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
1.
What Is Literary Theory?
2.
Traditional Literary Criticism
3.
Formalism and New Criticism
4.
Marxism and Critical Theory
5.
Structuralism and Poststructuralism
6.
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
7.
Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism
8.
Gender Studies and Queer Theory
9.
Cultural Studies
"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.
"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.
