Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI) 2015-2016 Study Guide PDF

Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2015-2016. Unit 1 Study Guide COMENTARIO DE TEXTOS GRADO LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA UNIT 1 GUIDE | APPROACHING THE LITERARY TEXTS IN ENGLISH 2023-2024 GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES: LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA Adriana Kiczkowski (co-ordinator) Isabel Castelao Inés Ordiz 1/10 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa STUDY GUIDE-UNIT 1 Approaching the Literary Texts in English 1. Introduction 2. What is Literature? 2.1. Introduction to Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory. 2.2. Activity 3. Classifying Literature: Genres, Literary Periods and Movements. 3.1.The Literary Genres. Narrative texts. Poetry. Drama. 3.2. Activity 3.3. Literary Periods and Movements. 3.4. Activity 4. How do we approach the Literary Text? Literary Criticism, Critical Theories. 4.1. Theoretical approaches to Literature Comprehension versus Interpretation. 5. Introduction to Literary Critical Schools 6. Activities 7. References 8. Further Resources 2 1. INTRODUCTION In this first unit we will reflect on the object of study of the course, that is, the literary text and the ways in which we can approach it. We will also review some basic concepts such as “genre” and “literary periods” that have served to organize the literary corpus throughout history. The last part of the unit summarizes some of the most important critical theories of the twentieth century. Below, you will find the reading materials we have selected for each of the sections that make up this unit. As you will see, most of the topics to be covered have been developed by different authors who are specialists in the field. In order to facilitate your study, we have incorporated some excerpts into these study materials. We recommend that you do the readings in the order in which they are presented to get the most of them. The different materials that we include in the Study Guides of each Unit, whether textual or audio-visual, are obligatory contents to prepare the subject except for the bibliography or webpages that you will find at the end in the "Further readings" section. We are aware of the difficulties often faced when dealing with some theoretical issues that require a level of abstraction to which we are often not accustomed, but we hope that the pleasure of finding new ways to understand, interpret or feel the literary text will make the effort worthwhile. We wish you the best of luck on this path and you can count on the teaching staff as well as your tutors to help you with those aspects that may be more complex. 2. WHAT IS LITERATURE? Before you continue reading, THINK about the word “literature”. How would you define it? That is, what is “literature” for you? WRITE this definition down. Although the objective of this unit is not to find a unique and satisfactory answer, the inquiry about the literary character of a text will be the central axis of our course. In contemporary times, there is a certain consensus to embrace the lack of specificity of literature, the inability to define it. The definition of any specific and distinguishing features that literary works share, according to most critics, is a question that “has been wrestled with without notable success” (Culler 21). Mario Klarer considers that there is an inevitable “lack of substance in the attempts to define it” (1). The definition of what literature is, according to Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, is “a question to which no one has yet provided an entirely satisfactory or convincing answer” (1). However, as Álvarez Amorós attests, literary courses have traditionally given for granted what literature consists of, evading the matter of the definition of the object of study “learning it in deductive ways and reducing it to the works that authors have written in a compulsory list of readings”, generally made through uncontested historical or national criteria, that exposes without questioning “the nature and existence of a phenomenon” that must be learnt, instead of “known” (15). Here, the sense of “knowing” is precisely the process of understanding the undefined nature of the object of study through questions and reflection, approaching the uncertainty of the essence of literature on an open-ended basis of questioning. 3 In the past, the specificity of literature, that is, that literature is something precise and systematized, was not put into question. This “specificity” of what literature is, the understanding that “it exists and that it can be distinguished objectively from the rest of linguistic products” belongs to a Romantic change of perspective born in the 19th c., when literature came to be understood as an exceptional and different work written by an author that includes “aesthetic worth in combination with general intellectual distinction” becoming then an aesthetic phenomenon related to an imaginative process (Amorós 21). Nevertheless, before the 14th c. the etymological root of literature, littera (“letter”), simply meant anything in print, “whatever is written or printed” (closer to the contemporary understanding of “written text”). The word literature was coined in English for the first time in the 14th c. as the study and knowledge of books (related to the Spanish filología). In the 17th c. it came to signify the profession of writing and the corpus of works related to a period or culture (Amorós 21). From the mere “printed letter” to the “writing having excellence of form and expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest” we see an evolution from a “descriptive” to an “evaluative” perception of literature (Amorós 20). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines literature in current times as the following: “imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value”; but who recognizes this artistic value? Is it society? Or literary experts? Even though literary works are esteemed and praised by the canon, the most important thing is how we, as readers, are able to recognize the artistic value, thinking for ourselves and being able to communicate what we appreciate about the imaginative and the artistic quality of a work (Mays 2). Our role as active readers relates to the fact that, even though dictionaries “define” literature, what makes literature what it is is also very much related to the way we look at texts: “With a bit of effort and imagination, we would suggest, any text can be read as poetic—the list of ingredients on a box of breakfast cereal, for example. Or even the most inane language of bureaucracy” (Bennet and Royle 2). The shopping list or the first line of a philosophy book, if taken apart and treated as a text detached from its original purpose can become literary to our literary eyes (our attention and imagination). For example, if we read the following line from a cooking recipe, ‘Stir vigorously and allow to sit five minutes’ it could be a one-line poem titled “Infatuation”, or a philosophy book first sentence: ‘A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity’ the stanza of a poem. Literary works are above all “texts”: “the word text is related to ‘textile’ and can be translated as ‘fabric’: just as single threads form a fabric, so works and sentences form a meaningful and coherent text” (Klarer 1), which before print were transmitted orally. Texts have visual and acoustic elements, but with the modern printing press, as Klarer emphasizes, “pure writing became more and more stylized as an abstract medium devoid of traces of material or physical elements” (2). Literary texts generally maintain these material and physical elements (visual and acoustic) and also share a creative wish to last as expression outside the creator, communicating and sharing: “Underlying literary production is certainly the human wish to leave behind a trace of oneself through creative expression, which will exist detached from the individual and, therefore, outlast its creator. The earliest manifestations of this creative wish are prehistoric paintings in caves, which hold ‘encoded’ information in the form of visual signs” (Klarer 1). Therefore, one of the conclusions that we can draw about literature is that, above all, it is an experience, or a way of reading “literarily” and giving a particular “attention” to texts, without any pragmatic purpose but the experience or process of reading in 4 “mindfulness” within the creative world where it belongs. Literary reading is not pragmatic reading because we are not looking for an objective, a solution to a problem, an action to be taken, or a practical information we need; the importance is in the process we enjoy or the experience we have, what happens during the reading: “The difference between pragmatic and literary reading in other words, resembles the difference between a journey that is only about reaching a destination and one that is just as much about fully experiencing the ride” (Mays 3). Reading literature is to “experience” through imagination, senses, feelings and intellect because, as the Greek etymology of “poetry”, the verb poiein (“to make” or “to do”), “words do not simply describe, but actually do things: they engage, entice, convince, seduce” (Bennett and Royle 11). One characteristic that literary works such as stories, poems and plays have is that “they help us move beyond abstraction by giving us concrete, vivid particulars. Rather than talking about things, they bring them to life for us by representing experience, and so they become an experience for us—one that engages our emotions, our imagination, and all of our senses, as well as our intellects” (Mays 3). Our purpose as students of literature is to be able to analyze and communicate this experience through the methods and terminology from the discipline of literary studies. 2.1. READ the following text from the introduction to Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory. (2008). If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is something called literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature? There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define it, for example, as 'imaginative' writing in the sense of fiction - writing which is not literally true. But even the briefest reflection on what people commonly include under the heading of literature suggests that this will not do. Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a pinch be taken to encompass Hobbes's Leviathan or Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. […] Nineteenth-century English literature usually includes Lamb (though not Bentham), Macaulay (but not Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer). A distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction', then, seems unlikely to get us very far, not least because the distinction itself is often a questionable one. It has been argued, for instance, that out own opposition between 'historical' and 'artistic' truth does not apply at all to the early Icelandic sagas. In the English late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word 'novel' seems to have been used about both true and fictional events, and even news reports were hardly to be considered factual. Novels and news reports were neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp discriminations between these categories simply did not apply. Gibbon no doubt thought that he was writing the historical truth, and so perhaps did the authors of Genesis, but they are now read as 'fact' by some and 'fiction' by others […]. Moreover, if 'literature' includes much 'factual' writing, it also excludes quite a lot of fiction. Superman comic and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but not generally regarded as literature, and certainly not as Literature. If literature is 'creative' or 'imaginative' writing, does this imply that history, philosophy and natural science are uncreative and unimaginative? Perhaps one needs a different kind of approach altogether. Perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or 'imaginative', but because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which, in the words of the Russian critic Roman Jakobson, represents an 'organized violence committed on ordinary speech'. Literature transforms 5 and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning […]. Your language draws attention to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like 'Don't you know the drivers are on strike?' do not. This, in effect, was the definition of the 'literary' advanced by the Russian Formalists […]. The Formalists emerged in Russia in the years before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and flourished throughout the 1920s, until they were effectively silenced by Stalinism. […] For them, literature was not pseudo-religion or psychology or sociology but a particular organization of language. It had its own specific laws, structures and devices, which were to be studied in themselves rather than reduced to something else. The literary work was neither a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of social reality nor the incarnation of some transcendental truth: it was a material fact, whose functioning could be analysed rather as one could examine a machine […]. Formalism was essentially the application of linguistics to the study of literature […]. Formalists passed over the analysis of literary 'content' (where one might always be tempted into psychology or sociology) for the study of literary form. Far from seeing form as the expression of content, they stood the relationship on its head: content was merely the 'motivation' of form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise. Don Quixote is not 'about' the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique. […] they did not deny that art had a relation to social reality — indeed some of them were closely associated with the Bolsheviks - they provocatively claimed that this relation was not the critic's business. […] What was specific to literary language, what distinguished it from other forms of discourse, was that it 'deformed' ordinary language in various ways. Under the pressure of literary devices, ordinary language was intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out, turned on its head. It was language 'made strange'; and because of this estrangement, the everyday world was also suddenly made unfamiliar. […] The Formalists, then, saw literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a kind of linguistic violence: literature is a 'special' kind of language, in contrast to the 'ordinary' language we commonly use. But to spot a deviation implies being able to identify the norm from which it swerves. […] The idea that there is a single 'normal' language, a common currency shared equally by all members of society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status and so on, which can by no means be neatly unified into a single homogeneous linguistic community. […] Even the most 'prosaic' text of the fifteenth century may sound 'poetic' to us today because of its archaism. If we were to stumble across an isolated scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we could not tell whether it was 'poetry' or not merely by inspecting it, since we might have no access to that society's 'ordinary' discourses; and even if further research were to reveal that it was 'deviatory', this would still not prove that it was poetry as not all linguistic deviations are poetic. Slang, for example. We would not be able to tell just by looking at it that it was not a piece of 'realist' literature, without much more information about the way it actually functioned as a piece of writing within the society in question. […] When the poet tells us that his love is like a red rose, we know by the very fact that he puts this statement in metre that we are not supposed to ask whether he actually had a lover who for some bizarre reason seemed to him to resemble a rose. He is telling us something about women and love in general. Literature, then, we might say, is 'non-pragmatic' discourse: unlike biology textbooks and notes to the milkman it serves no immediate practical purpose, but is to be taken as referring to a general state of affairs. Sometimes, though not always, it may employ peculiar language as though to make this fact obvious — to signal that what is at stake is a way of talking about a woman, rather than any particular real-life woman. This focusing on the way of talking, rather than on the reality of what is talked about, is sometimes taken to indicate that we mean by literature a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself. There are, however, problems with this way of defining literature too. […] In much that is classified as literature, the truth-value and practical relevance of what is said is considered important to the overall effect. But even if treating discourse 'non pragmatically' is part of what is meant by 'literature', then it follows from this 'definition' that literature cannot in fact be 6 'objectively' defined. It leaves the definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read, not to the nature of what is written. There are certain kinds of writing - poems, plays, novels - which are fairly obviously intended to be 'non-pragmatic' in this sense, but this does not guarantee that they will actually be read in this way. […] It is true that many of the works studied as literature in academic institutions were 'constructed' to be read as literature, but it is also true that many of them were not. A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature; or it may start off as literature and then come to be valued for its archaeological significance. Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them. Breeding in this respect may count for a good deal more than birth. What matters may not be where you came from but how people treat you. If they decide that you are literature then it seems that you are, irrespective of what you thought you were. In this sense, one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing. It would not be easy to isolate, from all that has been variously called 'literature', some constant set of inherent features. In fact it would be as impossible as trying to identify the single distinguishing feature which all games have in common. There is no 'essence' of literature whatsoever. Any bit of writing may be read 'non-pragmatically', if that is what reading a text as literature means, just as any writing may be read 'poetically'. If I pore over the railway timetable not to discover a train connection but to stimulate in myself general reflections on the speed and complexity of modern existence, then I might be said to be reading it as literature. […] Even if we claim that it is a non-pragmatic treatment of language, we have still not arrived at an 'essence' of literature because this is also so of other linguistic practices such as jokes. In any case, it is far from clear that we can discriminate neatly between 'practical' and 'non- practical' ways of relating ourselves to language. Reading a novel for pleasure obviously differs from reading a road sign for information, but how about reading a biology textbook to improve your mind? Is that a 'pragmatic' treatment of language or not? In many societies, 'literature' has served highly practical functions such as religious ones; distinguishing sharply between 'practical' and 'non-practical' may only be possible in a society like ours, where literature has ceased to have much practical function at all. We may be offering as a general definition a sense of the 'literary' which is in fact historically specific. We have still not discovered the secret, then, of why Lamb, Macaulay and Mill are literature but not, generally speaking, Bentham, Marx and Darwin. Perhaps the simple answer is that the first three are examples of 'fine writing', whereas the last three are not. This answer has the disadvantage of being largely untrue, at least in my judgement, but it has the advantage of suggesting that by and large people term 'literature' writing which they think is good. An obvious objection to this is that if it were entirely true there would be no such thing as 'bad literature'. […] Value-judgements would certainly seem to have a lot to do with what is judged literature and what isn't - not necessarily in the sense that writing has to be 'fine' to be literary, but that it has to be of the kind that is judged fine: it may be an inferior example of a generally valued mode. Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was. The term 'fine writing', or belles lettres, is in this sense ambiguous: it denotes a sort of writing which is generally highly regarded, while not necessarily committing you to the opinion that a particular specimen of it is 'good'. With this reservation, the suggestion that 'literature' is a highly valued kind of writing is an illuminating one. But it has one fairly devastating consequence. It means that we can drop once and for all the illusion that the category 'literature' is 'objective', in the sense of being eternally given and immutable. Anything can be literature, and anything which is regarded as unalterably and unquestionably literature - Shakespeare, for example – can cease to be literature. Any belief that the study of literature is the study of a stable, well-definable entity, as entomology is the study of insects, can be abandoned as a chimera. Some kinds of fiction are literature, and some are not; some literature is fictional and some is not; some literature is verbally self-regarding, while some highly-wrought rhetoric is not literature. Literature, in the sense of a set of works of assured and unalterable value, distinguished by certain shared inherent properties, does not exist. […] The reason why it follows from the definition of literature as highly valued writing that it is not a stable entity is that value-judgements are notoriously variable. 'Times change, values don't,' announces an advertisement for a daily newspaper, as though we still believed in killing off infirm infants or putting the mentally ill on public show. Just as people may treat a work as philosophy in 7 one century and as literature in the next, or vice versa, so they may change their minds about what writing they consider valuable. They may even change their minds about the grounds they use for judging what is valuable and what is not. This, as I have suggested, does not necessarily mean that they will refuse the title of literature to a work which they have come to deem inferior: they may still call it literature, meaning roughly that it belongs to the type of writing which they generally value. But it does mean that the so-called 'literary canon', the unquestioned 'great tradition' of the 'national literature', has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time. There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it. 'Value' is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes. It is thus quite possible that, given a deep enough transformation of our history, we may in the future produce a society which is unable to get anything at all out of Shakespeare. His works might simply seem desperately alien, full of styles of thought and feeling which such a society found limited or irrelevant. In such a situation, Shakespeare would be no more valuable than much present-day graffiti. […] The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns - indeed that in one sense of 'our own concerns' we are incapable of doing anything else - might be one reason why certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course, that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be that people have not actually been valuing the 'same' work at all, even though they may think they have. 'Our' Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor 'our' Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a 'different' Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other words, are 'rewritten', if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a 're-writing'. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair. I do not mean that it is unstable because value-judgements are 'subjective'. […] All of our descriptive statements move within an often invisible network of value-categories, and indeed without such categories we would have nothing to say to each other at all. It is not just as though we have something called factual knowledge which may then be distorted by particular interests and judgements, although this is certainly possible; it is also that without particular interests we would have no knowledge at all, because we would not see the point of bothering to get to know anything. Interests are constitutive of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil it. The claim that knowledge should be 'value-free' is itself a value-judgement. It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable. A thorough analysis of my tastes in food would probably reveal how deeply relevant they are to certain formative experiences in early childhood, to my relations with my parents and siblings and to a good many other cultural factors which are quite as social and 'nonsubjective' as railway stations. This is even more true of that fundamental structure of beliefs and interests which I am born into as a member of a particular society, such as the belief that I should try to keep in good health, that differences of sexual role are rooted in human biology or that human beings are more important than crocodiles. We may disagree on this or that, but we can only do so because we share certain 'deep' ways of seeing and valuing which are bound up with our social life, and which could not be changed without transforming that life. Nobody will penalize me heavily if I dislike a particular Donne poem, but if I argue that Donne is not literature at all then in certain circumstances, I might risk losing my job. […] The largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies our factual statements is part of what is meant by 'ideology'. By 'ideology' I mean, roughly, the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in. It follows from such a rough definition of ideology that not all of our underlying judgements and categories can usefully be said to be ideological. It is deeply ingrained in us to imagine ourselves moving forwards into the future (at least one other society sees itself as moving backwards into it), but though this way of seeing may connect significantly with the power- structure of our society, it need not always and everywhere do so. I do not mean by 'ideology' simply the deeply entrenched, often unconscious beliefs which people hold; I mean more 8 particularly those modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power. The fact that such beliefs are by no means merely private quirks may be illustrated by a literary example. In his famous study Practical Criticism (1929), the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards sought to demonstrate just how whimsical and subjective literary value-judgements could actually be by giving his undergraduates a set of poems, withholding from them the titles and authors' names, and asking them to evaluate them. The resulting judgements, notoriously, were highly variable: time- honoured poets were marked down and obscure authors celebrated. To my mind, however, much the most interesting aspect of this project, and one apparently quite invisible to Richards himself, is just how tight a consensus of unconscious valuations underlies these particular differences of opinion. Reading Richards' undergraduates' accounts of literary works, one is struck by the habits of perception and interpretation which they spontaneously share - what they expect literature to be, what assumptions they bring to a poem and what fulfilments they anticipate they will derive from it. None of this is really surprising: for all the participants in this experiment were, presumably, young, white, upper- or upper-middle-class, privately educated English people of the 1920s, and how they responded to a poem depended on a good deal more than purely 'literary' factors. Their critical responses were deeply entwined with their broader prejudices and beliefs. This is not a matter of blame: there is no critical response which is not so entwined, and thus no such thing as a 'pure' literary critical judgement or interpretation. If anybody is to be blamed it is I. A. Richards himself, who as a young, white, upper-middle-class male Cambridge don was unable to objectify a context of interests which he himself largely shared, and was thus unable to recognize fully that local, 'subjective' differences of evaluation work within a particular, socially structured way of perceiving the world. If it will not do to see literature as an 'objective', descriptive category, neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building. What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value- judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others. If this seems a far-fetched assertion, a matter of private prejudice, we may test it out by an account of the rise of 'literature' in England.” (Eagleton 1-14) 2.2. Activity 1 (Not compulsory) REFLECT on the text you have just read. Terry Eagleton exposes three aspects that have been considered when defining what literature is: 1. Literature as an “imaginative” writing. 2. Literature as a peculiar way of using language. 3. Literature as non-pragmatic discourse. According to the author, what problems do each of them have in defining what literature is? The following video may help you to better understand the text. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWf-kzJPaU&ab_channel=ShisukaFurada 9 Go back to the definition of literature you wrote down before reading this section. Did it align with one of the three aspects underlined by Eagleton? Has your understanding of literature changed? How? You can SHARE your reflections with other students in the thread created for this activity in the Unit 1 Forum or in the tutorial sessions. 3. CLASSIFYING LITERATURE: GENRES, LITERARY PERIODS AND MOVEMENTS. Ø REFLECT and WRITE What comes to mind when you think of the word “genre”? What is your favorite genre, whether literary or filmic (movie genre)? What are the main characteristics of that genre? As in all disciplines, whether scientific, social or humanistic, literary studies have attempted to organize and structure works, thus giving rise to classifications that have taken into account the genre (that is, the type of text); the literary period (that is, the historical moment to which the text belongs); and the artistic-literary movement to which it adheres. As Mario Klarer claims: As early as Greco-Roman antiquity, the classification of literary works into different genres has been a major concern of literary theory, which has since then produced a number of divergent and sometimes even contradictory categories. Among the various attempts to classify literature into genres, the triad epic, drama, and poetry has proved to be the most common in modern literary criticism. Because the epic was widely replaced by the new prose form of the novel in the eighteenth century, recent classifications prefer the terms fiction, drama, and poetry as designations of the three major literary genres. The following section will explain the basic characteristics of these literary genres […]. (Klarer 10). 3.1 The Literary Genres Classification by genre, although it has been questioned over time for various reasons, is undoubtedly one of the most widespread categorizations. The excerpts that follow, which are taken from Tison Pugh and Margaret E. Johnson’s Literary Studies. A Practical Guide and from Kelly J. Mays’s The Norton Introduction to Literature, offer simple definitions the most common categories: All academic disciplines have systems of classification, or taxonomies, as well as jargon. Biologists, for example, classify all organisms into a series of ever-smaller, more specific 10 categories: kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus, and species. Classification and comparison are just as essential in the study of literature. We expect a poem to work in a certain way, for example, when we know from the outset that it is a poem and not, say, a factual news report or a short story. And— whether consciously or not— we compare it, as we read, to other poems we’ve read in the past. If we know, further, that the poem was first published in eighteenth- century Japan, we expect it to work differently from one that appeared in the latest New Yorker. Indeed, we often choose what to read, just as we choose what movie to see, based on the ‘class’ or ‘order’ of book or movie we like or what we are in the mood for that day— horror or comedy, action or science fiction. As these examples suggest, we generally tend to categorize literary works in two ways: (1) on the basis of contextual factors, especially historical and cultural context— that is, when, by whom, and where it was produced (as in nineteenth century literature, the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, American literature, or African American literature)— and (2) on the basis of formal textual features. For the latter type of classification […] the key term is genre, which simply means, as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, ‘A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose. Applied rigorously, genre refers to the largest categories […] fiction, poetry, and drama (as well as nonfiction prose). The word subgenre applies to smaller divisions within a genre, and the word kind to divisions within a subgenre. Subgenres of fiction include the novel, the novella, and the short story. Kinds of novels, in turn, include things like the bildungsroman or the epistolary novel. Similarly, important subgenres of nonfiction include the essay, as well as biography and autobiography; a memoir is a particular kind of autobiography, and so on. However, the terms of literary criticism are not so fixed or so consistently, rigorously used as biologists’ are. You will often see the word genre applied both much more narrowly— referring to the novel, for example, or even to a kind of novel such as the epistolary novel or the historical novel. The way we classify a work depends on which aspects of its form or style we concentrate on, and categories may overlap. When we divide fiction, for example, into the subgenres novel, novella, and short story, we take the length of the works as the salient aspect. (Novels are much longer than short stories.) But other fictional subgenres— detective fiction, gothic fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, and even romance— are based on the types of plots, characters, settings, and so on that are customarily featured in these works. These latter categories may include works from all the other, length- based categories. There are, after all, gothic novels (think Stephenie Meyer), as well as gothic short stories (think Edgar Allan Poe). A few genres even cut across the boundaries dividing poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction. A prime example is satire— any literary work (whether poem, play, fiction, or nonfiction) ‘in which prevailing vices and follies are held up to ridicule’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Examples of satire include poems such as Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1728); plays, movies, and television shows, from Molière’s Tartuffe (1664) to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) to South Park and The Daily Show; works of fiction like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759); and works of nonfiction such as Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729) and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906). Three other major genres that cross the borders between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction are parody, pastoral, and romance. Individual works can thus belong simultaneously to multiple generic categories or observe some conventions of a genre without being an example of that genre in any simple or straightforward way. The Old English poem Beowulf is an epic and, because it’s written in verse, a poem. Yet because (like all epics) it narrates a story, it is also a work of fiction in the more general sense of that term. 11 Given this complexity, the system of literary genres can be puzzling, especially to the uninitiated. Used well, however, classification schemes are among the most essential and effective tools we use to understand and enjoy just about everything, including literature (Mays 4-6). Below we suggest a brief outline of each of the three literary genres as defined by Pugh, Johnson and Mays. They are narrative text (prose fiction), poetry and drama. We will study them in depth in the following units. 3.1.1. Narrative texts The essence of prose fiction, as opposed to drama, is narration, the recounting or telling of a sequence of events or actions. The earliest works of fiction relied almost exclusively on narration, with speeches or dialogue being reported rather than quoted directly. Narrative texts or prose fiction can be classified into different subgenres. Short stories focus on a few characters, who, given the genre’s compressed form, achieve a key, if partial, insight by the narrative’s end. The vast scope of novels allows for more complex storylines and numerous rich, fully developed characters whose motivations readers come to understand. Novellas typically run about one hundred pages and feature deeper complexity than short stories but do not share the expansive scope of novels. Miscellaneous genres of prose fiction include anecdotes, jokes, and parables, which further illustrate that the basic requirements of prose fiction include characters undertaking actions and the ensuing consequences. Also, while the term prose fiction denotes the imaginative aspects of this genre, the oxymoronic conflation nonfiction novel highlights how some authors employ the narrative strategies of fiction for such forms as memoirs, biographies, and other accounts of real life. Despite the variety of these forms of prose fiction, they share numerous key features uniting them into a coherent subsection of literature, including plot structure, point of view, characters and characterization, setting, theme, and style and tone (Pugh and Johnson 129). 3.1.2. Poetry Poetry invites readers to revel in the inherent beauty of language, to luxuriate in its rhythm and flow while pondering the author’s themes and insights. Poems often challenge readers as well, asking them to interpret words, phrases, images, and symbols conjoined in striking ways. Whereas one might think that the goal of language is to communicate simply and directly, to express ideas with as little ambiguity as possible, the goal of poetry is also to communicate—but to do so with keen attention to the nuances and aesthetic qualities of language through sound, meter, images, voice, and genre. Poets remove words from their everyday milieu, encouraging readers to enjoy the play of language and the rewards of immersing oneself in its cadences (Pugh and Johnson 93). Poems may be classified into subgenres based on various characteristics, including their length, appearance, and formal features (patterns of rhyme and rhythm, for example); their subject; or even the type of situation and setting (time and place) they depict. (A sonnet, for example, has fourteen lines. Defined broadly, an elegy is simply any poem about death.) A single poem might well represent multiple subgenres or at least might contain elements of more than one. (Mays 702) 3.1.3. Drama Unlike novels and other forms of prose fiction, plays must be performed in front of audiences to achieve their artistic potential. As Tennessee Williams passionately stated, ‘a play in a book is only 12 the shadow of a play and not even a clear shadow of it…The printed script of a play is hardly more than an architect’s blueprint of a house not yet built or built and destroyed’ (747). The performative aspect of plays, in that a director, actors, and crew must bring to life the playwright’s vision, separates the theatre from other literary forms, which do not require intermediaries between author and reader. Indeed, the necessity of performing theatrical works is encoded etymologically in its terminology: the word theatre derives from the Greek word meaning to behold or to view, and the word audience hails from the Latin word meaning listening. When plays are performed in a theatre, the audience engages through multiple senses as the story comes alive before them. At the same time, plays include similar narrative and aesthetic elements as fiction and poetry: like fiction, plays need characters, settings, and plots. Like poetry, plays pay detailed attention to language and its oral presentation. Like both poetry and fiction, plays employ symbols and themes to communicate the deeper significance of their storylines (Pugh and Johnson 155). 3.2. Activity 2 (Not compulsory) Make a chart with the different literary genres, subgenres, and kinds that are mentioned in this section as well as others that you know and that are not here. You can share it with your classmates in the thread dedicated to this activity in the Unit 1 Forum or in the tutorial sessions. 3.3. Literary Periods and Movements Apart from the classification by literary genres, literature is also ordered according to historical periods in which different artistic expressions usually share common characteristics and are grouped in what we know as literary movements. Mario Klarer classifies these periods as follows: The following survey encompasses the most important movements of literatures written in English in their historical succession. In spite of many discrepancies and inconsistencies, some terms and criteria of classification have established themselves as standard in Anglo-American literary criticism. The convention of periodical classification must not distract from the fact that such criteria are relative and that any attempt to relate divergent texts—with regard to their structure, contents, or date of publication—to a single period of literary history is always problematic. The criteria for classification derive from fields such as the history of the language (Old and Middle English), national history (colonial period), politics and religion (Elizabethan and Puritan age), and art (Renaissance and modernism) (Klarer 67). Periods of English literature Old English period fifth-eleventh century Middle English period twelfth-fifteenth century Renaissance sixteenth-seventeenth century Eighteenth century eighteenth century 13 Romantic period first half of nineteenth century Victorian age second half of nineteenth century Modernism World War I to World War II Postmodernism 1960s and 1970s Periods of American literature Colonial or Puritan age seventeenth-eighteenth century Romantic period and Transcendentalism first half of nineteenth century Realism and naturalism second half of nineteenth century Modernism World War I to World War II Postmodernism 1960s and 1970s The Old English or Anglo-Saxon period, the earliest period of English literature, is regarded as beginning with the invasion of Britain by Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) tribes in the fifth century AD and lasting until the French invasion under William the Conqueror in 1066. The true beginnings of literature in England, however, are to be found in the Latin Middle Ages, when monasteries were the main institutions that preserved classical culture. Among the most important Latin literary texts is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (AD 731) by Beda Venerabilis (673–735). As in other parts of Europe, national literatures developed in the vernacular parallel to the Latin literature. The earliest texts, written between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, are called Old English or “Anglo- Saxon.” The number of texts which have been handed down from this period is very small, comprising anonymous magic charms, riddles, and poems such as “The Seafarer” (c. ninth century) or “The Wanderer” (c. ninth-tenth centuries), as well as epic works such as the mythological Beowulf (c. eighth century) or The Battle of Maldon (c. AD 1000), which is based on historical facts. When the French-speaking Normans conquered England in the eleventh century, a definite rupture occurred in culture and literature. From the later half of this Middle English period, a number of texts from various literary genres have been preserved. The long list includes lyric poetry and epic “long poems” with religious contents, such as Piers Plowman (c. 1367–70), which has been attributed to William Langland. The romance, a new genre of a secular kind, developed in this period and includes the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (fourteenth century) and Thomas Malory’s (c. 1408– 71) Le Morte d’Arthur (1470). This form indirectly influenced the development of the novel in the eighteenth century. Middle English literature also produced cycles of narratives, such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), similar to Giovanni Boccaccio’s II Decamerone (c. 1349–51) in Italy and comparable works of other national literatures, which are important models for the short story of the nineteenth century. However, among the most striking literary innovations of the later Middle English period are mystery and miracle plays. After almost an entire millenium in which theater had little or no significance, drama re-emerged in these religiously inspired plays towards the end of the Middle Ages and has thus indirectly influenced the development of modern drama in the Renaissance. The English Renaissance is also called the early new English period, a term which focuses on the history of the language, and the Elizabethan age (Queen Elizabeth I) or Jacobean age (King James), divisions based on political rule. Particularly notable in this period is the revival of classical genres, such as the epic with Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen (1590; 1596), and modern drama with William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and others. Their revival of Greco-Roman genres was to influence 14 and dominate the further course of English literary history. Besides the adaptation of drama and epic, the English Renaissance also produced relatively independent prose genres, as for example, John Lyly’s (c. 1554–1606) romance Euphues (1578) or Philip Sidney’s (1554–86) Arcadia (c. 1580). […] The prohibition of drama for religious reasons and the closure of public theaters during the “Puritan interregnum” greatly influenced English literary history. The outstanding literary oeuvres of this time were written by John Milton (1608–74), whose political pamphlets and religious epics (Paradise Lost, 1667 and Paradise Regained, 1671) mark both the climax and the end of English Renaissance. In literary history the era after the Commonwealth is also referred to as the Restoration or sometimes— rather vaguely—as Baroque. The next period which is commonly regarded as an independent epoch is the eighteenth century, which is also referred to as the neoclassical, golden, or Augustan age. In this period, classical literature and literary theory were adapted to suit contemporary culture. Authors such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison (1672–1719), and Jonathan Swift wrote translations, theoretical essays, and literary texts in a variety of genres. This was also a time of influential changes in the distribution of texts, including the development of the novel as a new genre and the introduction of newspapers and literary magazines […]. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740–41) and Clarissa (1748–49), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–68) marked the beginning of the novel as a new literary genre. It soon assumed the privileged position previously held by the epic or romance and became one of the most productive genres of modern literary history. Much of the literary writing in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is religiously motivated and therefore may be subsumed under the rubric Puritan age or colonial age. This period can be seen as the first literary phenomenon on the North American continent. Early American texts reflect, in their historiographic and theological orientation, the religious roots of American colonial times. […] In recent years there has been an increased interest in works by African American slaves […] these texts provide new outlooks on the social conditions of the period from a non-European perspective. At the end of the eighteenth century, Romanticism marks the beginning of a new period in traditional English literary history. The first edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is commonly considered to be the beginning of a new period in which nature and individual, emotional experience play an important role. Romanticism may be seen as a reaction to the Enlightenment and political changes throughout Europe and America at the end of the eighteenth century. […] In America, Romanticism and transcendentalism more or less coincide. Influenced by Romantic enthusiasm for nature and German idealism, American transcendentalism developed as an independent movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. […] In transcendentalism, nature provides the key to philosophical understanding. From this new perspective, man must not be satisfied with natural phenomena, but rather transcend them in order to gain a philosophically holistic vision of the world. […] Subsequent to this period, America and England generally followed the course of the most important international literary movements. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, representatives of realism and naturalism can be found in both countries. Realism is often described as the movement that tries to truthfully describe “reality” through language. Naturalism, on the other hand, concentrates on the truthful portrayal of the determining effects of social and environmental influences on characters. While in the US these trends manifest themselves mostly in fiction, England is also famous for its dramas of this period […]. English and American modernism can be seen as a reaction to the realist movements of the late nineteenth century. While realism and naturalism focused on the truthful portrayal of reality, modernism discovered innovative narrative techniques such as stream-of consciousness, or structural forms such as collage and literary cubism. “Modernism” is a blanket term which encompasses the 15 extensive literary innovations in the first decades of the twentieth century which manifest themselves under the influence of psychoanalysis and other cultural-historical phenomena. […] In postmodernism, modernist issues regarding innovative narrative techniques are taken up again and adapted in an academic, sometimes formalistic way. This literary movement of the second half of the twentieth century indirectly deals with Nazi crimes and the nuclear destruction of World War II while structurally developing the approaches of modernism. Narrative techniques with multiple perspectives, interwoven strands of plot, and experiments in typography characterize the texts of this era. […] In the 1980s, the avant-garde works of postmodernism, many of which seem exaggerated today, were overshadowed by women’s and “minority” literatures, that is literature written by marginalized groups including women, gays, or ethnic minorities, the latter mostly represented by African Americans, Chicanos, and Chicanas. These literatures, which have gained considerably in importance over the last few decades, sometimes return to more traditional narrative techniques and genres, often privileging sociopolitical messages over academic, structural playfulness. […] In addition to women’s literature, post-colonial literature has recently become another center of attention. This vast body of texts is also categorized under Commonwealth literature, literatures in English or Anglophone literatures. Literatures from former British colonies of the Caribbean, Africa, India, or Australia have contributed to a change in contemporary literature. In many cases—but by no means in all— dimensions of content have regained dominance and act to counterbalance the academic playfulness of modernism and postmodernism. […] The general trend seems to privilege less complicated and apparently more traditional narrative techniques, while at the same time focusing attention on content more than in earlier, exaggerated narrative forms. This overview of the most important literary movements in English has only skimmed the surface of this wide and complex topic […]. Any survey of literary history confronts the issue of whether an exact classification of authors and their works is possible; such a classification must resort to conventions, in the absence of set guidelines (Klarer 68-73). 4. HOW DO WE APPROACH THE LITERARY TEXT? LITERARY CRITICISM, CRITICAL THEORIES. 4.1. Theoretical Approaches to Literature In the previous sections, we have seen the different categories used to organize literary texts and, from there, to analyze them within a series of determined patterns. In this part, we are going to look at the theoretical tools used to interpret a literary text. In the following excerpt, Klarer explains the origins, influences and main elements of some common approaches to textual analysis and interpretation: As with the classification systems of genres and text types, the approaches to literary texts are characterized by a number of divergent methodologies. […] Literary interpretations always reflect a particular institutional, cultural, and historical background. The various trends in textual studies are represented either by consecutive schools or parallel ones, which at times compete with each other. On the one hand, the various scholarly approaches to literary texts partly overlap; on the other, they differ in their theoretical foundations. The abundance of competing methods in contemporary literary criticism requires one to be familiar with at least the most important trends and their general approaches. 16 Historically speaking, the systematic analysis of texts developed in the magic or religious realm, and in legal discourse. At a very early date in cultural history, magic and religion indirectly furthered the preservation and interpretation of oracles and dreams forms the starting point of textual analysis and survives as the basic structures in the study of the holy texts of all major religions. […] The interpretation of encoded information in a text is important to all religions; it usually centers on the analysis or exegesis of canonical text such as the Bible, the Koran, or other holy books. As with dream and oracle, the texts which interpretations consequently decode are considered to originate from a divinity and are therefore highly privileged. It is important to observe that the interpretation of these kinds of texts deals with encoded information which can only be retrieved and made intelligible through exegetic practices. This religious and magical origin of textual studies can be traced from preliterate eras all the way to contemporary theology and has always exerted a major influence on literary studies. Partly influenced by religion, legal discourse also had a decisive impact on textual studies. As with religious discourse, in law a fixed legal text had to precede jurisdiction. Juridical texts, like religious ones, are only indirectly accessible since by nature they demand interpretation with regard to a particular situation. The overall importance of legal texts in everyday life consequently led to an extensive body of literature concerning their application and interpretation. Even today, the exegesis of legal texts remains the form of interpretation most regularly confronted by the majority of people. Since most religions also include legal elements, such as Judaic Law, Islamic Law, or canon law in Christianity, religious and legal discourses have constantly coincided. The approaches and methodologies associated with both (the exegesis of the Bible and the interpretation of legal text) have always indirectly influenced literary studies. Literary criticism derived its central term interpretation from […] two areas of textual study (religious and legal). The exegesis of religious and legal texts was based on the assumption that the meaning of a text could only be retrieved through the act of interpretation. Biblical scholarship coined the term hermeneutics for this procedure, and it has been integrated into literary interpretation over the past several centuries. Since literary criticism as a discipline holds a variety of opinions -and, indeed, contradictory ones- concerning the purpose and applicability of textual interpretation, a number of theoretical trends and methodological approaches characterize the field. Although each academic discipline tries to define and legitimate its scholarly work by terms like “general validity”, “objectivity”, and “truth”, most disciplines are subject to a number of variable factors including ideologies, sociopolitical conditions, and fashions. The humanities in general and literary studies in particular are characterized by a multiplicity of approaches and methodologies. Within the field of literary studies, literary theory has developed as a distinct discipline influenced by philosophy. Literary theory analyses the philosophical and methodological premises of literary criticism. […] Among the many diverse methods of interpretation it is possible to isolate four basic approaches which provide a grid according to which most schools or trends can be classified. Depending on the main focus of these major methodologies, one can distinguish between text-, author-, reader-, and context-oriented approaches. The following theoretical schools can be subsumed under these four basic rubrics: 17 Text Author Reader Context Philology Biographical Reception theory Literary history criticism Rhetoric Psychoanalytic Reception history Marxist literary criticism theory Formalism and Phenomenology Reader-response Feminist literary structuralism criticism theory New Criticism New Historicism and Cultural Studies. Semiotics and Post-colonialism deconstruction Ecocriticism The text-oriented approach is primarily concerned with questions of the “materiality” of texts, including editions of manuscripts, analysis of language and style, and the formal structure of literary works. Author-oriented schools put the main emphasis on the author, trying to establish connections between the work or art and the biography of its creator. Reader-oriented approaches focus on the reception of texts by their audiences and the texts’ general impact on the reading public. Contextual approaches try to place literary texts against the background of historical, social, or political developments while at the same time attempting to classify texts according to genres as well as historical periods. (Klarer 75-78) 18 Comprehension versus Interpretation In the preceding paragraphs, Klarer develops the concept of interpretation and its importance in the context of literary studies. However, we often tend to confuse comprehension with interpretation and vice versa. Herman Rapaport explains the difference between these terms when we analyze a text: Comprehension concerns the conceptual assembly of textual information in a way that is precise and literally accurate. In order to discuss a literary work, the critic needs to know how personages are described and characterized, how settings are depicted and what details they include and possibly exclude, what actions take place and in what order, and what sorts of figural details and narrative devices the author has included. A good comprehension of a literary work will also include the ability to identify points of view, major themes, and key allusions (references to historical occurrences, myths, or passages in other influential texts, for example, the Bible). Everything that falls under the term comprehension has to do with gathering and assembling of evidence that can be used for justifying interpretations […] In university, the teaching of literature tends to stress skills in interpretation. This exceeds mere literal comprehension and requires the ability to see problems and offer hypotheses. For example, why is the order of events in a story told in a sequence that is unchronological, and why in the case of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, do we not begin with the materials of Book 6 (Satan’s revolt in heaven), which is much closer to the epic’s real beginning? Books 1 and 2 start us out right after the rebellious angels have fallen down into hell after their revolt. Or, why does William Faulkner in the novel The Sound and the Fury not have Caddy Compson narrate a section of her own? How does this silencing of woman function in the novel? As sexual repression, if not sexism? As the 19 deliberate formation of a lacuna in the text that impedes our ability to totalize the narrations that are given? As a perspective Faulkner expects us to construct for ourselves, which then makes it much more a part of ourselves? To answer such questions requires interpretation. Here one is required to perceive a significant problem, conceptualize that problem, analyze textual evidence, and offer some hypotheses and solutions. Literary interpretation occurs when critics begin asking questions about what they have observed. (Rapaport 2-3). 5. INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY CRITICAL SCHOOLS Classifying schools of thought inevitably leads us to a simplification or schematization of issues that are very complex and that have developed over centuries, as well as a consequence of the conjunction of various disciplines. What is important to emphasize is that the different critical currents we use to analyze literature are forms or methods of interpretation or study that respond in some way to the cultural and social changes that have occurred throughout history, as well as to the prevailing ideologies. Likewise, it is important to bear in mind that none of these schools of thought or criticism are closed compartments; on the contrary, they have been feeding back on each other. Before we go on to define the main schools of academic criticism, have a look at these basic concepts outlined by John Peck and Martin Coyle: It should become clear that what a critic says about a book depends to a large extent upon the critical approach he adopts. As a student of literature you are likely, consciously or unconsciously, to be influenced by some of these critical approaches. Before dealing with such complicated matters, however, it seems logical to look at some more basic questions. (i) What is literary criticism? Literary criticism is usually regarded as the analysis, interpretation and evaluation of literary works: it does not mean 'finding fault with'. Criticism as an academic activity expresses the reader's sense of what is happening in a text. (ii) What are the basic guidelines? As criticism starts with the reader's response it would be possible to produce impressionistic criticism in which you wrote about your feelings, perhaps saying how moving you found a poem. Academic criticism, however, must be more analytic than this, commenting on the subject matter and method of the text. Criticism thus involves spotting the general themes of the work and then seeing how the text presents and develops these themes. […] In a sense you have to 'look through' the text and see what kind of common experience, feeling or problem is being examined. Then, to comment on the text, you have to show how the various choices the author has made - for example, the details he has included or the words he has used - serve to illustrate, develop or give a fresh slant on what you perceive to be the central issue. Your critical account becomes something more substantial than a mere summary the moment you begin to highlight some of the distinctive ways in which the author handles his theme. (iii) Is there a correct view of what a text is about? No, there is not, and it is this fact that makes the study of literature both difficult and fascinating: the text is a source of endless speculation and argument as critics compete to offer the most persuasive reading. Initially it might appear that all critic is purely subjective, as if every reader will see the book differently, but a response is also conditioned by the social and cultural context within which the book is read. For example, up to and including the eighteenth century the main view of literature was as 'pleasurable teaching', and criticism was concerned with how the text achieved its moral effect upon the reader. In the romantic period the emphasis changed. The romantics stressed the importance of the 20 individual, and, consequently, much of the focus of romantic criticism was on the unique value of what the individual author had to say. This can be called an expressive theory of literature - it concentrates on what the author says or expresses - and is still a widely held view. Indeed, many readers could see little point in studying literature if they did not believe that the author has something profound to communicate to us. (iv) What are the main features of twentieth-century criticism? Twentieth-century criticism as a whole can be characterised as displaying a shift from an emphasis on the author to an emphasis on the text and then a shift from the text to the reader. Expressive criticism at its worst can confine itself exclusively to the author's ideas, as if the works themselves were subsidiary. Similarly, some historical and social criticism, which looks at the context in which a work was written, always seems to stop short of actually discussing the text. As English became established as an academic discipline, however, there developed an increasing focus on the text itself rather than on the author or background. This is seen in England in the work of such a critic as F. R. Leavis and in America in the work of the 'New Critics': the call was for dose attention to the words on the page. Such critics did not reject expressive criticism, indeed they were very concerned with the value of what an author has to say, but they also looked at the text as an aesthetic construct, appreciating it first and foremost as literature rather than as a social document or philosophical statement by the author. It is this blend of attention to the text and the importance of what it says that is the most common approach to literature at school and university today. Indeed, it might seem such a natural response - looking at the text in order to appreciate both its intellectual and aesthetic qualities, or what it says and how it says it - that it might be hard to conceive that any other approach could be valid. Yet recent criticism and critical theory, particularly structuralist and post-structuralist thinking, has frequently been more single-minded in its emphasis on the text itself, especially the language of the text, and has also emphasised the extent to which the reader possibly creates, rather than perceives, the meaning of a text. (v) What Is critical theory? Critical theory is concerned with establishing general principles about how literature works and how criticism works. In recent years there has been a great surge of such thinking, much of which challenges established ideas about literature and rejects the assumptions inherent in traditional criticism. One effect of such thinking has been to stimulate a number of new developments in critical practice. (Peck and Coyle 149-151). Activity 3 (Not compulsory) The following activity is adapter from Peter Barry’s book Beginning theory (not a compulsory reading for this course). Before you start reading about different approaches to literary study, in what may be a new chapter in your involvement with the topic, it could be sensible to reflect on your own literary education until now. The purpose of this is to bring to light methods of literary analysis that you might be using subconsciously because they have become so familiar to you and may no longer be visible or obvious. To carry out this activity, answer the following questions: - In your previous literary studies, what authors and books did you study? What did they have in common? - Can you think of books and authors that were absent from your previous education? Why do you think this might be? 21 - Do you think your own identity (in terms of ideology, age, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, background, life experience, etc.) shapes the way you approach/have approached literary texts in the past? How and why? - What have you learnt (about the world and/or about literature, in general) from your previous studies? Spending some time reflecting on these issues should prove helpful to understand the rest of this unit. The information in the following sections is a bit abstract, so it is sensible to have a firm starting point based on your previous experience and knowledge. You can SHARE your reflections with other students in the thread created for this activity in the Unit 1 Forum or in the tutorial sessions. The following are excerpts from Jonathan Culler, Michael Ryan Tison Pugh and Margaret Johnson’s manuals summarizing some of the main schools of literary criticism of the 20th century. The intention of this section should not be for you to learn each and every one of their characteristics, but to see that there exists a variety of positions regarding literary criticism and understand the principal approaches. In the following units we will study some of them in greater depth --Feminism, Poststructuralism and Postcolonialism. 5.1. Russian Formalism Russian formalism was a movement which emerged in Russia during the second decade of the twentieth century. The Formalists rejected the subjectivism in the approach to criticism and, thus, believed that literature could be approached scientifically and objectively. They were interested in examining the internal mechanics of literature, as opposed to the semantics or the extraliterary systems (such as ideology, politics, economics, etc.): The Russian Formalists of the early years of the twentieth century stressed that critics should concern themselves with the literariness of literature: the verbal strategies that make it literary, the foregrounding of language itself, and the ‘making strange’ of experience that they accomplish. Redirecting attention from authors to verbal ‘devices’, they claimed that ‘the device is the only hero of literature’. Instead of asking ‘what does the author say here?’ we should ask something like ‘what happens to the sonnet here?’ or ‘what adventures befall the novel in this book by Dickens?’ Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Victor Shklovsky are three key figures in this group which reoriented literary study towards questions of form and technique (Culler 122). What does Formalism look for in a literary text? What are the major elements of the work’s form? Is the meaning of the work embedded as much in how it is done or written as in what it is about? How is the narrative organized or constructed? Can it be mapped as a logical structure of causes and consequences? What is the perspective from which the story is told and how does that affect what is told or can be told? 22 What metaphors or images are used? What thematic purposes do the metaphors serve? How do such elements of poetic construction as rhyme and rhythm affect meaning? (Ryan 121) 5.2. New Criticism New Criticism is a movement in literary criticism that arose in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Its emergence reacted against extrinsic approaches to the literary text: that is, those studies that believed texts could make a moral or philosophical statement about a given cultural and/or historical phenomenon. New Critics believed in the evaluation of the literary text without its context and promoted the use of tools such as close reading: What is called the ‘New Criticism’ […] focused attention on the unity or integration of literary works. Opposed to the historical scholarship practised in universities, the New Criticism treated poems as aesthetic objects rather than historical documents and examined the interactions of their verbal features and the ensuing complications of meaning rather than the historical intentions and circumstances of their authors. For new critics (Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, W. K. Wimsatt), the task of criticism was to elucidate individual works of art. Focusing on ambiguity, paradox, irony, and the effects of connotation and poetic imagery, the New Criticism sought to show the contribution of each element of poetic form to a unified structure. The New Criticism left as enduring legacies techniques of close reading and the assumption that the test of any critical activity is whether it helps us to produce richer, more insightful interpretations of individual works. But beginning in the 1960s, a number of theoretical perspectives and discourses – phenomenology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, feminism, deconstruction – offered richer conceptual frameworks than did the New Criticism for reflecting on literature and other cultural products. (Culler 122-123) What does New Criticism look for in a literary text? What is the text’s surface meaning, and what is its secondary meaning? What patterns and symbols does the text use repeatedly, and what effect do they achieve? What ambiguities, ironies, and paradoxes arise in the text, and how do they create complementary or contrasting interpretations? Does the text achieve organic unity, or does it fail to do so? Explain either how the various elements of the text unite into a seamless whole or how they succumb to fragmentation. Consider the relationship between form and theme. How does the author’s structuring of the text reflect its themes? (Pugh and Johnson 227) 5.3. Phenomenology Phenomenology arises from the work of the early twentieth-century philosopher Edmund Husserl. It is a philosophy of experience which was also used in the study of literature. For this philosophy, the lived experience of human beings is the ultimate source of all meaning: Phenomenology […] seeks to bypass the problem of the separation between subject and object, consciousness and the world, by focusing on the phenomenal reality of objects as they appear to consciousness. We can suspend questions about the ultimate reality or knowability of the world and 23 describe the world as it is given to consciousness. […] But more important has been ‘reader-response criticism’ (Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser). For the reader, the work is what is given to consciousness; one can argue that the work is not something objective, existing independently of any experience of it, but is the experience of the reader. Criticism can thus take the form of a description of the reader’s progressive movement through a text, analysing how readers produce meaning by making connections, filling in things left unsaid, anticipating and conjecturing and then having their expectations disappointed or confirmed.. Another reader-oriented version of phenomenology is called ‘aesthetics of reception’ (Hans Robert Jauss). A work is an answer to questions posed by a ‘horizon of expectations. The interpretation of works should, therefore, focus not on the experience of an individual reader but on the history of a work’s reception and its relation to the changing aesthetic norms and sets of expectations that allow it to be read in different eras. (Culler 123) 5.4. Structuralism Structuralism is a theory of culture that focuses on the relationship between different elements as they form a broader structure, or a system. In linguistics and literary criticism, Structuralist study centres on how meaning is produced: [S]tructuralism originated in opposition to phenomenology: instead of describing experience, the goal was to identify the underlying structures that make it possible. In place of the phenomenological description of consciousness, structuralism sought to analyse structures that operate unconsciously (structures of language, of the psyche, of society). Because of its interest in how meaning is produced, structuralism often (as in Roland Barthes’s S/Z ) treated the reader as the site of underlying codes that make meaning possible and as the agent of meaning. Structuralism usually designates a group of primarily French thinkers who, in the 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of language, applied concepts from structural linguistics to the study of social and cultural phenomena. Structuralism developed first in anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), then in literary and cultural studies (Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette), psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), intellectual history (Michel Foucault), and Marxist theory (Louis Althusser). Although these thinkers never formed a school as such, it was under the label ‘structuralism’ that their work was imported and read in England, the United States, and elsewhere in the late 1960s and 1970s. In literary studies structuralism promotes a poetics interested in the conventions that make literary works possible; it seeks not to produce new interpretations of works but to understand how they can have the meanings and effects that they do (Culler 123-125). What does Structuralism look for in a literary text? What is the structure of the work? Can you draw a map of it such that all of its elements make sense in relation to one another? Can the structure be seen as embodying a scheme of values? Are the characters the bearers of values? What might they be said to represent? Does the narrative follow a logical progression? Does it embody an argument regarding the world – i.e., is it making a statement regarding values or people in the world, and if so, how does the narrative work out that argument through opposition and resolution? Is the meaning of the work shaped and determined by codes and signs? What are those codes and how do they manifest themselves in signs within the work? (Ryan 38) 24 5.5. Poststructuralism and Deconstruction/Deconstructivism Poststructuralism is understood as a radical development in literary theory that emerged in response to some of the main events of the second half of the twentieth century, such as the World Wars and the advent of new technologies. These convoluted experiences are believed to have undermined some of the most prominent established notions of Western cultural thought. Poststructuralism is concerned with the indeterminate and complex nature of meaning and the arbitrariness of the constructions of knowledge, putting great emphasis on the workings that ideology and power have on human subjectivity: The term post-structuralism is used for a broad range of theoretical discourses in which there is a critique of notions of objective knowledge and of a subject able to know him or herself. Thus, contemporary feminisms, psychoanalytic theories, Marxisms, and historicisms, all partake in post- structuralism. But post-structuralism also designates above all deconstruction and the work of Jacques Derrida, who first came to prominence in America with a critique of the structuralist notion of structure in the very collection of essays that brought structuralism to American attention (…). Deconstruction is most simply defined as a critique of the hierarchical oppositions that have structured Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body, literal/metaphorical, speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, form/meaning. To deconstruct an opposition is to show that it is not natural and inevitable but a construction, produced by discourses that rely on it, and to show that it is a construction in a work of deconstruction that seeks to dismantle it and reinscribe it – that is, not destroy it but give it a different structure and functioning. (Culler 125-126) What does Deconstructivism look for in a literary text? Does the work assume a concept of what truth is? If so, what form does that truth take? Is it presented as the foundation of the fictional world, something that is beyond debate, absolute, and universal? Or is it presented as something more changeable, non-absolute, and contingent? Something “contingent” would be dependent on circumstances. What difference does the notion of truth in the work make for the events or lives depicted? Does the philosophical assumption of the work connect to other assumptions about, for example, morality or politics? Idealist notions of truth as something absolute and universal often are associated with nature. Does such an association appear in the work? Is the ideal of nature juxtaposed to characters, events, or institutions associated with all that is not natural – that is, for example, artificial, fabricated, simulated, or false? What are the implications of such distinctions in the work? Are certain characters portrayed as being better because they are closer to nature while those who are closer to non-natural artifice are portrayed as bad in some way? (Ryan 84) 5.5. Feminist Theory Feminist theory, as a social and intellectual movement, is more than a form of literary criticism. When applied to literature, Feminist theory aims at locating and describing the different ways in which literary texts reproduce the structures of male domination embedded in societies. As a twentieth and twenty-first literary theory, it is closely related to post-structuralism: 25 In so far as feminism undertakes to deconstruct the opposition man/woman and the oppositions associated with it in the history of Western culture, it is a version of post-structuralism, but that is only one strand of feminism, which is less a unified school than a social and intellectual movement and a space of debate. On the one hand, feminist theorists champion the identity of women, demand rights for women, and promote women’s writings as representations of the experience of women. On the other hand, feminists undertake a theoretical critique of the heterosexual matrix that organizes identities and cultures in terms of the opposition between man and woman. Elaine Showalter distinguishes ‘the feminist critique’ of male assumptions and procedures from ‘gynocriticism’, a feminist criticism concerned with women authors and the representation of women’s experience. Both of these modes have been opposed to what is sometimes called, in Britain and America, ‘French feminism’, where ‘woman’ comes to stand for any radical force that subverts the concepts, assumptions, and structures of patriarchal discourse. […] In its multiple projects, feminism has effected a substantial transformation of literary education in the United States and Britain, through its expansion of the literary canon and the introduction of a range of new issues. (Culler 126-128) What does Feminist criticism look for in a literary text? How are women and men depicted? What era is the text produced in and how might that make a difference in how the two genders are portrayed? How are gender relations constructed in the work? Are they equal or unequal? Is one gender privileged over another? If so, how and for what reasons? Is gender stable or unstable in the work? Can the text be queered by showing how its gender constructs are indeterminate or contingent? (Ryan 103) 5.6. Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis as a set of theories and treatment techniques was famously developed at the end of the nineteenth century by Sigmund Freud. Since then, its theoretical formulations have had an enormous influence on literary criticism: Psychoanalytic theory had an impact on literary studies both as a mode of interpretation and as a theory about language, identity, and the subject. On the one hand, along with Marxism it is the most powerful modern hermeneutic: an authoritative meta-language or technical vocabulary that can be applied to literary works, as to other situations, to understand what is ‘really’ going on. This leads to a criticism alert to psychoanalytic themes and relations. But on the other hand, the greatest impact of psychoanalysis has come through the work of Jacques Lacan, a renegade French psychoanalyst who set up his own school outside the analytic establishment and led what he presented as a return to Freud. […] The truth of the patient’s condition […] emerges not from the analyst’s interpretation of the patient’s discourse but from the way analyst and patient are caught up in replaying a crucial scenario from the patient’s past. This reorientation makes psychoanalysis a poststructuralist discipline in which interpretation is a replaying of a text it does not master. (Culler 128) What does Psychoanalytic criticism look for in a literary text? Are the actions, feelings, and ideas depicted in a work signs of health or illness? If of illness, what kind of illness is it? How does it manifest itself in behavior or statements by the characters? How might the work itself be said to be a manifestation of psychological or emotional problems in the writer? 26 How are relations between the characters depicted? Are they characterized by excess or obsession? What might such behavior be a symptom of? Does the work have an unconscious dimension? Are there aspects of the work that seem to arise from sources that are not conscious? How is the form of the work a way of dealing with psychological or emotional problems? Does the writer seem to be working on psychological or emotional problems in the work? (Ryan 63). 5.7. Marxism A Marxist interpretation of literature understands its object of study as an expression of class struggle. A text is therefore understood to be intrinsically connected to the social and political realities of its time. According to Marxism, literature is a social institution with a specific ideological function connected to the identity and background of the author. It is based, obviously, on the theories of Karl Marx (1818-1883). For Marxism, texts belong to a superstructure determined by the economic base (the ‘real relations of production’). To interpret cultural products is to relate them back to the base. [Marxist theorist Louis] Althusser argued that the social formation is not a unified totality with the mode of production at its centre but a looser structure in which different levels or types of practice develop on different time- scales. Social and ideological superstructures have a ‘relative autonomy’. Drawing on a Lacanian account of the determination of consciousness by the unconscious for an explanation of how ideology functions to determine the subject, Althusser maps a Marxist account of the determination of the individual by the social onto psychoanalysis. The subject is an effect constituted in the processes of the unconscious, of discourse, and of the relatively autonomous practices that organize society. This conjunction is the basis of much theoretical debate in Britain, in political theory as well as literary and cultural studies. Crucial investigations of relations between culture and signification took place in the 1970s in the film studies magazine Screen, which, deploying Althusser and Lacan, sought to understand how the subject is positioned or constructed by the structures of cinematic representation. (Culler 129) What does Marxism look for in a literary text? How might the work be said to be political? Does it advocate a position in a public debate? Does it seem to support or advocate ideals, values, ways of thinking, etc. that distract attention from the inequities of capitalism or that conceal the true nature of capitalist society? Is the work critical and negative in regard to social inequality and injustice (under capitalism, for example)? Does the work seem to posit or propose an alternative to the world it criticizes? Is that alternative implicit or explicit? (Ryan 75) 5.8. New Historicism/Cultural Materialism New historicism is a method of literary analysis that is based on the reading of literary and non-literary texts side-by-side. As Peter Barry puts it, “new historicism refuses (at least ostensibly) to ‘privilege’ the literary text: instead of a literary ‘foreground’ and a historical ‘background’ it envisages and practises a mode of study in which literary and 27 non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other” (Barry 166): The 1980s and 1990s in Britain and the United States have been marked by the emergence of vigorous, theoretically engaged historical criticism. On the one hand, there is British cultural materialism, defined by Raymond Williams as ‘the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production’. Renaissance specialists influenced by Foucault (Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, and Peter Stallybrass) have been particularly concerned with the historical constitution of the subject and with the contestatory role of literature in the Renaissance. In the United States, New Historicism, which is less inclined to posit a hierarch

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