• What is literary criticism?

• Literary criticism – “ a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world “ Matthew Arnold

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Definitions of Criticism, Theory & Literature

(TSL 3102)

• It attempts to formulate aesthetic and methodological principles on the basis of which the critic can evaluate a text.

• Its relationship to a work of art – literary critics ask basic questions concerning the philosophical, psychological, functional and descriptive nature of a text when analyzing a work of art.

• A discerning activity that we can

- explore those questions that help define our humanity

- evaluate our actions

- or simply increase our appreciation and enjoyment of both a literary work and our fellow human beings• Traditionally, literary critics involve

themselves in either theoretical or practical criticism

• Theoretical criticism formulates theories, principles and tenets regarding the nature and value of art. Provides the necessary framework for practical criticism by citing general aesthetic and moral principles of art.

• Practical criticism (applied criticism) applies the theories and tenets of theoretical criticism to a particular work/text

• Thus the basis for any form of criticism is literary theory

• What is Literary Theory?• A framework in which we articulate and

piece together the various elements of our practical criticism into a coherent, unified body of knowledge

• How?• Our response to any text or the

principles of practical criticism we apply it – is largely conditioned by our past experiences that help to shape how we arrive at meaning in fiction.

• Consciously or unconsciously, we have developed a mind-set or framework concerning our expectations when reading a novel, a short story, a poem or any other type of literature.

• We choose to value or uphold as good or bad, moral or immoral, beautiful or ugly within a given text – depends on this ever-evolving framework

• A well articulated literary theory assumes that an innocent reading of a text or a sheer emotional or spontaneous reaction to a work cannot exist, for theory questions the assumptions, beliefs and feelings of readers asking why they respond to a text in a certain way.

• How we as readers make meaning out of or from the text will depend upon the mental framework that each of us has developed concerning the nature of reality

• This framework or worldview consists of the assumptions or presuppositions that we all hold (either consciously or unconsciously) concerning the basic makeup of our world

• Questions like: - what is the basis of morality or ethics?

- what is the meaning of human history?

- what are beauty, truth and goodness?

- Is there an ultimate reality?

• Our answers to these questions do not remain static

• Why? Because we interact with other people, with our environment and with our own personal philosophies, and continue to grapple with these issues, often changing our ideas.

• But it is our answers that largely determine our response to a literary text.

• It is upon such a conceptual framework that rests literary theory

• Whether such a framework is well-reasoned, or simply a matter of habit and past experiences, readers respond to works of art via their worldview

• From this philosophical core of beliefs derive evaluations of the goodness, the worthiness and the value of art itself

• Based on this worldview as a yardstick, readers will respond to individual works of literature, ordering and valuing each separate or collective experience in the work based on the system of beliefs housed in their worldviews

• When we read, we are constantly interacting with the text.

• According to M. Rosenblatt, the relationship between the reader and the text is transactional, not linear – it is a process or event that takes place at a particular time and place in which the text and the reader condition each other.

• The reader and the text transact or interact, creating meaning – meaning does not exist either solely within the reader’s mind or solely within the text – but in the interaction between them

• Readers can reject, revise or assimilate into the resource with which they engage their world. Through this transactional experience, readers consciously and unconsciously amend their worldview

• No metatheory exist – no one overarching literary theory that encompasses all possible interpretations of a text suggested by its readers because:

- no literary theory can account for all the various factors included in everyone’s conceptual framework

- readers all have different literary experiences• Each literary theory asks valid questions to

and about the text and no one theory is capable of exhausting all legitimate questions to be asked about the text

• The kinds of questions asked by the various literary theories often differ widely

• Each theory focuses primarily on one element of the interpretive process, although in practice different theories may utilize several areas of concern in interpreting a text

• Egs:- one theory stresses the work itself – the text alone contains all the necessary information to arrive at an interpretation – this theory isolates the text from its historical/sociological setting and focuses on the various literary forms found in the text – figures of speech, diction, style

• Another theory places the text in its historical, political, sociological, religious and economic setting and

arrives at an interpretation that both the text’s author and its original audience would support• Still another theory focuses on the text’s

audience - asks how the readers’ emotions and personal backgrounds affect a text’s interpretation.

• Thus regardless of each literary theory’s critical orientation, it establishes its own theoretical basis and then proceeds to develop its own methodology -readers can apply this theory to an actual text

• Although each reader’s theory and methodology for arriving at a text’s interpretation will differ, these groups of readers and critics declare allegiance to a similar core of beliefs and band together - “founding” different schools of criticism

• Egs:- Marxist critics – critics who believe that social and historical concerns must be highlighted in a text or a reader-response critics concentrate on the reader’s personal reactions to the text

• Why the need for literary theories?

• To see through different lenses offered by theories since various schools of criticism asks different questions about the same work of literature - many options to choose from - readers can broaden their understanding not only of the text but also of their society, their culture, tolerance for other people’s beliefs and their own humanity

• To enable us to have different perspectives and visions, including re-visions, we would otherwise be denied and be unaware of. Without these alternative perspectives other than our own, - in danger of reading a text only through a single lens. Theory - an intervening tool that seeks to interpret and intercede in the world

• Help us to think - literary theories are thinking tools, offering new ways to think about our world – thinking through of concepts and arguments, often redefining and critiquing prior work – we participate in the seemingly endless historical conversation and debate concerning the nature of humanity and its concerns as expressed in literature itself

• To practise self-examination – a reflective practice – on our own terms and those supplied by others – raising and exploring questions about how texts and selves and societies are formed and maintained and for whose benefit

• In conclusion, theories may propose but it is particular writers, materials and readers that dispose

• What is Literature?• Definition – debatable – various

attempts to define literature• The word ‘literature’ derives from the

Latin littera meaning ‘letter of the alphabet’. The word came into English via court French, in the late 14th century and for the next few centuries simply meant ‘acquaintance with books’ and ‘book learning’ in general. Synonymous with what we now call ‘literacy’

• This generalised sense of literature means ‘anything written on a subject ‘ persists to the present day (scientific or advertising literature). Indicates very little attempt to distinguish the kinds of books. Only criterion – books of some value

• Only since the late 18th and early 19th centuries that ‘literature’ has become narrowed in meaning to its current dominant sense of creative or imaginative writing of a specifically aesthetic kind – Dr Johnson in his Life of Cowley (1779)

– ‘An author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have set him high in the ranks of literature’ ▲ • Correspondingly, in the same period

narrowings and elevations of meaning can be observed in the terms artist – increasingly distinguished from the humbler term artisan – and author – increasingly distinguished from the more general term writer

• Fictional writing – increasingly distinguished from a category of specifically factual writing just as story – separated out from history

• Thus ‘Literature’ from the late 18th century onwards – certain kinds of artistic or aesthetic writing which were reckoned to be especially creative and imaginative, fictional (not factual), stories (not histories) and to be the product of especially gifted or talented writers called authors. ●

• The ramifications of such a division and hierarchy – fundamentally significant – underpin the sorting of texts and the sorting of whole subject areas into distinct disciplines – ‘literature’ was put on a special pedestal of its own.

• Terry Eagleton in his book Literary Theory – An Introduction (1996) highlighted some debatable characteristics:-

• 1. If literature is ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing, does this imply that history, philosophy and natural science are uncreative and unimaginative? Eagleton raises this implicit stigmatisation of ‘non-literary’ writings

• Eagleton also raises the point that ‘literature’ is perhaps definable not according to whether it is fictional or ‘imaginative’ but it uses language in peculiar ways – in the words of the Russian critic Roman Jakobson – literature is a kind of writing which represents an ‘organized violence committed on ordinary speech’

• This school of criticism – Formalism – led by Roman Jakobson – analyzes the literary form in literature – application of linguistics to literature – study how the literary devices transforms and intensifies ordinary

language, deviates systematically from everyday speech – ‘estranging’ or ‘defamiliarising’ effect - brings the reader – fuller, more intimate experience.• Implies that one to be able to spot a

deviation is able to identify the norm it swerves – works only against a certain normative linguistic background – if the norm is changed it ceases to be literary!

• Eagleton – formalism is not out to define ‘literature’ but ‘literariness’ – special uses of language in literary texts and also others

2. Eagleton – literature is ‘non-pragmatic’ discourse – serves no immediate practical purpose but refers to a general state of affairs – a certain ‘way of talking’ – a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself• But this cannot be objectively defined

– leaves definition of literature up to how somebody decides to read – not to the nature of what is written

• no ‘essence’ of literature – any writing may be read non-pragmatically – if that is what reading a text as literature means, just as any writing may be read ‘poetically’ Eg: If I pore over the railway timetable not to discover a train connection but to stimulate in myself general reflections on the speed and complexity of modern existence, then I might be said to be reading it as literature

• Many of the works studied in literature in academic institutions were ‘constructed’ to be read as literature but also true that many of them were not

• A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature; or it may start off as literature and then come to be valued for its archaeological significance:

• “Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them” – Eagleton

• 3. By and large people term “literature” writing as good – value judgement – not necessary the writing has to be ‘fine’ to be literary, but it has to be of the kind that is

judged fine– it may be an inferior example of a generally valued mode – suggests that ‘literature’ is a highly valued kind of writing – therefore it’s not objective in the sense of being eternally given and immutable – eg Shakespeare can cease to be literature – since value judgements are variable – literature is thus not a stable entity by definition• The literary canon – the great tradition of

national literature – is thus a construct – fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time – there is no such

thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself • Eagleton highlights one of the reasons why

certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries – we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns – still share many preoccupations with the work itself but people may not have actually been valuing the same work at all even though they may think they have – Eg ‘Our’ Shakespeare is not identical with that of his contemporaries because different historical periods have

constructed a ‘different’ Shakespeare• In other words all literary works are

‘rewitten’ by the societies which read them – indeed there is no reading which is not also a ‘re-writing’ – the reason why literature is an unstable entity.

• 4. Our values which inform and underlie our factual statements we make is part of what is meant by ‘ideology’ – the ways in which what we say and believe

connects with power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in –eg the assumptions we bring to a poem and what fulfilments we anticipate we will derive from it are shaped by our habits of perception and interpretations which are socially structured ways of perceiving the world – value judgements are closely related to social ideologies – refer to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others• Eagleton’s view of the criteria that counts as

literature is thus ideological and value-laden

• In conclusion – the 18th century definition of literature in the narrow and elevated sense - dominated departments of literature until quite recently

• Now – there are signs of a return to Literary Studies – more resemble its pre-Romantic shape – a return to literature as ‘book learning’ in particular and the processes and products of reading and writing in general

• Another - there is a tendency to foreground the social-historical and power dimensions of various kinds of writing and reading by characterising them as discourses

Literary theorising from Aristotle to Leavis – some key moments

• The theoretical position about literature were never explicitly formulated by liberal humanists, at least in Britain, and that everything remained implicit

• What, then, constituted the body of theory about literature that had existed for many centuries as an available under-pinning for the study of literature?

• It goes back to Greek and Latin originals.

• Critical theory – long pre-dates the literary criticism of individual works

• The earliest work of theory – Aristotle’s Poetics – the nature of literature – 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 – 1st critic to develop a ‘reader-centred’ approach to literature – his consideration of drama – describe how it affected the audience

• Tragedy, he said, should stimulate the emotions of pity and fear (sympathy for and empathy with the plight of the protagonist) – combination of these emotions – effect of catharsis – whereby emotions are exercised, rather than exorcised, as the audience identifies with the plight of the central character.

• 1st prestigious name in English writing about literature – Sir Philip Sidney - representative scholar, writer and gentleman of the renaissance – regarded as the 1st great English critic-poet - – Apology for Poetry (sometimes called Defence of Poesy) in 1580 – It is the “epitome of the literary criticism of the Italian Renaissance” - first influential piece of literary criticism in English history

• Sidney was intent on expanding the implications of the ancient definition of literature first formulated by the Latin poet Ovid – its mission is ‘docere delictendo’ – to

teach by delighting (close to entertaining)• Sidney also quotes Horace – a poem is ‘a

speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight

• Sidney’s notion of literature as giving pleasure as its primary aim is revolutionary in a religious age where works of fiction and poetry are likely to be denounced as the work of the devil

• Sidney writes about literature in general, not about individual works or writers, defends poetry and decrees it to excel all

• With Sidney begins the English tradition and history of literary criticism

• Literary theory after Sidney – significantly advanced by Samuel in the 18th century

• Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and Prefaces to Shakespeare –both seen as another major step forward in critical theory and the start of the English tradition of practical criticism – first to offer detailed commentary on the work of a single author

• Prior to Johnson – only text subjected to intensive scrutiny – the Bible

• Johnson’s endeavour of literary criticism on non-religious works – marks a significant moment of progress in the development of secular humanism

• After Johnson – a major burgeoning of critical theory in the work of the Romantic poets – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley

• One of the main texts – Wordworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads – product of collaboration between himself & Coleridge – the introduction was added to the 2nd edition of the ballads published in 1800 after the first of 1798 had been met with puzzlement - blends high literature and popular literature – contains literary ballads constructed on the model of the popular oral ballads of ordinary country people

• Original readers of Lyrical Ballads disliked the abandonment of the conventions of verbal decorum – conventions had imposed a high degree of artificiality on poetic language – different from language of ordinary everyday speech

• Wordsworth & Coleridge – trying to make their poetic language as much like prose as possible, avoiding the conventions of diction and verbal structure that had held sway for a long time

• Preface to Lyrical Ballads – 1 of the significant critical works in literary theory – aims to provide a rationale for the critic’s own poetic work

and to educate the audience for it. It 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 2nd significant work from the Romantic era is

Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria – much of it addresses the ideas contained in Wordworth’s Preface – considers that Wordsworth writes his best poetry when he is furthest away from adherence to his own theories of what poetry should be

• Later, Coleridge disagrees completely that language of poetry must strive to become more like the language of prose – saw this as an impoverishment of the poetic effect

• This 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 – language entertains by its ‘fictive’ qualities – source of the aesthetic effect

• This is connoted in Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821) – sees poetry as essentially engaged in what a group of 20th century Russian critics (Formalists) later called ‘defamiliarisation’

• Shelley anticipates this term – 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 (Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919) – distinction made between the author (who is the person behind the work) and the writer (who is the ‘person’ in the work)

• 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

• The anticipation of the Freudian notion of the mind made up of conscious and unconscious elements is registered by Shelley a hundred years earlier:-

“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 its approach or of its departure”

• The idea of the unconscious - essential one in Romanticism - 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 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 – unconscious – ‘spirit’ into which it erupts - unconscious

• Keats’ idea of ‘negative capability’ also amounts to this same privileging of the unconscious, this same desire to allow it scope to work – ‘negative capability’ – ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’

• The critical writings of the Romantics reflect the many anticipations of the concerns of critical theory today

• After the Romantics the main developments in critical theory – work of mid and late Victorians – George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and Henry James

• George Eliot – her critical work ranges from classical and continental writers and philosophical issues as did Coleridge’s

• Two distinct ‘tracks’ in the development of English criticism

1. From Samuel Johnson & Matthew Arnold to T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis – text-led – practical criticism – close analysis of the work of particular writers – ‘close reading’

2. Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, George Eliot & Henry James ideas-led – tends to tackle big general issues concerned with literature: -

- how are literary works structured?

- how do they affect readers /audience?

- 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 the philosophical point of view?

• ‘Track 2’ preoccupations – similar to concerns of the critical theorists who became prominent from the 1960s onwards

• 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 – gave them 20th century currency

• Arnold’s concerns:

- decline of religion would leave an increasingly dividedsociety with no common system of beliefs, values and images – disastrous consequences

- saw literature as possible replacement for religion – believes the middle classes on whom the burden & responsibility of democracy largely fell – debased by

materialism and philistinism

- role of critic – help such people to recognise ‘the best that has been known and

thought in the world’ – thus enable them to give individual assent to the canon of great works – the collected wisdom of the ages - stresses the importance for literature of remaining ‘disinterested’ – means politically detached and uncommitted to any specific programme of action – goal of literature – attain pure disinterested knowledge - simply appreciate ‘the object as in itself it really is’ without wanting to press the insight gained into any specific action ●

- his key literary-critical device – notion of Touchstone – using aspects of the literature of the past as a means of measuring & assessing the literature of today – advises that we should ‘have always in mind lines and expressions of the great masters and apply them as a Touchstone to other poetry’• 1st half of 20th century – key critical names in

Britain – F.R. Leavis, T.S. Eliot, William Empson & I. A. Richards – all from Cambridge except Eliot from Harvard

• Responsible in pioneering English School in the 1920s

& 1930s – powerful influence on the teaching of English worldwide up to the 1970s• Eliot’s contribution to the canon of received

critical ideas - the greatest• His major critical ideas –

1. the notion of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ – a way of describing the special qualities of mind and sensibility found in the Metaphysical poets

2. the notion of poetic ‘impersonality’ (Tradition and the Individual Talent) - sees poetry not as an outpouring of personal emotion and 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 – not those which are most original but those in which the voice of his predecessors can be most clearly heard and speaking through him – thus distinction between the mind of the individual, experiencing human being and the voice which speaks in the poetry – not an original thought – Shelley – had something very like it in his Defence of Poetry - but Eliot was the 1st to make it the cornerstone of a whole poetic aesthetic

3. the notion of the ‘ objective correlative’ (his essay on Hamlet) – 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 – showing rather than telling• The most influential British critic prior to the

theory movement – F.R. Leavis – a British liberal humanist

• Like Arnold he assumed that the study and appreciation of literature – pre-condition to to the health of society

• Like Arnold – he rejected any attempt to politicise either literature or criticism directly

• Differ from Arnold – questions major established figures – through close textual scrutiny of their works – Arnold – took for granted the pantheon of past great writers – did not question – encourage the amateur – if you have read the best and can identify its qualities – confident of looking at new writings and reach a true judgement on it

• Looks at literary works in 2 aspects:- - gives the impression of analyzing the text but he is really paraphrasing it - his approach is overwhelmingly moral – purpose – to teach us about life & to transmit humane values• Weakness – his critical terms are never properly

defined• Challenged by Rene Wellek in the 1930s –

points out that Leavis’ practical criticism is not enough – he ought to spell out the theoretical assumptions on which his readings and his procedures are based – make it more explicit

• Leavis declined the challenge – implication – theory’s general response to this liberal humanist method – natural and take-for-granted way of ‘doing’ literature

• Thus ‘literature’ becomes more isolated and claims independence from language studies, from historical considerations and from philosophical questions – this subject held together from 1930s – 1960s on these demarcations ●

• William Empson – Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) - extreme ‘text-led’ type of track 1 British criticism – ultra close readings of texts without references to the wider context – T.S. Eliot calls this ‘lemon-squeezer’ school of criticism – textual surgery on ‘verbal difficulty’ approaching the frontiers of language looking into a void of linguistic indeterminacy

• Anticipates the post-structuralist views about the unreliability of language as a medium

• Later, Empson drew back from the linguistic void by stressing the autobiographical context in which the literary works are grounded -

– placing language within any context tends to reduce or eliminate ambiguity• I.A. Richards – pioneer of decontextualised

approach to literature – practical criticism – norm in Britain from 1930s to 1970s – roughly same period as ‘New Criticism’ in America

• Method – analyze and comment on anonymous literary texts to arrive at a ‘true judgement’ from first hand opinion

Conclusion – The ‘project’ of ‘theory’ from the 1960s onwards – to re-establish connections between literary study and the 3 academic fields – conflict with the liberal humanist approach – no systematic approach to literary criticism ●• Timeline of critical theories:-- 1920s – 1960s - close reading/practical criticism – liberal humanist approach – Arnold, the Cambridge group & T.S. Eliot- 1960s – resurgence of Marxist criticism (1930s) & psychoanalytic criticism (1930s); 2 new approaches:

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Linguistic criticism and feminist criticism- 1970s – 1980s – structuralism & post-

structuralism – from France (1960s)

- 1980s – new historicism – United States & cultural materialism – Britain- 1990s – postcolonialism & post-

modernism; feminism → gender studies (includes gay and lesbian texts – queer theory) & black feminist/womanist criticism

References:-• Barry. Peter. Beginning Theory – An Introduction

to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2002.

• Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism – An Introduction to Theory and Practice. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1994

• Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory – An Introduction. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996.