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Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


I like to read, think about, and talk about books. Yet, I missed out on a lot of literature classes, especially critical theory, when going through my undergrad, so I expect I am not getting as much out of FINE LITERATURE (tm) as I could be. I would now like to fix this deficiency in my background, and with the help of TBB I think I will!

Starting out, this will be a Let's Read of Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton, who apparently views things through a Very Marxist Lens. I expect that it will grow with suggested essays (like say Death of an Author or others of the ilk), to better develop the ideas behind various schools of thought. Perhaps others in turn will take on other texts.

IDK how this will go; I will try to summarize each chapter and ask what questions that arise for me and hope it spurs discussion. If nothing else, taking notes as I go should help structure my thinking about this subject.

I will probably start in the next couple of days, after I finish reading V. so if you want to read along there's time to get a copy (Anniversary Edition). If you have access to ProCite there is a digital version of the text there.

I'm thinking I will start with the Introduction and skip over the various prologues, which explain the book's purpose to be to introduce the various schools of criticism, and what changed in the field in the 20 odd years since the first edition was published.

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Mr. Steak
May 9, 2013

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
bookmarked.

i also need to fill my head with more concrete stuff than my own opinions (which are, u know, always right. but still, i need the sources to back it up)

Sidestep
May 16, 2012

This is an excellent idea. I am excited to see your personal journey through the text and I hope it sparks a wider interest in TBB.

Hopefully it inspires others to dig into the material as you work through it. I know the subject is often perceived as intimidating. Ideally the act of collectivising the process will help ease people into the idea of using Criticism as a tool to enhance their engagement.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Introduction: What is Literature?

In a book of literary criticism defining "literature" seems a logical first step, and it is with this that Eagleton begins. Is it writing fully imaginary things? No, he points out that there is plenty of non fiction that is considered "literary", and a lot of what we now consider fictional, like the Eddas or other religious writings, were taken as fact by the authors. Perhaps it was the use of language in a particular way that sets it off from "normal" language?

This question begins a longish illustrative discussion of a Russian school of criticism called Formalism. This school is likened to the application of linguistics to the study of literature, although originally for the study of poetry.

quote:

because the linguistics in question were of a formal kind, concerned with the structures of language rather than with what one might actually say, the Formalists passed over the analysis of literary ‘content’ (where one might always be tempted into psychology or sociology) for the study of literary form. Far from seeing form as the expression of content, they stood the relationship on its head: content was merely the ‘motivation’ of form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise. Don Quixote is not ‘about’ the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds of narrative technique. Animal Farm for the Formalists would not be an allegory of Stalinism; on the contrary, Stalinism would simply provide a useful opportunity for the construction of an allegory.

The Formalists would study a work on a technical level to understand how its literary application was estranged from normal, every day language. Their thinking was apparently that normal use of language would make it stale, but having to contend with the strange new applications readers or hearers would become refreshed. This raises the question though, of just what speech are we talking about? Eagleton uses the comparison of Oxford philosophers (he formally on faculty there) and Glaswegian dock workers to highlight that what we think of as "English" is more of a continuum of discourses that are more or less mutually intelligible. Could we tell that an isolated bit of writing is realist literature or just slang?

Context, then, is another crucial element necessary. This underscores that Formalism fails when applied to prose because it is sometimes is specifically NOT estranged--that fine writing tends to not draw attention to itself. Estrangement also not a clear criterion because with sufficient creativity most text could be considered estranging. Here he uses the example of a sign in the Underground that reads, "Dogs must be carried on the escalator". Will they kick you out of the tube if caught on the moving staircase sans doggo? But then he takes it one step further, and points out that that error could itself become disconnected from its original meaning to take on a more universal, meaning. This he illustrates by the drunk who sees that sign, thinks about it a minute, then chuckles to himself saying, "How true!" This he argues is actually a poetic reading, which jumps to the conclusion that is doesn't necessary matter how a thing gets written (or how literature gets defined) so much as how someone decides to read it.

quote:

It is true that many of the works studied as literature in academic institutions were ‘constructed’ to be read as literature, but it is also true that many of them were not. A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature; or it may start off as literature and then come to be valued for its archaeological significance. Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them.

This idea that there are a number of ways that people can relate themselves to writing demands the recognition that there is in fact no essential qualities that make up literature.

quote:

Perhaps ‘literature’ means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. As the philosophers might say, ‘literature’ and ‘weed’ are functional rather than ontological terms: they tell us about what we do, not about the fixed being of things. They tell us about the role of a text or a thistle in a social context, its relations with and differences from its surroundings, the ways it behaves, the purposes it may be put to and the human practices clustered around it. ‘Literature’ is in this sense a purely formal, empty sort of definition. Even if we claim that it is a non-pragmatic treatment of language, we have still not arrived at an ‘essence’ of literature because this is also so of other linguistic practices such as jokes.

He takes it another step. Recognizing now that literature is subjective, we must recognize that literary canon is a construct, and that what belongs in it can change over time with changing sensibilities. He quickly points out that this instability is not because "value-judgements are 'subjective'".

quote:

All of our descriptive statements move within an often invisible network of value-categories, and indeed without such categories we would have nothing to say to each other at all. It is not just as though we have something called factual knowledge which may then be distorted by particular interests and judgements, although this is certainly possible; it is also that without particular interests we would have no knowledge at all, because we would not see the point of bothering to get to know anything. Interests are constitutive of our knowledge, not merely prejudices which imperil it. The claim that knowledge should be ‘value-free’ is itself a value-judgement.

He brings these cultural values and frameworks for making value-judgements, often largely concealed, under the term ideology, but stresses that is not just unconscious beliefs people hold, but how it interacts with the production and maintenance of social power. Thus,

quote:

If it will not do to see literature as an ‘objective’, descriptive category, neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building. What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others.

( :siren: :ussr: :siren: )

What goes unsaid here is, presumably, that what is to follow is a set of tools to disentangle these biases and ideologies in order to struggle more directly with literature and what makes it of value.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


I guess I should have included the point that literature is not just pretty writing either because he illustrates that with, say, the works of Darwin and Marx (also Jeremy Bentham, which makes me chuckle since I've seen his old dead head) as being well written but not literature, and a bit of gibberish that was within the novel Hunger, which is literature.

OscarDiggs
Jun 1, 2011

Those sure are words on pages which are given in a sequential order!
You can bet I will be in this thread very regularly. It would probably be a bit to advanced for me as someone who had trouble comprehending most literature stuff anyway, but I will try to gain some knowledge via osmosis.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


OscarDiggs posted:

You can bet I will be in this thread very regularly. It would probably be a bit to advanced for me as someone who had trouble comprehending most literature stuff anyway, but I will try to gain some knowledge via osmosis.

Awesome! Me too of course. I am going to try to distill this down to its bare rudiments. I already see that Eagleton has a bit of a wandering approach to argumentation. Hopefully our more literary minded folks will correct me when I miss a crucial element or plain get it wrong.

I'm just starting the first full chapter so the next update will probably be within the week, although I will be skiing and have other appts this week that might conspire against me.

Lil Mama Im Sorry
Oct 14, 2012

I'M BACK AND I'M SCARIN' WHITE FOLKS
nice. i read this a few months back and this thread will be like rereading it but with another person.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Working on the next chapter now but it's interesting, I think I now understand why I have always hated Jane Austin

A human heart
Oct 10, 2012

that sucks, maybe you should read Jane Austen instead

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


ugh I have made so many typos and email errors today its a complete write off

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Will try to get the spellings right

Chapter 1: The Rise of English

This chapter isn't about the history of language but the history of the rise of the study of English as a topic, which is a surprisingly recent event. The tl;dr is that allowing for the working classes and women to study English was a means for social control through the distraction from an otherwise hard life and a consequent search for betterment, and instilling pride in Being English.

Literature wasn't originally thought of as we do now. Before it encompassed all writings of social value. In the 18th century it also became a way to transmit those values and reestablish social order in the wake of the English civil war. He observes that the Romantic period was a time of revolution, whereas in England it was a time of rising economic power, and a growing clash between the working and middle, mercantile, classes in particular. Observing the revolutions abroad, the English ruling class responded by establishing a police state.

Romanticism was one means for escaping the oppressiveness of the time, but more than just escapist reading, the act of writing for its own sake, of no value to the capitalists, could be celebrated, and Eagleton asserts that literature provides an alternate ideology to unbridled capitalism. Of course, this was commodified itself, and the revolutionary spirit disconnected from the longing for betterment, and it receded to be replaced with a nostalgia for "a better time".

At this moment too was the rise of aesthetics, with its central doctrine of the symbol. Eagleton argues that the symbol is a unitary thing, either recognized or not, and was considered blasphemous to explore it deeper, thus forestalling critical analysis.

quote:

In this sense the symbol brought such truths to bear on the mind in a way which brooked no question: either you saw it or you didn’t. It was the keystone of an irrationalism, a forestalling of reasoned critical enquiry, which has been rampant in literary theory ever since. It was a unitary thing, and to dissect it – to take it apart to see how it worked – was almost as blasphemous as seeking to analyse the Holy Trinity. All of its various parts worked spontaneously together for the common good, each in its subordinate place; and it is therefore hardly surprising to find the symbol, or the literary artefact as such, being regularly offered throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an ideal model of human society itself. If only the lower orders were to forget their grievances and pull together for the good of all, much tedious turmoil could be avoided.

The rise of the ideology of literature was a function of the failure of the ideology of religion and the social cement it provided, especially a means to pacify the lower classes through piety. Into this void lept literature. Here focus narrows onto Matthew Arnold and his efforts to "Hellenize" the great unwashed. Eagleton goes on at length to develop this parallel between the roles of religion and literature to preserve the social order--I'm not going to summarize all this though because life is too short and you all have access to the book if you wish to read it. I will note that the study of English started not in the universities but in the Mechanics Institutes, as a "poor man's classics" and essential part of this ideological effort. It was also found suitable for women as well, but this eventually provoked a "masculine" counter movement, especially in the post WWI times when English study made its way into the academy (and these two things, a masculine bent to literature and university study, were related in the person of Sir Walter Raleigh--obviously not the famous one of early colonial America).

The rest of the chapter introduces the influence of the early journal Scrutiny and the people behind it, the Leavis' primarily, which leads into an introduction of New Criticism.

quote:

In fashioning English into a serious discipline, these men and women blasted apart the assumptions of the pre-war upper-class generation. No subsequent movement within English studies has come near to recapturing the courage and radicalism of their stand. In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else. English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation. Far from constituting some amateur or impressionistic enterprise, English was an arena in which the most fundamental questions of human existence – what it meant to be a person, to engage in significant relationship with others, to live from the vital centre of the most essential values – were thrown into vivid relief and made the object of the most intensive scrutiny...
Dismissive of mere ‘literary’ values, Scrutiny insisted that how one evaluated literary works was deeply bound up with deeper judgements about the nature of history and society as a whole. Confronted with critical approaches which saw the dissection of literary texts as somehow discourteous, an equivalent in the literary realm to grievous bodily harm, it promoted the most scrupulous analysis of such sacrosanct objects. Appalled by the complacent assumption that any work written in elegant English was more or less as good as any other, it insisted on the most rigorous discrimination between different literary qualities: some works ‘made for life’, while others most assuredly did not. Restless with the cloistered aestheticism of conventional criticism, Leavis in his early years saw the need to address social and political questions: he even at one point guardedly entertained a form of economic communism. Scrutiny was not just a journal, but the focus of a moral and cultural crusade: its adherents would go out to the schools and universities to do battle there, nurturing through the study of literature the kind of rich, complex, mature, discriminating, morally serious responses (all key Scrutiny terms) which would equip individuals to survive in a mechanized society of trashy romances, alienated labour, banal advertisements and vulgarizing mass media.

I'm running out of steam and will take up again later.

Mrenda
Mar 14, 2012
I just finished one of those overview books on intertextuality, the kind designed for students who are supposed to be revising years of education but are really only looking up the small part they'll have in an exam. It was interesting in that for about 160 pages it was charting ever increasing literary theory's attempts at charting new land, then it hit the feminist theory and all of a sudden it was on another planet.

I'm having very definite thoughts about it.

Edit: gently caress it, thoughts. They're mainly about the divide between categorising thought versus indulging experience. One side of the theories being cartographers trying to chart land, the other side being people existing within a land that has only had its borders drawn but never had its details made known. A good portion of the feminist theory of the book was about the idea of the mad woman, having to be destroyed for others to live, to die or sacrifice themselves to allow normality to emerge for others seeing the destruction, allowing the world to return to a balance. Then how feminist literature allowed the madness to be valuable in its own right. And that speaks to me at a level where oppression, maddening as it is, wasn't allowed the intellectual weight to have its own place. Instead new ways of experiencing the world and knowing the world were waded into without ever recognising that the world was only ever known from one, lofty position. This merged into post-colonial theories, and as I would see it, eventually into seeing the world as "literature as/by X" and "writing of/by other."

An example from my own writing is telling the story, over a period of years, of someone coming out as transgender. A response I was given is "This has been done" and "There's already too many of these stories." That may be fair (I'm sure the story I wrote is at best middling and probably didn't do anything exciting) but again it speaks of literature as something where there's a charting of the new, the expansion of a collection of territories rather than living within a territory.

For one set of people there's a desire to be unique, original, inventive, innovative, "new." For another set of people there's a desire for others to see their nuance as what it is, mostly unseen. Even if an experience is formally acknowledged (other as madness, trans coming out, living unseen) that doesn't amount to the collective understanding that has been analytically granted to "the canon." Simply categorising something, as modernist, feminist, post-colonial, etc. isn't the same as assimilating these stories into a knowing of literature and understanding of people. At best it's acknowledging them as a form of writing, but it's not seeing them in the significance of their place. It's a focus on the technical achievement, to be dissected, studied, and theoretically acknowledged, rather than the telling of a story, to be felt, assimilated and put into meaning. It's writing as a theory rather than reading as a practice.

Mrenda fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Apr 23, 2019

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


I can't really speak to a lot of what you said there except to suggest that one coming out story is all we need is just about the dumbest thing I have ever heard--each individual story is unique and can inform on a whole lot of humanity. The person, hypothetical or not, that said that to you is to be ignored. Also, have you read belle hooks? She takes her feminism from the perspective of liberation, and also has a broad view of the roles of class and race--intersectional before that was a word in common parlance.

Chapter 1 part 2

I can't help but think I am on a fools errand trying to summarize this book because each paragraph is dense, and the author tends to have a wandering discursive style rather than working towards a central thesis. I'm going to try to step back even further

I left off talking about Scrutiny. The author notes was this was a lower-middle class, non-conformist effort when compared with the upper class of the first chairs of English at Oxbridge, which gives them a political reading of English history. Eagleton then focuses on the arrival of T. S. Eliot, who came to London with a similarly romantic view of the American South as a beacon shining behind the darkness of industrial capitalism. Apparently Eliot saw a dissociation in English literature sometime after Milton leading to a split between Victorianism and Romanticism, and the recuperation of English literature did not begin until his work, but it came with authoritarianism in an appeal to Tradition. This carried over into his real politics with flirtations with various fascist groups. He didn't care about what his poems actually meant as long as he was able to hook the reader viscerally and emotionally. This authoritarian strain was shared by Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme and the Imaginists, and D.H. Lawrence too although his views were glossed over by Levins to be placed among the "great tradition" including Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.

Eagleton then shifts gears and loots at the criticism of the Scrutiny example. He says Levins is closely associated with "close reading" and practical criticism, which focused excessively on what was written on the page to the exclusion of the surrounding context, and that the text can be understood independent of all other factors: an analytic exercise of focused attention. This reification of the text led to the rise of New Criticism.

quote:

A major link between Cambridge English and the American New Criticism was the work of the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards. If Leavis sought to redeem criticism by converting it into something approximating a religion, thus carrying on the work of Matthew Arnold, Richards sought in his works of the 1920s to lend it a firm basis in the principles of a hard-nosed ‘scientific’ psychology. The brisk, bloodless quality of his prose contrasts suggestively with the tortuous intensity of a Leavis. Society is in crisis, Richards argues, because historical change, and scientific discovery in particular, has outstripped and devalued the traditional mythologies by which men and women have lived. The delicate equipoise of the human psyche has therefore been dangerously disturbed; and since religion will no longer serve to retrim it, poetry must do the job instead. Poetry, Richards remarks with stunning off-handedness, ‘is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos’. Like Arnold, he advances literature as a conscious ideology for reconstructing social order, and does so in the socially disruptive, economically decaying, politically unstable years which followed the Great War...Richards’s quantifying, behaviourist model of the mind was in fact part of the social problem to which he was proposing a solution. Far from questioning the alienated view of science as a purely instrumental, neutrally ‘referential’ affair, he subscribes to this positivist fantasy and then lamely seeks to supplement it with something more cheering. Whereas Leavis waged war on the technologico-Benthamites, Richards tried to beat them at their own game. Linking a defective utilitarian theory of value to an essentially aestheticist view of human experience (art, Richards assumes, defines all the most excellent experiences), he offers poetry as a means of ‘exquisitely reconciling’ the anarchy of modern existence.
One more quote because I love this phrasing so much

quote:

Like Scrutiny , in other words, New Criticism was the ideology of an uprooted, defensive intelligentsia who reinvented in literature what they could not locate in reality. Poetry was the new religion, a nostalgic haven from the alienations of industrial capitalism. The poem itself was as opaque to rational enquiry as the Almighty himself: it existed as a self-enclosed object, mysteriously intact in its own unique being. The poem was that which could not be paraphrased, expressed in any language other than itself: each of its parts was folded in on the others in a complex organic unity which it would be a kind of blasphemy to violate. The literary text, for American New Criticism as for I. A. Richards, was therefore grasped in what might be called ‘functionalist’ terms: just as American functionalist sociology developed a ‘conflict-free’ model of society, in which every element ‘adapted’ to every other, so the poem abolished all friction, irregularity and contradiction in the symmetrical cooperation of its various features.
Eagleton observes that to make a poem an object itself, it must be dissociated from both author and reader. Although similar ideas were held previosuly, that Great Literature was written by Great Minds, and by reading you could somehow approach the mind of a Shakespeare or whatever, New Criticism departs by holding the author's intentions as irrelevant to the interpretation of the text. In so doing the poem was reduced to a fetish, but the effort succeeded on the longer term because it lent itself well to pedagogy. WIth growing student bodies (that GI Bill) it made it easier to have students perceive the tensions and resolution within a poem than launch a Great Books class. It also, he argues, leads to political inertia since it required no commitment to anything (which seems a bit far fetched to me but whatev). A major obstacle in this school are full length novels of course--how can one find a tightly intertwined and ultimately balanced package of symbolism in War and Peace? This chapter then ends with a study of how Empson, frequently included among New Critics, is actually opposed to this approach.

This book is dense and I have to either get better and distilling the central elements (despite how interesting all of these detailed case studies can be) or just ask questions as they come up because this is starting to become too much like work.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


have not forgotten about this, will be posting the next chapter soonish.

Do not autoarchive ktx

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Finally finished chapter 2 on Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Reception Theory. I'm not doing a summary of everything because it makes things too much like work, and sucks whatever joy I draw from this exercise right out. That said...

Eagleton sure does make his own personal biases completely clear. His multi page rant on liberal bias, basically being open to consideration of everything except that what holds up liberalism itself, was fun but I'm not sure really directly relevant to his discussions.

Boy he doesn't seem to care much for Stanley Fish either, falling into what I suspect is a trap that a lot of non post-structuralists do when dealing with someone for whom ultimate ambiguity about what a text means isn't a problem. But we shall see, structuralism and semiotics is next, to be followed by post structuralism.

LOL at his characteristic of Barthes as a literary hedonist, and the opposite side of the liberal coin.

Don't get me wrong, I am learning a lot by reading this, but I also have to lol as I go given my background in coming to his text, which a good Reception Theorist would probably approve.

e. fixed chapter number

Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Oct 17, 2019

cda
Jan 2, 2010

by Hand Knit

Bilirubin posted:

falling into what I suspect is a trap that a lot of non post-structuralists do when dealing with someone for whom ultimate ambiguity about what a text means isn't a problem.

Please elaborate on this.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


cda posted:

Please elaborate on this.

Well.

OK I can be completely wrong on this, as Fish might not be a post-structuralist himself (although he got me reading an interesting book on the impact of French Theory on American academia via a book review in the NY Times), but there is this assumption among non "pomo" types that the idea of relativism means that there is no basis for knowing, as all opinions are all equally valid. Dinesh D'Sousa iirc is one that really pushes this in the political realm. However, my understanding (and mind, I have not gotten to that point in the book yet) is that by understanding you are of a place and time and theoretical framework, that deconstruction and other tools of post structuralism (say Foucault's power analysis) enables you to attempt to extract you from your implicit biases to analyze a thing, if not objectively, at least as close as is possible.

Anyway in this book chapter Fish argues that there is no correct reading of a text because each and every reader brings to a text their own experiences etc. to the text, and who is to say which is the "most right"? Eagleton seems to think that this road leads to chaos and clearly cannot be, because a text was written and how could there be an infinite number of readings? And this has to be wrong. But, he points at Fish and says, this guy here doesn't see that as a problem AT ALL! HOW WRONG HE IS!

My take is that instead, this serves the basis for discussions that may lead to deeper understandings of a text from all parties (taking an academic perspective, prof and students) as their particular viewpoints are given consideration in turn. The text here would be fluid, but would eventually settle at a sort of meta interpretation at the center of a cloud distribution of readings (my metaphor).

But I'm an idiot who is reading this precisely because I know nothing about the application of theory to literature criticism.

cda
Jan 2, 2010

by Hand Knit
This is a bit tangential but, as I understand poststructuralism's theoretical concerns, the goal is not to return to a kind of objectivity or correct for bias. It is to demonstrate that there is no neutral standpoint from which to make such formulations of objectivity or lack of bias -- you're not less biased just because you recognize that you're biased. Even that recognition is coming from an unstable position. Putting it simply, the goal of deconstruction is not reconstruction.

W/r/t to Eagleton though, drat, can you provide a money quote where he's talking about the chaos that follows from recognizing different readings of a text, because he sounds like a total dumb rear end.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Lets see if I can capture this argument in less than three paragraphs

quote:

Reception theory of the Jauss and Iser kind seems to raise a pressing epistemological problem. If one considers the ‘text in itself ’ as a kind of skeleton, a set of ‘schemata’ waiting to be concretized in various ways by various readers, how can one discuss these schemata at all without having already concretized them? In speaking of the ‘text itself ’, measuring it as a norm against particular interpretations of it, is one ever dealing with anything more than one’s own concretization? Is the critic claiming some Godlike knowledge of the ‘text in itself ’, a knowledge denied to the mere reader who has to make do with his or her inevitably partial construction of the text? It is a version, in other words, of the old problem of how one can know the light in the refrigerator is off when the door is closed. Roman Ingarden considers this difficulty but can provide no adequate solution to it; Iser permits the reader a fair degree of freedom, but we are not free simply to interpret as we wish. For an interpretation to be an interpretation of this text and not of some other, it must be in some sense logically constrained by the text itself. The work, in other words, exercises a degree of determinacy over readers’ responses to it, otherwise criticism would seem to fall into total anarchy. Bleak House would be nothing more than the millions of different, often discrepant readings of the novel which readers have come up with, and the ‘text itself’ would drop out, as a kind of mysterious X. What if the literary work were not a determinate structure containing certain indeterminacies, but if everything in the text was indeterminate, dependent on which way the reader chose to construct it? In what sense could we then speak of interpreting the ‘same’ work?

Not all reception theorists find this an embarrassment. The American critic Stanley Fish is quite happy to accept that, when you get down to it, there is no ‘objective’ work of literature there on the seminar table at all. Bleak House is just all the assorted accounts of the novel that have been or will be given. The true writer is the reader: dissatisfied with mere Iserian copartnership in the literary enterprise, the readers have now overthrown the bosses and installed themselves in power. For Fish, reading is not a matter of discovering what the text means, but a process of experiencing what it does to you. His notion of language is pragmatist: a linguistic inversion, for example, will perhaps generate in us a feeling of surprise or disorientation, and criticism is no more than an account of the reader’s developing responses to the succession of words on the page. What the text ‘does’ to us, however, is actually a matter of what we do to it, a question of interpretation; the object of critical attention is the structure of the reader’s experience, not any ‘objective’ structure to be found in the work itself. Everything in the text – its grammar, meanings, formal units – is a product of interpretation, in no sense ‘factually’ given; and this raises the intriguing question of what it is that Fish believes he is interpreting when he reads. His refreshingly candid answer to this question is that he does not know; but neither, he thinks, does anybody else.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


I mean to me this seems to reduce Fish's take to absurdity.

Thanks for the clarification on the post-structuralist goal btw.

fauna
Dec 6, 2018


Caught between two worlds...
barthes died after being run over by a taxi

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

fauna posted:

barthes died after being run over by a taxi

laundry truck you loving idiot

Bonaventure
Jun 23, 2005

by sebmojo

Mel Mudkiper posted:

laundry truck you loving idiot

well that wasn't my interpretation of it

cda
Jan 2, 2010

by Hand Knit
He was hit by a semi...a semiotic challenge, that is!

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.
He was deconstructed by truck running in antithesis to the thesis of his crossing the street

Eugene V. Dubstep
Oct 4, 2013
Probation
Can't post for 8 years!

Bilirubin posted:

I mean to me this seems to reduce Fish's take to absurdity.

This is my read as well. 'This raises the intriguing question...' seems especially arch.

fauna
Dec 6, 2018


Caught between two worlds...

Mel Mudkiper posted:

laundry truck you loving idiot
oh poo poo i've been wrong all this time

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Mel Mudkiper posted:

He was deconstructed by truck running in antithesis to the thesis of his crossing the street

The Death of the Author

Mel Mudkiper
Jan 19, 2012

At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

Bilirubin posted:

The Death of the Author

gently caress

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

At least as of Wednesday Eagleton outlived Harold Bloom. Shockingly few critics can boast about that.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Antifa Turkeesian posted:

At least as of Wednesday Eagleton outlived Harold Bloom. Shockingly few critics can boast about that.

Embarrassed to say I have a copy of Jesus and Yahweh that I have not cracked since I got it when it came out. I liked The Book of J well enough.

Safety Biscuits
Oct 21, 2010

If you think about it, a laundry truck is just a taxi for clothes.

cda
Jan 2, 2010

by Hand Knit

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

This is my read as well. 'This raises the intriguing question...' seems especially arch.

Yeah and really dumb too, it's the lit crit version of why don't they make the plane out of the same stuff as the cockpit recorder

EmmyOk
Aug 11, 2013

I ordered this book recently op as I would also like to understand more about established literary theory. How did u find it?

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


EmmyOk posted:

I ordered this book recently op as I would also like to understand more about established literary theory. How did u find it?

Dense but readable. Loads of names only a book nerd can love. I have to be in the right mood for it but when I am it tends to go fairly well.

OMFG FURRY
Jul 10, 2006

[snarky comment]

Bilirubin posted:

The Death of the Author

"Arrgh!" said the author,

"But what does it mean?" asked the reader

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Alright. Just finished the lengthy chapter on Structuralism and Semiotics. Frightfully little on what structuralism is and how it applies to literary criticism that I could tell. LOTS of criticism of it and structural linguistics (some explicitly Marxist criticism here, not just the usual obvious author perspective background commentary), which he blends with semiotics with a wave of a hand...

quote:

With the work of the Prague school, the term ‘structuralism’ comes more or less to merge with the word ‘semiotics’. ‘Semiotics’, or ‘semiology’, means the systematic study of signs, and this is what literary structuralists are really doing. The word ‘structuralism’ itself indicates a method of enquiry, which can be applied to a whole range of objects from football matches to economic modes of production; ‘semiotics’ denotes rather a particular field of study, that of systems which would in an ordinary sense be regarded as signs: poems, bird calls, traffic lights, medical symptoms and so on. But the two words overlap, since structuralism treats something which may not usually be thought of as a system of signs as though it were – the kinship relations of tribal societies, for example – while semiotics commonly uses structuralist methods.

Lots here on why structuralism is useless, which I can totally agree with as presented.

The next chapter is on Poststructuralism, which is the first marginalia in this university textbook. Looking forward to this.

Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Feb 22, 2020

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Just read the Poststructuralist chapter. It started with the same criticism/advocacy tone from the previous chapter on Structuralism, about finding signs and countersigns, then veered into a brief discussion of the importance placed on speech vs writing in Western philosophy. The major point here was that any system of signification requires a central referent outside the system (God here used as an easy example) that serves as a foundation for the system. Then the author softens his position as he transitions into how Derrida's deconstruction (finding the signs and countersigns of structuralism/semiotics) works to strip away the coverings from the central referent (termed metaphysical by Derrida) in order to examine it in better clarity. In the process the text becomes exposed as self contradictory and instable (which is the author's central criticism again, because he finds the proposition that language cannot express truth objectionable). This discussion is very interesting to me and I will probably need to reread it and chew on it further.

As I said, he seems quite sympathetic to this stance despite himself, and cites Foucault as being essential to his even being able to write his conclusion.

The chapter continues with a profile of the evolution of the critical approach of Barthes over the years, leading ultimately to his book on a novelette of Balzac that doesn't serve as a detailed example, instead Eagleton assumes we the reader are already acquainted with it. He then ties this evolution of thinking of Barthes to the political events of France, especially the student uprising of 68 and consequent resurgence of the status quo (literally the return of deGaulle from exile). This he compares with the less historically grounded school of deconstruction in America, especially at Yale, using Paul de Mann as a punching bag, bringing it back around to Derrida's criticism of this American use of deconstruction. He ends the chapter by emphasizing the political intent of Derrida in developing the system not just for literary criticism, as a means to further express the radical politics of 68 now suppressed by having a means to criticize society without exposing ones own views (since the only way to break the eternal chain of deconstruction is by being empty of content in your own critique, so no one can deconstruct it). Gotta chew on this further. Finally the chapter ends with a discussion of the rise of feminism, which came outside this post structuralist movement, and discusses the inequality between the two sexes as a fundamental inequality never addressed by the purely economic arguments of Marxism.

If I remember it all; its a very dense chapter but helped by a much less critical approach by the author since he is clearly internalizing the lessons for his own world view.

OK, enough word vomit. I should probably reread this and think on it deeper and edit all the errors in the above later. In the meantime, whereas I am getting a better overview of theory, how it is applied to literary criticism is getting less of an explanation in this book. I think ultimately this text would be most effective in a class with a professor assigning additional readings of criticisms written from the various theories to serve as detailed case studies to be read side-by-side with this overview of theory.

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Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Almost finished with the final chapter (before the conclusion on political criticism), on Psychoanalytic criticism. This is a pretty straight forward chapter, starting with a detailed overview (and pretty good one I must say) of Freud's theory of the subconscious, which was oddly sympathetic given the rest of the book and the obvious issues and flaws in the theory. It then jumped to Lacan's take, and then provided a case study of analysis using D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. This was for me the highlight of the book, actually seeing analysis from a particular stance in action. He then talked some more about Freud's consideration of art and dreams, and then several pages in praise of Harold Bloom's battle with the forces of poststructuralism at Yale. This was pretty cool stuff.

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