An overview of some central ideas and movements in nineteenth-century criticism and aesthetics during the Victorian period, after the heyday of Romanticism. This lecture centers on the development of historical scholarship and its context in the history of ideas, followed by some notes on incipient sociological theories of literature and…[Read more]

A lecture on the history of critical ideas and aesthetics after the heyday of Romanticism, during the Victorian period. The movement of Art for Art’s sake is here presented with its French origins and an overview of the main ideas on poetics and aesthetics of its main representatives in the Anglophone sphere: Edgar Allan Poe, Walter Pater, and…[Read more]

An overview of some central ideas and movements in English criticism and aesthetics during the Victorian period, after the heyday of Romanticism. This lecture centers on the moralistic and aesthetic theories of Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill and the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a main emphasis…[Read more]

This paper provides an overview and commentary of Aristotle’s theory of poetry, of drama, and of narrative structure, as presented the Poetics. The main emphasis falls on plot structure, but we expound other important subjects dealt with in the work, such as the cognitive origins of literature, the nature of poetry, an incipient theory of media…[Read more]

This paper presents an introductory overview of Plato’s poetics, aesthetics, and literary theory, with particular reference to his notion of mimesis, and grounding the discussion on his Theory of Ideas. It is part of a lecture series on the history of literary criticism, partly available online as HYPERCRITICA: A HYPERTEXTUAL HISTORY OF LITERARY…[Read more]

Este artículo examina dos obras narrativas tardías de Samuel Beckett, “Mal Vu Mal Dit” y “Worstward Ho”, situándolas en el desarrollo de la estética metaficcional y autorreflexiva del autor. Los rasgos minimalistas de estas obras se ven como una modalidad de autorreferencialidad narrativa y estética. ____…[Read more]

Muchos de los rasgos de la escritura de madurez de Beckett comienzan a perfilarse en sus relatos de 1945, donde la historia y los personajes son máscaras de la escritura más bien que criaturas del realismo, pues la historia admite una doble lectura reflexiva, en la que el acto de escribir y las aventuras del personaje producidas por esta e…[Read more]