ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY

1. ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY LECTURE 9: NEW CRITICISM. STRUCTURALISM VS. POSTSTRUCTURALISM. DECONSTRUCTION

2. New Criticism (1930s-1950s) • forerunners: I.A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, W. Empson (Cambridge Revolution in 1920s) • in the States university professors, Austin Warren, René Wellek, Allan Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks, worked out ‘text-based’ criticism (textbooks, e.g. Understanding Poetry, Theory of Literature) • ”close reading”: to pay attention only to the usage of language and the created structure in poetry (and in drama, not in fiction) • decontextualised literature (textual-formalistic)

3. New Criticism 2 - new terms • denotative vs. connotative meanings • everyday – scientific – literary usage of language • irony of the context: the various elements in a context receive connotative meanings (e.g. metaphors, paradoxes, images of a poem) • the stability of a context is like that of the arch: based on the pressure of the elements, mutually supporting each other • unity is achieved (modernist!)

4. Cleanth Brooks, ”The Heresy of Paraphrase” • from The Well Wrought Urn (‘close reading’ of the traditionally great English poems) • structure of the poem: form or content? - both • ”The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings.” (Brooks, CP 115) • a poem should not be paraphrased!

5. Cleanth Brooks, ”The Heresy of Paraphrase” 2 • form and content are inseparable • the paraphrased prose-sense of a poem cannot show its wholeness, its essence • message? logical or rational statement? • he uses metaphors to indicate what the dynamic structure of a poem is (like): • a ballet or musical composition (”temporal scheme”) • architecture or painting (”pattern of resolved stresses”) • a dramatic play due to the conflicting elements

6. Cleanth Brooks, ”The Heresy of Paraphrase” 3 • ”the conclusion of the poem is the working out of the various tensions” – the unity is ”an equilibrium of forces, not a formula” (CP 118) • meanderings of meanings in a good poem • irony is ”the recognition of incongruities”, the contextual warping of the meanings • paradoxes and ironic logic in poetry • famous conclusion of Keats’ ”Ode an a Grecian Urn” – ”Beauty is truth, truth beauty” – makes the poem a parable about poetry, where ”myth is truer than history” (true vs. real)

8. Structuralism • an intellectual movement began in France in 1950s by the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the literary critic, Roland Barthes (Mythologies, The Fashion System) • in literary criticism in Britain in the 1970s, e.g. Frank Kermode, David Lodge; in the States from 1980s, e.g. Jonathan Culler • central idea: things cannot be understood in isolation, only in the context of larger patterns, structures, they are part of

9. Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist, on meanings in his modern approach, he emphasises how meanings are maintained and established; how grammatical structures function in the system of language • meanings are arbitrary: maintained by convention only • meanings are relational: can be defined in relation with other words • meanings are constitutive: attributed by the human mind in the understanding of the world

11. system or structure of a language set of rules, regulations in literature, forms or genres of writing e.g. the heroic epic a given utterance in that language a particular discourse, speech a given work is seen as an example e.g. Beauwolf ”In a language there are only differences without fixed terms.” Saussure- meanings exist in the network of differences-LANGUE vs. PAROLE

12. STRUCTURES • imposed by our way of perceiving the world and organising experience • ‘outside’ meanings attributed by the human mind, not contained within the things • structures take us away from the text – theory-based criticism vs. text-based (Anglo-Saxon criticism brings us closer) • analysis of a work in the context of its form, or genre etc.

13. Structuralist critics • apply the concept of systematic patterning and structuring to the whole field of Western culture, treating it as systems of signs (from Greek myth to ads of detergent) • analyse a text, relating it to larger containing structure as • an example of a particular literary genre • a member of a network of intertextual connections • as a model of an underlying universal narrative • in terms of underlying parallels or opposites (binary structure!)

14. Poststructuralism: criticism of structuralism • the structuralists do not follow through the implications of the views about language on which their intellectual system is based • language does not reflect or record the world but it shapes it! • we live in a universe of radical uncertainties without a fixed point of reference (Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’) • ours is a decentred universe characterised by the anxiety about language – ”If you know what I mean” (everyday fear of misunderstanding)

15. Structuralism vs. Poststructuralism • concerned about linguistics • scientific style, cold tone • positive attitude to language (system) • philosophical concern • emotive style, showy tone • sceptical about true knowledge and language • our reality is textual with its floating meanings (meanings are not guaranteed) • radical linguistic scepticism, irony, anxiety

16. Poststructuralism • emerged in the late 1960s in France • turning point: Roland Barthes’ ”The Death of the Author” (1968) with its rhetorical assertion of the independence of the literary text • radical textual independence and the birth ofthe reader – the text is read, that is, produced by the reader! • reading is an endless free play of meanings DECONSTRUCTION

17. Deconstruction – Jacques Derrida • the notion of the ”relativistic and logocentric universe” is liberating (e.g. différance) • transcendental signified: the neverending chain of signs (signifier1-signified1/signifier2- signified2/signifier3-signified3 etc.) • works of art can be ‘read’ as the emblems of our postmodern world: fragmented and centreless texts • reality is linguistic, our world is textual and we are readers – ”There is nothing outside the text.” • network of texts - intertextuality

19. Deconstruction • deconstruction ≠ destruction (Barbara Johnson) – closer to analysis, meaning ‘undoing’ • deconstructive reading uncovers the internal contradictions or inconsistencies in the text to show its disunity (cf. New Critics’ modernist unity) • ”reading the text against itself” • Ss in a text say something else what the text itself appears to be saying – a text may ‘betray” itself • ‘incidental’ reading of metaphors, similar sounds, puns, breaks in the text – showing the multiplicities of meaning!

20. Poststructuralist vs. Structuralist approach • seeks contradictions, paradoxes • shifts/breaks in tone, tense, viewpoint etc. • conflicts, absences, omissions • aporia, linguistic quirks • seeks parallels • balances, similarities • repetitions, symmetry, patterns of contrasts To show textual disunity vs. To show textual unity and coherence

21. Paul de Man, ”Semiology and Rhetoric” (1970s) • one of the Yale critics (+J. H. Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom) • emphasised the importance of rhetoric in reading • to move beyond formalism, having its roots in New Criticism • outside form & inside content is reformulated in the ‘box metaphor’ of literature – more exactly, in the Chinese boxes (chiasmus: rhetorical device for the inversion of parrallels)

23. Paul de Man, ”Semiology and Rhetoric” 2 • shift from semantic to semiology: from what words mean to how they mean (CP 122A) • parallely, shift from the study of grammar to the study of rhetoric, tropes and figures, in texts (e.g. Genette’s influence, Austin’s ‘speech acts’) • foundations of modern semiology made by Saussure and Peirce with main focus on the way of representation, where ”the interpretation of the sign is not […] a meaning but another sign” - it is reading/interpretation ad infinitum (CP 123A)

24. Paul de Man, ”Semiology and Rhetoric” 3 • in the enigma of the rhetorical question, the grammatical structure has two mutually exclusive meanings – the literal vs. the figurativemeaning – and it is impossible to decide which is meant • ”Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referentialaberration. […] I would not hesitate to equate the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself.” (CP124A) • see in Yeats’ ”Among School Children”: ”How can we know the dancer from the dance?” about the intertwining of the sign and meaning

25. Paul de Man, ”Semiology and Rhetoric” 4 • reading means getting inside the text, or rather uniting the outer meaning with inner understanding (chiastic play on dichotomies) • rhetorical reading aims at ‘deconstructing’ binary oppositions: ‘rhetorization of grammar’ and ‘grammatization of rhetoric’ • the question of the speaking self in a narrative: ”the figure of the narrator” – a mere grammatical pronoun? – or, rather an individual voice with specific rhetorical devices (see personal style)

26. ”The reading is not ‘our’ reading, since it uses only the linguistic elements provided by the text itself; the distinction between author and reader is one of the false distinctions that the reading makes evident. The deconstruction is not something we have added to the text but it constituted the text in the first place. A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode, […] Poetic writing is the most advanced and refined mode of deconstruction; […]” (de Man, CP 126B)