Approaches to Hamlet: Traditional, Biographical, Modern, Political, New Historicism, Reade, Resúmenes de Literatura inglesa

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Critical approaches Traditional Criticism - Concentration on Hamlet’s character – what might be his tragic flaw - Reluctance to address political and social aspects - Stress on supernatural and mysterious explanations - Assumption of coherence and unity in the play, some kind of harmony in the end. - Readings which do not challenge existing social structures - Rejection of theory as providing ways to understand Hamlet - Claim to objectivity, free from ideological bias • Biographical Criticism: • Literature is written by actual people and understanding an author’s life can help readers more thoroughly comprehend the work. • It often affords a practical method by which readers can better understand a text. • the biographical critic “focuses on explicating the literary work by using the insight provided by knowledge of the author’s life • Biographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it out with irrelevant material. Modern Criticism • Sceptical of character approaches • Political, social and economic factors • Rejection of supernatural and mysterious explanations • Identifies contradictions, fragmentation and disunity • Readings that are subversive of existing social structures • Identifies how the plays expresses the interest of dominant groups – rich and powerful males • Theory is essential to produce valid readings • Often expresses its commitment (feminism, equality, political change) • Argues that all readings are political and ideological Political criticism. New Historicism: • Refers to historic text • We cannot understand fully a literary text unless we reject our own presuppositions and assume the presuppositions of the contemporary age of work. • We cannot provide an objective view of History • Hamlet: Elizabethan and Jacobean period • Seek coincidences that cross generic and cultural lines • Extraliterary matters • Reveal opposing historical tensions in the text Hamlet reflects the dynasty problems of Elizabethan era, text reflect the background. Play has a function of containment of power critic. The authorities permitted tragedies to be performed even if they criticized the state because the effect was to contain and reduce such criticism: the tragedies end with the challenges to authority overcome, with the same hierarchical system firmly in place. Cultural materialism: • More concerned with today’s world, economic factors and drama. • Importance of revision of culture • Shares a way of reading tragedy that argues that culture and materialism are always related. • Interpretations are shaped by the economic, political and ideological systems of the times, as the context section illustrates • Social practices, forms, beliefs, values involved in the play. • Concept of discourse: the way language express ideology in a given situation. • Society has got different discourses: literature is part of discourses and society. • Anthropological roots • 2 trajectories: - led back to the past and feudal hierarchies -led toward future, socialist utopia (Marxist) Marxist Criticism: • Discourse for interrogating all societies and their texts in terms of certain specific views. • Text seen as material product to be understood in broadly historical terms. Product of Work. • Conflict between high and low cultures take place between classical and popular texts • Focuses on social conflict, creativity and the struggle for positive social change. • 3 types of sign: ■ ICONIC: sign resembles its referent ■ IDEXICAL: where the sign is associated with its referent ■ SYMBOLIC: sign has an arbitrary relation to its referent • Undergoing structure gives meanings/ structural patterns • The value of a sign within the structure is different with other binary oppositions. • Critic’s aim: to find binary oppositions in the structure of the work Hamlet: Actential roles. SENDER SUBJECT RECIEVER FATHERGHOST HAMLET ? HELPER OBJECT OPPONENT HORATIO VENGANCE CLAUDIUS, POLONIUS, LAERTES Post-structuralism • Idea of stable meaning doesn’t exist. • Signifier is never fixed so every text can be interpreted in many different ways. • There is always a different in meaning. • Literary work text is an intertextual text. • A site where words constitute a complex network of meaning. • Narrative as a fiction that looks readers into interpreting text in a single chronological manner that doesn’t reflect our experiences. • Questions the traditional notions of human improvement through science. • Contradictions in texts • No importance of authority of texts • Collaborative process between author and audience. • Unstable nature of signification: SIGNIFIER – SIGNIFICANT: two separate systems that become unstable together • Language is a sign systems amount articulated with subjective process. Discourse • Discourse formations: refuses to separate subject and object in different domains. Hamlet: Hamlet tells his mother not to tell something: Double negative, erase something – NON VERBAL reality Verbal realities exist and do not exist at the same time. Idea: negation – suicide impulse; meditation in living. Existential thoughts. Opposition resolved – death is the new live in which you can dream To die – to sleep Reader oriented/ response criticism • Literature exists as a transaction between physical text and the mind of a reader • Reading is a creative process • Relegation of the text in a secondary importance • Meaning derived from the act of individual readings • Each reader has a different interpretation of the same literary text. • Religious, cultural and social factors affect readings • To arrive at meaning critics should reject the autonomy of the text and concentrate on reading process. • Reach a veredict about a text regarding our interpretation as a stemming from a dialogue between past and present ( Fusion of horizons of expectations) codes : “systems of meaning which the reader activates in response to the text” Readers do not reveal the work's structure by using these codes; rather they structure the work itself. Five codes: – code concerned with the “enigma” or problem (Barthes calls it hermeneutic ) : In a mystery story, “the code works by delaying the solution to the enigma by giving false clues, by giving partial answers, ...” – code concerned with binary oppositions ( symbolic ) : oppositional concepts associated with fundamental ideas about human beings (gender, body) and society (economic divisions) – code concerned with references to intellectual commonplaces ( cultural ) : – semic codes : "the seme is the unit of the signifier" (Barthes 17) – proairetic codes : actions and small sequences of the story There may be a dominant horizon of expectations. Author and readers may not share this horizon (e.g. William Blake). Some works may contribute to the formation of a later horizon of expectations (e.g. avant-garde authors, Beckett). Performance criticism • Relationship between the original script and the performed (dramaturgical cuts, transpositions, additions, substitution. • Hamlet is a play to be performed by actors to an audience. • Work uses the language of theatre: • Concepts of drama are integrated • Characters are forced by others to perform roles they have great difficult in playing: ■ Hamlet as a revenger ■ Ophelia as a bait ■ Gertrude as a rebuking mother ■ Polonius as a eavesdropper ■ The players are caught up in someone else’s drama ■ Hamlet takes very divergent forms in its performances, afterlife. ■ Capacity to create an infinity of meanings is evident in this huge cultural legacy Psychoanalistic criticism • Sigmund Freud – Psychoanalysis. • Personality as the result of unconscious and irrational desires, repressed memories or wishes, sexuality, fantasy, anxiety and conflict • OEDIPUS COMPLEX in Hamlet: • Hamlet’s delay unconscious motive comes from his childhood’s feelings • Strongly disgusted for his mother behavior and his delay of killing Claudius is due to repression of his sexual desire for his mother. • He cannot kill Claudius because he has done precisely what Hamlet himself wanted to do. • Gertrude’s bed is a powerful symbolic presence throughout the film and Hamlet behaves as much like Gertrude’s lover as her son • Dysfunctional family relationships. Feminist criticism • Achieve rights and equality for women in social, political and economic life. • Challenges sexism and traditional portrayals of women characters ( virtue vs vice) • Rejection of male ownship • Male criticism stereotypes or disorts woman’s point of view. • Gertrude and Ofelia suffer at the hands of men in the play and in critics • Gertrude: emotional focus of the guilt. Male characters obsessed with her as a sexual object • Seen as lustful, false woman • Feminist approach: her words and actions actually create a soft, obedient, dependent and unimaginative woman. • In film versions is shown as a vain, self-satisfied woman of strong physical and sexual appetites. • Ophelia: • Is verbally abused by hamlet in the nunnery scene • Subjects her to obscenities as the court prepares to watch the play • Dominated by her father and her brother – they seek to control her sexuality • Polonius uses her as an instrument in his spying plot • Madness: presented on stage in a more bizarre and exaggerated fashion than Hamlet’s • Melancholy in women was much more negative regarded • Critics and directors have accepted negative constructions of the two female characters