The reluctance of AQA Specification A to embrace the critical and theo- retical possibilities of the new subject criteria came as no real surprise. Since the new specifications were launched, there have been a number of objections to the critical principles they represent: to the idea that the study of literature should involve anything other than a personal encounter with the text. This strand of complaint bears a number of … Read the rest
Tag: Social psychology
Woolf and Murry: Impressionism and authority
Woolf’s opposition to scholarship and the canon, and her upholding of a method of reading that was emphatically non-institutional, make her search for an authorial persona and an appropriate critical method- ology seem less the product of gender alone than the result of a complex set of intellectual and institutional factors, in which gender neverthe- less played an important part. It is certainly significant that there are parallels between Woolf’s … Read the rest
Greek Literature
This dissertation surveys the representation of crowds in the two great epics of
Homer, the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comedian
Aristophanes. It covers each of these authors in varying levels of detail, and has two
major goals: to identify the vocabulary with which they describe crowds, and to infer
from these descriptions certain underlying concepts of group behavior and collective
psychology.
As a preliminary question, I must … Read the rest