The Literary Theory Handbook

Gregory Castle

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118331583
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The Literary Theory Handbook introduces students to the history and scope of literary theory, showing them how to perform literary analysis, and providing a greater understanding of the historical contexts for different theories.

• A new edition of this highly successful text, which includes updated and refined chapters, and new sections on contemporary theories
• Far reaching in its inclusion of a detailed history of theory and in-depth discussions of major theories and movements
• Four distinct perspectives on theory—historical, thematic, biographical, practical—are carefully intertwined, so that key concepts, terms and ideas are developed in different contexts and cross-referenced, in the text and in the index.
• Includes alphabetically-arranged biographies designed for quick reference, and sample readings to illustrate the practical application of theory

1

The Rise of Literary Theory

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”

The historical life of ideas is neither straightforward nor causal. Ideas from one era are revived and revised for a new generation of thinkers, while new ones emerge from both predictable and surprising sources. This is certainly the case with the ­history of literary theory. As the twentieth century unfolded, literary theory took on a momentum that might be called progressive, each movement or trend building on the blind spots and logical flaws in those that had come before. But there was also a fair amount of recursive movement – doubling back to pick up a forgotten or misunderstood idea – as well as lateral forays into new terrain. Throughout this ­history, we find instances of innovation, both new combinations of existing ­theoretical ideas (for example, Marxist deconstruction) or the emergence of new areas of study (for example, cognitive studies); we also find projects of renovation, in which prior theoretical models (for example, materialist criticism or ­psychoanalysis) were given a new lease on life. These various modes of historical change were often happening simultaneously, so that we find clusters of intense growth and activity in key periods, especially in the modernist period (1920s and 1930s), the era of “high theory” (the 1960s and 1970s), and the posthumanist ­revolution that began to gain ground in the 1990s.

From the era of formalism and critical theory to the mid-century flourishing of poststructuralism and feminism to the rise of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and myriad theories under the banner of posthumanism, we see a rich and complex historical development. One cannot help but notice that from mid-century, the variety of theories increases dramatically, which means that this development is difficult to chart chronologically. For that reason, this history will attempt to illustrate the simultaneity as well as the progression of theoretical change and renewal. It will also draw attention to recursive tendencies, those moments when theoretical development appears to turn back on itself to reclaim earlier modes of thought and methodologies (as we see in the 1990s with a reinvigorated Marxist theory). Indeed, the game-changing ideas in the posthumanist movement frequently take us back to Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Darwin, those nineteenth-century “prolegomenal thinkers,” as Margo Norris calls them (6), who were products of their time but also, paradoxically, way ahead of it. This temporal paradox defines a good deal of literary theory and serves as a reminder of the importance of untimely experience, which Nietzsche describes as “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (“On the Uses” 60).

Early Developments in Literary Theory

Literary theory has its roots in Greek and Roman philosophy, principally Plato’s ideas on mimesis and Aristotle’s Poetics, though there were many competing Athenian thinkers until the time of the Romans. Of special note among the latter is Pseudo-Longinus, whose On the Sublime (first century CE) put forward the idea of an aesthetic experience that we might today call “the beautiful” and thereby marked the beginning of AESTHETIC theory. Ideas about art and literature changed little until the Renaissance era, though medieval refinements, like anagogical and allegorical modes of interpretation, were to prove important for hermeneutics and for various schools of formalist and archetypal criticism. The period from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries produced a number of important treatises on literary art. Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (1595) was instrumental in establishing the importance of the literary artist as an “inventor” or “maker,” while John Dryden, in his Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), followed the lead of Pierre Corneille, whose Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place (1660) established the principles of a neoclassical theory of drama and thereby formalized modern dramatic art. English neoclassicism reached its height in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), which articulates a view of the critic who aspires toward the perfection of “Unerring NATURE,” a “clear, unchang’d universal light.” For Pope, the task of the critic is to follow the guidelines of those who have come before, for “Those RULES of old, discover’d, not devis’d, / Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d” (ll.70–1, 88–9). The balanced and measured harmony of Pope’s couplets give a pleasing aesthetic form to a general neoclassical view of art as an improvement upon nature, a view that in the eighteenth century conformed to the Enlightenment principle of human perfectibility.

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, English and German Romantic ­literature challenged the neoclassical vision of art by giving voice to human striving for what lay beyond measure and balance, beyond formal perfection. At the same time, German idealist philosophy developed new theories of aesthetics. Most commentators today regard Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750) as the starting point of modern aesthetic theories. Baumgarten’s task was to find a way to bridge the gap between sensation and reason, a bridge he found in aesthetics, which is derived from the Greek αἰσθητóς, “sensible, perceptible” [OED]). The first major work in this new field was Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which sought to establish the general outlines of a theory of taste and aesthetic judgment. Burke uses the term “taste” to mean “that faculty, or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of imagination and the elegant arts” (6). Like Baumgarten, Burke proceeds from the assumption that taste is bound up with ­sensation; but he is not content with establishing aesthetics as an inferior kind of cognition. The faculty of imagination becomes an important feature of aesthetic judgment, for “the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own” ­separate from sensation, “either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the sense, or in combining those images in a new manner, according to a different order” (15–16). Burke was able to link empiricism and aesthetics in a systematic way, and his theories of art, particularly of the sublime, which emphasized affective states like terror and pain, were to prove immensely influential. Some years later, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) moved away from the English empirical tradition and Burkean aesthetic sensibility and established the importance of cognition in aesthetic ­judgments. For Kant, aesthetic judgments, though a “freer” form of ordinary cognition, are grounded in an a priori concept of taste that is analogous to the concepts that govern understanding and moral judgment. For Kant, aesthetic judgment ­resembles moral judgment, in that both have to take place outside the determinate CONCEPT, which is essential to reason. We know things because we have concepts for them, categories of understanding, but art, Kant says, does not become known in this conceptual way. All aesthetic judgments are reflective, not cognitive, and are deeply grounded in subjectivity; they are also singular because they cannot be defined under a general concept. An aesthetic idea “cannot become cognition because it is an ­intuition (of the imagination) for which an adequate concept can never be found” (215). But Kant required a universal ground or common sense (sensus communis) for artistic judgment. He found it in the idea of an indeterminate concept of Beauty (one that has the quality of a concept without being determined by reason), which allowed him to posit a “supersensible substrate of humanity” that grants aesthetic judgment universal validity. It is a necessary illusion, Kant admits, “the best we can do” (213). Kant’s theory of the sublime attempted to move past the emphasis on feeling in Burke’s philosophy. For both thinkers, the sublime defies the imagination’s power to conceive of an object or experience, but Kant tried to show how this failure of the imagination can be overcome by reason. The aesthetic judgment of the sublime, he argued, involves the judgment not of an object but of the relationship between an object’s overwhelming presence or force and the ability of the imagination to invoke a concept of “absolute freedom” or “absolute totality” that could assimilate it. When imagination is overwhelmed by perceptions (typically, natural and of the sort Burke describes as terrifying or awesome), reason steps in and “cognizes” what imagination has failed to grasp and thus shows its power over nature. This triumph of reason generates the sublime effect.

The concept of the beautiful is central to Kantian and neo-Kantian aesthetics, according to which judgments of the beautiful are disinterested, universal, and necessary; they present the beautiful object as possessing “purposiveness without purpose” – that is, it appears to have a purpose, it is driven by seeming to possess the quality of purposiveness, but it has no determinate purpose, no telos or goal, and it corresponds to no determinate concept. Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) departs from Kant’s aesthetics by sidestepping the problem of the concept and concentrating on the DIALECTICAL interplay of reason and imagination. He thus develops the Kantian idea of “play” well beyond where Kant himself wished to take it. In fine art, Kant notes, “the purposiveness in its form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature” – a free play that is also purposive – and it must not “seem intentional; i.e., fine art must have the look of nature even though we are conscious of it as art: it must not appear painstaking” (16). Schiller develops the idea of a “play impulse,” a state in which artistic play, rather than serving the function of a paradoxical purposiveness without purpose, mediates between sense and reason. By reconciling “becoming with absolute being, of variation with identity,” the play-drive mediates the sense-drive and form-drive, by enabling both to “act in concert” and thereby “introduce form into matter and reality into form” (97–9). Schiller’s thought was influential among German and English Romantic writers and ­artists who sought to bring together the material realm of the sensible and the spiritual realm of pure thought. Indeed, the concept of play enabled a new way of “distributing the sensible,” as Jacques Rancière puts it. “Minimally defined,” he writes, “play is any activity that has no end other than itself, that does not intend to gain any effective power over things or persons.” The “inactive activity” of the “player” (as opposed to, say, the worker) is a suspension of both the “cognitive power of understanding” and the “sensibility that requires an object of desire” (30). Kant and Schiller remain important among post-Marxist theorists, especially Rancière who argues that their work articulates “the new and paradoxical regime for identifying what is recognizable as art . . . the ­aesthetic regime” (Aesthetics 8), one which persists in framing our contemporary discussions of art and aesthetics. (On the aesthetic regime, see Post-Marxist Theory 114–15.)

G. W. F. Hegel answers what he considers to be the key questions confronting Kant and Schiller: Can we speak of universal assent to any aesthetic judgment without a concept of the beautiful or of the artwork? Can art be its own concept? Hegel thought that it could and developed a concept of art that is both true and necessary but that emerges in the same temporal and dialectical process as thought itself. Art aspires to the highest form of Spirit, for “the loftiness and excellence of art in attaining a reality adequate to its Concept will depend on the degree of inwardness and unity in which Idea and shape appear fused in one” (1: 72). Romantic art best exemplifies this notion of the artistic concept as part of the general process of Spirit (or Reason): rather than the “undivided unity of classical art” (a “unity of divine and human nature,” which is realized in a “sensuous immediate existence”), we find in Romantic art the “inwardness of self-consciousness” that “celebrates its triumph over the external and manifests its victory in and on the external itself, whereby what is apparent to the senses alone sinks into worthlessness” (1: 80–1).

The German idealist tradition exerted a powerful influence on English Romanticism, which in its turn inaugurated a tradition of critical reflection on literature and culture that influenced much of twentieth-century literary theory. One of the chief “conductors” of German aesthetic theory was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose Biographia Literaria (1817) successfully translated German aesthetics into English terms. The division of imagination into primary and secondary modes and the distinction between imagination and fancy are two of the most famous propositions in that volume, and both are grounded in the aesthetics of Kant, Schiller, and Friedrich Schelling. For Coleridge, the primary imagination is “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (295–6). The secondary imagination is an “echo” of this primary form, differing only in degree “and in the mode of its operation.” Fancy differs by virtue of its “play” within “fixities and definites,” a “mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space” (296). William Wordsworth was also influenced by Schiller, particularly his theory of aesthetic “play,” and in the distinction he drew between naïve and sentimental poetry, the latter characterized by reflective and skeptical self-consciousness, the former by “natural genius” and spontaneous, unselfconsciousness. The preface to Lyrical Ballads (co-authored by Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1800) expounds on the nature and function of literary art and the role of the artist in society; it also rejects neoclassical theories of poetic practice and turns to the “natural genius” of the “rustic” man as a model for the poet’s aesthetic sensibility. For Wordsworth, the poet is a hypersensitive individual, one “who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him” and who is “affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present” (xxviii). The poet finds in the “the native and naked dignity of man” and in divine Nature the “grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves” (xxxiii–xxxiv). The poem written by such a sensitive individual is the product of “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Percy Shelley’s Defense of Poetry puts forward a similar view of the poet as a sensitive participant in an “unremitting interchange” (“Mont Blanc”) with the natural world. For Shelley, poets “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” for they produce an aesthetic object that “is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” (46, 10). A more radical statement of poetic sensitivity at the time was John Keats’ “negative capability,” which refers to the imaginative absorption in the world outside of oneself, a capacity for surrendering one’s personality in the contemplation of an object.

Romantic notions of art and the beautiful persisted throughout the nineteenth century and constituted a kind of secular spiritualism in the arts that reached a high point in the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. However, not all writers of the era appreciated the Romantic emphasis on feeling and striving for the infinite. The critic and poet Matthew Arnold was ambivalent about Wordsworth, for example, though he admired him as he did the other major Romantics. As Michael O’Neill notes, Arnold “democratizes Romantic longing, presenting it as an all-pervasive emotion [in which] the special fate of the artist merges into [a] depiction of a general lot” (111). In fact, one of the problems for the Romantics was that they “did not know enough”: they “lacked “materials and a basis; a thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it” (Arnold 262–3). He believed that poetry, indeed all of literature, could serve an important function as a stabilizing influence in a society that was becoming increasingly less reliant on the church as the source of moral and ethical principles. His “­post-Romanticism” may have as much to do with the turmoil of mid-century Europe – marked by the wave of revolutions of 1848 – as with aesthetic concerns. Though much maligned for his cultural conservatism, Arnold may well have been the first literary theorist to recognize the deep connections between aesthetics and culture and, more important, between the critic and society. However, Arnold’s privileged position in nineteenth-century English society (his father was headmaster at Rugby School) gave him a somewhat restricted view of how literature could improve social conditions. His influential Culture and Anarchy (1869) considers the threat to society in class terms and offers what had become, by the late nineteenth century, a quintessentially liberal humanist solution to the problem. On the one hand, education, redesigned along humanist lines, should provide the kind of cultural knowledge necessary for a rapidly evolving industrial society; on the other hand, criticism should perform the function of recognizing and preserving “the best that is known and thought in the world” (268). Arnold held that “the critical power is of lower rank than the creative,” but he also held that criticism (along with philosophy) created “an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself” (260–1). Criticism should be free of Romantic emotionalism, for its chief endeavor is “to see the object as in itself it really is” (258). In order to do this, it must be informed by the “disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake” (268). In a sense, Arnold rewrites Schiller’s idea of “play” in a way that resolves the paradox at its heart by making it a function of critical clear-sightedness.

According to Linda Dowling, Arnold and his contemporaries in the mid-nineteenth century, especially writers like Joh...