“Literary Theory: An Introduction‟ by Terry Eagleton

Introduction: What is Literature

The Formalists, Russia, 1910s. “Literature language is a set of deviations from a norm. A “special ‟ kind of
language, in contrast to the “ordinary‟ language we commonly use.”
Ordinary language is different for different classes, regions, ages, etc. Literature language is an assemblage of
devices (sound, rhythm, narrative techniques, etc.) and the literature content is merely present as the reason to use
these in a particular way.
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 literature depends on how one
reads it. Literature is a “functional rather than ontological” term; “it tells us about what we do, not about the
fixed being of things.”
Literature is often what we think of as good. As this is a value judgement there can be no objective
category of writing that is literature; its whatever we say it is. But what we say it is shaped by inescapable social
ideologies. Our value judgements “refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions
by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others.”

1. The Rise of English

- During 18C, and by the Romantic period (19C), literature began to refer only to imaginative works.
- Utilitarianism and early industrial capitalism are dominant in English land. State reacts to working class
protests with “brutal political criticism repressiveness”.
- The Literature work is seen as spontaneous and creative, unlike society, and „poetry‟ as an idea has political
criticism force.
- But the creative artist and his ideals were isolated from society, and it was only at the time of William Morris
“that the gap between poetic vision and political criticism practice was significantly narrowed”.
- Art/literature past and present began to be seen as an unchanging object, the „aesthetic art‟, no purpose but
an end in itself above ordinary life.
- The Symbol was at the Centre of aesthetic theory at turn of 18C. Conflicts in ordinary life were resolved
within it, away from the middle-class empiricism. It was irrational and couldn’t be explained you saw
it or you didn’t —and it brought together the concrete and universal, motion and stillness. [Examples of
what this means would have been good.]
- By mid-Victorian period religion was ceasing to be the unifying and pacifying format had been. English.
literature was seen as something that could “heal the State”. Matthew Arnold saw the middle class as harsh
and unintelligent and unable to lead and educate the working class in order to prevent anarchy. They needed
to be shown “the best culture of their nation”.
- Literature 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
literature is an imparter of moral literature—or “is moral ideology for the modern age”.
- English literature was seen as feminine and an amateurish subject Oxbridge tried to avoid, but also a way of
promoting English values in an imperial age. WW I created a “spiritual hungering” and English literature
provided the answer.
- English literature was transformed at Cambridge after WW I under FR Leavis, QR Leavis and IA Richards,
as the offspring of the provincial petty bourgeoisie entered universities forth first time. Leavis launched
 Scrutiny in 1932 and English. literature became the important subject and established how it is
discussed today.
- 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 literature would not turn English. into an organic and moral country. They
disapproved of those who didn’t have their knowledge. But if literature made you better how,
after WW II, to explain away educated Nazis?
- Scrutiny became an isolated literature. “Organic societies are just convenient myths for belaboring the
mechanized life of modern industrial capitalism.” The organic society lived on in good literature for the
Leavisites, “rich, complex, sensuous and particular”. “Dramatically concrete” writers like Donne and
Hopkins manifested the essence of Englishness unlike the “Latinate orverbally disembodied” Milton and
Shelley.
- In 1915 TS Eliot came to London from St Louis andbegan to carry out a wholesale salvage
and demo literature job on [English land] Literature traditions. The Metaphysical poets and Jacobean
dramatists were suddenly upgraded; Milton and the Romantics were rudely toppled; selected European
products, including the French Symbolists, were imported. He thought English. literature was on the right
track in early 17C but “language drifted loose from experience” resulting in the “Literature disaster” of
Milton.
- Liberalism, Romanticism, Protestantism, economic individualism was perverted dogmas and a right-
wing authoritarianism was Eliot’s solution. Literature works were only acceptable if they were part of the
Tradition, or the “European mind”, which was a largely arbitrary definition.
- “Poetry was not to English age 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 unconscious ways”. Maybe there are deep roots that poetry can reach, going
beyond history and the crisis of European society.
- 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.
- Leavis is associated with “practical criticism” and “close reading”.
- Cambridge critic IA Richards was a major link between Leaves 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.
- New Criticism, 1930s-50s: Eliot, Richards, maybe Leavis and Empson, with American movement of John
Crowe Ransom, WK Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Monroe Beardsley and RP Blackmur. Roots in
a US South that was being industrialized. A poem was internally coherent but not cut off from real literature;
real literature was somehow included within it making the poem a self-sufficient object in itself. New Critics
broke with the Great Man theory (works are ways to access the author’s soul): “the poem meant what it
meant, regardless of the poet’s intentions or the subjective linguistics the reader derived from it”.
- New Critical methods offered a method of dissecting poetry. These critical instruments were a way of
competing with hard sciences on their own terms and by1940s and 1950s New Criticism was part of the
Establishment, perfectly natural.
- Empson seems like a New Critic because of his analysis and unravel linguistics of meaning but he has an
old-fashioned liberal rationalism. 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.

2. Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Reception Theory

- German philosopher Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences (1935). Rejected the “natural
attitude” that we reliably know about objects in the world. We only regard things as “intended” by
consciousness and we must “put in brackets” anything beyond our immediate experience. The
“phenomenological reduction”. The phenomena in our minds are a system of universal essences, not
just the experience of something, an “eidetic” abstraction. Attempts to lay bare the structure of
consciousness and of phenomena, it’s neither empiricism nor psychologism”.
- “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.
- Phenomenological criticism ignores a text’s historical context. One can only know the author’s mind
from what is manifested in the work itself.
- This goes against the “linguistics revolution” of 20C which recognizes that meaning is dependent on
language and [I think] the languages society.
- Language is the dimension in which human life moves, humans are only creatures, participating in
language’s existence. We should be humble before Nature; Heidegger was another proponent of the
organic society and briefly a supporter of Hitler.
- For Heidegger art is the only means through which phenomenological truth manifests itself, where we see
things as they really are. We don’t do Literature interpretation, we let it happen to us.
- Heidegger: “hermeneutical phenomenology”. Husserl: “transcendental phenomenology”.
- For Husserl meaning was an “intentional object”, fixed and identical with whatever the
author “intended”. ED Hirsch Jr (Validity in Interpretation (1967)) agrees but also thinks a work can have
many valid interpretations, all within the system the author’s meaning permits. For Hirsch and
Husserl meaning is pre-linguistics, although we’re not sure how that is supposed to work.
- Han-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method), following from Heidegger, says we can never know
the author’s work “as it is”; our interpretation always depends on our current situation. The prejudices we
bring to the interpretation are OK because they have been formed by the tradition itself and so connect us
with the work. This is hermeneutics. But it assumes a single artistic tradition through history without
conflicting ideologies.
- Most recent development of hermeneutics in Germany is „reception theory‟ which also concentrates on
recent works (unlike Gadamer), and it examines the reader’s role in literature. Three stages of modern
literature theory, focusing on different things: author (Romanticism and 19C); text (New Criticism); reader.
- For reception theory reading is a dynamic process. As we read on we shed assumptions, revise beliefs, make
more and more complex inferences and anticipations; each sentence opens up a horizon which is confirmed,
challenged English or undermined by the next. … All this complicated activity is carried out on many
levels at once, for the text has „backgrounds‟ and „foregrounds‟, different narrative
viewpoints, alternative layers of meaning between which we are constantly moving.
- 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 expectations.
- He says a reader with a strong ideology will be inadequate as they won’t be open toe text’s
transformative power. But this means a reader should be open to change, so any transformation is less
profound. And what you define as a „Literature‟ work is one that is open to these methods of enquiry, so
what you get out of the work depends on what you put in.
- 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‟.
 - 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.
- A work is written for an „implied reader‟ (Iser) who has the correct understanding to make some sense of
the subject and language.
- 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.
- We cannot make a text mean anything we like, “the idea is a simple fantasy bred in the minds of those who
have spent too long in the classroom”. A text belongs to language as a whole, has relations to other
linguistics practices. “

Summary:
According to Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory by Terry Eagleton, he
states, “All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking, I am aware that my
thoughts is ‘pointing towards’ some object. The act of thinking and the object of thought
are internally related, mutually dependent.” Basically, it’s saying that artists are fully
conscious of what they’re saying or writing. When I think about this, I think about when an
artist is calling someone out in their songs and they are conscious of what they’re saying.
The audience can also relate because they are conscious of what is being said and
conscious of the words coming out of their mouths when singing the song.
After reading the Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Reception Theory, it showed me that
there is so much more to writing, saying, or singing in rap music even if it very broad. It
gave a different perceptive to language as a whole. It showed me that we are always
conscious of what we are saying whether it is negative or positive, we are always conscious
which I find interesting. “The aim of phenomenology was in fact the precise opposite of
abstraction: it was a return to the concrete, to solid ground,” or meaning that language was
the base to consciousness.

3. Structuralism and Semiotics

- Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), moved on from New Criticism. Created a detailed
system of how literature functioned, and said that over the years it cycles through four phases: comic,
romantic, tragic and ironic. Literature exists within a history, but it is purely the history of literature; it has
no reference to the wider world. “Literature is not a way of knowing real literature but a kind of
collective utopian dreaming”.
- In structuralism images in a text only have meaning in relation to each other, not to external things. The
content is much less relevant than the form; items in the text could be changed and it would still be
structurally the same.
- Structuralism is indifferent to the cultural value of the text. It refuses the „obvious ‟meaning and looks to
„deep‟ structures within. The narrative is about itself, the content is its structure.
- Structuralism in all subjects is based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics
(Course in General Linguistics (1916) but literature structure flourished in 1960s). Language is a
system of signs, each “made up of a “signifier‟ (a sound-image, or its graphic equivalent), and a
„signified‟ (the concept of meaning)”. For example, the word “cat” and the idea of the animal. Relation
 between the two is arbitrary. The relation between this whole sign and the object it refers to, the „referent‟
is therefore also arbitrary.
- Roman Jacobson was a Russian Formalist and modern structuralism. For Jacobson, in poetics “the sign is
dislocated from its object” and the sign is allowed value in itself.
- Structuralism is a method of enquiry and semiotics is the study of a system of signs. But
structuralism tends to use semiotics and structure reduces all things to systems of signs.
- Founder of semiotics CS Peirce 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”, whereas 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
„syntagmatic‟ (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), „polysomic‟ signs which have more than one meaning, and a great
many other technical concepts.
- For Yury Lotman a poetic text is a „system of systems‟ with every tension, parallelism,
repetition, opposition continually modifying all the others. For example, the poems’ 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”.
- Structuralism had a big impact on the study of narrative. For example, for Lévi Strauss
there were a few basic themes behind all myths, and these had their own rules, a grammar. These are
inherent in the human mind so in looking at myths we are looking at the mental operations that
structure it.
- Structuralism said “real literature was not reflected by language but produced by it. The world is not
simply how we perceive it. “It undermines the empiricism of the Literature humanists—the belief that
what is most „real‟ is what is experienced, and that the home of this rich, subtle, complex experience is
literature itself.”
- Structuralism sees language as an object rather than a practice with human subjects, ignores the practical
conditions in which a language operates.
- Mikhail Bakhtin reacted against this “objectivist” linguistics. Signs weren’t fixed units but changed
depending on who said them to who and in what social and historical context.
- JL Austin, how to Do Things with Words (1962). Speech act theory. All language is “performative”.
Literature may describe the world, state facts, but its real function is bringing about certain effects in the
readers.
- “In reading, we build up a sense of what kind of effects this language is trying to achieve („intention‟).”
“None of this need be identical with the intentions, attitudes and assumptions of the actual historical
author.” The reader was someone who could understand the work “as it was”, although such an objective
reader, free of class, gender, cultural influences, etc. does not exist.

4. Post-Structuralism
- The signified (the concept of a boat) is not only what it is because of its signifier (“boat”) but also because all
the of signifiers it isn’t (craft, vessel etc.). Look up a signifier in a dictionary and the signified (the
definition) is made up of more signifiers, etc. “Structuralism divided the sign from the referent”, post-
structuralism “divides the signifier from the signified.” “Meaning is not immediately present in a sign.”
The meaning of a word in a text is affected by those before and after it.
- “It is difficult to know what a sign „originally‟ means” because its context is always different. I can never be
fully present to you through what I say or write because the meaning of the signs is always in flux. I can also
never have a pure meaning or intention myself as I am made up of language.
- Western philosophical tradition “has consistently vilified writing” because it is always at one remove from
one ‟s consciousness, whereas speech is more immediate. But this ignores the mutability of the signs in
speech too.
- There can be no transcendental, original meaning to a thought-system as we always want to go beyond it.
First principles can always be “deconstructed” as products of a particular system of meaning. They are often
defined by what they exclude, are part of the binary opposition beloved of structuralism (and ideologies in
general).
- Roland Barthes. A “healthy” sign draws attention to its own arbitrariness. Signs which pass themselves
off as “natural” and the only way of seeing the world are authoritarian and ideological. Realist
literature has this “natural attitude”, tries to give us real literature “as it is” and denies the
productive character of language. The “double” sign “gestures to its own material existence at the same
time as it conveys a meaning”.
- A literature work is no longer something to be read but something writable. It is not a stable structure
and the critic is now a producer not just consumer. A “writable” text has no set meaning, “an inexhaustible
tissue or galaxy of signifiers”. Barthes ‟S/Z (1970), a study of Balzac’s story Sarrasine

5. Psychoanalysis
- Freud, we must work to survive and in doing so we repress the “pleasure principle”, our tendencies
to pleasure and gratification. We might “sublimate” unfulfilled desires by directing them to a more
socially valued end.
- As children grow, become aware of sexual literature. Oedipus complex. Acceptance of and adoption
of masculine/feminine roles. “We turn from incest to extra- familial relations; and from
Nature to Culture”.
- 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.
- We may have unconscious desires that won’t be denied but find no outlet. The desire forces its way in from
the unconscious, the ego blocks it off defensively, and he 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 real literature.
- Jacques Lacan‟s takes on Freudianism. Reinterprets him in the light of structuralism and post-
structuralism theories and looks at the relationship to language.
- Literature draws attention to how something is said, not just what is said, unlike, say a textbook. The work
will not be taken for the absolute truth and the readers encouraged to think about this particular
representation of real literature.
- Louis Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses‟ in Lenin and Philosophy (1971). Individuals are
merely products of several social structures. But we experience ourselves as free, autonomous individuals.
 How? We feel that society is not an impersonal structure but something that addresses us personally, as
though the world is centered on ourselves. Ideology is the set of beliefs and practices that does this centering.
It is things like going to church, voting, letting women through doors first, how I dress.
- 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.
- Classical narrative for Freud, something is lost, it is distressing but exciting, but we know the object will be
restored. But also what we have might one day disappear forever.
- Naturalistic theatre, for example 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 real literature unfamiliar to unsettle the
audience’s convictions.

Conclusion: Political criticism

- Literary theory is always political criticism. “The great majority of the Literature theories outlined in this
book have straightened English rather than challenged English the assumptions of the power-system some
of whose present-day consequences [nuclear stockpiles, poverty] I have just described.”
- Modern Literature theory has ignored modern ideologies and history in favor of a flight into the poem, the
human mind, myth, language, etc.
- There is no common method that defines Literary theories, and no common object (impossible to
define what literature is). Many methods are mutually exclusive. One may choose to work without a
method, using only intuition, but this “will depend on a latent structure of assumptions”.
- Liberal humanism is part of the “official” ideology of modern capitalism, but in practice its
values are only paid lip service. Departments of literature, due to their funding, are part of the “ideological
apparatus of the modern capitalist state”. As a student 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. Literature studies, in other words, are a question of the signifier, not of the
signified.”
- “Certain pieces of writing are selected as being more amenable to this discourse than others, and these are
what is known as literature or the „Literature canon‟.”
- This is an arbitrary definition and should be an embarrassment to Literary criticism. Literary criticism
tries to keep itself alive by adding, say, historical analysis or structuralism, but this only
makes it obvious that other objects can have Literary theory applied to them too. Literature
theory, like literature, is an illusion, and should not be a discipline distinct from philosophy, linguistics,
psychology, etc. This book is an obituary.
- He wants to return Literature criticism to the paths of traditional Rhetoric, which analyses, and produced, all
kinds of discourse.
- We should not ask what literature is or how to approach it but why we should want to English age with it.
The liberal humanist response is reasonable but useless (it overestimates the power of literature to make you
a “better person” and ignores social context).
- With rhetoric (or “discourse theory” or “cultural studies”) you decide what you want to do and choose
the appropriate methods and objects.
- There are four occasions when culture “becomes newly relevant, charged with a significance beyond itself”:
“In the lives of nations struggle linguistics 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 Literature
subjects “could become as charged with energy, urgency and enthusiasm as[these] activities”.

Afterword
- 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 structuralisms 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.
- 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.”
- Marxist criticism language unshed since late 1970s. Western capitalism proved too strong for the
mass movements that fought against it. So maybe new, smaller organizations and theories were
needed. “There was no longer a coherent system or unified history to be opposed, just a discrete set of
powers, discourses, practices, narratives.
- Foucault and Lacan popular during 1980s. Derrida and deconstruction faded.
- New historicism focused on the Renaissance. Ignored many topics, often if they didn’t crop up in Foucault
or if they had literature bearing on present-day US culture.
- In Britain, Raymond Williams‟ “cultural materialism” took hold. A way of examining culture as being
thoroughly social and material.
- During 1980s many of the political criticism areas that post-structuralism ignored became more important. It
couldn’t compete with the German tradition of philosophical enquiry from Hegel to Habermas. A
resurgence of interest in Russian Mikhail Bakhtin.
- “Postmodernity means the end of modernity, in the sense of those grand narratives of truth, reason, science,
progress and universal emancipation which are taken to characterize modern thought from the
Enlightenment onwards. ‘Postmodernism is “the form of culture which corresponds to this world view.
The typical postmodernist work of art is arbitrary, eclectic, hybrid, decentered, fluid discontinuous, pastiche-
like Post-colonial theory has been second only to feminist criticism by mid-1990s.