Changing
Concepts of Literature & Criticism Since 1968
Now,
literature centers around text. Great literature has been debased to general
literature. Literary criticism is still under the impact of theory. Study of
literature now has been complicated with multiple unstable meanings. While
great literature may indeed be a straw man, literature in general seems to have
come through the Theory Wars, and all the hostilities, renewed. The process of
this change was started with the hands of the French deconstructionists Roland
Barthes and Jacques Derrida in 1960s. Barthes’ book The Death of the Author(1966)
is the landmark of it. The year 1968 when May’s student revolution in Paris dislodged the
authority of meaning is the year of evolution of French poetry as well as
evolution of the concept of literature and criticism through world literature.
Literary criticism is now termed as scientific “specialized genre”. Today,
literary theory is the linguistic, epistemological and philosophical foundation
of literary criticism. In most cases, literature is referred to as the entirety
of written expression with the restriction that not every written document can
be categorized as literature in the more exact sense of the word. The
definitions usually include additional adjectives such as “aesthetic” or
“artistic” to distinguish literary works from texts of everyday use such as
telephone books, newspapers, legal documents and scholarly writings.
In the 1970s news spread in
literary-critical circles in Britain
and U.S.A. of controversial
new critical approaches, in particular structuralism and post- structuralism,
both of which originated in France.
The questions these two approaches centered upon concerned matters of language
and philosophy, rather than history and context. The structuralism theories of
Barthes, expressed in, for example, Mythologies(1957), reveal a very
general interpretation of the term ‘language’ as social practice. He is
concerned with ‘haute cuisine’ and clothes. He interprets social practices
involving food and clothes as the sign systems which function on the same model
as language. It should be added that after 1968, Barthes was associated with
Deconstruction/Post-colonialism. He perceives that the explanation of any sign
system necessitates a theory of meaning/ explanation. This gives rise to the
idea of a ‘metalanguage’ i.e. ‘beyond language’ or ‘second-order language’
which is used to describe/explain/interpret a ‘first-order language’. Given one
metalanguage for explanation, it follows that there may be another in turn, and
a metalanguage may replace ‘a first-order language’. Each order of language implicitly
relies on a metalanguage by which it is explained, and therefore,
deconstruction is placed in the position of becoming a metalanguage itself. His
later theories lead him to other challenging caveats: i) that the author is
dead: the author should be diminished and the reader should be expanded;
“Author is not a person but a function”; readers are co-creators and agents and
authors can’t control their own texts; ii) that there are two basic experiences
to be had in reading: namely plaisir and jouissance; iii) that texts may be
either readily or writerly; and iv) that given the appreciation of certain
codes a text may be analyzed and interpreted as either ‘readerly’ or
‘writerly’. Umberto Eco calls readerly text as ‘close text’ and writerly text
as ‘open text’.
While
Barthes puts text outside text, Derrida brings back text within it. He shows
that a text can be read as saying something quite different from what it
appears to be saying, and that it may read as carrying a plurality of
significance or as saying many different things, contradictory to and
subversive of what may be seen by criticism as a single ‘stable’ meaning. He
says, speech is secondary, writing is primary--- it is logocentrism. A text has
already destroyed itself because of its inherent contradictions and paradoxes.
Literature is a verbal construct. Traditional poetry deals with semantic
meaning only. Textuality is the play of meanings that metaphysics of presence
are the same. He calls meaning ‘transcendental signifier’ in a novel, the
author’s intended meaning are in the text. Text includes marginalia, photographs
etc. Ecritia is more important than logos. The language of criticism attempts
closure which eludes. All reading may be misreading. Henry James’ story the
Figure in the Carpet gives definitive meaning as a mirror, a hallucination,
a persued of final explanation. Jean Baudrillard, another deconstructionist,
comments:” Language takes account of the illusion of language as definitive
stratagem and, through it, of the illusion of the world as infinite trap, as
seduction of the mind, as spiriting away of all our mental faculties. While
it’s a vehicle of meaning, it’s at the same time a superconductor of illusion
and non- meaning” (The Perfect Crime: 1996,104)
Defamiliarization
is a concept and term introduced by Viktor Shklovsky, a famous member of
Russian Formalism. To defamiliarize is to make fresh, new, strange, different
what is familiar and known. Through it the writer modifies the reader’s
habitual perceptions by drawing attention to the artifice of the text. The
classic example analyzed by Shklovsky is Sterne,s Tristram Shandy(1660-67).
Mikhail
Bakhtin’s dialogic criticism is a site for the diagnostic interaction of
multiple voices, or modes of discourse, each of which is not merely a verbal
but a social phenomenon, and as such is the product of manifold determinants
that are specific to a class, social group, and speech community. His prime
interest was in the novel, and especially in the ways that the voices that
constitute the text of any novel disrupt the authority of the author’s single voice.
He analyzed Dostoevsky’s Crime &
Punishment as a classic paradigm of polyphonic novel. In Rabelais and His
World
(1984) Bakhtin proposed his concept of
the carnivalesque. It parallels the flouting of authority and inversion of
social hierarchies that, in many cultures, are permitted in a season of
carnival. It does so by introducing a mingling of voices from diverse social
levels that are free to mock and subvert authority.
In the
1980s a shift occurred which is sometimes called the ‘turn of 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 in U.S.A. and cultural
materialism in Britain. New historists like Stephen Greenblatt comments,
literature is the reflection of power-relation and power-struggle. According to
them, Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the police report of Elizabethan age, Antony
and Cleopatra and Plutarch’s history have the same status and value. They
say, there is nothing like text and context. Both are co-texts. Greenblatt
says, “We value the textuality of history and the history of text.” The
boundary of literature and non-;literature is removed. Literature is a part of
socio-cultural context. According to them, sometimes, winning recids the white
space, there some secret dark meaning is spaced. Macherey said, a critic should
delve into the gaps and opinions of writing. According to Greenblatt, New
Historicism is not so much a theory or doctrine of literary criticism as a
textual practice. For example, in Lawrence’s
Women in Love , there is no reference of the First World War, though the
shadow shades all through the novel. On the other hand, Lacan’s theory
“everything is constructed by language and language constructs reality” created
the theory of New Historicism.
Finally, in the 1990s a general
flight from overarching grans 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, postcolonialism rejects
the idea of a universally applicable Marxist explanation of things and
emphasizes the separateness or otherness of post-imperial nations and peoples.
In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said comments, “An artist concerned not so
much with the articulation of the self, but rather with the articulation of
other selves. That’s a challenge.” Guelberger claims of ‘Postcolonial Studies’
that it is a distinctive problematic that can be described as an abstract
combination of all the problems inherent in such newly emergent fields as
minority discourse, Latin American studies, African studies, Caribbean studies,
Chicano studies, and so on, all of which participated in the significant and
overdue recognition that minority cultures are actually majority cultures. A
major element in the postcolonial agenda is to disestablish Eurocentric norms
of literary values and to expand the literary canon to include colonial and
postcolonial writers. There is an increasingly successful movement to include
the innovative novels, poems and plays by such postcolonial writers as African
Chinua Achebe, the Caribbean V.S.Noipaul and the authors from Indian
subcontinent Salman Rusdie, Amitava Ghose etc.The double identity is precisely
what they bring into being. Postcolonial criticism took as its main subject
while representations of colonial countries and criticized these for their
limitations and their bias:thus, critics would discuss the representation of
Africa in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or of Algeria in Camus’ The Outsider.
This corresponds to the early 70s phase of feminist criticism when the
subject-matter was the representation of women by male novelists like Lawrence-
the classic example is Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1979). The second
phase of it involved a turn towards explanations of themselves and their
society of postcolonial writers. At this stage the exploration of diversity,
hybridity and difference become central. This corresponds to the ‘gynotext’
phase feminist criticism. Thus, in postcolonial criticism we might see a split
between variants very directly influenced by deconstruction – such as the works
of Homi Bhabha and Said.
1990s
federation is black feminist or womanist criticism. The thesis that the
language is masculine is developed by Dale Spender in her book Man Made
Language(1981) which also argues that language is not a neutral medium but
one which contains many features which reflect its role as the instrument
through which patriarchy finds expressions. Their main argument is that they
chose to express their own female anger in a series of duplicitous textual
strategies whereby both the angel and the monster, the sweet heroine and the
raging madwoman, are aspects of the author’s self-image, as well as elements of
her treacherous anti-patriarchal strategies. For example, Bertha Rochester, the madwoman in
Jane Eyre. Such a figure is an image of Charlotte Bronte’s own anxiety
and rage. Such analysis comes into the category of what has been called by
Elaine Showalter’s ‘gynocriticism’: that
is, criticism concerned with writing by women and all aspects of their
production and interpretation. A notable book in this genre is Patricia Spacks’
The Female Imagination. French theorists, therefore, have posited the
existence of an ecriture feminine: a way that women have of expressing
themselves totally opposed to the representative aspects of male language and discourse.
It’s by its nature, transgressive, rule-transcending, intoxicated, but the
notion of Cixous raises many problems. The notion of ecriture feminine is found
in the writing of Julia Kristeva. She uses the terms Symbolic and semantic to
designate two different aspects of language.
Ecocriticism
as a concept first arose in the late 1970s. Simply defined, it’s the study of
the relationship between literature and the physical environment, between
culture and nature. The ecocritics reread major literary works from an
ecocentric perspective. They give special canonical emphasis to writers who
foreground nature as a major part of their subjet matter, such as the British
Romantics, Thomas Hardy, John Clair etc. They extend the range of
literary-critical practice by placing a new emphasis on relevant ‘factual’
writing, especially reflective topographical material such as essays, travel
writing, memories and regional literature. They emphasizes ecocentric values of
meticulous observation, collective ethical responsibility, and the claims of
the world beyond ourselves. It repudiates the foundational belief in ‘constructed
ness’.
There is no society in Derrida. There is
only the text to him as if words falls from heaven in a vacuam.Bakhtin grew
aspect of society of language. Greenblatt says, literature is a product of
history. Barthes writes, not for representing world, but for using word. So,
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. Many of the notions which we would usually
regard as the basic-‘givens’ of our existence are actually fluid and unstable
things, rather than fixed and reliable essences. Language itself conditions,
limits, and predetermines. Thus, all reality, is constructed through language,
so that nothing is simply ‘there’ is an unproblematic way – everything is a
textual construct. Theorists destruct all ‘totalizing’ notions. Literatures now
came to mean autobiographies, memories, essays, songs, scripts, journalism—all
equated with literature. Certain recent theoretical movements have undermined
the concept of great literature and the resulting effects for today’s
generalized ‘literature’. Continuum of theory – since the only 1970s wave after
wave of new theories disestablished literature and transformed literary
criticism.
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