Appunti di English literature and culture 1

English literature and culture

Introduction to literary theory

Literary theories are a series of ideas that are used to analyse literature and to criticise works of literature. Theory -> looking at something, having a perspective, the act of experiencing, being a spectator (you look and get an idea). You get a certain point of view through which we can see something, you interpret the text according to your thoughts, your perspective, what you think.

What is literary theory -> the body (a set) of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. -> revealing the meaning of a literature text, there will never be a definitive meaning (univocal answer) of a literature text because according to which theory you apply the meaning changes. But we cannot say that any interpretation is valid, the interpretation is valid if it is supported by a recognized literature theory.

About a text, you can study multiple things, there is the historical content, the private life of the author, the general plot, the background (we can focus also on different aspects that we can find in the texts: racial ideas and content, social classes, gender issues, the figure of the woman, then we have the linguistic elements, the style, the language).

Literary theory as cultural theory

In recent times there is less and less the idea that there is a high and a low literature, a popular and an intellectual literature. Literature is almost part of the bigger content that culture is. When we analyse a text we don’t analyse only what is inside the text, we also apply and use culture theories external to the text. - ex. Postcolonial theory it’s very cultural, about exploitation and racism.

Origins of literary theory

The origin of literary theory coincides with the history of philosophy, literature was called originally philosophy theory not literary, literary theory didn’t exist but they spoke about it.

• Plato: there is an arbitrary relationship that we have decided between words and things (rapporto arbitrario tra parole e cose; il tavolo si chiama tavolo perché l’abbiamo deciso noi non perché rappresenti effettivamente la cosa). Art should teach a moral lesson, for Plato aesthetic literary qualities weren’t important, the thing that matters is the didactic goal (il messaggio trasmesso non la forma).
• Aristotle: the enjoyment of the audience is also important, we should enjoy also the experience of a work of art, it doesn’t have to only teach something. Aristotle takes in consideration the aesthetic qualities because it has to give pleasure, enjoyment, the form is important (+ he created the classical unities of action, time and space: how the text should be constructed in order to entertain the audience).

Precursors of contemporary literature theories

Europe, XIX century (before this date there were different fields applied to interpret the text)

• Germany, higher criticism (alta critica, metodo storico critico) a precursor of formalist/structuralist approaches (è nota come teoria per l’analisi della Bibbia -> approccio filologico tradizionale) Style, form and language contribute to create the meaning of the work.
• France, Charles Augustin Saint Beuve vs Marcel Proust -> precursors of Barthes’ death of the author -> the biography of the author was important to understand the work for Beuve, for Proust it wasn’t necessary, for Proust the important thing is what the reader understands of the work, what reaches the reader not the things that the author wanted to communicate.
• Friedrich Nietzsche: facts are not facts until they have been interpreted -> precursor of the construction/readers’ response theories. If you write something but no one reads it then it doesn’t exist because it doesn’t cause any effect (except for the author) if we don’t know the fact for us it has never happened.

XX century literary theories

Many of the theories of this trend were actually born around the same time, the firsts are around the 30s, during the modernist period that wanted to challenge traditions, against the established values.

Formalism and new criticism

Just like artists were trying to innovate art, critics tried to innovate criticism, they criticized the traditional criticism that focused on the idea that in order to understand a work of art you had to understand the historical context, the biography of the author, the style… so this movement in the 1930s wanted to challenge this traditional approach, they wanted to have a more scientific background, that combines different disciplines to understand a work of art.

Formalism can be divided in 2 big groups, one is Russian formalism and the other is the new critics that is a formalist school in the Anglophone word, UK and USA. It’s a school of thought that tried to break away from traditional ways of criticizing a work of art because they argued that the text should only be analysed based on its internal characteristics, formalism focuses on what is inside the text, and they want to leave out anything that is not in the text. The methodology they use is the closed-reading -> reading the words of the text in a very detailed way. It emphasizes form, the value is the fact that it focuses on the form of the text, on the form of the work of art and the literariness of literature, all the characteristics of form language, structure that make the work enjoyable, pleasurable. It’s more adept to analyse poetry than novels, even if we cannot say that any of the schools has a certain preference, all can be applied to all genres: poetry, novels, theatre…

The movement was influenced by T.S. Eliot, a modernist poet, he developed the idea of objective correlative, his idea of poetry influenced the idea of criticism. You put focus on the use of symbols, the structure of the text and the ways in which the different parts are put together, the aesthetic qualities of the text, language, form and structure, the way form and content interact.

Marxism / critical theories

Critical theory is a school of thought that focuses on a critique of society, because of inequalities, differences, all social and economic problems in society. The idea at the basis is that of using philosophy, social sciences, political ideas to analyse a work of art: here the focus is on the meaning of the text and its relationship with society, we focus on the ways in which the text interacts with society and other disciplines. As the name says, this theory is based on the idea of criticizing something, so it has a political attitude, (formalism is more objective) the importance of applying ethical and moral values in the analysis of a text, it also has a political purpose.

Critical theory was born in the Frankfurt school in the 1930s, it’s a neo Marxist school of thought. Horkheimer said that the purpose of critical theory was to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslaved them. The relevance of this theory is the fact that it proposes for the first time a more cultural point of view, a wider social and cultural perspective in the analysis of literature.

Is this a work of art that supports someone interests? The interests of poor people or capitalists, the interest of the monarchy, the government, the working classes, the middle classes (class issues: which is the social class of the author or of the character) which values does this work reinforce, a conservative values or it’s progressive and liberal, which is the relationship between the classes?…

Structuralism

This movement, just like formalism, focuses on the structure of the work, however in structuralism we have something more, because it develops its ideas starting from the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure about signifier and signified (signifier is the word, the signifier is the thing, the concept, to which that word refers. He theorized that the relationship between them is arbitrary, there is no real or physical relationship between them but the two are linked only through an arbitrary relationship).

De Saussure created the distinction between langue (abstract form of the language) and parole (the physical word and sound), the idea is that each language has a different word to identify a same thing. Structuralism developed the idea that the only way in which we can understand the meaning of something is by examining its overall structure, the meaning of anything that we read is only created in relationship or in contrast with other things that have been written or that are in the text. It focuses on structural relationships, it looks for structure and connections between the different parts of a work of art and between one work of art and another similar or different one to try to develop some interpretation of the entire system to which that work of art belongs.

Structuralism focuses on the grammar of literature, the grammatical structure in which we can examine the text to create the meaning. Classification of text, it also looks at patterns within the text that connected to the rest of the world, experience or certain idea or experience. It also focuses on grammatical rules in the sense that we need to follow some rules that try to make the interpretation more objective and scientific as possible.

Psychoanalytic criticism

Here the method is psychoanalysis, it uses the method that was developed by Freud to interpret texts. Literary texts, just like dreams, are the expression of the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author. We try to analyse literary texts as the expression of the unconscious of the author. But it can also be applied to the characters of the work, we can psychoanalyze the characters and not only the author, but also the way he has constructed the characters and the ways they interact, anything that may affect the mind of characters and the mind of the author himself. The work of art is a manifestation of the problems, conflicts, thoughts of the author. It gives a lot of importance to the role of the author.

Lacan: the mirror stage (the moment when children finally recognized themselves in the mirror) is something that we constantly have to live with and face, not only physically; it’s the idea of recognizing ourselves, the formation of the ego and our emotional experience and relationship between who we think we are and what people see. The desire: the fact that the things that we do, that we write, and the ways in which we interpret what we read, may express unconscious desire.

Jung: the idea of archetypes and the collective unconscious, he argued that all of literature follows certain archetypes, structures, (we all have something in our minds that forms the basis of which our ideas are built) (abbiamo una sorta di inconscio collettivo, sono delle cose che noi percepiamo, sappiamo senza saperle, come quando gli animali sanno dove andare senza che lo abbiamo imparato da qualcuno, qualcosa che per qualche motivo fa parte dell’inconscio collettivo della mente umana anche se nessuno ce l’ha esplicitamente detto o insegnato)

The questions that he asks about a work of art are related to the mind, the mental characteristics, relationships and problems, characters' behaviour, what characters do, think, say, to try and explain them in terms of psychoanalytic concepts, such as the unconscious, death, suicide, sexuality, conflict between ego superego and id, trauma, depression, the void… the hidden meaning of things, it looks for what is not said in the work, unresolved or unspoken problems that we can understand from the behaviour. (Es. Primo Levi)

Post structuralism and deconstruction

They go beyond the idea of structure, and they focus on the idea of deconstructive structure.

• Roland Barthes (the death of the author, 1967) announced the metaphorical death of the author as the source of meaning: the author is dead because he is no longer the authentic source of meaning of the text he has written, the author is not the main source in which we should look for the meaning of the text he has written. He theorized the birth of the reader: it is no longer the author that we should focus on when we want to understand the meaning of a work of art, but it is actually the reader that is the source of the meaning of the text. We no longer have a univocal structure that we can analyse based on what the author wanted to say, we now have the proliferation of meanings: texts do not have a univocal meaning that comes from what the author wanted to say but the idea is that it doesn’t matter what the author wanted to say, what matters is what the reader sees in that work of art, the way in which readers interpret the text. The reader has replaced the author as the main subject to study. We should look for other sources: readers, society, other works of art…
• The focus is no longer on the context of production of a text that is how, where and when a text was produced by the author, but actually the focus shifts to the concept of reception that is where and how that work of art is read, interpreted and the way the readers can create connections between the work of art and their own society. Meaning is always created by the reader (facts are not facts until they have been interpreted): a text doesn’t have any meaning until it has been read.
• Derrida: he was the first to use the term deconstruction, that goes against deconstructuralism, he wanted to decompose structure in order to understand how these structures create meaning. Here the structure is still important but the purpose is different.
• Yale school of criticism (Miller, Hertmann, Paul de Man): a deconstructivist school, they have argued that deconstruction should focus on demonstrating that the structure of text is only there to be dismantled (le strutture iniziano a crollare, nel modernismo vengono sovvertite, ma nel postmodermismo vengono completamente smantellate -> dimostrare che le strutture non stanno in piedi in questa proliferazione di significati causata dalla morte dell’autore e dalla nascita del lettore, si distruggono le strutture perché l’autore non è più in controllo della sua opera, che è diventata di proprietà dei lettori)
• The reader-response criticism: the author becomes a fictional construction: the focus is on the reader. Meaning can be found between the text and the reader. (il rischio è la proliferazione eccessiva di significati e quindi di perdere il testo, il significato si può trovare nell’interazione tra testo e lettore)
• Critical legal studies had been applied on law text, it’s important also to interpret the law, also the text of the law is uncertain and unstable. (1970, USA indeterminacy thesis, questioning the rule of law) -> create a new structure based on readers’ point of view rather than the author’s perspective.
• Stanley Fish <is there a text in this room?>
• Wolfgang Iser: meaning is located between the text and the author

New historicism and cultural studies

Main influences: cultural materialism, Marxism, Gramsci, (Hegemony), Foucault (power/knowledge), Althusser (ideology)

The movement was born in the USA in the 1980s, and the main theorist is Stephen Greenblatt: see literature as part of culture and part of the economic sphere, power is related also to literature -> literature can contribute to maintaining power and maintaining things as they are or, on the other hand, other works of art could challenge the status quo and go against established powers.

Louis Montrose: the textuality of history and the historicity of texts -> on one hand history is created through texts, and on the other hand texts are inevitably connected and influenced by history; history is constructed and fictionalized through texts and texts are closely connected to history and they are the expression of the values and of the context in which they were produced.

Gramsci: hegemony, capitalism maintained control not only through violence but also through ideology. The idea at the basis is that capitalism, and the capitalistic society that Marxism wanted to fight, can survive because it has created a hegemonic culture, the fact that culture and information is controlled that allows capitalism to continue to exist, the idea of creating consensus, using the control of education and knowledge to obtain and maintain power. Power as knowledge and knowledge as power: if you control knowledge you will have total power and hegemony over the people.

The purpose of this movement is to try and connect literary texts with the social culture and historical conditions (the context in which the text was produced). The movement went against new criticism because it says that we should only focus on the text as an artefact and only the text itself, new historicism says that we cannot just focus on the text and its internal characteristics, but we should study literature in connection to history and the wider intellectual and cultural context -> new historicism gave birth to cultural studies: literature cannot be studied in isolation, but any work of art should be put in connection with philosophy, politics, historical content… they should be examined in order to explore whether they challenge the capitalistic society and the values of the time or whether they conform to the values of the time.

Cultural studies used the idea of new historicism about power, hegemony, knowledge, and the idea that literature is part of history and part of culture: to theorize that there should no longer be a distinction between high and low culture and instead cultural studies promoted the idea that all literature should be considered as part of culture and so they chose to focus on works that are considered popular because if you want to focus on the way in which literature is connected to culture and society you have to consider those texts that are most popular. /è proprio la letteratura popolare che viene letta da un gran numero di persone, ad avere la maggiore influenza sulla cultura e sulla società: sul controllo della conoscenza e quindi del potere. Power is knowledge and knowledge is power, quindi siccome la letteratura è conoscenza, la letteratura è anche potere, può conformarsi e supportare l’egemonia culturale oppure andarle contro proponendo nuove idee alternative/. Cultural studies put emphasis on the fact that literature should not only be something for intellectuals, it should...