I took notes because I knew Id forget so much of it straight away, but Id like some of it to stick, or at least be ready to hand for when I forget.It was a good grounding for someone like me whose English Literature study stopped at sixteen.Lit language is a set of deviations from a norm a special kind of language, in contrast to the ordinary language we commonly use.Ordinary lang is different for different classes, regions, ages, etc.
Lit lang is an assemblage of devices (sound, rhythm, narrative techniques, etc) and the lit content is merely present as the reason to use these in a particular way. Our value judgements refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others. State reacts to working class protests with brutal political repressiveness. The literary work is seen as spontaneous and creative, unlike society, and poetry as an idea has political force. Conflicts in ordinary life were resolved within it, away from the middle-classs crass empiricism. It was irrational and couldnt be explained you saw it or you didnt and it brought together the concrete and universal, motion and stillness. Matthew Arnold saw the middle class as harsh and unintelligent and unable to lead and educate the working class in order to prevent anarchy. Arnold, Henry James and FR Leavis are exponents of the idea that lit is an imparter of morality or is moral ideology for the modern age. WW I created a spiritual hungering and Eng lit provided the answer. Leavises launched Scrutiny in 1932 and Eng lit became the important subject and established how it is discussed today. But it didnt seek to change (apart from through education) mechanized society and its withered culture, just to withstand it. Closely reading lit would not turn Eng into an organic and moral country. But if lit made you better how, after WW II, to explain away educated Nazis Scrutiny became an isolated elite. The organic society lived on in good lit for the Leavisites, rich, complex, sensuous and particular. Dramatically concrete writers like Donne and Hopkins manifested the essence of Englishness unlike the latinate or verbally disembodied Milton and Shelley. The Metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists were suddenly upgraded; Milton and the Romantics were rudely toppled; selected European products, including the French Symbolists, were imported. Literary works were only acceptable if they were part of the Tradition, or the European mind, which was a largely arbitrary definition. Meaning was just to distract the reader while the poem worked on him in more physical and unconcsious ways.
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