4. Theoretical approaches

Modern literary theory has taken up many ideas from philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and cultural theory.

The approaches to studying literature can be grouped in the following way:

• Author-oriented

• Text-oriented

• Reader-oriented

Author-oriented (biographical, psychoanalytic, hermeneutic) approaches consider three aspects to be important: historical, the conscious intention, and the unconscious.

Biographical approach records facts about an author’s life and times, which are considered to be the cause of the literary output. It helps to identify the parallels between an author’s life and work. What is to be born in mind is that the text does not necessarily mirror experience but imaginatively transforms it.

Hermeneutic approach places the author in his/her historical context and gives the interpretation of the individual’s motivation and intention, gives the answer what author meant.

Psychoanalytic approach is aimed at studying how the unconscious reveals itself in the work of literature. Freud’s model of the human psyche consists of three areas, the superego (consciousness), which contains the social and cultural norms, the id (unconscious), which harbours the drives, and the rational ego (conscious), which tries to mediate between social norms and individual drives. While Freud did not ignore the conscious creation of art, he was more interested in the expression of unconscious as a revelation of the author’s psychic key conflicts and anxieties (penis envy, anxiety of castration, Oedipus complex, Electra complex). Two patterns of texts have to be deciphered: condensation, which combines and concentrates multiple experiences in complex images, and displacement, which substitutes one thing by another that is closely related to. The famous example of psychoanalytic criticism is the interpretation of Hamlet. Freud saw the Oedipus complex at work in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Claudius, killing Hamlet’s father and marring his mother, fulfilled his secret desire. Claudius is both his opponent and alter ego. The great success of the play with spectators is explained in a similar way since the play shows the fulfillment, the repression, and finally the punishment of the forbidden desire. On the part of the author, writing can reveal the return of the repressed, a dreamlike wish-fulfillment, or serve as a therapy parallel.

According to post-structuralist Lacan the subconscious processes of condensation and displacement follow the patterns of metaphor and metonymy. Lacan regarded the child’s early development as crucial for human identity and its problems. Whereas the baby has no conception of an identity apart from its mother, the discovery of its mirror image initiates a sense of the self. Instead of the commonsensical assumption of the identity of the self and its mirror image, Lacan stressed the separation of the observer, the self, from his/her image, the other. Learning language provides the infant with a symbolic order (associated with the father). The text may reveal conflicts of the mirror stage or the entry into the symbolic order. Both Freud and Lacan have been critisizsed by feminists for their “Phallocentric” construction of human identity and gender, which privileges male over female identity.

The text-oriented approaches (New Criticism, formalism, structuralism, semiotics) neglect extra-textual influences and conceive inter-textual processes.

The New Critics consider each literary text as a timeless, unique and autonomous artifact, self-sufficient verbal object. They take up the intrinsic approach to literature and concentrate on the text itself. Literature was regarded as an autonomous aesthetic object independent of authorial intention, historical circumstances, and its emotional effect upon the reader. Rhetoric, poetics, and metrics serve the close reading of a text, which is scrutinised for the aesthetic organisation of its elements into an organic whole. While the text is closely read, all the evidence provided by the language is taken into account – the images, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, characterization, plot, etc. (formal elements). For New Criticism, the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting meanings woven through it. And these meanings are a product primarily of four kinds of linguistic devices: paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension.

Formalists (Shklovsky, Jakobson) take into account linguistic structures. Shklovsky defined literature by its deviation from the conventional rules of language. Literature can be defined as the sum or the system of stylistic devices, which raises our awareness of language and defamiliarises our perception of the ordinary things that are familiar to us. Formalists comment on the functional roles of agents in stories and the function of the plot, which rearranges the temporal sequence of a story. Sructuralism is less concerned with artistic deviation of literature from the system of language than in the system of literature itself which enables the generation of actual texts. Structuralism focuses on the abstract system of signs and semiotics interest is in the encoding and decoding of signs by users in society. Jakobson developed an influential model of communication, which served to specify the aesthetic function of literature in a slightly different way than Shklovsky. According to Jakobson, language has six functions which are of various importance in different utterances and texts: the emotive, referential, conative, phatic, and metalingual function. The emotive or expressive function externalises a speaker’s emotions and thoughts, and the referential serves to convey information. The conative or imperative function aims at convincing the adressee, and the phatic serves to maintain the contact with the adressee. The poetic or aesthetic function reflects on the structure of the utterance itself, its diction, whereas the metalingual refers to the codes used in this process of communication. Jakobson stresses that literature foregrounds the poetic function, which points to its use of language at the expense of the referential function. Jury Lotman defined literature as a secondary modeling system, which uses elements from the primary modeling system, that is the way ordinary language and culture construct reality. Structuralists identify the fundamental semantic, syntactic, rhetorical, and poetic binary oppositions and the way they are interrelated; how these elements and their functions relate to the conventions of the genre. Structures are not physical entities; they are conceptual frameworks that we use to organize and understand physical entities. A structure is any conceptual system that has the following properties: wholeness (the system functions as a unit), transformation (the system is not static), and self-regulation (the elements engendered by transformations always belong to the system and obey its laws). Structuralists established the system of narrative voice and focalisation in discourse, and developed the study situation and plot on the level of the story. Structuralist approaches to literature have tended to focus on three specific areas of literary studies: the classification of literary genres, the description of narrative operations, and the analysis of literary interpretation.

Post-structuralism departed from structuralism. Roland Barthes claimed that texts can hardly be reduced to binary oppositions but reveal multiple and indeterminate meanings. He argued that the death of the author gives birth to the reader. The reader employs codes to unfold the meaning of the text, which are potentially endless because each text is intertextual in a wide sense. Realistic readerly texts are easy decoded, whereas experimental writerly texts challenge the reader to co-write the text, establishing a network of signs within this text and between this and other texts. The most influential deconstructivist Jacques Derrida claims that there is nothing outside the text. The text is a supplement to the world and replaces rather than represents it. Deconstraction’s theory of language is based on the belief that language is much more slippery and ambiguous than we realize. Derrida argues that language has two important characteristics: its play of signifiers continually defers, or postpones, meaning, and the meaning it seems to have is the result of the differences by which we distinguish one signifier from another. The theory that our view of the world is constructed by language performs a key role in the decentering of western philosophy because language is no longer seen as a product of our experience but rather as the conceptual framework that creates our experience.

Deconstructivists look for ambiguities and contradictions, shifts in perspective and judgement, subversive information in the text, self-referential statements and intertextual links that undermine the basic assumptions. The main purpose in deconstructing a literary text is to reveal the complex operations of the ideologies of which the text is constructed. To find that ideological framework and understand its limitations, a deconstructive critic looks for meanings in the text that conflict with its main theme, focusing on self-contradictions of which the text seems unaware.

As an example of a deconstructive criticism we can take Hubert Zapf comments on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. After violent struggles for honour and power, Macbeth comes to a disillusioning insight:

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Here life is marked by absence rather than presence, the shadow rather than the real thing; life is but a text, and what is more, one that is beyond the control of its speaker and does not make any sense; it is a sign without a referent, a signifier without a signified, nothing. However this statement hardly represents the play as a whole because it is voiced by the hero after his insight into the futile and amoral strife for the crown and because law and order are restored in the end.

Context-oriented approaches (Marxism, cultural materialism, New Historicism, feminism, and postcolonialism), deal with the relationship between text and context which is defined as social, political, and economic reality or as a system of signifying cultural practices.

According to Marxism the material reality of economic circumstances forms the base that conditions the social, political, and cultural life of the superstructure. Ideology is defined as a neutral or falsifying collectively held system of ideas and beliefs that interpret the world. In turn, literature can be identified as a mere vehicle of ideology predetermined by the base or as a reflection of ideology. So it serves as an expression or criticism of ideology. Cultural materialism locates a text in its material contexts but greatly enhances the relevance of language, communication, and culture. So the critics try to find the key features of the base and superstructure, the cultural forces of the period and authors position to them, social and economic conflicts represented, implicit ideology.

New Historisists (1980s-) maintain that the problem of historiography lies in the contradiction between past events and their retrospective representation. Historians cannot be objective because they are themselves subject to history. The past is not a stable, coherent entity, and therefore cannot serve as a firm background and reference point of literature, as Marxists saw it. History exists in multiple texts, which do not add up to one version. All events are shaped by and shape culture in which they emerge. New historisists were greatly influenced by Michel Foucault (1926-84), who analysed the historical formation of thinking and knowledge in discourses. Discourses regulate the ways in which we think and speak about certain topics in particular forms of statements with specific functions. The literary text is embedded in a dynamic network of interdependent cultural discourses and social practices. Texts circulate social and cultural energies or forces rather than mirroring society. The term discourse draws attention to the role of language as the vehicle of ideology. The New Historisists try to find out how the literary text describes, exposes, or takes part in negotiations of power, truth, and values. Thus, Stephen Greenblatt (1943-) compared Elizabeth I’s display of power in theatrical performances on the public stage of political representation to the performance of power on the Elizabethan theatre stage.

Feminism and gender theory take issue with real forms of discrimination, cultural gender constructions, or the link between practices and cultural constructions. Most of them agree on the difference between the biological sex (biological constitution as female or male) and the cultural construction of gender positions (cultural programming as feminine or masculine, which are categories created by society rather than by nature). Gender studies tend to analyse cultural constructs, whereas lesbian and gay theorists shift the balance towards the body and sexuality. Feminist readings of literature have exposed masculine representations of women and retrieved neglected literature by women. Anglo-American feminism has researched the historical positions, identities and experience of women, critisising the practical effects of discrimination. Feminist theory constantly incorporates new ideas from other fields and can be seen as interdisciplinary. Naturally, some literary works will lend themselves more readily than others to feminist analysis. It’s useful to examine the ways in which literary texts reinforce patriarchy. This approach applied to literary works in the male canon, was the dominant mode of feminist literary analysis in America during the 1970s, and it usually requires reading “against the grain” of the text apparent intention, for patriarchal literature is usually unconscious of the sexist ideology it promotes. Because feminist issues range so widely across cultural, social, political, and psychological categories, feminist literary criticism is wide ranging, too.

Postcolonialism and multiculturalism in criticism are concerned with the impact of colonialism and postcolonialism on both British cultures and identities and those of the peoples under the British Empire. The concept of postcolonialism is an ambiguous term, which signifies the temporal and/or conceptual difference to colonialism in spite of the neocolonial conditions in some of the cultures concerned. Postcolonial and multicultural theories are concerned with the multiple relationships between dominant and subordinate cultures. They dismantled the biological essence of race and define it as a significant cultural construction instead. The alternative term ethnicity includes the language and culture of peoples, but has been criticised as culturally racist if used to define “other” peoples as being deviant from “white” Western culture. Identity and alterity are two sides of one coin, sometimes the term hybridity is used in order to mark the independent construction of postcolonial identities, which combine and intersect binary oppositions in complex ways. Both postcolonial and multicultural critics have researched the ethnic re-reading and rewriting of canonised literary and historical texts, the recuperation of indigenous cultures, and the construction of multicultural identities and literatures.

Reader-oriented approaches hold on to consciousness as the central instance of reading, they are influenced by phenomenology, which maintains that the self and the world are only given in consciousness, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (1900-2002) hermeneutics, which argues that meaning is generated in a dialogue between the reader and the text, which is always a process situated in historical circumstances.

The representative of the reader-response theory Wolfgang Iser (1926-) argues that a literary work is the combination of the actual text and the response of the reader to the words on the page. The text itself consists of what is said and what remains unsaid, specific information and gaps of indeterminacy, which are filled by each reader in slightly different ways. Reading is a process of changing perspectives in response to the text. Norman Holland (1927-) realised that a reader’s personal identity theme conditions their typical reaction to the text. Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997) included historical circumstances (horizon of expectations, values, models of reality and of art) in his version of reception theory.