Literary Theory [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

• Literary Theory [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

  • we find an early attempt to theorize the position of African-Americans  within dominant white culture through his concept of “double consciousness,”  a dual identity including both “American” and “Negro.” Dubois and theorists  after him seek an understanding of how that double experience both creates  identity and reveals itself in culture. Afro-Caribbean and African  writers—Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe—have made significant early  contributions to the theory and practice of ethnic criticism that explores  the traditions, sometimes suppressed or underground, of ethnic literary activity  while providing a critique of representations of ethnic identity as found  within the majority culture
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  • Formalism and New Criticism

     

    “Formalism” is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes  literary form and the study of literary devices within the text. The work of  the Formalists had a general impact on later developments in “Structuralism” and  other theories of narrative. “Formalism,” like “Structuralism,” sought to  place the study of literature on a scientific basis through objective  analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other “functions” that comprise  the literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the  literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from  other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was essential for the  Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the “hero-function,” for  example, that had meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative  strategy was examined for how it functioned and compared to how it had  functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman  Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well known.

  • Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was “to make the stones stonier”  nicely expresses their notion of literariness. “Formalism” is perhaps best  known is Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization.” The routine of ordinary  experience, Shklovsky contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and  particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language, partly by  calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar  and made fresh the experience of daily life.
  • so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods, was a product of  the American university in the 1930s and 40s. “New Criticism” stressed close  reading of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept  “explication du texte.” As a strategy of reading, “New Criticism” viewed the  work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context  and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist.  T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the movement, expressed a  similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne and the  metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete  integration of thought and feeling. New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John  Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the   metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical  practice. “New Criticism” aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to  literary studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and the  formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others.  “New Criticism” was fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry  would yield a humanizing influence on readers and thus counter the alienating  tendencies of modern, industrial life
  • regard bears an affinity to the Southern Agrarian movement whose manifesto,  I’ll Take My Stand, contained essays by two New Critics, Ransom and  Warren. Perhaps the enduring legacy of “New Criticism” can be found in the  college classroom, in which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a  primary object of literary study.
  • focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of  class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use  traditional techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic  concerns to the final social and political meanings of literature. Marxist  theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and  authors whose work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist  societies.
  • in that Euro-American imperialism and colonization in the last four centuries,  whether external (empire) or internal (slavery) has been directed at  recognizable ethnic groups: African and African-American, Chinese, the  subaltern peoples of India, Irish, Latino, Native American, and Philipino,  among others. “Ethnic Studies” concerns itself generally with art and  literature produced by identifiable ethnic groups either marginalized or in a  subordinate position to a dominant culture. “Postcolonial Criticism”  investigates the relationships between colonizers and colonized in the period   post-colonization. Though the two fields are increasingly finding points of  intersection—the work of bell hooks, for example—and are both activist  intellectual enterprises, “Ethnic Studies and “Postcolonial Criticism” have  significant differences in their history and ideas.
  • the forefront of the theoretical scene first as feminist theory but has  subsequently come to include the investigation of all gender and sexual  categories and identities. Feminist gender theory followed slightly behind the   reemergence of political feminism in the United States and Western Europe  during the 1960s. Political feminism of the so-called “second wave” had as  its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in contemporary  societies, women’s identity, and the representation of women in media and  culture.
  • Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and  intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an activist stance  by proposing frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions  meant to change the social order. In the context of postmodernism, gender  theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category  of “gender” as a human construct enacted by a vast repetition of social  performance.

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