contemporary literary theory

7/29/2019 Contemporary Literary Theory

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CONTEMPORARYLITERARYTHEORY

John Lye

Professor John Lye

parce que je navais pas compris, jenavais pasvu Proust

Please note that ENGL 4F70 no longer exists. The pages below arestill in operation, however, or should be.

You may find more at my mainsite, http://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/

Material on Theory by John Lye Links to other Theorypages

General Theory Some characteristics of contemporary theory Contemporary Literary Theory (article) A checklist of theoretical concerns Some Factors Affecting/Effecting the Reading of Texts The differences between Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, and

'theory itself' The Problem of Meaning

Structuralism Elements of Structuralism Jakobson's Communication Model Summary of Genette, "Structuralism and Literary Criticism"

Reader-Response The Interpretive Turn Some Principles of Phenomenological Hermeneutics Reader-Response: Various Positions

Poststructuralism, including Deconstruction Some Poststructuralist Assumptions An Essay on Barthes' "From Work to Text" by Lisa Smith Deconstruction: Some Assumptions notes on diffrance Synopsis of J. Hillis Miller, "The Critic as Host" Examples of deconstructive reading by J. Lye:
http://www.brocku.ca/english/faculty.php#JLhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/faculty.php#JLhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/#mce_temp_url%23%23mce_temp_url%23http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/#links%23linkshttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/#links%23linkshttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/characteristics.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2P70/contemporary_literary_theory.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/factors.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/crit.vs.theory.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/crit.vs.theory.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/meaning.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/struct.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/jakobson1.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/genette.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/interpturn.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/ph.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/rr.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/poststruct.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/lisa_smith.barthes.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/lisa_smith.barthes.php#lisahttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/deconstruction.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/diffr.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/host.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/faculty.php#JLhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/faculty.php#JLhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/#mce_temp_url%23%23mce_temp_url%23http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/#links%23linkshttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/#links%23linkshttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/characteristics.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2P70/contemporary_literary_theory.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/factors.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/crit.vs.theory.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/crit.vs.theory.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/meaning.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/struct.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/jakobson1.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/genette.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/interpturn.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/ph.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/rr.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/poststruct.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/lisa_smith.barthes.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/lisa_smith.barthes.php#lisahttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/deconstruction.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/diffr.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/host.php


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o love poemo Impedimentso Time is the only just power

The 'death of the author' as an instance of theory

Critical Theories Brief ideology page prepared for my Year 1 & 2 students Some Issues in Postcolonial Theory An Ideological Reading of "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" Bakhtin on Language A summary of Foucault, "The Discourse on Language" Synopsis of Foucault,"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

Psychoanalytic Theory Psychoanalytic Theory

Miscellany Close Reading vs Cultural Studies Some Attributes of Modernist Literature (from my ENGL 2F55

site) Some Cultural Forces Driving Modernism (from my ENGL 2F55

site) Some Attributes of Post-Modernist Literature (from my ENGL

2F55 site) Nation article on university presses

Links to other Theory pages The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (limited

access) David Miall's Reader Response site Russ Hunt: On Literary Reading (new address) Dino Fellugi's Undergraduate Guide to Literary Theory Introduction to Modern Literary Theory (Kristi Siegel) Mary Klages' Modern Criticial Thought Literature and Social Change Tony Christini Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism Barry Laga, Mesa

State College A Brief History of Literary Theory by Chris Lang, at Xenos

Christian Fellowship. Postcolonial Studies Page at Emory University On the Teaching of Literary Theory -- article by D. G. Myers Bakhtin Links at the Bakhtin Center (U. of Sheffield) Culture Machine: Generating Research in Theory and Culture (on-
http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/lovepoem.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/impediments.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/time.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/author.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/ideology.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/postcol.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/aunt.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/bakhtin.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/discourse.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/geneal.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/psychthry.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/cs-close.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/modernism.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/forces.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/post-mod-attrib.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/univpresses.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/univpresses.phphttp://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/b-contents.htmlhttp://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/miall2.htm#Readinghttp://www.stthomasu.ca/~hunt/litread.htmhttp://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htmhttp://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/lecturelinks.htmlhttp://www.socialit.org/SociaLit.htmlhttp://mesastate.edu/~blaga/theoryindex/theoryhomex.htmlhttp://www.xenos.org/essays/litthry1.htmhttp://www.xenos.org/http://www.xenos.org/http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/http://www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/myers/teaching_theory.htmlhttp://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/bakh/online.htmlhttp://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/bakh/bakhtin.htmlhttp://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/lovepoem.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/impediments.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/time.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/author.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/ideology.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/postcol.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/aunt.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/bakhtin.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/discourse.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/geneal.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/psychthry.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/cs-close.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/modernism.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/forces.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/post-mod-attrib.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/univpresses.phphttp://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/b-contents.htmlhttp://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/miall2.htm#Readinghttp://www.stthomasu.ca/~hunt/litread.htmhttp://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htmhttp://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/lecturelinks.htmlhttp://www.socialit.org/SociaLit.htmlhttp://mesastate.edu/~blaga/theoryindex/theoryhomex.htmlhttp://www.xenos.org/essays/litthry1.htmhttp://www.xenos.org/http://www.xenos.org/http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/http://www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/myers/teaching_theory.htmlhttp://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/bakh/online.htmlhttp://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/bakh/bakhtin.htmlhttp://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/


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line journal) Critical Approaches to Culture, Communications and Hypermedia

by Ron Burnett, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design Sites of Significance for Semiotics

Theory Resource Pages

Contemporary Theory, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thoughtat Colorado-Denver

Voice of the Shuttle Literary Theory page Alan Liu, UCSB Cultural Studies and Critical Theory -- database of primary texts,

well structured Literary Resources--Theory (Jack Lynch)

Sarah Zupko's Cultural Studies Center

Download as an .rtf file

Note:

This essay was published in the Brock Review Volume 2 Number 1,1993 pp. 90-106, which publication holds the copyright. The articleaddresses contemporary theory in its more post-structural mode, andwere I to rewrite it today I would put more emphasis on the culturalstudies model, on the growth of gender studies, and on New

Historicism, than I do here. I believe however that what I have to sayhere is still relevant and describes the fundamental paradigm shiftwhich has altered the direction and mandate of literary study.

Studies in literature in universities in the last two decades have beenmarked by the growing interest in and bitter division over a set ofrelated theoretical approaches known collectively as Literary Theory.Many Departments have become divided between "theory people" andopponents who see themselves as defending the traditional values

central to the culture against Theorys perceived anti-humanism.Literary Theory is part of a wide-spread movement in the culturewhich has affected a number of disciplines, occasioning similardisputes in some, a movement which has explored and elucidated thecomplexities of meaning, textuality and interpretation. Literary Theoryis not a single enterprise but a set of related concepts and practices most importantly deconstruction, post-Althusserian ideological or'political' criticism, post-Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism, New
http://www.eciad.ca/~rburnett/Weblog/http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/EngSem1.htmlhttp://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/postmodern.html#derridahttp://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2718http://eserver.org/theory/http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/theory.htmlhttp://www.popcultures.com/http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2P70/CONTEMPORARY_LITERARY_THEORY.rtfhttp://www.eciad.ca/~rburnett/Weblog/http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/EngSem1.htmlhttp://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/postmodern.html#derridahttp://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2718http://eserver.org/theory/http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/theory.htmlhttp://www.popcultures.com/http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2P70/CONTEMPORARY_LITERARY_THEORY.rtf


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Historicist or 'cultural' criticism, some reader-response criticism andmuch feminist criticism. The aim of this essay is to define the issuesthat ground these contemporary literary theories.

There have always been literary theories about how literature

works, what meaning is, what it is to be an author and so forth. Thecentral interpretive practices in force and in power in the academywhich are being challenged by Theory were themselves revolutionary,theory-based practices which became the norm. The two main criticalpractices in the mid portion of the century have been the formalisttradition, or 'New Criticism', which sees a text as a relatively self-enclosed meaning-production system which develops enormoussignifying power through its formal properties and through its conflicts,ambiguities and complexities, and the Arnoldian humanist traditionexemplified most clearly in the work of F. R. Leavis and his followers,which concentrates evaluatively on the capacity of the author torepresent moral experience concretely and compellingly. Many readershave in practice combined the values and methodologies of thesetraditions, different as their theoretical bases are.

Contemporary theory: the issues at stake

Theories and interpretive practices change with time, reflectingchanging world-views and uses of literature, and each theoreticalperspective tends to find fault with the one before apparently anormal evolutionary pattern, an orderly changing of the paradigm

guard, the child rebelling against the parent as a way [end page 90] ofproclaiming its identity. Literary Theory challenges this orderlydevelopmental premise, suggesting that this continual cultural changereflects an inherent instability, fault lines in cultural imagination whichdemonstrate the impossibility of any certain meaning which could haveany ultimate claim on us.

Contemporary Literary Theory is marked by a number of premises, ofwhich I will present nine, although not all of the theoretical approachesshare or agree on all of them.

1. Meaning is assumed, in Saussure's seminal contribution, to becreated by difference, not by "presence" (the identification of thesign with the object of meaning). A word means in that it differsfrom other words in the same meaning-area, just as a phonemeis registered not by its sound but by its difference from othersound segments. There is no meaning in any stable or absolutesense, only chains of differences from other meanings.


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2. Words themselves are polysemic (they have multiple meanings)and their meaning is over-determined (they have more meaningpotential than is exercised in any usage instance). They thuspossess potential excess meanings. As well, rhetoricalconstructions enable sentences to mean more than their

grammar would allow irony is an example. Language alwaysmeans more than it may be taken to mean in any one context. Itmust have this capacity of excess meaning in order for it to bearticulate, that is, jointed, capable of movement, hence ofrelationship and development.

3. Language use is a much more complex, elusive phenomenonthan we ordinarily suspect, and what we take normally to be ourmeanings are only the surface of a much more substantialtheatre of linguistic, psychic and cultural operations, of whichoperations we are not fully aware.

4. It is language itself, not some essential humanness or timelesstruth, that is central to culture, meaning and identity. AsHeidegger remarked, man does not speak language, languagespeaks man. Humans 'are' their sign systems, they areconstituted through them, and those systems and theirmeanings are contingent, patch-work, relational.

5. Consequently there is no foundational 'truth' or reality noabsolute, no eternals, no solid ground of truth beneath the

shifting sands of history. There are only local and contingent'truths' generated by human groups through their culturalsystems in response to their needs for power, survival andesteem. Consequently, both values and personal identity arecultural constructs, not stable entitles. As Kaja Silverman pointsout even the unconscious is a cultural construct, as theunconscious is constructed through repression, the forces ofrepression are cultural, and what is taboo is culturallyformulated.

6. It follows that there is no stable central identity or essence toindividuals: an individual exists as a nexus of social meaningsand practices, psychic and ideological forces, and uses oflanguage and other signs and symbols. The [end page 91]individual is thus a 'de-centered' phenomenon, there is no stableself, only subject-positions within a shifting cultural, ideological,signifying field.


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7. The meaning that appears as normal in our social life masks,through various means such as omission, displacement,difference, misspeaking and bad faith, the meaning that is: theworld of meaning we think we occupy is not the world we do infact occupy. The world we do occupy is a construction of

ideology, an imagination of the way the world is that shapes ourworld, including our 'selves', for our use.

8. A text is, as Roland Barthes points out, etymologically a tissue, awoven thing (from the Latin texere, to weave); it is a tissuewoven of former texts and language uses, echoes of which itinherently retains (filiations or traces, these are sometimescalled), woven of historical references and practices, and wovenof the play ('play' as meaning-abundance and as articulability) oflanguage. A text is not, and cannot be, 'only itself', nor can it bereified, said to be 'a thing'; a text is a process. Literary Theoryadvocates pushing against the depth, complexity andindeterminacy of this tissue until not only the full implications ofthe multiplicities, but the contradictions inevitably inherent inthem, become apparent.

9. There is no "outside-of-the-text," in Derrida's phrase. Cultureand individuals are constructed through networks of affiliatedlanguage, symbol and discourse usages; all of life is textual, atissue of signifying relationships. No text can be isolated fromthe constant circulation of meaning in the economy of the

culture; every text connects to, and is constituted through andof, other texts.

Contemporary Theory as part of the 'Interpretive Turn'

Contemporary literary theory does not stand on its own; it is part of alarger cultural movement which has revolutionized many fields ofstudy, which movement is often known as the 'interpretive turn'. The'interpretive turn' was essentially introduced by Immanuel Kant twocenturies ago through the idea that what we experience as reality isshaped by our mental categories, although Kant thought of thesecategories as stable and transcendent. Nietzsche proposed that thereare no grounding truths, that history and experience are fragmentedand happenstance, driven by the will to power. Marx and Freudtheorized that what passes for reality is in fact shaped and driven byforces of which we are aware only indirectly, if at all, but which we canrecover if we understand the processes of transformation throughwhich our experience passes. What is new in the interpretive turn is


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that the insights of these and other seminal thinkers have coalescedinto a particular sociological phenomenon, a cultural force, a genuinemoment in history, and that they have resulted in methodologicaldisputes and in alterations of practice in the social sciences and thehumanities. [end page 92]

There are a number of ideas central to the interpretive turn: the ideathat an observer is inevitably a participant in what is observed, andthat the receiver of a message is a component of the message; theidea that information is only information insofar as it is contextualized;the idea that individuals are cultural constructs whose conceptualworlds are composed of a variety of discursive structures, or ways oftalking about and imagining the world; the idea that the world ofindividuals is not only multiple and diverse but is constructed by andthrough interacting fields of culturally lived symbols, through languagein particular; the related idea that all cultures are networks ofsignifying practices; the idea that therefore all interpretation isconditioned by cultural perspective and is mediated by symbols andpractice; and the idea that texts entail sub-texts, or the oftendisguised or submerged origins and structuring forces of themessages.

Interpretation is seen not as the elucidation of a preexisting truth ormeaning that is objectively 'there' but as the positing of meaning byinterpreters in the context of their conceptual world. Neither the'message' nor the interpretation can be transparent or innocent as

each is structured by constitutive and often submerged cultural andpersonal forces. In the interpretation of culture, culture is seen as atext, a set of discourses which structure the world of the culture andcontrol the culture's practices and meanings. Because of the waydiscourses are constituted and interrelated, one must read through,among and under them, at the same time reading oneself reading.

The 'dangers' of Literary Theory

It appears to many that Literary Theory attacks the fundamental valueof literature and of literary study. If everything is a text, literature isjust another text, with no particular privilege aside from its persuasivepower. If there are no certain meanings or truths, and if human beingsare cultural constructs not grounded in any universal 'humanness' andnot sustained by any transhistorical truths, not only the role ofliterature as the privileged articulator of universal value but theexistence of value itself is threatened. If interpretation is local andcontingent, then the stability and surety of meaning is threatened and


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the role of literature as a communication of wisdom and as a culturalforce is diminished. If interpretation is dependent upon the interpreter,then one must discount the intention of the author. The stability ofmeaning becomes problematic when one suspects the nature of theforces driving it or the goals it may attempt to attain. Imaginative

constructs such as literature may in fact be merely culturally effectiveways of masking the exercise of power, the bad faith, the flaws andinequities which culture works so hard to obscure. Ultimately Theorycan be seen to attack the very ground of value and meaning itself, toattack those transcendent human values on which humane learning isbased, and to attack the [end page 93] centre of humanism, theexistence of the independent, moral, integrated individual who iscapable of control over her meanings, intentions and acts.

As theory has become more central in English departments, literarystudies have in the view of many turned away from the study ofliterature itself to the study of theory. And as attention moves toliterature as the cultural expression of lived life, and to the textualityof all experience, the dividing line between 'literature' and morepopular entertainment is being challenged; such things as detectivefiction and romances are being treated to as serious and detailed astudy as are canonical works. The Canon itself, that collection of textsconsidered worthy of study by those in control of the curriculum, isunder attack as ethnocentric, patriarchal and elitist, and asessentializing in that it tends to create the idea that canonical worksare independent entities standing on their own intrinsic and

transcendent authority and not rooted in the agencies andcontingencies of history.

It is the case that Literary Theory challenges many fundamentalassumptions, that it is often sceptical in its disposition, and that it canlook in practice either destructive of any value or merely cleverlyplayful. The issues however must be whether Theory has good reasonsfor its questioning of traditional assumptions, and whether it can leadto interpretive practices that are ultimately productive ofunderstandings and values which can support a meaningful and justlife. In order to further elucidate Literary Theory's reasons for itsstands, it would be useful to examine and illustrate three main areasof meaning in literature: context, ideology and discourse, andlanguage itself.

The issue of meaning: context and inter-text


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The process of meaning in literature should, one thinks, be clear: authors writebooks, with ideas about what they want to say; they say it in ways that are powerful,moving, convincing; readers read the books and, depending on their training andcapacities and the author's success, they get the message. And the message is,surely, the point. It is at this juncture however that this simple communication modelruns into trouble. An author writes a text. But the author wrote the text in at least

four kinds ofcontext(note the presence of the text), not all of which contexts theauthor is or can be fully aware of. There are, first, aesthetic contexts the contextsof art generally, of its perceived role in culture, of the medium of the text, of thegenre of the text, of the particular aesthetic traditions the artist chooses andinherits, of the period-style in which she writes. Second, there are the cultural andeconomic conditions of the production and the reception of texts how the 'world ofart' articulates to the rest of the social world, how the work is produced, how it isdefined, how it is distributed, who the audience is, how they pay, what it means toconsume art, how art is socially categorized. Third, there is the artist's own personal[end page 94] history and the cultural interpretation of that personal history andmeaning for her as an individual and an artist. Lastly and most essentially, there arethe larger meanings and methods of the culture and of various sub-cultural, class,ethnic, regional and gender groups all of them culturally formed, and marked (or

created) by various expressions and distinctions of attitude, thought, perception, andsymbols. These include how the world is viewed and talked about, the conceptionand distribution of power, what is seen as essential and as valuable, what thegrounds and warrants of value are, how the relations among individuals and groupsare conceptualized.

These are the most basic considerations of the context of the production of a literarywork. Some of them are known to the author explicitly, some are sensed implicitly,some are unrecognized and virtually unknowable. Every context will alter, emend,deflect, restructure the 'meaning'. This would be easier to handle interpretively if thesame constraints of context did not apply also to the reader. Both author and readerare 'situated' aesthetically, culturally, personally, economically, but usually

differently situated. The reader has the further context of the history and traditionsof the interpretation of texts. When we read Hamlet, we read it as a text that hasbeen interpreted before us and for us in certain ways, not simply as the text thatShakespeare wrote or that his repertory company performed, whatever that wasexperienced to be.

An essential, central and inevitable context of any text is the existence of othertexts. Any literary work, even the most meager, will necessarily refer to and draw onworks in its genre before it, on other writing in the culture and its traditions, and onthe discourse-structures of the culture. This creation of meaning from previous andcognate expressions of meaning is known in Literary Theory as "intertextuality."Anything that is a text is inevitably part of the circulation of discourse in the culture,what one might call the inter-text: it can only mean because there are other texts towhich it refers and on which it then depends for its meaning. It follows that'meaning' is in fact dispersed throughout the inter-text, is not simply 'in' the textitself. The field of the inter-text extends not just to the traditions and usages of thegenre, and to literature generally, but to intellectual traditions, language andargument, to emotional experiences, to cultural interpretations of experience, tocentral symbols, to all expressions of meaning in the culture: it is a network ofallusion and reference. This is the ground of the question of the extent to which anindividualcan author a text. Many of these intertextual meanings may not beapparent to readers, who must be situated themselves in the inter-text in order to


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participate in the meaning. All meanings of a text depend on the meanings of theinter-text, and our interpretations of texts depend on our contextualized perspectiveand the norms of what Stanley Fish refers to as our "interpretive community," oursocially-determined interpretive understandings and methods. [end page 95]

The issue of meaning: discourse and ideology

The second general area of meaning is that of discourse and ideology. 'Discourse' isa term associated most closely with Michel Foucault; it refers to the way in whichmeaning is formed, expressed and controlled in a culture through its language use.Every culture has particular ways of speaking about and hence conceptualizingexperience, and rules for what can and what can not be said and for how talk iscontrolled and organized. It is through discourse that we constitute our experience,and an analysis of discourse can reveal how we see the world in the case ofFoucault, particularly the changing and multiple ways in which power is distributedand exercised. As language is the base symbol system through which culture iscreated and maintained, it can be said that everything is discourse, that is, that weonly register as being what we attach meaning to, we attach meaning through

language, and meaning through language is controlled by the discursive structures ofa culture. There is no outside-of-the-text; our experience is constructed by our wayof talking about experience, and thus is itself a cultural, linguistic construct.

Discourse is not, however, a unitary phenomenon. One of the great contributions ofthe Russian theorist of language and literature, Mikhail Bakhtin, is the concept ofmultivocality. The concept of multivocality might be likened to meteorology: the skylooks like a unitary entity, but if one attempts to measure it or traverse it, it turnsout to be full of cross-winds, whirls, temperature variations, updrafts, downdrafts,and so forth. Similarly the language of a culture is full of intersecting language uses those of class, profession, activity, generation, gender, region and so forth, a richprofusion of interacting significances and inter-texts.

As discourse constructs a world-view and as it inscribes power relations, it isinevitably connected to ideology. As used by Marx, the term referred to the idea thatour concepts about the structure of society and of reality, which appear to bematters of fact, are the product of economic relations. More recent thinkers,following Gramsci and Althusser, tend to see ideology more broadly as those socialpractices and conceptualizations which lead us to experience reality in a certain way.Ideology, writes Althusser, is our imagined relation to the real conditions ofexistence; our subjectivity is formed by it we are 'hailed' by it, oriented to the worldin a certain way. Ideology is an implicit, necessary part of meaning, in how weconfigure the world. But ideology is always masking, or 'naturalizing', the injusticesand omissions it inevitably creates, as power will be wielded by some person orclass, and will pressure the understanding of the culture so that the exercise of

power looks normal and right and violations appear as inevitabilities. It was clear intime past, for instance, why women were inferior. Women were physically weaker,more emotional, not as rational. The Bible said they were inferior and Nature said sotoo. Men did not think that [end page 96] they were oppressing women; women'sinferiority was simply an obvious matter of fact, as was the inferiority of blacks, ofchildren, the handicapped, the mad, the illiterate, the working classes. The theoristPierre Macherey showed that it is possible by examining any structure ofcommunication to see its ideological perspective through the breaks, the silences,


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the contradictions hidden in the text, as well as through all its implicit assumptionsabout the nature of the world.

Structuralism/Poststructuralism

The concept of ideology is part of structuralist and, consequent to that,

poststructuralist thought. Structuralism was a broad movement which attempted tolocate the operative principles which ground activities and behaviours; its importanceto Literary Theory is substantial, although Literary Theory has rejected a number ofits premises. Two central structural theories were Freud's psychoanalytic theory andMarx's economic/political theories. What marks these theories as structuralist is theirlocating of generative forces below or behind phenomenal reality, forces which actaccording to general laws through transformative processes. In structural theories,motive, or generative force, is found not in a pre-text but in a sub-text; the surfaceis a transformation, a re-coded articulation of motive forces and conditions, and sothe surface must be translated rather then simply read. From the rise of the wholerich field of semiotics to the theorizing of the history of science to the revolutionizingof anthropology to the creation of family therapy, structuralism has been a central,

pervasive force in the century. The idea of decoding the depth from themanifestations of the surface, that what appears is often masking or is atransformation of what is, is a key tenant of Literary Theory.

Poststructuralism carries on with the idea of the surface as a transformation ofhidden forces, but rejects structuralism's sense that there are timeless rules whichgovern transformations and which point to some stable reality below and governingthe flux what poststructuralism refers to as an essentialist or totalizing view.Poststructuralism sees 'reality' as being much more fragmented, diverse, tenuousand culture-specific than does structuralism. Some consequences have been, first,poststructuralism's greater attention to specific histories, to the details and localcontextualizations of concrete instances; second, a greater emphasis on the body,the actual insertion of the human into the texture of time and history; third, a

greater attention to the specifies of cultural working, to the arenas of discourse andcultural practice; lastly, a greater attention to the role of language and textuality inour construction of reality and identity. Literary Theory is a poststructural practice.[end page 97]

A demonstration reading: ideology

Perhaps we should take a moment to examine some of these concepts in art at work,with the warning that Literary Theory represents a broad range of practices andemphases, and no one kind of reading can be fully exemplary. Take, however, justthe first lines of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129:

Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shameIs lust in action; and till action, lustIs perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame.

This looks like a clear moral point: lust is bad stuff. There is, however, more to 'read'in these lines. As there was no standardized spelling in Shakespeare's time, thespelling of "waste" is an editorial decision. It could have been spelled "waist;" theforce of the pun is inevitably present. A "waist of shame" is a female waist,particularly when "spirit" is expended there, as "spirit" was a euphemism both for


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semen and for (as "sprit") the penis. So we have here lust in action indeed, genitalintercourse. But notice the valuation of the sexes. The male is associated with thespirit with the 'good', with non-material value; the woman is associated with thelowest of material being, waste. He is 'above' her in every sense. As in modernadvertising, the male is coded for action, the woman is coded as body parts. It is tothe woman, not to the man, that shame is attached; woman is the waist/waste of

shame. There is in the line as well a metaphysical discrimination, as the world of'spirit' is valued over the world of the body; it is not to the spirit but to the body thatwaste and shame are attached. There is an economic ideology here, as the sexualact is an economic transaction "expense" and "waste" with the male having thepower of the purse, economic, moral, sexual power tied together. This economiclanguage not only again privileges men, but places the imagination of the poemwithin the bourgeois mercantile culture. Shakespeare's lines can be analyzed toreveal not, or not only, a lucid and moving moral perspective, but an ideologicalconstruction which privileges male over female and spirit over matter, which usesmoral terms in an oppressive manner, and which in the end shares and shows badfaith in many ways. The very language of the line undermines the certainty andcentrality of the moral perspective the poem is claiming.

This undermining is continued in the bland assumption of the second line that actionis naturally consequent upon lust, an assumption which has been used againstwomen for centuries, and in the third line's linking sex and violence together as ifthat were natural. It is, shockingly enough, to the devilment of the gap between lustand release, "till action," that the word "blame" refers; while shame is attached tothe woman, blame is attached to the bad things men do in the heat of needing to getit off. Further, the moral perspective within the poem is placed in a neutral, remoteway as if it were inevitable, unassailable: while "blame" requires an agent, a blamer,it is spoken of as if it were inherent ("full [end page 98] of blame"), and the tone isauthoritative. Finally, the poem uses language from various realms of discourse moral, physical, social, economic and seams them together in a seemingly benignand normal, but damaging way.

The issue of meaning: language

The third large general area to be addressed is that of language. Contemporarytheory rejects the commonplace belief that language functions by establishing a one-on-one relationship between a word and an object or state which exists independentof language. Among the assumptions behind this rejected belief are that reality isobjective and is directly and unequivocally knowable; that words have a transparentrelation to that reality one can 'see through' the word to the reality itself; and thatthat meaning is consequently fixed and stable. Contemporary theory accepts none ofthis. 'Reality' is too simple a formulation for the collection of acknowledgments ofphysical entities and conditions, of concepts of all kinds, and of all the feelings,

attitudes, perceptions, rituals, routines and practices that compose our habitedworld. Medieval medicine was based in large part on astrology, and astrology wasbased on the known fact that the (not too distant) planets each had a signaturevibration which impressed the aether between the planets and the earth, which inturn impressed the malleable fabric of the mind of the newborn, and which thuscreated the person's disposition through the combination of and the relation betweenthe characteristics of the dominant planets at the time of birth. To what reality, dowe think now, did the language of medieval medicine refer? We could say that themedievals were 'wrong', but the conceptions involved so structured their imagination


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of human nature and motivation, so suffused their attitudes, were so integrated withvalues which we still hold, that such a statement would be meaningless. Languageexists in the domain of human conception, and is dependent not on 'reality' but onhow we see relations, connections, and behaviours. In turn how we see these thingsare, of course, dependent on our language.

Since the work of Ferdinand de Saussure at the beginning of the century, languagehas been seen by many to signify through difference: words mean in that, and as,they differ from other words, which words in turn mean in that they differ from yetother words. 'Meaning' becomes a chain of differentiations which are necessarily atthe same time linkages, and so any meaning involves as a part of itself a number ofother meanings through opposition, through association, through discrimination.As a word defines itself through difference from words which define themselvesthrough difference from words, language becomes a kind of rich, multiplex sonarthat carries the cognitive, affective and allusive freight of meanings shaped by andreflected off other meanings, full of dimensionally. Derrida's famous coinagediffrence, which includes both [end page 99] differing and deferring, catchessomething of the operation, although Derrida's concept penetrates to the verystructure of being, to the differing and deferring without which space and time areimpossible and which are thus fundamental to 'being' itself.

Language has many 'levels' or currents of meaning, shifting, interrelating, playing offone another, implicated (from L.plicare, to fold) and pliant (from F.plier, to bend,ultimately fromplicare). Some currents carry us back as in cultural memory to theetymological roots of the words, as just illustrated. Some currents carry us back tothe time and the way in which, as infants, we entered the symbolic order, the worldof signs and thus of authority, power and socially (Lacan), and even before that toevocations of our infantile immediate, inchoate experiences (Kristeva). Somecurrents tie us in to experiences and symbols that involve and evoke our repressions,our fears, and our narcissistic needs. Some currents tie us in to the various worlds of"discourse," socially constituted ways of conceptualizing and talking and feeling

judicial, economic, domestic, theological, academic and so forth (Foucault). Somecurrents tie us into key cultural symbols, to ways we see and feel the world asconstructed, to our imaginary world of hope, trust, identity, to our projection ofourselves into the future and into our environment. Many currents carry affectiveweight, as words are learned in social contexts from people who are usually close tous, and there is thus an intrinsic sociality in the very acquisition of the meanings andhence to the meanings themselves (Volosinov). Meaning in language is highlycontext-sensitive. Words are not little referential packages, they are shapes ofpotential meaning which alter in different meaning environments, which implicatemany areas of experience, which contain traces of those differences which definethem, and which are highly dependent on context, on tone, on placement.

A further demonstration reading: language and meaning

In order to look at how language might be approached in contemporary theory again with the caveat that there are many approaches and understandings within thedomain of theory let us take the first sentence from this first quatrain ofShakespeare's Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is not love


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Which alters where it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove.

One might ask, does the word "admit" mean "confess" or "allow to enter?" Is"impediment" a legal or a conceptual term here, or a term from the world of physicalmanipulation, a stumbling block? An impediment is something that gets in the way of

pedes, the foot, and while the word "impediment" as a moral or social hindrance istaken from the marriage ceremony, that explanation does not [end page 100]consum exhaust the meaning potential "impediment" also meant a physical defector impairment, a speech defect, and baggage. Its use must include these possibilitiesthrough the operations of difference. Why, one might go on to wonder, are theworlds of morality ("admit") and of fault ("impediment") immediately entered intothe world of "true minds"? And is it chance that, on the levels of bothconceptualization and enunciation, the smooth rhythmic flow of the first line issuddenly interrupted by two tough Latinate words? These words not only need to bestumbled over and figured out but introduce worlds of opposition on several levels:criminality vs. innocence, fault vs. wholeness, social/legal vs. moral/philosophical.Hasn't the poem just admitted a number of impediments while saying it wasn't goingto admit impediments?

The phrase itself "the marriage of true minds" implicitly admits an impediment. Thisimpediment is the body. The body is admitted but denied by the word "impediment"with its root reference to stumbling feet but its abstract usage, and the body isimplied by "marriage". The phrase "marriage of true minds" raises the wholequestion of the body by being explicitly about minds, whereas marriage itself as aninstitution is a union of bodies and property. The body is admitted by "marriage"most strongly through the fact that marriage is a social act (sanctified by the Church,the Body of Christ, and only legal when witnessed by others, bodily presences),through the realm of the legal, the control of bodies, and through the legitimation ofmarriage, as a marriage which was not "consummated," an interesting concept initself, was considered not to be a marriage.

There is yet another impediment in the sentence. The word "true" in reference to"minds" suggests of course straightness or levelness, body values, but it suggests byexclusion the unstraightness of mind that the "true" is structured against andincludes by difference. If the speaker has to say "true minds" then there are untrueminds, so we have to ask what the 'mind' is here that is being married, what thenature of 'mind' is. The word cannot refer to some abstract, non-physical value orbeing if 'mind' can be unstraight, morally unsound, not on the level, therefore fallen,therefore (as fallen) in the world of action and conflict and thus of the body. But'mind' is obviously explicitly opposed to the body, and the body is an impediment.The sentence's play of meaning forces us inexorably back to the centrality of thebody, and questions the status of 'mind'.

There is another impediment that the poem admits from the very beginning: "Let menot ....." Who is to let or not let the speaker admit impediments? (A "let" was,incidentally, a hindrance, an impediment). There is someone who can stop him fromnot admitting impediments, otherwise he would not have said "Let me not:" a worldof power and restriction peeks forth, qualifying the apparent freedom the line claims.As well, "Let me not," with its implicit emotional appeal, takes us back psychically tothe world of restriction, prohibition, [end page 101] forbidding, and in its colloquialforce and its imperative, demanding tone to the two-year-old's universe, its


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evocation therefore of narcissism, of the taboo, of the root conflict of social life andpersonal identity; it thus enters us into a world of meaning which on the surfacesorts oddly with the social/legal language that follows.

There is in the sentence as a counter-current a narcissism, the juvenile self-aggrandizement of a speaker who thinks he could in fact stop the marriage of true

minds. But if anyone can stop the marriage of true minds, as obviously he believesthat they can (or he can), then it is probably because the marriage of true mindsdoes depend on the powers of property, the body, physical and social force, and sothe line really does not in fact claim the power or liberty of the spiritual nature ofhumans, as an unsuspecting reading might assume, but claims instead the power ofthe physical and judicial. This may well be what the line really confesses or, to put itanother way, the reality that the ideological structure masks: that the social, judicial,physical elements of our world do in fact have the force over a union of persons thatthe line denies that they do, and perhaps that in point of fact a 'person' is comprisedof these physical, social, legislative elements, these worlds of discourse, of theconstitutive imaginary. The case could be made that the idealism of the apparentmeaning of the line, which idealism depends on there being real, isolable, inviolate"minds," is what is ultimately put in question; on the other hand, the 'obvious'meaning of the line remains in force, creating a challenge, a contest of meaning, anundecidablility.

Not only does this short sentence launch us on a strange journey of oppositions andcontradictions, but it enters us into whole arenas of cultural discourse and concern,the long-standing philosophical debates about the relation of and values of mind andbody, the place of the power of the judicial in the world of body and mind, thesociality of the individual, the nature of marriage and what it entails, the physicallyof marriage both sexually and legally and the relation of that physicality to the moralworld, issues of moral freedom, issues of what constitutes the good. These differingbut implicated worlds, with their differing assumptions, language uses and emotionalresonances importantly including the poetic expressions of these debates

become part of the meaning of the line.

Different Literary Theory approaches would concentrate on different aspects of theseconsiderations, give them different weight. A deconstructive approach wouldconcentrate on the way that the sentence works against itself, proving for instancethe dominance of law and the body while apparently proclaiming the freedom of themind it might be claimed that what I have done is to "deconstruct" the sentence.Typically too deconstruction would begin with something that seemed extra, ormarginal, or unchallenged, the presence of the lowly foot in "impediment', or theabsent presence of the body, and might show how the meaning ultimately dependson that exclusion or marginalized element. [end page 102] An ideological approachmight concentrate on the complex of linguistic and social meanings which attempt to

but ultimately fail to support the ideological construction of an independentautonomous immaterial self, and might tie that in with, say, the development of the(false) identity of the inviolate 'self' in the western capitalist regime. It might alsowant to look at the conditions of production and consumption of the line whowrote it for whom, under what conditions, with what social implications and classexclusions, for what kind of payment and reward, and how those things shape andare subtly present in the line itself. This form of poetry was written for the leisureclass, the world which had power over the bodies and discourses of others, by theleisure class or those who wished to profit by them, and was circulated to privileged


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individuals in manuscript form, not (basely, popularly) published. A psychoanalyticapproach might well head straight for the narcissistic demand and assumptions ofthe first words, on the currents of projection, denial and pre-symbolic conflicts thatswirl through the line, and on the issues of subjectivity, identity (or loss of identity)and displacement that the line suggests. A reader-response reading wouldconcentrate on how the line structures our responses, and on the larger issues of

how our horizons of meaning can coincide with those of the author, writing in adifferent time with different preconceptions. A cultural criticism or new historicistreading might want to work hard to see how the linguistic, ideological, culturalconstructs present in the line tied in with those of other texts and with the culturalpractices of the time, and to thus articulate the sentence in its culturally embeddedimplications, meanings and conflicts. It would be most interested in the lines ofpower that the sentence suggests and how they reflect the social structures of thetime, and in the power of the discourses themselves (the areas of for instancepersonal demand, philosophy of love, judicial and confessional legislation andexperience, social institutions) and how they work with and against each other.

What these approaches would not do is merely affirm that the lines support theideals of the freedom and independence of love and the wonder of the human spirit,although most would grant the presence and power of these meanings in the line.These approaches would not seek closure, trying to resolve into a neat package thevarious conflicts and centrifugal tendencies of the line (a "reader response" readingwould include the natural human demand for closure as part of its reading andtherefore as part of the way the line 'makes' its meaning). Most of these readingswould focus in some way on the disparities in our imaginations and our practices thatthe line reveals, the contingency of our lives, the hidden exercises of social powerthat the line finally confesses. They might well think that the line means more,humanly speaking, than the humanistic reading would suggest. [end page 103]

Is Literary Theory bad for us, and will it go away?

There is a certain self-satisfied celebration among people opposed to Literary Theorywho see that the practice of deconstruction, the most metaphysically-based and insome ways the most oppositional and intricate of the contemporary critical theories,is apparently on the decline. It is unlikely, however, that its methodology and itsinsights will be wholly left behind, or that the issues it raised or faced will disappear.Deconstruction de-limited linguistic performance and critical thought and hasafforded the most astute critique of our failure to question the assumptions and thecomplexities of our uses of language and discourses. Deconstruction has furtheredthe work of existential and hermeneutic thought in attempting to locate meaning in aworld which has no permanent or ultimate metaphysical realities to underwrite itsmeaningfulness, and it has most refreshingly challenged both the pieties ofhumanism and the rigidities of structuralism. The other kinds of Literary Theory,

enriched by poststructural theory and deconstructive practice, are still in force,coalescing most effectively at the moment in the cultural analyses of New Historicismand in the work of ideological criticism with both 'high' and popular culture inpenetrating to the motives and mystifications of cultural meanings. Contemporarycritical theories may or may not be 'right,' given that there is a 'right,' but the issuesthat they address are genuine and considerable, as is their contribution to and placein contemporary thought, and the practice gives rise to serious and at times tellinginterpretations and revaluations.


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Brock University St. Catharines, ON

A Guide to Further Reading

There are hundreds of books on Contemporary Theory. This guide gives texts onemight begin with of theorists mentioned in the essay, introductions to contemporary

theory , and major movements.

I Theorists mentioned

Althusser, Louis. 1971. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin andPhilosophy. London: New Left Books.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination. Austin:University of Texas Press. See Volosinov

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Glasgow: Fontana Collins. [end page104]

de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1959. Course in General Linguistics. New York: ThePhilosophical Library.

Derrida, Jaques. 1967. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,and 1992.Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge. Derrida isvery difficult; see "Deconstruction" for some introductions to his work.

Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class?. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1984. Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon.

Kristeva, Julia. 1986.A Kristeva Readered. Toril Mol, New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Lacan, Jacques. 1982. Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton. A difficult theorist andwriter, Lacan might best be approached through secondary sources such MadanSarup's brief and lucidJaques Lacan, 1992, Toronto: University of Toronto Press or,as an interesting alternative, Slavoj Zizek's Looking Awry: An Introduction toJacques Lacan through Popular Culture, 1991, Boston: MIT Press.

Macherey, Pierre. 1978.A Theory of Literary Production. New York: Routledge andKegan Paul.

Silverman, Kaja. 1983. The Subject of Semiotics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Silverman gives a good introduction to psychoanalysis and semiotics.

Volosinov, V.N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: AcademicPress. Originally published in 1929 and said to have been written in whole or part byBakhtin, it contains one of the finest and earliest critiques of de Saussure.

II Introductions to Contemporary Theory


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The best remains Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1983; very good and more difficult is FrankLentricchia'sAfter the New Criticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Agood brief introduction with applications is Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice,London: Methuen, 1980.

III Major Movements

Deconstruction. Good introductions are Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, Ithica:Cornell University Press, 1982; Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory andPractice, New York: Routledge, 1982; Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: AnAdvanced Introduction, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983; and a collectionof emys by the "hermeneutical [end page 105] Mafia" (also known as the Yaledeconstructionists) Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartmanand J. Hillis Miller, Deconstruction and Criticism, New York: Seabury Press, 1979.

Feminist Criticism. There are many kinds of feminist criticism. A good introduction isMaking a Difference, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, New York:

Routledge, 1985.

Ideological or Political Criticism. Francis Mulhern, Contemporary Marxist LiteraryCriticism, Harrow, Essex: Longman, 1992.

New Historicism. A collection edited by Aran Veeser, The New Historicism, New York:Routledge, 1989, is a good start.

Poststructuralism. Vincent B. Leitch, Cultural Criticism Literary Theory,Poststructuralism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Psychoanalytic Criticism. Elizabeth Wright's Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in

Practice, London: Routledge, 1984, is a good introduction; see also Silvemm.

Reader Response. Susan R. Suleinian and Inge Crossman have edited a very goodselection of writings in The Reader in the Text. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton UniversityPress, 1980. The most read book is Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading: A Theory ofAesthetic Response, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. See Fish for amore post-structural approach.

Structuralism. Good introductions are Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics,London: Metheun, 1977, and Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, New York:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.

Brock Review 1993

SOME CHARACTERISTICSOF CONTEMPORARYTHEORY


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1997, 2000 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, withattribution, for non-profit purposes.As are all of my posts for this course, this document is open to change.If you have any suggestions (additions, qualifications, arguments),mail me.

Contemporary Literary Theory is not a single thing but a collection oftheoretical approaches which are marked by a number of premises,although not all of the theoretical approaches share or agree on all ofthe them.

1. Meaning is assumed to be created by difference, not by"presence," (that is, identity with the object of meaning). As therevisionist Freudian Jacques Lacan remarks, a sign signals the absenceof that which it signifies. Signs do not directly represent the reality to

which they refer, but (following the linguistics of Ferdinand deSaussure) mean by difference from other words in a concept set. Allmeaning is only meaning in reference to, and in distinction from, othermeanings; there is no meaning in any stable or absolute sense.Meanings are multiple, changing, contextual.

2. There is no foundational 'truth' or reality in the universe (as far aswe can know)--no absolutes, no eternalities, no solid ground of truthbeneath the shifting sands of history. There are only local andcontingent truths generated by human groups through their culturalsystems in response to their needs for power, survival and esteem.

Consequently, values and identity are cultural constructs, not stableentities. Even the unconscious is a cultural construct, as KajaSilverman points out in The Subject of Semiotics, in that theunconscious is constructed through repression, the forces of repressionare cultural, and what is taboo is culturally formulated.

3. Language is a much more complex, elusive phenomenon than weordinarily suspect, and what we take normally to be our meanings areonly the surface of a much more substantial theatre of linguistic,psychic and cultural operations, of which operations we are not be fully

aware. Contemporary theory attempts to explore the implications (i.e.,the inter-foldings, from 'plier', to fold) of levels of meaning inlanguage.

4. Language itself always has excessive signification, that is, italways means more than it may be taken to mean in any one context;signification is always 'spilling over', especially in texts which aredesigned to release signifying power, as texts which we call 'literature'
mailto:%[email protected]%22mailto:%[email protected]%22


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are. This excessive signification is created in part by the rhetorical, ortropic, characteristics of language (a trope is a way of sayingsomething by saying something else, as in a metaphor, a metonym, orirony), and the case is made by Paul de Man that there is an inherentopposition (or undecidability, or aporia) between the grammatical and

the rhetorical operations of language.

5. It is language itself, not some essential humanness or timelesstruth, that is central to culture and meaning. Humans 'are' theirsymbol systems, they are constituted through them, and thosesystems and their meanings are contingent, relational, dynamic.

6. The meaning that appears as normal in our social life masks,through various means such as omission, displacement, difference,misspeaking and bad faith, the meaning that is: the world of meaningwe think we occupy is not the world we do in fact occupy. The worldwe do occupy is a construction of ideology, an imagination of the waythe world is that shapes our world, including our 'selves', for our use.

7. A text is, as the etymology of the word "text" proclaims, a tissue,a woven thing (L. texere, to weave); it is a tissue woven of formertexts, echoes of which it continually evokes (filiations, these echoesare sometimes called), woven of historical references and practices,and woven of the play of language. A text is not, and cannot be, 'onlyitself', nor can it properly be reified, said to be 'a thing'; a text is aprocess of engagements. Literary Theory advocates pushing against

the depth, complexity and indeterminancy of this tissue until not onlythe full implications of the multiplicities but the contradictionsinevitably inherent in them become more apparent.

8. The borders of literature are challenged by the ideas

a) that all texts share common traits, for instance that they allare constructed of rhetorical, tropic, linguistic and narrativeelements, and

b) that all experience can be viewed as a text: experienceinsofar as it is knowable is consequently symbolically configured,and human activity and even perception is both constructed andknown through the conventions of social practice; hence as aconstructed symbolic field experience is textual.

While on the one hand this blurring of differentiation between'literature' and other texts may seem to make literature less


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privileged, on the other hand it opens those non-literary (but not non-imaginative, and only problematically non-fictional) texts, including'social texts', the grammars and vocabularies of social action andcultural practice, up to the kind of complex analysis that literature hasbeen opened to.

9. So the nature of language and meaning is seen as more intricate,potentially more subversive, more deeply embedded in psychic,linguistic and cultural processes, more areas of experience are seen astextual, and texts are seen as more deeply embedded in andconstitutive of social processes.

None of these ideas shared by contemporary theories are new to theintellectual traditions of our culture. It appears to many, however, thatLiterary Theory attacks the fundamental values of literature andliterary study: that it attacks the customary belief that literature drawson and creates meanings that reflect and affirm our central (essential,human, lasting) values; that it attacks the privileged meaningfulnessof 'literature'; that it attacks the idea that a text is authored, that is,that the authority for its meaningfulness rests on the activity of anindividual; that it attacks the trust that the text that is read can beidentified in its intentions and meanings with the text that was written;and ultimately that it attacks the very existence of value and meaningitself, the ground of meaningfulness, rooted in the belief in thosetranscendent human values on which humane learning is based.

On the other hand, 'theory people' point out that theory does is noterase literature but expands the concept of the literary and renews theway texts in all areas of intellectual disciplines are or can be read; thatit explores the full power of meaning and the full embeddedness ofmeanings in their historical placement; that it calls for a more critical,more flexible reading.

It is the case that Literary Theory challenges many fundamentalassumptions, that it is often skeptical in its disposition, and that it canlook in practice either destructive of any value or merely cleverlyplayful. The issue is whether theory has good reasons for thequestioning of the assumptions, and whether it can lead to practicethat is in fact productive.

THEORY CHECKLIST: A WORKINGDOCUMENT


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1997, 1999 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, withattribution, for non-profit purposes.As are all pages for my course, this document is open to change. Ifyou have any suggestions (additions, qualifications, arguments), mailme.

One is faced at the very outset, when approaching literaturetheoretically, with considerations such as the following. You shouldbuild your own checklist of theoretical considerations as we go throughthe course. For some other formulations of these issues, see my pagesSome Factors Affecting/Effecting the Reading of Texts and TheProblem of Meaning.

I. What is the Nature of and What Are the Functions of Literature?II. What is the Nature of the Subject?

III. Who is the Reader?

IV. What is the Relation of the Author to the Text?

V. What are the Relations of the Author and the Text to Society?

VI. Where (and How) Does 'Reality' Exist?

VII. What is Representation (Mimesis)?

VIII. What is the Nature and Status of Language?

IX. What is the Relation of "Form" and "Art" to Meaning?

X. Where is Meaning?

I. What is the Nature of and What are the Functions of Literature?

The question of what "Literature" in fact 'is' is a difficult one. Whymight a seventeenth century treatise on religion be Literature, andscads of poems about love not be Literature? Is this Literature, or not-- ?

Nobody knows,Tiddley-pomHow cold my toes,Tiddley-pomHow cold my toes,Tiddley-pomAre growing.

Well, if it isn't Literature, what isit? It's part of our culture, ourheritage; it's in verse; it's in allthe bookstores.
mailto:%[email protected]%22mailto:%[email protected]%22http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/factors.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/meaning.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/meaning.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#lit%23lithttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#subj%23subjhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#reader%23readerhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#author%23authorhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#society%23societyhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#reality%23realityhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#rep%23rephttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#lang%23langhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#form%23formhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#meaning%23meaningmailto:%[email protected]%22mailto:%[email protected]%22http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/factors.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/meaning.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/jlye/meaning.phphttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#lit%23lithttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#subj%23subjhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#reader%23readerhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#author%23authorhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#society%23societyhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#reality%23realityhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#rep%23rephttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#lang%23langhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#form%23formhttp://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/checklist.php#meaning%23meaning


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Does literariness reside in the idea of quality (in which case a wellwritten book on brain surgery might be Literature), or in conventions(but many works which follow the conventions faithfully are notLiterature), or in fictionality -- that is, to be Literature it can't be true-- well, not literally, at least? (The latter question points of course toa further, serious problem: the truth status of narratives. Is an

autobiography true, or is it someone's imagination of 'real' events,moulded to tell a certain story of the self?)

Or, on quite another hand, is "Literature" merely what your professor(as a local manifestation of the power of the ruling class) says it is?

1. One might think of Literature as, for instance,a. a body of texts marked by the imaginative verbal

recreation of the world as we experience it

b. relying upon the powers of form, allusion, poeticqualities of language and tropes to intensify and render

complex such representation of experience

c. and both drawing on and referencing the forms, thegenre and discourse conventions, and specific examples,of previous literature

d. whose function is not simply to represent our experiencebut to offer possible worlds which may expand and/orcritique our vision of or understanding of human life.

Then again, on might have quite other ideas about whatconstitutes this cultural practice, or classification, that we call

"Literature," for instance....

2. And/or is Literature an institution: that is, "Literature" as acreation of the joint workings of publishing houses,professional critics, prize-awarding bodies, anthologizers, andthe designers of curricula in universities and schools. As such,its form and its definition or nature, as well as its 'body' ofworks, may be said to represent the interests of theprofessionals involved, and to represent their political agendaand sense of their place in the society.

Consider a comment from a recent supplement on literacy, inthe Canadian middle-brow, wishing it were-highbrow, weeklymagazine Saturday Night, a supplement decorated withcorporate logos and paid for by the literacy organization ABCCanada, "a joint initiative of business and labour." In it thewriter reports approvingly, surveying attitudes toward literacy,

Pity and scorn intermingle in the voice of [award-winning andfinancially successful] novelist Carol Shields when she talksabout the businessmen who tell her that their wives love her


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books, but they don't read fiction themselves because theyhave to wade through reports all day at the office.

Pity and scorn. Wow. Those barbarians!

3. Is Literature, to raise another problem, or the same one in a

different way,a. a self-contained body of knowledge which refers

primarily to itself,

or

b. one instance of the ongoing engagement of writers in thehistorical and cultural aspirations, anxieties and crises ofthe time, consequently responsive to and formed by theimmediacies of history and implicated in the forms anddiscourse practices of their time?

These questions lead us to ask, among other things, what the role of'aesthetic' value or force as opposed to representational value andforce are in literature, what the real functions of "literature" and"Literature" are (that is, works which we characterize as literature,and literature as a social structure and practice), what the ideologicaland/or moral force of literature may be said to be.

There are some suggestions for the nature of literature on my pageOn the Uses of Studying Literature and on my page on someconsiderations regarding quality.

II. What is the Nature of the Subject?1. Questions of the nature of the reader and the author, and of

their place in the process of meaning and significance, lead usto the question of the nature of the subjectthat is, theexperiencing self. Is the subject (here are some possibilities)...

a. an integral entity existing independently of language,cultural meanings, or the contexts of experience

b. an entity which is created through one or more of:language and other symbol systems; social interaction;responses to contexts; such that the 'subject' might be

said to be a social formation

c. a being distributed across different meaning frames anddiscursive practices, a 'de-centered' subject, as thephrase is.

2. If the subject is in some manner an amalgam of physical andmental being, what implications does this have for ethicalexistence, for the nature of consciousness and knowledge, and
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(hence) for the nature and functions of modes ofcommunication such as literature?

3. If the subject is an entity or a continuum of experience whichhas an unconscious and a conscious component, what is thebalance between and the relation between the two, what is the

unconscious and how is it formed, and to what elements of theunconscious and conscious self does literature appeal?

III. Who is the Reader?

In brief,

a. is the reader an individual affected only incidentally byhistory and social judgment, or is the reader the productof a 'reading formation', a set of cultural understandingsand expectations and a set of conventions for reading

literature?b. is the reader outside of and independent of the text, or is

the reader in fact a formation of the text, a 'self' createdthrough interaction with it?

The first of these questions has implications for interpretationand evaluation, the second has implications for the role ofliterature, especially in the socializing processes of the culture.

One must ask what the implications are of the apparent factthat one must be 'educated in' the reading of 'good literature'in order to appreciate and understand it. Does this mean

merely that appreciating literature is a complex process, ordoes it mean that the reader is only a 'proper reader' after asocializing process, so that 'literature' is regulated and itsinterpretations patrolled by guardians of correct reading? Thisof course gets us back to many previous questions, includingthe nature of 'aesthetic' experience.

II. What is the Relation of the Author to the Text?

1. Is the text the intentional production of an individual, or

2. Is the text an only partially intentional production whoseunintended determinants are one of or a combination of

a. the psyche of the author,

b. the psyche of the culture,

c. the ideology of the culture,


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d. the particular socio-economic conditions of theproduction (the placement and role of the artist in theculture, who pays for the production, who consumes it,what are the rewards of successful production, how arethey decided and, what are the material conditions ofproduction)

e. the traditions of writing which pertain to the text

f. the traditions of the treatment of the particular subject-matter in the culture and in the genre

3. Or is the text in fact almost entirely the production of theideological and cultural realm, in which realm the author ismerely a function, whose role, aspirations, ideas and attitudesare created by the society in which she lives. In this case, thetext is a complex structure of cultural and aesthetic codes,none of which the author has created, arranged around

traditional cultural themes or topoi -- whereas the authorherself, while an existent being (her existence and effort arenot denied), has little to do with the 'meaning' of the text, asshe herself is simply part of (or, constructed by) the circulationof meanings within the culture.

[For some considerations on the 'death' of the author, a thesisof poststructural theory, see my page The 'death of the author'as an instance of theory.]

III.

II. What is the Relation of the Author and the Text to Society?

This issue is implicitly addressed in the preceding questions. Asthe author is operating within a certain cultural milieu,

1. In what ways does she represent in her text, deliberately and/orunconsciously, the understandings of the world that the culture holds?2. In what ways does she represent in her text, again deliberatelyand/or unconsciously, the understandings of what art is and does, theaesthetic ideolog(ies) of the time?

3. In what ways are the ideologies of the culture, and of the 'educatedclasses', embedded in the conventions, traditions, canons, style and subjectmatter of the text?

Moreover the text not only will be an outcome of this situatedimaginative process, but will be structured in its productionand in its reception by various material social forces;consequently one must ask questions such as these:
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4. Who is the intended audience, and how does that shape theproduction of (the imagination of, the writing of, the editing of, the sale of)the text?5. Who has a say in the text's final form, directly (e.g. editors), orindirectly (who will pay for it and why, who will produce and distribute it)?

6. How is it paid for, and how it is distributed, who has access to it,under what conditions, and what effects might these conditions produce?

7. What status does that kind of writing have in the culture (e.g. what isits cach, what is its authority, where in the education and enculturationsystem is it placed, how does it relate to entertainment and to the culturalpractices that distinguish the elite)?

8. What cultural powers does the (successful) author have?

II. Where Does 'Reality' Exist?

1. If art represents reality, as Aristotle argued (and mosttheorists since him have agreed), then to theorize art we needto theorize 'represents' and 'reality'. At a very basic level,

a. does reality exist 'out there', independent of humans? --- in whichcase knowledge must be homomorphic with (essentially the same structureas) reality, else we couldn't know reality.

b. or on the other hand is 'reality' (or are some aspects of theconglomerate of conceptions we clump together under the heading 'reality')a product of the human mind, of our systems and methods of knowledge,

and of our symbols systems, including language? How culture-specific isreality?

2. Can we ever know reality, or is what we think is reality just aconstruct?

3. If we can know it, what is it we are knowing? After all, weknow symbolically, so all we know are our symbols; and weknow according to constructs of the relations of things, so whatwe know are those relations. The post-structuralist (or,structuralist, depending on your definitions) marxist LouisAlthusser wrote that, in effect, what we know is our imaginary

relations to reality -- that we live in ideology, not in 'reality'.

II. What is Representation (Mimesis)?

One must consider what it is to represent something, what getsrepresented, what relation such representation might have to'reality' (see the issue of what 'reality' is, below).


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Most compellingly, is literature a means of representing reality,or it is a means of representing particular imaginativeconstructions that we take to be reality but which may haveideological, cultural, political meanings which ground andshape the 'reality' we think we are looking at?

I. What is the Nature and Status of Language?

1. What is the status of language and rhetoric in literature? Is thelanguage of literature in any way privileged, intrinsically orculturally? -- Is it different from other discourses? -- If so whyand how?

2. Is there a particular literariness to some uses of language, asRoman Jakobson, for instance, argues? Are there particularforms of language use, such as ambiguity or irony, which formsmark a work as literary ( for instance one school of

contemporary theory, lead by the late Paul de Man, maintainsthat rhetoric, by which de Man means essentially tropes, waysof saying something by saying something else, are the hallmarkof literary language)?

3. Is language composed of signs which have their meaning onlyin reference to, and through difference from, other signs, as inthe popular Saussurean model? Or is language an actualindicator of the 'real world'?

4. Do we speak language, that is, is language subject to our willand intention, or does language speak us, that is, are we

implicated in a web of meaning located in and maintained bylanguage?

II. What is the Relation of "Form" and "Art" to Meaning?1. What is the role of Form in the meaning of the text? Is form

anything at all, and if it is, what is it?-- A means of constructingreader responses?-- A means of putting meanings intoparticular relationships with each other?

2. And what is what we call 'art'? Is art an inherent property ofhuman existence, or is it a set of learned conventions? Does

'art' have a privileged role in representing experience, or isPierre Bourdieu correct when, after the exhaustive analyses inDistinctions, he concludes that 'art' and taste in art are merelyclass markers, so that what we think of as 'art' does not haveany privileged representational force or qualities (other thansocial ones)?

III. Where is Meaning?


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Does 'meaning' reside in the author's intentions, in the text, orin the reading?

1. If it is in the text, is it in the text now, or in the text as anhistorical, culturally situated document, so that to fullyunderstand the meaning we might best understand the cultural

and aesthetic codes and the traditions and the meanings of theparticular time of writing?

2. If it is in the author's intentions, is that in the conscious, or theunconscious intentions? --In the intentions before or after thewriting, or somewhere in between? Can, in this case, the texthave meanings of which the author was not aware?

3. If meaning is in the reading, is that an informed reading, or anyreading, and what difference does that distinction really signal?Is it in an ideal non-historical reading, or in a historically andculturally placed reading? (See my handout The Problem ofMeaning for slightly more elaboration.)

IV. In Conclusion

These are some of the issues that are raised by the theorists onthe course, and some of the basic questions any considerationof the nature and function of literature, and of the meaning andfunction of particular works of literature, must address

SOME FACTORS AFFECTING/EFFECTINGTHEREADINGOF TEXTS

Copyright 1996 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, withattribution, for non-profit purposes.As are all of my posts for this course, this document is open to change.If you have any suggestions (additions, qualifications, arguments),mail me.

A: Matters to be brought to the text for use in the decoding ofthe text

accessibility of allusion, or

referenceaccess to historical references, to

cultural allusions, to literaryallusions, and recognition of theirrelevance or meaningfulness in

the text

usage of genre

knowledge of the characteristicsand conventions of various genre,of for instance irony in satire; andknowledge of the typical topics ofthe genre, e.g. heroism, romanticlove etc.; historical knowledge of

the same, i.e. what were the
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conventions of readingincluding 1) conventions of

significance (raising the meaningto its most general application),

of metaphorical coherence, and ofthematic unity, which all help to

create the meaningfulness of'literature'; 2) conventions as to

the way in which texts 'represent''reality'; and 3) conventions ofinterpretation, of how texts are

read -- e.g. formally,ideologically, psychoanalytically,

'morally' , etc.

history of interpretationknowledge of traditions of reading

and of interpretation -- forinstance, the Hamletwhich we

read (have been taught to read)has been interpreted before us

and for us.

expectations of the various kinds

of comedies held byShakespeare's contemporaries

attunement to polysemyto the multi-valence of words, toconnotative force, to metaphor

and metonymy and otherrhetorical structures and devices;

to historical uses of these

knowledge of the extensional

worldjudging inference, probability;attributing causality; assigning

truth values

B: "THE TEXT" as a coded structure

The rhetorical, formal, linguistic, allusive strategies which guide -- or

create, or evoke -- the readers' responses, including: association andinterconnection of culturally empowered images, ideas, situations; thecontextual loading of words, images, episodes and characters; plottingdevices; genre markers; rhetorical structures; multi-valence;ambiguity.

C: Contexualizations of reading and meaning

the personal worldthe realm of personal

associations, experiences, ideals

and images

the needs of personsinnate (or socialized) desires forfreedom, happiness, connection

and coherence; genuine,pervasive hopes and desires

socio-political referencesreferences which the reader may

apply to her or his social or

political milieu -- e.g. in novels ofmanners, satires against corrupt

governments, etc.

the world(s) of discoursethe use of language as it

structures our understanding of


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shared at some level ofconsciousness by all

the motive of the particular

readingexplicit and implicit motives andnorms -- reading for a course,

reading to improve social status,reading for entertainment or

understanding, etc.

the sociology of readingwho reads and why, with what

social expectations anddelimitations -- e.g.

considerations of class, of socialmobility and use, of relation of

reading to social and political life;the distinctions between 'high'and 'popular', 'good' and 'bad'

literature

soc

contemporary literary theory

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