Towards a Critical Practice

1. Towards a Critical Practice Belsey’s Challenge to “Traditional Criticism”

2. Back to Course Questions… "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of passionate feelings"- William Wordsworth"Language is legislation, speech is its code.  We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive."- Roland Barthes • What do these figures contribute to this conversation? • Shakespeare • cummings • Keats • Browning • Watt

3. Back to Course Questions… • What is language (and how does it work)? • Language is expressive of personal perception and experience in a largely empirical sense • Language is expressive of timeless, universal reality • Language is a medium of control and manipulation • Language is a limited system of categories and rules which must be subverted to express other meanings

4. Back to Course Questions… • What is meaning (and where does it come from)? • Timeless, Universal Truths • The Perception of the Author • The Text itself • Context/Reader Preconceptions

5. Belsey’s Project: • To ask questions about language and meaning directly in order to reflect upon the assumptions of different reading practices • To do so by submitting these questions to the various theoretical positions articulated in the history of literary criticism • The question: how we can construct a theoretically coherent reading practice? • Please remember that Belsey’s text is an argument – there are different accounts of this history and its ramifications.

6. What is “Common Sense” Reading? • Expressive Realism • “an assumption that novels are about life, that they are written from personal experience and that this is the source of their authenticity” (2) • Giving this practice a name is Belsey’s way of challenging this reading practice’s status as “common sense” • “Common sense” means it is never called on to account for its own inconsistencies • All reading practices have a theoretical grounding, whether they announce it or not.

7. Expressive Realism • Fusion of two ideas • “Mimesis” – art is an imitation or faithful representation of reality, the source of its “truth” • Romanticism – all art is the product of the expressive capacity/powerful feelings and perceptions of the individual artist – the source of its “truth” • Already we have a contradiction: How can art be said to “truthfully” represent reality and at the same time be rooted in individual perception • How can two different representations of the same thing be “truthful”? • Even if “truth” is ultimately in the representation of perception, how can any one perception be more “true” than others?

8. Expressive Realism • How does meaning work in this theory? • “Communication Model” Meaning Meaning Text Author Reader

9. Expressive Realism • Main question for ER: “What is the author trying to tell us?” • What kinds of claims get produced by ER reading practices? • Readings of individual “genius” or “authenticity” of perception • Meaning is singular and guaranteed/determined by the mind of the author

10. Challenges to ER: New Criticism • For NC: “…the pursuit of ‘sincerity’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘authenticity’ and the other expressive values associated with intentionalism had no relation to the more precise and truly critical values of ‘integrity’, ‘unity’, ‘maturity’, and ‘subtlety’. The latter were properties of not of the author but of the text” (15). • NC gives us our first real theory of language – as the source of all meaning • Meaning exists “on the page” (17) • Thus, the NCs went about analyzing literary works as “closed systems” whose meanings were a consequence of the form/content

11. Challenges to ER: New Criticism • Quote from Wimsatt: “If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do” (15). • NC challenges intentionalism, but does not disrupt the “communication model” Meaning Author(s) Audience Text

12. Challenges to ER: New Criticism • Main questions for New Criticism: “How does the text work? How does it construct its “formal unity”? • Types of claims produced by NC: • Meaning is singular and determined by the (author’s) text • Universal meanings – “truth” • Makes detailed analyses of how the text formally produces ideas

13. Challenges to ER: Reader Response • “At its best, interest in the reader is entirely liberating, a rejection of authorial tyranny in favour of the participation of readers in the production of a plurality of meanings; at its worst, reader-theory merely constructs a new authority-figure as guarantor of a single meaning, a timeless, transcendent, highly-trained model reader who cannot be wrong” (27). • An attempt to deal with the fact that meaning changes over time and across communities • Locates meaning with “readers” and what they “bring to the text”

14. Challenges to ER: Reader Response • Problem: what “readers” are we talking about? • “implied readers” – “the formal properties of the text construct a role for the reader. Readings therefore, are neither given nor arbitrary” (30). • Empirical – how on earth do we access these readers? • “Interpretive community” – “We interpret as we do because that is how our community interprets” (31).

15. Challenges to ER: Reader Response • RR (sometimes) challenges the notion of a single “true” reading of the text • Has a really hard time moving past notions of the “autonomous reader” who is completely free or only loosely bound by the text • Largely fails to account for uniformity of interpretation and the source of that uniformity Text Author(s) implied implied Audience

16. Communication Model: Remaining Problems • None of these theories are able to fundamentally move past the “communication model” of literature • All are an attempt to “guarantee” meaning in a singular, predictable sense in one of these three figures Text Author(s) Audience

17. Communication Model: Remaining Problems • The problem is the “empiricist idealist” model of language and its relation to the world • Empiricist: Concepts and knowledge are held to be the products of direct individual experience • Idealist: Ideas about that experience are simply communicated through language – in other words, that ideas precede language • “Common Sense” (Expressive Realism): Encounters a problem with perception and “truth” in meaning • New Criticism: Weak when trying to account for multiple meanings or meanings that change over time • Reader Response: Has a hard time accounting for variation and uniformity in readings

18. Communication Model: Remaining Problems • What is the concept or definition of language that would allow us to move past these contradictions? • How do we produce a theoretically coherent reading practice?