organization in America). Throughout his life Du Bois fought discrimination and racism. He made significant contributions to debates about race, politics, and history in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, primarily through his writing and impassioned speaking on race relations. 
Criteria of Negro Art

Such is Beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless. In normal life all may have it and have it yet again. The world is full of it; and yet today the mass of human beings are choked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly. This is not only wrong, it is silly. 

...especially those who are weary of the eternal struggle along the color line, who are afraid to fight and to whom the money of philanthropists and the alluring publicity are subtle and deadly bribes.

Zora Neale Hurston was one of the most prolific African-American female writers of her day. Between 1934 and 1948, Hurston published seven books including her autobiographyDust Tracks on a Road.  Perhaps her most well received publication was Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Inaddition to her major publications, she also wrote many short stories, plays, biographies, newspaper and magazine articles.
     Hurston was born in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida.  Eatonville was the setting for many of her stories of folklore and probably shaped many of her political views.


Characteristics of Negro Expression

• The Negro's universal mimicry is not so much a thing in itself as an evidence of something that permeates his entire sel. And that thing is drama. 
• The will to adorn is the second most notable characteristic in Negro expresssion. Perhaps his idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional standards, but it satisfies the soul of its creator. 
• Asymmetry is a definite feature of Negro art... but the sculpture and carvings are full of this beauty and lack of symmetry. 
• Imitation----The Negro, the world over, is famous as a mimic.  
• Mimicry is an art in itself.

http://www.howard.edu/library/reference/guides/hurston/

Ferdinand de Saussure

 The sign, the signifier, and the signified are concepts of the school of thought known as structuralism, founded  
by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, during lectures he gave between 1907 and 1911 at the University of Geneva. His views revolutionized the study of language and inaugurated modern linguistics. The theory also profoundly influenced other disciplines, especially anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism. The central tenet of structuralism is that the phenomena of human life, whether language or media, are not intelligible except through their network of relationships, making the sign and the system (or structure) in which the sign is embedded primary concepts. As such, a sign -- for instance, a word -- gets its meaning only in relation to or in contrast with other signs in a system of signs.
In general, the signifier and the signified are the components of the sign, itself formed by the associative link between the signifier and signified. Even with these two components, however, signs can exist only in opposition to other signs. That is, signs are created by their value relationships with other signs. The contrasts that form between signs of the same nature in a network of relationships is how signs derive their meaning.

In Saussure's theory of linguistics, the signifier is the sound and the signified is the thought. The linguistic sign is neither conceptual nor phonic, neither thought nor sound. Rather, it is the whole of the link that unites sound and idea, signifier and signified. The properties of the sign are by nature abstract, not concrete. Saussure: "A sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern"

• The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.
• The linguistic sign is arbitrary;
• The word symbol has been used to designate the linguistic sign, or more specifically, what is here called the signifier.
• The word arbitrary also calls for comment.
• The signifier, being auditory, is unfolded solely in time from which it gets the following characteristics: (a) it represents a span, and (b) the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line.
• Diachronic- a word over time
• Synchronic-any given moment
• Signifier(sound image) + Signified(concept) = Sign

 http://www.criticism.com/md/the_sign.html

Sigmund Freud

Along with Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Albert Einstein, he helped revolutionize the modern Western conception of human life and its place in the universe. For Freud, human reason was not master in its own house but a precarious defense mechanism struggling against, and often motivated by, unconscious desires and forces. His theory and practice of psychoanalysis have changed the way people think about themselves today, whether they are aware of it or not. At same time, psychoanalysis has been controversial from the beginning because, unlike experimental science it cannot be adequately tested, falsified, or objectified.
The "Uncanny"

The "Uncanny"---- is undoubtedlly related to what is frightening----to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general.
'uncanny'='unfamiliar'

The term 'repression' beyond its legitimate meaning. It would be more correct to take into account a psychological distinction which can be detected here, and to say that the animistic beliefs of civilized people are in a state of having been (to a greater or lesser extent) surmounted [rather than repressed]. Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. 

Fetishism

Fetish is recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by them as the symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering.

• Super ego
• Ego/conscious
• ID/ unconcious
• The core of dream: wish

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is the wild man, the self-proclaimed anti-Christ, of Western thought. A brilliant polemicist, he champions energy over reason and art over science while contmptuous of the quiet, "timid" virtues of domesticity, democracy, and peace. He is absolutely central to modern and postmodern attempts to rethink the Western tradtion's most fundamental assumptions.
He was born in Röcken, a small village in Prussian Saxony. He was the son and grandson of Lutheran ministers. Having received his doctorate at the University of Leipzig, Nietzsche was appointed professor of philology at the Univeristy of Basel in Switzerland in 1869. He met Wagner and Cosima von Bülow in late 1868, and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy(1872), combines a new theory of Greek tragedy with an extended argument that Wagner's work constitutes a German rebirth of that ancient form.
On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense

What do human beings really know about themselves? Are they even capable of perceiving themselves in their entirety just once, stretched out as in an illuminated glass case? Does nature not reman silent about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing and enclosing us within a proud, illusory consciousness, far away from the twists and turns of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream and the complicated trembling of the nerve-fibres? Nature has thrown away the key...

• Truth is a comfortable lie; it suggest that "the world [is] something which is similar in kind to humanity," and it boosts self-confidence, the untroubled conviction of being right. While Nietzsche is scornful of this smug"Anthropomorphism," he does underline its utility.
• This "first metaphor" introduces an unbridgeable gap, which leas Nietzsche to conclude that " subject and object" are "absolutely different spheres."
• Once Nietzsche pulls the veil of illusion from our eyes and shows that truth is a "mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms,"

The Birth of Tragedy

In the views described here we already have all the constituent elements of a profound and pessimistic way of looking at the world and thus, at the same time, of the doctrine of the Mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity; the view that individuation is the primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken a premonition of unity restored.

Matthew Arnold

Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics.

• Belief: The literature shapes culture.

Culture and anarchy
He defended culture against scientific materialism. culture means qualities of independent thinking and intellectual open-mindness.

1. He advocated that culture perfection can prevent corruption and help to curb the worship of material wealth. "The pursuit of perfection is the pursuit of sweetness and light."
2. "Sweetness and light"---- suggests reasonableness of temper and intellectual insight.
3. The society should be "permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive."
4. His concept of culture includes the political, the social and the religious aspects of life.
5. Culture should be the most effective way to cure the ills of a sick society.
6. The middle class in England is narrow minded and corrupted by materialism, therefore the world sold be dominated by a group of people who not qualified to play a leading role in the development of society. He tried to wake up those people, and to make them ware of the importance of improving themselves culturally.

Essay in Criticism(1865, 1888)

1. He expressed his understanding of social function of an artist in the Victorian age.
2. Literary criticism means a great deal more than simple book-reviewing.
3. Good criticism is " a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas."
4. Critics helps people to "see the object as in it really is".
5. Critism extends beyound literature; criticism has social function to foster the sublime spirit of age.
6. The poem should be serious and truthfu.

Dover Beach

1. Religious forward: Tendency to relay 
2. Religion fulfills literature to make the society processing in order properly.
3. Religion as socially cohesive element literature (poetry) as religion's surrogate social conservative.

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time

1. It is noticeable that the word curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a high and fine quality of amn's nature, just this disinterested love of a fee play of the mind on all subjects for its own sake, ----it is noticeable, I say, that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. 
2. Real criticism, is essentically the exercise of this very quality. It obeys and instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politic, and everything of the kind...

Karl Marx and Raymond Williams

Karl Marx

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluationof the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.    

                                  Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)

Engels

Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844 and with Engels, moved to Brussels where he remained for the next three years, visiting England where Engels' family had cotton spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the materialist conception of history. This he developed in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), of which the basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one -- industrial capitalism -- and its replacement by communism.

At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he also wrote a polemic (The Poverty of Philosophy) against the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon (1809-1865). He also joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigr?workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians. At a conference of the League in London at the end of 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a succinct declaration of their position. Scarcely was The Communist Manifesto published than the 1848 wave of revolutions broke out in Europe.

"Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no his tory, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking." (Karl Marx, The German Ideology)

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams  (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was born in Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny, Wales, Williams was the son of a railway worker in a village where all of the railwaymen voted Labour while the local small farmers mostly voted Liberal. 

He was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone and there are many translations available. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach.

'The base' is the real social existence of man. 'The base' is the real relations of production sorresponding to a stage of development of the material productive forces. 'The base' is a mode of production at a particular stage of its development."

"productive forces" is to give just brief reminders, the most important thing a worker ever produces is himself, himself in the fact of  that kind of labour, of the broader historical emphasis of men producing themselves, themselves and their history. 

Hegemony: governing class, ruling class.