SPAN 215: Contemporary Literary Theory

Contemporary Literary Theory

Works cited:

• A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, eds. Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson.  Lexington:  The U of Kentucky P, 1993.
• Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates, eds. Dianne F. Sadoff and William E. Cain.  New York:  The Modern Language Association of America, 1994.
• Twentieth-Century Literary Theory, ed. K.M. Newton.  London:  Macmillan, 1990.

I. Introduction

•  Richards from Practical Criticism:  “the technique of the approach to poetry has no yet received half so much serious systematic study as the technique of pole-jumping” (292) (Sadoff 5)
• “Again, criticism today is different not because it is theoretical where the criticism of the past was not but, rather, because the multiple forms that theory has taken have made criticism into something other than what it was before.”  (Sadoff 9)
• John Gross:  “Even the more rarified varieties of theory generally carry an implicit political message.  By their very nature they suppose that traditional Western values are illusory….In many respects modern theory might have been invented (and in some respects perhaps it was) in order to fill the gap left by the decline of classical Marxism.”  (Sadoff 10)”
• “As several of this book’s contributors remind us, language, history, and culture are all sites of conflict, and the teacher who confronts literature with theory foregrounds these contested conceptual spaces, engaging students in debates significant to their understanding of issues sucha as canon formation, literature as social text, multiculturalism, and the English department’s creation of curriculum.”  (Sadoff 17)
• “The teaching of theory raises questions of canonicity and textuality.”  (Sadoff 19)
• Consideration of the mutual implication of text and context  (Sadoff 10)

What follows comes from the Selden/Widdowson edition:

1. theory transforms reading from innocence to awareness
2. theory revitalizes our engagement with texts
3. theory asks questions from point of view of writer, of work, of reader, or of “reality”
4. Jakobson’s diagram:ADDRESSER  — CONTEXT  — ADDRESSEE
   MESSAGE
   CONTACT
   CODE
   __________________________________________________________________
   =WRITER              CONTEXT            READER
   WRITING
   CODE=
   ROMANTIC-                  MARXIST               READER-ORIENTED
   HUMANIST              FORMALISTIC
   STRUCTURALIST
5. The importance of politics in literary theory

II. New Criticism  (1920s – Britain;   1940s and 50s – America)

1. Anglo-American tradition
2. influence of British 19th cent. poet and critic Matthew Arnold
3.  profound, reverential regard for literary works themselves
4.  scrutiny — discrimination — tradition of “the best” — canon — exclusive and hierarchical
5. importance of T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”  (1919) —  importance of the “depersonalization” of the artist  Eliot:  “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from  emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”
6. emphasis on science, objectivity, impersonality, medium as focal object of
   analysis
7. tradition of works — “essence” of human experience
8. I.A. Richards:  Principles of Literary Criticism  (1924):  criticism should
   emulate the precision of science
9. William Empson:  Seven Types of Ambiguity  (1930)
   1. emphasis on ambiguity as the defining characteristic of poetic language
   2. virtuoso feats of close, creative “practical criticism” in action
   3. detaching of literary texts from their contexts in the process of “reading”
      their ambiguities

III. Russian formalism

1.  Like New Criticism, it aims to explore what is specifically literary in texts and rejects the “limp spirituality” of late Romantic poets in favor of a detailed and empirical approach to reading
2. more interest in METHOD, scientific basis for theory of literature
3. states that human “content” (emotions, ideas, “reality” in general) possesses no  literary significance in itself, but merely provides a context for the functioning of  literary “devices”
4. Peter Steiner:  3 metaphors as generative models for Russian formalism
   1. machine:  lit crit = mechanics / text = heap of devices
   2. organic:  text = fully functioning organism of interrelated parts
   3. system:  lit text = product of entire literary system and even of the meta- system of interacting lit. and non-lit. systems
5. SEE PHOTOCOPIES of section on NARRATIVE (pp. 33-34)
6. importance of Bakhtin
   1.  language or discourse AS social phenomenon
   2. language is made to disrupt authority and liberate alternative voices
   3. monologism vs. polyphony, or dialogism
   4.  importance of Carnival:  breaks up this unquestioned organicism and promotes the idea that major literary works may be multi-levelled and resistant to unification
7. Voloshinov:  words are active, dynamic social signs, capable of taking on different meanings and connotations for different social classes in different social and historical situations

IV. Reader-oriented theories

1. SEE PHOTOCOPY OF DRAWING (from p. 46)
2. The READER applies code to poem and thereby actualizes what would
   otherwise remain only potentially meaningful
3. ADDRESSEE is NOT a passive recipient of an entirely formulated meaning,
   but an active agent in the making of meaning
4. SEE PHOTOCOPY (p. 48-49):  Wordsworth poem and reader interpretation
5. Wolfgang Iser:  lit. texts always contain blanks which only the reader can fill
6. Umberto Eco (The Role of the Reader [1979]) argues that some texts are “open” and invite the reader’s collaboration in the production of meaning, while others  are “closed” and predetermine the reader’s response (comics, detective fiction).
7. Questions to be asked
   1. Who is the reader?
   2. Who are the possible narratees (types of people to whom the narrator
      addresses the discourse)?
   3.  How do different readers construct meaning?
8. Other reader-oriented ideas
   1.  Phenomenology  (Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer)
   2. Horizons of expectations (Hans Robert Jauss)
   3. Implied Reader (Wolfgang Iser)
   4. Reader’s Experience (Stanley Fish)
   5. Conventions of Reading (Jonathan Culler)

Reader psychology  (Norman Holland, David Bleich)

V. Marxist theories

1. Longest history / Marx 1850s; Marxist criticism = 20th c. phenomenon
2. Marx
   1. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but,
      on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
   2. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;
      the point is to change it.”
3. engage philosophy with real world
4. mental and ideological systems are products of real social and economic
   existence
5. Mukarokvsky’s Marxist view:  canons of great literature are socially generated
6. Soviet Social Realism
   1. the modernist rejection of traditional realism paradoxically left Social
      Realism as the leading custodian of bourgeois aesthetics
7. George Lukács:  first major Marxist critic (1930s-50s)
   1. realist approach
   2. Hegelian style of Marxist thought, treating lit. works as reflections of an
      unfolding system; a realist work must reveal the underlying pattern of
      contradictions in a social order
   3. insistence on material and historical nature of the structure of society
   4. novel REFLECTS reality, rejects the merely “photographic     representation”; “frames a mental structure” transposed into words
8.  Bertolt Brecht
   1. opposition to Social Realism
   2. the alienation effect as theatrical device; rejection of Aristotelian cathartic theater
   3. shock produces thought about social injustice
9. The Frankfurt School:  Adorno and Benjamin  (1930s-50s)
10. “Structuralist” Marxism:  Althusser, Goldmann and Machery  (1960s)
    1. anti-Hegelian
    2. literature can distance itself from ideology
11. Recent developments
    1. Raymond Williams:  cultural studies  (1950s and 60s)
    2. Terry Eagleton  (1970s)
       1. anti-Hegelian
       2. critique of British critical tradition
    3. Fredric Jameson  (1970s)
       1. narrative is not just a literary form or mode but an essential “epistemological category”; reality presents itself to the human mind only in the form of stories

VI. Structuralist theories

1. The author is “dead”; anti-humanist
2. Barthes’ idea (1968):  Writers only have the power to mix already existing
   writings, to reassemble or deploy them; writers cannot use writing to “express” themselves, but only to draw upon that immense dictionary of language and culture which is “always already written”
3. Ferdinand de Saussure (1910s)
   1. Swiss linguist
   2. What is the object of linguistic investigation?
   3. What is the relationship between words and things?
   4. LANGUE = social aspect of language (system)
      PAROLE = individual realization of the system in actual instances of
      language (utterance)
   5. words are SIGNS, made up of 2 parts
      1. the SIGNIFIER:  the mark, either written or spoken, and
      2. the SIGNIFIED:  what is “thought” when the mark is made,
         the conceptSTOP LIGHT:  signifier (“red”)
         _________________
         signified (stop)
   6. the science of these sign-systems = SEMIOTICS or SEMIOLOGY
4. Other structuralists
   1. Propp – “narrative syntax”
   2. Todorox – a “grammar” of literature
   3. Genette – theory of discourse
5. SEE PHOTOCOPY (pp. 115-18) “Metaphor and Metonymy:  Jakobson and  Lodge”
6. Jonathan Culler
   1. influence of Noam Chomsky
   2. “competence” and “performance”
   3. emphasis not on the text, but on the reader of the text; the reader’s SYSTEM of reading

VII. Poststructuralist theories

1. late 1960s
2. importance of the constant, ever-changing activity of the signifier as it forms chains and cross-currents of meaning with other signifies and defies the orderly requirements of the signified
3. Bakhtin School
   1.  rejected Saussurean notion of language, saying that all instances of
   language had to be considered in a social context
4. Barthes  1960s and 70s
   1.  the “plural text”
   2.  readers have the power to “open and close the text’s signifying process”
   3.  pleasure of the text lies in its plural meanings for the reader(s)
5.  Psychoanalytic theories
   1. Freud:  lit. work as symptom of the artist
   2. Holland;  reader’s “transactive” relation to the text is foregrounded
   3.  Jung:  “archetypal” criticism; relationship bet. personal and collective
      unconsciousness
6. Jacques Lacan
   1.  “considers that human subjects enter a pre-existing system of signifiers
      which take on meanings only within a language system.  The entry into
      language enables us to find a subject position within a relational system
      (male/female, father/mother/daughter).  This process and the stages which
      precede it are governed by the unconscious.” (Selden 138)
7. Julia Kristeva
   1. semiotic = prelinguistic flux of movements, gestures, sounds, and
      rhythms VERSUS
   2. symbolic = the regulation of the semiotic; the beaten pathways become
      logic, coherent syntax and rationality of the adult
8.  Deleuze and Guattari:  schizoanalysis
9. Jacques Derrida“The notion of ‘structure’, he argues, even in ‘structuralist’ theory has always presupposed a ‘centre’ of meaning of some sort.  This structural analysis (to find the structure of the centre would be to find another centre).  People desire a centre because it guarantees being as presence.  For example, we think of our mental and physical life as centred on an ‘I’; this personality is the principle of unity which underlies the structure of all that goes on in this space.  Freud’s theories completely undermine this metaphysical certainty by revealing a division in the self between conscious and unconscious.”  (Selden 144)“Deconstruction can begin when we locate the moment when a text transgresses the laws it appears to set up for itself.”  (Selden 147)
10. American Deconstruction:  De Man, White, Bloom, Hartman and Miller
11. Michel Foucault
    1. Discourse and power
    2. “In politics, art, and science, power is gained through discourse: discourse is a ‘violence that we do to things’.”  (Selden 160)
    3. There is no such thing as an objective text; what is “true” depends on who controls the discourse
12. New Historicism

VIII. Postmodernist and postcolonialist theories  (post-WWII)

1. Peter Brooker:  “In general terms it can be said to describe a mood or
   condition of radical indeterminacy, and a tone of self-conscious, parodic
   scepticism towards previous certainties in personal, intellectual and political
   life.”  (describing postmodernism)  (Selden 175)
2. Hassan, from Paracriticisms  (1975):  Postmodernists create “open, dis-
   continuous, improvisational, indeterminate, or aleatory structures.”  (Selden
   177)
3.  the theme of the ABSENT CENTRE; profound sense of ontological
   uncertainty
4. Jean Baudrillard
   1. “the loss of the real”
   2. world of simulation
5. Jean-François Lyotard
   1. “the end of the grand narratives”
   2. Marxism as a now vestigial metanarrative
6. Terry Eagleton
7. Fredric Jameson
   1. Andy Warhol’s work “reveals the total interpenetration of aesthetic
      and commodity production”
8. Linda Hutcheon
   1. postmodernist paradox:  a “use and abuse” of history
9. Postcolonialism
   1. an awareness of power relations between Western and “Third-World”
      cultures not taken seriously into account in postmodernist thought
   2. Postmodernism and poststructuralism direct their critique at the unified
      humanist subject, while postcolonialism seeks to undermine the imperialist
      subject.
   3. Edward Said:  to elucidate the function of cultural representations in the
      construction and maintenance of “First/Third-World” relations
   4. Gayatri Spivak
   5. Postcolonial criticism in general draws attention to questions of identity
      for individual human subjects, including the critics themselves, in relation to broader national histories and destinies.
10.  Problems with the prefix “post-”  !!

IX. Feminist theories

1. Goals
   1. to disturb the complacent certainties of patriarchal culture
   2. to assert a belief in sexual equality
   3. to eradicate sexist domination in transforming society
2. More a “cultural politics” than a theory or theories
3. Many feminists agree with the Lacanian and Derridean modes of post-
   structuralist thinking in their refusal of the (masculine) notion of authority or
   truth.
4. Mary Eagleton:  Feminist Literary Criticism  (1991)
5. Pluralism
   1. represents feminism’s “creativity and flexibility”
   2. BUT may signal a lack of direction (too much plurality)
   3. “there is no one ‘grand narrative’, but many ‘petits récits’, grounded
      in specific cultural-political needs and arenas”  (Selden 205)
6. First-Wave Feminist Criticism
   1. Virginia Woolf
      1. A Room of One’s Own  (1929) and Three Guineas (1938)
      2. wide-ranging slate of feminist projects
         1. mother’s allowances
         2. divorce-law reform
         3. proposals for women’s colleges and newspapers
         4. points out women’s collusion in their own victimization
      3. recognition that gender identity is socially constructed and can be
         challenged and transformed
      4. continually examined problems facing women writers
      5. adopted Bloomsbury sexual ethic of “androgyny”
      6. rejected the type of feminism that was only an inversion of male
         chauvinism
      7.  great awareness of the directness of women’s writing
      8. essay:  “Professions for Women”
         1. imprisoned by 19th c. ideal of the “Angel in the House”
         2. repressed by taboo on expression of female sexuality
   2. Simone de Beauvoir
      1. founder of feminist newspapers and journals; activist
      2. The Second Sex  (1949)
      3. recognition of vast difference bet. the interests of the two sexes
         and in its assault on men’s biological and psychological, as well
         as economic, discrimination against women
      4. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman;…it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature…Only the intervention
         of someone else can establish an individual as an Other.”
7. Second-Wave Feminist Criticism
   1. Betty Friedan:  The Feminine Mystique  (1963)
      a.  revelation of frustrations of white, heterosexual, middle-class
      American women–careerless and trapped in domesticity
      b.  founder of NOW  (1966)
   2. Five main foci
      a.  biology
      b.  experience
      c.  discourse
      d.  the unconscious
      e.  social and economic conditions
   3. Themes
      a.  omnipresence of patriarchy
      b.  the inadequacy for women of existing political organization
      c.  the celebration of women’s difference as central to the cultural
      politics of liberation
   4. Break between “Anglo-American” and “French” feminist criticisms
   5. Kate Millett:  Sexual Politics  (1969)
      a.  influenced by civil rights, peace, and other protest movements
      b.  distinction between “sex” and “gender” (sex – biology; gender –
      culturally acquired sexual identity)
      c.  analysis of masculinist historical, social and literary images of
      women
      d.  foregrounds the view of the female reader
   6. Marxist Feminism
      a.  Shulamith Firestone:  The Dialectic of Sex  (1970); “regards male
      domination as primary and quite independent of other social and
      economic forms of oppression…theoretical aim is to substitute sex
      for class as the prime historical determinant, and to present the
      ‘class struggle’ as itself a product of the organization of the
      biological family unit”  (Selden 216)
      b.  Juliet Mitchell:  “Women:  The Longest Revolution”  (1966)
      c.  Michele Barrett: Women’s Oppression Today:  Problems in
         Marxist Feminist Analysis  (1980)
8. Elaine Showalter:  Women’s Writing and Gynocriticism
   1. feminist critique (concerned with women readers)
   2. “gynocritics”  (concerned with women writers)
   3.  profound difference bet. women’s writing and men’s
   4. women’s writing
      1. “feminine” phase  (1840-80)
      2. “feminist” phase  (1880-1920)
      3. “female” phase  (1920 —)
9. French Feminist Critical Theory
   1. derived from de Beauvoir’s perception of woman as the “Other” to man
   2. secualty (together w/ class and race) is identified as a binary opposition
   3. this opposition registers difference bet. groups of people
   4. differences are manipulated socially and culturally in ways which cause
      one group to dominate or oppress another
   5. influence of psychoanalysis and Lacan’s work
   6. Gallop warns of emphasis on Lacan’s work, which “involves a sub-
      ordination of female sexuality”
   7. female sexuality associated with poetic productivity
   8. Kristeva:  polarity between “closed”, rational systems and “open”,
      disruptive, “irrational” systems
   9. Cixous:  “écriture féminine” ; celebrated manifesto of “women’s
      writing” which calls for women to put their “bodies” in their writing
   10. Irigary:  promotes radical “otherness” of women’s eroticism and its
       disruptive enactment in language/ fluidity and multiplicity of women’s
       difference
   11.  l’écriture féminine “asserts not the sexuality of the text but the textuality
       of sex”  (Mary Jacobus)
   12. This writing reshapes literary canons; refuses a unitary or universally
       accepted body of theory; overly politicizes the whole domain of discursive practice; it is fluid, multiplex, heteroglossic and subversive.
10. Black, Women-of-Color, and Lesbian Literary Theories