Literary Theory E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Anthologies
- Sprache: Englisch
The new edition of this bestselling literary theory anthology has been thoroughly updated to include influential texts from innovative new areas, including disability studies, eco-criticism, and ethics.
- Covers all the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory, from Formalism to Postcolonialism
- Expanded to include work from Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant.
- Pedagogically enhanced with detailed editorial introductions and a comprehensive glossary of terms
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Preface
A Short History of Theory
PART ONE: Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Poetics
CHAPTER 1: Introduction:
Formalisms
– Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: Art as Technique – Viktor Shklovsky
CHAPTER 3: The Formalist Critics – Cleanth Brooks
CHAPTER 4: Keats’ Sylvan Historian: History Without the Footnotes – Cleanth Brooks
CHAPTER 5: The Intentional Fallacy – Monroe Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt
II
III
IV
V
CHAPTER 6: Broken on Purpose:
Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season
– Sean O'Sullivan
Prosodic Structures in Television Serials
A Case Study of the Sonnet‐Season: Season 1 of
The Sopranos
Works Cited
CHAPTER 7: Tools for Reading Poetry – Herman Rapaport
Tropes
Reading
Elision
Reading
Resemblance
Reading
Objective Correlative
Reading
Language Poetry
Reading
The New Sentence
Reading
Sound Poetry/Concrete Poetry
Reading
Prosody
Reading
CHAPTER 8: Theory in Practice:
“Look, Her Lips”: Softness of Voice, Construction of Character in
King Lear – Michael Holahan
I
II
III
IV
CHAPTER 9: Theory in Practice:
Romantic Rhetorics (from Elizabeth Bishop
: The Restraints of Language) – C. K. Doreski
Works Cited
PART TWO: Structuralism, Linguistics, Narratology
CHAPTER 1: Introduction:
The Implied Order: Structuralism
– Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: The Linguistic Foundation – Jonathan Culler
CHAPTER 3:
Course in General Linguistics
– Ferdinand de Saussure
PART ONE General Principles
Chapter I:
nature of the linguistic sign
Chapter II:
immutability and mutability of the sign
Chapter III:
static and evolutionary linguistics
PART TWO Synchronic Linguistics
Chapter I:
generalities
Chapter II:
the concrete entities of language
Chapter III:
identities, realities, values
Chapter IV:
linguistic value
Chapter V:
syntagmatic and associative relations
CHAPTER 4: The Structural Study of Myth – Claude Lévi‐Strauss
CHAPTER 5: Mythologies – Roland Barthes
CHAPTER 6: Discourse in the Novel – Mikhail Bakhtin
CHAPTER 7: What Is an Author? – Michel Foucault
CHAPTER 8: Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology – David Herman
Sequences: Classical Accounts and Postclassical Perspectives
The Problem of Narrativity: A Thought Experiment
Scripts and Literary Interpretation
Works Cited
CHAPTER 9: From Beats to Arcs: Towards a Poetics of Television Narrative – Michael Newman
Micro Level: Beats
Middle Level: Episodes
Macro Level: Arcs
Conclusion
“From Beats to Arcs” 2015 Postscript
CHAPTER 10: Theory in Practice:
The Subplot as Simplification in
King Lear – Bridget Gellert Lyons
CHAPTER 11: Theory in Practice:
The Stories of “Passion”: An Empirical Study – Susan Lohafer
Works Cited
PART THREE: Phenomenology, Reception, Ethics
CHAPTER 1: Introduction:
Situations of Knowledge/Relations with Others
– Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: Transcendental Aesthetic – Immanuel Kant
General Observations on Transcendental Aesthetic
Conclusion of the Transcendental Aesthetic
CHAPTER 3: The Phenomenology of Reading – Georges Poulet
II
CHAPTER 4: Teaching, Studying, and Theorizing the Production and Reception of Literary Texts – Kathleen McCormick
Works Cited
CHAPTER 5: Distinction – Pierre Bourdieu
Classes and Classifications
Embodied Social Structures
Knowledge without Concepts
Advantageous Attributions
The Classification Struggle
The Reality of Representation and the Representation of Reality
CHAPTER 6: Ethics and the Face – Emmanuel Levinas
1. Infinity and the Face
2. Ethics and the Face
3. Reason and the Face
4. Discourse Founds Signification
5. Language and Objectivity
6. The Other and the Others
7. The Asymmetry of the Interpersonal
8. Will and Reason
CHAPTER 7: Levinas and Literary Interpretation: Facing Baudelaire’s “Eyes of the Poor” – Kuisma Korhonen
I
II
III
Works Cited
CHAPTER 8: Cultivating Humanity: The Narrative Imagination – Martha Nussbaum
Fancy and Wonder
Literature and the Compassionate Imagination
Compassion in the Curriculum: A Political Agenda?
World Citizenship, Relativism, and Identity Politics
CHAPTER 9: Theory in Practice:
Relation and Responsibility: A Levinasian Reading of
King Lear – Kent Lehnhof
CHAPTER 10: Theory in Practice:
The Baby or the Violin: Ethics and Femininity in the Fiction of Alice Munro
– Naomi Morgenstern
“Meneseteung”
“My Mother’s Dream”
Conclusion
Works Cited
PART FOUR: Post‐Structuralism
CHAPTER 1: Introduction
The Class of 1968 – Post‐Structuralism
par lui‐même – Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: The Will to Power – Friedrich Nietzsche
499
500
501
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
542
543
552
CHAPTER 3: What Is Becoming? – Gilles Deleuze
CHAPTER 4: Différance – Jacques Derrida
CHAPTER 5: That Dangerous Supplement – Jacques Derrida
From/Of Blindness to the Supplement
The Chain of Supplements
The Exorbitant. Question of Method
CHAPTER 6: The Death of the Author – Roland Barthes
CHAPTER 7: From Work to Text – Roland Barthes
CHAPTER 8: Writing – Barbara Johnson
Suggested Readings
CHAPTER 9: Theory in Practice:
Lear's After‐Life – John Joughin
I
II
III
IV
V
CHAPTER 10: Theory in Practice:
Allegories of Reading in Alice Munro’s “Carried Away”
– Miriam Marty Clark
Works Cited
PART FIVE: Psychoanalysis and Psychology
CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis – Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: The Interpretation of Dreams – Sigmund Freud
The Dream of the Botanical Monograph
The Dream‐work
VI
CHAPTER 3: The Uncanny – Sigmund Freud
I
II
III
Works Cited
CHAPTER 4: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego – Sigmund Freud
CHAPTER 5: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience – Jacques Lacan
CHAPTER 6: Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena – D.W. Winnicott
A Study of the First
Not‐me
Possession
Clinical Description of a Transitional Object
Theoretical Study
Summary
References
CHAPTER 7: Trauma Studies and the Literature of the US South – Lisa Hinrichsen
Trauma and the U.S. South
Works Cited
CHAPTER 8: Theory in Practice: King Lear:
The Transference of the Kingdom
– Jeffrey Stern
I
II
CHAPTER 9: Theory in Practice: The Weirdest Scale on Earth: Elizabeth Bishop and Containment – Lee Zimmerman
References
CHAPTER 10: Theory in Practice:
The Uncontrollable: The Underground Stream
– Ildiko dePapp Carrington
PART SIX: Marxism, Critical Theory, History
CHAPTER 1: Introduction:
Starting with Zero
– Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: The Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844 – Karl Marx
Estranged Labour
Private Property and Communism
CHAPTER 3: The German Ideology – Karl Marx
CHAPTER 4: Theses on the Philosophy of History – Walter Benjamin
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
CHAPTER 5: Structures and the Habitus – Pierre Bourdieu
A False Dilemma: Mechanism and Finalism
Structures, Habitus and Practices
The Dialectic of Objectification and Embodiment
CHAPTER 6: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses – Louis Althusser
Ideology is a “Representation” of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence
Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects
CHAPTER 7: Right of Death and Power over Life – Michel Foucault
CHAPTER 8:
Homo Sacer
– Giorgio Agamben
Introduction
PART ONE The Logic of Sovereignty
Works Cited
CHAPTER 9: New Historicisms – Louis Montrose
I
II
III
IV
V
CHAPTER 10: Theory in Practice:
Reason and Need
: King Lear
and the Crisis of the Aristocracy
– Rosalie Colie
CHAPTER 11: Theory in Practice:
Social Class in Alice Munro's “Sunday Afternoon” and “Hired Girl”
– Isla Duncan
References
CHAPTER 12: Theory in Practice:
Elizabeth Bishop, Modernism, and the Left
– Betsy Erkkila
Works Cited
PART SEVEN: Gender Studies and Queer Theory
CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Feminist Paradigms/Gender Effects – Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: The Traffic in Women – Gayle Rubin
Marx
Engels
Kinship
Deeper into the Labyrinth
Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents
The Political Economy of Sex
CHAPTER 3: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience – Adrienne Rich
I
II
CHAPTER 4: The Laugh of the Medusa – Hélène Cixous
CHAPTER 5: Imitation and Gender Insubordination – Judith Butler
Psychic Mimesis
CHAPTER 6: Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality – Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan
CHAPTER 7: Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts – Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Gender and Work: Historical and Ideological Transformations
Housewives and Homework: The Lacemakers of Narsapur
Immigrant Wives, Mothers, and Factory Work: Electronics Workers in the Silicon Valley
Daughters, Wives, and Mothers: Migrant Women Workers in Britain
Common Interests/Different Needs: Collective Struggles of Poor Women Workers
CHAPTER 8: “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess”: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory – Jasbir Puar
Intersectionality and Its Discontents
Cyborgs and Other Companionate Assemblages
Re‐reading Intersectionality as Assemblage
References
CHAPTER 9: Epistemology of the Closet – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
CHAPTER 10: Queers, Read This – Queer Nation
A Leaflet Distributed at Pride March in NY Published anonymously by Queers June, 1990
An Army of Lovers cannot Lose
Anger
Queer Artists
If you’re Queer,
Shout It!
I Hate …
Where Are You Sisters?
Where Are You?
Get Up, Wake Up Sisters!!
When Anyone Assaults You for being Queer, It is Queer Bashing. Right?
Why Queer
No Sex Police
Queer Space
Rules of Conduct for Straight People
I Hate Straights
CHAPTER 11: Sex in Public – Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner
1. There Is Nothing More Public Than Privacy
2. Normativity and Sexual Culture
3. Queer Counterpublics
4. Tweaking and Thwacking
CHAPTER 12: Naturally Queer – Myra Hird
Queerying Sexual Difference
Queerying Technology
Queerying Boundaries
Conclusion
References
CHAPTER 13: Cruising Utopia: “Introduction” and “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism” – José Esteban Muñoz
Introduction
Queerness as Horizon
CHAPTER 14: Theory in Practice:
Queer Lear: A Gender Reading of
King Lear – Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 15: Theory in Practice:
Elizabeth Bishop's “Queer Birds”: Vassar, Con Spirito, and the Romance of Female Community
– Betheny Hicok
Works Cited
PART EIGHT: Ethnic, Indigenous, Post‐Colonial, and Transnational Studies
CHAPTER 1: Introduction:
English Without Shadows: Literature on a World Scale
– Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: Orientalism – Edward Said
Introduction
The Scope of Orientalism
CHAPTER 3: An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
– Chinua Achebe
CHAPTER 4: Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism – Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
CHAPTER 5: Playing in the Dark – Toni Morrison
CHAPTER 6: A Small Place – Jamaica Kincaid
CHAPTER 7: Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy – Arjun Appadurai
References
CHAPTER 8: Cultural Identity and Diaspora – Stuart Hall
CHAPTER 9: Translation, Empiricism, Ethics – Lawrence Venuti
Works Cited
CHAPTER 10: Theory in Practice:
National Messianism and English Choreography in
King Lear – Jaecheol Kim
I. Nation, Nature and
Natio
: “The King Falls from Bias of Nature”
II. Topography,
Topos
and
Telos
: Kent and National Messianism
III.
Alba
, Albion and Albany: “Wherefore to Dover?”
IV. The Duke of Albany and
Macbeth
: “Is This the Promised End?”
References
CHAPTER 11: Theory in Practice:
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Brazil, January 1, 1502” and Max Jacob’s “Etablissement d’une communauté au Brésil”: A Study of Transformative Interpretation and Influence
Sylvia Henneberg
Works Cited
CHAPTER 12: Theory in Practice:
Annals of Ice: Formations of Empire, Place and History in John Galt and Alice Munro
– Katie Trumpener
Bibliography
PART NINE: Cognition, Emotion, Evolution, Science
CHAPTER 1: Introduction: In the Body of the Text – Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: Embodied Literature: A Cognitive-Poststructuralist Approach to Genre – F. Elizabeth Hart
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
References
CHAPTER 3: Narrative Empathy – Suzanne Keane
What Is Empathy?
How Is Empathy Studied?
A Theory of Narrative Empathy
Empathetic Narrative Techniques
How Narrative Empathy Works: Authors and Audiences
Unanswered Questions
Works Cited
CHAPTER 4: Affective Economies – Sara Ahmed
Economies of Hate
Fear, Bodies, and Objects
Global Economies of Fear
CHAPTER 5: Human Nature and Literary Meaning – Joseph Carroll
The Challenge to a Darwinian Literary Criticism
The Emerging Paradigm in Darwinian Psychology
The Cognitive Behavioral System
A Diagram of Human Nature
Meaning and Point of View in Literary Representations
Human Nature, Human Universals, Culture, and Individual Differences
Life History Analysis and Cognitive Style in
Pride and Prejudice
The Value of a Darwinian Literary Criticism
The Whole Story
Works Cited
CHAPTER 6: Literary Brains: Neuroscience, Criticism, and Theory – Patrick Colm Hogan
Some Notes on the Brain
The Goals of Literary Criticism and Theory and Their Relation to Neuroscience
A Concluding Note on the Distinctness of Literary Study
Works Cited
CHAPTER 7: Digital Humanities: Theorizing Research Practices – Ted Underwood
CHAPTER 8: Planet Hollywood – Franco Moretti
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
CHAPTER 9: Theory in Practice:
According to My Bond:
King Lear
and Re‐Cognition
– Donald C. Freeman
1 Metaphor and Schematised Bodily Experience
2 The King’s Account‐books
3 The LINKS Schema
4 On Description and Explanation
References
CHAPTER 10: Theory in Practice: Skinned: Taxidermy and Pedophilia in Munro’s “Vandals” – Carrie Dawson
Works Cited
PART TEN: Animals, Humans, Places, Things
CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Matters Pertinent to a Theory of Human Existence – Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
CHAPTER 2: Non‐Representational Theory: Life, But Not as We Know It – Nigel Thrift
Introduction
Non‐Representational Theory
The Book
The Chapters
Works Cited
CHAPTER 3: Complexity – John Urry
Introduction
Time and Space
Emergence
Systems and Feedback
Complex Systems
References
CHAPTER 4: On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications – Bruno Latour
I
II
III
IV
Literaturverzeichnis
CHAPTER 5: The Animal Turn, Literary Studies, and the Academy – Jennifer McDonell
I
II
III
Appendix
References
CHAPTER 6: The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification – Tobin Siebers
Three Definitions
Three Analytic Examples
Coda
Works Cited
CHAPTER 7: Ecocriticism – Pippa Marland
Introduction
The Roots of Ecocriticism
The First Wave – Reinstating the ‘Real’
Deep and Social Ecology
The Second Wave – Debating ‘Nature’
Slow Violence – Towards a Global Ecocriticism
Eco‐Cosmopolitics and the Third Wave
The Fourth Wave – Material Ecocriticism: Post‐Human and Post‐Nature
Shared Materiality and Post‐Humanism
The Agency of Matter
‘Thing Power’: Ethical Challenges
The Future of Ecocriticism – Despair, Excitement and ‘Slow Reading’
Works Cited
CHAPTER 8: Eating Things: Food, Animals, and Other Life Forms in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice
Books – Michael Parrish Lee
CHAPTER 9: Theory in Practice:
The Autumn King: Remembering the Land in
King Lear – Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley, and Howard Thomas
CHAPTER 10: Theory in Practice:
Elizabeth Bishop’s “Pink Dog” – Kim Fortuny
Other Animals in Bishop
‘Pink Dog’ and Non‐human Knowledge
Glossary of Terms
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1-7
Figure 1 Concrete Poem.
Figure 2 George Herbert, from “Easter Wings” (1633).
Chapter 10-6
Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images.
Chapter 10-7
Figure 1 © Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, used with permission.
Chapter 10-9
Figure 1 Red and white darnell, from John Gerard,
The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes
(London, 1597), 71. General Reference Collection 449.k.4.
Figure 2 A coat of arms appropriate to gentlewomen, from Gerard Legh,
The Accedens of Armory
(London, 1562), fol. 168r. General Reference Collection 605.b.1.
Figure 3 Frontispiece to William Camden,
Britannia
, trans. Philemon Holland (London, [1610]). General Reference Collection 456.e.16.
Chapter 2-11
Figure 1 Test Order
Figure 2 Normative Order
Figure 3 Story Order
Chapter 2-4
Figure 16
Chapter 5-6
Figure 19
Figure 20
Chapter 6-12
Figure 1 Paintings by Gregorio Valdes reproduced in Elizabeth Bishop’s commemorative article “Gregorio Valdes, 1879–1939,” which was published in the
Partisan Review
in the summer issue of 1939.
Figure 2 Cover of Bishop’s
Questions of Travel
(1965), which bears a map of the
Nuevo Mondo
drawn from the
Cosmographia
of the sixteenth‐century cartographer Sebastian Munster.
Figure 3 Photograph of the
favelas
(slums) in the hills above Rio de Janeiro, which appeared in Bishop’s Time‐Life book on
Brazil
(1962).
Figure 4 Cover of Bishop’s
Geography III
(1976), which bears images of the instruments and historical effects of geographical mapping.
Chapter 7-9
Figure 1 Some Mappings of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality.
Chapter 9-5
Figure 1 A Diagram of Human Nature.
Chapter 9-7
Figure 1 Occurrences of “laugh,” “laughter,” etc. in a collection of 13,789 volumes of poetry, divided by the topic to which each occurrence was assigned. Among 120 topics, I have plotted the three where “laugh‐” occurs most often; each topic is labeled with its most frequent words.
Chapter 9-8
Figure 1 US films as a percentage of top five box‐office hits, 1986–95.
Figure 2 Action films as a percentage of top five box‐office hits, 1986–95.
Figure 3 Comedies as a percentage of top five box‐office hits, 1986–95.
Figure 4 Children’s films as a percentage of box‐office top five, 1986–95.
Figure 5 Countries with fewest adventure films and most dramas.
Guide
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For Gabriel and Nathaniel
LITERARY THEORY
AN ANTHOLOGY
THIRD EDITION
Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
This third edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (1e, 1998); Blackwell Publishing Ltd (2e, 2004)
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication data
Names: Rivkin, Julie, editor. | Ryan, Michael, 1951– editor.Title: Literary theory : an anthology / edited by Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan.Description: Third edition. | Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2017. | Includes bibliographical references, glossary, and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016014427| ISBN 9781118707852 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781118718384 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Literature–Philosophy. | Literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc.Classification: LCC PN45 .L512 2017 | DDC 801–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014427
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Barbara Kruger: Untitled (No Radio), photograph 51" × 68," 1988.Collection Don/Doris Fisher, San Francisco, courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York.
Preface
This book began, as one might guess, in the classroom. We have been teaching courses in contemporary literary theory for the past two decades, and we have each had the familiar experience of not being able to match the design of our courses to any anthology currently available. The move from awkwardly assembled xerox packets to an actual anthology has been both a natural outgrowth of our teaching and an astonishingly complex process of research, selection, and projection. For although the germ of the book was our own classroom(s), its destination has always been many classrooms, courses no doubt much different than any we ourselves might teach, and yet ones that our selections would ideally work both to accommodate and to enrich.
The scale of the volume is one expression of its projected flexibility; we felt that an anthology of literary theory needed not only to cover the range of theoretical perspectives or approaches that characterize the era “after the New Criticism,” the era that we take to be that of contemporary literary theory, but also to represent those perspectives with reasonable depth and range. The effect of such a decision, we hope, is that many kinds of courses will find a home in these selections, that a course that takes as its focus Structuralism, Post‐Structuralism, Post‐Colonialism, or Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies will find this anthology as useful as one that makes a more extensive survey of theoretical perspectives.
The anthology opens with formalisms – both Russian and American – in a gesture that marks its organization as partly chronological and partly heuristic. That is, we take formalism – at least in its American avatar of New Criticism – to mark the condition of students’ theoretical awareness before beginning the journey into “theory.” To the degree that they have been taught a form of “close reading” as the basic task of literary analysis, they are practicing formalists, though the practice may be, like that of the prose‐speaking M. Jourdain in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, an unself‐conscious one. Exploring the theoretical premises of a New Critical practice, placing those in conjunction with a historically unrelated yet theoretically cognate predecessor, Russian Formalism, seems like an appropriate way to initiate an exposure to “theory” in its less familiar guises.
The parts themselves have undergone many evolutions; the issue of where to draw the lines, what denomination to use, and where to locate certain selections has been as theoretically complex as it has been practically consequential. While “Deconstruction,” for example, enjoyed a separate life in literary critical history in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, we felt it more appropriate to place it within its historical and intellectual French context, and so you will find Derrida amongst Deleuze and Guattari, and Baudrillard under “Post‐Structuralism.” The question of how to categorize some kinds of theory, regarding gender, for example, was also difficult, and we opted for a big tent: A separate section could easily have been devoted to any number of theoretical projects, each of which has already produced its own “classic” texts, and while attending to these developments has been one goal of the anthology, we wished as well to embrace both the heterodox and the newly canonical. Some of the names in our table of contents may not be readily recognizable for this reason, and our inclusion of these texts is less a sign of presumption regarding future canonicity than it is an indicator of our desire to locate the anthology as much in the contemporary realm as possible. That has meant guessing, and we based our guesses on what we felt would be exciting or helpful in the classroom.
In a desire both to be as inclusive as possible and to represent works not commonly anthologized, we have done a certain amount of excerpting. Our principle has been to represent the core of a given work, and if, to that end, we have sacrificed portions of texts that readers will deem necessary, we can only suggest that our selections constitute a useful beginning to a more extensive acquaintance. We apologize in advance for any such textual editing deemed brutal.
A final word about our cover illustration. The words “No Radio” refer to a sign people put in their cars in New York City. It means “don’t bother breaking into the body of this car; the radio has already been either stolen or else removed by the owner.” We asked Wiley‐Blackwell to use this image because it speaks to the reservations many still feel about “theory” and about its association with the ideology of mastery through critical analysis that murders to dissect. It also speaks, of course, to our hesitations as editors engaged in the compilation and dissemination of such theories. We would not summon the image (and we would not engage in the work) if we did not feel that “theory” is itself filled with doubt regarding the objectivist ideal the image so carefully mocks. Some theories do indeed fulfill the aspirations of the man with the heart in his hand, but we hope you will feel that there are many others in this book that adopt the perspective of the woman on the table.
A Short History of Theory
The first recorded human story, something that might be called “The Hunt,” appears on the walls of the caves at Lascaux, France. It was made either by children or for children, judging from the hand and feet impressions on the floor of the cave, and it represents not just a hunt but also a remarkable shift in human cognition that occurred, according to archeologist Richard Klein, around 42 ka. From this point forward, humans become more “human” in our modern sense. They invent new tools, everything from plows to currency, that expand the reach of human culture. They evidence an ability to picture abstract mental concepts and to imagine a spirit world. They slowly switch from a hunting existence to an agricultural existence. They stop living in small kin‐based bands and organize large settled communities. The early human tendency to commit rampant genocide against his cousins slowly diminishes, and humans live together in relative peace. The emergence of this new way of life can be accounted for by the change in human cognition that is expressed in “The Hunt.” The mimetic ability one sees in the paintings for the first time was essential to emergent sociality. A capacity for mental representations is linked to control over rapid‐fire, automatic negative emotions such as prejudice and fight‐or‐flight that aided survival on the savannah but were inimical to a settled social existence. That new mimetic cognitive ability was also crucial to imagining others’ lives empathetically so that communities of kin and non‐kin could be built. The capacity for story‐telling is thus connected in an essential way to the cognitive abilities that aided the emergence of modern human life. We did not so much begin to tell each other stories because we started living together in large communities; rather, we were able to build such communities because we were able to tell each other stories.
Story‐telling likely also played a more direct role in the emergence of modern human life. Stories allowed early humans to store and to transmit information that was crucial to the social learning upon which humans’ new culturally mediated civil existence depended. Stories are memory banks that record lessons from the past and are easily transmissible. Some ethnologists believe a greater capacity for short‐term memory was a key change in the human cognitive revolution around 42 ka. Early human stories were probably initially accounts of remembered events, simple documentaries. Those documentary accounts with time became fictional narratives as real characters were replaced by imaginary ones (some of whom would be taken from the surrounding nature, such as Crow or Turtle). Memory stories were also narratives that projected a future, the unknown part of the story yet to be told but anticipated in the mind. Such narrative graphing of life’s actions in terms of past, present, and future meant humans could also plan ahead and foresee events more so than before. Their lives were no longer limited to the satisfying of physical needs in an immediate and short‐term manner. “The Hunt” gave way to “The Trip to Whole Foods.”
Story‐telling would have aided the building of more complex social networks, the integration of diverse people into a uniform culture, the training of minds in a communally beneficial empathy, and the evolution of common norms. Early human stories often possessed a normative dimension. One purpose of telling them was to instruct the young in the life‐sustaining norms and practices of the community. Our earliest recorded verbal stories – Homer’s epics – teach norms of appropriate behavior towards others in one’s community such as hospitality and respect. And the tragedies of the fifth‐century Greek enlightenment caution against norm‐breaking behavior.
Literary theory came into being at a time when the normative function of story‐telling was felt quite strongly. One of the first theorists, Plato, argued that literature should educate the young in good behavior. He lived and taught in Athens 2600 years ago, and he founded the first institution of higher learning in the West, the Academy. That is important because one consequence of the evolution of human cognition is the creation of a need for nurturing environments or niches to sustain the new cognitive abilities. Those nurturing environments were possible in cities and took the form of institutions such as schools and practices such as writing. Psychologists now know that the mind’s advanced cognitive abilities as well as the mind’s ability to live in a civil, sociable way with others depend on training and modeling. External prompting is required to allow full cognitive powers to emerge and full emotional abilities to grow. That humans’ ability to think in certain ways happened at the same time that nurturing institutions such as schools came into being should therefore be no surprise. The advance in human cognitive powers allowed humans to use external instruments such as writing and book‐making to preserve past human cognitive achievements (as an external hard drive does today for a computer). Other tools and techniques could now also be used to train minds to replicate the achievements of the past so they would not be lost. Humans became capable of using what today we call cultural and social construction to maintain human civilization.
The new cognitive power of abstraction that began to emerge around 42 ka divided knowledge between sense impressions and the abstract ideas the new cognition made possible. Plato built his philosophy around this distinction. He felt the abstract ideas the mind could now imagine were more true than sense impressions. The world around one did not offer many examples of perfectly formed beautiful things, but in one’s mind one could imagine an ideal beauty. Plato mistakenly thought these abstract concepts – Beauty, Truth, Justice – were actual things in the world, a kind of spirit realm of pure forms or ideas. We now know that he was simply describing the new cognitive ability of the human brain, its new capacity to picture non‐sensory objects in the mind’s eye. All around Plato in his world, that new cognitive ability was helping his human companions to build a new civilization using new cultural tools such as currency, laws, and rhetoric. He felt, correctly, that the new cultural forms such as the enactment of fictional human events would serve an important function in the building of that new civilization. Empathy, an ability to live together in peace by imagining others’ lives and feeling them as similar to one’s own, was crucial to the new human capacity for sociality and civility, and literature and theater fostered it by obliging audiences to imagine others’ lives as if they were their own. Only a few hundred thousand years earlier, members of the Homo line had been hunting each other for food. Athens was clearly an improvement, but getting there required a new way of thinking whose normative function Plato correctly saw.
Plato:
If the prospective guardians of our community are to loathe casual quarrels with one another, we must take good care that battles between gods and giants and all the other various tales of gods and heroes coming to blows with their relatives and friends don’t occur in the stories they hear and the pictures they see. No, if we’re somehow to convince them that fellow citizens never fall out with one another, that this is wrong, then that is the kind of story they must hear, from childhood onwards, from the community’s elders of both sexes; and the poets they’ll hear when they’re older must be forced to tell equivalent stories in their poetry…. All things considered then, that is why a very great deal of importance should be placed upon ensuring that the first stories they hear are best adapted for their moral improvement.
If Plato’s belief in rational ideas such as Justice, Beauty, and Truth that existed in a purely ideal or rational realm apart from sensory experience reflects the emergence of a brain capable of abstraction, of separating mental concepts from sensory data, the ability to construct mental representations also made possible more refined observation of sensory objects by separating the adaptively evolved mind from the world around it. Prior to this point, the human brain, in order to help preserve life, needed to be vigilant and keenly focused on sense impressions for signs of danger. Living in the emerging civil communities allowed the brain to evolve further and to adapt to social life by developing new communicative and emotional skills that required less immersion in or fusion with the sensory world around it. With the diminishment of danger and the growth of sociality came a greater separation of mind from world through the development of a capacity for mental representation that allowed the world to be perceived and studied more like an object. Civil existence and science became possible at the same time.
Plato’s student Aristotle studied the structure of literature and its effects in this manner, treating literature as an object in the world that is as worthy of study as geology. He therefore described the structure of stories and noticed, for example, that the sequence of events in narrative is organized around moments of reversal and recognition. He differentiated between narrative perspectives and examined the traits that distinguish one genre like comedy from another like tragedy. He also analyzed the way literature provokes reactions in audiences. Tragedy inspires empathetic suffering with the fictional characters. His focus on empathy is especially important given how essential that emotion now was to the sustaining of human civilization. Without an ability to empathize with others grounded in the new power to imagine mental objects, humans would not have been able to form the newly complex societies that had come into being.
Aristotle:
Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements used separately in the various parts of the play; represented by people acting and not by narration, accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions….
Clearly, each of the kinds of representation we mentioned will contain these differences and will vary by representing objects which vary in this manner…. Tragedy too is distinguished from comedy by precisely this difference: comedy prefers to represent people who are worse than those who exist, tragedy people who are better. Again, a third difference among these kinds is the manner in which one can represent each of these things. For one can use the same media to represent the very same things, sometimes by narrating (either by becoming another person as Homer does or remaining the same person and not changing or by representing everyone as in action and activity). Representation, then, has these three points of difference, as we said at the beginning, its media, its objects, and its manner.
The Greek example suggests how important the feedback loop from mind to culture to mind had become in human life. The new sociality and the new civility one sees in Greece during its Enlightenment were dependent on a nurturing environment, and schools played a prominent role in Athenian life. The early cognitive abilities of the Athenians were sustained by that cultural niche. It is no wonder, then, that the conquest of Greece by Rome 2100 ka interrupted the progress of human culture and of human cognition at least in the West. With the disappearance of the nurturing niche the Greeks had built, the cognition it sustained also declined. Authoritarianism, brutality, and pillage – versions of the primitive automatic instincts the mind’s new capacity for mental representations helps regulate – became the norm in political and social life for six centuries. After the fall of Rome, the cultural ecosystem the Greeks evolved disappeared almost entirely. But the capacity for symbolic thought did not wane entirely. In the West, the Catholic Church preserved some of the cognitive abilities that emerged in Greece, especially the ability to think in abstract mental representations that stood apart from sensory experience or perception. Church thinkers became fascinated with allegory, the idea that religious texts especially contained hidden meanings. A biblical story about a man’s treatment of his wife or children would be interpreted to have a second, other meaning having to do with religious doctrine.
Church thinkers also retained the Platonic idea of a culture that instilled norms of good behavior. Even without Aristotle’s texts to serve as examples, some Church thinkers such as Augustine continued the analytic tradition and examined how logic and language worked. They developed a theory of language as signs that would prove important for future cultural analysts.
Augustine:
There are two reasons why written texts fail to be understood: their meaning may be veiled either by unknown signs or by ambiguous signs. Signs are either literal or metaphorical. They are called literal when used to signify the things for which they were invented: as, for example, when we say bovem [ox], meaning the animal which we and all speakers of Latin call by that name. They are metaphorical when the actual things which we signify by the particular words are used to signify something else: when, for example, we say bovem and not only interpret the two syllables to mean the animal normally referred to by that name but also understand, by that animal, “worker in the gospel,” which is what scripture, as interpreted by the apostle Paul, means when it says, “You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain.” …
