Chapter 17
Literary Devices, Ideas and Terms: Key Concepts-I
In this chapter I will introduce you to certain influential scholars, theories and concepts in literature and culture
studies. I know that you enjoy reading literature and must have read a number of texts. However, higher order
literature embodies a distinct style and to approach it, you need to equip yourself with the knowledge of
specific terms and theories. My attempt in this and the second part of this chapter (Chapter 18; Key Concepts –
II) is to make literary theories and terminologies more accessible for you. You have been acquainted with some
genres (such as theatre) and phenomenon (Modernism/Postmodernism) in the preceding chapters; and will
become familiar with major literary and culture theories in the subsequent ones.
I will start with a disclaimer. Although the topics are arranged alphabetically, the list is by no means exhaustive.
Education, as we all know, is an ongoing process, and I am sure that after getting comfortable with some of the
literary terms, you will continue your journey as learners by reading by yourself.
Allegory
An allegory (Greek, “agoria”= “to speak otherwise”)is a narrative, (in prose or verse), in which the agents and
actions, and sometimes the setting are contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the primary level of
signification, and at the same time to communicate a second, correlated order of signification. Plato uses the
“cave” allegory in The Republic (360BC) to exemplify the limits of human perception.
An allegory can be historical and political allegory, in which the characters and actions "allegorize," historical
personages and events, for example, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel
(1681) or be representative of ideas, in which the literal characters represent concepts and the plot allegorizes
an abstract doctrine or thesis. For instance, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress ( 1678). On a more popular
level,Aespo’s Fables (610BC) allegorize the human predicament in terms of animal narratives.
Everyman is an allegory in the form of a morality play. The Pilgrim ’s Progress is a moral allegory; Edmund
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-96) combines moral, religious, historical, and political allegory in a verse
form; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is an allegorical satire directed mainly against political,
philosophical and scientific conditions.
Allegory was a popular literary device in the Middle Ages in the fourteenth century. Dante’s Divine Comedy
(1472), the French Roman de la Rose (1270-80), Chaucer’s House of Fame (1379-80), and William Langland’s
Piers Plowman (1360?)
The Marxist critic Fredric Jameson uses the term to signify the relation of a literary text to its historical subtext,
its "political unconscious." The stories and novels of Franz Kafka (for example in The Castle, 1926)can be
considered instances of implicit allegory, though it was devalued for a long period during the twentieth century.
The renewed interest in allegory could be largely because of interest in the notion of representation and the
“inexpressible.” George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a political allegory, while Latin American
writers such as Borges too are known for successfully employing this device. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children (1980) and Shame (1983 ) are modern day allegories of the partition of the Indian subcontinent.
For critical theories on the topic, I suggest you read Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading (1979) and Walter
Benjamin’s Antinomies of Tradition ( 1993). Artists like Robert Rauchenberg and Sigma Polka are credited for
visually exemplifying allegory.
Canon
Canon ( Oxford AELD= A generally accepted rule, standard or principle by which sth is judged; a list of the
books or other works that are generally accepted as the genuine work of a particular writer or as being
important) became an important term in Christian theological discourse in AD 90 with the establishment of the
Hebrew biblical canon. The canon of scripture are those texts which are regarded as authentically Biblical,
whereas those discarded are termed as “apocryphal.”
In 18th century Samuel Johnson included 52 writers who constitute the canon of English verse in Lives of the
Most Eminent Poets. Anthologies proclaiming “101 Greatest Books” or “1000 Books You Must Read” are
nothing but attempts to canonize, to confer greatness on particular kind of books and certain kind of writers. It
is therefore inconceivable for any collection/anthology/list to omit Shakespeare or Homer or Tolstoy or
Dickens. These writers are our canonical writers. Likewise you can be sure that any “All-time Classics” will
feature Remembrance of Things Past (1913), Divine Comedy (1472 ), Paradise Lost (1667), and Moby Dick
(1851 ). Anthologies such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861) and Norton or
Oxford Anthology of Literature are yet another effort to canonize. Canons are interesting to analyze as they
dictate what we must read and teach.
Harold Bloom in his The Western Canon (1995) begins, “The book studies twenty-six writers, necessarily with
a certain nostalgia, since I seek to isolate the qualities that made these authors canonical, that is, authoritative in
our culture” (1994: 1). As he defends and explains his concept of “the anxiety of influence” he also claims to
enjoy “the School of Resentment’s repeated insistence that such a notion applies only to Dead White European
Males, and not to women and to what we quaintly term “multiculturalists.” (p.7). For a deeper understanding of
the “Canon War” , I recommend Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Also see its critique:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/18/lazere
According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975 ) all literary genres have a tendency towards canonization and thus
norms and conventions become hardened into universal ones.
(For a critique of Harold Bloom’s the anxiety of influence, visit
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/bloom-influence.html).
Irony
Irony (Greek= “dissimulation”) is a device which critics/writers find useful to inject subversion, satire or
skepticism. Plato’s Republic makes a reference to the term, to suggest a sly/ underhand way of getting one’s
way around. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates plays the role of a “dodger”. You must be familiar with
Shakespeare’s use of verbal and dramatic irony in plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Othello. In Sophocles’
Oedipus (5thcBC ) , Oedipus promises the citizens to punish the murderer of the previous king, not knowing
that it is he, in fact, who is the murderer.
Irony has gained a high stature as a literary device over the last few centuries. Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest
Proposal” (1729) is regarded as the most brilliantly written ironic text. In 1894, Thomas Hardy published the
collection of short stories, Life’s Little Ironies. We can find an oblique quality or tone of irony in the works of
Dryden, Pope, Swift, Voltaire, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Samuel Butler, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Evelyn
Waugh, James Joyce and Henry James for their dry observation of human beings and life. Irony thus draws
attention to one’s foibles and shortcomings, and aims to purify, reform and refine. For a more theoretical
discussion, you must go through Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony (1841) and Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric
of Irony (1974).
Mimesis
The idea of mimesis was first introduced by Aristotle in The Poetics (332BC) where he defended the concept
of mimesis as integral to art and literature. This was a response to Plato, who in The Republic (380BC )
decreed that poets should go into wilderness since their creations are mere imitations , or superficial and
subjective. According to Plato, poetry was the mere shadow of reality. In 1581, Sir Philip Sidney seconded
Aristotle in his The Defence of Poetry.
Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) is a Marxist take on the
idea of mimesis (see Chapter 21 for details) , and Erich Auberbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature (1946) is an influential text which further develops the idea.
Reception Theory
“Reception Theory” is mainly associated with the works of Hans Robert Hauss, Wolfgang Iser and Karlheinz
Stierle. (You will learn more about Iser later in this chapter). The upshot of this theory is that a literary text
should be viewed as partially open, and that a text also constitutes the response of its readers. Jauss’ Towards an
Aesthetics of Reception (1982) and Iser’s The Act of Reading (1976) had a far-reaching influence on the readerresponse theory and how we as consumers of texts, receive and respond to them. Iser’s Prospecting: From
Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989) was another worthy addition to the corpus of reception
studies.
In the concluding lines of Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), the reader of the novel ,
who is the protagonist, weds Ludmilla (yet another reader):
“Now you are man an wife, Reader and Reader. A great double bed receives your parallel readings. Ludmilla
closes her book, turns off her light, puts her head back against the pillow, and says, “Turn off your light, too.
Aren’t you tired of reading?” (p. 205). The reader thus becomes one with the text.
An important part of reception of books is the way books are published, marketed, distributed, sold, reviewed
and make it on the list of “Best-selling” and “All-time Greats” lists, and receive awards .
Related to the reception theory is the American scholar Stanley Fish’s concept of Interpret[at]ive Community ,
which says that the text is itself constituted by the pre-existing conventions of the interpret[at]ive community.
In France Roland Barthes (1915-80), gives us the binary distinctions between texts that are lisible or readerly
and scriptible or writerly. The writerly text is open –ended (for example, the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet and
the authors of the roman nouveau); the readerly texts insist on being understood in only one way.
Read Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author :
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm
Semiology
The term literally means “sign.” The idea of “semiotics” was first discussed in John Locke’s Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690). Much of the credit for laying the theoretical principles of semiology is given to
the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure and the lectures he delivered (1906-13), and later published as A
General Course in Linguistics. The term “semiotics” however, was coined by the American philosopher Charles
Sanders Peirce who in 1860s was involved in the investigation of the logic of semiotics and sign-relations. For
Saussure, a sign may be a word or some other form. A linguistic sign comprises a sound-image; for example,
the letters d-o-g spoken or written (the signifier) and the object or concept associated with the sound –image
(the signified). A structuralist approach therefore focuses on the relationship of individual parts to the larger
whole, that is, the structure, within which significance is made possible.
Saussure argues that the sign is essentially relational, and that the relationship between the signifier and the
signified is arbitrary. This means that any signifier can possibly represent any signified. The fact that “dog” is
an animal in English and its French equivalent is “chien” points out that there is no relationship between the
letters d-o-g and a particular animal.
Since signs are arbitrary, the meaning of any particular sign is determined in terms of similarity and difference
in relation to other signs. Saussure’s binary accounts go as follows:
Synchronic/diachronic: There are two ways of looking at language, historically or ahistorically---a distinction
crucial to the development of structuralism.
Langue/parole: Langue denotes the system or totality of language shared by a collective; parole is the actual use
which individuals make of the resources of language. One can generate any number of paroles, still langue will
never be exhausted. (I suggest you read Noam Chomsky’s observations on “competence” and “performance”
for an understanding of a similar dichotomy).
Signifier/signified: Each sign in language is a union of signifier (a sound image or its graphic equivalent) and a
signified (the referent, the concept referred to). The association of signifier and signified is the product of
linguistic convention and not of any natural link.
Saussure’s characterization of language as a system of difference is an important element in the field of
structuralism and poststructuralism. Various areas of inquiry, such as literature, theatre studies and film studies
have benefitted from it. S/Z (1970), Barthes’s structuralist/poststructuralist analysis of Honore de Balzac’s
“Sarrasine”, and conveys that texts never convey a single meaning but are always subject to multiple meanings
and interpretations. Words are unstable because they have meaning only in relationship to other words, as well
as the presence of several intertexts. Vladimir Propp’s Morphology (1928) is also indebted to the idea of
system of signs; Saussure is therefore a major influence on Russian Formalism and the Prague School.
For a critique of Saussure’s ideas on the arbitrariness of the language and its system read Michael Moriarity’s
“The Longest Cultural Journey: Raymond Williams and French Theory.” Social Text 30(1992): 57-77.
The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Culler’s The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature,
Deconstruction (1981):
Semiotics begins as a critique of the logocentric assumption that concepts exist prior to and independently of
their expression. In analyzing signification Saussure and his later followers insist that forms and concepts do
not exist independently of one another but that the sign consists of the union of a signifier and signified…both
signifiers and signifieds are purely relational entities, products of a system of difference. To speak of the
concept of ‘brown’, for example, is, according to semiotics, a way of referring to a complex network of
opposition which articulates the spectrum of colors on the one hand and the spectrum of sound on the other. The
meaning of brown is not a representation in my mind at the moment of utterance but a space in a complex
network of differences.
Semiotics thus takes up the problems of the sign, on which logocentric notions of signification have been based,
and gives it a relational or differential interpretation which seems to not only make possible a new type of
explanation----structural explanation in terms of underlying systems of relation----but also to displace
logocentrism. However, as Derrida has shown,….semiotics does not escape logocentrism: though the source of
meanings is no longer a consciousness in which they exist prior to their expression, their source becomes a
system of differences which semiotics treats as the necessary condition of any act of signification.
(Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs, pp. 40-41).
Discussion
Based on your own understanding of sign, signfieds, signification and logocentrism, discuss if an escape from
logocentrism is possible or not.
Wolfgang Iser
Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007) through his works “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”
contained in The Implied Reader (1972) and The Act of Reading (1976) has made immense contribution
towards the reader-response theory. He was a student of the German scholar Hans-Georg Gadamer, and together
with Hans Robert Jauss, Iser became a leading member of the Konstanz School. Iser’s article for the journal
New Literary History called “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” (1972) calls for a shift of
focus from the text itself to the text plus the actions involved in responding to the text. The implied reader is not
the actual reader, but instead is a textual construct. The real reader is supposed to approximate to the implied
reader. For Iser, reading is a creative process, which fills in “gaps” in the text and illuminates it from different
angles.
Key concepts in Iser are: the reader-response theory and indeterminacy.
Umberto Eco
Italian semiotician, critic, novelist Umberto Eco (1888-1965) is particularly noted for his interest in a range of
topics and his depth of knowledge. His field of investigation includes works from the medieval to the modern
period. His works include commentaries on both “high” as well as “low” culture.
Eco’s seminal works are: A Theory of Semiotics (1976), The Role of the Reader (1979), Semiotics and the
Philosophy of Language (1984), The Limits of Interpretation (1990), On Beauty (2004) On Ugliness (2007),
just to mention a few. His essay “Towards a Semiotic Inquiry into the Television Message” (1972) is an
important study of how viewers actually read and understand what they see.
Eco’s contribution towards theory is his approach towards the explanation of codes and sign system at work in
cultural productions. For the title of his celebrated The Name of the Rose (1983) Eco draws on the well-known
verse by Gertrude stein, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” This seemingly simple sentence however can be analyzed
at several levels, bringing out the inherent ambiguities in the word “rose.” Interestingly, the title of Eco’s novel
too is a misnomer, a sign pointing nowhere.
His contribution towards the reader-response theory is contained in The Role of the Reader which asserts that
every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, which means that in every
reception the work invites a fresh perspective on it (though these interpretations are infinite).
Eco also uses the term “model reader” which means that the author and the reader share and understand the
same codes. A model reader for Eco is inscribed in the text and is not, strictly speaking, external to the text.
Read the following extract from Eco’s The Name of the Rose ( 1983) which is a seminal work of semiotics
and a best-selling fiction:
On a page where the holy Gospel of the apostle Mark began, I was struck by the image of a lion. I was certain
it was a lion, even though I had never seen one in the flesh, and the artist had reproduced its features faithfully,
inspired perhaps by the sight of the lions of Hibernia, land of monstrous creatures, and I was convinced that this
animal, as for that matter the Physiologus says, concentrates in itself all the characteristics of the things at once
most horrible and most regal. So that image suggested to me both the image of the Enemy and that of Christ our
Lord, nor did I know by what symbolic key I was to read it, and I was trembling all over, out of fear and also
because of the wind coming through the fissures in the walls.
The lion I saw had a mouth bristling with teeth, and a finely armored head like a serpent’s; the immense body
was supported by four paws with sharp, fierce claws, and its coat resembled one of those rugs that later I saw
brought from the Orient, with red and emerald scales on which were drawn, yellow as the plague, horrible and
sturdy armatures of bone. Also yellow was the tail, which twisted from the rump to the head, ending in a fine
scroll of black and white turfs.
I was already quite awed by the lion (and more than once I had looked around as if I expected to see a animal
of that description suddenly appear) when I decided to look at other pages and my eye fell, at the opening of the
Gospel of Matthew, on the image of a man. I do not know why, but it frightened me more than the lion: the face
was a man’s, but this man was sheathed in a kind of stiff chasuble that covered him to his feet, and this
chasuble, or cuirass, was encrusted with red and yellow semiprecious stones. The head, which emerged
enigmatically from a castle of rubies and topazes, seemed (how blasphemous terror made me!) that of the
mysterious murderer whose impalpable trail we were following. And then I realized why I linked the animal
and the armored man so closely with the labyrinth: both illustrations, like all in that book, emerged from a
pattern of interlocking labyrinths, whose lines of onyx and emerald, threads of chrysoprase, ribbons of beryl
seemed all to refer to the tangle of rooms and corridors where I was. (pp. 240-241).
Case study
Umberto Eco’s Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading:
Read the following essay by Eco and understand what is meant by intertextual irony:
The Name of the Rose begins by telling how the author came across an ancient manuscript. We are in
full citationism here, since the topos of the rediscovered manuscript is of venerable antiquity, and as a
direct consequence we immediately enter the area of double coding: if the reader wants to get access
to the story as it is told, he has to accept some quite learned observations as well as a metanarrative
technique raised to the nth degree, because not only is the author inventing out of the blue a text that
he can dialogue with, but he is presenting it as a nineteenth-century, neo-Gothic version of the
original manuscript, which went back to the end of the fourteenth century. The “popular” reader
cannot enjoy the narrative that follows unless he has agreed to this game of Chinese boxes of sources,
which confers on the story n aura of ambiguity stemming from the fact that the source is uncertain.
But, if you remember, the title on the page that talks about the manuscript is “Naturally, a
Manuscript.” That “Naturally” has various resonances, because on the one hand it is intended to stress
that we are dealing with a literary topos, and on the other it lays bare an “anxiety of influence,” since
the reference is intended to be (at least for an Italian reader) to Manzoni, who begins his novel with a
seventeenth-century manuscript. How many readers will have grasped or could grasp the various
ironic resonances in that “Naturally”? And supposing they have not grasped them, will they still have
access to the rest of the story without losing much of its flavor?
Now attempt to answer the following questions:
i. Who is a “popular” reader in the above context?
ii. What does “anxiety of influence” mean here?
iii. What do you understand by the term “intertextual irony” in the title?
(Eco, Umberto. On Literature, pp. 217-18).
QUIZ
1. Match the following:
i
Wolfgang Iser
a The Anxiety of Influence
ii
Harold Bloom
b The Pursuit of Signs
ii
i
Roland Barthes
c Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
iv Hans Robert Jauss’
d The Act of Reading
v
e S/Z
Jonathan Culler
2. Fill in the blanks:
i. Everyman is an example of an……………
ii. Harold Bloom’s …………is a study of 26 writers who are authoritative in our culture.
iii. …………. is well-known for his interpretations of popular culture, especially film and television, and has
worked on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Answer key
1: i-d; ii-a ; iii-e ; iv-c ; v-b
2: i-allegory; ii-The Western Canon ; iii-Slavoj Zizek
Suggested readings:
Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 2002.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. London: MacMillan, 1995.
Calvino, Italo. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Florida: Harcourt Press, 1981.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. London & Henley: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981.
Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. London: Minerva , 1983.
--------------On Literature. London: Vintage, 2006.
---------. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984.
Journal
Social Text, Duke University Press.
Suggested websites:
•
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html
•
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_theory
•
http://www.librarything.com/author/todorovtzvetan
•
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence
•
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v013/13.2tofts.html
•
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771896