The Literary Theory Toolkit

A Compendium of Concepts and Methods

Herman Rapaport

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444395686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teoria della critica letteraria

The Literary Theory Toolkit offers readers a rich compendium of key terms, concepts, and arguments necessary for the study of literature in a critical-theoretical context.

• Includes varied examples drawn from readily available literary texts spanning all periods and genres
• Features a chapter on performance, something not usually covered in similar texts
• Covers differing theories of the public sphere, ideology, power, and the social relations necessary for the understanding of approaches to literature

1

Introductory Tools for Literary Analysis

1.1 Basics of Literary Study

Comprehension versus Interpretation

1.2 Common Critical Practices

Close Reading

Contextual Analysis

Application of a Critical Approach

Social Criticism

1.3 Literary Language

Multiple Meanings

Poetry and Plurisignation

1.4 Hermeneutics

Peshat and Derash

Medieval Hermeneutics: The Fourfold Method

Sympathetic Analogies

The Rise of Modern Literary Interpretation

Philosophical Hermeneutics

The Hermeneutic Circle

1.5 Major Twentieth-Century Schools of Critical Analysis

Traditional and New Historicisms

New Criticism

Marxism

Structuralism

Phenomenological Literary Analysis

Psychoanalytic Criticism

Reader Response Criticism

Post-Structuralism

1.6 Socio-Political Analyses

Feminism

Social Constructivism: Berger and Luckmann versus Michel Foucault

Race Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Ethnic Studies

Cultural, Global, and Post-colonial Studies

1.1 Basics of Literary Study

Comprehension versus Interpretation

Comprehension concerns the conceptual assembly of textual information in a way that is precise and literally accurate. In order to discuss a literary work, the critic needs to know how personages are described and characterized, how settings are depicted and what details they include and possibly exclude, what actions take place and in what order, and what sorts of figural details and narrative devices the author has included. A good comprehension of a literary work will also include the ability to identify points of view, major themes, and key allusions (references to historical occurrences, myths, or passages in other influential texts, for example, the Bible). Everything that falls under the term comprehension has to do with gathering and assembling of evidence that can be used for justifying interpretations. For literary critics comprehension exceeds mere competence in that it leads to noticing details that others have missed. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis is masterful in its capacity to select minute details that have major historical significance in the development of representational styles in the West. An even closer reader of literature was Paul de Man in his seminal article “The Rhetoric of Temporality” in which he demonstrates complexities with respect to how allegory and symbol function in the late eighteenth century.¹

In university, the teaching of literature tends to stress skills in interpretation. This exceeds mere literal comprehension and requires the ability to see problems and offer hypotheses. For example, why is the order of events in a story told in a sequence that is unchronological, and why in the case of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, do we not begin with the materials of Book 6 (Satan’s revolt in heaven), which is much closer to the epic’s real beginning? Books 1 and 2 start us out right after the rebellious angels have fallen down into hell after their revolt. Or, why does William Faulkner in the novel The Sound and the Fury not have Caddy Compson narrate a section of her own? How does this silencing of woman function in the novel? As sexual repression, if not sexism? As the deliberate formation of a lacuna in the text that impedes our ability to totalize the narrations that are given? As a perspective Faulkner expects us to construct for ourselves, which then makes it much more a part of ourselves? To answer such questions requires interpretation. Here one is required to perceive a significant problem, conceptualize that problem, analyze textual evidence, and offer some hypotheses and solutions.

Literary interpretation occurs when critics begin asking questions about what they have observed. How critics pose questions and formulate problems tells us how original and insightful they are. In fact, what distinguishes a seminal book or essay from a run of the mill study is the originality of the way in which a problematic is conceptualized and the surprising results to which it leads. In recent decades, we have seen many studies that have recycled the same questions and problems by way of applying them to new works, and with predictable results. The study of how yet another literary heroine subverts patriarchy may contribute somewhat to the understanding of yet another literary text, but as an interpretive project it would hardly indicate much originality of mind, given the many essays and books that have executed this very same project albeit with other primary texts. The same could be said about the many studies coming out right now in which critics look for hybrid social identities in order to show how characters in literature “negotiate” race or ethnicity in a represented social context. In the past, critics who were looking for ambiguity or archetypes in literary texts were engaging in very much the same sort of prescribed literary interpretive practice: the imitation of institutionally sanctioned projects pioneered by innovative thinkers in the profession. Major examples of original critical projects in the twentieth century would include Edward Said’s Orientalism and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.²

READING

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1953)

Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

1.2 Common Critical Practices

Four common types of critical practice are: close reading, contextual analysis, the application of a critical approach, and social critique.

Close Reading

Close reading concerns close attention to textual details with respect to elements such as setting, characterization, point of view, figuration, diction, rhetorical style, tone, rhythm, plot, and allusion. Often, close reading concerns the dichotomy between what the text literally says and what can be inferred. For example, we know in the case of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary that Emma Bovary is keyed to the color blue near the outset of the novel, but what does the author mean by this? What are we supposed to infer? Is the color blue thrown in by accident or does it actually point to something that has symbolic meaning? To know the answer to such a question, one has to notice, first of all, that the color choice is so consistent that it’s likely Flaubert intended it. Next, one may notice from the context of what is being related that Emma’s immature girlish interest in Catholicism is being thematized, which relates to the likelihood that in this context the color blue is likely to be symbolic of the Virgin Mary to whom Flaubert may well be comparing Emma with some irony, given that Emma will hardly turn out to be anything like the Virgin. Of course, this is an interpretation because a sequence of observations and logical connections had to be made by the reader in order to construct it. The proof of the interpretation, insofar as interpretations can be proven, is that it has explanatory power. It not only tells us what the color blue probably refers to, but how it functions to ironize Emma, to portray her one way while expecting the reader to see through that portrayal as misleadingly literal. Because there is so much evidence in the novel that supports this ironizing tendency, the interpretation of the color blue seems credible, since it is consistent with what is at work elsewhere in the novel and since it connects elements that otherwise would go unexplained. We generally call this most typical sort of interpretation close reading, because the interpreter is looking very closely at even the most minor textual details in order to develop explanations for the question of why things are presented the way they are.

Contextual Analysis

Contextual analysis could be called the “connect the dots approach,” because essentially the technique involves the establishment of a context (or contexts) within which to situate and determine the meanings of a work by drawing direct connections between elements within the work and elements within the context. This is the approach used by literary historians who generally work up the following contexts for analyzing a literary work: (i) philological history of the language; (ii) the literary tradition that has influenced the work and to which the work “belongs”; (iii) the biography of the author; and (iv) the social, political, and cultural contexts likely to have a bearing on the work’s meanings. This type of study presumes that a work cannot mean anything in isolation. For example, the language of a literary work pre-exists it and determines what the words and sentences of, say, a novel, poem, or play would mean. Given that language changes over time, we would need to know the state of the language at any given time when a work was written in order to properly decode its meanings. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are usually accompanied by copious footnotes that define words, many of which have fallen out of use or that meant something different at the time Shakespeare was writing.

Literary tradition is an important context too in that it donates the norms and forms that authors adopt and modify to suit their inclinations and needs. Shakespeare, Sidney, and Milton inherited the genre of the sonnet from Petrarch and his followers, and therefore it is useful to compare elements in their work to what can be found in the context of the sonnet tradition. After all, the differences may tell us something about what the authors intended and hence how to better construe the meanings. Knowing the biography of the author can help, as well, if what one is looking for is the primary intention an author had in composing a work. Henry James, for example, was quite self-conscious about leaving accounts of what experiences led him to formulate an idea or premise for writing one of his great novels. Although the initial experiences he had differ from the final works that he completed, it is useful to see the direction in which he was headed and how the work germinated. Indeed, James’ Notebooks offer invaluable evidence for how the work was intended to be read and how we are to construe the meanings, if what we are after is Henry James’ intentions.³ Another good example would be Virginia Woolf’s Diaries.⁴

The social, political, and cultural contexts within which authors have written are often quite vast, and literary historians naturally have to select something quite specific from these contexts in order to relate to a literary work. For example, a theme is often chosen. One might study the figure of the mermaid in Renaissance literature, drawing connections between the literary work and cultural context of the figure of the mermaid. One might study the writings of Franz Kafka in the context of Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe – its genres, themes, etc. Given that this Yiddish culture isn’t so well known to everyone, it can be illuminating to situate Kafka’s work within it. Or, one could study the fiction of Jane Austen in the context of British empire building. Here again a theme contextualizes and circumscribes (and hence controls) the interrogation of meanings in the work.

Such studies are the most typical of what professors of literature produce and they are most typical of the research on literature that one is likely to find in a university library. This approach has various limitations, and four can be mentioned here. (i) A contextual approach presupposes the meaning of a work lies outside the work per se, which suggests a certain extrinsic determinism at work, (ii) it presupposes that the meanings are fixed or frozen in a period of historical time, which suggests our experience of how a work speaks to us is subordinated to or cancelled out by its artefactual significance, (iii) it is based on the construction of contexts that may be highly selective and conveniently managed to yield the results for which the researcher is looking, and (iv) contextual analysis reduces works of literature to ordinary norms that were widely held in society; therefore, Hamlet isn’t seen as a unique work of art, but as merely a generic “revenger’s tragedy” whose innovations are idiosyncratic. Finally, traditional historicism never gets beyond the circumstantiality of evidence. One would think that Milton’s On Christian Doctrine ought to explain Paradise Lost. Or that Edmund Spenser’s famous letter to Sir Walter Raleigh about Spenser’s composition of the Faerie Queene ought to explain this epic poem satisfactorily. But in fact such empirical evidence, even from the pens of the authors themselves, are merely circumstantial and turn out to be controversial given that there are so many ways in which to read them in relation to the texts that really interest us. In short, there are no smoking guns in historical analysis, which has the consequence of calling the whole approach to this sort of analysis in question (also see 5.2).

Application of a Critical Approach

Application of a critical approach is a more systematic example of interpretation in which a coherent body of thought (i.e. a theory) is mapped onto the literary work in order to explain its meaning. In its crudest form, this approach is blatantly allegorical. But if it has an advantage, it is that the researcher is working with a coherent body of analytical thought and not just making ad hoc determinations; plus the theory has been tested by others and has much more validity than an individual’s ad hoc guesses and rationalizations.

Because methods and approaches quickly devolve into routines and habits of thinking, it is not surprising that researchers will want to avoid anything that seems hackneyed and trite. No one in the late 1960s wanted to hear yet another paper on ambiguity in poetry, because by then the topic had become entirely depleted. Today, few academics want to hear yet another gendered analysis of “the gaze,” because they’re all too familiar with Laura Mulvey’s argument in Visual and Other Pleasures, which has passed into the domain of public knowledge. The same can be said for J.L. Austin’s notion of performa...