POST-MODERN CRITICISM

POST-MODERN CRITICISM Lecture 29 History of English Literature COMSATS Virtual Campus Islamabad

Introduction • Postmodernism is an artistic, architectural, philosophical, and cultural movement or condition, said to arise after and in reaction to modernism. According to many commentators, whereas modernism frames itself as the culmination of the Enlightenment's quest for an authoritatively-rational aesthetics, ethics, and knowledge, postmodernism is concerned with how the authority of those would-be-ideals, sometimes called metanarratives, are subverted through fragmentation, consumerism, and deconstruction.

Features of postmodern culture begin to arise in the 1920s with the emergence of the dada movement, which featured collage and a focus on the framing of objects and discourse as being as important, or more important, than the work itself.

Another strand which would have tremendous impact on post-modernism would be the existentialists, who placed the centrality of the individual narrative as being the source of morals and understanding. However, it is with the end of the Second World War that recognizably post-modernist attitudes begin to emerge.

Central to these is the focusing on the problems of any knowledge which is founded on anything external to an individual. Post-modernism, while widely diverse in its forms, almost invariably begins from the problem of knowledge which is both broadly disseminated in its form, but not limited in its interpretation.

Postmodernism has manifestations in many modern academic and non-academic disciplines: philosophy, theology, art, architecture, film, television, music, theatre, sociology, fashion, technology, literature, and communications are all heavily influenced by postmodern trends and ideas, and are thoroughly scrutinised from postmodern perspectives.

Until the time of the modernist period of English literature, literary criticism was a “literary” activity, with leading (call them policy) documents written by the leaders of the literary movements. We know how from Dryden and Pope and Johnson to Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats to Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne to Eliot and Auden and Spender, English poetics was theorised by the leading English poets.

But in the post-modern period there is no such thing as literary theory, nor any of the dominant theoretic documents of today’s activity of criticism has come from any man-of-letters. It is mostly the philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, etc., who have propounded all kinds of dismantling orders, which are being applied, by their followers, in the field of literature. Today, the activity called “theory,” is related to, not any particular subject, but to all subjects

. No wonder the literary criticism today has become cultural studies, feminism, postcolonialism, etc., which use literary texts for making political, sociological, or psychological case studies. As Jonathan Culler has attempted to explain the nature of THEORY:

Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods for its study.... It is a body of thinking and writing whose limits are exceedingly hard to define....a new kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophesy, but all of these mingled together in a new genre. The most convenient designation of this miscellaneous genre is simply the nickname theory, which has come to designate works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong. This is the simplest explanation of what makes something count as theory. Works regarded as theory have effects beyond their original field.

Thus, the main effect of theory is disputing all that we have been considering “common sense.” It questions all the concepts and beliefs we have held about literature, author, reader, text, meaning, etc. It questions as well the non-literary concepts of philosophy, sociology, linguistics, etc.

Theory challenges the conception of the author’s intention, that the meaning of work or speaker is what he “had in mind.” It also challenges that literature is a representation of “life”, whose truth is outside of itself, in history, or biography, etc. It further challenges the very notion of reality as something present at a given moment.

In this all-round critique of common sense, theory insists that all that passes in the name of natural or essential or universal is nothing but a construction of social practices, a production of a certain discourse.

Broadly, Culler makes the following four points to sum up the activity called theory:a. It is interdisciplinary, always deriving ideas or leaving effects outside an original discipline.b. It is analytical and speculative, always working out what is involved or implied in a text, or language, or meaning, or subject, etc.c. It is a critique of common sense, always questioning whatever is considered a given or natural or essential or universal.d. It is thinking about thought, always enquiring into categories and concepts we use in making sense of things, such as what is woman or man or meaning or text, etc. (Culler, p. 15)

Critics like Terry Eagleton (a well known British Marxist critic) may find in theory an expression of democratic impulse, and a liberation “from the stranglehold of a civilized sensibility,” the fact of the matter is that it has seriously subverted the value of literature in various ways, such as the following:1. It has made criticism a jargon-ridden writing, inaccessible to the common reader. As such, it is anti-democratic.2. It has reduced literature to the status of a speech, any speech, political, pornographic, stray writing, etc. As such, it deprives art and literature of their humane and ennobling effect.

Conti: • 3. It has reduced literary criticism to dividing people into regions, races, tribes, cultures, colonizers, colonized, etc. As such, it is divisive, not unifying.4. It has also made criticism a negative activity, which is meant to trace faultlines, lapses, absences, what the text does not say or has failed to say. • Thus, theory has given birth to a set of approaches in criticism, which transforms the activity of understanding, appreciating, and evaluating a literary work into (largely) an activity of self-reflection. It tends to marginalize artists and their art-works.

THEORY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS • Reading through the vast variety of contemporary critical theories and textual interpretations under the various brand names, such as structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction and new historicism, cultural studies and feminism, minority discourse and post-colonialism, one is left wondering where the discipline of literary criticism has arrived in our time. The alien idioms one encounters, the gigantic critical apparatuses one confronts, the mind-boggling systems one has to comprehend, all quickly combine to create a climate utterly discomforting, making one unstable even for a ‘temporary stay against confusion.’

Terrorized by the teasing games of the dreadful discourses, the common reader instinctively terminates his journey through the dense forestry and returns to his own common-sense reading of the literary works. Of course, after his abortive journey through the verbal forest he does not return the same man; he comes back sadder’ but not wiser. What leaves him completely nonplussed are the oracular declarations, such as the ‘death of God’, the ‘death of the author’, the ‘death of the subject’, etc. Mortally afraid of encountering more of such declarations, he decides never to seek any critical company for his future journeys into the ‘cities of words.’

In such a situation it has become imperative for all those who value literature and literary criticism as instruments of education, essential for preserving and promoting the humanity of human societies, to understand and analyse the factors responsible for effecting this unprecedented change in the nature of literary criticism in our time. Until the end of the nineteenth century literary criticism had remained committed to elucidating for the common reader the social and moral significance of literary works, and was always written in a literary style as readable as literature itself.

Note, for example, the following from S.T. Coleridge: • The characters of the dramatis personae, like those in real life, are to be inferred by the reader—they are not told to him. And it is well worth remarking that Shakespeare’s characters, like those in real life, are very commonly misunderstood, and almost always understood by different persons in different ways. The causes are the same in either case.

If you take only what the friends of the character say, you may be deceived, and still more so, if that which his enemies say; nay, even the character himself sees himself through the medium of his character, and not exactly as he is. Take all together, not omitting a shrewd hint from the clown or the fool, and perhaps your impression will be right; and you may know whether you have in fact discovered the poet’s own idea, by all the speeches receiving light from it, and attesting its reality by reflecting it.

The very first thing one notices here is the use of an idiom readily available to the common reader. One also notices that the analogy used for explaining the critical method is taken from everyday human dealings, which implies that literature is a representation of life. One notices, too, how in a very simple manner the issue of the author’s intention has been explained, which makes clear that it is available within the text itself, and that one does not need to look for it anywhere else, including the author as a historical personage.

A drastic change in the nature of criticism began to become noticeable in the early years of the twentieth century. Those who brought about this change include I.A. Richards, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the New Critics. With them literary criticism changed from art to science. Perhaps it had to change with the increasing influence of science in the modern age. As W.T. Stace has observed, ‘The positive stage is the stage of science which, when fully attained, abolishes both metaphysics and theology. In the golden age of the future which the triumph of science is to usher in, nothing will be considered knowledge unless it is science.’

Read, for example, the following from Ezra Pound: ‘The Proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is, careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one “slide” or specimen with another.” Thus was adopted by Pound, as well as by those ‘new’ poets and critics who faithfully followed the dictates of this poet’s poet and the critic’s critic, the method of science in poetry and criticism. A similar thrust in the direction of science was given by I.A. Richards, who in his Science and Poetry pleaded, once again, for the scientific method of analyzing the working of the poem as well as the poet’s mind.

.Note, for example, the following: • To understand what an interest is we should picture the mind as a system of very delicately poised balances, a system which so long as we are in health is constantly growing. Every situation we come into disturbs some of these balances to some degree. The ways in which they swing back to a new equipoise are the impulses with which we respond to the situation. And the chief balances in the system are our chief interests. Suppose that we carry a magnetic compass about in the neighbourhood of power magnets…. Suppose that instead of a single compass we carry an arrangement of many magnetic needles, large and small, swing so that they influence one another…

The mind is not unlike such a system if we imagine it to be incredibly complex. The needles are our interests…. • Thus, from Pound’s scientific ‘method’ we move to Richard’s scientific ‘system.’ In the convention of criticism from Aristotle to Arnold, there used to be approaches to literature based on the social and ethical goals of human society. They considered literature as an instrument of education. Now with the High Modernists it got reduced to the status of the material productions of science and industry. The most influential of these high priests of scientism, T.S. Eliot, carried this task with greater force than even Pound and Richards.

Note, for instance, the following: • There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

Here the poet’s mind becomes the gas chamber in which various experiences combine like different chemicals to form a new compound. The chemical reaction is used to explain the process of composition of a poem or any other literary text. No doubt, this conversion of literary criticism into a study of systems and structures, principles and processes, involved in the making of literature, is effected under the express influence of science.

In the same vein, the New Critics, namely John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, W.K. Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, and William Emerson, viewed a poem as a structure of words, reducing the function of criticism to explicating the functioning of various verbal devices such as metaphor, ambiguity, paradox, irony, image, etc., in the working of the structure called poem. In this New Critical effort, while literature changed from being one of the beautiful arts into one of the functional sciences, literary criticism changed from being an educational source into a scientific method.

In its attempt to introduce scientism in literature and literary criticism, the modernist criticism in the early twentieth century also made the author invisible, for like the filament of platinum he does not go into the compound called poem; he just stays behind. It also made the business of criticism a specialist’s job. It became inaccessible to the common reader who would not have the benefit of knowing various sciences and their principles and processes, systems and structures.

The very language of literary criticism acquired a special ring, becoming far removed from the language of everyday conversation. The macro commentaries of earlier criticism were replaced by the micro explications of verbal devices used in the making of a poem. The writing called criticism became difficult. W.B. Yeats, who called himself one ‘the last romantics’, soon realized this arduousness of modern poetry and of modern criticism.

In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, he separated himself from the high modernists: • The difficult work which is being written everywhere now has the substance of philosophy and is a delight to the poet with his professional pattern; but it is not your road or mine & ours is the main road, the road of naturalness and swiftness and we have thirty centuries upon our side. We alone can think like a wise man, yet express ourselves like the common people.

Criticism today has been taken over by the disciplines of philosophy and psychology, sociology and anthropology, entirely changing the parameters of reading literary works. We no longer look for aesthetic or moral grounds for the appreciation of an art work. We look for the sub-texts and sub-structures, for faultlines and fictographs, using the apparatus borrowed from one of the disciplines just mentioned.

The current critical effort refuses to decide upon any goal of literature or literary criticism beyond the contingent. It is high time that resistance was put up to the confusing critical cries of our time, paving the way for the restoration of the every-abiding goal of literature and literary criticism.

Thank You!!!!

POST-MODERN CRITICISM