Literary Theory

A Practical Introduction

Michael Ryan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119061755, 9781119090021
• eBook ISBN: 9781119061748
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction, Third Edition, presents a comprehensive introduction to the
full range of contemporary approaches to the study of literature and culture, from formalism, structuralism, and historicism to ethnic, gender, and science studies.

Introduces students to a variety of contemporary approaches to the study of literature and culture

Demonstrates how the varying perspectives on texts can lead to different interpretations of the same work

Features numerous updates that include new literary texts, new and expanded sections

Represents the ideal accompaniment to the upcoming Third Edition of Literary
Theory: An Anthology

CHAPTER 1
Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Poetics

An Introduction to Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Poetics

One of the first things one notices about literature is that it consists of language that has been formed and shaped so that it no longer looks like ordinary language. It is easy to tell a novel from a weather report. Usually, such shaping and forming serves the end of telling imaginary stories, or of evoking intense emotions, or of communicating ideas. People who thought about literature in the early twentieth century were called “formalists” because they said literature is unique because of how it is done (form) rather than what it is about (content). A novel may be interesting because it is about the “hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie” or “the dangers of passionate love,” but it is worthy of study because it is executed in a way that is innovative, compelling, or significant. Its form makes it unique.

For some formalists, known as the Russian formalists, how literature is written, not what it is about, constitutes the essential component of literature that distinguishes it from other kinds of writing such as history or science. The language of literature is different from ordinary, everyday language because it has been bent away from habitual usage. This bending and shaping constitutes what these theorists called form. Literary study, they felt, should focus on this dimension of literature only.

The Russian formalists took issue with the notion that form is merely a clothing attached to meaning. Rather, they contended, form stands on its own and is what makes literature “literary.” Form is not “motivated” by meaning. It has its own autonomous rules and history. The history of tragic drama is not a history of the different ideas expressed in the plays; rather, it is a history of how the form has changed, how its conventions have evolved and what techniques are used. Form thus has no “correlation” with content. What matters in literature is not meaning but the literary techniques, devices, and procedures that writers use.

Shakespeare’s King Lear, in this view, is an important object of literary analysis not for its ideas about human life but for its technical devices. Its themes of family betrayal and personal failure are worthy of discussion, but to study what is literary about the play is not to study ideas. They are rightly the province of sociology or history or psychology. Literary analysis should be concerned with how the play is constructed, how language is used, what imagery is found in it, and the like.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for example, is a novel about adultery, but what distinguishes it from a sociological study of the phenomenon is the way it is executed. At one point, Tolstoy recounts a horse race from the perspective of a rider in the race. This unique and novel device could be connected to thematic issues, such as the way stasis and motion are aligned with characters in such a way as to explain Anna’s attraction for her future lover, who is the jockey whose point of view we temporarily assume in the horse race. But for the Russian formalists, the more important quality of the narrative moment is the device itself and the unique point of view on the action it creates for the reader. By placing us in the rider’s seat, Tolstoy takes us out of our ordinary universe of experience in much the same way that the officer takes Anna out of her ordinary world of experience. We not only hear an idea about the origins of adultery; we actually enact the reality of a disturbing and exciting new experience.

In another famous example, Tolstoy tells an entire story from the point of view of a horse. In another, flogging is described with a geometrical detachment and a calculated precision that force the reader to see anew – and to feel the shock of – a practice that might otherwise seem routine and acceptable. The device is unsettling, but that, according to Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, is precisely the point of good literature. It disturbs us and takes us out of our habitual and routine ways of seeing the world. It does so by bending and contorting language so that we cannot use it as we usually might to facilitate the kind of rote understandings of the world that allow us to get through our days without becoming overly shocked, alarmed, or surprised by the events around us. The repetitious nature of life dulls our senses and makes the world overly familiar. We cease to see things vividly. By bending language to new uses and new ways of seeing and understanding, literature reawakens our senses and defamiliarizes the world.

The invention of new formal devices and techniques also, according to the Russian formalists, makes possible new content in literature. Earlier theorists of literature had argued that ideas dictate form, but the formalists turned this around and contended that form gives rise to content.

In the Middle Ages in western Europe, for example, literature was dominated by stories about knights. In the Arthurian romances, knights pursued quests aligned with religious goals. The characters were static and usually embodied virtues such as steadfastness or courage. With the decline of feudalism and of the martial court culture that sustained such literary forms, new forms emerged that embodied the more secular and materialist values and ideals of the new middle class or “bourgeoisie.” Shklovsky argues that one of the first modern novels written during this period – Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a story of a man who imagines himself to be a knight from one of the medieval romances – develops a new form that makes possible an entirely new kind of hero. While the romance hero is static and unchanging, Quixote is pliable because the new narrative form strings together episodes rather than moving in a single plot line towards a quest goal. The new episodic narrative form makes it possible to have a hero that can change from situation to situation. Form, in this instance, determines content and not the other way around.

A pure Russian formalist reading of a literary text would attend to form alone without any reference to content. Not all formalists, however, thought the form of a work was the only thing worth studying. Some concerned themselves with the relationship between form and meaning, the essential link between the different ways language is used and the ideas such uses communicate. For the American “New Critics,” who dominated American literary discussion in the mid-twentieth century, literary form is welded to content or meaning in an organic unity.

Cleanth Brooks noticed that writers often rely on a particular language shape known as paradox that brings together two contrary qualities or values, such as “the last shall be first.” They do so, according to Brooks, because this particular form of expression embodies an essential quality of human experience. There are many versions of such paradoxes in literature and culture. In King Lear, for example, a man is blinded, but only then does he truly see what is going on around him. In The Matrix, a young man must die in order to be reborn as the person he truly is. In John Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the vivid experience of life is paradoxically captured most truly in the “cold pastoral” scene painted on a vase. According to Brooks, paradox is the only way of expressing or describing the unity of the eternal and the temporal, the universal and the momentary.

The New Critics were concerned with the universal aspects of human experience. Such universals, they believed, are true of everyone everywhere, and “great” literature captures them best. Such universals are general or abstract rather than specific and concrete, but literature makes them concrete. Since the time of the New Critics in the mid-twentieth century, literary scholars have come to question the idea that a writer like Shakespeare can indeed write plays that describe “universals” that apply equally to peasant women in India and wealthy aristocrats in Renaissance England. This is not to say that there are not universal ideas in the world or in literature. It is to note, rather, that the world, with all of its specific differences of wealth and station and status and power, does not allow all universal ideas to be equally applicable everywhere. Even a very abstract universal truth such as “hard work is usually rewarded” is belied by the educational system in the United States, for example, where children with similar test scores from different economic backgrounds fare differently in education. Those from wealthy backgrounds attend and graduate college more often than their poorer counterparts. Similarly intelligent children in rural India might not even have a choice.

Moreover, the works of literature that seem most universal often are the most religious or idealist. The New Critics were able to confirm their hypothesis about literature by choosing examples from eras such as the Renaissance and Romanticism when religious idealism – the belief that there is a spiritual world behind or outside the physical world – was taken seriously. Writers therefore wrote in a way that confirmed the New Critics’ essentially religious and idealist view of literature.

Exercise 1.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear

The method of “close reading” for which the New Critics are famous seeks to demonstrate how meaning inheres in the form of a work. A New Critic would seek in the play examples of irony and paradox, especially ones that represent a successful reconciliation of the universal and the concrete. In one of the dominant image patterns of the play, for example, two opposing values are joined in a single formulation. What is prized is suddenly despised, what without worth suddenly valued. The powerful and the powerless change places, and the virtuous are branded as vicious. Both the action and the imagery of the play are characterized by such paradoxes and ironic inversions. The pattern is evident in Lear’s caution to Cordelia: “Mend your speech a little, lest you mar your fortunes.” The two characters are close yet distant at this point in the play, joined by blood yet separated by judgment, and the image evokes phonetic alliteration or proximity (mend, mar) only to draw attention to a more destructive dissonance or disjunction (between repairing something and harming it).

How might such paradoxes be said to fuse a universal idea and a concrete example?

In the same scene, France draws attention to the social inversion that Lear’s rashness begets: “Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor, / Most choice, forsaken, and most loved, despised.” These paradoxes underscore Lear’s folly, the fact that his actions invert the right order of things. The images embody the sense of social disorder created when valuable things are disvalued and worthless ones elevated.

How do these paradoxes become a way of demonstrating what is truly valuable in the world as well as what, despite its apparent value in a worldly sense, is in fact without value?

In pursuing your own New Critical reading of the play, you might consider other paradoxes associated with sight, clothing, and madness.

A Russian formalist analysis of the play would be less concerned with universal ideas and more concerned with how the actual form of the play – its devices and procedures of dramatic construction – functions.

For example, rather than begin with a direct presentation of Lear, as one might expect from the title of the play, the play begins instead in a mode of indirect presentation. It tells his story initially through the voices of Kent and Gloucester. We learn in their conversation that Lear is both unpredictable and difficult to know: “It did always seem so to us [that Lear favored one duke over another]; but now in the division of the kingdom it appears not which of the Dukes he values most.” The device of indirect presentation of the main character thus coheres with the theme of the opening scene. This theme – that people’s real intentions are difficult to know – becomes part of one of the major themes of the play – that one cannot trust what people say because real intentions can be different from professed feelings. These themes in turn link to the political argument of the play – that strong monarchs are necessary to maintain control over the unpredictability and treachery to which people are prone.

A small, seemingly inconsequential dramatic device or formal procedure can thus have quite broad ramifications.

In the scene that follows in the play, we learn just how dangerous and harmful language can be. It is a medium without any built-in guarantees of truthfulness. It can be wielded to deceive someone who makes the mistake of taking for granted that words mean what they say. But as a form of verbal representation, an image rather than a thing, language has the potential to create a semblance of truthfulness and of accurate representation where there is none. The procedure of indirect presentation in the opening scene thus evokes themes that will prove central to the play’s core concerns. By placing the audience in a position of faulty knowledge (we only partially know Lear at the outset and only hear of him obliquely), the play formally executes one of its principal thematic concerns. It alerts the audience to the opacity of others’ motives and inner thoughts, and inscrutability will be a major motivator of plot action throughout the rest of the play.

The procedure of indirect presentation also, of course, decenters and distances Lear as a character. We are instructed by the procedure not to take his speeches in the scene that follows Gloucester and Kent’s conversation as seriously as we might had he been presented to us directly, in his own voice, as it were. His words are deprived of some of the authority they might have possessed had not the procedure of indirect presentation framed his entry, and we are positioned to consider him a character to be observed and perhaps even criticized rather than identified with.

A Russian formalist would also notice the bawdy language of the opening dialogue, which is filled with puns and ribald innuendo. The low language of gossip in the initial dialogue between Kent and Gloucester is strikingly at odds with the language of high statecraft in the scene that follows. The more florid speech is associated with Lear’s delusions regarding his daughters’ affections and with his daughters’ false flattery. And as we learn in later scenes, popular speech, in the form of the Fool’s instructive taunts and Edgar’s mad speeches, has a crucial redemptive effect on Lear. A victim of flattery, with its inflated and false images, he learns from the Fool and from Edgar, both of whose speech is laced with raw, literal, bodily imagery, the truth of what the real state of the world is, without the adornment of rhetorical inflation or of artifice.

The low or bawdy speech of the opening dialogue, therefore, which at first has a defamiliarizing effect that upsets our expectations regarding a tragedy about kings, in fact instantiates a crucial procedure at work throughout the play. The use of low language deflates the pretensions of high language and guides perceptions toward truth and away from falseness. In this initial instance, it prepares us to hear Lear’s inflated high speech in the rest of the first scene as being at odds with reality. It is certainly quite different from the more plain style associated with Gloucester’s honest acknowledgment of adulterous reality in the opening dialogue, a style that will be linked throughout the play with virtue and innate nobility.

The motif of the sexual pun in the dialogue between Kent and Gloucester (“Do you smell a fault?”, “I cannot conceive you”) has a similar function. The puns imply that words can have two meanings, one hidden or implicit, the other explicit. Such linguistic duality is at the origin of the political crisis of the play. Goneril and Regan can deceive Lear only because words can have more than one meaning, and the public or explicit meaning may have nothing to do with the private and withheld meaning.

Such duality also bears importantly on the play’s theme of true nobility or virtue. The topic of the initial conversation between Kent and Gloucester is the difference between Gloucester’s two sons – the illegitimate Edmund and the legitimate Edgar. As the same word can have two meanings, so the same object – a son – can have two different social meanings. Gloucester’s refusal to accept the inverse valuation of his sons – one legitimate, the other illegitimate – which feudal society imposes foreshadows a failure to differentiate truly noble from falsely noble in the scene that follows. For Gloucester, Edgar is “no dearer in my account” than Edmund, but for Lear, Cordelia will be much less in his account for not having flattered him. Lear fails to read his daughters’ speeches as Kent and Gloucester read each other’s in the opening dialogue, which is to say, as puns, as acts of language with dual meanings. Lear fails to read Goneril and Regan’s praise as an expression of dislike and Cordelia’s silence as an expression of love.

Of the opening dialogue, finally, a formalist might note that the action occurs out of the way of the principal events with which the play is concerned. Compared to the declarations of Lear that follow immediately, it has more the quality of an aside. Moreover, its topics are an event (adultery, illegitimate birth) that occurred behind the scenes of legitimate social ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• How to Study Literature
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Note to Teachers
• Literary Theory: A Primer
• CHAPTER 1 Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Poetics
• CHAPTER 2 Structuralism, Linguistics, Narratology
• CHAPTER 3 Phenomenology, Reception, Ethics
• CHAPTER 4 Post-Structuralism
• CHAPTER 5 Psychoanalysis and Psychology
• CHAPTER 6 Marxism and Critical Theory
• CHAPTER 7 History
• CHAPTER 8 Gender Studies
• CHAPTER 9 Ethnic Studies
• CHAPTER 10 Indigenous, Postcolonial, and Transnational Studies
• CHAPTER 11 Cognition, Emotion, Evolution, Science
• CHAPTER 12 Animals, Humans, Places, Things
• APPENDIX Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Village”
• Index
• EULA