For Thursday: Culler, Chapter 4 & Handout on Poetry

 Answer TWO of the following: 

Q1: If ‘poetics’ is about the meaning of texts and how these meanings are achieved, then what is ‘hermenutics’? Why might this be equally important in reading or discussing a text? When might hermeneutics also get in the way?

Q2: What is the "Intentional Fallacy," and why is it a "fallacy"? Why do you think intention used to matter for so much, and now, we tend to question it rather than accept it at face value? Similarly, how does this free us up to discuss Sappho in a way we normally couldn’t?

Q3: On page 63, Culler writes that “a work is interpreted as answering questions posed by [the] horizon of expectations, and a reader of the 1990s approaches Hamlet with expectations different from those of a contemporary of Shakespeare’s.” So if Shakespeare was writing to his audience and their expectations, how does it make reading his works especially difficult? How can a modern reader be aware of a previous age’s—and even their own—horizon of expectations?

Q4: What does it mean that a word's form and meaning have an arbitrary relationship? How can a dog not be a dog? Or a moon not be a moon? Does this relate to the idea that “meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless” (67)?

HANDOUT FOR TUESDAY (which didn't print!) 

From M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Thompson Wadsworth, 2005. 

Elegy: In Greek and Roman times, “elegy” denoted any poem written in elegiac meter (alternating hexamter and pentameter lines). The term was also used, however, to refer to the subject matter of change and loss frequently expressed in the elegiac verse form, especially in complaints about love…the Dirge is also a versified expression of grief on the occasion of a particular person’s death, but differs from elegy in that it is short, less formal, and is usually represented as a text to be sung.

Ode: A long lyric poem that is serious in subject and treatment, elevated in style, and elaborate in its stanzaic structure. Norman McLean said that the term now calls to mind a lyric which is “massive, public in its proclamations, and Pindaric in its classical prototype.” The prototype was established by the Greek poet Pindar, whose odes were modeled on the songs by the chorus in Greek drama…Romantic poets perfected the personal ode of description and passionate meditation, which is stimulated by an aspect of the outer scene and turns on the attempt to solve either a personal emotional problem or a generally human one.

Epic Poetry: In its strict sense, the term epic or heroic poem is applied to a work that meets at least the following criteria: it is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or (in the case of Milton's Paradise Lost) the human race...The narrator begins by stating his argument, or epic theme, invokes a muse or guiding spirit to inspire him in hsi great undertaking, then addresses to the muse the epic question, the answer to which inaugurates the narrative proper."