Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

    From her work, I learnt a new word Homosocial, a word difference from homosexual; oppositely, it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex. Sedgwick argues that "sexuality" and  "desire" were not a historial phenomenon but carefully managed social constracts. She also uses Foucault's theories of the history of sexuality to reproduce Feminism and Gay and Lesbian Studies.

       It also arises my curiosity of the difference between female and male.

Other informations Sex and Gender; Sex and Gender and Sexuality

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Talking Black: Critical signs of the Tiems

    For long time, I have been wondering about race problem in America. I feel the whites really misunderstand others especially on the African American culture. Gates give people a frank analysis in his work to argue with those bias from tradition. Besides, the black text or the black tradition is valued to the literary field. 

Martha C. Nussbaum

    After studying her work, I cannot help to think of an old saying by an ancient Chinese author---- Women are made of water. It may too rough by my translation, but I really want to express my feeling for her " Cultivating Humanity"---- as soft as water spreading into my mind.
About her interpretation on plot of Sophocles, the cultivation acts as nymph to connect the drama and the audience. This way, a work profoundly awakes the sleeping soul.

Here the arts play a vital role, cultivating powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship.

    This theory can be seen in many literary works. In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Height, the figure Heathcliff at the dying bed finding his original humanity hiding in the deepest part of his heart. Though he did his revenge to both families crudely, his unfair life experience draws the sympathy of the audience to his inside feeling. His rage and revenge are seen as the reimburse from an unjustified life. However, a wild life was eventually cultivated on his deathbed to back to his original soul so that the novel at the end brings a light of hope to people. The work practice the cultivating power to the audience which agrees with Nussbaum's theory of Cultivating Humanity.

Stephen J. Greenblatt

                                                             

Review from Resonance and Wonder 

     "The aesthetic wonder that texts arouse as well as their historical resonance". Greenblatt named the New Historicism which is an interest in the embeddedness of cultural objects in the contingencies of history. It is a distictive literary criticism from the traditional historicism, which opposite to the formalism and structuralism. The theory is a culturally poetic study on explaining the literature relates to history and politics. Another word, he emphasizes on the interaction of reality and history and politics, rather than thinking the history as just an event under a certain time.
    New historicism is different from the others like marxism as a doctrine, instead, it is more like a practice. First, the literature is a historic reflection which needs to be studied and researched on its historic characters and events. Secondly, it is also important to study the author because the author would be varied on characteristics, different times and environments. Thirdly, it is no necessary restoring in the traditional historicism---- to discover the affection of history on the context, while the context reflects the history.
    To conclude, according to his theory, the literature reflects the past and the present while the reality is led or affected by the literature---- "the touch of the real"---- re-creating the social and cultural negotiations of a historical moment.

Edward W Said

The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Oter. In addition the orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.

    Orientalism is a structure created by western power, colonism. It has two meanings: From the linguistic study, culture and anthropology, orient and occient are distinct. From the politics, the overstatement of West about their own opinion or idea of Orient "represents part culturally and even ideologically", but not the actual one. In his work, middle-east exemplifies orientalism----for western people, it expresses either the oil provider or the potential terrorism. Thus, the orientalism is an incomplete perspective by the west which is controlled by the idea of procolonism.

    Besides, Said has the flaw on his theory---- he only focus on the middle-esat as the Orient. However, the middle-east can only represent part of orient. Therefore, in my opinion, he overlook the other part of asia to work on his theory.

Stanley Fish

A New Idea About Reading

    "There is no right way (formula) to read the text. " I would like Fish's idea because it makes sense for me to think actively while I am reading, rather than just collecting the stuffs from a text. For me, I think an active reading make the interaction between the author and the readers, this way could be as giving a life to a literary work. At same time, Fish's theories prove the necessity of literary criticism, which an extraordinary process on modern criticism.

    Stanley Fish gives the readers the infinite space to absorb the information from the literary works. He breaks the limitation from the convention view of the relationship between the audience and the book. If his view of "The text doesn't exist, it's only from the reader, and the reader makes the text" is true, it will undoubtedly give a push to the readers to read, to think, and create positively.
    His theory also emphasizes on the importance of reading. Reading is a process requires optional ideas. Without reading, a book would lose the meaning of its existence. While the author takes the role who introduce a group of informations to the reader, the reader would work on collecting those informations and create one's own thought about it. Yet the produce from reading a text varies among the people. Therefore, there is no a certain way to read, and the text is made by the readers.

Lennard Davis

http://www.lennarddavis.com/home.html

The Existence of Varied Bodies In a Same Big World

Review from Disability Studies

    
    The patient with mental problem is always relate to "insane" and "uncontrollable" or something with crime. Those irrational images with the bias or discriminations limit the space of living for the disable people. The most of them are excluded joining the society cause of the potentially inexplicable dread or obstruction, thus "Once a man is prescribed as psychiatrically “abnormal”, he is sentenced to death because they are being isolated, incarcerated and even eliminated. "

    The world we are living in contains varied kind of lives, and everybody is different. The one's own particular signs diversity the world. However, there is a standard ("disability comes into consciousness after the construction of the concept “normalcy”) to distinguish "abnormal" and "normal", which implies those "abnormal" are disable and deficient. According to Lennard Davis, "normal" and "average" appeared until 19th Centruy. Thus, there should not have had those "natural standard" in the world. While the standard was built, those outside the "standard" would be "abnormal, unit, defective".

Undoubtedly some people with any different features or appearances would be the objects for others whom to be judged as unusual strangers.

    Davis states how brutal the situation is for the disable people. It is like fascist to saluter by distinct the people with the theory of good human race. Because we are judging people with the "standard" which makes the "abnormal" people have to be hide, otherwise, the living space is too tight to stay.  A normal soul would be crushed by this way not cause of the furious, but the crude reality. 

    What if the world can think about this problem with a multiple point of view? "Then there is no 'hegemony of normalcy' which has violently makes people unfit to the norm excluded from society. The world is big, big enough to hold all the differences; the world is big, big enough to be enjoyed by everyone.  

Frantz Fanon & Colonism

"Frantz Fanon's relatively short life yielded two potent and influential statements of anti-colonial revolutionary thought, Black Skin, White Mask(1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), works which have made Fanon a prominent contributor to postcolonial studies." (http://english.emory.edu/Bahri/Fanon.html)

To overcome the binary system in which black is bad and white is good, Fanon argues that an entirely new world must come into being. This utopian desire, to be absolutely free of the past, requires total revolution, "absolute violence" (37). Violence purifies, destroying not only the category of white, but that of black too. According to Fanon, true revolution in Africa can only come from the peasants, or "fellaheen." Putting peasants at the vanguard of the revolution reveals the influence of the FLN, who based their operations in the countryside, on Fanon's thinking. Furthermore, this emphasis on the rural underclass highlights Fanon's disgust with the greed and politicking of the comprador bourgeoisie in new African nations. The brand of nationalism espoused by these classes, and even by the urban proletariat, is insufficient for total revolution because such classes benefit from the economic structures of imperialism. Fanon claims that non-agrarian revolutions end when urban classes consolidate their own power, without remaking the entire system. In his faith in the African peasantry as well as his emphasis on language, Fanon anticipates the work of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, who finds revolutionary artistic power among the peasants.

German Colonism in Qingdao, Shandong Province in China in World War I

    It was hard to imagine the city Qingdao has been a colony of German and Japanese hundreds during World War I. I have never been to that city, but other cities in Shandong Province. It really impressed me of the people in Shandong are very friendly traditional Chinese. They inherit very traditional culture of Confucius. However, learning about the colonic history of this city just blow out all my old opinions about it.

Modern Qindao

    Qingdao is a bay city in Shandong Province which map in middle-east part of China. The modern urbanization can be tell clearly. Hundreds years, it was a small city likes a village on the bay area of East China Sea. It may offer the easier way for Germany to land and to built the colony. At present, there is a German town was kept in the city for people the remember the history. Besides, Germany built the city of Qingdao, which makes it being on industrialization earlier than other cities in China. And it brings the opportunity to Qingdao to become a industrial modern city in China. Moreover, it is very interesting about the Beer Festival in Qingdao. I did not ever think about it would be relate to the German culture of beer. Thus, that is evidence to display that Qingdao was impacts profoundly by German colonism.

     

      An university building in Qindao with German style


Learn more from here: http://www.echinacities.com/qingdao/city-life/exploring-old-qingdao-a-guide-to-the-area-s-main_1.html

Nothrop Frye

Born in 1912 in Canada, died in 1991.
Educated at University of Toronto, Emmanuel College, and Merton College in Oxford.
His wrote 40, among which Anatomy of Criticism is one of his most important contributions.
Frye views literature as an ongoing conversation; writers respond to each other. Richter explains that for Frye: "Each generation rewrites the stories of the past in ways that make sense for it, recycling a vast tradition over the ages" (641). 
(http://faculty.csusb.edu/ramirez/fall03/frye.html)


The archetype of literature

Section I.
action    art                wisdom
history    humanities    philosophy
events    criticism        ideas

art---->criticism; this should be a science

nature---->physics, etc.; this is a science

Criticism should have the appearance of a science; right now there is too much junk in literary analysis--to much opinion based on issues of taste rather than some organizing principle of evaluation.
We need principles to distinguish the significant from the meaningless; we need to keep the text/literature in the center.

We can't rely on value judgments that are casual--this is chitchat and pseudo criticism.  We need a systematic approach and we need to consider the reader in a rhetorical sense, but we also have to undertake a structural analysis that assumes an overarching coherence.

Literary criticism can rely on patterns

Section II
A critic's role is to look for connection between the poet and the poem, but there are also unconscious influences and their are myths and symbols that have been inherited.

Two ways to proceed: inductive and deductive

Inductive--look for patterns, make educated guesses
Deductve--look for consequences, look for coherence and try to categorize

There are two ways of thinking about genre:
1) that there is a platonic, pre-existing form
Note: there are archetypes of genres as well as of images

2) that the social conditions produced the work (Gothic, Baroque, etc.).
Literary criticism is the history of ideas; it moves from the analysis of the primitive to the analysis of the sophisticated

Perspective is gained by approaching the text closely and then backing up for perspective; this is induction.

Section III.
This section deals with deductive reasoning, the principle of recurrence
Examination of time and space, narrative and meaning
rhythm=narrative
pattern=meaning

Myths:
dawn, spring
zenith, summer
sunset, autumn,
darkness, winter

Structural approach based on archetypes: flood, sea, etc.
Epiphanies give meaning to these archetypes and wed the dream world and the hero

Visions: comic, tragic 

Simone De Beauvoir

                               "Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being."

1908-1986

Birth place

Paris, France

Works

                                         The Second Sex; Ethics of Ambiguity; The Mandarins;etc

Reveiw

The Second Sex speaks of the specific ways in which the natural and social sciences and the European literary, social, political and religious traditions have created a mystified world where impossible and conflicting ideals of femininity produce an ideology of women's “natural” inferiority to justify patriarchal domination. The book is based on her experience as a woman and her life in reality as a woman.

 “One is not born but becomes a woman” (The Second Sex, 267)

It introduces the meaning of the sex-gender distinction. 

"Beauvoir's The Second Sex gave us the vocabulary for analyzing the social constructions of femininity and the structure for critiquing these constructions. From a phenomenological perspective this most famous line of The Second Sex pursues the first rule of phenomenology: suspend judgments, identify your assumptions, treat them as prejudices and put them aside; do not bring them back into play until and unless they have been validated by experience." 

William K. Wimsatt JR. & Monroe C. Beardsley

What is Fallacy?

The intentional fallacy----what the reader responses to create or expand a new idea from the work, which is as same as the intention of the author.

The affective fallacy---- what the poem relates to the reality, and affects on people.

The philosophy of intentional fallacy suggests that, in literary criticism, the original meaning of the author is, perhaps, not the most important or correct interpretation of the work. In other words, there should be more freedom for the readers to interpret what they want from the information they receive. The concept is credited with first being introduced by William K.Wimsatt Jr., and Monroe Beardsley in 1946, and represents one opinion on literary criticism.

Intentional fallacy allows the readers a great deal of subjective freedom in determining what the work may say. Like anything, those readers who can make the strongest arguments to back up their points will likely receive more favorable responses. While it may seem as though this would change the meaning from what the author intended, it may or may not. If the author is clear in what is being written, readers may come to the same conclusion as the author.

Some may also apply this philosophy to other works of art, not just literature. For some works of art, interpretation is a key factor to an individual's enjoyment of that piece. Depending on how esoteric, or vague, a certain piece of art may be, it could be subject to a wide array of interpretations, especially if being viewed in a different time period than that in which it was created. Therefore, paintings, drawings, and sculptures could mean profoundly different things to different people.

Cleanth Brooks

The New Criticism that Brooks championed seems to have been a means of coming to terms with the literary modernism that emerged in the early twentieth century in the writings of Eliot, Yeats, Pound, and Joyce, and in their successors. The criticism of T. S. Eliot, in particular, sought a critical and historical justification for his own difficult and obscure poetry in the French symbolists and the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, and Eliot's revaluation of these poets implied a revision of literary history-or of the literary canon, to put it in contemporary terms.

Brooks' achievement was to apply the method of close reading, with its emphasis on poetic tension, or paradox, or irony, to virtually the entire English and American literary tradition, including prose fiction and drama as well as nondramatic verse. His early critical works like Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and, especially, The Well Wrought Urn (1947) were very influential in this development; but undoubtedly his most enduring contribution to literary education arises from the anthologies he edited for college students in freshman composition and introductory literature courses: Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction(1943) with Robert Penn Warren, and Understanding Drama (1945) with Robert B. Heilman.

Mikhail M. Badhtin

(1895–1975), Russian cultural and literary theorist whose life and works remain the object of controversies. Several key episodes in his life are shrouded in mystery, and the textual history of his works is extremely complicated due in part to the political context in which they were written.
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/mikhail-m-bakhtin#ixzz1tjWN0juN
Dialogical:
1) self----the soul of the idea----reflects the potentially capability, value.
2) self and others---- different language, no voice can be isolated.

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. ~New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993.

Anyone will have a other who think about him or her. The dialogue between people is not only oneself's thoughts in some culture and situation, but also the idea of the language reflects the point of view from others---- how others to see this oneself.
3)vocies: "averaged", "synthesized"---->truth. 

Erich Auerbach

"He who represents the course of a human life, or a sequence of events extending over a prolonged period of time, and represents it from beginning to end, must prune and isolate arbitrary. Life has always long since begun, and it is always still going on. And the people whose story the author is telling experience much more than he can ever hope to tell. But the things that happen to a few individuals in the course of a few minutes, hours, possibly even days - these one can hope to report with reasonable completeness." (Auerbach in Mimesis)

 "The work is a strikingly successful combination of philology, stylistics, history of ideas and sociology, of meticulous learning and artistic taste, of historical imagination and awareness of our own age." (from A History of Modern Criticism 1970-1950, Volume 7, 1991)

Review:
The literature work is not simply record a historical event or the surface things, but it should be include some deeply significant meanings which underneath the context. Besides, the depiction of every day life reflects the reality. The connection of literature and society and history is a new concept of realism which emphasizes on the relationship between literary works and the reality. His view of mimesis refers the inner consciousness.