practical reading of literature. By literary theory we refer not to
the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal
what literature can mean. Literary theory is a description of the
underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we attempt to
understand literature. All literary interpretation draws on a basis in
theory but can serve as a justification for very different kinds of
critical activity. It is literary theory that formulates the
relationship between author and work; literary theory develops the
significance of race, class, and gender for literary study, both from
the standpoint of the biography of the author and an analysis of their
thematic presence within texts. Literary theory offers varying
approaches for understanding the role of historical context in
interpretation as well as the relevance of linguistic and unconscious
elements of the text. Literary theorists trace the history and
evolution of the different genres—narrative, dramatic, lyric—in
addition to the more recent emergence of the novel and the short
story, while also investigating the importance of formal elements of
literary structure. Lastly, literary theory in recent years has sought
to explain the degree to which the text is more the product of a
culture than an individual author and in turn how those texts help to
create the culture.
1. What Is Literary Theory?
"Literary theory," sometimes designated "critical theory," or
"theory," and now undergoing a transformation into "cultural theory"
within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the
set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work
of explaining or interpreting literary texts. Literary theory refers
to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or
from knowledge external to the text that can be applied in multiple
interpretive situations. All critical practice regarding literature
depends on an underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways:
theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject matter of
criticism—"the literary"—and the specific aims of critical
practice—the act of interpretation itself. For example, to speak of
the "unity" of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes Aristotle's
theoretical statements on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe,
that Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full
humanity to the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed by a
postcolonial literary theory that presupposes a history of
exploitation and racism. Critics that explain the climactic drowning
of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening as a suicide generally call upon a
supporting architecture of feminist and gender theory. The structure
of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work may or may not be
acknowledged by the critic, and the status of literary theory within
the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve.
Literary theory and the formal practice of literary interpretation
runs a parallel but less well known course with the history of
philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far
back as Plato. The Cratylus contains a Plato's meditation on the
relationship of words and the things to which they refer. Plato's
skepticism about signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological
relationship to their meanings but are arbitrarily "imposed," becomes
a central concern in the twentieth century to both "Structuralism" and
"Poststructuralism." However, a persistent belief in "reference," the
notion that words and images refer to an objective reality, has
provided epistemological (that is, having to do with theories of
knowledge) support for theories of literary representation throughout
most of Western history. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in
Shakespeare's phrase, held "a mirror up to nature" and faithfully
recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer.
Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the
nineteenth century. In one of the earliest developments of literary
theory, German "higher criticism" subjected biblical texts to a
radical historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural
interpretation. "Higher," or "source criticism," analyzed biblical
tales in light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an
approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit of twentieth
century theory, particularly "Structuralism" and "New Historicism." In
France, the eminent literary critic Charles Augustin Saint Beuve
maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in
terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to
refuting Saint Beuve in a massive narrative in which he contended that
the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the
work of art. (This dispute was taken up anew by the French theorist
Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the "Death of the Author."
See "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism.") Perhaps the greatest
nineteenth century influence on literary theory came from the deep
epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts are not
facts until they have been interpreted. Nietzsche's critique of
knowledge has had a profound impact on literary studies and helped
usher in an era of intense literary theorizing that has yet to pass.
Attention to the etymology of the term "theory," from the Greek
"theoria," alerts us to the partial nature of theoretical approaches
to literature. "Theoria" indicates a view or perspective of the Greek
stage. This is precisely what literary theory offers, though specific
theories often claim to present a complete system for understanding
literature. The current state of theory is such that there are many
overlapping areas of influence, and older schools of theory, though no
longer enjoying their previous eminence, continue to exert an
influence on the whole. The once widely-held conviction (an implicit
theory) that literature is a repository of all that is meaningful and
ennobling in the human experience, a view championed by the Leavis
School in Britain, may no longer be acknowledged by name but remains
an essential justification for the current structure of American
universities and liberal arts curricula. The moment of
"Deconstruction" may have passed, but its emphasis on the
indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to establish exclusively
what a word means when used in a given situation) and thus of texts,
remains significant. Many critics may not embrace the label
"feminist," but the premise that gender is a social construct, one of
theoretical feminisms distinguishing insights, is now axiomatic in a
number of theoretical perspectives.
While literary theory has always implied or directly expressed a
conception of the world outside the text, in the twentieth century
three movements—"Marxist theory" of the Frankfurt School, "Feminism,"
and "Postmodernism"—have opened the field of literary studies into a
broader area of inquiry. Marxist approaches to literature require an
understanding of the primary economic and social bases of culture
since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product,
directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. Feminist
thought and practice analyzes the production of literature and
literary representation within the framework that includes all social
and cultural formations as they pertain to the role of women in
history. Postmodern thought consists of both aesthetic and
epistemological strands. Postmodernism in art has included a move
toward non-referential, non-linear, abstract forms; a heightened
degree of self-referentiality; and the collapse of categories and
conventions that had traditionally governed art. Postmodern thought
has led to the serious questioning of the so-called metanarratives of
history, science, philosophy, and economic and sexual reproduction.
Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes to be seen as "constructed"
within historical self-contained systems of understanding. Marxist,
feminist, and postmodern thought have brought about the incorporation
of all human discourses (that is, interlocking fields of language and
knowledge) as a subject matter for analysis by the literary theorist.
Using the various poststructuralist and postmodern theories that often
draw on disciplines other than the literary—linguistic,
anthropological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical—for their primary
insights, literary theory has become an interdisciplinary body of
cultural theory. Taking as its premise that human societies and
knowledge consist of texts in one form or another, cultural theory
(for better or worse) is now applied to the varieties of texts,
ambitiously undertaking to become the preeminent model of inquiry into
the human condition.
Literary theory is a site of theories: some theories, like "Queer
Theory," are "in;" other literary theories, like "Deconstruction," are
"out" but continue to exert an influence on the field. "Traditional
literary criticism," "New Criticism," and "Structuralism" are alike in
that they held to the view that the study of literature has an
objective body of knowledge under its scrutiny. The other schools of
literary theory, to varying degrees, embrace a postmodern view of
language and reality that calls into serious question the objective
referent of literary studies. The following categories are certainly
not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive, but they represent
the major trends in literary theory of this century.
2. Traditional Literary Criticism
Academic literary criticism prior to the rise of "New Criticism" in
the United States tended to practice traditional literary history:
tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the
literary periods, and clarifying historical context and allusions
within the text. Literary biography was and still is an important
interpretive method in and out of the academy; versions of moral
criticism, not unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic
(e.g. genre studies) criticism were also generally influential
literary practices. Perhaps the key unifying feature of traditional
literary criticism was the consensus within the academy as to the both
the literary canon (that is, the books all educated persons should
read) and the aims and purposes of literature. What literature was,
and why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that
subsequent movements in literary theory were to raise.
3. Formalism and New Criticism
"Formalism" is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that
emphasizes literary form and the study of literary devices within the
text. The work of the Formalists had a general impact on later
developments in "Structuralism" and other theories of narrative.
"Formalism," like "Structuralism," sought to place the study of
literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the
motifs, devices, techniques, and other "functions" that comprise the
literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the
literariness of texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary
from other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was essential
for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the
"hero-function," for example, that had meaning. Form was the content.
A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned
and compared to how it had functioned in other literary works. Of the
Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson and Viktor Shklovsky are
probably the most well known.
The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature was "to make the
stones stonier" nicely expresses their notion of literariness.
"Formalism" is perhaps best known is Shklovsky's concept of
"defamiliarization." The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky
contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the
objects of existence. Literary language, partly by calling attention
to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made
fresh the experience of daily life.
The "New Criticism," so designated as to indicate a break with
traditional methods, was a product of the American university in the
1930s and 40s. "New Criticism" stressed close reading of the text
itself, much like the French pedagogical precept "explication du
texte." As a strategy of reading, "New Criticism" viewed the work of
literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context
and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the
artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated with the
movement, expressed a similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his
essays on John Donne and the metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot
believed experienced a complete integration of thought and feeling.
New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren
and W.K. Wimsatt placed a similar focus on the metaphysical poets and
poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical practice. "New
Criticism" aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary
studies, confining itself to careful scrutiny of the text alone and
the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor,
among others. "New Criticism" was fired by the conviction that their
readings of poetry would yield a humanizing influence on readers and
thus counter the alienating tendencies of modern, industrial life.
"New Criticism" in this regard bears an affinity to the Southern
Agrarian movement whose manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, contained
essays by two New Critics, Ransom and Warren. Perhaps the enduring
legacy of "New Criticism" can be found in the college classroom, in
which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary
object of literary study.
4. Marxism and Critical Theory
Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class
conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through
the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques
of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final
social and political meanings of literature. Marxist theorist often
champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and authors whose
work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In
keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories
arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of
understanding the relationship between economic production and
literature, but all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of
society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and
practical criticism, most notably in the development of "New
Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism."
The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of
the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in
particular with realism and the historical novel. Walter Benjamin
broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics and the
reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers,
including most notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert
Marcuse—after their emigration to the United States—played a key role
in introducing Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of
American academic life. These thinkers became associated with what is
known as "Critical theory," one of the constituent components of which
was a critique of the instrumental use of reason in advanced
capitalist culture. "Critical theory" held to a distinction between
the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by
capitalist societies as an instrument of domination. "Critical theory"
sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood film,
advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the
workplace. Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist
societies were always already co-opted by the entertainment needs of
an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable
cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.
The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt
School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain
and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United States.
Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great
Britain and the development of "Cultural Materialism" and the Cultural
Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at Birmingham University's
Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both as a
Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely
read overview, Literary Theory. Lentricchia likewise became
influential through his account of trends in theory, After the New
Criticism. Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his
impact on Marxist theories of culture and for his position as one of
the leading figures in theoretical postmodernism. Jameson's work on
consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas,
typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the
realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. Jameson's work
investigates the way the structural features of late
capitalism—particularly the transformation of all culture into
commodity form—are now deeply embedded in all of our ways of
communicating.
5. Structuralism and Poststructuralism
Like the "New Criticism," "Structuralism" sought to bring to literary
studies a set of objective criteria for analysis and a new
intellectual rigor. "Structuralism" can be viewed as an extension of
"Formalism" in that that both "Structuralism" and "Formalism" devoted
their attention to matters of literary form (i.e. structure) rather
than social or historical content; and that both bodies of thought
were intended to put the study of literature on a scientific,
objective basis. "Structuralism" relied initially on the ideas of the
Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato, Saussure regarded
the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to
the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a
particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by
a system of "differences" between units of the language. Particular
meanings were of less interest than the underlying structures of
signification that made meaning itself possible, often expressed as an
emphasis on "langue" rather than "parole." "Structuralism" was to be a
metalanguage, a language about languages, used to decode actual
languages, or systems of signification. The work of the "Formalist"
Roman Jakobson contributed to "Structuralist" thought, and the more
prominent Structuralists included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology,
Tzvetan Todorov, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.
The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide
between "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." "Poststructuralism"
is less unified as a theoretical movement than its precursor; indeed,
the work of its advocates known by the term "Deconstruction" calls
into question the possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the
capacity for language to communicate. "Deconstruction," Semiotic
theory (a study of signs with close connections to "Structuralism,"
"Reader response theory" in America ("Reception theory" in Europe),
and "Gender theory" informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and
Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can be located under the
banner of "Poststructuralism." If signifier and signified are both
cultural concepts, as they are in "Poststructuralism," reference to an
empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language.
"Deconstruction" argues that this loss of reference causes an endless
deferral of meaning, a system of differences between units of language
that has no resting place or final signifier that would enable the
other signifiers to hold their meaning. The most important theorist of
"Deconstruction," Jacques Derrida, has asserted, "There is no getting
outside text," indicating a kind of free play of signification in
which no fixed, stable meaning is possible. "Poststructuralism" in
America was originally identified with a group of Yale academics, the
Yale School of "Deconstruction:" J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann,
and Paul de Man. Other tendencies in the moment after "Deconstruction"
that share some of the intellectual tendencies of "Poststructuralism"
would included the "Reader response" theories of Stanley Fish, Jane
Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the work of Sigmund Freud,
extends "Postructuralism" to the human subject with further
consequences for literary theory. According to Lacan, the fixed,
stable self is a Romantic fiction; like the text in "Deconstruction,"
the self is a decentered mass of traces left by our encounter with
signs, visual symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is
constituted by language, a language that is never one's own, always
another's, always already in use. Barthes applies these currents of
thought in his famous declaration of the "death" of the Author:
"writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin"
while also applying a similar "Poststructuralist" view to the Reader:
"the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply
that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by
which the written text is constituted."
Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose ideas
inform much of poststructuralist literary theory. Foucault played a
critical role in the development of the postmodern perspective that
knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the form
of discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is
discourse itself, can only be encountered textually. Following
Nietzsche, Foucault performs what he calls "genealogies," attempts at
deconstructing the unacknowledged operation of power and knowledge to
reveal the ideologies that make domination of one group by another
seem "natural." Foucaldian investigations of discourse and power were
to provide much of the intellectual impetus for a new way of looking
at history and doing textual studies that came to be known as the "New
Historicism."
6. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
"New Historicism," a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a
body of theoretical and interpretive practices that began largely with
the study of early modern literature in the United States. "New
Historicism" in America had been somewhat anticipated by the theorists
of "Cultural Materialism" in Britain, which, in the words of their
leading advocate, Raymond Williams describes "the analysis of all
forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the
actual means and conditions of their production." Both "New
Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism" seek to understand literary
texts historically and reject the formalizing influence of previous
literary studies, including "New Criticism," "Structuralism" and
"Deconstruction," all of which in varying ways privilege the literary
text and place only secondary emphasis on historical and social
context. According to "New Historicism," the circulation of literary
and non-literary texts produces relations of social power within a
culture. New Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism
in literary studies in several crucial ways. Rejecting traditional
historicism's premise of neutral inquiry, "New Historicism" accepts
the necessity of making historical value judgments. According to "New
Historicism," we can only know the textual history of the past because
it is "embedded," a key term, in the textuality of the present and its
concerns. Text and context are less clearly distinct in New
Historicist practice. Traditional separations of literary and
non-literary texts, "great" literature and popular literature, are
also fundamentally challenged. For the "New Historicist," all acts of
expression are embedded in the material conditions of a culture. Texts
are examined with an eye for how they reveal the economic and social
realities, especially as they produce ideology and represent power or
subversion. Like much of the emergent European social history of the
1980s, "New Historicism" takes particular interest in representations
of marginal/marginalized groups and non-normative
behaviors—witchcraft, cross-dressing, peasant revolts, and
exorcisms—as exemplary of the need for power to represent subversive
alternatives, the Other, to legitimize itself.
Louis Montrose, another major innovator and exponent of "New
Historicism," describes a fundamental axiom of the movement as an
intellectual belief in "the textuality of history and the historicity
of texts." "New Historicism" draws on the work of Levi-Strauss, in
particular his notion of culture as a "self-regulating system." The
Foucaldian premise that power is ubiquitous and cannot be equated with
state or economic power and Gramsci's conception of "hegemony," i.e.,
that domination is often achieved through culturally-orchestrated
consent rather than force, are critical underpinnings to the "New
Historicist" perspective. The translation of the work of Mikhail
Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the rise of the "New Historicism"
and "Cultural Materialism" and left a legacy in work of other
theorists of influence like Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan Dollimore.
In its period of ascendancy during the 1980s, "New Historicism" drew
criticism from the political left for its depiction of
counter-cultural expression as always co-opted by the dominant
discourses. Equally, "New Historicism's" lack of emphasis on
"literariness" and formal literary concerns brought disdain from
traditional literary scholars. However, "New Historicism" continues to
exercise a major influence in the humanities and in the extended
conception of literary studies.
7. Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism
"Ethnic Studies," sometimes referred to as "Minority Studies," has an
obvious historical relationship with "Postcolonial Criticism" in that
Euro-American imperialism and colonization in the last four centuries,
whether external (empire) or internal (slavery) has been directed at
recognizable ethnic groups: African and African-American, Chinese, the
subaltern peoples of India, Irish, Latino, Native American, and
Philipino, among others. "Ethnic Studies" concerns itself generally
with art and literature produced by identifiable ethnic groups either
marginalized or in a subordinate position to a dominant culture.
"Postcolonial Criticism" investigates the relationships between
colonizers and colonized in the period post-colonization. Though the
two fields are increasingly finding points of intersection—the work of
bell hooks, for example—and are both activist intellectual
enterprises, "Ethnic Studies and "Postcolonial Criticism" have
significant differences in their history and ideas.
"Ethnic Studies" has had a considerable impact on literary studies in
the United States and Britain. In W.E.B. Dubois, we find an early
attempt to theorize the position of African-Americans within dominant
white culture through his concept of "double consciousness," a dual
identity including both "American" and "Negro." Dubois and theorists
after him seek an understanding of how that double experience both
creates identity and reveals itself in culture. Afro-Caribbean and
African writers—Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe—have made
significant early contributions to the theory and practice of ethnic
criticism that explores the traditions, sometimes suppressed or
underground, of ethnic literary activity while providing a critique of
representations of ethnic identity as found within the majority
culture. Ethnic and minority literary theory emphasizes the
relationship of cultural identity to individual identity in historical
circumstances of overt racial oppression. More recently, scholars and
writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, and Kwame Anthony
Appiah have brought attention to the problems inherent in applying
theoretical models derived from Euro-centric paradigms (that is,
structures of thought) to minority works of literature while at the
same time exploring new interpretive strategies for understanding the
vernacular (common speech) traditions of racial groups that have been
historically marginalized by dominant cultures.
Though not the first writer to explore the historical condition of
postcolonialism, the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said's book
Orientalism is generally regarded as having inaugurated the field of
explicitly "Postcolonial Criticism" in the West. Said argues that the
concept of "the Orient" was produced by the "imaginative geography" of
Western scholarship and has been instrumental in the colonization and
domination of non-Western societies. "Postcolonial" theory reverses
the historical center/margin direction of cultural inquiry: critiques
of the metropolis and capital now emanate from the former colonies.
Moreover, theorists like Homi K. Bhabha have questioned the binary
thought that produces the dichotomies—center/margin, white/black, and
colonizer/colonized—by which colonial practices are justified. The
work of Gayatri C. Spivak has focused attention on the question of who
speaks for the colonial "Other" and the relation of the ownership of
discourse and representation to the development of the postcolonial
subjectivity. Like feminist and ethnic theory, "Postcolonial
Criticism" pursues not merely the inclusion of the marginalized
literature of colonial peoples into the dominant canon and discourse.
"Postcolonial Criticism" offers a fundamental critique of the ideology
of colonial domination and at the same time seeks to undo the
"imaginative geography" of Orientalist thought that produced
conceptual as well as economic divides between West and East,
civilized and uncivilized, First and Third Worlds. In this respect,
"Postcolonial Criticism" is activist and adversarial in its basic
aims. Postcolonial theory has brought fresh perspectives to the role
of colonial peoples—their wealth, labor, and culture—in the
development of modern European nation states. While "Postcolonial
Criticism" emerged in the historical moment following the collapse of
the modern colonial empires, the increasing globalization of culture,
including the neo-colonialism of multinational capitalism, suggests a
continued relevance for this field of inquiry.
8. Gender Studies and Queer Theory
Gender theory came to the forefront of the theoretical scene first as
feminist theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation
of all gender and sexual categories and identities. Feminist gender
theory followed slightly behind the reemergence of political feminism
in the United States and Western Europe during the 1960s. Political
feminism of the so-called "second wave" had as its emphasis practical
concerns with the rights of women in contemporary societies, women's
identity, and the representation of women in media and culture. These
causes converged with early literary feminist practice, characterized
by Elaine Showalter as "gynocriticism," which emphasized the study and
canonical inclusion of works by female authors as well as the
depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts.
Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the
paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes
an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative
epistemological positions meant to change the social order. In the
context of postmodernism, gender theorists, led by the work of Judith
Butler, initially viewed the category of "gender" as a human construct
enacted by a vast repetition of social performance. The biological
distinction between man and woman eventually came under the same
scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion: the sexual
categories are products of culture and as such help create social
reality rather than simply reflect it. Gender theory achieved a wide
readership and acquired much its initial theoretical rigor through the
work of a group of French feminist theorists that included Simone de
Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, who while
Bulgarian rather than French, made her mark writing in French. French
feminist thought is based on the assumption that the Western
philosophical tradition represses the experience of women in the
structure of its ideas. As an important consequence of this systematic
intellectual repression and exclusion, women's lives and bodies in
historical societies are subject to repression as well. In the
creative/critical work of Cixous, we find the history of Western
thought depicted as binary oppositions: "speech/writing; Nature/Art,
Nature/History, Nature/Mind, Passion/Action." For Cixous, and for
Irigaray as well, these binaries are less a function of any objective
reality they describe than the male-dominated discourse of the Western
tradition that produced them. Their work beyond the descriptive stage
becomes an intervention in the history of theoretical discourse, an
attempt to alter the existing categories and systems of thought that
found Western rationality. French feminism, and perhaps all feminism
after Beauvoir, has been in conversation with the psychoanalytic
revision of Freud in the work of Jacques Lacan. Kristeva's work draws
heavily on Lacan. Two concepts from Kristeva—the "semiotic" and
"abjection"—have had a significant influence on literary theory.
Kristeva's "semiotic" refers to the gaps, silences, spaces, and bodily
presence within the language/symbol system of a culture in which there
might be a space for a women's language, different in kind as it would
be from male-dominated discourse.
Masculine gender theory as a separate enterprise has focused largely
on social, literary, and historical accounts of the construction of
male gender identities. Such work generally lacks feminisms' activist
stance and tends to serve primarily as an indictment rather than a
validation of male gender practices and masculinity. The so-called
"Men's Movement," inspired by the work of Robert Bly among others, was
more practical than theoretical and has had only limited impact on
gender discourse. The impetus for the "Men's Movement" came largely as
a response to the critique of masculinity and male domination that
runs throughout feminism and the upheaval of the 1960s, a period of
crisis in American social ideology that has required a reconsideration
of gender roles. Having long served as the de facto "subject" of
Western thought, male identity and masculine gender theory awaits
serious investigation as a particular, and no longer universally
representative, field of inquiry.
Much of what theoretical energy of masculine gender theory currently
possesses comes from its ambiguous relationship with the field of
"Queer theory." "Queer theory" is not synonymous with gender theory,
nor even with the overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but
does share many of their concerns with normative definitions of man,
woman, and sexuality. "Queer theory" questions the fixed categories of
sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative
(that is, what is considered "normal") sexual ideology. To "queer"
becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are
transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued. "Queering"
can be enacted on behalf of all non-normative sexualities and
identities as well, all that is considered by the dominant paradigms
of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive, odd—in
short, queer. Michel Foucault's work on sexuality anticipates and
informs the Queer theoretical movement in a role similar to the way
his writing on power and discourse prepared the ground for "New
Historicism." Judith Butler contends that heterosexual identity long
held to be a normative ground of sexuality is actually produced by the
suppression of homoerotic possibility. Eve Sedgwick is another
pioneering theorist of "Queer theory," and like Butler, Sedgwick
maintains that the dominance of heterosexual culture conceals the
extensive presence of homosocial relations. For Sedgwick, the standard
histories of western societies are presented in exclusively in terms
of heterosexual identity: "Inheritance, Marriage, Dynasty, Family,
Domesticity, Population," and thus conceiving of homosexual identity
within this framework is already problematic.
9. Cultural Studies
Much of the intellectual legacy of "New Historicism" and "Cultural
Materialism" can now be felt in the "Cultural Studies" movement in
departments of literature, a movement not identifiable in terms of a
single theoretical school, but one that embraces a wide array of
perspectives—media studies, social criticism, anthropology, and
literary theory—as they apply to the general study of culture.
"Cultural Studies" arose quite self-consciously in the 80s to provide
a means of analysis of the rapidly expanding global culture industry
that includes entertainment, advertising, publishing, television,
film, computers and the Internet. "Cultural Studies" brings scrutiny
not only to these varied categories of culture, and not only to the
decreasing margins of difference between these realms of expression,
but just as importantly to the politics and ideology that make
contemporary culture possible. "Cultural Studies" became notorious in
the 90s for its emphasis on pop music icons and music video in place
of canonical literature, and extends the ideas of the Frankfurt School
on the transition from a truly popular culture to mass culture in late
capitalist societies, emphasizing the significance of the patterns of
consumption of cultural artifacts. "Cultural Studies" has been
interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary, from its inception; indeed,
"Cultural Studies" can be understood as a set of sometimes conflicting
methods and approaches applied to a questioning of current cultural
categories. Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris, Tony Bennett and Simon During
are some of the important advocates of a "Cultural Studies" that seeks
to displace the traditional model of literary studies.
10. References and Further Reading
General Works on Theory
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997.
During, Simon. Ed. The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1999.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press,
1996.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Stanton, Gareth, and Maley, Willy. Eds.
Postcolonial Criticism.
New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1997.
Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. Eds. Modern Literary Theory: A
Reader. 4th edition.
Richter, David H. Ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary
Trends. 2nd Ed. Bedford Books: Boston, 1998.
Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden,
Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998.
Literary and Cultural Theory
Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture. Ed. J. M.
Bernstein. London: Routledge, 2001.
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy: And Other Essays. Trans. Ben
Brewster. New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature. Trans.
Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1994.
—-The Pleasure of the Text
. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1975.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Tr. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:
Schocken, 1988.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of
Poetry. New York:
Harcourt, 1947.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins, 1976.
Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago:
A. C. McClurg
& Co., 1903.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of
Interpretive Communities.
Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction.
Trans. Robert
Hurley. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981.
—-The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage,
1973.
Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press,
1981.
Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge, 2001.
Lemon Lee T. and Reis, Marion J. Eds. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays.
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley
Mitchell. Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1962.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York:
Vintage, 1969.
Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C.K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence
Kilmartin. New York: Vintage, 1982.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. Between Men: English literature and Male
Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
—-Epistemology of the Closet. London: Penguin, 1994.
Showalter, Elaine. Ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women,
Literature, and
Theory. London: Virago, 1986.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American
Fiction, 1790-
1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Wellek, Rene and Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. New
York: Harcourt
Brace, 1956.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press,
1973.
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