The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms is a twenty-first century update of Roger Fowler’s seminal Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms. Bringing together original entries written by such celebrated theorists as Terry Eagleton and Malcolm Bradbury with new definitions of current terms and controversies, this is the essential reference book for students of literature at all levels. This book includes:

● New definitions of contemporary critical issues such as ‘Cybercriticism’ and ‘Globalization’. ● An exhaustive range of entries, covering numerous aspects to such topics as genre, form, cultural theory and literary technique. ● Complete coverage of traditional and radical approaches to the study and production of literature. ● Thorough accounts of critical terminology and analyses of key academic debates. ● Full cross-referencing throughout and suggestions for further reading.

Peter Childs is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Gloucestershire. His recent publications include Modernism (Routledge, 2000) and Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970 (Palgrave, 2004).

Roger Fowler (1939–99), the distinguished and long-serving Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of East Anglia, was the editor of the original Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms (Routledge, 1973, 1987). Also available from Routledge

Poetry: The Basics Who’s Who in Contemporary Jeffrey Wainwright Women’s Writing 0–415–28764–2 Edited by Jane Eldridge Miller Shakespeare: The Basics 0–415–15981–4 Sean McEvoy 0–415–21289–8 Who’s Who in Lesbian and Gay Writing Literary Theory: The Basics Gabriele Griffin Hans Bertens 0–415–15984–9 0–415–18664–1 Who’s Who in Dickens Contemporary British Novelists Donald Hawes Nick Rennison 0–415–26029–9 0–415–21709–1 Who’s Who in Shakespeare The Routledge Companion to Peter Quennell and Postmodernism (Second Edition) Hamish Johnson Edited by Stuart Sim 0–415–26035–3 0–415–33359–8 Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century The Routledge Companion to Russian World Poetry Literature Edited by Mark Willhardt Edited by Neil Cornwell and Alan Michael Parker 0–415–23366–6 0–415–16356–0 The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

Peter Childs and Roger Fowler Based on A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, edited by Roger Fowler First published in 1973 as A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms Revised edition published in 1987 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd This edition published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © Routledge 1973, 1987, 2006 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Routledge dictionary of literary terms / [edited by] Peter Childs and Roger Fowler. p. cm. ‘Based on A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, edited by Roger Fowler.’ Rev. ed. of: A dictionary of modern critical terms. Rev. and enl. ed. 1987. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Literature – Terminology. 2. English language – Terms and phrases. 3. Literary form – Terminology. 4. Criticism – Terminology. I. Childs, Peter. II. Fowler, Roger. III. Dictionary of modern critical terms. PN41.D4794 2005 803–dc22 2005006915

ISBN 0–415–36117–6 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–34017–9 (pbk) To Claire Philpott, with thanks

Contents

Note on the style of references viii List of terms ix

Dictionary of literary terms 1

Notes on contributors 254 Note on the style of references

Cross-references give the article to which the reader is referred in SMALL CAPITALS. Further reading is suggested wherever appropriate, sometimes within the text and sometimes at the end of articles, whichever is stylistically more suitable. Dates of first editions are given when they are significant, but usually the most accessible and convenient modern reprintings and translations are cited. List of terms

Absurd 1 Catastrophe 23 Action, actor 2 Catharsis 23 Aestheticism 2 Cento(nism) 23 Aesthetics 3 Character 23 Affective fallacy 4 Chicago critics 25 Aktualisace 4 Chorus 26 Alienation effect 4 Classic 26 Allegory 4 Closure 28 Alliteration 5 Code 28 Alterity 5 Cohesion 28 Ambiguity 6 Comedy 28 Analysis 7 Comedy of manners 29 Anticlimax 9 Comparative literature 29 Anti-hero 9 Competence, literary 31 Apocalyptic literature 9 Complaint 31 Aporia 10 Conceit 31 Appreciation 10 Concrete poetry 32 Archaism 10 Consonance 33 Archetype 11 Context 33 Aristotelian criticism 11 Contradiction 34 Art 11 Convention 35 Assonance 11 Couplet 36 Atmosphere 11 Creation 37 Author 12 Criticism 38 Autobiography 14 Critique 40 Ballad 15 Cultural criticism 41 Baroque 16 Cultural materialism 43 Belief 18 Culture 44 Bildungsroman 18 Cybercriticism 46 Biography 20 Dada 48 Burlesque 22 Decentring 48 Cacophony 23 Deconstruction 48 Caricature 23 Decorum 51 Carnival 23 Defamiliarization 52 x List of terms

Dénouement 52 Foregrounding 90 Deviation 52 Form 91 Dialogic structure 52 Formalism 93 Diction 54 Free verse 94 Différance 54 Gender 96 Difference 55 Generative poetics 97 Differend 56 Genre 97 Dirge 57 Globalization 98 Disbelief 57 Gothic 99 Discourse 57 Grammar 101 Dissemination 61 Grotesque 101 Dissociation of sensibility 62 Hegemony 102 Documentary 63 Heresy of paraphrase 103 Dominant 63 Hermeneutics 103 Double irony 63 Hero 105 Drama 63 Heroic couplet 107 Dramatic irony 64 Historical novel 107 Ecocriticism 65 Historicism 108 Écriture 66 Homophony 110 Effect 66 Humanism 110 Eiron 67 Humours 111 Elegy 67 Hybridity 112 Emblem 68 Hyperbole 113 Epic 68 Ideology 114 Epic theatre 70 Illocutionary act 115 Epistle 72 Image 115 Essay 72 Imagination 116 Essentialism 73 Imagism 118 Ethical criticism 74 Imitation 120 Euphony 75 Implied author 120 Eurocentrism 75 Intention 120 Evaluation 77 Interior monologue 121 Existentialism 78 Interpretant 121 Explication 80 Interpretation 121 Expressionism 80 Intertextuality 121 Fable 82 Irony 123 Fabula 82 Katharsis 125 Fabulation 82 Kinetic 125 Fancy 82 Lament 126 Fantastic 82 Language 126 Farce 84 Lexis 128 Feeling 85 Lisible 128 Feminist criticism 85 Literary mode of production 128 Fiction 88 Literature 129 Figure 90 Logocentrism 131 Foot 90 Lyric 132 List of terms xi

Magical realism 134 Persona 170 Mannerism 135 Phallologocentrism 171 Manners 136 Phenomenology 172 Marxist criticism 136 Picaresque 174 Mask 138 Plagiarism 175 Metafiction 138 Platonism 175 Metaphor 138 Pleasure 176 Metaphysical 140 Plot 177 Metre 141 Pluralism 178 Mimesis 143 Poetic diction 178 Mirror Stage, the 143 Poetic licence 178 Mock-epic 144 Poetics 179 Modernism 145 Poetry 181 Monody 146 Point of view 182 Motif 146 Polyphony 182 Myth 146 Polysemy 182 Mythos 147 Pornography 182 Narrative 148 Postcolonialism 183 Narrative structure 150 Postmodernism 185 Narratology 151 Post-structuralism 187 Nationalism and ethnicity studies 152 Practical criticism 188 Naturalism 154 Presence 188 Négritude 154 Prose 189 Neo-Aristotelianism 155 Protagonist 190 Neo-classicism 155 Psychogogia 190 Neo-Platonism 155 Psychology and psychoanalysis 190 New criticism 155 Queer theory 195 Novel 157 Reader 196 Objective correlative 160 Realism 198 Obscurity 160 Reason 200 Ode 160 Reception 200 Onomatopoeia 162 Refrain 200 Oral composition 162 Refunctioning 201 Organic 162 Representation 202 Orientalism 162 Response 202 Originality 164 Revisionary writing 202 Ostranenie 164 Rhetoric 204 Other, the 164 Rhizome 205 Paradox 166 Rhyme 207 Paraphrase 166 Rhythm 208 Parody 166 Ritual 208 Pastiche 167 Romance 208 Pastoral 168 Romanticism 209 Pathetic fallacy 169 Satire 211 Performativity 169 Scansion 212 Peripeteia 170 Scheme 212 xii List of terms

Scriptible 212 Syuzhet 235 Semiotics 212 Taste 236 Sensibility 214 Technique 236 Sexuality 216 Tenor 236 Short fiction 217 Tension 236 Sign 218 Text 237 Simile 218 Texture 238 Sincerity 219 Theme 239 Skaz 220 Threnody 240 Society 220 Topos 240 Soliloquy 221 Tradition 240 Sonnet 222 Tragedy 241 Sound 223 Translations 243 Speech 224 Travesty 244 Speech act 224 Typicality 244 Stasis 224 Uncanny, the 245 Story 224 Undecidability 246 Stream of consciousness 224 Value 248 Stress 225 Variation 248 Structuralism 225 Vehicle 249 Structure 227 Verbal irony 249 Style 228 Verisimilitude 249 Subaltern 230 Vers libre 249 Subject 231 Verse 249 Surfiction 231 Verse epistle 249 Surrealism 231 Voice 250 Suspension of disbelief 232 Wit 251 Symbol 232 Womanist 252 Synonym 233 Writing 253 Syntax 233 A

Absurd The theatre of the absurd was and Ionesco such a dialectical shift was a term, derived from Camus and popular- simply faith. For to the ‘absurd’ dramatist ized by Martin Esslin’s book The Theatre it is axiomatic that humans live in an of the Absurd (1961), applied to a group entropic world in which communication of dramatists whose work emerged during is impossible and illusion preferred to the early 1950s (though Beckett’s Waiting reality. The individual has no genuine for Godot and Ionesco’s The Bald Prima scope for action (Hamm sits lame and Donna were actually written in the late blind in Endgame, 1958; Winnie is buried 1940s). In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) to the neck in sand in Happy Days; the Camus defined the absurd as the tension protagonist of Ionesco’s The New Tenant which emerges from the individual’s (written 1953, produced 1957) is sub- determination to discover purpose and merged beneath proliferating furniture); order in a world which steadfastly refuses individuals are the victims of their meta- to evidence either. To writers like Ionesco physical situation. Logically, the plays and Beckett this paradox leaves human abandon linear plot, plausible character actions, aspirations and emotions merely development and rational language. In ironical. The redeeming message no contrast to Camus’s work their style longer comes from God but is delivered directly reflects their subject. by a deaf mute to a collection of empty The term ‘absurd drama’, applied by chairs (The Chairs, 1952); human Esslin to dramatists as diverse as Beckett, qualities, such as perseverance and Ionesco, Adamov, Genet, Arrabal and courage, no longer function except as Simpson, is something of a blunt weapon. derisory comments on the individual’s Esslin had a disturbing if understandable impotence (Happy Days, 1961); basic tendency to trace the origins of the instincts and responses, the motor forces absurd in an incredible array of writers of the individual, become the source of some of whom do not properly belong in misery (Act Without Words, 1957). Camus a theatre which is convinced of the himself could see a limited transcendence unbridgeable gulf between aspiration and in the ability to recognize and even exalt fulfilment, the impossibility of communi- in the absurd (The Outsider, 1942) or in cation or the futility of human relation- the minimal consolation of stoicism ships. In other words he is not always (Cross Purpose, 1944). But he came to completely scrupulous in distinguishing feel that absurdity implied a world which between style and content. In his revised appeared to sanction Nazi brutality as edition of his book, however, he has easily as it did individual acts of violence. shown a commendable desire to underline From an examination of the nature of the deficiencies of a term which, while absurdity, therefore, he moved towards proving a useful means of approaching liberal humanism: ‘The end of the move- dramatists intent on forging new drama, ment of absurdity, of rebellion, etc....is was never intended as a substitute for strin- compassion...that is to say, in the last gent analysis of the work of individual analysis, love’. For writers like Beckett writers. 2 Action

See Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the (Baudelaire’s l’hérésie de l’enseignement). Absurd (2004); J. L. Styan, Modern Drama Art, Whistler wrote in his ‘Ten o’clock’ in Theory and Practice: Symbolism, lecture (1885), is ‘selfishly occupied with Surrealism and the Absurd (1983). her own perfection only’ and has ‘no CWEB desire to teach’. As a fashionable fad, English Aestheticism was brought to a halt Action See DRAMA. with the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1896. Aestheticism, as a stage in the devel- Actor See DRAMA. opment of Romanticism, is not limited to Aestheticism A sensibility, a philoso- England. Profoundly a movement of reac- phy of life and of art, and an English tion and protest, it reflects the growing literary and artistic movement, culminat- apprehension of the nineteenth-century ing in the 1890s, with Oscar Wilde as its artist at the vulgarization of values and most extravagant exponent and Walter commercialization of art accompanying Pater its acknowledged philosopher. the rise of the middle class and the spread Other names commonly associated are of democracy (‘a new class, who discov- those of the members of the Pre- ered the cheap, and foresaw fortune in the Raphaelite Brotherhood, Swinburne, facture of the sham’ – Whistler). The hos- Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel tility of an alienated minority towards Johnson, Andrew Lang, William Sharp, bourgeois ‘Religion of Progress’ (‘Industry John Addington Symonds and the early and Progress,’ Baudelaire wrote, ‘those Yeats. Aubrey Beardsley and J. McNeill despotic enemies of all poetry’) prompted Whistler are representative of the same an indulgence in the decadent, the archaic trend in the fine arts. and the morbid. The Death of God, as For the Aesthete whose creed is to be proclaimed by Nietzsche among others, derived from Pater’s conclusion to The turned the Aesthete towards the occult Renaissance (1873), reality amounts to and the transcendental in an attempt to sharp, fleeting impressions, images and make a thoroughly spiritualized art sub- sensations arrested by the creative indi- stitute for the old faith. The fin-de-siècle vidual from an experience in constant witnesses the proclamation of an elitist flux. The life of art, or the art of life, ‘new hedonism’ determined, in the words which the Aesthete wishes to equate, is of Oscar Wilde, ‘never to accept any ideally a form of purified ecstasy that theory or system that would involve the flourishes only when removed from the sacrifice of any mode of passionate roughness of the stereotyped world of experience’. actuality and the orthodoxy of philosoph- Philosophy provides the theoretical ical systems and fixed points of view. The mainstay of the prevalent moods. Kant’s quest for unadulterated beauty is recom- postulate (Critique of Judgement, 1790) mended as the finest occupation individu- of the disinterestedness of the aesthetical als can find for themselves during the judgement, and the irrelevance of con- ‘indefinite reprieve’ from death which cepts to the intuitions of the imagination, their lives are. Pater’s phrase, ‘the love of is taken up and carried further by art for its own sake’, a version of the Schopenhauer. In the latter’s thought, an French l’art pour l’art, has served the ‘absolute’ Art removes the mind from a Aesthetes as a slogan, implying the repu- despicable life and frees it from its diation of the ‘heresy of instruction’ bondage to the will. Since music is the Aesthetics 3 most immaterial art, as well as the most as achievement. To perceive it so is to removed from quotidian reality, it perceive its ‘beauty’ (if it turns out to have becomes the ideal. Schopenhauer declares any). Such beauty, being the counterpart that ‘to become like music is the aspira- to use or purpose, which largely depend tion of all arts’, which is echoed by on content, must spring from formal Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy from qualities, as must the special pleasures its the Spirit of Music (1872), by Verlaine in perception gives rise to. Non-moral, non- ‘de la musique avant toute chose’, and by utilitarian and non-acquisitive, this is the Pater in his equally famous ‘All art purest of the pleasures, the one least constantly aspires towards the condition exposed to bias from areas outside the of music’ (The Renaissance, 1873). The work of art (and therefore the one most ensuing cult of pure or ‘essential’ form is appropriate for defining what ‘art’ is; see as characteristic of symbolism and liter- ART). Second, aesthetic pleasure may be ary Impressionism as it is of the entire distinguished from aesthetic apprecia- English 1890s. This, in turn, leads to the tion. The former emphasizes one’s experi- devaluation of the subject matter in ence of the work, which may be mistaken, favour of personal, innovatory techniques untutored or injudicious; the latter and the subtleties of exquisite execution. emphasizes the characteristics of the See Madeleine L. Cazamian, Le Roman work, and implies a critical assessment of et les idées en Angleterre, vol. 2: L’Anti- their ‘beauty’. Third, both presuppose intellectualisme et l’esthéticisme (1880– aesthetic attention. Unless a work is 1900) (1935); L. Eckhoff, The Aesthetic regarded in the way indicated above – for Movement in English Literature (1959); what it is, not for what it is up to – its Graham Hough, The Last Romantics aesthetic qualities, if any, are likely to go (1949); H. Jackson, The Eighteen-Nineties unperceived. For this reason works where (1913); R. V. Johnson, Aestheticism (1969); the subject, or manner, deeply involves Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis the reader are less likely to give aesthetic Psomiades (eds), Women and British pleasure or to prompt aesthetic apprecia- Aestheticism (2000). tion than those that encourage aesthetic NZ attention by formal devices that lend aesthetic distance. Aesthetics (The study of the beauti- Finally, aesthetic merit should be ful.) A subject that has developed, espe- distinguished from aesthetic qualities and cially in Germany, into a formidable one. reactions, for a work might possess gen- Lack of space forbids any attempt to deal uine aesthetic qualities, properly provide with its philosophical and psychological for their appreciation, yet in fact be a poor problems here; but some discrimination specimen of its kind. Merit and pleasure, may be made to clarify and amplify its too, are not necessarily related. An use as a critical term. untrained or naturally crude sensibility First, aesthetic pleasure may be distin- could clearly be aesthetically pleased by guished from other pleasures – according a crude work – and so, in certain cir- to the Kantian definition now widely cumstances, could a trained and refined accepted – as that which is disinterested, sensibility (though it would appreciate the result of perceiving something not as a the work for what it was). means but as an end in itself, not as useful Aesthesis (aesthetic perception) is but as ornamental, not as instrument but normally a blend of aesthetic pleasure and 4 Affective fallacy appreciation, and may be of three kinds: Allegory A Major symbolic mode aesthesis of composition, resulting from which fell into some critical disrepute in purely formal harmonies of part and part, the mid-twentieth century (‘dissociated’, or parts and whole, and more characteristic ‘naive’, ‘mechanical’, ‘abstract’) though of the fine arts than of literature; aesthesis it flourished in satire, underground litera- of complementarity, resulting from the ture and science fiction. It is often matching of form and content; and aesthe- defined as an ‘extended metaphor’ in sis of condensation, resulting from the per- which characters, actions and scenery are ception of aesthetic qualities in part of a systematically symbolic, referring to work only (a minimal instance, strictly spiritual, political, psychological con- speaking, of either of the other two modes). frontations (Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, The Aesthetic Movement, or Art for Orwell’s 1984). Historically the rise of art’s sake, which started in France during allegory accompanies the inward-looking the latter part of the nineteenth century psychologizing tendencies of late anti- and flourished in England in the 1880s quity and medieval Christianity (see and 1890s, was less concerned with such C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 1938). niceties than with a general reaction The ‘hero’ is typically a cypher (Spenser’s against the Art for morality’s sake so char- Guyon, Christian in Bunyan, Winston acteristic of the earlier part of the century. Smith in 1984), a proxy for the reader, When Wilde averred that ‘all art is quite because the action is assumed to take useless’ he spoke truly – if art is defined in place in the mind and imagination of the aesthetic terms. But the pleasures of liter- audience; ‘characters’ other than the hero ature are usually multiple and its proper are, rather like Jonsonian HUMOURS, appreciation therefore rarely limited to the demonically possessed by fear, desire or aesthetic. Critics, such as Paul de Man and need. (It is often misleadingly suggested Terry Eagleton, have argued that the that they ‘represent’ vices and virtues, but aesthetic is primarily an ideological cate- when successful they are jealousy, greed, gory reflecting and promoting Western modesty, etc. with intervals of neutrality bourgeois taste. See also PLEASURE. where they get the plot moving or are See Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics spectators to the obsessions of other char- (1958); P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims acters.) Allegory’s distinctive feature is of Taste (1979); British Journal of that it is a structural, rather than a textural Aesthetics ( passim); Anne Sheppard, symbolism; it is a large-scale exposition Aesthetics: An Introduction to the in which problems are conceptualized and Philosophy of Art (1987); Terry Eagleton, analysed into their constituent parts in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990); Paul order to be stated, if not solved. The typi- De Man, Aesthetic Ideology (1997); Jesse cal plot is one in which the ‘innocent’ – Matz, Literary Impressionism and Gulliver, Alice, the Lady in Milton’s Modernist Aesthetics (2001). ‘Comus’, K. in Kafka’s The Castle – is AER ‘put through’ a series of experiences (tests, traps, fantasy gratifications) which Affective fallacy See EFFECT. add up to an imaginative analysis of contemporary ‘reality’. Aktualisace See FOREGROUNDING. Many of the attitudes which character- Alienation effect See CONTRADICTION, ized MODERNISM and NEW CRITICISM were EPIC THEATRE. explicitly hostile to the intentionalist and Alterity 5 individualist assumptions allegory makes – are often increasingly at odds, and which that the emotive power of literature can be involves argument, discursiveness, para- channelled and directed, that the work phrasable opinion. Allegorists, like itself is the means to an end (saving souls, satirists (and the two are often the same) ‘to fashion a gentleman’, etc.). Pound’s employ myths rhetorically, rather than strictures against the abstract (‘dim lands respectfully embodying them (John Barth, of peace’); Richards’s insistence that Giles Goat Boy, 1966). More recently, poetry is ‘data’ not rationalist scaffolding; critics, such as Craig Owens have allied Yeats’s stress on the mysteriousness of the postmodernist writing with allegory genuine literary symbol – all seem to because of its tendency towards irony and label allegory as the product of a now parody. See also MYTH, SYMBOL. untenable idealism. But the clear-cut dis- See Angus Fletcher, Allegory, the tinction between ‘the music of ideas’ Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964); (Richards on Eliot) and the ‘dark conceit’ Northrop Frye, ‘Levels of meaning in of allegory is harder to make in practice literature’, Kenyon Review (1950), 246–62; than in theory: Yeats’s A Vision system- A. D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory atized and expounded the mystery of his (1967); Edmund Spenser, ‘A Letter of the symbols much as Spenser did in The Author’s...to Sir Walter Raleigh’ (1596); Faerie Queene. Cleanth Brooks in The Craig Owens, ‘The allegorical impulse: Well Wrought Urn (1947) allegorized all toward a theory of postmodernism’ in Scott the poems he explicated, so that they Bryson et al. (eds), Beyond Recognition become ‘parables about the nature of (1992); Theresa M. Kelley, Reinventing poetry’, and Northrop Frye in The Allegory (1997). Anatomy of Criticism (1957) summed up LS this tendency by pointing out that all Alliteration See TEXTURE. analysis was covert allegorizing. But though the common distinction between Alterity The dictionary definition of allegory and symbolism falsifies the facts the term alterity is ‘the state of being other of literary experience when it claims or different; diversity, otherness’. Its use an impossible instantaneity and univer- as an alternative (which, as it happens, is a sality for the symbol (symbolism can be term cognate to alterity) to ‘otherness’ has grossly schematic – cf. Hemingway or emerged from changes in twentieth- Steinbeck), and accuses allegory of arid century philosophy that have shifted rationalism, there is a genuine distinction the conceptualization of identity from the to be made. Cartesian humanist proposition of a self- Two main strands in the modernist contained consciousness located in the aesthetic, the doctrine of the autonomy of individual mind, based on the proposition the artefact and the association of litera- ‘I think therefore I am’, to subjectivity ture with collective and recurrent ‘myth’, located in social contexts that are discur- combined to leave little room and few sively and ideologically constituted. In terms for allegory. Modernist critics were this latter perspective, the formation of the equipped to talk about the textural enact- Other is inseparably involved in the for- ment of content, and about the largest mation of the Self for it is only through the (mythic) patterns into which literature discursive construction of this Other that falls, but were not at ease in the area the Self can be defined as an ‘identity’. between the two where form and content The ‘Other’ then is not something outside 6 Ambiguity or beyond the Self as the traditional it resolves (or, interestingly, does not Cartesian perspective would have it; resolve) questions within the colonial rather, it is deeply implicated within the Self. In other words, the only perspective Self. Its philosophical status must, that matters is the colonial one; it cannot, accordingly, shift from being an epistemic or rather refuses, to recognize the question to an ethical one. In short, the perspective of the colonized. philosophical ‘problem’ of the Other is no To use the term Other in this context longer of the sort that involves a coherent is to run the risk of reinscribing this Self-asking ‘How can I know the Other?’ Othering process instead of dismantling Rather, the questions become ‘What is my the very binaries on which such discourse relationship to the Other?’ and ‘How rests. Alterity offers the opportunity to should I act towards the Other?’ The term see colonial discourse and its Others in a alterity here becomes useful because it relational manner, each constituting the suggests that the Other involved in these other whilst simultaneously respecting questions is neither merely an abstract difference, thereby avoiding the trap of proposition, nor is it unrelated and there- collapsing all distinctions into an abstract, fore irrelevant to considerations of the ahistorical homogeneity. This respect for Self. The Other’s difference is therefore the difference of the Other opens up a not absolute but relative; it is determined space for recognition of mutual interac- by series of cultural, economic, political tion and dialogue. See also HYBRIDITY, and moral differences. It is this emphasis ORIENTALISM, POSTCOLONIALISM, OTHER. on relationality that gives alterity its value See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The in contemporary theory. Spivak Reader (1996); Michael T. Taussig, This is particularly marked in post- Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular colonialism, which seeks to deconstruct History of the Senses (1993). the ‘Othering’ process that Gayatri Spivak AM argues is the manner through which colo- nial identities formed themselves within Ambiguity If opposed to ‘clarity’, an ideology of racial and cultural hierar- ambiguity would be considered a fault. chy. Colonized Others functioned within Modernist criticism turned it into a virtue, this discourse to propagate a sense of self- equivalent roughly to ‘richness’ or ‘wit’. hood amongst colonizers that imagined This reversal of normal connotations itself to be utterly and absolutely different was made possible by two factors: from the colonized. The colonized Other I. A. Richards’s argument that what is is deployed as an ‘inscrutable’ figure that required of scientific language (e.g. is unknown and unknowable – that is, as lucidity) is not necessarily demanded in an epistemological question. This is poetry (see LANGUAGE); and William particularly apparent in such colonial fic- Empson’s promotion of the concept in tions as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India Seven Types of Ambiguity, first published and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in 1930. Following Empson, ambiguity both of which rehearse the limits of came to be regarded as a defining linguistic colonial knowledge. Significantly, this characteristic of poetry. discourse positions the Other outside Ambiguity is not a specific figurative of discourse and so involves a certain device which may be chosen at will for cultural solipsism in which the difference decoration; it is not, says Empson, ‘a thing of the Other functions only insofar as to be attempted’. Rather, it is a natural Analysis 7 characteristic of language which becomes The problem is justification, selection; heightened and significant in verse. The Empson’s reading of ‘trammel up the link between content and form is indirect consequence’ is clearly fantastic. What and arbitrary; hence syntactic ‘accidents’ control is there over the desire to spawn may occur, syntax realizing two or more meanings? meanings in the same signal. Linguists The doctrine of ambiguity is not a say that one ‘surface structure’ may licence for self-indulgence, free associa- conceal two or more ‘deep structures’ tion producing a mushy poem, an arbitrary (the reverse situation is PARAPHRASE). heap of meanings. Multiple meanings Ambiguity is common in ordinary lan- must be justified by their interrelation- guage, but we do not notice it because ships. We must neither impose meanings context usually selects just one of the without control, nor reject all meanings alternative meanings (‘disambiguates’). It but one; instead, we must reject all mean- is of several kinds: homophony, the con- ings but those which interact wittily. In vergence of unrelated meanings in one the same sonnet we find ‘those boughs form (bank, plane); polysemy, a scatter of which shake against the cold’. Shake is more or less connected meanings around either passive – the boughs being ravaged one word (bachelor, record ); purely syn- by the cold wind – or active and defiant, tactic ambiguity, as in Visiting relatives the shaking of a fist, a gesture against can be boring or old men and women. approaching death. This is a common Verse tends to be more ambiguous syntactic ambiguity: the diametrically than prose or conversation, for several opposed meanings capture the conflict reasons: it is less redundant; context is between decay and energy which the inaccessible or irrelevant; verse displays poem embodies. Here we have not merely extra levels of structure and can be mentioned the double meaning, but used ‘parsed’ in more ways. Empson sums this it in relation to the poem’s theme. up: ‘ambiguity is a phenomenon of com- Ambiguity in this usage resembles and pression’. Deletion of words for metrical/ informs the New Critics’ TENSION, IRONY, stylistic reasons leads to ambivalence, as PARADOX; it comes nearer than any of in Empson’s example from Browning: them to providing a linguistic explanation for poetic complexity and wit, for it I want to know a butcher paints, springs from the familiar resources of A baker rhymes for his pursuit... ordinary language. So does a line-break at a crucial syntactic RGF point: Analysis The purpose of analysis, If it were done, when ‘tis done, then according to William Empson, ‘is to show ‘twere well the modes of action of a poetical effect’. It were done quickly. And in the work of Empson (Seven Types Since we are disposed to assume multiple of Ambiguity, 1930) and Richards meaning in verse, we consent to read (Practical Criticism, 1929) it is a convic- in extra meanings. The leaves in tion of criticism that these effects are Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (‘yellow ...or accessible to reason, and not mysteries none, or few’) are simultaneously the reserved for silent appreciation. ‘The rea- leaves of the autumn metaphor and sons that make a line of verse likely to the poet’s writings – leaves of a book. give pleasure...are like the reasons for 8 Analysis anything else; one can reason about them’ analysis had access to the fact of the (Seven Types). Empson’s major achieve- poem, not simply to its incidentals. It ment was his demonstration that these could account for its ‘modes of action’. modes of action were capable of descrip- In fact the essential conceptual tion in terms of effects of language. The metaphors had been available to criticism conviction that the forms and meanings of since Coleridge; Romantic theories of literature are linguistically generated poetry as holistic and organic, with their gives to the business of analysis its cen- controlling analogies of plants and trees, trality in New Criticism. For the classical had supplanted the classical form–content idea of language as the dress of thought dichotomies. But so long as these vitally had for long limited literary analysis to interdependent ‘parts and whole’ were the categorization of stylistic features, unlocated except as metaphysical abstrac- the description of decorative externals. tions, their relationships remained So long as the reality of the work lay unanalysable. However, the revolutions ‘beyond’ language it had no objective in philosophy of Frege and Wittgenstein, existence, it could not be analysed. and in linguistics of Saussure, substituted Traditional stylistics concerned itself with for the ‘referential’ or ‘representational’ classification and comparison of types model of language an idea of meaning as of prosody, diction, imagery, etc. without a result of complex interaction. Criticism attempting to show how these features took the point that if the meaning of a co-operated in creating the ‘meaning’ of a word is everything it does in a particular work. The tradition of explication de texte CONTEXT, then analysis of the words of in French education, in which the ‘texte’ a poem, of their total interinanimation, often seems almost incidental to the would be nothing less than an account categorized information that is hung of the poem itself. The metaphysical about it, demonstrated the consequences abstractions which Romantic theory iden- of this dualistic form–content model of tified as the form of poetry could now be language. What is offered is what Ian located as linguistic realities, and since Watt called ‘explanation...a mere mak- language has a public existence, indepen- ing plain by spreading out’; Watt’s critical dent of the psychologies of poet or reader, analysis demands, on the other hand, they were open to analysis. ‘explication...a progressive unfolding of The analytic tradition that descended a series of literary implications’ (‘The from Richards and Empson, known in first paragraph of The Ambassadors’, England (and particularly at the University Essays in Criticism, 10, 1960). But of Cambridge) as Practical Criticism explication, or as W. K. Wimsatt refined it and in America as the NEW CRITICISM, ‘the explicitation of the implicit or the was primarily concerned with semantic interpretation of the structural and for- explorations. Its key terms – AMBIGUITY, mal, the truth of the poem under its aspect PARADOX, TENSION, gesture – emerged of coherence’ (The Verbal Icon, 1954), from a new awareness of multiplicity and had to wait upon a language theory that complexity of meaning in literature. This would abandon this dualism and redefine tradition (and its modern offshoot which ‘meaning’ as a totality, of linguistic rela- relies explicitly on the techniques and tionships (see LANGUAGE). If language in conceptual framework of linguistics: poetry could be conceived of not as the see LANGUAGE) has been attacked for its dress but as the body of meaning, then tendency to stick close to the lower levels Apocalyptic literature 9 of verbal structure; for its apparent the resurrection of the dead and the neglect of value-judgements; for its installation of a messianic kingdom. All alleged inability to account for the larger- these elements are not necessarily present scale structures of long works; for a in any one work, and it can be convenient necessary preference for short, complex, to use the term even where a deliberate highly textured lyric poems. For examples frustration of a conventional apocalyptic of structural analysis beyond purely expectation may be at issue. verbal structure, see Vladimir Propp, The Apocalyptic types characterize histor- Morphology of the Folk-Tale (1st Russian ical periods of upheaval and crisis, and edn, 1928; English trans. 1958; French interest in apocalyptic literature of the trans. of the 2nd Russian edn, 1970); past has also occurred in such periods. Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970). Similarly, critics of secular literature in See Martin Montgomery, Advanced the twentieth century became sensitized Reading Skills for Students of English to the apocalyptic elements in works not Literature (2000); Steven Cohan and Linda formally of the type, but whose language, M. Shires, Telling Stories: Theoretical particularly imagery, touches on the Analysis of Narrative Fiction (1998) themes of revelation, renovation and end- PM ing. Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967) is the most notable of Anticlimax See DÉNOUEMENT. these, using the ‘ways in which...we have imagined the ends of the world’ as a Anti-hero See HERO. taking-off point for a study of fictional Apocalyptic literature There exists a endings and fictional structures generally. body of biblical literature, canonical and For him, the literature of apocalypse is a apocryphal, conventionally called apoca- ‘radical instance’ of fiction, depending lyptic (from the Greek, meaning unveil- ‘on a concord of imaginatively recorded ing, uncovering). The Old Testament past and imaginatively predicted future’. Book of Daniel and the New Testament Awareness of apocalyptic types in fiction, Book of Revelation are the best known of he claims, has concentrated on ‘crisis, these. They are characterized by an inter- decadence and empire, and...disconfir- est in the revelation of future events, as in mation, the inevitable fate of detailed prophecy. As a kind of systematized eschatological predictions’. prophetic writing, the literature of apoca- In using apocalypse as a type of lypse takes a wide view of human history, fiction criticism may merely be using a which it schematizes and periodizes, and congenial language to define the litera- an especial interest in eschatology, in the ture of its own time – including that of ‘latter days’, the end of historical time, the past felt to be ‘relevant’ – in terms the last judgement. These revelations are acceptable to its own sense of crisis. It part of a hitherto secret knowledge. They seems also true that there has been a tend to affect an esoteric, visionary, social history of apocalyptic fictions in symbolic and fantastic scenario, a cast Anglo-American literature, for while of animals, angels, stars and numbers, apocalypse seems almost allied with which are to be understood symbolically. ‘progressive’ forces in Elizabethan times, The struggle between good and evil as in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, it is powers in the latter days of a terminal entertained later with mixed fascination period culminates in a final judgement, and horror by writers who project the 10 Aporia

Final End as an image of the abortion and thus immediately subject to the rather than the consummation of current reader’s scrutiny. It can be mere whimsi- trends of history. In his essay, ‘The end of cal display: Thackeray sometimes lapses the world’, reprinted in Errand Into The into language quaint in his own time and Wilderness (1964), Perry Miller provided irrelevant to the cast of mind of his char- not only a summary of English and acters, thus evoking a simple, ultimately American apocalyptic literature, but also an repetitious response and impeding any insight into the gradual transition in expec- probing of the more complex implications tations and reasons for the desirability of of characters and plot. In general, this typology. His focus was particularly on archaism’s tendency is to be a simplifying the period between the Elizabethan and the device: one’s experience of the language Modern and on the figures of Jonathan of one’s own time and place is of some- Edwards, ‘the greatest artist of the apo- thing richly and variously suggestive, calypse’ in America, and Edgar Allan Poe, closely related to one’s experience and whose eschatological stories pinpoint a knowledge, capable of complexity of transition in the handling of apocalyptic organization and delicate flexibility, materials, foreshadowing more modern spontaneously understandable and usable, attitudes to a world-consuming holocaust. whereas archaism refers back to a linguis- Apocalyptic writing has come to be tic or cultural system which it cannot understood in terms of writing an end point totally reconstruct, and archaic forms rather than the end of the world. The twen- may thus seem impoverished, rigid and tieth century was notable for a number of ponderous. The consistent archaism of the moments of apocalyptic writing from the Authorized Version (1611) of the Bible modernists, such as Lawrence, through the interposes a unified tone of solemnity News Apocalypse poets at mid-century, to between the varied subject-matter and the millennial pictures of destruction in a wide audience, making its response more range of writers, from Angela Carter and uniform because more uncomplex. More Martin Amis to Zadie Smith. The subject sophisticated, and richly fruitful, uses of has thus been taken up in some studies of archaic language are commonly found in ECO-CRITICISM in recent decades. canonical authors, invoking and incor- See Frank Kermode, ‘D. H. Lawrence porating the values of older literary and the Apocalyptic Types’ in Modern traditions: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Essays (1971); Arthur Edward Salmon, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot provide many Poets of the Apocalypse (1983); Morton examples. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in Archaism can arouse an often vague English Romantic Poetry (1990); David delight in the familiar but long forgotten, Seed (ed.), Imagining Apocalypse (1999); yet as it refers back to the unknown can Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (2004). also be made frightening: Thomas Mann, AMG in Doctor Faustus (1947), exploits this paradox to reveal affinities between cau- Aporia See DECONSTRUCTION. tious, conservative habits of mind and Appreciation See AESTHETICS, dangerous primitivism. Except in region- EVALUATION. alist writers, cultural archaism is not com- monly combined with consistent linguistic Archaism The use of forms whose archaism, but it too can be a simplifying obsoleteness or obsolescence is manifest device: many historical novels exploit the Atmosphere 11 reader’s unfamiliarity with the culture rise to aesthetic effects, so allowing described to give an uncomplex, idealized dissimilar works all to be classed as works and sometimes monumental and intrigu- of art yet without the disrespect to their ingly remote impression of human emo- differences that comes from concentrating tions, such as heroism, nostalgic yearning attention on some alleged metaphysical and guilt. common property. It is descriptive rather See Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: than prescriptive in so far as aesthetic Homer to Milton (1993); John N. Wall, appreciation depends on describable for- Transformations of the Word: Spenser, mal qualities (see AESTHETICS). Finally, Herbert, Vaughan (1988). such a definition is consonant with the MHP commonest use of this word in literary history, ‘Art for art’s sake’. Archetype See MYTH. The usefulness of this definition is both negative and positive. Negatively, by Aristotelian criticism See CHICAGO drastically reducing the value-connotations CRITICS. of ‘art’, it avoids that metaphysical discus- Art Like ‘good’, ‘Art’, it seems must be sion which distracts attention from more simply a commendatory word covering a concrete critical issues. Positively, by multitude of incompatible meanings. What leaving open the possibility of good, bad commends itself to one’s taste is to another or indifferent art (accordingly to the qual- distasteful, for such commendation is sub- ity of the aesthetic element) and also by jective. Nor can there be agreement about not pre-empting the possibility of factors objectively commendatory characteristics, other than ‘art’ being more pleasurable or for qualities perfectly appropriate to a important, it encourages full and varied good comic drama cannot be so to a love critical appreciation. lyric or a tragic novel. In any case com- See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion mendatory definitions are persuasive, and (1960); R. Wollheim, Art and its Objects therefore however descriptive they purport (1968); British Journal of Aesthetics; to be, they are always prescriptive, and Mieke Bal, Reading ‘Rembrandt’ (1991); thus provocative, in effect. A. S. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (2001); The pull of common usage is probably Antonella Braida and Guiliana Pieri too strong to allow this distracting com- (eds), Image and Word: Reflections of Art mendatory element to be eliminated, but and Literature (2003). perhaps the following stipulative defini- AER tion will serve useful: any work charac- Assonance See TEXTURE. terized by an obvious aesthetic element is to be deemed a work of art. This defini- Atmosphere A vague term with tion is minimally commendatory, for it diminishing currency, atmosphere is does not imply that the aesthetic element created where the overtones of the words defining a literary work as ‘art’ need be and ideas employed reinforce one its most valuable characteristic, or that all another. The paradox of ‘atmospheric’ lit- works, even of creative literature, ought to erature is that although (like almost all be works of ‘art’ as defined. It is not writing) it is linear, one word following essentialist in so far as any form, whether another, it gives an appearance of stasis. in drama, narrative or lyric, and any Such German Romantics as Brentano content in combination with it, may give and Eichendorff often use rhyme-words 12 Author closely related in emotional colouring, so to new forms of consciousness, endowed that the second rhyme-word, in recalling with powers of prophecy or moral the first, includes it; thus a progressively wisdom. This history demonstrates the all-engulfing sense of expansion is problematic relationship between writing achieved. This, combined with effects of and authorship: are all writers authors or ebb and flow as one rhyme is replaced by only some? What, in any given period, another, eliminates a risk of ‘atmospheric’ makes the difference? Nor is it a history writing, namely that it will seem aimless characterized by the simple succession of and meagrely repetitious, and sustains the one image of authorship by another: for paradox (exploited more complexly by example, the fascination with literary some authors, for example, Hardy) of a works as the product of divinely inspired movement which is no movement. genius which emerged in late eighteenth- Atmosphere is often created by the century Europe revives themes found in viewing of ordinary events from an Longinus and Plato. unusual angle, giving them an air of The history of the practice and con- mystery: in Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand cept of authorship is valuable to students Meaulnes (1913) even everyday happen- of literature because ideas and fantasies ings at school (which themselves evoke about the author have determined how we nostalgia in the reader) are mysterious read and value literary works. If we because the child’s understanding is insuf- regard literature as the product of genius, ficiently developed to work out to his own we approach it with reverence and an satisfaction how they are affecting him. expectation of revelation. Or the logic of MHP critical argument could be organized around the idea that the author is the sole Author According to common sense, or privileged arbiter of meaning. To dis- authors are people who write books. But cover the meaning of a work might be this is an activity subject to considerable regarded as equivalent to understanding historical variation, and one development what the author did intend or might have in criticism has been to attend to this vari- intended in writing it. The problem of ation: to analyse the shifting identity of how to decode the author’s INTENTIONS is the author in relation to different institu- itself the subject of extensive critical tions – the church, the court, the publish- debate. What is the relevance of bio- ing house, the university. This analysis graphical information? Can we discern includes among its concerns the effects of the author’s intentions by analysing the print technology upon authorship, and the literary work as a series of speech acts, emergence in the nineteenth century of each with an intended force? Can we authors as a distinct professional group know an author’s intention without access with legally protected rights of property to the historical context in which he or she in what they wrote. Another aspect of this wrote? What are the effects of PSYCHO- history is the changing cultural image of ANALYTIC criticism which introduces the authorship. Again the variation here is idea of unconscious motivation into an considerable, ranging from the scribe, to account of authorship? the artisan skilled in rhetoric, to the figure These questions continue to preoccupy who imitates either nature or established literary critics, testifying to the power models of excellence, to the seer who pro- of the author in critical argument and in duces forms of writing deemed equivalent the wider culture. Our contemporary Author 13 fascination with authors is long-standing, forms of quotation. Where do we find going back at least to the eighteenth Dostoevsky amid the multiple voices century when Samuel Johnson produced which make up Crime and Punishment? a classic of biographical criticism, The Where do we find Chaucer in the Lives of the English Poets (1779–81). Canterbury Tales? ROMANTIC theory introduced the analogy The impossibility of answering these between divine and literary creativity, and questions is the starting point for Roland this theological aura around authorship Barthes’s polemical essay ‘The Death of was renewed by MODERNIST accounts of the Author’. According to Barthes the the impersonality of the great writer. author is an ideological construct whose Authors have become heroic figures in purpose is to legitimate a practice of writ- modern culture: whether as rebels or reac- ing and reading which always pursues tionaries; because they write books, ‘the voice of a single, person, the author authors are expected to have wise things “confiding” in us’. Barthes proposes an to say about a whole range of political and alternative account: the text is irreducibly personal dilemmas. plural, a weave of voices or codes which But modern criticism has not simply cannot be tied to a single point of expres- underwritten the authority of authors. In a sive origin in the author. Reading is not famous essay, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ about the discovery of a single hidden (1954), the American critics Wimsatt and voice or meaning, but a production work- Beardsley issued a dictat forbidding crit- ing with the multiple codes that compose ics to refer to authorial intentions in the a text. Traditional assumptions about the analysis of literature: a literary work con- origin and the unity of a text are reversed: tained all the information necessary for The reader is the space on which all its understanding in the words on the the quotations that make up a writing page, so appeals to authorial intention are inscribed without any of them were at best irrelevant, at worst mislead- being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its ing. The argument is valuable in so far as origin but in its destination. Yet this it warns against replacing the interpreta- destination cannot any longer be per- tion of texts with an interpretation of the sonal: the reader is without history, author’s life. It founders, however, for var- biography, psychology; he is simply ious reasons: the words on the page do not that someone who holds together in a simply begin and end there, and under- single field all the traces by which the standing them requires reference to text is constituted. historical and social contexts, which are not so constant as Wimsatt and Beardsley Barthes’s stress upon the anonymity of believe. Nor can meaning be so readily the reader recalls T. S. Eliot’s earlier divorced from intention. According to account of the impersonality of the author speech act theory, to understand the in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ meaning of an utterance requires that we (1919). Barthes shifts the terms of a understand the intention of someone in Modernist poetics on to the side of the uttering it. The problem with literary texts READER; the meaning of a text is volatile, is identifying who that someone is, given varying according to the different occa- the multiple displacements of the author sions of reading and without reference to into narrator, persona, characters, state- an authority which will fix meaning. ments of traditional wisdom and other Barthes’s paradoxical transformation of 14 Autobiography authors into readers liberates us from the CREATION, DECONSTRUCTION, DIALOGIC oppressive reverence for authorial cre- STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE, READER. ativity and wisdom, but it excludes See J. Bayley, The Characters of Love important questions from the critical (1960); R. Barthes, ‘The Death of the agenda: what is it that brings a particular Author’ in Image-Music-Text (trans. 1977) person at a particular time to write? What and S/Z (1970, trans. 1975); M. Foucault, do we make of the phenomenon of origi- ‘What is an author?’ (1969) in Language, nality or of the fact that literary works Counter-Memory and Practice (1977); have stylistic signatures which enable us P. Parrinder, Authors and Authority (1977); to distinguish the work of one author from Sean Burke, Authorship: From Plato to the another? Turning authors into cults is not Postmodern – A Reader (1995). going to answer these questions, but nei- JC ther is banishing them altogether from the discourse of literary criticism. See also Autobiography See BIOGRAPHY. B

Ballad The term has three meanings of often by means of juxtaposed pictures or different scope. The widest is that of any direct speech of the persons involved: set of words for a tune. The narrowest The king sits in Dunfermline town refers to the English and Scottish tradi- Drinking the blude-red wine; tional ballad, a specific form of narrative ‘O whare will I get a skeely skipper poem which became a part of the larger To sail this new ship o’ mine?’... world of folk song. The ballad is not pecu- liar to England and Scotland, but is found Our king has written a braid letter, throughout Europe and in post-settlement And seal’d it with his hand, America. In Britain, the traditional ballad And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens, first appears in the later Middle Ages, Was walking on the strand... probably in the fifteenth century, when the There is little psychological comment, minstrels, declining in social status and and the ‘meaning’ is realized through circulation, began to carry to a wider audi- directly rendered action, and cryptic ref- ence their narrative art in folk songs based erences to the larger context of related on strong symmetrically constructed events. There is a ‘ballad form’ and a ‘bal- stories in a simplified four-line stanza. lad world’, both of supreme imaginative Then ballads were increasingly sung at interest. The traditional ballads became every level of society by non-professionals. admired literary objects in the eighteenth By the end of the seventeenth century, century, and numerous collections were emphasis had shifted to the music as the made and published from then on. The prime formative constituent and more bal- most famous is Francis J. Child’s five vol- lads used refrains, meaningless vocables umes of The English and Scottish Popular like ‘fal-lal’, common-places and formulae, Ballads (1882–98). Such study tended to ‘filler lines’ to give the singer time to treat the ballads as timeless, though later arrange the next stanza, and the peculiarly discussion, based on the invaluable effective structure known as ‘incremental work of scores of collectors, such as repetition’: Bishop Percy (Reliques of Ancient He was a braw gallant, English Poetry, 1765), Sir Walter Scott And he rade at the ring; (Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders, And the bonny Earl of Murray 1802–3) and Child himself, has begun to Oh he might have been a king! establish the evolution of style in the bal- lads. The Romantics were interested in He was a braw gallant the ballads as folk-art and monuments of And he played at the ba; the heroic past. The literary ballad, with And the bonny Earl of Murray no music, had a vogue at the end of the Was the flower among them a’. eighteenth century and for another cen- The traditional ballads as a whole have tury, the best known of such works being certain well-marked characteristics. They Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Keats’s deal with episodes of well-known stories, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. The older condensed and impersonally presented, study of ballads had the disadvantage of 16 Baroque treating ‘collected’ ballads both as written example, of the importance of rank in texts – though any written form poorly the narrative and modulations of names, represents the ‘performed’ ballad in its provide valuable material for the study of musical and dramatic strength – and as ballad tradition. American sources often fossil objects of a dead art. preserve archaic forms of European tunes, Before the end of the eighteenth and musical works are rich and distin- century the third meaning of the word was guished. The words, it has been said, are the most common: any doggerel verses set often preserved in relatively impoverished to one of several well-known tunes, such forms. An interesting reverse transplant- as ‘Packington’s Pound’. These were the ing of traditional material is to be noticed sheet ballads, broadside ballads sold in in the way modern American recordings roughly printed sheets, or stall-ballads frequently introduce Scottish and English hawked around the countryside at fairs or listeners and singers to forgotten or half- from door to door. The ballad-singer sang forgotten ballads. Indigenous American to collect customers for his wares, which ballads include broadsides of the dealt with murders, political events, prodi- Revolutionary Period and the Civil War. gies. Such ballads were ‘low-falutin’, See D. C. Fowler, A Literary History mostly realistic, irreverent, ironic, some- of the Popular Ballad (1968); M. J. C. times seditious. From this kind of produc- Hodgart, The Ballads (1950); V. de Sola tion come the miners’ ballads, work songs, Pinto and A. E. Rodway, The Common protest songs, party political attacks Muse (1950); Nicola Trott and Seamus which have had popular revival on the Perry (eds), 1800: The New Lyrical contemporary ‘folk scene’. Ballads (2001); Joseph Harris, The Ballad The European settlement of America and Oral Literature (1991); Susan Gilbert, has also produced large bodies of distinc- Ballad (2005). tive ballads in the New World, particularly AMR in the United States. The ballads in English consist either of transplanted Baroque A term denoting a distinctive traditional ballads which successive style deeply characteristic of the seven- waves of immigrants, to Virginia in the teenth century, long since firmly estab- seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for lished for critics of art and music, whose example, have taken with them, or of application to literature has been problem- indigenous ballads which have been and atic and controversial. However, it has still are produced among West Virginian offered possibilities for cultural analysis. miners, the cowboys of the South West Like ROMANTICISM, it submits to an enor- or African Americans. Versions of tradi- mous number of seemingly disconnected tional ballads have been collected in the and even contradictory usages, as phrases remoter parts and more isolated commu- like ‘Baroque grandeur’, ‘Baroque eccen- nities of the United States, such as portions tricity’, ‘Baroque mysticism’, ‘Baroque of the Atlantic coast and the Central exuberance’ attest; it is even more poly- West, or the mountain people of the morphously perverse in its frequent appear- Appalachians, and these have been an ances outside the seventeenth century in important source for British as well as labels like ‘The Contemporary Baroque’. American ballad scholars. The changes Art historians have generally agreed to which took place in the texts by trans- regard the Baroque as the third Renais- mission in America, modifications, for sance style, setting in around 1600, with Baroque 17 its centre in Rome and its quintessential might more fruitfully be considered in representative in Bernini, and with impor- relation to the art of Parmigianino or tant Catholic and post-tridentine tenden- Giulio Romano. cies. Musicologists associate the Baroque Besides setting a challenge of an inter- with the advent of Monteverdi, the birth disciplinary nature, the use of the word of operatic recitative and concertante baroque outside the seventeenth-century style, and with figured bass. The essential context involves other problems that features of the works of art produced can reach out as far as the theory of history. perhaps best be suggested in a short space Some critics (e.g. Hauser, Mannerism, by means of semantic clusters, obviously 1965) have seen ‘Baroque’ as a recurrent shading into each other, with appropriate phenomenon, a constant tendency of the illustrations: solidity, massiveness, size, human spirit. This requires very cautious intimidation (St Peter’s, Rome); orna- handling indeed; if one can posit a ment, playfulness, wit, fancifulness ‘Baroque spirit’ it seems most fruitful to (Bavarian and Austrian Baroque); mysti- regard it as historically activated, as a last cism, ecstasy, inwardness, transcendence energetic assertion of the Renaissance (Bernini’s St Teresa); drama, human faith in the fundamental interconnected- warmth, fleshiness (the paintings of ness of phenomena – one that is conveyed Caravaggio); illusion, trompe l’oeil (the above all in a fleshly solidity of realiza- Heaven Room in Burghley House). It is tion, accessible to a wider audience important to add, as a further defining than were the arcanae of Florentine feature, that Baroque works of art unify, neo-Platonists. or attempt to unify, such elements in In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a simple, massive organization: solidity contemporary vogue of Baroque imitation carries ornament, for instance, rather and pastiche among writers preoccupied than being swamped by it (consider with illusion and sham, such as John Baroque columns, or the function of the Barth, Iris Murdoch and Gunther Grass. figured bass in Bach). In many ways, however, this was failed The most fruitful approach to the rela- Baroque – the inflated or sentimental tions between literature and other arts is rhetoric that generated, for instance, the likely to be one that attempts to ‘translate’ stylistic conventions of religious kitsch – the stylistic elements of one art form into that fascinated and stimulated the ironic those of another. To give examples: it use of the self-evidently bad or hollow. seems legitimate and useful to regard the The best Baroque art – the work of frequent literary use of oxymoron and Bernini, Rembrandt, Milton, Monteverdi, paradox in the seventeenth century as a Bach – is of a different order of intensity counterpart to the dramatic use of and grandeur. chiaroscuro in Baroque painting, or to see See L. L. Martz, The Wit of Love a correspondence between the ‘play (1969); W. Sypher, Four Stages within a play’ form in seventeenth- of Renaissance Style (1955); Joseph century drama and the construction of M. Levine, Between the Ancients and the Bernini’s St Teresa chapel. In the case Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration of Baroque, it is helpful to be also aware England (1999); J. Douglas Canfield, of the term MANNERISM. The features of The Baroque in Neoclassical Literature Donne’s poetry, for instance, that have (2003). sometimes been referred to as ‘Baroque’ MAH 18 Belief

Belief Since I. A. Richards’s Principles be sceptical, calling both in question and of Literary Criticism (1924), critics have requiring a complex, questioning response. usually been wary of detailed explo- Some (e.g. Céline) display an innocuous- rations into reader psychology: ‘willing ness which at first creates uncritical belief suspension of disbelief’ (Coleridge) is but of whose implications the reader now more often alluded to than investi- becomes increasingly suspicious. Others, gated. It implies a contract between by undermining confidence in the world author and reader: the reader is encour- presented, induce us to transfer our belief aged to imagine that what is portrayed is to the narrator or author as the only real or possible rather than remain reliable authority. querulously aware of its fictionality and See Michael Bell, Literature, impossibility, and hopes thereby to attain Modernism and Myth: Belief and satisfactions and discoveries for which Responsibility in the Twentieth Century involvement, not distance, is required. (1997); Volney P. Gay, Joy and the Total delusion is rarely achieved (we do Objects of Psychoanalysis: Literature, not rush on stage to whisper in the tragic Belief and Neurosis (2001). hero’s ear) and would probably be MHP psychologically damaging: literature may help us to recognize and explore our Bildungsroman Often literally trans- fantasies without giving way to them. lated as a ‘novel of growth’ the term The means by which belief is encour- applies more broadly to fiction detailing aged are diverse. Perhaps the best known personal development or educational mat- is verisimilitude, an attempt to satisfy even uration. As a literary genre, the form orig- the rational, sceptical reader that the events inated in Germany towards the end of and characters portrayed is very possible the eighteenth century and Johann (e.g. typical of a certain milieu or recurrent Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s human tendencies). Other means are less Apprenticeship (1795–6) is commonly rational, such as the non-intellectual regarded as the prototype. Goethe’s atten- appeal of intellectual ideas, sometimes tion to the gradual growth to self-awareness reinforced by incidental sensuous and of his protagonist depends on a harmonious motor attractiveness (e.g. the power, lilt negotiation of interior and exterior self- and sound-quality of Hugo’s verse is hoods, a reconciliation that involves the sometimes seen as giving convincingness balancing of social role with individual to his ideas). Another, frequent in tragedy fulfilment. Crucial to that holistic rap- and linked to wish-fulfilment, is an appeal prochement is the educative journey that to the desire to believe in human dignity the hero undergoes: completion through and value. enlightenment has been, from its earliest A reader’s willingness to believe days, a cornerstone of the Bildungsroman. provides various possibilities for manipu- The focus on the integration of the self lating responses. Some writers (e.g. and society made the genre a particularly Arnim and Hoffmann in their use of apposite embodiment of bourgeois capi- ‘Romantic irony’, and many comic novel- talistic values and the apotheosis of the ists in their alternations of sympathy and form in the mid-nineteenth century mocking distance) use techniques which reflects both the wide-ranging social destroy belief, or which continually play impacts of revolutionary and industrial off our wish to believe against our wish to histories and the difficulties of positioning Bildungsroman 19 subjectivity within this rapidly changing the growth to emotional maturity of geo-political environment. In Britain, the Paul Morel against the backdrop of Bildungsroman became synonymous with financial hardship, industrial pragmatism a certain sense of social dislocation as is and social upheaval. The modernist discernible in some classic accounts Bildungsroman enabled the presentation of problematic identity and stifled indi- of an apolitical consciousness focalized viduation, such as Charles Dickens’s on self-knowledge and exploration. It lent David Copperfield (1850) and, Great itself particularly to the articulation of Expectations (1861) and Samuel Butler’s contemporary women’s experiences, but The Way of All Flesh (1903). George rather than showing psychosocial integra- Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2) typifies the tion, implied the impossibility of female Victorian embracing of the genre as an individuation under the auspices of a ambivalent site of psychosocial interac- patriarchal hegemony. Both Virginia tion. The story of the idealistic Dorothea Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) and May Brooke’s relationships with the pedantic Sinclair’s The Life and Death of Harriett Casaubon, the artistic Will Laidslaw and Frean (1922) declare female growth the ambitious Tertius Lydgate revolve impractical through the channels of con- around the political manoeuvrings of the ventional marriage and domesticity. The years preceding the Reform Act of 1832. development of the self as a creative and Social, economic, scientific and religious artistic force, so intrinsic to modernism’s orthodoxies are brought into a jarring denunciation of the dogmatism of sci- conflict that reveals not just the web of ence, gives the form a sub-generic life in societal connections but also a nation the shape of the Künstlerroman (‘novel of in a process of transition. Elsewhere in the artist’), which addresses the struggle Europe, the nineteenth century saw the to fulfil an artistic potential. James publication of Bildungsromane more Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young overtly transgressive in the arenas of Man (1916) is perhaps the most cele- sexuality and sexual politics. Gustave brated incarnation of this offshoot of the Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Bildungsroman but Thomas Mann’s Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1874–6) Doktor Faustus (1947) is also a pertinent present women as the models of example of the form. psychological growth whose development Postmodernism’s attention to the sup- intrinsically involves the fulfilment of a pressed narratives of marginalized groups sexualized subjectivity, a self-realization has further expanded the envisioning that flies in the face of social convention. potential of the Bildungsroman. Feminist Twentieth-century interpretations of interpretations have been joined by gay the genre have seen its subversion, frag- and lesbian rewritings, such as Jeannette mentation and reinvention but have not Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only diminished its compelling narrative Fruit (1985) and Alan Hollinghurst’s The importance. Modernism’s addiction to the Swimming-Pool Library (1988) in an revelation of the interior life tended to open renunciation of the traditionally focus attention away from the social inter- conservative values of the genre. Non- action of the individual and towards the white Bildungsromane, such as Chinua ineffability of the fractured self. One Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and notable exception is D. H. Lawrence’s J. M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Sons and Lovers (1913), which charts Michael K. (1983) explore the experience 20 Biography of self-realization under the oppressive best-known of all perhaps, Aubrey’s regimes of political intolerance, whilst Minutes of Lives which he began collect- Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children ing in the 1660s and in which he persisted (1981) offers a transgressive undermining till his death. It is in Aubrey that we first by problematizing the very notion of iden- hear the real human voice commenting tity. Postmodernism’s cynicism towards with a sly smugness, a gossipy humour fixed and stable subjectivity constitutes a and a delight in the oddity of human serious ideological blow to the relevance of nature on the affairs and misalliances of the Bildungsroman, but rather than dis- those he minuted. But it is in the eigh- pense with the genre altogether, contempo- teenth century and with Dr Johnson’s rary writers appear intent on redeveloping Lives of the Poets (1779–81) that the form it for the twenty-first century. is established beyond a doubt with his See Michael Beddow, The Fiction of claim for its recognition as a literary form Humanity: Studies in the Bildungsroman in its own right and his insistence on its from Wieland to Thomas Mann (1982); peculiar virtue being that it alone of liter- Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: ary forms seeks to tell the literal, unvar- The Bildungsroman in European Culture nished truth. It was fitting that the (1987); Martin Swales, The German founder of the form should be repaid by Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse becoming the subject of what is perhaps (1978); Marc Redfield, Phantom the best known of all biographies, Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791). Bildungsroman (1996). In the nineteenth century, biography DL continued to flourish (e.g. Lockhart’s Life of Scott (1837, 1838), Gilchrist’s Life of Biography In post-classical Europe Blake (1863)) but now it was also show- the literary recording of people’s lives ing its potential influence on the struc- begins with the search, for example, in tures of fiction. Wordsworth’s Prelude, the Lives of the Saints and the stories of the novels of Dickens and those of the the rise and fall of princes. Medieval his- Brontës all show in various ways the inti- torians like Geoffrey of Monmouth, macy which grew up between experience Matthew Paris and others, bring a concern and invention during and after the with human failings and strengths to their Romantic period. This process continued histories which often overrides their until the end of the century, culminating objectivity. But it is not until the sixteenth perhaps in that most literary of biogra- century that the first recognizable biogra- phies, Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) and phies appear. Cardinal Morton’s Life of that most biographical of novels, Butler’s Richard III (1513?), wrongly attributed to The Way of All Flesh (1903). But if the Thomas More; Roper’s Life of More hybrids flourished so did the thing itself, (1535?); and Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1554–7) are variously claimed as the (1918) established the standards both in first true biography, though no one could reasoned objectivity and in witty skill for claim that the genre was established in the all those who were to follow him. The eyes of a readership. The seventeenth modern biography was established. century saw Bacon’s Life of Henry VIII The main claim of modern biogra- (1621), Walton’s Lives (1640–78) and, phers has been an objectivity towards the Biography 21 chosen subject, asserting that by choosing but a means of defining identity. The the form they deal in fact, not fiction. distinction between novel and autobiogra- This claim may seem dubious if we phy becomes almost meaningless in this compare the methods and presuppositions context. A novel like Ralph Ellison’s with the autobiographer, who also claims Invisible Man (1965) and an autobiog- to tell the whole truth and nothing but raphy like J. P. Clark’s America, Their the truth. (Vladimir Nabokov has great America (1964) are united beyond their fun with this claim in his autobiography different forms in a single gesture of Speak Memory, 1966.) A much more passionate self-exposure. naïve judgement emerges from H. G. Work in England began to show this Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography influence too: Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s (1934) when he wishes the novel could Book (1960) and Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb more closely resemble the biography Culture (1968) continued a tradition since the latter is more ‘truthful’: ‘Who whose roots run back through Kerouac to would read a novel if we were permitted Henry Miller. This trend has continued in to write biography all out?’ This com- the extension of the ‘hybrid’ book whose pletely begs the question of the selection format disdains to answer the query, fact and presentation of the material; it pre- or fiction? supposes that the only limitations to Modern biography is now quite likely biographers’ truth telling are the range of to acknowledge a degree of artifice in its their knowledge and licence of their soci- writing, with some authors showing an ety to publish it. It ignores the central imaginative, inventive and speculative issue of what kind of reality language can approach to literary biography in such sustain. works as Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990) In the mid-twentieth century, a wide and D. J. Taylor’s Thackeray (1999). The interest was shown in the interchangeabil- late twentieth century was also notable for ity of fictional and documentary tech- an increase in a ‘life-writing’ approach niques. Novelists experimented with to fiction and non-fiction. Such books ‘factual subjects’ (e.g. Truman Capote’s use the autobiographical mode and are In Cold Blood, 1966), while social scien- written in a meditative, confessional tists went to the novel for structures which style, while their authors often seek nei- enabled them to relate patterns of behav- ther to equate the narrator with them- iour not amenable to the sequential logic selves nor to pretend that the narrator is of analytic prose discourse (e.g. Oscar simply a fictional character. Books in this Lewis, The Children of Sanchez, 1962). mode range from Martin Amis’s literary The traditional distinctions between bio- ‘autobiography’ Experience (2000) to graphy, personal history (diary/confession) semi-autobiographical novels such as and novel (especially first-person narra- V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival tive and/or tape-recorded novels) begin to (1987). Feminist critics have also attacked be questioned. For writers in African the traditional emphases of biographical countries (Achebe, Ngugi, Soyinka) and and autobiographical writing for their in Negro American circles (Baldwin, masculinist stresses on action and John Williams, Jean Tooner) autobio- public recognition over interpersonal graphical art is not a device for summing relationships and reproductive life. up the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime See also FICTION, NOVEL. 22 Burlesque

See Leon Edel, Literary Biography Relating Narrative (2000); Liz Stanley, (1957); Paul Murray Kendall, The Art of The Auto/biographical: Theory and Biography (1965); H. G. Nicholson, The Practice of Feminist Auto/biography Development of English Biography (1992). (1959); Lytton Strachey, Biographical GG Essays (modern collection, 1969); Adriana Cavarero (Paul Kottman, trans.), Burlesque See PARODY. C

Cacophony See TEXTURE. murder of a blood relation) is shown, through the structure of discovery and Caricature See PARODY. recognition, and the hero’s subsequent Carnival See DIALOGIC STRUCTURE. remorse, to be in some measure unde- served. So catharsis is the purification of Catastrophe See DÉNOUEMENT, DRAMA. the hero which enables us to go beyond Catharsis The most disputed part of fear, our horror at the events, to pity born Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is his of understanding; the poet’s structure statement that it is an action ‘through pity leads our reason to judge our emotion. and fear effecting a catharsis of these See also PLOT, TRAGEDY. emotions’. Traditionally catharsis is See Humphry House, Aristotle’s rendered as ‘purgation’ and refers to the ‘Poetics’ (1956); A. K. Abdulla, Catharsis psychological effect of tragedy on the in Literature (1985); Dana F. Sutton, audience. Against Plato’s condemna- The Catharsis of Comedy: Greek Studies: tion of art for unhealthily stimulating Interdisciplinary Approaches (1994). emotions which should be suppressed, PM Aristotle argues that audiences are not Cento(nism) See PASTICHE. inflamed or depressed by the spectacle of suffering in tragedy, but in some way Character The fictional representation released. Our subjective, potentially of a person, which is likely to change, morbid, emotions are extended outward, both as a presence in literature and as an through pity for the tragic hero, in an object of critical attention, much as it enlargement, a leading out, of the soul changes in society. Ideas of the place of (psychogogia). So tragedy moves us the human in the social order, of human towards psychic harmony. A related, but individuality and self-determination, less psychological, interpretation puts clearly shift historically; and this is catharsis into the context of Aristotle’s often mimed in literature by the relation argument that the pleasure peculiar to of characters to actions or webs of story. tragedy arises from the fact that our The idea of character often attaches, emotion is authorized and released by an therefore, to the personalizing or human- intellectually conditioned structure of izing dimension of literature; thus natu- action. In fiction, unlike reality, we feel ralism, which tends to create plots in the emotion and see its place in a which characters are not self-determining sequence of probability and necessity. agents but in ironic relationships to larger Alternatively catharsis may be seen, as sequences of force, seems a remarkably by G. Else (Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, 1957), impersonal writing. Yet, individual iden- not as the end result, but as a process tity is often partly an attribute of social operating through the ‘structure of interaction, of the play of the social drama; events’ which purifies, not the audience, this too is mimed in the dramatic char- but the events themselves. The tragic acter of much literature. In plays the hero’s pollution (typically from the paradox is compounded by the fact that 24 Character characters are not simply represented characters in the Aristotelian sense verbally but impersonated by actors – (i.e. detailed figures with their own a situation often used (as in much motives and capacity for distinctive Shakespearean drama) to explore the para- speech and independent action); some are doxes of being or identity themselves. enabling aspects of story, minor figures, If the idea of character undergoes stereotypes; there are some to whose variation in different phases of literature, perceptions we give credence (from so it does in criticism. Neo-classical criti- poetic speakers to characters like Anne cism tends to interpret characters as rep- Elliot in Persuasion) and some we resentatives of general human types and regard as a contextual society; some who roles; romantic, to isolate and humanize partake in and are changed in the action them (see A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean (heroes, protagonists) and confidantes or Tragedy, 1904) and even separate them devices. Literature is dramatic as well from the surrounding fictional determi- as personal; and the dramatic play of nants or dramatic design as ‘living’ peo- characters in a sequence frequently ple; modern, to regard them as humanized involves various levels of aesthetic outcroppings from some larger verbal impersonality. Hence there are always design. ‘Characters’ are by definition in variables of closeness to and distance determined contexts (i.e. they are parts of from them (a fact which has enabled a literary sequence, involved in a plot), much Shakespearean criticism). The com- and can hence arouse liberal issues about plex of impersonation, role and mask; the the individualism of selves: as happened complex of the personality and imperson- in the 1960s (in, for example, John ality of identity or of the dimensions of Bayley, The Characters of Love, 1960 and the unconscious; the complex of that W. J. Harvey, Character and the Novel, spectrum running from character as sepa- 1965) where an intrinsic association rate existence to character as qualities, between humanist realism and literature moral attributes: all of these have been was suggested, and the loss in fiction of essential areas of exploration for drama, what Iris Murdoch called ‘the difficulty poetry, fiction. and complexity of the moral life and the ‘Character’ has perhaps been the most opacity of persons’ explored. Indeed ‘lib- mimetic term in the critical vocabulary, eral’ character was a central aspect of and hence one of the most difficult to artistic attention: hence, perhaps, Henry contain within the fictional environment; James’s attempt (in parallel to that of his yet, it is an essential condition of fictional character Ralph Touchett) to set Isobel existence that a character is so contained. Archer ‘free’ in The Portrait of a Lady. In this sense the representation of persons Many fictional actions were in this sense in literature is a simultaneous process of portraits, aspects of the tendency of liter- their humanization and their dehumaniza- ature to personalize experience, in which tion. See also DIALOGIC STRUCTURE, HERO, the following out of the growth of a NARRATIVE. character was a primary cause of the See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of work, the basis of its form. Criticism (1957); Erving Goffman, The But (as Henry James indicated) there Presentation of Self in Everyday Life are characters and characters in fiction; (1959); Leo Lowenthal, Literature and the we recognize some as of the centre and Image of Man (1957); Ortega y Gasset, others as of the circumference. Some are The Dehumanisation of Art (1948). Chicago critics 25

The concept of ‘character’ came under or dramatic forms. What distinguished attack for methodological and ideological ‘Chicago’ theory was that it was holistic reasons in STRUCTURALIST and POST- (concerned with the complete, dynamic STRUCTURALIST theory. In the work of structure of works) and typificatory (con- Roland Barthes, for example, we find cerned to identify general kinds or ‘character’ dispersed into the constitutive species of works). It is thus that it was ‘indices’ or ‘semes’ of narrative dis- neo-Aristotelian: following Aristotle’s course. See Barthes, ‘Introduction to the ideal of a poetics always being derived structural analysis of narratives’ (1966), from existing works, it was empirically trans. in Image-Music-Text (1977) and plural, regarding criticism as secondary S/Z (1970, trans. 1975). Representative of analysis, and so continually opened by a more radical critique of this humanistic the ever-growing variety of literature. notion is Cixous, ‘The character of “char- Neo-Aristotelian poetics goes beyond acter” ’, New Literary History, 5 (1978). the Aristotelian base to the extent that it See John V. Knapp, Literary Character draws on a vastly larger and more various (1993); Robert Higbie, Character and literary corpus than Aristotle knew. Structure in the English Novel (1989). The neo-Aristotelian attitude in MSB criticism was this: critical discourse, ostensibly a dialogue, actually conceals a Chicago critics A group of critics, multitude of differing presumptions about literary scholars and philosophers who the genesis, nature and effect of a poem came together first at the University of (i.e. any fiction) and sees it according to a Chicago in the mid-1930s; included wide variety of metaphors and analogies, R. S. Crane, W. R. Keast, Richard often derived from extra-literary schemes McKeon, Norman Maclean, Elder Olson of knowledge, and often dependent on and Bernard Weinberg; are best known self-invigorating dialectical pairs (form– through the collective volume Critics content, tenor–vehicle, structure–texture) and Criticism (1952); and have had a which are at best local expedients of com- continuing influence on criticism. Their position rather than central features of contribution to literary study lies in the artistic ordering. For critical dialogue, we philosophical clarity with which they have to know what kind of thing a poem attempted two main tasks. One was a is, to have a poetics based on the nature of close analysis, historical and synchronic, the object. Hence the need for a pluraliz- of criticism itself, to find out the kind of able and pragmatic poetics which is still a thing it was and the kind of thing it was poetics capable of emerging with general studying; the second was an attempt to principles, a responsive theory of parts derive from that analysis a usable, coher- which are capable of creating concrete ent poetics. Participating in the general wholes in the given case, but will not tendency of modern American criticism predetermine the basis of coherence towards theory (as compared with the according to prescriptive assumption. The English tendency towards critical prag- neo-Aristotelian poetics turns primarily matism), these critics dissented from on the notion of plot as a complex of several NEW CRITICAL emphases – stress matter and means: the basis of unifying on symbolism, paradox and the iconic coherence which has reference both to nature of literature and the pre-eminent composition, to significant authorial concern with lyric rather than narrative choice, and the range of matters imitated. 26 Chorus

The result is a remarkably sophisticated choruses also exist (e.g. Norton and notion of the relation of parts to wholes – Sackville’s Gorboduc). Milton (Samson one of the most promising modern bases Agonistes), Racine (Esther, Athalie) and for deriving a literary (as opposed to a in the nineteenth century, Swinburne linguistically or scientifically based) (Atalanta in Calydon, Erectheus) use it in ontology. The risk is that the approach can an attempt to revive or imitate the spirit become a ponderous applied method and procedures of the Greek theatre. Rare rather than a critical sympathy; it led to in twentieth-century drama, it appears in some rather heavy works (Sheldon Sacks, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, and in Fiction and the Shape of Belief, 1964) as The Family Reunion, where the cast itself well as more famous critical endeavours assumes the role of chorus. But it (Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of survives in opera. Fiction, 1961). Crane, especially in The Interpretations of the nature and func- Languages of Criticism and the Structure tion of the chorus vary. A. W. Schiegel of Poetry (1953) and some essays in The considered it the ‘idealized spectator’. Idea of the Humanities (1966), was Nietzsche, who attacked the democratic the best exemplar; also see Elder Olson, conception of the chorus as representing The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (1962) the populace over and against the noble and Tragedy and the Theory of Drama realm of the play, maintained that it posits (1961) and Bernard Weinberg, History a reality set apart from quotidian reality, of Literary Criticism in the Italian affirming the timeless, indestructible Renaissance (1961). For an unsympa- force of Nature. English critics, such as thetic view see W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, The Lowes Dickinson and Gilbert Murray, Verbal Icon (1954), 41–65. pointed out that through the chorus the MSB poets could speak in their own person and impose upon the whole tragedy any tone Chorus A band of dancers and singers they desired. at the festivals of the gods; also, their See Reginald William Boteler Burton, song. According to Aristotle, Greek The Chorus in Sophocles’ Tragedies tragedy evolved from the choric song of (1980); Cynthia P. Gardiner, The the Dithyramb. Incorporated in fifth- Sophoclean Chorus: A Study of Character century drama, the chorus, male or and Function (1994). female, represents the voice of a collec- NZ tive personality commenting on events and interpreting the moral and religious Classic Matthew Arnold, in The Study wisdom of the play. In Aeschylus, it still of Poetry, says that ‘the true and right has some direct influence on the action. meaning of the word classic, classical, is With Euripides, who curtailed its func- that the work in question belongs to the tion, it loses some of its mythic solemnity class of the very best’; and as T. S. Eliot but takes on a new lyrical beauty. In post- observed (What is a Classic?) classic Euripidean tragedy, it apparently became status can be known ‘only by hindsight mere ornamental interlude. and in historical perspective’. A critic for In later drama, the chorus was never whom the term classic is important is to regain its original significance. In likely to be a conserver of the canons of Elizabethan tragedy, it is sometimes art: and the scholars of Alexandria who reduced to a single actor, but larger invented the classic status of earlier Greek Classic 27 literature held it fast in an elaborate mesh (who defined the classical as the healthy, of formal rules which they then tried the romantic as the sick) served to check to use as the basis of their own work, the individualistic aesthetics of romantic thus ensuring its own classic status. The conceptions of ‘genius’. Pushkin’s work Romans, inheriting this classificatory displays a classicism of this kind, often system of rhetorical terms, based their manifesting itself through SATIRE, as own upon them and reinforced the ‘clas- in the case of much eighteenth-century sic’ status of Greek literature, which they neo-classical writing. The revolt of many imitated with a recurrent sense of inferi- twentieth-century writers against their ority. For us ‘the classics’ means first the late romantic predecessors either enlisted literature of both Greece and Rome: but the literature of classical antiquity as an ‘a classic’ is nowadays likely to signify a aid to objectivity or universality (Joyce’s work about the status of which there is use of Homer in Ulysses, or Pound’s of general agreement, often unenthusiastic Sextus Propertius) or contained lyric (Arnold perhaps used the term thus when sensibility within the disciplined forms of he called Dryden and Pope ‘classics of a deliberate doctrine of classical imper- our prose’). A turning-point in the con- sonality. Eliot’s theory of the OBJECTIVE ception of classic status may have CORRELATIVE is neo-classical in this sense, occurred in the neo-classical eighteenth as is his insistence on the separation in century when deference to the rules of great literature of the man who suffers rhetoric, enshrined in the much-imitated from the mind which creates. A neo- Ars Poetica of Horace and in Aristotle’s classicism of this kind also underlies Poetics and sustaining an aristocratic IMAGIST theory and practice. It was Eliot’s culture, gave way to that sense of cultural elaboration of this new classicism into diffusion that enabled Dr Johnson to a Virgilian absolutism and orthodoxy invoke the general admiration for Gray’s extending beyond the frontiers of litera- ‘Elegy’ as real evidence of its excellence. ture that prompted D. H. Lawrence’s Since Arnold’s time the term classic has expostulation that ‘This classiosity is lost effectiveness in proportion as moral bunkum, and still more cowardice’ criticism has waned. Where there is no (Collected Letters, p. 753); and it is true critical consensus or (in Johnson’s phrase) that such neo-classical phenomena as ‘common pursuit of true judgement’ the neo-Aristotelianism in criticism run term is of doubtful use. Eliot, in What is a deliberately counter to the eclecticism of Classic? cites ‘a very interesting book the culture they spring from, rather than called A Guide to the Classics which tells constituting an authoritative definition of you how to pick the Derby winner’: and literary norms (as did the neo-classicism his own argument for the classic status of of Dryden, Pope and Boileau). Such phe- Virgil is clearly shaped by extra-literary nomena amount in essence to a renewed concerns. In general the term is too read- emphasis on the importance of style and ily used as a substitute for criticism, and technique. to endorse received judgements. See Matthew Arnold, Essays in Nevertheless an impulse towards Criticism, Second Series (1888); classicism as fostering the virtues of for- T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (3rd edn, mal discipline, impersonality, objectivity, 1951); T. S. Eliot, What is a Classic? and the eschewal of the eccentric and self- (1945); H. M. Peyre, Que’st-ce que le indulgent has since the time of Goethe classicisme? (1933); S. Vines, The Course 28 Closure of English Classicism (1930); Italo Rapidity can also be exploited more Calvino, Why Read the Classics? (2000). positively. If we are made to associate GMH things which at first seemed dissimilar, the enjoyment of comedy can become Closure See DECONSTRUCTION. more than an exercise in self-indulgence. Code See CREATION, SEMIOTICS. A comic dramatist may choose simply to indulge our preconceptions of the comic: Cohesion See DISCOURSE. those who watch a third Whitehall farce Comedy Arouses and vicariously know from the previous two exactly what satisfies the human instinct for mischief. forms of enjoyment to expect. But the The playing of tricks on unsuspecting comic dramatist may also aim to extend victims, whether by other characters (e.g. our awareness of comedy, so that we see Palaestrio in Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus) or analogies between what we regard as quirks of chance (e.g. Goldoni’s I due ridiculous and what previously we Gemelli veneziani) or both, recurs contin- regarded as having value. The effect of ually in comedy. The tendency to derive this may sometimes be to blur distinctions delight from watching characters who (e.g. Aristophanes, in The Clouds, falsely come to find situations difficult and equates Socrates’s style of philosophy problematical (although to the audience with that of the sophists); at other times they are clear and simple) can go beyond self-seeking and self-adulation can be mischief and draw on more dubious revealed behind an impressive exterior emotions, such as delight in sadistic and (Molière’s treatment of a hypocrite in voyeuristic observation of another’s dis- Tartuffe, and Kleist’s of a village magis- comfiture. A situation which to a comic trate in Der zerbrochene Krug, illustrate character seems dangerous (likely to ways in which respected social roles can erode or destroy self-esteem, comfort, be manipulated and misused). Comedy in amatory adventures or worldly success), itself is thus neither morally useful nor but which implies no great threat to the immoral: it can perpetuate and extend audience or humanity in general, is a misconceptions as well as ridicule them. typical comic situation. Indeed, one char- Sometimes, however, dramatists use the acteristic of comedy (especially of comic irresponsible instinctual speed of comedy drama, since it is frequently enacted at to lead the audience to a more complex speed) is its ability to blur the distinction intellectual awareness. Besides manipu- between harmless mischievous enjoyment lating audience responses, many comic and sado-voyeuristic satisfaction. When writers have developed various devices (as frequently in Molière) a master beats for making us conscious that manipula- his servant, or when a fop is humiliated in tions of various sorts are taking place and a Restoration comedy, our amusement is roles being adopted: the use of disguise spontaneous and unreflecting. This casts and masks is an obvious example (Love’s doubt on the supposedly intellectual and Labour’s Lost). unemotional appeal of comedy which, Such awareness of complexities, when according to some, derives from the it occurs, is normally available only to the absence of any deep sympathy and the audience; rarely does it leave an imprint distance which comedy sets up between of uneasiness on the language of the characters and audience. The tempo plays. The language of comedy is fluent leaves us no time to puzzle over our and articulate: characters do not feel a reactions and motives. need to develop exploratory, stretching Comparative literature 29 uses of language to account for themselves part of the literary critic’s analytic and and the world around them, but are satis- evaluative process: in discussing one fied that the relationships between them work, critics frequently have in mind, and the world are simple and compre- and almost as frequently appeal to, works hensible. Unlike tragic heroes, comic in the same or another language. Com- characters do not face up to the task of parative literature systematically extends reconciling inconsistencies in their own this latter tendency, aiming to enhance nature (Harpagon, in Molière’s L’Avare, awareness of the qualities of one work by feels no discrepancy between his selfish using the products of another linguistic avarice and his desire to marry an emo- culture as an illuminating context; or tionally lively young woman). Comic studying some broad topic or theme as it characters are, however, usually more is realized (‘transformed’) in the litera- than willing to face up to the task of tures of different languages. It is worth defending themselves, particularly in the insisting on comparative literature’s kin- cut-and-thrust of dramatic dialogue. Even ship with criticism in general, for there is comic butts share this articulateness: they evidently a danger that its exponents may may be fools, but they are normally seek to argue an unnatural distinctiveness capable of speaking the same language as in their activities (this urge to establish a their more perspicacious opponents distinct identity is the source of many (e.g. the language of abuse in Molière or unfruitfully abstract justifications of the language of pun and conceit in comparative literature); and on the other Shakespeare). Comic dialogue is fre- hand a danger that its opponents may quently a battle which needs evenly bal- regard the discipline as nothing more anced opponents to sustain its momentum. than demonstration of ‘affinities’ and With dialogue and characterization, as ‘influences’ among different literatures – with other aspects of comedy, it is per- an activity which is not critical at all, haps by examining an author’s capacity to belonging rather to the categorizing spirit generate pace, and the repetitiveness of literary history. or increasing subtlety of the ways in Comparative literature is often which writers exploit it, that one can best discussed as if it were analogous with arrive at an assessment of them as comic comparative philology or comparative dramatists. See also FARCE. religion: but it lacks, fortunately or unfor- See Henri Bergson, Le Rire (1899); tunately, the academic establishment of Maurice Charney, Comedy High and Low these disciplines. The idea that a work of (1978); Robert W. Corrigan (ed.), Comedy: literature yields a richer significance Meaning and Form (1965); Paul Lauter when placed alongside another, each (ed.), Theories of Comedy (1964); Elder serving as a way of talking about the Olson, The Theory of Comedy (1968); other, has more to do with the approaches Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys: An of NEW CRITICISM, and with Eliot’s asser- Essay on the Theory and Practice of tion that ‘comparison and analysis are the Comedy (1994); Ronald P. Draper, chief tools of the critic’, than with tradi- Shakespeare: The Comedies (2000). tional literary scholarship, since intrinsic MHP criteria of value help to shape such com- parisons. This is not to deny, of course, Comedy of manners See MANNERS. that an imposing family tree is available Comparative literature Techniques to show how a shared European culture in of comparison have formed a common medieval times (and later) took for 30 Comparative literature granted what must now be painfully Morphology of the Folk-Tale, first recreated: a culture in which to consider published 1928, trans. 1958) to describe Chaucer, for instance, only in an English the large metamorphoses undergone by context would have seemed as senseless certain themes or topoi in folk narratives, as to explain him away by reference to his when it became clear to him that it was French or Italian sources. On the world- unproductive to compare (or indeed to historical showing the nationalist nine- describe) ‘images’ or ‘characters’ – local teenth century and the critical aftermath, and partial phenomena. He discovered stressing the need for a high degree of that one tale about a rabbit, for instance, linguistic and cultural inwardness on might be radically different from another the part of the reader – who cannot, the such: but that one could compare tales in argument goes, be expected to attain this terms of patterns of activities, what one in a foreign culture except in unusual might call ‘fields’, generated by the topos circumstances – can be seen as a Romantic as it underwent changes of role and aberration, wrongly at odds with the relationship: its morphology, in fact. It is internationalist aspirations of European evident that where narrative fiction is culture which received a supreme formu- concerned a close study of the style of lation in the Enlightenment. But although any given episode of a large structure will an ideology of internationalism underlies be of questionable validity unless the comparative literary studies, and many analysis can refer to the relationship of of its more impressive exponents have this episode to the whole work conceived been European Marxists, such studies as a coherent utterance: and that this pat- clearly need to assimilate, not reject, the tern, often unperceived, is likely to yield admirable critical work done, for exam- more significance than local texture ple, in England by critics whose high minutely analysed. In other words, a degree of sensitivity to literature in their satisfactory account of a novel could con- own language has not been accompanied sist, more than is usually the case, in an by a developed critical interest in another account of its ‘plot’ (the morphology of literature. its fable, the pattern of formal changes), The presumptuousness of comparing and there is no reason why this should not literary works across languages can be be perceived and described in a translated avoided if emphasis is shifted from text as well as in a text in the original. the smaller units of the literary work Characteristic devices can be perceived (‘texture’) to the larger (‘structure’). Style in works which are products of similar can be described in terms of chapters as phases of civilization (the devices used well as sentences: and the failure of many by Tolstoy and George Eliot to assert the critics who approach novels as ‘dramatic religious significance of life against the poems’ can be explained as a conse- small agnostic ego are comparable). To quence of over-insistent application to the such a degree may this comparability minutiae of metaphoric language. The exist that comparative analysis can invoke analogy with linguistics is fruitful: one a concept of an underlying MYTH which needs as exact as possible an apparatus has structured the works in a given way, for describing the structure of a literary as suggested by the work of Lévi-Strauss. work, its ‘grammar’. The term ‘morphol- In the case of poetry, too, verbal texture ogy’ was appropriated by the Russian can be considered as one manifestation of anthropologist Vladimir Propp (The the total structure of the poem: but since Conceit 31 many forms and stanza-patterns are Complaint See ELEGY. common to the whole European tradition, Conceit A characteristic feature of where they engender comparable formal much Renaissance lyric poetry, the problems, comparative analysis will be conceit is a way of apprehending and rewarding to the critic who reads the expressing the subject which pleases and language in question. In many cases the illuminates by its ingenious aptness. It study of translations becomes a compara- belongs therefore to a kind of poetry tive critical exercise of great value, even which is avowedly artificial, which is not for readers who lack the original: intelli- ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful gent students of literature can benefit feeling’ of Wordsworth but instead invites from a systematic comparison of three the reader’s appreciation of virtuosity and significant translations of Homer (e.g. inventiveness. Like WIT and ‘fancy’, Dryden, Pope and Cowper) even if they do terms to which it is closely related, not know Greek. The Chomskyan concept the word ‘conceit’ itself refers to the of deep structure can also offer an impetus mental act of conception or understand- to comparative criticism, since it facili- ing, and it implies an artful varying of the tates the comparison of works whose ordinary, not only in verbal expression, surface structures may be dissimilar (an but in the way the subject has been example that springs to mind is Melville’s conceived. Bartleby and Gogol’s The Overcoat: dis- Although conceits may take the form similar in detail, these two masterpieces of paradox (‘The truest poetry is the most have a profound kinship which seems feigning’) or hyperbole (‘An hundred inadequately described in terms of ‘theme’ years should go to praise/Thine Eyes, and but may be more convincingly described on thy Forehead Gaze’), they commonly in terms of generative grammar). involve metaphorical or analogical corre- See Henry Gifford, Comparative spondences, which may be paradoxical or Literature (1969); Marius Guyard, La Lit- hyperbolical in character, for example: térature comparie (1961); Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History (1948); Full gently now she takes him by the N. P. Stallknecht and H. Frenz, hand, Comparative Literature: Method and A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow, Perspective (1961); René Wellek and Or ivory in an alabaster band; Austin Warren, Theory of Literature So white a friend engirts so white (1963). Steven Totosy De Zepetnek, a foe. Comparative Literature and Comparative (Shakespeare) Cultural Studies (2002); E. S. Shaffer (ed.), Comparative Criticism: Fantastic For I am every dead thing, Currencies in Comparative Literature – In whom love wrought new Alchimie. Gothic to Postmodern (2002). Relevant For his art did expresse journals include Comparative Criticism, A quintessence even from nothingnesse, Comparative Literature, Comparative From dull privations, and leane Literature Studies, Comparison. emptinesse: GMH He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot Of absence, darknesse, death; things Competence, literary See POETICS, which are not. STRUCTURALISM. (Donne) 32 Concrete poetry

As these examples illustrate, the conceit reader’s mental acuity as much as feeling. belongs as much to the courtly style of the For as the Renaissance itself insisted, Elizabethans as it does to the wit of the however far-fetched or elaborate the con- Metaphysical poets; yet, the former ceit, its success depends upon how appro- presents a series of emblematic pictures, priate its extravagance and ingenuity are. while the latter realizes its object in the True artifice in this kind of poetry conceptual terms of a philosophical demands of the poet a precise balance of definition. fancy and judgement. See also WIT. A single conceit may provide the basis See M. Praz, Studies in Seventeenth- of a whole poem (as in Sidney’s sonnet, Century Imagery (1964); K. K. Ruthven, ‘With how sad steps, O moon, thou The Conceit (1969); R. Tuve, Elizabethan climb’st the skies’, or in Donne’s ‘The and Metaphysical Imagery (1961); Flea’), or a poem may consist of a string George Williamson, Six Metaphysical of different conceits on a single subject Poets: A Reader’s Guide (2001). (Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’, Herbert’s DJP ‘Prayer’). The conceit may be sustained and elaborated at length, especially if it Concrete poetry Conceives of the derives from a familiar or conventional poem as ideogram; as an instantly assimi- motif (such as the innumerable variations lable, visually ordered text in which the on the ‘blazon’ or descriptive praise of the word stands both as physical spatial lady in Elizabethan love sonnets), or it object, and as a plurality of simultane- may be confined to a single striking fig- ously existing meanings. Preoccupations ure (such as Marvell’s image of the fish- with both typographical form and seman- ermen carrying their coracles over their tic content create confusions in which the heads: ‘Have shod their heads in their text is seen as being somehow ‘between canoes/Like the Antipodes in shoes’). It poetry and painting’, readers being unsure may even be altogether implicit, like the whether they are confronted with a picture unspoken pun on ‘host’ which underlies for reading, or a poem for looking at. At Herbert’s ‘Love’. its mimetic extreme, the structure of the The conceit went out of fashion when concrete poem either echoes its semantic it was generally felt that ingenuity or sur- content, in the manner of Apollinaire’s ‘Il prise were effects less suited to poetry pleut’, or else becomes its semantic than a sense of the natural. Like the pun, content; in the words of the painter Stella: which suffered disfavour at the same ‘a picture of its own structure’. time, it came to be regarded as a form of The concrete poem’s aesthetic is not that bad taste. But in the twentieth century, of accumulative, discursive, linear writing, with its taste for singularity and shock but that of the ‘constellation’; Max Bense in art, the conceit returned to poetry, explains: ‘It is not the awareness of words nowhere more so than in the work of following one after the other that is its T. S. Eliot, himself a great admirer of primary constructive principle, but the per- seventeenth-century wit. The famous ception of its togetherness. The word is not image from the beginning of ‘The Love used as an intentional carrier of meaning.’ Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ describing the Bense’s ‘abstract’ texts seem very close to evening ‘spread out against the sky/Like a the ‘silence of form’ that Roland Barthes patient etherised upon a table’, is a good believes attainable ‘only by the complete example of the conceit’s appeal to the abandonment of communication’. Context 33

Despite such formal preoccupations the typographical discoveries of the DADA not all concrete poetry rejects communi- and Futurist poetries, and adopting the cation; indeed the semantic extremes of single page as ‘working area’, transcend- concrete poetry, via its spatial ‘grammar’, ing the sequential, and creating simul- come closer than any other mode of taneity, by rejecting linear order and writing to the elusive meaningful semantic spatially punctuating the liberated word, simultaneity that Barthes lauds as ‘colour- henceforth an object to be read freely in less writing’; writing in which each word all directions, and as such a semantic is ‘an unexpected object, a Pandora’s box object capable of presenting both vertical from which fly all the potentialities of lan- and horizontal linguistic potentialities. guage’. The elusiveness of ‘writing degree Whilst the scale of Concrete Poetry (one zero’ may be explained by the fact that page) marks this genre with the limita- traditional syntax, and the logical form of tions of minimal rather than of epic linear writing, simply does not permit a literature, it is significantly symptomatic statement of the several simultaneously of a mode of writing permitting the existing semantic realities making up the presentation of unprecedented semantic ‘potentialities’ of the word. simultaneity. Concrete Poetry has offered The eye may perceive two objects, the important pointers to a visual writing mind may conceive two concepts, but transcending the limitations of sequential such pluralistic observations transcend language. the possibilities and patterns of linear lan- See Stephen Bann (ed.), Concrete guage which must choose to record first Poetry: An International Anthology one observation and then the other; a dis- (1967); Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete tortion which turns simultaneity into the Poetry: A World View (1968); Emmett sequential. Attempting to simultaneously Williams (ed.), An Anthology of Concrete evoke all the potentialities of language, Poetry (1967); K. D. Jackson, Eric Vos rejecting the internal ordering of sequen- and J. Drucker (eds), Experimental – tial linear language, yet, still working Visual-Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry within its confines, the Surrealists aban- Since the 1960s (1996). doned logical order for the ‘super-real’ NCPZ semantic impressionism of ‘automatic Consonance See TEXTURE. writing’, while Joyce, Helms, Eliot and Burroughs remixed fragments of words Context A central notion of modern and phrases in order to exchange old philosophical linguistics, and by exten- semantic potentialities for those of their sion, of modern literary criticism too. new hybrid creations. Mallarmé achieved Contextual theories of meaning assert a relatively non-sequential and non-linear that concepts precede percepts; that asso- simultaneity of pluralistic semantic poten- ciation can only take place between uni- tialities in his poem ‘Un Coup de Dés’ versals, not discrete impressions; and that whose pages, though precisely sequen- all discourse is over-determined, having a tially ordered, proffered scattered spatially multiplicity of meaning. In literary criti- punctuated words permitting permutation cism the effect of these doctrines has been in a number of non-sequential readings. to extend the use of the word ‘meaning’ to Concrete Poetry finally attained a cover all aspects of interpretation and truly poly-semantic ‘Pandora’s box’ of to promote the false dictum ‘The mean- potentialities of meaning, synthesizing ing of a word is its use in the language’. 34 Contradiction

What should be substituted for this is the interrelationships between the text’s sentence ‘The interpretation of an utter- component parts and thus contrives to ance is dependent upon a knowledge of state the universal in the particular’ (p. 8). the contexts within which it occurs.’ The See also DISCOURSE. problem may be seen at its most acute in BCL the use of puns, and is discussed by Paul Ziff in his Semantic Analysis (1960). As Contradiction From Aristotle to Ziff points out, knowing the meaning of Coleridge, Hegel to T. S. Eliot, literary the words will not help one to understand criticism tended to conceive of the the remark ‘England had at least one literary work as an achieved unity, often laudable bishop’. It is also necessary to of an ORGANIC or ‘spontaneous’ kind. catch the pun. The range of contexts Developments in MARXIST, SEMIOTIC and within which utterances occur extends DECONSTRUCTIVE criticism have queried from the narrowly linguistic (phonetic or this view, regarding it as a misleading, morphological) to the broadly philosoph- and potentially mystifying, account of the ical, and the task of literary criticism can nature of literary texts. Emphasis shifted be seen, in part, as the need to relate instead to the multiple, conflicting and words, phrases, sentences and other parts uneven character of such texts, which of literary works to their linguistic con- may well attempt to resolve into harmony texts. The other, more open-ended part of materials which nevertheless remain criticism involves relating the works stubbornly various and irreducible. themselves to relevant psychological, Deconstructive criticism has charac- social and historical contexts. The obvi- teristically fastened upon those aspects of ous difficulty of interpretation arises a literary work which appear to an ortho- from the need to assess the claims of dox eye fragmentary, marginal or contin- conflicting contexts, though through- gent, and shown how the implications of out the twentieth century an increasing such fragments may begin to deconstruct emphasis by Formalists, New Critics and or unravel the ‘official’, unifying logic on Structuralists, on the ‘foregrounded’ or which the text is founded. Expelled by ‘aesthetic’ elements of literature at the that logic to the text’s boundaries, such expense of ‘utilitarian’or ‘referential’ones, unconsidered trifles return to plague and resulted in a general lack of interest in the subvert the literary work’s ruling cate- broader, human contexts within which gories. For Marxist criticism, this process literature is produced and consumed. has ideological relevance. Literary texts, In an attempt to correct this imbal- like all ideological practices, seek an ance, David Lodge suggests in his book imaginary reconciliation of real contra- The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, dictions; the classical REALIST work, in Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern particular, strives for a symmetrical Literature (1977), that when literary texts ‘closure’ or ‘totality’ within which such work properly ‘it is because the system- contradictions can be contained. But in its atic foregrounding also supplies the place striving for such unity, a literary work of the absent context of facts and logical may paradoxically begin to highlight its entailments which validates nonliterary limits, throwing into relief those irresolv- discourse; one might say that it folds the able problems or incompatible interests context back into the message, limits and which nothing short of an historical orders the context in a system of dynamic transformation could adequately tackle. Convention 35

In granting ideology a determinate form, conflict and division, undermining their the work unwittingly reveals that ideol- consoling expectations of harmony and ogy’s absences and silences, those things forcing them to ponder the many-sided, of which it must at all cost not speak, and dialectical nature of history itself. See so begins to come apart at the seams. also EPIC THEATRE. All ideologies are constituted by certain See Leon Trotsky, Literature and definite exclusions, certain ‘not-saids’ Revolution (1971); Lucien Goldmann, which they could not articulate without The Hidden God (1967); Christopher risk to the power-systems they support. In Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (1937). daily life, this is not often obvious; but TE once an ideology is objectified in litera- ture, its limits – and consequently that Convention A generalizing term which it excludes – also become more which isolates frequently occurring simi- visible. A literary text, then, may find larities in a large number of works. If itself twisting into incoherence or self- critics are concerned to categorize a work, contradiction, struggling unsuccessfully they will describe it as belonging within to unify its conflicting elements. a convention which in this sense is a sub- For much Marxist and deconstructive category of TRADITION. If, on the other criticism, this is true of any literary writ- hand, they are more concerned to describe ing whatsoever. But there are also literary the individual work, they will point out works which are, as it were, conscious of that this or that element is conventional this fact, which renounce the illusory without implying that the whole work is ideal of unity in order to expose contra- thus defined as belonging within that dictions and leave them unresolved. In convention. As You Like It ‘belongs within much MODERNIST writing, the fundamen- the pastoral convention’: or As You Like tal contradiction of all realist literature – It ‘has this or that element of pastoral’, that it is at once FICTION and pretends not but is more usefully categorized in some to be – is candidly put on show, so that the other way. Clearly it is largely a matter text becomes as much about its own of how all-pervasive the conventional process of production as about a stable element is. reality beyond it. In the hands of Marxist It is tempting to distinguish between writers, such devices have been turned conventions of form and conventional to political use. For Bertolt Brecht, the content. A convention in the first sense is point of theatre is not to provide the audi- any accepted manner, hallowed by long ence with a neatly unified product to practice, of conveying meaning. The sec- be unproblematically consumed, but to ond sense coincides with ordinary usage reflect in its own conflicting, irregular and means a generally accepted, standard, forms something of the contradictory view or attitude. But it is as difficult to character of social reality itself. keep these two meanings separate, as it is ‘Montage’ – the abrupt linking of discrete generally to separate medium and mean- images – and the ‘alienation effect’, in ing. Take an example of what seems a which the actor at once exposes a reality purely technical convention: the invisible and reveals that this exposure is fictional, fourth wall separating the real world of are examples of such techniques. By the theatre audience from the imaginary articulating contradictions, the Brechtian world of the play. Even in this case it drama hopes to throw the audience into might be argued, as Brecht argues, that 36 Couplet the technical convention tends to express, Techniques and Cultural Conventions and foster as immutable truth, views (1982); Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before which are mere conventions in the second Reading: Narrative Conventions and the sense. Politics of Interpretation (1997). The pastoral convention shows clearly EJB how manner and meaning are inextricably Couplet In English verse, a unit entwined, and demonstrates too the posi- consisting of a pair of lines of the same tive and negative values of both aspects. length, linked by rhyme. The couplet may The conventionality of meaning allows be closed if the sense and syntax are com- for stylistic brilliance. We are so familiar plete within the metrical unit, or open if with the broad meaning that we can the couplet is itself a part of a longer unit. appreciate aesthetically the subtle expres- There are two chief kinds of couplets; sion of fine nuances – the variations on other experiments have proved unsuccess- a theme – as we cannot so easily in new ful. The older in English is the octosyl- un-assimilated areas of discourse. On the labic or four-stress couplet, perhaps based other hand, the conventional style or form on a common Latin hymn metre, which may function like a shorthand. It allows became a staple form of English medieval an author to introduce huge areas of narrative verse in works like The Lay of meaning very concisely by virtue of the Havelock the Dane, remaining a popular accretions of connotation and resonance it form into the eighteenth century. The two has acquired. In a negative way, such great practitioners of the four-stress manipulation of a literary convention is couplet both show the strengths of the a powerful weapon of the ironist. couplet as a form: pithy memorability of The drawbacks are obvious. The wit in closed units, and sinuous flexibility convention may become exhausted, the in the open structure. The craggy couplets language and form too mannered: a of Samuel Butler’s influential work, stylistic rigor mortis revealing dead Hudibras (1663–78) came to be known as attitudes and emotions (see MANNERISM). ‘Hudibrastics’: The accretions of meaning may be too heavy or centrifugal, so that works seem And Pulpit, Drum Ecclesiastick, abstruse or vague. The language may be Was beat with Fist, instead of a stick. so weighed down by conventional associ- Swift forms a link with the older masters ations that it cannot absorb and express of the shorter couplet in his satirical new meaning, even through irony. narratives like Baucis and Philemon, or in Conventional attitudes from the past may straight SATIRE (‘Verses on the death of blind to present truths. Conventional Dr Swift’): commonly has such pejorative undertones and in this sense is opposed to original My female Friends, whose tender (see ORIGINALITY). Hearts See M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Have better learn’d to act their Parts, Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy Receive the News in doleful Dumps: (1952); Bertolt Brecht, trans. and ed. ‘The Dean is dead, (and what is J. Willett, Brecht on Theatre (1964); Trumps?) W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral The Lord have Mercy on his Soul!’ (1935); Richard Taylor, Understanding (Ladies I’ll venture for the Vole.*) the Elements of Literature: Its Forms, * grand slam Creation 37

The decasyllabic or five-stress couplet is the work of Pierre Macherey) preferred to most commonly thought of as the English substitute the concept of literary produc- couplet form. It seems to have been intro- tion, which suggests the essentially ordi- duced into English by Chaucer in the nary, accessible nature of fiction making. ‘Prologue to the Legend of Good Women’ Production is understood as the general (c.1375), as an imitation of a French activity of purposive transformation of metre. In the Restoration theatre, it raw materials, whether this be economic, became the staple equivalent of the political, cultural or theoretical; and it is French dramatic Alexandrines of Racine seen as possessing a triple structure. All and others: hence the term, from its asso- production entails: ciation with those heroic tragedies, 1 certain specific raw materials to be ‘heroic couplet’. Early in the seventeenth transformed; century, Wailer adjusted and regularized 2 certain determinate techniques of the syllabic structure to match English transformation; and stress structure, and in the hands of 3 a definitive product. Dryden and Pope the ‘heroic couplet’ became one of the most disciplined and Because of the intervention of stage 2, effective verse forms. As with all formal- this product can in no way be reduced to ist art, it allows great sophistication and the ‘expression’, ‘reflection’ or mere power to develop from almost impercepti- reproduction of the initial raw materials. ble signals, such as small variations in Literary raw materials, for Marxist placing the caesura or pause, or from criticism, are essentially of two kinds. pressing the strict form into unusual uses On the one hand there is the specific (Pope, ‘Epistle to Bathurst’): historical experience available to a given writer, which will always be ideologically ‘God cannot love (says Blunt, with informed, directly or indirectly relevant to tearless eyes) the processes of political, cultural and The wretch he starves’ – and piously sexual power. On the other hand there are denies: previous writings, equally ideologically But the good Bishop, with a formed, which the writer may also trans- meeker air, form through intertextuality. These raw Admits, and leaves them, Providence’s materials are never ‘innocent’ or easily care. pliable: they come to the literary produc- AMR tive process with specific degrees of Creation The metaphor of creation has resistance, particular valences and ten- traditionally dominated discussions of lit- dencies of their own. The ‘techniques erary authorship, with strong implications of literary production’, always part of a of the mysterious, possibly transcendental certain LITERARY MODE OF PRODUCTION, nature of such activity. MARXIST CRITICISM can then be grasped as the codes, conven- has identified the roots of the notion as tions and devices historically available to essentially theological: the hidden model a particular literary producer. These tech- of literary creativity is the Divine Author, niques, equally, are never ideologically conjuring his handiwork – the world – neutral: they encode and secrete particular ex nihilo. Viewing such an idea as a ways of seeing which have complex rela- fundamental mystification of the process tions to social power-systems and power- of writing, Marxist criticism (in particular struggles. Since a particular literary 38 Criticism device or convention may belong to an ‘to judge’. If usage were to be restricted ideology other than that to which its raw to both these meanings some coherence material belongs, one can expect that the could be given to a now dangerously ideology of the end product is especially over-extended term. Literary scholarship complex. and literary history, then, should be so Such a view of literary production named and should be regarded as comple- renders writing amenable to analysis by mentary to literary criticism, not as part ‘decentring’ the individual AUTHOR, who of it. Critical theory too should be distin- can then be seen not as the unique, privi- guished from criticism, since it concerns leged ‘creator’ of the text, but as a partic- itself with the analysis of concepts rather ular analysable element in its constitution, than works. It is a philosophical activity a ‘code’ or ideological sub-formation in which should underlie criticism but, itself. How important this ‘authorial ide- again, should not be regarded as part of ology’ is in the production of the text will it. Similarly, metacriticism is probably be generically and historically variable: the better name for what has been called more important, obviously, in ROMANTIC extrinsic criticism: the practice of using lyricism than in medieval religious verse. literary works for some extra-literary end, Such a decentring of the author finds paral- such as gaining insight into authors or lels in STRUCTURALIST, POST-STRUCTURALIST their readers or society, amplifying stud- and DECONSTRUCTIVE criticism, where the ies of ethics, religion, psychology and so ‘author’ is no more than one text among on. Structuralist criticism, so called, since others; the ‘author’s life’ will not provide it regards literature only as a manifesta- us with a firm foundation for the meaning tion of its environment and is therefore of the work, since this itself is only textu- intent on using it merely as evidence – a ally available to us. Post-structuralist crit- piece in the jigsaw ‘structure’ of society – icism, in its concern with the potentially is a type of metacriticism. Arguably, infinite productivity of language, and (intrinsic) criticism must precede meta- PSYCHOANALYSIS, which sees the dream as criticism, as no literary work can consti- itself the product of a ‘dream-work’ or tute valid evidence in any more general determinate process of labour, both tend field until its own workings have been to converge with Marxist criticism in its assessed. It is usually desirable that dethronement – to many still scandalous – critical appreciation of meaning should of the ‘creative author’. be complemented by metacritical study of See L. Althusser, Lenin and relevant significance; that a grasp of Philosophy (1971); R. Coward and J. Ellis, literary identity should lead to discussion Language and Materialism (1977); of extra-literary relationships. But the two T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology activities, despite some overlapping, (1976); F. Jameson, The Political Uncon- should not be confounded under one scious (1981); P. Macherey, A Theory of term; nor should the extra-literary end in Literary Production (1978); P. Macherey view be allowed to bias the critical and E. Balibar, ‘Literature as ideological activity (by pre-selecting the aspects form’ in R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text considered to be central) or to blind the (1981). metacritic to the possibility of other TE significances, other standards (for literary works are multifaceted and multivalent). Criticism ‘To criticize’, etymo- ‘Extrinsic criticism’ has been used for logically, meant ‘to analyse’ and later, that criticism which relies heavily on Criticism 39 information drawn from outside the personal reaction – are necessarily literary work, and is contrasted with an subjective. Practical criticism and judicial ‘intrinsic criticism’ which does not. criticism – since they seek consensus- Sometimes the same terms are also used judgements based on analytical or other to distinguish criticism that deals mainly evidence – are necessarily objective in with content (attitudes, ideas, subject- their aims. matter) from that dealing mainly with As with metacriticism and criticism, form. These usages evidently do not there is inevitably some overlapping of correspond to the difference between objective and subjective methods. Objec- metacriticism and criticism, since a work tivity, in the arts, can be defined only as grasped without the aid of external schol- the attempt to be unbiased, uneccentric, arship could then be put to some meta- about personal reactions, the attempt to critical end and, contrariwise, a good deal get them right, so that they may constitute of scholarly information might be neces- valid evidence not mere opinion. It cannot sary to appreciate a work in and for itself. imply their exclusion; criticism that The distinction therefore is between two excluded them would not be criticism at critical approaches to a work, not between all, for they are much of the literary work. a critical and an extra-critical use of it. Similarly the most impressionistic of External criticism and internal criticism critics must refer, at least implicitly, to thus seem to be preferable terms. And the some recognizable (and therefore objec- second distinction mentioned is made tive) characteristics of the work if their more clearly by the terms contentual impressions of it are to carry any weight criticism and formal criticism. The term as criticism and not be discounted as ‘extrinsic criticism’ is better used, if at all, mere autobiography. Nevertheless, the only as a synonym for metacriticism, perceived existence of objective criticism and ‘(intrinsic) criticism’, with or without led to claims that criticism could be, or the brackets, only as the contrary of should be, a science. Alternatively, the metacriticism. existence of subjective criticism has led The distinction of ends, which marks to claims that criticism is, or should be, off various kinds of criticism from vari- an art, parallel to literature rather than a ous kinds of metacriticism, may be commentary parasitic upon it. But both matched by a broad distinction of means: the etymology of the word and all the objective or subjective. Metacriticism can various traditional practices that have obviously attain objectivity more easily come under it, indicate ‘criticism’ to be an than criticism (but has to be based on activity dealing with fictions but not itself the latter). External criticism seems to fictional; it has rarely been considered encourage objectivity, internal criticism strictly creative, rather than re-creative. subjectivity. But within the field of Analysis or judgement are already internal criticism, though, it is clearly varied enough to strain the viability of easier to be objective about form (as ‘criticism’ as a useful term. Yet, the formal criticism is technical) than about number of critical approaches, from content. Equally clearly, none of these practical criticism to ECO-CRITICISM, approaches actually compels the critic to continues to grow. See also ANALYSIS, adopt one attitude or the other. However, CRITIQUE, DECONSTRUCTION, EVALUATION, impressionistic criticism and affective crit- HERMENEUTICS. icism – since they limit themselves by def- See Gary Day, Re-reading Leavis: inition to judgement from immediate ‘Culture’ and Literary Criticism (1996); 40 Critique

E. D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation works, who are felt to need guidance in (1967); Allan Rodway, The Truths of matters of taste and judgement. Literature Fiction (1970); R. Wellek, A History of becomes a two-fold process: the produc- Modern Criticism (1961); René Wellek tion of novels, plays, poetry and works of and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature philosophy and history, and the produc- (3rd edn, 1963); W. K. Wimsatt, Jr and tion of a commentary on them in the form C. Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short of essays and reviews. Critique, then, may History (1962); D. Lodge (ed.), Twentieth have been a useful word to describe this Century Literary Criticism (1972); relatively new kind of writing, a literature A. Jefferson and D. Robey (eds), about literature, concerned with matters Modern Literary Theory (1982). Jerome of taste, judgement, and advertisement, J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual a new form for the promotion and Criticism (1992). See C. Belsey, Critical circulation of opinion. Practice (1980) or R. Fowler, Linguistic A new meaning for critique emerged Criticism (1986) for alternative concep- in England during the nineteenth century, tions of ‘criticism’. and again, the reasons for this have to AER do with intellectual developments outside England. In the late eighteenth century Critique A word that comes into the the German philosopher Kant published English language from French early in the a series of what, in translation, became eighteenth century. The Oxford English known as critiques. A word recently Dictionary cites, among other examples, borrowed from French was used to the following quotation from Addison: translate the German word Kritik. The ‘I should as soon expect to see a Critique provenance of critique moved away from on the Posie of a Ring, as on the inscrip- literature and towards philosophy, where tion of a medal’. Here ‘critique’ refers it designated a mode of inquiry designed to a piece of writing, in the manner of to reveal the conditions of existence for an essay or review, concerned with the certain ideas and perceptions. Kantian description and judgement of a work of critique was concerned to discover the art or literature. The connection with writ- nature and limits of human understand- ing about literature is maintained in the ing, and found these in what were claimed transfer of the word from noun to verb, as as the fundamental structures of the in the further example from the OED, human mind. Marx changed the direction ‘Hogg’s tales are critiqued by himself in of critique by locating such fundamental Blackwoods’ (1831). This usage, although structures not in the human mind but in it has died out in England, continues in the economic organization of society. the United States where it is still possible This became, however mediately, the to ‘critique’ a poem and to write a explanatory ground for why we think, feel ‘critique’ of a novel. and act the way we do, and in Marx’s writ- The precise reasons for borrowing ‘cri- ing critique became closely concerned tique’ from French are difficult to discern. with ideology: the purpose of critique was The word appears in English during a to reveal ideology at work in thought by period when a new form of literary culture referring it to its base in economically is appearing, marked by the emergence of determined antagonisms of class. Marx’s reviews, such as the Spectator and the writing forms one episode in the transfor- Tatler, and by new audiences for literary mation of Kantian critique into what has Cultural criticism 41 subsequently become known as the reproduces today a division – and a point sociology of knowledge. Weber and of transgression – which characterized Durkheim are also central figures in the its eighteenth-century origins. As Paul transformation. Although the three writ- Connerton has noted (Introduction to ers do not necessarily agree about what Critical Sociology, 1976), in the eigh- the relevant social context is for explain- teenth century ‘The process of critique ing why we think as we do, they do share claimed to subject to its judgement all a sense that it is in some concept of social spheres of life which were accessible to structure that an explanation is to be reason; but it renounced any attempt to found. touch on the political sphere.’ But this Literary criticism has developed self-denying ordinance was not main- various affiliations with the different tained for long. Critique increasingly modes of critique. An early equivalent for concerned itself with politics and laid the the Kantian critique can be found in intellectual foundations for the French ROMANTIC theories of IMAGINATION which Revolution. Then, as now, when critique, attempt to locate the origins of literature and the forms of literary criticism associ- in a faculty which is ambiguously placed ated with it, question the prevailing distri- between a human and a divine mind. bution of political power, the alarm bells Since then, the different modalities of start to ring. By contrast, the apolitical critique – Marxism, feminism, linguistics, forms of critique are a tolerated part of the structuralism, psychoanalysis – have all, intellectual scene. But this distinction in combination or separately, produced between the political and the apolitical is critical theory which is concerned not not itself invariable and we cannot neces- only with the detailed analysis and evalu- sarily know in advance what form of cri- ation of literary works but also with their tique will strike a political nerve. See also conditions of existence, whether these are DECONSTRUCTION, DISCOURSE, FEMINIST discovered in the structures of culture or CRITICISM, MARXIST CRITICISM, PSYCHOLOGY language, in the laws of narrative, or the AND PSYCHOANALYSIS and references. ideologies produced by class-divided Some examples of work which, in societies. It is possible, therefore, to dis- various ways, presupposes critique as a tinguish between those forms of literary goal, would include C. Belsey, Critical criticism which bear some affiliation to Practice (1980); T. Eagleton, Criticism critique and those which do not concern and Ideology (1976); A. Easthope, Poetry themselves with reflexive thought, prefer- as Discourse (1983); R. Fowler, Literature ring instead to carry out routine mainte- as Social Discourse (1981), Linguistic nance of a literary canon whose own Criticism (1986); P. Widdowson (ed.), creation is not subject to inquiry. But Re-Reading English (1982); Deborah there are other and equally important Cameron (ed.), The Feminist Critique of kinds of distinction to be made, notably Language: A Reader (1998). between those kinds of critique and JC criticism which put in question forms of political power, and those which locate Cultural criticism This term is an the fundamental questions outside the extremely broad and generally unhelpful realm of politics, in certain (claimed) appellation given to an amorphous body invariant properties of culture, language of critical practices that explore the or the human unconscious. Critique functioning of culture not purely in its 42 Cultural criticism

Arnoldian sense of the best of a civiliza- dominant superstructure. This line of tion, but as a holistic study of the whole thinking, which is often referred to as range of a society’s products. As a field, ‘culturalist’ derives partly from the disci- Cultural Studies, emerged during the plines of sociology, anthropology and late-1950s across the English-speaking history, which, during the period 1960–80 world and, though it frequently developed focused serious attention on what became out of academic departments of English known as ‘history from underneath’ – Literature, it very often stood in opposi- social, particularly working class history tion to the conservative dominance of that situated the average person rather those programmes of study by the literary than the elevated or monarchical orders as canon. Where ‘English Literature’ explic- the barometer of social change. This itly suggested an accepted, ideologically branch of Cultural Studies which took a driven hierarchy of cultural production broadly socio-historical stance was and signification, ‘Cultural Studies’ methodologically distinct from the ‘struc- tended to gravitate towards those forms turalist’ branch which owed much to the of expression that were conventionally development of linguistics, of literary deemed (often pejoratively) to be popular. theory and of semiotics. This group of Thus critics focused attention on the critics, employing the work of Louis arenas of mass culture and took as their Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel texts newspapers, magazines and popular Foucault, examined the position of the literary genres, such as the romance, the subject as an effect of the ideological detective story or the western, as well as structures and institutions that formed it. non-literary forms, such as radio, televi- The subject is a product of a matrix of sion, film, music, advertising and fash- persuasive political, ethical, educational, ion. In fact the remit of Cultural Studies historical, ethnographic and demographic extended to all forms of articulation that forces that frame a view of reality as ‘nor- reflected a society’s idiosyncratic charac- mal’ and situate the individual as both ter and therefore included the analysis of subject of and subject to a particular art and architecture as well as subcultural social and cultural order. The products of expressions of resistance, such as the that order are interpreted as discourses Goth and Punk phenomena. that underlie but also reinforce the domi- The academic credentials of the nant cultural codes. Adherents of the discipline were established along the lines ‘structuralist’ branch of the discipline of Raymond Williams’s argument that tend to examine forms of discursive ‘culture’ was the outcome of a whole way practice for the collective conventions that of life rather than being simply the they implicitly or explicitly supported. selected highlights of a society’s most In Britain the most celebrated intellectually, philosophically or artisti- institution for research in the field since cally enlightened citizens. Culture as a the mid-1960s was the Centre for conglomeration of disparate and antago- Contemporary Cultural Studies at the nistic forces reflected the vitality and University of Birmingham. Set up under vibrancy of a society at a given moment the directorship of Richard Hoggart, its and, by de-emphasizing the prior claim to period of greatest prominence came supremacy of high culture, revealed during the 1970s under the stewardship both the ideological bent of that society of Stuart Hall. It established itself as a and the voices that sought to resist the pioneering centre for cultural research Cultural materialism 43 with the publication of collectively edited with new historicism. Both are reactions works such as Resistance through Rituals: to the view that literature can be studied Youth Sub-Cultures in Post-War Britain in isolation from its social and political (1976), On Ideology (1978) and Working contexts. However, both cultural material- Class Culture (1979), and paved the way ists and new historicists did not merely for the acceptance of Cultural Studies as want to situate literature in its context but a serious academic programme across to question the whole idea of the work higher education. It has sadly been and its ‘background’. They argued that disbanded in recent years. In the United this was a false distinction and that the States the field came to prominence relationship between the text and its during the 1980s and 1990s and provided context was mutually constitutive, the a forum for a new interdisciplinary text helped shape the context as the momentum. The intellectual fragmenta- context helped shape the text. Cultural tion that attended postmodernism’s dis- materialists and new historicists are also quisition of the metanarrative encouraged interested in the relationship between a productive dialogue between feminist literature and power. They agree that liter- scholars, literary critics, philosophers, ature can be used to legitimize power but Marxists, postcolonialists, New Histori- where new historicists believe that the cists and sociologists that explored the challenge literature poses for power is interventions between, and interdepen- ultimately contained, cultural materialists dences of academic territories. In recent believe that literature has the potential to years the subject has expanded in its intel- subvert it. So where a new historicist lectual remit (analysing for instance the would argue that Shakespeare’s Henry V impacts of the internet and hypertextual- ultimately asserts the value of monarchy ity on the consumption and signification even though it questions it, a cultural of culture) and in its popularity amongst materialist would claim that the critique new generations of scholars and students. of kingship has consequences beyond the See also CULTURE and CRITICISM. play. In particular, they would highlight See Louis Althusser, Ideology and the subversive elements in the play in Ideological State Apparatuses (1970); order to make us think about the role of Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (1980); royalty today. Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural The term cultural materialism was Studies (1991); Antony Easthope and Kate coined by the critic Raymond Williams McGowan (eds), A Cultural Studies (1921–88) in Marxism and Literature Reader: Texts and Textuality (1992); John (1977) and he used it to describe the Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture material effect that culture has in social (1989); Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies: The life. This is most easily seen in the case of Two Paradigms (1980); Laura Mulvey, IDEOLOGY which constitutes us in such a Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema way that we happily assent to the author- (1975); Raymond Williams, Culture and ity that governs us. The education system, Society, 1780–1950 (1958). which is of part what the French Marxist DL Louis Althusser (1918–90) called ‘the ideological state apparatus’, uses culture Cultural materialism That which to instil in us the belief that we are free looks for the dissident elements in a individuals living in a democratic society text – is often compared and contrasted and that great art, with its timeless truths 44 Culture of human nature, transcends mere similar issues in the present, for example, politics. Consequently, and here is the homelessness. material bit, we behave in ways – voting, Although cultural materialists initially earning a living, getting married, setting focussed on Shakespeare their work has up a home, shopping – that help to per- now expanded to take in everything from petuate that society. While acknowledg- The Canterbury Tales to crime fiction. ing that ideology indeed has this effect, There is no doubt that cultural material- the cultural materialist would also argue ism has energized literary studies – not that it can be challenged. Instead of least in its interrogation of the concept of ideology, they prefer the term HEGEMONY, ‘literature’ and how that has privileged which derives from the Italian philo- certain forms of writing at the expense of sopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), others. However, cultural materialists do because it emphasized how the dominant operate with a rather simplistic model of and subordinate groups in society were in reading – are all works really no more constant conflict with each other whereas than a struggle between dominant and ideology, particularly in the work of subordinate readings? – and, moreover, Althusser, seemed to allow no room for they have very little to say about the opposition to the status quo. language of the works they study. Finally, What particularly interests culture they may exaggerate the claims they materialists is the role art and literature make on behalf of cultural materialism as plays in the struggle between dominant a means of social change. Some things and subordinate groups. Cultural materi- have got better in Britain in the last thirty alists start with the idea that literature is years and some have got worse. But how used to support the system. For example, much of either is due to cultural material- the role of Shakespeare in schools and ism remains to be seen. See HISTORICISM. universities is to promote Englishness See Jonathan Dollimore and Alan and to justify the principle of hierarchy Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: in all areas of social life from class to Essays in Cultural Materialism (2nd edn, sexuality. Having shown how an author 1994); Kiernan Ryan (ed.), New Histori- or a work is used to transmit the values of cism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader the establishment, the cultural materialist (1996). then wants to disrupt this transmission by GD pointing out those meanings in a work that a more conventional reading would Culture Metaphorically, a cultivation either overlook or ignore. An example (agri-cultura); the cultivation of values; would be the murderers whom Macbeth by extension, a body of values cultivated, employs to kill Banquo. The despera- See Raymond Williams, Culture and tion that makes them accept this commis- Society, 1780–1950 (1959) and The sion is born partly of their impoverished Long Revolution (1961). More recently, status brought about by the enclosure sociologists and anthropologists have movements which deprived many peo- employed the term to denote the totality ple of their livelihood. By drawing of customs and institutions of a human attention to such details in a work, the group (cf. SOCIETY). cultural materialist not only recovers Literary criticism has traditionally the repressed voices of history, here the concerned itself with culture as a body of ‘masterless men’, but also relates them to values, especially those values transmitted Culture 45 from the past to the future through Debate has increased with the growth imaginative works. Culture in this of mass communication. Films, televi- sense implies the accumulation of dis- sion, the Internet – the whole range of criminations. It implies a selective social devices for the distribution of images and structure, since it distinguishes passive information – call into question tradi- recipients of social perspectives from tional standards and accepted forms. In those who cultivate an awareness of such the face of this threat to its standards, perspectives. This, in turn, implies a literary criticism failed to create the teaching and learning process, and gener- necessary models to investigate the new ates theories of a distinctive class with a phenomena. Critics discovered that it was duty to protect and disseminate traditions. necessary to turn to other disciplines, Such an embodiment of the standards such as sociology, to find tools to aid their reinforces the traditional personal dimen- work. A pioneer in this field was Richard sion of culture, as implicit in the under- Hoggart, whose The Uses of Literacy lying metaphoric skein (a ‘cultivated’ or (1957) led to a widespread interest in ‘cultured’ person). It becomes simultane- what had previously been dismissed by all ously a code of values and a mode of but the most acute (e.g. George Orwell) as perception. So, concepts like SENSIBILITY pulp-art. Cross-fertilization between and taste evolve. Matthew Arnold (Culture mass- and minority-art, and between its and Anarchy, 1869 and Essays in audiences, necessitated rejection of the old Criticism, 1889) represents the classic pyramidical structure of high-, middle- statement of this view of culture. and low-brow, as conceived by the first At first this version of culture seems critical response (e.g. Q. D. Leavis’s isolated from the alternative, ‘scientific’ Fiction and the Reading Public, 1932). As version, namely, culture as the totality of all art-forms began to overlap it became human habits, customs and artefacts. See, increasingly apparent that pigeon-holing for example, M. F. Ashley Montague, was not enough. As Williams said, the Culture and the Evolution of Man (1962) mass-minority split is not the cure of and Culture: Man’s Adaptive Dimension our plight but its symptom (Raymond (1968). But the critical and scientific Williams, Communications, rev. edn, definitions overlap, despite the apparent 1966). Modern cultural discussions stress central difference that one claims to be the rejection of the past and the increasing evaluatory and the other descriptive. It is disengagement of modernist and postmod- arguable that the distinctions depend on ernist thought (Bernard Bergonzi (ed.), the isolation of certain phenomena as Innovations, 1968), such that the central expressions of human value, and the false cultural metaphor of unfolding growth rejection of others (institutions, social starts to disappear entirely in an age habits, political movements, etc.). A wedded increasingly to violent change. communal act, for example, the founding In recent decades, ‘culture’ has bifur- of the trades unions, clearly part of the cated into its older associations with an sociological dimension of ‘culture’, is an over-arching, largely national or ethnic, embodiment of cultural values as much as collective of practices and signs, and a a novel or a painting. It involves a radical now-more-common reference to smaller, change of sensibility and may be said to local socio-anthropological phenomena be an expression of cultural advancement that might range from bikers’ culture to in the widest sense. a drinking culture. The rise of cultural 46 Cybercriticism studies has also contributed to a partial literary texts were approached, and this shift in usage from a nature/culture would have implications for the meanings division to one of art/culture within the produced by such texts as well as the general perception of a widespread underlying attitudes and practices upon Western consumer culture. Critics from which such meanings depend. The devel- Gramsci to Bourdieu have analysed the opment of online literary criticism has value-laden aspects of the usage of the certainly altered many aspects of tradi- word, while migration, diaspora and tional critical discourse, especially in an GLOBALIZATION have highlighted the pro- academic context; a researcher can dis- liferation of hybrid and pluralized cultural cover relatively quickly, for example, how identities. frequently Shakespeare employs a certain See also SOCIETY and CULTURAL word or phrase or metaphor. What hap- CRITICISM. pens to such information afterwards is For the etymology and semantic devel- another question. Opponents maintain opment of the term, see R. Williams, that the greatest use to which digital ‘Culture’ in his Keywords (1976); his technology has been put is undergraduate Culture (1981) is a book-length treatment plagiarism, and that such a development with full bibliography. See also Dick is indicative of the essential incompatibil- Hebdidge, Subculture: The Meaning of ity between electronic print media and the Style (1979); Simon During (ed.), The critical imagination. Cultural Studies Reader (1999); Michèle The second (more usual) use of Barrett, Imagination in Theory (1999). ‘cybercriticism’ refers to analysis which GG focuses upon the developing interaction of human life and the great variety of Cybercriticism A term that is invoked mechanical technology which humans in modern critical discourse in two dis- have employed throughout history. Mary tinct but related ways. The first (which is Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is regarded less usual) refers to the use of mechanical as a key moment in this tradition. With aids in the analysis of literary texts and the advent of digitalization towards the the influence of such technology upon end of the twentieth century, the question both the subject matter and the methods of the interaction between human con- of literary criticism. sciousness and mechanical activity Literary historians point to the exam- became acute. Co-terminous develop- ple of the radical changes wrought upon ments in medicine (such as cloning and established medieval practices by the the mapping of the human genome), sci- invention of the printing press in the fif- ence (advances in Artificial Intelligence teenth century. A similar paradigm shift and computer technology) and philosophy was widely felt to be in the offing in the (the vogue for various ‘post-humanist’ latter part of the twentieth century with systems) combined to produce a general the invention of the microcomputer ‘postmodernist’ cultural climate in which and the advent of the World Wide Web. both the meaning and the limits of the Supporters suggested that the meaning of human were constantly brought into texts (and of reading) might no longer be question. confined to the limits of the human imag- Many of the issues that animate this ination; rather, new and different kinds of latter form of cybercriticism emerged in analyses would change the way in which the first instance in the imaginative Cybercriticism 47 writing of figures, such as William overlaps with ecocriticism insofar as both Gibson, Ursula K. le Guin and Philip look to expose the ‘human’ as a contin- K. Dick. The influential ‘cyber’ strand of gent historical effect rather than a time- science fiction interfaces with ‘postmod- less essential quality. This effect (they ernism’ in their mutual concern with the claim) has been gained throughout his- impact of technology upon the human tory at the expense of the ‘non-human’ condition. Dick is responsible for one of (the mechanical or the animal) – again, the most influential of all ‘cyber’ texts: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? constitutes a key meditation on this point. (1967), adapted by British director Ridley Opponents have been inclined to Scott into the influential film Blade regard the ‘post-humanism’ touted by Runner (1982). Dick poses the question cybercritics (and ecocritics) as a thinly dis- of what it might mean to be human in the guised form of ‘anti-humanism’ – another high technological age, asking what will trendy attack upon the Enlightenment occur to the species when it evolves to the tradition of critical reason. This latter point at which it is capable of artificially discourse, maintains its adherents, is not engineering those capacities and attrib- the great demon represented by pes- utes we have been encouraged to consider simistic postmodernists; rather, in a world as the most deeply, the most undeniably in which uncontrolled technology is rush- human. ing human civilization towards collapse, By focusing upon the absolute inter- critical reason remains the best hope penetration of the human and the mechan- for the species. See also ECOCRITICISM, ical, cybercriticism claims to represent an POSTMODERNISM. assault upon all the categories which have See Mike Featherstone and Roger traditionally exercised the critical imagi- Burrows (eds), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/ nation. For cybercritics, the medium/ Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological message dialectic becomes the central Embodiment (1995); Donna Haraway, focus rather than a marginal considera- Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The tion; this issue may be traced all the way Reinvention of Nature (1991); Andrew back to Genesis in which it figures as a Milner, Literature, Culture and Society relationship between God (the original) (1996). and Man (the copy). Cybercriticism GS D

Dada Received its enigmatic name in When Dada found itself outflanked by the February 1916; was a reaction against the more coherent and purposeful experi- brutality of war, the expediency of art and ments of the Surrealists it was laid to rest literature and the dangerous inadequacy in 1922. But, as an attitude of mind rather of rational thought; in fact it spat out its than a formal movement, its subversive contempt for the spiritual and moral deca- energy could not be contained by the dence of a whole intellectual, cultural and incantations of a mock funeral service. social system. Born in neutral Zurich in In the 1960s American artists, writers, the middle of the anarchic destruction of actors and musicians laid claim to the the Great War, it expressed its disgust excitement and commitment of Futurists, with a morally culpable bourgeoisie and Dadaists and Surrealists alike and a spiritually nerveless art which had no approximated their experiments in the objective beyond a simplistic social pho- technique of Pop Art, happenings and the tography, a faith in its own function as multimedia performance. See also anodyne and a reprehensible dedication to SURREALISM. self-fulfilment. With unabashed relish See C. W. E. Bigsby, Dada and Dada declared its negative intent: it Surrealism (1972); Hans Richter, Dada: wished, apparently, to destroy art along Art and Anti-art (1965); William S. Rubin, with bourgeois society, but in truth it Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage opposed itself to the abuse of art rather (1968); S. Foster and R. Kuenzl (eds), than art itself, to society rather than Dada Spectrum (1979) (contains extensive humanity. Its exponents were poets and bibliography); R. Sheppard (ed.), Dada: artists (Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, Studies of a Movement (1979), New Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Man Studies in Dada (1981); R. Short, Dada Ray, Max Ernst) who professed to despise and Surrealism (1980), Modernism, Dada, art and literature but who, paradoxically, Postmodernism (2000); D. Tashjian, expressed their contempt in terms which Skyscraper Primitives (1975). identified them as part of the modernist CWEB movement. Its chief weapons – manifesto, Decentring See AUTHOR, CREATION, phonetic poetry, simultaneous poem, DECONSTRUCTION, DISCOURSE. noise music and provocative public spec- tacle – were all borrowed directly from Deconstruction Refers to a philo- the Futurists and stood as an image of the sophical activity initiated by Jacques dissolution which seemed the central fact Derrida in France; the first major publica- of modern existence. Their commitment tions appeared in the late 1960s. It is a to experimental modes, and the vitality of critique of concepts and hierarchies their performances, however, seemed to which, according to Derrida, are essential indicate a more fundamental faith in the to traditional criteria of certainty, identity possibility of opposing historical entropy and truth; but which, nevertheless, with energy and concern if not with the achieve their status only by repressing self-contained structure of art itself. and forgetting other elements which thus Deconstruction 49 become the un-thought, and sometimes meaning is closed by the presence of a the unthinkable, of Western philosophy. centre as guarantor of signification. Derrida, following Nietzsche and Derrida’s approach to these desires is Heidegger, tries to expose and explain sceptical; but simply to equate decon- this partiality, which he calls ‘logocen- struction and scepticism is to miss the trism’. Both aspects of this name – the point. The critique of logocentrism or of fact of being centred, and of the logos as a metaphysics of presence cannot take centre – are significant. Logos is a Greek place from a privileged position outside term that can specifically mean ‘word’, the traditions it questions, for there is no but also carries implications of rationality such outside; the traces are too deep in and wisdom in general, and is sometimes language and thought. But just because reified as a cosmic intellectual principle. ideal logocentrism is never actually Early Christianity, in its drive to contain achieved, the language will also carry and supplant classical philosophy, traces of its repressed other, of the adapted logos for the Word of God, thus un-thought. And hence Derrida’s philoso- annexing the principle of wisdom to the phical practice involves a close textual creative divine utterance, as in the Fourth criticism in order to trace the contradic- Gospel. God is the only self-sufficient tion that shadows the text’s coherence and being; his word, as both source and ‘expresses the force of a desire’. This standard of meaning, is the only self- undermining from within is the first stage sufficient discourse. of deconstruction, and usually subverts a The logos casts a long shadow: a privileged term: thus ‘nature’ is shown as whole series of preferences is seen to always already contaminated by ‘culture’, derive, nostalgically, from its value judge- ‘speech’ by ‘writing’, and so on. Writing ments. Speech, as unmediated expression, (écriture), necessarily caught up in the is privileged in relation to writing, which play of signification, takes the place of appears as a suspect supplement to the pure speech as a norm for language. But authenticity of utterance – a distinction Derrida is not concerned with simple already evident in Greek thought. A binary reversals of value, which would desire for self-sufficiency, for the unquali- merely offer another centred structure. He fied and unmediated, shows itself in therefore releases his ‘undecideables’, attitudes to meaning, in the search for radically unstable terms which act to absolute knowledge, original truth, or disrupt systematization. The most impor- determinate signification; and in attitudes tant of these is ‘differance’, a coinage to existence, in the search for unified which plays on two meanings of the being or a self-knowing reflexive con- French différer: difference – between sciousness. It is as if the urge of every signs as the basis of signification (see entity – signified or existent – is to be SEMIOTICS), and deferment – deferment of present to itself in a way that makes presence by the sign which always refers it self-confirming and self-sufficient. to another sign, not to the thing itself. ‘Presence’ is thus a prime value for logo- Derrida’s ‘mis-spelling’ cannot be heard centrism, which itself forms ‘the matrix of in French pronunciation; it exists only as every idealism’. And the various systems written, emphasizing writing and textual- which function as ‘centrisms’ of whatever ity at the expense of speech. And so that kind are attempts to delimit realms of ‘differance’ cannot be recuperated as a security in which the proliferating play of centre, he insists that it is neither word, 50 Deconstruction concept nor origin: at most, a condition of involvement with phenomenology, the possibility of meaning, which resists semiotics and psychoanalysis. Many crit- hypostatization. The artifice and even ical issues are open to a deconstructive frivolity of its neologism act to prevent it approach; thus the concern with authors being taken as a master key to any struc- evinces a desire for origin, to serve as ture. Indeed, the use of neologisms, puns interpretive closure; and realist represen- and etymologies, as well as individually tation is precisely an illusion of presence. opaque styles, is common among decon- In general, Derrida’s way of thinking structive writers. radically revises what a reader expects to As we have seen, the power of do with a text. logocentrism is not total. Certain texts The specific use of deconstruction in appear ‘to mark and to organize a struc- literary argument grew in the United ture of resistance to the philosophical States, following pioneer work by Paul conceptuality that allegedly dominated or de Man and J. Hillis Miller at Yale. There is comprehended them’. There is a distinc- a dubious tendency in de Man to privilege tion between this latter group and those literature in general as a self-deconstructing texts that simply contain an inherent contra- discourse; but this does not destroy the diction or aporia. The aporia is a built-in brilliance of individual readings which, in deconstruction, as it were; but the ‘resis- their aporetic ensemble, make the text tant’ texts go further and begin their own ‘unreadable’ in terms of closure critique. They include (only in part) the (Allegories of Reading, 1979). Similarly, writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Hillis Miller argues that ‘The fault of Freud and Saussure. They also include premature closure is intrinsic to criticism’ some ‘literary’ texts – Derrida distrusts (Fiction and Repetition, 1982). Besides the category, but finds in Artaud, generating new readings, mainly of Mallarmé and others ‘the demonstration nineteenth- and twentieth-century material, and practical deconstruction of the American deconstruction has enlivened representation of what was done with debate about critical principles. The literature’. refusal of final meaning caused a certain The relevance to literary studies, then, institutional anxiety about anarchic is not through a critical method (which is individualism – understandably so, not on offer as such) nor in the finality of perhaps, in view of the polemical man- given interpretations (there are no final nerism of deconstructionist style for those interpretations) but in the theoretical and who do not enjoy it. But the absence of conceptual insights of deconstruction. absolute criteria for interpretation does There are specific points at which not mean total freedom; it is precisely the Derrida’s argument overlaps with more pressure of pre-existent discourse that narrow literary concerns: the treatment of deconstruction re-marks in its critique of nature in Rousseau, for example (Of origin. In a recent interview, Derrida says Grammatology, 1967, trans. 1976); or that ‘Meaning...does not depend on the the treatment of mimesis in Mallarmé subjective identity but on the field of (Dissemination, 1972, trans. 1981). A different forces, which produce interpre- great deal of modern writing has turned tations’ (The Literary Review 14, 1980, around problems of representation and p. 21). consciousness, and these are extensively Deconstruction, as a set of popular discussed by Derrida through his critical clichés, soon palls. Simply to demonstrate Decorum 51 logocentrism becomes a tautologous aesthetic and moral considerations, as a exercise. But the major examples of criterion of right relationships whether deconstructive practice retain their power. between style and subject matter or in the Few theoretical approaches have fulfilment of social obligations. combined such challenging abstraction Sensitivity to decorum is likely to be with such intense textual work. Not the greater when and where the observance of least of its values lies in the learning and formal conventions is felt to be important; wit of its principal practitioners. ‘To write in art and life the concept of what is on their plan, it was at least necessary to fitting implies a sense of established or read and think.’ See also DISCOURSE, POST- accepted values. Thus by the critical STRUCTURALISM, DIFFERENCE, PSYCHOLOGY canons of neo-classicism, decorum regu- AND PSYCHOANALYSIS. lated the distinctions between literary For overviews see M. McQuillan (ed.), genres, determining what kinds of style Deconstruction: A Reader (2000) and and subject were in keeping with each N. Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s other: an elevated style for epic, for Guide (2000). The most approachable of instance, to match the heroic proportions Derrida’s texts is Positions (1972, trans. of character and action, but a mean style 1981); there are excellent translators’ for comedy, in which ignoble vices and introductions to the English versions of follies were ridiculed. By such canons Dissemination (Barbara Johnson) and Shakespeare’s drama was held to be Of Grammatology (Gayatri Spivak). essentially indecorous, since it persis- Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: tently mingled tragedy with comedy, Theory and Practice (1982) is a general and high style with low; Dr Johnson’s account from a literary standpoint. For objection to the word ‘blanket’ in examples of effects on criticism see Macbeth is a celebrated example of what Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: neo-classical taste felt to be a breach of Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of decorum. Reading (1980), Gregory L. Ulmer, The vagaries of Shakespeare’s critical Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy reputation illustrate how the principle from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys of decorum can atrophy and become (1985) and Martin McQuillan, Decon- mechanical in its application. Indeed an struction: A Reader (2001). Relevant application of inappropriate critical crite- journals include Glyph and the Oxford ria is in itself a form of indecorum, and Literary Review. in this respect we can understand why EC writers in any age who depart radically from accepted conventions are likely to Decorum The appropriateness of be judged indecorous by their contempo- manner to ideas or situation, defined by raries. Donne, whose love poetry the Elizabethan critic Puttenham as ‘this ‘perplexes the minds of the fair sex with good grace of every thing in his kinde’. nice speculations about philosophy’, as It is primarily associated with the Dryden put it, deliberately flouted the tradition of classical rhetoric and courtly established decorum of courtly tradition, values underlying Renaissance literature. while the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads Nevertheless, as a principle of propriety and the Eliot of The Waste Land were and appropriateness its validity is not felt by most of their first readers not only confined to one period. It has, too, both to be abandoning conventional ideas of 52 Defamiliarization decorum but also to be defying any Deviation See FOREGROUNDING, POETIC principle whatsoever of fitness and formal LICENCE. coherence. Such cases remind us that the sense of decorum lies not in the rigid pre- Dialogic structure The term ‘dia- scription of absolute law but in a tactful logic’ is uniquely associated with the and flexible judgement. ‘For otherwise work of the Russian scholar Mikhail seems the decorum,’ wrote Puttenham, Bakhtin, and in particular his theorization ‘to a weake and ignorant judgement of the novel in Problems of Dostoevsky’s then it doth to one of better knowledge Poetics. The dialogic principle is central and experience; which sheweth that it to Bakhtin’s extensive and polemical resteth in the discerning part of the theory of language and consciousness. minde.’ Dialogue, he writes, DJP is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already Defamiliarization See FORMALISM. ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows Dénouement French metaphor, liter- himself outwardly, but he becomes for ally ‘unravelling’, derived from the Latin the first time that which he is, not only for ‘knot’; synonym ‘catastrophe’. First for others but for himself as well. To be used in French with reference to drama in means to communicate dialogically. 1636, adopted in English in 1752, to denote the neat end of a plot, the final There can be no such ready-made charac- resolution of all conflicts in a play, the ter existing somehow prior to the linguis- tying up of loose ends, usually in the last tic, social operations of the dialogue with act or even scene. Like all conclusions, the other. And likewise, before we can use dénouements have a reputation for diffi- words for inner self-expression we must culty, and even great playwrights (such as have developed language through dia- Shakespeare and Molière) have been logue with other people. Bakhtin is not criticized for the unconvincing artificial- merely talking about dialogue in the ordi- ity of theirs. But as with other elements of nary sense in which two or more people dramaturgy once thought essential, the talk with each other. He is addressing the traditional type of dénouement is gener- prior issue as to how such dialogues are in ally avoided by contemporary writers, for the first place enabled or even possible. example, Samuel Beckett in Waiting for They are so because, in his view, Godot (1955) and Harold Pinter in language is constitutively intersubjective The Caretaker (1960) both opt for open, (therefore social) and logically precedes ambiguous endings which resolve subjectivity. It is never neutral, unad- nothing – anticlimax in place of striking dressed, exempt from the aspirations of climax. By extension, the term ‘dénoue- others. In his word, it is dialogic. ment’ is also applied sometimes to the The polemical thrust of Bakhtin’s unravelling of plots in narrative fiction. theory lies in his pervasive suggestion See also NARRATIVE STRUCTURE and that our hallowed autonomous individuality CLOSURE. is an illusion; that in fact the ‘I’ that speaks See William Archer, Play-Making is speaking simultaneously a polyphony (1912), 253. of languages derived from diverse social JWJF contexts and origins. In reality each of us Dialogic structure 53 is a ‘we’ and not an ‘I’. Without ever de-privileged. In Dostoevsky Bakhtin using religious terminology, Bakhtin found a paradigmatic polyphonic struc- nonetheless assigns to this fact of life an ture where the other voices in the text exalted value: and he turns to the study of come into their own, as it were; they genre in literature, to the novel in particu- acquire the status of fully fledged verbal lar, to raise the question of the degree to and conceptual centres whose relation- which texts embrace or efface this value. ship, both amongst themselves and with He uses the term monological to desig- the author’s voice, is dialogic and carni- nate the reduction of potentially multiple valized, and thus not susceptible to subor- ‘voices’ (or characters) into a single dination or reification. Raskolnikov, as authoritative voice. This voice is some- with all the other characters, is a subject times inescapable. The apparent and not an object: therefore never exhaus- polyphony of drama, for example, tively known or defined as he would be remains tied to the fact that the dramatist were the implied author to have the first imposes upon characters what they must and last word about him. say. But the technical resources of narra- The dialogic or polyphonic text thus tive in prose (the varieties of indirect dis- puts the much-argued issue of the author’s course in particular) do have an inherent ‘disappearance’ into a significantly new capacity to represent languages other than light. The character ceases to be the object the author’s. Bakhtin celebrates the novel of the choices and plans open to the as the genre most capable of technically implied author. Many critics in the Western dismantling the dictatorial authorial voice tradition have argued (Wayne C. Booth, for that regulates and resolves any interplay example, in The Rhetoric of Fiction) that of other voices in the text. only these choices and plans can guarantee The dialogical text remains, none- the ‘unity’ of the text and justify the ways theless, the exception rather than the of the author to the reader. Bakhtin chal- norm; it is perhaps better described as an lenges these long-held assumptions radi- experimental possibility: the writer think- cally: the monological text is a partial ing, as it were, in points of view, con- report. There is even an attractive value- sciousnesses, voices, as, for example, judgement implicit in Bakhtin’s constant Richardson did in the epistolary form of invitation to us to distinguish more keenly Clarissa. In Bakhtin’s account, however, between those techniques that favour this possibility has a long and rich histor- polyphony and those that easily give the ical foundation in the genres of the final word to the monologue. Socratic dialogue and the ancient See M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson, Menippean SATIRE, the latter being Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984); directly rooted in the world of carnival M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World folklore. In the carnival the social hierar- (1965); V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and chies of everyday life – their solemnities the Philosophy of Language (1973); and pieties and etiquettes as well as all M. Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic ready-made truths – are profaned and lit- Imagination: Four Essays by M. Bakhtin erally outspoken by normally suppressed (1981); K. Clark and M. Holquist, voices and energies demanding equal Mikhail Bakhtin (1984); T. Todorov, dialogic status. In this world-turned- Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical upside-down, ideas and truths are end- Principle (1984). lessly tested and contested, and thus TM 54 Diction

Diction Aristotle’s low ranking of ‘matter’ of poetry, language, is as diction (lexis) among the six elements of incidental to its essential form as wood to tragedy implies an idea of the poet cloth- the chair; chairs can be made out of many ing the essential form, the structure of materials and remain chairs. But it is dif- action, character and thought, in appropri- ficult to imagine poetry ‘made out of’ ate language: the selection of words is anything other than language. In fact secondary to the imaginative design. This descriptive criticism would prefer the dualistic view of language as the dress of organic analogies of Romantic poetics, thought lies behind traditional critical and assert that language is no more attitudes to diction in poetry. It is custom- incidental to poetry than wood is to trees. ary to speak of the archaic diction in The new attitudes to language of the The Faerie Queene or the Latinate diction later Richards (Philosophy of Rhetoric, of Paradise Lost as if these were stylistic 1936) and William Empson (Seven Types incidentals. In the eighteenth century, the of Ambiguity, 1930) relocated diction at idea of ‘poetic diction’ emerged: poets the centre of critical attention. For if like Thomas Gray asserted that the ‘meaning’ is the result of the total activity language of poetry was necessarily of all the words in a context, and not specialized and remote from ‘ordinary’ something pre-existing expression, then language. It was this ‘poetic diction’, with statements about the meaning and form of its elaborate devices of archaism, Latinity poems are implicitly statements about and circumlocution, that Wordsworth organizations of words: diction, the attacked as artificial and unnatural; he choice of words, is a fundamental element denied any ‘essential difference between of meaning. Winifred Nowottny (The the language of prose and metrical Language Poets Use, 1962) points out composition’. But the idea that there is that diction determines the personae of a special language for poetry persisted; poetry, the voices the poet adopts, and I. A. Richards, in Principles of Literary argues that poetry differs from other utter- Criticism (1924), attempted to separate ances in its ability to create its own con- poetry from other forms of discourse in text, to speak with any voice. Indeed, far his theory of the emotive and scientific from being restricted to a ‘poetic diction’, uses of language. However, as Elder it is uniquely free ‘to raid other forms of Olson points out, ‘there are no necessary language at will’; poetry can take its words differences between poetic diction, as dic- from any style of language, literary or tion, and the diction of any other kind of other. Once in the poem, however, words composition. There are no devices of are characteristically ‘used to induce or language which can be pointed to as dis- define attitudes other than those in which tinctively poetic’ (‘William Empson, con- everyday language allows us inertly to temporary criticism, and poetic diction’ rest’. See also ANALYSIS, CHICAGO CRITICS, in R. S. Crane’s Critics and Criticism, LANGUAGE, NEW CRITICISM. 1957). But Olson’s neo-Aristotelian rele- See Emerson R. Marks, Taming the gation of language to the least important Chaos: English Poetic Diction Theory place among the parts of poetry revived Since the Renaissance (1997). the dualism that generated the concept of PM ‘poetic diction’. His argument that ‘the chair is not wood but wooden; poetry is Différance See DECONSTRUCTION, not words but verbal’ suggests that the FEMINIST CRITICISM. Difference 55

Difference Not confined to a single between various texts and different social theoretical school or perspective, the phenomena. Espousing a supposedly sci- notion of difference would be difficult to entific view of the world, it concentrates underestimate in terms of its importance on the binary oppositions and systems of within modern thought. In the twentieth similarity and difference that supposedly century, this concept first came to promi- generate meaning. The move from struc- nence in the work of the French linguist turalism to POST-STRUCTURALISM entails Ferdinand de Saussure. In his Course in a recognition that binary oppositions General Linguistics (1913), Saussure are also hierarchies where one element debunks referential theories of language is always privileged over the other. This by arguing that ‘in language there are recognition opens the door to a variety of only differences, and no positive terms’. political readings concerning the con- In other words, there are no inherent qual- struction and representation of difference, ities within a sign that demand that it refer especially in relation to the dominant to one specific referent. According to this norms. As this norm is often represented relational theory of language, meaning is as white, male and heterosexual, the con- generated only through the difference cept of difference has been particularly between signs. Yet, according to the useful to feminist, queer and post- deconstructive critic Jacques Derrida, colonial critics. Such critics have played Saussure is unable to acknowledge the a key role in identifying and exploring the most radical implications of his own argu- excluded or repressed term within the ment. As Derrida demonstrates, Saussure hierarchy. effectively severs the sign from its extra- It is important to note, however, that textual referent but continues to maintain the concept of difference is employed in a the unity of signifier and signified as variety of ways. Feminist theories offer a established by their conventional spoken case in point. While certain branches of usage. In order to destabilize the sign feminist criticism have made a strategic itself, Derrida puts forward the ‘concept’ and political decision to emphasize the of différance. Suspended between its two difference between men and women in senses of differing and deferring, this order to consolidate a more positive and neologism represents the non-originary self-determined conception of ‘woman’, origins of a generalized system of lan- others have employed the concept of guage that encompasses both speech and difference to challenge the ESSENTIALISM writing; where meaning is never located of such a position. It is now widely recog- within the sign as a self-sufficient entity nized that language does not simply but is, rather, constituted through the reflect the world but actually constitutes differential play between an infinite num- it. This means that language does not rep- ber of signifiers and signified. As a result, resent pre-existing differences (between, meaning is always deferred. Thus, the for example, men and women). Rather, ‘concept’ of différance represents a such differences are themselves the prod- powerful critique of PRESENCE and its uct of the language system that organizes associated values. our thoughts and perceptions (see Building on the work of Saussure, DISCOURSE). Thus, the notion of linguistic STRUCTURALISM focuses its attention not difference represents a profound chal- on the intricacies of any individual text or lenge to the essentialist view that men social phenomenon, but on the relation and women are fundamentally different 56 Differend creatures, each possessing certain Lyotard (1924–98) to the point of difference unalterable and innate characteristics. that arises between two disputant agen- Instead, such critics concentrate on the cies who do not possess common terms of ways in which such differences are con- reference within which to conduct their structed and represented in language. dispute. Any attempt to describe or Finally, certain recent feminist theories analyse the disagreement will always be use the term difference more broadly to unjust, because it will always function to refer not only to the differences between sanction one side of the conflict, while groups but also to differences within implicitly proscribing and/or marginaliz- groups. Emphasizing diversity rather than ing the other. sameness, this use of the term recognizes Lyotard’s work engages with a long that class, racial, local and national differ- European philosophical tradition (includ- ences fracture any generalized notion of ing most centrally the thought of what it is to be a woman. Immanuel Kant [1724–1804] in the latter It is also important to recognize that part of the eighteenth century and that of the concept of difference plays a pivotal Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889–1951] in the role in the construction of our subjec- first part of the twentieth) focussed on the tivity. According to post-structuralist intersection of culture, politics and ethics. thought, the SUBJECT is, precisely, a con- He began his career as a philosophy struction and, most obviously, a construc- teacher with strong left-wing affiliations. tion of language (we are born into a As with many of the key names in the language system that pre-dates and development of modern European cul- shapes us). Moreover, each subject – like tural theory, a pivotal moment for Lyotard the linguistic sign – depends upon its rela- was the Paris riots of 1968. Frustrated tion to, and differences from, other sub- with the failure of the ‘real’ revolution, a jects. Thus, we are all constituted through generation of erstwhile activists turned relations of both similarity and difference their energies to expediting a ‘revolution and our sense of what we are depends, in in the text’ which would in turn precipi- part, on what we are not. Group identities tate the ‘revolution in the head’ that are predicated on the same principles. To they understood to be a necessary pream- identify yourself as a member of a group ble for any programme of social change. is to claim certain similarities with its Lyotard’s own work belongs to (and is one other members, but it is also, and equally, of the key components in the formulation to differentiate yourself from other of) the moment of ‘postmodernism’ – a groups and their members. As a result, moment he shares (despite widespread constructions of the self are always bound antipathy towards the term) with fellow up with an other that both constitutes and French intellectuals Jacques Derrida and destabilizes the boundaries by which we Michel Foucault, as well as the German are constituted. See also ESSENTIALISM, Jürgen Habermas (1929–) and the DECONSTRUCTION, HYBRIDITY, STRUC- American Fredric Jameson. TURALISM and THE OTHER. Like many modern philosophers and See M. Currie, Difference (2004). social theorists, Lyotard looks for, and JA invariably finds, support for his philo- sophical speculations in literature. Differend Differend is a term given by Great writing (such as that of Marcel the French philosopher Jean-François Proust [1871–1922] or James Joyce Discourse 57

[1882–1941]) invariably functions to justice is founded upon a notion of reveal (although not to ‘represent’ in the democratic consensus formed by subjects accepted literary sense) a differend – a who, although perhaps characterized by mode of being in the world which is not incommensurate language systems when amenable to the traditional discourses of they first encounter, are willing to work to narrative, language or character. Like the find common terms of reference within critical theorist or the radical philosopher, which they may communicate effectively. the task of the great writer (regardless of Although wide-ranging in both implica- intention or affiliation) should be to bear tion and application, the differences witness to the differend; the task of the between Lyotard (broadly representing responsible reader, meanwhile, should postmodernism) and Habermas (broadly be to transpose literary effects into a representing an ongoing modernism discourse of social justice. In between grounded in the responsible human sub- these two categories, however, there exists ject) stem from radically different ways of another figure, one whose institutional understanding how language functions in identity militates against the survival of relation to reality, and more finely still, the differend: the critic. The traditional from mutually exclusive apprehensions of role of the critic has been to sit in judge- the individual word as it relates to the ment upon the literary text – that is, to other words with which it is surrounded bring a particular array of skills and and to the ‘real’ world it ostensibly knowledge to bear upon the text so that its represents. See also POSTMODERNISM and secret may be revealed, its ‘meaning’ dis- POST-STRUCTURALISM. covered. Traditional critical practice, in See Jürgen Habermas, The other words, is by definition opposed to Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: the differend. Critical language represents Twelve Lectures (1987); Jean-François the arbitrary power which will always Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A attempt to (re)solve the differend with Report on Knowledge (1984), The reference to one or another privileged Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988); subject (the author or the reader), or some Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art favoured external political narrative, such and Politics (1991). as Marxism. GS The differend, for Lyotard, is an injus- tice suffered by those whose signifying Dirge See ELEGY. system is silenced by established repre- Disbelief See BELIEF. sentations of ‘reality’; as such, it is part of an ethical programme in which ‘the Discourse Up until the later part of unpresentable’ – that which is silenced in the twentieth century, ‘discourse’ had its every discursive event – is witnessed and traditional meaning: the ordered exposi- activated as an element within the process tion in writing or speech of a particular of judgement. For others, however, post- subject, a practice familiarly associated modernism à la Lyotard is a profoundly with writers, such as Descartes and pessimistic proposition, one based upon a Machiavelli. In recent decades the term denial of the Enlightenment concept of has been used with increasing frequency rational critique and a long tradition of and with new kinds of meaning, reflecting organized political dissent. The key figure in part the effect on critical vocabulary here is Habermas, whose theory of social of work done within and across the 58 Discourse boundaries of various disciplines: the context of communication has varied linguistics, philosophy, literary criticism, from one field of inquiry to another. In history, psychoanalysis and sociology. the philosophy of language, the theory of The term now represents the meeting- the speech act, notably developed in the ground for diverse inquiries into the work of Austin and Searle, has been nature and use of language; but it has incorporated into this expanded defini- meant different things when spoken in a tion of discourse. Speech act theory is, in French or an Anglo-American accent. part, a reaction against the impoverished A basic motive in the formulation of conception of language inherited from discourse in Anglo-American research logical positivism whereby the meaning- has been to discover the regularities and ful use of language consists in the utter- constraints at work in units of language ance of statements about the world that larger than the sentence. This has meant can be either confirmed or disconfirmed. a redefinition of the goals of linguistic Austin and then Searle proposed that lan- inquiry as formulated by Chomsky. guage use was not simply a matter of Whereas Chomsky had given priority to making true or false statements about the a description of our knowledge of the world, but also a kind of action, the grammaticality of sentences, work on expression of an intention in relation to a discourse stressed the importance of person or state of affairs. To understand a description of communicative compe- the meaning of an utterance requires more tence, our ability to combine sentences, than knowing what it refers to; it is also to relate them coherently to the topics of to understand its ‘force’, whether it be discourse, and to say the right thing at the promising, commanding, questioning or right time. A string of grammatically any one of a number of what Austin well-formed sentences does not necessar- and Searle called ‘illocutionary acts’. ily constitute a successful act of commu- Although working with invented exam- nication. To reply to the question ‘What is ples of utterance, speech act theory has your name?’ by saying ‘The cows are made a good case for describing the under the bridge’ is not, ordinarily, to necessary conditions for a successful or respond appropriately, even though both ‘felicitous’ act of communication, a task question and answer are grammatically neglected not only by linguistic philoso- correct. Such an exchange might make phy but also by the Chomskyan grammar sense in the context of a surrealist novel of sentences (see J. R. Searle, Speech or of schizophrenic language, but nor- Acts, 1969). mally discourse is cohesive, and one of Three other related areas of inquiry the aims of discourse analysis is to show need to be noted: the ethnography of how a knowledge of conventions for links speaking, conversational analysis and between sentences and for links with con- functional linguistics. The first of these, text is a necessary condition of successful through the development of such con- communication (see M. A. K. Halliday cepts as speech community and speech and R. Hasan, Cohesion in English, style, has refined our understanding of 1976). language as a force in social life, and A concern for understanding language notably the way that language contributes in the context of communicative use has to the definition of social identity and been central to the contemporary concep- difference (see J. J. Gumperz and tion of discourse. What is understood as D. Hymes, Directions in Sociolinguistics, Discourse 59

1972). Conversational analysis poses which inequalities of power and various questions – what are the constitu- position are negotiated and contested tive events in a conversation, how do we (M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social recognize that it is our turn to speak, who Semiotic, 1978; R. Fowler, R. Hodge, controls the topic of conversation – in an G. Kress and T. Trew, Language and effort to identify the regularities and con- Control, 1979). straints at work in examples of actual The work described above had a conversation (M. Coulthard, Intro- considerable effect on literary study. At duction to Discourse Analysis, 1977; one level the refinement of the analysis of M. Coulthard and M. Montgomery, spoken language contributed a new set of Studies in Discourse Analysis, 1981). The techniques for the close reading of liter- premiss of functional linguistics has been ary language. Work done in the analysis usefully described by its principal expo- of conversation allowed a more discrimi- nent, M. A. K. Halliday: ‘The particular nating description of dialogue in drama form taken by the grammatical system of (D. Burton, Dialogue and Discourse, language is closely related to the social 1980). Speech act theory produced a and personal needs that language is diversified if unstable set of categories required to serve.’ Given that our which can be used in the analysis of the language allows us to make the same intentions and verbal actions encoded in proposition in different forms – ‘John the rhetorical strategies of literature loved Mary’, ‘Mary was loved by John’ – (R. Ohmann, ‘Speech, action and style’, functional linguistics investigates what it in S. Chatman (ed.), Literary Style: is that determines one realization over A Symposium, 1971). At another level dis- another. The question of determination course analysis provided a global model here is complex: preference for one gram- for literature itself, one which describes matical form can be partly understood in literary works not as iconic objects set terms of the immediate speech context, apart from a world of intention and effect, but implicated in that and surrounding it but as a socially determined communica- are other contexts of power and politics. tive practice between reader and writer, Functional linguistics can alert us to the and, as such, analogous to other forms of operations of ideology in language, communication (R. Fowler, Literature as whether it be in everyday usage or in Social Discourse, 1981). literature. For example, the use of nomi- Working from a different perspective, nalization and personification – ‘The discourse is a key term in the writings of stock market had a good day today’ – can the French philosopher and historian, obscure the issue of who immediately Michel Foucault. The place of discourse profits; compare as an alternative realiza- in Foucault’s own work can be crudely tion ‘Today a number of stock brokers described through two intertwined con- and speculators made a lot of money’. cerns. The first is with discourse as an Besides enriching our understanding historical phenomenon, an emphasis that of the social context of communication, has been marginal to the main body of functional linguistics, conversational Anglo-American work. For Foucault analysis and the ethnography of speaking there is no general theory of discourse or have opened up a critical potential for dis- language, only the historically grounded course analysis because of their capacity description of various discourses or to illuminate language use as a process in ‘discursive practices’. These latter consist 60 Discourse in a certain regularity of statements which author’ (M. Foucault, ‘What is an then define an object – whether it be author?’, 1969; see AUTHOR). The fact that sexuality or madness, criminality or literature and authors have become so economics – and supply a set of concepts closely identified needs to be explained which can be used to analyse the object, as the condition of a discursive practice to delimit what can and cannot be said which may itself be historically transient. about it, and to demarcate who can say it. Foucault’s critique of our common But the regularity which produces a dis- sense about authors is consonant with cursive practice should not be confused another important component of his with a logical or systematic coherence. It conception of discourse. For Foucault, is an historical event, not the realization discourse is at once a denial and a critique of some pre-existent system. The analysis of a canonical assumption in our thinking of discourse is a matter of research into about literature and language, the the historical conditions which permitted, assumption that these are expressive but did not guarantee, its appearance. As activities, either in the sense that they discourse defines its object, there are no express emotions and ideas ‘within’ the criteria of truth external to it: the truth of individual, or in the sense that acts of a discourse is, according to Foucault, akin expression, and notably acts of literary to a rhetorical imposition. We believe a expression, are a means of self-realization. discourse about sexuality to be true The different ‘discursive practices’ within because we have no alternative. Truth is a society afford various ‘subject posi- the unrecognized fiction of a successful tions’ which permit us to write or speak in discourse. certain ways about certain subjects. But The second concern, already indicated this cannot be equated with acts of in Foucault’s attitude towards the concept expression or self-realization. The oppo- of truth, is a radical scepticism about site is true: ‘discourse is not the majesti- many basic assumptions in intellectual cally unfolding manifestation of a history, literary criticism and linguistics. thinking, knowing subject, but on the In literary criticism Foucault has contrary, a totality in which the dispersion unpacked and criticized the assumptions of the subject, and his discontinuity with at work in such terms as ‘tradition’ and himself may be determined’ (Foucault, ‘author’. Foucault sees the idea of tradi- The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969, tion as bestowing a specious unity upon trans. 1972). This account of discourse works whose difference is then obscured expressly challenges the commonly held for the sake of a myth of a unified devel- assumption that literature is the expres- opment of literature which transcends the sive use of language par excellence. For abrupt discontinuities between diverse Foucault this would simply be another social formations. Similarly, the idea of myth about literature in our cultural the ‘author’ is historicized: ‘Even within epoch, one that could be traced in the our civilization the same type of texts genealogy of an ideal of expressive self- have not always required authors; there hood in the forms of lyric poetry. was a time when these texts which we Conceived as discourse, literature no now call “literary” (stories, folk-tales, more expresses us, either as writers or epics, and tragedies) were accepted, readers, than do the leaves on a tree circulated, and valorized without any express themselves when they are blown question about the identity of their by the wind. Dissemination 61

Although Foucaultian discourse words, whether we are dealing with opposes traditional conceptions of the lit- speech or writing, meaning is never erary, his work can be read as the theoret- located in any one sign but is, rather, pro- ical equivalent of a contemporary practice duced by the difference between that sign of literary writing which itself traces the and all the other signs in the language disappearance of the expressive subject system. Caught in a concatenation of (the works of the American writers John signification, meaning is always on the Ashberry and Thomas Pynchon would be move, always deferred. a case in point). More generally, work Inevitably, this radical re-conception done around a conception of discourse of writing and signification has a pro- has permitted a rethinking of notions of found impact on traditional, logocentric literary form. Instead of seeing the liter- understandings of meaning and interpre- ary work as an ideal aesthetic harmony, or tation. As Derrida suggests in his essay the equally ideal resolution of psycholog- ‘Différance’ (1982): ical tensions in the author or reader, dis- course theory conceives of the literary the first consequence to be drawn work as an instance of the historically from this is that the signified concept variable institution of literature, an insti- is never present in and of itself, in a tution which mediates relations between sufficient presence that would refer writer and reader in different ways at only to itself. Essentially and lawfully, different times, and in so doing, echoes, every concept is inscribed in a chain transforms or challenges the uneven or in a system within which it refers to distribution of power within societies. See the other, to other concepts, by means also C. Belsey, Critical Practice (1980); of the systematic play of differences. A. Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (1983); Sara Mills, Discourse (1997), Michel This ‘play of differences’ is, moreover, Foucault (2003). infinite; without origin or end. Nor can it JC ever be brought under control – anchored or arrested – by any external point of Dissemination As a term employed reference that, escaping its play, would by the deconstructive critic Jacques allow the signifier to be reduced, or subli- Derrida, dissemination designates the mated, into its signified. As a result of this idea that meaning is never stable, or fixed, disseminating force of writing, our desire but is, rather, dispersed or scattered for a stable, self-present meaning is throughout the language system. Thus, always frustrated. Thus, the notion of dis- like the notion of UNDECIDABILITY (to semination plays a key role in Derrida’s which it is related), dissemination calls critique of the logocentric valorization of into question the possibility of definition PRESENCE and all its associated values. itself. For this reason, it is best conceived More generally, this concept subverts, of as an effect of writing. It is, however, resists and disrupts any attempt at mas- essential to recognize that Derrida tery or totalization. As Barbara Johnson extends the traditional understanding of suggests in the Translator’s Introduction writing (the graphic signifier of the to Dissemination (1981), it is what ‘foils spoken word) to include a system of dif- the attempt to process in an orderly ference, deferral and spacing that encom- way toward meaning or knowledge, passes language in general. In other what breaks the circuit of intentions or 62 Dissociation of sensibility expectations through some ungovernable dangerous effects (see UNDECIDABILITY). excess or loss’. As Derrida reveals, the disseminating As is the case with all of the key terms proliferation of these terms within Plato’s within Derrida’s vocabulary, it is impossi- argument undermines the conceptual sys- ble to extricate the concept of dissemina- tems on which it is based. Thus, the oppo- tion from the chain of signification in sition between speech and writing is which it is embedded. Thus we must effectively disabled. turn to his text of this title and, more While the notion of dissemination specifically, to his deconstruction of the assumes a prominent place within any speech/writing opposition within Plato’s deconstructive reading, its usefulness is Phaedrus. Concentrating on a family not limited to any one school or critic. scene – of good and bad fathers, legiti- By reminding us that every text is charac- mate and illegitimate sons, good and bad terized by a play of signifiers that no writing – Derrida employs the notion of author or reader can control, the term dissemination in order to demonstrate forces us to recognize that no text can ever how, for Plato, both semen (the Latin term be reduced to its signified content. As a for seed) and sema (the Greek term for result, dissemination calls into question sign) may either be planted productively the traditional conception of the book as a (within the realm of the father as logos) in unified totality by acknowledging a prolif- order to produce legitimate offspring eration of meanings waiting to be discov- (speech) or may be scattered on the bar- ered – but not exhausted – by each new ren ground outside his presence (writing). reading. See also DECONSTRUCTION, LOGO- As Derrida suggests: CENTRISM, PRESENCE, UNDECIDABILITY. See M. McQuillan (ed.), Deconstruc- Writing and speech have thus become tion: A Reader (2000) and N. Royle (ed.), two different species, or values, of the Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (2000). trace. One, writing, is a lost trace, a JA nonviable seed, everything in sperm that overflows wastefully, a force Dissociation of sensibility A term wandering outside the domain of life, coined by T. S. Eliot in ‘The metaphysical incapable of engendering anything, of poets’, originally an anonymous review in picking itself up, of regenerating TLS (1921) of Grierson’s anthology, itself. On the opposite side, living Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the speech makes it capital bear fruit and Seventeenth Century. Its success dates does not divert its seminal potency from its reprinting under Eliot’s name in toward indulgence in pleasures 1924. The essay concludes: ‘The poets of without paternity. the seventeenth century...possessed a This opposition, however, is destabilized mechanism of sensibility which could by the disseminating play of writing from devour any kind of experience. . . . [But which Plato’s argument cannot escape. We with Milton and Dryden] a dissociation can trace the effects of this dissemination set in, from which we have never recov- most obviously in the network of textual ered...’. This malady of English poetry referrals between the related concepts of allegedly stemmed from a separation of the pharmakon, the pharmakeus and the the ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ parts of the pharmakos that Plato employs whenever poets’ consciousness, an inability to he is forced to confront writing and its accommodate intellection in the poetic Drama 63 synthesis. Thus thought and emotion in theatre, the poet’s art is only one among poetry appeared embarrassingly raw. A many, and it is not an essential one: unified sensibility, such as Donne’s, was indeed, words at all are not essential. In able, on the other hand, to feel a thought, Greek the term meant simply to act or ‘as immediately as the odour of a rose’. perform, and the definition is still valid; The poetry of the ‘moderns’ was to recap- all others are derivative and of limited ture this unified sensibility: The Waste historical significance. The dictionary Land is a kind of pattern for the poetic offers ‘a set of events...leading to cata- amalgamation of disparate elements. strophe or consummation’; but that relates Coleridge’s synthesizing IMAGINATION is to Victorian theatre and to a Victorian at the back of this idea, but the terms and view of Greek tragedy. The dancing and concept derive from the French symbolist flute playing which Aristotle discussed are critic Remy de Gourmont, and Eliot sees not events, and do not lead to catastrophe; in Baudelaire, Laforgue and Corbière a nor does the Fool in Lear, nor the tramps similar unification (which was also present in Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s play is by implication in Pound and Eliot himself). constructed against an expectation of con- By 1931 Eliot was detecting the dis- summation, but its positive qualities are sociation even in Donne, but in his last vested in the tramps, who are clowns. reference to the problem (in 1947) he reaf- Their performance derives for us from the firmed the original doctrine, though in circus, or more specifically from Charlie more general terms: ‘All we can say is, that Chaplin, but the association of clown and something like this did happen; that it had outcast is ancient, recurrent and common something to do with the Civil War...that to most societies. we must seek the causes in Europe, not in The clown invites our laughter, England alone...’. Cleanth Brooks attrib- and through it our derision. The clown’s uted the dissociation to Hobbes and opposite is the heroic actor, who invites L. C. Knights to Bacon, but Frank admiration (naïvely, emulation or identi- Kermode, in a chapter on the doctrine in fication), and whose identity is estab- Romantic Image (1957), described the lished by: presence on the stage and the concept as ‘quite useless historically’. physical power to dominate the scene and FWB the audience; but the heroic actor, far more than the clown, depends on words, Documentary See BIOGRAPHY. and can use them. For such an actor Dominant See POETICS. (Alleyn), Marlowe created the language of Tamburlaine. Hamlet’s language rarely Double irony See IRONY. displays such authority, and readers have Drama As a form of literature, drama doubted Ophelia’s view of him as a noble has been studied for centuries – ‘a poem mind o’erthrown; Shakespeare sets what written for representation’ (Johnson). In the actor is (leading actor) against what other words, it has been judged primarily the actor says, and makes that the focus of as a poem, and all that peculiarly belongs Hamlet’s relation to the player king. A to the stage – acting, production, scenery, heroic actor relies on projecting the role effects – have been subsumed under the through his personality, which means that vague term ‘representation’. The alterna- the ‘character’ presented depends on the tive is to invert that position, and stress actor’s own. The clown, on the other hand, the representation before the poem. In the like the character actor, appears to be 64 Dramatic irony quite other than the actor. But king and more than was set down for them; by the clown are equally roles that individuals time of Hamlet he requires even clowns play (as parents do to their children): the to perform strictly within the ‘necessary actor’s relation to the audience is a double questions of the play’, which have one: the actor must imitate men and become too consistently intricate for women as they appear to be, and must rep- undisciplined expansion. resent our urge to play a role – the paradox Drama, then, is not a poem; not even a that we can only ‘be ourselves’ when we dramatic poem. But prose is only in spe- can find a role to play. For the first, the cial circumstances adequate to its nature. actor’s language must resemble speech, It cannot be defined in literary terms, or if for the second it will not; hence the dual- it must be, they take on a different mean- ity observable even in Aeschylus, where ing in the theatre. Action in a novel is the the reader may concentrate on elements of journeys and battles in which individuals human utterance which the actor will find engage; in drama that is only a secondary to be only inflections in a poetry whose sense, action must primarily mean the general condition is close to recitative. movement of actors on the stage. It is not Lear can attack the storm with tremen- enlightening to offer a map of Scotland dous rhetoric; his Fool can use snatches of in an edition of Macbeth: he does not folk song and ballad. The relation of king travel from Glamis to Forres, but enters to fool is profoundly disturbing in Hamlet, and exits on the stage. Drama depends on acutely painful in Lear. actors with an audience. Performances, The range of a celebrated dramatic even of the same production with the text, then, derives from the roles that same cast, will vary, sometimes radically, actors play. The peculiar richness of from night to night; and the variation Shakespeare’s drama depends on the will primarily depend on the different derivation of his company from the multi- audiences, and the actors’ response to plicity, of talents masquerading in the them. There is no such consistent object Middle Ages under the general term of to abide our criticism as a painting, or a minstrels (and the status of vagabonds). printed poem; nor can there be an ‘ideal The impoverishment of drama represent- theatre of the mind’. Actual performance ing upper-middle class drawing rooms did is inherent in drama. So King Lear may not derive only from its social narrow- be one night a rather abstract disser- ness, but also from its lack of theatrical tation on Nature, the next an overwhelming range. The problem for Elizabethan experience whose end is silence. Dramatic dramatists was to unify the diversity at criticism has to reckon with this variability their disposal (dancing and fooling would and actuality; but it must not be defeated happen whether it was part of the play or by it; the variables are neither infinite nor not). Marlowe wrote great poetry only for arbitrary. King Lear is never Endgame. those moments when it would be needed; See S. W. Dawson, Drama and for others, only the necessary words for the Dramatic (1970); Clifford Leech, The what was largely silent action; for the Dramatist’s Experience (1970); Stanley clowns it seems likely that he provided Wells, Literature and Drama (1970); Mark only a scenario to be fulfilled with Fortier, Theatre/Theory: An Introduction improvization. Shakespeare seems always (2002). to have provided a fuller text, but in MSB Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the musicians must have been relied on to do Dramatic irony See IRONY. E

Ecocriticism The study of literary a general ‘green’ consciousness that has texts with reference to the interaction emerged in the developed world since the between human activity and the vast Second World War. range of ‘natural’ or non-human phenom- There are two main impulses or ena which bears upon human experience – strands to ecocriticism. The first encompassing (amongst many things) addresses itself to the growing canon of issues concerning fauna, flora, landscape, ‘ecoliterature’ that has emerged in environment and weather. response to the global environmental Although ecocriticism is principally crisis – imaginative writing which self- part of a wider response to a modern consciously engages with ‘green’ issues. In environmental crisis, its roots lie in what this respect, it is worth noting the ‘literary’ its adherents perceive to be the ‘human- air which permeates much ecocritical writ- centric’ model of history originating with ing itself; infused with the proselytizing the Greeks. The latter were the first to nature of their subject, and naturally indis- focus on ‘Man Apart’ – that is, humankind posed towards received critical discourses without reference to the physical environ- (which they perceive to be infected with ment in which the species subsists, – as the scientific spirit), ecocritics have a merely one element of a complex ecosys- tendency towards ‘purple’ prose – writing tem. For ecocritics, history since the that is intended to sway the emotions as Greeks testifies to the triumph of ‘Man well as engage the intellect. Apart’, and the marginalization of any The second, more challenging, perspective attempting to re-integrate impulse involves re-reading the existing humankind into the natural environment. literary canon in ecocritical terms, that is, ‘Man Apart’ came into his own with the attempt to address ‘standard’ literary the Age of Enlightenment and the onset of texts in the light of what they reveal about industrialization. The task of science human relations with the non-human since the eighteenth century has been the world. Because of the extent to which domination of nature through the accre- his writing is grounded in a specific tions of rational knowledge. During the determining landscape, a writer, such as same period, the industrial imagination Thomas Hardy, for example, lends him- roamed unchecked throughout the world, self quite easily to this kind of analysis. constantly searching (much of the time The typical Hardy narrative (say, Tess of aided by scientifically derived knowl- the D’Urbervilles) presents a human edge) for ways to better exploit the crisis against a background in which planet’s natural resources. Ecocriticism alternative discourses of time (beyond emerged at a time (the latter half of the the average human lifespan) and space twentieth century) when, after centuries (varieties of ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘built’ of systematic exploitation, many of those environment) are constantly invoked to non-renewable resources were nearing the provide ironic distance upon the action. point of exhaustion. As such, it may be The ecocritical task is less easy regarded as the literary critical wing of (although potentially more rewarding) 66 Écriture when addressed to material that does not on the reader is attacked by W. K. Wimsatt appear to lend itself readily to the task in and Monroe C. Beardsley, in their essay hand. This is where ecocriticism can ‘The affective fallacy’ (The Verbal Icon, come into conflict with a variety of other 1954), as encouraging impressionism and critical ‘isms’, upon whose ‘natural’ terri- relativism much as the ‘Intentional tory it may seem to be intruding. Emily Fallacy’ (see INTENTION) encourages Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), for biography and relativism. They relate the example, has traditionally been domi- practice to the nineteenth-century tradi- nated by a variety of humanist, feminist tion of affective criticism in which critics and Marxist analyses, each of which has were concerned to exhibit and record attempted to interpret the text in terms of their emotional responses, to catch the their own concerns. An ecocritical analy- intensity of their experience of a work sis would not necessarily reject such without bothering to investigate the interpretations, but would look to inte- causes of the experience. This habit of grate them into its own critical system regarding poetry as an exclusively which, to reiterate, addresses the interac- emotional affair arises from the Romantic tion of human and extra-human phenom- distinction of psychological events into ena, in this case, the Yorkshire landscape, ‘thought’ and ‘feeling’, ‘reason’ and the weather and the ubiquitous animal ‘emotion’: in such a scheme poetry is imagery invoked throughout the text. always the expression of feeling or emo- In the academic sphere, ecocriticism tion. I. A. Richards, in Principles of faces many of the same critiques levelled Literary Criticism (1924), continued to at its ‘green’ political counterpart, associate poetry with an ‘emotive’ as namely, that it is divisive, that it is opposed to a ‘scientific’ use of language, ultimately collaborative with that which it and attempted to apply behavioural ostensibly opposes and that it represents psychology to analysis of the effects of an effete response to a genuine global poetry. His failure to find terms in which environmental crisis on the part of profes- the psychological processes of the reader sionals-in-search-of-a-career. Ecocritics could be described meant that descriptive respond by indicting the inadequacies of criticism had to seek explanations not present practices in the face of environ- in psychology but in language. Thus mental crisis, by pointing out the culpa- Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that emo- bility of traditional critical systems, and tive import depends on the descriptive by maintaining the absolute priority of and contextual aspects of a word; it is ecological issues to all human concerns. not something added on but a function of See also CYBERCRITICISM. meaning. So for an emotion we have not See Jonathan Bate, Romantic merely a cause, but an object, a reason – Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environ- one is angry because one thinks a thing is mental Tradition (1991); Greg Garrard, false, insulting or unjust. The emotion Ecocriticism (2004); Cheryll Glotfelty aroused by poetry is felt in response to an and Harold Fromm (eds), The Ecocriticism organization of meaning. The descriptive Reader (1996). critic seeks to describe the reasons for GS emotion, the meaning of the poem as a structure of language. Écriture See DECONSTRUCTION. An absurd misunderstanding of this Effect Concentration of critical atten- argument concludes that poems have no tion on the psychological effect of poetry effect, no emotional quality, are merely Elegy 67 objects to be ‘objectively’ analysed. But Spenser’s ‘Daphnaida’ (1591) and the critic could hardly hope to account for ‘Astrophel’ (‘A Pastorall Elegie upon the an effect that was not experienced. death of the most noble and valorous Wimsatt and Beardsley rightly insist that Knight, Sir Philip Sidney’, 1595) are in explaining the reasons for their influential early examples; Donne uses response to a work – in any case a more the word in the same sense (e.g. ‘A complex mental event than a state of Funerall Elegie’ in An Anatomy of the ‘feeling’ – critics must seek terms which World, and the titles of several poems in relate to the public object, the poem as a the collection Epicedes and Obsequies pattern of knowledge. See also FEELING, upon the Deaths of Sundry Personages); PLEASURE, READER, SINCERITY. then there are the ‘Elegies upon the PM Author’ by several hands appended to the 1633 edition of Donne’s poems. But since Eiron See IRONY. Donne also uses the word for his collec- Elegy Some genres, such as EPIC and tion of twenty ‘Elegies’, casual, erotic and SONNET, are fairly unequivocal in classical satirical poems on various topics, the pre- and/or modern European literature: the cise ‘funeral elegy’ sense was obviously first of these two examples is identified not securely established. by its scale, its subject matter, and its Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ mourning the death manner of handling that subject matter; of Edward King (1637) revives the the second must obey stringent metrical pastoral form, with its apparatus of shep- rules. ‘Elegy’ illustrates a different type herds, nymphs and satyrs, and sets the of genre-term: ultimately classical in ori- pattern for the modern English elegiac gin, transplanted into modern European tradition. The best-known poems in this terminology only as a word, without the mode are Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ on Keats classical formal basis, unrestricted as to (1821) and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ on structure (except for the minimal require- Clough (1867). (Milton and Arnold refer ment that it be a VERSE composition), to their poems as ‘monodies’, not overlapping with a number of similarly ‘elegies’.) Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ on inexplicit terms (complaint, dirge, the death of Arthur Hallam (1833–50) is lament, monody, threnody), yet conven- not pastoral, but introspective and personal. tionally tied to a limited range of subject The language of funeral elegies pro- matters and styles (death and plaintive vided opportunity for plaintive, melan- musing), and readily comprehensible to choly generalizations on death or on the educated readers. In these respects, a state of the world: there are signs of this most typical genre-term. appropriation of the mode for general Elegia in Greek and Latin was a complaint already in ‘Lycidas’, where the type of metre, not a type of poem – a author ‘by occasion foretells the ruin of couplet consisting of a dactylic hexa- our corrupted clergy’. Thomas Gray’s meter followed by a pentameter. Since ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ this verse-form was used for all kinds (1750) is the archetypal general medita- of subjects, the classical ancestry is rele- tion on the passing of life, unconnected vant to modern elegy principally in an with any particular death. Coleridge etymological way. departicularized the definition still fur- From the English Renaissance, ‘elegy’ ther when he stated that the elegy ‘is the or ‘elegie’ referred to a poem mourning form of poetry natural to the reflective the death of a particular individual. mind’ – so elegy came to be a mood, or 68 Emblem a style, as well as a poem for a specific (whether in paint or words or spectacle); dead person. This second, looser, defini- a compressed poem-within-a-poem, or a tion of elegy is invoked by literary histo- central motto or hieroglyphic epitomizing rians to characterize assorted melancholy the poem’s intention. It might be tradi- poems of any period, for example, the tional (the insignia of saints or nations) so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon elegies’ including or bizarrely original, simultaneously ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer’, both announcing and hiding its meaning, tales of personal deprivation shading into assuming the portentousness of a regretful meditations on the mutability of talismanic sign. the world and seeking divine consolation. More recent use of the term has been As long as we are clear that there is a vexed by the ambiguous ‘concreteness’ it strict and a loose definition of ‘elegy’, implies (see IMAGE); also by the aware- that there is slender classical warrant for ness that, no matter how personal its the term in either of its two familiar mod- communicative intention, ‘emblem’ sug- ern senses, and that we perforce apply it gests an arrogantly intentionalist aesthetic to works which were not thought of by at odds with modern critical thinking their authors as ‘elegies’ (remember that (‘A Device’ said Puttenham (1589) ‘such the paradigm elegy ‘Lycidas’ is called a as a man may put into letters of gold and ‘monody’), we have a useful exploratory send to his mistresses for a token’). Post- genre-term. romantic distrust of the ‘frigidity’ of See A. F. Potts, The Elegiac Mode calculation, combined with the discredit (1967); Peter M. Sacks, English Elegy: of analogical thinking, inhibited reactions Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats to emblematic techniques. They exist (1985); Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of however: in Coole Park and Ballylee, Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy 1931, Yeats exclaims ‘Another emblem to Heaney (1994). there!’ with the assurance that character- RGF izes public and explicit image making. See Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Bacon in 1605, wrote Emblem Books (1948); Erwin Panofsky, ‘Emblem reduceth conceits intellectual to Studies in Iconology (1962); Edgar Wind, images sensible’. In its fullest develop- Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance ment the emblem comprised a symbolic (1958); Michael Bath, John Manning and picture plus motto and explanation; famil- Alan R. Young (eds), The Art of the iar moral and religious paradoxes were Emblem (1993); Michael Bath, Speaking encoded in popular books like Francis Pictures: English Emblem Books and Quarles’s Emblemes (1635), and poetic Renaissance Culture (1994). emulation of such ‘silent parables’ LS (cf. ALLEGORY, CONCEIT) helped stimulate ‘concreteness’ and palpability in meta- Epic European literature was described phor, and witty, reflexive verbal texture by Samuel Johnson as a series of foot- (see J. A. Mazzeo, ‘A critique of some notes to Homer; and Keats’s ‘On first modern theories of metaphysical poetry’, looking into Chapman’s Homer’ 1952, reprinted in W. R. Keast (ed.), expresses a delight at Homer in superb 17th Century Poetry, 1962). ‘Emblem’ translation. The Iliad has remained the or ‘Device’ came to signify a complex of type of classical epic ever since Aristotle’s meaning enacted through analogy Poetics, and the romantic fascinations of Epic 69 the Odyssey have not been exhausted by the Old English Widsith remain names. It Ulysses and the Cantos. Virgil’s Aeneid, is only in the mid-twentieth century that recapitulating the themes of Odyssey the techniques of oral composition were and Iliad, consecrated the epic as the definitively analysed by Milman Parry; supreme literary form of antiquity, and his work showed in minute detail how the so it remained for Dante and for the text of Homer has the same formal char- Renaissance humanists. The Christian acteristics as the improvised oral epics of epic Paradise Lost was the consummation Yugoslavia; both verbal phrase and type- of Renaissance efforts to soar ‘above the scene and overall structural patterning are Aonian mount’; it was also the last. part of a repertoire of stock formulae, a Dryden and Pope chose to translate rather tradition which evolved in response to the than to emulate Virgil and Homer; Arnold conditions of oral improvisation. Parry’s lectured on the Grand Style. methods have been applied to the prod- Victorian definitions of epic spoke of ucts of other cultures. But the conse- ‘national themes’ (usually war) and quences of his work for the poetics of an invoked Milton’s ‘great argument’ and epic written in an ‘oral’ style have to be ‘answerable style’. Classically trained worked out critically. There is, after all, a critics, expecting art to see life steadily qualitative difference between Homer’s and see it whole, looked for an idealized epic and the Yugoslav epos; their compo- realism and debarred folklore and sitional mechanics may be the same, but romance elements. W. P. Ker disqualified their aesthetic effects differ, at least in Beowulf because its hero fights monsters degree, and the difference may be due in and not humans; Tolkien defended it on part to a literate finishing of the epea the same grounds. Bowra (Heroic Poetry) pteroenta, Homer’s ‘winged words’. held that heroic poetry, for all the power Between Homer and Virgil lies a vast of the gods, is centred on the human level, difference, and again between Virgil and and that magic should not play a deter- Milton; critics speak of primary, sec- mining role. Twentieth-century advances ondary and tertiary epic. The verbal art of in the study of non-classical heroic and Virgil refines and transmutes the clear oral poetry (Chadwick, Bowra, Parry, and inevitable directness of Homer into Lord) illuminated the connection of epic something softer; the laughter of his gods, with ‘heroic ages’ where the warrior-lord when heard, is less uncontrollable. For all of a pastoral society is the shepherd of his the sternness of its ethos and beauty of its people in peace, and in war achieves surface, his world has a fuller moral and glory by a life of action. ‘Breaker of psychological dimension, and a more cities’ and ‘tamer of horses’ are equally personal reverberation, than Homer’s. complimentary epithets; and death is bet- Milton himself and his concerns as a ter than dishonour. So it was with those at Renaissance humanist and Protestant are Thebes and at Troy; so with Beowulf, so powerful in Paradise Lost, and it with Charlemagne, with Myo Cid; so contains in baroque form so much of the perhaps with Gilgamesh and with King extravagance of the so-called romantic David. A heroic age lasts very few gener- epics of Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser, ations, and is firmly integrated about a that the usefulness of the term ‘epic’ may few central places and figures. be disputed. The epic surely cannot be The stories of these particular heroes an individual’s personal view of the are known through writing; the heroes of world? 70 Epic theatre

The point about epic, Northrop Frye stems from the fact that Frye’s ‘poet’s argued, is its encyclopaedic scope and its vision’ is the traditional vision of a cyclic structure; the anger of Achilles, the preliterate society. Hence the aidos of journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas – these epic, its respect for the given facts of stories in their resolution recapitulate nature and human life, which it crystal- the life of the individual and of the race. lizes into generic type-scenes and verbal The note of epic is its objectivity: formulae; hence its pattern, beauty and authority. It is hardly possible to overestimate See Erich Auerbach, trans. W. Trask, the importance for Western literature Mimesis (1953); Maurice Bowra, Heroic of the Iliad’s demonstration that the Poetry (1952), Virgil to Milton (1945); fall of an enemy, no less than of a H. M. and N. K. Chadwick, The Growth of friend or leader, is tragic and not Literature (reprinted 1968); Northrop comic. With the Iliad, once for all, an Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957); objective and disinterested element W. P. Ke r, Epic and Romance (1896); enters into the poet’s vision of human G. S. Kirk, Homer and the Epic (1965); life. With this element,...poetry C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost acquires the authority that since the (1942); A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales Iliad it has never lost, an authority (1964); Milman Parry, ed. A. Parry, The based, like the authority of science, on Making of Homeric Verse (1971); Gregory the vision of nature as an impersonal Nagy, Homeric Responses (2004). order. MJA Frye argued well for this pattern and this authority in Virgil and Milton; he also Epic theatre The cardinal concept of considered the Bible an epic. the work of Bertolt Brecht (the classic It is this objectivity and authority that MODERNIST, and, after Shakespeare, per- Joyce sought and Brecht wanted in his haps the most frequently performed of all ‘epic theatre’. The epic qualities achieved dramatists), ‘epic theatre’ means, simply, by Tolstoy, aimed at by Steinbeck and a theatre that narrates, rather than repre- even by Cecil B. de Mille are based on the sents. Stemming from the period in which idea of epic presenting the whole of the Brecht first began to study Marx, with life of a society against a natural back- The Threepenny Opera of 1928 as its first ground with simplicity, grandeur and major exhibit, the theory is grounded in authority. The fate of characters is part of historical and political propositions – in the overall pattern. ‘The lives of men are the view, espoused by mentors like the like the generations of leaves’ or an inci- sociologist Fritz Sternberg and the critic dent in battle is ‘as when a shepherd in the Walter Benjamin as well as by Brecht mountains sees a thundercloud (or a himself, that the workings of modern wolf)...’. The coherence of the pattern of industrial civilization, and the essentially life is maintained by these traditional epic ‘inorganic’ cities spawned by it, are similes; there is the feeling that the whole too abstract and complex to be visually is more than the part you are reading, and apprehended, or immanently represented that you know, in general, what the whole upon the stage. Upon such premisses is like. Aristotle remarked that Homer Brecht built a ‘scientific’ theory of a leaves the stage to his characters; this radical drama in which experimental impersonality of narrative technique work upon contemporary society might Epic theatre 71 be carried out through a sober, narrative ‘romantic irony’), shifts critical attention analysis of its inherent (and frequently from ‘affekt’ to ‘effekt’, to the perhaps comic) contradictions. idealized possibility of audience politi- Consequently, the theory of the ‘epic cization through a process where cool theatre’ emphasizes rationality, and detachment leads to correct and effective devices calculated to secure a suitable judgement and action. ‘Alienation means environment for its exercise. Brecht felt historicizing, means representing persons that to foster a state of relaxation in the and actions as historical, and therefore theatre – an atmosphere in which reason mutable’, writes Brecht in the 1929 essay and detachment, rather than passion and ‘On experimental theatre’, restating the involvement, were to predominate – was Marxist equation of scientific and histor- to subvert the established theatre and the ical consciousness. The attainment of bankrupt ‘culinary’, ‘Aristotelian’ plays such consciousness means, for Brecht, that were performed in it. He had in mind, the ‘alienated’ awareness that history’s essentially, the drama of bourgeois real- outcomes are never inevitable, always ism, with its roots in Lessing’s neo- amenable to political intervention and Aristotelian theory, and its aim of transformation. achieving empathetic identification Consequently, the epic theatre’s fore- between audiences and ‘stars’ who in turn grounding of narratives and narrators identify themselves with their roles, and does not imply any straightforward, represent individual psychologies in emo- unproblematical unfolding of chrono- tionally charged styles of acting. One logical or other linear sequences. In a alternative model was cabaret, where continual recapitulation, perhaps, of the drinks and smokes guarantee a laid-back, frustrations of 1926, when he was forced critical frame of mind: ‘I even maintain’ to abandon plays that foundered upon the (wrote Brecht in a hyperbolic mood) ‘that invisibility and unrepresentability of one man with a cigar in the stalls at a processes like the operation of the Shakespeare performance could bring Chicago Grain Market, the emphasis of about the downfall of western art’. Brecht’s work is upon discontinuity. No In such an atmosphere, Brecht’s plays chain of events is held together by a are commonly introduced by narrators natural or self-evident logic; the spectator (sometimes cynics, like the comperes of is to experience the constant disruption of cabarets) who see through social façades narrative structure, as one device undercuts and distance themselves from the another. Actors are continually abandon- events they recount; played by actors who ing speech for song, or taking off masks do not identify with their roles; and set to become other characters, or to take part in remote times and places – Chicago, in other plays; scenes are shifted abruptly China, medieval Georgia and Victorian in time and space, with intervening London – with which no spectator can chasms. The epic theatre asserts narrative identify. in an unpropitious time (compare The ensemble of these measures is to Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’, on produce the famous Verfremdungseffekt the loss of narrative art), rather than takes or ‘alienation effect’. This concept, with it for granted. its formalist and idealist antecedents Yet, in the history of the reception of (the Russian FORMALIST ostranenie or Brechtian theory, it may be possible ‘making strange’, and German Romantic to point to some of its own contradictions. 72 Epistle

It has created a new aesthetics, perhaps, but Epistle See VERSE EPISTLE. not a new politics of art. The ease and ubiq- uity of its absorption was foreshadowed by Essay Both the term and the form were the instant worldwide success of The invented by Montaigne (1533–92) and Threepenny Opera and ‘Mack the Knife’, a adopted soon afterwards into English by song whose basic propositions (1. that the Bacon; literally the try-out in discursive equation of businessmen and sharks insults prose of an idea, judgement or experi- sharks; 2. that the upholders and subverters ence. Although the essay is by definition of bourgeois law are interchangeable) have informal and even conversational in man- seemed to offer little resistance to painless ner, the persuasive and rhetorical tradition consumption. Whether or not Brecht can be of much Greek and Roman writing was held responsible for the dissemination of familiar to Bacon and Montaigne and lies his work in versions that (to requisition a behind what they write. We therefore find phrase of Clive James’s) often have less of in all essays a direct and even intimate the atmosphere of poisonous old Berlin appeal to the reader; sometimes, as in than of poisonous old Bournemouth, the Swift’s ‘Modest proposal’, this is com- fact remains that Brechtian techniques have plex and ambiguous in line with the ironic now been universally domesticated on purpose of engaging the reader in the television. interpretative process; sometimes, as in Perceiving such problems, Brecht in his George Orwell’s most effective essays last years began to replace the theory of (e.g. ‘Shooting an Elephant’), the rhetoric epic theatre with the theory of dialectical is all the more influential for being muted theatre, and to base it on the much more and oblique. Usually, though, the essay is radical practice of the Lehrstücke (where a polished and sophisticated form of fire- the entire distinction between performers side chat, a smooth way of putting over and audience was abolished, and the per- moral reflections, aphorisms and obiter formance itself – with potential Nazi dicta in a less rigorous and rebarbative wreckers at the doors – became a political manner than the treatise or ethical disqui- act). In Anglo-American criticism, where sition permits. It must appear relaxed but the critical working-through of Brechtian not flabby, nonchalant but not trivial. In theory has been sluggish, such difficulties France, Montaigne set the pattern of a have surfaced only in recent years, but fundamentally moral argument based on are thoroughly comprehended in (for anecdotes and the lessons to be drawn instance) Fredric Jameson’s ‘Afterword’ in from them – the gentle art of egotism, in Aesthetics and Politics (1978). fact, involving autobiography of a sort, if Cf. CONTRADICTION. selective and intellectual in style rather See also Walter Benjamin, Under- than frankly confessional. In England, standing Brecht (1973); John Willett William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and others (ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Develop- made it more sentimental and whimsical ment of an Aesthetic (1974); G. Bartram by playing down the serious aspect the and A. Waine (eds), Brecht in Perspective French kept to the fore. In America, (1982); J. L. Styan, Modern Drama in Washington Irving, Emerson and Thoreau Theory and Practice: Expressionism and wrote in the genre, and the form flourished, Epic Theatre (1983); J. Reinelt, After particularly among black writers, such as Brecht: British Epic Theater (1996). James Baldwin and Leroy Jones. In all MAH cases, however, there is no formal structure Essentialism 73 of progression, and little attempt at a final neatly into a single, self-evident category synthesis: the play of the mind in free determined by shared physiological associations around a given topic is what features. Yet, this ‘Wooman’ – far from counts. Essays are therefore not debates, constituting a ‘natural’ category – refers but dialogues with an assumed reader; to a historically specific construction that but in the finest examples, this does not is intimately bound up with contemporary preclude a fruitful and stimulating tension DISCOURSES of class, gender, nationality between a frequent high seriousness in and race. Turning from literature to the the theme and the almost casual informal- real world, we might also consider the fate ity of the way in which it is handled. of two individuals: a young black man An attempt was made by Scholes and living in South Africa during the reign of Klaus to subdivide the genre according apartheid and a middle-class white man to its analogies with the oration, the living in the South of England in the poem, the story and the play, but since twenty-first century. Although each pos- even they admitted that ‘any essay may sesses a penis (the definitive marker of be a combination of the four basic forms’, sexual DIFFERENCE and, for the essential- the most sensible approach is that which ists, sexual identity), such superficial views the essay as a minor art-form in its similarities mean little when compared to own right. a whole range of other contextual factors See Robert Scholes and Carl H. Klaus, that differentiate these men. Both univer- Elements of the Essay (1969). salizing and transcendent, essentialism is JWJF inherently reductive because it ignores the decisive role that factors, such as environ- Essentialism Associated with the ment, history, class, education, the family tenets of HUMANISM, essentialism is based and language itself play in constituting on the belief that all individuals, or who and what we are. groups of individuals, possess certain At certain stages in their development, fundamental, innate traits. Thus, essen- branches of both feminist and post- tialism treats identity as fixed, permanent colonial theory advocated an essentialist and stable. Essentialists also assume that view of gender and race in an attempt to there are certain basic and unalterable consolidate a more positive and self- physical and psychological differences determined notion of women and persons between, for instance, men and women, of colour. For example, the French heterosexuals and gays/lesbians and feminist Luce Irigaray has argued that people of different races. To put it most experiences specific to women, such as simply, essentialists view identity as the menstruation and childbirth, mean that product of biology rather than the con- they are more connected to the material struction of culture. In chapter 14 of realm than men and therefore hold a dif- Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–3) ferent set of ethical values. More recently, a character called Mr Turveydrop offers however, such methodologies have been us an easily recognizable example of called into question, especially by those such views when he exclaims, ‘Wooman, influenced by POST-STRUCTURALISM which lovely Wooman...what a sex you are!’ is decidedly anti-essentialist in orientation. Collapsing GENDER into sex, this com- It is now widely recognized that any ment implies that all women (emphasized attempt to privilege the differences by the capitalization of ‘Wooman’) fit between men and women, or people 74 Ethical criticism of different races, minimizes the key examples of good behaviour which read- differences and diversity within such ers could emulate. This changed with the groupings. One of the most important of advent of romanticism. Literature was such critiques of essentialism is that of now seen as an expression of emotion the American feminist Judith Butler, who rather than a guide to ethics. Of course, argues that femininity is the effect, rather writers did not cease to be concerned than the cause, of behaviours held by about ethical issues-look, for example, at essentialists to be natural and intrinsic to how the Victorian novelists tried to raise women (see PERFORMATIVITY). Speaking awareness about the plight of the poor, more generally, the essentialist view of but literature was no longer conceived the individual has been replaced by the primarily as a guide to right action. This post-structuralist notion of the SUBJECT. became even more pronounced at the Rather than being seen as fixed, stable end of the nineteenth century with the and permanent, the subject is contingent, aesthetic movement which promoted multiple, fragmented and always in the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’: beauty, not process. Above all, the subject is a con- morality was to be the new touchstone of struct subject to external forces and literature. factors over which it has no control. One Nor did ethics seem to be a priority of of the most important of such forces is modernist art where the interest was more language itself which, according to in the nature of consciousness than in the post-structuralism, constitutes rather than workings of conscience. Moreover, the reflects our identity and the world in nature of modernist art made it difficult to which we live. engage with ethical issues. The emphasis As we have already seen, essentialism on formal experimentation rather than is based on a belief in certain unalterable, accurate representation made it difficult fundamental truths about the individual for the reader to connect any moral mat- and human nature more generally. Thus, it ters that might arise in a work with his or should come as no surprise that an essen- her own experience of the world. Ethics tialist reading of a literary text would is central to the work of F. R. Leavis concentrate on how these universal and (1896–1978) but he did not believe that immutable values are expressed by literature should be used as a guide to the author. Such a reading would, more- behaviour. His was a much more subtle over, treat the text as an autonomous conception, one which stressed the power entity, divorced from both its context of of literature to make us more responsive production and consumption. See also to the possibilities for growth and devel- DIFFERENCE, HUMANISM and THE OTHER. opment in both ourselves and the society JA in which we live. The advent of French critical theory in Ethical criticism Until the late the 1970s signalled another change in the eighteenth century, it was a commonplace perception of literature. Thinkers, such as of criticism that literature should promote Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel virtue. From The Epistles of the Roman Foucault (1926–84) and Jacques Lacan poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17) to the novels of (1901–81) focussed on the nature of Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) litera- signification while in Britain CULTURAL ture was expected not so much to imitate MATERIALISTS drew attention to the role nature as to improve it by providing literature played in legitimizing the social Eurocentrism 75 order. One criticism of these develop- not try to speak for others as this has the ments is that they undermined the idea of potential to oppress them and whether we individual responsibility, not only by should judge an act as good in itself or showing that social and economic and according to the consequences that follow even linguistic structures limited the free- from it. Finally, there is the question of dom to act, but also by questioning the how ethics relates to literary form: are very idea of the human itself. To be fair, some forms, such as REALISM, more there was something deeply ethical about amenable to the exploration of ethical theory’s aim to give a voice to those on issues than, say, self-referential works? the margins but such concerns often But there are also more straightforward seemed lost in the sort of highly abstract, issues here, such as how clearly writers formal analysis that can be found, for communicate, or how sincere they example, in the writings of Derrida. It may be. was dissatisfaction with these and other See Todd Davis and Kenneth Womack elements of theory that led to a revival of (eds), Mapping the Ethical Turn: A ethical criticism. A key figure in this Reader in Ethics, Culture and Literary change was Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) Theory (2001); Andrew Hadfield (ed.), whose idea that we have an absolute oblig- The Ethics in Literature (1999); Dominic ation to the other struck a chord in a society Rainsford and Tim Woods (eds), Critical where social bonds were disintegrating Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility under the impact of market forces. (1999). There is no one form of ethical criti- GD cism. Instead, there are a range of ethical Euphony See TEXTURE. concerns, all of them rooted in the fact that a work of literature presupposes a Eurocentrism Put simply, Eurocen- relation between the author and the trism is a way of thinking that privileges audience and is therefore ethical by Europe (or, ‘the West’) as the centre nature. There is the conventional view of historical development, and posits that literature is ethical because it enables European culture as superior to all others. us to empathize with others. It does this It is, therefore, a species of ethnocen- by its special use of language which trism; but is also more than that. Whilst appeals simultaneously to the intellect, ethnocentrism, in the abstract form of the passions and the affections thereby believing one’s own culture to be better or reminding us that ethics is not a matter of more satisfying than anyone else’s is following rules but of balancing all kinds arguably a feature of all human societies, of conflicting claims and then taking and is therefore, transhistorical and responsibility for whatever decision we transcultural, Eurocentrism is a specifically finally make. Ethical criticism is based on modern construct that has emerged in close reading which respects the unique complex relation to the formation of cap- character of the work. It also concerns italism and colonialism. This means that itself with how a work represents the prior to the emergence of the modern world, especially if it is based on a world and the ideological formations true event, and with how a work relates to that sustain it (of which Eurocentrism the writer’s or the reader’s own life. More is one, highly important, dimension), broadly, there are debates in ethical criti- European self-centredness was no more cism about whether we should or should than a ‘banal provincialism’; afterwards it 76 Eurocentrism becomes part of ‘a theory of world history what has become known, following the and...a global political project’ (Amin). emergence of Eurocentrism itself, as However, this should not be taken to the ‘Orient’. This distinction from the imply that Eurocentrism is a coherent set ‘Orient’ (as a marker for all of Europe’s of ideas that may be located in a series of Others) is another feature of Eurocen- identifiable texts; rather, its force derives trism, and is most fully developed in the from the way it has embedded itself into discourse of Orientalism. As a result, his- the common sense of European discourse. torical development moves northwards and It is not a theory in itself but forms the westwards, from the eastern and southern basis, or framework, for many theories of half of the great Eurasian land mass to the history, society and humanity and is man- Atlantic shore. As for those spaces beyond ifested in day-to-day encounters between Eurasia, such as the Americas and Africa, individuals, in the media and in political these are historically ‘empty’ until filled by discourse, as well as in the sophisticated European colonization, which brings them formulations of academic specialists. It into History. is, therefore, more than just a prejudice – From the Eurocentric viewpoint, it is whether unconscious or not. Rather, its only Europe and Europeans that can ideological power resides in the way therefore make History; the Others are Eurocentric ideas become visible as either consigned to a fossilized ‘past’ that ‘facts’ (Blaut). These ‘facts’ may or may has been surpassed by European advance not be true: capitalism did emerge in (since it could not be denied that civiliza- Europe; Europeans are not more intelli- tions did exist outside Europe, in west, gent than other ‘races’ etc. However, the south and east Asia, some means of force of these ‘facts’ lies in the manner by accommodating this fact with European which they are explained or interpreted so exceptionalism and superiority had to be as to conform to the Eurocentric vision. found), or are awaiting the hand of Eurocentrism can thus appear disinter- Europe to help them onto the stage of ested and objective and may even refract history. Thus, the advances in human a discourse that ostensibly challenges history are all reframed and resituated European dominance and superiority. within a narrative that has at its centre a Eurocentrism is both historical and Europe whose development and progres- geographical. That is, it assumes certain sive maturation is its subject. It is not propositions about both space and time. Eurocentric, therefore, to acknowledge At its core lies a belief in European that capitalism emerged in Europe; exceptionalism that underlines the notion what is Eurocentric are those historical of a ‘Europe’ that is territorially and narratives that suggest it could not have civilizationally distinct from the rest of happened otherwise. In this sense, whilst the world. This ‘Europe’ is a mythical Eurocentrism is a definitive feature of construct that consists of a fabricated the ideology of capitalism, it has also genealogy of European civilization that historically been part of its critique. can be traced back through an unbroken Marxism, for instance, is but one of the historical continuity to classical Greece. oppositional discourses to capitalist In so doing, it erases the marks of classi- hegemony that is itself marked by its cal Greece’s emergence within and affili- Eurocentrism. ation to a wider Mediterranean cultural If Europe represents the highest sphere that had its centre of gravity in form of civilization, historical progress Evaluation 77 involves the progressive diffusion of distinct traditions, and propose sharply European civilization from its centre differentiated programmes. to the outlying peripheries. As such, The evaluative tradition is in England Eurocentrism is never separable from rooted in the neo-classic criticism of colonialism, or from the racism which Dryden, Pope and Johnson. They saw accompanied it. All modern colonial themselves as arbiters of public taste, discourse is Eurocentric and, conversely, interpreting the works of the past and, in Eurocentrism is necessarily colonialist in their light, judging the work of the pre- its implications. The end of history, and sent. Their concern was the preservation the future of humanity, is conceptualized and assertion of traditional literary and in terms of the world’s progressive cultural values; the commitment of such Europeanization, or, in today’s language, criticism to moral and aesthetic standards Westernization. Such ideas have, of makes public judgement constantly nec- course, been consistently challenged essary, and belief in them makes it possi- but their durability is such that they ble. This tradition of public criticism, remain part of the hegemonic structure mediating between the past and the of the contemporary world. See also present, the artists and the public, was ORIENTALISM. continued in the nineteenth century by See J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s major critics, such as Matthew Arnold History of the World (1992); Samir Amin, and Henry James, and survived in the Eurocentrism (1989). twentieth century in the work of Leavis AM and the Scrutiny writers. The challenge to this tradition, evident Evaluation When we engage critically in Eliot’s 1918 declaration, emerged from with a literary work, we are not merely the aspirations of many academic disci- describing it, making it accessible to other plines at the beginning of the twentieth readers; at the same time we judge it, century to the attitudes and procedures of explicitly or by implication. But the the fashionable sciences. The new enthu- ‘objectivity’ of description is often felt to siasm for objectivity and disinterested- preclude evaluation, which is suspected ness, for precise analysis and comparison, of being a subjective, authoritarian action. implied the irrelevance of public critics T. S. Eliot testified to the tension between and their concern for judgement. Leslie the descriptive and evaluative roles of Stephen urged that the critic ‘should criticism by arguing for the primacy of endeavour to classify the phenomena with both. In 1918 ‘Judgement and apprecia- which he is dealing as calmly as if he tion are merely tolerable avocations, no were ticketing a fossil in a museum’. part of the critic’s serious business’ (The The scientific analogies were ultimately Egoist, V), while in 1923 the critic is false – literature is not fossilized, not so urged to ‘the common pursuit of true many value-free facts – and in practice judgement’ (‘The function of criticism’, the ‘objective’ criticism of Eliot and Selected Essays, p. 25). Eliot’s self- I. A. Richards was full of strident value contradiction reflected the enduring judgements. But the desire for objective tendency of criticism to define its ambi- procedures led to the development of a tions in terms of one or the other of these descriptive criticism whose end was not ideally complementary activities. The judgement but knowledge, which took alternative emphases produce historically the value of the works it examined for 78 Existentialism granted. Descriptive criticism assumed present and future, its loss is said to cause not that judgement is irrelevant but that it individuals to feel that they have been is implicit in description and analysis; the thrown into a world of reified fragments analysis of a work is a discovery of form, which say nothing, into a world of human of order, and is thus a testimony to value. beings who talk past each other and into The public critic asserts and defines a time-stream of disconnected present standards against which any work must be moments without past or future (see measured, but a descriptive critic like Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927). Thus, William Empson has declared that ‘you human institutions, severed from the gen- must rely on each particular poem to erative source, cease to be sign-structures show you the way in which it is trying to of that source and become factitious be good; if it fails you cannot know its structures which engage the surface levels object’ (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930). of the personality and provide no home. This lack of interest in ‘bad’ literature and Even language, the most self-evident urbanity about problems of evaluation institution, is felt to be a complex of cere- pointed to the critic’s new role in the intel- bralized structures which impede com- lectual and cultural safety of the univer- munication and give only limited control sity, distanced from contemporary culture over the empirical world. Nietzsche called and the reading public, while the public this total experience of forfeiture ‘the critic’s mantle was assumed by the death of God’, and perhaps K.’s vision of reviewer. the world in Kafka’s The Castle (1926) See W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, ‘Explication as forms its fullest literary expression: long criticism’ and ‘Poetry and morals’ in The conversations lead nowhere; shambling Verbal Icon (1954); Steven Connor, buildings are inhabited by beings going Theory and Cultural Value (1992); Patrick through meaningless motions like bees in McGee, Telling the Other: Question of a hive after the removal of the queen; and Value in Modern and Postcolonial everything is permeated by a sense of Writing (1992). groundlessness, futility and grey opacity. PM K. is therefore a menace because his wilfulness perpetually threatens to smash Existentialism Literary and philo- this fragile world and precipitate it into sophical responses to the experience of the nothingness that underlies almost nothingness, anomie and absurdity which everything. attempt to discover meaning in and At the same time, the Angst which through this experience. haunts the Existentialist world was said – All Existentialist writers begin from a and this paradox is fundamental to sense that an ontological dimension Existentialist psychology – to point to the (Being; the Encompassing; Transcendence; possibility of its own transcendence. the Thou) has been forced out of con- Precisely because the individual can sciousness by the institutions and systems experience absurdity so intensely, there of a society which overvalues rationality, must, it is argued, be some inherent will-power, acquisitiveness, productivity human propensity to order and meaning. and technological skill. Because this essen- Angst, in other words, is seen as the tial dimension properly constitutes the sub- by-product of the conflict between this stantial unity between person and person, propensity and the factitious forms which thing and thing, subject and object, past, have been imposed upon it. Existentialism 79

Existentialist writers and thinkers ‘eternal Thou’ breaks into time through did not, however, share a unified under- the ‘human Thou’ (Buber, I and Thou, standing of this propensity. Sartre, 1923). For Kierkegaard, a Christian the most consistently atheistic of the Existentialist, it is the divinely motivated Existentialists, equated it with the human principle of ‘subjectivity’ which urges will shorn of all illusions and responsible the individual to make the ‘leap of faith’ only to itself. Camus, more of an agnos- and discover the task and responsibility tic, located it below the will, in the spon- for that task which God has laid upon taneous potential of the personality, but each person even if that task ends in fail- refused to name it, pointing to it through ure and absurdity (Kierkegaard, Fear and a variety of metaphors. Heidegger, whose Trembling, 1843). thinking is crypto-theistic, referred to it Consequently, Sartre’s famous dictum as Sorge (care) and Kierkegaard, an ‘existence precedes essence’ – often avowed Christian, identified it with the considered to be the basic tenet of soul. Nevertheless, it is this propensity Existentialism – can mean one of two which is said to save individuals from things. Either that existence is inherently nihilism, despair or escape into the ready- meaningless so that individuals have, by made values of the fallen world. the exercise of the will, to create their Furthermore, Existentialist writers own values. Or that, for each individual, and thinkers draw radically different there is a hidden meaning embedded in metaphysical conclusions from the exis- existence which, by the exercise of total tence of this propensity. Although, for personal resources, the individual has to Sartre, it points to nothing beyond itself discover and live by. and is not capable of overcoming the On the one hand then, theistic and néant in any final sense, it does permit crypto-theistic Existentialism moved individuals to live with theor ‘unhappy towards an inner-worldly mysticism consciousness’, to tolerate their own where the experience of the Transcendent Angst. For Camus, however, it enables is discovered within and not apart from humanity to find happiness and peace of society. On the other hand, agnostic and mind in an absurd universe (Meursault atheistical Existentialism moved towards and Sisyphe), engage in collective work an attitude of defiance which can turn against the forces of negation (Rieux and into a social or explicitly ideological his friends) and, occasionally, to glimpse commitment (Camus’s Socialism and transcendent powers. For Jaspers, it Sartre’s Marxism). enables people to alter their ‘conscious- In all cases then, a radically negative ness of Being’ and ‘inner attitude towards experience was seen by Existentialists to things’ and to listen in an attitude of contain the embryo of a positive develop- ‘philosophial faith’ for the silence of ment – though the psychological and hidden Transcendence as it emanates into philosophical content of that development experience and overcomes fragmentation, is extremely diverse. isolation and encrustation (Jaspers, The See W. Barrett, Irrational Man (1961); Perennial Scope of Philosophy, 1948). J. Collins, The Existentialists (1977); For Buber, the Jewish Existentialist, it C. Hanley, Existentialism and Psycho- indicates the possibility of attunement to analysis (1979); P. Roubiczek, and existence according to the timeless Existentialism (1964); G. Rupp, Beyond moments which are generated when the Existentialism and Zen (1979); Walter 80 Explication

Kaufman (ed.), Existentialism from a violence which threatens to explode Dostoevsky to Sartre (1977); Mary these. Correspondingly, the syntax of an Warnock, Existentialism (1977); David E. early Expressionist poem involves a Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction struggle for dominance between noun and (1990). verb, and its adjectives are used not to RWS describe the surface of a static noun but to point metaphorically to a hidden Explication See ANALYSIS. dynamism at work below that surface. Expressionism A label applied to Expressionism is, however, not just a the avant-garde literature, graphics, stylistic phenomenon but, in Bakhtin’s architecture and cinema which appeared sense, a metalinguistic Problematik which throughout the German-speaking world, can be resolved in a variety of ways. 1910–c.1922, and of which Vorticism was The works of early Expressionism, the closest equivalent in England. First 1910–14, are, typically, situated on the used of German painting in April 1911, edge of the specifically modern context, and of literature in July 1911, the term the megalopolis of industrial Capitalism, gained rapid currency with reference to and present this under two aspects: the visual arts but was probably estab- beneath a rigid artificial, asphalt crust, lished as a literary critical term only as and controlled by the authoritarian father- late as mid-1913. Several important early figure, chaotic forces, ungovernable by Expressionists died without ever using the individual, are destructively active. the term; other important writers reacted Furthermore, in the early Expressionist negatively to it during the years in vision, the machine, ostensibly a tool question; others denied any validity to it for extending human dominance over or were unwilling to associate themselves Nature, turns back on itself, becoming a with it. Frankenstein monster, a Golem which At the most, Expressionism is a blanket seeks to devour the beings that made it. term. It does not characterize a uniform Consequently, the inhabitants of the movement propagating a neatly definable Expressionist city are presented as spec- set of ideas or working towards well- tral, puppet-like beings assailed by dark defined and commonly accepted goals. powers over which, despite their assumed The product of a generation which had and absurd self-confidence, they have no been born into a pre-modern Germany, final control. grown up during twenty-five years of To this ambiguous and disturbing unprecedentedly rapid social change and vision, various responses are possible: achieved maturity in a society which was withdrawal into nostalgia for pre-modern extensively industrialized and urbanized, forms (Ernst Blass’s and Georg Trakl’s Expressionism stands between two poetry), cosmic pessimism (Georg worlds and is riven by inner conflict, con- Heym’s poetry), irony (Jakob van Hoddis’s tradiction and paradox. Thus, the classic and Alfred Lichtenstein’s poetry), ecstatic early Expressionist poem, for example, is irrationalism (Ernst Stadler’s and Ernst marked by a time-sense of imminent cri- Wilhelm Lotz’s poetry; Ludwig Rubiner’s sis, torn between a desire for stillness and manifesto Der Dichter greift in die an urge to lose itself in chaos, and charac- Politik) – which may, as with Ich-Dramen terized by a disjunction between a rigid like Reinhard Sorge’s Der Bettler and verse form and images of rigidity and Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn, involve Expressionism 81 a passionate wish to murder the father – aspirations intensified and spread as the or the Rimbaldian desire to find a saving, War went on, merging by 1918 with a spiritual dimension beyond the sterile sterile revolutionary rhetoric of which surface and demonic night-side of the the final scenes of Ernst Toller’s Die modern city (Georg Heym’s Novellen; Wandlung (1917–18) are an example and Georg Traki’s last poems and Wassily the whole of Toller’s Masse Mensch Kandinsky’s theoretical work Über das (1920–1) a critique. When the German Geistige in der Kunst). Revolution of 1918–19 failed to produce The outbreak of war reinforced the the hoped-for total revolution, a wide- early Expressionist vision and gave spread disillusion set in among surviving urgency to some of the possible responses. Expressionists which frequently ended in Thus, the urban landscape seemed to the suicide, exile, or a ‘sell-out’ to some total- Expressionists to have prefigured the bat- itarian organization, and which is tlefields of the Great War whose mecha- reflected in the drama of cultural and nized slaughter was, in turn, seen as a political despair, such as Georg Kaiser’s horrendous extension of the Capitalist Gas trilogy (1916–19). system of production, with people and Expressionism issued into DADA, the material going in at one end and corpses Bauhaus and Constructivism. Where coming out of the other. Correspondingly, DADA continued the metaphysical investi- although the War was greeted enthusiasti- gations of early Expressionism, offering cally by some Expressionists for a few systematic folly and carnivalization both weeks or months as a means of over- as a means of coming to terms with a coming everyday boredom and revitaliz- many-layered and paradoxical vision of ing a dead Society (Hugo Ball, Rudolf reality and as a political weapon, the Leonhard, Hans Leyboid, Ernst Wilhelm Bauhaus and Constructivism, through Lotz), the experience of trench warfare the medium of architecture, investigated soon made it clear that something more how the utopian neo-humanism of late than affective dynamism was necessary Expressionism might be realized with the for social renewal. This realization accen- new techniques and materials provided by tuated in some Expressionists the tempta- the twentieth century. tion to withdraw from the modern world A comprehensive anthology on this (Gottfried Benn) or surrender to cosmic subject is Thomas Anz and Michael Stark pessimism (August Stramm). (eds), Expressionismus: Manfeste und At the same time, Autumn 1914 Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur saw the emergence of Kurt Hiller’s 1910–1920 (1982). Critical works include: Aktivismus – a pacifist neo-humanism, R. F. Allen, German Expressionist Poetry shorn of idealist metaphysics, which (1979); R. S. Furness, Expressionism attracted considerable support from (1973); J. Ritchie, German Expressionist among the Expressionists and which Drama (1976); W. H. Sokel, The Writer placed its hopes in the emergence of in Extremis (1959); S. Vietta and a new, spiritualized humanity and H.-G. Kemper, Expressionismus (1975); redeemed society out of the Purgatory of J. Willett, Expressionism (1970). the War. These and similar millenarian RWS F

Fable A short moral tale, in verse or John Gay (1685–1732). In Germany, prose, in which human situations and G. E. Lessing (1729–81) preferred the behaviour are depicted through (chiefly) simpler model of Aesop to the refined beasts and birds, or gods or inanimate modern version. objects. Human qualities are projected The fable had twentieth-century onto animals, according to certain con- practitioners, too. George Orwell’s ventions (e.g. malicious craftiness for the Animal Farm (1945), sometimes seen as fox). Fables are ironic and realistic in an allegory, employed the beast fable as tone, often satirical, their themes usually the vehicle for an extended SATIRE on reflecting on the commonsense ethics of the totalitarian state. In America, James ordinary life: they dramatize the futility Thurber contributed Fables for our Time of relinquishing a small profit for the (1940). See Niklas Holsberg, The Ancient sake of larger (but hypothetical) future Fable: An Introduction (2003); Jayne gains, of the weak attempting to take on Elizabeth Lewis, The English Fable: the powerful on equal terms, the irony of Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740 falling into one’s own traps, etc. Such (1996). themes are close to the advice of RGF proverbs, and the moral point of a fable is Fabula See FORMALISM. usually announced epigrammatically by one of the characters at the end. Fabulation See FICTION. The beast fable is extremely ancient, Fancy See CONCEIT, IMAGINATION, WIT. evidenced from Egypt, Greece, India and presumably cognate with the develop- Fantastic Now commonly comprises ment of a self-conscious folklore in a variety of fictional works which use primitive cultures. The Western tradition the supernatural or apparently supernatural. derives largely from the fables of Aesop, Examples are found in German Roman- a Greek slave who lived in Asia Minor in ticism (e.g. Tieck, Hoffman); in English the sixth century BC. His work is not GOTHIC fiction and ghost stories; in known directly, but has been transmitted nineteenth-century French literature through elaborations by such writers as (e.g. Nodier, the later Maupassant); and in Phaedrus and Babrius. Collections were twentieth-century depictions of dream extensively read in medieval schools; the worlds (e.g. Carroll) or seemingly impos- tone of the genre became more frankly sible worlds and events (e.g. Kafka, humorous. The most famous medieval Borges). example is Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Not all works in which the super- Tale’. The fable achieved greater sophisti- natural or eerie appears are classified as cation in the hands of Jean de la Fontaine fantastic, however. Works of fantasy, (1621–95), whose verse fables revived such as Tolkien’s fiction and C. S. Lewis’s the fashion throughout the Europe of the Narnia series, create their own coherently seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. organized worlds and myths. References England’s representative in this mode was to familiar everyday activities render these Fantastic 83 worlds more homely and comprehensible. STYLE is lucid, even crystalline, but poor The everyday details are integrated into in undertones, repetitive in its creation of the other world, extending its range of ATMOSPHERE. The lucidity often resides in reference; the combination of ‘real’ and an overgeneral statement of the narrator’s ‘supernatural’ suggests a world of greater or protagonist’s impressions: Poe’s refer- opportunity and fullness than one consist- ence to ‘the thrilling and enthralling ing of ‘real’ elements alone. If the ‘real’ eloquence’ of Ligeia’s ‘low musical lan- world is also depicted separately (as in guage’ (Ligeia, 1838) leaves the reader Lewis), movement between the two unsure what kind of speech and auditory worlds happens at specific points in the sensations to imagine, more aware of the text, so that any character is always in intensity of the narrator’s response than either one world or the other. The reader its quality. In the work of Cortázar, a is invited to feel not bewilderment at but lucid, matter-of-fact style conveys bizarre respect for the order of the ‘supernatural’ and impossible meanings, the truth of world, even awe and wonder. which the narrator takes for granted. It is characteristic of the fantastic text Lucidity and intensity, we may reflect, are that the reader is made unsure how to compatible with some forms of insanity. interpret and respond to the events nar- The confusion usually focuses on the rated. Critics have stated that the fantastic narrator’s or the protagonist’s personality. cannot exist without the notion of a clear Protagonists are characteristically iso- dividing line (which the text transgresses) lated from interaction and discussion. between things possible according to the Family life, a steady career, friendship, laws of nature and things supernatural and even common everyday activities are impossible: for some, what defines the either meaningless to them or highly fantastic is a brutal intrusion of the myste- problematical: Anselmus in Hoffmann’s rious into real life. But the reader’s Golden Pot (1815), using a door knocker bewilderment is rarely confined to this to gain admittance to a house, sees it turn shock effect. Are the ghosts in Henry suddenly into a snake. The protagonists’ James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) hal- lack of conventionality and urge towards lucinations created by the protagonist’s ideal perfection can take different forms. repressed feelings, or are they external to Frequently in Tieck and Hoffmann, they her in some sense – and if so, what sense? hold themselves open to the unexpected, Are we to read Kafka’s Metamorphosis aware of both the spiritual opportunity (1916) as a description of mental illness and the spiritual risks of this, whereas in from the inside, a metaphor for some kind The Turn of the Screw and Maupassant’s of alienation, or a literally true story (the Le Horla (1887) attempts are made to cre- protagonist turns into an insect, but the ate a stable world by leaving out worrying objective third-person narrative is remark- aspects of the self and its environment – ably matter-of-fact)? Are Poe’s stories repressing them, Freudians would say. penetrating studies of human aspirations The attempt to make life manageable yet and limitations, or carefully contrived satisfying thus becomes an attempt to games which the narrator plays to keep the transcend human limits: Stevenson’s reader in suspense for as long as possible Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) tries to and maximize mystification and horror? resolve his tensions by neatly splitting Frequently, the bewilderment is his personality. But in thus pushing increased by the text’s language. The human nature beyond its normal bounds, 84 Farce the protagonist sets up unconscious characters and unrealistic plotting. It compensatory mechanisms and becomes combines elements from pantomime, decreasingly able to think straight. Rarely, music hall and social comedy into a however, are more restrained, socially con- theatre of sexual innuendo, snobbery and ventional lifestyles presented favourably; slapstick. English farce is broader and the attempt to exceed one’s limits invites more physical, with dropped trousers in the reader a fascination which makes and chamber pots predominant. It stays any condemnation ambiguous. close to circus and music-hall humour. Modern criticism has stressed links French farce crudifies manner comedy between fantastic texts and the societies (see MANNERS), balancing sexual sugges- in which they appear. In industrial society, tiveness and social humour, for example, ‘the individual comes to see himself at the plays of Georges Feydeau. More the mercy of forces which in funda- literate and polished, it reflects the mental ways elude his understanding’ elegant vulgarity of the boulevardier. (David Punter, The Literature of Terror English music hall had its counterpart in (1980), p. 128); the fantastic ‘characteris- American vaudeville, but this produced tically attempts to compensate for a no distinctive American farce tradition. lack resulting from cultural constraints’ The American contribution is rather to be (Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Litera- found in the visual and physical humour ture of Subversion (1981), p. 3). Critics of silent films (Chaplin, Keaton) which thus see their task as a translation of the in their turn provided models for the supernatural terrors of the text into techniques of ABSURD drama. the social ones which underlie it. The Farce seeks to demonstrate the contigu- fantastic gives indirect expression to ity of the logical and the illogical. It doubts about itself which society refuses explores a closed world where belief to entertain if they are directly stated; is suspended because nothing has a real the protagonist’s confusion arises from cause. Action is self-generated, once the the urge to express aspects of self which ground rules are accepted. These rules society condemns and accordingly for embody a mechanical, deterministic view which no adequate language is available. of life which undermines pretensions to See Irene Bessière, Le Récit fantas- human dignity (free will): all women are tique (1974); David Punter, The Literature predatory, all husbands are fools, all banis- of Terror (1980); Eric S. Rabkin, The ters rotten, all doors revelatory. This encap- Fantastic in Literature (1976); Tzvetan sulated universe encourages a comedy of Todorov, The Fantastic (English transla- cruelty since the audience is insulated tion 1973); Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: from feeling by the absence of motive, and the Literature of Subversion (1981); Lucie by the response being simultaneously more Armitt, Theorising the Fantastic (1996); and less aggressive than real-life response, Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: for example, the custard pie routine. from Gothic to Postmodernism (1990). Modern playwrights, such as Joe MHP Orton (Loot, What the Butler Saw) revived the farce conventions and used Farce Interpolations in church liturgy; them to force the audience to rethink con- later, that ‘forced’ between the events of cepts of the normal and the abnormal. liturgical drama, usually comic. Farce is Called ‘highcamp’ comedy, this type of comedy involving physical humour, stock farce realizes its ideas through discarded Feminist criticism 85 fictions, involving its audience in the this view, and some philosophers have conscious manipulation of its own followed their lead, arguing that feeling response. See also COMEDY. itself participates in knowledge and See M. E. Coindreau, La Farce est understanding. Art is the area of creative jouée (1942); Leo Hughes, A Century of activity in which organic sensation English Farce (1956); Albert Bernell, plays the strongest controlling part. Farce: A History from Aristophanes to I. A. Richards expounded a variant of this Woody Allen (1990); Jessica Milna Davis, idea in his Principles of Literary Farce (2001). Criticism (1924). He wanted to restrict GG feeling to refer to pleasure/un-pleasure, to mean ‘not another and vital way of appre- Feeling Accounts of how a work of hending’ but a set of signs of personal literature is created, or of how it affects attitudes. As well as people who neatly the reader, touch on two areas of non- reason things out, there are, he suggests, literary investigation. Epistemology, the some who can read these signs (feeling) theory of how we come to know, is an particularly well, better than most of us. ancient philosophical puzzle. Since the Such people are, when they create some- late eighteenth century, psychology has thing which allows us to read some of also approached such problems. It is an the signs better, great artists. Thus for axiom in epistemology that two processes Richards, it is not the intensity of the are involved in knowing: traditionally, feeling that matters, but the organization reason and feeling; philosophy has usu- of its impulses, the quality of the reading ally concentrated on the former, the latter of the signs. being left to psychology. The two terms Another way in which feeling is used suffer from the imprecision of all tradi- in aesthetic theory was illustrated in the tional labels. Feeling, especially, has a work of the philosopher Susanne Langer: wide and confusing range of meanings. It see Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and is partly synonymous with ‘emotions’. Feeling and Form (1953). She argued that Psychology has a similar axiomatic frame feeling is expressed by ritual and attitude, for discussion: the presentation of a men- which in turn are embodied by the artist tal event in terms of thought (cognition), in presentational symbolism. Music is the feeling (the conscious character of the art which fits best with such ideas. event) and will (conation, which may be Wagner argued that music is the represen- conscious or unconscious). Feeling is a tation and formulation of feeling itself. way of considering the general sensibility But literature has moral, social and ratio- of the body. nal dimensions that interfere with clear Aesthetic theory has made use of such exemplification of any feeling-based philosophical and psychological thought. aesthetic. See also EFFECT, PLEASURE, In reaction to the Western belief that READER. reason is dominant, it has been argued See Derek Matravers, Art and Emotions that feeling is itself formulation, that is, it (2001); David Punter, Writing the Passions prefigures thought or reasoning. Eliseo (2000). Vivas argued that literature is ‘prior in the AMR order of logic to all knowledge: constitu- tive of culture’ (Creation and Discovery, Feminist criticism Developed as part 1955). The gestalt-psychologists are of of the discourse of the second wave 86 Feminist criticism feminism which emerged in Europe and the late-romantic, vaguely androgynous America in the late 1960s to revive individualism (intellectual and imaginative political and social issues associated with life as potentially neutral territory) which turn-of-the-century suffrage debates, and characterized Simone de Beauvoir’s enor- to question again the extent of women’s mously influential retrospective survey of actual participation in Western cultures. oppression in The Second Sex (1949). Both feminists and feminist literary However, this has been uneasily com- critics are of course indebted to pre- bined with the suspicion that, while soci- twentieth-century writers, and to writers ety remains ‘patriarchal’ in its division of of the interwar years, like Virginia other kinds of labour, then neither access Woolf – ‘if one is a woman, one is often to, nor interpretation of, literature can be surprised by a sudden splitting off of gender-free. consciousness, say in walking down The most identifiable divergences in Whitehall, when from being the natural feminist criticism begin here: between a inheritor of that civilization, she becomes mainly Anglo-American emphasis on the on the contrary outside of it, alien and recovery, reprinting and revaluation of critical’ (A Room of One’s Own, 1929). works more-or-less admitted to belong to However, one of the fundamental obser- a minority culture (a defensive or recu- vations, and difficulties, of feminist perative strategy); and a more aggressive, criticism has been that the continuous tra- mainly French stress on literary language ditions (including the anti-traditions) of (indeed, language itself) as a primary literary studies have largely obscured locus of the repression of radically dis- women’s work and women’s perspectives. junctive female ‘otherness’. The thinking of French feminist critics is openly, if One serious cultural obstacle encoun- ironically, indebted to STRUCTURALISM tered by any feminist writer is that each and POST-STRUCTURALISM, and particularly feminist work has tended to be received to the revision of Freudian assumptions as if it emerged from nowhere.... about creativity in the work of Lacan and women’s work and thinking has been Derrida. Whereas the work of reconstruc- made to seem sporadic, erratic, tion seeks to describe plural (if warring) orphaned of any tradition of its own. cultures, the advocates of DECONSTRUC- (Adrienne Rich, On Lies, TION argue that patriarchal culture contin- Secrets and Silence, 1979) ually subsumes ‘otherness’ by means of linguistic strategies still to be exposed Thus, a major effort of feminist and analysed. In its most extreme form criticism has been to recover and reread the post-structuralist reading of patri- the work of women writers, as a problem- archy delineates a closed culture: the atic appendix to the existing corpus of individual’s entry into subjectivity is literature, neither exactly ‘a tradition of determined by the symbolic orders of its own’, nor yet part of a shared culture. language and family, in which Much of this rewriting of literary history has been pragmatic, scholarly and anti- the phallus is the privileged signifier theoretical in its bias, devoted to rendering (Lacan); intellectual life and the world women’s texts legible without fore- of letters constitute a hidden homo- grounding methodological issues. The sexual succession, a logocentric econ- ‘feminism’ involved sometimes recalls omy which has suppressed its own Feminist criticism 87

duplicitous origins (patricide) in exclusion from full participation in imposing order and wholeness of culture, while they differ widely on ques- meaning on its discourse (Derrida). tions of the nature and extent of that exclu- Deconstruction opening up the rela- sion, and on the centrality of ‘language’ tionship between what authors com- (in the structuralist sense). As well as mand and do not command of the extending the canon, and rewriting aspects language they use seeks to demystify of literary history, feminist criticism has the (phallic) Word, and authorise brought new pressure to bear on the analy- absence, disjunction, différance. Moves sis of texts at many levels, from the struc- like these, concerned with subverting ture of the sentence to the concept of the authority of ‘classical’ traditions of ‘character’ and the composition of ‘I’, and thought and letters, have an obvious has foregrounded certain literary ‘kinds’ attraction for feminist thinkers, not (from diaries and journals to GOTHIC, least because they suggest an area of FANTASTIC and speculative fiction) as discourse in which ‘Woman and artist, specially charged interfaces between the feminine and the avant-garde, are masculine culture and female culture. elided....Writing, the production of Post-colonial and lesbian feminists meaning, becomes the site of both chal- have questioned the category of ‘woman’ lenge and Otherness; rather than (as in within feminism as a universal, asking more traditional approaches) simply whether a predominantly heterosexual yielding the themes and representation white Western movement can represent of female oppression.’ women from other or minority cultures. (Mary Jacobus, Women Writing Identity aspects, such as class, ethnicity, and Writing about Women, 1979) sexuality and even age striate the notion of similar experience promoted by Feminist criticism which adopts such a feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. position scrutinizes its texts for fissures See WOMANIST, GENDER. and cracks and signs of heterogeneity, See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second re-examining ‘the masculine imaginary, Sex (1949); Mary Ellmann, Thinking to interpret how it has reduced us to About Women (1968); Monique Wittig, silence, to mutism...to find a possible Les guérillères (1969); Kate Millett, space for the feminine imaginary’ (Luce Sexual Politics (1970); Julia Kristeva, Irigaray). The ‘feminine’ is all that is La revolution du langage poétique repressed in a patriarchal linguistic struc- (1974); Hélène Cixous, ‘The Character of ture: for example, the Oedipal phase of “Character” ’, NLH 5 (1978); Ellen rhythmic, onomatopeic sound (unmedi- Moers, Literary Women (1977); Elaine ated, ecstatic) which precedes the Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: symbolic order (Julia Kristeva). British Women Novelists from Brontë to Some feminist critics have sought for Lessing (1977); Angela Carter, The themselves a fluid and problematic Sadeian Woman (1979); Mary Jacobus language that will harmonize with the (ed.), Women Writing and Writing About Babel/babble of the avant-garde (Hélène Women (1979); Marks and Courtivron Cixous, Monique Wittig). Others’ proce- (eds), New French Feminisms (1980); dures have been more traditional in G. Spivak, In Other Worlds (1987); Rita style and method. All, however, subscribe Felski, Literature After Feminism (2003). to the thesis of women’s continuing LS and LSM 88 Fiction

Fiction A complex term with many deceive others. For a classic (and ironic) overlapping uses. Although often used account of this attitude, see George synonymously with novel, it is a more Herbert’s platonic poem ‘Jordan I’(begin- generic and inclusive term. NOVEL has a ning, ‘Who says that fictions only and narrower historical and ideological con- false hair/Become a verse?’) and for an tent than fiction – novels did not exist in explicit defence of fiction against the Greek or Roman culture, but works of pressure of utilitarian ‘fact’, see Dickens’s fiction in prose did. Equally, allegories in Hard Times. Traditional puritanism or prose (like Pilgrim’s Progress) are works moral scepticism is reflected in the pejo- of fiction, but not novels. ‘Novel’ is thus rative epithet fictitious which derives a genre term, while ‘fiction’ is a generic from the sense of fiction as an unneces- term. ‘Fiction’ can more easily designate sary or undesirable deviation from truth; hybrid forms than ‘novel’; it can include the adjective fictional does not normally artistic intentions and formal characteris- have the same emotive content. Imagi- tics in prose works (structures and native literature is of course the primary devices borrowed from romance or manifestation of this pernicious tendency, poetry, pastiche or dramatic forms, etc.) and attacks on fiction are usually attacks which indicate either simple unawareness on literature, but clearly there is also of novels (e.g. the Satyricon) or a deliber- a wider sense implied of fiction as an ate questioning of the assumptions of the element in human thought and action. novel-genre (e.g. Tom Jones). Thus, by A more positive use of fiction has virtue of this high level of generality, recently been revived in literary criticism ‘fiction’ can be opposed to ‘novel’ by (see Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of both writers and critics alike. As If, 1952 and Frank Kermode, The The two terms also diverge because Sense of an Ending, 1967) which would ‘novel’ must refer to the product of imag- appear to make both literature and what inative activity, whereas ‘fiction’ can be the critic wants to say about it more used to describe the activity itself (it broadly relevant to other ways of writing derives from the Latin fingo, to fashion or and thinking and other educational disci- form). Fiction thus has a transitive sense plines. The assumption behind this use of that implies a mental process; we speak the term is that all mental activity is to be of works of fiction – an ambiguous construed on the analogy of imaginative phrase which suggests either the category creation. A fiction in this sense refers to to which they belong or the activity by any ‘mental structure’ as opposed to the which they were produced. formless flux existing outside our minds, There has always existed a moral and the Pure Contingency which we call intellectual distrust of fiction as a mode nature. Time, for example, is a fiction we of writing which leads people to believe impose on nature for the purposes of in things which are not ‘true’ or which do living. All mental activity, it is claimed, not exist in nature. However hostile to is fictional because it involves shaping each other’s definition of ‘nature’ (com- material which is inherently shapeless. pare Plato’s Republic with Bentham’s We can only make sense of things by Theory of Fictions), the perennial oppo- imposing fictions (shapes or interpreta- nents of fiction equate it with lies and tions) on them. ‘Fiction’ thus becomes a deception. The maker of literary fictions kind of umbrella, sheltering many differ- may be self-deceived, or may intend to ent kinds of mental activity and cultural Fiction 89 institution. The term appears to have There is a danger that the unthinking use become the focus of a valuable relativism, of the term could lead to a lack of intel- an anti-positivistic, anti-empiricist caveat. lectual commitment in criticism, because The justification for such an extension is no fiction will need justification when it not so clear; the argument seems flawed implies its own falsehood. On the other and ultimately uninformative. If we can hand, the term is not really relativistic at only make sense of things through fic- all, if it implies that all our critical inter- tions, how do we know of the existence of pretations are ultimately invalid in the that which is non-fictional? By the same same way. It then becomes the banner of argument, the vitally necessary assump- a naïve and reactionary fundamentalism, tion of Pure Contingency is also a fiction. which measures the validity of all ideas Equally, it is absurd to reduce whatever is by a single standard of truth (Pure true to whatever we cannot make sense of. Contingency or Chaos). Perhaps the most In addition this extension of the term telling objection to the extension of this initiates a set of general conditions for the term is that it adds to our vocabulary operation of fictions which makes it without adding to our understanding: either impossible or unnecessary to dis- except where it can be shown to be false, tinguish between one fiction (say, poetry) according to conventional criteria, it and another (say, history). makes no difference to an interpretation Another aspect of the extension of this that we call it a ‘fiction’. term needs justification. Fictions in gen- Literary fictions may have various eral are like legal fictions – suppositions degrees of plausibility. The archaic adjec- known to be false, but taken as true for tive fictive, revived by the American poet the purposes of practical or theoretical Wallace Stevens, is used extensively in convenience. Where this usage extends to modern criticism to denote the making a description of mental processes, it over- of fictions which do not suspend the laps with the preceding sense, but the reader’s disbelief, but stimulate it, in order stricter model gives a more explicit to establish particular kinds of rhetorical account of the role of belief implied in effect. Many novelists in the post-war that sense. It is claimed that fictions are period, such as Barth, Borges, Beckett, mental structures which we know to be Genet and Nabokov, often depended false, but which we accept as true for the for their effects on a consistent sense of purposes of mental coherence and order. implausibility, and such writers forced Thinking becomes a matter of simultane- critics to distinguish shades of meaning in ous belief and disbelief in the truth of our their terminology to account for varieties ideas; we know that our interpretations of of literary self-consciousness. Hence, the things are ultimately false, but we must use of the cognate terms fictiveness go on relying at least in part on these and fictionality, which differ from fiction fictions because we have no other way of or fiction making by their implication of making sense of things. The term seems authorial self-consciousness. Critics have relativistic because it sensitizes us to the also distinguished between MODERNIST limitations of our own and other people’s self-consciousness and the POSTMODERNIST viewpoints, but it also tends to imply such degree of self-consciousness in the post- mental diffidence that it is hard to know war period which flaunted its own condi- how we could take the truth of any idea tions of artiface. Hence, the rise of seriously enough to be sceptical about it. such terms as metafiction, surfiction and 90 Figure fabulation, which purport to describe the rhetoric continued in the school-books mood of postmodernism. See R. Federman, long after Puttenham’s day. In this, an Surfiction (1975); R. Scholes, Fabulation unrealistic and mechanical theory of and Metafiction (1979); P. Waugh, composition is implied; and authors Metafiction (1984). See also LITERATURE. within this tradition (e.g. Chaucer) VS achieved excellence largely in spite of it, or by a self-consciously ironic use of Figure George Puttenham defines figures. From a critical point of view, ‘figurative speech’ as follows: very little is to be gained by memorizing a novelty of language evidently (and lists of names for figures, and much is to yet not absurdly) estranged from the be lost in so far as the attitude encourages ordinary habit and manner of our daily students to view literature as theme talk and writing, and figure itself is a plus ornament. Yet, some terms have certain lively or good grace set upon remained current and valuable in analysis words, speeches, and sentences to (e.g. chiasmus, hyperbole, metonymy, some purpose and not in vain, giving synecdoche, etc.). See also RHETORIC, them ornament or efficacy by many SCHEME. manner of alterations in shape, in See Bradford T. Stull, The Elements of sound, and also in sense, sometime by Figurative Language (2002); Laura way of surplusage, sometime by Kendrick, Animating the Letter: The defect, sometime by disorder, or Figurative Embodiment of Writing from mutation, and also by putting into Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (1999). our speeches more pith and substance, RGF subtlety, quickness, efficacy, or Foot See METRE. moderation, in this or that sort tuning and tempering them, by amplifica- Foregrounding (A free translation of tion, abridgement, opening, closing, the Czech term, aktualisace.) It is a enforcing, meekening, or otherwise concept evolved by the pre-war Prague disposing them to the best purpose. school of linguistics and poetics, (The Art of English Poesie, 1589) under the influence of Russian formalist doctrines, to represent the abnormal use He then devotes a dozen chapters of his of a medium, its obtrusion against a back- treatise to listing, classifying, defining ground of ‘automatic’ responses, which is and exemplifying figures. In this enter- characteristic of much, if not all, artistic prise he follows the venerable tradition of expression. RHETORIC, in which literary composition In literature, foregrounding may be is thought of as ‘invention’ (choosing a most readily identified with linguistic subject matter) and ‘amplification’ or as deviation: the violation of rules and Puttenham calls it, ‘exornation’, of the conventions, by which a poet transcends subject by a decorous choice from the fig- the normal communicative resources of ures. The hundreds of figures, schemes the language, and awakens readers, by and tropes available for this purpose were freeing them from the grooves of cliché listed in many handbooks designed to expression, to a new perceptivity. Poetic help budding and practising authors to metaphor, a type of semantic deviation, is regulate their style according to received the most important instance of this type principles; this tradition of prescriptive of foregrounding. Form 91

More generally, foregrounding may appropriate than an approach via include all salient linguistic phenomena foregrounding, since significance lies which in some way cause the reader’s not so much in individual exceptional attention to shift from the paraphrasable features of language as in the density content of a message (‘what is said’) to a of some features relative to others. focus on the message itself (‘how it is Foregrounding in prose works applies said’). One may thus subsume under fore- rather at the levels of theme, character, grounding the deliberate use of ambigui- plot, argument, etc. than at the level of ties (e.g. punning) and, more importantly, linguistic choice. See also FORMALISM. parallelism, in its widest sense of pattern- See V. Erlich, Russian Formalism ing over and above the normal degree of (1965); Jan Mukarˇovskò, ‘Standard patterning which exists in language by language and poetic language’ in virtue of linguistic rules. P. L. Garvin (ed.), A Prague School Reader Foregrounding is a useful, even on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style crucial, concept in stylistics, providing a (1964); G. N. Leech, ‘Linguistics and the bridge between the relative objectivity of figures of rhetoric’ in R. Fowler (ed.), linguistic description and the relative Essays on Style and Language (1966). subjectivity of literary judgement. It is a GNL criterion by which, from a mass of lin- guistic detail, those features relevant to Form Often used to refer to literary literary effect can be selected. It is not, kinds or genres (e.g. ‘the epic form’). But however, an entirely precise criterion: the we prefer to take form as what contrasts contrast between foreground and back- with ‘paraphrasable content’, as the way ground is a relative one, and only subjec- something is said in contrast to what is tive response can ultimately decide what said. The word ‘paraphrasable’ is impor- is and what is not foregrounded. Further tant since the way of saying affects what unclearnesses are: Is the writer’s intention is being said – imperceptibly in prose a relevant indication of foregrounding? works of information, vitally at the other What is the psychological basis of fore- end of the spectrum in lyric poems. But grounding? (Foregrounded features can since authors do in fact often revise their ‘work’ without coming to one’s conscious works to improve the STYLE rather than attention.) Can foregrounding be equated the matter, since synopses are written and with artistic significance? found useful, since writers (like Ben The last question can be answered Jonson) can turn prose versions of their negatively by pointing out two difficulties work into verse, and since it is evident in the way of any attempt to make fore- that much the same point may be made in grounding the basis of a comprehensive plain or figurative language, simple or theory of literary style. (1) Deviations and complex sentences, it is clear that even parallelisms often seem to have a back- though form and content may be insepa- ground rather than a foreground function, rable for the ‘full meaning’ of a work, the and resist critical justification except paraphrasable content may nevertheless in terms of vague principles, such as be used to enable the concept of form to euphony and VARIATION. (2) With prose, be discussed (cf. PARAPHRASE). a probabilistic approach to style in terms Form in this sense has traditionally of a ‘set’ towards certain linguistic been felt to be either organic or imposed. choices rather than others is often more Felt, because this is rather a psychological 92 Form distinction than a technical one. In the comes and contentual, rather than formal, one case, manner seems to fit matter like in so far as the chain carries a meaning a velvet glove, form seems to spring from that one link, an unrepeated image, would content; in the other case, the form seems not. In the last analysis, structure is a an iron gauntlet that the content must matter of memory, texture of immediacy. accommodate itself to. In some short lyric Since structure is a matter of arrange- poems where form and content are insep- ment, it includes the formal ordering of arable anyway, it may be difficult to the content in time. Temporal form may decide whether, say, apparent oddities of be linear or fugal. Linear form is that of metre and rhyme are flaws in an imposed traditional literature, in which first things form or examples of organic fluidity. In come first, and last last. Fugal form is most of these cases, however, the diffi- characteristic of modernist experimental culty of decision will itself suggest that writing, which takes liberties with the decision is irrelevant to a critical chronology on the grounds that literature judgement. For the modern dogma that need not present life in a linear form. organic form is better hardly stands up to Linear works, of course, may give more examination. All ‘given patterns’ – such or less reading-time to similar periods as sonnet, rondeau, ballade – are imposed of narrative time, but fugal works, in forms; and while it is true that the content addition, rearrange temporal sequence so must fit them effortlessly or be faulted, it is that first and last things come not in order also true that the form took precedence. In but where they will make most impact some cases, too – particularly in large (usually by standing in juxtaposition). novels dealing with amorphous material – Counterpoint takes over from melody, so imposed form may seem a beneficial to speak. Such structuring used well, discipline even though the imposition is gains thematic and aesthetic benefits in evident. Moreover, it is easier to encompass return for the sacrifice of traditional aesthetic effects of composition and com- storyline and suspense. Such emphasis plementarity (see AESTHETICS) by imposed of temporal form tends to give greater form than by organic form. Organic form importance to textural quality (since the tends to emphasize what is said, imposed reader is less distracted by an eagerness to form how it is said. So where neither see what happens next). emphasis is evident other approaches to the Works of this kind present themselves work will clearly be more profitable. more concretely as objects in space than Whether considered to be organic or as abstract patterns of cause and effect, imposed, form must be either structural or and it follows that the reader’s attention textural, the one being large-scale, a mat- will be directed towards their textural ter of arrangement, the other small-scale, rather than their structural qualities. The a matter of impressionism. Structure at its elaboration of texture invariably has the most obvious (plot, story, argument) is the effect of arresting movement – whether of skeleton of a work; texture at its most thought or action – and substituting the obvious (metre, diction, syntax) is the opaque for the transparent in language. At skin. But certain elements are comparable its furthest extremes such developments to muscles. A motif for instance is struc- lead to CONCRETE POETRY or Euphuistic tural in so far as the images making it up Prose involving a progressive elimination are seen as a chain, textural in so far as of meaning, until a point is reached where each is apprehended sensuously as it the textural devices – dependent as they Formalism 93 are on the meanings of words – become experimental 1920s and erected on the ineffective. In most works, however, foundations laid by the SYMBOLIST move- where the marriage of sound and sense is ment a critical method that posited the not perfect, compromises are achieved autonomy of the work of art and the dis- between denotation and connotation, continuity of the language of literature referent and reference. Texture, unlike from other kinds of language. The structure, is an inherent (psychological) Formalists outdid in purism the English property of every part of language, and and American NEW CRITICS, with whom therefore less under the control of the they had much in common. writer. It follows that part of the author’s There were two groups of Formalist task consists of eliminating or subduing critics in the early days: the one in indeterminate textural elements in the St Petersburg called itself Opoyaz, taking language used. More positively the writer its name from the initial letters of the strives to materialize particular meanings, Russian words meaning Society for the and if language were a more subtle Study of Literary Language, and was medium, this imitative function could be founded in 1916. The other, more linguis- classified according to the (various) sen- tically oriented (though both derived sory apparatus to which it appealed. As it their basic techniques from Saussure) is, it may be preferable to categorize tex- was founded in 1915, and called itself tural qualities according to the known the Moscow Linguistic Circle. The properties of language. They may be Formalists, impatient with the obscuran- musical (onomatopoeia, alliteration, etc.); tism that disfigured Symbolist poetics, lexical (metaphor, synecdoche, etc.); set about the objective and ‘scientific’ syntactic (chiasmus, antithesis, etc.). examination of literary STYLE, defining it The dominant contemporary view is in terms of its departure from established that form is closely bound up with style norms by means of identifiable and and content, and the easy separation of analysable devices. One talented these aspects to the work is largely to be Formalist critic, Victor Shklovsky, in the avoided by the critic. See also ORGANIC, early essay Art as Device (1917), empha- STRUCTURE, TEXTURE. sized that the deformation of reality, See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of ‘making strange’ or ‘defamiliarization’ Fiction (1961); Wallace C. Hiddick, (ostranenie), was central to all art. He Thirteen Types of Narrative (1968); Robie claims that the habitual nature of every- Macauley and George Laming, Technique day experience makes perception stale in Fiction (1964); J. C. Ransom, The and automatic, but World’s Body (1938). For further reading, J. L. Calderwood and M. R. Toliver, art exists that one may recover the sen- Forms of Poetry (1968); Allan Rodway, sation of life; it exists to make one feel The Truths of Fiction (1970); Elizabeth things, to make the stone stony. The Boa and J. H. Reid, Critical Strategies purpose of art is to impart the sensa- (1972); Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy tion of things as they are perceived of Literary Form (1992). and not as they are known. The AER technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, Formalism A school of literary to increase the difficulty and length criticism that grew up in Russia in the of perception because the process of 94 Free verse

perception is an aesthetic end in itself (1972); Ann Jefferson, ‘Russian formalism’ and must be prolonged. Art is a way in Jefferson and David Robey (eds), of experiencing the artfulness of an Modern Literary Theory (1982); object; the object is not important. L. M. O’Toole and Ann Shukman, ‘A contextual glossary of formalist termi- Plot in the novel was defined as consist- nology’, Russian Poetics in Translation, ing of the devices which defamiliarize the 4 (1977). English anthologies of the most story, or ‘make it strange’ (hence the high important texts are Stephen Bann and regard of the Formalists for Sterne’s John E. Bowlt (eds), Russian Formalism Tristram Shandy). The terms fabula and (1973); Andrzej Karcz, The Polish syuzhet were introduced for, respectively, Formalist School and Russian Formalism the raw story-material and the finished (2002). See also LITERATURE, POETICS, plot as presented through the formal STRUCTURALISM. devices of construction. An important set GMH of devices drawing attention to the act of narration, the voice of the storyteller and Free verse For many, this is a therefore the artificiality of the fiction, misnomer not only because most free are collectively known as skaz. In verse verse assimilates itself to at least one of theory, one of the best early essays was the prosodies – syllable-stress (Eliot, Osip Brik’s Rhythm and Syntax (1927), ‘Prufrock’), quantitative (Pound), pure- which attempted to describe all the signif- stress (Eliot, Four Quartets), syllabic icant linguistic elements in poetry, cor- (Marianne Moore) – but also because as a recting earlier theorists who had term it is dated. But some word is needed established the primacy of metaphor and to describe speech still deliberate enough image. His concept of zvukovoy povtor, to be rhythmic, but not patterned enough to sound repetition, was notably fruitful. As be a metre, to describe a poetry in the Formalists developed, they grew less which utterance is only an intermittent iconoclastic, and often managed to assim- emergence from speech, and whose ilate their linguistic techniques to the complexity derives more from multiplicity study of literary history and biography of tone than from multiplicity of meaning. (Eikhenbaum’s work on Tolstoy is a The origins of free verse are variously notable example): but they took care inferred: poetic prose, liberated blank always to go through the necessary verse (Browning), a specifically free adjustments and manoeuvres in passing verse tradition (Dryden, Milton, Arnold, from the literary text to its milieu and Henley). There may be other factors. context. Through the influence in the Versification re-articulates conventional West of Roman Jakobson, once a member syntax, releases unsuspected expressive of the Moscow group, Formalist aesthet- dimensions; because we are so accus- ics exerted a powerful influence on later tomed to the writtenness of poetry, typo- STRUCTURALIST developments in linguis- graphy alone can be relied upon to perform tics and literary criticism. The history of this function (hence a visual prosody). the movement has been admirably Alternatively, by using dislocated syntax described in Victor Erlich’s book Russian (see OBSCURITY), the poet re-articulates Formalism (1965). See also Tony Bennett, language at the outset and versification is Formalism and Marxism (1979); Fredric rendered in this sense otiose. And the new Jameson, The Prison-House of Language apparatus that has facilitated analysis of Free verse 95 the recited poem admits the vagaries of (Valéry). Rhyme becomes the crucial personal and regional reading as valid ad-libbing mechanism, suited to captur- prosodic factors; once these are admitted ing the miscellaneousness of modernity. free verse exists without anyone having to The irregular rhyme of free verse is a invent it. structuring rather than structural device The casting off of metres in favour of and is a better guide to the tempo of unopposed rhythms – particularly in the memory, emotion, etc. than variation in syntax- and cadence-centred prosodies of line-length, which has no fixed relation Whitman and the Imagists – is an attempt to reading speed. Besides, with rhyme to fully develop the expressive function of removed, a poem may be deprived of the latter at the expense of the interpreta- much of its magnetic compulsiveness; tive ( pace Pound), discriminatory func- because nothing is anticipated, nothing is tion of the former. It is also designed to looked for. Without this inbuilt momen- more fully implicate readers in the poem tum, the free verse poet has often to fall as a psychological or emotional event by back on the syntactic momentum of withdrawing the substitute sensibility of enjambment or the momentum of rhetoric an accepted prosody and by compelling (Whitman, D. H. Lawrence) and the con- them to create their own speeds, intona- comitant dangers of overintensification tion patterns and emphases. In such verse and monotony of tone and intonation; the a prosody is not to be disengaged from poet’s energies may be too much concen- the linguistic material; in such verse the trated on the mere sustaining of impetus, line is superseded by the strophe, the line rather than on using language to explore itself (syntactic unit) becoming the mea- mental states etc. In this sense at least, sure, and variation in line-length the rhyme is liberating. rhythmic play. What Amy Lowell means See T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on vers by cadence is a retrospectively perceived libre’ (1917) in To Criticize the Critic rhythmic totality, an overall balance (1965); G. Hough, ‘Free verse’ in Image rather than the continuously disturbed and and Experience (1960); C. O. Hartman, restored balance of regular verse. Free Verse (1980); D. Wesling, ‘The Ironically the need to do away with prosodies of free verse’ in R. A. Brower rhyme as a worn out convention coincided (ed.), Twentieth Century Literature in with the need to retain it as an inherent Retrospect (1971); Chris Beyers, A History part of the psychology of creation, of Free Verse (2001). the new ‘Muse Association-des-Idées’ CS G

Gender Frequently still used as a reported that, far from the female sexual synonym for ‘sex’, as in: ‘she is of the passivity, frigidity or disinclination and female gender’. The difficulty here is that inherent monogamy outlined by Freud, while gender and sex are most often – women were sexually active, initiatory though not inevitably – seen as related and multiply orgasmic: ‘women’s inordi- they are not synonyms or substitutes for nate orgasmic capacity did not evolve each other although, until the interroga- for monogamous, sedentary cultures’ tions of ‘second wave’ feminism in the wrote psychiatrist Mary Jane Sherfey in a 1970s, they tended to be used as such. 1966 essay on ‘The Theory of Female In 1974, anthropologist Sherry Ortner Sexuality’. Thus, the gender stereotype published a much-anthologized essay, ‘Is which had apparently been predicated on Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ sexual determinants (the body and the which provided a framework with which activity of sex) was thoroughly disman- to begin to disentangle ‘sex’ from ‘gen- tled and exposed for the vested (largely der’. Ortner investigated the ways in male) interests it protected and promoted. which women’s bodies align them with Now that sex did not necessarily lead to nature (‘doomed to mere reproductive procreation, the notion that female gender life’) whereas men, lacking ‘natural’ identity is always in the thrall of the creative functions, assert their creativity potential for motherhood (thus, nature not ‘ “artificially,” through the medium of culture) was called into question. Gender technology and symbols’. Ortner’s hypo- was seen to be much more about the thesis suggested that gender is to culture reproduction and maintenance of certain as sex is to nature, and that gender is societal norms than related to safeguard- the social expression of, and the roles ing the requirements for the reproduction assigned to, gendered dichotomies of men of the species. The rise of sex for pleasure and women. Thus, it could now be appre- for women has had a dramatic effect on ciated that the nineteenth-century doc- gender, or rather, an effect on the dramat- trine of separate spheres for men and ics of gender. Judith Butler’s Gender women, for instance, was built on con- Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion structs of gendered identity rather than of Identity, published in 1990, introduced any inherent predisposition on the basis her now well-known theory of the of anatomy and capacity for childbearing. PERFORMATIVITY of gender. Butler goes The debates relating to women’s libera- further than to say that gender is the tion in the 1960s and 1970s (fuelled performance or expression to which a by the so-called sexual liberation afforded particular identification gives rise; rather, by the birth-control pill and other repro- for her, it is the performance itself that ductive technologies) were also influ- constructs the identification: ‘identity is enced by the work of sexologists, such performatively constituted by the very as Masters and Johnson’s (William H. “expressions” that are said to be its Masters and Virginia E. Johnson) Human results’. Further, Butler believes that, Sexual Response (1966). Sexologists rather than the ‘cultural’ gender being Genre 97 predicated on the ‘natural’ sex, it is that surround the development of the gender performativity that determines our theory of genres. The attempt to classify very apprehension of sexed bodies. Thus, or describe literary works in terms of in Gender Trouble, Butler elaborates upon shared characteristics was begun by Ortner’s earlier equation: Aristotle in the Poetics, and the first sentence of his treatise suggests the two gender is not to culture as sex is to main directions genre theory was to follow: nature; gender is also the discursive/ cultural means by which ‘sexed Our subject being poetry, I propose to nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced speak not only of the art in general, and established as ‘prediscursive’, but also of its species and their res- prior to culture, a politically neutral pective capacities; of the structure of surface on which culture acts. This plot required for a good poem; of the [is the] construction of sex as the number and nature of the constituent radically unconstructed. parts of a poem; and likewise of any other matters on the same line of Of course, like other theorists who seek to enquiry. disrupt the persistent dualism of gender as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, Butler Classical genre theory is regulative and attempts to QUEER the binarism of a prescriptive, and is based on certain fixed hegemonic ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. assumptions about psychological and Adrienne Rich’s essay of 1987, ‘Com- social differentiation. Modern genre pulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian theory, on the other hand, tends to be Existence’, which outlined the notion of a purely descriptive and to avoid any overt ‘continuum’ of modes of being in relation assumptions about generic hierarchies. In to gender – and thus to sex – is an impor- the last century, beginning with such tant precursor to Butler’s work, as is Russian Formalists as Roman Jakobson, Monique Wittig’s ‘One is Not Born a there has been a continuing effort to link Woman’ (1981), in which she claims les- literary kinds to linguistic structures. bians refuse not only the ‘role’ of woman Vladimir Propp’s seminal study, Morpho- but the whole heterosexual matrix – ‘the logy of the Folktale, written in 1928, was economic, ideological and political power strongly influenced by the Formalists, of man’ – by which society operates. and he in turn laid some of the ground- Lesbians are thus not women. work for the genre studies of the later See David Glover and Cora Kaplan, Structuralists in both film and literary Genders (2000); Joseph Bristow, criticism. Tzvetan Todorov, however, in Sexuality (1997); Shelley Saguaro (ed.), his book The Fantastic: A Structural Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader Approach to a Literary Genre (1973), (2000). takes issue with Propp’s attempt to relate SS the concept of genre to that of ‘species’ in the natural sciences. Todorov points out Generative poetics See POETICS. that, unlike specimens in the natural Genre There is no agreed equivalent world, every true literary work modifies for this word in the vocabulary of English the sum of all possible works, and that we criticism. ‘Kind’, ‘type’, ‘form’ and only grant a text literary status insofar as ‘genre’ are variously used, and this fact it produces a change in our notion of the alone indicates some of the confusions canon. If a work fails to achieve this, 98 Globalization it is removed to the category of ‘mass’ Typology of Modern Literature (1977); or ‘formulaic’ literature. This assertion A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An inevitably led to debates about the status Introduction to the Theory of Genres and of ‘literature’ itself as a genre. Modes (1982). Another significant contribution to BCL genre theory is that of Northrop Frye whose Anatomy of Criticism (1957) pre- Globalization The process whereby sents a comprehensive typology of myth individual lives and local communities and archetype. are affected by economic and cultural The second major distinction is that forces that operate worldwide. In effect, it between genres defined in terms of ‘outer is the process of the world becoming a form’ and ‘inner form’. These terms were single place. Globalism is the perception coined by Rene Wellek and Austin of the world as a function or result of the Warren in their Theory of Literature processes of globalization upon local (New York, [rev. ed.] 1956), to describe communities. on the one hand specific metres and Part of the complexity of globalism structures, and on the other, attitude, tone comes from the different ways it is and purpose. They argue that genres perceived and understood. Some critics ought to be based on both inner and outer embrace it enthusiastically as a positive forms together, though the ostensible feature of a changing world in which basis may be one or the other (e.g. access to technology, information, ‘pastoral’ or ‘satire’ for the inner form; services and markets will be of benefit ‘dipodic verse’ or ‘Pindaric ode’ for the to local communities, where dominant outer). They maintain that it is only by forms of social organization will lead to adopting some such complex definition universal prosperity, peace and freedom, of genre that the confusions of neo- and in which a perception of a global classical criticism can be avoided. In environment will lead to global ecological the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concern. For this group, globalism is a no attempt was made to discriminate positive term for an engagement with between the quite diverse criteria global issues. Others reject it as a form of involved in differentiation by subject mat- domination by ‘First World’ countries ter, structure, language, tone or audience. over ‘Third World’ ones, in which indi- So not only was it impossible to make vidual distinctions of culture and society useful comparisons between particular become erased by an increasingly homo- works, it was not even possible to say geneous global culture, and local econo- what did or did not constitute a genre. mies are more firmly incorporated into a The advantage of Wellek and Warren’s system of global capital structured to definition is that it allows for an impor- serve the interests of the wealthiest tant distinction between, for example, nations. The chief argument this group novels of The Oxford Movement, which raises against globalization is that it does do not constitute a genre, and Gothic not impact in the same way or equally ben- Novels, which do. See also CHICAGO eficially upon rich and poor communities. CRITICS, FORMALISM, POETICS. As a field of study, globalization See D. Lodge, The Modes of Modern covers such disciplines as interna- Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the tional relations, political geography, Gothic 99 economics, sociology, communication discussion of the phenomenon. In this studies, agricultural, ecological and view the responses of local communities cultural studies. Globalization did not becomes critical. Such critics argue that simply erupt spontaneously around the globalization must now engage everyone world, but has a history embedded in the whether they oppose or support its forces. history of imperialism, in the structure of Indeed they go further and suggest that the world system, and in the origins of a the only means of resisting the negative global economy within the ideology of effects of globalization is to engage with imperial rhetoric. As some recent studies, and reorganize these forces themselves to such as that of Hardt and Negri (2000) a just more and equitable goal (see Hardt have argued, the key to the link between and Negri). Since globalization will classical imperialism and contemporary undoubtedly continue to be a significant globalization in the twentieth century has feature of the foreseeable future such been the role of the United States and its responses seem likely to produce the most control of global economic relations. effective form of resistance to the nega- Despite its resolute refusal to perceive tive impact of globalization and the most itself as ‘imperial’, and indeed its public hopeful sign that it may yet emerge as the stance against the older European precursor of a more positive global polity. doctrines of colonialism up to and after See M. Albrow, Globalization: Myths the Second World War, the United States, and Realities (1994); M. Albrow and in its international policies, eagerly E. King (eds), Globalization, Knowledge espoused the political domination and and Society (1990); M. Featherstone economic and cultural control associated (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, with imperialism. More importantly, US Globalization and Modernity (1990); society during and after this early expan- M. Featherstone et al., Global Moder- sionist phase initiated those features of nities (1995); M. Hardt and A. Negri, social life and social relations that today Empire (2000); A. D. King, Culture, may be considered to characterize the Globalization and the World System global: mass production, mass communi- (1991); E. Kofinan and G. Youngs, cation and mass consumption. During Globalization: Theory and Practice the twentieth century, these have spread (1996); R. Robertson, Globalization: transnationally. Social Theory and Global Culture (1992); That global culture is a continuation of T. Spybey, Globalization and World a dynamic of influence, control, dissemi- Society (1996). nation and hegemony that operates GG according to an already initiated structure of power that emerged in the sixteenth Gothic The gothic romance emerged century in the great confluence of imperi- in England when the novel form itself alism, capitalism and modernity explains was only a few decades old. Thus, when why the forces of globalization are still, in Horace Walpole published The Castle some senses, centered in the West (in of Otranto in 1764, it was in part a reac- terms of power and institutional organiza- tion against limitations which the early tion), despite their global dissemination. novelists seemed to have accepted with However, how it is engaged by local com- equanimity. The novel of manners and the munities forms the focus of much recent novel of didactic sensibility are exposed to 100 Gothic the whole sub-world of the unconscious. unexplained; Ann Radcliffe, or, in Sensibility is shown under pressure. America, Charles Brockden Brown, felt Sexuality, elemental passions and fear now the need to rationalize the ineffable. moved to the centre of the novelist’s stage. The ‘classic’ gothic novels spanned The word ‘gothic’ initially conjured up the years between 1764 and, approxi- visions of a medieval world, of dark mately, 1820, which saw the publication passions enacted against the massive and of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. sinister architecture of the gothic castle. Among the best-known examples are: By the end of the century it implied the The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann whole paraphernalia of evil forces and Radcliffe, 1794; The Adventures of Caleb ghostly apparitions. The gothic is charac- Williams by William Godwin, 1794; terized by a setting which consists of The Monk by M. G. Lewis, 1795; castles, monasteries, ruined houses or Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1818. The suitably picturesque surroundings, by strain continued in the nineteenth and characters who are, or seem to be, the twentieth centuries both in England (e.g. quintessence of good or evil (though Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn, 1963 and innocence often seems to possess a par- David Storey, Radcliffe, 1963) and in ticular menace of its own); sanity and America, where it played an important chastity are constantly threatened and role not merely in the work of such over all there looms the suggestion, nineteenth-century gothicists as Charles sometimes finally subverted, that irra- Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe and tional and evil forces threaten both Ambrose Bierce or, less directly, individual integrity and the material order Hawthorne, Melville and James, but also of society. in the work of authors, such as James On one level the gothic novel was an Purdy, John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut. attempt to stimulate jaded sensibilities The Gothic has developed a strong and as such its descendants are the appeal in fiction and film. Its features can modern horror film and science fiction be seen in a range of authors from Angela fantasy. Yet, as the Marquis de Sade Carter to Poppy Z. Brite, while writers detected at the time and as the surrealists like Anne Rice have catered for the were to assert later, the gothic mode was general cultish vogue for the Gothic in potentially both socially and artistically contemporary culture witnessed in the revolutionary. The iconography of decay sustained popularity of the Vampire and dissolution which filled such novels movie. clearly has its social dimension (William See Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror Godwin in particular drew political (1921, reprinted 1963); Leslie Fiedler, morals from his entropic setting) while Love and Death in the American Novel the assertion of a non-material reality (1960); Montague Summers, The Gothic clearly stands as an implicit criticism of Quest (New York, 1964). the literalism of the conventional novel as See G. St John Barclay, Anatomy of it does of the rational confidence of the Horror: The Masters of Occult Fiction age itself. The debate between rationalism (1978); C. Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of and the imagination which came to the Unreal (1981); C. A. Howells, Love, characterize the age is contained within Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic the gothic mode. Horace Walpole was Fiction (1978); R. Jackson, Fantasy: The content to leave his terrors irrational and Literature of Subversion (1981); H. Kerr, Grotesque 101

J. W. Crowley, and C. L. Crow (eds), grotesque to include anything horrific, The Haunted Dusk: American Super- fantastic or interesting to Kayser, at least natural Fiction, 1820–1920 (1983); stressed the origin of the term in the P.B. Messent (ed.), Literature of the Occult extravagant, whimsical representations of (1981); D. G. Punter, The Literature of heads and faces that ornamented classical Terror (1980); Donald Ringe, American decorative friezes, rediscovered by Gothic (1982); V. Sage, Horror Fiction in Renaissance archaeologists and rapidly the Protestant Tradition (1986); T. Todorov, imitated by Mannerist artists. A definition The Fantastic (1975); David Punter and of the grotesque that omits its unmotivated Glennis Byron, The Gothic (2003); playfulness is likely to be unsatisfactory. Fred Botting, Gothic: Critical Concepts in The rhetorical strategy of the Literary and Cultural Studies (2004). grotesque in literature is usually deadpan; CWEB the reader must not be allowed a perspec- tive that permits explanation of its incon- Grammar See LANGUAGE, SYNTAX. gruity or preposterousness. So Kafka’s Grotesque The grotesque usually pre- ‘Metamorphosis’ opens with the matter- sents the human figure in an exaggerated of-fact narration of Gregor Samsa’s and distorted way; Bergson’s theory of awakening into insecthood. Likewise comedy as a whole as a deliberate dehu- Pancks’s breezy insinuation of grotesque manization or mechanization of observed comparison in Little Dorrit: behaviour seems too limiting, but offers a stimulating approach to the grotesque. A person who can’t pay, gets another The grotesque exploits similarities person who can’t pay, to guarantee that between people and animals or things, he can pay. Like a person with two and vice versa. There is a strong critical wooden legs getting another person tendency to regard the grotesque as in with two wooden legs, to guarantee opposition to REALISM. Grotesque art, that he has got two natural ones. It such arguments run, is failed realism, its doesn’t make either of them able to do failure determined by social or personal a walking match. And four wooden inadequacies. Mark Spilka, in Dickens legs are more troublesome to you than and Kafka (1963) put forward the view two, when you don’t want any. that the grotesque is conditioned by ‘oedi- pal arrest’, an inability to realize the Exaggeration and distortion gain their roundedness of personality because of a effect by being passed off in serious and fixation with the mother; T. A. Jackson, in woodenly correct prose. Charles Dickens: The Progress of a See Arthur Clayborough, The Radical (1938), argued that the flatness of Grotesque in English Literature (1965); Dickens’s characters is determined by the Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (1972); dehumanizing forces of the society that Anthea Trodd, Victorian Culture and Dickens lived in and depicted. But the Idea of the Grotesque (1999); Wolfgang Kayser’s book The Grotesque Bernard McElroy, Fiction of the Modern in Art and Literature (1963), even if it did Grotesque (1989). little else but dilute the concept of the MAH H

Hegemony The term hegemony as of mass communication emerged there defined in conventional discourse signi- was an increasing emphasis on ideas of fies simply power. But in contemporary hegemonic control in social critiques. critical discourse it has come to mean Even Marxist critics opposed to power exercised by creating the belief in Gramsci’s emphasis on the need for a the majority of people in a society that popular ideological commitment to the power is the prerogative of a group or revolution based on the humanist idea of class as a ‘natural’ or otherwise justified the ‘winning over’ of the proletariat at a right. conscious level, notably Louis Althusser, The origins of this contemporary who sought vigorously to reconstitute the usage can be traced to Marxist theory. forces of the state as the primary source Although the term is employed in the late for social determinism, recruited to their nineteenth century by Russian Marxists, description of that state not only the coer- such as Plekhanov, to signify the need cive forces of the state (police, army, etc.) to emphasize the leadership of the prole- but its cultural forces (ideological state tarian class in any successful revolu- apparatuses, in Althusser’s terms). More tionary alliance of classes and social positively, we can see the influence of groupings, it is to the usage developed by Gramscian ideas of hegemony in Michel the twentieth-century Italian Marxist, Foucault’s emphasis on the power of dis- Antonio Gramsci, that the modern impor- course, which, at times, seems to place tance of the term must be traced. As a the cultural, where classic Marxism had Marxist, faced by the rise of fascism in placed the economic, as the principal the 1920s, Gramsci’s analysis resisted the determinant of society. Ideology is crucial simple emphasis on economic determin- as a tool in both levels of analysis, invig- ism, which had led to a fatalistic empha- orated now as a means of linking the sis on the ‘inevitability’ of the fall of economic and the cultural in a powerful capitalist power. Gramsci emphasized the fresh mode of social analysis. need to develop the political conscious- In post-colonial societies where power ness of the proletariat to enable its emer- was often exercised by a small minority gence as a ‘hegemonic’ force in its own over a majority population Gramscian right. For Gramsci, the proletariat had to ‘hegemony’ has been a crucial concept in be convinced that it had a ‘right to rule’. explaining how such power was success- To achieve this, the existing belief in the fully exercised. Hegemonic power is ‘natural’ right to rule of the existing always in the last analysis based on force. ‘ruling class’ had to be exposed. The pro- But the fact that such force need only be letariat’s cultural forms and ideologies had used as a last resort indicates how impor- to be respected and incorporated into the tant the exercise of hegemonic control is strategy of revolution (even problematic in maintaining imperial control. ‘popular’ concepts, such as nationalism). From the point of view of literary and This meant that new attention had to be cultural criticism this contemporary paid to cultural forms. As modern modes usage of ‘hegemony’ serves to place the Hermeneutics 103 production of culture at the heart of the two categories of text: Classical and issue of power and social change. It sug- Biblical. Each was obscured by cultural gests that social texts, literature, film, tele- and historical distance, yet, each held a vision, the Internet, etc., may be crucial in meaning or value that the interpreter tried allowing a ruling class to exercise power. to reach. In theology, Origen produced a They may also, of course, be crucial triple explication through grammatical, means of resistance to such power by a ethical and allegorical meanings, and revolutionary class. So cultural and social Augustine added an ‘anagogical’ or texts themselves become a site of struggle mystical dimension. The Reformation of the utmost importance in determining intensified hermeneutic activity as who controls social processes and who Protestant theologians tried to form an exercises power successfully. autonomous interpretation of scripture; The analysis of such texts has been and later, Enlightenment rationalism central to the emergence of ‘cultural stud- made for codification of interpretive pro- ies’ in the academies of Europe and cedures. Early in the nineteenth century, America, leading to significant reassess- Friedrich Schleiermacher proposed a gen- ments of the institutions of literature, and eral hermeneutics that would underlie all mass media in social analyses of their specific interpretations and provide them societies past and present. The emergence with a system of understanding. This pro- of print, the development of literary gramme has remained a hermeneutic forms, the development of popular genres ambition; as Paul Ricoeur points out, it and of new modes of providing texts to echoes the Enlightenment and the Critical the masses in new media have all been the philosophy of Kant, but it also displays subject of extensive analysis as critics a Romantic element. Schleiermacher dis- engage with the issue of how texts tinguished between ‘grammatical’ inter- influence, confirm and maintain power. pretation, based on the general discourse See Robert Bocock, Hegemony (1986); of a culture, and ‘technical’ interpreta- Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political tion, based on the individual subjectivity Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and of an author. The interpreter seeks to the Revolutionary Process (1981); Antonio reconstruct that subjectivity, and may Gramsci, Selections from Political gain a better grasp of it than the author. Writings 1921–1926 (1978), Letters from Here an intuitive psychologism comple- Prison (1975); James Joll, Gramsci ments the comparatist approach of ‘gram- (1977). matical’ method; and intuition is also GG evident in Schleiermacher’s famous legacy, the hermeneutic circle. Trying to Heresy of paraphrase See PARAPHRASE. understand any hermeneutic object – a Hermeneutics Comprises the general sentence, a text – we approach the parts theory and practice of interpretation. The by reference to the whole, yet, cannot term was first specifically applied in the grasp the whole without reference to seventeenth century; but hermeneutic the parts. This ‘circular’ process also practice is as old as the exegesis of texts. applies in approaching an unfamiliar Many questions that are still current author or period: some foreknowledge in contemporary interpretation can be seems essential. For Schleiermacher, the traced through the history of Western problem was resolved intuitively, by a hermeneutics, which typically handled ‘leap’ into the circle, like the leap of faith. 104 Hermeneutics

This may sound suspiciously unscientific part of a tradition.’ This concept of in an age of progress; and by the end of tradition is crucial for Gadamer’s dealings the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Dilthey with history, and with what he calls an had to make room for hermeneutics in the effective consciousness of history. Far face of the huge prestige of the natural from being neutral, the interpreter is sciences and their positive methods. He always situated in relation to the tradition produced yet another division; between ‘out of which the text speaks’. This situat- the explanation of external objects in the edness (and its prejudices) must come natural sciences, and the understanding to consciousness as the interpreter’s of inner states in the human sciences. ‘horizon’. The text’s horizon is of course Hermeneutics applied to the latter; different and distant; and though a fusion Dilthey thus follows Schleiermacher in of horizons is sought, historical distance his psychological emphasis. His concern is not cancelled but recognized as itself is not so much to understand the text as to productive of meaning. In this sense, and reconstruct the lived experience of its not in Schleiermacher’s, the interpreter author. Such experience, says Dilthey, is may understand more than the author. intrinsically temporal, and interpretation The open dialectic and evolving must therefore itself assume a temporal or tradition of Gadamer’s hermeneutics act historical character. The role of history to prevent closure; meaning is understood was to remain important for hermeneu- but it is never final. A desire to avoid the tics; and in the ‘understanding of spiritual ‘Babel of interpretations’ has prompted life and of history’ Dilthey gave literature E. D. Hirsch, Jr to seek a regulative an ‘immeasurable significance’; for ‘in principle for hermeneutics through another language alone the inner life of man finds reconstruction of the author. He separates its complete, exhaustive and objectively ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’; significance intelligible expression’. Literature is thus is any relationship between meaning and a privileged object for hermeneutic study. something else – taste, period, and so on. Martin Heidegger moved twentieth- It is thus variable and the concern of crit- century hermeneutics away from psychol- icism. Interpretation, on the other hand, ogism towards ontology: the question of deals with meaning; this does not change being, and of being in the world, a world because it is intended by an author – whose strangeness demanded interpreta- though seen not as historically active, nor tion. The philosophical issues will not as unconsciously motivated, but as ‘that concern us here; but it is important to “part” of the author which specifies or note Heidegger’s reformulation of the determines verbal meaning’. However, hermeneutic circle, not as a problem to be this specifying intention must itself be resolved by an intuitive leap, but in terms specified by the interpreter, and so its of interplay between an interpreter and a practical use for validation would seem to tradition which is encountered, under- involve us in a really vicious circle. But stood and remade in an open dialectic. As the subsequent controversy in hermeneu- Fleidegger’s pupil Hans-Georg Gadamer tics does not stem from Hirsch, who has describes it, ‘There is a polarity of been subjected to devastating critique familiarity and strangeness on which (see David Hoy, later). It rather concerns hermeneutic work is based...that inter- what could be called the optimism of mediate place between being an histori- Schleiermacher, Dilthey and Gadamer. cally intended separate object and being Much as these hermeneuts differ, they do Hero 105 share an allegiance to universality, and to not whimsical’ (‘The Construal of a common human nature which suggests Reality’ in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), The a measure of co-operation and of shared Politics of Interpretation, 1983). Both discourse in the interpretive dialogue. sides must abjure their myths; hermeneu- Hermeneutic objects may differ, but they tics is no longer judged and delimited by are credited as truths which await illumi- ‘hard’ science, and its scope is implicitly nation. Ricoeur has distinguished increased. An even more far-reaching between this ‘hermeneutics of belief’ and extension is described by Richard Rorty a contrary ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature whose exemplary figures are Nietzsche, (1980). Rorty proposes the abandonment Marx and Freud. Such figures are con- of that quest for knowledge which seeks cerned not just to clarify but also to essential principles and tries to posit a demystify; texts may be mistrusted rather meta-discourse that commands all others. than revered, and tradition may be a He calls this ambition ‘epistemology’ and repository of false consciousness. Such suggests hermeneutics as an alternative attitudes are linked to oppositional prac- procedure: ‘Hermeneutics...is what we tices for the READER, and to the concept of get when we are no longer epistemologi- REFUNCTIONING. One noteworthy debate cal.’ It is thus a polemical term which between belief and suspicion has con- seeks to turn human inquiry away from cerned Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, envying some predictive sciences towards whose ideological approach derives from a pragmatic anti-essentialism which the Frankfurt School. For Habermas, a (following Gadamer in this respect) resists hermeneutics like Gadamer’s offers closure. Heidegger’s open model of the knowledge which is ‘sterilized’, clear of hermeneutic circle applies, suggesting a the suppressed traces of special interest ‘notion of culture as a conversation rather which critical reflection should uncover. than as a structure erected upon founda- But for Gadamer this task is not invari- tions’. Interpretation becomes a pervasive ably necessary or primary; he resists the necessity, when, as Stanley Fish remarked exclusive equation of understanding and in another context, ‘interpretation is the unmasking, and the inevitable opposition only game in town’. of reason and authority. See Andrew Bowie and Friedrich Dilthey’s distinction between natural Schleiermacher (eds), Hermeneutics and human sciences has also been chal- and Criticism (1998); Paul Ricoeur, lenged, and with it much arts-versus- Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, science rhetoric. The distinction was still edited and translated by John B. Thompson followed by Heidegger and Gadamer, (1981); Kurt Mueller-Volimer (ed.), The prompting comments on the alienation of Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German the detached scientific observer. But for Tradition from the Enlightenment to the much modern science the observer is not Present (1986). detached, the object is not passive, and EC investigation occurs within the horizon of a theoretical paradigm. An historian of Hero In classical myth heroes had science like Stephen Toulmin can now superhuman powers; they conversed claim: ‘Critical judgement in the natural with gods (sometimes, like Achilles or sciences, then, is not geometrical, and Theseus, they were demigods) and their critical interpretation in the humanities is lines were accompanied by prophecies 106 Hero and portents. But when these figures a distinctive ‘heroic’ diction, but initiated appear in the Homeric epics, their status, simultaneously a fertile debate about who as Aristotle showed, is changed – they (if anyone) was the ‘hero’. Satan, as have become aspects of literary structure, Dryden said, was technically the hero – and ‘Unity of plot does not, as some peo- but was the concept even relevant to a ple think, consist in the unity of the hero’ work claiming truth to universal moral (Poetics). Homer’s heroes, for Aristotle, and spiritual experience? Surely, Addison are elements in the unity of an action, not urged, Milton had no hero in the classical its sole origin and end as they had been in sense (though if we wanted one, it must the loosely cumulative preliterary leg- be Christ)? When, in the romantic period, ends; in epic or tragedy heroes exist for Blake and Shelley declared Milton was the sake of the literary whole. But the on the Devil’s side, very different valua- hero is not easily demoted from his tions of the heroic came into the open: on mythic status: Romantic criticism, culmi- the one side radical individualism (repre- nating in A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean sented diversely by Byron, the Brontës Tragedy (1904) is now notorious for the and Carlyle), on the other the communal fallacy of considering heroes in artificial values of restraint, civilization, maturity, separation from their dramatic context first in Scott and Austen, later in the (see L. C. Knights, How Many Children social novels of Mrs Gaskell and George had Lady Macbeth?, 1933). Conversely, Eliot. Thackeray, who subtitled Vanity the New Critics who de-mythologized the Fair (1847–8) ‘A Novel without a Hero’, hero stressed ‘unity’ to the point where applied in Henry Esmond (1852) the plays became ritual re-enactments of searching perspective of domestic realism order rather than actions. The concept of to the great figures of the past. The the hero seems inextricably involved with eighteenth-century epigram, ‘No man is a the discussion of dramatic structure. hero to his valet’ encapsulated the kind of Though by an illusion they seem so, scrutiny that cut the hero down to size. Shakespeare’s heroes are rarely continu- Carlyle argued, ‘It is not the Hero’s blame, ous creations. When the hero returns to but the Valet’s: that his soul, namely, is a the scene after an absence we do not take mean valet-soul!’ – but his own version of up where we left off, or reconstruct some ‘the Hero’ demonstrates grotesquely the biographical fiction; we take the hero up vices of essentialism: ‘For at bottom the from where the play, in the language and Great Man, as he comes from the hand of action of other characters, has got to. This Nature, is ever the same kind of thing: is perhaps the clearest indication of the Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns. . .’ distinction (and the interaction) between Getting rid of ‘the Hero’ seemed a dramatic structure and the structure of the critical necessity: as wielded by Carlyle hero’s consciousness or career; we may in the concept was unmanageable, a barrier some works be more aware of one or the to the understanding of literary structures. other, but neither can dominate without Critics preferred the slippery term ‘CHAR- evaporating the drama. ACTER’, and analysed social and/or verbal The critical issues raised by the detail; rhetoric, action, conventional Protean forms of the hero in narrative motifs and large-scale effects were poetry and novels are more complicated, systematically played down. There were, and have been aired less. Paradise Lost however, many nineteenth-century novels provides an example: Milton established where this obviously did not work Historical novel 107

(e.g. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, private events, and the protagonist may be 1847, Meredith’s The Egoist, 1879) and either an actual figure from the past or an twentieth-century fictional developments, invented figure whose destiny is involved like the absurd, villainous or insane with actual events. The major practition- narrator-heroes of Beckett or Nabokov, ers of this, the ‘classic’ form of the have produced the term ‘anti-hero’ to fill historical novel in English and American a much-felt gap. The hero has re-emerged, literature, were Sir Walter Scott and James in complicity with the author against the Fenimore Cooper. The historical actions in norms of ‘the whole’, and may be, as in Scott’s ‘Waverley’ and Cooper’s ‘Leather- Beckett’s title, The Unnameable (1953), stocking’ novels largely concerned but this is of course a precise inversion, not social changes of great magnitude – the a banishment, of the classical archetype. destruction of the Scottish clans, the Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) impingement of the settlers on the new exemplifies a continuing ambivalence – land and their conflict with Native the sinister yet patronizing attitude of the Americans. The protagonist was often author introducing ‘our hero’. We may someone of mixed loyalties, whose agree with T. S. Eliot’s debunking of diverse impinging pressures mirrored in ‘Sir Philip Sidney/And other heroes of that individual struggle the interplay of wider kidney’ but the concept seems inescapable social forces. despite its extra, or anti-literary, overtones. In England, Thackeray carried forward The narrative without a hero remains the tradition of the genre, but reached a critical fiction. See also CHARACTER, back to connect it with the comic novels EPIC, MYTH. of Fielding and Smollett. Like Scott, See Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero- Thackeray communicates a sense of Worship (1840); Northrop Frye, Anatomy momentous and irretrievable social of Criticism (1957); R. W. B. Lewis, The change, but his dissatisfaction with that Picaresque Saint, Representative Figures which prevailed in any given situation in Contemporary fiction (1959); Peter seems stronger than Scott’s. On the Mercer, ‘Othello and heroic tragedy’, Continent, the successors to Scott Critical Quarterly, 11 (1969); Mario Praz, included Manzoni, Pushkin, Gogol, Hugo, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction Merimée, Stendhal, Balzac and Tolstoy. (1956); Alex Woloch, The One Vs the Gradually, the interests and techniques of Many: Minor Characters and the Space the historical novel began to be applied to of the Protagonist in the Novel (2004). contemporary events and the genre LS merged with, even as it helped create, the great realistic novels of the nineteenth Heroic couplet See COUPLET. century. A double movement occurred Historical novel A term which refers in which the treatment of ‘history’ in to novels set in a period of time recogniz- fiction became progressively more exotic ably ‘historical’ in relation to the moment and archaeologically accurate – as in of writing. The past tense may be Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) – while employed in the narration; the account treatment of the present became more may purport to have been written in that ‘naturalistic’. past time, or in some intervening time. The historical novel merges on one The subject matter of the historical novel side with the realistic novel, on the other – tends to encompass both public and as the historical substance generalizes – it 108 Historicism merges with the national epic, and is as ‘pastoral’, but that it has proved more perhaps the counter-phenomenon to durable than the majority of ‘urgent fic- Fielding’s notion of the novel as a comic tive confrontations of immediate contem- prose epic. The epic model here is Virgil’s porary reality’ despite the more recent Aeneid, in so far as certain events can be tags of ‘nostalgic’ and ‘costume drama’. seen as inaugurating and justifying (or Byatt notes that this renaissance is at least failing to justify) the nation state. coincident with, if not in part due to, the The question of historical psychology – reconsideration of history’s relation to of the motives and feelings which can be narrative by historians themselves, from attributed to people in the past – arises. Hayden White to Simon Schama. Some historical novelists have attributed to See Georg Lukács, trans. Hannah and characters in the past substantially the same Stanley Mitchell, The Historical Novel inner lives as their contemporaries. This (1962); A. S. Byatt, On Histories and type of anachronism, which can be used to Stories: Selected Essays (2001). significant and to comic effect, is allied to AMG other ‘deteriorated’ forms of the historical novel, including the ‘historical romance’, Historicism Many branches of literary where only costume and not substance study involve the use of historical evi- differentiates the period of the fiction from dence: questions of textual transmission the present. See also ARCHAISM. and authenticity, of archaic or obsolete A penchant for the historical novel language, of sources and literary borrow- reappeared at the end of the twentieth ing, of relations between an author’s life century. A. S. Byatt, whose work is par- and work, are all in the strict sense ticularly associated with the reinscription ‘historical’. But the term ‘historicism’ is of Victorian Britain in works, such as usually reserved for that approach to liter- Possession (1990), Angels and Insects ature which sets it in the context of the (1992) and The Biographer’s Tale (1999), ideas, conventions and attitudes of the writes in one of her essays: period in which it was written. Although good literature is ‘not of an age, but for all I believe that postmodern writers are time’, the social and intellectual climate returning to historical fiction because within which every writer has to work, the idea of writing the Self is felt to be and which his writing reflects in some worked out.... We like historical degree, is subject to change. The unin- persons because they are unknowable, formed modern reader is therefore likely only partly available to the imagination, to bring to the literature of the past and we find this occluded quality assumptions and associations that may be attractive. quite alien to the frame of reference from Byatt is referring to authors writing in a which that literature derives its form and fabulist European tradition, such as meaning. The aim of historicism is to Lawrence Norfolk, Penelope Fitzgerald, make works of different periods more Peter Ackroyd and Tibor Fischer, but her accessible to the modern reader by recon- comments about a return to history apply structing the historically appropriate to a wide range of literary production background as it affects an understanding around the millennium. She notes that and judgement of the work concerned. in the 1950s the historical novel was The theory as well as the practice of frowned on as ‘escapist’ or pigeonholed historicism have not gone unchallenged. Historicism 109

It has been argued, for instance, that a recognized, it can extend and refine our modern reconstruction of the cultural or understanding of the literature we most ideological identity of a past age must admire. The validity of historicism rests still be essentially modern in its point of not upon an antiquarian curiosity about view. Historicism cannot transform a how a writer was influenced or inter- twentieth-century mind; it may only be preted by the world he lived in, but upon transferring modern preconceptions from the endeavour to enrich modern sensibili- the critical to the historical plane of ties by comprehending and transmitting thought. Moreover, historicism must those ideas and values which preserve the inevitably be selective and interpretative continuity of our civilization. in treating what evidence there is con- New historicism evolved in the 1980s cerning standards and habits of mind that as, in some ways, a reaction to structural- differ from our own; it may tend to ism and formalism. Indebted to political, impose a falsifying uniformity and immo- post-structuralist and reader-response bility upon its conception of a literary theory, new historicism focusses on the ‘period’, and its findings are themselves intertexuality of (literary and non-literary) demonstrably subject to change from gen- texts and the presence of diverse cultur- eration to generation. Much of the histori- ally specific discourses within and around cism of thirty years ago is now as obsolete the text under examination. New histori- as other kinds of literary interpretation cism acknowledges both the radical dif- which were merely of their age. In addi- ference of the past and the impossibility tion, there is a tendency in historicism to of accessing it free from the critic’s own interpret, and measure the work of great historical moment. Critics seek to be vig- and original imagination by the common- ilant over both their own preconceptions places of its time, reducing the unique- and the traditional tendency to see histor- ness and subtlety of genius to the lowest ical criticism as objective rather than common denominator of a reconstructed interpretive. Indebted to Foucault, new idea of ‘period’. If, for instance, a knowl- historicism has developed in tandem with edge of Elizabethan ideas about kingship, the new cultural history influenced by the or of their dramatic conventions, helps Marxism of the 1970s and the French us to understand Shakespeare’s history Annales historians. In Britain, new his- plays, we must still remember that toricist criticism developed under the Shakespeare is hardly to be circumscribed name CULTURAL MATERIALISM, where a by an abstraction of the average mentality greater debt to the work of Raymond of his contemporaries. Conventions that Williams was acknowledged. Cf. MARXIST have been obliterated by time may be CRITICISM. recovered for us by historicism, but the See Helen Gardner, The Business of great writers of the past are more than Criticism (1960); René Wellek, Concepts conventional. of Criticism (1963); W. K. Wimsatt, Jr, Historicism, therefore, cannot provide The Verbal Icon (1954); S. Greenblatt, us with an absolute or objective measure Renaissance Self-Fashioning from more of literary meaning or value. It is not a to Shakespeare (1980); H. Aram Veeser substitute for the act of intelligent imagi- (ed.), The New Historicism Reader nation which we call criticism; but it is, (1993); Paul Hamilton, Historicism properly used, one of the critic’s most (2003). valuable tools. Provided its limitations are DJP 110 Homophony

Homophony See AMBIGUITY. positively as a means of identifying with others. It is this sense of humanism that is Humanism There are two basic most powerfully at work in our response positions regarding humanism. The first to literature. is that human beings are self-determining The term itself is a nineteenth-century creatures and the second is that their lives coinage. It referred primarily to the new are largely determined by forces beyond conception of ‘man’ in the Renaissance. their control. The irony is that these A key element of this conception was the forces, in the shape of economic and idea of the individual. This contrasted social structures, are ones that they them- with the figure of ‘Everyman’ who was a selves have developed. So, a working def- common feature of the Medieval period. inition of humanism is that human beings Standing for all of (hu)mankind this create their world and are conditioned by figure had no distinctive characteristics, it. Once we move beyond this very basic and was moreover a passive person fought formulation, things become confusing over by a good and bad angel. The dis- and indeed controversial. For example, covery of classical writers precipitated a how do we differentiate humanism from change in this view of the human, which humanity, or even from the individual could be seen in works like Giorgio human being? These are all closely Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550). The related but subtly different concepts. stress was now on what made a person Even if we try to define humans as a different and on how they determined species we run into trouble. It is not only their own existence. Along with these that many other mammals use tools and developments was a sense not of ‘man’ as communicate with one another but also a fallen creature but as one who could that we share 98 per cent of our genes aspire to higher things. with the chimpanzee and something like Although the culture of Puritanism, in 67 per cent with a banana. The history of the seventeenth century, undermined the written culture is partly an attempt to dis- dignity and self-determining nature of the tinguish humans from other species, often human with its dark theology of damna- on the basis of their ostensibly divine tion, this was eclipsed in the eighteenth origin but, since Darwin, we have become century by a new emphasis on the rational more and more aware of our kinship with nature of ‘man’. In the latter half of the the animal kingdom. The point is that if period, this gave way to an appreciation we cannot draw an absolute boundary of the emotional nature of ‘man’ which between ourselves and other species, how carried its own sort of truth. This was, in can we be clear about humanism? crude form, the philosophy of romanti- Another problem is that the term human- cism and another central feature of this ism has been regarded with suspicion thinking was the idea of human beings as because it glosses over questions of class, creative individuals. During the course of ethnicity, gender and sexuality. It also the nineteenth century, various thinkers, provides a ‘justification’ for interfering in such as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, began other cultures where it is felt that ‘human to question the idea of human autonomy nature’ is not as developed as it might and essential goodness that had been be and this was one of the justifications prevalent since the Renaissance. Marx of imperialism. On the other hand, the showed that humans were conditioned by notion of humanism can be used more the class into which they were born, Humours 111

Nietzsche that they were still in the toils Humour, 1600). The obsessional humour of Christian morality which they needed riding the character is the source of the to transcend and Freud that they were torn ‘comedy’. In the early plays the humour between their instincts and their ideals. is ‘spent’ in the course of the action, free- One of the main ideas of humanism ing the character, in a literal use of the was the importance of learning, manifest medical analogy. Later the humours are in the mastery of language. The work developed as symbolic stances through of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) which the characters are seen to react to undermined this assumption with his the values of the world they inhabit, rather idea, elaborated in different ways by than as simple flaws or biases in their Michel Foucault (1926–84), Jacques nature. Thus, Morose’s silence (phleg- Lacan (1901–81) and Jacques Derrida matic melancholy) is simultaneously a (1930–2004), that language shaped us cause and a product of his relationship more than we shaped language. with his society. This sophistication of the In recent years there has been a reaction theory culminates in a humour character to the ‘anti-humanism’ of theory. Since like Overreach (sanguine/choleric?) human beings are always changing – the where the bias is a complex symbol of the intersection of the human and computer general and social values of the world of technology is an important factor here – the Fair in Bartholomew Fair (1614? folio there can be no precise definition of 1631) and people’s response to them. humanism. But from the medieval to the Restoration dramatists continued to modern period, one thing is constant: the insist in their critical responses that idea that humans are divided and unful- humour theory is central to comic effect filled and that they look back to the past but in practice the increased interest in the or to the future to have a complete view of presence or absence of the acceptable themselves. It may also be a reason why response by which society judges the wit they write literature, to give themselves and worth of its members makes humour a sense of wholeness denied in life. characterization seem too inflexible. See Tony Davies, Humanism Attempts have been made to distinguish (1997); Martin Halliwell and Andy Affectation, with its conscious, social Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/ overtones, from Humour, where the Anti-Humanist Dialogues (2003). stress is individual and pathological. As GD Congreve says, ‘what is Humour in one, may be Affectation in another; and noth- Humours In medieval medicine the ing is more common, than for some to four humours were the fluids whose dom- affect particular ways of saying, and inance determined the nature (‘complex- doing things, peculiar to others, whom ion’) of men: Blood (sanguine); Phlegm they admire and imitate’ (Concerning (phlegmatic); Choler (choleric); Black Humour in Comedy, 1696). But though he Choler or Bile (melancholic). These are seems determined to defend the humour used by Ben Jonson to construct an idea concept he rings its knell when he admits of character obsession. A humour may in the same work ‘that a continued ‘so possess a man, that it doth draw / All Affectation may in time become a Habit’. his affects, his spirits and his power, / For in the world which he inhabits and In their confluctions, all to run one way’ describes it becomes impossible effec- (Prologue to Every Man Out of His tively to distinguish continued affectation 112 Hybridity from reality (consider the marriage such as ‘mimicry’ and ‘ambivalence’, and contract in The Way of the World). is embedded within a wider framework of Humour remained an influence in the concern with what Bhabha calls the ‘Third figures of the Tunbellys and Clumsys of Space’. This ‘Third Space’ allows us to Restoration plays but they no longer had conceive of the identities of cultures in the distinction of being vessels of disrup- terms that transcend the binary dialectic tive forces who had to be freed if others between ‘us/them’, ‘insider/outsider’, were to escape the shadow of their obses- ‘inclusion/exclusion’. It also enables sions: they became mere butts to provoke discussion of cultural difference in terms the humour of those who had learned the that do not exoticize it for in such exoti- correct manner to suit the mood of cism Bhabha detects an Othering princi- the world. See also MANNERS. ple that distances difference and disavows See Alain C. Dessen, Jonson’s Moral the constitution of the Self by the Other. Comedy (1971); Paul Lauter, Theories Bhabha sees this ‘Third Space’ as of Comedy (1964); Kenneth Muir, The having a ‘colonial or postcolonial prove- Comedy of Manners (1970); A. Johnson, nance’ precisely because hybridity emerges Ben Jonson (2003). specifically from colonial encounters that GG have resulted in today’s ‘multicultural’ or diasporic societies. (Bhabha) That is, the Hybridity The term hybridity emerged legacy of the colonial past echoes in a post- within post-colonial studies as a response colonial present that has been profoundly to static and essentialist notions of iden- shaped by encounters between colonial dis- tity of race and nation promoted by courses and cultures deemed ‘Other’, so colonial discourses, and also such anti- that the ‘location’ of culture in such hetero- colonial discourses as NATIONALISM and geneous societies exists in-between, as NÉGRITUDE. Ironically, however, the term opposed to ‘inside’, cultural formations hybridity was itself formerly deployed that are ideologically reified and rendered within colonial discourses on mixed static. This is particularly true of nations race offspring and thus constituted a and nationalisms, and so Bhabha conceives central term in discourses of colonial of the Third Space as ‘international’. racism. Some critics have warned that the Hybridity is often spoken of uncritical deployment, or fetishization, colloquially in terms of its use within of ‘hybridity’ may in fact ironically rein- horticulture as the combination of two scribe the very structures of thought kinds that produce a third. Such a way of and domination that it is intended to thinking reproduces the essential difference deconstruct (Young). between the ‘kinds’ involved and so rein- The term has been most extensively forces the notion that each element pos- articulated and theorized by Homi sesses a self-identity that is sufficient in Bhabha. Bhabha introduces the term first and of itself. In post-colonial studies, how- within the colonial arena and he, amongst ever, the intention is to deconstruct the others, has since transported it to other apparent self-identity of cultures that per- fields of analysis in post-colonial con- ceive themselves to be whole but are in fact texts, where hybridity has now become a constituted by a lack that requires supple- central term in discussions of multicultur- mentation by (an) ‘Other(s)’. Thus Bhabha, alism and diaspora. It is, within Bhabha’s in his essay ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, theoretical lexicon, closely related to terms rehearses the dilemma of colonial Hyperbole 113 educators in India who require ‘a class of culture as the most important field of Indians native in blood and colour but resistance to domination, and reading as English in tastes, in morals, and in intellect’ the appropriate form of political practice. (Macaulay, 1835). Thus, in order to facili- Moreover, since hybridity destabilizes all tate colonialism, there is a ‘desire for a collective identities, its political efficacy reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject has been drawn into question for it under- of difference that is almost the same, but mines not only dominant constructs but not quite’ (Bhabha). However, in creating subordinate ones as well. Thus, it hampers this class of ‘mimic men’ the whole ques- any mobilization of a collective identity as tion of ‘Englishness’ is thrown open to a basis for political resistance. question. Where does ‘Englishness’ reside? It could equally be argued, however, In ‘blood and colour’ or in ‘tastes, in that the cultural frameworks that hybrid- morals, and in intellect’? In acquiring ity seeks to dismantle have material English ‘culture’, have these Indian mimics effects in the institutional contexts of become English? If so, what has happened power. It seeks to draw into question to their Indianness? And what gives the those very contexts within which political English their identity if anyone can become and economic practices take place, con- English? The colonial ‘mimic men’ occupy texts which are formed and reformed by a hybrid cultural space that is indefinable in culture and ideology. By destabilizing static or essentialized terms because they ‘pure’ cultural identities, and by disman- are neither one thing nor the other but tling the hierarchies between them, something else besides, an excess that can- concepts, such as hybridity contribute not be contained within the terms ‘English’ to a reconceptualization of the very or ‘Indian’. This illustrates an ambivalence basis of what is at stake in political within those very terms that renders them struggle. See also POSTCOLONIALISM; uncertain. ORIENTALISM; ALTERITY. Hybridity is thus one of the confluence See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of points between postmodernism and post- Culture (1994); Avtar Brah and Annie colonialism. It has, for this very reason, Coombes (eds), Hybridity and its attracted considerable controversy with Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture critics attacking it for being part of a (2000); Thomas B. Macaulay (1835) panoply of ideas that textualize and ‘Minute on Education for India’ in Philip aestheticize power struggles between D. Curtin (ed.), Imperialism (1971); unequal forces, peoples and cultures, and Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity which overlook the economic dimensions in Theory, Culture and Race (1995). of colonial and post-colonial modernity. AM Particular concern has been expressed at the ways in which hybridity privileges Hyperbole See CONCEIT. I

Ideology Traditionally, the word implicit in the term. Who, traditionally, ideology refers to the system of ideas has produced ‘literature’? The white used by the ruling group in society to jus- middle class. Who has access to literature? tify its dominance. It is closely bound up Those who have gone onto higher educa- with the idea of class. The dominant class tion. Who are the most likely to do that? needs to be able to hold onto its power The white middle class. We can see that and it does this ultimately by force but the writing and dissemination of literature normally by ideology; in particular, it has been used as a marker of social divi- promotes the view that what is good for sion but, at the same time, it has been itself is good for the rest of society. claimed that literature is the expression Ideology is not simply imposed on us, for of the nation and so it has a unifying then we would know it was ideology. For function. This is a classic example of how it to be effective, we should not know that ideology can work because it expresses it is ideology at all. Far better for those in what people have in common while repro- power if we freely agree, for example, ducing the divisions that keep them apart. with their view that ‘the private sector In terms of individual works themselves, runs things more efficiently than the pub- ideology can function in two ways. The lic sector’ than that we should have it first occurs when a writer simply wishes forced upon us. In fact, we absorb ideol- to write a poem, play or story in order to ogy as soon as we begin to speak because promote or criticize a particular ideology, language is shot through with percep- and such works are usually fairly didactic. tions, assumptions, values and ideas that The second functions even when a writer are constantly reinforced in, for example, has no such intention because his or her schools and the media. Here we start to a work is ideological to the extent that read- move away from the notion of ideology as ers are moved to identify with precisely a set of beliefs that legitimize the power those characters who are most consistent of the ruling group to a view of ideology with the ideology of the society. as a complete way of understanding the This does not mean that works of world; in other words, ideology is our literature cannot criticize ideology. They normal consciousness. We can only may do so either openly or as a function become aware of the ideological nature of of the way literary language signifies. An this consciousness when we reflect on example of the first would be George how closely it matches the view of reality Orwell’s Animal Farm. It is harder to offer constantly portrayed by politicians and an example for the second since this is big business, or if we go and spend some always highly particular to any given time in a society whose members do not work and requires the sort of analysis share our view of the world. for which there is no space here. The idea Language is the link between ideology is that literary language so transforms and literature. Indeed, the very word ‘lit- ordinary, ideological language that we are erature’ can itself be seen as ideological to able to see what is either repressed or con- the extent that it hides the power relations tradictory about it. In this way, literature, Image 115 according to the French Marxist, Louis encouraging the reader to view poems as Althusser (1918–90), gives us knowledge virtually concrete artefacts, allows whole of ideology. This insight was systemati- poems to be regarded as ‘images’. cally developed by Pierre Macherey in his The great appeal of ‘image’ is its A Theory of Literary Production (1978). shifting application: in Macbeth, for Since the late 1970s, there has been a example, the following might be called decline in the interest in ideology and its ‘images’ or ‘imagery’: relation to literature. One of the main rea- 1 metaphors, similes, figurative language: sons for this is that the concept of ideol- ‘Pity like a naked newborn babe’; ogy always assumed, at some level, that 2 Lady Macbeth’s children: ‘I have there was a true and a false version of given suck’; events. The advent of POST-STRUCTURALISM, 3 Macduff’s son, who is a flesh-and-blood with its claim that words constitute the character; world rather than correspond to it, made 4 The vision ‘Who wears upon his baby questions of truth or falsehood, at least brow...’whom the witches show to in the conventional sense, irrelevant. But Macbeth. such a view is ideological to the extent that it chimes with the prominence given All of these, as ‘iterative imagery’, a to image, spin and presentation in post- play-within-the-play where distinctions industrial capitalist society. As long as the between language, action and character class divisions of capitalism persist so lapse (see Cleanth Brooks, The Well will our need to understand and indeed Wrought Urn, 1947, ch. 2). resist its ideology. The point of having one word to do See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: all these jobs is clear: the whole play An Introduction (1991); Terry Eagleton becomes one symbolic utterance, a ‘dra- (ed.), Ideology (1994); David Hawkes, matic poem’ (or, of course, an ‘image’), Ideology, 2nd edn (2003). its central preoccupations iterated at GD every level. This New Critical treatment of imagery sought to avoid the damaging Illocutionary act See DISCOURSE. assumption that verbal texture was Image In the eighteenth century, one incidental ornament. theory of ‘imagination’ was that it was a The effect of over-reliance on the word faculty for visualization, so literature was image is to encourage a focus on literature often regarded as a medium which which makes syntax, argument, plot, tem- promoted visual responses in the reader: poral and relational structures recede into that is to say, ‘images’. Descriptive poetry invisibility, while description and figura- flourished. One basic meaning for tive language become foregrounded to a ‘image’ is provided by that context, but distorted degree. The whole thus isolated other, looser meanings have accreted: any becomes a static ‘spatial’ experience, sensuous effect provoked by literary lan- imagined as a ‘cluster’ of ‘images’. The guage; any striking language; metaphor; very use of the term encourages the critic symbol; any figure. ‘Image’ and to make the subjective appear objective. ‘imagery’ have also come to be vaguely It is easy to move on to assertions that laudatory terms, simply gesturing a taste poems are revelatory, symbolic, ‘icons’, for concreteness, richness of texture, in that the process they enshrine is ‘mirac- verse. Finally, NEW CRITICAL poetics, ulism’ or ‘incarnation’, the Word made 116 Imagination flesh. What starts as a gesture of respect This ambivalence is ancient, if not for the TEXTURE of literature ends by universal. In theory, the Renaissance importing a sub- or supra-literary struc- assigned Reason and Imagination to dif- ture. The rejection of the work’s overt ferent faculties, and reason was certainly order (dismissed as abstraction) leads the higher. Imagination co-ordinated the to the search for some more esoteric physical senses on which alone it ‘hidden’ pattern. depended, and was therefore shared by all ‘Image’ has not got much to do with animals; reason was angelic, free of the verbal analysis, and the most persuasive body, even godlike and therefore peculiar analysts, for example, Empson, have hardly (beneath the moon) to humanity. Such a used it. It has become associated with the simplistic version of experience was not demand that we respect what is ‘there’ in really accepted, but the problems of over- the work, but the connection is tenuous. valuing imagination were illuminated by As Richards has shown, ‘image’ blurs the Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: verbal facts about metaphor, by obscuring The lunatic, the lover, and the poet the relations that are being made (between Are of imagination all compact. ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’) and suggesting that a free-floating ‘emblem’ is being offered. The same trinity bedevilled William The real connection of ‘image’ is with a Blake in his espousal of Hell. Behind group of assumptions which ‘place’ poetry, him was not only the rationalism of the more or less frankly, in relation to some eighteenth century, but also its terror of ‘deeper’ structure – depth psychology, lunacy. Samuel Johnson knew no differ- Baroque Christianity, etc. In the long run ence between ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy’ this can impoverish literature, since it sub- and defined them as the power of repre- stitutes for the diversity and fluidity of the senting things absent from oneself or literary medium a shadow-play of ‘images’ others; but he found no power in either to whose resolution lies elsewhere. distinguish the tangibly real from danger- See P. N. Furbank, Reflections on the ous hallucination. Yet, Johnson also Word ‘Image’ (1970); Frank Kermode, recognized Imagination as one of the Romantic Image (1957); I. A. Richards, three constituents of genius in Pope: ‘He The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936); had Imagination, which strongly impresses Akhter Ahsen, New Surrealism: The on the writer’s mind, and enables him to Liberation of Images in Consciousness convey to the reader, the various forms of (The Literary Image) (1992). nature, incidents of life, and energies of LS passion’. Pope had likewise Good Sense, but Johnson did not discover any princi- Imagination Leads a double life – like ple to reconcile the two. Nor did Blake, ‘tragedy’. In common usage it has a very who found subservience to reason as equivocal sense, more often than not bad as the belief in general truths, and trivial, even derogatory – ‘it’s all in your both hostile to the energy of particular imagination’. But as soon as it is associ- imaginative experience. ated with any form of art it becomes an Coleridge’s early reflections on the indication of value. The extremes meet in problem produced the image of an Aeolian the distrust of Art as the enemy of common harp: the chance play of the wind over a sense, decency, reason, good government mechanical device. It was an old idea, and or sound business. has been revived since. Automatic writing Imagination 117 and SURREALIST theory came close to it, distinguishing art from normal perception, but were usually sustained by a Freudian which is presumably what he intended by faith in their origins in a subconscious dividing ‘secondary’ from ‘primary’ mind which offered a concept, but not an imagination (although nothing he says explanation, of ultimate meaning. For about secondary imagination is peculiar Coleridge the image served to relate the to art). internal unity of an individual human Coleridge effectively reconciled mind to the external random collection of imagination with Reason, without appar- objects it perceives; and it made a proper ently diminishing either. The lighter (if disturbing) allowance for chance. But values of poetry were relegated to ‘fancy’; it allowed of only a very limited relation imagination was essential to all knowl- to reason, and none at all to the energy of edge, and poetry therefore became a seri- creative power. His efforts to modify the ous form of knowledge. Matthew Arnold image in revising the poem only produced expected it to replace discredited religion. confusion, and he moved towards a fresh The study of literature eventually became epistemology assisted by reading German a central discipline in universities. ‘Object’ transcendentalists (Kant and others). The was ambiguous: strictly, it meant anything, eighteenth-century propositions that the tangible or intangible, regarded objec- mind merely received impressions from tively; but Coleridge was deeply involved objects (Locke), and that objects could with Wordsworth’s poetry, so that his dis- not be known to exist except when con- cussion often seems to imply rocks and tacted by our senses (Berkeley) gave way stones and trees. IMAGISM was therefore a to the proposition that perception depends direct derivative and through that, T.S. on an active mind perceiving an object Eliot’s insistence that emotion in art can which nevertheless exists without us. only be expressed through objects, the The peculiar achievement here is to OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE. Wallace Stevens’s re-define all perception as imaginative, a poetry could fairly be described as a set of creative act of the subjective self; but variations on a theme by Coleridge. In simultaneously the sanity of a perception Eliot and Stevens the association with is guaranteed by the reality of the object reason remained dominant; their sanity perceived. Subject and object coalesce; was never in doubt. Yeats was far more objects are only known subjectively, but ambiguous: teasing rationalists by flirting equally one’s self is only known in with all forms of the esoteric, yet retaining objects. A bush may burn in a visionary an ostentatious sanity as well. But Yeats blaze; but it is not a bear: it is a bush per- saw imagination as essentially hostile to ceived in a certain way dependent on reason, and their relationship rather as one’s imaginative predisposition. The fruitful tension than reconciliation; his position is reassuring, even if paradoxical. study of Blake was early and lasting, and Blake placed less confidence in the it was supplemented by intense interest in solidity of objects, far more in subjective his wife’s automatic writing. vision: he, too, was sane, and knew that a The status of Imagination as a concept flower was a flower; but he might, in con- owes far more to Coleridge than to Blake; templating it, see an old man or an angel, but its use in the twentieth century often and the validity of the vision was assured owed more to Blake. solely by the fact that he saw it. For See J. A. Appleyard, Coleridge’s Coleridge, a major difficulty remained in Philosophy of Literature (1965); 118 Imagism

R. L. Brett, Fancy and Imagination The poetics of Imagism may best be (1969); C. C. Clarke, Romantic Paradox considered as three interlocking entities: (1962); S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Hulme’s prognosis of a classical revival, Literaria (1817), G. Watson (ed.) (1956); the stylistic or workshop prescriptions Richard Kearney, The Wake of the formulated by Pound and upheld by the Imagination (1988). school even after his departure from it, MSB and Pound’s full-blown Doctrine of the Image. Hulme’s case is argued in the few Imagism The term was coined by Ezra articles and short pieces published during Pound to denote the principles agreed on his lifetime and, more elaborately, in his by himself and the other members of a posthumously published work. It consists literary group he formed in London in of a repudiation of Romanticism and its 1912. As a broad movement, Imagism aesthetics of the Beyond. The new poetry signals the beginning of English and was going to be that of ‘small, dry things’ American MODERNISM, and a definite conveyed by concrete visual metaphor. break with the Romantic-Victorian tradi- Rejecting infinity, mystery and an indul- tion. As a stylistic programme, it mani- gence in emotions, he called for a poetry fests the desire of the post-Symbolist, of self-imposed limitation, corresponding pre-war generation for a harder, more to a metaphysical attitude which regards precise and objective medium. As a man as an ‘extraordinarily fixed and particular school, Les Imagistes are the limited animal’, and reality as something heirs of T. E. Hulme’s 1909 group of that may only be apprehended in isolated Impressionist poets who experimented glimpses. with brief visual poems in the Oriental The stylistic canon of Pound’s school manner. Finally, Imagism shares with comprises the three principles agreed on Gautier and the Parnassians the penchant by its three original members, Pound, H. D. for sculptural hardness and immaculate and Richard Aldington: craftsmanship; with the SYMBOLISTS – the accent on pure poetry to the exclusion of 1 Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether all extra-poetic content, as well as the subjective or objective. practice of irregular, ‘free’ verse; with 2 To use absolutely no word that does REALISM – the resolve to remain close to not contribute to the presentation. the outlines of concrete reality. The 3 As regarding rhythm, to compose in poem projected by Imagism is a laconic the sequence of the musical phrase, complex in which ‘painting or sculpture not in sequence of a metronome. seems as if it were just coming over into These are augmented by Pound’s list of speech’. As a model, Pound chose the ‘Don’ts’, chiefly intended for the appren- ‘Oread’ by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), com- tice poet. They vary in substance from monly considered the most representative general advice (the avoidance of abstrac- of his group: tion, rhetoric and non-functional orna- Whirl up, sea – ment) to suggestions of a more technical whirl your pointed pines, nature (the practice of enjambment to splash your great pines diversify the rhythmical ‘waves’). Central on our rocks is the emphasis on poetry as an acquired hurl your green over us, art, the acquisiton of which demands the cover us with your pools of fir. labours of a lifetime. The modern aspect Imagism 119 of the programme is reflected in Pound’s concise metaphoric miniatures and ‘hard’, dictum that ‘no good poetry is ever asymmetrical treatments of Hellenic and written in a manner twenty years old’. But other motifs constitutes the bulk of a the Imagist is given a free choice of poetry compatible with, but not necessarily subject matter, not excluding classical occasioned by, the theory. themes, and is counselled to study a vast Assessments of the significance of and disparate ‘tradition’ so as ‘to find out Imagism vary greatly. Eliot’s opinion was what has been done, once for all, better that its accomplishment in verse had than it can ever be done again’. been ‘critical rather than creative, and as Pound’s Doctrine of the Image centres criticism very important’. Leavis, another on his successive definitions of the term. early critic, considered that ‘in itself it His earliest attempt – ‘an “Image” is that amounted to little more than a recognition which presents an intellectual and emo- that something was wrong with poetry’. tional complex in an instant of time’ – But the formidable influence Imagism yields its full meaning when read in con- exercised, and continues to exert, suggests junction with later pronouncements in that such a judgement is untenable. Other which the Image is described as the poet’s critics consider it of importance chiefly as ‘primary pigment’, the hard core of poetry a stage in Pound’s development towards wherein it reveals itself as distinct from, his Cantos. Wallace Stevens reproaches and yet, basically parallel to, other arts. Imagism with its belief that all objects are The Image – the ‘word beyond formulated equally suited for poetry, and its equation language’ – may comprise traditional of meaning with bare surface. As a critical metaphor, when the latter can be said to be movement, Imagism’s main significance ‘interpretative’ of reality, that is, when it probably resides in its revaluation of posits a relationship based on inherent, not Romanticism and of the nineteenth century merely fanciful, qualities. Commonly, which, with few exceptions, it dismissed as however, it connotes in Pound such mod- a sentimental, blurry, manneristic period. ern procedures as juxtaposition and super- No less significant was its insistence on the position. Pound’s illustration is his own functional, rather than the merely ornamen- haiku-like ‘In a Station of the Metro’: tal, potentiality of the poetic image, and the latter’s capacity for conveying the concrete The apparition of these faces in the and definite. In this, it ‘isolated the basic crowd; unit of the modern poem’, as Stephen Petals on a wet, black bough. Spender suggested. But in overstating its Here ‘one idea is set on top of another’ to case, it was ignoring other, no less effec- produce the synthetic complex, also tive, poetic energies, as well as dangerously described as language’s ‘point of maximum limiting its own scope. energy’. The two (or more) components See D. Davie, Ezra Pound – Poet as of the Image remain faithful to objective Sculptor (1965); G. Hough, Image and reality, representing two distinct acts of Experience (1960); H. Kenner, The Poetry sense-perceptions, yet, their fusion is of Ezra Pound (1951); H. Kenner, The expected to form a higher, governing real- Pound Era (1972); F. Kermode, Romantic ity, untainted with photographic realism. Image (1957); C. K. Stead, The New In actual Imagist writing, stringent Poetic (1964); A. Kingsley Weatherhead, conformity is the exception. A shorthand The Edge of the Image (1967). notation of impressionistic glimpses, NZ 120 Imitation

Imitation The first recorded use of style of the Iliad is one complex process ‘imitation’ (mimesis) as an aesthetic term of mimesis. Hence Pope’s snappy line on is Plato’s: in the Republic it is a derogatory Virgil: way of describing the poet’s counterfeit Nature and Homer were, he found, the ‘creations’, which reflect and mimic the same. transient appearances of this world (see PLATONISM). Aristotle in his Poetics Theoretically there is no conflict between stretches the term to give it a radically dif- formal imitation and representation, but ferent and more complex application: the neither ‘nature’ nor language stay ‘the poet ‘imitates’ not the accidental features same’, and in practice there is tension, of character in action, but the universal issuing in the characteristic neo-classical type, ‘clothed with generic attributes’ forms of MOCK-EPIC and PARODY. (Coleridge). Aristotle is not arguing for a For the concept of imitation to retain symbolic or emblematic function for liter- its precision and range, social, moral and ature (only that would have satisfied psychological values must seem self- Plato) but for a concrete manifestation of evident: there has to be consensus about the ‘natural’ order he asserted was present what is ‘natural’ and ‘probable’, or at least (though obscured) in ordinary experience. agreement about the value of such gener- Aristotle’s ‘imitation’ combines a sense alizations. In the eighteenth century an of the literary work as the representation of anti-theoretical realism, reflecting a more some pre-existent reality, with a sense of fluid, fragmentary and individual reality the work itself as an object, not merely a (see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1957; reflecting surface. The poet is not sub- and REALISM) began to erode the assump- servient to the irrationality of the actual: tions behind imitation. The term lost its the play or poem has its own natural form great virtue of referring to both form and and objective status. In the Poetics tragedy content and was used almost synony- is like an organism – it grows, achieves its mously with ‘representation’. Deliberate prime (with Sophocles) and decays. The efforts to resurrect Aristotelian usage (see form has an imperative logic whereby CHICAGO CRITICS) foundered in stilted and (e.g.) the poet chooses a ‘probable impos- questionable generalization, while more sibility’ rather than an event which though fluent use of the term (e.g. Auerbach’s possible (even historical) does not follow Mimesis) had to accommodate shifting ‘naturally’ in context. The poet ‘imitates’ definitions of reality. best by allowing the work to achieve its See Erich Auerbach, trans. W. Trask, own fitting formal excellence. Mimesis (1953); S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s This stress on the imitative function of Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (1907) with formal harmony (Aristotle says music is an introduction by John Gassner (1951); the most ‘mimetic’ art) connects with the R. S. Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism second major use of the term in classical (1957); G. F. Else, Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’: and neo-classical criticism – the ‘imita- The Argument (1957); Raymond Williams, tion’ of one writer by another (Homer by The Long Revolution (1961). Virgil, both by Milton, all three by Pope). LS If Homer’s epics are the fullest realization Implied author See AUTHOR, PERSONA. of the laws of epic (and involve therefore the fullest correspondence with the laws Intention In their influential essay of reason and nature) then to imitate ‘The intentional fallacy’ (in The Verbal heroic action and to imitate the form and Icon, 1954) W. K. Wimsatt, Jr and Intertextuality 121

Monroe C. Beardsley argued that the See also ANALYSIS, AUTHOR, DISCOURSE, author’s intentions were not the proper EFFECT, NEW CRITICISM. concern of the critic. Their argument has See Patrick Swinden, Literature and produced many misconceptions about the Philosophy of Intention (1999). descriptive criticism – that poems are PM autonomous, or autotelic, that they are Interior monologue See STREAM OF discontinuous from language and each CONSCIOUSNESS. other, that any external evidence is criti- cally inadmissible. Essentially the essay Interpretant See SEMIOTICS. disputed the formulae and terminology of Interpretation See ANALYSIS, expressive criticism with its Romantic HERMENEUTICS. concentration on the inspired utterances of the poet, and asserted the existence of Intertextuality With the identification the poem as a fact in the public language. in STRUCTURALISM of language as a series The characteristic vocabulary of expres- of interconnections between signs came sive or intentionalist criticism, its criteria the recognition of the importance of the of sincerity, fidelity, spontaneity, original- relationships between those signs and the ity, pointed to a misconception about ways they interact to produce different the mode of existence of a literary work. meaning-formations. Thinking in POST- It was not a practical message, a real STRUCTURALISM subsequently tended to statement, which could be measured for emphasize the ways in which signs, and its sincerity against a known context, their more complex relations – texts – but a fictional utterance by a dramatic depend upon each other for their meaning speaker; so it was more properly judged within the structures and frameworks of in terms of coherence, profundity, beauty. GENRE and DISCOURSE. Intertextuality is Consequently, the essay argued, the the name often given to the manner in meaning of a work was better discovered which texts of all sorts (oral, visual, liter- by attention to ‘internal’ evidence, the ary, virtual) contain references to other language of the poem, which paradoxi- texts that have, in some way, contributed cally, because it was language, was pub- to their production and signification. The lic, than to external evidence – the private notion was initially introduced by Julia disclosures of poets, their friends or bio- Kristeva who envisaged texts as function- graphers. This advice has often been ing along two axes: the horizontal axis understood to mean the irrelevance to determines the relationship between the critical enquiry of all information that is reader and the text whilst the vertical axis not derived from the linguistic character- contains the complex set of relations of istics of the text. But Wimsatt and the text to other texts. What coheres these Beardsley do not dispute the usefulness of axes is the framework of pre-existing this other information; the core of their codes that governs and shapes every text argument is that our ability to use this and every reading act. In Kristeva’s view information depends upon our sense of the importance of a text’s structure is its relevance, and that relevance can be matched by its ‘structuration’, that is, the established only in relation to the poem as pattern of interconnected fields within a fact in language. In proposing that the which its meaning is transmitted to the only public existence a work of literature reader through already-known vocabular- has is its existence in language, they were ies of generic and discursive formation. stating an axiom of descriptive criticism. For instance, the reader of a detective 122 Intertextuality novel knows it is such not only because interpretive systems and can therefore only of the conventions of style, action and employ those systems available to her/him dénouement, but also because the book is to describe the experience of reality. When shelved in a specific section of the book- we speak, we are always revisiting what shop and is graced by a suitably mysteri- has been previously spoken. ous image on its front cover. The reader The implication of this circularity of knows what to expect from the novel pre- language for creative artists is that their cisely because of its similarities (whether texts become collages of other textual direct or indirect) to other texts s/he may influences from the level of the phrase to have encountered. the arena of genre. The writer (or speaker) Intertextuality, with its endlessly becomes an orchestrator rather than an receding network of debts and legacies, originator, blending and rearranging mater- disturbs a casual belief in the uniqueness ial to frame an idiosyncratic view of the of the text and of the originality of the world. Critics can explore the range of authorial consciousness. Such beliefs intertextual reference and the creative are relatively recent phenomena. Until the engagement with the process of inheritance Renaissance, it was a widely accepted fact but they cannot escape the framing that that literary texts were patchworks of exist- contains their imagination, the media used ing works either directly appropriated or to express it nor the context within which modified into a new form but in which the it is consumed. Postmodern artists have identity of the author was of little impor- deliberately drawn attention to the self- tance. Even after the Renaissance texts referential quality of art and overtly tended to be elaborate, often ostentatious exposed the frames of both production and revisionings of prior works and interpreted interpretation. In a literary sphere, such not as plagiaristic copies but as respectful subversion is often referred to as metafic- homages to tradition and to the skill of the tion and frequently involves writers writing source-material. Only with the period of about the process of writing. Many, accept- Romanticism (in the late-eighteenth and ing the inescapability of the system, revel early-nineteenth centuries) does the notion in self-conscious flirtation with prior texts of authorial originality become an impor- through parodic reframing and rewriting, tant issue. It is tied to the Romantics’ idea drawing the reader’s eye not to the ‘reality’ of the singularity of the creative con- of the world created but to its artificial sciousness that also evidences a movement constructedness. The knowing distance that towards a modern conception of individu- is created between the acts of reading alism. The text becomes a product of an and interpretation situates intertextuality autonomously acting mind and something as a crucial feature of postmodernism’s that is as unique as the vision of the cynicism towards authority and orthodoxy. individual that inspired it. This idea of Centring on the imprecise intercourse authorship was severely challenged by between author/text/reader, intertextuality structuralist and post-structuralist theorists tends to privilege the reader as indispens- who claim supreme importance for the fact able to the creative process. Because that language is a system that is already in the author’s role is to manage the echoes place before the speaker makes a commu- that emanate from her/his particular nicative act. The pre-existence of linguistic arrangement of textualized forebears, the codes and structures means that the subject reader’s decoding of that pattern is of is always already positioned within equal importance. The ‘meaning’ that is Irony 123 derived from any given text (whether it be In tragic irony the ostensible reasons for a novel, a poem, a film, a sitcom, an the hero’s downfall, whether it is the advertisement) depends upon the reader’s anger of the gods or his own relentless prior encountering of the intertexts that pursuit of an ideal, are undercut by psy- are invoked – without the necessary semi- chological reasons of a more mundane otic exposure the reception of the work sort. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim provides a would inevitably bring forth differing, but good example of this. Comic irony uses equally valid interpretations. This inter- similar kinds of juxtaposition to describe play between the reader and the author and deflate the social aspirations of its empowered the Reader Response criticism protagonists. In both forms the pivotal of the 1970s and 1980s which highlighted character tends to be the eiron himself; a the supremacy of readerly interpretation dissembler who brings two conflicting over authorial intention, though some and contrasting worlds into sharp focus. form of middle-ground is now seen as a Examples of such characters are Conrad’s more productive critical approach. The Marlow and P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves. popularity of intertextuality has seen it Without such characters, there is a danger become a significant element of popular that an author’s ironies will be completely cultural discourse, so much so in fact, missed by the reader; for, unlike the that it can appear any time, any place, satirist, he tends to suppress any direct anywhere. See also CREATION. attitudes to his subject, and to rely upon a See Roland Barthes, The death of shared set of assumptions or prejudices, the Author (1968), S/Z (1973); Jonathan for the establishment of a context. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, It is, however, possible to introduce Linguistics and the Study of Literature structural ironies without the use of an (1975); Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in eiron. Typically, this is the form situa- this Class? The Authority of Interpretive tional irony takes in plays, where narrators, Communities (1980); Julia Kristeva, concealed or otherwise, are more difficult Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to employ; hence the term dramatic irony. to Literature and Art (1980). Here the eiron is replaced by members of DL the audience who have been apprised of a character’s real situation before he knows Irony A mode of discourse for it himself, and who can therefore antici- conveying meanings different from, and pate and enjoy the frustration of the ideal usually opposite to, the professed or by the actual. Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex ostensible ones. There are several kinds of uses multiple dramatic ironies to criticize irony, though they fall into two main naïve rationalism by reversing all the pro- categories: situational and verbal. All tagonist’s normal expectations. Oedipus irony, however, depends for its effective- in attempting to avoid his fate acts in such ness on the belief in and exploitation of a way as to seal it. Within this overarching the difference and distance between irony, many others operate both to words or events and their contexts. reinforce Sophocles’s view of life and to Since the contexts of situational express it with maximum dramatic force. irony may be primarily social, moral or Dramatic irony can take many forms. metaphysical, irony can be further For a more extended discussion see classified as comic or tragic, though these W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, adjectives are in a sense inaccurate. (1947) 2nd edn, pp. 38–47. 124 Irony

Verbal irony usually operates by to experience particularly sympathetic. exploiting deviations from syntactic or Like symbolism, allegory and metaphor, semantic norms. The ability to recognize irony provides a means for unifying the such irony depends upon an appreciation apparent contradictions of experience, but of the particular linguistic, or sometimes is also uniquely able to assert the world’s more general social or moral, context. In diversity. Cleanth Brooks’s The Well speech, it is possible to indicate by tone of Wrought Urn (1947), is one of the more voice that the word ‘clever’ in the sen- influential mid-twentieth-century studies tence ‘He’s a clever chap’ is to be under- that made large claims for the prevalence stood to mean ‘stupid’, but as this cannot and persistence of the ironic mode. be said to be any of the meanings of the More recently, some Deconstructionist word ‘clever’, the writer has to convey his critics, following Jacques Derrida, have sense obliquely. Irony is thus an art of seen writing as a structure divorced from juxtaposition and indirection, relying for consciousness as an absolute authority, and its success on such techniques as under- agree with his conclusion that the term statement, paradox, puns and other forms irony will probably cease to be employed of wit in the expression of incongruities. in literary criticism. Paul de Man, on In the following lines from Alexander the other hand, in his book, Blindness Pope’s Rape of the Lock the contrasts and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of between heroic style and banal content Contemporary Criticism (1983), pursues reflect the opposition within the lines the paradoxical idea that irony is at the between the spiritual and the physical: same time impossible, yet, inescapable. This debate, which lies at the centre of Whether the nymph shall break Deconstructive criticism, about how there Diana’s law, can be ‘other’ or ironical meanings if all Or some frail china jar receive a flaw; we have are texts, is described at length Or stain her honour, or her new by C. Colebrook in her book Irony (2004). brocade; See N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism Forget her prayers, or miss a (1957); A. K. Mellor, English Romantic masquerade. Irony (1980); D. C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic (1983); L. Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: Much modern criticism has seen, in the The Theory and Politics of Irony (1994). ambiguities of the ironic mode, a response BCL K

Katharsis See CATHARSIS.

Kinetic See LITERATURE. L

Lament See ELEGY. but the language’s word also – it imports senses and connotations from contexts Language A concept which was central external to the poem. Thus, as psycholin- to one of the major disputes of twentieth- guists and semanticists would agree, lan- century criticism: does literature consist guage controls conceptualization and of language, or is language simply one hence apprehension of poetic structure. component of literature? In Aristotle’s This has been the standpoint of the NEW enumeration of the six parts of tragedy, CRITICS: in poetry, ‘content’ is inaccessible lexis (diction) is merely one component. except in the terms laid down by ‘form’. The CHICAGO CRITICS extended this analy- And as David Lodge argued (Language of sis to poetry, detecting four ‘parts’ in the Fiction, 1966), there is no good reason to lyric, among which ‘diction’ (ϭ lan- propose a different kind of theory for guage) was said to be the least important. prose fiction. Language may exercise a Elder Olson (‘An outline of poetic theory’ particularly stringent control over our in R. S. Crane (ed.), Critics and responses to lyric poetry because of the Criticism, 1957) speaks of ‘such embell- FOREGROUNDING of surface structure, ishments as rhythm, ornamental lan- but this control, even if less powerful in guage’ – other examples of ‘ornaments’ fiction, cannot be qualitatively different: are masques, pageants, progresses, in if language governs meaning, it does so in drama. Language may be decorative, but all its usages. it is essentially a means, a medium: ‘the Although many twentieth-century words are the least important, in that they critics asserted the prime importance of are governed and determined by every language in literature, they did not wholly other element in the poem’. agree on this question of different ‘uses’ It is curious that Olson gives unobserv- of language. I. A. Richards, setting up able elements, such as ‘choice’, ‘thought’ a Romantic, affective theory of literature, and ‘character’ priority over language. He distinguished two uses of language, the does grant that access to these elements is ‘scientific’ or ‘referential’ versus the through language, but he seems not to ‘poetic’ or ‘emotive’. His claim that only realize the implications of this concession: scientific language is used ‘for the sake of that apprehension of the abstract structure the reference, true or false, that it causes’ is and meaning of a piece of literature is an essential preliminary to any theory of determined by linguistic arrangements. the ‘fictionality’ of literature – truth condi- An intentionalist view of literature might tions must be suspended (cf. BELIEF). claim that the author’s poetic decisions Another influential literary-theoretical control choice of appropriate language, account of ‘uses of language’ is that but this neglects the fact that language, propounded by Roman Jakobson. Jakobson once chosen, is out of the control of the distinguishes six uses of language – author – it is public property and elicits emotive (better, expressive), conative, public responses and perceptions: a word phatic, referential, metalingual and poetic – in a poem is not simply the poem’s word, according to the degree of importance of Language 127 different constitutive factors of the thought, and language and society; and a communicative event: the referential func- sophisticated discussion of the relation- tion, for example, lays stress on the non- ships between linguistics and adjacent linguistic context (the ‘world’) referred disciplines – education, psychology, sociol- to in communication, minimizing other ogy, anthropology, politics, artificial intelli- factors, such as the characteristics of gence, literary theory, literary criticism. A speaker and addressee, and the actual small selection of good textbooks to give a structural form of the utterance. The flavour of various parts of linguistics might ‘poetic’ function, on the other hand, include W. Downes, Language and Society invests attention precisely in the formal (1984) and M. A. K. Halliday, Language as linguistic construction; and Jakobson Social Semiotic (1978). offers a very illuminating formula to The linguistic study of literature, explain the structural principle of poetic known as ‘stylistics’ or ‘linguistic criti- form. The validity of Jakobson’s ‘poetic cism’, has advanced in several ways. It principle’ is not at issue here; what is built on the work of Mukarˇovskò and of questionable is the classification of Jakobson to make powerful contributions ‘functions’. A partition of functions to literary theory (cf. FORMALISM, STRUC- of language which sets off the ‘poetic’ or TURALISM). It added substantially to ‘literary’ as a separate category can lead knowledge of some aspects of literary to neglect of linguistic features which do structure which are manifestly linguistic not fall under the criterion, and thus to an in character (e.g. METAPHOR, METRE); and incomplete apprehension of the literary some less obvious topics, such as SYNTAX, text (see R. Fowler, Literature as Social were made more salient to the critic. The Discourse, 1981, chs 9 and 10). best way to sample these diverse contri- Theorists of literature have been butions would be to browse in some of the increasingly ready to recognize the conti- collections of specialized papers which nuity of linguistic processes within and have been published, such as R. Carter outside literature. Certainly, there are no (ed.), Language and Literature (1982). linguistic criteria for distinguishing litera- Linguistic studies have also focussed ture and non-literature (cf. LITERATURE). on specific genres of literary writing. For The consequence of these decisions – to poetry, see G. N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide grant priority to language and to see to English Poetry (1969); M. Riffaterre, language in literature as not essentially Semiotics of Poetry (1978). For the novel, different from the language of other see R. Fowler, Linguistics and the Novel texts – is that we may feed into literary (2nd edn, 1983); G. N. Leech and criticism whatever insights we gain about M. H. Short, Style in Fiction (1981). For language at large. Such insights, have drama, see D. Burton, Dialogue and been very considerable, resulting in a Discourse (1980). For a general discus- refined and rich debate over the theory sion, see Ronald Carter and Walter Nash, of language; a detailed understanding of Seeing Through Language: Guide to the principles of linguistic construction at Styles of English Writing (1990). different levels, particularly syntax and In the move towards theorizing literature phonology; great strides in empirical as DISCOURSE language is regarded as far knowledge of different languages; signif- more than formal structure and communi- icant advances in the understanding of cated ideas: it is seen as an interpersonal the relations between language and practice with causes and effects in social 128 Lexis structure, and ideological implications. production: the social relations between Linguistic criticism on discourse premisses the popular modern novelist, publishers is a historically grounded practice of and readers contrast with those between analysis, seeking to interpret texts the writers, directors, actors and audi- with reference to their and our cultural ences of a regional theatre group. Certain contexts and ideological systems. In this literary modes of production may be approach the analysis of linguistic form, merely sub-sectors of what we might term and reference to context, are integrated the ‘general’ mode of economic produc- rather than divorced as in most modern tion in society as a whole: modern-day criticism. See R. Fowler, Literature as writing is largely part of the capitalist Social Discourse (1981), Linguistic publishing industry. But other literary Criticism (1986). Also M. L. Pratt, modes of production may represent sur- Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary vivals from earlier societies, or may try to Discourse (1977); A. Easthope, Poetry as prefigure new kinds of social relations in Discourse (1983); Norman Fairclough, society as a whole. Language and Power (1989); Ronald The concept of a ‘literary mode of Carter, Language, Discourse and production’ does not merely belong to Literature (1988); R. L. Trask, Language: what is termed the ‘sociology of litera- the basics (2004). ture’. It is not a purely external fact about RGF literary writing, as the colour of a dust- jacket may be. On the contrary, it is part Lexis See DICTION, LANGUAGE. of the critical analysis of literature itself.

Lisible See PLEASURE. Every work of literature, in however indi- rect a fashion, implies how and by whom Literary mode of production The it was written, and how and by whom it is concept of a ‘literary mode of production’ expected to be read. Every work posits an was developed by modern MARXIST ‘implied author’ and an ‘implied reader’, CRITICISM to explain the ways in which all establishes tacit contracts and alliances literary writings depend upon social between itself and its audience. In order institutions and relations. Any form of to be accepted as ‘literature’ at all, the production draws upon certain material work must be a certain kind of product forces (in the case of writing, paper, print- within certain social institutions; most ing, publishing technology and so on), but critics would not regard graffiti, which is these material forces are themselves part indubitably a mode of writing (often of of a set of social relations between pro- considerable interest and value) produced ducers, intermediaries and consumers. for an audience, as an acceptable literary The social relations between a tribal bard, topic for academic study. What counts as chief and audience will differ from those ‘literature’, in other words, is already a between an eighteenth-century poet, matter of social (and ideological) defini- aristocratic patron and readers, and these tion; a piece of writing may be ‘literary’ in turn are contrastable with the often for one age and not for another. ‘Non- isolated literary producer of our own day, literary’ writing may be treated in a who produces work as a market commod- ‘literary’ way, or vice versa. ity for a rarely encountered audience. The very definitions and criteria of Any society may contain a set of dif- ‘literature’, then, belong to a set of values ferent, even conflicting, literary modes of and ideas embedded in a literary mode of Literature 129 production. In turn, the values and social a parodic manipulation in art of a form relations of that mode of production from everyday life. So the criteria seem to will leave their imprint on the works it be of different kinds, some formal and produces. It is thus very difficult to distin- some existential; but they apply fairly guish an ‘external’, historical study of liter- clearly in individual cases. ary works from an ‘internal’, critical one. We may seek the characteristics of See also CREATION, CRITICISM, LITERATURE. literature from many points of view, some See T. Eagleton, Criticism and intrinsic and some extrinsic. Extrinsically, Ideology (1976); P. Macherey, A Theory we will certainly want to regard it as of Literary Production (1978). a definite cultural institution, an inter- TE related set of SEMIOTIC systems. We can note the values a society assigns to its lit- Literature In present times generally erature: these vary from society to society taken to be imaginative compositions, and from age to age, ranging from seri- mainly printed but earlier (and still, in ousness and ritual, to frivolity and verbal some cultures) was oral, whether dra- play (and different GENRES have different matic, metrical or prose in form. This is expectations). Literature has commonly a relatively recent usage, having general been distinguished from linguistic acceptance in the European languages ephemera, effort being expended to only from the nineteenth century. Earlier preserve it in script or oral tradition; it has senses have been less restricted: for been regarded as a potent tool in the example, the body of writings in a lan- transmission and preservation of cultural guage, artistic or not; and particularly, the values; it has also often been associated study of such a corpus of written materials. with an elite, either conservative or revo- For an account of the history of the term, lutionary, or with an influential and self- see René Wellek, ‘The name and nature of esteeming bourgeoisie. Cultural attitudes comparative literature’ in Discriminations towards literature, such as these are (1970), especially pp. 3–13. empirical: they may be derived from No ‘discovery procedure’ is needed anthropological and sociological observa- for literature. Borderline cases are easier tions. A different series of extrinsic to resolve than at first appears, and their criteria involves speculation about the manner of resolution is instructive. relationship between literature and indi- William McGonagall may be a bad poet, viduals, society or culture. In relation to but he is clearly a poet: there is crafts- authors, works have been claimed to be manship, a sense of tradition, even if both either expressive, gestures from the qualities are precariously fulfilled in his writer’s personal character and percep- work. (We can say he is a poor artist, but tions (Longinus, Wordsworth) or, con- that is not the same as asserting that he is trariwise, impersonal, creations which not an artist: EVALUATION is quite indepen- efface their creators as individuals (Yeats, dent of identification as literature.) But Eliot, NEW CRITICS). In relation to the the telephone book, though highly struc- reader, literature has been supposed to tured, fails to be literature because it is have many different functions and effects. ‘real’ – a list of people, addresses, numer- Theorists who assume impersonality in ical codes for calling these actual people. respect to origin generally assume stasis in Contrast Scott Fitzgerald’s list of Gatsby’s respect to effect: if the audience is ‘moved’ visitors in The Great Gatsby (1925), by the aesthetic experience, it is not moved 130 Literature to action (so propaganda, PORNOGRAPHY, but are actually abstract and therefore etc. have not been considered art because cannot be said so easily to impinge on they are kinetic). On the quality of stasis, one’s worldly experience. Literature is irre- the aesthetician would generally concur sponsible in the sense of amoral. Compare with the law courts: that which pumps Archibald Macleish’s dictum that a poem our adrenalin is not art (cf. AUTHOR, must be ‘equal to: not true’ (Ars Poetica). READER, ART). Considerations of truth and reality are not More specific theories of literary relevant to literature; but my car hand- EFFECT have been proposed: the various book must be true, since it is designed to sophistications of a concept of PLEASURE, guide actions. or I. A. Richards’s belief that literature On the basis of such observations, causes stability, harmonization of impulses, literature is traditionally distinguished in a successful reader (Principles of from science, history, philosophy, etc. Literary Criticism, 1924), or the doctrine Literature is at the same time like the of CATHARSIS, the essentially harmless other arts (in terms of FORM or STRUC- release of emotions. Such theories prolif- TURE) and unlike them (in terms of erated in the nineteenth and twentieth LANGUAGE). Now we appeal to intrinsic centuries: pressed to the extreme, the lead criteria, and ‘poem’ creeps in as the to a belief that literature can cleanse and general term, inviting us to substitute a save society (Arnold, Leavis) – but here focus on the individual literary construct the theory undermined itself, since on for the ‘extrinsic’ focus on literature as a that interpretation literature hardly differs cultural institution or as an influence on from propaganda or sermons. If literature the psyche. ‘Poem’ retains its etymologi- is a form of persuasion (as the RHETORICAL cal connotations (Greek poesis, ‘making’) tradition claims) there must be supplemen- and evokes the literary work as a ‘made tary criteria specifying exactly what kind of thing’, an artefact, a single, unique, persuasion it is – for example, persuasion construct; a hard enduring object (and not to adopt a certain ‘world-view’ but not a pale reflection of something else). persuasion literally to fight to change the As soon as we have achieved a definite world. conception of the poem as a single, coher- Fictionality is one such criterion (see ent, aesthetic object, we are instantly FICTION, IMITATION). Evidently literature involved in ontological speculations: ‘imitates’, ‘depicts’, ‘represents’, ‘pre- what mode of being does a literary work sents’, ‘embodies’ people, objects, soci- enjoy? Is it, in fact, an independent entity, eties, ideas: Mr Micawber, Middlemarch, or is it located in, for example, the writer’s Howards End, Camus’s plague. Literature or reader’s consciousness? (see EFFECT, is not alone in this respect – the telephone INTENTION, LANGUAGE). If it has a mode of book, an inventory of the contents of a separate being, what are its ‘internal’ house, the service manual for a car, are characteristics? Various styles of criteria also representational. But if someone’s have found fashion in attempts at the neighbours listed in the directory enjoy intrinsic definition of literature or of par- spatio-temporal existence, Mr Micawber ticular kinds of literature. The CHICAGO does not; thus the concept of imitation CRITICS avoided an overall definition, is different for David Copperfield and but erected a scheme of ‘parts’, abstract for the telephone directory. Fiction is structural components (CHARACTER, creative: its creations are felt to be real, DICTION, PLOT, etc.); a particular selection Logocentrism 131 from this set of components, in an appro- M. Bradbury and D. J. Palmer (eds), priate order of importance, serving to Contemporary Criticism (1970); E. Vivas define the nature of each GENRE. Thus the and M. Krieger (eds), The Problems of complete field of literature is, allegedly, Aesthetics (1953); M. Weitz (ed.), mapped out by a set of characterizations Problems in Aesthetics (2nd edn, 1970); of the genres. The intrinsic quality (if R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory it exists) remains undefined. A quite of Literature (3rd edn, 1963); different approach, though dependent on W. K. Wimsatt, Jr and C. Brooks, Literary equally abstract notions, results from Criticism: A Short History (1957); Peter assuming that any literary work is literary Widdowson, Literature (1998). by virtue of possessing certain qualities RGF which are common to the arts as a whole (cf. AESTHETICS, and the recommended Logocentrism According to the reading below): ‘balance’, ‘composition’, deconstructive critic Jacques Derrida, the ‘structure’ and so on. However, a defini- history of Western thought has always tion of literature derived from general been governed by a belief in certain aesthetics would certainly have to be fundamental and eternal truths. Serving augmented by criteria which make as a ground or foundation, these truths reference to the linguistic medium. provide the basis for all stable meaning. The search for intrinsic linguistic The term coined by Derrida to designate criteria intensified in Russian, Czech and such a belief is logocentrism. From the French Formalism and Structuralism, with ancient Greek, logos signifies word, writers, such as Jakobson, Mukaìovskò, speech and reason but is now understood Todorov and Culler making illuminating more broadly to refer to any extra- claims. The ideas are dealt with in the systemic point of reference that functions articles on FORMALISM, STRUCTURALISM, as the origin of meaning and truth. Thus, and particularly POETICS, which also list the logos can assume many forms includ- major titles for further reading. ing Reason, God, Self, Being and Truth. The majority of contemporary critics Whatever form it takes, its role is always are of the opinion that literature as such the same: to act as a fixed guarantee of cannot be adequately defined, though its meaning. Consider, for example, the previous definitions can be analysed in interpretive strategies of traditional liter- terms of their cultural and ideological ary criticism. Firmly embedded within assumptions. ‘Literature’ thus appears the history of logocentrism, many readers more as a descriptive term that refers to still see the author as a logos presiding texts which are deemed to have certain over his or her work. Acting as a centre, intrinsic family resemblances that enable or foundation, this author is presumed them to be discussed for extrinsic pur- to be both the starting point and final poses under the heading, though ‘fiction- destination for any reading of the text. ality’ is not a reliable measure with which Two of the most important characteris- to decide whether a text will institution- tics of the logos are captured within ally or more generally be considered to be the synonymous phrase ‘transcendental ‘literature’. signified’. As the term transcendental For the older traditions, see suggests, the logos exists independently M. C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in of and outside all of the various systems the Philosophy of Criticism (1958); that govern our thoughts. Above all, the 132 Lyric logos exists independently of language. Once Derrida has demonstrated that Indeed, according to a logocentric way of the logos is implicated in the play of thinking, the logos is the one signified differences, that is, language, it is robbed (mental concept) that has no need for a of its transcendental status and can no signifier (spoken or written word). Both longer function as the origin and guaran- self-sufficient and self-determining, it tee of meaning. In short, the logos is remains untouched by the play of linguis- revealed to be nothing more than an illu- tic DIFFERENCES by which meaning is artic- sion. As a result, we live in a decentred ulated (see STRUCTURALISM). As a pure universe, devoid of any authorizing signified, the logos is a site of unadulter- ground or foundation. Within such a uni- ated PRESENCE. More generally, Western verse, Truth is replaced by interpretation thought is not only logocentric but also and fixed meaning becomes multiple and phonocentric (phono ϭ voice), consis- contingent. Thus, it is hardly surprising tently privileging speech over writing as that, within the logocentric tradition, the a vehicle of truth. pull of the logos remains powerful and we It is important to recognize that the continue to crave the security it offers. logos has a key role to play in the rela- Yet, Derrida and other recent critics sug- tionship between language and meaning. gest that such a development should be Language, according to Derrida, is the viewed positively, not negatively. Rather product of difference and deferral. If, for than being haunted by the loss of the example, we consider a dictionary defini- logos and a desire to find a substitute, we tion of a particular signifier, we find not a should embrace the ensuing play of final or definitive signified, only more language and meaning as affirmative. signifiers and signifieds that led, in turn, Indeed, one might argue that the logocen- to others. As this analogy suggests, tric belief in stable meanings and ultimate meaning is constantly deferred and truths actually limits our interpretations disseminated throughout the language of literary texts by assuming that there is system. Yet, as Derrida suggests in Of a single meaning waiting to be discov- Grammatology (1976), the role of the ered. In contrast, Derrida’s notion of logos is to ‘place a reassuring end to decentring liberates the reader by opening the reference from sign to sign’. Thus the the text up to multiple, diverse and logos holds out the promise of linguistic even contradictory readings. See also stability. It is this promise, the very basis DECONSTRUCTION and PRESENCE. of logocentricism, that has been called See M. McQuillan (ed.), Deconstruc- into question by DECONSTRUCTION and, tion: A Reader (2000); N. Royle (ed.), more generally, POST-STRUCTURALISM. In Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (2000). one of Derrida’s most often quoted state- JA ments, he asserts that ‘there is no outside- text’. While not denying the concept of Lyric That the lyric was originally a reality, he insists that we have no access to song set to the lyre, and later to other it except via language. In other words, all musical instruments, is worth remembering of our thoughts, perceptions and knowl- now only because the post-Renaissance edge are filtered through language. Thus lyric, or lyrical passage, though not often nothing, including the logos, escapes the intended to be sung, nevertheless tends to play of differences that disrupts any be relatively mellifluous in sound and simple notion of self-present meaning. rhythm and to have a flowingly repetitious Lyric 133 syntax that lends itself to expansive, often than in that which Matthew Arnold exclamatory, expressions of intense per- suggested (favourable to the long poem). sonal joy, sorrow or contemplative insight. Life seen as a sequence of intensely A sixteenth-century English example is felt moments, rather than a structure of Thomas Wyatt’s ‘Fforget not yet’, from interrelated and assessed experiences, which these two verses are taken: tends to encourage the use of the first person, vivid images and ‘local life’ at the Fforget not yet the gret assays, expense of architectonics, anecdotal The cruell wrong, the skornfull ways, narrative and intellectual abstraction. The The paynfull pacyence in denays. effect on criticism or on poetry (even Fforget not yet! the longest twentieth-century poems tend Fforget not yet, forget not thys, to be fragmentary, like ‘The Waste Land’, How long ago hathe ben and ys or built out of poem-sequences, like Ted The mynd, that neuer ment amys, Hughes’s ‘Crow’) makes it desirable to Fforget not yet. redress the balance by suggesting that the pressure of feeling and intellect which the The lyric poem, usually short, was often long poem accommodates has consider- constructed on a single mood. But the able force due to the fact that, while it can twentieth-century lyric is frequently more avail itself of all the devices of lyricism, complex, allowing for contrastive themes the long poem builds up, in addition, a and for changes, even ambivalences, of larger structure of controlling tensions attitude, though remaining in an emo- and so may achieve a more inclusive tional rather than intellectual mode. A intensity than that afforded by isolated contemporary example, by the Irish poet ‘peak moments’. Richard Weber, shows a technical rela- See H. J. C. Grierson, Lyrical Poetry of tionship with Wyatt’s song but greater the Nineteenth Century (1929); C. M. Ing, complexity: Elizabethan Lyrics (1951); J. L. Kinneavy, As my eyes moved thoughtfully A Study of Three Contemporary Theories Over your face of Lyric Poetry (1957); Norman Maclean, And your eyes moved thoughtlessly ‘From action to image: theories of the lyric Into place in the eighteenth century’ in R. S. Crane I knew that all I could not say (ed.), Critics and Criticism (1952); Edwin Had been said before Muir, The Estate of Poetry (1962); Gilbert And left no trace. Murray, The Classical Tradition in Poetry (1930); Roland Arthur Greene, Post- British poetry has on the whole Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of developed in the direction Walter Pater the Western Lyric Sequence (1991). suggested (favourable to lyricism) rather AAAC M

Magical (magic) realism The term Columbian novelist Gabriel Garcia magical realism (Magischer Realismus) Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude had its first use in 1925 in German art in 1967. critic Franz Roh’s attempt to define a In the Caribbean, too, the work of return to a more realistic style after the Haitian writer and critic Jacques Stephen abstraction of EXPRESSIONISM. Alexis had been instrumental in introduc- The movement against Expressionism ing the term to the post-colonial task of also involved the so-called New combining the recording force of realism Objectivity movement (Neue Sachlichkeit). with a recovery of the central role of Both movements were generated by the the fabulous and mythic in indigenous urge to revisit the neglected possibilities of cultures, dismissed by colonial aesthetic realism, obscured or dismissed by move- preoccupations. Alexis’s essay ‘Of the ments such as Expressionism. They argued magical realism of the Haitians’ (1956) for a sparser, clearer form of representation sought to reconcile the arguments of than Expressionism and so had an influ- postwar radical intellectuals in the post- ence on the work of politically engaged colonial world who favoured social real- artists, such as George Grosz. At the same ism as a tool of revolutionary social time and entwined with this political representation with the recognition that in engagement was a formalist impulse to many post-colonial societies a largely use realism to expose the inner strange- pre-industrial, peasant society still had its ness of objects. This latter element of the imaginative life and identity rooted in a movement emphasized the alienation at living tradition of the mythic and the the heart of modern experience, its magical. This was also obviously true for uncanny quality (or unheimlichkeit to use the displaced indigenous populations of Freud’s term). It emphasized the urge to settler, colonial societies. Examples of perceive reality as in some sense unreal, the influence of this concern in fiction and the unreal as in some sense embodying include Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s the real. Children (India), Ben Okri’s The Roh’s foundational essay was trans- Famished Road (Nigeria) and Thomas lated into Spanish by Ortega y Gasset in King’s Green Grass, Running Water 1927 and so the term entered the aesthetic (Canada). vocabulary of both peninsular Spain and In this post-colonial context, the social the Latin American and Caribbean dias- and political dimension of the use of the poras. Latin American narrative already mythic is emphasized. For example, the had a long history of engagement with the Cuban, Marxist novelist Alejo Carpentier marvelous and the fabulous in texts in his definition argues that in South through the late nineteenth and early America and the Caribbean, Magical twentieth centuries, well before the emer- Realism (Real Maravillos) reflects the gence of the term onto the wider stage of shifting, transformative, ever-changing world criticism with the phenomenal native world and even its very tropical success of the English translation of landscape, which becomes for him a Mannerism 135 symbol of the power of the colonized and Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy oppressed to act as a revolutionary force B. Faris (eds), Magical Realism: Theory, and to resist and dismantle the static, History, Community (1995). fixed and conservative force of European GG aesthetic and politic force. Despite these politicized readings of Mannerism Has three different, but the form of magical realism, following related usages: as a fairly narrow stylistic the so-called ‘Boom’ period of magical term; as a historical period; as a broad realism in the 1960s and the overactive literary mode. promotion by publishers and distributors A mannered style is marked by obtru- of novels which employed the form, some sive ‘mannerisms’ or peculiarities: often post-colonial critics attacked it as having an elaborate syntax and elevated diction, become a means of reinforcing stereo- remote from a colloquial register. Since types of the post-colonial world as an the manner remains the same irrespective exoticized Other. of the matter, the twin dangers of mono- At the same time, and perhaps under tony and bathos threaten. Mannered the increasing tendency of post-colonial writers, such as Sir Thomas Browne or texts to ‘write back to the centre’, in Walter Pater, are better taken in small Salman Rushdie’s phrase, European and doses. But a mannered style, in drawing American writers began to explore the attention to presentation as distinct from ways in which reality could be opened up representation, may bring aesthetic gains. and shown to be a gloss on the more com- By analogy with the mannerist painting plex forces at work in the so-called ‘ratio- of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth nal’ societies of the post-Enlightenment centuries, mannerism may, as a term for period in their own backyards. Genres, a ‘period’, designate the transition such as the Gothic and Science Fiction between Renaissance and Baroque litera- had already posed just such a critique of ture. The widespread mannered styles of post-enlightenment rationality, as had the period, such as Euphuism and psychological fiction from a different Gongorism, might be called mannerist, perspective, but now the concept of ‘mag- rather than just mannered. ical realism’ asserted that the interaction As a literary mode rather than a of realism and the supra-rational was the period, mannerism largely overlaps with mode which might best allow us to BAROQUE. Indeed E. R. Curtis substituted explore the complexities and contra- mannerism for baroque altogether, but dictions of all late twentieth-century extended its reference to mean the dialec- societies. See also REALISM. tical antithesis of classicism, in whatever See J. S. Alexis, ‘Of the magical real- period. He defined mode in terms of ism of the Haitians’ in Présence Africaine style. Mannerist style is hermetic and (1956); Maria-Elena Angulo, Magic ingenious, full of paradox and puns, Realism, Social Context and Discourse asyndeton, hyperbole and pleonasm. For (1995); Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, other critics mannerism means, more Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: dubiously, a style reflecting a psycho- Deconstructing Magic Realism (1998); logical type or sociological pressures. Franz Roh, Nach-Expressionismus. The mannerist spirit is calculating, yet, Magischer Realismus. Probleme der passionate, disharmonious and modern. neuesten Europäischen Malerei (1925); In English literature the METAPHYSICAL 136 Manners poets are the archetypal mannerists and comedy (Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve) parallels are drawn or denied between and sometimes by analogy to the work of seventeenth- and twentieth-century writers like Oscar Wilde. These plays mannerism, as, for example, in Joyce. explore a universe where all values are The term has suffered from the reductive bound up with appearances, where tendency of all such vast generalizations. honour is synonymous with reputation See E. R. Curtius, trans. W. Trask, and truth identified with a glib tongue European Literature and the Latin Middle and a steady eye. The veil of conventions Ages (1953); John M. Steadman, shields the action from anarchy and Redefining a Period Style: ‘Renaissance’, despair. By their success or failure at ‘Mannerist’ and ‘Baroque’ in Literature society’s intricate play, characters sepa- (1991); John Greenwood, Shifting rate into true wits or gulls. They learn to Perspectives and the Stylish Style: live with the precarious balance of forces Mannerism in Shakespeare and His which govern the way of their worlds. Jacobean Contemporaries (1988). See also CULTURE, SOCIETY. EJB GG

Manners Literature has nearly always Marxist criticism Is distinguished sought to define the relationship between from all forms of idealist, FORMALIST and character and environment. The social aestheticist criticism by its belief that context of behaviour makes visible the ‘Literature’ is a social and material prac- inner conflicts of individuals. Thus tice, related to other social practices, and Hamlet’s antic posturing is defined not finally explicable only in these terms. only against his soliloquizing but also It differs from other historical or socio- against the manners of the court. This logical approaches to literature mainly in becomes of more central importance its view of the nature of history itself. For when the society represented is aware of Marxism, ‘history’ does not form a single the rules by which it exists; when they category or seamless whole: it is grasped, have attained the status of social conven- rather, as a field of conflicting interests tions. Societies create patterns of behav- and forces (cf. CONTRADICTION). Domi- iour by which success or failure can be nant among those conflicts is the epochal measured, and the writer, too, must react struggle between social classes – between to these either by conforming to them or those who, by virtue of controlling a soci- by attacking and exposing them. These ety’s economic production, can usually conventions are most revered in periods dominate its cultural and intellectual pro- of high social mobility, when outward duction as well, and those exploited behaviour becomes the ‘sign’ of personal classes whose labour makes this privi- success and social respectability. In such leged situation possible in the first place. periods literature may become preoccu- In such class societies, all intellectual pied with the recording of mannerisms production is likely to bear the indelible and behaviour patterns, for example, in print of these fundamental material strug- some Victorian novels, such as those of gles; and in so far as it does, it can be said Mrs Gaskell. to be ‘ideological’. ‘Literature’ is for The term manners is most frequently Marxism a particular kind of signifying employed in the phrase ‘comedy of practice, which together with other such manners’, usually referring to Restoration practices goes to make up what may be Marxist criticism 137 termed an ideological formation. Such a hand, has been what one might broadly formation is always complex and contra- term a genetic criticism, concerned to dictory, but it is never innocent. Its relate the literary work to its historical impulse is to stabilize and unify the and ideological conditions of possibility. various meanings, values and representa- The scattered literary writings of Marx tions in which a society lives out its own and Engels themselves, drawing as they experience, in ways which help to secure do on the aesthetics of Hegel, fall into this and reproduce the power of its ruling category, as do Lenin’s well-known arti- class. ‘Literature’, then, might be said to cles on Leo Tolstoy, or Trotsky’s sensitive represent the class struggle at a specific accounts of his Russian poetic contempo- level; in writing, reading, interpreting and raries. The eminent Hungarian Marxist evaluating we are already, consciously or critic Georg Lukács also belongs to this not, engaged in a struggle over linguistic lineage: his work aims to identify the meanings which is intimately related to complex relations between certain histor- systems of power. ical epochs and the rise and fall of certain ‘Vulgar Marxist’ criticism accepted literary forms, such as REALISM. The great this conclusion with a vengeance, reduc- bourgeois realists, still able to ‘totalize’ ing literary texts to a mere reflex or history into a complex significance by symptom of history, content to determine deploying characters and events at once the political ‘tendency’ of the work. The sharply individuated and historically ‘typ- major traditions of Marxist criticism, ical’, give way at a point of political crisis however, while firmly locating literature to the disturbed, private, more frag- in its historical context, nevertheless mentary forms of MODERNISM. In the work granted it a high degree of ‘relative auto- of Lukács’s disciple Lucien Goldmann, nomy’. It is never merely a ‘reflection’ Marxist and STRUCTURALIST themes are or ‘expression’ of historical forces, but a interwoven to provide a similarly genetic specific, highly codified social practice account of the flourishing of French with its own conditions of material pro- seventeenth-century tragedy. duction and reception (cf. LITERARY MODE Lukács and Goldmann inhabit an OF PRODUCTION), its own conventions, Hegelian, ‘humanistic’ current of Marxism devices and histories (cf. CREATION). Its for which many of the traditional cate- ideological significance is to be sought gories of bourgeois aesthetics (unity, truth, not merely in its abstractable political beauty and so on) are still valid. The later content, but more rewardingly in its work of Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey forms – in its narrative structures and and others has interrogated these assump- generic rules, its habits of language and tions, grasping the literary text as divided, characterization, its modes of imagery uneven and contradictory, forced by its and technical mechanisms. ‘History’ and complicities with ideology into certain ‘ideology’ are not merely the extraneous revealing gaps, silences and absences outworks of a literary text: as the inti- whereby it ‘deconstructs’ itself and betrays mately informing pressures at work its ideological hand. Such critics have also within its very capacity to signify, they been more concerned with literature as a are constitutive of its very being. form of analysable ‘production’ than an Historically speaking, Marxist criti- author-centred ‘creation’. cism might be roughly if conveniently But for both Lukács and Althusser, divided into two main types. On the one ‘Literature’ itself remains a largely 138 Mask unproblematic term – as it does indeed for political direction?); ‘reception theory’ in the Hegelian Marxists of the German a political context; and SEMIOTICS and Frankfurt School (notably Theodor sociolinguistics (the understanding of Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), who find literary works as social codes and in the very forms of art a spiritual tran- DISCOURSES, inseparable from ideological scendence of class-bound society. They modes of perception). For later Marxist differ thus from the second major Marxist criticism, there is no isolated ‘literature’ cultural heritage, which concerns itself to be ideologically examined; what we less with the genesis of the artwork than have instead is a set of LITERARY MODES OF with its political uses and effects, less PRODUCTION, embedded in the dominant with the literary product itself than with social relations of capitalism, which may the social relations and cultural institu- themselves be transformed by political tions from which it emerges. The aim of practice to produce new meanings of this tradition is to transform or dismantle ‘literature’ and new audiences. The liter- the very meaning of the term ‘literature’ ary works of the past must be studied in by transforming the material means of their historical conditions; but, more cultural production in society as a whole. importantly, they must be constantly Prominent among such revolutionary rewritten, in order to be put to different cultural workers were the Bolshevik kinds of political use. See IDEOLOGY avant-garde artists (Futurists, Formalists, See further H. Arvon, Marxist Constructivists, etc.) of the 1920s, who Esthetics (1973); L. Baxandall and sought not merely a new meaning in art S. Morawski (eds), Marx and Engels on but a new meaning of art, fashioning new Literature and Art (1973); W. Benjamin, social relations between artists and audi- Illuminations (1973), One-Way Street and ences, collapsing the barriers between art Other Essays (1979), Understanding and social life, and insisting on new Brecht (1973); T. Bennett, Formalism and media of cultural communication. Marxism (1979); P. Demetz, Marx, Crushed by Stalinism, their great inheri- Engels and the Poets (1967); T. Eagleton, tors were the revolutionary artists and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976); critics of Weimar Germany (Erwin F. Jameson, Marxism and Form (1971); Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, Walter R. Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics Benjamin), and to some degree the (1977); V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and Marxist SURREALISTS of France gathered the Philosophy of Language (1973); around André Breton. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature More recent Marxist criticism has (1977); Gary Day, Class (2001); Terry revived or sustained these influences, Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism rejecting some timeless notion of the (2002). ‘literary’ for an insistence that what TE counts as ‘literary’ in the first place is Mask See PERSONA. always a matter of ideological and institu- tional definition. The work of Raymond Metafiction See FICTION. Williams in England has been central in Metaphor Like simile is easier to this respect. But other influences have illustrate than to define. In the phrase been at work too: PSYCHOANALYSIS (how are readers constituted as collective or The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d individual subjects by the unconscious throne meanings of literary texts, and in what Burn’d on the water Metaphor 139 as well as much else, there is both a particles suppressed. Against this view metaphor, ‘the barge...burn’d on the many people feel that, in the first place, water’, and a simile, ‘the barge...like a metaphors are usually more effective than burnish’d throne’. similes or comparisons, suggesting that In general, a metaphor ascribes to there is a real difference between them some thing or action X a property Y (Black, ‘More about metaphor’), or which it could not literally possess in that further, that there is a distinction to be context. Responding to this anomaly, the drawn between them in terms of their hearer or reader infers that what is meant truth conditions (and thus a difference of is that X is Z, where Z is some property meaning). Thus, J. R. Searle argues that suggested by Y, X or the interaction of the a sentence like ‘Richard is a gorilla’ two, that can be literally true of X in some might say something true about Richard context. A simile, using one of several (namely that he is coarse and brutal) possible syntactic devices of comparison whereas in reality, gorillas could be (...as...as,...like..., etc.) states explic- charming and gentle in their behaviour, itly that there is a similarity (Z) between making ‘Richard resembles a gorilla in X and Y though it usually does not state his behavior’ false (Searle, ‘Metaphor’). explicitly what this similarity is, and thus the hearer is likewise forced to infer what The paraphrasability of metaphors Z might be in that context. We usually find no difficulty in para- The study of metaphor generates a phrasing dead metaphors (those which great deal of terminology, often itself have become wholly or partly lexicalized, metaphorical. The most firmly estab- like ‘tying up a few loose ends’ or ‘swim lished terms for describing a metaphor like a fish’), but the consensus seems to are perhaps those of I. A. Richards (The be that fully satisfactory paraphrase of a Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936) and Max live and effective metaphor is not gener- Black (Models and Metaphors, 1962). ally possible (see especially Davidson, Richards describes a metaphor as result- ‘What metaphors mean’). This is often ing from the interaction of a ‘vehicle’ taken to argue against the ‘truncated and a ‘tenor...the underlying idea or simile’ view, and Davidson, in particular, principal subject which the vehicle or claims that metaphors have not just an figure means’. ‘Tenor’ seems to be used elusive or incomplete literal meaning, but by Richards (as Black points out) to mean no meaning at all, over and above their either X, or the proposition that X is Z, false or anomalous one. To the extent while ‘vehicle’ seems to correspond to that this view rests on the difficulty of Y. Black himself uses ‘principal subject’ satisfactory paraphrase, it would, of (X) and ‘subsidiary subject’ (Y), more course, be more convincing if our experi- recently, ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ ence was not that paraphrase of ordinary subject (‘More about metaphor’, 1979). literal sentences is often difficult to achieve to everyone’s satisfaction. Metaphors as elliptical comparisons There is a tradition, traceable to Aristotle, Creativity and interaction which maintains that there is no important The view that metaphors work by a logical difference between metaphors process of ‘interaction’ between X and Y and similes, and that metaphors can be is a popular one, and surely true, though regarded as either similes or literal com- the precise nature of this interaction needs parisons with the explicit comparative further clarification. There is a stronger 140 Metaphysical thesis, argued for by Black, that (which has a large bibliography) are metaphors are ‘creative’, by which he views from Anglo-American linguistics, means that rather than just drawing our philosophy and psychology; included are attention to some similarity already the papers by Black and by Searle cited existing, they ‘create’ a new similarity above. Sacks represents a variety of (a possibility which, ironically, his own literary and philosophical standpoints, theory finds it difficult to accommodate; and includes Davidson’s and Ricoeur’s cf. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The metaphorical papers. Though dated, Christine Brooke- process as cognition, imagination and Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (1958) is feeling’). It is certainly the case that a useful work on the syntax of metaphor- people can often find some aspect to ical expressions in literature. A helpful the interpretation of a word in a metaphor primer is Zoltan Kovecses, Metaphor: A that they may not be able to find in the Practical Introduction (2002). See also word in isolation. But as we have no very SIMILE. good way of delimiting what counts as SGP part of the ‘meaning’ of a word, it is diffi- cult to know whether this is evidence for Metaphysical Dr Johnson’s observa- the creativity thesis, or for the view that tion in The Life of Cowley (1779) that there is no sharp distinction between ‘about the beginning of the seventeenth word meaning and factual belief. This is century appeared a race of writers that complicated by the fact that people are may be termed the metaphysical poets’ inclined to say retrospectively that the gave currency to a label that is convenient aspect of meaning focussed on in the though imprecise. Before Johnson, metaphor may well have been an unno- Dryden had remarked in 1693 that ticed regular part of the meaning of the Donne’s love poetry ‘affects the meta- word. If there are cases where the mean- physics’, and in Donne’s own lifetime ing of a metaphor is not derivable from William Drummond of Hawthornden the meanings of the words in it, it may complained of a new poetical fashion for well be that the meaning is derived from ‘Metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical the mechanisms of conversational impli- Quiddities’. The twentieth-century cature (see H. P. Grice, ‘Logic and interest in this ‘race of writers’, which conversation’ in P. Cole and J. L. Morgan after Donne includes Herbert, Crashaw, (eds), Syntax and Semantics Vol. 3, Vaughan and Marvell, was promoted Speech Acts (1975)). chiefly by H. J. C. Grierson’s anthology, The literature on metaphor is massive. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of T. Hawkes, Metaphor (1972), oriented the Seventeenth Century (1921) and by towards literary approaches, is a useful T. S. Eliot’s essay, ‘The metaphysical starting point. Alongside Paul Ricoeur poets’, originally a review of that anthol- The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of ogy. Modern admiration for the intellectual Meaning in Language (1986), the books agility and stylistic complexity of this by Richards and by Black cited above are poetry, for its analytical and ironic modes, classics, which have each generated a makes a curious contrast with the dis- large secondary literature. Useful collec- paraging overtones originally attached tions are A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and to the term ‘metaphysical’. But the redis- Thought (1979) and S. Sacks (ed.), On covery of the metaphysicals was part of Metaphor (1979). The articles in Ortony a reaction to the Romantic tradition of Metre 141 nineteenth-century poetry, and T. S. Eliot’s of metrical form and the asymmetrical critical interest was closely related to the rhythms of speech and thought, and a ‘modern’ qualities of his own poetry in capacity for abrupt shifts of tone. Not that period. all metaphysical poetry possesses these As Grierson pointed out, ‘to call these qualities in the same degree; on the other poets “the school of Donne” or “meta- hand, they are also found in the Jacobean physical” poets may easily mislead if one drama, and in the prose of the period. The takes either phrase in too full a sense’. attempt to produce a consistent or exclu- Direct imitation of Donne is not the main sive definition of metaphysical poetry is feature of most metaphysical poetry, nor therefore less profitable than a flexible is it ‘metaphysical’ in the sense of being understanding which obscures neither the philosophical. It is essentially the poetry distinctions between individual poets nor of ‘wit’, in the seventeenth-century the properties of ‘wit’ common to the sense of wit as the capacity to recognize period as a whole. See also CONCEIT, WIT. similarity in disparity, and to combine See T. S. Eliot, ‘The meta- playfulness with seriousness. Thus, physical poets’ in Selected Essays the metaphysical CONCEIT, of which the (1961); F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (1962); best-known example is Donne’s compari- G. Williamson, The Donne Tradition son of two lovers to a pair of compasses (1961); Richard Willmott, Metaphysical (in ‘A valediction forbidding mourning’) Poetry (2002); Frances Austin, The turns upon a surprising and ingenious Language of Metaphysical Poets (1992). analogy between apparently unrelated DJP areas of experience. It is produced not by the arbitrariness of free association or the Metre If we are presented with a irrational process of the unconscious sequence of events, we tend to perceive mind, but by the alertness of a mind them rhythmically: they seem to fall into accustomed to think in terms of corre- patterns, whatever their actual temporal spondences and to reason by analogy. In relationships might be. This is true of this respect the ‘metaphysic’ underlying linguistic experiences. Hearing English metaphysical poetry is a traditional but by sentences, we feel that the most promi- then obsolescent conception of an ordered nent syllables recur at about the same universe in which correspondences were time-interval, regardless of the number of held to exist between all planes of being. intervening light syllables. VERSE is The metaphysical conceit, of which metered as well as rhythmical: there is a Dr Johnson said that ‘the most hetero- metrical superstructure over the rhythm. geneous ideas are yoked by violence An additional level of phonetic organiza- together’, characteristically forms part of tion gathers the rhythmical groups into an ingeniously paradoxical argument in metrical units-lines. In prose, the rhythm which immediacy of feeling is appre- continues sequentially as long as the hended through conceptual analogies text lasts, but verse is chopped up into rather than in sensory images. regularly repeated metrical units. (It is a Other notable features of metaphysical vexing question whether there can be poetry include a dramatic sense of a one-line poem.) situation, a plain rather than ornate dic- Metre emerges from the numerical tion, an elliptical and condensed syntax, control of rhythm: it entails counting. a strong tension between the symmetries Classical French verse counts syllables; 142 Metre typically, twelve define the line. phrase-stresses run against the expected Anglo-Saxon counts stresses, four to a pattern, smoothing out the stress-contrasts line, ignoring the number of light sylla- of the verse design so that there are bles. Modern English measures are based only three dominant accents. The Pope on syllabic and stress patterning: the par- line presents a middle stage, a delicate adigm iambic pentameter has five strong syncopation of the prose rhythm against stresses – the even syllables out of a total the verse design. Note the way the of ten, with the odd ones light. Classical words mystic and mazes run across the metres were equally complex – syllables foot boundaries, bridging the junctures were either long or short, and both were between the second and third, and third counted. In principle, any phonological and fourth, feet. The interest of metre, it feature of a language may provide the seems, lies in just this tension of the basis for metre; but the features available rhythm of prose played against the more vary from language to language. Length stylized norms of metre. We cannot of syllable is phonologically inactive in neglect the normal stress-patterns of English, so it makes no sense to talk about speech without destroying meaning; at long and short syllables in English the same time, we throw our prose experi- metres; in fact, conventional prosodic ence into fruitful conflict with the regu- analysis is meaningless in so far as it larizing metre. Since the stress-patterns relies on such terms. of language are infinitely variable, so is Scansion is analysis of verse lines by the experience of metrical tension. stating the distribution of the metrically The complexity of the verse experience significant features; it displays the design demands a proportionately discriminating the poet works to, and a set of idealized analytic apparatus. The abstract metrical expectations by the reader: patterns described and classified by the older historians of metre (G. Sainsbury, x / x / x / x / x / History of English Prosody, 1906–10; The Sylphs/thro’ mys/tic maz/es, T. S. Osmond, English Metrists, 1921) guide! their way. give too little information, failing to (Pope) capture the intricate interplay between the For a line like this, the reader expects five reader’s expectations of verse accents or pairs (‘feet’) of light and heavy syllables. ‘beats’ and the linguistic realities of Actually, the experience is much more ordinary stress. Very few of the older complex than this neat up-and-down prosodists managed to convey the ‘feel’ model suggests. Compare: of verse (Robert Bridges, Milton’s Prosody, 1921, is a brilliant exception). Before, behind, between, above, below At the other extreme, pure phonetic (Donne) expositions of verse performances tell us Unfolded transitory qualities too much-in the physical detail, we lose (Wordsworth) the abstract scheme which orders the phonetic facts (see Wilbur Schramm, both instances of the same verse design, Approaches to a Science of Verse, 1935). but radically different in texture. In the Modern techniques of phonemic metrical first, the natural stress-patterns of the analysis concentrate on a display which words fulfil exactly the reader’s prosodic seeks to show the tension between prose expectations; in the second, the word- and rhythm and ideal metre. The aim is to Mirror Stage 143 present an account of the internal in a primordial form’, claims Lacan. The structure of lines as selections from polished, objectified reflection of a the infinite repertoire of rhythm/verse mirror image is crucial as a symbol or design juxtapositions which a language emblem of this stage and its effects, affords. although Lacan is also careful to caution See Seymour Chatman, A Theory of that one should not be too reductive: ‘the Meter (1965); Roger Fowler, ‘ “Prose idea of the mirror should be understood rhythm” and metre’ in Essays on Style as an object which reflects – not just the and Language (1966); Roger Fowler, visible, but also what is heard, touched ‘What is metrical analysis?’ in The and willed by the child’. For Lacan, the Languages of Literature (1971); Donald stage is the first point at which the subject C. Freeman (ed.), Linguistics and misrecognizes itself as a unified, separate Literary Style (1970) (the last three and autonomous individual; the polished essays); Morris Halle and Samuel Jay surface and the insecure child’s anxious Keyser, English Stress (1971); Derek projections together present a fiction of Attridge and Thomas Carper, Meter and the self, to which fallacy, with its Meaning: Introduction to Rhythm in inevitable fragmentation, lack and obscu- Poetry (2003); Jeffrey Wainwright, rity (to itself as much as to others) it is Poetry: The Basics (2004). always striving. Lacan is building on RGF Freud’s theories of the unconscious and his tripartite model of the mind (id, ego Mimesis See IMITATION, REALISM, and super-ego) with its desires, conflicts TYPICALITY. and repressions. He is also elaborating Mirror Stage, the In 1936 Jacques Freud’s theories from a perspective Lacan (1901–81) delivered a paper to the informed by structural linguistics, and, in International Psychoanalytic Conference particular, by Ferdinand de Saussure at Marienbad which introduced his notion (1857–1913). Thus, one of Lacan’s best of the mirror phase in the development of known and persistently puzzling pro- the human subject: ‘The Mirror Stage in nouncements is that ‘the unconscious is the Formative Function of the I’. The structured like a language’. paper was revised in 1949 and later pub- Above all, however, Lacan was at lished in the collection, Écrits in 1966. pains to show that the consoling notion The mirror stage (sometimes called ‘the that language was a proficiency acquired mirror phase’) occurs between 6 and 18 and at the service of the will of the indi- months, when the infant is still in the neo- vidual was just as fictive as the unity of natal state of dependency, awkward and the specular image of the self. Rather, uncoordinated and without structured lan- says Lacan, the subject is inserted into a guage. From this realm, with its instinc- language system and is then spoken from tual drives and diffuse desires (Lacan it and by it – at the level of the uncon- calls this the Imaginary), the infant sees scious and by virtue of lack and desire. itself reflected in ‘the mirror’ and with Freud’s castration and oedipal theories are delight, recognizes itself; ‘this jubilant also revised as Lacan outlines the child’s assumption of the specular image by the relation to language as part of the com- child at the infans stage [. . .] would seem to plex. As the child moves from the sym- exhibit in an exemplary situation the sym- biotic closeness with the mother s/he bolic matrix in which the I is precipitated perceives that the mother who had been 144 Mock-epic believed to have/be everything, in fact in mock-epic the ritualistic becomes lacks – and in this lack desires the father the fussy, dignity becomes pomposity (what the father has). It is this apprehen- and respect turns out to be veiled but sion of the complexity of separation, exasperated familiarity. threatened castration (or for the girl, the Groups are parodied by mock-epic condition of ‘castration’), lack and desire because they suffer from that immaturity that positions the child in the Symbolic and falsity which come from self- order of language and other conventional, satisfaction and from the use of criteria socializing systems. Saussure’s influence, of evaluation peculiar to an essentially particularly his work on semiotics and the parochial society; an obsession with linguistic sign (comprised of signifier behavioural patterns comes to predomi- and signified), can be seen in Lacan’s nate over any broader, more humane papers ‘The function and field of speech understanding of social activity. The char- and language in psychoanalysis’ (1953) acters are not enlarged by encountering and ‘The agency of the letter in the resistance to their wishes – actions have unconscious or reason since freud’ the ease and versatility of game and the (1957), as in his work on the Phallus as the gods, unlike Homer’s, connive with Transcendental Signifier in the Symbolic humanity to the point of subservience (see order. See also PHALLOGOCENTRISM. especially Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, See Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (1991); 1712 and 1714). But in the poet’s attitude, Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A too, the satirist’s contempt gives way to the Feminist Introduction (1990); Juliet virtuoso’s unfailingly apt and delightfully Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), varied development of an initial stance; Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the subject, while never ceasing to be a the École Freudienne (1985). target, is exploited as an instrument of SS a self-consciously formal and decorative achievement which, through its own Mock-epic In heroic epic, the extra- game-like quality, its refusal to impoverish ordinary and the trivial can coexist and a spade by calling it a spade, becomes can be respected as part of one another; itself increasingly exhilarating and life- the trivial has a reassuring, integrative, affirming. Mock-epic is a developed form anchoring function. However, in mock- not so much of sarcasm as of euphemism: epic (e.g. Butler’s Hudibras, 1662–78; it has a paradoxical willingness to ‘extract Boileau’s Le Lutrin, 1674; Pope’s Dunciad, from contemporary life its epic dimen- 1728; Zachariae’s Der Renommist, 1744) sion, showing us...how grand and poetic the poet is less interested in an open- we are in our cravats and highly-polished minded and discursive treatment than in boots’ (Baudelaire). the delights of intellectual penetration More recently, mock-epic has func- and dismissive speed; the even-paced tioned less as a generical concept and equanimity of epic narration is leavened has instead been limited to the area of with the unmerciful self-assurance of per- language, where it covers most grandilo- sonal satire. In the society the poet quent modes. Here it is a defensive portrays, the trivial attempts to usurp the posture and a necessary guarantee of the position of the extraordinary but manages poet’s desire to establish a plausible only to make its pretensions and unre- relationship between language and a lieved concern with itself extraordinary; contemporary environment; the image is Modernism 145 no longer enhanced by being embedded stylistically analogous (e.g. T. S. Eliot and in a rhetorical syntax allegedly equal to it, William Carlos Williams). A like tech- but rather is given ‘epic’ finality by being nique can be very differently used (e.g. set against voracious and self-perpetuating the use of STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS in dictions. This may account for a cyclical Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William mock-epic like Ted Hughes’s Crow Faulkner) according to different notions (1970), a mock-epic of short and complete of underlying order in life or art. The utterances. post-symbolist stress on the ‘hard’ or See R. P. Bond, English Burlesque impersonal image (see IMAGISM) can Poetry, 1700–50 (1932); J. Dixon Hunt dissolve into the fluidity of Dada or (ed.), Pope – The Rape of the Lock (1968); Surrealism or into romantic personaliza- Ian Jack, Augustan Satire (1952); tion: while the famous ‘classical’ element Gregory G. Colomb, Designs on Truth: in modernism, emanating particularly Poetics of Augustan Mock-epic (1992). from Eliot, its stress on the luminous MHP and CS symbol outside time, can be qualified by a wide variety of political attitudes and Modernism Modernist art is, in most forms of historicism. critical usage, reckoned to be the art of Modernism means the ruffling of the what Harold Rosenburg calls ‘the tradition realistic surface of literature by under- of the new’. It is experimental, formally lying forces; the disturbance may arise, complex, elliptical, contains elements of though, from logics solely aesthetic or decreation as well as creation, and tends to highly social. Hence, modernism still associate notions of the artist’s freedom remains a loose label. We can dispute from realism, materialism, traditional about when it starts (French symbolism; genre and form, with notions of cultural decadence; the break-up of naturalism) apocalypse and disaster. Its social content and when it ends (Kermode distinguishes is characteristically avant-garde or ‘paleo-modernism’ and ‘neo-modernism’ bohemian; hence, specialized. Its notion and hence a degree of continuity through of the artist is of a futurist, not the con- to postwar art). We can regard it as a server of culture but its onward creator; its timebound concept (say 1890–1930) or notion of the audience is that it is foolish a timeless one (including Sterne, Donne, if potentially redeemable: ‘Artists are the Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed a body of major writers (James, Conrad, many will never learn to trust their great Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce, artists’ is Ezra Pound’s definition. Beyond Musil, Faulkner in fiction; Strindberg, art’s specialized enclave, conditions of cri- Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in drama; sis are evident: language awry, cultural Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, cohesion lost, perception pluralized. Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose Further than this, there are several works are aesthetically radical, contain modernisms: an intensifying sequence striking technical innovation, emphasize of movements from Symbolism on spatial or ‘fugal’ as opposed to chronolog- (Post-impressionism, Expressionism, ical form, tend towards ironic modes, and Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism, involve a certain ‘dehumanization of art’ Surrealism) often radically at odds, and (Ortega y Gasset). See also CLASSICISM, sharp differences of cultural interpreta- DADA, EXPRESSIONISM, IMAGISM, SYMBOL, tion coming from writers apparently SURREALISM. 146 Monody

See M. Bradbury and J. Macfarlane appropriate modes and genres are (eds), Modernism (1976); D. Lodge, dominant – comedy belongs to summer, The Modes of Modern Writing (1977); tragedy to autumn, and so on. P.Childs, Modernism (2000); J. Goldman, Frazer’s beliefs that ‘primitive’ Modernism, 1910–45 (2004). societies have literal faith in the efficacy MSB of magic, or adopt totems because they regard themselves as blood relations of Monody See ELEGY. the totemic animal, or are ignorant of

Motif See FORM, THEME. the connection between sexual relations and birth (wittily exploded by Edmund Myth Myths are stories of unascertain- Leach), are checked by ethnographic able origin or authorship accompanying work. Frazer’s ethnocentrism is paralleled or helping to explain religious beliefs. by Frye’s; his cyclical system to contain Often (though not necessarily) their sub- all myths and all literary works as a ject is the exploits of a god or hero, which simultaneous order of the mind projects may be of a fabulous or superhuman proclivities for autonomy and timeless- nature, and which may have instituted a ness derived from SYMBOLISM or perhaps, change in the workings of the universe or in their enthusiastic embrace of universal in the conditions of social life. Critics identical duplication, from the optimism value myth positively because of its of capitalist technology. apparent spontaneity and collectivity, The work of Lévi-Strauss and its expressing some lastingly and generally approach to mythic universals is more satisfying account of human experience. fruitful than Jung’s theories in accounting Equally attractive is the apparent univer- for differences as well as for similarities; sality and timelessness of myth. The STRUCTURALISM does not seek a constant tantalizing recurrence of mythic heroes significance for the same motif, but rather and their exploits, or of natural or animal a variable meaning dependent on its motifs (the moon or water or serpents or relation to other symbolic elements horses) have activated many ‘Keys to All within a mythology. Mythologies’, of which Frazer’s and The assumption operating here is that Jung’s gained most favour with literary myth is a language designed to communi- critics. The work of Northrop Frye, for cate thought, amenable to a reconverted instance, reflected the influence of form of linguistic analysis; the properties Frazer’s attempt to explain myths by common to all myths are not to be sought reference to rituals designed to ensure the at the level of content but at the level of continuing fertility of animal and veg- a structure necessary to all forms of etable life; Frye assigned all myths to an communication. Mythic thought is about appropriate place in the cycle of seasons, insoluble paradoxes of experience, which with their alternation of barrenness, appear as ‘gaps’ the elements of a mythic growth and fruitfulness. Their ubiquitous message are so arranged as to attempt hero is the corn-god, who passes through to mediate the gaps. The essential gap stages of growth, decline and death in is between nature and culture – nature harmony with the turning year. Literature felt as an undifferentiated continuity derives from myth, and literary history and culture as the institution of difference recapitulates the process, as it moves upon which communication (which through a seasonal cycle in which utilizes it to construct binary pairs) Mythos 147 rests; the project of myth is therefore the presence of a myth as a sign of its an impossibility. The primary mythic reincarnation, regardless of context. theme is thus a Rousseauistic version of The structural approach to myth as a the Fall. form of language also makes manageable Myth as a language, an abstract, ‘con- the analysis of secular myth – about ‘race’ tentless’ systems of signs, thus becomes or otherness – as a schematic ordering closer to literature in a different way; in of otherwise unintelligible experience the words of Geoffrey Hartman, ‘litera- similar in its functioning to language. See ture and myth are both mediators rather also SEMIOTICS, STRUCTURALISM. than media’, presupposing an absence – See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough nature, reality, God, eternity. The struc- (1923); Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criti- turalist approach to myth gives strong cism (1957); Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Struc- impetus to fresh thought about the rela- turalism: the Anglo-American adventure’ tions between language and ‘the thing in Jacques Ehrmann (ed.), Structuralism itself’ in imaginative writing. Myth thus (1970), 137–58; E. Nelson Haves and may usefully be approached as an Tanya Hayes (eds), Claude Lévi-Strauss. absence in literature, all the more potent The Anthropologist as Hero (1970); for being so; Romanticism in particular C. G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective thrives on making poetry out of the Unconscious (1934; trans. R. F. C. Hull, longed-for return of the lost gods and 1959); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage myths of the childhood of the race or the Mind (1966), The Raw and the Cooked childhood of the individual (the poetry (1970); Octavio Paz, Claude Lévi-Strauss of Hölderlin is its major expression). (1971); K. K. Ruthven, Myth (1976); Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s ‘The waste land’ Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: and similar works of the same generation Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship also exploit (in a different spirit) the gap (2000). between primeval myth and its contempo- MAH rary parodies and urge a more complex approach than the critical tendency to see Mythos See PLOT. N

Narrative The recounting of a series travel writers like Captain Dampier who of facts or events and the establishing of commonly establish their credentials in some connection between them. The word an Introduction. This key role of the travel is commonly restricted to fiction, ancient narrator has been exploited by satirists epics and romances or modern novels and and expert rhetorical writers like Lucian, short stories. In imaginative literature the or Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. Narrative is nature of the link between the reader and also of crucial importance in the writing the text is crucial, and here the narrator of history: the selection of incidents for becomes important. This may be the recording, the treatment of time and its author speaking in the author’s ‘own effects, and the kind of connection which voice’; the author adopting some role the historian establishes between events. towards the reader, such as an honest The latter is a mark of the cultural context friend, a joking companion or a con- of the writer and is to a degree outside of temptuous enemy; or a ‘character’ or conscious control. ‘characters’ introduced to ‘tell the story’. All historical narrative seems to take Narrative thus has two overlapping up some position at a point in the scale aspects. One is a question of content, the between the demonstration of limited assemblage of material, the nature of the relationships between discrete events, and connections implied. The other is rhetori- the implication of some vast, non-human cal, how the narrative is presented to the design. Psychological determinism and audience. Such questions are in literary Marxist apocalypse are only two of the criticism apt to be considered exclusively many narrative styles. The rhetorical in terms of ‘imaginative’ literature, but an aspect of historical narrative is important, examination of some non-fictional narra- for instance the epigrammatic fastidious- tives illuminate the profound and far- ness of Tacitus: reaching power of narrative. The word is Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem used in Scots law for the recital of facts at appellant: the beginning of a deed or agreement. The When they make a desert, they call it connection between them is their rele- peace: vance to some declaration of intent. There are no complex rhetorical considerations or Churchill’s flourishes. In English apart from the legal solemnity of the doc- literature, one of the most fascinating ument which claims demonstrable truth instances of historical narrative, in its for some state of affairs. Similar kinds of content, selection, discussion of time and narrative, in which convention suppresses rhetorical skill, is Gibbon’s Decline and the power of the narrator, are found in Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). accounts of scientific experiments or Perhaps the particular characteristic of in do-it-yourself books. When we come to the mid-eighteenth-century world is the ‘scientific’ eyewitness reports of journeys chaotic flux of time and experience. In or travels, the narrator becomes of great Gibbon’s vast panorama of fifteen cen- importance, a fact recognized by early turies, the most lasting imaginative effect Narrative 149 on the reader is a sense of the way in moral imagination, and intensifies the which the historian’s own mind imposes a reader’s appreciation of the force and pattern on the bewildering uncertainties ubiquity of obsessional states. Sterne’s of events. Poets and writers of fiction Tristram Shandy (1760–7) questions the have long exploited these characteristics nature of the assumed connections of narrative. A sophisticated example of between narrated events. Our assump- such expertise, pre-dating the novel, is tions about cause and effect, or the rela- found at the beginning of Chaucer’s tion between thought and action, are ‘Troilus and Criseyde’: attacked. Sterne explores another feature of narrative, the fact that there is a For I, that god of Loves servaunts timescale of events and a time-scheme of serve, narration itself, which are not the same. Ne dar to Love, for myn unlyklinesse, Each of the characters has an interior Preyen for speed, al sholde I therefor cinematograph of events and ‘explana- sterve ...[help...even if...I die] tions’ for the connection between them. If this poem was read out by Chaucer to a Tristram Shandy himself, the narrator, courtly audience, the distinction between has a more complicated picture, but still the poet, an individual of worldly accom- presents an ‘omniscient’ view, plishment, and this narrator who does not The narrator or narrators in a novel ‘dar to Love’ must have been a witty ges- may be made puzzled, unreliable or mis- ture, and of importance to the narrative. leading. The early years of the twentieth There is an added complication in the century, in the work of Freud and others, tone, since Chaucer ironically makes the saw the swift development of certain lines narrative voice describe itself in the same of speculation about the self which frag- terms as the Pope did in a papal bull, ‘the mented irretrievably the certainty which servant of the servants of God’. Defoe’s had prevailed that human perceptions Robinson Crusoe (1719) is archetypal were pretty much the same everywhere. both in the fictional development of the Novelists like Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, narrative, and in the rhetoric of the Virginia Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner employment of a narrator, Crusoe him- strained the rhetorical technique of self. A shadowy ‘editor’ appears in the fiction to present a refracted picture of introduction, and the book is thus an early experience in all its complexity as unique example of the framework of ‘journals’ mental pictures. Readers were increas- found in drawers and desks, a popular ingly required to interpret a difficult text, ‘realistic’ device in the next century. As to inspect their own responses as they far as Moll Flanders (1722) is concerned, read. See also CHARACTER, NARRATIVE controversy has long raged about whether STRUCTURE, STRUCTURALISM. the moral doctrine, which Moll as narra- See Erich Auerbach, trans. W. Trask, tor expounds, is ironically intended or Mimesis (1953) which gives one kind of whether Defoe is actually speaking analysis of narrative; Wayne C. Booth, through his character. Richardson’s nov- The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) provides els are rhetorically more complex. The an exhaustive discussion of modes of employment of a series of ‘narrators’ in narration. See also Robert Scholes letters to rehearse accounts of the same and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of events from different points of view Narrative (1966); Michael J. Toolan, enriches Richardson’s embodiment of Narrative: A Critical Linguistic 150 Narrative structure

Introduction (2001); J. Hillis Miller, moral level. As Petrovsky showed in Reading Narrative (1998); H. Porter 1925, the central phases of narrative Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to structure are normally framed by ele- Narrative (2002); Martin McQuillan ments of ‘prologue’ and ‘epilogue’, both (ed.), The Narrative Reader (2000). of these having a general phase (i.e. the AMR total social scene out of which the world of the story arises and to which it reverts) Narrative structure Refers most and a specific phase (i.e. essential prior simply to the shape of a story’s trajectory. and subsequent information about the Every story is projected from a state of lives of the main protagonists). rest by a force of some kind in an arc of Most models of narrative structure rising tension until it reaches the apogee start by assuming a previous state of rest where it begins to fall towards a point of or equilibrium or normality which is impact. This trajectory represents the disturbed by an outside force of some ‘unity of action’ proclaimed by Aristotle kind. The condition initiated by this force to be the essential principle of tragedy, gets worse until it reaches an extreme but also applicable to related genres, such degree. At this point another force comes as the epic. to bear which reverses the process and Poeticians and students of dramatic allows for the gradual resumption of nor- and narrative forms have tended to take mality or the establishment of a new equi- for granted Aristotle’s division of the librium. This homeostatic pattern may action into ‘complication’ and ‘denoue- have either a social or a psychological ment’ (or ‘unravelling’) around a central function, or both. MYTHS in both primitive ‘peripeteia’ or turning point. Modern and modern societies tend to come into literary theorists, strongly influenced by being as highly formalized, even formu- Russian Formalism, have often ignored laic, structures which resolve the society’s this unifying structural principle, either deepest tensions. These may concern following Propp in focussing on the mere social conflicts, ritual taboos or human- chaining of narrative functions, or distin- ity’s struggle to come to terms with its guishing (after Shklovsky) between the physical environment. The narrative underlying material of the story, fabula, structure of the myth allows the real con- and its compositional form, syuzhet or flict to be projected in dramatized form ‘plot’. This distinction usually only high- and resolved via the peripeteia and lights the sequential relations between dénouement, thus providing both a ritual episodes and neglects the essential enactment and a magical relief for the relations of ‘complication’ and ‘denoue- society in question. On the individual ment’, such as their mirror-like opposi- level a similar process may be at work: tion in intensity and result, a patterning tensions are produced by narrative in the which is preserved in the traditional reader/listener which will match in their ‘trajectory’ metaphor. variety and diffusion his residual psycho- The central point around which logical tensions, but which are specific the narrative structure pivots is the enough to be resolved within the context peripeteia, and the nature, placing and of the art experience, thus channelling stylistic marking of this turning-point the residual tensions into a manage- determines the nature of the conflict, able framework and allowing for their whether on a physical, psychological or vicarious relief. Narratology 151

Whatever the social or psychological schools of linguistic theory. Their functions of narrative structure, it must be attention to the intrinsic literary qualities accorded a major role in establishing the of a text, divorced from its originating aesthetic unity which creates pleasure context of production, followed the through the contemplation and enjoyment conviction that human action and com- of purely formal patterning in narrative munication are governed by preset rules art. See also DÉNOUEMENT, FORMALISM, that abide by self-regulating discursive MYTH, NARRATIVE, PLOT, STRUCTURALISM. practices and can therefore be isolated See G. F. Else, Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’: and examined as formal elements of oper- The Argument (1957); L. M. O’Toole, ative systems of meaning. Within any Style, Structure and Interpretation in the story, a narratologist seeks the identifying Russian Short Story (1982); M. Petrovsky, typological characteristics that corre- ‘Morphology of the novella’, Russian spond to a canon of predetermined laws. Poetics in Translation, 10 (1983). Though the events of any given narrative MO’T can be presented in a number of ways (as they occur; in direct or indirect recollec- Narratology Concerns the study of tion; in a deliberate disorder for instance) narrative and proposes the isolation of the narratologist locates what is being characteristics common to all narratives narrated independent of the way in which whether they be literary, filmic, musical it is told and of the narrating conscious- or painterly. It is a theory that seeks to ness. By isolating the core narrated story locate the qualities of narrative that s/he can dispense with the discursive underlie all stories and that enables us to baggage of presentation and the specific recognize modal similarities and distin- vagaries of narratorial control and con- guish between different registers of pre- centrate purely on the events that under- sentation and content. It concerns itself pin the story. This is not primarily a less with the detail of the narrative than vehicle for interpretational explication, with the typological building blocks that indeed the categorical dismemberment of make the conveyance of that narrative the text to reveal, as it were, its moving possible. A starting point for understand- parts, functions less as a determinant of ing narratology is the recognition that meaning and more as an indicator of the many acts of human communication, in a ways that texts are endowed with meaning variety of media, contain elements of con- in general. structive form that coalesce and interact Two significant figures within the in broadly similar ways to make a story field of narratology have been Vladimir sensible to the observer/reader. And, Propp and Gérard Genette. Propp’s because these stories can be transposed Morphology of the Folktale (1928) between modes of presentation (say in explored the Russian fairy story for the adaptation of a novel for the screen), typological consistencies and detected they must contain components that are over thirty recurrent motifs that invariably specific to narrative and are sustained appear in a particular order. He also regardless of the form within which they isolated specific character-types who are consumed. fulfil important roles within the narra- The programmatic analysis of narra- tives. These are: the hero, the villain, the tive developed, perhaps unsurprisingly, princess, her father, the dispatcher, the out of Russian Formalist and Structuralist donor, the helper and the false hero. 152 Nationalism and ethnicity studies

The identification of these constants Functioning of Narrative (1982); Vladimir established an orderliness to narrative that Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928). implied an underlying logic to the stories DL human tell about themselves and about the world around them. Not all critics Nationalism and ethnicity studies agreed with the pre-eminent status of the To some it may seem unnecessary to narrated, however. Influentially, Genette develop a field of study into nations and stressed the importance of the way in nationalism. Nations present themselves which the events of a story are unfolded. as immemorial communities, their histo- For him, the attention on the narrated ries arching back into the mists of time; tended to marginalize intriguing varia- they represent the natural divisions of tions in the process of recounting and humankind. To study them would perhaps unveiling those narrated components. His involve nothing more than delineating the method of analysis focussed more closely distinctive features of that community, or on the relationship between the text and assembling its folklore; for such people – the story that it contained and, in particu- nationalists – there is no need, however, lar, on the devices brought to bear on the for analysis or explication. And yet, telling to elucidate, obfuscate or prob- despite their best efforts, nationalists have lematize the process of revelation. This failed convincingly to present nationhood line of narratological criticism locates as a self-evident truth that requires no and interlinks specific instances of pro- further explanation. The phenomenon of lepsis, analepsis, ellipsis, summary, repe- nations and nationalism has attracted con- tition and others as a framework of siderable scholarly and critical interest, structural embedding that bears a produc- particularly, in the latter decades of the tive relation to the material that consti- twentieth century. tutes the narrated story. Contrary to the nationalists’ claims, it The most illuminating branch of is observable that nations represent a narratology is that which considers the historical innovation in the organization equal importance of the narrated and the of human social life. All critical studies of discursive manner of narration. This nationalism, beginning in the nineteenth allows readers to establish distinctions century with the philosopher Ernest between narrative genera through the Renan and the historian Lord Acton, have identification of consistent features whilst sought to analyse and explain the emer- also taking account of the formal and gence of nations historically, which is to contextual networks within which the nar- say, as the product of historical forces rative as a whole operates. In this way, it that determined them, not as the expres- is possible to draw connections between sion of some ‘essence’. Renan, in fact, the interpretive freight of a text and its prefigures, albeit it hesitantly, some of the stylistic and formal qualities in a manner features of nationalism studies that have that is neither reductively mechanical nor emerged in the wake of post-structuralism vaguely impressionistic. and other advances in cultural theory that See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, propose nations to be cultural constructs Text (1977); Gérard Genette, Narrative that narrativize themselves into being. Discourse (1972); Claude Lévi-Strauss, In particular, his notion of the nation Structural Anthropology (1958); Gerald being the product of a daily plebiscite Prince, Narratology: The Form and which entails a selective organization Nationalism and ethnicity studies 153 of the community’s collective memory the new socio-political problems posed foreshadows, in some general respects, by the transformation of social reality in Benedict Anderson’s pathbreaking modernity. The strongest advocate of this conceptualization of nations as ‘imagined position has been Ernest Gellner. For him, communities’. nations are sociologically necessary There is a loose but nevertheless solid correlates to objective macroscopic trans- consensus amongst scholars that nations formations in social life. In modernity, are modern phenomena but there is strong society is mobile – both socially and disagreement concerning the nature of geographically – and constantly so; this their emergence and development. Two requires the development of a standard- broad groups can be identified: those who ized means of communication, that is, believe that nations constitute some form ‘context-free’ since contexts are con- of continuity from prior ethnic groups stantly changing in a mobile society; a (ethnicists), and those who believe that centralized education system results and nations are entirely new formations, institutionalizes a vernacular language. fashioned out of scraps of existing cul- The result is ‘social entropy’, or cultural tural material, but nevertheless, constitut- homogenization, and nationalism is an ing a decisive break with older forms of expression of this phenomenon. This community (modernists). sociological determinism is attenuated One of the foremost ethnicists is somewhat in the work of other mod- Anthony Smith, who argues that nations ernists, in particular Benedict Anderson, are anchored in pre-existing cultural the force of whose contribution was to communities called ethnies. These are reframe the discussion in terms of ideol- more or less culturally homogeneous, ogy and consciousness. In suggesting that consisting of a ‘myth-symbol complex’ nations are ‘imagined’, he draws attention that forms a fund of shared historical not only to the idea that ‘nation-ness, as meanings to which every person in the well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts ethnie has access, which bonds ‘a people’ of a particular kind’, but also to the role together, and which ties that people to a of culture in politics because, to be more ‘historical territory or homeland’ (Smith precise, a nation is an ‘imagined political 1991: 10–15). The ethnie thus places community’ (Anderson). limits on the scope and nature of the Both ethnicists and modernists concur transformations that convert premodern that culture is a vital aspect of nationalism communities into modern nations. In and nationhood. Indeed, this reflects both particular, the nation is seen as modern the fact that nationalism is perhaps one mainly inasmuch as ‘the era of national- of the earliest forms of cultural politics, ism succeeded in uniting the community and that in modernity the question of on a new, political basis’ (Hutchinson). identity has emerged as a key site of The modernists, on the other hand, are social and political contestation and nego- sceptical of the bonds between modern tiation. It is not surprising, therefore, that national cultures and those premodern studies of ‘ethnicity’ – the signifier of a elements that can be detected in them. cultural identity distinct from ‘race’ on They take a more instrumentalist attitude the one hand, and nation on the other – to the formation of national identity, have emerged in the context of the visible arguing that nationalists refashion ‘cul- heterogenization of nations following ture’ as a response in the cultural field to large-scale postwar immigrations from 154 Naturalism the Third World. Ethnicity figures as part was directed to all peoples of the of the debates over multiculturalism, African diaspora, whether in Africa, the debates which take place in a political Caribbean, America or Europe. Indeed, arena in which the nation-state remains négritude had been influenced heavily by dominant but where the mask of a homo- transatlantic currents that had made geneous national culture has slipped. an impact in prewar Paris, such as the See also NÉGRITUDE, POSTCOLONIALISM, Harlem Renaissance, and earlier American HYBRIDITY. race activists and thinkers, such as See Benedict Anderson, Imagined W. E. DuBois. In turn, négritude became Communities: Reflections on the Origin popular in America and the Caribbean as and Spread of Nationalism (1983); Ernest well as in Africa and Europe so the move- Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983); ment’s trajectory illuminates the diasporic John Hutchinson, Modern Nationalism circulation of ideas and cultures theorized (1994); Anthony Smith, Theories of by Paul Gilroy as ‘the Black Atlantic’. Nationalism (1971), National Identity Nevertheless, it also had a profound (1991). impact on nationalist struggles in Africa. AM If this seems somewhat paradoxical, it can be added that this was due to the fact Naturalism See REALISM. that négritude mobilized many of the Négritude A theory of the uniquely discursive tropes and structures of nation- valuable potential of black African peo- alist discourse, particularly essentialism ples and cultures and was, for a period and nativism. after the Second World War, very influen- Put simply, the discourse of négritude tial amongst black intellectuals, artists, celebrates what European colonial dis- activists and politicians who were con- courses of race had identified with Africa ducting anti-colonial or anti-racist strug- and Africans only in terms of a lack. gles. It is today most closely identified Africans lacked civilization and culture; with two African statesmen-intellectuals, they lacked intelligence; they lacked Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, who sensibility and so on. At the heart of met as students in Paris in the 1930s and, négritude is, therefore, a concern with in response to the racism they encoun- ‘race’, but its distinctiveness lay in the tered, began to formulate and disseminate ways in which this racial foundation was ideas that celebrated black culture and extended and developed to encompass an personalities. This was in opposition to entire ‘way of life’ – intellectual, cultural, the dominant colonial discourses that emotional, physical – that all black perceived Africa as lacking in civilization peoples shared. This is the essentialist and culture, and of Africans as primitive aspect of négritude. Black people, argued savages. Senghor, looked at and behaved in the As can be inferred from the different world in a different way to non-Africans: backgrounds of its two principal propo- their relationship to the world around nents (Césaire was from the French them was unique and this uniqueness Caribbean colony of Martinique, whilst should be celebrated on its own terms, not Senghor was from the African colony of in relation to European and white values Senegal), it was from the outset a pan- and mores. Négritude, like other nativist national movement, and though it identi- and essentialist theories of identity, is fied itself closely with Africa, its message therefore relativist in its outlook. No one New criticism 155 standard of judgement exists by which its own desire for a pan-national different cultures and peoples can be identification across national and cultural measured. boundaries because it embedded an inclu- From this theoretical foundation, the sion/exclusion logic in the very heart of discourse of négritude develops through its thinking. This separatism has proved a series of binary comparisons between less than successful historically, and given ‘Africans’ and (white) Europeans. Instead Senghor’s and Césaire’s humanist and of ‘civilization’, Senghor validates the universalist aspirations that négritude African proximity to ‘nature’; instead of would be the first step in the emancipa- promoting intellect, he espouses the tion of all peoples, has also proved African’s intuitiveness; instead of advo- something of a failure on its own terms. cating abstract rationalism he indicates See also NATIONALISM AND ETHNICITY the more immediate sensuousness of the STUDIES, ORIENTALISM. African’s physical experience of life. See B. E. Jack, Négritude and Literary Ironically, these merely invert the terms Criticism: The History and Theory of of colonial discourse while keeping its ‘Negro-African’ Literature in French structure intact: it was part of the com- (1996); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: mon sense of European racism that Modernity and Double Consciousness Africans were ‘closer to nature’; that they (1993); Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of were ‘physical’ (and over-sexual); that Orient (1986). they were intuitive (read: irrational); and AM that they were not capable of intellectual Neo-Aristotelianism See CHICAGO pursuits. All of these constituted the basis CRITICS. for European claims that Africans were ‘savages’. Thus, rather than challenging Neo-classicism See CLASSIC, DECORUM, this claim, Senghor’s definition of IMITATION. négritude may in fact have reinforced it. Neo-Platonism See PLATONISM. It is only fair to add that Césaire’s vision of négritude differed somewhat New criticism The term new criticism, from Senghor’s; probably because of his originally coined by J. E. Spingarn in location away from Africa. His was an 1910 in protest against the pedantry of the imaginative rather than a concrete, lived American academic scene (see Creative relationship to Africa and so he was more Criticism, 1917) is now used to refer ambivalent in his espousal of essential- specifically to the work of the American ism. Césaire grounded his discourse in critics associated with the programme the historically shared black experience announced in John Crowe Ransom’s book of suffering, whether in Africa, the The New Criticism (1941), notably Caribbean, America or in Europe. His Cleanth Brooks (The Well Wrought Urn, négritude, whilst still deploying the 1947), R. P. Blackmur (Language as binaries of racial thought, is less clear- Gesture, 1952), Allen Tate (Collected cut, more nuanced, more problematic. Essays, 1959) and Robert Penn Warren Indeed, this binarism was one of the (Selected Essays, 1964). Ransom dis- reasons that négritude was so spectacu- covered the stimulus for this movement larly successful and is now out of favour. in T. S. Eliot’s urging of a new spirit It encouraged and fed the black separatist of objectivity in criticism, and in movements in America, but also unhinged I. A. Richards’s attempt to provide a 156 New criticism scientific terminology for describing narrowly prescriptive view of poetic poetic effect. The fundamental effort was form – such as Brooks’s paradox – and to free criticism from the impressionism a concentration on the rhetorical features and emotionalism of the amateur tradition of certain kinds of complex, highly con- and the intentionalism of literary-historical centrated poetry. One consequence was scholarship (see EFFECT and INTENTION), a rewriting of literary history; the poetry and to propose an aesthetic that would of the early-seventeenth century replaced consider poetry ‘primarily as poetry and that of the nineteenth in critical popular- not another thing’ (Eliot). Richards’s ity. Another was a narrowing of descrip- development of Romantic theories of tive procedures; the axiom that the poem form as the systemization and harmoniz- as an organization of language was the ing of elements in poetry, with its idea of only determinant of the critical relevance the poem as a complex activity of mean- of external evidence was sometimes ing, inspired many of the key terms and modified into meaningless assertions of concepts of the new criticism: ambiguity, the ‘autonomy’ of poems, their explicabil- irony, paradox, tension, gesture, etc. ity without any external reference or However, Richards’s attempt to locate this knowledge. complexity in the psychological effects of The larger tradition of descriptive poetry, rather than in the linguistic struc- criticism in England and America derived ture of the work, had failed to produce its assumptions about language in litera- immediately useful descriptive attitudes ture from the later Richards of Philosophy and terminology. The major stimulus here of Rhetoric (1936), and Empson. It iden- probably came from his pupil William tified poetry not as a kind of language Empson, whose determination to prove but as a use of language, and therefore poetry capable of explanation led to a declared its essential continuity with all brilliantly imaginative account of its language and with culture; it rejected verbal complexity (see ANALYSIS). His distinctions of language function along demonstration that poetic effect often emotive/descriptive lines, and asserted a arose from a rich exploitation of the concept of ‘meaning’ as the result of the references and relationships inherent in total linguistic activity of words in a con- language stood behind the new critical text (see ANALYSIS). And it rested on the disposition to regard all literary works conviction that true descriptive criticism as structures of language, and to be must be ultimately a criticism of literature relatively indifferent to concepts like as organized language, because it is only GENRE, CHARACTER or PLOT. as language that the work has an objective However, much of the American new existence at all. criticism took its ideas about language not See Roger Fowler and Peter Mercer, from Empson but from the semantic work ‘Criticism and the language of literature’, of Richards himself. His identification of Style 3 (1969), 45–72; reprinted in poetry as an example of the emotive use Fowler, The Languages of Literature of language, in contrast to the scientific (1971); Stanley Edgar Hyman, The use, perpetuated Romantic thought/ Armed Vision (1947, rev. edn 1955); feeling dualisms, and encouraged ‘new Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for critics’ to conceive of poetry as a special Poetry (1956); Brian Lee, ‘The New kind of language. This fallacy, attacked Criticism and the language of poetry’ in by the CHICAGO CRITICS, often led to a Roger Fowler (ed.), Essays on Style and Novel 157

Language (1966); Walter Gutton, and reliable narrators. The circumstantial Modern American Criticism (1963); and specific elements, and the engrained W. K. Wimsatt, Jr and Cleanth Brooks, scepticism (Ian Watt’s ‘realism of presen- Literary Criticism, A Short History tation’ and ‘realism of assessment’, The (1957); D. Robey, ‘Anglo-American New Rise of the Novel, 1957), easily merge Criticism’ in A. Jefferson and D. Robey here into self-conscious fictiveness, con- (eds), Modern Literary Theory (1982); stituents of the novel ever since. Though T. Eagleton, Literary Theory: An touching on reportage and history at one Introduction (1983); Mark Jancovich, The extreme, taking structure from non- Cultural Politics of the New Criticism fictional prose forms ( journalism, history, (1993); A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand sociology), the novel touches on formal- and Lawrence Rainey (eds), The ism at its other extreme, taking structure Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: from myth, and symbolic or linguistic Modernism and New Criticism (2000). coherence. Many classic debates about PM fiction (novel versus romance in the nine- teenth century; life-novel versus art-novel Novel Of the three main kinds of at the turn of the century; ‘journalistic’ literature (poetry, drama, novel), the novel versus ‘crystalline’ in the mid-twentieth is the last to evolve and the hardest to century) cover this spectrum. So does define, for reasons suggested in the name. every individual novel. Lacking the ‘A fiction in prose of a certain extent’: metrical-typographical and generic con- this economical definition by a French ventions of most poetry, and the theatre- critic begs more questions than it audience presentation of most drama, and answers. There are many such fictions using the most familiar, open and decon- predating the emergence of the species as ventionalized form of written language, a recognizable type: usually dated from prose novels are open to a wide variety of Don Quixote (1605–15), and in England registers, structures, typologies. This from either the seventeenth century range an adequate critical definition must (Aphra Behn) or the early-eighteenth cover too. century (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, The fascination of the novel is that, Sterne), and associated with the rise of because of its representational dimension, prose as an empirical, sceptical instru- it raises the problem of the nature of a ment for probing familiar environments. fiction at a point very near to familiar, This links the novel with realism and unfictionalized versions of reality. The a-genericism; Fielding set it up as a propensity of novels towards ‘giving to mock-species in calling it a ‘comic epic the imaginary the formal guarantee of the poem in prose’, intending to suggest its real’, their dependence on recognition low (or else mock-heroic) style, its width and their relative formal contingency, are of social range and bagginess of structure, essential features; though clearly ‘reality’ its contingency and episodic design. is not a stable object. These features have The self-sceptical element is reinforced often led critics to see it as a basically by Fielding’s willingness to parody referential or mimetic species. Its social Richardson, and then Sterne’s to flout the density and range, its following of loose emergent conventions of the species in and lifelike sequences, are valid objects Tristram Shandy (1760–7), which mocks of critical attention, so long as we remem- beginnings, middles and ends; chronicity ber that realism is an imaginative creation 158 Novel and that the term itself encourages ‘progressive’ view of self and history. confusion (cf. REALISM). One consequence Such criticism tends to assume that of the term was the growth of a critical MODERNISM constitutes a crisis of the method based on ‘plot’, ‘character’, species; hence, it often concludes in ‘description’, etc. (i.e. mimetic assump- prophecies of the imminent death of tions); against this, there developed a the novel. This helps demonstrate that critical tradition of post-Jamesian fic- versions of reality change over time, and tional theory, stressing other essential helps explain certain features of novel- structuring features: ‘point of view’, development: the dominance of the form ‘paradox’, ‘symbol’, ‘tension’, and what at its most realistic in the nineteenth Mark Schorer calls ‘technique as discov- century, and the later emergence of ery’, a poetic emphasizing means of naturalism, certain types of fictional presentation rather than objects of imita- modernism, the anti-novel. It tends, tion. What seems apparent is that, though however, to encourage the view that the both approaches stress primary features novel of morals-and-manners (see Lionel of novels, each often best serves discus- Trilling, ‘Manners, morals, and the sion of the kind of fiction contemporary novel’, The Liberal imagination, 1961) is with it: the former tends to get us closer to the prototypical novel, hardly accurate if nineteenth-century realistic fiction, the we take a broad international perspective; latter to twentieth-century neo-symbolist to see ‘fabulation’ as either aberrant or fiction. The latter is the more sophisti- a crisis-symptom (cf. FICTION); often cated, reminding us that all fictions are to undervalue contemporary production. makings, verbal constructs; its weakness Reminding us that realism is a conven- is that it tends to ascribe all primary struc- tion, it gives that convention a historic- ture in fiction to rhetorical and linguistic cultural rather than a creative explanation. features, rather than to the unfolding of Like much stylistic history, it assumes orders perceived in psychology, experi- inevitability and undervalues the startling ence or society (cf. STRUCTURE). plurality of the novel-form, its remarkable The novel, being an ‘institution’ of endurance in many different cultural modern society particularly exposed to circumstances. A recent trend in novel- the contingency of life and prevailing criticism has seen its development along- structures of perception (Harry Levin, side that of colonialism, beginning with The Gates of Horn, 1963), has passed the period of imperial incursions and through marked stages of development; reaching its apogee at the imperial zenuth this has encouraged historicist criticism. of the late nineteenth century. It has been called the ‘burgher epic’; See also CHARACTER, FICTION, identified with the social eminence of its NARRATIVE, PLOT. main reading public, the bourgeoisie; See Miriam Allott (ed.), Novelists on seen as a manifestation of its perception the Novel (1959); Erich Auerbach, trans. of reality, the secular, material but moral- W. Trask, Mimesis (1953); Wayne C. ized reality of a particular class; linked Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961); with its view of the rounded, individuated Malcolm Bradbury, What is a Novel? human character in sequential moral (1969); Henry James in R. P. Blackmur growth; tied in with particular notions (ed.), The Art of the Novel (1934); David of cause-and-effect and chronological Lodge, Language of Fiction (1966); sequence in character and society, a Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957); Novel 159

R. Scholes and R. Kellogg, The Nature of Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Narrative (1966); Terry Eagleton, The Fiction (1978); U. Eco, The Role of the English Novel: An Intro-duction (2004); Reader (1979); G. Genette, Narrative Jesse Matz, The Modern Novel (2004); Discourse (1980); W. Iser, The Implied Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Reader (1974), The Act of Reading (1978); Novel (2001); Dorothy Hale (ed.), An F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Anthology of Criticism and Theory Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act 1900–2000: The Novel (2004). (1981); G. Prince, Narratology: The Form Theoretical discussions of various and Functioning of Narrative (1982); aspects of the novel are plentiful. See, H. Ruthrof, The Reader’s Construction of for example, M. Bloomfield (ed.), The Narrative (1981); Firdous Azim, The Interpretation of Narrative (1970); Colonial Rise of the Novel (1993). D. Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative MSB O

Objective correlative Popularized by have thought it’. For two comprehensive T. S. Eliot (who later admitted his aston- and opposing views of the problem see: ishment at its success) in 1919 to explain J. Press, The Chequer’d Shade (1958); his dissatisfaction with Hamlet: J. Sparrow, Sense and Poetry (1934); see also G. Steiner, ‘On difficulty’ in his On The only way of expressing emotion Difficulty and Other Essays (1978); Allon in the form of art is by finding an White, Uses of Obscurity: Fiction of Early ‘objective correlative’; in other words, Modernism (1981). a set of objects, a situation, a chain of CS events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that Ode In English, a much-practised form when the external facts...are given, of lyric poetry from the time of Ben the emotion is immediately evoked. Jonson to that of Tennyson, with sporadic The application to Hamlet now seems modern revivals. The most elevated and fanciful, but as the technical procedure in complicated species of lyric, the ode was ‘pure poetry’ the general formula is plau- often written to celebrate notable public sible. The most serious omission is the occasions or universal themes. It attracted creative contribution of the unconscious an exalted diction and free metrical mind. Eliseo Vivas criticized the concept experimentation, highly formalized in detail in Creation and Discovery stanza-types rather removed from the (1955), arguing that a writer only dis- main currents of English versification. covers a particular emotion to express in The exponents of this genre were usually the act of composition. See T. S. Eliot, explicitly conscious of their classical Hamlet (1919) in Selected Essays models, hence, the strangeness of the (3rd edn, 1951), p. 145. verse forms: many poets attempted to render in English metrical patterns Obscurity A charge levelled at much which were natural only in terms of the experimental twentieth-century poetry, sound-structure of Greek. and some prose. It is perhaps most prof- The classical models are Pindar itable to think of obscurity as a term (522–442? BC) in Greek and Horace descriptive of a modern poetic rhetoric of (65–8 BC) in Latin. Although Horace was ellipsis, metaphor, typographic enter- much more familiar to the English, the prise, as a convention for accuracy and Pindaric ode interested poets more, authenticity; not a classical accuracy because it was metrically highly distinc- derived from a constant correction and tive. Pindar’s odes (derived from choral reapplication of ready-authenticated lyrics in drama) were composed to be material, but an accuracy of the unimagin- chanted to music by a dancing chorus. able, authentic because unchallengeable; The demands of music and dance resulted not ‘nobody else has thought this therefore in a highly elaborate stanzaic structure: I must have thought it’ but ‘nobody else this type of ode was built on a sequence of could have thought this therefore I must sections called strophe, antistrophe and Ode 161 epode, the sections constructed from lines Gray (1716–71) continued the Pindaric of varying length. Such a complicated fashion; William Cowper (1731–1800) verse-form provided a stimulating chal- favoured the less spectacular, more quietly lenge to English metrists. The Pindaric serious, Horatian manner. Towards the end ode was ‘occasional’, that is to say, com- of the eighteenth century, burlesques of posed for a specific and important public the ode began to appear, but the genre event (e.g. to honour the victors in Greek was taken over by the Romantics and athletic games). The Horatian ode, though employed in several notable lyric poems sometimes public, was frequently per- on political, emotional and aesthetic sonal and reflective. It shared the solem- themes: Wordsworth’s elaborate ode, nity and dignity of the Pindaric ode, but ‘Intimations of Immortality’ (1803, pub- was less of a metrist’s virtuoso-piece. Its lished 1807) and the odes of Keats contribution to English poetry was a matter published in 1820 (‘Nightingale’, ‘Psyche’, of tone and feeling, rather than of technical ‘Grecian Urn’, ‘Autumn’, ‘Melancholy’) design. are the best-remembered examples in this The English ode begins with Ben period, highly philosophical, intense, yet Jonson and rises in esteem through the controlled. Coleridge (‘France’, period of neo-classicism, culminating in ‘Dejection’) and Shelley (‘West Wind’, some of the more exalted poems of the ‘Liberty’, ‘Naples’ – the last employing Romantics and then surviving in public an extraordinarily complicated metrical Victorian verse. In 1629 appeared arrangement with some claims to Greek Jonson’s ‘Ode to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir heritage) also practised the form. H. Morison’, a conscious attempt to pro- Although exceptionally diverse in its vide an exact English equivalent for the structural patterns, the ode was sustained complicated stanza forms of Pindar; as a poetic ideal for over two centuries of Milton’s ‘On the morning of Christ’s English verse. Its dignity, classical pedi- nativity’, written in the same year, though gree and technical potentialities endeared not Pindaric in the same way, exercises an it to the Augustans; its intensity and philo- extremely complex metrical pattern. The sophical pretensions made it suitable for Horatian model is represented in the the most exalted Romantic verse. Since the ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return Romantic era it has declined in fortune, from Ireland’ by Milton’s younger con- become the prerogative of poets laureate temporary Andrew Marvell. In 1656, and of other writers given to ceremonious Abraham Cowley’s collection Miscellanies public utterance. It used to be the mode for made available a number of adaptations metrical experimentation (the classical as well as imitations of Pindar, and set a models warranting departure from estab- fashion for a type of free Pindaric ode lished English prosodies) but the radical which was to become popular with the experimentalism of Europe and America in Augustans. Three odes of Dryden were the twentieth century had no need for such also influential: two of them, odes for an outmoded basis for metrical licence. St Cecilia’s Day (1687 and 1697, the See John Heath-Stubbs, The Ode second entitled ‘Alexander’s feast’), (1969); Norman Maclean, ‘From action honoured the patron saint of music and to image: theories of the lyric in the returned to Pindar at the same time, for eighteenth century’ in R. S. Crane, Critics they were designed to be set to music. and Criticism (1952); Carol Maddison, William Collins (1721–59) and Thomas Apollo and the Nine, A History of the 162 Onomatopoeia

Ode (1960); Robert Shafter, The English neutral term ‘structure’ which has all the Ode to 1660 (1918); George N. Shuster, advantages and none of the disadvantages The English Ode from Milton to Keats of the older, Romantic term. See also (1940, reprinted 1964); Paul H. Fry, The FORM, LANGUAGE, STRUCTURE. Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (1980). See George Rousseau, Organic Form RGF (1972); Gary Day, Re-reading Leavis: ‘Culture’ and Literary Criticism (1996). Onomatopoeia See TEXTURE. On organic doctrine in criticism, see Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Oral composition See EPIC. Poetry (1956). See also Anne Cluysenaar, Organic The notion of organic form in Introduction to Literary Stylistics (1976); literature (bequeathed to Modern Anglo- Q. S. Tong, Reconstructing Romanticism: American criticism by Coleridge, who Organic Theory Revisited (1997). referred to it constantly) appealed to a AAAC biological analogy which can be mislead- ing as well as revealing. Its revealing Orientalism In modern critical theory, aspect was the emphasis it placed on the the term Orientalism was popularized by overall structure of the work and, conse- Edward Said’s book of the same name, quently, on the relationship of the parts which has subsequently been cited as one and aspects to each other and to the of the formative moments in the develop- whole. The whole was thought of as being ment of post-colonial studies. Said draws ‘more than the sum of its parts’ in the on Foucault’s conceptualization of dis- sense that the whole provides impressions course as a semantic field which struc- which cannot be traced back to the parts tures and limits what is thinkable and in isolation. The validity of this notion, as sayable about a particular object. In Said’s applied to the non-biological world of art, case, that object is the ‘Orient’. It is the receives support from perceptual psychol- discourse about the Orient that constructs ogy. Visual impressions of length, colour, its meaning and so what is important for texture, prominence and so forth can be Said is not the ‘truth’ of the discourse in altered not by altering the parts that some correspondence with an actual appear to produce them, but merely the Orient but rather the internal consistency context in which those parts function. of the discourse of Orientalism. It is in A distinct use of ‘organic form’ this sense that Orientalism ‘produces’ the opposed organic (irregular, unique) forms Orient. The basic structuring principle of to inorganic (regular, traditional) forms. Orientalism is ‘an ontological and epi- This generally involved an evaluative stemological distinction made between preference for organic (living, natural) as “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the against inorganic (mechanical, artificial), Occident” ’ (Said). Related to this primary the central assumption being that organic binary are a series of subsequent binary forms grow from the meaning and divisions that adhere to one term or the embody it while inorganic forms pre-exist other. Thus, whilst rational thought is asso- and therefore act as a straitjacket to mean- ciated – whether explicitly or indirectly – ings. This use of the term ignored the fact with ‘the Occident’, its opposite is seen as that both ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ forms characteristic of ‘the Orient’; whilst the can be relevantly or irrelevantly used. The Occident is seen as masculine, the Orient term was largely eclipsed by the more is feminized and so on. Consequently, Orientalism 163

Orientalism is a discourse that produces specialized scholarship on ‘the Orient’ that the ‘Orient’ as Europe’s Other and in so professes to be objective and disinterested. doing enables Europe to fashion a sense Said attacks such claims as symptomatic of of its own identity. Orientalism therefore the collusion of such scholarship in the not only produces ‘the Orient’ but also material processes of colonial power and ‘Europe’ too. its justification. Knowledge is not con- Orientalism sets a limit on European ceived as existing in a rarefied world of thinking about the ‘Orient’ because it ideas but rather is profoundly implicated in constitutes the sum of possibilities open a complex network of worldly affiliations to any European thinking about ‘the that serve the interests of colonial and Orient’. The Orient exists as a set of imperial powers. Here Said draws not only already available and already spoken on Foucault but also Antonio Gramsci, ideas that permeate through civil society whose conceptualization of hegemony has in a wide range of texts – novels, plays, shaped much critical thinking on the rela- economic theorems, political treatises, tionship of culture to power. Gramsci’s scholarly monographs, travel diaries, ideas helped Said to demonstrate how administrative manuals, and so on – and colonial power is justified and maintained the institutions that produce them. This not only by raw power and naked aggres- archive of knowledge is available to all sion based on technological superiority and European – and in due course, non- military might but also by the ‘soft’ power European – writers, philosophers, admin- of ideology. This power is both material istrators, politicians and suchlike, and sets and visible on the one hand, and invisible their thinking about the Orient along cer- and unconscious on the other; its efficacy tain paths that achieve coherence in the lies in what Ngugi wa Thiongo calls ‘colo- context of the discourse as a whole. This nizing the mind’ so that both colonizer is what Said means when he talks about and colonized think of the assumptions Orientalism involving a ‘textual attitude’ encoded in Orientalism as natural, to the world. For even those with first- inevitable and uncontestable (Ngugi). hand experience of the Orient, their expe- Said has, however, been criticized by riences will in some measure be filtered many for appearing to suggest Orientalism through what they read about it – and what is a homogenous and monolithic dis- they read will inevitably be shaped by course within which there is no room Orientalist discourse. The implication of for agency, difference or dissent. Like this is that every European text that deals Foucault, he has been charged with with the Orient – whether directly or indi- disabling those who wish to contest exist- rectly, consciously or unconsciously – will ing power structures. Nevertheless, post- be implicated in Orientalism. colonial studies have developed, refined The other side of Said’s theorization of and nuanced his arguments rather than Orientalism is its link to colonialism. rejected them. Their value persists in the Orientalism, as a body of ideas about present as global politics continues to be an ‘Orient’, is, he argues, put into the ser- shaped by talk of a ‘clash of civilizations’ vice of power and gives rise to a hege- between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’. As such, mony that both produces and in turn Orientalism remains one of the pivotal justifies European supremacy. Here he conceptual terms in modern critical rejects one of the existing definitions of theory. See also POSTCOLONIALISM, the term ‘orientalism’, which referred to DISCOURSE, EUROCENTRISM. 164 Originality

See Ngugi wa Thiongo, De-colonising Francois Meltzer, Hot Property: The the Mind: The Politics of Language in Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality African Literature (1981); Edward Said, (1994). Orientalism (1978); Ziauddin Sardar, EJB Orientalism (1999). Ostranenie See FORMALISM. AM Other, the In its everyday usage, the Originality term ‘other’ is seemingly unproblematic. An Original may be said to be of a We use it to designate that which is vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously different – other than – ourselves or the from the vital root of Genius; it grows, myriad of established norms and practices it is not made: Imitations are often a that govern our lives. Yet, in acknowledg- sort of Manufacture wrought up by ing the interdependence of self and other, those Mechanics, Art and Labour, out norm and deviation, the preceding sen- of pre-existent materials not their own. tence already begins to hint at the under- (Edward Young) lying complexity of this concept and the impossibility of offering a stable defini- The eighteenth-century notion of origi- tion that does not evoke its antithesis. It is nality rests on an analogy between artistic important to recognize, however, that the and natural creation, on a cult of individ- other is not, in any simple way, the direct ualism and self-expression and, later, a opposite of the self. Rather, the two exist realization that nature, indeed all creativ- in a complex relation that undermines ity, is evolutionary. Three distinct, though any simplistic conception of self/other, often conflated, senses of ‘originality’ are inside/outside or centre/margin. Nor is discernible: a psychological theory about the other a stable or unchanging entity. the creative act; a theory concerning the Rather, it is best thought of as a site or proper function of art in society; an location upon which we project all the aesthetic theory. qualities that we – as individual subjects, The third, aesthetic, sense of original- social groups or even nations – most fear, ity was the most important for twentieth- or dislike, about ourselves. In other century critics. If an original work is so words, the other is a construct. It is, more- because each aspect contributes to the over, a historically and culturally specific internal economy of the whole and is not construction that is determined by the dis- there only for external reasons, then ‘orig- cursive practices that shape us into what inal’ is virtually synonymous with ‘good’. we are (see DISCOURSE). Thus, rather than Such a work is original irrespective of representing the real and diverse qualities whether it is conventional or not. If, how- of any given group or entity, such con- ever, a work is original because it breaks structions reflect the values and norms of with convention or, more radically, with the individual or group that constructs it. tradition, originality in this sense is not an As the locus of qualities that threaten evaluative but a descriptive term. See also our sense of who we are, the concept of AUTHOR, CREATION. the other plays a key role in the formation See Ezra Pound, Make It New (1934); of our identity, or subjectivity. In part, we Edward Young, Conjectures of Original consolidate our sense of self by distin- Composition (1759, reprinted 1966); guishing ourselves from those that are Other 165 different, or other than, ourselves. In other radical re-interpretation of Freud, Lacan words, the concept of ‘me’ is predicated argues that the self is not simply divided upon what is ‘not-me’. Daphne Du by the presence of an other but actually is Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) offers us a an other. According to Lacan, the child clear example of how this process works. first begins to see itself as an autonomous In this novel, the unnamed narrator (her being during the MIRROR STAGE when it lack of a proper name immediately sig- encounters an image of wholeness and nals the lack of a self-sufficient identity) coherence reflected back to itself from constructs a sense of self by opposing a mirror or the people around it. Yet, herself to the eponymous Rebecca. while this identification with what is Effectively, she seems to say to herself: ‘I both ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ lends the child an am what I am because I am not she’. Both illusory sense of self, it also explodes any feared and admired, Rebecca is clearly simple notion of an autonomous, self- constructed as the other of the nameless same identity. protagonist. Yet, through a process of In the same way that individual imaginative identification, the boundaries subjects are defined through their rela- between self and other begin to blur until tionship to their others, so too are social this protagonist, at least temporarily, groups, gender, race and nation. In this becomes Rebecca. As this example sug- respect, it is essential to recognize that gests, the relationship between self and the ‘opposition’ between self and other other is complex, paradoxical and contra- is never neutral but always hierarchical. dictory. If the self is predicated on the In other words, the self – whether it is existence of an other, this other can no conceived as male, white, European or longer be conceived as simply external or heterosexual – is constructed as the positive marginal. Thus, while delineating the term. Conversely, the other – be it female, boundaries of selfhood, the notion of the black, non-European or homosexual – is other simultaneously destabilizes them. constructed as its negative reflection. This This complex relationship between reflection, in turn, helps to consolidate self and other lies at the heart of much the (superior) identity of those responsi- psychoanalytic theory, including that of ble for its construction (see ORIENTALISM). Sigmund Freud and the French post- Moreover, such constructions are inti- structuralist psychoanalyst, Jacques mately bound up with questions of power. Lacan. According to Freud, each of us is Once the other has been constructed as dominated by an unconscious that we can inferior, this construction may be used, never know or control. This unconscious not only to justify certain material prac- is, precisely, the other of conscious- tices (colonization, sexual inequality, ness and rational thought; every self is ‘queer bashing’, etc.) but also to natural- thus already inhabited by an other. When ize them. For this reason, the concept of this other within the self makes itself the other assumes a prominent place heard or felt, the boundaries of coherent within feminist, post-colonial and queer selfhood are called into question. Such theories. See also ALTERITY, FEMINISM, destabilizing moments are felt to provoke DIFFERENCE and ESSENTIALISM. feelings of the UNCANNY. Offering a more JA P

Paradox An apparently self- one expression for the same meaning. The contradictory statement, though one theory of STYLE seems to demand belief which is essentially true. Two examples of in the possibility of paraphrase, and con- paradox may help to demonstrate its sequently in a model of language which special significance in modern thought distinguishes form and content, expression (Schopenhauer, Shaw): and meaning. These assumptions were vigorously The more unintelligent a man is, the challenged by neo-Romantic critics, tak- less mysterious existence seems to him. ing as their battle cry Shelley’s assault on The man who listens to reason is lost: ‘the vanity of translation’ and drawing reason enslaves all whose minds are support from the many linguists and lin- not strong enough to master her. guistic philosophers who have denied the The movement of twentieth-century existence of synonyms or asserted that philosophy away from causal modes of a word in context has a unique and thought towards an acceptance of contra- unmatchable meaning. The most vocal rieties and oppositions, seems to be advocate for the inseparability of form reflected accurately in the present critical and content was Cleanth Brooks, who preoccupation with paradox in literature. attacked what he called ‘The heresy of An acceptance of the radical discontinuity paraphrase’ (The Well Wrought Urn, ch. 11): between thought and existence prompts ‘the imagery and the rhythm are not merely both Shaw and Schopenhauer to point to the instruments by which this fancied core- the futility of searching for solutions of-meaning-which-can-be-expressed in- within the unity of thought. Modern a-paraphrase is directly rendered’. The criticism, beginning with the rehabilitation alleged heresy is a belief that a poem of the Metaphysical poets and continuing reduces to an arbitrary conjunction of a with the rediscovery of the Augustans, ‘meaning’ (statement, theme, etc.) and a gradually progressed from the exploration decorative surface. Brooks asserted that of simple intellectual paradox associated the surface is not merely decorative: we with irony and satire, to a discovery of apprehend meaning by way of the ‘words the paradox of wonder in the existential on the page’, and changing the words may poetry of the Romantics. As Cleanth change our conception of the poem. Brooks has shown (The Well Wrought Paraphrase is, willy-nilly, part of the Urn, 1947) the paradoxes upon which critic’s normal procedure. See also such poems as Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality CONTENT, FORM, STYLE, TEXTURE. Ode’ are built represent the basic struc- See David Lodge, Language of Fiction ture of Romantic thought and are far (1966), 18–26, which rehearses some of removed from a trivial verbal exercise. the literary arguments on this issue. BCL RGF

Paraphrase Depends on the possibility Parody One of the most calculated and of synonymy: the availability of more than analytic literary techniques: it searches Pastiche 167 out, by means of subversive mimicry, any appropriation: ‘burlesque’ was said to be weakness, pretension or lack of self- the kind where some new ‘low’ subject awareness in its original. This ‘original’ was treated incongruously in an old ‘high’ may be another work, or the collective style, and ‘travesty’ the opposite (with style of a group of writers, but although Juno using the language of a fishwife). parody is often talked of as a very clever Such distinctions can seldom in practice and inbred literary joke, any distinctive be sustained, since one parodic work habit- and artful use of language – by, for exam- ually exploits a whole range of incongru- ple, journalists, politicians or priests – is ous juxtapositions, and the categories susceptible of parodic impersonation. obscure the complex intermingling of par- Although it is often deflationary and odic effects. Both terms, however, are use- comic, its distinguishing characteristic is ful to indicate the kind of response a work not deflation, but analytic mimicry. The appeals to: ‘travesty’ (as in its popular use) systematic appropriation of the form and implies something savagely reductive, and imagery of secular love poetry by the ‘burlesque’ the comic immediacy of a the- sacred lyric is an example of parody in atrical ‘spoof’. A distinction can be made, this basic sense. It is one of the ways for however, between all forms of parodic a writer to explore and identify available imitation and ‘caricature’: the analogy techniques, and may focus on their between caricature in painting and parody unused potentialities as well as their limi- in writing (established by Fielding in his tations. As an internal check that litera- parodic novel Joseph Andrews, 1742) is ture keeps on itself, parody may be misleading. Parody attacks its butt indi- considered parasitic or creative, and is rectly, through style; it ‘quotes’ from and often both. Perhaps because parodic alludes to its original, abridging and works are themselves highly critical, they inverting its characteristic devices. The are more frequently annotated than caricaturist’s ‘original’ is not some other analysed; sometimes parodists are so self- already existent style or work, whereas conscious that they pre-empt their would- parody is a mirror of a mirror, a critique of be critic, providing their own footnotes a view of life already articulated in art. and explanatory comments (like Vladimir Parody is so common an element in litera- Nabokov in Pale Fire, 1962). The parodist ture precisely because it adds this extra addresses a highly ‘knowing’ and literate level of critical comment which is lacking audience, for whom criticism is merely a from caricature. See also PASTICHE, SATIRE. part of literature, not a separate industry. See S. Dentith, Parody (2000); Linda The parodist is often an ironist, affecting Hutcheon, Theory of Parody (2000). admiration of the style borrowed and dis- LS torted (Pope ‘compliments’ Milton in this way in The Dunciad, 1728); sometimes Pastiche Whether applied to part of explicitly and systematically undermining a work, or to the whole, implies that it a rival mode (as Jane Austen does with is made up largely of phrases, motifs, the Gothic novel in Northanger Abbey, images, episodes, etc. borrowed more or 1818); impersonation of the alien style is less unchanged from the work(s) of other always the basic technique. In various author(s). The term is often used in a periods, particularly in the eighteenth loosely derogatory way to describe the century, attempts were made to kind of helpless borrowing that makes an distinguish different kinds of parodic immature or unoriginal work read like 168 Pastoral a mosaic of quotations. More precisely, it Fredric Jameson argues that parody has two main meanings, corresponding to has been replaced by pastiche in post- two different deliberate uses of pastiche modernism, where all the cultural styles as a technique. There is a kind of pastiche of the past are open to cannibalization and which seeks to recreate in a more extreme appropriation: ‘Pastiche is, like parody, and accessible form the manner of major the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idio- writers. It tends to eliminate tensions, to syncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic produce a more highly coloured and pol- mask, speech in a dead language. But it is ished effect, picking out and reiterating a neutral practice of such mimicry, with- favourite stylistic mannerisms, and weld- out any of parody’s ulterior motives, ing them into a new whole which has a amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid superficial coherence and order. Unlike of laughter’. plagiarism, pastiche of this kind is not See Barbara Barber, Pastiche (1997); intended to deceive: it is literature frankly Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural inspired by literature (as in Akenside’s Memory in Art, Film, Literature (2001); poem ‘The pleasures of imagination’, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the 1744). The second main use of pastiche is Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992). not reverential and appreciative, but dis- LS respectful and sometimes deflationary. Instead of ironing out ambiguities in its Pastoral In classical and neo-classical source(s) it highlights them. It cannot be definitions pastoral is a mode with con- distinguished absolutely from PARODY, but ventional prescriptions about setting, whereas the parodist need only allude to characters and diction. In drama, poetry the original intermittently, the writer of or prose it employs stylized properties pastiche industriously recreates it, often and idealized Arcadian situations from concocting a medley of borrowed styles rural life – ‘purling streams’, ‘embower- like Flann O’Brien in At Swim-Two-Birds ing shades’; singing contests, mourning (1939). A closely synonymous term, processions – as a deliberate disguise for nearly obsolete, ‘cento’ or ‘centonism’, is the preoccupations of urban, sophisti- relevant here: in its original Latin form it cated people. Pastoral focusses on the meant a garment of patchwork and, contrast between the lives of the people applied to literature, a poem made up by who write it and read it, and the lives of joining scraps from various authors. those country people it portrays (both Many of the specialized uses of pastiche ends of society often appear, as in are reminiscent of this literary game: it Shakespearean comedy). It relies on may give encyclopaedic scope to a work, conventions shared with the audience – including all previous styles (Joyce’s traditional names (Corydon, Thyrsis, Ulysses); it is used by writers who wish to Adonais), inherited motifs (the flower exemplify their ironic sense that language catalogue), plots based on transparent dis- comes to them secondhand and stylized guises. It may be idyllic, but is more often (George Herbert’s ‘Jordan I’). And a gen- (as in Spenser’s ‘Shepheardes Calender’ eral air of pastiche is created by many or Milton’s ‘Lycidas’) tinged with melan- writers who, for various reasons, refuse to choly and satire; because of its dimension evolve a style of their own, and who (like of reference to contemporary society, pas- John Barth) employ other’s cast-off toral invites allegory and symbolism. The phrases with conscious scepticism. proliferation of stock features made it, in Performativity 169

Greece, Augustan Rome and Renaissance as a label, ‘pastoral’ acquired an extended Europe, an extremely precise medium for application which relates to the search for exploring the attitudes (rural nostalgia, literary MYTHS and archetypes. narcissism, self-doubt) of consciously See Terry Gifford, Pastoral (1999). civilized and cultured people – poets LS particularly (N. B. the heightened self- consciousness of the pastoral ELEGY for a Pathetic fallacy Ruskin introduced dead fellow-poet). this notion (Modern Painters, vol. 3, The artificiality of pastoral is not an 1856) to account for the attribution to evasion of realism: its rural setting is inanimate nature of animate, even human, metaphorical, a means rather than an characteristics. He gives ‘the cruel, crawl- end. Like other conventions, it decays ing foam’ as an example. People, he when the means cease to be viable, not claims, fall into four categories: those because it is false (since it was never who see nature clearly because their emo- true). Many uses of the term are distorted tions are too dull to interfere (non-poets), by criteria adopted from realistic fiction. those whose emotions are too strong for Documentary ‘truth to the object’ is irrel- their intellect (second-order poets), those evant in pastoral, which is a mirror who, having strong intellect and passions, reflecting back its audience and writer achieve a balance between the two (first- rather than a transparent window. Pastoral order poets) and finally those who per- is a product of pre- or anti-realistic world- ceive realities too great for humanity to views which stress imaginative projection bear and who revert to expressions which (e.g. the PATHETIC FALLACY) rather than reason no longer controls (prophets). The passive perception. Thus, it lost its credi- second and last make use of the pathetic bility with the rise of empiricism (and of fallacy, but only the former do so through the novel) during the eighteenth century, weakness. Ruskin argues, moreover, that and was partially reinstated in the twenti- the poet who sees nature as having ‘an eth by writers like the American poet animation and pathos of its own’ (rather Wallace Stevens who argued that ‘Life than borrowed from culture) does not consists/Of propositions about life’. commit the fallacy, but merely shows ‘an ‘Failed realism’, and ‘anything depicting instinctive sense...of the Divine pres- country life’ are both uses of ‘pastoral’ ence’. What constitutes a ‘pathetic fal- based on unexamined realist assumptions. lacy’ must therefore vary with the Exploratory twentieth-century use of dominant idea of the time: many have the term dated from William Empson’s seen in such an ‘instinctive sense’ a fal- Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). He lacy rather than the perception of a truth. pointed out that pastoral was not a bundle AAAC of conventional properties, but a particular structural relationship (‘putting the com- Performativity As understood and plex into the simple’) which survived and used in current critical studies, the theory extended beyond the limits of the formal of performativity was introduced by mode. Empson’s best example was Alice in Judith Butler (1956–) in Gender Trouble: Wonderland, where the heroine, like the Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ‘shepherd of sixteenth century pastoral, (1990). In this book she argued that gen- explores the anxieties and complacencies der is performative, a mime of dominant of her society’. While retaining its function characteristics conventionally attributed 170 Peripeteia to gender, and related to the categorization recommended, however, is the sustained of two different sexes. However, as Butler interrogation of the discursive and institu- explains, even if one allows, for the sake tional conditions by which these cultural of argument, that sexed bodies fall into effects are taken as norms (the ‘historicity two categories, ‘it does not follow that the of norms’), constructing as they do, even construction of “men” will accrue exclu- the apprehension of material bodies. This sively to the bodies of males or that of Butler aimed to clarify in her next book, “women” will interpret only female bod- Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive ies’. Following the argument and method Limits of Sex (1994). Here she returns to of the French philosopher, Michel reconsider the category of sex (occluded Foucault (1926–84), Butler adopts a to a large extent by her prior focus on ‘genealogical critique’ of gender which gender) and the materiality of bodies. She investigates ‘the political stakes in desig- questions the way in which certain bio- nating as an origin and cause those iden- logical differences, such as pregnancy, tity categories that are in fact the effects of which will only ever constitute a rela- institutions, practices and discourses with tively small portion of any woman’s life, multiple and diffuse points of origin’. have become the salient characteristics of However, the discussion of performativity sex and have been central to the reductive, in Gender Trouble has sometimes been binary sexing of the body. As she misunderstood. It has been seen as the described in her Radical Philosophy recommendation for the deliberate sub- interview in 1994, she ‘wanted to work version of gender by performative acts, out how a norm actually materializes a such as drag, for instance, which Butler body, how we might understand the mate- had used in Gender Trouble as an exam- riality of the body to be not only invested ple of perfomativity. As Butler explained with a norm, but in some sense animated in an important interview, published in by a norm, or contoured by a norm’. the journal Radical Philosophy in 1994, See, Sara Salih, Judith Butler drag is an example of, but not a paradigm (2002); Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as for, performativity. While her thesis Masquerade’ in Shelley Saguaro (ed.), is that gender is culturally performed, and Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader thus, a performance, performance is not (2000); Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies the same as performativity. Performativity of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and is not about voluntary or deliberate acts of Fiction (1989). performance and subversion – such as SS drag – but is rather, the analysis of ‘that Peripeteia See NARRATIVE STRUCTURE. aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names’ through repeti- Persona Originally used to denote the tion and recitation. Performance always acting masks of classic Greek theatre, the ‘presumes a subject’ whereas performa- term ‘persona’ developed extensive criti- tivity contests the very notion of a subject cal connotations. It has been commonly able to volunteer to act outside its own used to indicate the difference between instalment by virtue of performativity, the person who sits down to write and the which is ‘the discursive mode through ‘author’ as realized in and through the which ontological effects are installed’. words on the page. This persona, or ‘second Further, subversion cannot be so deliberate self’ of the author has to be distinguished or have such calculable effects. What is from the narrator even in first-person Phallologocentrism 171 narration. The degree of correspondence others. Late Romantics, like Yeats, turn to between narrator and persona may vary the ‘mask’ concept to express a longing greatly. In Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), for for an art which permits the artist to objec- instance, the narrator shares many qualities tify personal experience and free it from with the persona – tolerance, humour, wide mere subjectivity. See also NARRATIVE. understanding of human behaviour and GG humanistic learning. But in the case of Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729), to Phallologocentrism A portmanteau assume continuity between narrator and word combining phallocentrism with persona would be disastrous. The narrator LOGOCENTRISM. Whereas logocentrism, deliberately heightens and distorts the according to Jacques Derrida, is bound up view Swift seeks to expose. The distortion in the drive to find stability, presence and establishes the tone which makes us aware meaning in objective concepts which are of Swift’s voice in the prose. The persona really linguistic effects, phallologocen- clearly recommends the very opposite trism acknowledges the masculine orien- view, the amelioration of conditions and tation both of this drive and of systems the implementation of social remedies, not that privilege the (concept of the) phallus the breeding of children for food, etc. as the signifying source of power. Wayne C. Booth argued in The Femininity is thus the ‘Other’, most obvi- Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) that the com- ously and essentially of phallologocen- plex problem of reliable and unreliable trism, but conventionally, of logocentrism narrators involves the persona or, as he too, which has privileged masculine rea- called it, the implied author. Thus, ‘I have son over feminine emotion, male culture called a narrator reliable when he speaks over female nature, the phallus-bearing for or acts in accordance with the norms body over the body of the woman. As a of the work (which is to say, the implied deconstructive critic, Derrida criticized author’s norms), unreliable when he does the dominance of logocentrism in not.’ Recognizing the persona is therefore Western thought; in ‘Structure, sign and central to the act of effective reading, play in the discourse of the human since the persona represents the sum of all sciences’ (1966), for instance, he noted the author’s conscious choices in a real- the way in which logocentrism is predi- ized and more complete self as ‘artist’. cated on and made secure by binary oppo- This idea of persona as ‘second self’ sitions: presence/absence; male/female; incorporates the metaphorical roots of the order/chaos; reason/unreason; unity/ ‘mask’ concept, implying the total being multiplicity. Building on – in part to presented to the audience, outside and dismantle – the claim by Swiss philolo- beyond the actor who assumes it. This, in gist and linguist Ferdinand de Saussure turn, is rooted in magic ritual where (1857–1913) that language is an arbitrary ‘masks’ are independent beings who pos- but conventional system of ‘differences sess the individual who assumes them. without positive terms’, Derrida chose Metaphorically, mask belongs to the instead a strategy that looks to defer group of concepts which imply that artists meaning rather than to identify stable dif- discover a more fully integrated vision ferences of meaning. Thus, in a feat of than exists in ‘reality’. It implies, too, a linguistic play for which he and other way out of the closed world of the ego postructuralists are known, Derrida coined into an objective vision communicable to the term DIFFÉRANCE (in French sounding 172 Phenomenology the same as difference) to indicate the Cixous and Luce Irigaray (1930–) in her combination of the verbs to differ and to punningly titled essay ‘This sex which is defer in his theory of meaning. New not one’ (1977; trans. 1985), for example, French Feminists borrowed from Derrida exult in the female body and the jouissance and Jacques Lacan (1901–81) to develop (orgasmic, sensuous, generous, disinter- their own analysis of the ‘phallacy’ of ested, expansive, fluctuating) of its libidi- phallologocentrism. Hélène Cixous nal economy (as opposed to the masculine (1937–) further notes that binary opposi- calculating conservatism). They exhort tionalism, on which ‘every theory of cul- women to ‘write the body’ (écriture fémi- ture, every theory of society’ is based – nine), a fluency that can be criticized for ‘everything that’s organised as discourse, being essentialist and conforming to rather art, religion, the family, language, every- than overthrowing the stereotypes of the thing that seizes us, everything that madwoman, witch and hysteric. Others, acts on us’ – is always hierarchical particularly feminist scholars and theorists and is inevitably related to a primary in the 1970s and 1980s, found the exuber- dualism: Man/Woman (‘Castration and ant combination of theory and practice, in Decapitation’, English translation: 1981; terms of writing, at least, to be very inspir- see also ‘Sorties’, 1986). In Lacan’s ing. Also see DECONSTRUCTION, FEMINISM return to Freud through structuralism and and LOGOCENTRISM. linguistics, the Phallus is indeed a privi- See Isabelle de Courtivron and Elaine leged signifier, the transcendental signi- Marks (eds), New French Feminisms: An fier, but it has little to do with the frail Anthology (1981) and Shelley Saguaro corporeal penis. The Phallus, as the origi- (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Woman: nary and constellating term in the A Reader (2000). Symbolic language system known as the SS Law of the Father, always denotes lack in all its human subjects, regardless of Phenomenology At its simplest, anatomical differences. Feminist critics, phenomenology is the attempt to describe such as Elizabeth Grosz, in Jacques whatever we perceive exactly as it appears Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990), to us. This does not make it sound very discerned that if all human subjects lack exciting, and yet, phenomenology has in relation to the Phallus, then women, been an important part of philosophical whose sex is considered an absence, even thought for the last hundred years. lack such lack. In ‘The meaning of the Although he was not the first to use the Phallus’ (1958), Lacan insists on the term – that distinction went to one Johann Phallus as an arbitrary signifier divorced Heinrich Lambert (1728–77) – Edmund from the penis and yet uses a Husserl (1859–1938) was certainly the sexual/anatomical analogy in his rationale: first to turn it into a philosophical move- ment. Lambert used the term to signify this signifier is chosen as what stands the process whereby we move from out as most easily seized upon in the appearance to truth and this was how it real of sexual copulation [. . .] by was generally used in the eighteenth virtue of its turgidity [which the century. Immanuel Kant (1728–1804), for penis, of course, cannot sustain], it is instance, probably the most significant the image of the vital flow as it is thinker of the period, employed the term transmitted in generation. to refer to the science of how things Phenomenology 173 appear to us. Husserl’s main influence, by unconscious forces. Despite this, the though, was the now largely forgotten main contribution of phenomenology to Franz Brentano (1838–1917) who twentieth and perhaps twenty-first century regarded philosophy as a description of philosophy remains its insistence on the phenomena not an explanation of them. importance of subjectivity in any account However, in order to describe phenomena of knowledge. properly, a vital part of which is how they It is the concern with the subjective appear to consciousness, it is necessary to nature of experience that links phenome- suspend all those things, such as tradition, nology with literature since we view science and common sense, which distort poems, novels and plays as in some sense perception. Husserl called this process an expression of the author’s view of the ‘reduction’. Only by reducing the role of world. Having said that, there has not habit in our perception can we see phe- been a marked tradition of phenomeno- nomena in their purity. It is important to logical criticism, at least in England, stress that Husserl is not saying that we where commentary tends to be either will see things as they really are, but only pragmatic or political. Nevertheless, there as they appear to consciousness. is a general relationship between phe- Husserl influenced a number of thinkers nomenology and criticism. For example, including Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), the demand that we try to reduce the role Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), of habit and custom in order to see things Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), Jean-Paul afresh is very close to the Russian Sartre (1905–80), Maurice Merleau-Ponty FORMALIST demand that art should ‘make (1908–61) and Jacques Derrida strange’. Moreover, both phenomenology (1930–2004), all of who differed from him and literature share a commitment to in a number of ways. Heidegger, for exam- describing lived experience and the fact ple, thought Husserl took too little account that some phenomenologists, such as of the context in which we view phenom- Levinas, are interested in ethics, posits ena and he also disagreed with the claim another possible relation between the two that we could describe phenomena as they activities. And then there are the observa- really appear to us, arguing that all descrip- tions on art by individual phenomenolo- tion involves an element of interpretation. gists. Heidegger argued that art did not Derrida goes even further declaring that it represent the world rather it created a new is impossible for us ever to have to have a one which disclosed the possibilities for clear view of the contents of our conscious- change in the old order. Gadamer dis- ness because they always come to us cont- cussed the problem of interpretation – aminated by language. Since we can never which he called hermeneutics – for exam- escape language, we can never see phe- ple, the need to be attentive to what a nomena in their true light; we can only work actually says rather than impose our experience them through words which pre- own view upon it. But he also said that we vent us from experiencing them in their are unlikely ever to be able to recover the immediacy. Other criticisms of phenome- original intention behind the work of art, nology include that is ‘pseudo-mysticism’, for our understanding of it is a fusion of that it is too focussed on the individual and what we want from the work now and that it puts too much trust in the evidence of what it meant in the past. consciousness, forgetting that much of our Its interest in the subjective experience so-called conscious experience is shaped makes phenomenology a form of romantic 174 Picaresque criticism but there is little of that philosophy unalterable hostility. The novels allow a in the work of British romantics, with the statement of the individual’s freedom and exception perhaps of Coleridge. There independence but invoke the counter- are, however, pronounced phenomenolog- balancing, restraining oppression of ical themes in the work of F. R. Leavis, society. All picaroons have a series of although he does not use the term. His tyrannical masters, and the servile rela- concern with perception and the concrete, tionship which demands abasement and and his commitment to becoming more allows cheating is a microcosm of the conscious in our response to literature human state. certainly chimes with the writings of the Picaresque is a term that must refer major thinkers in this tradition. to the nature of the subject matter as See Michael Bell, F. R. Leavis (1988); well as to the superficial autobiographical Dermot Moran, Introduction to and episodic features of the fiction. Phenomenology (2000). Unfortunately, in English it is the acci- GD dental arrangements that are usually indi- cated by picaresque: a low-life narrator, a Picaresque A kind of realistic fiction rambling tale. There was plenty of rogue which originated in Spain with the anony- literature in England from Nashe’s mous Lazarillo de Tonnes (1554) and the Unfortunate Traveller (1594) onwards. more influential novel by Mateo Alemán, Obviously Defoe in Moll Flanders (1722) Guzmán de Alfarache (1559 and 1604), has some affinity with the picaresque. which was widely translated. Other impor- The novel is episodic; it has an auto- tant novels in this genre include in German, biographical narrator and it is realistic. Grimmeishausen’s Simplicissirnus (1669), Moll, though, does not seem to be a real and in French, Le Sage’s Gil Bias picaro. She is that peculiarly English (1715–35). The Spanish picaro or figure, a temporary déclassé(e). Smollett’s picarón, the anti-hero of such a novel, Roderick Random (1748) is similar. was translated into English as the pica- Random is only temporarily of low estate; roon; a scoundrel of low birth and evil he ends by being restored to his own life, at war with society. The form of the level. He is really a master, not a servant. novel is commonly an autobiographical The same author’s The Adventures of account of the picaroon’s fortunes, mis- Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) is more fortunes, punishments and opportunism. nearly a real picaresque. Various features The tales are episodic, frequently of the picaresque are found in different arranged as journeys. The endings are English novels: Tom Jones is organized abrupt, either as the picaroon sets off for along a journey; Dickens’s Nicholas America for a ‘new life’, or for the gal- Nickleby allows realistic description of leys. This allows a sequel to be added; but scenes of real life; Joyce Cary’s The the mode is not formless. The pessimistic Horse’s Mouth presents physical decay as judgement of life does not allow a neat the sign of experience, and Gully Jimson dénouement. Life is just more of the enjoys the ‘free life’. same. The stories inflict physical damage See Robert Alter, Rogue’s Progress: on their characters, and the damage is a Studies in the Picaresque Novel (1964); sign of experience. Experience, however, A. A. Parker, Literature and the is only more instances for picaroons of their Delinquent: A Study of the Picaresque irrepressible independence and society’s Novel (1947); Giancarlo Maiorino (ed.), Platonism 175

The Picaresque: Tradition and poetry – ‘Poets are the unacknowledged Displacement (1996); Ulrich Wicks, legislators of the world’ (Shelley, Defence Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions: of Poetry, 1821) – and metaphors from A Theory and Research Guide (1989). poetics about politics or music. AMR It follows that Platonic criticism avoids classification of genres or of Plagiarism See PASTICHE. rhetorical figures; the Platonist’s interest Platonism In his utopian Republic in language and form is compounded of (written c.380 BC) Plato banished the miraculism and frustration: on the one artists, having diagnosed the arts as indul- hand the aspiration towards a fixed, inno- gent imitations of a perceptible universe cent, ‘golden’ language, in which metre, which was itself a misleading shadow of image and syntax will embody that essen- the eternal Ideas. He allowed only propa- tial harmony towards which creation gandist myths (‘noble lies’) as a conces- strives; on the other a profound scepti- sion to the irrationality of the majority, cism which pushes language to its limits, and suggested ironically that the arts were destroys and impoverishes it as if to prove lower than practical crafts – better make its eternal enmity to the ideal. The Platonic a chair than a painting of one. theorist is always likely to dismiss the But Plato’s own highly fictionalized product – the words, the rhythms – as ‘a method; his use of dialogue and of myth feeble shadow of the original conceptions (the Cave, the Spindle of Necessity) of the poet’ (Shelley). This pressure on the undermined his attack on the arts. medium unites with the idealist yearning Plotinus (AD 204–70), founder of neo- towards the one to produce hybrid forms Platonism, reinterpreted Plato in the (allegorical epics, lyrical dramas). Again, direction of subjective mysticism (stress- this is paradoxical: Platonism produces a ing the visionary elements in Book 6 of subversive multiplication of forms in the the Republic, and the Symposium) and his strife for order. version of Plato the myth-maker and In literary history, too, the idealist vates, mingling with the more practical pressures proved liberating. Shelley’s original, became the source of the most reading of Milton (like Blake’s) is charac- far-reaching claims for the arts in Western teristically Platonic: culture. He mingled...the elements of human The Platonic artist, whether renais- nature as colours upon asingle pallet, sance or romantic, is a philosopher, who and arranged them...according to the aspires to change the world by changing laws of epic truth, that is, according to people’s attitudes and values. The ‘poem’ the laws of that principle by which a may be an institution or an epic and it is series of actions of the external universe not the work itself that makes the Platonic and of intelligent and ethical beings is artist but the ‘idea or fore-conceit of the calculated to excite the sympathies of work’ (Sidney, Defence of Poesie, 1595). succeeding generations of mankind. ‘Imitation’ in Platonic terminology can be misleading – theoretically at least the poet Platonic literary history is repetitious will ‘to imitate borrow nothing of what is, or circular (Yeats), a continual return hath been or shall be’ (Sidney). Platonism to mythic figures and structures only does not distinguish the arts by media: incidentally clothed in the trappings of metaphors from statecraft are used about a particular culture. 176 Pleasure

Platonism is the poets’ poetics; more and ‘sublime’ pleasure require distance: than any other theory it has been respon- Oedipus and Lear do not enjoy their tragic sible for poetic self-consciousness experiences as their audiences may, and (Collins’s Ode on the Poetical Character what distinguishes aesthetic enjoyment of (1746), Stevens’s Notes towards a form from a factory owner’s admiration Supreme Fiction (1942)). This fact alone of a complex machine or a lecher’s of a indicates its particular freedoms and lim- beautiful body is its disinterestedness: we itations: it may set the poet squarely at the seek satisfaction neither of self-interest centre of the world but it undermines the nor of aroused desire, experiencing plea- world’s reality and solidity. The result is sure in our temporary freedom from such that the processes of creativity become feelings. what the work itself is about. See also Totally unenjoyable literature would IMITATION. probably cease to be published. Yet plea- See W. H. Auden, ‘The poet and sure, especially if distanced or restful, is the city’ in The Dyer’s Hand (1962); often considered suspect and self-indulgent. Christopher Butler, Number Symbolism If we find Diderot’s The Nun a good read, (1970); R. S. Crane (ed.), Critics and rather than feeling indignation at the Criticism (1957); Wallace Stevens, The heroine’s suffering, we perversely refuse Necessary Angel (1951); Anna Baldwin to be disturbed by how human beings can and Sarah Hutton (eds), Platonism and treat one another in society. the English Imagination (1994). Roland Barthes detects insufficiently LS challenging pleasure in almost all pre- Modernist literature. He too postulates Pleasure Some texts stimulate rather two radically different kinds of pleasure. than satisfy, and indeed Novalis cultivated He argues that we interpret what we read the fragment as a genre with this inten- (as also our other experience) by applying tion. But for many Neoclassicists (e.g. already familiar conventions: our previ- Kant), art is made pleasurable by its satis- ous novel-reading and acquaintance with fying harmony of design: once we have social assumptions create a large yet discovered a work’s central theme, all finite set of expectations, activated when other features (such as versification or we tackle another novel. A text might plot) can be seen as closely related to it, work totally within these limits, avoiding creating a complex yet powerfully unified surprise and confirming our cultural effect. Nevertheless, the problems of expectations: Balzac, despite his complex- applying this view to the disturbing, fear- ity, can be seen as very readable (lisible), ful events in TRAGEDY led Kant and others offering pleasure in reassuring recogni- to postulate a radically different pleasure, tion of the familiar. But the ideal text is aroused by the ‘sublime’ rather than the for Barthes totally plural, in the sense that ‘beautiful’: the audience thrills to see it refuses to imprison its readers within tragic heroes rise above adversity and conventions or compel any particular their self-preservation instinct because it interpretation: such a text he calls feels itself participating in and aspiring scriptible. For example, as we read towards the potential indomitability of the Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) or human spirit. By accepting guilt and the Philippe Sollers’s Paradis (1981), small destruction of his achievements, Oedipus segments of text, at first apparently dis- transcends them. Note that both ‘beautiful’ connected, can be related in innumerable Plot 177 different ways. This experience, in which partly derived from Aristotle’s word each reader ‘writes’ or constructs their own mythos in the Poetics, commonly trans- text, Barthes sees as liberating. lated as ‘plot’; and for a richer sense of Although such works may indeed be the term it is worth recalling what he said. used by the patient and inventive for Aristotle’s plot was the mimesis (i.e. the individualistic self-expression, Barthes analogous making) of an action. He dis- implies a heedlessly optimistic view of tinguished six parts in his exemplary the reader. Faced with segments which species, tragedy, but did not reduce them can mean almost anything and an absence to equivalence: plot constitutes the of authorial direction, readers will imagine dynamic whole to which the other parts and impose interpretations deriving from relate, the necessary order as opposed to their previous habits of sense-making and the enabling features of development. It is thus from their acquired conventions: the distilling centre of the choices avail- supposedly liberated reading becomes able to the author; having determined a indistinguishable from uninventive, self- medium (stage, book) and a mode (lyric, indulgent mental drift. A more useful dramatic), the author must also choose approach to pleasure’s origins is to other essential principles of coherence. analyse the experience of having expecta- The plot must have a shape (e.g. a rise in tions sometimes confirmed, sometimes the hero’s fortune followed by a descent); surprised by a text (impossible if it is it must have a sequence or order deter- totally plural). At a first reading, there is mining the kind and degree of effort at delight in a release from and expansion of particular points (beginning, middle, our limited consciousness as we compare end); it must have a size (magnitude, our responses with the text’s; at a later duration) which will help determine that reading, the no less pleasurable realiza- shape and sequence. It must have agents tion that our perceptions of it have altered and a society: for these there must be a and that therefore our relation with it language, appropriate not only to them remains productive. See also AESTHETICS, but also to the other elements of the struc- READER. ture. It must have a developing psychol- See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of ogy culminating internally in good the Text (trans. 1976), S/Z (trans. 1975); tragedy in the protagonist and externally Donald W. Crawford, Kant’s Aesthetic in an effect on the audience (CATHARSIS); Theory (1974); William Wordsworth, and it must accord with and seek out gen- ‘Preface’ (1802 version) to Lyrical Ballads. eral human experience (universality). MHP Aristotle’s mythos is close to Henry James’s assumptions in his preface to The Plot A term of highly varied status. It Portrait of a Lady, when he distinguishes can mean just the paraphrasable story of a donnée and then sees certain elements a work – the simple narrative line which as being of the essence and others of the we can then flesh out by considering char- provision. This adds what is perhaps acter and description, tone and texture, implicit in Aristotle; that there is play in pattern and myth; E. M. Forster’s ‘low’, writing for continuous choice; plot is ‘atavistic’ story-telling. So creative writ- emergent from the selective logic of the ing courses offer compendia of plots; so writerly act. many works (lyric poems, modernist Few twentieth-century critics took up novels) can be ‘without’ it. The usage is this complex usage, viewing plot as a 178 Pluralism necessary order of a fiction. An exception T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (trans.), were the Chicago Aristotelians (see Russian Formalist criticism: Four Essays CHICAGO CRITICS), who spoke persuasively (1965); Russian Poetics in Translation, of its value as a means of distinguishing Vol. 4, Formalist Theory (1977); Tzvetan the determining order of a work. (The Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (trans. Russian FORMALIST critics also usefully 1977); Seymour Chatman, Story and explored the concept.) What (here to Discourse (1978). adapt Aristotle considerably) seems MSB apparent is that the ‘deep’ definition of plot approximates to the difficulties of the Pluralism See CHICAGO CRITICS. writing process before and during compo- Poetic diction See DICTION, POETRY. sition: it involves recognizing an essential relationship, familiar to writers if not Poetic licence It has sometimes been always to critics, between ‘plot’ in its argued that, because of the difficulty of simple story sense and other elements satisfying the additional voluntary restric- much more complicated than is usually tions of poetic form, the poet has a understood – characters, local linguistic ‘licence’ to relax some of the normal devices (‘speeches’, ‘descriptions’), gen- restrictions of the language-system. The eral linguistic devices (rhetorical strate- most thorough attempt to find a justifica- gies, pervasive symbols), generative tion for this was made by the Russian sequence in actions at narrative and tonal Formalist and Prague Structuralist critical levels, starts and finishes. schools. According to Shklovsky, people Plot is a compositional whole. Even living by the sea grow impervious to the then, it can seem a deterministic grid, sound of the waves. making the writer of a fiction a God- By the same token, we scarcely ever figure whose command over characters is hear the words which we utter.... We absolute. (This analogue – character as look at each other, but we do not see liberal, plot as determinist – has often each other any more. Our perception been a theme in fiction: Muriel Spark’s of the world has withered away, what The Driver’s Seat, 1970 is a clear example.) has remained is mere recognition. This is a possible derivative of the concept of plot, and suggests its coherent whole- By disturbing language, and therefore the ness. See also CHARACTER, NARRATIVE view of reality which we receive through STRUCTURE, STRUCTURALISM, STRUCTURE. language, the poet refreshes perception See Aristotle, trans. I. Bywater, and replaces recognition by an impression Poetics (1909); R. S. Crane, ‘The concept of novelty. Or, as Roman Jakobson has of plot and the plot of Tom Jones’in put it, ‘The function of poetry is to point Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism (1957); out that the sign is not identical with its E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel referent.’ On this view, the kind of (1927); Henry James, ‘The art of fiction’ ‘licence’ we ought to grant should cover (1888), reprinted in Morris Roberts (ed.), neither technical incompetence nor nov- The Art of Fiction and Other Essays by elty for its own sake, but only deviations Henry James (1948); N. J. Lowe, The which bring about a new sense of inner Classical Plot and the Invention of and outer realities. Many writers, even Western Narrative (2004). For the prose-writers, have agreed. Conrad, for Formalist/Structuralist tradition, see Lee example, wrote that ‘the development Poetics 179 of...phrases from their (so-called) natural relationships with the additional modalities order is luminous for the mind’. See also of character/actor and stage/audience FOREGROUNDING, FORMALISM, ORIGINALITY. relations (see Keir Elam, The Semiotics of See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism Theatre and Drama, 1980). Poetic genres (1965) for a general discussion of the have been studied in terms of the formal topic and for the quotations from patterning of sounds (assonance, allitera- Shklovsky and Jakobson above. tion, rhymes); rhythms (metre, phrase- AAAC and sentence-rhythm), relations of lines, stanzas, sections, syntax, point of view, Poetics In modern usage poetics is not etc. (the verse analyses of Roman the study of, or the techniques of, poetry Jakobson have been an important model (verse), but the general theory of litera- and focus for controversy). Poetics does ture. From the Russian FORMALISTS, not aim, however, to study these ‘devices’ Prague School and French STRUCTURALISTS piecemeal, but seeks the determining to structuralist and POST-STRUCTURALIST patterns of literary structure, such as writers there has been an appeal for a sci- the relationship between automatism and ence of literature which should be devoted FOREGROUNDING and the master device of not to the piecemeal criticism or interpre- the ‘dominant’ (Jakobson), that compo- tation of specific literary texts, but to nent of a work which sets in motion and identifying the general properties which determines the relations between all other make literature possible: one should study components. ‘literariness’ rather than existing works of Theory and description in twentieth- ‘literature’. The search was, then, for gen- century poetics was much influenced eral laws underlying particular texts: for by the analogies provided by the ‘genera- an ‘essence’ to literature. For a clear pro- tive’ linguistics of Noam Chomsky grammatic statement, see T. Todorov, (cf. LANGUAGE): hence generative poetics. ‘Poétique’ in O. Ducrot et al., Qu’est-ce Chomsky proposed that mature native que le structuralisme? (1968). speakers possess ‘linguistic competence’, Universals of literature might seem an based on universal properties of lan- over-abstract and overambitious goal, guage, which allows them to produce and given the great formal diversity of poems, comprehend an unlimited number of new plays, novels, oral stories, etc., and most sentences; a grammar of a language cap- work in poetics has consisted of descrip- tures this linguistic competence and tive studies of specific kinds or genres of assigns structural descriptions to sen- texts. Narrative genres from the oral anec- tences of the language. Such a grammar is dote and fairy tale to the epic and novel said to ‘generate all and only the gram- have been analysed in terms of claimed matical sentences of the language’. universal elements, such as ‘functions’ of Analogously, argued the poeticians, expe- characters and the relations between them rienced readers of literature possess ‘liter- in fable, plot or narrative structure, or the ary competence’, a knowledge of the relations between these internal elements essential universal properties of literature and relationships and the position of which gives them access to the signifi- the narrator or reader (see Shlomith cance of specific literary texts: just as we Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: know the grammar of our own language, Contemporary Poetics, 1983). Dramatic we may in some sense know the ‘grammar’ genres involve the same elements and of (e.g.) story construction, and even 180 Poetics a naïve reader or listener senses when a sequences of actions, and it is these, not story is deviant, if it is incomplete, if individual verbs, which may be reordered, events seem to be in the wrong order or inverted or embedded (three typical trans- if causal and sequential connections formations). Moreover, there is a seman- between elements are inconsistent or tic congruence between key sequences, suppressed. such as the hero’s struggle to solve a riddle Although, as suggested above, universal set by the donor of a magic aid and his literary competence is implausible, com- struggle to overcome the villain and thus petence in particular genres with which achieve victory and rewards. A similar the reader is familiar is reasonable, and exploration of narrative transformations grammars of genres of the kind suggested which underlie the shifting roles of charac- by Todorov could be regarded as account- ters was attempted by Todorov in his analy- ing for such competence. At this point the sis of the novel Les liaisons dangereuses linguistic analogy can be brought closer: (see Littérature et signification, 1967). the particular technical concepts which Two Russian poeticians, Zholkovsky linguists use for describing sentences and Scheglov, took a more radically (e.g. deep structure, transformation, semantic line: literary texts are generated embedding, semantic feature, lexical from themes (the object of search in tradi- item, etc.) can be applied to the larger tional literary analysis and interpreta- unit, text, on the SEMIOTIC assumption tion). The entire literary work is an that texts are structured analogously to expansion of a basic theme, and our abil- sentences. A strictly generative poetics ity to move to and fro between text and involves the analogic use of linguistic theme must depend on some rather concepts in accounting for a text as consistent psychological mechanisms derived from underlying abstract units of (‘expressiveness devices’) whereby sim- significance. We may distinguish between ple meanings are ‘processed’ into more syntactic and semantic approaches to the complex meanings. The number of such generation of literary texts. Working with mechanisms is probably quite small, but it syntactic analogies, Todorov and Kristeva must include ‘concretization’, ‘multiple in France applied traditional grammatical realization’, ‘augmentation’, ‘contrast’, terms to the analysis of narrative struc- ‘antecedence’, ‘reversal’ and ‘ellipsis’. tures: ‘proper name’ represents character; These may operate at any level of struc- ‘adjective’ represents properties of or ture and at any phase in the generation of states experienced by the characters; the text, so that their operation is not con- ‘verb’ represents actions by the characters fined to specific sentence-like structures that modify situations or affect the char- and sequences, as with the syntactic gen- acters. See T. Todorov, ‘The grammar of erative models. This model provides a set narrative’ and ‘Narrative transformations’ of procedures whereby we can trace the in The Poetics of Prose (trans. 1977); derivation of a literary text from its deep J. Kristeva, Le texte du roman (1970). In theme while making explicit at every America, the syntactic transformations stage our interpretative and analytical of Chomsky’s grammar have been applied processes. See Yu. K. Scheglov and to the ordering of narrative functions A. K. Zholkovsky, ‘Towards a “theme- analysed by Propp in his Morphology of (expression devices)-text” model of literary the Folk-Tale (1928, trans. rev. edn, structure’ in Generating the Literary Text, 1968): a story consists of ‘moves’ or Russian Poetics in Translation, I (1975); Poetry 181

L. M. O’Toole, ‘Analytic and synthetic tropes, more linguistic reverberations, approaches to narrative structure: Sherlock and in a qualitative way, as using them Holmes and “The Sussex Vampire”’ in more productively. Verse may also be R. Fowler (ed.), Style and Structure in considered ‘prosy’, that is, mechanically Literature (1975). correct but uninspired: this characteriza- Although founded on the generative tion merges with the pre-twentieth-century model of linguistic competence, this gen- idea of poetry as a metaphysical quality, erative poetics does not confine itself to an intangible, romantic, virtue. So the studying the sequential arrangement of technical, descriptive, distinction between quasi-grammatical elements, but focusses prose and verse is blurred: verse may be on the specific mechanisms of literary poetic or prosaic, prose may be poetic or competence. For other questions which not. The overtly evaluative ‘poetic’ haz- are traditional concerns of poetics, see ardously transcends formal categories, LITERATURE. except in such usages as ‘poetic diction’ See also J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics by which is meant the artificial vocabulary (1975); V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: conventions obeyed in, say, Anglo-Saxon History, Doctrine (1965); R. Fowler, or Augustan verse: purling streams, finny Literature as Social Discourse (1981), tribes and the like. chs 9 and 10; R. Jakobson, ‘Linguistics The technical imprecision of ‘poem’ and poetics’ in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style and its derivatives is allowed by its etymol- in Language (1960). Relevant journals ogy: Greek poesis, meaning a ‘making’, include Communications, Journal of in verse or not. The contrast invoked Literary Semantics, Poetics, Poetics is between that which is constructed Today (formerly Poetics and the Theory and that which is natural. Traditionally of Literature), Poétique, Russian Poetics ‘poetry’ has narrowed to the sense of a in Translation. verbal making (as opposed to poesis in MO’T the other art media), but is still more gen- eral than ‘verse’, so again obscuring the Poetry The terms ‘poem’, ‘poetry’, distinction between metred and unmetred ‘poetic’ and ‘poetics’ seem to be neces- language which common usage supports. sarily frequent in critical writing but vari- So ‘poetics’ comes to mean the general ous in their senses. The commonest use of aesthetics of literature-as-opposed- ‘poem’ is ‘any composition in verse’: to-other arts and, more particularly, VERSE referring to a set of technical con- literature-seen-as-verbal-construct. The ventions for regulating a composition by latter, more restricted, usage derives from line-length, for making the line part of the the extension of NEW CRITICAL doctrine, expressive form, and ‘poem’ claiming to which stipulates that the method of analy- be a genre-term subsuming any produc- sis must be basically verbal (see David tion which utilizes that convention. There Lodge, Language of Fiction, 1966, and is some redundancy here, if poetry is articles by various authors in early issues equated with verse, but perhaps we need of the new periodical Novel ); critics can the term, for we have no other word, par- thus discuss ‘the poetics of fiction’, allel to, say, NOVEL in PROSE, for a com- considering the novel as a fundamentally plete set of verses. However, poetry is verbal construct and its peculiar inner also commonly contrasted with verse, ‘world’ as ultimately linguistically created. both in a quantitative way, as using more So a novel can in this sense be (akin to) 182 Point of view a ‘poem’, and again the verse criterion for Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1857) and poetry arguably disappears. used omniscience with such discretion See Jon Cook (ed.), Poetry in Theory that it passes virtually unnoticed. Others, (2004); David Buchbinder, Contemporary again, have adopted Dickens’s practice Literary Theory and the Reading of in Bleak House (1852–3) (intercalating Poetry (1991); Jeffrey Wainwright, Esther’s narrative with omniscient narra- Poetry: The Basics (2004). tive, and allowing Esther occasionally to RGF and AER narrate things not observed by her but reported to her by others), or have imi- Point of view A term used in twentieth- tated the manner in which Conrad, in century theory and criticism of FICTION Under Western Eyes (1911), employs an to designate the position from which a intelligent first-person narrator having story is told. Although a large number of privileged access to the mind of another these have been distinguished by some through the perusal of a private diary or critics, only two are common: first-person correspondence. Henry James is the nov- and third-person narration (few authors elist usually most associated with detailed attempt the second-person: John Fowles, exploration of point of view, but some Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Michel Butor). experimental novelists like Alain Robbe- Narration from the first-person point of Grillet transcend the issue altogether by view has some obvious advantages in that abrupt and unsignposted shifts from one it enables the author, without artificiality, point of view to another, in line with a to enter the intimacy of the protagonist’s systematic undermining of the entire mind, in a STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS traditional notion of consistency, and manner or otherwise. But there are also produce works which read as William limitations to this form of narration: if Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury access to the hero is privileged and exten- (1929) would, if all its paragraphs were sive, by the same token, since we are not placed in a hat and pulled out in random able to read the minds of other people, the order. See also NARRATIVE. thoughts and feelings of the other charac- See Norman Friedman, ‘Point of view ters remain a matter of conjecture to hero, in fiction’, PMLA, 70 (1955), 1160–84, author and reader alike. Needless to say, updated by Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric some novelists turn this opaqueness to of Fiction (1961); G. Genette, Narrative good ironic account (cf. The Outsider Discourse (1980); S. S. Lanser, The by Albert Camus (1942) which relies Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose heavily on the inscrutability of others). Fiction (1981); F. Stanzel, Narrative Traditionally, the third person is, however, Situations in the Novel (1969); the more widespread mode of narration, B. Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition and most novelists have assumed it grants (trans. 1973); Paul Simpson, Language, them licence to virtual omniscience. In a Ideology and Point of View (1993). famous essay Jean-Paul Sartre pilloried JWJF François Mauriac for usurping wisdom reserved only to God, who – Sartre con- Polyphony See DIALOGIC STRUCTURE. cluded with cutting emphasis – is no Polysemy See AMBIGUITY. artist, ‘any more than Mr Mauriac is’. As if to forestall this sort of broadside, some Pornography Classified by the novelists have followed the example of Library of Congress as ‘Literature, Postcolonialism 183 immoral’, has evaded definitions by critics force. It appears to push sensibility to its and courts alike precisely because of the limit and to stand as an implicit criticism difficulty of establishing the exact rela- of a society intent on denying freedom of tionship between literature and morality. thought and expression. It is perhaps sig- Lawyers have tended to describe it in nificant that pornography was permitted terms of its effects – the pornographic is for a brief period during the French that which tends to deprave or corrupt – Revolution. Yet, if it is subversive in its while recognizing that the pursuit of liter- appeal to anarchic impulses it is cathartic ary or scientific objectives may be held to in its purgation of such impulses. Finally, justify even the potentially corrupting. therefore, pornography is perhaps little Pornography cannot simply be more than the perfect consumer product, equated with eroticism, although the word simultaneously creating and doing its best originally signified accounts concerned to satisfy a specific need. Twentieth- with prostitutes. Lawrence, for example, century feminist critics have argued for saw eroticism as an essential element in and against poetry: a critic like Andrea human relations and as a reassuring con- Dworkin sees in it exclusively masculine trast to the sterility of the modern envi- constructions of a passive female sexual- ronment; the SURREALISTS discovered in ity open to abuse, while a writer, such as the erotic evidence of the central role of Angela Carter has argued for its liberatory, intuition and evidence of that reconcilia- Marcusian potential. The ICA volume tion of opposites which was their chief Pieces of Flesh (2001), edited by Zadie aim. In other words eroticism has been Smith, is an attempt at writing stories seen as an essential aspect of the battle with a twenty-first century sensibility between humanity and its social determi- more at ease with the commercialism of nants, as a key to mystical experience and the porn industry. a salutary reminder of a non-rational See Anon, The Obscenity Laws dimension to existence. Pornography, on (1969); Norman St John Stevas, the other hand, has no aim beyond sexual Obscenity and the Law (1956); Peter stimulation. As Lawrence suggested, Michelson, Speaking the Unspeakable: pornography is a result of the separation Poetics of Obscenity (1992); Bradford of sexuality from a notion of the whole K. Mudge, The Whore’s Story: Women, person; it stems, at least in part, from a Pornography and the British Novel, refusal, for religious, moral or aesthetic 1684–1830 (2000). reasons, to admit in a public way to the CWEB centrality or the detailed reality of the sexual impulse. By this argument porno- Postcolonialism Emerged out of graphy is the inevitable by-product of developments within literary studies in prudery, and it is scarcely surprising, the late 1970s as the revolution in ‘theory’ therefore, to discover the extent of was extended to encompass the cultural, pornography during the Victorian years: political and economic legacy of empire see Stephen Marcus, The Other and its aftermath. For many, the pivotal Victorians (1966). moment in the development of postcolo- Pornography may constitute a con- nialism came with the publication of scious defiance of conventional standards Edward Said’s path-breaking book of taste and propriety; it is thus poten- ORIENTALISM in 1978. Here, Said linked tially a subversive, even a revolutionary, the cultural and intellectual discourse of 184 Postcolonialism

‘the West’ with the material practices of the configurations of power in the colonial colonialism. This concern with the rela- world have remained largely intact in the tionship between culture and power is the post-colonial period. That is, far from dominant feature of postcolonialism, achieving independence, the former which has broadened into a disciplinary colonies have now succumbed to more sub-field in its own right. Nevertheless, it subtle forms of domination. Analysis of is also a highly contested and, to a great neo-colonialism and the structures of extent, controversial area of study and this domination and subordination in the post- is reflected in diasgreements over the term colonial period is one of the key features itself. of postcolonialism and so the hyphen The term ‘postcolonialism’ has seems misplaced from that perspective. emerged from these controversies as a It has been suggested that the ‘post’ way of marking the existence of a field of refers to everything that happens after the discourse rather than a particular theoret- colonial intervention so that historically ical concept – the absence of the hyphen postcolonialism encompasses the colonial indicating perhaps the lack of substantive period as well as its aftermath. This is one content within the term. However, this is reason why ‘colonial discourse analysis’ not to imply the field is therefore theoret- is also one of the key sub-fields of post- ically empty. On the contrary, it is distin- colonialism. In examining the production guished, if not fraught, by theoretical and reproduction of discourses produced complexity and richness; indeed, for by and for colonialism, in deconstructing some it is overly theoretical and this in their rationales and habits of mind, in itself is reason to suspect that far from analysing colonial representations of the increasing our understanding, postcolo- subjugated peoples, colonial discourse nialism tends to obfuscate the urgent analysis seeks to lay bare the processes political, economic and social crises that through which colonialism was practised have been brought about and intensified culturally as well as materially, and how during and after colonialism. Many critics ideologies justifying colonialism were charge it with concentrating too much on disseminated and embedded into con- culture at the expense of a genuinely rad- sciousness. Colonial discourse analysis ical critique of the materialities of power adopts Foucauldian concepts of discourse and inequality in a post-colonial age. that conceive of culture as a material The absence of the hyphen is perhaps practice, and rejects criticism of discourse indicative of the indeterminacy of what analysis as thereby privileging cultural exactly is meant by ‘post-colonial’ (i.e. critique over material analysis. with a hyphen). The ‘post’ clearly refers Others, however, have criticized post- to and implies a period ‘after’ colonialism colonialism for privileging the colonial and in this strict literal sense the object of encounter as the central fact in the histories postcolonial studies is the historical of colonized peoples. This takes for granted period of the late twentieth century as the the centrality of European experience and European empires of the nineteenth and posits the experience of the colonized as an early twentieth centuries broke up and adjunct to that. It thereby replicates at the former colonies achieved their political level of analysis precisely that kind of independence. However, this is unsatis- dependency that remains a feature of con- factory because to suggest that colonial- temporary neo-colonialism, leading some ism has ended is to overlook the fact that critics to suggest that postcolonialism is Postmodernism 185 the ‘cultural logic’ of neo-colonialism (1994); Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), writ small in the language of the metro- Culture and Imperialism (1993); Gayatri politan academy. Certainly, the theoretical Chakravorty Spivak, The Spivak Reader sophistication of post-colonial theory, and (1996); Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial its sometimes difficult and opaque lan- Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics guage, extends itself to criticism that (1997). postcolonialism is an over-elaborate, AM abstracted and self-indulgent form of cul- tural analysis that does little to address Postmodernism A philosophical the politically urgent problems of the for- response to the fragmentation of merly colonized world. The writings of MODERNISM in the post-1945 period, post- Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, who, modernism’s influence on intellectual along with Said have been characterized debates about the production, valorization as the ‘holy trinity’ of postcolonial theory, and interpretation of cultural production raise objections because of their dense has been enormous. Its principal theoreti- style. Yet, particularly in the case of cal tenets have been hotly disputed since Spivak, this may be seen as a postcolonial the appellation was first used in 1947 to strategy of ‘deforming’ the discourse of describe a mode of architectural style, but European knowledge, a discourse that in broad terms postmodernism refers to Said has shown to be deeply implicated in three key areas of socio-cultural interac- colonialism itself. tion. First, it describes a period after mod- Ambiguity concerning the temporal ernism though this has always been a scope of postcolonialism is offset by a fair contentious and rather arbitrary distinc- degree of consensus concerning its geo- tion as, for some critics, the technical and graphical provenance. Postcolonialism formalistic experiments of postmod- sees modern colonialism as having been ernism are little more than extensions of global in scope and so it concerns itself modernist engagements with form and with a global agenda, concentrating as language. Certainly the two major artistic much on the former European (or movements of the twentieth century differ Western) ‘centre’ as the colonial ‘periph- less than some critics would contend, but eries’. It has extended its concern into equally both would resist the cohering debates concerning multiculturalism, framework of the term ‘movement’ as diaspora, racism and ethnicity as the mass each seeks to break from the suffocating migrations in the postwar period by for- uniformity of conservative aesthetics. merly colonized peoples have radically The term ‘postmodern’ began to be used transformed the cultures and societies of during the 1960s as a means of distinguish- their erstwhile masters. In addition, a gen- ing the subversive fiction of writers, such eration of feminist scholars have exam- as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Samuel ined the intersections of gender and Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges from the sexuality with colonial and post-colonial experimental works of high modernism discourses on race, ethnicity and nation. composed during the 1920s and 1930s. See also ORIENTALISM, SUBALTERN, The playful, irreverent liberties taken HYBRIDITY, NÉGRITUDE. with language, narrative structure, typol- See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, ogy and the reader/text interface by these Classes, Literatures (1992); Homi novelists suggested an exhaustion with K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture the modes of traditional expression and 186 Postmodernism championed an artistic freedom that allied to significant socio-economic shifts allowed the celebration of non-literary in the Western world, encouraged the media derived particularly from popular formation of emancipatory movements culture within the text. The modernist dedicated to the vocalization of previously notion of the artist alienated from the marginalized politics. Tied to this vision mundane irrelevances of daily life forging of an ideological equivalence is the third an ethereal connection with an other principal arena of postmodernism’s world of art was gradually being replaced impact. by an artist that revelled in the visceral In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard contemporaneity of the everyday, mould- published The Postmodern Condition: A ing out of the maelstrom of mass culture Report on Knowledge. In it he argued that an aesthetics of ephemerality. the postmodern condition was character- The second key feature of postmod- ized by a deeply felt scepticism towards ernism is its deeply ambiguous political metanarratives (discursive formations character. Where modernist art scorned promising a totalized account of knowl- the insubstantiality of the political realm, edge). For Lyotard the traditional pivots claiming that it reflected only a temporary of human belief (whether they be religion, and localized example of human praxis, philosophy or science) could no longer be postmodern culture centred itself on the sustained for each reveals its domineering inherently political qualities of art. From ideological insistence in its intolerance this can be inferred the strong links of competing voices. The totalizing between postmodernism and Marxism, a imperative of the metanarrative obscures legacy deriving in no small measure from and denigrates the claims of Others the Leftist political persuasions of many and, in so doing, according to Lyotard, it of the academic proponents of the field. invalidates itself. The freedom that this The rise of postmodernism as a philo- anti-establishmentarianism extended was sophical discourse during the 1960s and grasped by a host of liberation movements 1970s was matched by the emergence of (such as feminism, gay rights and the literary theory, and in particular linguistic racially and religiously dispossessed) as a and discourse analysis. The work of vindication of their rights. Not all critics Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel agreed with Lyotard’s egalitarianism: Foucault and Julia Kristeva quickly Jürgen Habermas and Fredric Jameson in became associated with the theoretical particular attacked the lack of distinction principles underpinning postmodernism between an ideological free-for-all and the and whilst they tacitly acknowledged the monolithic state bureaucracies that hold economic enchainment of the work of art, sway in the West. The dominance of late- they moved the agenda of the Left onto capitalism means, for Jameson, that there is fresh territory by insisting that all cultural no distance between postmodern art and practices were imbued with oppressive the society that created it, thereby rendering undertones and therefore offered sites of the act of critical judgement impractical – productive political struggle. That any one is ultimately always judging postmod- communicational act was conceived, ernism from within postmodernism and made and interpreted within ideology and therefore merely ordering a procession of thereby excluded competing ideological self-referential landmarks. formations became a defining intellectual The 1980s saw attempts to formalize reference point for postmodernism and, postmodernism’s stylistic characteristics Post-structuralism 187 with particular attention to the recycling, it can be approached as a working often parodically, of existing images, through, in various fields of inquiry, of forms and cultural codes. By focussing on some implications of DECONSTRUCTION. the pre-inscribed status of artefacts from Derrida’s influential lecture on ‘Structure, across a high/low cultural divide, produc- sign and play in the discourse of the human ers celebrated the circularities of artistic sciences’ (Writing and Difference, 1967, creation, vaunting the impossibility of trans. 1978) proposed a disruption in the originality by reappropriating convention- very concept of structure as a stable sys- alized forms to pastiche and ironize their tem, mischievously quoting Lévi-Strauss ideological ‘sincerity’. Ultimately this against himself. The effects of deconstruc- self-reflexive wit became ubiquitously tion, though, were not confined to a employed to refer to any radicalization of critique of structuralism. They rather the aesthetic act and casual invocations of emphasized a methodological shift, a move postmodernism were used to identify a away from explanation by origin, order by return to a form of conservatism (such as opposition, fixed or closed signification in the worst excesses of post-feminist and the person as a unified subject. Recent chauvinism). That such a traduction is PSYCHOANALYSIS, notably that of Jacques consistent with postmodernism’s own cul- Lacan, encouraged the latter move, and tural relativism is itself ironic, but it is much recent psychoanalytic criticism is appropriate that a philosophical move- one variety of post-structuralism. It can ment dedicated to the politics of con- also be traced in cultural and ideological sumption should ultimately eat itself. analysis like that of Michel Foucault or See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Gilles Deleuze, and in the feminism of Simulations (1980); Jürgen Habermas, Hélène Cixous or Luce Irigaray. Divergent The Philosophical Discourse of accounts of the READER, like Bloom’s Modernity (1985); Linda Hutcheon, A ‘misreading’, can be cited; so, of course, Poetics of Postmodernism: History, can the literary studies listed under Theory, Fiction (1988); Fredric Jameson, DECONSTRUCTION. Roland Barthes’s career Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of shows the post-structural shift with partic- Late Capitalism (1991); Jean-François ular emphasis, as in the sardonic opening Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A of S/Z (1970, trans. 1974): ‘There are said Report on Knowledge (1979). to be certain Buddhists whose ascetic prac- DL tices enable them to see a whole landscape in a bean.’ Such tidy encapsulation had Post-structuralism As a general term been Barthes’s own ambition in the for developments in literary theory and mid-1960s, and it is precisely what criticism, especially the ‘linguistic turn’, post-structuralism rejects. became common in the 1970s. Like all See Catherine Belsey, Post- such compounds, it is ambiguous. Is the structuralism: A Very Short Introduction relation to STRUCTURALISM one of succes- (2002) and Mark Poster, Critical Theory sion or supercession? – that is, do we see and Post-structuralism: In Search of a post-structuralism as simply later than its Context (1989). Two useful anthologies: predecessor, or is it in some sense a devel- Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post- opment? Both usages can be found; and Structuralist Criticism, edited by Josué post-structuralism covers so many V. Harari (1979); and Untying the Text: practices that it is difficult to define. But a Post-Structuralist Reader, edited by 188 Practical criticism

Robert Young (1981). The Oxford steps that lead to it. The authority of Literary Review and Diacritics publish presence, its power of valorization, relevant articles. structures all our thinking. EC Speaking more specifically, this valoriza- Practical criticism See ANALYSIS, tion of presence is part and parcel of the CRITICISM, NEW CRITICISM, READER. logocentric history of the West, of its desire for a stable ground or foundation Presence To begin, three examples: (the logos). However the logos is con- Rene Descartes’s famous pronouncement ceived – Being, Essence, Origin, Truth, ‘I think therefore I am’; the signature that etc. – its role is always the same: to binds us to a contract; and the proverb anchor and fix meaning. Its ability to do ‘The letter killeth but the spirit giveth so is, in turn, based on the assumption that life’. What links these seemingly dis- the logos is a site of unmediated presence. parate phenomena is that each is based on Escaping the play of differences by which a certain conception of presence as a meaning is articulated, the logos consti- source of authenticity and guarantee of tutes a pure and self-present signified. meaning. Thus, the stability of Descartes’s This logocentric emphasis on presence ‘I’ is supposedly underwritten by the fact is seen most obviously in its privileging that this thinking subject is present to of speech over writing. From Plato to itself within consciousness. Following the the present day, the history of Western same logic, a signature is meant to testify thought has consistently considered to the present intentions of its bearer at speech to have a privileged relationship to the moment of signing. The proverb, truth. When we speak, we seem to have finally, effectively privileges the spirit – direct access to our thoughts. The voice an internal essence associated with the that is always present to the speaker at the ultimate presence of God – over the very moment it issues forth, is inextrica- destructive powers of writing. This val- bly linked to understanding. At the same orization of presence as a site of truth and time, the spoken signifiers seem to fall authentic meaning is ubiquitous through- away – to efface themselves – in order to out the Western world and dominates all reveal an unmediated and transparent aspects of our thought. As Jonathan Culler meaning. Speech is therefore the sign of suggests in On Deconstruction (1982): truth located within the realm of the logos Among the familiar concepts that that guarantees its authenticity. Writing, depend on the value of presence are: on the other hand, is held to be incapable the immediacy of sensation, the pres- of bypassing speech and is thus construed ence of ultimate truths to a divine con- as the mere sign of a sign: the written sciousness, the effective presence of signifier of the spoken word. Its written an origin in a historical development, signifiers, moreover, introduce a material a spontaneous or unmediated intu- barrier between meaning and its communi- ition, the transumption of thesis and cation. As a result, writing has traditionally antithesis in a dialectical synthesis, the been treated as a medium divorced from presence in speech of logical and truth. In this sense, writing is like an ille- grammatical structures, truth as what gitimate or orphaned child. Without a subsists behind appearances, and the father (speaker or logos) to control it, writ- effective presence of a goal in the ing can slip out of our control and become Prose 189 subject to misinterpretation. Moreover, From its ‘different’ look on the page, defined broadly as a system of differences verse at first glance announces itself as where meaning is never self-present but something formed, pretentious, arresting; is, instead, produced through difference the claim to coherence, the inescapable and deferral, writing disrupts and threat- frequency of line-endings, the alternate ens the very notion of presence and all its acceptance of and resistance to the poten- associated values. For example, the privi- tially monolithic control of metre, gives leged status of speech is overthrown by verse a tenseness which may render it the recognition that all signs – spoken or inadequate to explore modes of experi- written – function only in relationship ence which are untense, only partially with other signs and thus the presence of coherent, not attainable except by free- a speaker can never anchor the meaning and-easy groping, such as that of of his or her words. Montaigne. But theories of prose are Precisely because writing represents heavily outnumbered by those of POETRY, such a profound threat, the logocentric many of which, willingly blinded by the tradition has always done its best to partially incidental etymological relation- exclude and repress this destabilizing ship between ‘prose’ and ‘prosaic’, are force as external, secondary and deriva- liable to stigmatize prose as irredeemably tive. Yet, as the deconstructive critic more ordinary, diffuse, unrefined, Jacques Derrida has demonstrated, the straightforward, and thereby to assume an effects of writing cannot be contained. As often unexplained superiority for extra- a system of differences, writing exceeds ordinariness, compression and refined and contains the concept of presence obscurity. and, indeed, constitutes its non-originary Prose, like the Homeric epic, becomes origin. As Derrida asserts in his essay formulaic if it aims at fixity and crystal- ‘Différance’ (1982): ‘An interval must lization. Flaubert, for example, in separate the present from what it is not, in attempting to refine it, eventually subjects order for the present to be itself, but this it to a near-monolithic discipline, an interval that constitutes it as present must, impoverishment of language to a finite, by the same token, divide the present in recurring range of devices, not unrelated and of itself’. Inhabited by the trace of an perhaps to the formulaic meagreness of absence that is never simply present, it is memoranda and scientific discourses. His no longer possible to think of presence as prose can often be read only one way: originary or as the source and guarantee many of his ternary sentences are so clear of meaning. See also DECONSTRUCTION, in structure and cadence, so controlled in DISSEMINATION AND LOGOCENTRISM. meaning, that the alert reader’s initial See M. McQuillan (ed.), experience of them can scarcely avoid Deconstruction: A Reader (2000); being total; this excludes any search for N. Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s alternative groupings of word or idea, and Guide (2000). presents us with a bareness where lan- JA guage, thought and character lie unre- lievedly open to our merciless gaze. Prose Though apparently the antithesis Indeed, one resource of prose, which or sibling of verse, prose suffers from a makes it an eminently suitable vehicle for lack of the precise definition which more REALISM, is the relative looseness of its readily delimits its formal counterpart. context, its refusal to presuppose the 190 Protagonist inevitability of complex pattern, its ability withdrawals from a consciously literary to acknowledge the right of something to mode of narration) makes it easier for exist as itself and not some other thing, as prose to establish clear hierarchies of a self-sufficient detail which may be significance than for verse: some parts of absorbed only slowly into an organized an essay or novel may be less important perception. without being unimportant. Prose can Stanzas, by their visual shape, without mockery admit and accept that announce their separateness and monu- something plays a minor role; it can if it mentality; the appearance of the most fre- wishes avoid being cleverer than life, quent prose forms (ESSAY, NOVEL, SHORT whereas verse, with its evidently deliberate FICTION) asserts an often-reassuring sub- patterns, imposes an air of absoluteness on stantiality and continuity. A danger, yet its material. See also VERSE. also a resource of longer forms, is repeti- See Robert Adolphe, The Rise of tion: the early pages of Dostoevsky’s Modern Prose Style (1968); Ian Crime and Punishment (1866), for A. Gordon, The Movement of English instance, make much use of adjectives, Prose (1966); George Levine and William such as ‘petty’, ‘disgusting’, ‘filthy’, Madden (eds), The Art of Victorian Prose ‘loathsome’, ‘ill-tempered’, ‘weary’, (1968); Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of which come increasingly to share each Prose (1971, trans. 1977). other’s overtones, so that the qualitative MHP unvariedness of Raskolnikov’s percep- tions is rendered, as well as the ebb and Protagonist See CHARACTER, HERO, flow of their intensity. Frequently a vari- PLOT. ety of strands are sustained and repeated Psychogogia See CATHARSIS. during a prose work: throughout Mutmassungen über Jakob (1959), Uwe Psychology and psychoanalysis The Johnson sustains various possible inter- connection between literature and psy- pretations of the central character’s death; chology is an ancient one. The classic none is a full interpretation, but no satis- locus is Aristotle’s series of attempts to factory unified view emerges either, the account for the effects of tragedy and his various strands attempting to fuse but deployment of the term CATHARSIS. Such partly failing to do so: the book’s contin- a play as Hamlet has traditionally been uing hesitation between them generates seen as an account of the psychological a highly complex view of an insoluble consequences of chronic circumstantial riddle, while also conveying a view of dilemma. With the rise of the novel, a new East German life as paralysingly slow. dimension of psychological intensity Slowness, as prose has perhaps realized comes on to the literary agenda; Pamela, better than the verse paragraph, is no bar- in the eponymous Richardson novel, sup- rier to complexity; the groping centrifu- plies us with a set of insights into a mind; gal incompleteness of a vision (e.g. in but a mind which demands to be read Proust) is no barrier to intensity. simultaneously as typical of a particular The reassuring substantiality of prose, historical moment, the rise of individual- its ability to exist at low tension ism as an accompaniment to the social (enhanced in some authors by a casual transition to capitalism. In the eighteenth colloquial tone approaching everyday century in the West, the whole structure speech, or other temporary or permanent of the mind’s relation to society and Psychology and psychoanalysis 191 nature becomes the problematic site on this as the unconscious, Freud generated a which the literary is constructed. paradox: how can we know of the existence With the arrival in England of ROMAN- of the unknowable? TICISM, we see a shift of attention onto the We know of it, Freud contends, in creativity act itself. Following on from three ways: through dreams; through Kant’s classifications of mental activity, parapraxes, principally slips of the and from Schelling’s delineation of an tongue; and through the technique of aesthetic philosophy, Coleridge provides analysis and its main tool, free associa- another crucial locus in Biographia tion. These phenomena demonstrate that Literaria (1817). His principal contribu- memory is merely a filtering mechanism, tions are in giving an account of the kind of and that a large part of what we appar- activity in which the poet engages, and in ently forget is in fact stored. A major fitting this into a hierarchy of mental activ- image for this occurs in his late work ities. The central term is IMAGINATION; Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), Coleridge conceives of this semi- where he compares the unconscious to an theologically, comparing the task of the ancient city, but one where all the preced- poet with the divine creative task, but his ing versions of that city continue to exist, attempts to differentiate between imagina- superimposed one upon another: from the tion, reason and understanding neverthe- unconscious nothing ever goes away. The less constitute an early psychology of terms in which we become aware of these creativity. It was also Coleridge who pro- suppressed areas of the psyche are lin- vided the first useful coinings of the word guistic, for language, according to Freud, ‘unconscious’, paralleling Hegel’s efforts is a double structure: while we think we to detect the mind’s mode of recapitulating speak what we mean, something else is past history. This interest in the creative always speaking through us (see, e.g. urge continues through Shelley, and is later Jokes and Their Relation to the given an added twist by Darwin’s problem- Unconscious, 1905). Literature is deeply atic assertion of human kinship with the implicated in this double structuring: animals: problematic because it implies the Freud says that much of what he has dis- possible operation within the mind of covered was already known to us in the forces beyond individual or species control. works of Goethe and the great German Psychological speculation in English writers, because the artist has privileged criticism continues through the ‘apprecia- access to otherwise unknown realms. tive’ but subtle essays of Swinburne and The techniques of psychoanalysis are Pater, and into T. S. Eliot’s major work on essentially the techniques of close read- the relations between the writing of ing, and the posture of the analyst is that poetry and the presence of the TRADITION. of the disinterested but observant inter- But all of this was largely overtaken by preter of a text, seeking to discern the the work of Freud, whose evolution of unconscious level which can be sensed psychoanalysis as a technique which beneath, or within, the everyday chains of eventually generated a ‘metapsychology’ discourse. But that relationship is always fundamentally altered the field of specu- complicated: in dreamwork – our lation. The most basic of Freud’s discov- attempted recollections of dream – we are eries was that there does exist a large part always performing an act of naturalization, of the psyche which is not under the direct trying to represent our inadmissible wishes control of the individual. In referring to in forms which will not severely dislocate 192 Psychology and psychoanalysis cultural conventions. This activity relies on and his own clinical experience. His central certain crucial devices, principally conden- ideas can be found in Écrits (1977) and sation and displacement, which have The Four Fundamental Concepts of since been assimilated to the structuralist Psycho-analysis (1977). Language, he categories of metaphor and metonymy. claims, is the major force through which Freud’s dissident disciple Jung concen- the human individual is constituted as a trated on the transindividual, collective structured, gendered subject; the entry unconscious; and his involvement with the upon language is a simultaneous submis- arts has generated a set of readings in sion to social authority, in which the indi- which the main focus is on the discernment vidual passes under the ‘name of the of specific ‘universal’ symbols or arche- Father’ and is coloured with patriarchy at types. Jung moves further back into the the very moment of emergence from realm of biologism, asserting that the cen- undifferentiation. Lacan’s discovery of tral shapes of the organism are responsible the ‘mirror-phase’ and his less well- for the structuring of works of art. This known work on psychopathology offer approach has proved more fruitful in the versions of the construction of the subject visual arts; where writing has been con- which have proved congenial to literary cerned, some post-Freudian developments and other critics searching for explana- have been more concerned with the relation tions of the constitutive power of lan- between the instincts and socio-historical guage and image (see, e.g. Yale French change. Herbert Marcuse, for instance, Studies, 1977: Literature and working both with psychoanalysis and with Psychoanalysis). a version of Marxism mediated through the This work has been followed to fasci- Frankfurt School, suggests that different nating if complex conclusions by Gilles ‘instinctive’ shapes emerge in response to Deleuze and Félix Guattari (see Anti- different social conditions (e.g. the ‘perfor- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, mance’ principle within capitalism; the 1977 and A Thousand Plateaus, 1988); necessity of an element of ‘surplus repres- it has also been taken up in FEMINIST CRIT- sion’ to the smooth running of the State). ICISM. The writings of Juliet Mitchell, His claims for literature, and particularly Jacqueline Rose, Julia Kristeva, Hélène for the more surrealist kinds of lyric poetry, Cixous, Luce Irigaray and others offer are high; he regards them as ways of utter- variously deconstructive approaches to ing the otherwise unutterable, as modes of Freud’s evidently inadequate accounts of escape from the bondage of ideology (see female sexuality; principally, and espe- Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964 and cially in the French context, mediated Eros and Civilisation, 1966). through Lacan, they seek to establish a More recent post-Freudian develop- specifically female location in relation to ments have moved into a different area, language, and to prescribe a practice of taking on board the concepts of STRUC- writing. Some feminist approaches define TURALISM and POST-STRUCTURALISM, and grammar itself as a form of patriarchal offering new ways of describing the power, while seeking to avoid a logocen- displacement of the subject. One of the tric prescription of a utopian alternative. most prominent thinkers has been Jacques In the work of Hélène Cixous we see Lacan, who has fashioned a remarkable the opposition male/female modulated discourse from Lévi-Straussian anthropol- into other categories: single/collective; ogy, linguistics, recent French philosophy quasi-permanent/recognizedly transitory Psychology and psychoanalysis 193

(see Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, in the work of a large number of creative 1991; The Cixous Reader, Susan Sellers writers – Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, (ed.), 1994; Irigaray, This Sex which is not William Gibson, Don DeLillo – where the One, 1985; Feminism and Psychoanalysis, complexity of subject construction which Elizabeth Wright (ed.), 1992). Other recent Freud originally proposed is increasingly work in feminist psychoanalysis, notably being taken as an alternative to traditional by Nancy Chodhorow, suggests a whole notions of character autonomy, a develop- new pattern in which female skills in nur- ment which itself follows from earlier turing are seen as having been systemati- twentieth-century writers of the bureau- cally downgraded in the interchange cratic State – Chekhov, Kafka, Lu Xun – between the generations in favour of the and their perceptions of the intense rela- phallocentric, and feminist critics have tionship between the psyche and the discerned this power structure in particu- external forces which condition its devel- lar literary works (see Mitchell, opment and shape. Psychoanalysis and Feminism, 1974; Perhaps the most significant immediate Marks and de Courtivron (eds), New development in psychoanalysis, the impli- French Feminisms, 1980). cations of which for literature and literary There are several further contempo- criticism are still being worked through, rary developments worth pointing to. The lies in the work of Jean Laplanche, and work of Melanie Klein on young infants, especially his book Essays on Otherness and her descriptions of familially induced (1999). Here he essentially replaces the psychosis, are now being seen as capable structuralist Lacanian categories with a of generating accounts of the origins of new repertoire of interpretative tools, creativity and symbolism in early centred on the enigma and the message. infancy; Klein also presents a version of Lacan’s revelation was to tell us in what what it is like to be human which has a ways the unconscious is ‘structured like a revisionary relationship to the now con- language’; Laplanche comes to demon- ventional theorizing of sexual difference. strate how it is not structured like a lan- Her work is sometimes referred to as guage, and indeed not ‘structured’ at all in ‘object-relations psychology’; referred to any meaningful sense of the term, thus sit- under the same heading, although it has uating the tasks of the psychoanalyst and significant differences, is the work of the literary critic against a very different such analysts as D. W. Winnicott. From and more challenging backdrop. Freud and Klein have come the attempts See also Freud, The Interpretation of to read a whole culture and its myths Dreams (1900) and Introductory Lectures suggested by the group relations practice on Psycho-Analysis (1916–17). A useful of Wilfred Bion and pioneered by the anthology of Jung is Anthony Storr (ed.), Tavistock Institute, a project of cultural Selected writings (1983). On object- analysis which is convergent with relations psychology, see Michael Rustin, Foucault’s institutional histories. It should ‘A socialist consideration of Kleinian also be noted that one of the great charges psychoanalysis’, New Left Review levelled against Freud was that he had (1982). The best general accounts are prevented the world from ever again Maud Ellmann, Psychoanalytic Literary indulging in the primal innocence implied Criticism (1994) and Elizabeth Wright, in fantasies of the free individual; cer- Psychoanalytic Criticism (2nd edn, tainly this development now finds an echo 1998). See also D. W. Winnicott, Playing 194 Psychology and psychoanalysis and Reality (1974); Joseph H. Smith Promises: Essays on Literature and (ed.), The Literary Freud (1980); Peter Psychoanalysis (2000); David Punter, Fuller, Art and Psychoanalysis (1980); Writing the Passions (2001); Canham and Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud Satyamurti (eds), Acquainted with the (1982); Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Night: Psychoanalysis and the Poetic Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis Imagination (2003). (1986); Adam Phillips, Promises, DGP Q

Queer theory Until the 1990s, ‘queer’ gay sexualities’ in Differences: A Journal was commonly a slang word, usually of Feminist Cultural Studies in 1991. derisory, used to mean ‘homosexual’. Since Nonetheless, Judith Butler’s work is the 1990s, ‘Queer theory’ and ‘Queer profoundly influential in Queer Theory. studies’ have been legitimate theoretical For instance, when Dennis Halperin, author approaches engaged with in University of Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay departments, as ‘Gay and Lesbian Studies’ Hagiography (1995), claims that ‘queer is had been somewhat earlier. Queer Theory by definition whatever is at odds with the was also given popular impetus by the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. activist group Queer Nation, who were There is nothing in particular to which it frustrated with the constraining and often necessarily refers. It is an identity without prescriptive ‘identity politics’ of lesbians an essence’, he unmistakably draws on and gay men. Even though ‘queerness’ is Butler’s theories of gender PERFORMATIVITY most often associated with lesbian and gay and on the discursive effects on sex that subjects, being queer is to resist any models masquerade as material origins or causes. of sexual stability and static identification, Her 1994 book, Bodies that Matter: On the albeit with an overarching resistance to Discursive Limits of Sex, contains a signif- ‘heterosexual hegemony’. Rather, explains icant chapter entitled ‘Critically queer’ in Annamarie Jagose in Queer Theory (1996), which she asks some challenging questions queer theory’s ‘analytic framework also of a theoretical approach which has includes such topics as cross-dressing, ‘refunctioned’ as new and affirmative, a hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and term that once ‘signalled degradation’: gender-corrective surgery’. There are ‘Is this a reversal that retains and reiterates several generally acknowledged pioneers the abjected history of the term?’; ‘Does of queer theory and Michel Foucault the reversal reiterate the logic of repudia- (1926–84) is invariably numbered among tion by which it was spawned?’; ‘Can the them. His three volumes The History of term overcome its constitutive history of Sexuality (1976–86) is particularly influ- injury?’ Other reservations about queer ential in this regard. Two other books, theory note the way in which ‘queer chic’ both of which appeared in 1990 and had has been hijacked by postmodern visual their roots in Foucauldian thought, also culture, so that rather than being subversive, made a formative contribution: Gender queerness is just the latest commercial Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of novelty. While ‘queer’ is so visible, so aes- Identity by Judith Butler and Episte- thetically permissible, so ‘heterosexually mology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky camp’, its loses its radical political force. Sedgwick. However, Judith Butler has See Andy Medhurst and Sally also described, in a 1994 interview, how R. Munt (eds), Lesbian and Gay Studies: she was unaware of her own status in A Critical Introduction (1997); Donald Queer Theory circles until after it had E. Hall, Queer Theories (2002); Annamarie been well established. To her mind, the Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction catalyst had been Teresa de Lauretis’s (1996). special issue, ‘Queer theory: lesbian and SS R

Reader Classical theory, seeing however, pure empiricism, since it was literature as an affective medium, neces- informed by a motive: the production of sarily assumed a reader to be affected, but a totally unified reading, in which all did not emphasize the reader as such. inconsistencies are resolved. And this Horace, in his Art of Poetry, says that the totalization in turn produced a supposed poet’s aim is either to profit or to please – psychological result of synthesis and but readers are dismissed with the casual harmony. Reading was thus seen as comment that elders prefer profit and therapeutic, in a tradition that goes back youngsters pleasure. To cite ‘the poet’s to Aristotle. Unified readings were also aim’ as Horace does is to shift from affect the concern of Anglo-American NEW to intention, a typical move in author- CRITICISM; in the famous article on centred criticism. Neoclassical discussions ‘The affective fallacy’ by Wimsatt and of taste suggest attention to what in the Beardsley (The Verbal Icon, 1954), affect twentieth century was called the reader’s was ruled out as a confusion between the competence. Eighteenth-century fictional poem and its results. To see the work as practice goes further, enacting the dynam- autonomous is to forbid specific attention ics of reading: an inscribed reader for to readers. Reaction against new critical Fielding or Sterne is functionally engaged autonomy prompted studies of readers in a temporal process of challenge and and their responses which tended to use a response. Nineteenth-century novelists dynamic rather than an affective orienta- often imply a social dimension for tion. It is important to note that reader readers, including them by address in study is only an orientation, not a method. some actual or imagined community; but It is indeed possible to convert any formal twentieth-century didactic criticism usu- description into a ‘readerly’ account sim- ally glossed this by a return to authorial ply by changing terms, so that a reader intention. As usual, it is Henry James who instead of a critic discovers formal dis- offers crucial insights into the question of tinctions. Theories that try to go further author versus reader. An early formula- than this can be categorized in terms of tion suggests that the balance of power the methods that they seek to appropriate. is on the author’s side: ‘the writer makes Similar appropriations do not necessarily the reader, very much as he makes his produce similar results. Thus, Norman characters’. But James described his own Holland and Harold Bloom, both studied reading practice in terms of ‘reconstruc- reading through psychology or psycho- tion’, and his emphasis is increasingly on analysis; but while Holland used the the reader as an active figure rather than reader’s ‘identity theme’ to produce uni- a mere affective target for experience or fied, convergent readings, Bloom staged instruction. an Oedipal conflict which prompts mis- One influential twentieth-century study readings that diverge from the authority of reading was the ‘practical criticism’ of of their predecessors. This split between I. A. Richards, which used empirical convergence and divergence, or between accounts by actual readers. It was not, total and plural readings, can also be Reader 197 found in appropriations of SEMIOTICS. It And though he went on to repudiate it, can be seen from my discussion under Jauss was by no means alone in this that heading that Riffaterre’s reader, approach. Theorists as different as transforming the essential ‘matrix’ of a Barthes, Iser and Fish have concentrated text, is a supreme exemplar of convergent on the change or frustration of a reader’s activity; while Umberto Eco’s work expectations; change is always seen as seems to offer both convergent and diver- somehow salutary, a variety of Horatian gent emphases. In so far as he attempts a ‘profit’. Jauss’s colleague Wolfgang Iser systematic account of how readers extend built on the phenomenology of Roman their codes, he seems to offer a positive, Ingarden. They considered the reader’s total study. But in so far as he follows activity in ‘actualizing’ what is only Peirce on the unlimited nature of semiotic potential in any text. Iser attempted a process, any such account must be provi- compromise in the balance of power sional, one of many plural readings. between text and reader. The text offers a Plurality or divergence are emphasized in ‘structure of appeal’ which calls for its borrowings from SEMIOTICS that have felt ‘implied’ reader; their interaction creates the impact of DECONSTRUCTION; the later the aesthetic object, as the reader works work of Roland Barthes is a case in point. through gaps and indeterminacies in the S/Z (1970, trans. 1974) studies reading text, through shifts of vantage point, through the interplay of semiotic codes, through distinctions of theme and hori- yet, refuses to codify that interplay. zon. This process, though idealized, is Where Eco offers diagrams, Barthes one of the most intimate accounts of read- prefers the undecidable model of an inter- ing yet produced; but it was fundamen- woven textile. Barthes’s presuppositions tally challenged by Stanley Fish. Fish’s are also evident in his hedonism. The approach derived in part from linguistics Pleasure of the Text (1975) may recall and stylistics, but his writing is both Horace by its title, but the Barthesian eclectic and variable. Instead of implying reader thrills to the decidedly unHoratian a reader, the text becomes itself a product qualities of transgression, discord and of the reader, in that its significant struc- excess. tures are not given but ascertained by Reader studies from the University of prior interpretive procedures that are Constance offered a more sober set of always already in place. ‘Strictly speak- appropriations. H. R. Jauss’s approach ing,’ says Fish, ‘getting “back-to-the-text” derived from sociology and HERMENEUTICS. is not a move one can perform’. To get rid His ‘reception aesthetics’ moved away of the text as an autonomous authority from intrinsic accounts of an individual might seem to open the way for the most reader’s response to consider the com- widely divergent readings, but Fish dif- munal ‘horizon of expectations’ against fered from Barthes or Bloom in preserving which any work is received. These a convergent factor. Reading is not a radi- horizons are historically generalized as cally private affair. It always takes place ‘paradigms’, following Thomas Kuhn’s within an ‘interpretive community’, social work in the history of science. In his ear- or institutional or both. Though communi- lier writing, Jauss betrayed a modernist ties and their memberships change, there bias in his emphasis on innovation, evaluat- is always a set of normative procedures ing works by their degree of distance from available – if only for challenge – at any the horizon against which they appeared. given time. 198 Realism

Though Fish himself did not pursue the social life of France in all its aspects. the point, to speak of communal constraints The adoption of this role led to detailed is to suggest a politics of reading. Barthes’s reportage of the physical minutiae of apparent perversity, for example, is politi- everyday life – clothes, furniture, food, cized by his claim that power is inscribed etc. – the cataloguing of people into social in the language itself. He thus produces a types or species and radical analyses of rhetoric of contestation which, in differ- the economic basis of society. The virtues ent forms, is echoed by a range of opposi- pursued were accuracy and completeness tional reading practices that seek not of description. At its extreme the realistic simply to actualize the meaning of a text programme runs into two difficulties. but to call it into question. This activity is Technically, it becomes obsessed with especially strong in FEMINIST CRITICISM, and physical detail and topographical accu- it is neatly characterized in the title of racy for its own, or history’s sake, and so a book by Judith Fetterley: The Resisting novels may amount to little more than Reader (1979). guidebooks or social documents. Second, See Umberto Eco, The Role of it becomes confused about the distinction the Reader (1979); Elizabeth Freund, between art and history or sociology: The Return of the Reader (1987); the novelist is only metaphorically and Gerry Brenner, Performative Criticism: incidentally a historian; whatever the Experiments in Reader Response (2004). relations of writing with the ‘realities’ of Two useful anthologies are edited by Jane society, the novelist is finally involved in P. Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism: the making of fictions, and has responsi- from Formalism to Post-Structuralism bilities to FORM that the historian or (1980); and by Susan R. Suleiman and sociologist does not. Inge Crosman, The Reader in the Text: The failure to acknowledge this crucial Essays in Audience and Interpretation distinction is evident in the development (1980). The Constance School is of realistic theory into Naturalism, whose described in Robert C. Holub, Reception claim for an even greater accuracy and Theory: A Critical Introduction (1984). inclusiveness rested on an analogy with William Ray, Literary Meaning: From scientific method. Naturalism, notably in Phenomenology to Deconstruction (1984) the theories of Emile Zola, borrowed its covers the major theorists. terms from post-Darwinian biology and EC asserted the wholly determined both indi- vidual and society. Since humans were Realism In literary history, realism is simply higher animals, their nature was usually associated with the effort of the controlled by the regular forces of hered- NOVEL in the nineteenth century, particu- ity and environment. So the novelist as larly in France, to establish itself as social historian now appeared as the taxo- a major literary genre. The realism of nomic biologist, displaying a scientific Balzac and the Goncourt brothers was objectivity in elaborate documentation and essentially an assertion that, far from being unwonted frankness in regard to bodily escapist and unreal, the novel was uniquely functions. Fortunately, many of Zola’s capable of revealing the truth of contem- novels, at least, managed to survive their porary life in society. Baizac, in La methodology. Comédie Humaine, saw himself as a scien- The theory of realism in England was tific historian, recording and classifying much less coherent and scientific. Until Realism 199 the 1880s, when the debate on realism form – narrative structuring, symbolic and naturalism was imported from patterning, linguistic complexity and so France, critics and novelists tended to talk on. Much of the major modernist fiction rather of the novel’s duty to be true to of this century – the later James, Conrad, ‘life’. The central concern in this injunc- Joyce, Woolf – and most postmodernist tion was not the representation of mater- novels, seem to exist in terms of this alter- ial reality but the investigation of the native poetic; they advertise their fiction- moral behaviour of people in society. The ality. Arguably all novels relate in some mechanistic and deterministic elements way to the general complex of realism, but of realism were alien to the temper of relatively few can be fully understood in Victorian novelists and their critics. But the terms of the specific theory of realism. the concern for truth, for morality and for This is why attempts to use ‘realism’ an accurate and unromanticized descrip- as a critical term to define the core aspect tion of contemporary society, defined an of the novel, rather than as a label for a unmistakably realistic concept of the diverse but identifiable tradition, prove novel. Of course, such demands implied unsatisfactory, if initially attractive. Ian a general agreement about the nature of Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, points out reality, about certain self-evident truths that we find in nearly all novels, in com- concerning the individual and society, for parison to other genres, an accentuation without these there could be no way of of the temporal and spatial dimensions. identifying the abnormal, the deviant, the Novels give us a sense of people existing novels that were untrue to life. At the in continuous time, and locate them in a worst, this critical demand could nar- physical world more specifically than any row to a prescription for a conformist other kind of literature. In this sense fiction of the commonplace, novels for Ulysses is the supreme realist novel. The Mrs Grundy. Dickens, George Eliot and difficulty arises when Watt goes on to Henry James, all major realists in different specify, as a defining element of realism, ways, found it necessary to assert a larger ‘the adaptation of prose style to give an idea of realism that might answer to more air of complete authenticity’, and takes, complex views of the possibilities of life. as models of authentic report, the novels All theories of realism, however of Defoe and Richardson. The implication sophisticated, rest on the assumption that is that the novelist attempts to divert the novel imitates reality, and that that attention from the fictionality of the text reality is more or less stable and com- by avoiding all eloquent and figurative monly accessible. But it is possible to language. Novelists write the neutral conceive of the relationship between art prose of the dispassionate reporter so that and reality in terms of imaginative cre- reality, or their image of reality, may seem ation rather than imitation. The writer more purely itself. On this view of real- may be said to imagine, to invent a fic- ism the ideal novel would be a flawless tional world which is more than a copy of mirror to the world; but since language is the real one. Such a shift in conceptual never neutral, such a novel is impossible. metaphors produces attitudes to the novel, More importantly, it is doubtful whether and perhaps even novels, with quite many novels, even within the realist tradi- different priorities from those of the real- tion, have any such ambitions for linguis- ist tradition. The emphasis moves from tic transparency. Perhaps Arnold Bennett, accuracy of representation to aspects of Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser 200 Reason longed for the anonymity of reportage, England, 1850–1870 (1961); Ian Watt, but there is nothing self-effacing about The Rise of the Novel (1957); René the language of Flaubert, Dickens or Wellek, ‘The concept of realism in liter- James. ary scholarship’, Neophilologus 44 Hence as a critical term, ‘realism’ (1960), 1–20, reprinted in Concepts of identifies some important characteristics Criticism (1963); D. Grant, Realism of the novel form, but fails to define it. (1970); G. Lukács, Studies in European Most novels are too complex to be Realism (1950); C. Belsey, Critical accounted for in terms of their representa- Practice (1980); Dario Villanueva, tional authenticity, and the languages of Theories of Literary Realism (1997); the novel are too various to be subsumed Pam Morris, Realism (2003). under the model of direct report. The art PM of the novel is rhetorical as well as repre- sentational; ‘realism’ gives us an account Reason See FEELING, IMAGINATION, of only one of its dimensions. See also SENSIBILITY. FICTION, IMITATION, NOVEL. Reception See READER. Emile Benveniste posited in Problems in General Linguistics that narration Refrain A refrain is a line, or a group operates in two different ways. When nar- of lines, of verse, repeated in its totality ration calls attention to its act of narration so regularly or in such a specific pattern as presuming both a speaker and a lis- as to become a controlling (ballad) or tener, with the speaker seeking to affect defining (fixed forms) structural factor. the listener in some way, it appears as dis- In the BALLAD, much of the effect of course. By contrast, when ‘events that a refrain depends on the narrative not at took place at a certain moment of time are first comprehending it: each goes its presented without any intervention of own way. But as the poem proceeds, the the speaker’, the narration appears as narrative increasingly invests the refrain histoire. Catherine Belsey in Critical with circumstance and an awful aptness, Practice refers to this distinction between while the refrain makes of the narrative ‘discourse’ and ‘histoire’ to point out something pre-ordained and lyrically how in classic realist fiction ‘the events self-engrossed. Ultimately, the poet may seem to narrate themselves’, whereas dis- anticipate the refrain and explore the course assumes a speaker and a listener. various opportunities it offers (e.g. Poe’s Accordingly, the ‘authority’ of classic The Raven). For an exceptional reversal realism’s impersonal narration stems from of refrain’s irreversibility, see Pound’s its effacement of its own status as dis- Threnos, in which the refrain – ‘Lo the fair course. Consequently, in late twentieth- dead!’ – is finally ingested into the body century criticism, realism was frequently of the verse, parenthesized by brackets discussed in terms of a hierarchy of and surmounted by the word ‘Tintagoel’, discourse, with the narrator occupying which resurrects the lovers, Tristram and a discursive position above the characters Iseult, even as it identifies them. and standing between them and the In ballads in lighter or coarser vein, reader. the refrain may act as a verbal substitute See Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn for knowing laughter, in patriotic ballads a Study of Five French Realists (1963); (e.g. The ‘George Aloe’), as a mark of R. Stang, The Theory of the Novel in steadfastness in vicissitude and insolent Refunctioning 201 complacency in victory. The nonsense to suggest the way in which works of art refrain – ‘Heigh ho! says Rowley’, ‘Ay and literature could be constantly put to lally, o lilly lally’ – seems to be a way of diverse uses. Such writers rejected the expressing a complete acquiescence in view that literary works were ‘timeless’, the mood of the poem without interfering stressing the historical conditions of their with its meaning, a way even of momen- production and reception; but they also tarily backing away from the meaning of dismissed the notion that literary works a song in order to capture its feeling belonged only to their historical moment, nearer to its pre-verbal inarticulacy. and that their meaning was ‘exhausted’ by In many ballads and rhymes, the what they meant to their contemporaries. refrain enjoys a typographical separation On the contrary, works of literature could which points to its origin in a dialogue, be given new meanings by successive between the poet and chorus. But in many generations, turned to social uses of the fixed forms (rondel, triolet, ron- unthinkable for their authors and so deau) the refrain has been absorbed into ceaselessly reinterpreted and ‘rewritten’. the poem and thus emerges only gradually For such a theory, the ‘meaning’ of a lit- from it; indeed, it may appear to betray erary text does not reside within it like the the poem by becoming at once the poem’s core within a fruit; it is the sum-total of subject and limitation, formally beautify- the history of uses to which the text is put. ing but intellectually stultifying. The Such uses will naturally be constrained by alternating refrains of the villanelle, in the nature of the literary work itself: it is particular, suggest a choking process; not possible to put any work to any the peculiar anguish of those villanelles kind of use. But it is equally impossible to devoted to the theme of time (e.g. read off from a literary work the various Dobson’s Tu ne quaesieris, Henley’s interpretations which it may validly Where’s the use of sighing, Auden’s If I receive in different historical contexts. could tell you), derives from the continual For writers like Brecht and Benjamin, notation of passing time within a struc- the most significant meanings of a liter- ture that wastes time and condemns the ary work are always determined by one’s poet to contemplative immobility. But the present situation. Though it is often fixed form may equally struggle against enough to establish what a work ‘origi- its refrain, not allow it to settle into a nally’ meant, we can, of course, only repressive role; it may outwit it with an establish this within the limits of our own indefatigable novelty or humanity, it may discourses, which may be quite alien to make it an instrument of novelty itself, or the discourse of the work itself. The it may re-integrate the refrain by making German critical traditions of HERMENEU- its lyric intentions unknown to itself, TICS and reception theory (cf. READER) dependent on the fancy of the ‘common’ ponder the interpretative problems lines. involved in this encounter between our CS own social world of meaning, and that of a literary work produced in different con- Refunctioning A translation of the ditions. But whereas HERMENEUTICS is on German term Umfunktionierung, which the whole concerned with the problem of was used by certain left-wing German how we can recapture, as faithful as pos- writers and critics of the 1930s (Bertolt sible, a sense of what the work originally Brecht and Walter Benjamin, in particular) meant, the exponents of ‘refunctioning’ 202 Representation were more concerned with lending English (1982); J. Willett (ed.), Brecht on the work a new, contemporary set of Theatre (1964), The New Sobriety: Art and meanings, if necessary by deliberately Politics in the Weimar Republic (1978). ‘misreading’ it. (For certain critics, in TE particular, the American Harold Bloom, all readings of literary texts are ‘misread- Representation See DECONSTRUCTION, DRAMA IMITATION REALISM TYPICALITY ings’; other, DECONSTRUCTIVE, critics, , , , . having rejected the notion of a ‘correct’ Response See EFFECT, READER. reading, deny the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ readings.) Revisionary writing Draws together Refunctioning, then, is a deliberate theoretical developments in the fields of using or appropriation of an artefact. But sociology and cultural studies but partic- it would insist, against those who would ularly, historiography and postmodernist regard this as scandalous or unethical, literary criticism. Commencing from the that all criticism is, inescapably, a form of post-structuralist recognition that all acts use of the text: there is in this sense no of communicative interchange involve a disinterested criticism. The difference is speaker, a hearer and a message, that each between those schools of criticism participant transmits or receives from a which frankly admit that they are using the position of ideological partiality and that work – often for political ends – and those the message is equally contained by the which do not. The criticism of Coleridge or ideological framework of discourse, revi- T. S. Eliot would in this view be quite as sionary critics (and writers) seek the ten- ‘ideological’, and ultimately political, as sions and discontinuities in this clashing that of a Marxist writer; it is just that the of world views. Working with the concept latter makes his or her position plain. of HEGEMONY, as formulated by Antonio An example of refunctioning would be Gramsci, these critics examine the textual Brecht’s attempt to produce Shakespeare’s products of a given society for the ways in politically conservative Coriolanus for which the political and cultural assump- socialist audiences and socialist political tions that those texts make about their ends. Such an attempt, of course, may society reflect (or possibly resist) the fail: it may be that changed historical con- dominant forces that give shape to the ditions result in people’s ceasing to experience of living. Because the hege- extract any significant meaning from a monic network of power relations that work of the past, even a highly valued operates in any given society through one. (It may also be that if we discovered the auspices of culture necessarily privi- more about the original meanings of cer- leges voices that reinforce the stability of tain past works – say, Greek tragedy – we the ruling elite and maintain the political might cease to value them as highly as we status quo, so certain subaltern voices do.) If, on account of a deep historical are marginalized. Post-structuralism’s transformation, people ceased to find attention to discursive practices of relevance in the works of Shakespeare, it unconscious empowerment and post- would be interesting to ask in what sense, modernism’s interest in the contestation if any, those works were still ‘valuable’. of totalizing ideas of truth enables critics See T. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or to imagine other possible world forma- Towards a Revolutionary criticism tions by highlighting the narratives of the (1981); P. Widdowson (ed.), Re-Reading repressed communities. Revisionary writing 203

Revisionary writing, or Revisionism ‘Great Tradition’) has had to be rethought as it is sometimes termed in academic in order to accommodate the claims of circles, gained significant popularity those previously excluded. Feminist, during the 1970s and 1980s in the field queer and postcolonial writing has sought of historiography. The work of Stephen the revision of the concept of Literature by Greenblatt, Louis Mink and, in particular, revealing the exclusionary politics of a Hayden White, explores the structural and canon that tended to be built around dead, ideological parameters of historical writ- white, European men. Writers, such as ing to destabilize the claims to privileged J. M. Coetzee, have taken their own trans- status that the discipline has enjoyed since gressive stance by literally revisioning the mid-eighteenth century. White, in his classic texts: in Foe (1986) he takes an celebrated books Metahistory (1973) and icon of protestant bourgeois culture, Tropics of Discourse (1978), studied Robinson Crusoe (1720), and rewrites it the ways in which historiographical writ- from the perspective of a woman. In ing tended to mimic literary forms and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber tropes as rhetorical means for establishing and Other Stories (1979) and Jeanette a persuasive case for a specific reading Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only of historical events. By employing the Fruit (1985) the fairy story is disarticu- frameworks of fiction in the representa- lated to reveal the implicit sexism and dis- tion of supposedly ‘truthful’ and factual empowerment of women that the form incidents, historians create, so White enshrines. Such revisions expose the argued, certain well-defined and recog- inherent assumptions of a particular kind nizable trajectories that may enable a sat- of text, but for some critics the indoctri- isfying narrative of cause and effect, but nating impact of ideology manifests itself that indicate the containment of history at the level of the word that needs to be within certain political, ethical and ideo- depoliticized before a literature of genuine logical boundaries. History’s claim to self-expression can be conceived. In the ‘truth-telling’ was seriously undermined popular imagination, this sensitivity is by the New Historicist movement (as it often derided as political correctness became known) and though extreme diag- but the repositioning of a grammatical noses that ‘history is fiction’ have been imbalance is an important facet in an gradually tempered over time, the impact inclusive revisioning of power relations of the metahistorical turn has been signifi- between individuals, groups and global cant far beyond the field of historiography. communities. If History, or for that matter Literature, Also of importance is Adrienne Rich’s is an ideological state apparatus designed essay, ‘When we dead awaken: writing as to promote and preserve a particular hege- re-vision’, where Rich argues that ‘Re- monic balance, then counter-histories vision – the act of looking back, of seeing resist the consensual imperative of that with fresh eyes, of entering an old text hegemony by demanding acknowledge- from a new critical direction – is for ment of their validity. This has been seen women more than a chapter in cultural most strikingly in the field of literary history: it is an act of survival.... how our studies where the traditional canon of language has trapped as well as liberated English Literature (established in the early us, how the very act of naming has been part of the twentieth century and heavily till now a male prerogative’. See also influenced by F. R. Leavis’s notion of the POSTMODERNISM and POST-STRUCTURALISM. 204 Rhetoric

See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from and forms, how authors present their the Prison Notebooks (1971); Stephen credentials, relates to their audience, Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: attempt to persuade – even a few pieties From More to Shakespeare (1980); about ethical and intellectual truth. At Christian Moraru, Rewriting (2001); the same time, no student who pays a Hayden White, Metahistory (1973), moment’s attention to epistemology, Tropics of Discourse (1978); Adrienne ontology or intellectual history is likely to Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: confuse Rein with Aristotle, a composi- Selected Prose 1966–78 (1979). tion handbook with a formal theory of dis- DL course or, for that matter, fail to discover that Campbell’s beliefs very often contra- Rhetoric Traditionally, the art of dict Aristotle’s, that neither writer’s first putting a thought over in a particular principles would be at ease with the manner; command of a number of artfully reformed positivism of Perelman. different manners of expression or per- This inordinately broad range of suasion. As a result of the diversity of its opinion as to what constitutes rhetoric, products, there is and has been no certain from a concern with the grammatical or orthodoxy in its doctrines. On the other inflectional efforts of novices to the hand, in spite of the discord which has search for the mainsprings of rational dis- characterized it both as a subject and as course, is further complicated by the fact a discipline, rhetoric probably does have that from classical times onwards the a boundary or two and, within each of its majority of writers on the subject, despite schisms, a surprising amount of homo- their own particular allegiances, have geneity and tradition. There is not all that dealt with rhetoric as something akin to much difference, for example, between mathematics, a more or less universally two textbooks of English composition, applicable tool. That it may profitably be say A. M. Tibbett’s The Strategies of viewed as such is perhaps so, but this bias Rhetoric (1969) and Kane and Peter’s has more often led generations of rhetori- A Practical Rhetoric of Expository Prose cians into a marked fondness for eccentric (1966). Nor are these two texts entirely eclecticism, vague key terms, untenable unrelated to Irving Rein’s The Relevant and extreme generalizations and a naïve Rhetoric (1969), although the latter work enthusiasm for instant social and language is concerned with teaching speakers reform. rather than writers. And in a broader The temptation to consider rhetoric as sense, all three of these books are recog- an all-embracing compositional and criti- nizable descendants of such Sophistic cal discipline, panacea and touchstone for handbooks as the Rhetorica, ad human motivation has also occasionally Alexandrum and the Rhetorica ad led scholars to conclude that all writers in Herennium. They share a considerable all times have succumbed to it, that its amount of subject matter and a few attrib- universality is chronological as well as utes with even such famous philosophic conceptual. Charles O. McDonald, to cite rhetorics as Aristotle’s or Campbell’s or a one case, argues in his Rhetoric of respectable writer’s in this vein, Tragedy: Form in Stuart Drama (1966), Perelman’s The New Rhetoric, a Treatise that English dramatists from Shakespeare on Argumentation (1969): a concern for to John Ford were thoroughly infected grammar, figures, argumentative devices by an ‘antilogistic’ ‘Sophistic’ ‘habit of Rhizome 205 mind’, caught, allegedly, from a somewhat has yet to be exploited to the point where too free association with the two thousand its body of knowledge is inevitably repeti- years of rhetorical tradition which he out- tious, replete with miniscule observations lines in a hundred pages of prefatory and haunted by portents of collision with material. We are left with the provocative if dead ends. eristic implication that Gorgias of Leontini Cf. STYLE, a term with a similar basic made a demonstrable and significant meaning and a similar wide range of contribution to Hamlet. connotations and thus power to evoke All of this is not to say that the ‘garden contention. Both ‘style’ and ‘rhetoric’ of eloquence’ is naught but a jungle of signify systems of conventional (hence, verbiage, nor to disparage the occasional variously prescriptively teachable) verbal fine flowerings in the pioneer work of devices for the ‘ornamentation’ of a dis- such twentieth-century writers as Father course. If style often suggests artificiality, Ong, Wayne C. Booth, Richard McKeon self-indulgence or preciousness, rhetoric, and Kenneth Burke. A fair case could because it is initially a verbal art for even be made out to show that the infinite persuasion often connotes design, insin- variety and lack of cohesion in rhetoric cerity, even lies. Alternatively, the and rhetorical studies is favourable to availability of hundreds of rhetorical independent thought, original research handbooks – lists and examples of figures and heuristic scholarship. And certainly and schemes – produced over the last two the long and complex history of the thousand years may suggest a mechanical influence of rhetoric on Western thought shallowness of linguistic technique. is too important a subject to be ignored Attempts to make the term exploratory by serious investigators into language and and critical rather than normative and literature. Yet the fact remains that the technical (e.g. I. A. Richards, Philosophy resurgence in the twentieth century of of Rhetoric, 1936; Wayne C. Booth, The scholarly interest in rhetoric did not pro- Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961) play down the duce a substantial body of important evaluative dimension and the sinister side thought or impressive research. There is of ‘persuasion’. Booth’s book also shows not a single well-regarded general history that it is, unfortunately, all too easy to of the subject, there are surprisingly few neglect the linguistic aspects of persua- careful studies of the theories held in sion; here ‘rhetoric’ is being used in an various periods, and there is a marked essentially untraditional sense. paucity of modern theoretical treatises Wimsatt and Beardsley’s Literary which will withstand more than a few Criticism, A Short History (1957) minutes’ critical scrutiny. And beyond provides an elementary account of the that, the relationships of rhetoric to his- classical and medieval tradition. tory, literature, linguistics, homiletics, TGW law and philosophy have seldom been investigated in any detail, let alone under- Rhizome The term ‘rhizome’ was stood on more than a superficial level. first used by the French writing/thinking Looked at from a constructive point of team of Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and view these all too obvious gaps and short- Félix Guattari (1930–92) in 1976, comings in rhetorical studies constitute the although its currency as a theoretical one major advantage which rhetoric has concept derives from the introduction to over many of its academic neighbours: it A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and 206 Rhizome

Schizophrenia (1980), and its subsequent contingent and improvisatory; it does not ‘application’ throughout that text. Botanists follow established narrative principles, it use the term to differentiate between the does not proceed ineluctably along pre- diffused underground growth systems of established lines towards predetermined certain kinds of plant (such as couch-grass) goals. Instead, it proceeds by way of leaps and those with a dominant or radicle/ between different, seemingly incommen- radical root system (such as the carrot). In surable, parts of the system; it is chaotic the adaptation of Deleuze and Guattari, and metamorphic, forging temporary rhizome refers to a non-hierarchical links between different languages and network in which established practices of different categories only for them to dis- logic, causation, filiation, etc. (including integrate as new pathways are mapped the practice which would look to oppose and new connections forged. Above all, rhizome and root) cannot function. the rhizome is always and everywhere Derrida and Foucault notwithstanding, opposed to binary thought which, even Deleuze and Guattari are perhaps the when it opposes the Multiple to the One, most mutinous of a generation of revolu- is still mortgaged to the One – which is to tionary French thinkers. Although trained say, to an ordered, hierarchical model of as philosopher and psychiatrist, respec- reality in which everything is (and can tively, both rejected the notion of (the) only ever be) itself. intellectual discipline because of what Although Deleuze and Guattari begin they understood to be its inherent collu- A Thousand Plateaus by outlining ‘the sion with the bourgeois capitalist state. book’ as an example of the rhizome, the The work produced during their twenty- application of their anti-disciplinary year partnership was dedicated to the thought to the discipline of literature unmasking of this collusion, and to the would be difficult to assess; yet, their advancement of an anti-disciplinary focus on the rhizomatic nature of desire counter-tradition derived from a variety (which, they claim, Freud recognized but of brilliant (some would say hopelessly then eschewed so as to preserve the egotistical) intellectual figures, including integrity of psychoanalysis) has proved Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) and Friedrich influential in some literary analyses. The Nietzsche (1844–1900). idea of ‘literature’ itself – a vast intercon- The rhizome is one of the most auda- necting web of narratives and characters cious rhetorical figures developed by which may be entered or exited at any Deleuze and Guattari. In the introductory point, and in which critical tweakings at essay to A Thousand Plateaus they one point will set off vibrations through- describe it with reference to a number of out the web – is also a potentially fruitful characteristic ‘principles’, including con- idea. With its incalculable army of users nection, heterogeneity, multiplicity and deploying the technology to communicate rupture. As a metaphor for the organiza- in a seemingly endless variety of official tion of human experience, the rhizome is and unofficial ways, some have claimed explicitly cast against another botanical that the Internet is the rhizomatic system organism – the tree – which, with its con- par excellence. notations of solidity, hierarchy, longevity It is unlikely if those with an intellectual and totality, has been central to the devel- and/or material investment in the tradition opment of established forms of knowledge. of rational thought descended from the Rhizomatic thought is anti-systematic, Greek philosophers are about to welcome Rhyme 207 the rhizome with open arms (or open Rhyme is also the music that thought and minds). By the same token, most ‘opposi- feeling are capable of: thought when it is tionalist’ critics (feminists and post- so just as to delight the ear as well as the colonialists, for example) have enough on mind, feeling when the consonance it their hands trying to deal with (what they achieves testifies to its participation in a perceive to be) the abuses of power facil- principle greater than itself. In the service itated by rationalist thought over the of rhetoric, rhyme is an insidious substi- years; attempting to ‘unthink’ the whole tute for causality. In a rhyme like play: system of discursive exchange could rob stray, to take a simple example, the poet them of the grounds for resistance, and can play on the knowledge that the reader, thus deny them an identity. It is in this attempting to rationalize the phenomenon context that Deleuze and Guattari have of near-homonymity, will see lightheart- often been accused of bad faith: only edness as the necessary source and neces- those possessed of a deep familiarity with sary outcome of vagabondage; as Daniel the workings of an established system so succinctly puts it: ‘Whilest seeking to could advocate its terrorization in such an please our ear, we enthrall our judgment’ apparently blasé manner. The mercurial (A Defence of Rhyme). Frenchmen reply that the system cannot Rhymes in dramatic, and particularly be changed from within; a true revolution tragic, verse, encode patterns of predesti- can be effected not (as advocated by gen- nation; they are recurrent moments of erations of revolutionary thinkers) by irrevocability; the rhyme-words fit much ‘radical’ thought which always remains too snugly for characters to be able to go demonstrably in thrall to that which it back on them (name: shame, cast: waste, opposes, but by ‘rhizomatic’ thought success: distress). It is also probable that which, lacking a visible (and thus always in the course of a play, the audience will vulnerable) front, constitutes a kind of become familiar with rhyme-groups in guerrilla assault upon the established their entirety; in other words rhymes act power/knowledge complex – irregular, as gravitational centres for dramatic erratic, always just about to cause trouble syndromes and create, ironically, a sense somewhere else. of freedom which, however, is at best See Roland Bogue, Deleuze and limited and in the very act of rhyming Guattari (1989); Gilles Deleuze and shown to be illusory. The group ‘cacher: Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: chercher: attacher: approcher: reprocher: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987); toucher’, for example, which we find in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Racinian drama, covers a whole behaviour Reader (1996). pattern, and of the possible combinations GS most involve contradiction or duplicity. It is rhyme that has allowed, encouraged Rhyme A word in a line and a word in the diversification of strophic forms, a scheme of things that transcends the the rhythmic organization of lines. Rhyme line; and it is by virtue of this duality that schemes, even in the abstract, execute it can at once act as the line’s ticket to meaningful gestures. Abab describes the membership of a larger poetic community thrust and parry, give-and-take of leisurely and counterpoint the line by suggesting discursive development; abba describes, with its rhyme-partner meanings extremer apart from its self-stabilizing chiastic than or contradictory to the line’s meaning. structure, an aggressive movement in 208 Rhythm which the aa pair outflanks and envelops The romance is usually concerned with the bb couplet, so that the bb couplet is ever an avowedly fictive world, though the in danger of becoming a mere parenthetic medieval romance was more directly insertion. rooted in contemporary fact than might See Philip Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm seem apparent from our perspective. At the and Verse Form (1995); Jeffrey same time it could be viewed increasingly Wainwright, Poetry: The Basics (2004). as an imaginative and psychological pro- CS jection of the ‘real’world. In the nineteenth century, renewed interest in things Rhythm METRE See . medieval (cf. GOTHIC), together with a growing respect for the power of the imag- Ritual See MYTH. ination and the intangible truth of the inner Romance A term which can encom- world, gave new life to a form which pass the medieval narrative poem, tended now to be counterposed to the Spenser’s Faerie Queene, gothic horrors apparent facticity of the novel (cf. NOVEL, and Mills and Boon is bound to be diffi- REALISM). In many mid-nineteenth-century cult to define. The linguistic history of the works, such as Jane Eyre, Dombey and word (the romance, a romance, romance) Son and Silas Marner, many of the quali- reflects a movement from the definite to ties of romance and realism appear along- the indefinite which illustrates the neces- side each other in the narrative. Hawthorne sary diffusion which must accompany saw the essential difference between the such linguistic longevity and plasticity. two as lying in the imaginative freedom As Gillian Beer points out (The Romance, granted to writers of romance which 1970), the ‘term “romance” in the early enabled them to pursue psychological and Middle Ages meant the new vernacular mythical truth more single-mindedly. languages derived from Latin, in con- The main criticism of the romance, tradistinction to the learned language, from Cervantes to Dr Johnson and Jane Latin itself’. Enromancier, romancar, Austen, has been a moral one. The reader, romanz meant to translate or compose it is argued, is seduced into applying its books in the vernacular. The book itself values, appropriate enough to the artifi- was then called Romanz, roman, romanzo. cial world treated by the writer, to a real The word became associated with the world in which pain has a genuine sharp- content of these diverse works – usually ness and the romantic pose is little more non-didactic narratives of ideal love and than a pallid gesture. This sense is chivalric adventures, such as Sir Gawain retained in modern practice: sentimental and the Green Knight or Chrétien de ideals are presented in the knowledge that Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la Charete. Then their power lies simultaneously in their these medieval romances, which took both apparent reality and actual ideality. poetic and prose form and which continued See J. M. Nosworthy, Introduction to influence the Elizabethan romance, to Cymbeline (1955); E. H. Pettet, tended to be regarded with some suspicion Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition and even contempt by the classically (1949); Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, The oriented writers of the seventeenth and Spirit of Medieval Popular Romance: eighteenth centuries (see Arthur Johnston, A Historical Introduction (2000); Janice Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Radway, Reading the Romance (1991). Romance in the Eighteenth Century, 1964). CWEB Romanticism 209

Romanticism The confusion surround- M. H. Abrams provided an indispensable ing the term ‘Romanticism’ seems only to account of the origin and development of be deepened by further attempts at defin- romantic theories of perception and imag- ition. A. O. Lovejoy’s famous essay ‘On ination in The Mirror and the Lamp the discrimination of romanticisms’ (1953). Underlying these theories, from insisted on the need for discrimination the end of the eighteenth century and for between the meanings of the term at vari- the next hundred years or more, is the ous times and in various countries. The sense that humanity has become sepa- danger perceived by Lovejoy was that the rated from nature, which leads to a false word loses all meaning unless we insist characterization of external nature as on defining our references. Other critics, ‘fixed and dead’. The romantic poet seeks René Wellek and Northrop Frye, argued a way to reactivate the world by discover- that Romanticism is not essentially an ing the creative perceptiveness which will idea but ‘an historic centre of gravity, allow the writer to draw aside the veils which falls somewhere around the which modern living has laid across the 1790–1830 period’ (Frye). They accused senses and seek a perception where the Lovejoy of attempting to break this false separation of Nature (fixed, external historic characteristic into its component objects) and nature (the living being of parts and of trying to insist on a romantic the perceiver) can be reconciled: a new period or character wherever any of these synthesizing vision. The romantic thinker components appear. This ‘fallacy of time- often feels that such a faculty is not an less characterization’ of Romanticism invention, but a rediscovery of the truth they saw as destructive of the specific about the way we perceive and create quality of the historic romantic period. which has been lost in the development of They attempted to define the romantic more complicated social forms and the event from a more isolatedly critical con- growth of rational and self-conscious theo- text. Whereas Lovejoy saw Romanticism ries of human thought. This belief leads to as the general term for a range of related a marked historicism, to an increased inter- ideas, poetic, philosophic and social, his est in primitivist theories of culture: to a refuters lay more stress on the character- persistent strain of historical reconstruction istic images which haunt the romantic in romantic writing, a medieval element in imagination. The central distinctive poetry and the novel, and an idealized feature of the romantic mode was said resurrection of ballad and folk-song. to be the search for a reconciliation This attempt to revitalize the percep- between the inner vision and the outer tive process is also bound up with the experience expressed through ‘a creative desire to rediscover a ‘living language’. power greater than his own because it The search in ballads and in everyday lan- includes his own’ (Frye); or the synthetic guage (Wordsworth) is only a side-issue. IMAGINATION which performs this recon- At root the romantic is trying to find a ciliation and the vision it produces of a way back – or forward – to the Word, the life drawing upon ‘a sense of the continu- Logos which is the act it describes. The ity between man and nature and the romantic thinkers are finally baffled by presence of God’ (Wellek). their loyalty to the traditional concept of The central feature of these attempts to art as an embodiment or vitalized repre- define a Romantic entity is the development sentation of a separate perceptive act in of romantic theories of the imagination. the ‘real’ world. But their struggles with 210 Romanticism this problem prepare the way for the more and that is subject to decay. With the total concepts of the post-romantic artists, romantic thinkers and poets, with the SYMBOLISTS and IMAGISTS who force Wordsworth’s lost ‘splendour in the romantic aesthetics to its logical conclu- grass’, Keats’s and Coleridge’s ‘frag- sion by identifying a desire for complete ments’ (‘The Fall of Hyperion’, ‘Kubla reconciliation between perception and art: Khan’) we have begun the artistic ‘How can we know the dancer from the dilemma which leads to Yeats’s desire for dance?’ (Yeats) Romantic artists suffer an the immutable permanence of the golden agonizing struggle to grasp and express bird of Byzantium and the modern, post- what they perceive; they are continually Symbolist search for unchanging form in aware that they cannot objectively ‘trust’ the heart of chaos itself. what they see since they are involved in During the 1970s Harold Bloom, Paul creating what they see. They are barred de Man and other Yale critics, all distin- from the convenient symbolic systems guished Romantic scholars, concerned available in existing mythic patterns themselves with Romanticism in the light because such public symbols falsify the of the work of Derrida, initiating a major truth of personal feeling. On the one hand reformulation of Romantic writing lies the quagmire of personal mythology through deconstruction. Paul de Man, for with its resulting lack of communicative example, argued that the romantic histor- power (Blake), on the other the terrible ical consciousness had been a powerful isolation of the specific and actual: ‘the influence on the modern development of weary weight of all this unintelligible a historical identity. Their work has been world’ (Wordsworth). enormously influential on subsequent The artist feels isolated, unable to studies of the subject. discover what must exist, some objective See M. H. Abrams (ed.), form or Form to embody the sense of con- English Romantic Poetry (1960) tinuity between the imagination and the (includes Lovejoy’s essay cited above); visible world, and is drawn towards those M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp experiences which offer a blurred version (1953); D. Aers, J. Cook and D. Punter, of the separation of ego and event, drug Romanticism and Ideology (1981); hallucination or the radical innocence of M. Butler, Romantics, Rebels and childhood perceptions. But such experi- Reactionaries (1981); Paul De Man, ences are special and not typical, and they The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984); are also transient, Thus Wordsworth, look- F. Kermode, Romantic Image (1957); ing back at the apparent directness of J. J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology childhood, sees it slipping away as ‘shades (1983); Duncan Wu (ed.), A Companion of the prison house’ close round him. to Romanticism (1999); Paul de Man Coleridge argued that ‘we receive but et al., Romanticism and Contemporary what we give’ (‘Dejection Ode’), but his Criticism (1993); Kathleen Wheeler, poem celebrates this realization in the Romanticism, Pragmatism and Decon- context of the inevitable pressures of time struction (1993); Harold Bloom (ed.), and decay. At the heart of the romantic English Romantic Poetry (2004); David dilemma is the agony of the disappearing stevens, Romaticism (2004). dream. Life in nature is life in our nature, GG S

Satire A genre defined primarily, but ideas and generalizations and theories and not exclusively, in terms of its inner form dogmas over against the life they are sup- (see GENRE). In it, the author attacks some posed to explain’. It employs Menippean object, using as his means wit or humour cynicism to attack systems of reasoning that is either fantastic or absurd. and their social effects. The third phase, or Denunciation itself is not satire, nor, of satire of the high norm, abandons common course, is grotesque humour, but the sense pragmatism itself, and by a slight genre allows for a considerable prepon- shift of vision and perspective, presents derance of either one or the other. What the world, stripped of its social conventions, distinguishes satire from comedy is its as a locus of ‘filth and ferocity’. lack of tolerance for folly or human In the last of these phases the moral imperfection. Its attempt to juxtapose the standard referred to by Frye is often only actual with the ideal lifts it above mere discernible in the satirist’s tone of indig- invective. nation; and in those forms which effec- From this need to project a double tively deny the author any tone of voice, vision of the world satire derives most of satire has to be achieved differently. For its formal characteristics. IRONY, which example, much critical discussion of exploits the relation between appearance Restoration Comedy has fruitlessly and reality, is its chief device, but as pursued the question of the dramatists’ Northrop Frye points out in his essay attitudes towards their subjects. Where an on satire and irony (Anatomy of author is forced to efface himself from Criticism, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton his creation, or chooses to mask his University Press, 1957, pp. 223–39) it is own attitude, as Swift does in A Modest irony of a militant kind, ‘Irony is consis- Proposal (1729), he must rely on the tent both with complete realism of con- reader to make the necessary comparison tent and with the suppression of attitude between the grotesque fantasy he creates on the part of the author. Satire demands and the moral norms or ideals by which it at least a token fantasy, a content which is to be judged. The best clue to the the reader recognises as grotesque, and at intentions and the achievements of the least an implicit moral standard.’ Restoration dramatists lies in the tech- Frye goes on to describe three phases niques of distortion they employ – or fail of satire which correspond roughly to the to employ – in the creation of a fantasy traditional classification of Horatian, world. Menippean and Juvenalian satire. The first In some satires distortion takes the of these, low-norm satire, takes for granted form of displacement: the substitution of a world full of anomalies, follies and an animal world for the human in Swift’s crimes, and employs a plain, common Gulliver’s Travels (1726), or George sense, conventional eiron to stand against Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). In others, the various alazons who represent aspects inverted values serve to distort reality. This of the unjust, ruling society. The theme of technique makes possible the subgenre the second phase of satire is ‘the setting of of MOCK-EPIC. Yet again, writers may 212 Scansion use a variety of devices: caricature, Scriptible See PLEASURE. exaggeration, parallelism or parody, to achieve similar ends. Semiotics Deals with the study of See R. C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: signs: their production and communica- Magic, Ritual, Art (1960); R. Paulson (ed.), tion, their systematic grouping in lan- Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism guages or codes, their social function. It is (1971); C. Rawson (ed.), English Satire doubly relevant to the study of literature, and the Satiric Tradition (1984). for literature uses language, the primary BCL sign system in human culture, and is fur- ther organized through various subsidiary Scansion See METRE. codes, such as generic conventions. Scheme Redefined by classical Semiotics has an odd history. Various rhetoricians and grammarians until its Western thinkers – the Stoics and Saint meaning became indeterminate, ‘scheme’ Augustine, Locke and Husserl – have in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries treated signs and sign-functions, without was enormously popular in the vocabu- quite constituting a separate study. Other lary of literary and rhetorical theorists disciplines can be seen, retrospectively, as who, exploiting their new methods, crypto-semiotic; thus Tzvetan Todorov managed to repeat the process. Any rea- has discussed rhetoric from a semiotic sonably accurate reading of the versatile point of view (Theories of the Symbol, definitions and usages of the term in such 1977, trans. 1982). It is probable that any works as Richard Sherry’s Treatise of study as ambitiously inclusive as semi- Schemes and Tropes (1550), Henry otics will always be plagued by problems Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) of cohesion and demarcation. These prob- or John Prideaux’s Sacred Eloquence lems are reflected in the double founding (1659) will arm the critic with sufficient of modern semiotics from within different authority to explain and defend as disciplines, by the American philosopher ‘schemes’ all known figures and tropes in Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and English and Mandarin Chinese, the by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de ‘conceits’ of seventeenth-century poetry, Saussure (1857–1915). the rhetorical strategies of Robespierre, Saussure’s reorientation of linguistics and the designs, foils, plots and prosody from a diachronic to a synchronic of Vladimir Nabokov. Or, conversely approach, from the study of historical ‘scheme’ has been dealt with as a special change to the systemization of a given kind of FIGURE: an ‘easy’ one, a ‘figure state of language, conditions his treat- of sound’ or, more simply, as a hazy ment of the sign. ‘Language is a system of synonym for ‘trope’. To support such signs that express ideas’, and the interre- interpretations of Renaissance thought lationship of signs thus determines mean- and practice requires the suppression of ing. The expressive function of the sign is a considerable amount of evidence, not achieved through its components of only because of the extreme scope of the signifier (as image or form) and signified viewpoint in the original texts, but also (as concept or idea); their linkage, with because ‘figure’, in Renaissance terms, is minor exceptions, is seen as arbitrary and habitually referred to as a subordinate unmotivated. Similarly, the system of component of ‘scheme’. Cf. FIGURE. signs that comprises a language expresses TGW no given or predetermined meanings; Semiotics 213 these arise from the interrelations of the along with it. A crucial factor was the rise system: ‘in language there are only differ- of STRUCTURALISM, in which the role ences without positive terms’. And since of linguistics as a systematic model – language is only one among sign systems either directly, or through its adaptation (Saussure mentions writing, military in anthropology – was paramount. signals, polite formulas) it is possible to Structuralism and semiotics, as they envisage a future ‘science that studies the impinged on literary studies, were often life of signs within society’, which indistinguishable, especially when semi- Saussure calls ‘semiology’ – a term otics concentrated on the production of common in French discussions, but meaning rather than its communication. elsewhere yielding to ‘semiotics’. And they raised similar problems for crit- While Saussure envisages an extension ics. Could the individual text be analysed to the science of signs, Peirce begins with as a sign-system? If not, of what system a generalized system, which he sees as was it an instance? Was it justified to a branch of logic. And while Saussure accord any privilege or particularity to works with binaristic, dyadic relations, literary language as an aesthetic code? Peirce puts everything in threes, even Semiotics should arguably be self- coining the term ‘triadomany’ for his critical, and the fashionable structuralist obsession. The triads make for a certain semiotics of the 1960s did sometimes dynamism in Peirce’s account; he is inter- reflect on its procedures; thus Roland ested in semiosis, the act of signifying, Barthes’s Elements of Semiology (1964, and the triadic description of this act pre- trans. 1967) extends the Saussurean base, sents it as a mediation between two terms gives a greater role to motivation, and by a third. ‘A sign is anything which is expresses doubts about binarism. But any related to a Second thing, its Object...in expressed doubt in this period was coun- such a way as to bring a Third thing, its terbalanced by a surge of scientistic Interpretant, into relation to the same optimism about the development of what Object’; the interpretant is itself a sign, was seen as a rigorously objective and so the process recurs. Peirce offers an comprehensive study – especially when exhaustive and exhausting taxonomy of contrasted with impressionistic literary all aspects of semiosis, but most of his criticism. And there were undeniable terms are now neglected except those advances; for example, in describing the describing the relation between the sign signifying systems of NARRATIVE. But and its object; Peirce differs from 1970s and 1980s saw extensive ‘post- Saussure in allowing a greater role for structuralist’ criticism of this semiotic motivated linkage. Besides the arbitrary enterprise. The positivist ideal of a closed ‘symbol’, he describes the ‘icon’ (linked and total structuration is itself subject to the through resemblance) and the ‘index’ metaphysical critique of DECONSTRUCTION. (with an existential or causal linkage). More particularly, the idealization of sys- These terms are now often applied to the tems can lead to neglect of the dynamics signifier/signified pair. of signification and a reductive account Although Peirce may offer more scope of the agents involved. To combat this as a critical tool, Saussure has exercised reductionism, Julia Kristeva uses psycho- the greater influence. While Peirce’s logic analysis to enlarge the notion of the was neglected, Saussure’s linguistics speaking subject in semiotics; and the flourished, and drew his semiotics later work of Roland Barthes persistently 214 Sensibility strives to extend and to de-formalize the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics. In role of the reader. Umberto Eco’s Theory 1971, Lotman produced one of the most of Semiotics (1976) actualizes the poten- thorough accounts of structuralist semiotics tial dynamism of Peirce and the social as applied to literature: The Structure of hints of Saussure. It emphasizes process the Artistic Text (trans. 1977). This, pre- through what Eco calls ‘the mobility of dictably, uses a synchronic approach; but semantic space’. Codes are subject to Lotman’s cultural studies also encompass change in use: through undercoding, the diachrony. In the first place, he makes simplification of alien systems, and typological distinctions between the through overcoding, the addition of extra semiotic practices of historical cultures: signifying rules that are crucial in stylis- thus medievalism is marked by ‘high tic or ideological elaboration. And the semioticity’, which ‘proceeds from the ‘unlimited semiosis’ promised by Peirce’s assumption that everything is significant’ interpretant that is itself a sign means that (there is an overlap here with the work of for Eco any determinate meaning is Michel Foucault); whereas enlightenment replaced by something transitory, the culture sees the world of natural objects provisional semantic stability of a given as real, so that ‘signs become the symbols culture or subculture. of falsehood’. Second, Lotman studies This is not to suggest that all diachronic change by describing the inter- semiotics has abjured determinate signifi- play between culture as patterned infor- cation. A contrary example is Michael mation and an unpatterned ‘non-culture’, Riffaterre’s Semiotics of Poetry (1978), or by describing cultural ‘translation’ in which describes the reading of poems in which communicative needs encourage terms of a ‘semiotic transfer’ between two a creative recoding. systems. The first system is mimetic: for See John Fiske, Introduction to Riffaterre, prior readings are unpoetically Communication Studies (1982) ch. 3; referential. They suggest difficulties or R. W. Bailey, L. Matejka and P. Steiner ‘ungrammaticalities’ (predictably, as (eds), The Sign: Semiotics Around Riffaterre’s examples are Symbolist and the World (1978); M. E. Blanchard, Surrealist), which are resolved by Description: Sign, Self, Desire; Critical code-switching from mimesis to poetic Theory in the Wake of Semiotics (1980); semiosis proper. In the latter system all Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and relationships are finally motivated, it is Semiotics (1977); Jonathan Culler, produced by transforming the ‘matrix’, a Structuralist Poetics (1975). unifying node of significance which is EC variously encoded in text or intertext. The essentialist and organicist bias of Sensibility The prestige of mathemat- Riffaterre’s theory has been sharply ical reasoning in seventeenth-century questioned. Europe was immense, and the end of the The study of culture itself as a semiotic century might in England be called the phenomenon was¸ initiated by the work of Age of Reason. To some thinkers, it Jan Mukaˆrovsky and the Prague school, looked as if having accomplished so which began in the 1930s. And the most much in interpreting the natural world, ambitious approach to a semiotics of reason could go on to solve problems culture also came from Eastern Europe, in hitherto left to less clear and distinct the work of Jurij Lotman and the methods of investigation – matters of Sensibility 215 values and morals. But poets and critics in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. England never accepted the total primacy Sensibility is the important constituent in of reason, and they were very willing to the eighteenth-century form of the second take over a moral and aesthetic doctrine view. There had been a shift in critical which was in reaction against a too great interest from the late seventeenth century demand on reason. Such a doctrine onwards, away from categorizing works existed: the elaboration of a notion of a of literature to investigating the psycho- personal, inner faculty, an emotional logical processes involved in creating and consciousness which came to be called responding to art. ‘Genius’ is the fascinat- sensibility. The doctrine assumed great ing concept in discussions of the artist, importance in English thought in the ‘sensibility’ both in discussing the artist eighteenth century, so much so that after and analysing the audience’s response. mid-century, the Age of Sensibility would Since ‘process’ is also to be seen in be a better label for the critical context history and in nature, sensibility involves of English literature. The book that a sense of the past and is frequently crystallized this idea was the Earl of the informing principle of reflective Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, ‘nature’ poems like Thomson’s Seasons Manners, Opinions, Times (1708–11). (1726–30). Shaftesbury held that ‘the Shaftesbury develops a not very clear Beautiful, the Fair, the Comely were neo-Platonic argument and an ethic, never in the Matter, but in the Art and based on this inner aesthetic sense, ‘to Design: never in Body it-self, but in the learn what is just in Society and beautiful Form and forming Power’. in Nature, and the Order of the World’. Wordsworth and Coleridge developed The natural moral sense is also the this idea of the ‘aesthetic imagination’, individual taste, though Shaftesbury did which leads to the Coleridgean ‘primary not abandon all traditional restrictions on imagination’ where sensibility, human its free workings. perception, is ‘a repetition in the finite It is too neat to see the development mind of the eternal act of creation in the of the powerful idea of sensibility only as infinite I AM’. Shaftesbury’s ‘sensibility’ a reaction to prevalent philosophical was a little more modest than that, but it doctrine, or as a component in the history had an all-important moral side. This was of Western empiricism. Northrop Frye, in later developed by Adam Smith in his a valuable article ‘Towards defining an Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759), which age of feeling’ (reprinted in J. L. Clifford had great influence on critics in later (ed.), Eighteenth-Century English discussions of sensibility. Smith added a Literature, 1959) suggests that there are related doctrine: the power of sympathy. two polar views of literature. One is an Sympathy powered the benevolence that aesthetic, Aristotelian view that considers Shaftesbury advocated, and Shakespeare, works of literature as ‘products’, that it was agreed, had it to a sublime degree. seeks to distance the audience. The other A poet to be truly great also needed a con- view is psychological, seeing the creation comitant of sensibility, the ‘enthusiastic of literature as a ‘process’, and seeking to delight’ of imagination. Sensibility was involve the audience in this. Longinus’s the particular faculty that responded treatise On the Sublime is the classical to the greatest imaginative power, the Greek statement of the latter, and sublime, another important part of Longinus is an important source for the later eighteenth-century critical 216 Sexuality picture. This whole aesthetic was ‘penis envy’ and refusing to acquiesce to audience-based. Sensibility, though the passivity of an adult, vaginal-oriented instinctive, could be cultivated, and the female sexuality (as opposed to the whole psychological theory gave greater infantile clitoral activity). The word and greater prominence to education, a ‘homosexual’ is also a relative latecomer ‘sentimental education’. Obviously, sensi- to Euro-American cultural discourse, bility and sentiment could become a cult. appearing, according to Eve Kosofsky It did, giving rise to a good deal of attitu- Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet dinizing. It is the cult of ‘sensibility’ (1990), during the last third of the nine- taken beyond the bounds of reason and teenth century. As Kososfsky Sedgwick common sense that Jane Austen portrays observes, it is not that a wide range of in Sense and Sensibility (1811), in the sexual behaviours or ‘sexual clusters’ did character of Marianne Dashwood, whose not exist before nineteenth century, but selfish concentration on her own feelings rather that a range of ‘new, institutionalized is contrasted with the self-control and taxonomic discourses – medical, legal, consideration for other people’s feelings literary, psychological – centering on shown by her ‘sensible’ sister, Elinor. See homo/heterosexual definition proliferated also IMAGINATION. and crystallized with exceptional rapidity’ See Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of at this time. There has been a move to see Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style sexuality as more individual – just as (1998); Markman Ellis, The Politics of there is a sense that there is a greater free- Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce dom to express ‘who we really are’ and to in the Sentimental Novel (2004). ask for ‘what we really want’ sexually. AMR Thus, although many would claim that there is undoubtedly still the persistent Sexuality Generally taken to be assumption that most people are innately related to sex; that is, to the characteris- heterosexual, there is also broader tics of sexed bodies, and to sexual desires, acknowledgment that a wide range of fantasies and acts – most often with the sexual behaviour (homosexual, bisexual, aim of orgasm – ‘the quality of being QUEER, transgender, transsexual) is not sexual or having sex’ (OED). The term pathological or perverse. However, the first came into common usage in the late- fundamental notion that sexuality is eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. inherent or latent, something to be uncov- As Joseph Bristow notes in Sexuality ered and then expressed, is controversial. (1997), a book devoted to answering his According to Michel Foucault (1926–84), opening question ‘What is sexuality?’, in volume one of The History of Sexuality ‘psychoanalysis was the first body of the- (1976), the notion that we are freer to ory to produce a detailed account of why profess and act out our sexual preferences sexuality must be understood separately is a myth. Rather, in Foucault’s terms, the from reproduction’. However, Freud’s very premises of sexuality and sexual essay of 1931, ‘Female Sexuality’ is pre- behaviour have been constructed by the occupied with the ‘normal’ heterosexual prevailing cultural discourse which cre- development from infant to adult sexual- ates, institutionalizes and protects the ity. To resist the normative is to suffer interests of power. Sexuality tends to trauma and repression. For the woman, be seen as something natural that was it is to be an hysteric, in the grip of formerly subdued by powerful institutions, ‘a masculinity complex’, suffering from such as the church, but which has now Short fiction 217 been liberated. However, Foucault refutes Joyce, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and this. His point is, not just that ‘sexuality’ D. H. Lawrence, as well as those like is historically contingent, but rather, that Maupassant and Katherine Mansfield just where Western society now feels who excelled in this particular genre. itself to be most free, it is being most Perhaps because of its diversity short disciplined, most policed. As a society we fiction has given rise to surprisingly little, have seen ‘sexuality’ become a category theoretical criticism. One of the earliest, to be obsessively scrutinized and dis- and best attempts to define the genre was cussed, its subjects compelled to ‘confess’ Poe’s, in two reviews (1842 and 1847) of their sexuality in infinite detail. For Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales: ‘short prose Foucault, this bringing of sex under the narrative, requiring from a half-hour to microscope is part of the science of sexu- one or two hours in its perusal’, working ality (scienta sexualis), with psycho- towards a ‘single effect’ created by analysis becoming the new confessional. incidents chosen with economy and a The increasing distinction between sex as rigorous sense of necessity in the design. the means for procreation (and a societal Other critics (most of them in fact duty to protect this) and of sex for plea- themselves practitioners of the art, such sure/recreation, has been instrumental as H. E. Bates, Sean O’Faolain and in the discursive construction of the V. S. Pritchett) have stressed the fact that category of ‘sexuality’. short fiction must be exemplary and See Andy Medhurst and Sally R. representative, a world in brief compass; Munt (eds), Lesbian and Gay Studies: that it establishes unity of impression and A Critical Introduction (1997); Joseph a feeling of totality, by concentrating on a Bristow, Sexuality (1997). single character, event or emotion, and by SS compression and the avoidance of digres- sion or repetition; that it satisfies our Short fiction Probably the most craving for paradox and shape, our longing ancient of all literary forms; the term to perceive a dramatic pattern and signif- covers everything from the fable, folktale icance in experience, even if this means or fairy-story, to such sophisticated sacrificing plausibility to effect (as some- and highly developed structures as the times in Pushkin and Maupassant, not to German Novelle, via the stories of the mention Poe). Truman Capote goes so far Decameron, and Cervantes’s Exemplary as to assert that ‘a story can be wrecked Tales. Like the EPIC, short fiction goes by a faulty rhythm in a sentence – back in time far beyond the art of writing, especially if it occurs towards the end – or and it was not until relatively recently in a mistake in paragraphing, even punctua- the history of literature that stories arose tion’; James, he says, ‘is the maestro from anything but a common stock; of the semicolon’, and Hemingway ‘a praise went to the art of the teller rather first-rate paragrapher’. O’Faolain argues than the originality of his material. It was similarly that the language of short fiction only at the beginning of the nineteenth should be ‘spare’, and that realistic detail century that short fiction, because of is only a ‘bore’ if it simply seeks ‘idle the requirements of magazines of ever- verisimilitude’ rather than ‘general widening circulation, came into its own revelation by suggestion’. All these and attracted notable writers to practise theorists insist on meaningful openings it, like Pushkin, Edgar Allan Poe, (not of the anecdotal ‘by the way’ kind), Henry James, Anton Chekhov, James and natural yet appropriate endings, 218 Sign either the ‘whimper’ sort as in Chekhov, Sign See SEMIOTICS. or the ‘whip-crack’ variety practised by Maupassant. The sonorous last phrase of Simile While METAPHOR is a dramatic, Joyce’s closing story in Dubliners, for absolute and intuited identification of two instance (‘upon all the living and the phenomena, simile is a comparison, dis- dead’), is effective because it has been cursive, tentative, in which the ‘like’ or prepared for throughout by gradual and ‘as...as’suggests, from the viewpoint of almost imperceptible shifts of tone from reason, separateness of the compared the breezy opening onwards (‘Lily, items (Marston, Antonio and Mellida): the caretaker’s daughter, was literally and thou and I will live – run off her feet’). In this story, as in Let’s think like what – and thou and I other masterpieces of the genre like will live Pushkin’s ‘Queen of spades’ or Kafka’s Like unmatch’d mirrors of calamity. ‘Metamorphosis’, a central, controlling image maintains an essential unity which Because simile is usually a pointedly transcends as it complements the unity rationalized perception, it has none of the guaranteed by the more obvious devices revelatory suddenness of metaphor nor catalogued by Poe and others. expresses and demands the same degree Short fiction is less diffuse than the of mental commitment to the image. NOVEL, just as the short story proper dif- Instead it presents itself as a provisional, fers from the folk tale of the Thousand even optional, aid whose function is and One Nights variety in that it does explanatory or illustrative. Simile appeals not easily tolerate loosely connected to what we already know about things, episodes, digressions and moral or bawdy metaphor invites the imagination to break commentary; but the closest analogy for new ground; for this reason we can pass short fiction probably lies outside litera- an evaluative judgement on simile, ture proper. As Bates saw, the film and the whereas we must either take or leave a short story are expressions of the same metaphor. The temporariness of simile art, that of telling stories by a series of underlines, in the work of a Baudelaire or gestures, shots and suggestions, with little a Rilke, the fact that the universal analogy elaboration or explanation. It is certainly is only glimpsed, only fragments vouch- no coincidence that some of the most safed. And because simile is temporary, it effective films are adaptations of short and the totality of experience it promises fiction. are infinitely renewable. Simile is a figure See Caroline Gordon and Allen with much stamina. Tate, The House of Fiction (1960); Because simile does not upset reality, Eugene Current-Garcia and Walton but merely inflects our perception of it, R. Patrick, What is the Short Story? keeping different phenomena discrete, it (1961); Sean O’Faolain, The Short can be used with some irresponsibility. Story (1948, reprinted 1964); On the one hand, this means it can play an H. Bonheim, The Narrative Modes: important alleviatory role, letting air and Techniques of the Short Story (1982); whimsy into involved narrative or analy- Dominic Head, The Modernist Short sis (Proust) and on the other, that poets Story (1992); Susan Lohafer, Reading not prepared to envisage the chaos of for Storyness (2003). metaphor can use simile as the repository JWJF for their inventive boldnesses and keep Sincerity 219 their metaphors conventional (early If they be two, they are two so Hugo, George). As stiffe twin compasses are two, The position of the ‘like’ phrase is Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show significant. When it succeeds the justifica- To move, but doth, if th’other doe. tory adjective or verb (‘thy beauty...stings CS like an adder’ – Swinburne), we are given a metaphor defused; the figurative dimen- Sincerity Prior to the eighteenth sion of ‘stings’ is superseded by its literal century, a term of little significance in dimension. When it precedes (‘Mon criticism: the absence or otherwise of dis- coeur, comme un oiseau, voltigeait ...’– simulation on the part of a writer (though Baudelaire), the relationship between not necessarily of a fictional character, phenomena is more complete; here the such as Iago in Othello) was neither ques- ‘like’ phrase not so much explains away tioned nor thought worthy of comment. the verb as supposes other verbs. But in the late 1760s, Jean-Jacques In calling simile provisional, we mean Rousseau’s Confessions, an unprecedent- that the comparability is provisional, its edly frank, if subtly edited, autobiogra- appositeness dependent on a particular phy, projected a persona of the author confluence of circumstances, and this has which the reader was beguiled or blud- made simile a natural vehicle for a rela- geoned into taking at face value. Soon tivistic view of the world (Proust); the after this, Goethe, in his early novel The world of simile is a world of passing Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), acquaintances, incessant sensory flirta- attacked calm rationalism and exalted tion with objects never finally known. But instead sensibility and passionate within these limitations the simile, by feelings, all in the name of sincerity. Both using or implying the present tense, can these works were to prove of seminal lift an action or perception out of the importance in the Romantic movement, fleeting and exceptional and install it in which arose in the late eighteenth century the constant and familiar. (As A does B, and lasted well into the nineteenth. so X did Y.) This is a main function of the During this period writers popularized epic simile, where often a noble or com- the image of poets suffering intense plex sentiment is made accessible to the emotions of grief and joy which they then reader through being linked with a famil- proceeded to enshrine directly and iar external state of affairs. The same ‘sincerely’ in their works. But with expository function is performed by those E. T. A. Hoffmann’s allegorical fairy- fantastic Renaissance conceits which take story The Golden Pot (1813), Byron’s the form of similes. These two notorious epic satire Don Juan (1819–24) and stanzas from Donne’s ‘Valediction: Baudelaire’s figure of the poet as dandy forbidding mourning’, for instance, exter- (analysed in his essay The Painter of nalize, in an exploratory fashion, a spiri- Modern Life, 1863) a new note is struck: tual and emotional state which might be the idea of pose, show, even outright impenetrable without the similes: duplicity begins to creep in. In the 1880s Nietzsche perceptively noted that ‘every Our two soules therefore, which are one profound spirit needs a mask’. This Though I must goe, endure not yet tendency culminated in the life and art A breach, but an expansion of such fin-de-siècle ‘decadents’ as Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate. J. K. Huysmans, the creator in Against 220 Skaz

Nature (1884) of the character Des a certain point in its history the moral life Esseintes, whose neurasthenic extra- of Europe added to itself a new element, vagances fascinated Oscar Wilde and the state or quality of the self which we his contemporaries. It was Wilde who call sincerity’ (Lionel Trilling); and that enunciated the pithiest of anti-sincerity this point occurred somewhere around the paradoxes when he wrote that ‘the first middle of the eighteenth century. Trilling duty in life is to be as artificial as defines the meaning of the term as ‘con- possible’. Around the same time the gruence between avowal and actual feel- discrepancy between what people may ing’. In this sense it tends, in discussions say or do in public and what they really about literature, to become the amateur’s think (betrayed through dreams or panacea, used as a means of explaining or by involuntary slips of the tongue) isolating literary excellence; in such naïve attracted Sigmund Freud’s scientific exercises in evaluation it serves as a loose curiosity, and led to the publication of form of approbation (cf. ‘genuineness’ or such studies as The Psychopathology of ‘authenticity’). On examination the most Everyday Life in 1914 (see PSYCHOLOGY). apparently ‘sincere’ works usually turn After Freud it was no longer possible to out to have reached their final form long take an innocent attitude towards the issue after the original emotions which gave of sincerity, and this deepened awareness rise to them, and should ultimately be of complexity in matters hitherto thought seen to have more in common with a liter- relatively simple was reflected in the ary tradition than with the feelings of a par- work of modernist novelists. The noctur- ticular individual. Leo Tolstoy, himself an nal persona of Molly Bloom, the speaker almost archetypally sincere writer, put it of the closing monologue in James succinctly when he saw ‘poetry in the fact Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), is clearly more of not lying’, by which he meant that the sincere, or at least more authentic, than work of art has its own truthfulness, which her everyday self. Similarly, in bringing has little or nothing to do with the honest the titanic clashes of ancient tragedy into transcription of feeling. Sincerity as usually the demure and sedate drawing rooms of understood is therefore not a very helpful her characters, Ivy Compton-Burnett word in the literary critic’s vocabulary and (1892–1969) called into question the should be sparingly employed. As Oscar ‘sincerity’ of much that passes for Wilde discerned with his usual acuteness, polite conversation. Her French disciple ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his Nathalie Sarraute (b. 1902) concentrated own person. Give him a mask and he will on the phenomenon of ‘sub-conversation’, tell you the truth.’ See also PERSONA. or the level of social intercourse which is See I. A. Richards, Principles of never heard aloud but conveys unavowed Literary Criticism (1924), chs 23 and 34; animosities, conflicts and resentments, in Henri Peyre, Literature and Sincerity fact all the unseemly deceptions hidden (1963); Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and beneath urbane surfaces. Authenticity (1972). The evolution of attitudes towards JWJF insincerity in art and life is thus a com- Skaz See FORMALISM. plex one, and examination of it is not assisted by imprecision in the term Society In critical usage, a term with ‘sincerity’ itself. All the intellectual histo- two main senses: (1) the ‘society’ of rian can say with any assurance is that ‘at a novel, play or poem, a social world Soliloquy 221 created or imitated within the work, What is clear is that the term ‘society’ (2) the ‘society’ of literature’s creation invites or reveals critical confusion, since and consumption, the world of customs, it refers to something that can be thought values, institutions and language-habits in of as primarily inside or outside the work. which the work is created, published and The society of, say, a Jane Austen novel read, the culture in its broadest definition can be thought of primarily as a fiction (cf. CULTURE). In autotelic theories of (a deliberately selective, conventionalized literature (those which assume that milieu which is an aspect of the composi- literary works are self-sustaining, coher- tion) or a structure from outside ‘reported’ ent structures) the two usages are com- or analysed. Beyond this are larger issues. monly held distinct. In realistic theories We can see literary works as social of literature (those which assume that products and agents, and society as an literary works in some sense copy life) envelope around literature, analysable in they blur. In historicist theories of litera- terms of reading publics, authors’ ture (those which assume that the Weltanschauungen, content-analysis, literary work is an instance of contempo- linguistics and ideologies. Or we can see rary discourses) they become virtually them as creative centres lying outside indistinguishable. such determinisms, though perhaps as Critics from Plato and Aristotle on potential powers in society. ‘Society’ have known that literature is essentially raises all the problems of the territorial ‘social’ – has social causes, contents and boundary separating ‘art’ from ‘reality’; effects. The question is how valuable that for that reason it will always constitute a insight is. With the personalization of critical crux, and remain a centre of atten- romantic art, and the self-subsistence of tion for critics interested in the complex symbolist art, the tendency to stress the relationships between the fictional and distinctiveness of literary expression formal and the world we observe round grew, reacting against deterministic social us. See also CULTURE. accounts of literature: those which saw it See Malcolm Bradbury, The Social as a social mirror, a social product (e.g. Context of Modern English Literature Tame), a social criticism (e.g. naturalism) (1971); Alan Sinfield, Society and or an ideological instrument (e.g. some Literature 1945–70 (1983); Raymond Marxist critics). Criticism tended to sub- Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 stitute median terms: ‘culture’ for the (1961). milieu, ‘icon’ for the work. But the final MSB decades of the twentieth century saw new interest in the complex transactions exist- Soliloquy A formal device by which a ing between ‘literature’ (meaning either dramatic character, alone on the stage, the single text, or the entire corpus) and reveals feelings, thoughts and motives in ‘society’ (meaning a particular commu- speech to the audience. In its simplest nity or the large-scale social metastruc- form, as often in the Elizabethan drama ture). There are various reasons for this: before Shakespeare, it can be merely a the growth of sociology, linguistics and means of directly communicating informa- structuralism; an increasing critical stress tion that has not emerged in the course of on fiction as opposed to poetry; a general the action or dialogue; for unskilful play- tendency towards the politicalization of wrights, therefore, it may be no more than thought. a substitute for fully dramatic writing. 222 Sonnet

The typical soliloquy is either a soliloquies do not describe the character’s passionate speech giving vent to the state of mind, they act it out. immediate pressure of feeling at a point See W. Clemen, English Tragedy of crisis, or a deliberative speech in which Before Shakespeare (1961); Farleigh a particular dilemma or choice of action is Dickinson, Shakespeare and the History debated and resolved or, since one may of Soliloquies (2003). lead naturally to the other, a combination DJP of both. Thus, the most effective solilo- quies are introduced at moments of Sonnet Technically the sonnet is easy urgency for the character concerned, to identify: fourteen lines divided (usu- particularly, when there is a reason for ally) by rhyme and argument into units of privacy and secrecy rather than public dis- eight lines (octave) and six (sestet). The play of passion or reasoning. Sometimes, metre is normally the prevalent metre of however, the soliloquy may be spoken the language – in English the iambic directly to the audience by characters who pentameter, in French the alexandrine and wish to take them into their confidence. in Italian (the original language of the Clowns and villains are inclined to this sonetto, ‘little song’) the hendecasyllable. mode of address: the clowns because they Petrarch (1304–74) was the first major often stand on the periphery of the plot sonneteer: his Rime to ‘Laura’ established and so invite the audience to join them in the essential form and matter – a record of ridiculing situations in which they are not the intense and hazardous service of a directly involved, and the villains (like lover, a service offering precarious local Shakespeare’s Richard III and Iago) triumphs and the certainty of final defeat. because their awareness of the audience’s Petrarch’s rhyme-scheme (abba, abba, presence adds to their stature as clever cde, cde, or cdc, dcd) was significantly rogues in charge of events. different from Shakespeare’s (abab, cdcd, When the audience is eavesdropping efef, gg) which had more ironic possibili- on a meditative or impassioned soliloquy, ties. But the point of the proliferating the dramatist has the opportunity to inter- formal rules which characterize the sonnet nalize the presentation of character and to convention often gets lost in cataloguing trace the dynamics of thought and feeling variations: every sonnet is a ‘variation’ on even beyond the level of the character’s the norm. What the convention means to own awareness. In Shakespeare’s subtlest the poet is a specialized ‘vocabulary’ of soliloquies (those of Hamlet and formal devices in addition to the normal Macbeth, for instance) the audience is rules of the language (cf. METRE), and the made to recognize ironies and ambigui- voluntary subjection to this discipline ties in what the character says, but of produces (hopefully) a high precision of which the character is unaware. Thus, the utterance, a new and paradoxical freedom: actor is given the opportunity not only for ‘rhyme is no impediment to his conceit, a virtuoso performance of a set speech, but rather gives him wings to mount and but also for suggesting either the involun- carries him, not out of his course, but as it tary direction the character’s thoughts and were beyond his power to a far happier feelings move in, or the painful effort to flight’ (Samuel Daniel, Defence of articulate what lies almost out of reach of Rhyme, 1603). The over-running of gram- the character’s words. In both cases matical logic in the sonnet is analysed in the language and style of these great Robert Graves and Laura Riding, Sound 223

A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1928) and sonnets who was not Shakespeare William Empson, Seven Types of himself, much less that depressing ghost Ambiguity (1930), ch. 2; the development Mr W. H., but Shakespeare’s subject, the of a sustained metaphoric argument, in master-mistress of his passion’ (Northrop Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Frye, Anatomy of criticism, 1957). The Use (1962). uncompromising technical discipline It is clear that sonnets are often of the sonnet combined with the logical technical ‘exercises’, but it by no means and emotional intensity available has follows that they are therefore insincere. preserved its fascination for many poets In exploring the medium, poets are right down to the present day. exploring their own capacities to feel and See J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love think: Sidney’s declaration Astrophel and Sonnet (1956); Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Stella, c.1583), ‘I am no pick-purse of Poetry (1952); Antony Easthope, Poetry another’s wit’ has an ironic edge, but is as Discourse (1983). justified in the emotional thoroughness of LS his expropriations. Conventionality can be misunderstood and overstressed; it is Sound According to Mallarmé, perfectly possible to write insincere versification (and therefore poetry) exists sonnets – to be facile, self-deceived, whenever a writer attempts STYLE, giving inexperienced or gross (Ben Jonson, ‘An equal prominence to sonority and to Elegie’): clarity of linguistic performance: ‘Toutes les fois qu’il y a effort au style il y a Such songsters there are store of; versification’. But sound is a primary witness he aspect of poetry rather than of prose, and That chanced the lace, laid on a Mallarmé’s dictum that the aesthetic smock, to see, impulse, the ‘effort au style’, renders And straightway spent a sonnet prose and poetry indistinguishable visual The fragile idealism of the convention vehicles of versification, fails to convince: invited parody and self-parody (as in prose is a most unsatisfactory medium for Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost), but writers concerned with sound (and for proved inseparable from its ability to some poets, poetic writing is little better). endure through time and change. Donne’s The writer of prose can only control famous lines form ‘The Canonisation’ sound and attempt to indicate subtleties of catch both the permanence and the sound, by means of punctuation. fragility: A reviewer of essays by Robert Creeley, a poet obsessed with sound, was We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; moved to comment, ‘One is puzzled by the As well a well wrought urn becomes exotic syntax’. The writer of poetry cannot The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs only produce exotic syntax, but can also In the sonnet the individual poet may find counterpoint punctuation spatially with a fullness and spaciousness of meaning line endings; the pause at the end of the that could not be attained in isolation: ‘The line offers an additional means of scoring true father or shaping spirit of the poem is sound to the comma, the semicolon, etc. the form of the poem itself, and this form Spatial ‘punctuation’, and typographical is a manifestation of the spirit of poetry, variation – innovated by Mallarmé in the “onlie begetter” of Shakespeare’s his ‘Un Coup de Des . . .’ (1897), and 224 Speech simplified yet more radically by Raoul literature’, Comparative Criticism, 4 Hausmann’s Optophonic Poems of 1918 – (1982); Roland Barthes, ‘The grain of the increased the poet’s grammatical/ voice’, in Image-Music-Text (trans. spatial/typographical syntax, and partially 1977); Richard Swigg, Look with the solved the problems of scoring sound. Ears (2002). Such problems are usually restricted to NCPZ the work of poets for whom sound is of the same importance as meaning; work Speech See DECONSTRUCTION. where variations of sound result from Speech act See AUTHOR, DISCOURSE. idiosyncrasies of the specific poet’s voice and speech patterns, rather than being Stasis See LITERATURE. sonic variations within the confines of Story See MYTH, NARRATIVE, NARRATIVE some pre-established communal verse STRUCTURE, PICARESQUE, PLOT. structure, such as the sonnet or the haiku, or variants within some similarly Stream of consciousness A technique pre-established line/rhyme convention. which seeks to record the flow of impres- Whilst such conventions appeal to the sions passing through a character’s mind. collective ‘mind’s ear’, their very visual The best-known English exponents are nature – the fact that such stereotyped Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and symmetrical structures can be charted James Joyce. Later novelists have often diagrammatically – suggests that the employed the technique, though rarely poetry of such conventions subordinates with such thoroughness as its early pro- sound to visual semantics; the extreme ponents. For them it was a fresh weapon product of this tendency being ‘CONCRETE’ in the struggle against intrusive narration. POETRY, a purely visual poetry of silent, By recording the actual flow of thought spatially punctuated semantics. with its paradoxes and irrelevancies they It is thus essential that the visual sought to avoid the over-insistent author- experience of reading poetry motivated by ial rhetoric of Edwardian novels. They felt both sonic and semantic considerations be that the traditional techniques could not complemented by the audial experience of meet the social pressures of the new age; the poet’s voice. Clearly it is impossible to believing that, in Virginia Woolf’s words, totally appreciate unrecorded poetry of the ‘human nature had changed . . . in or past, though phonetic reconstructions of about December 1910’, they rejected the such works as Beowulf, and reconstructed socio-descriptive novel in favour of a ‘period’ readings, such as Basil Bunting’s novel centring on ‘the character itself’. approximations of Wordsworth’s accent, Inner thoughts and feelings now occupied may offer valuable insights into the sonic the foreground of attention. values of past works. Whilst it is incon- Theoretically, the aim is inclusiveness: testable that poetry exists whenever there ‘No perception comes amiss’ (Woolf). But, is effort towards sonic or semantic style, in practice, each novelist developed the ear should not be neglected, for poetry selective principles and personal structural aurally experienced may well transcend procedures. Joyce and Woolf use the tech- prose, verse and book. nique in quite different ways. Woolf’s style See Nicholas Zurbrugg (ed.), Stereo is leisurely and repetitive, returning con- Headphones, 4 (1971), ‘Futurism and after: stantly to dominant images (e.g. the chimes Marinetti, Boccioni, and electroacoustic of Big Ben in Mrs Dalloway, 1925). Structuralism 225

These images have no significance second, as a particular set of approaches outside the novel: Woolf alone makes to literature (and other arts and aspects of their meaning by the patterning she creates culture) flourishing especially in France in the flow of recorded experience. in the 1960s but with older roots and Disconnected association is heightened continuing repercussions. and ordered by the passionate yet rational The basic premiss of structuralism is mind which conceives and controls it. that human activity and its products, even Joyce’s work, with its mastery of the perception and thought itself, are abrupt shift from reflection to reflection, constructed and not natural. Structure is approaches the theory more nearly: ‘Not the principle of construction and the there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. object of analysis, to be understood by its Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe...’. But intimate reference to the concepts of he, too, inevitably imposes structures on system and value as defined in SEMIOTICS. the random. In Ulysses (1922), the ulti- A structure – for example, the conven- mate order and meaning of events is tional sequencing of episodes in fairy related to those primary images which stories, the geometry of perspective in span human culture; each event is contin- post-medieval art or something as appar- uous with all other such events in human ently mundane as our arrangements for history, refracted through language into what, when and how we eat – is not its radical meaning: Bloom/Stephen merely an insignificantly mechanical are Ulysses/Telemachus, as they are the ordering. Each element in the structure, eternal type of Father/Son. whether ‘unit’ or ‘transformation’ or Each writer seeks a different way of whatever, has meaning in the Saussurean organizing, and so communicating, the sense of ‘value’ because it has been arbitrary, and each finally gestures selected from a system of options and is towards the inability of any single device therefore defined against the background to render fully the processes of thought. of other possibilities. This is a radical See Leon Edel, The Modern view of meaning in its proposal that Psychological Novel (rev. edn, 1964); meanings do not come from nature or Melvin J. Friedman, Stream of God, but are arbitrary, manmade. Clearly Consciousness: A Study of Literary these assumptions encourage ANALYSIS Method (1955); Robert Humphrey, and CRITIQUE and therefore disturb the Stream of Consciousness in the Modern complacency of traditional human Novel (1954); Dorrit Cohn, Transparent inquiries. Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Structuralist students of literature Consciousness in Fiction (1978); David linked semiotic assumptions with ideas Dowling, ‘Mrs Dalloway’: Mapping from other sources, principally Russian Streams of Consciousness (1991). FORMALISM; Prague School structuralism GG (cf. FOREGROUNDING); the narrative analysis of Vladimir Propp; structuralist Stress See METRE. anthropology as blended from linguistics Structuralism To be understood at and Propp in the cooking-pot of Claude two levels of generality: first, as a broad Lévi-Strauss; the new generative linguis- intellectual movement, one of the most tics of Chomsky. Their activities and significant ways of theorizing in the publications were too vast and diverse to human sciences in the twentieth century; summarize here, but I can mention the 226 Structuralism three most important, paradigmatic, such as tense and number, and thus rework models of analysis. it into an intensely patterned formal First, is the theory of literature and the object, static and impersonal and remote attempt to formulate general rules to from the communicative and interpersonal distinguish literary from non-literary practices which language ordinarily discourse: see POETICS. ‘Poetics’ is the serves. This analysis has been taken as an theory of ‘literariness’ rather than the example of the application of linguistics to description of individual literary works. literary analysis, fabricating ‘poetic’ struc- The late Roman Jakobson was the key tures which the reader does not perceive: figure in this ambitious enterprise: see M. Riffaterre, ‘Describing poetic his seminal paper ‘Linguistics and structures’ (1966), reprinted in Ehrmann; poetics’ (1960) proposed what would in Fowier, ‘Language and the reader’ in Style Chomskyan terms constitute a set of ‘sub- and Structure in Literature (1975). stantive universals’ to characterize the Aspects of Jakobson’s theory provided essence of literature, based on processes illumination in verse analysis, as of repetition, parallelism and equivalence. Riffaterre’s own later work demonstrates: Another version of poetic theory follows see his Semiotics of Poetry (1978). the lead of Chomsky and relocates liter- Third, has been the more successful ariness: it is said to be not an objective analysis of narrative structure. The property of texts but a faculty of (some) inspiration came from Vladimir Propp’s readers who are said to possess a ‘literary Morphology of the Folk-Tale (1928), competence’ in addition to and analogous which appeared in French translation in to the universal ‘linguistic competence’ 1957 and in English in 1958. Propp noted postulated by Chomsky. See J. Culler, that, though the individual characters in Structuralist Poetics (1975). Neither of Russian tales were very diverse, their these proposals seems very plausible; for functions (villain, helper, etc.) could be a critique, see Fowler, ‘Linguistics and, described in a limited number of terms and versus, Poetics’, reprinted in (he suggested thirty-one, falling into Literature as Social Discourse (1981). seven superordinate categories). By refer- However, if the writing of generative ence to these elements, the narrative rules for all and only those texts consti- ordering of any tale could be analysed as tuting Literature seems an impossible a sequence of ‘functions of the dramatis project, the more modest programme of personae’ and associated actions. This is generative grammars for specific genres in fact a generative grammar of narrative: has seemed a feasible enterprise, and this a finite system (paradigm) of abstract has been attempted by Tzvetan Todorov in units generates an infinite set of narrative a number of studies: see his Grammaire sequences (syntagms). The linguistic du Décaméron (1969) and The Fantastic analogy was seized on by Lévi-Strauss (1973). and made explicit by A. J. Greimas Second, is the analysis of verse where (Sémantique Structurale, 1966), who the reference-text here is the analysis by provided a sophisticated reinterpretation Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss of Baudelaire’s of Propp’s analysis in semantic terms. It ‘Les chats’ (translated in the DeGeorge became a standard assumption in narra- and Lane anthologies). The analysts sift tology that the structure of a story was the poem for all kinds of linguistic sym- homologous with the structure of a metries, from rhyme to syntactic minutiae, sentence; this assumption allowed the Structure 227 apparatus of sentence-linguistics to be post-structuralism’ in Jefferson and applied to the development of a metalan- Robey (eds), Modern Literary Theory guage for describing narrative structure. (1982). Anthologies of structuralist writ- The work of Roland Barthes, Tzvetan ings include R. T. and M. DeGeorge, The Todorov and Gerard Genette are particu- Structuralists. From Marx to Lévi-Strauss larly important in this development. See (1972); R. Macksey and E. Donato (eds), Communications 8 (1966): the contribution The Structuralist Controversy (1972); of Barthes is translated as ‘Introduction to J. Ehrmann (ed.), Structuralism (1970); the structural analysis of narratives’ in his M. Lane (ed.), Structuralism, A Reader Image–Music–Text (1977); this model was (1970). applied to a story from Joyce’s Dubliners RGF by Seymour Chatman in ‘New ways of analyzing narrative structure’, Language Structure All critical theories have and Style, 2 (1969). Chatman’s Story and some notion of structure but the terms in Discourse (1978) applies many ideas which organization is discussed will vary: from the French structural analysis of pattern, plot, story, form, argument, lan- narrative in an English context. See also guage, rhetoric, paradox, metaphor, myth. Fowler, Linguistics and the Novel (2nd Starting from these dispositions, the term edn, 1983). An informative general ‘structure’ then becomes an enabling ref- account of French structural narratology erence; the reader is advised to consult is Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative potentially parallel entries (e.g. FORM, Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983). where structure is distinguished from Anglo-Saxon reaction to structuralism texture, both being aspects of form) to was in many ways hostile, deploring see how this can be. The proposition is its mechanistic and reductive style. reversed here: such features are typolo- Fortunately, the response in France was gies of structure, organizational means more subtle and more positively critical, for arriving at hypotheses about the prin- confronting problems of what is ciples of coherence in a given work. There neglected in the structuralist approach: are many such means, but they fall into reader, author, discourse as commu- two main categories: those derived from nicative practice and as ideology. See internal means and emphasizing features AUTHOR, DECONSTRUCTION, DISCOURSE, likely to be found especially in literature, POST-STRUCTURALISM, PSYCHOLOGY AND and those derived from applying general PSYCHOANALYSIS, READER, SEMIOTICS. principles of structure found in language, For an account of structuralism in or the psychology of individuals or com- the broader sense see Jean Piaget, munities, or in social structure, to works Structuralism (1971). David Robey’s of literature for typological purposes. Structuralism: An Introduction (1973) Criticism can generalize features like reprints a series of accessible lectures on genre, rhetoric, motif and language into structuralism in a variety of disciplines. recurrent types in order to come to per- Structuralism in literary studies is the ceptions about what is distinctively liter- subject of Jonathan Culler, Structuralist ary. But developing order in fictions has Poetics (1975); Terence Hawkes, analogues, deliberate or attributable, in Structuralism and Semiotics (1977); order outside fiction. Thus, while many John Sturrock, Structuralism (2002); typologies of order will concern what is Ann Jefferson, ‘Structuralism and distinctive about literary presentation, 228 Style they are also likely to extend to structures From ‘style’, ‘stylistics’ is derived as a in writings not fictional: to those in lan- branch of literary study. Some historians guage in general; then to those in forms of of criticism have called any approach to expression or consciousness; and then in literature which pays close attention to a society at large. These things open liter- aspects of language (imagery, sound- ature to analogical explanation and to structure, syntax, etc.) ‘stylistics’. This linguistic, psychological, sociological can be misleading, since stylistics is a and ideological study; and they may historical division of criticism with its creatively suggest the recurrence of own principles and methods. Stylistics is structure analogously through all culture less diffuse, more single-minded, more (cf. STRUCTRUALISM). The main danger mechanical, than criticism in general. here is that of applying methods of Similarly, the word ‘style’ itself has rela- structural analysis assumed to be ‘objec- tively technical connotations; those not tive’ because scientific, and derived in involved in (strict) stylistics have tended the first instance for other purposes, to to speak of ‘tone’ or, often, ‘rhetoric’. literary works: an interesting case of the Linguistic form is not absolutely application of structural fictions to controlled by the concepts we want to structural fictions. express. There are alternative ways of See Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of putting messages into words, and the Literary Form (1957); R. S. Crane, The choice among alternatives is exercised Languages of Criticism and the Structure along non-linguistic principles. Whether I of Poetry (1953); Northrop Frye, Anatomy say ‘Shut the door!’ or ‘I wonder if you of Criticism (1957); Frank Kermode, The would mind closing the door, please?’ is Sense of an Ending (1967). determined by a whole complex of per- MSB sonal, cultural and situational facts struc- turing the communicative event of which Style One of the oldest and most the sentence is a part. Stylistics posits that tormented terms in literary criticism; its these extra-textual influences on the form meaning is controversial, its relevance of communication are organized system- disputed. One usage can be discarded at atically, and that the system brings about once: criticism is not concerned with the orderings of linguistic form which are belief that some authors or books have themselves systematic and, more impor- style (are ‘stylish’) whereas others do not. tant, characteristic, that is, symptomatic We must assume that all texts manifest of one particular set of extra-verbal style, for style is a standard feature of all factors. This determination of style by language, not something peculiar to context works outside literature as well as literature or just to some literature. within it (see D. Crystal and D. Davy, A style is a manner of expression, Investigating English Style, 1969). Thus describable in linguistic terms, justifiable styles may be seen as characteristic of an and valuable in respect of non-linguistic author, of a period, of a particular kind of factors. The concept ‘manner of expres- persuasion (rhetoric), or a genre. Literary sion’ is controversial (see below), but the stylisticians have generally been con- other two parts of the definition seem not cerned to test such hypotheses as these: to be: that it is a facet of language; and authors’ styles – ‘linguistic fingerprints’, that it is given significance by personal or allegedly – have been one focus; we also cultural, rather than verbal, qualities. find such generalizations as ‘Ciceronian’, Style 229

‘Senecan’, ‘Attic’, ‘baroque’, ‘mannered’, semantic content and stylistic or rhetorical ‘grand’, ‘middle’, ‘low’, ‘terse’, ‘expan- form – is explained by the division sive’, ‘florid’, ‘periodic’, etc. These labels between deep and surface structure found indicate that stylistics is a classificatory in generative linguistics. See Ohmann’s mode of literary study, generating cate- ‘Generative grammars and the concept of gories of text arrived at on the basis of literary style’ in D. C. Freeman (ed.), many different kinds of taxonomic Linguistics and Literary Style (1970). criteria, generally a mixture of linguistic/ Stylistics as an academic subject was formal and extra-linguistic/situational. born at the time of the birth of modern Style depends on a FOREGROUNDING of linguistics, and has continued to use some some selected feature, or set of features, of the techniques of linguistics. Charles of linguistic surface structure. A particular B. ally, an eminent French stylistician, diction may be prominent, or a persistent was a student of Saussure’s; Leo Spitzer rhythm, or a certain reiterated syntactic developed his methods in an attempt to organization. This density in one part of bridge a gap between linguistics and the language may not catch our conscious literary history; and Stephen Ullmann, attention, but it causes a certain stylistic besides being an influential stylistician of impression in us: we feel that the text French fiction, was also an expert on belongs to a familiar authorial or cultural semantics. milieu. ‘Density’ suggests counting, and The term ‘stylistics’ or ‘linguistic indeed stylistics (unlike linguistics) is stylistics’ has come to designate any implicitly quantitative, and is sometimes analytic study of literature which uses the explicitly so. Extreme instances of quan- concepts and techniques of modern titative stylistics would be G. U. Yule’s linguistics, for example, in the title of statistical work on literary vocabulary, Anne Cluysenaar’s excellent book and the more recent computer-assisted Introduction to Literary Stylistics (1976) studies in authorship-detection. Here which is not a study of style as such but counting is directed to discovery; usually an introduction to practical textual we count to confirm hypotheses – that criticism refined by linguistic ideas. It is there is a syntactic or lexical tendency preferable to restrict the term to the which explains our perception of a peculiar linguistic study of style in the sense period-style, for instance. indicated above, devising appropriate The idea of style involves an idea of terms for other literary applications of choice among equivalent ways of express- linguistics. See LANGUAGE for discussion ing the same thought. Such a proposal and references. Cf. POST-STRUCTURALISM. was anathema to the NEW CRITICS See R. W. Bailey and D. M. Burton, (cf. PARAPHRASE), for whom a change in English Stylistics: A Bibliography (1968); wording was inevitably a change in mean- M. W. Croll and J. Max Patrick (eds), ing. The New Critical attitude relied on a Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm (1966); false use of ‘meaning’. Sentences may H. Hatzfeld, A Critical Bibliography of the have the same propositional content (be New Stylistics, Applied to the Romance synonymous) but express it in different Languages, 1900–1952 (1953); Graham ways so that the reader’s mode of Hough, Style and Stylistics (1969); apprehending meaning is distinctively Josephine Miles, Style and Proportion: determined. Richard Ohmann has The Language of Prose and Poetry (1967); suggested that this distinction – between Lance St John Butler, Registering the 230 Subaltern

Difference (1999). Relevant journals outside the mechanisms that produced include Style and Language and Style. colonial ‘subjects’ – was invisible in RGF traditional colonial historiography; the agency of the subaltern was ignored and Subaltern Was first deployed as a excised. critical term by the Italian communist In his ‘Preface’ to the first volume of thinker Antonio Gramsci. As he uses it, the Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha, who was term refers to the non-elite classes, includ- the founding spirit and editor of the first ing but not restricted to the proletariat. In six volumes of the series, suggested that this, he departs from the economic deter- there were two political domains: that of minism and historical teleology of ortho- the elite and that of ‘the people’, the sub- dox Marxism by considering the ‘politics altern domain. This latter domain was of the people’ as consisting of more than autonomous insofar as ‘it neither origi- just a revolutionary, or potentially revolu- nated from elite politics nor did its exis- tionary, industrialized working class. tence depend upon the latter’ (Guha). It Himself a native of the Italian south, where had its own modes of operation, which capitalization of the rural economy had were themselves a result of the subaltern barely taken root, he understood that the groups having their own consciousness rigid frameworks of orthodox Marxism and forms of behaviour. In order to limited any full analysis of class society. recover the agency of subaltern groups Taken together with his more fluid concep- and their contribution to the politics of tualization of class–state relations, his colonial India, and their role in its decol- development of a methodological pro- onization, the task for the historian was to gramme for studying the history of the identify moments when the subaltern subaltern placed greater emphasis on the consciousness could be witnessed in cultural and ideological dimensions of action and, through a ‘thick description’ hegemony and subordination. of such events, inscribe the subaltern as a Gramsci’s work in general has had a political actor within a narrative that was profound influence on leftist thinking in not necessarily commensurable with elite the twentieth century both in Europe and narratives of colonialism and nationalism. the global South, but the trajectory of the Subaltern Studies was, therefore, an term ‘subaltern’ was decisively shaped by attempt to write history from below. its encounter with a group of Marxist his- This attempt to recover the silenced torians in India in the late 1970s and early agency of the subaltern groups attracted 1980s, who later became known as the attention from the growing scholarship on Subaltern Studies collective. Recognizing colonialism and postcolonialism that was the importance of Gramsci’s thinking for emerging in the Anglo-US academy in the analysis of partially capitalized societies 1980s. The term ‘subaltern’ has thus since in which the peasantry remains the largest passed into the lexicon of post-colonial non-elite sector, these historians adapted studies. It is often used here with less the- Gramscian ideas about hegemony, sub- oretical precision than by the Subaltern ordination and subalternity within a Studies historians, referring in general to methodological programme designed to dominated or subordinate groups within contest the dominance of elitist histori- colonial power relations and is sometimes ographies of colonial India. The politics applied to the colonized elite as well as of the ‘people’ – those who remained non-elite sectors of colonial societies. Surrealism 231

Ironically, this may be closer to Gramsci’s Selected Subaltern Studies (1988); own usage insofar as he used subalterno Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping to refer to dependency, because he Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial thought only the hegemonic groups had (2000); David Ludden (ed.), Reading autonomy. Subaltern Studies (2002); Gayatri The Subalternist conceptualization of Chakravorty Spivak, The Spivak Reader subaltern autonomy is a theoretical inno- (1996). vation that had led to much debate and, in AM time, a reorientation of the project itself. In particular, it raised the question of rep- Subject See DISCOURSE. resentation. If part of the reason that the Surfiction See FICTION. subaltern consciousness is autonomous is because it exists beyond the reach of the Surrealism Grew directly out of DADA, discursive regimes that produced colonial its founder and chief spokesman, André ‘subjects’, that is, because it existed Breton, having played an important role outside colonial representation, then how in Dada experiments. Yet, where Dada can one recover this consciousness when reflected a sense of dissolution, providing the only access to the past is through public displays of artistic anarchy and those very discursive frames? Gayatri images commensurate with the absurdity Chakravorty Spivak, in her well-known and uncertainty of the age, Surrealism essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ observed propounded its own coherent antidote to that one cannot do so; the subaltern both nihilism and optimism. It did so with consciousness eludes representation and an evangelical enthusiasm which should exists only as an effect within elite have forewarned of its subsequent com- discourses (Spivak). mitment to radical politics. Where the This has led many in the Subaltern Dadaists had seen meaningless disorder, collective to engage more thoroughly the Surrealists saw a synthesis which with post-colonial theory and to contest owed something to Hegel, the Romantics, Eurocentric systems of knowledge, of the Symbolists. Breton was prepared which historiography is itself a part. The to acknowledge that Surrealism could encounter with post-colonialism by be seen as the ‘prehensile tail’ of younger members of the collective who Romanticism. Certainly it borrowed some are primarily based in the US, where of its methods – a concern with dreams, Subaltern Studies was received warmly as madness, hypnosis and hallucination, a major contribution to post-colonial deriving in part from Novalis, Coleridge, studies, has gradually led to a ‘post- Nerval and Baudelaire. But the Surrealists structuralist’ turn in which the major were less dedicated to seeking visible evi- influences are Foucault and Derrida dence of a spiritual world than to creating rather than Gramsci. Thus, just as post- the marvellous. Their aim was to change colonialism has been profoundly altered the world, partly through social revolution by its encounter with Subaltern Studies, but more centrally through a revolution in so too has the latter been transformed by consciousness. The techniques devised or the former. See also POSTCOLONIALISM. borrowed – automatic texts and paintings See Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern (created in an attempt to evade conscious Studies 1 (1982); Ranajit Guha and control and tap the intuitive, alogical, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds), power of the subconscious), works 232 Suspension of disbelief inspired and shaped by chance, written Surrealism, Politics and Culture (2003); accounts of dreams and paintings provid- David Gascoyne, Michel Remy ing images of dream visions – were all (Introduction), Dawn Ades (Preface), designed to subvert aestheticism and A Short Survey of Surrealism (2000). precipitate a fundamental alteration in CWEB our understanding of ‘reality’. To this end Suspension of disbelief See BELIEF. the Surrealists delighted in paradoxical images which mocked the process of Symbol The literary symbol, defined rational thought and perception. They straightforwardly by Kant (who, in his juxtaposed unrelated words and objects, Critique of Judgement, 1790, calls it an thereby creating tantalizing images and ‘aesthetic idea’) in terms of the ‘attributes’ iridescent verbal effects. Surrealism is of an object ‘which serve the rational idea concerned with reinvigorating language, as a substitute for logical presentation, but expanding our definition and perception with the proper function of animating the of reality to incorporate the insights of the mind by opening out for it a prospect into subconscious, and extending our appreci- a field of kindred representations stretch- ation of the central and liberating role of ing beyond its ken’ (his examples are chance, automatism and eroticism. It pro- the eagle that stands for Jove, and the posed the release of the imagination and peacock that represents Juno) takes on a stood as an implicit criticism of a restric- special significance for Romantics, early tive rationalism in society and realism in (Coleridge) and late (Yeats). Yeats indeed literature. Though international in scope goes so far as to maintain that a ‘continu- and influence, Surrealism is more firmly ous indefinable symbolism’ is ‘the sub- rooted in France than Dada had been. Its stance of all style’ (The Symbolism of major writers and artists tend to be French Poetry, 1900), and for him the excellence (Breton, Soupault, Eluard, Aragon, of a symbol consists in the suggestiveness Masson, Tanguy, Delvaux). Its impact in that derives from the suppression of a England came late (1936) and was largely metaphor’s directly apprehensible terms ineffectual. But the United States bene- of reference: ‘as a sword-blade may fited from the wartime presence of some flicker with the light of burning towers’, of the leading European Surrealists, and so the symbol evokes unseen worlds. its literature and art bore the marks of this Between Jove’s symbolic eagle (and cultural transfusion. the symbolism of medieval literature, not The standard history of Surrealism is always distinguishable from allegory), Maurice Nadeau, trans. R. Howard, The and Yeats’s mysticism, lies Blake’s idio- History of Surrealism (1968). For a book syncratic appropriation of the symbolic which counterbalances his tendency to see language of the Bible (‘Bring me my bow Surrealism as a movement contained of burning gold/Bring me my arrows of within the years 1922–39, see Roger desire’) and the major literary movement Cardinal and Robert Short, Surrealism: known as Symbolism, where the almost Permanent Revelation (1970). See also autonomous symbol reveals the hidden Savone Alexandrian, Surrealist Art order that lies behind deceptive everyday (1970); Ferdinand Alguié, The Philosophy reality. of Surrealism (1969); C. W. E. Bigsby, The elaboration of a language of signs Dada and Surrealism (1972); Raymond into what Arthur Symons (The Symbolist Spiteri and David LaCross (eds), Movement in Literature, 1899) calls Syntax 233

‘a form of expression...for an unseen new AESTHETICISM endorsed Pater’s belief reality apprehended by the conscious- that ‘all art aspires to the condition of ness’, a quasi-occult mode of knowledge music’, praising Wagner’s attempt to deliberately opposed to the positivism express the unconscious of his race in of the age, stems from the work of intricate structures of myth and symbol. Baudelaire (his Swedenborgian poem The dedication of the Symbolists to the ‘Correspondances’, for instance) and techniques of art, which, in Mallarmé’s from Gerard de Nerval’s visions of a sen- words, ‘purify the language of the tribe’, timental world lurking beneath natural influenced many modern writers, includ- forms, where (‘Vers Dorés’): ing Eliot, Joyce, Valéry and Rilke, and engendered a literary criticism (that of the comme un œil naissant couvert par ses Russian Formalists and the English and paupières, American New Critics) which, stripping Un pur esprit s’accroît sous l’écorce the Symbolist aesthetic of its late des pierres! Romantic elements, evolved critical pro- De Nerval’s active world of occult corre- cedures delicate enough to describe the spondences mocks the freethinking indi- complex inner workings of modernist vidual’s inability to penetrate reality; literature at the same time as it brought Baudelaire’s poem is devoted to the an unprecedented attention to bear on proposition that nature is a temple the linguistic devices of earlier writing. wherein the individual hears ‘de confuses See also ALLEGORY. paroles’ offering an imitation of an order See Maurice Bowra, The Heritage of we are not equipped to confront face to Symbolism (1943); Guy Michaud (ed.), face. For later Symbolist writers, the artist La Doctrine Symboliste (1947); Guy becomes a high priest of this temple, Michaud, Message Poétique du communing with, and communicating (to Symbolisme (1961); Arthur Symons, The the extent that the profane multitude can Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899, comprehend) the occult truths hidden by reprinted 1958); Edmund Wilson, Axel’s the veil called reality. Baudelaire’s highly Castle (1935, reprinted 1961); Richard sensuous ‘Correspondances’, which Candida Smith, Mallarmé’s Children: draws attention to the elaborate pattern of Symbolism and the Renewal of synaesthesia by which it isolates itself Experience (2000). from linear discourse, foreshadows an GMH autonomous art which, in the work of Synonym See PARAPHRASE. Mallarmé, extends the ritualistic concern with the sacrosanct exactness of the Syntax The ordering of words, phrases incantation in the direction of an extreme and clauses in the structure of sentences: preoccupation with technique: the conno- the ‘left-to-right’ principle of linguistic tative and associative functions of literary structure. Meaning is abstract; it is there- language and the evocative effects manip- fore not transferable from person to per- ulated by the writer in the creation of a son directly: the mediation of a physical fictional world distinct from (often supe- channel is needed. Meaning has to be rior to) the world of everyday reality. The made concrete, spread out in time and Art for art’s sake of Gautier’s Émaux et space (‘left-to-right’) for speaker, hearer, Camées (1858) had turned upon analogies writer, reader. It is the arrangements of between literature and the fine arts; the syntax which are responsible for this 234 Syntax space-time ordering of abstract elements reverse of that required for the processing of meaning. And syntax is a major influ- of meaning. The ways in which syntax ence on STYLE: the way meanings are con- determines, assists or even impedes the cretized, through syntax, affects the way reader’s apprehension of meaning are an audience responds to those meanings. manifold. One property of syntax is its capacity To proceed to a literary example, the to provide different word-orders for the indirect and interrupted first sentence of same meaning. Even though word-order Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors – is not strictly ‘significant’, it is neverthe- ‘Strether’s first question, when he reached less valuable and potent because it can the hotel, was about his friend’ – appro- determine the sequence in which a reader priately gives one time to wonder what apprehends the elements of the complex this question is to be, sets up the tone of structure of meanings embodied in a sen- tentative enquiry which characterizes the tence. For example, the second and fifth whole narrative. (See Ian Watt’s important words of the sentence She put the book paper in Essays in Criticism, vol. 10, down form one single meaning 1960.) Syntax can be mimetic; as the fol- (cf. deposit) but are, because of the word- lowing lines from Paradise Lost demon- order, experienced discontinuously. The strate, the contrast between action and meaning of put must be incomplete, pro- guile is imitated in first direct, then visional, until the sentence is completed contorted, syntax: by down. This interrupted or delayed per- My sentence is for open war. Of wiles, ception of meaning does not occur when More unexpert, I boast not: them we listen to the synonymous sentence She let those put down the book. Meaning is the same, Contrive who need, or when they but the mode of experiencing meaning is need; not now. importantly different, because of the dif- ference in syntax. Here, the meaning of Because syntax is inevitable and, in put is immediately completed by down, a sense, imperceptible, critics may fail to there is no suspense, and no subsequent attend to its power. But as Winifred part of the sentence disturbs the firmly Nowottny observes, we should not regard apprehended meaning’ (‘deposit’). A dif- syntax as merely ‘ “a harmless, necessary ferent kind of syntactic influence on the drudge” holding open the door while the reader’s reception of meaning is illus- pageantry of words sweeps through’ (The trated by the sentence She put down the Language Poets Use, vol. 10, 1962). We rebellion. It is obvious, once one has read must recognize that syntax exercises a the whole sentence, that put down does continuous and inexorable control over not mean ‘deposit’ but ‘subdue’. But this our apprehension of literary meaning and fact is obvious only after one has taken in structure – and that its influence is not the whole of the sentence (unless one limited to the spectacular grammatical guesses from context). In the temporal games of Pope or Browning or experience of reading, or listening, this Cummings. figurative meaning for put down is sup- The importance of syntax is acknowl- plied retrospectively, the basic, physical edged by the French pedagogic tradition meaning being assumed first. Here the of explication de texte. In Anglo- temporal sequence of mental operations American criticism. Donald Davie’s demanded by the syntactic order is the Articulate Energy (1955) is a brilliant Syuzhet 235 exposition of different kinds of poetic ‘Linguistic function and literary style: an syntax. Syntax has been more extensively inquiry into the language of William and technically analysed in linguistic styl- Golding’s The Inheritors’ in S. Chatman istics, using techniques drawn from (ed.), Literary Style: A Symposium transformational-generative grammar. (1971); R. Fowler, Linguistics and the See, for example, S. Chatman, The Later Novel (2nd edn, 1983), Linguistic Style of Henry James (1972), and many of Criticism (1986). There has also begun the papers in D. C. Freeman (ed.), Essays some interesting work on psycholinguis- in Modern Stylistics (1981), in which it is tic implications of syntax for readers: often claimed or implied that artistic for example, G. L. Dillon, Language design is embodied in FOREGROUNDED Processing and the Reading of Literature syntactic patterns. Advocates of func- (1978). See also LANGUAGE, STYLE. tional linguistics have made another bold RGF claim that syntactic patterns encode a ‘vision of things’ (Halliday) or ‘mind- Syuzhet See FORMALISM, NARRATIVE style’ (Fowler). See M. A. K. Halliday, STRUCTURE. T

Taste See CLASSIC, CULTURE, reflecting the contemporary writer’s EVALUATION. increased awareness of tension, whether psychological, social or that within the Technique STYLE as a deliberate frame of the linguistic medium. Thus, procedure; literary and artistic craft, Gottfried Benn describes the Expres- connoting formal rather than affective sionist’s medium as that of ‘tension-laden or expressive values. Every writer has words’. Generally, tension has been located employed a (more or less conventional) wherever opposing forces, impulses or technique, but the insistence on technique meanings could be distinguished and rather than on inspiration, or the reverse, related to one another. has been related to changing modes of The Russian Formalists and their sensibility. Thus, René Wellek follows followers described verse rhythm in terms other critics in maintaining that the of the tension between the force of the distrust of inspiration and an accompany- rhythmical impulse and that of the syn- ing faith in technique are the major tactical pattern (cf. METRE). Other critics points which set off Symbolism from have pointed to the tensions inherent in Romanticism. In this, there exists an metaphor. Empson’s types of ambiguity unbroken continuity from Poe, Baudelaire were studies in different manifestations of and Flaubert to Pound, Eliot and Valery. tension between simultaneous meanings, Pound has declared that he believes in while Cleanth Brooks’s theory of paradox technique ‘as the test of a man’s sincerity’ posited the power of the tensions involved and Eliot has praised Valéry’s On Literary in poetry as an evaluative criterion, Technique for projecting the image of in accord with the notion of a poem as the poet as a ‘cool scientist’ rather than as drama. John Crowe Ransom defined a a ‘dishevelled madman’. tension between the logical argument of a NZ poem and its local texture, W. K. Wimsatt Tenor See METAPHOR. implied a tension between the concrete and the universal or the particular and Tension Conflict or friction between the general, and Allen Tate attempted a complementaries, converses, opposites. theory in which tension means the In literary criticism, a much-used term simultaneity of literal and metaphoric relying on its context for whatever partic- or figurative meaning (exTension and ular meaning it may have. Endemic in inTension). Such preoccupations with dialectic thought, it has been variously tension were responsible for the critical employed in the analysis of the Romantic bias in favour of such lyrical or dramatic sensibility, and in criticism involving such poetry in which it prevails as against polarizing conceptions as the Classicism– poetry of tensionless sentiment or narra- Romanticism antithesis, the Freudian tive and descriptive poetry. opposites or Lévi-Strauss’s dynamic See Brian Lee, ‘The New Criticism dualisms. It is particularly common in and the language of poetry’ in Roger discussions of twentieth-century poetics, Fowler (ed.), Essays on Style and Text 237

Language (1966), pp. 29–52, and if it is not to be local or (at worst) references. autobiographical, must appeal to that NZ wider system of meanings. It must also be remembered that since the socio-linguistic Text We should beware of regarding background against which we decode a the printed text of a literary work as ‘the text constantly changes through time, work itself’. Many interesting questions marks on paper and recorded sound give arise when we consider the process of only an illusion of total stability. But then, recovering ‘the work’ from ‘the text’. In as Gombrich shows in Art and Illusion Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) (1960), the same applies to the apparent I. A. Richards attempted to describe the permanence of stone and pigment. process of reading and reacting to a text, Attempts to restore the past can be par- and his analysis is suggestive. tially successful only and cannot govern Descriptive linguistics has clarified our overall response to the text. certain aspects of the decoding process, In his influential essay ‘From work to as applied to written or spoken ‘text’. Two text’, Roland Barthes put forward seven important points arise for literary criti- propositions to distinguish between tradi- cism. First, an adequate understanding of tional understanding of the literary work the language-system involves a recogni- and a new emphasis on ‘the text’ which tion of the important role played by stress, has since come to inform all recent dis- speed, loudness, pitch and voice-quality cussion of the term: (1) ‘the work is con- in meaning. All these features are more crete, occupying a portion of book-space or less effaced by transposition into the (in a library, for example); the Text, on the written code, and much of the writer’s other hand, is a methodological field.... work is to find means of replacing or reor- While the work is held in the hand, the ganizing them. Gerard Manley Hopkins text is held in language’. The first is resorted to modifications of the written displayed, the second demonstrated. ‘A system which are far from precious or text can cut across a work, several works.’ irrelevant. Second, knowledge of how (2) ‘The Text does not come to a stop with the members of a community learn the (good) literature; it cannot be appre- meanings of words (through their use in hended as part of a hierarchy or even a contexts of language and situation) leads simple division of genres. What consti- to a distinction between subjective and tutes the Text is, on the contrary (or pre- intersubjective responses to the text. cisely), its subversive force with regard to Subjective responses rely on meanings old classifications.... If the Text raises derived from the use of a word in special problems of classification, that is because circumstances unique to the individual, it always implies an experience of while intersubjective responses rely on limits...the Text is that which goes to the uses which are widespread throughout the limit of the rules of enunciation.’ community. Clearly there is nothing so (3) ‘Whereas the Text is approached and simple as a dichotomy: some contexts are experienced in relation to the sign, the peculiar to a section of a community or to work closes itself on a signified... a family. The possibility of communica- [the Text’s] field is that of the signifier’ tion, however, in the community at large the work is moderately symbolic, but the depends on the widest type of intersub- text is radically symbolic. (4) ‘The Text is jective response. And literary criticism, plural.... The Text’s plurality does not 238 Texture depend on the ambiguity of its contents, is thus possible to describe the texture of but rather on what could be called the language in terms of either of the means stereographic plurality of the signifiers used or the effects obtained. Assonance that weave it.’ The Text is ‘completely (identity of vowel sounds), consonance woven with quotations, references and (identity of consonant sounds) and alliter- echoes’. (5) ‘The Text...is read without ation (repetition of initial consonants) the father’s signature.’ The author can may each be used to produce such effects only come back to the text as ‘a guest’ so as cacophony (a sense of strain in pro- to speak. ‘The Text can be read without its nunciation) or euphony (a sense of ease in father’s guarantee: the restitution of the pronunciation). All are exemplified in intertext paradoxically abolishes the con- Alexander Pope’s famous exercise ‘An cept of filiation’ (p. 78). So, a text read in Essay in Criticism’: the weave of texts no longer is anchored in the author. (6) The Text ‘asks the reader When Ajax strives some rock’s vast for an active collaboration’. The reader weight to throw, thus should produce the Text. (7) ‘The The line too labours, and the words Text is linked to enjoyment.’ In brief, move slow; Barthes sees the work as ‘closed’ and the Not so when swift Camilla scours the text as ‘open’. Many literary critics have plain, subsequently been influenced by the work Flie o’er th’unbending corn, and skims of Foucault and Derrida on the status and along the main. composition of both text and the text. Samuel Johnson, however, attempting to See also TEXTURE. prove that the mind governs the ear and See Edward Said, The World, the Text not the reverse, quotes more lines with and the Critic (1991); Stanley Fish, Is similar textural qualities and demon- There a Text in This Class? (1980); Roland strates quite convincingly that not even Barthes, ‘From work to text’ in Josue V. ‘the greatest master of numbers can fix Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies (1979); the principles of representative harmony’ Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (1983). (Life of Pope, 1779). AAAC Many other critical theorists from Aristotle to I. A. Richards have disputed Texture Strictly, the word texture the possibility of any natural connection when applied to language, describes the between the sounds of any language, tactile images employed to represent var- and the things signified. Richards in The ious physical surfaces, but by extension Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) asks: has come to mean the representation in words of all physical phenomena. The what resemblance or natural connec- widespread use of the term is based on the tion can there be between the semantic assumption that words have an expressive and phonetic elements in the mor- or simulative aspect which helps to illus- pheme? One is a sound the other a trate their meanings more immediately. reference. Is (fl-) {in flicker, flash, This belief in the onomatopoeic proper- flare} really like ‘moving light’ in any ties of language has not always gone way in which (si-) or (gi-) is not? Is unchallenged, but the existence of tech- that not like asking whether the taste niques for producing particular sensory of turkey is like growing in some way effects in the reader is undisputed, and it that the taste of mint is not? Theme 239

One need not go quite so far as this to apprehend the theme by inference – it is agree with his conclusion that most the rationale of the images and symbols, expressive words get their feeling of not their quantity. There is a case for peculiar aptness from other words sharing restricting the loosely formal use of the the morpheme and supporting them in the term; if we use ‘theme’ to mean a certain background of the reader’s mind. The quantity of features in a work (iterative relation of texture to structure is dealt imagery or stylistic mannerism), we are with more fully elsewhere (see FORM), but confusing a symptom with a cause. For it should be noted here that of all those example, if we talk about the ‘theme of critics and theorists who have disagreed drowning’ in Dickens’s Our Mutual with Richards about the nature of poetic Friend, we are only saying that it is a discourse the most influential is probably novel in which people are repeatedly John Crowe Ransom, the founder and drowned or drowning is frequently men- foremost theoretician of New Criticism. tioned, whereas the ‘theme of Christian Believing that Richards’s attempt to dis- redemption’ offers an explanation of the criminate poetic discourse from prose by significance of drowning. Recurrent local its ability to tease dormant affective states features are better designated by the term into unusual activity, relegates poetry to motif. a disreputable status, Ransom looked for The degree of abstraction of the term a more promising differentia in the kind depends on the nature of the work under of structure exemplified by a poem. In consideration. It makes more sense, for its simplest form that organization can example, to talk of the ‘theme of waiting’ be described as ‘a loose logical structure in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1956) with an irrelevant local texture’. He goes than the ‘theme of drowning’ in Dickens, on to discuss the difficulties of composing because the play offers the action itself as poems on what he calls the ‘two ground an important part of its subject matter, not basis’ of (1) an intended meaning and (2) simply one kind of event which becomes an intended meter (texture), an operation ‘thematic’ by repetition. The epithet in which the argument of the poem fights thematic should thus mean ‘symptomatic to displace the texture and the texture of the presence of a theme’ rather than fights to displace the argument. merely ‘iterative’ or ‘recurrent’. See John Crowe Ransom, The New However, the term is sensitive and Criticism (1941). useful precisely because it admits of BCL degrees of abstract reference; it is neither possible nor desirable to restrict all quan- Theme Traditionally means a recurrent titative usages, because theme implies the element of subject matter, but the modern linearity or extension of a work in a way insistence on simultaneous reference to that other subject matter terms do not. form and content emphasizes the formal Compared, for example, with thesis, a dimension of the term. A theme is always qualitative term meaning the core of argu- a subject, but a subject is not always a ment or attitudes a work promotes or theme: a theme is not usually thought of reveals, theme is a more concrete and for- as the occasion of a work of art, but rather malistic term with structural implications. a branch of the subject which is indirectly We think of a theme as a line or thread expressed through the recurrence of running through a work, linking features certain events, images or symbols. We which are un- or otherwise related 240 Threnody

(cf. PLOT). The thesis of a work is Can styles determine ways of thinking? paraphrasable, but a theme might not be In what lies the newness of a work? How so. Thesis is also an intentionalist term, does the individual work contribute to whereas theme may or may not be. the evolution of the tradition? How far do Proust’s themes, for example, modelled social changes contribute to changing on the analogy of music, are a conscious literary forms? Paradoxically, placing a part of his creative method; but in other, work in an intellectual tradition may less self-conscious cases, to use the term draw one’s attention to specifically liter- is to talk about structure, not intended ary problems to explain why one work is content. Thus, critics may use ‘theme’ to more effective than another when both refer to those repeated parts of a subject express similar ideas. And vice versa: the which control aspects of a work which extra subtlety of thought of one work may they perceive as formal as well as become obvious through comparison with conceptual. other works in the same convention. Most ‘Theme’ is also used to refer beyond basic of all, an awareness of tradition may the individual work. We speak of ‘peren- be indispensable when trying to establish nial themes’, such as the theme of the the original meaning of a text, especially Fall. Here, theme pre-exists the individual if works are closely linked by literary work and borders on archetype or even influence or imitation, as in (say) an oral MYTH. On the other hand works of litera- tradition, or in the ‘Classical tradition’. ture may express themes which condition Two methodological problems arise. other works (e.g. the carpe diem theme) We derive our definition of the tradition in which case the term is starting to from individual works, but we decide overlap with CONVENTION. which works are relevant according to our VS definition. The way out is the dialectical process of measuring the works against Threnody See ELEGY. the tradition, modifying the tradition in

Topos See COMPARATIVE LITERATURE. the light of the works. The second problem concerns how the Tradition A historical scheme made up tradition works (if it works at all). of formal, stylistic and ideological attrib- The causal link between works may be utes common to large numbers of works the influence of a common environment, over a long time. It generally implies a including a common literary environment causal nexus linking individual works. of aesthetic conventions and the language Literary historians may use the idea of tra- itself. It may be ideological or religious. It dition either in a strictly historical way or may be the direct link of literary borrow- as an aid to criticism. In the first case, ing. The attempt to determine the varying they will use individual works to demon- proportions of such influences by placing state a process of literary change; in the a work in a tradition can help immensely second, the procedure will be reversed to to reveal the structure of a literary work. illumine the individual work. Traditional is sometimes opposed Tradition tends to be defined either in to original (see ORIGINALITY), with formal and stylistic terms, or in terms of corresponding pejorative or laudatory ideas and attitudes: the ‘oral tradition’ and undertones. Such oppositions rest on the ‘radical tradition’, for example. misconception and misapplication. Few Placing a work raises many questions. works, if any, exist in such a vacuum that Tragedy 241 they cannot be related to any sort of human action, and moves towards a kind tradition. And ‘traditional’ should not be of savage farce (e.g. Euripides’s Electra) equated with the negative sense of ‘con- in which the heroic stance degenerates servative’: there are radical traditions. into futile posturing. ‘Traditional’ is more properly a neutral The tragic gap and the shift from the descriptive term, with approving or disap- heroic to the ironic phase are evident in proving undertones depending on one’s Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. The attitude to the tradition in question. See fates of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and also CONVENTION, CREATION, DISCOURSE. Faustus are consequent on their hubristic See T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the indi- error – denial of human mortality – but vidual talent’ in The Sacred Wood (1920). the tragic structure of these morality EJB situations insists on the hostility, even the malevolence, of the ‘gods’ or ‘God’ that Tragedy As a species of drama exact their rights. In Shakespeare’s heroic tragedy can be defined only in the most tragedies – Othello, Coriolanus, Antony general terms, such as Aristotle’s ‘the imi- and Cleopatra – the heroes’ psychologies tation of an action that is serious...with are involved in a destruction that is incidents arousing pity and fear’. His limited in scope – domestic or political, Poetics attempts a classification of the not metaphysical – and the hero, in a final elements proper to tragedy but, despite speech, asserts an enduring virtu against his inductive methodology, few Greek the facts of defeat and death. But the psy- tragedies conform to his model. However, chological factors – pride, lust, jealousy – his concept of hamartia, the act of the are the données of the action, not its hero which initiates the fatal process, sug- significant causes; they provide a context gests a basis for a more developed theory in which the forces of destruction can of tragedy. This hamartia may be anything work. Similarly, the tragedies of Racine from a mistake over identity to deliberate are not really explorations of the psychol- crime or sin, but is always horrifyingly ogy of ‘passion’; in their world a out of proportion to the consequences of monstrous primeval power infiltrates the pain and destruction. The act of the hero, social and moral order through the intox- an individual ‘better than ourselves’, icating irrationality of sexual desire. opens a gap in the fragile fabric of moral- The gap between human and ultimate ity and civilization through which the causes widens in Elizabethan develop- primeval forces of anarchy and destruc- ments of the Senecan tragedy of blood; in tion pour. Tragedy is a dramatization of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Marston’s an individual’s sense of life and society as Antonio’s Revenge the revenge structure constantly under threat from the arbitrary becomes a metaphor for an irruption of chances of fate and humanity’s own evil. Whatever the superficial moral real- innate savagery. In tragedy’s heroic phase ities of the situation, and the calls of the (e.g. Sophocles’s Oedipus) the individual revenger on nature, honour and blood, the accepts a measure of responsibility for the acting out of revenge is a descent into a destructive action and asserts against it a chaos of horror and savagery urged on by quality of heroic suffering and knowl- a malignant and insatiable ghost. The edge. But in its ironic phase tragedy revenger can only carry out a sense of emphasizes the arbitrariness of evil, ‘duty’ by stepping back from the reality of rather than simply its disproportion to the act by elaborate mimes, masks and 242 Tragedy plays. It is the unbearable knowledge of If tragedy has not been an available the nature of revenge that makes Hamlet mode since the eighteenth century this a prisoner in his own play. T. S. Eliot’s may have to do with the growth of ratio- complaint that Hamlet’s emotion was ‘in nalism and the bourgeoisie. The tradition excess of the facts as they appear’ is of REALISM in the new form of the NOVEL unwitting testimony to the gap between was antipathetic to the extraordinary or human motive and action and the pressure inexplicable; the canonical English novels of evil behind them that defines the tragic in this tradition lack a metaphysical experience. In Macbeth, a revenge struc- dimension, a sense of active evil pressing ture in reverse, the commitment to crime on the edges of civilization. Evil is is specific and deliberate, albeit fearful, redefined as moral or social error and but the tragedy again lies in the enormity the scrutiny of psychology and motive and universality of the evil that enters becomes the animating structural con- through the gap in ‘nature’ that Macbeth cern. The tragic gap closes and individu- has opened. The darkness and chaos of als are wholly responsible for the disorder Scotland are not caused by the murder of they create. In this situation the drama of Duncan; the forces that the weird sisters external evil finds expression only in the testify to are given licence by it. The sym- melodramatic modes of the GOTHIC fan- bolism of evil is not merely explanatory tasy and, later, the ghost story; in these or emblematic; similarly, in King Lear the the evil is external to ‘normal’ society, tempest is not a symbolic extension of whereas in tragedy it is inherent. Some of Lear’s disintegration so much as an the dramas of Ibsen attempt to express a expression of the primeval chaos that now sense of tragic destiny with insistent sym- engulfs him and his action. But at least in bolism, but even at its most impressive Macbeth the act and the consequence are and dramatic, as in Ghosts, the require- still clearly related; in Lear the gap is ment of realism, of explicability, inhibits appallingly wide. An act of senile folly the symbolism of transcendence. Here- precipitates the disintegration of human ditary syphilis is undoubtedly horrific, society – the basic ties of kinship fall but as a symbol of evil it lacks universal- apart to reveal a chaos where humanity ity, it is too specifically a disease. ‘must prey on itself like monsters of the A different sense of tragic structure deep’. The causal element, the hamartia, informs the symbolic fictions of Henry has become almost incidental; evil is James and Conrad. A comparison of immanent and overflows from the small- the similar moral situation in James’s est breach. In this phase of tragedy the Portrait of a Lady and George Eliot’s protagonist is forbidden even the luxury Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda shows of stoicism; Lear’s pathetic submission to James’s symbolic rhetoric creating a fate is merely the prelude to the final sense of active, immanent, evil where cruelty. Beyond this there is only the sur- Eliot was content with terms of moral realist horror of Webster: in The White responsibility and guilt. And Conrad’s Devil and The Duchess of Malfi tragedy is work is full of pressures from the heart of a horrible and inconsequential farce darkness. Tragedy is a possible form for relieved only by magnificent rhetorical these novelists because they collapse the gestures; insanity, disease and corruption realistic opposition of the ‘real’ and the inform a world in which the individual is ‘poetic’; their symbolisms of evil are not an arbitrary actor. illustrative or exemplary, but functions of Translations 243 their language. As Jorge Luis Borges said, elements in the source text elude the net ‘Conrad and Henry James wrote novels of of the target language: others stretch it reality because they judged reality to be and call attention to the device by which poetic’. See also CATHARSIS, DRAMA. they are admitted: the process is con- See A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean trolled by the translator, who must be a Tragedy (1904); J. Jones, On Aristotle and scrupulous critic and a creative writer to Greek Tragedy (1962); Dorothea Krook, locate the ‘seed’ and make it grow. Elements of Tragedy (1969); F. L. Lucas, Dryden, regrounding the classics in Tragedy: Serious Drama in Relation to a contemporary idiom, was much con- Aristotle’s Poetics (1927, repr. 1961); cerned with translation. Unaware of mod- F. W. Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann, The ern conceptions of the relation between Birth of Tragedy (1967); G. Steiner, The form and content, he could happily advo- Death of Tragedy (1961); N. Frye, Fools of cate reasonable freedom, demanding that Time (1967); R. P. Draper (ed.), Tragedy: the translator should first ‘know what is Developments in Criticism (1980); peculiar to the author’s style’, and then R. B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy ‘tis time to look into ourselves, to (1980); John Drakakis and Naomi Conn conform our genius to his, to give his Liebler (eds), Tragedy (1998). thoughts either the same turn, if our PM tongue will bear it, or, if not, to vary but the dress, not alter or destroy the Translations The literary translator substance. has at all times been extremely influen- tial, and the branch of literary criticism This kind of translation, called by concerned with translation brings close Dryden paraphrase, is, however, sharply analysis of language to bear on cross- distinguished from impermissibly free cultural literary questions in a way central imitations. Modern translators, not shar- to COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, since a ing Dryden’s conviction that human unique creative energy is generated where nature is everywhere the same, and con- languages converge. cerned, like modern critics, with the phe- The NEW CRITICAL insistence on the nomenology of a given work, have paid inseparability of form and content ques- more attention to imitation as a mode of tioned the possibility of translation: and translating at least lyric poetry, and have one could cite a number of poets, from often worked in the territory between Shelley’s likening of translation to sub- two languages, rather than offering to jecting a violet to chemical analysis to reconstruct one on the foundations of Robert Frost’s working definition of another. Lowell’s ‘Imitations’ are repre- poetry as ‘what gets left out in transla- sentative of, fifty years earlier, Pound’s tion’ to demonstrate that writers have had ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. Louis grave doubts about it. Yet, Shelley (e.g.) Zukovsky’s recent translations of Catullus was himself an admirable translator: and have created an even more striking syn- it seems that he was primarily stressing thetic language that mimes or mouths the the impossibility of exact correspondence Latin of the original in a way that is delib- between source and target texts, rather erately indecent. See also PARAPHRASE. than rejecting translation; he believed that See W. Arrowsmith and R. Shattuck (eds), ‘the plant must spring again from the The Craft and Context of Translation seed, or it will bear no flower’. Some (1961); W. Benjamin, ‘The Task of the 244 Travesty

Translator’, in Illuminations; S. Bassnett, dogmatically regards them as absolute Translation Studies (1980); R. W. Brislin errors. Characters in such fictions are (ed.), Translation: Approaches and either damagingly ‘privatized’, reduced to Research (1976); G. Toury, In Search of mere abstract consciousness, or allegori- a Theory of Translation (1980); George cally presented. But the latter defect is Steiner, After Babel (1998). also, for Lukács, typical of the ‘socialist GMH realist’ literature to which he was pri- vately hostile: socialist realism in this Travesty See PARODY. sense perpetuates the weaknesses of ‘nat- uralism’, which represents a declension Typicality Although types and from the major realist tradition. Scott and typologies have long been traditional Baizac, writing at a period when the ideas in literary criticism, MARXIST bourgeoisie was still a progressive force, CRITICISM deployed this notion in new were able to create ‘typical’ events and ways. The Hungarian Marxist critic characters, sensing the shaping forces of Georg Lukács, heavily influenced by the history within particular phenomena. By aesthetics of the German philosopher the time of Flaubert, Zola and Conrad, the Hegel, used the idea of ‘typicality’ to bourgeoisie had endured a crisis of politi- indicate the process whereby, in classical cal confidence, could no longer make liv- REALIST literature, events and individuals ing connections between individuals and are at once uniquely particularized, and their world and found itself confronted by representative of broader, deeper trends in an opaque, impenetrable reality. It took history itself. A George Eliot character, refuge either in dispassionate descrip- for example, is neither an isolated tion of this supposedly immutable society ‘personality’ nor a mere emblem of some (Flaubert, NATURALISM), or in the private underlying reality; the peculiar complex- recesses of consciousness (SYMBOLISM). ity of such a character lies in its dialecti- In the work of such exceptional writers as cal unity of the individual and the Thomas Mann, Lukács found the great representative. For Lukács, such a fusion tradition of typicality perpetuated into the avoids at once an ‘alienated’ presentation twentieth century. of character which divorces it from its See J. Bernstein, The Philosophy of social context, and a pure reduction of the Novel (1984); G. Lukács, The individuals or situations to abstract Historical Novel (1962), Studies in ‘symptoms’ of impersonal forces. Lukács European Realism (1950); R. Williams, finds MODERNIST literature characterized Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968). by both forms of representation, and TE U

Uncanny, the From Freud’s translation uncanny effect of Lucy’s experience of the German term das Unheimlich, results from the conjoining of the familiar the uncanny designates both a concept and the strange. To subtract either element and a feeling and is primarily associated would be to rob the scene of its uncanny with a profound sense of unease about quality. Moreover, as this example sug- both ourselves and the world we inhabit. gests, the uncanny is intimately bound up Precariously located in the liminal space with the mode of representation. If the of the in-between, it calls into question same events had occurred within a fairy established norms and boundaries, espe- tale or ghost story, the effect would not cially those between the familiar and be uncanny. In order to be experienced unfamiliar, imagination and reality, inside as such, they must be situated within and outside (psychical and material a narrative of ordinary material reality. realms) and self and other. As have so The notion of the uncanny has received many others who have written on the the critical attention of a range of influen- uncanny, we must turn to the realm of tial thinkers from Karl Marx to the German literature in order to illustrate the disori- philosopher Martin Heidegger, and, more enting effects of such destabilization. In recently, the French post-structuralist, chapter 16 of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette Jacques Derrida. It is, however, associ- (1853), Lucy Snowe – having collapsed ated primarily with the founder of in the street – awakens in a house that is psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and his rendered strange precisely through its 1919 essay ‘The “Uncanny” ’ is still the familiarity. Caught between the states of key text for anyone interested in the sub- sleep and wakefulness, she surveys her ject. Purporting to be a scientific investi- surroundings and struggles to reconcile gation, it has an undeniably literary the presence of objects long familiar and quality due both to his concentration on intimately associated with her own child- E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1891 novella, ‘The hood with the unfamiliar context of a sandman’, and Freud’s own poetic style. strange house in a foreign country. Such The essay begins with an extended objects appear as ghosts of a past life and etymological discussion of das Heimlich a former self, effectively splitting her (the canny) and das Unheimlich (the identity while blurring the boundary uncanny). As Freud demonstrates – in a between the inner realm of her own psy- manner entirely typical of later post- chical existence and the real world. What structuralists – the two terms begin as makes this episode specifically uncanny, opposites but come to resemble each as opposed to simply frightening, is, in other more and more closely until they are part, related to its setting. Uncanny indistinguishable. This collapse into effects are most likely to be produced UNDECIDABLITY is central to Freud’s where they are least expected, within, for argument as it allows him to conclude that example, the confines of a comfortable the uncanny is ‘nothing new or alien, home where one would normally expect but something which is familiar and old- to feel safe and secure. But, above all, the established in the mind and which has 246 Undecidability become alienated from it only through the Undecidability To offer a simple or process of repression’. In short, an stable definition of undecidability is to uncanny effect is produced by the return ignore the radical implications of this of the repressed. He also, however, lists a ‘concept’ and its ability to undermine the number of more specific sources of the conceptual basis of definition itself. uncanny including: intellectual uncer- Associated primarily with the deconstruc- tainty, doubles, déjà vu, coincidences and tive critic Jacques Derrida, undecidability repetition, omnipotence of thoughts is best described as an effect of writing (recalling our surmounted belief in the where the latter is conceived, by Derrida, power of thoughts to affect the material as a system of spacing and differences world), the blurring of the boundary that encompasses language in general. As between imagination and reality, being a site where the effects of writing are writ buried alive, ghosts and death itself. large, the undecidable, in turn, effects a Taken as a psychoanalytic treatise, profound destabilization of meaning, Freud’s essay is limited by his determina- interpretation and the possibility of deci- tion to trace the uncanny back to infantile sion itself. Within Derrida’s own texts, desires and fears, especially castration we can see these effects most clearly in anxiety (where a young boy fears his his reading of terms such as différance, father will castrate him as punishment for supplement, pharmakon, hymen, etc. desiring the mother). Recent critics, According to the editor of Positions including the French feminist Hélène (1981), what links each of these undecid- Cixous, have argued that this emphasis is able terms is that they ‘are always differ- based on a misreading of Hoffmann’s nar- ent from themselves, they always defer rative, one that ignores key formal and any singular grasp of their meaning’. thematic features and, as a result, actually Thus, for example, the term pharmakon reduces the uncanny element of the story. signifies, amongst other things, both Moreover, Freud’s essay has itself been poison and cure while, at the same time, revealed as a text haunted by its own gaps suspending the possibility of simply and omissions. It is now widely recog- deciding between these contradictory nized that the lasting importance of this meanings on the basis of the context in piece resides precisely in such uncanny which it is used. As Derrida argues in qualities. The significance of the uncanny Dissemination (1982): to literary studies is similarly assured. Western literature has always been preoc- The ‘essence’ of the pharmakon lies in cupied with the uncanny effect of doubles the way in which, having no stable and repetition while some would argue essence, no ‘proper’ characteristics, it that the relationship between imagination is not, in any sense (metaphysical, and reality and, even more importantly, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the the familiar and the strange, is central to word, a substance.... If the phar- all literature and, in fact, constitutes its makon is ‘ambivalent’, it is because it status as such (see FORMALISM). constitutes the medium in which See A. Bennett and N. Royle, ‘The opposites are opposed, the movement uncanny’ in Introduction to Literature, and play that links them among Criticism and Theory, 3rd edn (2004). themselves, reverses them or makes JA one side cross over into the other Undecidability 247

(soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, such notions of self-present knowledge memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, and truth by revealing the fundamental etc.).... The pharmakon is the move- undecidability of the conceptual opposi- ment, the locus, and the play: (the tions on which they are based. Never con- production of ) difference. tent simply to reverse such oppositions (privileging, for example, absence over As this example suggests, the undecidable presence or writing over speech), its strat- does not simply suggest a temporary egy is to destabilize the very ground of inability to choose between two (or more) opposition itself by revealing how each of alternative meanings (AMBIGUITY). Nor is the terms is actually the product of differ- it a collection of stable and discrete terms. ence (or writing), and thus inhabited by It is, rather, a site that opens up the possi- the trace of its other. In Dissemination bility of differentiation while simultane- (1981), for example, Derrida deconstructs ously resisting any attempt to master it on Plato’s distinction between bad memory the basis of opposition itself. (associated with external, technical signs Although the undecidability of terms and thus with writing and absence) and such as pharmakon cannot be detached good memory (a pure truth or presence from the chain of textual relations in that has no need for signs). As Derrida which they are embedded, its effects reveals, Plato would like to maintain that exceed any single text to infect the larger good memory is completely separate conceptual systems upon which they from writing but, at the same time, he can depend. For this reason, the notion of only conceive of the former in terms of undecidability represents a profound the latter (good memory is described, for challenge to the rational discourse of example, as being ‘written in the soul Western philosophy. Since its inception, of the learner’ [italics added]). Thus Western philosophy has been organized the opposition between good and bad by the law of non-contradiction. As artic- memory collapses into undecidability. ulated in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, this law It is important to recognize that asserts that ‘it is impossible that contrary undecidability does not constitute a tool attributes should belong at the same time or strategy that can simply be applied to – to the same subject’. This, ‘the most or imported into – a literary text. As certain of all principles’, allows rational I have already suggested, the undecidable discourse to be organized around a series is inextricably bound up in the contexts in of conceptual oppositions (presence/ which it is produced. That said, this absence, speech/writing, intelligible/ notion does represent an important sensible, etc.) where each of the two reminder that no text is a unified entity. terms is simply external to the other. In Indeed, whenever a reader or critic claims establishing the very possibility of truth to have produced a totalizing reading, it (as opposed to falsehood) and of a pure will have been achieved only by ignoring, PRESENCE untouched by absence, it allows or suppressing, the inevitable presence of for the possibility of self-present and other features – textual or otherwise – that self-authenticating knowledge. contradict it. See also DECONSTRUCTION, In its broadest sense, DECONSTRUCTION DISSEMINATION and LOGOCENTRISM. represents an attempt to challenge all JA V

Value See EVALUATION, REFUNCTIONING. patterns, whether these are patterns on a metrical or a lexico-syntactic level. Variation The calculated avoidance of Metrical variation is an accepted licence uniformity of expression, seems to be a of English verse whereby (under certain feature of all art-forms (music, literature, conditions) the positions of stressed and etc.) having a time dimension. A perva- unstressed syllables may be reversed. A sive characteristic of literary language, similar phenomenon is the final twist it occurs on lexical, syntactic and in the verbal pattern of (Merchant of phonological levels. Venice, 3,1): Lexical variation has its most commonplace manifestation in the If you prick us, do we not bleed? if ‘elegant variation’ of fictional and jour- you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you nalistic prose: avoidance of repeated use poison us, do we not die? and if you of the same expression by choosing an wrong us, shall we not revenge? alternative expression having the same Whatever the differences between the reference; for example, by successively above cases, they all illustrate enhance- referring to a character as Parson Smith, ment of the element of unpredictability in the man of God, Mr Smith, our clerical language, often where in ordinary lan- friend, etc. Lexical variation is also a guage the orderliness of repetition might stylistic convention of much heroic poetry, have been expected. It is notable that for example, Old English verse, where the whereas verbal parallelism characteristi- use of variant coreferential phrases is an cally follows a strictly predictable pattern inseparable part of the technique of alliter- in compositions such as folk-songs and ative composition. Syntactic variation can language games, it rarely does so in take the form of repeating the same struc- literature. Similarly, metrical variation is ture but with different ordering (often with found in serious poetry, but not in a chiasmic, or mirror-image pattern), as in doggerel verse or nursery rhymes. Such Whitman’s Jehovah am I/Old Brahm I, observations suggest that variation has a and I Saturnius am (from ‘Chanting the more significant role in literature than the Square Deific’). Phonological variation mere negative one of avoiding the tedium can take the form of ‘ringing the changes’ of mechanical repetition. One possible on stressed vowel sounds (particularly explanation is prompted by the Russian long vowels and diphthongs) for formalist thesis that art ‘makes strange’ euphonious effect (Paradise Lost, 3): the experience it describes, and hence that Then feed on thoughts that the language of art has to be a ‘twisted’, voluntary move oblique mode of discourse. Variation, Harmonious numbers; as the unexpectedness, establishes a medium or wakeful bird. ‘scenario’ of poetic heightening, in which daring departures from linguistic norms A further kind of variation is the breaking become acceptable. See also FORMALISM. up of excessive regularity in parallelistic GNL Verse epistle 249

Vehicle See METAPHOR. enjambment is enough to suggest an unseen entity imposing itself, to look Verbal irony See IRONY. like compliance with a formal structure. Indeed there is a sense in which in free Verisimilitude See BELIEF, REALISM. verse enjambment is a psychological need Vers libre See FREE VERSE. for both writer and reader, and more a purely formal than an expressive device. Verse is the minimal condition of Perhaps the first line of a lyric poem is poetry if poetry is to mean anything even more line than any of the subsequent as a metaphor – ‘Poetry is only in verse ones. Its formulation is an act of perfect and nowhere else’ (Vigny). The degree of faith, it is invocation, libation, abstracted expressivity of language depends upon utterance. It can be neither good nor bad, the frame of mind in which we approach because however the poet came by it, it is it and that frame of mind is in turn deter- the absolutely given, the only assumption mined by conventions of presentation, the poem can allow itself. Many poems lay-out, etc. Free verse might perhaps be are a making sense of and a giving quality printed as prose, but, printed as verse, ‘the to the first line. And if the first line can so words are more poised than in prose’ and often stand for a title, it is because, while ‘are to be attended to, in passing, for their being part of the poem, it partakes also of own sake’ (MacNeice, Modern Poetry, a paradigmatic existence. 1938; 2nd edn, 1968). If we call prose ‘poetic’ we must Verse is the line of poetry; a line of recognize that it is poetic not for any verse differs from the line of prose in that intrinsic reason but because it alludes to it has an active relationship with the page itself in a verse context. Prose is a manner, on which it may be written; it asks the verse a form; there is no language called page to proclaim its self-sufficiency, to poetry, there is only a poetic language in make it portentous and to make room for the verse instance. Verse is verse before its mental and emotional extension, the it is anything else, meaning, vision, etc. If infra-line (Claudel calls the primordial highly imaged language is called poetic, it line ‘an idea isolated by blank space’); the is because verse alone has enough formal prose line merely undergoes the physical presence to give direction to the caprice of limitations of the page which thwarts its invention and equilibrium to semantic urge for continuous linearity (the para- violence, just as it has enough formal graph is a concession to the page, the presence to re-animate the semantically stanza collusion with it). And the poem sedate. See also METRE, POETRY, PROSE. differs from the shopping list in that the See V. Forrest-Thompson, Poetic poem turns sequence into the formally Artifice (1978); P. Fussell, Poetic Meter consequential. and Poetic Form (revised edn, 1979); A line of verse will be a line of verse Phillip Hobsbaum, Meter, Rhythm and as long as it can point to an authority of a Verse Form (1995); Jeffrey Wainwright, higher order than grammar. By this stan- Poetry: the basics (2004). dard, many lines need the corroboration CS of others, derive their ‘lineness’ from accompanying evidence. This authority Verse epistle One of the neo-classical of course need not be metric or rhythmic; forms of familiar and complimentary it may be as arbitrary as it pleases; poetry which flourished in England 250 Voice during the seventeenth century. Imitating Drayton, Carew and Herrick are much the epistles of the Roman poet Horace, admired. The full capacities of the form, such verse was addressed to friends, however, are best exemplified by Jonson patrons and fellow-poets in a style that and Pope; like Horace himself they are approximated to the informal candour also keen satirists, and the kinship and civility of conversation, allowing the between verse epistle and satire rests in a poet to expatiate freely in a personal man- common emphasis upon moral and criti- ner on moral and literary themes. Among cal realism. The Horatian familiar epistle the principal themes of the Horatian epis- should not be confused with the Ovidian tle, for instance, are the pleasures and elegiac epistle (e.g. Drayton’s Englands virtues of friendship, the values of self- Heroicall Epistles and Pope’s Eloisa to knowledge and integrity of mind, the Abelard) in which historical characters praise of the temperate life in country are fictitiously supposed to lament their retirement, and general or specific reflec- misfortunes. tions on the art and status of poetry See R. A. Brower, ‘The image of (Horace’s Ars Poetica is in the form of an horace’, in Alexander Pope: The Poetry of epistle). Many of the complimentary Allusion (1959); D. J. Palmer, ‘The verse poems with which Jonson and his follow- epistle’ in Bradbury and Palmer (eds), ers commended and appraised each Metaphysical Poetry, Stratford-upon-Avon other’s work are related to the epistolary Studies, 11 (1970). form in their tone of personal familiarity. DJP The extravagance of Donne’s epistles to noble ladies has not drawn much critical Voice See DIALOGIC STRUCTURE, approval, but the epistles of Daniel, FORMALISM. W

Wit The term first comes into critical poets, is that of the most influential importance applied to literature in the philosopher of the age, John Locke, who seventeenth century, though it was used in defines it as ‘the Assemblage of Ideas, the previous century in a general way to and putting those together with quickness denote liveliness and brilliance of conver- and variety’. sation. ‘Witty Jack Donne’ is an Locke is here, however, acting as the Elizabethan man-about-town, but when spokesperson for the new highly devel- he turns up in Carew’s ‘Elegie upon the oped and articulate consciousness of the Death of the Deane of Pauls’ (1623) as self in moral thinking, scientific observa- tion and poetry, which begins to assume a King, that rul’d as hee thought fit special importance in England in the The universall Monarchy of wit seventeenth century. The consciousness we are moving into a time when wit was a of the self as initiator, user and arbiter of powerful if disputed critical concept or ideas produced the problem of establishing basis for value-judgement, though such a communal, standard judgement, a point a time was more surely after the of rest which became increasingly the Restoration. The clue to the reason for goal of the succeeding Augustan age. The this may lie in a meaning of wit which is arrogance of wit was resisted. There was assigned to the Restoration years: ‘the a backlash of sensibility, from individuals seat of consciousness or thought, the who followed their hearts; and there was a mind’. Dryden, living in this critical conservative backlash from those who climate, defined wit as ‘sharpness of distrusted unsupported human daring. conceit’. His emphasis is on self- Addison devoted several Spectator papers consciousness on the part of both the poet to discussing wit (see nos. 35, 61–3, 140 and the audience. It is no accident, then, and 249). In No. 62, he elaborates his that at this time ‘the wits’ emerged – a famous distinctions between ‘true wit’ group conscious of their nimble minds and ‘false wit’ allowing an escape hole of and cultural awareness. Apart from self- ‘mix’d wit’ to avoid condemning writers consciousness itself, there are several whom he half admired. There is a see-saw other characteristics of Restoration and between admiration for quick cleverness eighteenth-century wit that come from and admiration for the harmony of the such an in-group attitude. Comparison is assemblage. ‘False wit’ appears to stressed. The wit demands to be used in a Addison to be ‘Gothick’, that is without context of accepted ideas and reading, proportion, fussy, entertaining but lacking though the opposite side of this is also overall control. ‘True wit’ he sees as valued, namely unexpected justness. majestic and ‘natural’. Cleverness and quickness are parts of it, It would be possible to give a historical too, and the idea of the marshalled account of the use of ‘wit’ as a critical disposition of material. Lastly, ideas are term. Pope, for example, makes it one of important: the most famous characteriza- the primary topics of his ‘Essay on tion of wit, echoed by later critics and Criticism’. Dr Johnson was himself 252 Womanist a witty writer. His Rasselas depends for been recognized by earlier writers, though much of its powerful and moving moral they also saw its divisive disadvantages. judgement on the witty juxtaposition of As Pope wrote: ideas and judgements. At the same time, Thus wit, like faith, by each man is he is firmly committed to total control in apply’d literature. In his Life of Cowley, a ‘witty’ To one small sect, and all are damned writer of the seventeenth century, he gave beside two of the most widely quoted critical definitions of wit: ‘that which though not See A. Alvarez, The School of Donne obvious, is, upon its first production, (1961), ch. 6; W. Empson, The Structure acknowledged to be just; a kind of of Complex Words (1951), ch. 3; Bruce discordia concors . . .’. It is perhaps more Michelson, Literary Wit (2000), ch. 4; important, however, to see the prizing of D. J. Millburn, The Age of Wit: wit in poetry and writing in general as one 1650–1750 (1966), useful bibliography, of the ends of an arc through which taste 315–16. can swing, from admiring the uncon- AMR scious, the area of FEELING. In the 1890s, the writers in the Yellow Book, very Womanist A term first proposed by conscious rebels against a suffocating Alice Walker (1944–) in her 1983 collec- Victorian tide of feeling, cultivated wit. tion of essays, In Search of Our Mother’s T. S. Eliot, later, developed a poetic which Gardens: Womanist Prose. ‘Womanist’ is made use of wit and selected for admira- defined at the outset of the collection in a tion certain seventeenth-century writers definition comprising four different parts, such as Donne and especially Marvell, in three of which are long and will be whose work he saw the successful realiza- summarized in brief: (1) from womanish tion of wit, which he defines in his essay (i.e. opposite of ‘ “girlish”, frivolous, on ‘Andrew Marvell’ (1921) as ‘tough irresponsible, not serious’), a black femi- reasonableness beneath the slight lyric nist or feminist of colour; (2) ‘A woman grace’: knowledgeable technical skill who loves other women, sexually and/or united with a total self-consciousness. nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers Here wit is not arrogant as in the women’s culture, women’s emotional seventeenth century, but a defensive per- flexibility [. . .] and women’s strength. sonal attitude. Cleanth Brooks was a Sometimes loves individual men, sexually member of a group of American writers and/or nonsexually’; (3) A woman who and critics who seized on wit as a per- loves everything, herself included. The sonal style of writing and of living, in fourth part of Walker’s definition can be defence against the blanketing megalopo- given in full: (4) ‘Womanist is to feminist lis of American capitalism. In The Well as purple is to lavender’. Wrought Urn (1947), he refers to wit as Walker’s best-known fiction The ‘an awareness of the multiplicity of possi- Color Purple (1982) is alluded to here ble attitudes to be taken towards a given and points to the ways in which the novel situation’. This was also a defensive posi- (which also won the Pulitzer Prize and tion against the mass ‘feeling’ of commu- was released by Steven Spielberg as a nism, or fascism. The value of wit as a film in 1985) is informed by ‘womanism’, personal protection and a weapon had exemplified by the used and abused Writing 253

African-American women who come into character in that novel, Walker explained their own in the ways outlined in Walker’s in an interview with Claudia Tate, that she definition of ‘womanist’. The paler knew men such as him well and would not ‘lavender’ which betokens ‘feminist’ as ignore characters like him: ‘I want you to opposed to the rich and royal purple of know I know they exist. I want to tell you ‘womanist’ is a swipe at some of the about them, and there is no way you are patronizing and universalizing theories of going to avoid them’. Walker is also inter- white, middle-class feminists, who ested in analysing and understanding the fail(ed) to understand or see the speci- ways that disempowered black men vent ficity of black women’s experience, their frustration on black women, but she particularly the experience of double is not interested in a cover-up which discrimination – or, more accurately, keeps black women silent and unseen. doubly-determined invisibility (reminis- However, she does represent scenes of cent of Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 story reconciliation between black men and of black manhood, Invisible Man) – on women; Celie and her one-time abusive the basis of race and sex. As Walker husband, Mr (later, Albert) in The Color explained in ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Purple are a case in point. A Womanist Gardens’: ‘Black women are called [. . .] Studies Consortium was established in “the mule of the world,” because we have 1994 at the University of Georgia. been handed the burdens that everyone It advertises itself as an interracial, else – everyone else – refused to carry’. intergenerational, regional affiliation of Similarly, the black-American writer, Bell scholars’ which ‘supports and facilitates Hooks, noted in Ain’t I a Woman? in feminist research on women of color in all 1981: ‘No other group in America has so disciplines and at all possible stages had their identity socialized out of exis- of development’. It seeks to provide a tence’. Thus, when in The Color Purple, service that ‘bridges the isolation, social one of the characters says that ‘it makes exclusion, silence and intellectual desue- God angry to walk by the color purple in tude among women-of-color researchers, a field somewhere and don’t notice it’, it students, and independent scholars within is a hypothesis that could be extended to their home institutions’. ‘Womanist the failure to notice and respect black theology’ is also establishing itself as a women in particular. Walker has been lively contributor to contemporary criticized from time to time for her treat- theological debates. ment of black male characters, particu- SS larly in early work, such as The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Of her main male Writing See DECONSTRUCTION. Notes on contributors

New and revising contributors CWEB C. W. E. Bigsby JA Janice Allan, Lecturer in English, EJB Elizabeth Boa University of Salford MSB Malcolm Bradbury PC Peter Childs, Professor of Modern AAAC Anne Cluysenaar English Literature, University of JC Jonathan Cook Gloucestershire EC Ellman Crasnow GD Gary Day, Principal Lecturer in TE Terry Eagleton English, University of De Montfort JWJF John Fletcher GG Gareth Griffiths, Professor of RGF Roger Fowler English, University of Western AMG Arnold Goldman Australia GG Gareth Griffiths DL Daniel Lea, Senior Lecturer in MAH Michael Hollington English Studies, Oxford Brookes GMH G. M. Hyde University BCL Brian Lee BCL Brian Lee, Emeritus Professor of GNL Geoffrey N. Leech American Studies, University of TM Timothy Marshall Nottingham PM Peter Mercer AM Anshuman Mondal, Lecturer in MO’T Michael O’Toole Modern and Contemporary DJP D. J. Palmer Literature, University of Leicester MHP M. H. Parkinson DGP David Punter, Professor of English, SGP S. G. Pulman Research Director, Faculty of Arts, DGP David Punter University of Bristol AER Allan Rodway SS Shelley Saguaro, Principal AMR Angus Ross Lecturer in English, University of LS Lorna Sage Gloucestershire VS Victor Sage GS Gerry Smyth, Reader in Cutural CS Clive Scott History, Liverpool John Moores RWS Richard Sheppard University LSM Lorna Smith TGW Todd G. Willy Original contributors NZ Natan Zach MJA Michael Alexander NCPZ Nicholas Zurbrugg FWB F. W. Bateson Literary Theory: The Basics Hans Bertens

Part of the successful Basics series, this accessible guide provides the ideal first step in understanding literary theory. Hans Bertens:

● leads students through the major approaches to literature which are signalled by the term ‘literary theory’

● places each critical movement in its historical (and often political) context

● illustrates theory in practice with examples from much-read texts

● suggests further reading for different critical approaches

● shows that theory can make sense and that it can radically change the way we read.

Covering the basics and much more, this is the ideal book for anyone interested in how we read and why that matters.

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Available at all good bookshops For ordering and further information please visit www.routledge.com Semiotics: The Basics Daniel Chandler

Following the successful Basics format, this is the book for anyone coming to semiotics for the first time. Using jargon-free language and lively, up-to-date examples, Semiotics: The Basics demystifies this highly interdisciplinary subject. Along the way, the reader will find out:

● what is a sign?

● which codes do we take for granted?

● what is a text?

● how can semiotics be used in textual analysis?

● who were Saussure, Peirce, Barthes and Jakobson – and why are they important?

Features include a glossary of key terms and realistic suggestions for further reading.

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Available at all good bookshops For ordering and further information please visit www.routledge.com The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism 2nd edition Edited by Stuart Sim

What does ‘postmodernism’ mean? Why is it so important? Now in its second edition, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism combines a series of in-depth background chapters with a body of A–Z entries to create an authoritative, yet readable guide to the complex world of postmodernism. Following full-length articles on postmodernism and philosophy, politics, feminism, religion, post-colonialism, lifestyles, television, and other postmodern essentials, readers will find a wide range of alphabetically- organized entries on the people, terms and theories connected with postmodernism, including:

● Peter Ackroyd ● Michel Foucault

● Jean Baudrillard ● Frankfurt School

● Chaos Theory ● Poststructuralism

● Desire ● Retro

Students interested in any aspect of postmodernist thought will find this an indispensable resource.

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Available at all good bookshops For ordering and further information please visit www.routledge.com The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism Edited by Sarah Gamble

Approachable for general readers as well as for students in women’s studies and related courses at all levels, this invaluable guide follows the unique Companion format in combining over a dozen in-depth background chapters with more than 400 A–Z dictionary entries. The background chapters are written by major figures in the field of feminist studies, and include thorough coverage of the history of Feminism, as well as extensive discussions of topics such as:

● Postfeminism

● Men in Feminism

● Feminism and New Technologies

● Feminism and Philosophy.

Dictionary entries cover the major individuals (Aphra Behn, Simone de Beauvoir, Princess Diana, Robert Bly), and issues (Afro-American feminism, cosmetic surgery, the ‘new man’, reproductive technologies) essential to an understanding both of Feminism’s roots and of the trends that are shaping its future.

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Available at all good bookshops For ordering and further information please visit www.routledge.com Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts Edited by Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick

An up-to-date and comprehensive survey of over 350 of the key terms in cultural theory today! Each entry provides clear and succinct explanations for students in a wide range of disciplines, including literature, cultural studies, sociology and philosophy. Topics include:

● Consumption ● Deconstruction

● Epistemology ● Feminism

● Hermeneutics ● Holism

● Methodology ● Postmodernism

● Semiotics ● Sociobiology

Major entries are accompanied by suggestions for further reading and the book also includes a bibliography of essential texts in cultural theory.

“Thorough, well-written and accessible, this text should be an indispensable part of every library.” Professor Douglas Kellner, University of California at Los Angeles

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