Morning Ramblings

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that spending large amounts of time in the library stacks significantly increases the chances of having extremely academic and/or thought-provoking conversations with near-strangers. After my shift this morning, I went up by the 2nd floor stacks to browse the literary criticism section and ran into a student I’d seen frequently in the mornings, studying in the same spot. Considering that he probably recognized me as “that girl who always shelves books here in the morning” and we have managed to wave to each other in the mornings, a proper “hello” and conversation was in order. Coincidentally, he happened to be a graduate student studying English literature. After the revelation that we were both English majors, the conversation plunged off the deep end of intellectual literary geek-dom. The conversation jumped from discussing favorite UW English professors, to classes (I’ve been strongly recommended to go with the Chaucer class over introduction to Middle English) to various bits of literary criticism and philosophy. We partially discussed his ideas for a thesis, which was some focus on Romantic literary criticism (purposely vaguely described as I don’t precisely remember what his full topic was). The Romantics (Blake, Coolidge, Wordsworth and company) take a far more holistically soulful approach to literature and literary criticism than Aristotle’s Poetics would encourage.

The bulk of the discussion: Aristotle takes a psychological approach to affect. Tragedy and comedy physically affect the senses… I feel like he would have taken readily to the field of psychology in how concretely he viewed the effect of art on the psyche. To the Romantics, art transcends physical affect. The analogy he offered me- literature appreciated in its most pure form is like a white light and literary criticism is the prism that divides white light into the different colors. One can view each branch of criticism (formalism, culturalism, etc) as a different color, or a part of the whole.

For some reason, this analogy particularly resonated with me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been asked far too many times to defend why one would pull apart a perfectly good piece of literature to pieces analyzing it from a particular vantage-point. At times, I’ve even wondered the same thing myself; isn’t analyzing a Shakespeare play from a strictly formalist viewpoint deliberately ignoring other important aspects of the play? I love the explanation this analogy gives. Isolating one “color” gives an overall greater understanding of the work as a whole. Maybe I’m starting to over-use the analogy as a crutch, but it certainly provides a succinct explanation to the practice different studies of criticism. Also, two mornings ago, a patron tried to educate me on Latin roots while I was shelving. Go figure :-)