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Rescuing the subject from deadly dry theorists and -isms, Clare Connors focuses on the real questions that emerge when we read and study literature - such as how we find meaning and how literature relates to its historical context - before exploring the response of theorists. Using selections from works including poetry by Christina Rossetti and Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Connors unites theory with practice, revealing how enjoyable it is to think about reading.
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1
Introducing literary theory
All theory, my friend, is grey.
Lifeâs golden tree is green.
Lifeâs golden tree is green.
Goethe, Faust, Part 1 (1808)
So whispers the diabolically persuasive Mephistopheles to a young man just beginning his studies. These words express a very common view of âtheoryâ. Theory is arid and abstract. Its generalizations wash lifeâs vivid and variegated colours to an undifferentiated grey. To be a theorist is to sit on the margins, thinking distantly and dispassionately about life but never getting stuck in, never living. This set of anti-theoretical prejudices emerges with particular ferocity when people begin to contemplate literary theory: theory seems so much the opposite of literature that the words âliterary theoryâ sound like a contradiction in terms. To theorize about literature will, we fear, leach away the engaging, various and particular liveliness we prize it for. But it neednât do this. And this Beginnerâs Guide is animated by the conviction that the best forms of theory donât.
As weâll come to see, Mephistopheles is wrong on two fronts. For a start, theory can itself be full of colour and interest, drama and feeling. And second, theory is not something we can simply oppose to âlifeâ, as the sophisticated, satanic seducer does in his insidiously simple couplet. Weâll see instead how theory is muddled up with life, literature and practice â all those things to which it is customarily and too-easily opposed â from the first, and how, conversely, theory itself turns out to have literary properties. Theory is vital then, in both senses of that word: full of life and essential to life, and to the life of literature. But to say all this is to suggest that theory is in fact a rather different beast from the one we suspiciously imagine. Letâs look first at our most usual, everyday sense of what âtheoryâ is.
Theory and the Enlightenment
A theory, at least as it is understood in the sciences, is a structure of ideas that explains the data under scrutiny, or, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, a âhypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known factsâ (OED sense 4). We can note here that âhypothesisâ is singular and âthe factsâ plural. The theory of gravity accounts as competently for the fall of a boulder as it does for that of a banana, just as the theory of evolution describes the development of all living things, both animal and vegetable. Theory in its most usual, scientific or philosophical, twentieth-century sense is able, then, to subdue a variety of data to a single hypothesis.
This understanding of theory can be situated historically. Most modern scholarship and the theorizing it performs has its origins in the Enlightenment, that period of thought and enquiry across Europe which, as its name suggests, sought to shed light on all that was obscure. Enlightenment thinkers include Thomas Paine, author of The Age of Reason (1794), the philosophers Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Spinoza and John Locke, the scientist Robert Hooke, the encylopaedist Denis Diderot and Ekaterina Dashkova, a polymath who became, remarkably for an eighteenth-century woman, the director of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts and Sciences. These thinkers often propounded diametrically opposed ideas. What they shared, however, was a desire to rid thought, science, political theory and philosophy of their dependence upon customs, institutions and untested suppositions or superstitions, and to reflect rationally and clear-sightedly about the world and about thought itself. Shining the light of reason on all aspects of the world, they sought to come to a lucid understanding of all manner of phenomena â scientific, cultural and linguistic. Such an understanding, it was hoped, would ultimately provide a rational account of every aspect of the worldâs workings.
These developments in thought and scholarship have had a profound effect on all areas of human knowledge, invention and production up to the present day. Nevertheless, it is possible to question their success, and indeed the extent of their neutrality. Michel Foucault, a twentieth-century theorist of history and of knowledge, has argued, for example, that the Enlightenment emphasis on reason operates as a power (see Foucault 1980). He claims that to know something (such as the habits and activities of a nationâs population) is to have power over it. There is, for Foucault, then, a dangerous Big Brother-ism at work in the Enlightenment project.
While these questions are too large to pursue further here, what we can and must ask is whether literature can be viewed in the clear, rational light that Enlightenment thinking demands. Can it be taken as a simple object for knowledge? Can its diverse âdataâ can be subdued to a single, elegant theory which would account for all the known facts about it? In keeping with the whole spirit of this Beginnerâs Guide, we will read some literature in order to explore that question.
Reading literature
Iâve chosen a passage which deals with the reading of literature itself. Weâll spend a while with it, reading it in order to tease out the variety of phenomena any theory of literature would have to address, as well as the problems that literature and reading might pose to our ordinary understanding of theory. The passage comes from a novel called The Little Girls (1963), written by the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen. Here one of the three âlittle girlsâ of the bookâs title, Clare, enters the house of her friendâs mother:
To disturb Mrs Piggott once she was in a novel was known to be more or less impossible [...]. She was as oblivious of all parts of her person as she was of herself. As for her surroundings, they were nowhere. Feverel Cottage, the sofa, the time of day not merely did not exist for Mrs Piggott, they did not exist. This gave Clare, as part of them, an annihilated feeling. She burned with envy of anythingâs having the power to make this happen. Oh, to be as destructive as a story! (Bowen 1999, 78)
Mrs Piggott is â in a novelâ. That underlined preposition âinâ implies that the act of reading itself is not a distanced contemplation, but rather an immersion. And the passage goes on to imply, rather more radically, that Mrs Piggott isnât really âinâ anything â that, in a sense, she does not exist at all. Her reading is not primarily to do with an âeyeâ looking at a page, nor is it to do with an âIâ. Mrs Piggott is âobliviousâ of the world of things, people and furniture in which she lives, because she is oblivious of âall parts of her personâ and even of âherselfâ. The world of things doesnât exist in this moment, because there is no Mrs Piggott there for them to exist for.
Reading, in this account, then, seems to be to do with the obliteration of both a subjective viewer and an objective world. Enlightenment thinkers strove to bring their own rational thoughts to bear on objects and phenomena in the world. But Bowen here suggests that reading is both the aggressive or exhilarating annihilation of the world, and the blissful loss of a self which could stand back from the world in order to view it or to think rationally about it.
I think we might make the grander claim that this is a good way of describing what always happens in reading. When we read we are âout of ourselvesâ, inhabiting another place and anotherâs words. At the same time, we are taken over and occupied by those words, as they displace our own thoughts in our reading minds. As we read the last longing line of free indirect discourse from our quotation â âoh to be as destructive as a storyâ â a voice speaks within us which is not our own. Whether we want to or not, we voice inwardly a desire which is both ours and not ours as we read. We might wonder, then, what chance there is that a theory of literature could ever stand back dispassionately from its own reading, and therefore from what it theorized about. Just as reading seems to impassion, involve and obliterate Mrs Piggott and the world in which she exists, so, we might argue, it does similar things for us. And so to suggest that we can view literature neutrally, as a knowing subject facing a literary object, is to ignore the fact that literature can only be viewed through reading it and becoming involved in it, and that that involvement might always change us.
On the other hand, to say all this is already to have done more than simply immerse ourselves in reading the passage. We have offered a reading of it, quoting words from it in order to suggest what it is telling us about the dynamics of reading. Other analytical approaches could also be taken. We could think about the class implications of this scene, for example, and analyse its depiction of a genteel middle-class cottage and its owner, who has the leisure to lie about reading. We could also place it in larger literary-historical contexts. The figure of the female reader is one with a long literary history â think of Lydia Languish in Sheridanâs The Rivals (1775), Catherine Morland, avid consumer of Gothic novels in Austenâs Northanger Abbey (1818), or Jane Eyre, reading in her window seat at the start of the novel which bears her name. We might want to consider how Mrs Piggott â who is doubly âin a novelâ, both reading one and a character in one â participates in this tradition. This passage hints at other literary contexts too: the name âFeverel Cottageâ will remind novel readers of George Meredithâs The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), a tale of intergenerational conflicts and the psychology of sexual repression and jealousy. It would be interesting to see how far one might take up the allusion to Meredith, in an exploration of the intergenerational relationship here between Mrs Piggott and the little girl Clare, who is bursting with violent impulses, and envious of Mrs. Piggottâs absorption in her reading.
In all these ways it does seem possible to stand outside our reading of the passage in order to know it and analyse it. And here is where some theoretical reflections would be necessary, in order to justify our approach. What kind of links is it proper to make between a text and its sociological or literary-historical context? Do those contexts fix a work in its place? Or can it tell us about them? These are questions weâll explore in chapters 2 and 4 of this Guide. What does Bowenâs account of the pleasures and annihilating violence of reading tell us about pleasure, and about the psyche? And how to account for the extraordinary, visceral, intellectual, uneasy pleasures of reading Bowenâs strange, often witty, and superbly intelligent writing? Questions about reading and pleasure will be addressed in chapter 5. How to analyse the gender politics of this scene between an older, female reader, who is â in a novelâ and an envious, desirous âlittle girlâ, who aspires to be like a story? The relationship between literature and gender will be the concern of chapter 6 of this book. Is it significant that the Anglo-Irish Bowen here represents a situation in which the complacent occupier of a cottage and of a novel causes the marginalized outsider Clare to feel annihilated, to burn with envy, to wish for power and the power to destroy? Might we make comparisons here with her earlier novel, The Last September (1928), which depicts complacent members of the Anglo-Irish gentry in a country house in Cork, obliviously playing tennis and dancing, while all around them the Irish âTroublesâ brew? Questions of literatureâs implication in imperial contexts, where occupation and marginality, power and violence, are to the fore, will be asked in chapter 7. Perhaps you think that a reading of this passage in terms of imperialism is taking things too far. We could argue that Bowen did not mean it to be read in this way. But what does it mean to take our reading too far? How do we decide on the legitimate meanings or interpretations of a text? Weâll look at questions about authorial intention and meaning in chapter 3.
Insofar as we can stand outside our reading of the passage and offer an account of it, then, theoretical reflections which test and analyse the basis on which we undertake our readings would seem to be possible. Indeed, in order to justify our readings, some clear, lucid theoretical account of what is admissable in reading in general is absolutely necessary. But thereâs a twist here. Our more analytical and dispassionate reading of the passage has elicited a rather strange fact â which is that Bowenâs writing is itself offering a theory of reading. Clare/Bowen articulate the idea of a story as âdestructiveâ: the passage explores and makes claims about the effects reading has on the self and the world. The passage could, then, be said already to be undertaking the kind of thinking we seek to bring to bear on it. Insofar as it is offering a theory of reading, it seems to be theorizing itself.
What starts to emerge from our readings and reflections here, then, is that it seems at once necessary for us to have a theory of literature, in order to justify and ground our readings, and yet impossible for that theory to have any fixed ground, absolutely and neutrally outside the literary dynamics it wants to account for. Literature seems to require an almost exorbitant breadth of dispassionate scholarly knowledge (of other literature, of history, of psychology and so on), and a tight, clear theoretical account of what reading demands and entails, even while it also elicits â just by needing to be read â a readerly involvement in, and abandonment to, someone elseâs words. Furthermore, those words can, potentially, themselves reflect on and theorize literature and reading, and alter our sense of the contexts and histories in which we might want simply to place them. Thereâs a final twist too. To claim, as Iâve just done, that Bowenâs writing has self-reflexive or self-theorizing qualities, is to situate my arguments in relationship to ideas of literature which emerge out of âpost-Romanticâ and âtheoreticalâ contexts. This idea of literature has its own histories â which could be read, reflected upon and theorized.
Attempting to theorize literature seems to put us in a spin or spiral, in which theories are necessary, but never fully adequate, and never able to extricate themselves totally from what they want to theorize about. Literature, in short, seems to present the would-be theorist with impossible demands. âLiterary theoryâ names at once a necessity and an impossibility.
This book
While this book is called a guide to Literary Theory, there is, in fact, no such thing as âliterary theoryâ in a general sense. The term âtheoryâ is a shorthand way of describing a series of stabs, speculations, hypotheses and intellectual forays, which seek to provide the best account they can of different aspects of the thing we call âliteratureâ. These forays venture out from particular contexts: contexts which are institutional, geographical, intellectual, political, literary and personal. Theories themselves can be read, analysed, contextualized â the intentions of theorists can be asked after, their hidden motivations or ideologies explored. Different theorists are in dialogue with one another, as well as with literature.
No presentation of literary theories, then, can be absolutely neutral. We could, for example, offer an account of theories which contextualized them very precisely in terms of their emergence from specific social and economic situations. But such an historicist reading of theory would, therefore, already be working with its own implicit theory of history.
Let me, then, make my own intentions as clear as possible. The aim of this Beginnerâs Guide is to involve you â and more importantly to show that we are all, as readers of literature, already involved â in the debates that form the discipline of âliterary theoryâ. In each chapter weâll pursue a backwards and forwards movement between readings of specific literary works and the writings of specific literary theorists. Only the misconception of literary theory as something purely and abstractly conceptual leads to the Mephistophelian view of it as grey and rebarbative. Literary theory is a process of readings and reflections rather than a fixed set of ideas which can be packaged up and given to you. The best way to understand something is to participate in it â and that is what this book conjures you to do.
In the chapters that follow weâll read a range of theoretical statements alongside and in relation to literature, moving back and forth between the two, judging and testing, clarifying arguments, but also noticing, reading and analysing how theoretical claims are made. In each chapter, Iâve taken a single, short, strange work of literature as the focus for my readings. They are: Gerard Manley Hopkinsâs âAs Kingfishers Catch Fireâ, Joseph Conradâs âThe Secret Sharerâ, Charles Dickensâs Hard Times, Annie Proulxâs Brokeback Mountain, Christina Rossettiâs âGoblin Marketâ and Rider Haggardâs She. Itâs not necessary for you to have read these â in each case I give an account of what the text is about, as well as quoting amply from it. On the other hand, I should say that Iâve chosen these works because they are by turns inspiring, engaging, interesting, odd, brilliantly-written, funny and moving. And that my hope is that, if you havenât read them before you start this book, youâll want to by the time youâve finished.
At this juncture you could stop reading this introduction, and cut straight to the first chapter. What Iâm going to do in the second half is to give a brief survey of the whole terrain of âliterary theoryâ, suggesting some of its broader features, and offering some, necessarily partial, accounts of the contexts from which it emerged. You might find these helpful as a way of orienting yourself before you plunge in. On the other hand, you might prefer to return to them later, once you have already engaged in some literary-theoretical reflections and readings.
The histories of literary theory
Theoretical musings about literature â on what it is, how it works, on what it can and ought to do, how best to treat or read it, and what role it does or should play in our lives â have gone on for millennia. Literary theory may well be as old as literature itself, and we can certainly date it back to pre-Socratic thinkers. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Leitch 2001) for example, a 2,625-page tome, begins with an excerpt from the work of Gorgias of Leontini, a writer of the fourth century BC, in which he discusses the power and function of speech and of rhetorical or poetical language. The anthology then moves through Plato and Aristotle, medieval and Renaissance theorists of rhetoric, eighteenth-and nineteenth-cen...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1. Introducing literary theory
- 2. What is literature?
- 3. Whatâs it mean?
- 4. Contextualizing literature
- 5. Literature, psychoanalysis and pleasure
- 6. Literature and gender
- 7. Literature and empire
- Coda: Theoryâs futures
- Further reading
- Index