IMPORTANT QUESTIONS - CRITICISM

1. POETICS BY ARISTOTLE

1. Answer the following questions. 

(i) What is literary criticism?
(ii) What does Plato say about poetry?
(iii) The subject of 'Republic' is politics. Comment.
(iv) What does 'Poetics' deal with?
(v) How does Aristotle define poetry?
(vi) In what three ways does Aristotle differentiate various art forms from one another?
(vii) What is the difference between epic poetry and tragedy?
(viii) Why does Aristotle value Homer so highly as a poet in 'Poetics'?
(ix) How does Aristotle define 'the universal'?
(x) What are the three meanings of imitation?
(xi) Define the term 'mock epic'.
(xii) What is the main difference between poetry and history?
(xiii) What are the six parts every tragedy must have? Which, according to Aristotle, is the most important?
(xiv) What, according to Aristotle, is the primary purpose of tragedy?
(xv) What is the place of cathersis in tragedy? 

2.  Answer the following questions. 

(i) What is 'anti-climax' is drama?
(ii) What is the importance of plot in tragedy?
(iii) What is the opinion of Aristotle about three unities in the play?
(iv) What is the place of suffering in tragedy?
(v) Among the three unities, which one is called Aristotelian?
(vi) What are the characteristics of an ideal tragic hero?
(vii) Why does Aristotle consider a saintly figure inappropriate to be a tragic hero?
(viii) What does Aristotle mean by the singleness of in tragedy?
(ix) What does the term hamartia mean?
(x) What is the Probable Impossibility as discussed by Aristotle?
(xi) Why is plot more important than character or speech in a tragedy?
(xii) What are 'recognition' (anagnorisis) and 'reversal' (peripeteia)?
(xiii) What role does language play in the development of epic and tragedy?
(xiv) What is peripety? What is a discovery? What is the best form of discovery?
(xv) What are the four requirements of a character?
3. Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy

4. Aristotle's Concept of Ideal Tragic Hero

5. Importance of Plot in Tragedy

6. Plot-Character Relationship

7. Aristotle's Concept of Imitation

8. Aristotle's Concept of Cathersis

2. AN APOLOGY FOR POETRY BY PHILIP SIDNEY

9.  Answer the following questions. 

(i) Who was Philip Sidney?
(ii) What was the purpose of writing "An Apology for Poetry"?
(iii) Define the term Renaissance.
(iv) What two ideas does "An Apology for Poetry" deal with?
(v) What is the origin and meaning of the word "poet"?
(vi) What is the nature and function of poetry according to Sidney?
(vii) How is poetry superior to philosophy and history?
(viii) How has Sidney established that poetry is antique and universal in nature?
(ix) What, according to Sidney, is the relationship between pleasure and learning?
(x) How does the poet's art differ from that of the astronomer, geometrician, moral philosopher, rhetorician, and others?
(xi) What, according to Sidney, did Greeks mean by the philosophical term architectonike?
(xii) Is Sidney's idea of mimesis Platonic or Aristotelian?
(xiii) What are the three kinds of poetry according to Sidney?
(xiv) What is Elegy?
(xv) What is the essence of Sidney's defense against poetry? 

10. Answer the following questions.
(i) What is Sidney's opinion about the heroic or Epic poetry?
(ii) Sidney says, "Comedy is not merely to provide according to Aristotle".
(iii) What are the main objections brought against poetry by its enemies?
(iv) To what extent, ultimately, does Sidney agree with Horace about the aim or "end" of poetry?
(v) Does "rhyming and versing" make a poet, according to Sidney?
(vi) How does Sidney refute the allegation against poetry that it is bound up with "rhyming and versing"?
(vii) How does Sidney refute the allegation against poetry being the waste of time?
(viii) How does Sidney refute the allegation against poetry being the mother of lies?
(ix) How does Sidney refute the allegation against poetry being the nurse of abuse?
(x) What was Sidney's approach on Plato's banishment of poets from his ideal republic?
(xi) Why has England grown so hard a step-mother to poets? Asks Sidney.
(xii) What should be the qualities of a tragedy according to Sidney?
(xiii) What should be the qualities of a comedy according to Sidney?
(xiv) What argument does Sidney make concerning the unity of place? Does his comment seem fitting? Why or why not?
(xv) What is the value of Sidney's criticism?
11. The Puritan Attack on Poetry

12. Sydney's Defense of Poetry

13. Sydney's Theory of Poetry

14. Sydney As a Critic

3. SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS BY T.S. ELIOT

15.  Answer the following questions. 

(i)
Tradition and Individual Talent
Metaphysical Poets
Milton - I
Milton - II

16. Answer the following questions.
(i)
17. T.S. Eliot As a Critic
18. Relation Between Tradition and Individual Talent
19. T.S. Eliot's Concept of Metaphysical Poets

20. Theory of Impersonality in Poetry

4. THE WELL WROUGHT URN BY CLEANTH BROOKS

21.  Answer the following questions. 

(i) Who was Cleanth Brooks?
(ii) What are the major works of Cleanth Brooks?
(iii) What is the significance of the title "The Well Wrought Urn"?
(iv) What is the subject matter of "The Well Wrought Urn" by Brooks?
(v) Why has Brooks chosen poetry as his subject in "The Well Wrought Urn"?
(vi) Write the table of contents of "The Well Wrought Urn" by Brooks.
(vii) What has been discussed in Brooks' essay "The Language of Paradox"?
(viii) "The language of poetry is the language of paradox". Says Brooks.
(ix) Why has Brooks chosen Wordsworth in "The Language of Paradox"?
(x) What is R.S. Crane's objection against Brooks' centrality of paradox?
(xi) How does Brooks define irony, especially poetic irony?
(xii) Is satire different from irony?
(xiii) What is an ode according to Brooks?
(xiv) Brooks notes that Keats, contrary to his dictum, closes his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with a meaningful statement. What is this sententious statement?
(xv) What is "Sylvan historian' according to Brooks?

22. Answer the following questions.
(i) Which comment of T.S. Eliot does Brooks quote about "Beauty is truth"?
(ii) What becomes of the poem, according to Brooks, unless we assert "the primacy of the pattern"?
(iii) Write three analogies does Brooks offer for "the essential structure of a poem".
(iv) What does Brooks state about "organic context"?
(v) What is the difference between the "terms of science" and the "terms of a poem"?
(vi) What is a "well made poem" according to Brooks?
(vii) What is the role of a word and logic withing a poem?
(viii) What does poetry communicate according to Brooks?
(ix) What does Brooks say in his essay "The Heresy of Paraphrase"?
(x) What are some of the consequences of allowing ourselves to be misled by "the heresy of paraphrase"?
(xi) According to Brooks, what do good works of literature have in common?
(xii) What should be the qualities of a critic according to Brooks?
(xiii) What is the true function of literary criticism according to Brooks?
(xiv) What are the strong points of Brooks' criticism?
(xv) Which features of Brooks' views have been criticized by later reader, and on what grounds?


i. What does poetry communicate? ii. Gray’s Storied Urn, iii. Keats’ Sylvan Historian: History without footnotes, iv. Yeats’ Great Rooted Blossomer

23. Cleanth Brooks As a Critic

24. Cleanth Brooks' Method for the Analysis of Poetry

25. Brooks' Views on 'What Does Poetry Communicate?'

26. Brooks' Views on Keats' Urn

5. CRITICAL PRACTICE BY CATHERINE BELSEY

27.  Answer the following questions. 

(i) Who was Catherine Belsey?
(ii) What subject does Belsey deal in Critical Practice?
(iii) What is Belsey's view about Classical Realism?
(iv) What does Belsey mean by Expressive Realism?
(v) How much the common sense view of literature is justified? Discuss with reference to Belsey's arguments.
(v) What relationship does Belsey establish between criticism and common sense?
(vi) What, according to Belsey, is the difference between common sense and literary theory?
(vii) How does Belsey discuss the authority of common sense with respect to Saussure's view of linguistic theory?
(viii) What is Belsly's opinion about Saussure's theory?
(ix) Explain the Post-Saussurean notion that the transparency of language is an illusion.
(x) What is post-structuralism?
(xi) What are the three kinds of the texts mention by Belsey?
(xii) What do you understand by Dialectical Text?
(xiii) Differentiate between Dialectical and the Rhetorical Text.
(xiv) Critical Practice is produced with a bias in favour of the Interrogative Text. Do you agree?
(xv) Discuss the concept of split and unfixed subject with reference to the Interrogative Text.  

28. Answer the following questions.
(i) What, according to Lacan, are the three stages of child development?
(ii) In what ways did New Critics change the approach of criticism towards a literary text?
(iii) How can meaning be constructed by reproducing what is familiar?
(iv) Discuss Belsey's arguments in the favour of structural criticism.
(v) What are the three features that describe a Classic Realist text?
(vi) Define the terms ideology and discourse and explain their relationship to each other.
(vii) How does ideology shape the subject? Can the subject find its way out of ideology?
(viii) "There is no criticism without ideology". How does Belsey argue this thesis?

(ix) What is the influence of Marx and Althusser on literary criticism?

(x) What id Deconstruction method? How has it changed the concept of modern criticism?

(xi) Explain the deconstruction of the text with reference to Barthes and Macherey.

(xii) Where does the meaning lie: in the text, the reader, the writer, or the structure?

(xiii) Discuss the methods of extracting meanings out of a creative text as described by Belsey.

(xiv) What are the problems involved in the production of text?

(xv) What are the major drawbacks preventing the attainment of a new and productive critical practice? 

29. Belsey's Views on 'New Criticism'

30. Relationship Between Criticism and Commonsense

31. Difference Between the Dialectical and the Rhetorical Text

32. There is no Criticism Without Ideology

6. CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF IMPORTANT POEMS
33. Critically evaluate the following.
(i) When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away!
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.
When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there
The spent and maim'd among;
God grant you find one face there
You loved when all was young!

(Charles Kingsley) 

(ii) Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on --on--and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

(Siegfried Sassoon) 

34. Critically evaluate the following.
(i) Never seek to tell they love
Love that never told can be
For the gentle wind does move
Silently invisibly
I told my love I told my love
I told her all my heart
Trembling cold in ghastly fears
Ah she doth depart
Soon as she was gone from me
A traveller came by
Silently invisibly
O was no deny

(William Blake) 

(ii) I will drain
Long draughts of quiet
As a purgation
Remember
Twice daily
Who I am;
Will lie o'nights
In the bony arms
Of Reality and be comforted.

(Elizabeth Sewell) 

35. Critically evaluate the following.
(i) 'Nature' is what we see --
The Hill -- the Afternoon --
Squirrel -- Eclipse -- the Bumble bee --
Nay -- Nature is Heaven --
Nature is what we hear --
The Bobolink -- the Sea --
Thunder -- the Cricket --
Nay -- Nature is Harmony --
Nature is what we know --
Yet have no art to say --
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

(Emily Dickinson) 

(ii) Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known.
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

(Robert Frost)

36. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide and made my pains his prey.

Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay

A mortal thing so to immortalise;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise.

Not so (quod I); let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;

My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.

(Edmund Spenser)

(ii) Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

But they eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

(William Shakespeare)

37. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours:

We have given our hears away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. --- Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

(William Wordsworth)

(ii) Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove,

The linner and thrush say, 'I love and I love!'

In the winter they're silent -- the wind is so strong;

What is says, I don't know, but it sings a loud song.

But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,

And singing, and loving -- all come back together.

But the lark is so brimful of gladness and love,

The green fields below him, the blue sky above,

The he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he -

'I love my Love, and my Love loves me!'

(S.T. Coleridge)

38. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) There be none of Beauty's daughters

With a magic like thee;

And like music on the waters

Is they sweet voice to me:

When, as if its sound were causing

The charmed ocean's pausing,

The waves lie still and gleaming,

And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:

And the midnight moon is weaving

Her bright chain o'er the deep,

Whose breast is gently heaving

As an infant's asleep:

So the spirit bows before thee

To listen and adore thee;

With a full but soft emotion,

Like the swell of summer's ocean.

(Lord Byron)

(ii) BRIGHT star! Would I were steadfast as thou art --

Not in love splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priest-like task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or grazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors --

No --- yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever --- or else swoon to death.

(John Keats)

39. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night

To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, --

Out of the night, two cocks together crow,

Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:

And bright before my eyes with trumpeters stand,

Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,

Each facing each as in a coat of arms:

The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.

(Edward Thomas)

(ii) Twelve o'clock

Along the reaches of the street

Held in a lunar synthesis,

Whispering lunar incantations

Dissolve the floors of memory

And all its clear relations,

Its divisions and precisions,

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drum,

And through the spaces of the dark

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

(T.S. Eliot)

40. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Easter tide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

(A.E. Houseman)

(ii) At school I loved one picture's heavy greenness -

Horizons rigged with windmills' arms and sails.

The millhouses' still outlines. Their in-placeness

Still more in place when mirrored in canals.

I can't remember not ever having known

The immanent hydraulics of a land

Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.

My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry

Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.

Me waiting until I was nearly fifty

To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans

The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,

Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

(Seamus Heaney)