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My question(s): What surprised you, if anything, in the essays by Fruit and Lockwood? What caught your attention? What seems notable in the picture those essays create of the state of literary criticism in the early twentieth century?
11 responses so far ↓
2southgreen // 7 September 2008 at 10.15 pm
So, I just finished Lockwood’s essay on Milton, and honestly, it was incredibly painful to read. Don’t get me wrong, I reasonably enjoyed the text book introduction and even the article on Shakespeare, Milton, and “completeness,” but what Lockwood wrote went way beyond complete… the examples she detailed were grueling to go through, especially without the context of the entire poem. I feel like if some of the hero worship could be turned off, the whole article could be summed up as, “Milton, a human being with the requisite flaws of his species, chose to revise most of his poetry by…” Four sentences tops. Instead, I’m flooded with line after line, totally out of context, largely with very minor fixes. I’d be happier actually reading one of Milton’s pieces with revisions included. The article’s commentary seemed to be primarily common sense. Maybe she was a fabulously fun woman in her free time, but based on her contributions to Modern Language Notes, Laura Lockwood is no friend of mine.
david // 8 September 2008 at 10.26 pm
Perhaps we’ve already aired everything out in class, but I just wanted to discuss in further detail the early literary critics’ concern with inspirational origin. Fruit takes offense to Milton’s depiction of a mortal world that is secondary to that of the heavens, and Lockwood, for her part, justifies Milton’s revisions as providing a more lucid image of what the author had in mind when first setting pen to paper. But what says that the world came before the verse? Can’t (and doesn’t) literature have the power to form our perceptions, preceding even inspiration? Thinking of beginnings, what is it that literature sets out to do in the first place? Feel free to answer or ignore at will.
spotofbother // 9 September 2008 at 3.12 pm
What bothers me about all of these early essayists is that they take for granted the goals of the artist. According to Lockwood, Milton revised his work so that it would be more clear because art must be clear. For Fruit, literature must be complete, and there must be “an omnipresent humanity.” If there is a battle, even in heaven, there must be blood because “there was no artistic difficulty in connecting blood (of angels!) with the earth to great effect.”
Neither critic spends any time pondering the larger goals of the artist – what Milton set out to do when he wrote Paradise Lost, for example. When trying to “justify the ways of God to man” (as Milton wrote), is it necessary that angels shed blood? Is that the only way Milton could have expressed the “omnipresent humanity?”
I think the essay on Beginnings would have served Fruit and Lockwood well…
bolon // 9 September 2008 at 5.32 pm
So I have so say the line “which drizzled blood upon the Capitol” is really a fantastic line, although I can’t really explain why. And Fruit has a bit of trouble too. To present another author’s work as complete is difficult, and Fruit can only present Shakespeare’s work as great by comparing it to the lesser Milton’s. Even if Fruit’s essay did not follow any logic, I did find it entertaining to read. Fruit is just so impressed by Shakespeare’s work that his passion and excitement translate to paper as being illogical and a bit ridiculous.
On Lockwood, I wonder how much knowing the author’s original wording can really show the intention behind his words. But then again, as we’ve discussed in class, how much does the author’s intention matter?
And responding to david, I think literature definitely can form our perceptions and opinions, based on the way we read the words. Whatever the author’s original intent, it is the reader who finds meaning in literature, and so literature can invoke a wide range of thought and ideas.
cwr // 9 September 2008 at 6.32 pm
I found Lockwood’s essay to be incredibly tedious because she was writing about a reasonably dry topic, and attempted to prove her point basically by giving a list of every single correction Milton ever made. Her essay, by the end, seemed to come down to a statistical analysis of Milton’s edits, without any comparison to other authors, and without any explanation why she had chosen to say in five pages what she could have said in a few paragraphs.
Fruit, on the other hand, I think seriously underwrote his essay. I think he stumbled across a very interesting difference between the writing styles used by Shakespeare and Milton, but he never developed the comparison. It seemed (from the limited quotation that he gave) that Calpurnia’s speech was much shorter than Milton’s description of battle, and focused on the human aspects of warfare. Milton’s, however, focused on the celestial nature of this battle of angels, emphasizing many aspects of warfare that are not part of the human experience. I believe that Fruit could have written a very interesting essay exploring the differences between the two ways these authors chose to describe this their battles in the sky. Moreover I think he still could have used these examples to try to prove that one author’s style was more effective at conveying some central theme from the two works. Instead, however, he wrote an essay focusing entirely on the mention of blood, that I think was quite ineffective.
sfbull5 // 9 September 2008 at 6.58 pm
I agree with cwr about the tediousness of Lockwood’s fact-based essay. While I believe Fruit makes some interesting points, he ruins them for me when he turns his article into a competition between Milton and Shakespeare by trying to compare the validity or artistic worth of one to the other. One part of our in-class discussion on Fruit and Lockwood’s essays, in addition to “Beginnings,” that I wanted to comment on was the notion that every author is inherently influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by the authors preceeding him or her. I feel like this point can be beaten into the ground without really adding anything more to the conversation — “Beginnings” does an excellent job of pointing out the textual and thematic links that connect various authors and texts — and one could argue that those links date back even before written languages. But is there any greater significance to this point? And moreover, does a greater level of interconnectivity with other texts make a certain text better or worse (more “worldly” or less “original”)? If we accept that every text necessarily draws on other pre-existing texts, can any author in the 21st Century (or ever, for that matter) claim to be truly original? I realize I’m asking broad, unanswerable questions to which I don’t expect definitive answers…
sprinkles // 9 September 2008 at 9.21 pm
The most relevant point brought up in class, to me, was that beginnings are subjective. The subjectivity of beginnings can also be extended to reading itself. Different people will understand a text differently based upon their previous experiences and beliefs; just as different people will have varied ideas about what constitutes a beginning. As far as Fruit’s and Lockwood’s essays, the served as no more than a window into early literary criticism. Lockwood’s essay was so dry that I couldn’t track with it. Also, Fruit’s insistance upon proving his bias through arbitrary evidence made me incapable of taking his essay seriously.
tab194 // 9 September 2008 at 11.50 pm
I think it is safe to say we all agree that Lockwood’s essay was dry and redundant. The part about that essay that really jumped out at me was not this repetitiveness, but the fact that she was so careful in finding evidence of corrections to his poems without really digging into the possible meanings. She seemed to interpret each correction as having one particular meaning when it could have meant anything. For example, she recalls an instance when he wrote then then in one of his poems before correcting it. She claims that it was because his ear told him that it belonged in the next line so he repeats it in the proper position. For all she knows he just wrote it twice accidentally. Her assumption is absolutely ridiculous. It appears that this was common at the turn of the century as Fruit does the same thing. He makes arbitrary comments about how Milton’s poems are far inferior to Shakespeare’s. Both revisions of Milton lacked any serious analysis even when Lockwood provided more than enough examples of revisions.
mercurylanes // 10 September 2008 at 12.43 am
What struck me most in both of the essays was their mutual dismissal of “premeditated” works.
Fruit argues that Shakespeare is a better author than Milton in part because what he does “is done, it seems, incidentally–the more art for that; but what Milton does, is done prepense.” Shakespeare’s work appears to have sprung into the world fully formed–it’s Fruit’s gold standard of poetic perfectibility, and it never occurs to him to cast any doubt on its success as a text–hence, effortless. Blood drizzled upon the Capitol? How significant!
Lockwood’s critical methodology is completely different, but she reaches a similar conclusion about Milton’s work: Milton’s least “premeditated” works are his best–that is, those which appear to have gone through the fewest changes from brain to page.
So, getting back to the idea of “beginnings,” Fruit and Lockwood seem to be buying into a very romantic notion about the work of the author–that is, that it shouldn’t be a labored process of writing, crossing out, rewriting, and so on; that there’s no “thought” but rather a grand moment of divine inspiration, as though they’re supposed to be channeling some Platonic ideal of a poem, hence that’s the standard by which we judge their success.
Which brings me to the question about “originality”–the implication is that that which is premeditated is less original, less like whatever form the author is supposedly attempting to portray. Why is “originality” valuable? As is pointed out towards the end of the chapter on “Beginnings,” a literally “original” work, one with no literary precedent, would be both impossible to read and impossible to write. And perhaps, as Fruit and Lockwood’s criticisms suggest, what we actually *like* about a work of literature has nothing to do with its originality, but rather with how well it fits our own preconceptions.
I’m deliberately confusing a couple senses of the word “originality,” but i think it does the trick. I also (speaking of preconceptions) may be deliberately misreading Fruit and Lockwood to suit my argument, so if you see any gaping holes in this logic, fire away, but i’m going to bed.
campusm79 // 10 September 2008 at 1.28 am
Although Fruit’s and Lockwood’s essays did not resonate with me, I recognize the value in having read them. I agree with sprinkles that the two essays act as starting points for examining literary criticism. To me, the Fruit and Lockwood essays, through their arbitrary measures of completeness in expression, reveal just how subjective literary criticism is. I struggled most with Lockwood’s essay in that I could not find any reason to care why Milton made the corrections he did. In her third paragraph, Lockwood posits that an English student’s interest in a poet would increase if he understood how a poet transformed his thoughts into art. I agree with this to some extent, but I also think that knowing (or rather, thinking that I know) a poet’s exact reasoning for expressing a thought in the manner that he or she did detracts from the pleasure I get in reading. I agree with tab194 that Lockwood does make assumptions and could be incorrectly interpreting the reasons for Milton’s corrections. Merely having Lockwood’s assumptions in mind, however, whether they be correct or not, breaks down Milton’s work too much. By citing so many examples, I think Lockwood inadvertently butchers the “fulfillment of expression†that she believes Milton to have worked so hard to achieve. The way in which Lockwood penned her essay causes readers to examine Milton’s work in isolated phrases, prohibiting the reader from grasping the fullness of expression supposedly in his work.
tiger // 14 September 2008 at 1.41 am
I think these two pieces stick out as two extremes of literary interpretation. Both start off with relatively clear (although subjective) theses. However they part paths as the Fruit piece provides too little back up for the arguments that he is making even though the points made are usually very huge, conclusive statements. For example, in order to prove his subjective conclusion that Shakespeare is a superior writer than Milton, he simply states: “In Shakespeare the blood drizzled upon the capitol. How significant!” without really mentioning why or how this is significant. I believe subjective opinions should be valued in literary interpretation but if it is not backed up with sufficient material, it is better left unstated.
On the other hand, Lockwood’s piece seemed to be on the other end of the axis of providing too much evidence for her points. In putting forth too much evidence to back up her argument, it makes the overall piece feel very dry. There seems to be not much thinking involved in her arguments. Rather, it comes across as more of a dry list to support an argument that seems relatively unimportant.
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