Weird thing I just noticed:
In this scene in my copy (the Penguin Books one), it's a shield that gets rescued, not a child, and the knight who took it is Breunor Sauns Pite, not Breuse Sans Pitee. Peculiar, the things translations do.
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Well, Persephone, lemme see if I can recall some old categories of criticism.
Um.
Norman Holland was big into psychological crit, which involved lots of statistics of readers, and dealt with texts as psychological artifacts - as reflections of primal anxieties, complexes, desires, all that stuff. The book as brain, maybe (if I'm remembering right).
I'm not sure if Holland was into psychoanalyzing the text the way some Lacanians are, but that'd probably fit the same general mode.
Tristram as the forming ego.
Had a prof in undergrad who was big into genetic crit, which was more about text-as-history or historical product, reading texts as they relate to zeitgeist, generating and reflecting the moods and obsessions of an age. I think a lot of new historicism and *some* feminist theory falls into the same rough category: text as culture.
Tristram as medieval European ideal.
Similar, but not the same, was something I dimly recall as being called mimetic crit, which takes texts as journalism, in a way. I can't remember any of the theorists behind this, but it was also related to new historicism & some feminism - the novel as disguised ich-roman, really.
Tristram as the memories of Thomas Malory, nostalgic man-at-arms. Or, better yet, Tristram as the literal history of an actual figure, made legendary by the passage of time.
And then there's formalism, which could be seen as a fellow-traveler with psychoanalytic theory, in a way, but is really about structure and structuralism and, by extension, deconstruction. The text as a generator of meaning (or, maybe, "meaning") through the use of formal structures like Hero, Narrative Arc, Episodes, Sentences, etc. Words as words, relating to other words. Eliot was a formalist. I can't recall much else.
Tristram as Campbellian hero-story, or allegory, or as early soap opera, or as destroyer of "history."
I think that was it for the basic categories, as taught me. Of course, they're pretty arbitrary, and pretty distorted by passage of time.
So how does the story *appeal* to you? |
