Literary Theory
"Literary theory" is the body of
ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By literary
theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories
that reveal what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the
underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to
understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in theory
but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of critical activity.
It is literary theory that formulates the relationship between author and work;
literary theory develops the significance of race, class, and gender for
literary study, both from the standpoint of the biography of the author and an
analysis of their thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers
varying approaches for understanding the role of historical context in
interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious elements
of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and evolution of the
different genres narrative, dramatic, lyric in addition to the more recent
emergence of the novel and the short story, while also investigating the
importance of formal elements of literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in
recent years has sought to explain the degree to which the text is more the
product of a culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help
to create the culture.
Table of Contents
- What Is Literary Theory?
- Traditional Literary Criticism
- Formalism and New Criticism
- Marxism and Critical Theory
- Structuralism and Poststructuralism
- New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
- Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism
- Gender Studies and Queer Theory
- Cultural Studies
- References and Further Reading
a. General Works on Theory
b. Literary and Cultural Theory
"Literary theory," sometimes
designated "critical theory," or "theory," and now
undergoing a transformation into "cultural theory" within the
discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of concepts and
intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting
literary texts. Literary theory refers to any principles derived from internal
analysis of literary texts or from knowledge external to the text that can be
applied in multiple interpretive situations. All critical practice regarding
literature depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways:
theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of
criticism "the literary" and the specific aims of critical practice the
act of interpretation itself. For example, to speak of the "unity"
of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes Aristotle's theoretical
statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe, that Joseph
Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full humanity to
the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed by a postcolonial literary
theory that presupposes a history of exploitation and racism. Critics that
explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening as
a suicide generally call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and gender
theory. The structure of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work may or
may not be acknowledged by the critic, and the status of literary theory within
the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.
Literary theory and the formal practice of
literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well known course with the
history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far
back as Plato. The Cratylus contains a Plato's meditation on
the relationship of words and the things to which they refer. Plato’s
skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological
relationship to their meanings but are arbitrarily "imposed," becomes
a central concern in the twentieth century to both "Structuralism"
and "Poststructuralism." However, a persistent belief in
"reference," the notion that words and images refer to an objective
reality, has provided epistemological (that is, having to do with theories of
knowledge) support for theories of literary representation throughout most of
Western history. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase,
held "a mirror up to nature" and faithfully recorded an objectively
real world independent of the observer.
Modern literary theory gradually emerges in
Europe during the nineteenth century. In one of the earliest developments of
literary theory, German "higher criticism" subjected biblical texts
to a radical historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural
interpretation. "Higher," or "source criticism," analyzed
biblical tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an
approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth century
theory, particularly "Structuralism" and "New Historicism."
In France, the eminent literary critic Charles AugustinSaint Beuve maintained
that a work of literature could be explained entirely in terms of biography,
while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a
massive narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the
artist are utterly transformed in the work of art. (This dispute was taken up
anew by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the
"Death of the Author." See "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism.")
Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century influence on literary theory came from
the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not
facts until they have been interpreted. Nietzsche's critique of knowledge has
had a profound impact on literary studies and helped usher in an era of intense
literary theorizing that has yet to pass.
Attention to the etymology of the term
"theory," from the Greek "theoria," alerts us to the
partial nature of theoretical approaches to literature. "Theoria" indicates
a view or perspective of the Greek stage. This is precisely what literary
theory offers, though specific theories often claim to present a complete
system for understanding literature. The current state of theory is such that
there are many overlapping areas of influence, and older schools of theory,
though no longer enjoying their previous eminence, continue to exert an
influence on the whole. The once widely-held conviction (an implicit theory)
that literature is a repository of all that is meaningful and ennobling in the
human experience, a view championed by the Leavis School in Britain, may no
longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification for the
current structure of American universities and liberal arts curricula. The moment
of "Deconstruction" may have passed, but its emphasis on the
indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to establish exclusively what a word
means when used in a given situation) and thus of texts, remains significant.
Many critics may not embrace the label "feminist," but the premise
that gender is a social construct, one of theoretical feminisms distinguishing
insights, is now axiomatic in a number of theoretical perspectives.
While literary theory has always implied or
directly expressed a conception of the world outside the text, in the twentieth
century three movements "Marxist theory" of the Frankfurt School,
"Feminism," and "Postmodernism" have opened the field of
literary studies into a broader area of inquiry. Marxist approaches to
literature require an understanding of the primary economic and social bases of
culture since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product,
directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. Feminist thought and
practice analyzes the production of literature and literary representation
within the framework that includes all social and cultural formations as they
pertain to the role of women in history. Postmodern thought consists of both
aesthetic and epistemological strands. Postmodernism in art has included a move
toward non-referential, non-linear, abstract forms; a heightened degree of
self-referentiality; and the collapse of categories and conventions that had
traditionally governed art. Postmodern thought has led to the serious
questioning of the so-called metanarratives of history, science, philosophy,
and economic and sexual reproduction. Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes
to be seen as "constructed" within historical self-contained systems
of understanding. Marxist, feminist, and postmodern thought have brought about
the incorporation of all human discourses (that is, interlocking fields of
language and knowledge) as a subject matter for analysis by the literary
theorist. Using the various poststructuralist and postmodern theories that
often draw on disciplines other than the literary linguistic, anthropological,
psychoanalytic, and philosophical for their primary insights, literary theory
has become an interdisciplinary body of cultural theory. Taking as its premise
that human societies and knowledge consist of texts in one form or another,
cultural theory (for better or worse) is now applied to the varieties of texts,
ambitiously undertaking to become the preeminent model of inquiry into the
human condition.
Literary theory is a site of theories: some
theories, like "Queer Theory," are "in;" other literary
theories, like "Deconstruction," are "out" but continue to
exert an influence on the field. "Traditional literary criticism," "New
Criticism," and "Structuralism" are alike in that they held to
the view that the study of literature has an objective body of knowledge under
its scrutiny. The other schools of literary theory, to varying degrees, embrace
a postmodern view of language and reality that calls into serious question the
objective referent of literary studies. The following categories are certainly
not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive, but they represent the major
trends in literary theory of this century.
Academic literary criticism prior to the
rise of "New Criticism" in the United States tended to practice
traditional literary history: tracking influence, establishing the canon of
major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying historical context and
allusions within the text. Literary biography was and still is an important
interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions of moral criticism, not
unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic (e.g. genre studies)
criticism were also generally influential literary practices. Perhaps the key
unifying feature of traditional literary criticism was the consensus within the
academy as to the both the literary canon (that is, the books all educated
persons should read) and the aims and purposes of literature. What literature was,
and why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that subsequent
movements in literary theory were to raise.
"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.
The 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.
The "New Criticism," 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.
"New Criticism" in this 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.
Marxist literary theories tend to 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 keeping
with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the
Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of understanding the
relationship between economic production and literature, but all cultural
production as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound
effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the
development of "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism."
The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs
contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical
materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical
novel. Walter Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics
and the reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers,
including most notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse after
their emigration to the United States played a key role in introducing Marxist
assessments of culture into the mainstream of American academic life. These
thinkers became associated with what is known as "Critical theory,"
one of the constituent components of which was a critique of the instrumental
use of reason in advanced capitalist culture. "Critical theory" held
to a distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass
culture produced by capitalist societies as an instrument of domination.
"Critical theory" sees in the structure of mass cultural forms jazz,
Hollywood film, advertising a replication of the structure of the factory and
the workplace. Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist
societies were always already co-opted by the entertainment needs of an
economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché and
suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.
The major Marxist influences on literary
theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton
in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United
States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great
Britain and the development of "Cultural Materialism" and the
Cultural Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at Birmingham University's
Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both as a Marxist
theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read
overview, Literary Theory. Lentricchia likewise became influential
through his account of trends in theory, After the New Criticism.
Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his impact on Marxist
theories of culture and for his position as one of the leading figures in
theoretical postmodernism. Jameson’s work on consumer culture, architecture,
film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary
boundaries taking place in the realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory.
Jameson’s work investigates the way the structural features of late capitalism particularly
the transformation of all culture into commodity form are now deeply embedded
in all of our ways of communicating.
Like the "New Criticism,"
"Structuralism" sought to bring to literary studies a set of
objective criteria for analysis and a new intellectual rigor.
"Structuralism" can be viewed as an extension of
"Formalism" in that that both "Structuralism" and
"Formalism" devoted their attention to matters of literary form (i.e.
structure) rather than social or historical content; and that both bodies of
thought were intended to put the study of literature on a scientific, objective
basis. "Structuralism" relied initially on the ideas of the Swiss
linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier
(words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the
signified, to which it referred. Within the way a particular society uses
language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of
"differences" between units of the language. Particular meanings were
of less interest than the underlying structures of signification that made
meaning itself possible, often expressed as an emphasis on "langue"
rather than "parole." "Structuralism" was to be a
metalanguage, a language about languages, used to decode actual languages, or
systems of signification. The work of the "Formalist" Roman Jakobson
contributed to "Structuralist" thought, and the more prominent
Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov,
A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.
The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be
a key figure on the divide between "Structuralism" and
"Poststructuralism." "Poststructuralism" is less unified as
a theoretical movement than its precursor; indeed, the work of its advocates
known by the term "Deconstruction" calls into question the
possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the capacity for language to
communicate. "Deconstruction," Semiotic theory (a study of signs with
close connections to "Structuralism," "Reader response
theory" in America ("Reception theory" in Europe), and
"Gender theory" informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and
Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can be located under the banner of
"Poststructuralism." If signifier and signified are both cultural
concepts, as they are in "Poststructuralism," reference to an
empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language.
"Deconstruction" argues that this loss of reference causes an endless
deferral of meaning, a system of differences between units of language that has
no resting place or final signifier that would enable the other signifiers to
hold their meaning. The most important theorist of "Deconstruction,"
Jacques Derrida, has asserted, "There is no getting outside text,"
indicating a kind of free play of signification in which no fixed, stable
meaning is possible. "Poststructuralism" in America was originally
identified with a group of Yale academics, the Yale School of
"Deconstruction:" J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul de
Man. Other tendencies in the moment after "Deconstruction" that share
some of the intellectual tendencies of "Poststructuralism" would
included the "Reader response" theories of Stanley Fish, Jane
Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the
work of Sigmund Freud, extends "Postructuralism" to the human subject
with further consequences for literary theory. According to Lacan, the fixed,
stable self is a Romantic fiction; like the text in "Deconstruction,"
the self is a decentered mass of traces left by our encounter with signs,
visual symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is constituted by language,
a language that is never one's own, always another’s, always already in use.
Barthes applies these currents of thought in his famous declaration of the
"death" of the Author: "writing is the destruction of every
voice, of every point of origin" while also applying a similar
"Poststructuralist" view to the Reader: "the reader is without
history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who
holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is
constituted."
Michel Foucault is another philosopher,
like Barthes, whose ideas inform much of poststructuralist literary theory.
Foucault played a critical role in the development of the postmodern
perspective that knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in
the form of discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is
discourse itself, can only be encountered textually. Following Nietzsche, Foucault
performs what he calls "genealogies," attempts at deconstructing the
unacknowledged operation of power and knowledge to reveal the ideologies that
make domination of one group by another seem "natural." Foucaldian
investigations of discourse and power were to provide much of the intellectual
impetus for a new way of looking at history and doing textual studies that came
to be known as the "New Historicism."
"New Historicism," a term coined
by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a body of theoretical and interpretive
practices that began largely with the study of early modern literature in the
United States. "New Historicism" in America had been somewhat
anticipated by the theorists of "Cultural Materialism" in Britain,
which, in the words of their leading advocate, Raymond Williams describes
"the analysis of all forms of signification, including quite centrally
writing, within the actual means and conditions of their production." Both
"New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" seek to
understand literary texts historically and reject the formalizing influence of
previous literary studies, including "New Criticism,"
"Structuralism" and "Deconstruction," all of which in
varying ways privilege the literary text and place only secondary emphasis on
historical and social context.
According to "New Historicism," the
circulation of literary and non-literary texts produces relations of social
power within a culture. New Historicist thought differs from traditional
historicism in literary studies in several crucial ways. Rejecting traditional
historicism's premise of neutral inquiry, "New Historicism" accepts
the necessity of making historical value judgments. According to "New
Historicism," we can only know the textual history of the past because it
is "embedded," a key term, in the textuality of the present and its
concerns. Text and context are less clearly distinct in New Historicist
practice. Traditional separations of literary and non-literary texts, "great"
literature and popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged. For the
"New Historicist," all acts of expression are embedded in the
material conditions of a culture. Texts are examined with an eye for how they
reveal the economic and social realities, especially as they produce ideology
and represent power or subversion. Like much of the emergent European social
history of the 1980s, "New Historicism" takes particular interest in
representations of marginal/marginalized groups and non-normative behaviors witchcraft,
cross-dressing, peasant revolts, and exorcisms as exemplary of the need for
power to represent subversive alternatives, the Other, to legitimize itself.
Louis Montrose, another major innovator and
exponent of "New Historicism," describes a fundamental axiom of the
movement as an intellectual belief in "the textuality of history and the
historicity of texts." "New Historicism" draws on the work of
Levi-Strauss, in particular his notion of culture as a "self-regulating
system." The Foucaldian premise that power is ubiquitous and cannot be
equated with state or economic power and Gramsci's conception of
"hegemony," i.e., that domination is often achieved through
culturally-orchestrated consent rather than force, are critical underpinnings
to the "New Historicist" perspective. The translation of the work of
Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the rise of the "New
Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" and left a legacy in
work of other theorists of influence like Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan Dollimore.
In its period of ascendancy during the 1980s, "New Historicism" drew
criticism from the political left for its depiction of counter-cultural
expression as always co-opted by the dominant discourses. Equally, "New
Historicism’s" lack of emphasis on "literariness" and formal
literary concerns brought disdain from traditional literary scholars. However,
"New Historicism" continues to exercise a major influence in the
humanities and in the extended conception of literary studies.
7. Ethnic Studies and
Postcolonial Criticism
"Ethnic Studies," sometimes
referred to as "Minority Studies," has an obvious historical
relationship with "Postcolonial Criticism" 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.
"Ethnic Studies" has had a
considerable impact on literary studies in the United States and Britain. In
W.E.B. Dubois, 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. Ethnic and minority literary theory emphasizes the relationship of
cultural identity to individual identity in historical circumstances of overt
racial oppression. More recently, scholars and writers such as Henry Louis
Gates, Toni Morrison, and Kwame Anthony Appiah have brought attention to the
problems inherent in applying theoretical models derived from Euro-centric
paradigms (that is, structures of thought) to minority works of literature
while at the same time exploring new interpretive strategies for understanding
the vernacular (common speech) traditions of racial groups that have been
historically marginalized by dominant cultures.
Though not the first writer to explore the
historical condition of postcolonialism, the Palestinian literary theorist
Edward Said's book Orientalism is generally regarded as having
inaugurated the field of explicitly "Postcolonial Criticism" in the
West. Said argues that the concept of "the Orient" was produced by
the "imaginative geography" of Western scholarship and has been
instrumental in the colonization and domination of non-Western societies.
"Postcolonial" theory reverses the historical center/margin direction
of cultural inquiry: critiques of the metropolis and capital now emanate from
the former colonies. Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned
the binary thought that produces the dichotomies center/margin, white/black,
and colonizer/colonized by which colonial practices are justified. The work of
Gayatri C. Spivak has focused attention on the question of who speaks for the
colonial "Other" and the relation of the ownership of discourse and
representation to the development of the postcolonial subjectivity. Like
feminist and ethnic theory, "Postcolonial Criticism" pursues not
merely the inclusion of the marginalized literature of colonial peoples into
the dominant canon and discourse. "Postcolonial Criticism" offers a
fundamental critique of the ideology of colonial domination and at the same
time seeks to undo the "imaginative geography" of Orientalist thought
that produced conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East,
civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect,
"Postcolonial Criticism" is activist and adversarial in its basic
aims. Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role of
colonial peoples their wealth, labor, and culture in the development of modern
European nation states. While "Postcolonial Criticism" emerged in the
historical moment following the collapse of the modern colonial empires, the
increasing globalization of culture, including the neo-colonialism of
multinational capitalism, suggests a continued relevance for this field of
inquiry.
Gender theory came to 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. These causes converged with early
literary feminist practice, characterized by Elaine Showalter as
"gynocriticism," which emphasized the study and canonical inclusion
of works by female authors as well as the depiction of women in male-authored
canonical texts.
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. The biological distinction
between man and woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who
reached a similar conclusion: the sexual categories are products of culture and
as such help create social reality rather than simply reflect it. Gender theory
achieved a wide readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor
through the work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone
de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while
Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French. French feminist
thought is based on the assumption that the Western philosophical tradition
represses the experience of women in the structure of its ideas. As an
important consequence of this systematic intellectual repression and exclusion,
women's lives and bodies in historical societies are subject to repression as
well. In the creative/critical work of Cixous, we find the history of Western
thought depicted as binary oppositions: "speech/writing; Nature/Art,
Nature/History, Nature/Mind, Passion/Action." For Cixous, and for Irigaray
as well, these binaries are less a function of any objective reality they
describe than the male-dominated discourse of the Western tradition that
produced them. Their work beyond the descriptive stage becomes an intervention
in the history of theoretical discourse, an attempt to alter the existing
categories and systems of thought that found Western rationality. French
feminism, and perhaps all feminism after Beauvoir, has been in conversation
with the psychoanalytic revision of Freud in the work of Jacques Lacan.
Kristeva’s work draws heavily on Lacan. Two concepts from Kristeva the
"semiotic" and "abjection" have had a significant influence
on literary theory. Kristeva’s "semiotic" refers to the gaps,
silences, spaces, and bodily presence within the language/symbol system of a
culture in which there might be a space for a women’s language, different in
kind as it would be from male-dominated discourse.
Masculine gender theory as a separate
enterprise has focused largely on social, literary, and historical accounts of
the construction of male gender identities. Such work generally lacks
feminisms' activist stance and tends to serve primarily as an indictment rather
than a validation of male gender practices and masculinity. The so-called
"Men’s Movement," inspired by the work of Robert Bly among others,
was more practical than theoretical and has had only limited impact on gender
discourse. The impetus for the "Men’s Movement" came largely as a
response to the critique of masculinity and male domination that runs
throughout feminism and the upheaval of the 1960s, a period of crisis in
American social ideology that has required a reconsideration of gender roles.
Having long served as the de facto "subject" of Western thought, male
identity and masculine gender theory awaits serious investigation as a
particular, and no longer universally representative, field of inquiry.
Much of what theoretical energy of
masculine gender theory currently possesses comes from its ambiguous
relationship with the field of "Queer theory." "Queer
theory" is not synonymous with gender theory, nor even with the
overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but does share many of their
concerns with normative definitions of man, woman, and sexuality. "Queer
theory" questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the
cognitive paradigms generated by normative (that is, what is considered
"normal") sexual ideology. To "queer" becomes an act by which
stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or
otherwise critiqued.
"Queering" can be enacted on behalf of all
non-normative sexualities and identities as well, all that is considered by the
dominant paradigms of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive,
odd in short, queer. Michel Foucault's work on sexuality anticipates and
informs the Queer theoretical movement in a role similar to the way his writing
on power and discourse prepared the ground for "New Historicism."
Judith Butler contends that heterosexual identity long held to be a normative
ground of sexuality is actually produced by the suppression of homoerotic
possibility. Eve Sedgwick is another pioneering theorist of "Queer
theory," and like Butler, Sedgwick maintains that the dominance of
heterosexual culture conceals the extensive presence of homosocial relations.
For Sedgwick, the standard histories of western societies are presented in
exclusively in terms of heterosexual identity: "Inheritance, Marriage,
Dynasty, Family, Domesticity, Population," and thus conceiving of
homosexual identity within this framework is already problematic.
Much of the intellectual legacy of
"New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" can now be
felt in the "Cultural Studies" movement in departments of literature,
a movement not identifiable in terms of a single theoretical school, but one
that embraces a wide array of perspectives media studies, social criticism,
anthropology, and literary theory as they apply to the general study of
culture. "Cultural Studies" arose quite self-consciously in the 80s
to provide a means of analysis of the rapidly expanding global culture industry
that includes entertainment, advertising, publishing, television, film,
computers and the Internet. "Cultural Studies" brings scrutiny not
only to these varied categories of culture, and not only to the decreasing
margins of difference between these realms of expression, but just as
importantly to the politics and ideology that make contemporary culture possible.
"Cultural Studies" became notorious in the 90s for its emphasis on
pop music icons and music video in place of canonical literature, and extends
the ideas of the Frankfurt School on the transition from a truly popular
culture to mass culture in late capitalist societies, emphasizing the
significance of the patterns of consumption of cultural artifacts.
"Cultural Studies" has been interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary,
from its inception; indeed, "Cultural Studies" can be understood as a
set of sometimes conflicting methods and approaches applied to a questioning of
current cultural categories. Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, Tony Bennett and
Simon During are some of the important advocates of a "Cultural
Studies" that seeks to displace the traditional model of literary studies.
- Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
- During, Simon. Ed. The Cultural Studies Reader.
London: Routledge, 1999.
- Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
- Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
- Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Stanton, Gareth, and Maley, Willy.
Eds. Postcolonial Criticism. New York: Addison, Wesley,
Longman, 1997.
- Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. Eds. Modern Literary
Theory: A Reader. 4th edition.
- Richter, David H. Ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic
Texts and Contemporary Trends. 2nd Ed.
Bedford Books: Boston, 1998.
- Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Eds. Literary Theory:
An Anthology. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998.
- Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays
on Mass Culture. Ed. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 2001.
- Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy: And Other
Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press,
1971.
- Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality
in Western Literature. Trans.
- Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1953.
- Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
1981.
- Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Trans.
Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
- Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans.
Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
- Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Tr. H.M.
Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953.
- Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah
Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1988.
- Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the
Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, 1947.
- Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri
C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976.
- Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and
Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903.
- Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The
Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1980.
- Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1.
An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin, 1981.
- Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology
of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973.
- Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of
African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989.
- hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.
Boston: South End Press, 1981.
- Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin
Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2002.
- Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
- Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
- Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. London:
Routledge, 2001.
- Lemon Lee T. and Reis, Marion J. Eds. Russian Formalist
Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, 1965.
- Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah
and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1962.
- Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1955.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals.
Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1969.
- Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton
and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.
- Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans.
C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage, 1982.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon,
1978.
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. Between
Men: English literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Epistemology of the Closet.
London: Penguin, 1994.
- Showalter, Elaine. Ed. The New Feminist Criticism:
Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. London: Virago,
1986.
- Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: the
Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
- Wellek, Rene and Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature.
3rd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956.
- Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
