Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory PDF

Beginning theory An introduction to literary and cultural theory Second edition Peter Barry © Peter Barry 1995, 2002 ISBN: 0719062683 Contents Acknowledgements - page x Preface to the second edition - xii Introduction - 1 About this book - 1 Approaching theory - 6 Slop and think: reviewing your study of literature to date - 8 My own 'stock-taking' - 9 1 Theory before 'theory' - liberal humanism - 11 The history of English studies - 11 Stop and think - 11 Ten tenets of liberal humanism - 16 Literary theorising from Aristotle to Leavis - some key moments - 21 Liberal humanism in practice - 31 The transition to 'theory' - 32 Some recurrent ideas in critical theory - 34 Selected reading - 36 2 Structuralism - 39 Structuralist chickens and liberal humanist eggs 39 Signs of the fathers - Saussure - 41 Stop and think - 45 The scope of structuralism - 46 What structuralist critics do - 49 Structuralist criticism: examples - 50 Stop and think - 53 Stop and think - 55 Stop and think - 57 Selected reading - 60 3 Post-structuralism and deconstruction - 61 Some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism - 61 Post-structuralism - life on a decentred planet - 65 Stop and think - 68 Structuralism and post-structuralism - some practical differences - 70 What post-structuralist critics do - 73 Deconstruction: an example - 73 Selected reading - 79 4 Postmodernism - 81 What is postmodernism? What was modernism? - 81 'Landmarks' in postmodernism: Habermas, Lyotard and Baudrillard - 85 Stop and think - 90 What postmodernist critics do - 91 Postmodernist criticism: an example - 91 Selected reading - 94 5 Psychoanalytic criticism - 96 Introduction - 96 How Freudian interpretation works - 98 Stop and think - 101 Freud and evidence - 102 What Freudian psychoanalytic critics do - 105 Freudian psychoanlaytic criticism: examples - 105 Lacan - 108 What Lacanian critics do - 115 Lacanian criticism: an example - 115 Selected reading - 118 6 Feminist criticism - 121 Feminism and feminist criticism - 121 Feminist criticism and the role of theory - 124 Feminist criticism and language - 126 Feminist criticism and psychoanalysis - 130 Stop and think - 133 What feminist critics do - 134 feminist criticism: an example - 134 Selected reading - 136 7 Lesbian/gay criticism - 139 Lesbian and gay theory - 139 Lesbian feminism - 140 Queer theory - 143 What lesbian/gay critics do - 148 Stop and think - 149 Lesbian/gay criticism: an example - 150 Selected reading - 153 8 Marxist criticism - 156 Beginnings and basics of Marxism - 156 Marxist literary criticism: general - 158 'Leninist' Marxist criticism - 159 'Engelsian' Marxist criticism - 161 The present: the influence of Althusser - 163 Stop and think - 166 What Marxist critics do - 167 Marxist criticism: an example - 168 Selected reading - 170 9 New historicism and cultural materialism - 172 New historicism - 172 New and old historicisms - some differences - 174 New historicism and Foucault - 175 Advantages and disadvantages of new historicism - 177 Stop and think - 178 What new historicists do - 179 New historicism: an example - 179 Cultural materialism - 182 How is cultural materialism different from new historicism? - 184 Stop and think - 186 What cultural materialist critics do - 187 Cultural materialism: an example - 187 Selected reading - 189 10 Postcolonial criticism - 192 Background - 192 Postcolonial reading - 194 Stop and think - 198 What postcolonial critics do - 199 Postcolonialist criticism: an example - 200 Selected reading - 201 11 Stylistics - 203 Stylistics: a theory or a practice? - 203 A brief historical account: from rhetoric, to philology, to linguistics, to stylistics, to new stylistics - 205 How does stylistics differ from standard close reading? - 208 The ambitions of stylistics - 210 Stop and think - 213 What stylistic critics do - 214 Stylistics: examples - 215 Note - 219 Selected reading - 219 12 Narratology - 222 Telling stories - 222 Aristotle - 224 Vladimir Propp - 226 Gerard Genette - 231 1. Is the basic narrative mode 'mimetic' or 'diegetic'? - 231 2. How is the narrative focalised? - 232 3. Who is telling the story? - 233 4. How is time handled in the story? - 234 5. How is the story 'packaged'? - 235 6. How are speech and thought represented? - 237 'Joined-up' narratology - 239 Stop and think - 240 What narratologists do - 241 Narratology: an example - 241 Selected reading - 246 13 Ecocriticism - 248 Ecocriticism or green studies? - 248 Culture and nature - 251 Turning criticism inside out - 257 Stop and think - 261 What ecocritics do - 264 Ecocriticism: an example - 264 Selected reading - 269 Appendices - 272 1 Edgar Allan Poe, 'The oval portrait' - 272 2 Dylan Thomas, 'A refusal to mows' - 275 3 William Cowper, 'The castaway' - 276 Where do we go from here? Further reading - 279 General guides - 279 Reference books - 280 General readers - 280 Applying critical theory: twelve early examples - 281 Against theory - 283 Index - 285 Acknowledgements You'd better not look down, If you want to keep flying So says the great B. B. King. It is excellent advice, and trying to stick to it helped me to complete this book. I was also greatly helped by the advice and expertise of Anita Roy, Humanities Editor at Manchester University Press. Annie Eagleton was a meticulous and helpful copy-editor, and Alison Abel provided valuable help at the proof-reading stage. Many of the chapters are based on material I used on the 'Introduction to Literature' and 'Concepts of Criticism' courses at LSU. The former is taught by a 'team-ministry' of various colleagues, whose comments and advice I have been most grateful for over the past few years. In particular, I must thank Gillian Skinner for reading sections of the manuscript and making a number of extremely useful suggestions, all of which I have acted upon. Nicola King supplied the 'What feminist critics do' checklist, and I have adopted this idea for all the chapters. Of course, all the faults which remain in the book are entirely my own responsibility. Steve Dorney rescued me when my technical expertise proved unequal to the task of producing hard copy from my (as I thought) cunningly adapted disks. Marian and Tom enabled me to write the book by giving me frequent periods of study leave from Sainsbury's and 'Playdays'. The book is for my mother and in memory of my father, Francis Barry. I will be most interested to hear from any users of this book who might wish to write to me (either via Manchester University Press, or directly to English Department, UCW, Aberystwyth, Dyfed SY23 3DY, Wales, UK ([email protected]). If anything in the book seems unclear, or unnecessary, or misrepresented, or wrongly omitted, or fails to acknowledge a source, I will endeavour to improve or rectify matters in any subsequent edition. Sections of Chapter 3 have previously appeared (in a slightly different form) in The Use of English and The English Review. Peter Barry LSU April 1995 Preface to the second edition Since the first edition of this book (which was written in the earlier part of the 1990s) literary theory has continued to change and develop. To reflect these developments, I have added a new chapter on ecocriticism, making this the first book of its kind to register the increasing interest in 'Green' approaches to literature. Of course, my own feelings about the various kinds of theory have changed a bit too. In particular, I now find structuralism rather more interesting than poststructuralism, and to reflect this I have added a new chapter on narratology, a branch of structuralist theory which lends itself very readily to enjoyable and thought-provoking practical applications. Apart from these new chapters, the second edition is the same book as the first, but with up-dated bibliographies. With my colleagues at Aberystwyth I teach on a range of theory courses, notably the 'RTRT' modules ('Reading Theory/Reading Text'), whose original twenty-seven mini-topics I helped reduce to four somewhat larger ones. This is more or less what the structuralists Levi-Strauss and Todorov wanted to do to the thirty-one narrative functions posited by Vladimir Propp (see Chapter 12), which shows how keen we are at Aber to apply the lessons of literary theory to our everyday teaching lives. I am very grateful to my colleagues and students for all the discussions we have had about 'RTRT', and to students on the 'Short Story' option over the past few years with whom the various theoretical approaches to narrative have been tried out. The cartoon narrative on page 225 is supplied courtesy of Gray Dudek, Marketing Division of Pedigree Masterfoods, a division of Mars UK 2001. I am very grateful to Matthew Frost at MUP lor his tireless promotion of this book (which is now part of the 'Beginnings' series), and, for nearly everything else, to Marianne and Tom (who has graduated since the first edition from 'Play-days' to 'Gameboy Advance'). English Department, Aberystwyth Introduction About this book The 1980s probably saw the high-water mark of literary theory. That decade was the 'moment' of theory, when the topic was fashionable and controversial. In the 1990s there was a steady flow of books and articles with titles like After Theory (Thomas Docherty, 1990) or 'Post- Theory' (Nicolas Tredell, in The Critical Decade, 1993). As such titles suggest, the 'moment of theory' has probably passed. So why another 'primer' of theory so late in the day? The simple answer is that after the moment of theory there comes, inevitably, the 'hour' of theory, when it ceases to be the exclusive concern of a dedicated minority and enters the intellec-tual bloodstream as a taken-for-granted aspect of the curriculum. At this stage the glamour fades, the charisma is 'routinised', and it becomes the day-to-day business of quite a large number of people to learn or teach (or both) this material. There are evident dangers of over-simplifying things and so offering a false reassurance to students facing the difficulties of this topic for the first time. All the same, the main responsibility of anyone attempting a book like this one is to meet the demand for clear explanation and demonstration. If the task were impossible, and the mountain of theory could be climbed only by experts, then the whole enterprise of establishing it on undergraduate courses would have been a mistake. The emphasis on practice means that this is a 'work-book', not just a 'text-book'. As you read you will find suggested activities, headed 'STOP and THINK', which are designed to give you some 'hands-on' experience of literary theory and its problems. You will not just be reading about it, reducing theory to a kind of spectator sport played only by superstars, but starting to do it for yourself. Becoming a participant in this way will help you to make some personal sense of theory, and will, I hope, increase your confidence, even if you suspect that your practical efforts remain fairly rudimentary. It is also hoped that the 'STOP and think' activities will provide the basis for initiating seminar discussion if this book is being used in connection with a taught course on critical theory. All the critical approaches described in this book are a reaction against something which went before, and a prior knowledge of these things cannot be assumed. Hence, I start with an account of the 'liberal humanism' against which all these newer critical approaches, broadly speaking, define themselves. Likewise, the currently successful versions of Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, and linguistic criticism all define themselves against earlier versions of each of these, and therefore I try in each case to explain the earlier versions first. I think that many of the current difficulties students have with theory arise from trying to miss out this stage. My approach amounts to throwing you in at the shallow end. Potentially this is more painful than being thrown in at the deep end - the technique used in most other student introductions to literary theory - but it does reduce the risk of drowning. It should, perhaps, be stressed that the other general introductions to theory that are now available represent a stage on from this one. They offer an even and comprehensive coverage of the entire field, but with relatively little in the way of practical discussion of applications. I find them very useful, but they seem to me to be recapitulations of literary theory, often from a viewpoint more philosophical than literary, rather than introductions to it. The evenness of the coverage means that the pace never varies, so that there is no opportunity to stop and dwell upon an example in a reflective way. By contrast, I haven't tried to be comprehensive, and I do try to provide variation in pace by selecting questions, or examples, or key essays for closer treatment. Gen- erally, the available introductions don't grapple with the problems of teaching or learning theory: until recently, the only two that tried to do so were Durant and Fabb's Literary Studies in Action and Lynn's Texts and Contexts (see Further reading section). Both these are interesting but eccentric books whose rather fragmented format prevents any real flow of discussion or explanation. At undergraduate level the main problem is to decide how much theory can reasonably be handled by beginners. Time is not unlimited, and there is a need to think about a realistic syllabus lather than an ideal one. Theorists, like novelists, are dauntingly plentiful, and the subject of theory cannot succeed in lecture rooms and seminars unless we fashion it into a student-centred syllabus. We are rightly dismissive these days of the notion of leaching a 'Great Tradition' of key novelists, as advocated by the critic F. R. Leavis. But Leavis's Great Tradition was essentially a syllabus, manageable within a year-long undergraduate course on the novel. It is possible to read and adequately discuss a novel or two by Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad, and Lawrence within that time. We need to make sure that what is presented as theory today likewise makes teaching sense. When we are about to move into something new it is sensible to first take stock of what we already have, if only so that the distance travelled can later be measured. So in the first chapter of this book I invite you to look back critically and reflectively on your previous training in literary studies. We then go on to look at the assumptions behind traditional literary criticism, or 'liberal humanism' as theorists usually call it. The term 'liberal humanism' became current in the 1970s, as a shorthand (and mainly hostile) way of referring to the kind of criticism which held sway before theory. The word 'liberal' in this formulation roughly means not politically radical, and hence generally evasive and non- committal on political issues. 'Humanism' implies something similar; it suggests a range of negative attributes, such as 'non-Marxist' and 'non-feminist', and 'non-theoretical'. There is also the implication that liberal humanists believe in 'human nature' as something fixed and constant which great literature expresses. Liberal humanists did not (and do not, as a rule) use this name of themselves, but, says an influential school of thought, if you practise literary criticism and do not call yourself a Marxist critic, or a structuralist, or a stylistician, or some such, then you are probably a liberal humanist, whether or not you admit or recognise this. In the course of explaining some of the major critical ideas now current, this book provides summaries or descriptions of a number of important theoretical essays. But I want to stress at the outset that it is important, too, that you read some of the major theorists at first hand. Yet as soon as you begin to turn the pages of Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, or Derrida you will encounter writing which looks dauntingly difficult and off-putting. How, then, to cope? I suggest that it is much better to read intensely in theory than to read widely. By this I mean that you will gain little from reading chapter after chapter of a book that is making little sense to you. You will gain much more by using the same amount of reading time to read one crucial and frequently mentioned chapter or article several times for yourself. Having a detailed knowledge of what is actually said in the pages of a well-known argument, being aware of how the argument unfolds and how it is qualified or con-textualised, will be far more useful to you than a superficial overall impression gained from commentaries or from desperate skim- reading. However daunting the material, you have to make your reading meditative, reflective, and personal. Try to become a slow reader. Further, some intensive reading of this kind will enable you to quote lines other than the handful that are cited in all the commentaries. And most importantly, your view of things will be your own, perhaps quirky and incomplete, but at least not just the echo and residue of some published commentator's prepacked version. In a nut- shell, intensive reading is often more useful than extensive reading. 'English studies' is founded on the notion of close reading, and while there was a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when this idea was frequently disparaged, it is undoubtedly true that nothing of any interest can happen in this subject without close reading. I suggest, therefore, that you try out for yourself a useful form of intensive reading, the technique known as 'SQ3R'. This breaks down the reading of a difficult chapter or article into five stages, as designated by the letters 'SQRRR', or 'SQ3R', as is it usually given. The five stages are: S - That is, Survey the whole chapter or section fairly rapidly, skimming though it to get a rough sense of the scope and nature of the argument. Remember that information is not evenly spread throughout a text. It tends to be concentrated in the opening and closing paragraphs (where you often get useful summaries of the whole), and the 'hinge points' of the argument are often indicated in the opening and closing sentences of paragraphs. Q - Having skimmed the whole, set yourself some Questions, some things you hope to find out from what you are reading. This makes you an 'active' reader rather than a passive one, and gives your reading a purpose. Rl - Now Read the whole piece. Use a pencil if the copy is your own to underline key points, query difficulties, circle phrases worth remembering, and so on. Don't just sit in front of the pages. If the book is not your own jot something down on paper as you read, however minimal. R2 - Now, close the book and Recall what you have read. Jot down some summary points. Ask whether your starting questions have been answered, or at least clarified. Spell out some of the difficulties that remain. In this way, you record some concrete outcomes to your reading, so that your time doesn't simply evaporate uselessly once the book is closed. R3 - This final stage is the Review. It happens after an interval has elapsed since the reading. You can experiment, but initially try doing it the following day. Without opening the book again, or referring back to your notes, review what you have gained from the reading; remind yourself of the question you set yourself, the points you jotted down at the Recall stage, and any important phrases from the essay. If this produces very little, then refer back to your notes. If they make little sense, then repeat the Survey stage, and do an accelerated Read, by reading the first and last paragraphs of the essay, and skim-reading the main body assisted by your pencilled markings. You may well have evolved a study technique something like this already. It is really just common sense. But it will help to ensure that you gain something from a theoretical text, no matter how intially forbidding it might be. Finally, it will, I hope, go without saying that no comprehensiveness is possible in a format such as this. Clearly, also, this book does not contain all you need to know about theory, and it does not in itself (without the reading it refers you to) constitute a 'course' in literary theory. It leaves out a good deal, and it deals fairly briskly with many topics. It is a starter-pack, intended to give you a sense of what theory is all about, and suggest how it might affect your literary studies. Above all, it aims to interest you in theory. Approaching theory If you are coming to literary theory soon after taking courses in such subjects as media studies, communications studies, or socio-linguistics, then the general 'feel' of the new theoretical approaches to literature may well seem familiar. You will already be 'tuned in' to the emphasis on ideas which is one of their characteristics; you will be undaunted by their use of technical terminology, and unsurprised by their strong social and political interests. If, on the other hand, you took a 'straight' 'A' Level literature or 'Access' course with the major emphasis on set books, then much of what is contained in this book will probably be new to you. Initially, you will have the problem of getting on the wave-length of these different ways of looking at literature. As you would expect in studying at degree level, you will encounter problems which do not have generally agreed solutions, and it is inevitable that your understanding of the matters discussed here will remain partial, in both senses of that word, as everybody's does. But whichever of these two categories you fall into, I want to assure you at the outset that the doubts and uncertainties you will have about this material are probably not due to: 1. any supposed mental incapacity of your own, for example, to your not having 'a philosophical mind', or not possessing the kind of X-ray intellect which can penetrate jargon and see the sense beneath, or 2. the fact that your schooling did not include intensive tuition in, say, linguistics or philosophy, or 3. the innate and irreducible difficulty of the material itself (a point we will come back to). Rather, nearly all the difficulties you will have will be the direct result of the way theory is written, and the way it is written about. Tor literary theory, it must be emphasised, is not innately difficult. There are very few inherently complex ideas in existence in literary theory. On the contrary, the whole body of work known collectively as 'theory' is based upon some dozen or so ideas, none of which are in themselves difficult. (Some of them are listed on pp. 34—6). What is difficult, however, is the language of theory. Many of the major writers on theory are French, so that much of what we read is in translation, sometimes of a rather clumsy kind. Being a Romance language, French takes most of its words directly from Latin, and it lacks the reassuring Anglo-Saxon layer of vocabulary which provides us with so many of our brief, familiar, everyday terms. Hence, a close English translation of a French academic text will contain a large number of longer Latinate words, always perceived as a source of difficulty by English-speaking readers. Writing with a high proportion of these characteristics can be off-putting and wearying, and it is easy to lose patience. But the frame of mind I would recommend at the outset is threefold. Firstly, we must have some initial patience with the difficult surface of the writing. We must avoid the too-ready conclusion that literary theory is just meaningless, pretentious jargon (that is, that the theory is at fault). Secondly, on the other hand, we must, for obvious reasons, resist the view that we ourselves are intellectually incapable of coping with it (that is, that we are at fault). Thirdly, and crucially, we must not assume that the difficulty of theoretical writing is always the dress of profound ideas - only that it might sometimes be, which leaves the onus of discrimination on us. To sum up this attitude: we are looking, in literary theory, for something we can use, not something which will use us. We ought not to issue theory with a blank cheque to spend our time for us. (If we do, it will certainly spend more than we can afford.) Do not, then, be endlessly patient with theory. Require it to be clear, and expect it, in the longer term, to deliver something solid. Don't be content, as many seem to be, just to see it as 'challenging' conventional practice or 'putting it in question' in some never quite specified way. Challenges are fine, but they have to amount to something in the end. STOP and THINK: reviewing your study of literature to date Before we go on, into what may well be a new stage in your involvement with literature, it would be sensible to 'take stock' and reflect a little on the nature of our literary education to date. The purpose of doing this is to begin the process of making visible, and hence open to scrutiny, the methods and procedures which have become so familar to you (probably going back to the time when you began secondary school) that they are no longer visible at all as a distinct intellectual practice. But stock-taking is not part of our normal intellectual routine, unfortunately, and it is a difficult and demanding thing to do. Yet please do not skip this section, since theory will never make any sense to you until you feel the need for it yourself. What I would like you to do is to try to become conscious of the nature of your own previous work in English, by recalling: 1. what first made you decide to study English, what you hoped to gain from doing so, and whether that hope was realised; 2. which books and authors were chosen for study and what they had in common; 3. which books and authors now seem conspicuously absent; 4. what, in general terms, your previous study taught you (about 'life', say, or conduct, or about literature itself). Doing this will help you to begin to obtain a perspective on your experience of literature to date. Spend an hour or so doing it. I carried out a similar exercise myself as part of the process of working on this book, and some of the result is given below. It is intended more as a prompt than a model, and I have not responded in any systematic way to the four questions above. Reproducing it will perhaps help to 'personalise' the voice behind this book, but I leave you to decide whether you want to look at this before or after doing your own. My own 'stock-taking' Since literary theory is the topic of this book I will concentrate on detailing the course of my acquaintanceship with it. In fact, I heard nothing at all about literary theory as an undergraduate at London University in the late 1960s. I took a straightforward 'Wulf-to-Woolf' English course {Beowulf to Virgina Woolf) with compulsory Old and Middle English papers. Essentially, I now realise, the English course I followed in the late 1960s retained the shape and the outlook of the pioneer English degree courses established at London University more than a century before. The one innovation in English teaching at London was to recognise the existence of something called American literature and to appoint a lecturer* to teach it. As a result of taking this American course I became an enthusiast for a range of American poets who were part of the 'alternative culture' of the time. At the same time, and for several years afterwards, I was also trying to write poetry of more or less this kind. It quickly became apparent that conventional criticism could make very little of poetry like this. So by the early 1970s I was beginning to look at newer critical approaches than those I had encountered at university. But I wasn't at that time an advocate of literary theory, since 'theory' as such was then a non- existent category in literary studies. * The lecturer was Eric Mottram, who died in January 1995. The change of emphasis seems to have happened in my own case around 1973, when the words 'structuralism' and 'semiotics' begin to feature in notes about what I was reading and in the titles of the books and articles I was interested in. Structuralism, we were then learning, was a new kind of literary theory which had recently become prominent in France, and semiotics ('the science of signs') was one of its sub-branches. I was loosely connected with the London Graduate Seminar started by Frank Kermode after he became Professor of English at University College, London. The group debated the work of the structuralist Roland Barthes and caught Kermode's enthusiasm for it. I bought and read everything by Barthes then in print in England, no great undertaking since all that was available was Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, probably his least interesting and least accessible books. His much more engaging collection Mythologies appeared in English in 1973 in the Paladin imprint. 1973 was also the year when The Times Literary Supplement devoted the major part of two issues (5 and 12 October) to a 'Survey of Semiotics', with articles by Umberto Eco, Tzvetan Todorov, and Julia Kris-teva, major names in these new kinds of critical theory and encountered then (in my case) for the first time. This interest in theory was consolidated in 1981 when I was asked to devise a course on literary theory as part of the BA programme at my previous college, and, in turn, a decade or so of teaching that course has led to this book. 1 Theory before 'theory' -liberal humanism The history of English studies It is difficult to understand liberal humanism (that is, the traditional approach to English studies, see the Introduction, pp. 3-4) without knowing something about how English developed as an academic subject. So this is the topic of the next few pages. STOP and THINK The multiple choice questions below indicate the scope of what is touched upon in this section. Underline what you think are the right answers before reading further, and then correct your answers, if necessary, as you read on: 1. When do you think English was first taught as a degree subject in England?: was it 1428, 1528, 1628, 1728, 1828, or 1928? 2. At which institution was English first taught as a degree subject in England?: was it Oxford University, Cambridge University, London University, Southampton University, or none of these? 3. Until the nineteenth century you had to be a member of the Anglican (Episcopalian) Church and male to take a degree in England. True or false? 4. Until the nineteenth century lectures degree courses in England had to be unmarried Church of England clergy. True or false? 5. Until the nineteenth century women were not allowed to take degrees in England. True or false? 6. In the early twentieth century women could take degree courses in England, but were not allowed to receive degrees. True or false? To explain the rise of English studies we need to indicate briefly what higher education was like in England until the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The short answer is that it was a Church of England monopoly. There were only two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. These were divided into small individual colleges which were run like monastic institutions. Only men could attend them, of course, and students had to be Anglican communicants and attend the college chapel. The teachers were ordained ministers, who had to be unmarried, so that they could live in the college. The subjects available were the classics (ancient Greek and Latin literature), divinity (which was taken by those seeking ordination) and mathematics. Anyone who was Catholic, Jewish, or Methodist, or atheist was barred from entry, and hence, in effect, barred from the professions and the Civil Service. As far as higher education was concerned, then, you could say that right up to the 1820s, the organisation of higher education had not changed since the Middle Ages. Many attempts were made to reform the situation, expand higher education, and introduce practical subjects into the curriculum, but they all came up against entrenched conservative forces. The breakthough came in 1826 when a University College was founded in London with a charter to award degrees to men and women of all religions or none. From 1828 English was offered as a subject for study, and they appointed the first English Professor of English in 1829. However, it was not really English as we know it. It was mainly the study of English language, merely using literature as a source of linguistic examples. English literature as such was first taught at King's College, London (another college of what later became London University) beginning in 1831. In 1840 F. D. Maurice was appointed Professor at King's. He introduced the study of set books, and his inaugural lecture lays down some of the principles of liberal humanism; the study of English literature would serve 'to emancipate us... from the notions and habits which are peculiar to our own age', connecting us instead with 'what is fixed and enduring'. Maurice regarded literature as the peculiar property of the middle class and the expression of their values. For him the middle class represents the essence of Englishness (the aristocracy are part of an international elite, and the poor need to give all their attention to ensuring mere survival) so middle-class education should be peculiarly English, and therefore should centre on English litera-ture. Maurice was well aware of the political dimension of all this. People so educated would feel that they belonged to England, that they had a country. 'Political agitators' may ask what this can mean 'when his neighbour rides in a carriage and he walks on loot', but 'he will feel his nationality to be a reality, in spite of what they say'. In short, learning English will give people a stake in maintaining the political status quo without any redistribution of wealth. You can see from this that the study of English literature is being seen as a kind of substitute for religion. It was well known I hat attendance at church below middle-class level was very patchy. The worry was that the lower classes would feel that they had no stake in the country and, having no religion to teach them morality and restraint, they would rebel and something like the French Revolution would take place. The Chartist agitation of the 1830s was thought to be the start of this, and the first English courses are put in place at exactly the same time. The conventional reading of the origins of the subject of English is that this kind of thinking begins with Matthew Arnold in the 1850s and reaches its height with the publication of the New-bolt Report on the Teaching of English in England in 1921. It is evident from material like Maurice's inaugural lecture that this was happening much earlier. However, I do not accept the simplistic view that the founders of English were motiviated merely by a desire for ideological control. This was undoubtedly one of their motives, but the reality was much more complicated. There was, behind the teaching of early English, a distinctly Victorian mixture of class guilt about social inequalities, a genuine desire to improve things for everybody, a kind of missionary zeal to spread culture and enlightenment, and a self-interested desire to maintain social stability. London University degrees were taught by external licence at university colleges in major industrial cities - Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, and so on, all these places eventually becoming major universities in their own right. Hence the spread of the subject at degree level throughout the country. However, Oxford and Cambridge were suspicious of the new subject of English and held out against it, Oxford until 1894 and Cambridge until 1911. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century there was vigorous discussion and campaigning to establish a Chair in English at Oxford. In 1887 the first attempt was defeated largely because of a speech in the Convocation by the Professor of History, Edward Freeman. Freeman's speech is another key document: it touches upon several problems in English which are still unresolved. He said: We are told that the study of literature 'cultivates the taste, educates the sympathies and enlarges the mind'. These are all excellent things, only we cannot examine tastes and sympathies. Examiners must have technical and positive information to examine. This is a problem which has never been entirely solved in English. What, exactly, is its knowledge component? As a way of attaching specific and technical information to the study of English, early supporters had advocated the systematic study of language, but early advocates of English wanted to separate literature and language study, so that the one could be done without the other. Freeman's famous response was: 'what is meant by distinguishing literature from language if by literature is meant the study of great books, and not mere chatter about Shelley?' Freeman won the argument. Literature had to be studied along with language, otherwise it would not be an academic subject at all. So when the English course was finally set up at Oxford in 1894 it contained a very heavy element of historical language study - Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, Letto-Slavonic, Middle English, etc., from which it has still not managed to free itself. A greater sense of direction was given to English in the Cambridge English school in the 1920s. Because Cambridge English was the most recently founded, dating only from 1911, it had the least weight of tradition to fight against, so change was relatively easy. The engineers of this change were a group of people who began teaching at Cambridge in the 1920s. They were: I. A. Richards, William Empson, and F. R. Leavis. I. A. Richards was the founder of a method of studying English which is still the norm today. Firstly, it made a decisive break between language and literature. Richards pioneered the technique called Practical Criticism (the title of his book in 1929). This made a close study of literature possible by isolating the text from history and context. Instead of having to study, say, the Renaissance period as a distinct historical moment, with its characteristic outlook, social formations, and so on, students could learn the techniques of practical criticism and simply analyse 'the words on the page'. The gain from this was that it was no longer possible to offer a vague, flowery, metaphorical effusion and call it criticism. Richards argued that there should be much more close attention to the precise details of the text. A second Cambridge pioneer was a pupil of Richards, William Empson, who presented his tutor with the manuscript of the book which was published in 1930 with the title Seven Types of Ambiguity. This book took the Richards method of close verbal analysis to what many felt to be an extreme. Empson identified seven different types of verbal difficulty in poetry (which is what he meant by ambiguity) and gave examples of them, with worked analyses. Another Cambridge critic, F. R. Leavis, said in a review that it is a highly disturbing book because it uses intelligence on poetry as seriously as if it were mathematics. Not everybody liked this ultra- close form of reading. T. S. Eliot called it the lemon-squeezer school of criticism, and his own critical writing is always on a much more generalised level. The last of these Cambridge pioneers was F. R. Leavis, probably the most influential figure in twentieth-century British criticism. In 1929 he met and married Q. D. Roth, subsequently known as Q. D. Leavis. He had written his doctoral thesis on the relationship between journalism and literature. She had written hers on popular fiction. These were revolutionary topics, and a certain excitement and glamour attached to this couple in the 1930s. In 1932 they founded an important journal called Scrutiny and produced it together for twenty-one years. As the title implies, it extended the 'close-reading' method beyond poetry to novels and other material. Leavis's faults as a critic are that his close readings often turn out to contain lengthy quotations on which there is surprisingly little comment. The assumption is that the competent reader will see there what Leavis sees. As has been said of him, he often gives the impression that he is analysing the text when he is really just paraphrasing it. Secondly, his approach to literature is overwhelmingly moral; its purpose is to teach us about life, to transmit humane values. His critical terms are never properly defined. He famously refused the invitation offered by the critic Rene Wellek in the 1930s that he should 'spell out the principles on which he operated in a more explicit way than hitherto'. The result was one more degree of isolation for literary studies. In the period of its growth just surveyed, it claimed independence from language studies, from historical considerations, and from philosophical questions. The consensus which held the subject together from the 1930s to the 1960s rested upon the acceptance of these demarcations. The 'project' of 'theory' from the 1960s onwards is in essence to re-establish connections between literary study and these three academic fields from which it had so resolutely separated itself. Ten tenets of liberal humanism The personal account on pp. 9-10 mainly responds to the second and third of the four questions given earlier. I'm now going to expand on the implications of the fourth question, which asked what it is, exactly, that we learn when we 'do' English in the traditional way. Of course, we learn things about specific books and authors, but I mean here the more general values and attitudes which we absorb from English, and which remain as a kind of distilled essence of the subject when all these specific details have been forgotten. These are not usually formulated and stated, but they are, in a sense, all the more real for that, being simultaneously both pervasive and invisible. They can only be brought to the surface by a conscious effort of will, of the kind we are now trying to make. So what follows is a list of some of the elements which seem to constitute this 'distilled essence' of the subject, that is, the corpus of attitudes, assumptions, and ideas which we pick up, probably unawares, as we do it. These seem to have been what we were learning when we studied English - these are the values and beliefs which formed the subject's half-hidden curriculum: 1. The first thing, naturally, is an attitude to literature itself; good literature is of timeless significance; it somehow transcends the limitations and peculiarities of the age it was written in, and thereby speaks to what is constant in human nature. Such writing is 'not for an age, but for all time' (as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare): it is 'news which stays news' (Ezra Pound's definition of literature). 2. The second point is the logical consequence of the first. The literary text contains its own meaning within itself. It doesn't require any elaborate process of placing it within a context, whether this be: (a) Socio-political - the context of a particular social 'background' or political situation, or (b) Literary-historical - whereby the work could be seen as the product of the literary influences of other writers, or as shaped by the conventions of particular genres, or (c) Autobiographical - that is, as determined by the personal details of the author's life and thought. Of course, as scholars, most academics would assert the value of studying these contexts, but as critics their adherence to the approach which insists upon the primacy and self-sufficiency of the 'words on the page' commits them to the process which has been called 'on-sight close reading'. Essentially, this removes the text from all these contexts and presents it 'unseen' for unaided explication by the trained mind. 3. To understand the text well it must be detached from these contexts and studied in isolation. What is needed is the close verbal analysis of the text without prior ideological assumptions, or political pre-conditions, or, indeed, specific expectations of any kind, since all these are likely to interfere fatally with what the nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold said was the true business of criticism, 'to see the object as in itself it really is'. 4. Human nature is essentially unchanging. The same passions, emotions, and even situations are seen again and again throughout human history. It follows that continuity in literature is more important and significant than innovation. Thus, a well-known eighteenth-century definition of poetry maintains that it is 'what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed'. Likewise, Samuel Johnson famously denigrated Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy on the grounds of its novelty, that is, its originality. 5. Individuality is something securely possessed within each of us as our unique 'essence'. This transcends our environmental influences, and though individuality can change and develop (as do characters in novels), it can't be transformed -hence our uneasiness with those scenes (quite common, for instance, in Dickens) which involve a 'change of heart' in a character, so that the whole personality is shifted into a new dimension by force of circumstance - the miser is transformed and changes his ways, or the good man or woman becomes corrupted by wealth. Such scenes imply a malleability in the essence of character which is at odds with this underlying assumption of English studies. The discipline as a whole believed in what is now called the 'transcendent subject', which is the belief that the individual ('the subject') is antecedent to, or transcends, the forces of society, experience, and language. 6. The purpose of literature is essentially the enhancement of life and the propagation of humane values; but not in a programmatic way: if literature, and criticism, become overtly and directly political they necessarily tend towards propaganda. And as Keats said, 'we distrust literature which has a palpable design upon us', that is, literature which too obviously wants to convert us or influence our views. 7. Form and content in literature must be fused in an organic way, so that the one grows inevitably from the other. Literary form should not be like a decoration which is applied externally to a completed structure. Imagery, for instance, or any other poetic form which is detachable from the substance of the work in this way, rather than being integrated with it, is merely 'fanciful' and not truly 'imaginative' (the distinction made by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria). 8. This point about organic form applies above all to 'sincerity'. Sincerity (comprising truth-to- experience, honesty towards the self, and the capacity for human empathy and compassion) is a quality which resides within the language of literature. It isn't a fact or an intention behind the work, which could be gleaned by comparing, say, a poet's view of an event with other more 'factual' versions, or from discovering independent, external information about an author's history or conduct. Rather, sincerity is to be discovered within the text in such matters as the avoidance of cliche, or of over-inflated forms of expression; it shows in the use of first hand, individualistic description, in the understated expression of feeling, whereby (preferably) the emotion is allowed to emerge implicitly from the presentation of an event. Moreover, when the language achieves these qualities, then the truly sincere poet can transcend the sense of distance between language and material, and can make the language seem to 'enact' what it depicts, thus apparently abolishing the necessary distance between words and things. 9. Again, the next idea follows from the previous one. What is valued in literature is the 'silent' showing and demonstrating of something, rather than the explaining, or saying, of it. Hence, ideas as such are worthless in literature until given the concrete embodiment of 'enactment'. Thus, several of the explicit comments and formulations often cited in literary history contain specific denigrations of ideas as such and have a distinct anti-intellectual flavour to them. Here we see the elevation of the characteristic 'Eng Lit' idea of tactile enactment, of sensuous immediacy, of the concrete representation of thought, and so on. According to this idea (which is, of course, itself an idea, in spite of the fact that the idea in question is a professed distrust of ideas) words should mime, or demonstrate, or act out, or sound out what they signify, rather than just representing it in an abstract way. This idea is stated with special fervency in the work of F. R. Leavis. (For a critique of the 'enactment' idea see 'The Enactment Fallacy', by the present author, in Essays in Criticism, July 1980. For a general discussion see James Gribble's Literary Education: a Re-evaluation, Cambridge University Press, 1983, chapter 2). 10. The job of criticism is to interpret the text, to mediate between it and the reader. A theoretical account of the nature of reading, or of literature in general, isn't useful in criticism, and will simply, if attempted, encumber critics with 'preconceived ideas' which will get between them and the text. Perhaps in this phrase 'preconceived ideas' we get another glimpse into the nature of this pervasive distrust of ideas within liberal humanism, for there seems to be the notion that somehow all ideas are 'preconceived', in the sense that they will come between the reader and text if given half a chance. There is, in fact, the clear mark here of what is called 'English empiricism', which can be defined as a determination to trust only what is made evident to the senses or experienced directly. Ultimately this attitude goes back at least to the philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704), which gives a philosophical expression to it. His book Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) puts forward the view that ideas are formed when direct sense impressions from the world are imprinted on the mind. The mind then assembles these, so giving rise to the process of thinking. Locke rejected introspective speculation as a source of valid knowledge and insisted on the need for direct experience and evidence of things. Traditional English studies, we might say, has always been Lockean in this sense. The above list contains a series of propositions which I think many traditional critics would, on the whole, subscribe to, if they were in the habit of making their assumptions explicit. Together, ideas like these, and the literary practice which went with them, are now often referred to as 'liberal humanism'. Literary theorising from Aristotle to Leavis -some key moments So far I have perhaps given the impression that theoretical positions about literature were never explicitly formulated by liberal humanists, at least in Britain, and that everything remained implicit. Yet a widely current body of theoretical work existed from the start within English studies, and references were often made to it in books and essays. The average student or teacher of 'Eng Lit' up to the 1970s would probably have had a fairly limited direct contact with this body of work, since the whole thrust of the subject was away from this kind of generalised position-taking. What, then, constituted the body of theory about literature that has existed for many centuries as an available under-pinning for the study of literature, even if literary students seldom had any extensive first hand acquaintance with it? Well, the material goes back to Greek and Latin originals. Critical theory, in fact, long pre-dates the literary criticism of individual works. The earliest work of theory was Aristotle's Poetics, which, in spite of its title, is about the nature of literature itself: Aristotle offers famous definitions of tragedy, insists that literature is about character, and that character is revealed through action, and he tries to identify the required stages in the progress of a plot. Aristotle was also the first critic to develop a 'reader-centred' approach to literature, since his consideration of drama tried to describe how it affected the audience. Tragedy, he said, should stimulate the emotions of pity and fear, these being, roughly, sympathy for and empathy with the plight of the protagonist. By the combination of these emotions came about the effect Aristotle called 'catharsis', whereby these emotions are exercised, rather than exorcised, as the audience identifies with the plight of the central character. The first prestigious name in English writing about literature is that of Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote his 'Apology for Poetry' in about 1580. Sidney was intent on expanding the implications of the ancient definition of literature first formulated by the Latin poet Ovid, who had said that its mission is 'docere delictendo'- to teach by delighting (meaning, approximately, by entertaining). Sidney also quotes Horace, to the effect that a poem is 'a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight'. Thus, the giving of pleasure is here allowed a central position in the reading of literature, unlike, say, philosophy, which is implicitly stigmatised as worthy and uplifting, but not much fun. The notion of literature giving pleasure will now seem an unremarkable sentiment, but Sidney's aim was the revolutionary one of distinguishing literature from other forms of writing, on the grounds that, uniquely, literature has as its primary aim the giving of pleasure to the reader, and any moral or didactic element is necessarily either subordinate to that, or at least, unlikely to succeed without it. In a religious age, deeply suspicious of all forms of fiction, poetry, and representation, and always likely to denounce them as the work of the devil, this was a very great step to take. In English too, then, critical theory came before practical criticism, as Sidney is writing about literature in general, not about individual works or writers. Literary theory after Sidney was significantly advanced by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. Johnson's Lives of the Poets and Prefaces to Shakespeare can be seen both as another major step forward in critical theory, and as the start of the English tradition of practical criticism, since he is the first to offer detailed commentary on the work of a single author. Prior to Johnson, the only text which had ever been subjected to this intensive scrutiny was the Bible, and the equivalent sacred books of other religions. The extension of this practice to works other than those thought to be the direct product of divine inspiration marks a significant moment of progress in the development of secular humanism. After Johnson came a major burgeoning of critical theory in the work of the Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. One of the main texts is Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads. What Wordsworth wrote in this preface was the product of collaborative discussions between himself and Coleridge. The introduction was added to the second edition of the ballads, published in 1800, after the first, of 1798, had been met with puzzlement. The book blends high literature and popular literature, since it contains literary ballads constructed on the model of the popular oral ballads of ordinary country people. The original readers of Lyrical Ballads also disliked the abandonment of the conventions of verbal decorum. These conventions had imposed a high degree of artificiality on poetic language, making it as different as possible from the language of ordinary everyday speech. Thus, a specialised poetic vocabulary had tended to enjoin the avoidance of simple everyday terms for things, and an elaborate system of rhyme and a highly compressed form of grammar had produced a verbal texture of much greater density than that of ordinary language. Suddenly, two ambitious young poets were trying to make their poetic language as much like prose as possible, avoiding the conventions of diction and verbal structure which had held sway for so long. Thus, this book is one of a number of significant critical works in literary theory whose immediate aim is to provide a rationale for the critic's own poetic work, and to educate the audience for it. It also anticipates issues of great interest to contemporary critical theory, such as the relationship between poetic language and 'ordinary' language, and that between 'literature' and other kinds of writing. A second significant work from the Romantic era was Coleridge's misleadingly titled Biographia Literaria. The title might lead us to expect a work like Johnson's Lives of the Poets, but in fact much of it directly addresses the ideas contained in Wordsworth's Preface, showing by a close consideration of aspects of his work that Wordsworth writes his best poetry when he is furthest away from adherence to his own theories of what poetry should be. Indeed, in the years during which he and Coleridge had drifted apart as friends, they had also taken radically differ- ent views about the nature of poetry. Coleridge came to disagree completely with the view that the language of poetry must strive to become more like the language of prose. He saw this as an impoverishment of the poetic effect which must ultimately prove suicidal. The argument dovetails neatly with the works already cited: if literature and other works differ in their aims and effects, as Aristotle and Sidney had maintained, and if poetry, unlike other kinds of writing, aims to teach by entertaining, then the major way in which the entertaining is done must be through the language in which it is written. The language entertains by its 'Active' qualities - this is the source of the aesthetic effect. Something like this is also connoted in Shelley's A Defence of Poetry (1821) which sees poetry as essentially engaged in what a group of twentieth-century Russian critics later called 'defamiliarisa-tion'. Shelley anticipates this term, since for him poetry 'strips the veil of familiarity from the world... it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity... It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know'. This remarkable critical document also anticipates T. S. Eliot's notion of impersonality (put forward in his 1919 essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent') whereby there is a distinction between (as we might call it) the author (who is the person behind the work) and the writer (who is, so to speak, the 'person' in the work). In Eliot's view, the greater the separation between the two the better, since 'the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates', so that poetry is not simply the conscious rendering of personal experience into words. Shelley registers all this a hundred years earlier in his characteristically magisterial prose: the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or of its departure. (A Defence, lines 999-1003, my italics) There is also an anticipation here of the Freudian notion of the mind as made up of conscious and unconscious elements. Indeed, the idea of the unconscious is an essential one in Romanticism, and implicit in everything written about poetry by another major Romanticist, John Keats. Keats did not write formal literary theory in the way Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley did, but he did reflect on poetry in a sustained way in his letters. He too formulates a notion of the workings of the unconscious, for instance in a letter to Bailey of 22 November 1817 when he speaks of how 'the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine suddenness'. The 'silent working' of the mind is the unconscious and the 'spirit' into which it erupts is the conscious. Keats's idea of 'negative capability' also amounts to this same privileging of the unconscious, this same desire to allow it scope to work, negative capability being 'when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason' (letter to his brothers, 21 December 1817). In the critical writings of the Romantics, then, there are many anticipations of the concerns of critical theory today. After the Romantics the main developments in critical theory were the work of mid and late Victorians, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and Henry James. George Eliot's critical work ranges widely over classical and continental writers, and philosophical issues, as did Coleridge's. It is worth emphasising this, since there are two distinct 'tracks' in the development of English criticism. One track leads through Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold to T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. This might be called the 'practical criticism' track. It tends to centre upon the close analysis of the work of particular writers, and gives us our familiar tradition of 'close reading'. The other track lies through Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, George Eliot, and Henry James. This track is very much 'ideas-led' rather than 'text-led': it tends to tackle big general issues concerned with literature - How are literary works structured? How do they affect readers or audiences? What is the nature of literary language? How does literature relate to the contemporary and to matters of politics and gender? What can be said about literature from a philosophical point of view? What is the nature of the act of literary composition? These 'track two' preoccupations are very similar to the concerns of the critical theo- rists who became prominent from the 1960s onwards, and it is important to realise that these concerns are not an exotic imposition upon 'native' Anglo-American approaches to literature but, rather, have been part of it from the beginning. The insistence upon 'close reading' in the 1920s sprang partly from the work of Matthew Arnold in the previous century. Arnold has remained a key canonical figure in the history of English criticism, partly because F. R. Leavis adopted and adapted several of his ideas and attitudes and gave them twentieth- century currency. Arnold feared that the decline of religion would leave an increasingly divided society with no common system of beliefs, values, and images, with potentially disastrous consequences. He saw literature as a possible replacement for religion in this regard, but believed that the middle classes, on whom the burden and responsibility of democracy largely fell, had been progressively debased by materialism and philistinism. The critic would help such people to recognise 'the best that has been known and thought in the world' and thus enable them to give individual assent to the canon of great works which had emerged through the collective wisdom of the ages. Arnold's most significant thinking is contained in the essays 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' and 'The Study of Poetry'. He stresses the importance for literature of remaining 'disinterested', by which he means politically detached and uncommitted to any specific programme of action. The goal of literary criticism is that of attaining pure, disinterested knowledge, that is, to use another of his favourite phrases, of simply appreciating 'the object as in itself it really is' without wanting to press the insight gained into the service of a specific line of action. Arnold's key literary-critical device is the notion of the Touchstone, which avoids any definitions of desirable literary qualities, and merely suggests using aspects of the literature of the past as a means of measuring and assessing the literature of today. The way the Touchstone works is concisely explained in J. A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (3rd edition, Blackwell, 1991): A touchstone is... so-called because gold is tried by it. Matthew , Arnold used the word in his essay The Study of Poetry (1880) in connection with literary criteria and standards: Arnold advises that we should 'have always in mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and apply them as a Touchstone to other poetry'. He suggests that his Touchstone method should provide the basis for a 'real' rather than an 'historic' or 'personal' estimate of poetry. (See Cuddon, p. 980.) In the first half of the twentieth century, the key critical names in Britain were F. R. Lea vis, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and I. A. Richards. All except Eliot were at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s, involved in the pioneering English School there which had a powerful influence on the teaching of English worldwide up to the 1970s. Eliot's contribution to the canon of received critical ideas was the greatest, his major critical ideas being: the notion of the 'dissociation of sensibility', developed in the course of his review article on Herbert Grierson's edition of The Metaphysical Poets, the notion of poetic 'impersonality', developed in the course of his two-part essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', and the notion of the 'objective correlative', developed in his essay on Hamlet. All these ideas have become controversial: the idea that a 'dissociation of sensibility' occurred in the seventeenth century, radically separating thought from feeling, is one for which historical evidence has never been found. Later in his career Eliot denied that he thought the dissociation had been caused by the English Civil War, though he added rather cryptically that he thought it might have been caused by the same factors as those which brought about the Civil War - a nice distinction. The best use of the idea is simply as a way of describing the special qualities of mind and sensibility which we detect in the Metaphysical poets: as a historical generalisation it seems quite without support. The best critique of the idea can be found in Frank Kermode's book Romantic Image. The idea of impersonality was partly Eliot's way of deflecting current thinking about poetry away from ideas of originality and self-expression which derived from Romanticism. Eliot's own personality, and the education he had received at Harvard, made this emphasis on the individual highly distasteful. It was much more congenial to him to see poetry not as a pouring out of personal emotion and personal experience, but as a transcending of the individual by a sense of tradition which spoke through, and is transmitted by, the individual poet. The best parts of a poet's work, he says, are not those which are most original, but those in which the voice of his predecessors can be most clearly heard speaking though him. Hence, there is a large distinction to be drawn between the mind of the individual, experiencing human being, and the voice which speaks in the poetry. This was not an original thought - Shelley, as we saw, had something very like it in his Defence of Poetry - but Eliot was the first to make it the cornerstone of a whole poetic aesthetic. The objective correlative, finally, is really another encapsulation of English empiricist attitudes: it holds that the best way of expressing an emotion in art is to find some vehicle for it in gesture, action, or concrete symbolism, rather than approaching it directly or descriptively. This is undoubtedly true: little is gained in fiction or poetry by having characters (or narrators) say what they feel: it has to be shown in some way in words or actions. This is perhaps little more than the ancient distinction (first made by Plato) between mimesis and diegesis. The former is a showing of something, in the character's own words, or in actions which we actually see on the stage, if it is a play, while the latter is telling the audience or reader about things they don't see for themselves or experience in the direct speech of the characters. All Eliot's major critical ideas are thus flawed and unsatisfactory, and perhaps their long-standing currency is indicative of the theoretical vacuum into which they were launched. The most influential British critic prior to the theory movement was F. R. Leavis. Leavis, like Arnold in the previous century, assumed that the study and appreciation of literature is a pre-condition to the health of society. He too distrusted abstract thought and looked for a system of literary appreciation (like Arnold's Touchstones) which by-passed fixed criteria, arguing instead for an openness to the qualities of the text. Like Arnold, finally, he rejected any attempt to politicise either literature or criticism directly. The two differ, however, in a few notable regards: Arnold, for example, takes the pantheon of past great writers more or less for granted: he does not question the excellence of Dante, for instance, which is why Dante can become a Touchstone. By contrast, Leavis sometimes wrote essays attacking the reputations of major established figures, and, indeed, it was the essence of his method to argue that some reputations would not stand up to the kind of close textual scrutiny he constantly recommended. Arnold, in his critical ideas, seems essentially to license and encourage the amateur. You may not have read everything, he implies (how could you, since you don't have the unlimited time of the professional critic?), but if you have read the best, and can identify its qualities, then you can be confident in looking at new writing and reaching a true judgement on it. This 'protestant' aes-thetic encourages a direct relationship between the individual reader and the literary greats. F. R. Leavis began as an admirer of Eliot's critical work as well as of his poetry, but later greatly modified his views. He avoided the coining of critical vocabulary, and instead used as critical terms words and phrases which already had established lay senses: 'life', for instance, is used by Leavis almost as a critical term, as is the notion of 'felt experience'. For Leavis the crucial test is whether the work is conducive to 'life' and vitality. Leavis's extreme popularity was partly due to the fact that he was essentially a kind of combined avatar of Johnson and Arnold, offering again the former's moralism and the latter's social vision and anti-theoretical critical practice. Leavis is still so pervasive an influence that little more need be said about him here. William Empson and I. A. Richards can perhaps be taken as a pair, though the latter was the tutor of the former in the late 1920s. Empson's book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) was itself somewhat ambiguous in its effects. On the one hand, its ultra-close readings of texts demonstrated the kind of text-led extreme which might be seen as the logical development of the 'track one' tradition of British criticism described above. The word 'ambi- guity' in the book's title can be translated as 'verbal difficulty', and Empson unravels his examples by meticulous textual surgery, rather than references out to a wider context. On the other hand, though, Empson's basic attitude towards language is that it is really a very slippery medium indeed: when we handle language we need to be aware that the whole thing is likely to explode into meanings we hadn't suspected of being there at all. As we go from ambiguity type one to type seven we seem to be approaching the frontiers of language, where the territory eventually becomes un-mappable, and we seem to end up looking into a void of linguistic indeterminacy. This can be seen as an anticipation from within the British tradition of post- structuralist views about the unreliability of language as a medium (see p. 64). But the placing of language within any context naturally tends to reduce or eliminate ambiguity. (For instance, the word 'pain', when you hear it spoken in isolation, is ambiguous, since it sounds the same as 'pane', but encounter it in the context of any actual situation of usage and the ambiguity disappears). Hence the later Empson drew back from the linguistic void by stressing, in particular, the autobiographical context in which literary works, in his view, are grounded. 1. A. Richards, finally, is the pioneer of the decontextualised approach to literature which became the norm in Britain from the 1930s to the 1970s as 'practical criticism' and in America during roughly the same period as the 'New Criticism'. Richards's experiments in the 1920s of presenting students and tutors with unan-notated, anonymous poems for commentary and analysis gave rise to the ideal of removing the props of received opinion and knowledge and fostering a 'true judgement' based on first hand opinion. It is easy to see the connection betwen this and Arnold's 'Touchstones'. What is certain is that this decisive 'Ricardian' moment established the 'track one' 'practical' tradition of criticism so completely for so long that a selective amnesia descended on the discipline and it came to be widely regarded as the only tradition that had ever existed. The subsequent conflict between liberal humanism and 'theory' is a pretty fundamental one, but it is worth reminding ourselves that it is actually much older than the 1970s when it broke out with such force in Britain, America, and elsewhere. Similar debates and arguments took place in the 1930s, for instance between F. R. Leavis, whom we might regard as the archetypal British liberal humanist, and the critical theorist Rene Wellek. Leavis and Wellek debated the relationship between literary criticism and philosophy in the pages of Leavis's journal Scrutiny. Wellek's point against Leavis was simply that practical criticism was not enough - he ought to spell out the theoretical assumptions on which his readings, and his procedures generally, were based. In Wellek's view a series of 'close readings' of Romantic poets in Leavis's book Revaluations is offered to the reader in a theoretical vacuum. As he politely put it, 'I could wish that you had stated your assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically' (Scrutiny, March 1937, p. 376). This refusal to accept the liberal humanist method as simply the 'natural' and taken-for-granted way of 'doing' literature is the crux of theory's general response to it. Though less politely than Wellek, theorists make the same demand as he did - spell out what you do, and why, when you read and criticise literature, so that your methods can be evaluated along with others. Implicit in this demand is the view that if these things are made explicit (as we tried to do in the previous section) then the weaknesses of liberal humanist assumptions and procedures will become apparent, and other approaches will have a chance of replacing them. The work of all the figures discussed in this section can be found in the collection English Critical Texts, ed. D. J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera (Oxford University Press, 1962). Liberal humanism in practice It is perhaps unnecessary to supply a full-scale example of liberal humanist practice, since that practice will surely be familiar to anyone reading this book. However, I will sketch out, mainly for comparative purposes, what I would consider to be a characteristic liberal humanist reading of Edgar Allan Poe's tale 'The oval portrait' (see Appendix 1) since the tale will be used later to illustrate structuralism in practice, and narratology. A liberal humanist approach to this tale (or, to be more specific, a Leavisite approach) might focus on the evident conflict of values in the story between 'art' and 'life'. The central point of commentary and interpretation might be the moralist argument that true value lies in the 'lived life' of the unique individual, and that it is disastrous for the artist to fail to recognise a necessary subservience of art to a communal reality. Further, when artists begin to see themselves as Faustian super-heroes, able to cross all boundaries of taste, taboo, and conduct, and even to assume the god-like role of creating and sacrificing life itself, then a hubris-tic act is committed which ultimately dries up the sources of the life of art itself. Hence, the artist in this tale in his isolated turret, feeding vampire-like on the vital energies of his sitter, is an emblem of a debased and degenerate form of art whose values are of the purely aesthetic 'art for art's sake' kind and have no reference to any wider notion of personal and psychic health. Two things stand out in this approach: firstly, this kind of reading is driven (ultimately) by its moral convictions (laudable in themselves, of course) rather than by any model of what constitutes a systematic approach to literary criticism. The robust championing of 'life' in the above sketch makes the term 'Leavisite' seem an appropriate one to apply to it. The second notable aspect of it is that it seems to by-pass matters of form, structure, genre, and so on, and launches straight into the discussion of matters of content. If the sketch were filled out, there would doubtless be comments on such characteristics as structure, symbol, and design, but they would probably be secondary in nature, intended as concrete support for the primary focus of the reading, which is the moral position taken. I am not, of course, dismissing such an approach as worthless: my intention is simply to characterise it and distinguish it from other approaches. The transition to 'theory' The growth of critical theory in the post-war period seems to comprise a series of 'waves', each associated with a specific decade, and all aimed against the liberal humanist consensus just illustrated, which had been established between the 1930s and the 1950s. In the 1960s, firstly, there were two older, but still unas- similated, rival new approaches, these being Marxist criticism, which had been pioneered in the 1930s and then reborn in the 1960s, and psychoanalytic criticism, which was of the same vintage and was similarly renewing itself in the 1960s. At the same time two new approaches were mounting vigorous direct assaults on liberal humanist orthodoxies, namely linguistic criticism, which came into being in the early 1960s, and early forms of feminist criticism, which started to become a significant factor at the end of the decade. Then, in the 1970s news spread in literary-critical circles in Britain and the United States of controversial new critical approaches, in particular structuralism and post-structuralism, both of which originated in France. The effect of these two was so powerful as to produce, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, a situation which was frequently referred to as a 'crisis' or 'civil war' in the discipline of English. The questions these two approaches centred upon concerned matters of language and philosophy, rather than history or context. In the 1980s a shift occurred which is sometimes called the 'turn to history', whereby history, politics, and context were reinstated at the centre of the literary-critical agenda. Thus, in the early 1980s two new forms of political/ historical criticism emerged, new historicism from the United States and cultural materialism from Britain. Both these take what might be called a 'holistic' approach to literature, aiming to integrate literary and historical study while at the same time maintaining some of the insights of the structuralists and post-structuralists of the previous decade. Finally, in the 1990s a general flight from overarching grand explanations seemed to be taking place, and there was what seemed a decisive drift towards dispersal, eclecticism, and 'special- interest' forms of criticism and theory. Thus, the approach known as postcolonialism rejects the idea of a universally applicable Marxist explanation of things and emphasises the separateness or otherness of post-imperial nations and peoples. Likewise, postmodernism stresses the uniquely fragmented nature of much contemporary experience. Feminism, too, shows signs of dissolving into a loose federation known as gender studies, with gay and lesbian texts emerging as distinct fields of literature, and hence implying and generating appropriate and distinct critical approaches: also part of this 1990s federation is black feminist (or 'womanist') criticism. The necessary limits on a book like the present one make it impossible to include everything, and for the time being it does not venture beyond postcolonialism and postmodernism. Some recurrent ideas in critical theory These different approaches each have their separate traditions and histories, but several ideas are recurrent in critical theory and seem to form what might be regarded as its common bedrock. Hence, it makes some sense to speak of 'theory' as if it were a single entity with a set of underlying beliefs, as long as we are aware that doing so is a simplification. Some of these recurrent underlying ideas of theory are listed below. 1. Many of the notions which we would usually regard as the basic 'givens' of our existence (including our gender identity, our individual selfhood, and the notion of literature itself) are actually fluid and unstable things, rather than fixed and reliable essences. Instead of being solidly 'there' in the real world of fact and experience, they are 'socially constructed', that is, dependent on social and political forces and on shifting ways of seeing and thinking. In philosophical terms, all these are contingent categories (denoting a status which is temporary, provisional, 'circumstance-dependent') rather than absolute ones (that is, fixed, immutable, etc.). Hence, no overarching fixed 'truths' can ever be established. The results of all forms of intellectual enquiry are provisional only. There is no such thing as a fixed and reliable truth (except for the statement that this is so, presumably). The position on these matters which theory attacks is often referred to, in a kind of shorthand, as essentialism, while many of the theories discussed in this book would describe themselves as anti-essentialist. 2. Theorists generally believe that all thinking and investigation is necessarily affected and largely determined by prior ideological commitment. The notion of disinterested enquiry is therefore untenable: none of us, they would argue, is capable of standing back from the scales and weighing things up dis- passionately: rather, all investigators have a thumb on one side or other of the scales. Every practical procedure (for instance, in literary criticism) presupposes a theoretical perspective of some kind. To deny this is simply to try to place our own theoretical position beyond scrutiny as something which is 'com- monsense' or 'simply given'. This contention is problematical, of course, and is usually only made explicit as a counter to specific arguments put forward by opponents. The problem with this view is that it tends to discredit one's own project along with all the rest, introducing a relativism which disables argument and cuts the ground from under any kind of commitment. 3. Language itself conditions, limits, and predetermines what we see. Thus, all reality is constructed through language, so that nothing is simply 'there' in an unproblematical way - everything is a linguistic/ textual construct. Language doesn't record reality, it shapes and creates it, so that the whole of our universe is textual. Further, for the theorist, meaning is jointly constructed by reader and writer. It isn't just 'there' and waiting before we get to the text but requires the reader's contribution to bring it into being. 4. Hence, any claim to offer a definitive reading would be futile. The meanings within a literary work are never fixed and reliable, but always shifting, multi-faceted and ambiguous. In literature, as in all writing, there is never the possibility of establishing fixed and definite meanings: rather, it is characteristic of language to generate infinite webs of meaning, so that all texts are necessarily self-contradictory, as the process of deconstruction will reveal. There is no final court of appeal in these matters, since literary texts, once they exist, are viewed by the theorist as independent linguistic structures whose authors are always 'dead' or 'absent'. 5. Theorists distrust all 'totalising' notions. For instance, the notion of 'great' books as an absolute and self-sustaining category is to be distrusted, as books always arise out of a particular socio-political situation, and this situation should not be suppressed, as tends to happen when they are promoted to 'greatness'. Likewise, the concept of a 'human nature', as a generalised norm which transcends the idea of a particular race, gender, or class, is to be distrusted too, since it is usually in practice Eurocentric (that is, based on white European norms) and androcentric (that is, based on masculine norms and attitudes). Thus, the appeal to the idea of a generalised, supposedly inclusive, human nature is likely in practice to marginalise, or denigrate, or even deny the humanity of women, or disadvantaged groups. Tosum up these five points: for theory: Politics is pervasive, Language is constitutive, Truth is provisional, Meaning is contingent, Human nature is a myth. If, at later points in this book, or later in your study of theory, you begin to find that your grasp of things is slipping it would be worthwhile coming back to this list to remind yourself of the basic frame of mind which theory embodies. It is very likely that a concept with which you are having difficulty will turn out to be a version of one of these positions. Selected reading Books representing the liberal humanist position Alter, Robert, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideogical Age (Simon and Schuster, 1989; rpt. W. W. Norton, 1997, with a new preface). Polemical anti-theoretical introduction, 'The disappearance of reading', and final chapter, 'Multiple readings and the bog of indeterminacy'; the chapters in between are on traditional literary critical concepts such as 'Character', 'Style' and 'Perspective'. Gardner, Helen, In Defence of the Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1984). Based on a course of lectures responding to a book by Frank Kermode (then a champion of theory). A vigorous defence of traditional human- ist scholarship and criticism against what she saw as the malign influence of theory. Gribble, James, Literary Education: A Re-evaluation (Cambridge University Press, 1983). One of several books from the early 1980s which mounted a defence of traditional literary scholarship against theory. See chapter one, 'Literature and truth': chapter four, 'The subjection of criticism to theory': chapter five 'Literature and the education of the emotions'. Steiner, George, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (Faber, 1989; rpt. University of Chicago Press, 1991). Steiner is a polyglot, polymath humanist whose work has never been anti-theoretical. In the three long essays in this book he grapples with the problem of relating theoretical accounts to the actual experience of responding to literature and the other arts. Watson, George, The Certainty of Literature: Essays in Polemic (Harvester, 1989). Watson's opposition to contemporary theory is absolute and unqualified, as the title of this book implies. Books about the rise of English as an academic subject Baldick, Chris, The Social Mission of English Studies 1848-1932 (Oxford University Press, 1983). A clearly argued history of literary criticism in England from Matthew Arnold. Detailed, and with a clear introduction. Doyle, Brian, 'The hidden history of English Studies' in Re-Reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson (Methuen, 1982), pp. 17-31. Asks 'why and how did English become a major subject in higher education?' An influential account, though the emphasis is slightly different from the one I have offered here. Eagleton, Terry, 'The rise of English', chapter one in his Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1983; 2nd edn. University of Minnesota Press, 1996). A polemical and very readable account of the growth of 'English', broadly in line with Doyle's. Graff, Gerald, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (University of Chicago Press, 1987). A detailed account of the growth of English studies in the United States. Kearney, Anthony, The Louse on the Locks of Literature: John Churton Collins (Scottish Academic Press, 1986). Collins was a nineteenth-century pioneer of English studies. This enjoyable book includes an account (on which I have drawn in the relevant part of this chapter) of debates in the press and Parliament on the proposed new academic subject of 'English'. Mulhern, Francis, The Moment of Scrutiny (New Left Books, 1979). Scrutiny was the journal founded by F. R. Leavis in 1932, so this widely respected book continues the story of 'English' from where Baldick (above) leaves off. Palmer, D. J., The Rise of English Studies (Oxford University Press, 1965). A readable account. Potter, Stephen, The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education (Cape, 1937, rpt. Folcroft, 1973). An early account of early English. The specimen examination papers from the nineteenth century (included in the appendices) are very revealing. Tillyard, E. M. W., The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge (London, Bowes & Bowes, 1958). Continues the story of English from where Potter (above) leaves off, describing Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s and the early careers of Richards, Empson, and Leavis. Palmer, Potter, and Tillyard together provide what might be called liberal humanism's own account of its development, distinctly different from that offered by Baldick, Doyle, Eagleton, and Mulhern. 2 Structuralism Structuralist chickens and liberal humanist eggs Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908—) and the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980). It is difficult to boil structuralism down to a single 'bottom-line' proposition, but if forced to do so I would say that its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation - they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of (hence the term 'structuralism'). Structuralism was imported into Britain mainly in the 1970s and attained widespread influence, and even notoriety, throughout the 1980s. The structures in question here are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world and organising experience, rather than objective entities already existing in the external world. It follows from this that meaning or significance isn't a kind of core or essence inside things: rather, meaning is always outside. Meaning is always an attribute of things, in the literal sense that meanings are attributed to the things by the human mind, not contained within them. But let's try to be specific about what it might mean to think primarily in terms of structures when considering literature. Imagine that we are confronted with a poem, Donne's 'Good Morrow', let's say. Our immediate reaction as structuralists would probably be to insist that it can only be understood if we first have a clear notion of the genre which it parodies and subverts. Any single poem is an example of a particular genre, and the genre and the example relate to each other rather as a phrase spoken in English relates to the English language as a structure with all its rules, its conventions, and so on. In the case of Donne's poem the relevant genre is the alba or 'dawn song', a poetic form dating from the twelfth century in which lovers lament the approach of daybreak because it means that they must part. But the alba, in turn, can hardly be understood without some notion of the concept of courtly love, and, further, the alba, being a poem, presupposes a knowledge of what is entailed in the conventionalised form as utterance known as poetry. These are just some of the cultural structures which Donne's poem is part of. You will see that your structuralist 'approach' to it is actually taking you further and further away from the text, and into large and comparatively abstract questions of genre, history, and philosophy, rather than closer and closer to it, as the Anglo-American tradition demands. Now if we use the crude analogy of chickens and eggs, we can regard the containing structures (the alba, courtly love, poetry itself as a cultural practice) as the chicken, and the individual example (Donne's poem in this case) as the egg. For structuralists, determining the precise nature of the chicken is the most important activity, while for the liberal humanists the close analysis of the egg is paramount. Thus, in the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures which contain them. These structures, as I suggested at the start of this section, are usually abstract such as the notion of the literary or the poetic, or the nature of narrative itself, rather than 'mere' concrete specifics like the history of the alba or of courtly love, both of which, after all, we could quite easily find out about from conventional literary history. The arrival of structuralism in Britain and the USA in the 1970s caused a great deal of controversy, precisely because literary studies in these countries had traditionally had very little interest in large abstract issues of the kind structuralists wanted to raise. The so-called 'Cambridge revolution' in English studies in the 1920s had promulgated the opposite to all this: it enjoined close study of the text in isolation from all wider structures and contexts: it was relentlessly 'text-based' and tended to exclude wider questions, abstract issues, and ideas. Structuralism in that sense turned English studies on its head, and devalued all that it had held dear for around half a century, asking long-repressed questions such as: 'What do we mean by "literary"?' 'How do narratives work?' 'What is a poetic structure?' Traditional critics, in a word, did not welcome the suggestion that they ought to switch their attention from eggs to chickens. Signs of the fathers - Saussure Though structuralism proper began, as we said, in the 1950s and 1960s, it has its roots in the thinking of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure was a key figure in the development of modern approaches to language study. In the nineteenth century linguistic scholars had mainly been interested in historical aspects of language (such as working out the historical development of languages and the connections between them, and speculating about the origins of language itself). Saussure concentrated instead on the patterns and functions of language in use today, with the emphasis on how meanings are maintained and established and on the functions of grammatical structures. But what exactly did Saussure say about linguistic structures which the structuralists later found so interesting? This can be summarised as three pronouncements in particular. Firstly, he emphasised that the meanings we give to words are purely arbitrary, and that these meanings are maintained by convention only. Words, that is to say, are 'unmotivated signs', meaning that there is no inherent connection between a word and what it designates. The word 'hut', for instance, is not in any way 'appropriate' to its meaning, and all linguistic signs are arbitrary like this. (There is the minor exception of a small number of onomatopoeic words like 'cuckoo' and 'hiss', but even these vary between languages.) Insisting that linguistic signs are arbitrary is a fairly obvious point to make, perhaps, and it is not a new thing to say (Plato said it in Ancient Greek times), but it is a new concept to emphasise (which is always much more important), and the structuralists were interested in the implication that if language as a sign system is based on arbitrariness of this kind then it follows that language isn't a reflection of the world and of experience, but a system which stands quite separate from it. This point will be further developed later. Secondly, Saussure emphasised that the meanings of words are (what we might call) relational. That is to say, no word can be defined in isolation from other words. The definition of any given word depends upon its relation with other 'adjoining' words. For example, that word 'hut' depends for its precise meaning on its position in a 'paradigmatic chain', that is, a chain of words related in function and meaning each of which could be substituted for any of the others in a given sentence. The paradigmatic chain in this case might include the following: hovel shed hut house mansion palace The meaning of any one of these words would be altered if any one of the others were removed from the chain. Thus, 'hut' and 'shed' are both small and basic structures, but they are not quite the same thing: one is primarily for shelter (a night-watchman's hut, for instance), while the other is primarily for storage: without the other, each would have to encompass both these meanings, and hence would be a different word. Likewise, a mansion can be defined as a dwelling which is bigger and grander than a mere house, but not as big and grand as a palace. Thus, we define 'mansion' by explaining how its meaning relates to that of the two words on either side of it. If we have paired opposites then this mutually defining aspect of words is even more apparent: the terms 'male' and 'female', for example, mainly have meaning in relation to each other: each designates the absence of the characteristics included in the other, so that 'male' can be seen as mainly meaning 'not female', and vice versa. Similarly, we could have no concept of 'day' without the linked concept of 'night', no notion of 'good' without a 'bad' to define it against. This 'relational' aspect of language gave rise to a famous remark of Saussure's: 'In a language there are only differences, without fixed terms'. All words, then, exist in 'differencing networks', like these 'dyads', or paired opposites, and like the paradigmatic chain of 'dwelling place' words given earlier. Saussure used a famous example to explain what he meant by saying that there are no intrinsic fixed meanings in language - the example of the 8.25 Geneva to Paris express train (see the Course, pp. 108-9, and Jonathan Culler's discussion of this example in Structuralist Poetics, p. 11). What is it that gives this train its identity? It isn't anything material, since each day it will have a different engine and carriages, different drivers and passengers, and so on. If it is late, it won't even leave at 8.25. Does it even have to be a train? I once asked at Southampton station for the Brighton train, and the ticket collector pointed to a bus standing outside the station and said, 'That's it'. It was a Sunday, and because of engineering works on the line a bus service w

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