THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: POST-WAR DEVELOPMENTS--Blamiers

The Twentieth Century I: The Early Decades PART II--Blamires

M. Phil English, Bharathiar University--Blamiers—

Approaches--Unit III

Summary by Dr. S. Sreekumar

Syllabus for Unit III
The Romantic Age (Blamires, pp 217-380)
The Victorian Age
The Twentieth Century I: The Early Decades
The Twentieth Century II: Post-war Developments

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: POST-WAR DEVELOPMENTS

English literary criticism was strongly influenced by European thoughts and ideas during the post-war period. This gave a cosmopolitan character to studies in literary criticism.

Since the Second World War we see an escalation in the way fashions succeed each other in the field of literary criticism. Moreover in the early years of the century there was always a link between creative writing and critical output. But this relationship totally disappeared at the post-war period.

Before looking at the various theories that flourished during this period, let us look at the contributions of two major critics whom it is difficult to classify as belonging to particular schools.

C.S. Lewis

Lewis revived the genre of historical criticism by his work on Medieval and Renaissance literature in The Allegory of Love and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. ‘It is not just the scholarship in these books that stands out as distinctive; it is also the quality of presentation in which deft logic, aptly imaginative exemplification and felicitous phrasing make study a delight’.

In Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis tried to remove the misunderstandings about Milton. He argued that poetry must not be treated as the expression of the poet’s personality. ‘The great poet may be merely the man who possesses the poet’s skill in a high degree, not necessarily a man great in wisdom or virtue who happens to write poetry. It is not difficult to prove that major poets may be quite unfit as models of virtue. Poetry is an art or skill…’

Lewis was at loggerheads with his age. In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge he argued that the assumed divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is not as significant as the divide between the Christian and Post-Christian ages –‘ which lies somewhere  between us and the Waverley novels, somewhere between us and Persuasion. Christian and pre-Christian pagans had more in common with each other than either has with the post-Christian’.

Lewis doubted whether evaluation is really an important function of criticism and whether training the young in evaluative criticism is fruitful. He quotes Arnold, ‘The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity decide’. To follow this precept is far better than compelling the students to evaluate what they have read. Lewis says that he has learned more from ‘dryasdust’ editors and textual critics, the literary historians, and the emotive critics who have infected him with their enthusiasm.

Northrop Frye

Frye attempted to find common elements in the worldwide multiplicity of literary traditions in his book Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Frye and like-minded critics around the globe saw literature and other art forms as manifestations of universal myths and archetypes (largely unconscious image patterns) that cross cultural boundaries.

Frye looked for archetypes in the study of literature.  His views on what is an archetype are worth quoting. An archetype is not only a unifying category of criticism, but itself a part of a total form. The search for archetypes is a kind of literary anthropology, concerned with the way that literature is informed by pre-literary categories such as ritual, myth and folk tale. We find them reappearing in the great classics—there seems to be a general tendency in the classics to revert to them.

Frye believed that the unity of a work of art is the basis for structural analysis. This unity is not produced solely by the unconditional will of the artist. Poems like poets are born and not made. The poet’s task is to deliver it as uninjured a state as possible. If the poem is alive it is equally anxious to get rid of the poet. It screams to be cut loose from his private memories and associations and the other strings and tubes of his ego. The critic takes over where the poet leaves. Criticism survives by connecting the psychology of the poem with the psychology of the poet. Every poet has his private mythology—his own private formation of symbols. The same psychological analysis can be extended to the study of characters.

Frye connects the rhythm in literature to more universal phenomena. Literature seems to be intermediate between music and painting. Its words form rhythms which approach a musical sequence of sounds. They also form a pictorial image. The rhythm of literature is narrative, the simultaneous grasp of the verbal structure and the meaning or significance.

Rhythm is a recurrent movement deeply founded on the natural cycle. Everything in nature—be it a flower or a bird’s song—grows out of a profound synchronization between an organism and the rhythms of its environment. With animals some expression of synchronization like the mating dance of birds could almost be called rituals. But in human life a ritual seems something of a voluntary effort to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle. A farmer must harvest his crop at a certain time every year. This is involuntary; therefore harvesting itself is not a ritual. It is the deliberate expression of a will to synchronize human and natural energies at that time which produces the harvest songs; harvest sacrifices and harvest folk customs that we call rituals.

We must also notice the tendency of ritual to become encyclopedic. All the important recurrences in nature, the day, the phases of the moon, the seasons get rituals attached to them. Most of the higher religions are equipped with a definite total body of rituals suggestive of the entire range of potentially significant actions.  

Frye’s illustrations are more persuasive than his generalizations. He insisted that poems (like ‘Lycidas’) must not be studied in isolation. In his study of ‘Lycidas’, Frye demolishes the traditional concept of ‘Lycidas’ as an elegy. He considers the poem as a representative of the dying spirit of nature.

II. NEW CRITICISM

New Criticism was in part a reaction against the genteel cultivation of taste and sentiment that marked late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criticism and against the prevalence of traditional philological and antiquarian study of literature in the academy.

The theoretical differences among the critics commonly described as New Critics (not necessarily by themselves)-- I. A. Richards, William Empson, F. R. Leavis, Kenneth Burke, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., René Wellek--are sometimes so great as to leave little ground for agreement. The New Critics tended to be eclectic on matters of theory, concentrating instead on what Blackmur called the critic's "job of work."

A systematic and methodological formalistic approach appeared only with the rise of the 1930s of what came to be called the New Criticism. The New Critics originally came together in Vanderbilt University in the years following the First World War. Their leader was a teacher-scholar-poet, John Crowe Ransom who had several bright students – Allen Tate, R.P. Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. At first they adopted the name Fugitives and published a literary magazine called The Fugitive. They got in T.S.Eliot a strong ally. Their shared ideas were the following:-  i. Literature is an organic tradition, ii. Strict attention to form is important., iii. Conservatism is needed in classical values, iv. The ideal society believes in order and tradition, v. They preferred ritual and vi.  They liked rigorous and analytical reading of texts. By the 1950s, New Criticism became the dominant form of criticism

New Criticism regards literature as "a unique form of human knowledge that needs to be examined on its own terms."

All the elements necessary for understanding the work are contained within the work itself.

Of particular interest to the New critic are the elements of form—style, structure, tone, imagery, etc.—that are found within the text. A primary goal for New critics is to determine how such elements work together with the text's content to shape its effects upon readers.

New Critics – Programs and preferences

New Critics sought precision and structural tightness in a literary work.

They favored a style and tone that tended towards irony.

They insisted on the presence within the work of everything necessary for its analysis.

They wanted to end all concerns with matters outside the work itself.

The life of the author, the history of his times, or the social and political implications of the work were not considered important at all.

They insisted that what the work says and how it says   were inseparable issues.

They influenced at least one generation of college students to become more careful and serious readers than they otherwise would have been.

III FORMALISM

Russian Formalism is a type of literary theory and analysis which originated in Moscow and Petrograd in the 1920s.

The leading representatives of the movement—Boris Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky, and Roman Jakobson. When the Communists opposed the theory, Russian formalists shifted to Czechoslovakia, where it was continued by the Prague Linguistic Circle. The Prague Linguistic Circle included Roman Jakobson (who had migrated from Russia), Jan Mukarovsky, and Rene Wellek.

What is Formalism?

Ü A. Literature is viewed as a specialized mode of language

Ü B. There is a fundamental difference between the literary use of language and the ordinary ‘practical’ use of language.

Ü C. The primary function of ordinary language is communication.

Ü D. Literary language is self-focused. Its function is not mere communication but to offer us a special mode of experience. 

Ü E. Literary language draws attention to its literariness.

Literariness

Roman Jakobson writes:--“The object of study in literary science is not literature but ‘literariness’, that is, what makes a given work a literary work”.

Ü Literariness of a work consists in the maximum of ‘foregrounding’ of the utterance. [foregrounding—to bring something into the highest prominence, to make it dominant]

Ü By ‘backgrounding’ the referential aspect and the logical connections in the language, poetry makes the words themselves ‘palpable’ as phonic signs.

Estrange or Defamiliarize

The primary aim of literature in foregrounding its medium is to estrange or defamiliarize. By disrupting the modes of ordinary linguistic discourse, literature ‘makes strange’ the world of everyday perception and renews the reader’s lost capacity for fresh sensation.

                                                                                            

The artistic devices which estrange poetic language are often described as ‘deviations’ from ordinary language. Such deviations include violating patterns in the sound and syntax of poetic language—including patterns of speech sounds, grammatical constructions, rhythm, rhyme and stanza forms—and also in setting up prominent recurrences of key words or images.

a. American New Criticism   is sometimes called ‘formalist’ because it stress the analysis of the literary work as a self-sufficient verbal entity, independent of reference either to the state of mind of the author or to the external world. . It also conceives poetry as a special mode of language.

b. Roman Jakobson and Tzvetan Todorov introduced formalist concepts and methods into French Structuralism.

c. Marxist criticism, reader-response criticism, speech-act-theory and new historicism reject the concepts of formalism.

IV.  STRUCTURALISM & DECONSTRUCTION

Structuralist criticism means the practice of analysing literature on the explicit model of modern linguistic theory. Structuralists use the concepts and analytic tools of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure’s book Course in General Linguistics is the model for structuralists.

French Structuralism was inaugurated in the 1950s by the cultural anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss. Levi Strauss analysed such cultural phenomena as mythology, kinship relations, and modes of preparing food. His analysis was based on Saussure’s linguistic model.

Anthropology = the study of the human race, especially of its origins, development, customs and beliefs.

Ethnology = the scientific study and comparison of human races.

In the 1950s and 1960s structuralism tried to provide an objective account of all social and cultural phenomena in a range that includes mythical narratives, literary texts, advertisements, fashions in clothes and patterns of social decorum. It views these phenomena as a signifying structure and undertakes to explain how the phenomena have achieved their cultural significance. The primary interest of the structuralist is not in the cultural parole but in the langue that is not in any particular cultural phenomenon but on the general system that provides its meaning.

Structuralist criticism views literature as a second-order system that uses the first-order structural system of the language as its medium. Structuralist critics apply a variety of linguist concepts—phonemic and morphemic/ paradigmatic and syntagmatic— to the analysis of a literary text. The ultimate aim of structuralism is to make explicit the system of rules and codes that governs the forms and meanings of all literary productions. As Jonathan Culler puts it in Structuralist Poetics, the aim of structuralist criticism is “to construct a poetics which stands to literature as linguistics stands to language”.

Structuralism is opposed to mimetic criticism (the view that literature is primarily an imitation of reality). Structuralism is opposed to expressive criticism (the view that literature primarily expresses the feelings or creative imagination of its author). Structuralism departs rapidly from traditional humanistic criticism.

1. In the Structuralist view a literary work is simply a text. It is constituted by literary conventions and codes. These create an illusion of reality. But they have neither truth value nor even any reference value to a reality existing outside the literary system itself.

2. The individual author is given no initiative. He is also a product of the workings of the linguistic system. The mind of the author is a space within which the impersonal ‘always-already’ existing system of literary language, conventions, codes, and rules of combination gets precipitated into a particular text. As Roland Barthes said, “As an institution, the author is dead”.

3. Structuralism replaces the author by the reader as the central agency in criticism. But what he reads is not a text imbued with meanings, but ecriture, writing. The focus of Structuralist criticism is on the impersonal process of reading which makes literary sense of the codes, conventions, expectations, that constitute a text.

In the late 1960s structuralist enterprise gave way to deconstruction and other modes of poststructural theories. These theories questioned the scientific claims of structuralism.

Roland Barthes-- His early works helped to develop the main concepts of structuralism. But in his later writings, he abandoned the scientific claims of structuralism and distinguished between the readerly text such as the realistic novel that tries to ‘close’ interpretation by insisting on specific meanings and the writerly text that aims at the ideal of a galaxy of signifiers and so encourages the reader to a producer of his or her own meanings according not to one code but to a multiplicity of codes.

In The Pleasures of the Text Barthes praises the ‘jouissance’ evoked by a text that incites a hedonistic (self-gratifying, wild, pleasure-seeking) abandon to the uncontrolled play of its signifiers.

DECONSTRUCTION

Structuralism tried to take control of all things as a science of signs. Post-Structuralism or Deconstruction punctures this ambition. It does by displaying the instability of signification. If you look up for any word in the dictionary you are confronted by the plethora of meanings. (‘cat’ as example). Thus signifier does not lead to a signified but to many signifieds.

It was the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida who initiated the movement called Deconstruction. In a paper entitled, Structure, sign, and play in the Discourse of Human Sciences, presented to a conference held at John Hopkins University in 1966, Derrida questioned the methodologies generated by European structuralism.

Some of the key ideas propagated by Derrida are given here.

A rupture has occurred in the history of the concept of structure. The concept of structure and the word ‘structure’ are as old as western philosophy. A structure has a centre and we cannot imagine a structure with out a centre. The centre is the point at which the substitution of contents/elements/terms is no longer possible. It has always been thought that the centre which is by definition unique, constituted the very thing within a structure which governs the structure while escaping structurality. Classical thought could say that the centre is within the structure and outside it. Derrida says that this is a paradox.

Then Derrida makes his famous statement: “The centre is not the centre”. He argues that since the centre does not belong to the totality, the totality has its centre elsewhere.  The need for a centre arose from the anxiety that in the absence of a centre everything will be free play. Anxiety is the result of being caught by the game. Philosophy has given different names to the centre—essence, existence, substance, subject, consciousness, conscience, God, Man, and so forth.

 Supplementarity

Free play is permitted by the lack of absence of a centre of origin. It is the movement of Supplementarity. One cannot determine the centre. The sign supplements it. This sign adds itself, occurs in addition, over and above, comes as a supplement. Supplement is a lack on the part of the signified. Levi-Strauss speaks about the “superabundance of signifier”. The superabundance is the result of a lack which must be supplemented.

Difference and Differance

These are terms popularized by Derrida. Difference is from Saussure concept of language. Saussure said that in language there are only differences. We understand ‘cat’ because it is different from ‘dog’. Derrida coined the term ‘Difference’ by combining differ & defer. ‘Defer’ means postponement. In language we are always postponing the meaning. There is no final point where the meaning is totally at hand.  (For example, look at the meaning of ‘meaning’ in a dictionary. Meaning= the symbolic value of something, the significance of a thing. Here we understand that the word ‘meaning’ is creating new difficulties. Now we have to look for the meaning of ‘symbolic’ and ‘significance’. Again this is going to lead us into further difficulties. Thus meaning of any term appears circular.)

Reasoning of this type takes us out of the purview of literary criticism. The insistence of regarding language as a system of signs and not a vehicle of meanings gives the whole process an air of arid alienation from human realities. It also creates an abundance of technical jargons which are mostly tasteless.

V. MARXIST CRITICISM

Marxist Criticism is based on the economic and cultural theory of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his fellow thinker Fredrich Engels. The following are the main doctrines of Marxism—

1. The history of humanity, its social relations,  its institutions and its ways of thinking are determined by the changing mode of its “material production”—its overall economic organization.

2. Historical changes in the methods of production effect changes in the social class structure. In each era there are dominant and subordinate classes that engage in a struggle for economic, political and social advantage. 

3. Human consciousness is constituted by an ideology—that is the beliefs, values, and ways of thinking and feeling through which human beings see and explain what they think to be reality. An ideology is the product of the position and interests of a particular class. In any historical era, the dominant ideology serves to legitimize and perpetuate the interests of the dominant economic and social class.

Marx represented ideology as a ‘superstructure’ of which the contemporary socioeconomic system is the ‘base’. The reigning ideology incorporates the interests of the ruling class, as opposed to the proletariat, or wage earning class. This ideology seems a natural and inevitable way of seeing, explaining and dealing with the world for those who live in it. Ideology governs the social and cultural institutions and practices of the present era—including religion, morality, philosophy, politics and the legal system as well as literature and the other arts.

Marxism and Literature

A Marxist critic undertakes to ‘explain’ the literature in any historical era, not as works created in accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as products of the economic and ideological conditions of that era.

In ‘vulgar Marxism’ bourgeois literature is in direct correlation with the present stage of the class struggle. It demands that such works should be replaced by ‘social realism’. More flexible Marxists grant that traditional literary works possess a degree of autonomy that helps some of them to overcome the bourgeois ideology. Thus they may represent the reality of their time.

Georg Lukacs

 

The Hungarian thinker Georg Lukacs is the most influential of the Marxist critics. He represents a flexible view of the role of ideology. According to Lukacs—

Each great work of literature creates its own world which is different from every day reality.

A master of realism like Balzac or Tolstoy brings to life the “greatest possible richness of the objective conditions of life”

Thus their characters display the essential tendencies of their epoch. [Such characters overcome the author’s ideology].

Their fictional world brings out all the contradictions of the real world.

Thus their fictional world accords with the Marxist conception of the real world of class conflict, economic and social ‘contradictions’ and the alienation of the individual under capitalism.

Lukacs attacked modernist experimental writers as ‘decadent’ examples of the alienated individual in the fragmented world of the late stage of capitalism. In opposition to Lukacs, the ‘Frankfurt School’ of German Marxists, especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, lauded modernist writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Beckett. They argued that the modernists give a fragmented picture of modern life which serves as a critique of the dehumanizing institutions and processes of society under capitalism.

The German Marxists—Bertolt Brecht & Walter Benjamin

In his critical theory, Brecht rejected the “Aristotelian” concept of a tragic play as an imitation of reality that has a unified plot and a universal theme. Further, he rejected the concept of identification of the audience with the hero and the generation of catharsis. Brecht believed that the illusion of reality should be deliberately shattered by the use of an episodic plot. This can be done by protagonists who do not attract the audience’s sympathy. Brecht is for emphasizing the theatricality in staging and acting, and for baring the devices of drama so as to produce estrangement effects that will jar audiences out of their passive acceptance of modern capitalist society as a natural way of life. The above concepts are together known as ‘Epic Theatre’.

Walter Benjamin was an admirer of Brecht and an associate of Frankfurt school. He said that changing material conditions in the production of the arts, especially the technological developments of the mass media have changed the traditional ideas about art. Modern technical inventions such as photography, the phonograph, the radio, and especially the cinema, have transformed the very concept and status of a work of art. Formerly an artist or an author produced a work of art that was unique. It was the special preserve of the bourgeois elite, around which developed an aura of uniqueness, autonomy, and an aesthetic value independent of any social function. The new media make it possible to have infinite and precise reproducibility of the objects of art. Motion pictures are specially designed to be reproduced in multiple copies. Such modes of art have destroyed the mystique of the unique work of art as a subject for pure contemplation.

Marxist criticism has become more and more flexible in recent years. Now there is a belief that Marxist critical theory is not a set of timeless truths but only a part of historical process.

The Neo-Marxists

Louis Althusser

In the 1960s the influential Marxist Louis Althusser assimilated the principles of structuralism into the Marxist theory. The structure of society as a whole is constituted by diverse social formations or “ideological state apparatuses”. Religious, legal, literary and political institutions are part of the ideological state apparatus. Ideology vary according to the form and practices of each mode of state apparatus and the ideology of each mode operates by means of a discourse which ‘interpellates’ the individual to take up a pre-established ‘subject position’. A great work is not a mere product of ideology, for its fiction establishes for the reader a distance from which to recognize the ideology from which it is born. 

Pierre Macherey

 

Macherey was a follower of Althusser. He stressed that a literary text not only distances itself from its ideology by its fiction and form, but also exposes the contradictions that are inherent in that ideology by its ‘silences’ or ‘gaps’—that is what the text fails to say because its ideology makes it impossible to say it. The aim of Marxist criticism is to make these silences speak and reveal the flaws, stresses, and incoherence in the very ideology that it incorporates.

Raymond Williams & Terry Eagleton

Williams adapts Marxism to his humanistic concerns with the overall texture of the individual’s ‘lived experience’.  Eagleton believes that literary text is a special kind of production. In this ideological discourse is described as mental representation of lived experience. In recent years Eagleton has incorporated the concepts of deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis into Marxist theory.

Fredric Jameson

The American Marxist, Jameson has a synthetic critical approach to Marxism. Modes of criticism like Structuralism, archetypal criticism, semiotics and deconstruction are applicable at various stages of a critical interpretation of a literary work. Marxism subsumes all the other modes. It retains the positive findings within its political unconscious. 

VI. Feminist criticism

The feminists, like the Marxists are dissatisfied with the wider social and cultural situation. Writing is an activity from which women are not excluded and they have also gained equality with men.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86)

In her book The Second Sex she pointed out that the dominance of men was the main reason for the subservience of women. A woman has always to define herself from the beginning. Masculine is seen as true humanity and woman is seen only as a relative of man.

Virginia Woolf

In A Room of One’s Own she dealt with the specific problems of women writers. Literary forms have been hardened by centuries of masculine writing and it has become something unsuitable for women.

The style of Bronte sisters and George Eliot descended from male writers and was unsuitable for female expression. She asserted that the style of Jane Austen derived from Sheridan.

Elaine Showalter

Feminist criticism is concerned with the impact of gender on writing and reading. It usually begins with a critique of patriarchal culture. It is concerned with the place of female writers in the cannon.  Finally, it includes a search for a feminine theory or approach to texts. Feminist criticism is political and often revisionist. Feminists often argue that male fears are portrayed through female characters. They may argue that gender determines everything, or just the opposite: that all gender differences are imposed by society, and gender determines nothing.

Elaine Showalter's Theory:

In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter argued that literary subcultures go through three major phases of development. For literature by or about women, she labels these stages the Feminine, Feminist, and Female:

(1) Feminine Stage - involves "imitation of the prevailing modes of the

dominant tradition" and “internalization of its standards”.
(2) Feminist Stage - involves "protest against these standards and values and advocacy of female rights.

(3) Female Stage - this is the "phase of self-discovery, a turning inwards freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity."

Feminist criticism has beneficial as well as harmful impact on literary criticism

Advantages:

Women have been somewhat underrepresented in the traditional cannon, and a feminist approach to literature redresses this problem.

Disadvantages:

Feminist turns literary criticism into a political battlefield and overlooks the merits of works they consider "patriarchal."   When arguing for a distinct feminine writing style, they tend to relegate women's literature to a ghetto status; this in turn prevents female literature from being naturally included in the literary cannon. The feminist approach is often too theoretical.

Modern feminist theory is predominantly, but not exclusively, associated with western middle class academia. Feminist activism, however, is a grass roots movement which crosses class and race boundaries. It is culturally specific and addresses the issues relevant to the women of that society, for example, genital mutilation in Sudan.  Some issues, such as rape, incest, mothering, are universal.

The earliest works on 'the woman question' criticized the restrictive role of women without necessarily claiming that women were disadvantaged or that men were to blame. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written by Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the few works written before the 19th century that can be called feminist. By modern standards, her metaphor of women as nobility, the elite of society, coddled, fragile and in danger of intellectual and moral sloth, does not sound like a feminist argument. Wollstonecraft believed that both sexes contributed to this situation and took it for granted that women had considerable power over men.

Over a century and a half the movement has grown to include diverse perspectives on what constitutes discrimination against women. Early feminists and primary feminist movements are often called the ‘first-wave’ and feminists after about 1960 ‘the second-wave’. There is a so called ‘third-wave’, but feminists disagree as to its necessity, its benefits, and its ideas. These three "waves" are called so because like ocean waves, each wave comes on top of the one before, drawing on each other.

Dr. S. Sreekumar