Aristotelian contributions to New Criticism
New Criticism is primarily focused on the dialogue between the author, the work itself and the reader. It centers, however, upon the notion of a work as a separate entity for critical consideration, unlike the traditional Romantic approach in which the poet was the emphasis, and unlike the Empirical tradition in which the emphasis was placed on the reader and his interpretation of a work. Yet can New Criticism’s critical method, a preoccupation with isolated textual (as opposed to historical, psychological, biographical or contextual) analysis, be attributed to a Platonic or an Aristotelian history?
From Amazons to Wives: The gendered difficulties of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its Classical foundations
Though many have historically criticized Shakespeare’s early play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as shoddily written, re-examination of the text over the last several decades has leant new prestige to this entertaining ‘classic’. Most scholars agree that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a light and frivolous accompaniment to the celebration of a wedding; and while the historical identity of the couple for whom it was written has escaped the knowledge of his students, there is ample textual evidence to support this claim. The main plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream involves the complex machinations of two couples (Helena and Demetrius and Hermia and Lysander) whose romantic cross purposes are further complicated by their flight into the woods and into the realm of the faerie King and Queen (Oberon and Titania) who themselves are engaged in domestic battle. The play contains some of the usual ‘lighter’ themes common to Shakespearean literature such as love, dreams and the creative imagination. It is love however, that causes the most difficulties for Shakespeare’s hapless characters. This sentiment leads to confusion, escape, intrigue and a great many laughs for the audience. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the quintessential comedy using misunderstanding and circumstance to create a scene that becomes incrementally absurd as to produce nothing but laughter.
Marked by a Kiss: Sexual Perversions and the real identify of the Spider Woman
Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spider Woman consists almost entirely of extended dialogue shared between the two main characters of the novel, Molina and Valentin, who are two prisoners in a seedy Argentinean prison in the late sixties. Molina is a middle aged man who was incarcerated for his corruption of the youth, clever language to explain that he had been arrested for being homosexual, who passes his time recounting and modifying his favourite films as stories for his fellow prisoners. Valentin is a young, middle-class, and involved in the heated political struggle for the Argentina of the period. Both men develop a strange and close bond under the oppressive forces of incarceration that eventually lead each to their own demise. Manuel Puig’s novel, however, is so much more than a pithy love story.
Crime in Cronenberg’s Videodrome: A perversion of the everyman’s subconscious
Rena King:
“Don’t you feel such shows [of soft-core pornography and hardcore violence] contribute to a social climate of violence and sexual malaise, and do you care?”
Max Renn:
“Certainly I care. I care enough to give my viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and their frustrations…”
Videodrome stars James Woods as Max Renn, president of an independent, Canadian (more specifically, a Torontonian) television station, Civic-TV. At a time when everyone seems TV-obsessed, addicted to the emissions of the all-powerful Cathode Ray Tube, Max’s station offers to viewers sensational programming – specializing in a unique mix of illicit sex (“smut”) and violence (“snuff”) – which earns it the dubious slogan of “the one you take to bed with you.” Fearing that his station – and indeed all of North America – is getting too “soft”, Max embarks on a quest to find “tougher” material for his audience. The plot thickens when he discovers pirate tapes of an experimental show called “Videodrome”, a raw, seedy program without plot or characters, only merciless acts of violence, torture and murder. Max quickly becomes infatuated with the scrambled images from the single-camera operation – in which a screaming victim is tortured, whipped, chained and beaten to death by two hooded figures – and develops an obsession with the “purity” (simplicity) of its message.
The ‘Chinaman’ in the basement: Visual den narratives of the late-nineteenth century
Historically, art and literature have served a fundamental role in mirroring (and perhaps creating) a society’s cultural climate; they have become the means through which a society comes to ‘know’ itself. By artistically or literally depicting categories of people, or ‘social types’, one is easily able to comprehend society at large. Yet the socio-cultural worldview that art and literature inform is often based on idealised depictions of reality, heavily influenced by custom, tradition, optimism and romanticism; however, so too does it oft include realistic portrayals of everyday, plebeian life.
In reflecting a particular socio-cultural ‘reality’, art and literature have also played a historic role in constructing meta-narratives of criminality. This paper will explore the way in which mass-media ventures of the late-nineteenth-century, specifically popular illustrated fiction, served to shape Victorian notions of criminality by establishing an archetypal, Asian ‘Other’ as a villainous criminal.