General Essay Questions

1		As this book demonstrates, there are certain critics and works of criticism whose catholic approach radically defies all categorization. The famous concluding chapter of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, for example, is a methodologically eclectic analysis of a passage in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse that is centered around the disarmingly simple question: "Who is talking here?" And the plasticity of Mikhail Bakhtin's theoretical concepts have made his critical approach adaptable to various ideologies and interests. What do such specimens of criticism say about the employment of multiple theoretical perspectives? Analyze other examples of criticism in which various critical perspectives merge to offer more than the sum of their separate insights.
2		Critics have long argued over the distinction between poetic truth and scientific truth (Philip Sidney's famous 16th-century essay is only one early example). How have the critical schools discussed in this book defined their position in response to the (perceived) methods and practices of the sciences? Are there methodological principles (analogous to Occam's Razor) that are observed - or ought to be observed - across the spectrum of critical theories?
3		Over the past two decades, Harold Bloom has waged a polemical war against various poststructuralist theories in his effort to promote and establish a stable canon of Western literature. Discuss the project of "canon revision" as a focal point for critical debate. Are poststructuralist and New Historicist criticism fundamentally incompatible with the traditional concept of a literary canon?
4		Theory-based criticism focuses on certain properties of literature to the neglect of others. Many would argue that Georg Lukacs' appraisal of Modernist literature was handicapped by his narrowly Marxist ideology, New Criticism by its poem-centered methodology and conservative political agenda, Mikhail Bakhtin's by his rejection of the poem in favor of the novel and by his neglect of Modernist novels such as Ulysses. Analyze other instances where the benefits of a theoretical stance have come at a reductive cost. At what point does one begin using a text to illuminate a theory, rather than using a theory to illuminate a text?
5		Many of the great critics of the past century were literary figures themselves and not affiliated with academia or with any one critical theory. Edmund Wilson, for example, considered himself primarily a journalist and not a literary critic. Wilson's contemporary, T.S. Eliot, inspired the institutionalized brand of formalism known as "New Criticism," though Eliot himself was not a formalist critic in the institutional sense. Describe this process of institutionalization following the advent of a new critical theory (New Criticism, New Historicism, Deconstructionist criticism, etc.). Would you argue -- as some have in recent years -- that the culture of academia has had a negative impact upon the art of criticism? Can you cite evidence of an historical cycle of "normal" and "revolutionary" criticism, analogous to Thomas Kuhn's interplay between normal and revolutionary science?