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English 101: English Literature / English Courses
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Introduction to Literary Theory: Major Critics and Movements
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Lesson Transcript
Instructor: Ellie Green
Ellie holds a B.A. with Honors in English from Stanford University.
She is pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at Princeton
University.
When you hear the word 'theory,' your mind probably darts to the
sciences - the theory of relativity, the theory of gravity, etc. Did you
know that literature, too, is full of theory? Check out this lesson to
get a basic primer on just what literary theory is, and how you might
apply it.
Introduction
So we're going to be talking about literary criticism, which means it
is time for the non-fiction glasses because things are getting serious.
This is like the 'eating your vegetables' section of the English
literature course. They're good for you - pay attention!
When we hear the word 'criticism,' you probably think of somebody
telling that you did a bad job at something. Like someone's giving
you 'constructive criticism,' but they give you a sentence like, 'You
chose a good font, but your writing is crap.' That's people's version
of constructive criticism, and it's annoying. But if you're told to think
of criticism in a more artistic sense, your minds might leap over to
someone like Roger Ebert, famous movie critic. His job basically
amounts to giving movies a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If you
think about it in that way, criticism starts to seem pretty secondary to
art itself - it's about art. It's in response to art. And in many cases it
is. In many cases the kind of criticism that we're exposed to is like
that.
What we call 'critics,' in general, are probably more accurately
described as 'reviewers.' Particularly in literature, this impulse to
review (because everyone has an opinion and they want to share it)
things actually starts to develop into a genre all its own called
'criticism,' which actually starts to have as much of an influence on
art as art has on it. It kind of becomes its own monster, in a way. I
think the food reviewer in the Pixar movieRatatouille gives a
surprisingly nuanced take of criticism's role in art. I'm actually going
to read that to you because I love that movie and I think this is such
a good speech (bear in mind, he's writing this review after being fed
a meal prepared by a rat):
'We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.
But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme
of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful
than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic
truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the
new.'
Just kind of let that marinate a bit. It's no accident that the genre of
literary criticism starts to evolve alongside movements like
Modernism in the early 20th century avant garde work, which was
kind of self-consciously about making things new. That's Ezra
Pound's famous statement about Modernism - 'Make it new.' If
criticism becomes important in the defense of the new, we can see
how those would evolve alongside each other. The New Criticism (it
actually is called that - New Criticism is what they call themselves at
that point) isn't just about saying thumbs up or thumbs down.
More purely stated, criticism is interpretation. You look at a text and
argue about what you think it means, what you think its themes are,
and what you think about its philosophical arguments it puts forth.
They also try to understand how a text does what it does - how it
makes you feel a certain way or how it describes whatever it
describes. In the 20th century, literary theory has developed into a
system all its own for doing this. There's a bunch of different
branches of theory that all have different ways of approaching texts
and making arguments about them. Criticism has been around in one
form or another since Ancient Greece because, like I said before, we
love to tell people what we think of stuff.
As you might expect, literary theory covers a pretty broad spectrum
of thought. You might remember the idea that in certain classic texts
'everyone can have their own interpretation' - that's sort of an old
standby about that. This is true in one sense. You probably
encountered this in English class and it annoyed you - this idea that
this book can mean anything. How could the author possibly have
meant all of these things to be in here? Literary theory is devoted to,
in a way, figuring out how to do this systematically in a way that it's
not just random. You can't say anything about a text, but if you can
back it up in certain ways, then you can say what you want. It
doesn't necessarily have to be there, but you can argue for it. That's
essentially what criticism is trying to do. There are a bunch of
different schools of thought to do this, but there's a few general
points we can make about theory.
1. Like we said before, let me say it again: criticism does not
imply a value judgment. That's really important. It's not saying
thumbs up or thumbs down. If someone tells you to read a
critique of something, it might be a review - they might say it's
good or it's bad or it's successful or unsuccessful - but it's
probably more likely that it will be a little bit more
investigative. It's going to look at the text, why it does things
and how it does things. We're not just asking, 'Does it
function?' We're asking, 'How does it function?' Why does it
do what it does?
2. The history of literary theory is pretty intertwined with
philosophy, especially European Continental philosophy of the
last couple centuries. A lot of that discipline's key thinkers names you might recognize like Nietzsche, Sartre, Marx - have
contributed to literary theory a lot. It makes sense because
they're analyzing life and how we live it; books are metaphors
for life, in a way, and so it makes sense that there would be
overlap there.
3. Though some people might disagree, prevailing thought about
this is that literary theory isn't just confined to just books.
Most people tend to argue that all things in the world can be
'read' and examined as a text. So you can do novels, plays familiar stuff like that. You can do rock & roll records,
historical events, and maybe other people. In some cases, like
with psychoanalytic theory, it actually goes the other way - we
were analyzing people, and now we start using those
techniques to analyze books. In short, the deep, thorough
analysis that's so necessary for literary theory can actually be
applied anywhere. (Maybe not to a subway sign... but maybe!
Someone's probably done it.) That's kind of the rule of literary
theory - if you can think of an idea, probably someone's done
it, which is endlessly frustrating if you're trying to come up
with something new.
Major Types of Literary Theory
So now we're going to go through major types of literary theory.
You can shorthand call them 'the -isms' because they're all -isms, I
think, most of them. If you study literary theory in an academic
setting, you'll likely run into some of these or all of them that we're
going to cover. So you're going to want a basic knowledge at least what they are and who the dudes associated with them are. We're
just going to run right through them.
Formalism
We've got formalism, which is kind of the big daddy of modern
criticism. Formalism develops in Russia in the early 20th century. A
huge name associated with this is Mikhail Bakhtin - that's kind of the
guy. It comes in direct opposition to the Romantic idea and
Romantic schools of thought, which places value on the genius of
the artist and the creator. Formalists basically seek to totally deny
this value. They don't care about the creator. They want to throw all
of their attention on to the text itself. This interpretive shift, new in
the history of literary criticism - that we just want to say, 'Eh, I don't
care about the author' - basically paves the way for the development
of modern theory in general. Not everyone still agrees with this, but
it kinds of allows the development of theory as it goes.
That's also true of New Criticism, which is happening in England
and America a bit later, but it shares a lot of the basic ideas. New
Criticism - a big buzzword associated with that is 'close reading,'
which is essentially looking at a book - not reading it really close to
your face - but looking at a book and picking out details and
examining these things in isolation in the text and, again, ignoring
the author. These two dudes William Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley are important guys for that. They write this famous article
called 'The Intentional Fallacy' - the 'intentional' refers to the author's
intention. What they're basically saying is that whatever the author
meant to do does not matter. You can say whatever you want as long
as it's in the text and you can back it up.
If you've ever been sitting in English class and thinking, 'Oh my god,
he can't possibly have meant yellow or trees or canker sores or
squirrels to symbolize whatever my teacher is saying it symbolizes' no, the author might not have meant it to do that (although some
were pretty good about being specific about what things meant. Like
if you ever read anything by Vladimir Nabokov who's
the Lolita guy, he is amazing in terms of what he has planned out),
but, yeah, your teacher might be talking about something that the
author didn't intend. The author might not have meant squirrels to
symbolize death, but if you can make an argument for a pattern
being there, you can say it! You can say that it means that. It doesn't
matter what the author meant. Like I said before with formalism, it
sort of gives the critics free reign to talk about anything they want
because the author is taken out of it. The importance of the author is
now questioned, and it lets you say whatever you want.
Deconstructionism
Now now we get to deconstructionism, which is associated with the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida. He created this term
'deconstruction' to describe what he thought should be the primary
endeavor of literary theorists. If the word sounds confusing, do not
worry because Derrida himself admits that deconstruction is difficult
to explain, and all of his essays were trying to explain it. We read
him in translation because he wrote in French, so all of his weird,
vague, French stuff becomes almost incomprehensible in English (in
my personal opinion). But we'll give it a go in a paragraph or so.
Deconstruction is the idea that all texts contain inherent
contradictions. What does this mean? It basically means that to
Derrida, and to other people who thought like him, all things including words - only have meaning in relation, or opposition, to
other things. So concepts are defined by their opposites. 'Truth'
doesn't inherently mean anything - the word 'truth,' the sounds that
are coming out of my mouth. But it enters a language system in
which it refers to other things and distances or aligns itself with
other things. So 'truth' becomes 'not false' or 'not trivial,' but then of
course, what do 'false' and 'trivial' mean? So it goes on, and you're
never really able to get to something that has meaning on its own.
Deconstruction aims to examine these key points in a text where we
can see these oppositions really tugging at each other. We can see
the system breaking down or acting particularly strongly. The
system of building meaning off of oppositions is basically what
we're getting at. Some followers of Derrida go on to explain this idea
in a bit more friendly terms; one of the things his disciples would
say is deconstruction looks at the accidental elements of a text, the
things that disturb the tranquility of a text, or attempt to uncover the
questions behind a text.
Deconstructionism is associated with
French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
That still might leave questions in your mind - how can a text have
anything accidental about it? The author wrote it all - why would he
make something that's an accident? Doesn't make any sense. That's
really one of the key questions of literary theory in general. And in
this case, what they mean by it is just the stuff that doesn't seem
central to the meaning. Like we were saying before, if we're going to
remove authorial intent, if we're not going to care what the author
wanted to do, then a work of art can mean much more than the
creator wanted it to mean. Derrida and other theorists believe that
texts will invariably take on disparate, contradictory elements by
virtue of just existing in the world. The author might have meant it
to do something, but, say he wanted to describe a scene and he sets it
in a cafe, and the way he describes the cafe inadvertently
undermines the meaning of the scene. That's one of the things that a
deconstructionist would look at and try to figure out what's going on
there and why are there these oppositional things.
Postmodernism
Now we're going into postmodernism. The focus in deconstruction
on contradictions or unexplained textual phenomena is a key aspect
of one of the prevailing schools of late-20th century
thought. Postmodernismreally takes this up. It's sort of summarized
as a study of differences. It kind of is an umbrella term for a lot of
things. Remember how deconstruction had to do with pulling apart
contrasting forces - that is part of postmodernism. Postmodernism,
again, is a term that covers a bunch of stuff. Key landmarks in
postmodern thought is the questioning of objective knowledge - so,
again, how much does the author have final say over his text? No
one person can have final say over interpreting the world around us.
Another key thing in postmodern that comes out of this is examining
the role of the Other, or the socially marginalized individual. This
coincides, not coincidentally, with a sense of splintering in the idea
of the literary canon. The literary canon is just what we think you
should read, from Shakespeare on of things that you ought to read.
Rather than just be a bunch of books written by dead white men,
which is what it was for a long time, people start looking at it more
like, maybe we should start highlighting more traditionally
marginalized literature - literature by women or by people of color kind of diversifying the body of literature. That's associated with
postmodern thought. This shift in thinking about stuff gives rise to
lots of different branches of criticism.
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The different interpretive and epistemological perspectives of
different schools of theory often arise from, and so give support to,
different moral and political commitments. For instance, the work of
the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and
sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem
by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in
expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for
belief in the modern world. Meanwhile, a Marxist critic might find
such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist
would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical
distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it.
Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by
understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of
meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their
referential nature rather than what they refer to. A critic
using Darwinian literary studies might use arguments from
theevolutionary psychology of religion.
Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent
in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the
critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different
intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an EastCoast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist
derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic
thought, the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentiethcentury Continental philosophy of language, and the Darwinian from
the modern evolutionary synthesis. To expect such different
approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling
them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their
heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.
In the late 1950s, the Canadian literary critic Northrop
Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical
criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early
reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches.
His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly
structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of
words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach
held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost
favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.
For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of
formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts
is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly poststructuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction,
some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down
distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual
interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction,
historical writing, and even cultural events.
Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is
evident when it is forced to deal with the novel; while other genres
are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.[4]
Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary
interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the
author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor
and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts.
The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the
author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in
a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between
formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's
interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any
other.
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature
of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature.[1]However,
literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in
addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—
considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social
prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes which are of relevance
to the way humans interpret meaning.[1] In humanities in modern
academia, the latter style of scholarship is an outgrowth of critical
theory and is often called simply "theory."[2] As a consequence, the
word "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of
scholarly approaches to reading texts. Many of these approaches are
informed
by
various
strands
of Continental
philosophy and sociology.
Schools of literary theory[edit]
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of
literary theory, along with their major authors. In many cases, such
as those of the historian and philosopherMichel Foucault and the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the authors were not primarily
literary critics, but their work has been broadly influential in literary
theory.
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Aestheticism – often associated with Romanticism, a philosophy
defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding
literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to
understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar
Wilde who have stressed art for art's sake.
 Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom
American pragmatism and other American approaches
 Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
Cognitive Cultural Studies – applies research in cognitive
neuroscience,
cognitive
evolutionary
psychology
and
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anthropology, and philosophy of mind to the study of literature
and culture
 Frederick
Luis Aldama, Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy
Easterlin, William Flesch, David Herman, Suzanne
Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, Ellen
Spolsky, Blakey Vermeule, Lisa Zunshine
Cultural studies – emphasizes the role of literature in everyday
life
 Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British
Cultural
Studies); Max
Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory
Darwinian literary studies – situates literature in the context of
evolution and natural selection
Deconstruction – a strategy of "close" reading that elicits the
ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or selfundermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
 Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
Gender (see feminist literary criticism) – which emphasizes
themes of gender relations
 Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter
Formalism - a school of literary criticism and literary theory
having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text
German hermeneutics and philology
 Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Erich Auerbach, René Wellek
Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) – which emphasizes
themes of class conflict
 Georg
Lukács, Valentin
Voloshinov, Raymond
Williams, Terry
Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson, Theodor
Adorno, Walter Benjamin
Modernism
New Criticism – looks at literary works on the basis of what is
written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
 W. K. Wimsatt, F. R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth
Brooks, Robert Penn Warren
New Historicism – which examines the work through its
historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual
history through literature
Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H.
Aram Veeser
Postcolonialism – focuses on the influences of colonialism in
literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting
from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous
peoples by Western nations
 Edward
Said, Gayatri
Chakravorty
Spivak, Homi
Bhabha and Declan Kiberd
Postmodernism – criticism of the conditions present in the
twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social
deviants or the Other
 Michel
Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix
Guattari and Maurice Blanchot
Post-structuralism – a catch-all term for various theoretical
approaches (such as deconstruction) that criticize or go
beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of
culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other
discursive and aesthetic formations
 Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva
Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) – explores
the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature
including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
 Sigmund
Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj
Žižek, Viktor Tausk
Queer theory – examines, questions, and criticizes the role of
gender identity and sexuality in literature
 Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault
Reader-response criticism – focuses upon the active response of
the reader to a text
 Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, HansRobert Jauss, Stuart Hall
Russian formalism
 Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) –
examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the
linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning
through any structures
 Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude LéviStrauss, Roland
Barthes, Mikhail
Bakhtin, Yurii
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Lotman, Umberto
Eco, Jacques
Ehrmann, Northrop
Frye andmorphology of folklore
Eco-criticism – explores cultural connections and human
relationships to the natural world
Other
theorists: Robert
Graves, Alamgir
Hashmi, John
Sutherland, Leslie
Fiedler, Kenneth
Burke, Paul
Bénichou, Barbara Johnson, Blanca de Lizaur, Dr Seuss
The concept of emergence has been applied to the theory of
literature and art, history, linguistics, cognitive sciences, etc. by the
teachings of Jean-Marie Grassin et the University of Limoges (v.
esp.: J. Fontanille, B. Westphal, J. Vion-Dury, éds. L'Émergence—
Poétique de l'Émergence, en réponse aux travaux de Jean-Marie
Grassin, Bern, Berlin, etc., 2011; and: the article "Emergence" in
the International Dictionary of Literary Terms (DITL)).
Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism
"Ethnic Studies," sometimes referred to as "Minority Studies," has an obvious
historical relationship with "Postcolonial Criticism" in that Euro-American
imperialism and colonization in the last four centuries, whether external
(empire) or internal (slavery) has been directed at recognizable ethnic groups:
African and African-American, Chinese, the subaltern peoples of India, Irish,
Latino, Native American, and Philipino, among others. "Ethnic Studies"
concerns itself generally with art and literature produced by identifiable
ethnic groups either marginalized or in a subordinate position to a dominant
culture. "Postcolonial Criticism" investigates the relationships between
colonizers and colonized in the period post-colonization. Though the two
fields are increasingly finding points of intersection—the work of bell hooks,
for example—and are both activist intellectual enterprises, "Ethnic Studies
and "Postcolonial Criticism" have significant differences in their history and
ideas.
"Ethnic Studies" has had a considerable impact on literary studies in the
United States and Britain. In W.E.B. Dubois, we find an early attempt to
theorize the position of African-Americans within dominant white culture
through his concept of "double consciousness," a dual identity including both
"American" and "Negro." Dubois and theorists after him seek an
understanding of how that double experience both creates identity and reveals
itself in culture. Afro-Caribbean and African writers—Aime Cesaire, Frantz
Fanon, Chinua Achebe—have made significant early contributions to the
theory and practice of ethnic criticism that explores the traditions, sometimes
suppressed or underground, of ethnic literary activity while providing a
critique of representations of ethnic identity as found within the majority
culture. Ethnic and minority literary theory emphasizes the relationship of
cultural identity to individual identity in historical circumstances of overt
racial oppression. More recently, scholars and writers such as Henry Louis
Gates, Toni Morrison, and Kwame Anthony Appiah have brought attention to
the problems inherent in applying theoretical models derived from Eurocentric paradigms (that is, structures of thought) to minority works of
literature while at the same time exploring new interpretive strategies for
understanding the vernacular (common speech) traditions of racial groups
that have been historically marginalized by dominant cultures.
Though not the first writer to explore the historical condition of
postcolonialism, the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said's
book Orientalism is generally regarded as having inaugurated the field of
explicitly "Postcolonial Criticism" in the West. Said argues that the concept of
"the Orient" was produced by the "imaginative geography" of Western
scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonization and domination of
non-Western societies. "Postcolonial" theory reverses the historical
center/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and
capital now emanate from the former colonies. Moreover, theorists like Homi
K. Bhabha have questioned the binary thought that produces the
dichotomies—center/margin, white/black, and colonizer/colonized—by which
colonial practices are justified. The work of Gayatri C. Spivak has focused
attention on the question of who speaks for the colonial "Other" and the
relation of the ownership of discourse and representation to the development
of the postcolonial subjectivity. Like feminist and ethnic theory, "Postcolonial
Criticism" pursues not merely the inclusion of the marginalized literature of
colonial peoples into the dominant canon and discourse. "Postcolonial
Criticism" offers a fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination
and at the same time seeks to undo the "imaginative geography" of Orientalist
thought that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West
and East, civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect,
"Postcolonial Criticism" is activist and adversarial in its basic aims.
Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of colonial
peoples—their wealth, labor, and culture—in the development of modern
European nation states. While "Postcolonial Criticism" emerged in the
historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the
increasing globalization of culture, including the neo-colonialism of
multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of
inquiry.
8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Gender theory came to the forefront of the theoretical scene first as feminist
theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation of all gender
and sexual categories and identities. Feminist gender theory followed slightly
behind the reemergence of political feminism in the United States and
Western Europe during the 1960s. Political feminism of the so-called "second
wave" had as its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in
contemporary societies, women's identity, and the representation of women in
media and culture. These causes converged with early literary feminist
practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as "gynocriticism," which
emphasized the study and canonical inclusion of works by female authors as
well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts.
Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and
intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an activist stance by
proposing frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions
meant to change the social order. In the context of postmodernism, gender
theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category of
"gender" as a human construct enacted by a vast repetition of social
performance. The biological distinction between man and woman eventually
came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion:
the sexual categories are products of culture and as such help create social
reality rather than simply reflect it. Gender theory achieved a wide readership
and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the work of a group of
French feminist theorists that included Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray,
Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while Bulgarian rather than French,
made her mark writing in French. French feminist thought is based on the
assumption that the Western philosophical tradition represses the experience
of women in the structure of its ideas. As an important consequence of this
systematic intellectual repression and exclusion, women's lives and bodies in
historical societies are subject to repression as well. In the creative/critical
work of Cixous, we find the history of Western thought depicted as binary
oppositions: "speech/writing; Nature/Art, Nature/History, Nature/Mind,
Passion/Action." For Cixous, and for Irigaray as well, these binaries are less a
function of any objective reality they describe than the male-dominated
discourse of the Western tradition that produced them. Their work beyond the
descriptive stage becomes an intervention in the history of theoretical
discourse, an attempt to alter the existing categories and systems of thought
that found Western rationality. French feminism, and perhaps all feminism
after Beauvoir, has been in conversation with the psychoanalytic revision of
Freud in the work of Jacques Lacan. Kristeva’s work draws heavily on Lacan.
Two concepts from Kristeva—the "semiotic" and "abjection"—have had a
significant influence on literary theory. Kristeva’s "semiotic" refers to the gaps,
silences, spaces, and bodily presence within the language/symbol system of a
culture in which there might be a space for a women’s language, different in
kind as it would be from male-dominated discourse.
Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely on social,
literary, and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities.
Such work generally lacks feminisms' activist stance and tends to serve
primarily as an indictment rather than a validation of male gender practices
and masculinity. The so-called "Men’s Movement," inspired by the work of
Robert Bly among others, was more practical than theoretical and has had
only limited impact on gender discourse. The impetus for the "Men’s
Movement" came largely as a response to the critique of masculinity and male
domination that runs throughout feminism and the upheaval of the 1960s, a
period of crisis in American social ideology that has required a
reconsideration of gender roles. Having long served as the de facto "subject" of
Western thought, male identity and masculine gender theory awaits serious
investigation as a particular, and no longer universally representative, field of
inquiry.
Much of what theoretical energy of masculine gender theory currently
possesses comes from its ambiguous relationship with the field of "Queer
theory." "Queer theory" is not synonymous with gender theory, nor even with
the overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but does share many of their
concerns with normative definitions of man, woman, and sexuality. "Queer
theory" questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive
paradigms generated by normative (that is, what is considered "normal")
sexual ideology. To "queer" becomes an act by which stable boundaries of
sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued.
"Queering" can be enacted on behalf of all non-normative sexualities and
identities as well, all that is considered by the dominant paradigms of culture
to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive, odd—in short, queer. Michel
Foucault's work on sexuality anticipates and informs the Queer theoretical
movement in a role similar to the way his writing on power and discourse
prepared the ground for "New Historicism." Judith Butler contends that
heterosexual identity long held to be a normative ground of sexuality is
actually produced by the suppression of homoerotic possibility. Eve Sedgwick
is another pioneering theorist of "Queer theory," and like Butler, Sedgwick
maintains that the dominance of heterosexual culture conceals the extensive
presence of homosocial relations. For Sedgwick, the standard histories of
western societies are presented in exclusively in terms of heterosexual
identity: "Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Family, Domesticity, Population,"
and thus conceiving of homosexual identity within this framework is already
problematic.
9. Cultural Studies
Much of the intellectual legacy of "New Historicism" and "Cultural
Materialism" can now be felt in the "Cultural Studies" movement in
departments of literature, a movement not identifiable in terms of a single
theoretical school, but one that embraces a wide array of perspectives—media
studies, social criticism, anthropology, and literary theory—as they apply to
the general study of culture. "Cultural Studies" arose quite self-consciously in
the 80s to provide a means of analysis of the rapidly expanding global culture
industry that includes entertainment, advertising, publishing, television, film,
computers and the Internet. "Cultural Studies" brings scrutiny not only to
these varied categories of culture, and not only to the decreasing margins of
difference between these realms of expression, but just as importantly to the
politics and ideology that make contemporary culture possible. "Cultural
Studies" became notorious in the 90s for its emphasis on pop music icons and
music video in place of canonical literature, and extends the ideas of the
Frankfurt School on the transition from a truly popular culture to mass
culture in late capitalist societies, emphasizing the significance of the patterns
of consumption of cultural artifacts. "Cultural Studies" has been
interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, from its inception; indeed, "Cultural
Studies" can be understood as a set of sometimes conflicting methods and
approaches applied to a questioning of current cultural categories. Stuart Hall,
Meaghan Morris, Tony Bennett and Simon During are some of the important
advocates of a "Cultural Studies" that seeks to displace the traditional model
of literary studies.
Structuralism and Poststructuralism
Like the "New Criticism," "Structuralism" sought to bring to literary studies a
set of objective criteria for analysis and a new intellectual rigor.
"Structuralism" can be viewed as an extension of "Formalism" in that that
both "Structuralism" and "Formalism" devoted their attention to matters of
literary form (i.e. structure) rather than social or historical content; and that
both bodies of thought were intended to put the study of literature on a
scientific, objective basis. "Structuralism" relied initially on the ideas of the
Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the
signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept,
the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a particular society uses
language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of "differences"
between units of the language. Particular meanings were of less interest than
the underlying structures of signification that made meaning itself possible,
often expressed as an emphasis on "langue" rather than "parole."
"Structuralism" was to be a metalanguage, a language about languages, used
to decode actual languages, or systems of signification. The work of the
"Formalist" Roman Jakobson contributed to "Structuralist" thought, and the
more prominent Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology,
Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.
The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide
between "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." "Poststructuralism" is less
unified as a theoretical movement than its precursor; indeed, the work of its
advocates known by the term "Deconstruction" calls into question the
possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to
communicate. "Deconstruction," Semiotic theory (a study of signs with close
connections to "Structuralism," "Reader response theory" in America
("Reception theory" in Europe), and "Gender theory" informed by the
psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can
be located under the banner of "Poststructuralism." If signifier and signified
are both cultural concepts, as they are in "Poststructuralism," reference to an
empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language.
"Deconstruction" argues that this loss of reference causes an endless deferral
of meaning, a system of differences between units of language that has no
resting place or final signifier that would enable the other signifiers to hold
their meaning. The most important theorist of "Deconstruction," Jacques
Derrida, has asserted, "There is no getting outside text," indicating a kind of
free play of signification in which no fixed, stable meaning is possible.
"Poststructuralism" in America was originally identified with a group of Yale
academics, the Yale School of "Deconstruction:" J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey
Hartmann, and Paul de Man. Other tendencies in the moment after
"Deconstruction" that share some of the intellectual tendencies of
"Poststructuralism" would included the "Reader response" theories of Stanley
Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the work of Sigmund Freud, extends
"Postructuralism" to the human subject with further consequences for literary
theory. According to Lacan, the fixed, stable self is a Romantic fiction; like the
text in "Deconstruction," the self is a decentered mass of traces left by our
encounter with signs, visual symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is
constituted by language, a language that is never one's own, always another’s,
always already in use. Barthes applies these currents of thought in his famous
declaration of the "death" of the Author: "writing is the destruction of every
voice, of every point of origin" while also applying a similar "Poststructuralist"
view to the Reader: "the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is
simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which
the written text is constituted."
Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose ideas inform
much of poststructuralist literary theory. Foucault played a critical role in the
development of the postmodern perspective that knowledge is constructed in
concrete historical situations in the form of discourse; knowledge is not
communicated by discourse but is discourse itself, can only be encountered
textually. Following Nietzsche, Foucault performs what he calls "genealogies,"
attempts at deconstructing the unacknowledged operation of power and
knowledge to reveal the ideologies that make domination of one group by
another seem "natural." Foucaldian investigations of discourse and power
were to provide much of the intellectual impetus for a new way of looking at
history and doing textual studies that came to be known as the "New
Historicism."
Formalism and New Criticism
"Formalism" is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that
emphasizes literary form and the study of literary devices within the text. The
work of the Formalists had a general impact on later developments in
"Structuralism" and other theories of narrative. "Formalism," like
"Structuralism," sought to place the study of literature on a scientific basis
through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other
"functions" that comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great
importance on the literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the
literary from other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was essential
for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the "hero-function," for
example, that had meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative
strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had
functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman
Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well known.
The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was "to make the stones
stonier" nicely expresses their notion of literariness. "Formalism" is perhaps
best known is Shklovsky's concept of "defamiliarization." The routine of
ordinary experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness
and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by
calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar
and made fresh the experience of daily life.
The "New Criticism," so designated as to indicate a break with traditional
methods, was a product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s.
"New Criticism" stressed close reading of the text itself, much like the French
pedagogical precept "explication du texte." As a strategy of reading, "New
Criticism" viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of
historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility
of the artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the movement,
expressed a similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne
and the metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete
integration of thought and feeling. New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John
Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt placed a similar focus
on the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New
Critical practice. "New Criticism" aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor
to literary studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and the
formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others.
"New Criticism" was fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry
would yield a humanizing influence on readers and thus counter the alienating
tendencies of modern, industrial life. "New Criticism" in this regard bears an
affinity to the Southern Agrarian movement whose manifesto, I'll Take My
Stand, contained essays by two New Critics, Ransom and Warren. Perhaps the
enduring legacy of "New Criticism" can be found in the college classroom, in
which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of
literary study.