What is Literary Criticism For? (Part 2)

A Defense of Postcritique and Wonder

A Short History of Literary Theory

When I came to college and graduate school, I encountered some very different ideas of art from my own (see Part 1). I was challenged to grapple with texts in a new way, to approach them from a variety of unfamiliar angles, and to apply a rigorous set of analytical tools to dig beneath their surfaces. I was trained in deep reading, critical thinking, analysis, and critique, all of which benefited me greatly. I learned much, and it turned out that my ideas about literature were in some ways out of fashion—though this was not enough to make me abandon them outright, as I will discuss presently. I’ve described a little how my ideas about literature developed, and now it’s time to contrast that with the way that the ideas of mainstream literary criticism have developed since the mid-twentieth century.

NOTE: for those readers who are not interested in ivory tower academic theories, I must offer a preliminary apology for what follows. And yet…this discussion is not irrelevant to you, even if you have no interest in literary theory. The philosophies of the sages have a way of making their way, eventually, into the mainstream and into everyday life—your everyday life. And if anything I said about art above resonated with you, then you know that there is something more than just books at stake in the question of how we approach literature.

Modern literary histories usually begin with New Criticism, but before turning to that, I want to make brief mention of a much older philosophical development which, to some extent, underpins and explains the course of literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. I refer to nominalism. Headed by the Medieval thinker William of Ockham, nominalism eventually won out against realism in the debate over universals—words that can be applied to individual things having something in common. “Nominalism denied the real being of universals on the ground that the use of a general word (e.g. ‘humanity’) does not imply the existence of a general thing named by it” (Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 8, 753). In effect, nominalism holds that concepts—especially transcendentals—have no existence in themselves. They are mere words, terms constructed in our own minds in order to conveniently classify objects, perceptions, or phenomena that have no inherent connection to one another. With that philosophical background in mind, we can look at recent developments in literary theory.

New Criticism had its origins in the 1920’s and 30’s. The new critics were the first Anglo-American group to set up a systematic method for the study of literature. Prior to the new critics, the study of literature was a nebulous field, involving a combination of history, impressionistic response to literature, moralizing, and reading aloud, according to Robert Dale Parker’s overview of theory, How to Interpret Literature (13). The new critics—reacting to this informal style of teaching and learning literature and seeking to rival their scientific compatriots, who had clear, strict methods and a sense of identity—insisted on a rigorous, almost empirical method of interpretation consisting of close reading, evidence from the text, and an emphasis on the words on the page as opposed to history, biography, or context surrounding those words (11, 14). They were interested in patterns and symbols, and looking at the text as a self-contained unit, resolving its apparent contradictions, paradoxes, or ambiguities. Headed by critics such as R.P. Blackmur, John Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Penn Warren, they valued form, especially “organic unity,” over moral, historical, or political implication (18, 21, 23). They also introduced the idea of the intentional fallacy, which holds that we cannot know an author’s intention, or at least that the author’s intention is not synonymous with the best interpretation of a work (30-31).

From the middle of the twentieth century onwards, various waves of literary theory began to react against New Criticism. First came structuralism, built largely on the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobsen, and Claude Levi-Strauss, with its emphasis on comparison. In structuralist thinking, we know things by their differences from other things, which introduces the notion of binary oppositions (45). Saussure’s method of signifier (sound image) and signified (concept represented by signifier), their arbitrary relationship, and his disregard for the referent (the actual physical object described in the signified) (46) recalls nominalism. Structuralist thinking is essentially an outgrowth of nominalism: in it, not only are words referring to universals mere human constructions, with no actual corresponding reality outside language, but even words referring to concrete objects have, at best, a tenuous relationship to the actual object, whose existence or nonexistence hardly enters the equation for Saussure. “For structuralists, language itself, in a broad sense of the term that include all systems of representation and not just words, constructs the things that we use it to describe. . . Structuralists thus see reality as constructed, not as made up of underlying essences that language merely coats over or labels” (Parker 49). Structuralism’s notion of the constructedness of reality and arbitrariness of language—which, I would argue, evolved out of nominalism—would pave the way for most of the major schools of criticism that would explode in the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s.

As structuralism went on to emphasize arbitrariness and difference more and more, it evolved (devolved?) into deconstruction (50). The philosopher Jacques Derrida (pictured above) can be considered the founding father of deconstruction. Derrida and his followers emphasized the multiplicity of meaning. They took Saussure’s idea of the signifier and the signified and widened the gap between the two, focusing on “free-floating signifiers,” the free play of signifiers. “[I]n deconstruction, seemingly singular or stable meanings give way to a ceaseless play of language that multiplies meanings” (Parker 87). The deconstructionist’s thinking echoes Roland Barthes’s in “The Death of the Author.” No singular meaning to a text can be determined—rather, an ever-expanding number of meanings overwhelms a text through dissemination—figurative meanings proliferate to the point that they displace literal meanings (88, 89). Strict definition becomes impossible.

Then psychoanalytical criticism, inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, began to look at literature from a less philosophical and more psychological perspective, though using the same assumption as deconstruction that words, ideas, and images can have a multiplicity of meanings. Psychoanalytic critics read authors, characters, and texts symptomatically, looking for ways in which they repressed unflattering meanings or desires through omissions, fissures, transference, or displacements (Parker 112-128). The psychoanalytic critic approaches a text assuming that it has something to hide, that the surface meaning is not the whole meaning, and that the item under investigation, perhaps unconsciously, has filtered out much pertinent information.

The socio-political schools of criticism that entered the fray from the 1960’s on would take the philosophical and interpretive tools developed by structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, and psychoanalysis and apply them to various spheres of human life: economics, race, gender, sexuality, empire, history, the environment, and so on. In her book The Limits of Critique (an important work, to which I will return) Rita Felski writes of this time, “My first forays into theory occurred at the high point of Althusserian thought in the early 1980’s. . . [this thought] drew from psychoanalysis as well as Marxism: the language of literary studies grew weighty with references to symptoms and repressions, anxieties and the unconscious. . .Vocabularies proliferated and changed with an often bewildering speed” (19). At first, conflict occurred between psychoanalysis and some of the more socially oriented schools (Parker 112), but gradually these latter began to see how they could use psychoanalysis’s methods of questioning, investigating, and identifying guilt and repressed desire to illuminate the struggles they saw going on within society, whether they be between the bourgeois and the proletariat, heteronormativity and queerness, the patriarchy and feminism, the dominant race and the marginalized race, or the colonizer and the colonized. They aimed to challenge the status quo.

In the 1970’s and 80’s, early feminist criticism, such as that of Toril Moi, looked at images of women (how women were represented in fiction) (Parker 151). Feminist critics also looked at women’s literary history, contributing toward a movement to redefine the canon by including more voices that critics considered marginalized—in the case of feminism, female writers (155). Later feminist criticism moved away from mere images of women criticism, and began to explore how women are not merely objects and victims, but have agency and shape their own lives (156). Psychoanalytic feminists such as Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva came to view language as masculine, or phallogocentric, and tried to imagine alternative feminine ways of speaking (159). The work of Simone de Beauvoir and Gayle Rubin began to look at the meaning of “woman” itself. Using nominalist, structuralist, and deconstructionist philosophy about language, meaning, and essences, they declared that one is not born as a woman, but rather becomes one (157). Much contemporary feminist theory views gender as a constructed product of culture rather than a natural entity, a clear nod to structuralist notions of reality constructed through language—in this case, the “language” of culture (158). It is easy to see, also, how these feminist explorations of gender would develop into a field of its own in the form of gender and queer theory.

Queer studies believed, once again, in the constructedness of concepts that society has traditionally considered natural. Thus they spoke of the naturalization of heterosexuality and society trying to make it compulsory, the false binary of heterosexual/gay or heterosexual/lesbian and even male/female, and recalled Freud’s notion of the polymorphously perverse (181). Inheriting from the deconstructionists’ the philosophical heritage of the multiplicity of meanings, queer studies believes in a multiplicity of genders and sexualities, often repressed or hidden because of the rules and assumptions of a hegemonic society (a la Freud and Marx). For them, “there is no core identity. . .people do not have a preexisting self that then performs identity. Instead, the performance of identity constructs the self” (Parker 186). Key figures in this field include Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault.

As we can see from the above examples, many of the other schools of literary criticism drew on Marxism. Marxist criticism saw class warfare as the driving force of history, reflected in literature, and developed many of the key concepts and vocabulary that other critical theories would utilize, such as the idea of a base and superstructure, alienation, center and periphery, and perhaps most significantly, the dialectic, used to describe the ongoing struggle between oppressor and oppressed (212, 213). Thinkers Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci began to argue that the bourgeois hegemony was maintained by cultural influence as much as by political or economic influence, and that a revolution could be enacted through culture as well (216, 218), another pair of ideas that other schools adopted in reflecting on apparent social conflicts. The Frankfurt School went onto try to determine why the proletariat revolution had not occurred, looking at how capitalist ideology deters revolutionary consciousness, primarily through culture (219-220). The connection to literature, and the way Marxists viewed it, is clear here. For Marxists and post-Marxists, literary texts can be examined for how they reinforce the dominant social structure or how they sometimes try to subvert it. Post-Marxism grew from this, moving away from the idea of economic determinism and towards a more flexible view of the relationship between power, economics, and culture (221). French Marxist Louis Althusser was influential with his concept of ideology and interpellation, in which the hegemonic system is reproduced through individuals beings passively and unconsciously drawn into dominant social assumptions. (221-222, 224). Pierre Bourdieu added to this his idea of cultural capital (233). Cultural studies grew out of these ideas; it sought to bring together “Marxism…poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and—eventually—feminism for the study of contemporary popular culture” (Parker 260), while New Historicism looked at the interplay between literature, economics, and history in the forming of previous cultures, operating on the assumption of complex, multiplied interpretations, meanings, influences, and relationships in the texts and histories studied (245). Stephen Greenblatt, with his look at how culture shaped writers’ sense of selfhood and vice versa, is an important figure here.

Led by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha postcolonialism and race studies would apply Marxist, post-Marxist, and psychoanalytic techniques to look at the power dynamics between colonizers and the colonized or between a dominant and a marginalized race—and the way those identities can shift through ambivalence and contradictory feelings. They explore the position of the subaltern. Frantz Fanon, in an interesting parallel to Althusser, looked at a condition he believed to be internalized racism that “allowed colonized peoples to perpetuate the colonialist and racist myths of their inferiority” (276).

One other major school of literary criticism that should be mentioned is reader response criticism. Reader response criticism takes the doctrine of the intentional fallacy and Barthes’s and Derrida’s ideas to their logical conclusion, stating that texts’ meaning are constructed by the reader, not the writer. Opposing themselves to the new critics and their disdain for affective reading, Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser spearheaded the field with their exploration of the movements of the reader as they read a text, both in the form of the ideal and implied reader, and within the context of interpretive communities (317-18, 325). For reader response critics, the reader projects meaning onto the text, and that is where the interest lies. This field continues to use Marxist and cultural studies ideas since it considers the way that a reader’s connection or disconnection to the dominant ideology affects their reading (dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional reading) (Parker 323).

The critical method of interrogating literature to discover its role in various forms of power dynamics, exploitation, marginalization, and oppression proved to be very effective. The paradigm has been applied to many different areas of study, the most recent including the environment, disability, and medicine. Felski summarizes, “To immerse oneself in the last few decades of literary theory and cultural theory is thus to be caught up in a dizzying whirlwind of ideas, arguments, and word pictures” (20).

This was the situation of literary criticism, then, when I began my formal education in the field. As I progressed through my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature, I found myself, more often than not, defining my approach by positioning myself against a particular school of literary criticism rather than by identifying with it. What seemed to me to link theoretical approaches was their limitations, not their expanding horizons. What was common between postcolonialism, Marxism, queer theory, feminist studies, deconstruction, and the rest was the way that they confined and boxed in the approach to a text (they simply offered different boxes to choose from). For me, they stifled. I felt that I could predict the conclusion of, for instance, a postcolonial reading of The Tempest almost before I began reading it, for its object and scope was, to some extent, predetermined. In the case of our Tempest example, the method and angle is so specialized that it allows for only two ultimate conclusions or theses regarding the play (with minor variations): (1) the play reinforces a discourse of imperial hegemony or (2) it resists a discourse of imperial hegemony. But we know that the existence of a discourse of imperial hegemony—and that the text’s engagement with that discourse is the text’s most salient meaning—is a given from the outset. Thus I am sure I am not the only student of literature to begin such an essay with a pretty clear idea of where it will end. The method presets the binary—the existence of an imperial discourse in the text is guaranteed. The only unknown component, the only variable, is precisely how the text either reinforces or resists the idea of empire and colonization, and the critic works primarily to demonstrate the text’s mode of accomplishing this.

Such an activity, either as critic or reader, can hardly be considered a process of discovery, however. While the postcolonial critic intends, no doubt, to expand our horizons by defamiliarizing the text and unveiling its hidden agenda, which admittedly has its value, the end result, for me at least, is just the reverse. In the end the critic has forced the work into an interpretive mold with a predetermined shape or conclusion—or at least the critic runs the risk of doing so, a point that I argue at length in my paper “‘This Cell’s My Court’: A Look at Postcolonial Criticism on The Tempest and Its ‘Erosion’,” written for Introduction to Graduate Studies (ENG 601) in Fall 2018. As Rita Felski puts it, “The art work, even at its most radiant and effulgent, turns out to be an anticipation and confirmation of the tenets of [the critical school’s] thought. . .There is no moment of revelation, no startling of consciousness, no transformation of thought; the world view of the critic is neither shaken nor stirred. What a text ultimately portends is foretold by a prior theoretical-analytical scheme” (The Limits of Critique 64). To use a literary analogy, these methods give us the epilogue before the prologue. And every reader can testify that knowing the ending too soon can sometimes ruin a good novel. This reductionist approach can extend to the meaning of individual characters as well. “[A]llegorical interpretation can thus lead to an all-too-predictable style of reading, where characters in novels or films are reduced to the indexical function of signaling some larger social injustice” (Anker and Felski 7). In their understandable leap toward emancipation, such approaches, ironically, end up limiting thought. Indeed, we literary critics are expert treasure-hunters for we often find what we’re looking for, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

These schools of thought, then, are the specialist’s tools: they are designed to perform a very specific task, and they often perform it very well. But the danger they pose, or at least the difficulty they presented for me as a student of literature, was the substantial risk of falling into a kind of monomania. The critical method must be commended for its rigor, its doggedness, its nose for sniffing out oppression, and its refusal to be taken in. But, to put it crudely, there is a fine line between doggedness and pig-headedness. When we confine ourselves to a “lens,” or even the idea of a “lens,” what other points of view are we cutting ourselves off from? We have a natural human tendency, when we are committed to a conclusion, to make the evidence fit the claim, rather than the other way around. And so when we read a text with the aim of unveiling its commentary on a specific, pre-set point or agenda or matrix of power, we run the risk of becoming blind to its other, even contrary, readings.

Because the conclusion of a “lens” type paper is more or less foregone, the result is that, in order to stand out and innovate, a critic has to become more and more creative in discovering subterranean patterns of reinforcement or rebellion against the status quo. The brilliance of the critical essay is judged not on its findings but on its method, which is a dangerous inversion. This then feeds a cycle of increasing skepticism as each critic must outdo the others in being the most vigorous in unearthing text’s hidden motives and agendas—that is, the critic must be the most skeptical. But what had drawn me to literature to begin with was its ability to comment on important issues, on questions relevant to us all. I was interested in how literature could unite, not how it could divide (through its injustices, oppressions, its reinforcement of inequalities), yet the latter was the prevailing occupation of the critics.

One of the questions, then, that I had to ask, was, Where does skepticism end? The danger of skepticism is that it may become the snake that devours its own tail. Skepticism breeds skepticism, until we are skeptics of skepticism itself. For instance, as a student, I often found myself using the tools of critique to destabilize the very method of critique being used. This is a game that can be played endlessly (and a fun one), but what does it yield?

PART 3