The 20th Century Literary Theory Lecture One: Introduction

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The 20th Century Literary TheoryLecture
OneIntroduction
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The problem of theory

• literary criticism became theory-oriented,
  especially in the 1980s.
• No interpretation of a text was considered to be
  serious without a theoretical background.
• Theory can be seen as the armour of the critic.
• It provides him or her with systematic inventory
  of points of view and techniques of textual
  interpretation
• However, the danger of too much theory can be
  that it outgrows the text to be understood.
• It becomes a mere technical jargon which rattles
  above the text.
• Therefore, it precisely serves the avoidance of
  the experience based encounter.
• This might even lead to a catharsis-resistent
  reading.

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The problem of theory

• The critic should remain in command of the
  various theories.
• He or she should apply often more than one theory
  to the text.
• The critic should select the most appropriate
  theories by paying close attention to the nature
  of the text.
• The nature of the text will invite or even
  provoke certain theoretical approaches.

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Theoretical Approaches

• After the war of theories in the 1980s, some of
  the 20th century approaches dissolved into more
  recent ones.
• Dominant theories tend to live side by side
• Critics quietly adhere to their own favourites.
• The dominant 20th century critical approaches can
  be put into two major categories
• One tradition focuses primarily on the text,
• The other, first and foremost, focuses on the
  context.

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Theoretical Approaches

• We are going to study four critical approaches
  that focus primarily on the text
• New Criticism
• Russian Formalism
• Structuralism
• Deconstruction
• We are going to study two critical approaches
  that focus primarily on the context
• The Political Reading of Feminism
• Postcolonial Criticism and Theory

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New Criticism

• New Criticism emerged partly in Cambridge,
  England in the works of I.A. Richards and William
  Empson in the 1930s, and partly in the United
  States in the 1940s and 50s, represented by
  Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Allan Tate,
  etc.
• Its basic principle was the close reading of the
  text without taking into consideration the
  writers life, the historical background, etc.,
  and operated with such interpretative tools as
  metaphor, metonymy and irony.

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Russian Formalism

• Russian Formalism developed in the 1920s.
• For a long time, it remained uninformed by
  Structuralism in the works of such theoreticians
  as Propp and Shklovsky.
• A careful distinction was made between story
  and plot.
• Shklovsky offered the concept of
  defamiliarization, which means that literary
  representation is able to show well-known
  phenomena in a totally new, startling light.

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Structuralism

• Today, structuralism is largely outdated but
  other theories has developed in an active debate
  with it e.g. Deconstruction
• Structuralism first emerged as a linguistic
  theory developed by the Geneva linguist Ferdinand
  de Saussure at the beginning of the 20th century.
• Saussure claims that language is a system of
  signs
• The value of each sign is assigned to language by
  all the other signs making up the system.

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Structuralism

• It became a form of literary study in the works
  of Roman Jakobson, Gerald Genette, etc.
• The main idea of literary Structuralism is that
  the total description of the system of signs
  constituting a literary work is identical with
  its meaning.

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Deconstruction

• Deconstruction emerged in the works of the French
  Jacques Derrida and the Belgian-American Paul de
  Man.
• It is a response to both Structuralism and New
  Criticism.
• The basic assumption is that a text is always
  more threatening and dynamic.
• No description could exhaust its meaning.
• A disturbing, unaccountable residue will always
  remain.
• This residue will go on, generating newer
  meanings in an endless chain of signifiers.

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The Political Reading of Feminism

• Political criticism in general claims that
  literary texts always have a political dimension.
• Literary texts can be shown to take specific
  stances to social issues, either through what
  they say or what they do not say.
• Feminism has called attention to pervasive male
  bias in Western literature.
• It has rediscovered forgotten female writers,
  rewriting the canon.
• The major figures are Simon de Beauvoir, Virginia
  Woolf, Helene Cixous, Elaine Showalter.

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Postcolonial Criticism and Theory

• The postcolonial theory critically analyses the
  relationship between colonizer and colonized.
• It focuses on the role of texts, literary or not,
  in the colonial enterprise.
• It examines how the texts construct the
  colonizers masculine superiority and the
  colonizeds inferiority as well as the
  legitimization of colonialization.
• The main thinkers of the theory are Homi Bhabha,
  Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak.