ENGL A337 Critical Approaches to Literature

Lois Tyson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351049894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This thoroughly updated third edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism and postcolonial criticism.

This new edition features:

• amajor expansion of the chapter on postcolonial criticism that includes topics such as Nordicism, globalization and the 'end' of postcolonial theory, global tourism and global conservation
• an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts
• a list of specific questions critics ask about literary texts
• an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory
• a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works
• updated and expanded bibliographies

• 
  
  

Both engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.

THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

School of Arts and Social Sciences

ENGL A337
Critical Approaches to Literature

featuring extracts from Critical Theory Today,
Third Edition by Lois Tyson

Volume I

First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Routledge

Previously published as 978-0-415-50674-8 Critical Theory Today, Third Edition (2015), Chapters 2 and 5–8, by Routledge.

This text may include materials submitted for publication by the instructor of this course. The instructor is solely responsible for the editorial content of such materials.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-48505-1 (volume I, pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-48507-5 (volume II, pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-8153-9221-7 (2 volume set, pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-04991-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

Note: This custom textbook covers only Units 6–9 of ENGL A337. Please refer also to the OUHK-produced Study Guide for these units.

Units 1–5 and Unit 10 are self-contained study units and are not included here.

VOLUME I

Unit 6 New Criticism and reader-response criticism

Module 1 New Criticism

Module 2 Reader-response criticism

Unit 7 Structuralism, deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism

Module 1 Structuralist criticism

Module 2 Deconstructive criticism

Module 3 Psychoanalytic criticism

VOLUME II

Unit 8 New historicism and cultural criticism

Module 1 New historical and cultural criticism

Unit 9 Feminist criticism and postcolonial criticism

Module 1 Feminist criticism

Module 2 Postcolonial criticism

Unit 6

New Criticism and reader-response criticism

Module 1 New Criticism

Module 2 Reader-response criticism

Module 1 New Criticism

New Criticism occupies an unusual position, both in this textbook and in the field of literary studies today. On the one hand, it’s the only theory covered in this book that is no longer practiced by literary critics, so it can’t really be called a contemporary theory. On the other hand, New Criticism, which dominated literary studies from the 1940s through the 1960s, has left a lasting imprint on the way we read and write about literature. Some of its most important concepts concerning the nature and importance of textual evidence – the use of concrete, specific examples from the text itself to validate our interpretations – have been incorporated into the way most literary critics today, regardless of their theoretical persuasion, support their readings of literature. In fact, if you’re an English major, you probably take for granted the need for thorough textual support for your literary interpretations because this practice, which the New Critics introduced to America and called “close reading,” has been a standard method of high school and college instruction in literary studies for the past several decades. So in this sense, New Criticism is still a real presence among us and probably will remain so for some time to come.

Few students today, however, are aware of New Criticism’s contribution to literary studies or of the theoretical framework that underlies the classroom instruction it has fostered. For this reason, I think we should give New Criticism the same kind of attention we give to the other theories in this textbook. In addition, we need to understand New Criticism in order to understand those theories that have developed in reaction against it. As we’ll see in subsequent chapters, reader-response criticism opposes New Criticism’s definition of the literary text and method of interpreting it, and structuralism rejects New Criticism’s focus on the individual literary work in isolation from other literature and from other cultural productions. In addition, deconstruction’s theory of language and new historicism’s view of objective evidence are directly opposed to New Critical assumptions about language and objectivity.

“The text itself”

To fully appreciate New Criticism’s contribution to literary studies today, we need to remember the form of criticism it replaced: the biographical-historical criticism that dominated literary studies in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. At that time, it was common practice to interpret a literary text by studying the author’s life and times to determine authorial intention, that is, the meaning the author intended the text to have. The author’s letters, diaries, and essays were combed for evidence of authorial intention as were autobiographies, biographies, and history books. In its most extreme form, biographical-historical criticism seemed, to some, to examine the text’s biographical-historical context instead of examining the text. As one of my former professors described the situation, students attending a lecture on Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas” (1805) could expect to hear a description of the poet’s personal and intellectual life: his family, friends, enemies, lovers, habits, education, beliefs, and experiences. “Now you understand the meaning of ‘Elegiac Stanzas,’” they would be told, without anyone in the room, including the lecturer, having opened the book to look at the poem itself. Or, in a similar manner, scholars viewed the literary text merely as an adjunct to history, as an illustration of the “spirit of the age” in which it was written, not as an art object worthy of study for its own sake. For New Critics, however, the poem itself was all that mattered.

“The text itself” became the battle cry of the New Critical effort to focus our attention on the literary work as the sole source of evidence for interpreting it. The life and times of the author and the spirit of the age in which he or she lived are certainly of interest to the literary historian, New Critics argued, but they do not provide the literary critic with information that can be used to analyze the text itself. In the first place, they pointed out, sure knowledge of the author’s intended meaning is usually unavailable. We can’t telephone William Shakespeare and ask him how he intended us to interpret Hamlet’s hesitation in carrying out the instructions of his father’s ghost, and Shakespeare left no written explanation of his intention. More important, even if Shakespeare had left a record of his intention, as some authors have, all we can know from that record is what he wanted to accomplish, not what he did accomplish. Sometimes a literary text doesn’t live up to the author’s intention. Sometimes it is even more meaningful, rich, and complex than the author realized. And sometimes the text’s meaning is simply different from the meaning the author wanted it to have. Knowing an author’s intention, therefore, tells us nothing about the text itself, which is why New Critics coined the term intentional fallacy to refer to the mistaken belief that the author’s intention is the same as the text’s meaning.

Just as we cannot look to the author’s intention to find the meaning of a literary text, neither can we look to the reader’s personal response to find it. Any given reader may or may not respond to what is actually provided by the text itself. Readers’ feelings or opinions about a text may be produced by some personal association from past experience rather than by the text. I may, for example, respond to Hamlet’s mother based solely on my feelings about my own mother and nevertheless conclude that I have correctly interpreted the literary character. Such a conclusion would be an example of what New Critics called the affective fallacy. While the intentional fallacy confuses the text with its origins, the affective fallacy confuses the text with its affects, that is, with the emotions it produces. The affective fallacy leads to impressionistic responses (if a reader doesn’t like a character, then that character must be evil) and relativism (the text means whatever any reader thinks it means). The final outcome of such a practice is chaos: we have no standards for interpreting or evaluating literature, which is therefore reduced to the status of the ink-blot on which psychiatric patients project their own meanings.

Although the author’s intention or the reader’s response is sometimes mentioned in New Critical readings of literary texts, neither one is the focus of analysis. For the only way we can know if a given author’s intention or a given reader’s interpretation actually represents the text’s meaning is to carefully examine, or “closely read,” all the evidence provided by the language of the text itself: its images, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, characterization, plot, and so forth, which, because they form, or shape, the literary work are called its formal elements. But before we discuss how this method of close reading operates, we need to understand just what New Critics meant by “the text itself” because their definition of the literary work is directly related to their beliefs concerning the proper way to interpret it.

For New Criticism, a literary work is a timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient) verbal object. Readers and readings may change, but the literary text stays the same. Its meaning is as objective as its physical existence on the page, for it is constructed of words placed in a specific relationship to one another – specific words placed in a specific order – and this one-of-a-kind relationship creates a complex of meaning that cannot be reproduced by any other combination of words. A New Critical reading of Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (1966) can help us appreciate the poem by explaining how the poem’s complex of meaning works, but it cannot replace that complex of meaning: only “Middle Passage” is “Middle Passage,” and it will always be “Middle Passage.” This is why New Criticism asserted that the meaning of a poem could not be explained simply by paraphrasing it, or translating it into everyday language, a practice New Critics referred to as the heresy of paraphrase. Change one line, one image, one word of the poem, they argued, and you will have a different poem.

Literary language and organic unity

The importance of the formal elements of a literary text is a product of the nature of literary language, which, for New Criticism, is very different from scientific language and from everyday language. Scientific language, and a good deal of everyday language, depends on denotation, the one-to-one correspondence between words and the objects or ideas they represent. Scientific language doesn’t draw attention to itself, doesn’t try to be beautiful or emotionally evocative. Its job is to point not to itself but to the physical world beyond it, which it attempts to describe and explain. Literary language, in contrast, depends on connotation: on the implication, association, suggestion, and evocation of meanings and of shades of meaning. (For example, while the word father denotes male parent, it connotes authority, protection, and responsibility.) In addition, literary language is expressive: it communicates tone, attitude, and feeling. While everyday language is often connotative and expressive, too, in general it is not deliberately or systematically so, for its chief purpose is practical. Everyday language wants to get things done. Literary language, however, organizes linguistic resources into a special arrangement, a complex unity, to create an aesthetic experience, a world of its own.

Unlike scientific and everyday language, therefore, the form of literary language – the word choice and arrangement that create the aesthetic experience – is inseparable from its content, its meaning. Put more simply, how a literary text means is inseparable from what it means. For the form and meaning of a literary work, at least of a great literary work, develop together, like a complex living organism whose parts cannot be separated from the whole. And indeed, the work’s organic unity – the working together of all the parts to make an inseparable whole – is the criterion by which New Critics judged the quality of a literary work. If a text has an organic unity, then all of its formal elements work together to establish its theme, or the meaning of the work as a whole. Through its organic unity, the text provides both the complexity that a literary work must have, if it is to adequately represent the complexity of human life, and the order that human beings, by nature, seek. For New Criticism, then, the explanation of literary meaning and the evaluation of literary greatness became one and the same act, for when New Critics explained a text’s organic unity they were also establishing its claim to greatness. Let’s take a closer look at each of the criteria of literary value embodied in organic unity: complexity and order.

For New Criticism, the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting meanings woven through it. And these meanings are a product primarily of four kinds of linguistic devices: paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension. Briefly, paradox is a statement that seems self-contradictory but represents the actual way things are. For example, it is a biblical paradox that you must lose your life in order to gain it. On the surface, that phrase seems self-contradictory: how can you gain an object by losing it? However, the phrase means that by giving up one kind of life, the transitory life of the flesh, you gain another, more important kind of life: the eternal life of the soul. Similarly, a paradox of everyday experience can be seen in the old saying Joni Mitchell uses so effectively in her song “Big Yellow Taxi”: “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone.” Not unlike the biblical reference above, this old adage tells us that you have to lose something (physically) before you can find it (spiritually). Many of life’s spiritual and psychological realities are paradoxical in nature, New Critics observed, and paradox is thus responsible for much of the complexity of human experience and of the literature that portrays it.

Irony, in its simple form, means a statement or event undermined by the context in which it occurs. The following description of a wealthy husband’s sense of moral rectitude, from Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905), is an example of an ironic statement.

Once in the winter the rector would come to dine, and her husband would beg her to go over the list and see that no divorcées were included, except those who had showed signs of penitence by being remarried to the very wealthy.

(57)

Part of the ironic implication of this passage is that the husband is a hypocri...

Table of contents

• Volume I Cover
• Volume II Cover