Paris, ''The Uses of Psychology''

Use this blog to wade through the murky waters of Mimetic Criticism.

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/EL312/2009/03/paris_the_uses_of_psychology/#comments

I claim this article for my presentation.

The above link is incorrect because it takes you to this page...duh! Here's the real one.

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/AngelaPalumbo/2009/02/the_reason_for_a_mimetic_criti.html

Note that I've bumped this article from March 5, in order to make room for the articles on "Life is a Dream."

I have three major problems with Paris's article. Read this to find out what they are.
“As critics we demand, indeed, that the central characters of realistic fiction be like real people, that they have a life of their own beyond the control of their author” (Paris 219).
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/GretaCarroll/2009/03/if_realistic_fiction_exists_ho.html

If Real Life vs. Eternal World is a form of psychology, then how different is literature vs. criticism?

can't we look at it ALL

“A careful examination of the nature of the realistic fiction as modern criticism is coming to conceive it will show that in certain cases it is proper to treat literary characters as real people and that only by doing so can we fully appreciate the distinctive achievement of the genre.”

-From Bernard Paris’s “The Uses of Psychology” in Donald Keesey’s Contexts for Criticism page 217
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/EricaGearhart/2009/03/a_little_different_but_still_v.html

"In novels of psychological realism there is a character-creating impulse which has its own inner logic and which tends to go its own way, whatever the implied author's formal and thematic intentions may be."

Literary Liposuction!

What type of reader are you?
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/JennaMiller/2009/03/what-type-of-reader-are-you.html

Holland: "The 'three possible minds to which the psychological critic customarily refers' are the author's mind, a character's mind, and the audience's mind..."(Paris/Holland 216)

The three possible minds to which the psychological critic customarily refers are the author's mind, a character's mind, and the audence's mind." (Paris 216).

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/SueMyers/2009/03/psychology-just.html

"Fiction lets us know what it is like to be a certain kind of person with a certain kind of destiny."(Paris/Holland 222)

http://blogs.setonhill.edu/QuinnKerno/2009/03/psychology_and.html

"No study of character should ignore the fact that charcters in fiction participate in the dramatic and thematic structures of the works in which they appear and that the meaning of their behavior is often to be understood in terms of its function within these structures" (Paris 216).