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Literary Theory
Literary Theory
It took me forever to read this, but mainly because I was taking fairly
detailed notes; it’s not too tricky a read really. I took notes because I knew
I’d forget so much of it straight away, but I’d like some of it to stick, or at
least be ready to hand for when I forget. It was a good grounding for
someone like me whose English Literature study stopped at sixteen.
6-7 However, it’s possible to read anything as literature, giving the text a
more general significance beyond its pragmatic purpose (reading it “non-
pragmatically”). So whether something is lit depends on how one reads it.
Lit is a “functional rather than ontological” term; “it tells us about what
we do, not about the fixed being of things.”
15-16 During 18C, and by the Romantic period (19C), lit began to refer
only to imaginitive works.
22-4 Lit could impart universal ideals, putting its readers’ “petty”
concerns in perspective, and let them experience lives they couldn’t
afford. Arnold, Henry James and FR Leavis are exponents of the idea that
lit is an imparter of morality — or “is moral ideology for the modern
age”.
24-26 Eng lit was seen as feminine and an amatuerish subject Oxbridge
tried to avoid, but also a way of promoting English values in an imperial
age. WW I created a “spiritual hungering” and Eng lit provided the
answer.
29-30 Scrutiny was “the focus of a moral and cultural crusade”. But it
didn’t seek to change (apart from through education) mechanized society
and its withered culture, just to withstand it. Closely reading lit would not
turn Eng into an organic and moral country. They disapproved of those
who didn’t have their knowledge. But if lit made you better how, after
WW II, to explain away educated Nazis? Scrutiny became an isolated
elite.
31-2 “Organic societies are just convenient myths for belabouring the
mechanized life of modern industrial capitalism.” The organic society
lived on in good lit for the Leavisites, “rich, complex, sensuous and
particular”. “Dramatically concrete” writers like Donne and Hopkins
manifested the essence of Englishness unlike the “latinate or verbally
disembodied” Milton and Shelley.
He thought Eng lit was on the right track in early 17C but “language
drifted loose from experience” resulting in the “literary disaster” of
Milton.
35 “Poetry was not to engage the reader’s mind: it did not really matter
what it actually meant.” “A language closely wedded to experience.”
Meaning was just to distract the reader while the poem worked on him
“in more physical and unconcsious ways”. Maybe there are deep roots
that poetry can reach, going beyond history and the crisis of European
society.
36 Eliot’s ideas about the need for language to become more primal was
shared by Ezra Pound, TE Hulme and the Imagist movement. Middle
class liberalism was finished — like Eliot, they were more right wing.
38-40 Cambridge critic IA Richards was a major link between Leavis and
the American New Criticism. He thought that modern science was the
model of true knowledge [unlike Leavis’s technophobia] but that poetry
was needed to balance the human psyche, something religion could no
longer do.
44-46 Empson seems like a New Critic because of his analysis and
unravelling of meaning but he has an old-fashioned liberal
rationalism. Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Some Versions of
Pastoral (1935), The Structure of Complex Words (1951), Milton’s
God (1961). He treats poetry as something that can be paraphrased, and
takes into account what the author probably meant. The reader brings
social context and assumptions to the work.
50 “The subject was to be seen as the source and origin of all meaning”
and was not part of the world and its history and society because these
flowed from him.
51 Phenomenological criticism ignores a text’s historical context. One
can only know the author’s mind from what is manifested in the work
itself.
53-54 For Husserl man stamps his image on the world. His pupil
Heidegger moves on from this: the world is not “out there”, we are bound
up in it. Understanding is not an “act I perform, but part of the very
structure of human existence.” A human is constituted by history, or time,
the structure of human life. Being and Time (1927) Existentialism.
67-68 Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading (1978). Texts deploy ‘codes’,
sets of rules which govern the ways it produces meanings. We apply
codes to interpret works, but there may be a mismatch. For Iser the most
effective work is forces the reader to examine their customary codes and
epectations.
70 Iser says readers are free to interpret a text in different ways but they
must construct it in such a way as to render it internally consistent. An
‘open’ work must become coherent, indeterminacies must be
‘normalized’.
70-71 Roland Barthes (The Pleasure of the Text (1973), also a reception
theorist, looks at modern works. The reader cannot make a coherent
whole but must revel in the glimpses of meaning, textures of words.
Barthes and Iser both largely ignore the reader’s social and historical
position.
72-73 A work is written for an ‘implied reader’ (Iser) who has the correct
understanding to make some sense of the subject and language.
73-74 If a work is only the many readers’ interpretations, in what sense
are we reading the same work? Stanley Fish says we aren’t, a novel is the
sum of its interpretations. What then is it that is being interpreted, “the
text in itself”? Fish says he doesn’t know, there is nothing “immanent” in
the work waiting to be released.
distinguished between three basic kinds of sign. There was the ‘iconic’,
where the sign somehow resembled what it stood for (a photograph of a
person, for example); the ‘indexical’, in which the sign is somehow
associated with what it is a sign of (smoke with fire, spots with measles),
and the ‘symbolic’, where as with Saussure the sign is only arbitrarily or
conventionally linked with its referent. Semiotics takes up this and many
other classifications: it distinguishes between ‘denotation’ (what the sign
stands for) and ‘connotation’ (other signs associated with it); between
codes (the rule-governed structures which produce meanings) and the
messages transmitted by them; between the ‘paradigmatic’ (a whole class
of signs which may stand in for one another) and the ‘syntagmitic’ (where
signs are coupled together with each other in a ‘chain’). It speaks of
‘metalanguages’, where one sign-system denotes another sign-system (the
relation between literary criticism and literature, for instance), ‘poysemic’
signs which have more than one meaning, and a great many other
technical concepts.
88-89 For Yury Lotman a poetic text is a ‘system of systems’ with every
tension, parallelism, repetition, opposition continually modifying all the
others. Eg the poem’s rhythm may be interrupted by its syntax. what is a
‘device’ is decided by the reader: “one person’s poetic device be
another’s daily speech”.
4. Post-Structuralism
122-125 [Stuff about Paris in 1968 etc. Can’t quite fathom the exact
relationship between that and post-structuralism.]
5. Psychoanalysis
136-137 The child now has an ego, identity, but only by repressing its
guilty desires into the unconscious. Dreams are our main access to the
unconscious. They are “symbolic fulfilments of unconscious wishes” but
filtered by the ego and confused by the unconscious — metaphor,
metonymy.
137-138 We may have unconscious desires that won’t be denied but find
no outlet. “The desire forces its way in fro the unconscious, the ego
blocks it off defensively, and the result of this internal conflict is what we
call neurosis.” Psychoanalysis sees unresolved conflicts behind neuroses
which stem from the Oedipal moment. If the ego cannot partly repress the
unconscious desire psychosis occurs, the unconscious builds up an
alternative, delusional reality.
150 For Lacan the unconscious is not just within us but an effect of our
relations with one another. Language is similar. Language, the
unconscious, parents, the symbolic order — the ‘Other’.
162 Naturalistic theatre, eg Shaw: the discourse may urge change and
criticism but the form enforces the solidity of this social world. To break
with these ways of seeing it would need to move beyond naturalism (later
Ibsen and Strindberg), jolting audience out of the reassurance of
recognition. Brecht’s “estrangement effect” makes the most taken-for-
granted aspects of reality unfamiliar to unsettle the audience’s
convictions.
171 Modern literary theory has ignored modern ideologies and history in
favour of a flight into the poem, the human mind, myth, language, etc.
nobody is especially concerned about what you say, with what extreme,
moderate, radical or conservative positions you adopt, provided that they
are compatible with, and can be articulated within, a specific form of
discourse. It is just that certain meanings and positions will not be
articulable within it. Literary studies, in other words, are a question of the
signifier, not of the signified.”
187-189 There are four occasions when culture “becomes newly relevant,
charged with a significance beyond itself”: “In the lives of nations
struggling for their independence from imperialism”; the women’s
movement; the “culture industry” [I think he’s saying something about
fighting the dumbing down of the media’s discourse]; working-class
writing. It would be good if the study of traditional literary subjects
“could become as charged with energy, urgency and enthusiasm
as [these] activities”.
Afterword
190-192 In late 1960s and early 1970s there were more students for
whom the supposedly universal values of literature were alien. So the
Russian Formalists, French structuralists and German reception theorists
came into fashion. As structuralism revealed the same codes traversed
both high and low cultures, a new field of enquiry, “cultural studies”,
emerged.
192-194 End of 1970s, revolutionary movements faded, capitalism
reasserted itself. Feminism and post-structuralism came to the fore. There
have been few breakthroughs in feminist theory since the 1970s but it has
become “the most popular of all the new approaches to literature.”
Comments
Ted Mills at 8 May 2007, 5:38am. Permalink
I love the fact that the stuff you don't understand is in grey text. These are
grey areas indeed.
Ah, memories of first year crit-theory lectures with the man himself,
when frankly I wasn't clued (or attentive) enough, as I realised a few
years on.
Never did own that particular primer, though, and picking up on Ted, it
feels a little dated, not least because to some extent We Are All New
Historicists Now, especially in my field.
Williams comes out of a Marxist tradition (as does Eagleton himself), and
the basic thrust of his work is to ground cultural developments in broad
social change, particularly industrialisation, mass production and the
changing nature of 'popular culture'. His particular argument is that
culture isn't just an expression of social change -- the classic Marxist
superstructure/base dichotomy -- but that culture is entirely integrated
into society. (I like this essay's summary, though it only scrapes the
surface.)