Literary Theory A Very Short Introduc…
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- Author: bwaters
Highlights
because their analyses of language, or mind, or history, or culture, offer new and persuasive accounts of textual and cultural matters. — location: 95
The genre of ‘theory’ includes works of anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and intellectual history, and sociology. The works in question are tied to arguments in these fields, but they become ‘theory’ because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people who are not studying those disciplines. — location: 98
As a critique of common sense and exploration of alternative conceptions, theory involves a questioning of the most basic premisses or assumptions of literary study, — location: 111
A characteristic of thinking that becomes theory is that it offers striking ‘moves’ that people can use in thinking about other topics. — location: 155
What we think we know about the world – the conceptual framework in which we are brought to think about the world – exercises great power. — location: 165
Derrida treats this particular case as an instance of a common structure or a logic: a ‘logic of supplementarity’ that he discovers in Rousseau’s works. This logic is a structure where the thing supplemented (speech) turns out to need supplementation because it proves to have the same qualities originally thought to characterize only the supplement (writing). — location: 208
For Rousseau, then, his ‘true’ inner self is different from the self that appears in conversations with others, and he needs writing to supplement the misleading signs of his speech. — location: 201
Sometimes even in her presence I committed extravagances that only the most violent love seemed capable of inspiring. One day at table, just as she had put a piece of food into her mouth, I exclaimed that I saw a hair on it. She put the morsel back on her plate; I eagerly seized and swallowed it. — location: 218
And ‘Maman’ herself is a substitute for the mother Rousseau never knew – a mother who would not have sufficed but who would, like all mothers, have failed to satisfy and have required supplements. 11 — location: 225
The conclusion is that our common-sense notion of reality as something present, and of the original as something that was once present, proves untenable: experience is always mediated by signs and the ‘original’ is produced as an effect of signs, of supplements. — location: 233
For Derrida, Rousseau’s texts, like many others, propose that instead of thinking of life as something to which signs and texts are added to represent it, we should conceive of life itself as suffused with signs, made what it is by processes of signification. Writings may claim that reality is prior to signification, but in fact they show that, in a famous phrase of Derrida’s, ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ – ‘There is no outside-oftext’: when you think you are getting outside signs and text, to ‘reality itself’, what you find is more text, more signs, chains of supplements. — location: 235
This does not mean that there is no difference between the presence of ‘Maman’ or her absence or between a ‘real’ event and a fictional one. It’s that her presence turns out to be a particular kind of absence, still requiring mediations and supplements. — location: 245
Derrida’s interpretation shows the extent to which literary works themselves, such as Rousseau’s Confessions, are theoretical: they offer explicit speculative arguments about writing, desire, and substitution or supplementation, and they guide thinking about these topics in ways that they leave implicit. Foucault, on the other hand, proposes to show us not how insightful or wise texts are but how far the discourses of doctors, scientists, novelists, and others create the things they claim only to analyse. Derrida shows how theoretical the literary works are, Foucault how creatively productive the discourses of knowledge are. — location: 250
There also seems to be a difference in what they are claiming and what questions arise. Derrida is claiming to tell us what Rousseau’s texts say or show, so the question that arises is whether what Rousseau’s texts say is true. Foucault claims to analyse a particular historical moment, so the question that arises is whether his large generalizations hold for other times and places. — location: 255
These examples display the main thrust of recent theory, which has been the critique of whatever is taken as natural, the demonstration that what has been thought or declared natural is in fact a historical, cultural product. — location: 262
Theory is interdisciplinary – discourse with effects outside an original discipline. 2. Theory is analytical and speculative – an attempt to work out what is involved in what we call sex or language or writing or meaning or the subject. — location: 273
So what is theory? Four main points have emerged. — location: 272
It is an unbounded corpus of writings which is always being augmented as the young and the restless, in critiques of the guiding conceptions of their elders, promote the contributions to theory of new thinkers and rediscover the work of older, neglected ones. — location: 278
But theory makes mastery impossible, not only because there is always more to know, but, more specifically and more painfully, because theory is itself the questioning of presumed results and the assumptions on which they are based. — location: 293
First, since theory itself intermingles ideas from philosophy, linguistics, history, political theory, and psychoanalysis, why should theorists worry about whether the texts they’re reading are literary or not? — location: 304
The modern Western sense of literature as imaginative writing can be traced to the German Romantic theorists of the late eighteenth century and, if we want a particular source, to a book published in 1800 by a French Baroness, Madame de Staël’s On Literature Considered in its Relations with Social Institutions. — location: 353
because its failure to be anything except an image invites a certain kind of attention, calls for reflection. So do sentences where the relation between their form and their content provides potential food for thought. — location: 389
Literature is language that ‘foregrounds’ language itself: makes it strange, thrusts it at you – ‘Look! I’m language!’ – so you can’t forget that you are dealing with language shaped in odd ways. — location: 453
in literature there are relations – of reinforcement or contrast and dissonance – between the structures of different linguistic levels: between sound and meaning, between grammatical organization and thematic patterns. — location: 467
Reference to the world is not so much a property of literary works as a function they are given by interpretation. — location: 503
the aesthetic is the name of the attempt to bridge the gap between the — location: 522
material and the spiritual world, between a world of forces and magnitudes and a world of concepts. Aesthetic objects, such as paintings or works of literature, with their combination of sensuous form (colours, sounds) and spiritual content (ideas), illustrate the possibility of bringing together the material and the spiritual. A literary work is an aesthetic object because, with other communicative functions initially bracketed or suspended, it engages readers to consider the interrelation between form and content. — location: 522
Aesthetic objects, for Kant and other theorists, have a ‘purposiveness without purpose’. There is a purposiveness to their construction: they are made so that their parts will work together towards some end. But the end is the work of art itself, pleasure in the work or pleasure occasioned by the work, not some external purpose. — location: 527
It would at once teach disinterested appreciation, provide a sense of national greatness, create fellow-feeling among the classes, and ultimately, function as a replacement for religion, which seemed no longer to be able to hold society together. — location: 576
by converse with the thoughts and utterances of those who are intellectual leaders of the race, our heart comes to beat in accord with the feeling of universal humanity. We discover that no differences of class, or party, or creed can destroy the power of genius to charm and to instruct, and that above the smoke and stir, the din and turmoil of man’s lower life of care and business and debate, there is a serene and luminous region of truth where all may meet and expatiate in common. — location: 609
This is central to what literature is: for any orthodoxy, any belief, any value, a literary work can mock it, parody it, imagine some different and monstrous fiction. — location: 638
But literature cannot be reduced to this conservative social function: it is scarcely the purveyor of ‘family values’ but makes seductive all manner of crimes, from Satan’s revolt against God in Milton’s Paradise Lost to Raskolnikov’s murder of an old woman in Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment. It encourages resistance to capitalist values, to the practicalities of getting and spending. Literature is the noise of culture as well as its information. It is an entropic force as well as cultural capital. It is a writing that calls for a reading and engages readers in problems of meaning. — location: 646
Cultural studies dwells in the tension between the analyst’s desire to analyse culture as a set of codes and practices that alienates people from their interests and creates the desires that they come to have and, on the other hand, the analyst’s wish to find in popular culture an authentic expression of value. — location: 718
What is called the ‘literary canon’: the works regularly studied in schools and universities and deemed to form ‘our literary heritage’. — location: 746
choosing works to represent a range of cultural experiences as well as a range of literary forms. — location: 776
A famous poem by Paul Verlaine plays on this structure: ‘Il pleure dans mon coeur | Comme il pleut sur la ville’ (It cries in my heart, as it rains on the town). We say ‘it’s raining in town’; why not ‘it’s crying in my heart’? — location: 917
one, modelled on linguistics, takes meanings as what have to be accounted for and tries to work out how they are possible. The other, by contrast, starts with forms and seeks to interpret them, to tell us what they really mean. In literary studies, this is a contrast between poetics and hermeneutics. — location: 941
Taking meanings or effects as the point of departure (poetics) is fundamentally different from seeking to discover meaning (hermeneutics). — location: 953
(1) such arguments are never settled, and (2) arguments have to be made about how particular scenes or combinations of lines support any particular hypothesis. You can’t make a work mean just anything: it resists, and you have to labour to convince others of the pertinence of your reading. — location: 1010
Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless, always open to mutations under the pressure of theoretical discussions. — location: 1052
A rhetorical figure has generally been defined as an alteration of or swerve from ‘ordinary’ usage; — location: 1087
if metaphor links by means of similarity, metonymy links by means of contiguity. Metonymy moves from one thing to another that is contiguous with it, as when we say ‘the Crown’ for ‘the Queen’. Metonymy produces order by linking things in spatial and temporal series, moving from one thing to another within a given domain, rather than linking one domain to another, — location: 1110
Narrative poems recount an event; lyrics, we might say, strive to be an event. — location: 1200
The perception of resemblance between faces in the crowd and petals on a bough – seeing faces in the crowd as petals on a bough – is an instance of the poetic imagination ‘seeing the world — location: 1251
anew’, grasping unexpected relationships and, perhaps, appreciating what to other observers would be trivial or oppressive, finding profundity in formal appearance. This little poem thus can become a reflection on the power of poetic imagination to achieve the effects that the poem itself achieves. An example like this illustrates a basic convention of poetic interpretation: consider what this poem and its procedures say about poetry or the creation of meaning. — location: 1253
Stories, the argument goes, are the main way we make sense of things, whether in thinking of our lives as a progression leading somewhere or in telling ourselves what is happening in the world. — location: 1265
‘The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form.’ — location: 1274
The question ‘who speaks?’, then, is separate from the question of ‘who sees?’ From whose perspective are the events brought into focus and presented? The focalizer may or may not be the same as the narrator. — location: 1360
In so far as we become who we are through a series of identifications (see Chapter 8), novels are a powerful device for the internalization of social norms. But narratives also provide a mode of social criticism. They expose the hollowness of worldly success, the world’s corruption, its failure to meet our noblest aspirations. They expose the predicaments of the oppressed, in stories that invite readers, through identification, to see certain situations as intolerable. — location: 1420
After all, even the exposure of narrative as rhetoric has the structure of a narrative: it is a story in which our initial delusion yields to the harsh light of truth and we emerge sadder but wiser, disillusioned but chastened. We stop dancing around and contemplate the secret. So the story goes. — location: 1435
Such a notion has now gained wide currency – the true self is the one you find through love and through your relations with family and friends – but it begins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an idea about the identity of women and only later is extended to men. — location: 1730
Theory, then, offers not a set of solutions but the prospect of further thought. It calls for commitment to the work of reading, of challenging presuppositions, of questioning the assumptions on which you proceed. — location: 1834
the verbal strategies that make it literary, the foregrounding of language itself, and the ‘making strange’ of experience that they accomplish. — location: 1850
Focusing on ambiguity, paradox, irony, and the effects of connotation and poetic imagery, the New Criticism sought to show the contribution of each element of poetic form to a unified structure. — location: 1860