Benguet State University

College of Arts and Sciences

Reporter: Erwin P. Gagate

Subject: LANG 303 (Philosophy of Literature)
Professor: Cynthia T. Lubiton, PhD.

CONTEXTUAL TRUTH OF LITERATURE

by Graham Hough

 Graham Hough was born in Great Crosby, Lacanshire, the son of Joseph and
Clara Hough. He was educated at Prescott Grammar School, the University of
Liverpool and Queens’ College, Cambridge. He became a lecturer in English at
Raffles College, Singapor, in 1930. In World War II he served as a volunteer with
the Singapore Royal Artillery, until taken prisoner and interned in a Japanese
prison camp. After further travelling and teaching in the Far East, Hough returned
to Cambridge as a fellow of Christ’s College in 1950. He was Tutor at Christ’s
from 1955 to 1960. In 1958 he was Visiting Professor at Cornell University. From
1964 to 1975 he was Praelector and Fellow of Darwin College. University Reader
in English from 1965 to 1966, he was Professor of English at the university from
1966 to 1975.
 He died in Cambridge on September 5, 1990.

WORKS

 The last Romantics, 1949

 The Romantic Poets, 1953
 The Dark Sun: a study of D.H. Lawrence, 1956
 Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution, 1960
 Legends and Pastorals, 1961
 A Preface to the Faerie Queene, 1962
 The Dream and the Task: Literature and Morals in the Culture of Today, 1963
 An Essay on Criticism, 1966
 Style and Stylistics, 1969
 Selected Essays, 1978
 The Mystery Religion of W.B. Yeats, 1984

Mimesis

 In the general sense literature can mean almost any kind of recorded discourse,
from patent-medicine advertisements and the propaganda of obscure sects (“free
literature on request”) to works of scholarship and science. In the special sense
we qualify the word and say imaginative literature, and there are many traditional
criticisms simply use the word ‘poetry’ but not confining the sense to what is
written in the verse.

Literature Represent History of Ideas

 The criterion for distinguishing ‘literature’, ‘imaginative literature’, or poetry from

other forms of discourse was rather uncertainly suggested by Aristotle: he say it
is the ‘mimetic quality’, that is to say the fictitious quality. The point is not, or
ought not to be, that literature ‘imitates’ objects in the real world: so does
scientific and historic writing. The point is literature creates fictitious objects.
  The ‘imitations’ of poet, though not of specific objects with a substantial, historical
existence are not cut off from the real world.

Ex. Achilles’ shield in homer is not an imitation of any shield that has ever existed: but it
is an imitation of a shield

- So, there is a sense in which the poet is the maker; he makes things that have
never existed before. Yet he is also an imitator; he makes them by analogy with
things that have existed.
-
o Literature is significant fiction, an imaginary presentation that has some
meaningful relation with the real world
o Poets express themselves usually by real life situation they are in or some
write a poem about what they wish things could been or wish for things to
be.

Novel and History

Are there any grounds for considering the novel a special case, for believing it to be
related to reality in a special way?

- But each literary kind is in some way a special case. It is precisely its relation to
reality that constitutes the specialty of the novel. The novel is only one band in
the whole literary spectrum. Other kinds-tragedy, comedy, heroic poetry,
pastoral-are distinguished by each dealing with a special area of human
experience. The novel cannot be distinguished in this way. It covers all these
areas. There can be tragic novels and comic novels. We are even inclined to
speak loosely of a particular novel as a tragedy or a comedy of manners.

We know that is a novel all the same. And that is constituted as novel, not by
dealing with any special area of experience, but by a special way of presenting
reality.

Are we then to judge a novel by the truth or otherwise of its historical representation?

In part, yes. We certainly do so. The main reason that Scott’s novels of
18th century Scotland are superior to his medieval novels is that in the first he is
representing a phase of history that knows and intimately understands, while in
the second he gives us only a fancy picture. In the novels of recent Scottish
history, he has simply a more substantial truth to tell us. It may be said that these
are overtly historical novels and so are atypical. But the same considerations
apply to novels of contemporary life. A large part of superiority of the Rainbow to
kangaroo is that the Rainbow presents a real stage in the social evolution of
English provinces, while kangaroo is only a socio-political fantasy.

How do we judge the historical truthfulness of a novel?

- The novel present a particular society at a particular time.

Conclusion

- Literary piece is mostly based from history and a product of wild imagination of
writers. It may explore more fully and more intensely the farthest reaches of
imaginative experience.