ETI 309Introduction to Contemporary Western Literature

Literary Theory IVReader Response, Post-Structuralism,

Deconstruction, Postmodernism

Reader-Response Criticism• Reader-response criticism

– arose in the 1960s and '70s, in response to formalist interpretations of literature

– focuses on the reader and his or her experience of a literary work (in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the content and form of the work or the author)

– recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation.

– argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance.

Reader-Response Criticism• Central assumptions:– Meaning is not something that is contained within a

text or that can be extracted from it.

– The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value; there is no one "correct" meaning.

– What a text does is more important than what it is.

– Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance (meaning is produced by readers working in conjunction with the structures of the text.

Reader-Response CriticismThree essential issues:

• Meaning is 'social', that is, language and conventions work only as shared meaning, and our way of viewing the world can exist only as shared or sharable. When we read a text, we are participating in social, or cultural, meaning. Response is not merely an individual thing, but is part of culture and history.

• Meaning is contextual; change the context, you often change the meaning.

• Texts constructed as literature, or 'art', have their own codes and practices, and the more we know of them, the more we can 'decode' the text, that is, understand it - consequently, there is in regard to the question of meaning the matter of reader competency, as it is called, the experience and knowledge of decoding literary texts.

Reader-Response Criticism • How does the interaction of text and reader create meaning?

• What does a phrase-by-phrase analysis of a short literary text, or a key portion of a longer text, tell us about the reading experience prestructured by (built into) that text?

• Do the sounds/shapes of the words as they appear on the page or how they are spoken by the reader enhance or change the meaning of the word/work?

• How might we interpret a literary text to show that the reader's response is, or is analogous to, the topic of the story?

• What does the body of criticism published about a literary text suggest about the critics who interpreted that text and/or about the reading experience produced by that text?

“My Papa's Waltz” by Theodore Roethke The whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother's countenanceCould not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.

Structuralism vs. Post-structuralism

• Structuralism, a fashionable movement in France in the 1950s, studied the underlying structures inherent in cultural products (such as texts), utilizing analytical concepts from linguistics, psychology, anthropology etc. to understand and interpret those structures.

• The structuralist movement emphasized logical and scientific results. Many structuralists sought to integrate their work into pre-existing bodies of knowledge.

• Post-structuralism, which emerged in France during the 1960s, can be understood as a body of distinct reactions to structuralism.

Post-structuralism• Post-structuralism holds that the study of underlying structures

is itself culturally conditioned and therefore subject to myriad biases and misinterpretations.

• To understand an object (e.g. one of the many meanings of a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself, and the systems of knowledge which were coordinated to produce the object.

• In this way, post-structuralism positions itself as a study of how knowledge is produced.

• Two key figures in the early post-structuralist movement were Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes.

• The post-structuralist movement is closely related to postmodernism—but the two concepts are not synonymous.

Post-structuralism• The approach concerns itself with the ways and places where

systems, frameworks, definitions, and certainties break down.

• It maintains that frameworks and systems are merely fictitious constructs and that they cannot be trusted to develop meaning or to give order.

• In fact, the very act of seeking order or a singular Truth (with a capital T) is absurd because there exists no unified truth.

• Post-structuralism holds that there are many truths, that frameworks must bleed, and that structures must become unstable or decentered.

• Moreover, post-structuralism is also concerned with the power structures or hegemonies and power and how these elements contribute to and/or maintain structures to enforce hierarchy.

Post-structuralism• By questioning the process of developing meaning, post-

structural theory strikes at the very heart of philosophy and reality and throws knowledge making into what Jacques Derrida called “freeplay.”

• in 1966 at Johns Hopkins University, Derrida delivered a lecture titled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in which he challenged structuralism's most basic ideas.

• Post-structural theory can be tied to a move against Modernist/Enlightenment ideas and Western religious beliefs. An early pioneer of this resistance was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In his essay, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche rejects even the very basis of our knowledge making, language, as a reliable system of communication.

Post-structuralism

• Below is an example of some language freeplay and a simple form of deconstruction:

– Time (noun) flies (verb) like an arrow (adverb clause) = Time passes quickly.

– Time (verb) flies (object) like an arrow (adverb clause) = Get out your stopwatch and time the speed of flies as you would time an arrow's flight.

– Time flies (noun) like (verb) an arrow (object) = Time flies are fond of arrows (or at least of one particular arrow).

Post-structuralism• Post-structuralists assert that if we cannot trust language

systems to convey truth, the very bases of truth are unreliable and the universe—or at least the universe we have constructed—becomes unraveled or de-centered.

• Post-structuralism holds that we cannot trust the sign = signifier + signified formula (of structuralism); that there is a breakdown of certainty between sign/signifier, which leaves language systems hopelessly inadequate for relaying meaning so that we are in eternal freeplay or instability.

• It is important to note that deconstruction is not just about tearing down; through deconstruction we can identify the in-betweens and the marginalized to begin interstitial knowledge building.

Modernism vs Postmodernism• With the resistance to traditional forms of knowledge making

(science, religion, language), inquiry, communication, and building meaning take on different forms to the post-structuralist.

modernism postmodernismromanticism/symbolism paraphysics/Dadaism form antiform purpose play design chance hierarchy anarchycentering absencegenre/boundary text/intertext semantics rhetoricmetaphor metonymy

Post-Structuralism and Literature• If we are questioning/resisting the methods we use to build

knowledge (science, religion, language), then traditional literary notions, including the narrative and the author are also thrown into freeplay.

• Narrative: the narrative is a fiction that locks readers into interpreting text in a single, chronological manner that does not reflect our experiences. Postmodern texts may not adhere to traditional notions of narrative. (e.g. in the final sections of The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles steps outside his narrative to speak with the reader directly)

• Grand narratives are also resisted (e.g. the belief that through science the human race will improve is questioned). In addition, metaphysics is questioned. Instead, postmodern knowledge building is local, situated, slippery, and self-critical (i.e. it questions itself and its role).

Post-Structuralism and Literature• Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a

single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence.

• Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text.

• A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another. It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables, usually involving the identity of the reader

Post-Structuralism and Literature• Because post-structural work is self-critical, post-structural

critics even look for ways texts contradict themselves.

• Author: the author is displaced as absolute author(ity), and the reader plays a role in interpreting the text and developing meaning (as best as possible) from the text.

• In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes argues that the idea of singular authorship is a recent phenomenon. Barthes explains that the death of the author shatters Modernist notions of authority and knowledge building.

• Lastly, he states that once the author is dead and the Modernist idea of singular narrative (and thus authority) is overturned, texts become plural, and the interpretation of texts becomes a collaborative process between author and audience.

Post-Structuralism and Literature

• In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry. This displacement is often referred to as the "destabilizing" or "decentering" of the author, though it has its greatest effect on the text itself.

• Without a central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (e.g., readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.).

Post-Structuralism and Literature

• Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the hierarchy, choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant term on its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems which produce the illusion of singular meaning.

Post-Structuralism: Typical questions• How is language thrown into freeplay or questioned in the

work? (e.g. note how Anthony Burgess plays with language (Russian vs English) in A Clockwork Orange, or how Burroughs plays with names and language in Naked Lunch).

• How does the work undermine or contradict generally accepted truths?

• How does the author (or a character) omit, change, or reconstruct memory and identity?

• How does a work fulfill or move outside the established conventions of its genre?

• How does the work deal with the separation (or lack thereof) between writer, work, and reader?

• What ideology does the text seem to promote?• What is left out of the text that if included might undermine

the goal of the work?• If we changed the point of view of the text - say from one

character to another, or multiple characters - how would the story change? Whose story is not told in the text? Who is left out and why might the author have omitted this character's tale?

On Interpretation • To "interpret" something means that we make sense of something.

The second we ask "What does it mean?" or the moment we try to "understand" something we experience, we are in the realm of interpretation.

• We order it, group it, and ultimately try to relate it to what we already know in an effort to integrate it (texts that refuse to be integrated within our frame of reference remain "too difficult" or "not understandable").

• We don't "discover" meaning as much as we "construct" meaning, for the reader is the one who makes the connections. On the other hand, the author provides a kind of "field" or parameters that the reader works with, so the text can't just signify "anything."

– Compare a story to the night sky. The configuration of stars is preset, awaiting a reader, but the reader makes the connections to create meaningful constellations.

On Interpretation• As Robert Scholes points out, "the major function

of interpretation is to say what a previous text has left unsaid: to unravel its complications, to make explicit its implications, to raise its concrete and specific details to a more abstract and general level."

• In other words, when we read a story about two kids in a forest who meet a lady who wants to eat them, we make sense of that story by interpreting it. We say it is a story about poverty, justice, greed, feudal society, hope and victory, childhood anxieties, or abuse, etc.

On Interpretation• Remember that interpretation is not a matter of

just thinking hard or thinking well. It's not really a matter of "digging deeper" or "dissecting" either.

• Instead, interpretation relies on a methodology, lens, perspective, and frame of reference, principles of classification, or interpretive framework, which allow us to see different aspects of what we are studying.

• By "methodology" or "lens" what’s meant is the way we gather materials, what we "count" as evidence (what we see as relevant or important), and how we talk about what we see. In brief, a method is defined by our goals and the questions we ask.

Sources• Cuddon, J.A. (1999) Dictionary of Literary Terms

and Literary Theory. UK: Penguin Books

• Macey, D. (1999) Dictionary of Critical Theory. UK: Penguin Books

• Bertens, H. (1999) Literary Theory. London and New York: Routledge

• http://home.mesastate.edu/~blaga/theoryindex/interpretatiox.html

• http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/rr.php