New Criticism, Structuralism, Formalism

1835 | English Education Act

• East India Company: officially makes English the medium of instruction in Indian education, and requires the study of English literature

• English has a civilising mission (religion failed, Indians could not be converted to Christianity)

• English Literature is taught to the Indian population as a mould of the English way of life, morals, taste → training of good and faithful company servants, who consent to their own oppression (cf. later: Gramsci) (and today: Indians are still the best circketers)

Victorian Age

• Matthew Arnold: “The Study of Poetry” (1880): “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”

“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865) Criticism: “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”

20th century

• After WW I → Literature turned into a solace, and an alternative to the nightmare of history. English becomes not only a subject, but the supremely civilizing subject, the spiritual essence of social formation.

• In 1917, a group of lecturers at Cambridge University came together to introduce radical innovations in their university’s mainly philological curriculum.

  • E.M. W. Tilyard (1889-1962) and I.A.Richards (1893-1979) want to create a subject that would study English literature in its own right, not just a source of examples of how English was used in Shakespeare’s time, or as pale imitations of Greek and Latin works. As the intellectual inheritors of Arnold, they believe that literature would restore a sense of humanity to the world, in the face of modernity, of the growth of dehumanizing technology and the machine age.

• Lord George Gordon, 1922: "England is sick, and … English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State" → canon formation (T.S. Eliot – tradition)

• Canon: great texts that we should read and admire.

  • origin: biblical writings established as authorised (Council of Trent, 1546).

  • 18th c.: debates over the worth of particular writers. Joseph Warton (1722-1800): “in the first class, I would place only thee sublime and pathetic poets: Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton”

T.S. Eliot “Tradition and Individual Talent” (1919)

Questions:

1. originality vs. intertextuality

2. tradition = canon (present in the mind of the great writer) – challenge to the Romantic idea of originality (→ strong presence of intertextual references in Eliot’s own works)

• The tradition (i.e. canon) is “the storehouse of Western values” → for Eliot: Western values = universal human values

I.A Richards: Practical Criticism (1924)

• literary analysis has to achieve the precision of science (self-legitimation of English as university discipline) + “practical”: morally elevating, has social utility + applied to specific works.

• Influence of Matthew Arnold, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

  • S.T. Coleridge: discussion of Shakespeare’s poetry in Biographia Literaria (1817!)

• work of art: work of a genius → organic unity: nothing can be added or withdrawn (each part contributes to the perfection of the whole), transcends historical time and geographical place

• Poetry “reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order.” → reconciliation of opposites in a harmonious, ideal order even discordant qualities.)

• the poem has an intrinsic artistic worth (independent from any context, incl. the author’s biography) → “close-reading”: an “objective” way of reading literary texts.

• experiment: R. withholds all extra-textual information, and ask his students to interpret the poems themselves → paying attention only to the text’s language- BUT: focus on meaning, on how form contributes to the “one” meaning

• Key Ideas

• The study of literature has a civilizing mission to humanize people and provide values which, in the modern world, can’t be obtained elsewhere.

  • civilizing: a process of forcing people into a fixed, ideal pattern of “Englishness”

• Criticism should make an objective judgement.

  • objective: no interpretation can be objective, because no interpretation happens in a vacuum. (we all have presuppositions coming from our own context + from the ways in which we were educated to read lit.) + the experiment, in order to be scientific, should be repeatable, yet, interpretations always differ from one another.

• At the same time, the reader must demonstrate sensibility to the text, which happens naturally.

  • sensibility, natural response: there is no such thing (cf. above) – if it existed, then why was there a need to teach literature?

• Close reading involves the intense scrutiny of a piece of prose or poetry, concentrating on the words on the page, and disregarding the work’s context. → The literary text has an intrinsic artistic worth, transcending all particularities of time and space.

  • intrinsic value: the judgement of intrinsic worth depends, in fact, on an external context, on the time- and space-specific criteria of those who make the value judgement.

• There is a canon of authoritative list of great works of literature that everyone with sensibility should study and admire.

  • canon: judgements of worth cannot be neutral and disinterested (cf. how a piece becomes canonized as “great”? The process of canonisation is historical and geographical (i.e. not “natural”), it does not happen in a vacuum, there are always vested interests, cultural elite, reviewers, professors in power position, etc.)

American New Criticism

• John Crowe Ransom The New Criticism (1941) 

• Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: Understanding Poetry (four different editions between 1938 and 1976) → becomes a textbook for undergraduate university students. 

• William Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Cleanth Brooks: The Well-Wrought-Urn (1949) 

• W.K. Wimsatt: The Verbal Icon (1954) 

• Poem: “an organic system of relationships, and the poetic quality should never be understood as inhering in one or more factors taken in isolation” → organic unity → more emphasis on form 

Key Ideas of American New Criticism

1. Autonomy of the literary text, i.e. the text is a “verbal icon”, the poem is a “well-wrought urn”. Clear-cut boundary between text and context, the reader needs to focus on the system of relationships that are operating within the text. Literature must be understood “in itself” 

2. Literary artefact: primarily a system of language. In it language operates differently than it does elsewhere, it is governed by a different set of rules.  

3.  Heresy of paraphrase: It is impossible to paraphrase a poem, “a poem should not mean but be”. It is never what a poem says which matters, but what it is.

4. Intentional fallacy: when readers evoke what the author “meant”. What the author intended is never relevant to the literary work, and it is also unavailable. : “Never trust the artist, trust the tale” (D.H. Lawrence) → to invoke the intention of the author is to threaten the integrity of the literary text.  

5. Affective fallacy: when readers convey their own emotional responses to the text. One has to concentrate solely on the work the way in which it brings the diversity of experience into unity. It is not the author that does this, but rather a principle inherent in any good artwork..  

Russian Formalism

• 1916 – 29 | Moscow Linguistic Circle and OPOYAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg. 

• Roman Jakobson: “The subject of literary scholarship is not literature in its totality but literariness i.e. that which makes of a given work a work of literature.” Concerned with the how of literature rather than the what. Form becomes more important than meaning.  

• Viktor Shklovsky: "defamiliarization" of automated perceptions, “defamiliarization” of objects, as if we saw them for the first time - it makes “the stone stony”. 

• Contrast between poetic and practical language

  • Practical language: used to accomplish a goal 

  • Poetic language: foregrounds itself, draws attention to itself: foregrounding - defamiliarises language use as well, by laying bare the device (i.e. language). Poetic language emphasises itself as a medium over the message it contains, foregrounds itself as language.  

Structuralism

• Russian Formalism → Structuralism

• Linguistic determinism (i.e the way we think – and even feel -- is determined by language): 

• Ferdinand de Saussure: Cours de linguistique générale (1916, Course in General Linguistics, 1959) 

  • distinction between langue (competence) and parole (performance) 

  • arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified: “cat”, “macska” refer to the same concept

    • convention determines the sign

    • language determines/structures (our) reality → each language divides up the world in a particular way and differently, constructing different meaningful categories and concepts 

    • before Saussure: reality/referent → language

    • Saussure: signifier + signified = sign

    • language does not touch the real world, but is constitutive of reality, it does not mirror reality, but structures it and makes it meaningful. cf. The colour spectrum (“in reality” colours form a continuum, yet, the concept of specific colours in language divide and constitute the world arbitrarily.)

    • language is inherently performative, rather than constative. → Signs have no referent in reality, only a referential function they have the function to present, rather than re-present reality

  • language is a system of signs, which is itself a system of differences: no item has significance in itself, but derives its significance entirely from its relationship with other signs. Every item is defined by what it is not. (On the phonetic as well as on the semantic level

    • E.g. phonetics - “cat” is cat, because it is not “rat” → the difference between c and r is significant, and significant only because this difference is able to generate meaning Semantics – “hot” is “hot” because it is not “cold”)

    • our thinking is determined by hierarchical binary oppositions: presence (+) / absence (-); male (+) / female(-); light (+) / darkness (-); white (+) / black ( -); etc. -> one term is always privileged (+). Yet, this value attribution is not based on actual facts! → ideology

Deconstruction

• Deconstruction: structuralism does not examine the consequences of the gap between language and world

  • Language cannot but conjure up a reality – reality is absent – we are in a world of absences – our shared “linguistic predicament” 

    • Paul de Man: (1919-1983) – first and foremost a Romanticist 

      • gap between reality and language → language creates reality 

        • e.g. autobiography: writing creates a (coherent, meaningful) life, rather than being created by one’s (chaotic) life 

      • “Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge ‘reality’, but because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature [i.e. language] is a reliable source of information about anything but its own langauage.” (“Resistance to Theory”, 1986. 11.) → take literature as a synonym for language in general!  

  • “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.” (Ibid.): there is a difference between referent (natural reality) and the referential function of language (linguistic reality) → ideology is when we think that the meaning constituted by language is the same as natural reality, when we apply linguistically constructed meanings to the real world (and act accordingly)

  • There is no point of view, which is outside language → we are born into a world of language that determines us (“il n’y a pas de hors texte” – Derrida) 

• emphasis on  ambiguity, on  undecidability

  • no Author, no authority, no presence, no centre, no origin, no essence, no fixed meaning, because the working of language subverts all fixities and definites → this becomes a metaphysical and ontological position → critique of Logocentrism (Logos: order, origin, the spoken word

• deconstruction has strong political and ethical stakes 

  • language is a political force: the referential function of language does not touch the real world, but affects it, it constitutes an imposition upon reality  

  • deconstruction of the hierarchical binary opposition between constative and performative: what camouflages itself as constative is always already performative → the preformative power/the performative violence of all utterances → language is a political force that shapes reality, e.g. it is the imposition of the general upon the particular and the singular. (e.g. a.) The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” during the French. Rev: “all men are equal” – seems to be constative, but is, in fact, performative – men become equal bc. of the declaration. - the violence of language

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

• The language that determines the world and us is a system of differences →  meanings are products of differences, each sign gets its meaning because of its difference from every other sign:

  • difference + emphasis on différAnce: the meaning of each sign changes in time, it means something else in a different context or at a different time + the context is never saturated (see: ‘lying” in WB – it gets various new meanings depending on the context which can never be closed once and for all)  → there is  no closure, the meaning is always deferred  i.e. no definite meaning) + nothing outside the text

  • we cannot have access to any kind of “reality” behind language that could give us the “true” meaning → all our knowledge is mediated through texts:

    • writing is orphaned – absence of the author 

    • deconstruction of the hierarchical binary opposition between literal and metaphorical

  • Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

    • Locke’s language deconstructs itself: it says that rhetoric insinuates wrong ideas, that it mislead judgement, and yet, Locke’s language is plenty of metaphors → there is a difference between what the text says and what it does (this is a focal point for deconstructionist analyses!)

      • there is no “closure” (definitive, fixed meaning), all attempts at “totalisation” (at establishing a total, all encompassing, definitive structure) are vain

      • there is a persistent threat of misreading → no definitive or absolutely true reading is possible

    • speech and writing → showing that the non-privileged term <writing>, is, in fact, the more important, and that everything is, in fact, “writing” 

      • writing (marked by absence) seems to be a supplement to speech (presence) → BUT if speech has to be  supplemented, it is already marked by an absence to be supplemented (Derrida’s analysis of Rousseau’s Confessions) → there is an absence, a lack, within speech → there is always already a trace of absence in presence, and there is always already a trace of writing in speech  

      • via an analysis of Plato: writing both destroys “truth”/memory (aletheia, anamnesis) and serves it → writing is a “pharmakon”: both remedy and poison

        • poison: 1) writing is ambiguous, can be interpreted in many different ways, as opposed to speech, 2) we need writing, if we cannot remember, but true remembrance is always based on interiorisation, and on our capacity to remember → writing (as an exterior supplement) destroys “true” memory 

        • remedy: writing helps memory, we were not able to remember without writing + speech can be just as ambiguous as writing, because both are based on the iterability of the sign