objective poetry, 刚查了下是和艾略特相关的,搜到的下面这篇英文似乎很有GMAT的风格!!!
The concept of the objective correlative and the criticism surrounding it make it an important consideration for writers even though literary theory has changed.
The term "objective correlative" was first used by Washington Allston, a poet and painter who was singularly influential in the Romantic movement of American landscape painting. However, it was brought to currency by T.S. Eliot, who was associated with the Formalist literary school, in a 1920 essay entitled "Hamlet and His Problems."
A Formula for Conveying Emotion In the essay, Eliot offers a critical reading of William Shakespeare's Hamlet and asserts that "the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."
Having established that the objective correlative is the only way for art to show emotion, Eliot goes so far as to conclude that Hamlet is an artistic failure because Hamlet's emotions are out of proportion with the events of the play. These strong statements have garnered criticism regarding how "objective" an author and reader can be, and caused Eliot's original idea to seem like a dated product of Modernism.
Criticisms However, the concept is still used by advertisers looking for a measure of how well their message is getting across, and many writers are familiar with it. In writing as in advertising, it is often associated with a psychological approach, because its insistence on objectivity arguably implies the existence of an ingrained human nature.
Eliot himself used the objective correlative, and similar earlier doctrines, in his own poetry, filling it with outward imagery which was meant to convey the mood of the narrator. He believed that concrete, immediate imagery was necessary to create the objective correlative, which caused Peter Barry to liken Eliot's rubric to Plato's idea of mimesis and diegesis. That is, the objective correlative for Eliot might be as simply expressed as the old writer's advice of "show, don't tell."
Read more: http://writingfiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_objective_correlative#ixzz0SDmid1Wk
Implications Both the idea of the objective correlative and literary mimesis, whether or not one takes them as the same, are open to epistemological scrutiny: how sure can a writer be that external details can create the same state of mind in the reader, and is diegesis -- or the narrative, confessional mode -- more subjective? Is objectivity an attainable goal, and is objectivity mean a work is more effective, on the whole? (In philosophical terms, the debate is between internalism and externalism.)
The objective correlative therefore seems in direct opposition to the fashionable confessional mode. In fact, the poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill has suggested that Irish poets' use of the objective correlative as a "distancing lens" has given it a staying power that confessional American poetry does not have. Conversely, Cynthia Ozick has said that Eliot's method was only a shield from the "raw shame of confession," though in her opinion this meant Eliot's poetry was in fact quite confessional underneath.
The debate in this critique which writers would do well to consider is how much the events depicted in mimesis are to be taken at face value and how much they are references or symbols for something else, what has been called the "subjective correlative." |