The Literary Theory Handbook E-Book

Gregory Castle

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Literature Handbooks
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1119

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The Literary Theory Handbook introduces students to the history and scope of literary theory, showing them how to perform literary analysis, and providing a greater understanding of the historical contexts for different theories.

• A new edition of this highly successful text, which includes updated and refined chapters, and new sections on contemporary theories
• Far reaching in its inclusion of a detailed history of theory and in-depth discussions of major theories and movements
• Four distinct perspectives on theory—historical, thematic, biographical, practical—are carefully intertwined, so that key concepts, terms and ideas are developed in different contexts and cross-referenced, in the text and in the index.
• Includes alphabetically-arranged biographies designed for quick reference, and sample readings to illustrate the practical application of theory

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgments

Alphabetical Listing of Key Movements and Theories

Introduction

The Nature of Literary Theory

What is Literature?

The Practice of Theory

How To Use the Handbook

1 The Rise of Literary Theory

Early Developments in Literary Theory

Modernism and Formalism, 1890s–1940s

Cultural and Critical Theory, 1930s–1960s

The Poststructuralist Turn, 1960s–1970s

Culture, Gender, and History, 1980s–1990s

Postmodernism and Post-Marxism, 1980s–2000s

Posthumanism: Theory at the Fin de Siècle

Conclusion

2 The Scope of Literary Theory

1 Form/Structure/Narrative/Genre

Formalism and Structuralism

New Criticism

Chicago School Neo-Aristotelian Theory

Narrative Theory/Narratology

Theory of the Novel

2 Ideology/Philosophy/History/Aesthetics

Marxist Theory

Critical Theory

Post-Marxist Theory

New Historicism/Cultural Poetics

Postmodernism

3 Language/Systems/Texts/Readers

Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Reader-Response Theory

Deconstruction

Poststructuralism

4 Mind/Body/Gender/Identity

Psychoanalysis

Feminist Theory

Gender Studies

Gay and Lesbian Studies

Trauma Studies

5 Culture/Ethnicities/Nations/Locations

Cultural Studies

African American Studies

Ethnic and Indigenous Studies

Chicano/a Studies

Native and Indigenous Studies

Asian American Studies

Postcolonial Studies

Transnationalism

6 People/Places/Bodies/Things

Posthumanism

Evolutionary Literary Theory

Object-Oriented Ontologies

Disability Studies

Ecocriticism

3 Key Figures in Literary Theory

Theodor Adorno (1903–69)

Giorgio Agamben (1942– )

Louis Althusser (1918–90)

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975)

Roland Barthes (1915–80)

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007)

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)

Homi Bhabha (1949– )

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002)

Lawrence Buell (1939– )

Judith Butler (1956– )

Hélène Cixous (1937– )

Lennard Davis (1949– )

Teresa de Lauretis (1939– )

Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari (1930–92)

Paul de Man (1919–83)

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

Terry Eagleton (1943– )

Frantz Fanon (1925–61)

Stanley Fish (1938– )

Michel Foucault (1926–84)

Henry Louis Gates (1950– )

Sandra Gilbert (1936– ) and Susan Gubar (1944– )

Stephen Greenblatt (1943– )

Elizabeth Grosz (1952– )

Stuart Hall (1932– )

Donna Haraway (1944– )

N. Katherine Hayles (1943– )

bell hooks (1952– )

Luce Irigaray (1930– )

Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007)

Fredric Jameson (1934– )

Julia Kristeva (1941– )

Jacques Lacan (1901–81)

Bruno Latour (1947– )

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98)

J. Hillis Miller (1928– )

Antonio Negri (1933– )

Jacques Rancière (1940– )

Edward Said (1935–2003)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009)

Elaine Showalter (1941– )

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942– )

Raymond Williams (1921–88)

Cary Wolfe (1959– )

Slavoj Žižek (1949– )

4 Reading with Literary Theory

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Recommendations for Further Reading

African American Studies

Chicago School Neo-Aristotelian Theory

Critical Theory

Cultural Studies

Deconstruction

Ethnic and Indigenous Studies

Feminist Theory

Formalism and Structuralism

Gender Studies

Marxist and Post-Marxist Theory

Narrative Theory/Narratology

New Criticism

New Historicism/Cultural Poetics

Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Postcolonial Studies

Posthumanism

Postmodernism

Poststructuralism

Psychoanalysis

Reader-Response Theory

Theory of the Novel

Transnationalism

Trauma Theory

Encyclopedias, Histories, and Introductions

Glossary

Index

Blackwell Literature Handbooks

This new series offers the student thorough and lively introductions to literary ­periods, movements, and, in some instances, authors and genres, from Anglo-Saxon to the Postmodern. Each volume is written by a leading specialist to be invitingly accessible and informative. Chapters are devoted to the coverage of cultural context, the ­provision of brief but detailed biographical essays on the authors concerned, critical coverage of key works, and surveys of themes and topics, together with ­bibliographies of selected further reading. Students new to a period of study or to a period genre will discover all they need to know to orientate and ground themselves in their studies, in volumes that are as stimulating to read as they are convenient to use.

Published

The Science Fiction HandbookM. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie ThomasThe Seventeenth-Century Literature HandbookMarshall GrossmanThe Twentieth-Century American Fiction HandbookChristopher MacGowanThe British and Irish Short Story HandbookDavid MalcolmThe Crime Fiction HandbookPeter MessentThe Literary Theory HandbookGregory Castle

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Castle, Gregory.The literary theory handbook / Gregory Castle.pages cm. – (Blackwell Literature Handbooks)Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-67195-5 (Pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-118-33158-3 (ePub) – ISBN 978-1-118-33161-3 – ISBN 978-1-118-33195-8 (eMobi) – ISBN 978-1-118-33247-4 (ePdf) – ISBN 978-1-118-33201-6 (cloth soft) 1. Criticism–History–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc.–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title.PN86.C35 2013801′.9509–dc23

2012050374

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Wyndham Lewis, Workshop, c.1914–15, oil on canvas, 765 × 610 mm. Tate, London. © Tate, London 2013.Cover design: Richard Boxall Design Associates.

For Ralph and Donna Castle,whose encouragement and support come without conditionandCamille Angeles-Castle, who continues to teach me the theory of love

Acknowledgments

The Literary Theory Handbook was first published in 2007 under the title The Guide to Literary Theory. Since publishing the first edition, I have taught a number of literary theory courses and participated on panels and roundtables at ­international conferences; I also talked with many friends and colleagues about various issues and problems in literary theory. Over those six years, a number of theories and theorists were becoming more prominent and it seemed to me that the time was ripe for another edition, one that would not only include these new directions and new thinkers but also expand and refine the existing material. To all the people involved in these various conversations I owe more than I can say. I am grateful for the ­opportunity to teach literary theory and thereby discover at first hand what sort of things readers at all levels might require. I thank especially the graduate students at ASU who were instrumental in advancing my own understanding of the myriad theories discussed in this Handbook. I want to single out for special thanks Ian Murphy, who served as a research assistant in the final phase of this project, and Kristi Van Stechelman Perkins, a former student and dear friend who has talked with me for hours over the years about theory and literature and life and to her I owe a debt of affection and gratitude. I want also to thank my colleagues in the Department of English, particularly Patrick Bixby, Ron Broglio, Joni Adamson, Mark Lussier, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, and Dan Bivona, for bearing with me when I asked them about their own approach to theory or engaged them in discussions of particular theoretical problems.

I want to thank Professor Gerardine Meaney, director of the Humanities Institute at University College, Dublin, for providing me with office space and library access so that I might work on this book. And to Ruth Black, I give thanks for being such a good host and providing me with a comfortable environment in which to work. Ruby, the boxer, whose contemplative mood rivaled that of any philosopher I have read, kept me company on many rainy afternoons. Finally, I am deeply grateful for the patience and kind attentions of Alyssha Nelson, who watched over the final stages of this book.

I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their advice and counsel: Joseph Valente, David Lloyd, James Phelan, Stephen Ross, Margot Backus, Nicholas Allen, Enda Duffy, and Gregory Dobbins. My dear friend Chouki El Hamel, a brilliant historian and critical thinker, bore with me for many hours as I hashed out various theoretical problems and offered sound advice and often led me to new insights. Another dear friend and mentor, John Paul Riquelme, has been a sounding board and guide for more years than I can remember (or will confess to) and has helped me understand the suppleness and nuances of theoretical approaches to literature. But more than that, he and his partner, Marie-Anne Verougstraete, have opened up their home to me on more than one occasion and it was in the third floor aerie of their home in Boston that I was able to finish this book on time. Finally, I want to thank Michael Ryan, with whom I worked on the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Over four years of working together, I received what amounted to a master-class in theory. Without his sound judgment and often impassioned advocacy for this or that idea, this Handbook would have been a poorer thing.

Any academic book, but especially one of this nature that covers so much ground, involves a number of people who make it possible. I am grateful for the unstinting support of the Hayden Library at ASU, especially the kindness and expertise of Henry Stevens, Library Supervisor, who provided resources and good humor. The folks at Wiley-Blackwell have been wonderful to work with, particularly Ben Thatcher, Project Editor, and Bridget Jennings, Senior Editorial Assistant, who were patient and supportive at every stage of this project. Brigitte Lee Messenger worked patiently with me through copy-editing and proofing, and proved, by her careful work, that none of us are fallible. There are not enough superlatives to describe Emma Bennett, Executive Editor, who shepherded the first edition through production and who helped me plan this new edition. Without her encouragement and support, I may well have thrown in the towel. All writers should be so fortunate as to have an editor so singularly committed to an author’s success and well-being.

It may be unconventional to thank the musicians who have filled the air while working on an academic book, but I am part of a generation for whom music is more than the soundtrack of a life. Music is a vital part of all of my work, for without it my thoughts would lack lyricism, they would have stumbled without grace or rhythm. So, to Radiohead and Miles Davis, to Thelonious Monk, Brad Mehldau and Eno, I raise a glass. To the folks at Constellation Records in Montréal, particularly the crew of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, I lift my fist.

Alphabetical Listing of Key Movements and Theories

African American Studies

Chicago School Neo-Aristotelian Theory

Critical Theory

Cultural Studies

Deconstruction

Ethnic and Indigenous Studies

Asian American Studies

Chicano/a Studies

Native and Indigenous

Feminist Theory

Formalism and Structuralism

Gender Studies

Gay and Lesbian Studies

Marxist Theory

Narrative Theory/Narratology

New Criticism

New Historicism/Cultural Poetics

Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Postcolonial Studies

Posthumanism

Disability Studies

Ecocriticism

Evolutionary Literary Theory

Object-Oriented Ontologies

Post-Marxist Theory

Postmodernism

Poststructuralism

Psychoanalysis

Reader-Response Theory

Theory of the Novel

Transnationalism

Trauma Studies

Introduction

And the end of our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.

                              T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Nearly a century ago, the English literary critic, I. A. Richards, spoke of a “chaos of critical theories,” an assessment that would not be wide of the mark in the early years of the twenty-first century. The student of literature today is confronted with an array of theoretical approaches that touch on nearly every facet of human ­experience, from language and history to sexuality and gender, from cognitive ­science to the environment. How is one to choose? The Literary Theory Handbook is designed to help readers find their way through the chaos of theory by providing in-depth overviews of the leading approaches. Most of the theorists discussed in these pages assume that literary texts – and not just books, but other kinds of texts, like film and other works of art – give us pleasure and help us understand the world around us. Some recent theoretical fields, like posthumanism, are profoundly ­concerned with what it means to be human and what our relation ought to be with the non-human. This new emphasis is, in some respects, a return to the humanism that for centuries defined literary and cultural study – but with an important ­difference. For the posthumanism we find today has learned the lessons of ­theoretical reflection on humanism, anti-humanism, and a host of other perspectives. My point is that not only does literature matter but theory matters too, and not simply because it helps us understand literature. Theory has its own claim on our attention because it seeks, like literature has always done, to make the world come alive in our imaginations. Theory can be hard sometimes, especially when a specialized vocabulary is involved. But any theory worth its salt is finally about human experience and how to make it better. Matthew Arnold, a nineteenth-century English poet and critic, once said that “literature is a criticism of life.” I would like to add that theory, at its best, is always trying to get at the life of literature. The reader of this Handbook is invited to explore in its pages how literature can come alive with a little help from theory.

Since at least 1980, a number of introductory texts have emerged that seek to explain the tenets of the main theoretical trends. The Literary Theory Handbook differs in a number of ways. First, it includes a brief history of theory that gives a broad overview from the classical era to the present, with an emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; this is a unique feature. Another feature not found in similar texts is a chapter that includes short biographies of literary theorists, which emphasize the major works and accomplishments of over forty key figures. Many guides and introductions provide discussions of the major theories, but few provide the kind of detailed coverage of a wide range of theories that the reader will find in this Handbook. Each section of chapter two goes into sufficient detail about each theory, including explanations, quotations, and examples, so that the reader gets a good foundation for further reading. Moreover, the sections are organized under broad categories that help the reader to see the interrelations between and among theoretical approaches. Finally, the Handbook offers sample readings (in chapter four) that give the reader a sense of how theoretical analysis works. No other similar book – be it a guide or an introduction – offers all of these features.

The Nature of Literary Theory

The rise of “high theory” in the 1960s and 1970s (think, for example, of deconstruction and feminism) and its popularity in the human and social sciences has changed fundamentally the way we read literature. But theory has been with us since the time of the ancient Greeks, when Aristotle set down his theory of poetics, which was an attempt to understand how tragic drama worked and how it affected its audiences. His Poetics, like so many studies after it, focused on the relationship between literature and life and, even when it related the most terrible events, celebrated life and all of its mysteries. Since Aristotle, literary theory has gone through many changes, sometimes circling back on itself to reclaim an earlier idea, other times leaping ahead according to a new paradigm for understanding language or the human experience. The notion of theory that dominates the humanities and social sciences today really begins with theories of form and structure in the 1920s and 1930s, though some theories (like Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism) have roots that go back further into the nineteenth century. The 1960s saw a groundswell of theoretical innovation (and, at times, renovation) that has continued, despite alarming talk of the “death of theory,” until the present day.

Theory is a way of thinking. In fact, one could say that thinking theoretically is a paradigm for thought itself, at least that form of thought used to understand concepts and ideas and to combine them meaningfully. Broadly speaking, theory is deductive or inductive: in the first, the theorist begins with a general idea and then investigates individual instances of it (literary texts) in order to prove its validity; in the second, the study of individual instances leads to the formation of general ideas based on them. Inductive reasoning is more common in the sciences, though Aristotle’s theory of tragedy and some formalist approaches rely on it. By and large, literary theory is deductive, in that a general idea governs our analysis of individual texts. In deduction, knowledge is built up through generalizations that test the limits of what can be included in general categories. Deductive reasoning, particularly in literary analysis, assumes the possibility of alternative viewpoints and thus requires the power of persuasion to make an argument based on a general idea, because other general ideas could account equally well for the same individual texts. Despite this openness to alternatives, the thought process in literary theory remains the same in large part because we are always moving from general principles to particular instances, from general ideas to individual texts. Even theories that attack generalization are grounded on the general principle that generalities ought to be avoided.

One reason literary theory appears so forbidding or impenetrable to so many readers is that it asks us to manage multiple general ideas and devise multiple strategies of interpretation. The tendency toward theoretical collaboration – for example, postcolonial feminism, Marxist deconstruction, posthumanism – has enriched our sense of how theory can be used but it also challenges us to juggle multiple analytical strategies and technical vocabularies. The good news is that the difficulty is one of degree rather than kind, for theoretical thought functions in the same way no matter how many ideas we juggle. The Literary Theory Handbook seeks to make this theoretical juggling easier by showing how complex ideas work singly and in combination. Of course, literary theory neither seeks nor can achieve the kind of stability, uniformity, consistency, and UNIVERSALITY that is the aim of scientific inquiry. While scientists cannot ignore such things as ideology, social changes, and political pressures, the scientific method insures that, in the proper conditions, objectivity can be achieved. With literary theory, aspects of society and politics are often the focus of analysis. This does not mean that theory is free of norms and rules or that it is totally subjective; the point is rather that the norms and principles of theory are constructed precisely in order to take the measure of social and political influences on literature. While literary theory involves a subjective element, traditions of practice have made possible a certain consistency that enables readers and theorists alike to share their experience with literary texts. It also allows teachers and writers like myself to communicate fundamental theoretical ideas, concepts, and methods. Literary theory therefore resembles the literary text because the very fact that the latter is a product of a particular person or persons in a particular society and culture at a particular time is vitally important.

In the sciences, a new theory can displace an old one, relegating the older theory to the history of science. This rarely happens in literary theory. We might find that a particular theory (say, formalism) falls out of fashion, but in the humanities, there is always a chance that an “outdated” theory will be revived, often in connection with new ideas (as when narrative theorists use formalist concepts). Another thing that distinguishes literary theory is its openness to a wide variety of disciplines, including anthropology, architecture, biology, communications, design, economics, history, international relations, linguistics, mathematics, music, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology, semiotics, sociology, and theatre. Because literature, and the human experience it both represents and creates, is rich and various, literary theory has found it both useful and invigorating to borrow methods and ideas from these disciplines. In a world that has become increasingly specialized, in which our own experience is often limited to our workplace and own small field of expertise, literary theory makes other forms of expertise available to us and reminds us, by virtue of its openness and adaptability, of the wider world in which we each play our small but significant role.

This leads me to address two problem areas in literary theory that, for some readers, can be a stumbling block: terminology and style. Some theories – for example, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, phenomenology, postcolonial theory, narrative theory – could be faulted for stylistic extravagance, for having a specialized vocabulary, or for close adherence to a specific doctrine. There are sound reasons for each of these qualities, particularly if a given theory (say, Marxism or postcolonial theory) seeks to question conventional modes of writing, thinking, or organizing knowledge. In fact, many contemporary literary theorists seek to subvert or challenge Enlightenment thought, which is typically characterized by a stable and unified subject of knowledge, and a belief in the primacy of reason and in concepts like universality. The style and vocabulary of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist criticism is in part designed to circumvent easy answers to complex questions about language, just as the difficulties of Luce Irigaray’s feminist psychoanalysis are the result of her avoidance of traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and psychology. To be sure, some theorists use obscure terminology or affect a difficult style to mask a trivial or incoherent argument. In these cases, readers are not to be faulted for complaining about jargon or obscurantism.

What is Literature?

An important question needs to be raised at this point, one that is often felt, by readers of all kinds, to be self-evident: what is the object of literary theory? The obvious answer is literature. But this obvious answer fails to satisfy readers, especially those who have been engaged in teaching and writing about it for years! So it is worthwhile asking, what do we mean when we use terms like literature and literary? From the time of Aristotle to the present, philosophers have recognized the preeminence of literature, particularly poetry, in aesthetic theory. “Poetry,” writes G. W. F. Hegel, “is adequate to all forms of the beautiful and extends over all of them, because its proper element is the beautiful imagination, and imagination is indispensable for every beautiful production, no matter to what form of art it belongs” (1: 90). Hegel was pretty sure he knew what literature was, as were most critics and readers until the modernist era, when novelists, poets, and playwrights began to experiment with traditional literary forms and raised all sorts of questions about what constitutes a specifically literary work. Postmodernism and cultural studies have only made these questions more urgent by expanding our conception of what constitutes a literary object (that is, one that can be read) to include television shows, advertisements, video games, internet sites, musical compositions, newspapers, cookbooks, and so much more.

Despite a long tradition of regarding literature as a fine art and despite the consensus in previous historical eras that literature is imaginative writing – a consensus based on Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry: “the former relates things that have happened, the latter things that may happen” (12) – literary theory has, throughout the twentieth century, called into question the special status of both fine art and literature. Anyone who has read a major anthology of literature will notice that a substantial amount of the material in it is not literary in the sense of poems or fictional stories. One is as likely to find political, historical, or scientific writings as poetry, fiction, and drama. And many of these works are “imaginative” in the sense that they use language in “artistic” ways (that is, they rely on the connotative or suggestive meanings as often as the denotative or specific meanings of a word). All sorts of fine writing qualifies as literary, which is why we find works by John Stuart Mill, Cotton Mather, Margaret Fuller, and Charles Darwin in literature anthologies. We cannot stop here, however, for the criterion of “fine” or “imaginative” writing has changed over the years and not everyone agrees about how to make judgments about such writing, other than to say it is literary, which brings us back to the original question: but why is this kind of writing literary?

If we cannot rely on a special or “fine” use of language or specifically literary genres (e.g., fiction, poetry, drama) as a foundation for defining literature, perhaps we could find what we are looking for by asking whether an author intended to create literature. But this, too, is untenable, for it presupposes that we can know such intentions reliably enough to provide a basis for theoretical analysis; in any case, there is no good reason to think that literary authors have any special authority on this matter.

For many readers, literature is that which has stood the test of time, the “classics.” But this criterion is unsatisfactory, for one of the reasons a text becomes a “classic” is that it has been kept in print and in the classroom. And until very recently, this meant a process of selection and exclusion by cultural elites (publishers, professors, editors, agents) who created CANONS of literature that reflect their values and vision of the world. Ralph Rader, a Chicago School Neo-Aristotelian critic, puts the case strongly: “writers and works” are “ruthlessly winnowed by the collective judgment and the survivors arranged in a relatively fixed honorific hierarchy of status and value (247). This kind of thinking tends to keep literature cordoned off in privileged spaces (e.g., universities, art schools, literary societies, coteries, and the like) where it is explained by experts (hence, Harold Bloom’s idea that literary critics are a kind of secular clergy). Common sense tells us that literature is not restricted to a certain kind of reader, though an English major might have an advantage by virtue of spending a lot of time reading literature and literary criticism. But this advantage does not change the nature of the books she might read, for it is simply a means of access to literature. Few readers, though, will be happy with a definition of literature that is grounded in the marketplace or on admissions standards at universities. Nor will they be happy with a definition that limits literature to fiction, poetry, and drama. After all, today’s newspaper may be tomorrow’s literature, as was the case with Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s essays in the eighteenth-century periodical The Spectator. Or it may remain, as most journalistic writing remains, ephemeral, useful primarily to historians. By the same token, what is considered the highest literary achievement today may become a classic; but it is just as likely (if not more so) to be forgotten tomorrow. This is a problem of genre as well, for literary history reveals a complex web of influences in which we see the ascendancy now of poetry, now of the novel as the paradigmatic form for “literature” for a given age. The contemporaries of Addison and Steele did not regard their works as literature, nor were their works written in the forms great literature typically took for their age. Saying this is saying nothing about the quality of their work, its popularity, or its influence. That we do tend to value their work now as literature, however, says a great deal about twenty-first-century reading habits.

So we are back to our question, which we might answer by considering a definition of literature that emphasizes perennial themes and subject matter. Fair enough, but who is to decide what the important subjects and themes are? Even a cursory glance at literary history shows that themes and subjects change constantly; and while some themes and subjects are consistently treated over the years, they are rarely treated in the same way. Would John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which deals with the theme of humankind’s fall from heavenly grace, be more “literary” than Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which focuses on AIDS and the nature of gay experience in late twentieth-century United States? As with the problem of defining what “fine writing” is, so with this problem: there is simply no way to define a truly literary theme.

These unsatisfactory answers to our question share one thing in common: they presuppose that literature is separate from other forms of representation, protected by its AUTONOMY from the corrosive effects of social and political life. On this view, the literary text is an AUTONOMOUS text, an idea that has its roots in German idealist philosophy, particularly Immanuel Kant’s notion of the art-object as self-contained and self-governing But we might well ask how autonomy can be realized if the art-object – in the present context, the literary text – is so bound up with publishing, marketing, reviewing, and teaching? Even if we argue that literature is autonomous in the sense that it works according to its own inner laws and principles, we must contend with the objection that authors and readers are inextricably caught up in complex ideological and cultural ideas that have powerful effects on how they read and write. One of the most profound achievements of literary theory has been to challenge this idea of autonomy by analyzing ideology, culture, politics, and other elements that we once confidently thought lay outside the sphere of art. Let’s go so far as to grant that literature is “relatively” autonomous, that literary language does more than merely serve as a mode of communication in or reference to the external world. What would be the limits of such an autonomy? Who or what would set those limits? In the end, the argument that literature is radically separate from other spheres of life violates good sense as well as logic.

One answer to our question, what is literature, does not seem to go away, no matter how hard literary theorists try to disprove it. For some people would have us believe that literature is “high-brow,” that it somehow transcends the interests and concerns of the majority of people. If we believed this, we would have to see literature at the top of a hierarchy, below which would be popular forms of writing (low- or middle-brow writing, so-called genre fiction, song lyrics, graphic novels, and the like). If we look at literary history, we see that such a distinction falls apart, for it is at bottom a distinction dependent on fluctuations of taste and the nature of textual production. The example of Addison and Steele illustrates this. So too does a novelist like Charles Dickens, whose work was once regarded as “popular” rather than “literary,” but is now regarded as one of the great literary giants of the nineteenth century. These criteria having to do with the value of literature – that it is better (morally, aesthetically, or socially) than other forms of writing – are often unconsciously assumed by the same readers and teachers who might consciously condemn them.

Even if we could agree what “good” and “bad” corresponded to and could agree further that such judgments were worth making, how do we select our criteria: those that existed at the time of publication or those in place at the time of the critic’s judgment? Are such criteria, no matter where they originate, a function of purely aesthetic elements, like style and form, or are they a function of social or political ideas? As Friedrich Nietzsche has argued, values are never intrinsic to a work or an action, nor do they come to us from a transcendent source and nor are they universal in character. Our literary values, like our moral ones, are developed in order to preserve our sense of cultural and personal well-being; our judgments are therefore partial and interested, contingent on historically conditioned aesthetic, social, and political attitudes. For some people, this realization leads to the conclusion that all values are relative, and to a point, that is the case. Yet, some values seem to prevail over others and some works inspire the same sense of value in a given community (say, among English majors or among members of a book club). So how do we determine if a book is valuable as literature? What makes us so confident, generation after generation, that some works (for example, Shakespeare’s plays, Emily Dickinson’s poems, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, or James Joyce’s Ulysses) are clearly literature while others (the mass of out of print and forgotten books languishing in secondhand book shops) are clearly not? Part of the reason is that readers recognize in such works the innovation and creativity, the love of language and exuberance in its use, and for these reasons want to continue reading and talking about them. These readers have not necessarily judged these features good or bad, but they do seem to have consistently found in them a certain kind of pleasure, have regarded them as part of a tradition that includes novels, poems, and plays, but also histories, sermons, essays, and other forms of writing. Readers keep coming back to this tradition and the pleasures it offers, even if what they find is not quite the same as what a prior generation found. Readers who love dramatic characters who speak well of life’s joys and vicissitudes are as likely to appreciate Oscar Wilde as Shakespeare, as likely to find Virginia Woolf as compelling as Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Literature, then, might well be that form of writing that engages with life in the most exciting, innovative, creative, and mind-altering ways. It is a way of seeing and being in the world that we find so attractive because it allows us to see the world in a new way. Literature is, as Wolfgang Iser has noted, a kind of anthropological investigation, for it goes into areas of life that are left unexplored by science, philosophy, religion, or politics. Literature, then, is the most fully human way of seeing and understanding the world.

The Practice of Theory

Even if we accept this definition of literature, we are left with the question of how to interpret it, for like our experience with the world, our reading practices vary from person to person. Theoretically, we could have a different reading of a given text for every reader, but what we more often find are common modes of interpretation used by multiple readers who share reading experiences. Stanley Fish, a pragmatist and reader-response theorist, calls these “interpretive communities.” Though we often think of such communities in connection with schools, they exist at all levels of society; they exist even when we are not made aware of them, as when readers of crime fiction respond in similar ways to generic conventions. A chemistry textbook, a novel by Virginia Woolf, a cookbook, Kant’s philosophy, a Volkswagen manual, the LA Times, a back issue of Star! magazine: these all require certain conventions of reading and understanding. In each case, the generic expectations of a certain kind of text will be more or less apparent to readers of it, though the communities that read Kant and Woolf will often be more formal, and the members of it more likely to communicate with each other (through criticism, reviews, discussion, and so on). And while such communities have the virtue of creating shared habits of reading, they can run the danger of assuming that their mode of reading is a natural one, even the “best” or “authorized” one (the latter is often the case with respect to sacred texts). Literary theory, particularly in the late twentieth century, seeks to avert this danger and to celebrate the multiplicity of reading standpoints and interpretive communities.

Interpreting literature is a way of raising questions about it. The more questions raised, and the more difficult they are to answer, the more likely we are going to be tempted to want some kind of “toolkit,” and theory provides just the variety of tools that readers can employ to answer the questions that literature raise. These questions can be about the form or genre of a text, or about the way gender and sexuality are represented, or about how language works to communicate emotion and states of consciousness, or about how political ideas and ideology are reflected or produced by the text. The range of questions corresponds very closely to the range of our experiences in the world. Formalist and structuralist theorists tend to emphasize a predictable relationship between the reader and the language of literature because individual readers, as Roland Barthes has pointed out, “cannot by [themselves] either create or modify” language, for “it is essentially a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate” (14). At the same time, as poststructuralists emphasize, language can be slippery and unstable, because the signifiers (the words in the text) lack a clear and direct relation to what we think (or hope) are the signifieds (the ideas or concepts) to which they refer. For some of these theorists, language refers only to itself (that is, signifiers refer to other signifiers), which means that, theoretically, meaning can proliferate endlessly. Both of these positions are valid and valuable ways of reading literature; they respond to different perspectives on the world, on language, and on reading practices. The Literary Theory Handbook explores these and myriad other theoretical positions and emphasizes their coexistence not their exclusive authority.

The practice of literary theory is, therefore, not a matter of following an orthodoxy, but of finding the best way to open the text to the questions we want to ask about it. The literary critic who uses theory (either explicitly or implicitly) is free to be creative, to express herself and her own values in the process of answering the questions she poses about the text. Oscar Wilde understood this well when he linked the artist and the critic in terms of their shared creation of a new aesthetic experience. For him, the best criticism treats the work of art “as a starting point for a new creation” and, further, the highest criticism “fills with wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely” (150). Wilde’s insight is very close to that of hermeneutical critics, who devised techniques for reading sacred and historical texts, for both insist that the reader must listen to what the text has to tell us.

If there is “truth” to be had from literature, it is very much bound up with our ways of reading, which are not all that different from our ways of understanding the world around us. The “special” status of the literary text, then, is attributable not to its essential qualities but rather to the reader’s own reading practices and experiences. The task of the critical reader is not to pass judgment on the text but to enjoy the reading process in a disciplined way and to share that pleasure with others.

How to Use theHandbook

The Literary Theory Handbook is designed to help readers with this task. One can begin with the historical overview in chapter one, “The Rise of Literary Theory,” in order to get a sense of how theory has developed and the relations between and among theories. Another strategy is to consult individual theoretical fields in chapter two, “The Scope of Literary Theory,” either by reading a single entry or the entries clustered in one of the six parts. Chapter three, “Key Figures in Literary Theory,” and the “Recommendations for Further Reading” are research tools designed to provide biographical and bibliographical information in a quick and accessible fashion. The “Glossary” is a valuable resource that can accompany just about any reading task in literary criticism and theory. Finally, readers who wish to see how theory is used in literary analysis can consult the sample interpretations in chapter four, “Reading with Literary Theory.” The Literary Theory Handbook provides multiple points of entry for readers of all kinds and for every stage of the process of learning about and enjoying the experience of theory.

To make the Handbook a more effective reference tool, I have used a system of cross-referencing. SMALL CAPITALS are used to indicate terms that can be found listed in the glossary. Boldface type is used to indicate that a theorist is treated at length in chapter three, “Key Figures in Literary Theory.” Generally, I cross-reference the first use of a name or term in any given section. A similar system of cross-referencing terms and concepts is employed in the glossary and index. In chapter two, parenthetical cross-references refer to relevant discussions of a given topic, figure, or concept elsewhere in the Handbook, while the “note” at the end of each section points the reader to related sections in the chapter.

Note on Sources

Throughout this Handbook, I have supplied the date of first publication in the original language; for texts not originally written in English, I have supplied the title used for the first English translation. Bibliographies, including both works cited and recommend readings, follow each entry on a theory or theorist. For more titles, and a list of anthologies and general collections of literary theory, see the “Recommendations for Further Reading.”

Works Cited

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Richard Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.

Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1973.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Rader, Ralph. “Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation.” Critical Inquiry 1.2 (December 1974): 245–72.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” In Intentions and the Soul of Man. Vol. 8 of The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Robert Ross. London: Methuen, 1908. 99–224.

1

The Rise of Literary Theory

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”

The historical life of ideas is neither straightforward nor causal. Ideas from one era are revived and revised for a new generation of thinkers, while new ones emerge from both predictable and surprising sources. This is certainly the case with the ­history of literary theory. As the twentieth century unfolded, literary theory took on a momentum that might be called progressive, each movement or trend building on the blind spots and logical flaws in those that had come before. But there was also a fair amount of recursive movement – doubling back to pick up a forgotten or misunderstood idea – as well as lateral forays into new terrain. Throughout this ­history, we find instances of innovation, both new combinations of existing ­theoretical ideas (for example, Marxist deconstruction) or the emergence of new areas of study (for example, cognitive studies); we also find projects of renovation, in which prior theoretical models (for example, materialist criticism or ­psychoanalysis) were given a new lease on life. These various modes of historical change were often happening simultaneously, so that we find clusters of intense growth and activity in key periods, especially in the modernist period (1920s and 1930s), the era of “high theory” (the 1960s and 1970s), and the posthumanist ­revolution that began to gain ground in the 1990s.

From the era of formalism and critical theory to the mid-century flourishing of poststructuralism and feminism to the rise of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and myriad theories under the banner of posthumanism, we see a rich and complex historical development. One cannot help but notice that from mid-century, the variety of theories increases dramatically, which means that this development is difficult to chart chronologically. For that reason, this history will attempt to illustrate the simultaneity as well as the progression of theoretical change and renewal. It will also draw attention to recursive tendencies, those moments when theoretical development appears to turn back on itself to reclaim earlier modes of thought and methodologies (as we see in the 1990s with a reinvigorated Marxist theory). Indeed, the game-changing ideas in the posthumanist movement frequently take us back to Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Darwin, those nineteenth-century “prolegomenal thinkers,” as Margo Norris calls them (6), who were products of their time but also, paradoxically, way ahead of it. This temporal paradox defines a good deal of literary theory and serves as a reminder of the importance of experience, which Nietzsche describes as “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (“On the Uses” 60).