Literary Theory: A Complete Introduction (Complete Introductions) 147361192X, 9781473611924

Table of contents :
Title
Contents
Introduction
How to use this book
1 Aestheticism
The Pre-Raphaelites
Art for art’s sake
Symbolism
Decadence
New aestheticism
2 Formalism
Practical criticism
The new criticism
Continental formalism
Defamiliarization
Formalism today
3 Reader response theory
Is there a text on this paper?
Rejecting formalism
Unacceptable readings?
‘Readerly’ and ‘writerly’
Reader response theory today
4 Marxism and post-Marxism
Base and superstructure
Ideologies
The Frankfurt School
Post-Marxism
5 Structuralism
The elements of language
The sign
‘The Death of the Author’
Denotations and connotations
Metaphor and metonymy
Narratology
6 Psychoanalytic criticism
Identity and the self
Jungian psychoanalysis
Lacanian psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis and literature
7 Modernism and surrealism
High modernism
Surrealism
When was/is modernism?
8 Existentialism
Life and truth
Nietzsche’s Übermensch
Authenticity and bad faith
Absurdism
9 Poststructuralism
Language and reality
Deconstruction
Poststructuralist politics?
The heterotopia
Intertextuality
Gilles Deleuze
10 Postmodernism
Postmodern culture
The simalcrum
Postmodern politics
Postmodern literature
Historiographic metafiction
Post-postmodernism
11 Feminist theory
First-wave feminism
Second-wave feminism
The rise of feminist literary theory
French feminist theory
Feminisms
Third-wave feminism and beyond
12 Queer theory
Dancing to your own tune
Queer
Compulsory heterosexuality
Gender performativity
Undoing gender
Queering literature
13 Postcolonial criticism
The Empire writes back
Postcolonial spaces
Postcolonial forms
Criticism of postcolonial theory
14 Cultural studies
What is culture?
Critiquing mass culture
Interdisciplinarity
Cultural identities
15 Historicisms and materialisms
Historicisms
Cultural materialism
New materialism
Decentring the human
Ergodic literature
16 Humanisms
Being human
Humanist ethics
Humanism and literature
17 Ethical criticism
The ethical text and morality
The ethical turn
Three ethical moments
Transversal poetics
18 Genre theory
The influence of Aristotle
The Chicago School
The Rhetoric of Fiction
The role of the reader
‘Popular’ literatures
19 Ecocriticism
Studying the earth
The death of nature
Critiquing the human
Conclusion
References
Answers
Copyright

Citation preview

LITERARY THEORY A complete introduction Sara Upstone

Contents Introduction How to use this book 1

Aestheticism The Pre-Raphaelites Art for art’s sake Symbolism Decadence New aestheticism

2

Formalism Practical criticism The new criticism Continental formalism Defamiliarization Formalism today

3

Reader response theory Is there a text on this paper? Rejecting formalism Unacceptable readings? ‘Readerly’ and ‘writerly’ Reader response theory today

4

Marxism and post-Marxism Base and superstructure Ideologies The Frankfurt School Post-Marxism

5

Structuralism

The elements of language The sign ‘The Death of the Author’ Denotations and connotations Metaphor and metonymy Narratology

6

Psychoanalytic criticism Identity and the self Jungian psychoanalysis Lacanian psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis and literature

7

Modernism and surrealism High modernism Surrealism When was/is modernism?

8

Existentialism Life and truth Nietzsche’s Übermensch Authenticity and bad faith Absurdism

9

Poststructuralism Language and reality Deconstruction Poststructuralist politics? The heterotopia Intertextuality Gilles Deleuze

10 Postmodernism Postmodern culture

The simalcrum Postmodern politics Postmodern literature Historiographic metafiction Post-postmodernism

11 Feminist theory First-wave feminism Second-wave feminism The rise of feminist literary theory French feminist theory Feminisms Third-wave feminism and beyond

12 Queer theory Dancing to your own tune Queer Compulsory heterosexuality Gender performativity Undoing gender Queering literature

13 Postcolonial criticism The Empire writes back Postcolonial spaces Postcolonial forms Criticism of postcolonial theory

14 Cultural studies What is culture? Critiquing mass culture Interdisciplinarity Cultural identities

15 Historicisms and materialisms Historicisms Cultural materialism New materialism Decentring the human Ergodic literature

16 Humanisms Being human Humanist ethics Humanism and literature

17 Ethical criticism The ethical text and morality The ethical turn Three ethical moments Transversal poetics

18 Genre theory The influence of Aristotle The Chicago School The Rhetoric of Fiction The role of the reader ‘Popular’ literatures

19 Ecocriticism Studying the earth The death of nature Critiquing the human

Conclusion References Answers

Introduction What is theory? You have probably picked up this book because you want to know, or your teacher or lecturer wants you to know, something about a reading tool called ‘literary theory’. In this book, you will find outlines for all the major groups of literary theorists – what we call ‘schools’ of literary theory. Each school represents a group of thinkers who are identified as sharing particular approaches to thinking about the world. If you gave these thinkers a simple and familiar question, they might all answer it rather differently… ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’

• Karl Marx: ‘It was a historical inevitability.’ • Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Because if you gaze too long across the road, the road also gazes across you.’

• Carl Jung: ‘The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore brought such occurrences into being.’

• Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.’

• Jacques Derrida: ‘Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!’1 What none of them would probably give us is the answer we might expect: ‘To get to the other side’. This tells us something about what literary theory is. It is a set of different

answers to questions we might ask about the meaning, function and effect of a text; these answers are often unexpected and complex. As a result of this unique way of looking at things, each school offers us a different and particular way to think about a literary text. It can give us a perspective on what a literary text is, on the issues it contains, and the way it is written. Literary theories are not all the same. Early theories, such as formalism and structuralism, are very engaged with the nature of language and, even more than this, with reading practices. Other theories, such as poststructuralism and postcolonial theory, often discuss literature directly but within the context of a wider range of concerns. Some literary theory, such as psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, is based in another discipline which does not often explicitly address literature, unless as an example. In these latter cases, literary theory is about the application of ideas to literature, rather than finding within the theory itself discussion of literary analysis. This range of approaches means that you may also see literary theory described as critical theory: a set of tools that are useful not only for the interpretation of literature but also for interrogating much wider questions. Much of what we call literary theory is not intended to be considered in terms of literature. This is why Jonathan Culler, in his Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997), defines theory as ‘works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong’. Literary theory is, in essence, any ideas, whether directed towards literature or not, that can shape literary analysis. You will also find usages of the word ‘theory’ in other disciplines. For example, cultural theory is the theory that enables us to ask questions about culture, while film theory may or may not explicitly discuss film, but is regardless useful for its interpretation. These ‘fields’ that Culler writes about are somewhat arbitrary – it is often not the thinkers themselves who identify with a particular school but other critics and writers who group them in this way. To make things more complicated, some thinkers may be associated with more than one school. This means that you may find some theorists appearing in more than one chapter of this book.

Put simply, then, literary theory can be defined as a range of texts or ideas, often associated with literature but not explicitly concerned with it, that offer perspectives useful in the discussion of literature’s scope, content and form. Most commonly, these ideas come from semiotics, philosophy, politics and psychoanalysis, although they are increasingly also related to theories surrounding the interpretation of culture. This represents a shift to some extent in the content of theory. While early theoretical approaches may have been largely focused on language and the practice of reading, it is only more recently that interests have broadened to include philosophical and cultural approaches. This shift reflects changes in reading practices since the 1940s, which have become increasingly open to the contexts in which a text is read and produced. If you compare two books on literary theory, you might be surprised to see that their contents are quite different. For some critics, literary theory is specifically about work directly associated with literature; for others, it is quite the opposite, and may stretch back to the early thinking of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. In this book we have focused on modern theory, although this may include use of earlier work (such as Aristotle’s relevance to genre theory). In terms of theme, we have taken the widest understanding of theory, to include all the major ideas that currently contribute to literary analysis. This includes chapters on some literary movements that contribute heavily to theory, or without which it is difficult to understand how theory has developed. For example, modernism is usually described more as a literary movement than a school of theory, but many of its central thinkers contributed ideas that have become important to other fields of theory, such as T. S. Eliot’s contribution to new criticism and Virginia Woolf’s feminist thinking. Moreover, modernist ideas are so important to postmodern theory that it would be very difficult to understand one without the other, so we have included chapters here on both.

Why theory? If you are asked to think about a piece of literature in relation to literary theory, you are being required to undertake an approach to reading that may be quite different from others you have encountered. When we read literature,

we may examine a variety of texts to assist us. We can look at information about the author (the biographical material) or about the period in which the text was written and/or set (the historical context). We can look at articles and books that discuss the text we are interested in, or that focus on questions about literature more generally. This work is usually referred to as literary criticism and is not to be confused with literary theory, which – as we have said – does not predominantly focus on either a specific literary text or on literature, although it may use this as an example. One question that is sometimes raised is why we need to think about these approaches, which are not explicitly intended for use in the discussion of literary texts. Indeed, literary theory has only really become popular since the 1960s, when it became more acceptable to look outside the text itself for different meanings. In the conclusion to this book, we will consider the question of literary theory’s future: one that is to some extent uncertain and suggests that theory might not always be the dominant approach to reading texts, at least not with the same kind of explicit focus that we have seen since the 1980s. Despite these debates, perhaps the best answer to the question of why theory is important is that theory has now become integral to how we produce literary criticism. Literary criticism, unlike theory, can be thought of as being our direct response to an author, a text or set of texts. Unlike literary theory, literary criticism is always explicitly directed towards literature. Criticism, then, is where we find the interpretation of literature. Theory, in contrast, is where we find the tools to facilitate that interpretation. When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different approaches that literary theory offers. By making use of these, they create new interpretations of the text that would not otherwise be possible. In your own reading and writing, literary theory fosters new avenues into the text. It allows you to make informed comments about the language and form of literature, but also about the core themes that a text might explore – concepts such as gender, sexuality, the self, race and class. A good response to a literary text will make selective use of theory to expand upon and support the reader’s ideas developed through close reading, within

the context of an understanding of the text’s biographical and historical frameworks. In this way, theory is an essential part of the matrix of tools available to you when you are interpreting a literary text. It is not a substitute for a personal response rooted in your own engagement with the text, but a way of expanding and supporting this, facilitating the development of new interpretive directions. Indeed, a useful strategy when working with theory is not to downplay your personal response to the text, but rather to find theory that supports and enhances your own interests. Theory, we must remember, is a text also and, just as with any other text, we will have a personal response to it. The best uses of theory are those where the student has a passion for the ideas that is as evident as their passion for the text(s) to which they relate. The best use of theory will also not lose sight of the fact that what is central to the discussion is literary criticism. This means that theory should not overshadow the discussion of the text; rather, it should inform that discussion. In this book you will find case studies based on the discussion of literary texts alongside theory that provide examples of how such balanced discussion works in practice. If you are interpreting literature in an assessed context, one of the key things a tutor is looking for in your work is originality. It is here that literary theory plays perhaps its most important role: by giving you an almost limitless number of texts to work into your own response, literary theory ensures that your interpretation will be truly original. This is why, although literary theory can initially appear alienating and difficult, it is something to get really excited about. Imagine you are standing in the centre of a circular room, with a whole set of doors laid out around you. You have the text in hand. And each doorway opens on to a new and illuminating field of knowledge that can change how you think about what you have read – perhaps in just a small way, but also perhaps dramatically and irrevocably. You can open one door, or many of them. The choice is yours. Put the knowledge you gain together with your own interpretation, however, and you have a unique and potentially fascinating response.

______________

1 Adapted from ‘Daily Philosophy Joke: June 14th 2014’, The Coeus House, http://coeushouse.org/​ category/​jokes/

How to use this book The chapters in this book cover all the major schools of literary theory. They are constructed in such a way that you can read the book from beginning to end, or dip in and out, focusing on the chapters that are of most interest. Although the complex development of ideas makes a straightforward chronology of theory impossible, nevertheless the early chapters of this book focus on some of the first fields to be seen as defining approaches to literature, whereas the later chapters of the book focus on more recent developments. In each chapter, you will find a number of key features to direct your study:

• Key ideas give you the central ideas from each chapter, which you can return to if you want to revise the main points of a theory.

• Spotlights are interesting or humorous facts that can help you to engage with the theory in each chapter.

• Quotations outline key points and can be revised for examinations or included in essays.

• Case studies give you a more in-depth insight into an aspect of a particular theory or a literary example that will help you see how that theory can be used in practice.

• Fact checks at the end of each chapter allow you to test your knowledge and understanding. The answers are given at the end of the book.

• Dig deeper sections give you further reading suggestions if you want to know more.

1 Aestheticism The beginnings of literary theory are often identified as an early twentieth-century development, occurring at the same time as the movements that began to consciously name and define literary and artistic production. Guides to literary theory often begin with formalism: a field of literary criticism that sprang up alongside the movement towards self-conscious artistic definition. However, there was a tradition preceding this of attempting to theorize approaches to thinking about literature within the context of wider debates surrounding artistic production. Certainly, we might see Romanticism as one such movement. We could also refer to the metaphysical poetry movement, or transcendentalism, as other examples. We are going to begin, however, not with these but with perhaps a less familiar term that is associated with the nineteenth century – and that is aestheticism. It is often neglected in accounts of literary theory, but it haunts the twentieth-century movements that follow, particularly modernism and, as we shall see at the end of the chapter, it has seen a twenty-first-century resurgence.

The Pre-Raphaelites Aestheticism has its roots in the Romantic ideas of John Keats (1795–1821), the mid-nineteenth-century writings of John Ruskin (1819–1900) and the PreRaphaelite movement. Unlike the American transcendentalist movement or the largely English metaphysical poetry and Pre-Raphaelite traditions, aestheticism can be seen to define thinking about literature beyond national literary identities. Its significance comes, in particular, in the ways in which it defined the role of art in relation to society. These definitions would be the same ones that later critical schools such as formalism, new criticism (see Chapter 2) and reader response theory (see Chapter 3) would grapple with. In its early development, from 1850 until around 1870, aestheticism was heavily influenced by Pre-Raphaelite ideas as well as by the emerging artistic impressionist movement. The Pre-Raphaelites rejected narrative in favour of imagery and atmosphere. They were particularly concerned with the nature of beauty, which was often reflected in a focus on the female form, for example in paintings such as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1852) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1859) and Astarte Syriaca (1877). Paintings such as Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents (1850) challenged classical idealism with the representation of Christ as the member of an ordinary working family. Modernism (see Chapter 7) was a trend in literature with its roots in aestheticism that was dominant from 1900 to 1965. Although the term was used only rarely in literary criticism before the 1940s, the writers and artists associated with it used the term as early as the 1910s and 1920s, when it was at its peak. In contrast, a term like Romanticism, which refers to literary trends of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would not have been one used by the likes of the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron, who are now so closely associated with it.

Spotlight

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. He changed the order of his names, however, to emphasize his connections with the Italian poet Dante.

The first literary Pre-Raphaelite success was Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), the work of Dante’s sister, Christina Rossetti (1830–94). Heavily illustrated, the title poem eschews realism for a powerfully symbolic narrative of lost female innocence at the hands of fantastical goblins. Rossetti’s market is a striking world of unnaturalness – ‘all fruits ripe together’ – that pulls the reader away from realism into a vivid and erotic dream world.

Key idea ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ was the term given to a group of artists and writers formed in England in 1848 and named with reference to their preference for early modern and medieval art.

Rossetti’s book is evidence of what we will see to be a recurring association between ideas used for thinking about literature and those used for considering the visual arts. Aestheticism in this regard is principally concerned with the style and form of a literary work rather than its content. Alongside Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite interests, aestheticism was increasingly influenced by European ideas regarding poetic form, such as those advanced by the French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821–67). At the end of this early period came the writings of Walter Pater (1839–94), a figure who brings together precisely this parallel concern for visual and written art forms. Walter Pater was an Oxford professor and literary critic whose book The Renaissance (1873) is an extension of Pre-Raphaelite interests, but it also uses Italian culture as a veiled means of challenging Victorian attitudes. It was criticized on publication for the dangerous influence it presented to young, impressionable scholars; so much so that Pater withdrew the conclusion of the book from its second edition. Pater argued, like the Romantics, that art was intensely personal, and that it was the

experience of art, rather than the object created, that should be the central focus of artistic endeavour. Yet while many of the Romantics were interested in questions of social justice and morality – think, for example, of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) or Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) – Pater believed that art should exist purely for the pursuit of this aesthetic experience. This brought Pater into conflict, too, with Victorian writers such as Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, who gave art and literature an elevated moral or social function.

‘“To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly […] What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realize such primary data for one’s self, or not at all.’ Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873)

Art for art’s sake To describe his approach, Pater invoked the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’. Its origin is much debated, but it is most commonly attributed to the French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867), who first used it in 1818. It was seen to be established in literary circles a little later, with the publication in 1830 of Mademoiselle de Maupin, a novel by Théophile Gautier (1811–72). Gautier defined the phrase as ‘the pursuit of pure beauty – without any other preoccupation’. It was immediately taken up by members of the aesthetic

movement such as Pater, for whom it defined a Romantic refusal of rationalism. However, some criticized it for its disavowal of moral purpose. It is for such controversy that the term is particularly relevant in the development of literary theory, for it asks us to consider how literature relates to the social, political and economic realities around it – the very realities that preoccupy approaches such as reader response, postcolonialism, feminism, Marxism and queer theory. Art for art’s sake suggests that literature must be created not for any inherent moral or political purpose, but purely for the sake of the beauty it creates.

Spotlight In an editorial of 1917, the journal Art World would declare that the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ was ‘saying that an artist should be nothing but a parasite’!

Pater’s writing is central to the more defined period of aestheticism from 1870 until the turn of the century. Later aestheticism rejected both realism and naturalism, two related approaches to art and literature that were dominant until that point, embodied most particularly in literary terms by the nineteenth-century realist novels of writers like George Eliot, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy (if not so neatly by the more gothic, Romantic fictions of Charles Dickens and Emily and Charlotte Brontë). This represents a rethinking around the notion of ‘truth’: the pursuit of truth becomes not an engagement with the empirical world that can be touched but rather with the imagined. It also represents a rethinking around notions of time. In The Renaissance, Pater invokes what Carolyn Williams (1989) calls an ‘aesthetic historicism’ that prefigures postmodern approaches to history, refusing conventional historiography for the idea of multiple truths that challenge the idea of any straightforward ability to access the past. Alongside this comes a distinct focus on the intense pleasure of the here and now – what Pater referred to as the ‘ecstatic moment’. While realism often involves a historicism that looks back through history for meaning, aestheticism focuses on the present and on each individual experience as worthy of indulgence and celebration.

Such developments illustrate how, in this second phase, aestheticism can be read less in relation to what came before it and more in terms of what would come after. In particular, the development of aestheticism drove an interest in symbolism that would become central to the emergence of modernism in the early twentieth century. Aestheticism was influenced here again from activities in France, where symbolist form, driven by the early influences of Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), increasingly drove writing away from realist representation.

Symbolism

‘In recent years we have heard it said in a thousand and different ways, “Copy nature; just copy nature. There is no greater delight, no finer triumph than an excellent copy of nature.” And this doctrine (the enemy of art) was alleged to apply not only to painting but to all the arts, even to the novel and to poetry. To these doctrinaires, who were so completely satisfied by Nature, a man of imagination would certainly have the right to reply: “I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial.”’ Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1859

Key idea Symbolism is a late nineteenth-century movement using symbols and images to express ideas, emotions and states of mind.

Alongside these French works, symbolism is evident most notably in the novels of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) and in the United

States in the work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), whom Baudelaire enthusiastically wrote about and translated. In his essay ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850), Poe argues that poetry ‘has no concern whatever with Duty or with Truth’. These writings precede the official definition of symbolism, which was established in 1886 with the publication of Jean Moréas’s Symbolist Manifesto. In the manifesto, the French poets Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine (1844–96) are named as the three leading writers of a ‘polymorphous’ movement that would resist artistic meaning in favour of mystery and abstraction. Symbolists rejected realist description and replaced this with powerful symbolic language – allusions, images and word pictures meant to suggest particular ideas or ways of thinking. While all literature is to some extent symbolic, the symbolists expanded this to all areas of their writing, rather than reserving it for privileged objects or ideas as earlier writing had done. Free verse was favoured over rhyme as more authentic to the fluid, shifting nature of individual experience. The importance of symbolism for literary theory lies in its central contention that language does not refer to a pre-existing (what you may see referred to as a priori) reality – as realism suggests – but rather plays a central role in the construction of that reality. The goal of the writer is not to capture a thing, for this is impossible, but rather to capture the effect of that thing or the experience of it: the same sense of a subjective reality that would consume modernist writers in the early twentieth century. Symbolism also challenged the Romantic sense of writing as the expression of the author’s self or subjectivity for a more complicated sense of the author’s reality – like reality in general – in part being constructed through and during the act of writing and the relationship with language. Here we can see the beginnings of the debates regarding the relationship between language and ideas of reality and truth that would preoccupy structuralist, poststructuralist and postmodern literary theorists in the twentieth century.

Decadence Aestheticism is often defined in relation to the term ‘decadence’, as the rejection of moral and political concerns was seen to promote indulgence in the artistic experience – in the heady, undirected and often passionate

engagement with life without purpose or order. Baudelaire used the word to distinguish his and fellow writers’ work from what he saw as the stilted Victorian culture. In The Eighteen Nineties (1913), Holbrook Jackson identifies decadence as having four central characteristics: artificiality, egotism, curiosity and perversity. In these characteristics can be seen the aesthete’s interest in artistry rather than nature, in the relentless pursuit of beauty, and also an indulgence in transgressions, sexual and otherwise.

Key idea The Decadence Movement refers to those writers associated with aestheticism whose rejection of realism was in the pursuit of beauty and artistic experience without moral or political purpose.

While proponents of aestheticism might be symbolists and decadents, not all followers of aestheticism neatly fit into both categories. In particular, some symbolist work can be seen to have a definite moral and/or political tone. Indeed, Jean Moréas (1856–1910) originally devised the term ‘symbolist’ in part to distinguish symbolist from decadent art. The embodiment of the decadence movement is the Irish writer and critic Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), whose status not simply as a writer but also a wit and raconteur – a flamboyant dandy of London society – was in sharp contrast to the stern sobriety of many Victorian artists. Eminently quotable, Wilde’s use of satire questions Victorian moral values and exposes their hypocrisy. His plays The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and A Woman of No Importance (1893) laugh at the pretensions of Victorian society, while his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), defies realism with its dark gothic narrative.

Spotlight

In The Critic as Artist (1891), Oscar Wilde writes, ‘A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.’

In his non-fiction, Wilde argues strongly that ‘art is individualism’; his Socratic dialogue ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889) critiques the lack of creativity in Victorian realism. The purpose of art, so Wilde argues, is not the revelation of truth, but rather untruth: the beautiful artifice that only the artist can achieve. In this sense, decadence was a powerful precursor to much later literary movements like postmodernism. Decadence shares with modernism an attachment to the symbol and a rejection of objective reality and naturalism. Yet modernist writers would continue to grapple for the possibility of truth and a new definition of objectivity in ways that did not concern many decadent writers. It is only with later, mid-twentieth century theory that there is a return again to the kind of relativism so central to aestheticism.

‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. […] All art is quite useless.’ Oscar Wilde, Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

While decadence is therefore sometimes read as a simple bridge between Romanticism and modernism, it would be more accurate to see it as a radical departure that continued to resonate across the literary and critical movements of the twentieth-century. What is evident throughout, however, is the distinct sense of the passing away of earlier Romantic and Victorian cultures. Aestheticism is therefore very much the spirit of the emerging twentieth century, what is often referred to in literary studies as the fin de siècle. At the turn of the century, there was the defined sense of a falling away of older religious and social orders: an indulgence in decadent, selfinterested behaviour that was both derided and celebrated.

Key idea Fin de siècle, the French term meaning the ‘end of the century’, was often specifically applied to the end of the nineteenth century and to the cultural changes taking place at that time.

Recent scholarship has associated decadence in particular with queer politics and questions of sexuality. This is in part because of the influence of Wilde, whose The Picture of Dorian Gray was critiqued for its homoerotic imagery, and whose own sexuality and the scandal that surrounded it resulted in Wilde’s prosecution for indecency in 1895 (when homosexuality was illegal in England). Yet it also reflects a wider concern, evident in works such as George Meredith’s book of sonnets Modern Love (1862) and the lyric poet Algernon Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866), which was withdrawn by the publisher because of its sexually explicit content. It is particularly identified, also, with the influence of Baudelaire, whose inclusion of sexually explicit material in his poems and themes of same-sex and transgressive desire inspired the movement. (Baudelaire’s 1857 poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) was in the year of its publication at the centre of a trial for obscenity because of its lesbian content.) In this regard, aestheticism, though tied to form, might also be seen to embody particular thematic concerns. It also complicates the suggestion that ‘art for art’s sake’ takes us away from the social or political importance of literature. For, ironically, decadence can be seen as a politics that was political precisely because of its eschewal of a political significance; it was a contravention of Victorian morality that, through the elevation of beauty, gave voice to a homosexual culture denied by previous cultural expression.

Case study: The Line of Beauty One writer associated with the later period of aestheticism is the novelist Henry James (1843–1916). Through this association, the modern British novelist Alan Hollinghurst

explores contemporary aestheticism as a continued embodiment of gay culture in his 2004 novel The Line of Beauty. The novel’s central character, Nick Guest, is a young man living in 1980s London about to do graduate work on James’s literary style, specifically his relationship to realism. As the title of the novel implies, Nick’s fascination with James runs alongside an appreciation for the visual arts that aligns him with aesthetic concerns. The ‘line of beauty’ in question is the line referred to in William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753) as the shape of beauty itself. In the novel, Nick and his wealthy gay lover, Wani, create a luxury magazine named Ogee after the line’s formal name. Wani and Nick’s magazine embodies the aesthetic notion of ‘art for art’s sake’; only a single issue is ever produced, and it exists purely for the satisfaction of an imagined elite readership who would indulge themselves. It is content without purpose, education or benefit. The line’s movement in both directions – its double curve – comes in the novel to stand for the beauty of fluid identities that move in multiple directions and, more specifically, Nick’s simultaneous movement towards convention in his domestic life – lodging with the family of a Conservative MP – and his movement away from this conservatism through his exploration of his sexuality. Parallels can be drawn here between Nick’s position and that of Wilde, whose own sexuality stood at odds with his establishment position at the centre of London literary culture. Hollinghurst’s novel in this respect is an exploration of the continued relevance of aestheticism as an essential part of gay cultural expression, but also a problematizing of ‘art’s for art’s sake’. Hogarth believed that art should have both a moral and a pleasurable function, and his line represents a movement between these two polarities. Nick, equally, must negotiate between the purity of the aesthetic position and the social and economic realities of a classist, racist and homophobic Thatcherite London. Whereas many in the nineteenth-century aesthetic movement lived on humble means, Hollinghurst’s aesthetes are part of a consumerist capitalist culture driven by the same right-wing agendas that would demonize homosexuality. Where is the place, Hollinghurst asks, for a contemporary aestheticism that might posit a radical decadence, not in support of conservative politics but against it? What is the contemporary function of art?

New aestheticism Hollinghurst’s novel illuminates the relevance that aestheticism holds in relation to literary theory even to the present day. One recent response to this is a renewed interest in aestheticism under the label ‘new aestheticism’.

Unlike its precursor, new aestheticism does not entirely eschew the moral or political value of literature; rather, it attempts to emphasize the unique place of literature and its ‘strangeness’ as a form that cannot easily be treated as synonymous with other written discourses, and that evades truth as it is reinvented on each reading in a dialogue between reader and text. New aestheticism can be seen to have prompted a return to intense scrutiny of the form and language of a text, rather than the kind of thematic interests of alternative theoretical positions. However, it sees the form of the text as a crucial response to these thematic interests. This, then, is a modified aestheticism that recognizes how intense focus on the text can assist in the development of ethical and political readings, as well as being something that resists them. The best-known text on this question is Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), in which Bloom argues that writing can only be usefully judged in terms of form, and that it is through form that one can identify literary quality. New aestheticism in this regard is the discursive position responsible for judging the importance of literary work. Its elevation of beauty asks that we return to a concern for how a text is crafted rather than what it says. As Bloom’s book illustrates, it is central to questions of taste and literary value: to the possibility of what we call ‘the canon’.

Key idea The Western Canon in literature is defined as the body of works judged to be of the greatest artistic merit and value in shaping Western thought and culture.

At the same time, such function means that new aestheticism can be associated with rather reductive classifications of literature, including the exclusion of non-white authors, women, the working class and other minority groups. Two questions occur in this instance. Firstly, how might one create an elevated group of fictions that do not reflect such prejudices? And, secondly, is it possible for new aestheticism to reprivilege the literary without furnishing the distinctions required for canon building?

Fact check 1 Who wrote The Renaissance? a Walter Pater b Dante Rossetti c Oscar Wilde d Christina Rossetti 2 What was the name of the artistic movement to which Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti belonged? a Modernism b The Pre-Raphaelites c Romanticism d Symbolism 3 Who wrote the controversial poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal? a Oscar Wilde b Walter Pater c Christina Rossetti d Charles Baudelaire 4 Which of these years would we most associate with the fin de siècle? a 1950 b 1900 c 2000 d 1800 5 Which of these is not a characteristic of the decadence movement? a Curiosity b Perversity c Egotism d Humour 6 Who first used the term ‘art for art’s sake’? a Walter Pater b Théophile Gautier

c Oscar Wilde d Harold Bloom 7 With what movement do we associate Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon? a Decadence b New aestheticism c Modernism d Postmodernism 8 In what country was the Pre-Raphaelite movement formed? a France b Germany c England d The Netherlands 9 Who wrote The Line of Beauty? a Alan Hollinghurst b Ian McEwan c Oscar Wilde d Nick Guest 10 For what crime was Oscar Wilde prosecuted in 1895? a Theft b Tax fraud c Assault d Indecency

Dig deeper Beckson, Karl, ed. (2005), Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Brodskaya, Nathalia (2012), Symbolism. New York: Parkstone. Hall, Jason David et al., eds (2013), Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mahoney, Kristin (2015), Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sizeranne, Robert de la (2012), The Pre-Raphaelites. New York: Parkstone.

2 Formalism and new criticism Literary criticism is a matter of not only when but where. The multitude of perspectives now available in the study of literature is testament to a contemporary global culture that has, over time, drawn its influences from across the world. In the early twentieth century, everyone, it seemed, was reading poetry: decadent, aesthetic poetry and modernist poetry. And the reading of this poetry changed the face of literary studies. In continental Europe, these readers would come to develop a literary method known as formalism. In Britain and the United States, developments in reading practice would be called practical criticism and – later – new criticism. Both schools of thought would go on to have profound influence on how we read literary texts.

Both new critics and formalists are interested in what is on the page. They argue that it is only textual detail that should be of interest. The AngloAmerican poet T. S. Eliot, writing in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), argues that good poetry relegates the personality of the poet and his emotions in favour of artistry that keeps the reader’s attention on the text. At the centre of this are two facets central to early twentieth-century criticism: firstly, an intense focus on the text and, secondly, a preoccupation with quality that would evolve into the contemporary idea of the literary canon.

‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’ T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919)

Spotlight T. S. Eliot is famous for his ‘difficult’ modernist poetry. He is famously quoted as having declared, ‘A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.’

Practical criticism When the academic I. A. Richards took up Eliot’s work at the University of Cambridge, he emphasized a focus on the text as a self-contained work and a complete refusal of outside information. Richards called this ‘practical criticism’, a methodology he outlined in his book of the same name in 1929. As a basis for this study, Richards asked his students to interpret poems without any knowledge of their author or historical context, and with no concern for the role of the reader. His ideas would be furthered by William

Empson, one of his students, whose book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) is a masterly study of reading texts according to Richards’s practice. David Fuller (2006) calls Empson a ‘theoretical anarchist’, an idiosyncratic radical who followed his own, often contradictory, impulses. Nevertheless, what emerges from the work of Empson and Richards is a somewhat prescriptive way of reading. It might be a process you have engaged with in the course of studying literature: a pure type of ‘close reading’ in which you are asked to write on a text you have not seen before or researched. You may also see this approach referred to as Leavisite, a term applied with more than a hint of implied criticism. This acknowledges the role played by another Cambridge academic in its development: F. R. Leavis. Often described as the most influential critic of modern literature, Leavis was an outspoken critic of what he saw as the devaluing of art by popular culture. More than any other critic, he advanced through his work The Great Tradition (1948) the idea of close reading as a test of what made ‘great literature’ – a narrow list comprising Henry James, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad and George Eliot. Reading is not a neutral activity, according to Leavis, but rather a morally improving one, and thus the reader must be directed to the most valuable works of literature.

‘It is necessary to insist, then, that there are important distinctions to be made, and that far from all of the names in the literary histories really belong to the realm of significant creative achievement.’ F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948)

Key idea Practical criticism is the close formal analysis of a literary work without reference to

its outside contexts, including the author and historical period.

The new criticism What Richards and Empson outlined as practical criticism resonated strongly with an American school of thought that was equally focused on poetry and a desire to centre critical attention on the text alone. During the 1930s a group of poets and academics, including John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, developed the ideas of practical criticism in an American context. Although they did not name themselves as such immediately, they are the critics we now call new critics, a name they eventually gave themselves via Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941). Like the practical critics, the new critics considered the value of the text to exist outside of author, reader or context. Their most influential text is Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938), in which the authors argue that poetry has its own unique literary language. The task of the student or critic is to decipher this language, capturing the spirit of the original. So, for example, one should avoid paraphrasing because putting a poem in nonliterary language would be to move away from its special literary properties.

Key idea New criticism is the practice, following from practical criticism, of analysing the specific literary qualities of a given piece of literature outside specific authorial or historical contexts.

LITERARY FALLACIES In the 1940s two other new critics, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, devised a terminology to describe the new critical approach, developed in two related essays, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1949). In the former, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that, although there is clearly an author who has creative power over a work of literature – a ‘designing intellect’ – there is no place for biography or other speculation. If

an author has been successful, the intention will be there in the poem, easy to identify, but if we need to go outside the poem to find this information then the poem has not been successful in conveying it and therefore there is no need to look for it. Central to this is the idea that we must not confuse the author with the voice of the poem (or, in fiction, the narrator). Rather than looking for some relation to the author, we should focus on the meaning of the text within and for itself. In what seems an aesthetic argument (see Chapter 1), Wimsatt and Beardsley suggest that we should not demand of the text any political or moral message or any accuracy of representation, but rather appreciate it for its own inherent literary quality. The idea of intention is false – it is a fallacy. In ‘The Affective Fallacy’, Wimstatt and Beardsley turn their attention to the reader. Just as it is impossible to know the intention of the author so, they argue, the reader’s response – their emotional engagement with the text – leads us to confuse what the poem is with what it does. The latter is potentially dangerous, because individual responses can be unpredictable and coloured by the reader’s own methods of reading, life experience and subjectivity. Therefore we need to distance ourselves from emotional responses in favour of objective analysis based on the actual text. These ideas would subsequently be challenged both by reader response theory and by other political ways of reading.

Key ideas Intentional fallacy is a method of reading literary texts without concern for what the author intended, looking only at the text on the page. Affective fallacy is a method of reading literary texts without concern for the effect of the text on the reader.

Continental formalism At the same time as these developments, a group in Europe was also turning its attention to the isolated particularities of the text. What we now call

continental formalism began in Russia (so you may also see it called ‘Russian formalism’), although it quickly spread across Europe, with particular influence in France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Its founders began their activities in two separate groupings, established just before the Russian Revolution. In 1915 Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) led the newly formed Moscow Linguistic Circle, while in 1916 the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka, or Opojaz for short) was founded, dominated by Viktor Schlovsky, Yury Tynyanov and Boris Eikhenbaum.

Spotlight Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959) became a literary scholar only after abandoning his ambitions for a professional musical career. He studied violin, piano and voice at music school before switching to studies in philology.

Like their Anglo-American counterparts, these scholars were disenchanted with the aesthetic movement, and particularly with symbolism. Instead, influenced by the mechanization of modern society, the formalists looked to futurism, an Italian artistic movement that had become influential in Russia. Within futurism they found a dynamism focused on a repudiation of the past in favour of forward-looking developments; within the context of futurism, the influences of Romanticism and the aesthetic movement could be rejected and their emotion replaced with more scientific approaches.

Defamiliarization For formalism, the literary text has unique qualities that distinguish it from other kinds of written text such as journalism, memoir and factual writing. In 1921 Jakobson would term this quality ‘literariness’. Much of formalism can be seen as an effort to consider how ‘literariness’ functions. The answer to this is through what Viktor Shklovsky terms, in his essay ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘making strange’ (ostranenie). Poetry, he argues, does not use language in its normal, everyday fashion, but rather in its

own special way that makes it appear new and different. It is constructed in a way that the ‘practical’ language of everyday communication is not. Such linguistic newness leads to a new way of seeing for the reader.

Key idea Defamiliarization is the tendency of literature to make language ‘strange’ through the use of literary devices and structures.

How does this ‘making strange’ take place? In his essay ‘The Theory of the “Formal Method”’ (1926), Eichenbaum outlines the specific qualities of poetic language. Literature, he suggests, uses a series of literary devices that are not found in ordinary language to create its own unique speech. These devices tell the reader that what is being presented is not real or factual, but imaginative: that they are adventuring into the realm of creativity. Rhythm, in particular, is singled out. The musicality of literary language distinguishes it from its everyday counterpart. It may be useful to consider how literariness is signposted in different types of literary text. For example, we might find it easiest to locate in poetry, where rhyme and metre stand out from ordinary ways of organizing language. We can also see it quite easily in experimental prose, such as modernist or postmodernist novels that use language in unusual ways. Where, however, can we locate defamiliarization in a realist novel that, in fact, attempts to obscure its artistry and instead present itself as close to ‘truth’? One answer to this comes in the distinction between what happens in a story and how it happens – a distinction between what formalists called the fabula and the syuzchet. In his Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997), Jonathan Culler develops Aristotle’s theory of narrative and describes it as a combination of events, story, plot and discourse. Story is the overall impression the reader engages with; plot is the ordering of events that the reader infers from the text to create that impression; and discourse is what the reader actually encounters in reading. While story is the basis of narrative, and plot and events are drawn from it by the reader, it is discourse that makes

literature. It is not so much in the language itself, but rather in the ordering of the language, and the ordering of events through that language, therefore, that fiction finds a correlative to rhyme and metre in poetry. Anything that contributes to this ordering and the reader’s awareness of it creates literariness. This includes breaks in chronology, framing material such as footnotes, prefaces and epigraphs (what are called peritexts), and changes in style or pace.

Case study: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things As an example, let’s look at the opening of a contemporary novel, Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002): If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house. It’s clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you. It’s a wordless song, for the most, but it’s a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note. McGregor pursues his description of the city without the introduction of human character and so immediately we know that this is a literary construction. It is a prose poem to the city: the granting of agency to the city as that which ‘sings’ takes a word that is, in non-literary language, attached only to living beings and associates it with the non-living physical space, so that ‘sing’ is drawn out of its normal contexts and becomes literary. This is further developed when the song is described as ‘wordless’ – an oxymoron (contradiction of opposites) that would be inaccurate in a real-world context, but that here contributes to the poetic image. Move on again, and the suggestion that the song ‘sings loudest when you pick out each note’ is a scientific impossibility, which tells us again that we are in the realm not of fact but imagination. McGregor’s description of the city continues across the novel’s opening pages to form

an extended image: The low soothing hum of air conditioners, fanning out the heat and the smells of shops and cafes and offices across the city, winding up and winding down, long breaths layered upon each other, a lullaby hum for tired streets. Such detailed description functions in a similar way to Shklovsky’s example of defamiliarization: Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (1759). For Shklovsky, Sterne’s detailed and unusual description of Shandy lying on his bed reawakens the banal, as an everyday moment becomes linguistically exciting. Equally, McGregor takes the banal details of the city and renews them: the hum of air conditioners is part of the city’s life, its anthropomorphic transformation into a breathing, beating entity. The reader is awakened, not by a new idea, but rather by the new linguistic presentation of something familiar. McGregor, like Sterne, announces that what we are reading is literature – and announces at the same time the unique and privileged place of that literature.

As formalism developed, it began to question the idea that devices could be interpreted without reference to when and by whom they were used. This later phase of formalism sees literariness not in terms of devices, therefore, but rather of functions. Whereas devices are static, functions depend on context for how they work. This later work also considers how defamiliarization functions through difference – what seems strange is so not only in relation to the ordinary language of the outside world but also to the definition of ‘ordinary’ established within a text. An example might be a sudden change in rhyme scheme or a move away from very literal language to a rich, symbolic phrase. If we look at William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126, we see both these factors at work: O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle, hour; Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow’st; If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill

May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure! She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure: Her audit, though delay’d, answer’d must be And her quietus is to render thee. Shakespeare’s use of iambic pentameter (lines of ten stressed and unstressed syllables) puts us in the realm of literature rather than everyday occurrence: the words that Shakespeare offers us are made new in this context. Yet, in lines nine and ten Shakespeare deviates from this pattern – what is ordinary within the text – by including an extra unstressed syllable (a feminine ending). When the rhyme scheme deviates from the pattern, this awakens us to newness, drawing our attention to the place of difference. In this particular poem, this is compounded by the fact that Shakespeare does not use traditional sonnet form, writing in rhyming couplets rather than the standard abab form. The poem is thus simultaneously riven by difference to the nonliterary, but also an internal difference from the traditional and expected poetic device.

HOW AND WHY These concerns were the same as those of the new critics. Why then, given these similarities, do we distinguish between them? The answer lies in a fundamental difference of emphasis between new and formalist critics. While both formalists and new critics direct the reader only to what is on the page, formalists, as the name suggests, are principally interested in this textual presence because it indicates the form of the text, and generalizable rules. They have no interest in content, themes or attitudes. In contrast, new critics rarely looked at the form of a text: they were more interested in the tones, images and attitudes of the individual text, taken in its singularity. For new critics, each text is different, whereas for formalism each text is part of a greater pattern. Formalism is interested in how literature works in order to achieve its linguistic effect (defamiliarization), but new criticism is interested in how it works to uncover its deeper meaning.

To see this difference in practice, we can return to our Shakespeare sonnet. Reading it from a formalist perspective, we can interpret the breaks in form as shifting the reader out of their comfort in the sonnet structure and reawakening them to literary manipulations. A new critic would be equally interested in this disruption but would also look at what this might mean – in this case, perhaps, seeing the disruption as central to the speaker’s passionate emotional engagement. Neither critic, of course, would speculate about the reason for this, such as that this poem is one of several sonnets with broken form directed towards William Herbert, a young man with whom Shakespeare enjoyed an intense nine-year friendship that has been the subject of much speculation, particularly from queer critics.

Spotlight William Herbert was known to be a quiet man who suffered from migraines, and who could frequently be found alone in his study, smoking a pipe. Before his marriage, he was imprisoned for refusing to marry a woman whom he made pregnant, although the child later died. He had at least two other illegitimate children but produced no legitimate heirs – his only legitimate child, a son, dying in infancy.

It may seem as if new criticism is making a bigger claim for literature than formalism, by suggesting that it can speak to the outside world. However, in many ways the opposite is also true: the grand claim of formalism is that literature does not need to exist in relation to the world; it can exist purely for itself. While both schools share the same reverential attitude towards text – an almost religious fervour towards the power of literature – it is in formalism that we find the most powerful expression of the pure art argument first offered by earlier aesthetic criticism and its proclamation of ‘art for art’s sake’.

Case study: Mrs Dalloway The Anglo-American literary scene may have been oblivious to Russian formalism, but its literature was nevertheless exploring similar questions about language. In the

early pages of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), a young man and war veteran, Septimus Smith, is sitting in Regent’s Park with his wife. Above him, and watched intently by a large crowd, appears an aeroplane, engaged in a dramatic act of skywriting. As the words gradually come into focus, the crowd is caught in determining not only the words themselves but also their contextualized meaning. But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps? Septimus in this moment is the reader of fiction subject to defamiliarization. The words he reads are not the words of poetry but the mundane, quotidian words of advertising: the plane is being used to advertise a brand of toffee. This suggests a nonliterary context. These are the words of everyday language. But as the words come into focus they take on a poetic quality, transfixing the people below, haunting them, and serving as a refrain disassociated from the product they are advertising. Septimus sees not an advertising campaign but rather ‘beauty…exquisite beauty’ in a language he feels he cannot read. What renders these words strange is not their essential nature but, rather, their striking positioning. The transformation of the sky into a writing surface pushes the words out of their normal context. Woolf’s scene is an exemplification of how the same words, used differently, may function differently. The device here is an exaggerated one – the sky as canvas, the words appearing in a performance as they slowly emerge on the skyline. Yet it speaks more generally to the formalist sense of devices that position words and in doing so give them essential properties.

Formalism today New and formalist criticism offers an objective, quasi-scientific approach to the literary text, far removed from the emotional subjectivity celebrated by the aesthetic movement. Its contribution to today’s theory is to develop an ongoing debate about literature’s relation to the world. As we shall see in later chapters, the idea that the author or the context of a work is irrelevant becomes problematic once the idea of a universal literary language is questioned by the political readings of feminism, queer theory, Marxism and postcolonial theory – all schools of thought that demand precisely the view beyond the text that formalism denies.

However, this movement is not straightforward or linear. More recently, there has been a renewed call for a return to close reading practices. The British scholar Derek Attridge, for example, has argued that, while a work must be situated in its historical context, there is a risk that such approaches mean that ‘We may be teaching our students to write clever interpretations without teaching them how to read…’ For Attridge (2008), contemporary theory has taken readers too far away from the text.

‘The notion that it is smarter to read “against the grain” rather than to do what one can to respond accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work can compound this disregard of what is truly important. This is not to say that the use of literary works as illustrations of historical conditions or ideological formations (including abhorrent ones) is invalid or reprehensible; just that to do so is not to treat the works in question as literature.’ Derek Attridge and Henry Staten, ‘Reading for the Obvious in Poetry: A Conversation’ (2008)

This is not to say that all post-war theory is against new critical readings. For example, when in the 1960s the poststructuralist critic Roland Barthes wrote of ‘The Death of the Author’, he was in fact in some ways – as we shall see in Chapter 5 – reasserting the new critical position on the intentional fallacy. While much of the new critical position may seem a long way from how we read now, its founding principles of close reading continue to be an important starting point for much literary study. As we shall examine in later chapters, what has become contested is to what purpose we put that reading.

Fact check 1 Who wrote the essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’?

a b c d

F. R. Leavis Roland Barthes T. S. Eliot Derek Attridge

2 What is the name for the idea in practical criticism that we should disregard the author when reading? a The authorial fallacy b The context fallacy c The intentional fallacy d The affective fallacy 3 What is the name for the idea in practical criticism that we should ignore the possible effects of the text when reading? a The affective fallacy b The authorial fallacy c The effective fallacy d The impact fallacy 4 In what country did formalism originate? a Germany b Russia c France d The United Kingdom 5 In what country did new criticism first develop? a The United States b Canada c Germany d The United Kingdom 6 In what country did practical criticism originate? a France b Germany c The United States d The United Kingdom 7 Which text does Shklovsky use as an example of defamiliarization? a Shakespeare’s sonnets

b Tristam Shandy c Robinson Crusoe d Romeo and Juliet 8 Who wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity? a William Smith b William Shakespeare c Willliam Empson d Frank Empson 9 ‘The Death of the Author’ was written by which French critic? a Roland Barthes b Jacques Derrida c Gilles Deleuze d Charles Baudelaire 10 What term does Roman Jakobson use to define the specific features of literature? a Creativity b Literariness c Defamiliarization d Language

Dig deeper Armstrong, Rick (2013), The New Criticism: Formalist Literary Theory in America. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bogel, Fredric (2013), New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Kopcewicz, Andrzej and Semrau, Janusz, eds (2012), From Moby-Dick to Finnegans Wake: Essays in Close Reading. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Sanford, Anthony J. and Emmott, Catherine (2012), Mind, Brain and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3 Reader response theory Indulge me. Stop reading for a moment. Find a piece of paper and a pen. And on it write the first words that come into your head. Now tell me what you have written. Is it the beginning of a poem? A story? A list? Even a play, perhaps? A dramatic monologue? More importantly, how do you know that is what it is? And how do you know whether I will agree with you when I read it? Does it mean for you what it will mean for me?

Is there a text on this paper? Before the advent of what we called reader response criticism, no one was interested in these kinds of questions. Formalist strategies of reading, which make little reference to the social or political contexts in which a text is produced, may seem quite alien to those of us producing literary criticism in the twenty-first century. If we want to know why this is, then the answer can be found in the changes to reading texts that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. In this period began a growing concern for how a text affects individual readers – and also communities of readers. This theory, called reader response theory, or reception theory, dramatically shifted the way in which texts are now read. Once readers become part of the meaning of the text, their own place in the world becomes important. The context of reading becomes hugely important. Moreover, meaning becomes much less certain and more unstable. If there is no longer an ideal reader but simply many different readers, the text becomes a dynamic and changing entity.

Rejecting formalism Reader response theory can be seen as a rejection of the scientific, objective approach of formalism and new criticism. It first emerged during the 1970s in Germany, where the academics Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007)and Hans Jauss (1921–97) led a group of scholars concerned with the reception of literary texts.

Key idea Reception refers to the creation of meaning of a text by a reader.

Jauss and Iser were influenced by a number of earlier developments. In particular, reader response theory owes much to a school of philosophy called phenomenology. Established by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in the early twentieth century, phenomenology examines the

relationship between subjective, human consciousness and the real objects of the physical world; what matters is not objects in themselves but, rather, the lived experience of them. Reader response theory translates this into the idea of studying how humans experience texts. Iser published his ideas about reception in two key works, The Implied Reader (1972) and The Act of Reading (1976). In his earlier book, Iser argues that the text exists between two poles. The first, the artistic pole, is the text the author creates, while the other, the aesthetic pole, is the text as the reader receives it. Only by taking together the actual text and the reader’s conception of it can we get to the actual literary text. Without the reader, the practice of meaning creation is incomplete. In The Act of Reading Iser complicates the idea of a hypothetical or ideal reader. He says that the ideal reader is merely an abstract created by the critic, and is therefore meaningless. We don’t know any ideal readers, so it is pointless to talk about them because all we are really doing is talking about our own ideal reading, or a kind of authorial intention. Equally, however, the ‘real’ reader is elusive and almost impossible for us to gain access to. Iser suggests instead an ‘implied reader’ who is the active reading force in the creation of meaning alongside the plot, the narrator(s) and the characters. The implied reader has no particular characteristics but is always there as part of the process.

Key idea The implied reader is the reader we imagine when we are talking about the meaning of a literary text.

‘The possible reader must be visualized as playing a particular role with particular characteristics, which may vary according to circumstances. And so, just as the author divides himself up into the narrator of the story and the

commentator of the events in the story, the reader is also stylized to a certain degree, being given attributes which he may either accept or reject.’ Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974)

INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES A parallel movement towards the reader began at the same time in the United States, through the work of Stanley Fish (1938– ). Fish began his critical career investigating reader responses to the work of John Milton. These works, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, paved the way for an essay ‘Interpreting the Variorum’ (1976), in which Fish shifts his focus from individual readers to how those readers create meanings in the context of other readers. In order to explore this contextualized reading, Fish uses the term ‘interpretive communities’.

Key idea An interpretive community is a group of readers who share a context for their readings of a literary text.

Fish argues that there are multiple acts of reading that produce multiple meanings. One thing that contextualizes this is the specific time and place of reading. In particular, academic communities such as universities define literary value to direct how words are engaged with. In Is There a Text in this Class? (1980), Fish uses an example of writing a list of names on a chalk board and asking a group of students to analyse that group of names, pretending to them that it is a poem, in an exercise very similar to the one you engaged with at the opening of this chapter. Given this institutional context, the students behave as if the text is a poem and give literary evaluations. As an example, let’s take a look at some lines of writing: If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and

it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue. How would you define this? On the page, these lines look like prose. They are, however, in fact part of a poem called ‘Objects’ (1914) by Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). One might argue that they are only poetry because they are included in a poem and thus defined as such. Out of this context, they become prose description. Like Fish’s example, we can see here how the community shapes reading. Those who read this text in a book of poems, having decided that a poem can be a prose poem, will read it as poetry. Those who have defined poetry differently, however, and expect a different visual appearance on the page, will define it as prose. While Stein’s intention here is signalled by the inclusion of these words in a poem, this only limits the reading when it is received in that context.

‘Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions.’ Stanley Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’ (1976)

Unacceptable readings? To this point, we have presented reader response theory as a rather positive space, in which all voices are heard and all readers are valued equally. Reader response critics have to consider, however, what to do when readings are produced that challenge the interpretive community.

• What, for example, about readings that take a text completely out of context?

• What about readings that are the complete opposite of the established readings?

• In short, can a reading ever be ‘wrong’? Spotlight In a recent online list of funny answers to literature exam questions comes the following: Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

Case study: The Rushdie Affair A powerful example of interpretive communities can be seen in the events surrounding the publication in 1988 of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses. Following uproar from certain segments of the Muslim community regarding the novel’s content, in 1989 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. The author went into hiding in London, from which he emerged only in 1998. Readers were particular outraged by one particular scene in the novel, in which one of the central characters visits a brothel where the women are named after the prophet Mohammad’s wives. In addition, the novel hints, through the presence of a poet named Baal who is sceptical about Mohammad’s abilities, that a number of verses removed from the Qur’an for supposedly being falsely given to Mohammad by the devil (the so-called Satanic Verses) were perhaps removed for other reasons, part of a larger lack of authenticity. Finally, the novel was criticized for its use of derogatory terms such as Mahound for Mohammad and Jahilia for Mecca. On 2 December 1988, 7,000 Muslims in the town of Bolton staged the first demonstration against the book, which included publicly burning it. Much attention has been given to how many of the critics of Rushdie’s novel had not in fact read it – they had only seen distributed extracts that took the brothel scene out of its satirical context. An interpretive community was formed that ‘read’ the novel as offensive without regard for its overall content. Against this, other interpretive communities of Muslim readers, such as the Southall Black Sisters, campaigned in support of Rushdie. This vitriolic response shows the power of interpretive

communities in defining the meaning of a text: the novel polarized the opinions of those who read it (Muslim and non-Muslim), opinions that were largely determined by reading contexts. In reality, The Satanic Verses was satirical, something which those opposing it seemed to ignore. However, at the same time, there is some suggestion that Rushdie knew his novel would be found offensive and that he intentionally tried to stir up controversy. He made the women in the brothel chaste, and made the man who calls Mohammad by the name Mahound an unreliable figure, thus attempting to create a problematic text in which it is possible to be offended but difficult to uphold one’s offence. In this respect, although many interpreters of the text had not read it, the meaning of the text lay fluidly between these absolute positions in ways that make attitudes to criticisms of the novel (yet not the fatwa) somewhat complex.

Spotlight A number of contemporary novelists have used the Rushdie Affair as subject matter. In his novel The Black Album (1995), the satirical British author Hanif Kureishi includes a scene to parody responses to the Rushdie Affair, in which a young group of men defend the sanctity of a ‘holy aubergine’. In White Teeth (2000), Zadie Smith follows the lives of twin brothers, one of whom attends protests against the publication of Rushdie’s novel.

Our resistance to readings such as those that violently opposed The Satanic Verses rests upon the fact that they are incomplete readings of the text. It seems easy to argue against these but, at the same time, they are evidence of how meaning exists beyond a written text in the dynamic relationship between the text and its context. Meaning, then, becomes a matter not of the text but of its creation through the individual reader, who is part of an interpretive community. If a text has been read, in its entirety and with great care, it is even more tempting to want to say no, there cannot be a ‘wrong’ reading. But what if, for example, a diligent reader said that Voldemort was the hero of Harry Potter, that Jane Eyre was a villain, or that (as happened in one of my classes) a book written in the first half of the twentieth century was about the HIV crisis?

The short answer to this question is that reader response theory asks us to be sensitive. We have to say that some readings are factually wrong. For example, it is not possible to say that Nancy doesn’t die in Oliver Twist (1838) or that Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813) marries Mr Bingley. These readings are prevented by the reader’s central concern with uncovering the intention of an imagined author, which means they play close attention to the codes and structures the author has provided. If we return, however, to the example of the student who said that an early twentieth-century novel was about the HIV crisis that did not happen until the 1980s, it is possible to amend rather than dismiss this reading. The novel cannot be ‘about’ the HIV crisis, because the device of historical context makes this impossible. The text can, however, contain themes that resonate with that later historical moment. That a reader might spot these resonances and that the text is a transformative space in which those resonances shape how the text is read is as important to a reader response critic as the surface meaning. Equally, one can argue, for example, that Voldemort’s exclusion as a young man from an elite represented by Harry’s parents can produce a reading in which his vengeance is, from a Marxist perspective, a mirror of violent revolution against ruling power structures. Likewise, if one reads Jane Eyre (1847) from a postcolonial rather than feminist perspective and identifies with Rochester’s first wife Bertha, then Jane in fact can become the villain of the novel: the representative of white, Anglican colonial supremacist attitudes. These readings are not in line with our perception of authorial intention. It is therefore important to note that reader response theory shares with formalism a belief in the intentional fallacy. While it reintroduces questions of affect and context, this is very much in the service of privileging possible different interpretations of the text and understanding how those readings come to exist, not in getting closer to any ‘essential’, author-driven reading.

Case study: The Lord of the Rings

When J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings (1954), he intended it as a new mythology for Britain. His work was shaped by his Catholic faith, his experience of the First World War and his profound attachment to nature. When, however, The Lord of the Rings became a massive publishing success ten years after its initial publication, readers associated it with very different meanings – with liberal values including drug use and free love. The text that led Leonard Nimoy, otherwise known for playing Mr Spock in Star Trek, to record a song entitled ‘Bilbo Baggins’ and that saw fans wearing pin badges declaring their support for the Hobbit seems a very different one. Asked about the craze surrounding the novel, and plagued by phone calls to his home by adoring fans, Tolkien merely replied that ‘many young Americans are involved with the stories in a way that I am not’. Tolkien’s own response, in which he refuses to say that such readings are ‘wrong’, points to his own belief in the openness of the text. In an early essay, ‘On Fairy Stories’ (1947), Tolkien writes of his desire for texts that include what he calls ‘applicability’: the possibility for a range of different meanings to be applied to a text because of its inherent openness. While Tolkien may have been annoyed at the telephone calls he kept receiving in his retirement, the nuisance only reflected his success in achieving the expansive fiction he so believed in.

‘Readerly’ and ‘writerly’ One question raised by Tolkien’s theory is whether some texts are more open to reader response than others. This idea is also important in the theory of the (post)structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes. Barthes divides literature into ‘readerly’ texts and ‘writerly’ texts. The former – readerly texts – for Barthes make up the majority of literary works. These are texts in which meaning is largely fixed and the role of the reader is a passive one. By strategies of description and direction, these texts limit the possibility of multiple meanings. In contrast, writerly texts are a rarer group of works that allow the reader an active role in creating meaning. With many possible meanings, the reader becomes the writer of the text. Rather than there being one stable meaning, a multitude of different meanings emerge. As a poststructuralist, Barthes is interested in a deconstructive process whereby what is hidden in a text is, through analysis, revealed. Thus, although there may seem to be a sharp distinction between readerly and writerly texts, in fact the situation is more complicated. Writerly texts merely

reveal the instability of meanings that a readerly text tries to obscure. What makes a text readerly or writerly is also a complicated question – for while the author may in part be responsible for this effect in their conscious decisions, it is also a characteristic that is shaped by readers and the interpretive communities they form. For Barthes, the ideal text was a writerly one: his desire for non-linear, open texts predicts much about postmodern literature.

Spotlight Barthes spent much of his life in poor health, which seriously disrupted his education. He died, however, as a result of an accident: he was knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van while walking home from a lunch party held by the future President of France, François Mitterand.

‘The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.’ Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)

Key ideas A readerly text is one for which the meaning is closed and the role of the reader is passive. A writerly text is one that is open and in which the reader is an active participant in

writing its meaning.

Reader response theory today Reader response theory has been profoundly influential in cultural studies, in which the written text exists as part of a matrix of sources that the individual engages with. Events such as the Rushdie Affair exist in this context, where the meaning of The Satanic Verses was being produced in relation to a range of racist and Islamophobic discourses in Britain during the 1980s. By allowing the roles of individual interpretive communities to be heard in this manner, reader response theory has been integral to the ideas of political schools of criticism such as postcolonialism, feminism and queer theory. It also has an interesting relationship to new materialist theory, which, as I discuss in Chapter 15, considers the individual’s engagement with the physical, material world. New materialism intersects with reader response theory by asking what in the physicality of the text itself shapes a reader’s engagement. How, for example, does reading a book in electronic form rather than paper contribute to its overall meaning? How might the quality of the paper, the binding or even the very weight of a book change the reading experience? It is these complex questions about precisely how different readers come to different meanings that makes reader response theory such a rich source of discussion.

Fact check 1 Who wrote Is There a Text in this Class? a Wolfgang Iser b Stanley Fish c Michel Foucault d Alex Salmon 2 What is the name in reader response theory for groups of readers? a Interpretive communities b Reading groups

c Reading communities d Universities 3 Reader response theory is a rejection of the methods of which approach to literature? a Feminism b Marxism c Formalism d Ecocriticism 4 Who wrote S/Z? a Roland Barthes b Walter Pater c Jacques Derrida d Kate Millett 5 Who is the author of The Satanic Verses? a Zadie Smith b Salman Rushdie c Ian McEwan d Stanley Fish 6 A TV star from which TV show recorded a song featuring a character from The Lord of the Rings? a Top of the Pops b Star Trek c Buffy the Vampire Slayer d Red Dwarf 7 Barthes’s term for a text that is open to the reader’s meanings is called what kind of text? a Writerly b Readerly c Open d Closed 8 What is Iser’s name for the imagined reader of a text? a Imagined reader b Real reader

c Actual reader d Implied reader 9 Fish’s early work was on what author? a Shakespeare b Milton c Brontë d Austen 10 What is the name of Gertrude Stein’s prose poem? a ‘Objects’ b ‘Things’ c ‘Lily’ d ‘Red’

Dig deeper Davis, Todd and Womack, Kenneth (2002), Formalist Criticism and ReaderResponse Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave. D’Haen, Theo (1983), Text to Reader: A Communicative Approach to Fowles, Barth, Cortazar and Boon. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Fish, Stanley (1980), Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

4 Marxism and post-Marxism The ideas of what we now call Marxism were first laid out in 1848 by the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–83) and the German sociologist Friedrich Engels (1820–95) in their Communist Manifesto. Their worldview – communism – was based on the idea that common ownership (hence ‘communism’) could create a classless society in which everyone is equal. For both Marx and Engels, history was a series of class struggles. The aim of communism was to push this struggle towards a conclusion in which the violent uprising of the working classes (the proletariat) would overthrow the aristocracy and the middle class (the bourgeoisie) and lead to a levelling of economic difference as the wealth of those with more would be equally distributed to abolish economic difference.

Key ideas The proletariat: the working classes. In Marxist philosophy these are people who work in the cities in industrial positions and factories. The bourgeoisie: the Marxist term for the middle classes who work in professional, skilled employment.

As a materialist philosophy, Marxism is concerned with empirical difference: that is, it is concerned not with abstract ideas but with the very physical and tangible reality of existence. For this reason, there have often been conflicts between Marxist and poststructuralist thinkers, whom Marxists accuse of playing linguistic games that underestimate the crippling realities of class. For Marxists, these relations and structures are real: they cannot be reduced to a matter of language and they exist, concretely, outside of our imaginative and descriptive worlds.

Base and superstructure So what does this material reality look like from a Marxist point of view? Marxists see society as a combination of what they call the base and the superstructure. The base is the material means of production, and the superstructure is the cultural world surrounding it: art, literature, philosophy, religion and law. For Marxists, there is a strong connection between base and superstructure, so that the cultural world is determined by the economic base. This means that at the centre of all artistic expression, driving its nature and purpose, is the economic system. Marxists call this economic determinism. Marxism, perhaps more than any other aspect, can be seen to be central to the development of literary theory in the twentieth century. In fact, critical theory, which as we examined in the introduction is one facet of literary theory, has its basis very much in Marxist thought.

Spotlight In 2011 the British writer and theorist Jason Barker made a German documentary entitled Marx Reloaded. The name is a wordplay on The Matrix Reloaded, the sequel to The Matrix, which is parodied in the film.

For literary study, Marxism is important not simply because it asks us to examine the class politics of the novels we read, but also because it situates literature within this class politics. For Marxist critics, literature cannot be removed not only from the economic circumstances of production, but also from the social contexts shaped by this production. The superstructure is determined by the base, and the arts within that superstructure inform each other and reinforce this relationship. For Marxism, it is impossible for literature to fully step outside of the contexts of its production. As we shall see in later chapters, this relationship is central to the interests of new historicist, new materialist and cultural materialist critics. But it also establishes a wider connection between texts and their socio-economic contexts that has been important for those critical positions rooted in concerns for questions of identity such as feminism, queer theory and postcolonial theory. Because Marx argues that the base and superstructure are interwoven with each other, it becomes impossible to think of literature outside of the economic realities of its production.

‘within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour

process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.’ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (1867)

Spotlight A joke… Why does Karl Marx hate Earl Grey? Because all proper tea is theft.

Ideologies It is in this context that texts become relevant to wider power structures, or what Marxists call ideologies. By ideology, we simply mean a system of ideas that is the basis for political thinking.

Key idea Ideology: the ideas in a society that serve as the foundation for people’s opinions and which contribute to political activity.

The dominant ideology is that held by those in power, or by the majority in society. For Marxists, ideology is a set of ideas held by the elite, which they use power to maintain. This in turn keeps them in a position of economic dominance. Ideology is presented by the state as natural – for this reason, we do not go around thinking that we are being ideologically controlled. In fact, even if we do, then this is something that ideology itself has accounted for – even when we think that we are resisting, we are not!

‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’ Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’ (1970)

The idea of ideology was developed by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–90) in his 1970 essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’. In this work, Althusser extends the Marxist idea of ideology to consider in more detail precisely how ideologies are reproduced. He suggests that this takes place through the work of two separate forces. First, what he calls the repressive state apparatuses are those government structures, such as the police, law courts and military, which enforce rule either through violence or coercion (the threat of violence). These can be distinguished from the ideological state apparatuses, which exist outside of official government structures in schools, religious institutions and family. Here, there is no threat of violence, but rather a fear of being socially rejected or ridiculed. Ideology speaks to the individual and gives them recognition – what Althusser calls interpellation. We can think about this in terms of a schoolteacher calling us by name, or receiving a blessing at a religious ceremony. These activities recognize us as individuals and make us feel secure. Because therefore state apparatuses are involved in the subject’s sense of self, the idea of resisting them is unattractive.

Spotlight In 1980, at the age of 62, Althusser killed his wife by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity, and was committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. In a posthumously published autobiography, Althusser describes the murder as an accident which took place when he was massaging his wife’s neck. In the same book, Althusser also confesses to having only a limited knowledge of philosophy. He writes, 'I knew the work of Descartes and Malebranche well, Spinoza

a little, Aristotle not at all; Plato and Pascal quite well, Kant not at all, Hegel a little.'

HEGEMONY What Althusser calls the state apparatus describes the transmission of ideology not through force, but rather through consent. Another way to think of this is through the Marxist concept of hegemony developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937): the idea that the state controls its population through coercion rather than violence, through the operation of religion, the family, education and culture. In hegemony, people are often not aware they are being controlled – rather they are manipulated by the social structures they are part of.

Key idea Hegemony: state control through coercion rather than force.

Literature, like all other creative forms, is formed in relation to ideology, and can serve hegemony. Unlike religion, philosophy, politics and legal discourses, however, the arts are given a special place by Marx as being capable of working both for and against ideological systems. Their unique nature, their creative power, means they hold a radical potential not seen in more explicitly institutional structures. One Marxist critic with particular influence on literary theory is György Lukács (1885–1971). His writings on realism continue to be influential to the present day. For Lukács, modernism was a stagnant form that denied historical realities and the dynamic politics of contemporary life. Instead, he argues in The Historical Novel (1937) and Studies in European Realism (1950) that realism as a form is capable of giving access to the reality of experience: a truer, more complete essence. Ironically, this seems very similar to the arguments modernism makes for its own relationship to reality. For Lukács, however, it is only a realist text that strives towards a direct representation that can achieve such closeness to the real world: modernism can never achieve this because its focus on individual experiences closes it

off from taking in the bigger picture of events and their historical significance. This view would continue to be espoused by later critics, such as Eric Auerbach (1892–1957) in Mimesis (1946), and more recently its essence can be seen in ethical criticism’s preference for realist narratives (see Chapter 17).

The Frankfurt School The materialist focus of Marxism and the kind of criticism produced by Lukács suggests a prioritizing of realism. Yet perhaps the best-known group of Marxist critics, the Frankfurt School, reject realism. It was the Frankfurt School who were responsible for establishing what we now call critical theory, developed during their work at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, then later in New York, then again in Frankfurt, from the 1930s until the 1960s. Led by Theodor Adorno (1903–69), Herbert Marcuse (1898– 1979) and Max Horkheimer (1895–73), the group was exiled from Germany to the United States in 1933 and did not return there until 1950. The group is best known for its criticism of mass culture as a form of ideological thought control. For the Frankfurt School, as for other Marxists, art has a privileged place in critiquing ideological structures. In contrast to Lukács, however, they argue that a text can never approximate reality and, moreover, it is the text’s distance from reality that gives it subversive power. So modernism is in fact a powerful example of literature’s power to question dominant ways of thinking, in direct contradiction of Lukács’s reading.

Case study: Brechtian alienation One useful example of literature’s attempts to engage with Marxist principles is the work of German dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). A life-long Marxist, Brecht was concerned to create drama that would not allow the audience to be manipulated. He saw this was the effect of realist drama, which allowed the audience to forget they were watching a play. By being lured into the fantasy, Brecht felt that audiences responded emotionally and lost the ability to engage with art as a social or political critique. In order to prevent this, in the 1920s and 1930s Brecht developed the alienation effect (in German Verfremdungseffekt, sometimes referred to as

distantiation effect). Interrupting social realism with songs, stage directions shouted out on stage or obvious scenery changes, Brecht prevented audiences from immersing themselves in the play in the hope that this would lead them to think critically about the events being presented. For example, in both Mother Courage and Her Children (1941) and The Threepenny Opera (1928) Brecht uses songs to draw the audience out of the bleak events being presented, and characters announce the status of the action as drama. Brecht’s ideas have been very influential on theatre to the present day. For example, in an English context one can see these ideas at work in a play such as John Osborne’s The Entertainer (1957), where social realism is interspersed with music-hall scenes that draw our attention to the artificiality of what is being presented and prevent us from being drawn into the action, or more recently in Carol Ann Duffy’s 2015 version of the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman which opens with a caretaker clearing the stage, and which has dramatic set pieces including a giant wind machine and a human garbage heap that draw attention to the theatricality of events. In terms of the former, audiences must confront the play’s political context regarding the Suez Crisis; in the latter they must engage with themes of poverty, capitalist exploitation and drug abuse. These strategies illustrate how literature can resist its ideological function, and actively engage the audience in a critical process.

For Frankfurt critics, popular art reinforces the ruling economic system, while it is difficult, individualistic and obscure art which has the power to draw audiences away from the current state of events and lead them to question the status quo. This difficult, experimental literature – the avant-garde – unsettles audiences. For this reason, the masses reject it because it forces them to confront their own oppression, but for those who engage with it it leads to political awakening. As we shall see in later chapters, recent work has questioned this somewhat singular reading of popular culture.

Post-Marxism From the 1980s in the United States and Britain there was a resurgence of Marxist thinking, dominated by Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism, Terry Eagleton’s rethinking of questions of ideology (1994), and the rise of cultural studies. Jameson’s landmark study Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) argues that postmodernism is not a difficult, avant-garde form, but rather the dominant cultural form of the late twentieth

century. For Eagleton, the radical function of avant-garde literature is overestimated in the work of the Frankfurt School, and his focus is instead on examining how literary texts of all kinds uphold and in fact produce dominant ideologies pertaining to the time in which they are written. For those working in cultural studies, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 14, the complex relationship between popular culture and audiences exceeds the negative influence perceived by Adorno and Horkheimer. This reappraisal of the Marxist tradition is referred to as post-Marxism. In his book Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (2000), Stuart Sim defines postMarxism as a theoretical approach that has ‘rescued’ Marxism from its decline as a global force in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and other communist regimes across Europe, and the depressing failure of socialism that these regimes represent. Theorists such as Ernesto Laclau (1935–2014) and Chantal Mouffe (1943– ) adapt Marxism to work with the frameworks of poststructuralism, feminism and postmodernism. So, while traditional Marxism was often in tension with these other positions, post-Marxism embodies a flexibility that makes it more relevant to the complex contemporary world. In post-Marxism, economic processes are no longer necessarily privileged, but instead become one aspect of a complex cultural matrix. With the decline of the working class and trade union power, post-Marxism attempts to examine the new ways in which economic difference functions: in particular, it needs to come to terms with a world in which the underclass are not the workers, but the mass unemployed. The overthrowing of capital will not be a revolution of the proletariat, but something quite different. And it will rely upon a unity that Marxism assumes, but which does not in fact exist – with the disenfranchised divided over questions of race, gender, religion, class, disability and nationality. At the same time, class mobility means that economic power is not necessarily aligned with social influence.

CULTURAL CAPITAL One way in which post-Marxist perspectives have developed beyond the centrality of economic power is via the concept of what we call cultural capital. The term was first used in 1977 by the French theorist Pierre

Bourdieu (1930–2002) in his essay ‘Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction’. By cultural capital, Bourdieu means all the elements, other than financial wealth, that confer social mobility. This can mean education, intelligence, knowledge of particular art forms, modes of dress, speech or physical appearance. Bourdieu’s work draws attention to how social advantage is not merely a matter of money, but also of particular modes of behaviour and knowledge. In the British class system, the operation of cultural capital can be seen in the insidious idea of the nouveau riche, or new money. This refers to a distinction made between those who have earned their money and those who have inherited it, with the former seen as lacking the same heritage as the latter. In practice, new money is judged not by declaration, but rather by a set of codes and behaviours which have been taught to those with old money, but might be absent in those who have earned their wealth. Alongside cultural capital runs social capital – the influence of networks and associations that give one access to sources of power. In this respect the idea of property is transformed – from something that is exchanged through monetary means to something that is the subject instead of a cultural exchange through knowledge and influence. Cultural capital complicates the Marxist position when it is evident that those who are on low incomes but maintain cultural capital can in fact hold more power than those with new money. For example, an individual who has earned their wealth and does not work as a result may have less cultural power than someone who has inherited cultural capital through family background but in fact may now have to work as a result of a decline in family fortune.

Case study: The Line of Beauty This reality is exposed to great effect in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty (2004), which we first encountered in Chapter 1. Set in the 1980s at the height of the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher who famously declared the end of class in Britain, the novel ironically reflects on this reality by highlighting the cultural

capital that maintains power and prevents social mobility. The novel is populated by a large number of upper-middle-class and upper-class Britons, who spend their time indulging in high-cultural musical and artistic pursuits. The entry of new money into their world is represented by the Lebanese businessman Bertrand Ouradi, whose son Wani is the lover of the novel’s central character, Nick. His status as an outsider in this world, despite his fortune, illustrates the closed world of British society – dependent not on economic value, but rather on cultural wealth: the ability to display certain behaviours which identify one as an ‘insider’. Wani’s father cannot access social capital because his lack of cultural capital prevents this. Much of the novel revolves around the ability of Nick to successfully ‘pass’ in the upper-middle-class world he falls into from his resolutely middle-class and suburban upbringing. Nick’s surname, Guest, testifies to this unstable position. Yet his education and knowledge of art, music and literature allow Nick to enter this world successfully in a way that is not available to Wani’s father, who is both ‘uncultured’ and an immigrant. Although Nick does not have money, he gains social capital through his cultural capital, and it is only when he is embroiled in a gay scandal that this advantage dissolves. In particular, the novel plays on this distinction through the notion of objectified cultural capital – Bourdieu’s terms for owning cultural objects. Wani’s father has the finances to create this, and the art magazine that Wani and Nick set up refers to this buying and selling of culture. Yet he cannot in Bourdieu’s terms ‘consume’ the artwork, because this is available only to those with a knowledge and education required to display understanding of it. In contrast, Nick cannot buy anything, but his knowledge, education and a certain understanding allow him to display necessary ownership. In this respect, the novel powerfully exposes the limitations of the Thatcherite discourse: an empty rhetoric which does little to address the complex nuances of power in Britain entrenched not by wealth but by unspoken judgements and prejudices.

THE POLITICS OF TASTE Novels such as Hollinghurst’s illuminate how a politics of association which aligns certain cultural knowledge with class continues to operate in society. Bourdieu himself considers this through writings on the concept of taste, which he articulates in a book written two years after his first discussion of cultural capital, entitled Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979). Bourdieu argues that it is those with cultural capital who determine what constitutes ‘taste’. The result of this is that certain forms continue to be privileged, and there is little space for new forms to be seen as

valuable. Cultural power is reproduced down through the generations as parents transmit their taste to their children, who also inherit their cultural capital, and therefore the ability to keep those privileged cultural texts in a place of superiority. If those without economic or cultural capital have their own ideas of good taste, these can never become dominant. Meanwhile, what those in positions of dominance see as good taste becomes naturalized so society ceases to question it. Bourdieu calls this an act of ‘symbolic violence’.

‘Nothing more clearly affirms one’s “class”, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music…there is no more “classificatory” practice than concert-going, or playing a “noble” instrument.’ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1979)

By having good taste and cultural capital, individuals are able to associate themselves with the social capital that allows for associations with others in positions of power. Through these social connections, opportunities for economic power arise. Taste ensures that power stays in the hands of those who already have it, and that those from outside these networks of power have only limited opportunities to acquire it, through a slow process of education and assimilation. The opportunity to acquire power outside of this, by changing the rules of taste, seems almost impossible. Although Bourdieu’s ideas of taste can seem out of step with the more open state of culture in contemporary society, nevertheless they still exist. For example, we can ask why it seems more sophisticated to attend an opera rather than a musical, a classical music concert rather than a pop concert, or to spend an evening at the ballet rather than at a night of Irish dancing. These are not matters of economics, for in fact the latter events may in some cases be more expensive to attend. Instead, the privilege given to the first events in each pair relies upon a cultivated sense that they indicate ‘good taste’. That

they are perceived as more exclusive and difficult to understand adds to the sense that they cannot easily be bought. In this regard, they mirror ideas of objectified capital, and the privilege given to cultural forms for which understanding is more elusive than purchase. We can translate this into our own experiences. Are we more impressed, for example, by a writer who references obscure, early literature, or by one who references popular culture? Do we value an artwork more if it is difficult to understand? Do we think it is more impressive to understand a difficult poem written in early modern English than an equally difficult rap lyric written in urban slang? All of these responses are informed by associations between taste and capital. Bourdieu’s ideas in this respect form an important addition to Marxist ideas of hegemony, in that they show one way that power is reproduced via culture. Taste encourages individuals to agree with cultural preferences as they already exist, and not to challenge these, risking exclusion. Taste therefore creates a system where it is important to concur with existing ideas about what is culturally desirable. At the same time, it is difficult to change one’s taste, because it is inherited by children from their parents during their early education and family experiences. Identification with traditionally lowcultural pursuits identifies an individual as inferior, while superiority is reinforced by the ability to successful consume high culture. This means the ideas of those in power are continually reinforced, with wider consequences for their social dominance.

Case study: working-class degeneracy While Marxist literary critics can examine how texts function in relation to ideology, we can also turn our attention to how, in literature, question of power and influence are played out in relation to economic circumstances. During the nineteenth century a strong discourse emerged surrounding the fear of intellectual decline in the wake of urbanization and an expanding working-class population. This fear of degeneracy – the thought that somehow, rather than making progress, the human population was in decline – filtered into literature of the period in texts such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1996). The stunted figure of Hyde is a representative of the physically deformed degenerate, overcoming the professional and middle-class Jekyll. In the twenty-first century the novelist Ian

McEwan resurrects the discourse of degeneracy in his 2005 narrative, Saturday, in which the central character, a middle-class brain surgeon named Henry Perowne, is forced to face an invasion of his home by a young, working-class man named Baxter, who suffers from the genetic condition Huntington’s disease. Baxter is literally degenerating, and his attack on Henry is presented as a coarse and violent event without reason. When Baxter enters Perowne’s home, his plans to assault his daughter, Daisy, are thwarted when she reads to Baxter – naked in the living room – Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1867). In this highly problematic scene, high literary culture and the liberal humanism that Arnold represents seemingly prevents the decline into brutality that Baxter symbolizes. While we must as readers be careful not to easily equate Perowne’s attitudes with those of McEwan, nevertheless such scenes ask important questions about how far our attitudes have moved from the associations between taste, cultural capital and class that Marxist critics have emphasized.

As literary critics, it is useful to identify how our own understanding of literature and its value is shaped by ideas about taste, cultural capital and mass culture. Our association to particular texts in this regard is never innocent, and we can question whether our ‘tastes’ are as independently decided as we might at first assume.

Fact check 1 Which cultural form for Bourdieu defined taste more than any other? a Television b Theatre c Dance d Music 2 What is Marx’s term for the middle class? a Aristocracy b Bourgeoisie c Proletariat d White-collar 3 Who are the proletariat? a Urban workers

b Farm labourers c Teachers d Office workers 4 What is Gramsci’s term for coercive state control? a Ideology b Hegemony c Oppression d Apparatus 5 What two elements make up society according to Marx? a Base and substructure b Base and structure c Base and superstructure d Basic and substratum 6 To whose art does the ‘line of beauty’ refer? a Henry James’s b William Hogarth’s c William Shakespeare’s d George Eliot’s 7 In Saturday, the poem Daisy recites is by which author? a William Shakespeare b Emily Brontë c Phillip Larkin d Matthew Arnold 8 The critical reappraisal of Marxism is referred to as a Postmodernism b Ecocriticism c Cultural studies d Post-Marxism 9 The idea of cultural capital was first used by which French philosopher? a Gilles Deleuze b Michel Foucault c Pierre Bourdieu d Giorgio Agamben

10 Carol Ann Duffy recently revived which play to include Brechtian elements? a The Entertainer b Love’s Labour’s Lost c Antigone d Everyman

Dig deeper Boucher, Geoff (2014), Understanding Marxism. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Bowman, Paul (2007), Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies Theory, Politics and Intervention. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eagleton, Terry (2013), Marxism and Literary Criticism. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Reed-Danahay, Deborah (2004), Locating Bourdieu. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

5 Structuralism Consider these two sentences: The cat sat on the mat. The cat sat on the rug. Now take a look at the following two sentences: The cat sat on the mat. On the mat sat the cat. What is the difference between the two sentences in each pair? We are drawn to say, no doubt, that in the first case the meaning is slightly different. A mat and a rug are not quite the same thing. In the second case, perhaps, we are tempted to say there is no difference. Yet we probably find that we think first of a cat in the first sentence, while in the second we think first of a mat. Although the overall image may be the same, something is – somehow – different. But how?

It is these questions of how language constructs meaning, and how words combine to create particular images and ideas, which preoccupy the school of criticism known as structuralism. Coming to prominence in the period after the Second World War, structuralism is in many ways a continuation of new critical ideas in that it promises an objective, scientific means of studying language. Its main proponents were the French anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss (1908–2009), the French philosopher Roland Barthes and the Russian formalist Roman Jakobson. Their ideas are strongly influenced by the earlier work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). In his Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure outlines an approach to the study of language as a synchronic rather than diachronic system; this means simply that he presents language as something that can be studied at a given point in time without the need to look at its development across history. Although later poststructuralist thinking challenged this idea, Saussure’s ideas were in keeping with dominant new and formalist approaches to literature. For this approach Saussure uses the term ‘semiology’, meaning ‘study of signs’. This is because he sees language as a system of signs and the study of how these signs work as the principal concern in the study of language.

‘Structuralism is not particularly interested in meaning per se, but rather in attempting to describe and understand the conventions and modes of signification which make it possible to “mean”.’ Phillip Rice and Patricia Waugh, Modern Literary Theory (1996)

Key idea Semiology is the study of signs.

The elements of language Saussure splits language into two elements. The first, langue, defines the structures of language based on a defined set of rules. The second, parole, defines the speech acts that take place as a result of the expression of language based on these rules. Semiology is concerned only with the former, because this is language as it exists outside the influence of individuals. Langue is the stable structure, which is given meaning because it is agreed by all who use it. Here, again, we can see parallels with new critical and formalist approaches: there is no place here for Romantic or aesthetic subjectivity but, rather, the sense of a stable system that can be decoded via analysis.

Key ideas Langue is the fixed and rule-bound structures of language. Parole means the acts of speech that express language.

Although the subjectivity of aestheticism is strikingly different from this position, what structuralism shares with this is the sense of language as a powerful force in the definition of reality. Saussure challenges the idea that words and the things they describe have any inherent connection with each other beyond what a community has agreed. If we return to our opening example, there is no reason why the English word for a small feline creature is ‘cat’, while the Spanish word is gate and the Turkish word is kedi. What this means is that the world does not create language, but rather language is the statement through which we create the world. Language is not simply a system of name-giving to a world that already exists but is, rather, integral to how that world exists. This echoes the aesthetic idea that literature is not a reflection of reality but a creator of that reality.

Spotlight: the mystery of snow

One way this relationship to language is often explained is through the myth of the Inuit word for snow. In 1911 the American anthropologist Franz Boas wrote that the Inuits had four different words for what in English is called snow. Then, in 1940, the American linguist Benjamin Whorf took up Boas’s claim and expanded it to seven words describing different types of snow. Thus began a process by which, over the years, critics gradually increased the number of Inuit words for snow. Whorf believed that what words we know dictate how we think: this is a theory called linguistic relativity that is not dissimilar from structuralist ideas about the relationship between language and reality. However, claims that there are many Inuit words for snow neglect the fact that, firstly, there is not one Inuit language and, secondly, that it does not function like English: it creates compound words from nouns and adjectives so, for example, what we would refer to as light snow becomes ‘lightsnow’. Even though the Inuit case is a myth, it symbolizes an important structuralist principle. Inuit words may be compound but the result is a much larger set of individual words than we would find in English. In a very subtle way, this means that Inuit reality is different. It is not a case of snow being particularly important to Inuits but that the compound structure of their language equally gives them endless words for trees, rain and any other noun. It does illustrate, however, that their sense of objects is linguistically different as a result.

The sign Saussure’s analysis of the sign introduces the terms ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. Saussure argues that every sign (actual thing) is made up of these two elements. The signifier is the word (or what Saussure calls sound-image) we use to refer to the thing, while the signified is the concept that we think of when that word is used. Together, these two things create the sign: the word and the thing.

Key ideas Sign is an actual object or thing, the meaning of which is a combination of the signifier and the signified. Signifier is the word used to name an actual object or thing.

Signified is the concept evoked by the signifier.

If we return again to our opening example, then ‘cat’ is an actual thing. This is the sign. It is made up of the signifier (the word ‘cat’) and the signified (the concept of a cat). The relationship between these two things is arbitrary, but agreed. So when we use the word ‘cat’, we all think of a small furry animal with four legs and a tail, which chases mice. We don’t think of an elephant! We have been taught to associate word and image. There is no reason why the word for this small animal could not be elephant, if we had communally agreed it, but as we haven’t the rule is fixed: we cannot as individuals change it. This basic understanding of how language functions has been central to the study of literature. Although the example here is simple, it represents a more complex linguistic system, where words create meanings. So in the study of literature we can consider why authors choose particular signs: why, for example, one might choose the word ‘mat’ rather than the word ‘rug’ in terms of the signified being evoked. Structuralism provides us with a framework for considering these choices, along what Saussure calls syntagmatic and associative relations. This is simply a way of saying that meaning does not occur through words alone, but rather through difference: through how one signifier is elected in favour of another, and how it is placed in relation to other signs. These relations are often described as axes, with Roman Jakobson’s word for the associative – paradigmatic – often favoured. The syntagmatic axis describes the ordering of words within a sentence, while the paradigmatic describes the choice of words against a range of possible alternatives. If we return one final time to our opening example, we can see how this works. First, let’s look at the syntagmatic axis:

• The cat sat on the mat. • On the mat the cat sat. Here, the signifiers are exactly the same. Meaning has been formed by the arrangement of words within the sentence. In this case, we might think the ordering along the syntagmatic axis has made little difference. If, however,

we were to do this to the sentence:

• The mat sat on the cat. we can see how the syntagmatic axis is very important. In literary analysis, we may come across ordering of words that appears unusual: in new critical terms the syntagmatic axis is one device that allows us to distinguish literary language from the everyday. As critics, we can examine the syntagmatic axis to consider how an author has manipulated word ordering to affect meaning. In the same way, we can look at the paradigmatic axis:

• The cat sat on the mat. • The cat sat on the rug. Structuralism asks us to consider why one word is favoured over another. The change can be quite profound (for example, if here we had substituted mat with dog) or, as in this case, it can be subtle. In literature, these subtle differences have particular significance: what concept, we can ask, is carried by a particular signifier and what does it do to shape the overall meaning of a sentence, and indeed an entire work?

Spotlight Even structuralism has its Romantic side. In Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes writes, ‘Take a bunch of roses; I use it to signify my passion. Do we have here, then, only a signifier and a signified, the roses and my passion?…But on the plane of analysis, we do have three terms; for these roses weighted with passion perfectly and correctly allow themselves to be decomposed into roses and passion: the former and the latter existed before uniting and forming this third object, which is the sign.’

In the 1950s and 1960s Saussure’s ideas were taken up by a number of critics, including Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson and Barthes. It is at this point that semiology becomes structuralism. Rooted in semiology’s ideas, structuralism – as the name implies – concerns itself with the underlying structures of language. Echoing formalism, structuralism sees no place for the author in

literary studies. Indeed, one of the most famous essays of this period, which bridges structuralist and poststructuralist concerns, is Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968).

‘The Death of the Author’ It seems fitting, given his subject matter, that you may find it difficult to locate Roland Barthes in your study of literary theory. At times, he is positioned as a structuralist; at others, he is defined very much as part of the later group of poststructuralist critics. At the fulcrum of this turn comes Barthes’s most famous essay, ‘The Death of the Author’. Although it is important to poststructuralist thinking, its central argument regarding the irrelevance of the author is very much aligned with the structuralist interest in language as a system to be read as outside the authorial intention. We know, of course, that this statement in itself is not new: it is rooted in the new critical idea of the intentional fallacy, which we examined in Chapter 3. For Barthes, the author is a modern construction, emerging out of a cult of individuality that gives the author supreme influence. This power is not neutral, but is aligned with political structures, particularly capitalism, which favour the individual over the community. The idea that one can trace the text back to an original meaning located in the author is a myth used to uphold this cultish individualism. It is here that Barthes departs from the new critical position. Whereas new critics remove the author in order to construct a pure close reading that will get them closer to the ‘true’ meaning of the text, for Barthes the author is to be avoided precisely because that ‘true’ meaning is an illusion. Rather than the author, meaning is constructed through a reader, although this reader, too, is a function of the text: an individual ‘without history, biography, psychology’. ‘The birth of the reader’, he writes, ‘must be at the cost of the death of the author.’ What emerges in this interpretive space is not the pure meaning of close reading, but rather multiple readings and meanings, the text becoming a ‘multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, bleed and clash’. Here we see the beginnings of poststructuralist ideas pertaining to the intertextuality of literature and the

instability of the sign.

‘A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.’ Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968)

Denotations and connotations In his Elements of Semiology (1967), Barthes explores how the literal meaning given to the signifier – what is called the denotation – is not the only possible signified. Rather, there is a second level of meanings – connotations – that are additional meanings agreed by the language community.

Key ideas Denotation is the literal, obvious meaning attached to a signifier. Connotation is the additional, hidden meanings given to a signifier, as agreed by communal understanding in specific contexts.

For example, if we describe a person as ‘unique’, we might mean that they are precious and individual. In a particular context, however, the same word gives connotations of being strange or difficult. The original, surface meaning has been added to by a further, almost contradictory meaning, and our understanding of what is being implied depends on our ability to read the speech act in which the word is placed. In literary studies, this means considering not simply the most obvious meaning of a word but also the connotation it holds. Decisions on the paradigmatic axis can often be made in order to imply particular connotations. For example, in her book Parentage

and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (1994), Anny Sadrin explores Dickens’s use of the word ‘governor’. Although the denotation for this word is master, since the early nineteenth century it had also taken on the secondary meaning of ‘father’. When a character in one of Dickens’s novels uses this word, it implies not merely a master but also a father, often in ironic terms (a harsh father, more like an employer) but also a kind of relationship surpassing the professional. Structuralism uses cases like this in order to draw our attention to the ways in which language is always laden with conceptual meaning. Whereas we may have been encouraged in our literary studies to look for obvious examples of ‘literary’ language such as metaphors or similes, structuralism dictates that all language choices are literary. Such ideas shape the schools of reader response theory and poststructuralism. As we examined in Chapter 3, for reader response critics like Stanley Fish the idea of language choice would be influential in considering how groups of readers construct meaning. For poststructuralism, the idea of the sign would become the basis for considering how the arbitrary nature of the relationship between signifier and signified creates a fundamental instability within language.

‘There is no such thing as ordinary language.’ Stanley Fish (1980)

Case study: John Agard’s ‘Half-Caste’ In his 1996 poem ‘Half-Caste’, the British Guyanese poet John Agard takes a term of racist abuse used to describe those of mixed racial backgrounds and considers the arbitrary nature of the relationship between signifier and signified: Explain yuself wha yu mean

when yu say half-caste yu mean when Picasso mix red an green is a half-caste canvas? The poem goes on to describe England’s mixture of rain and sunshine as half-caste weather, the music of Tchaikovsky written on a piano with black and white keys as half-caste symphonies. Through these alternative signifieds, Agard’s poem illustrates how the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary: half-caste could be used to refer to all these different images, and yet it is applied only to mixedrace individuals because of how a community of language users have agreed on its meaning. The denotative meaning of two colours combined is overwhelmed by a single connotation, produced in a twentieth-century setting and in the context of racist discourse. By associating the signifer with a host of beautiful and creative signifieds, Agard reclaims the term from its negative and racist connotations and replaces them with a series of positive connotations. In doing so, the sign is disrupted, interrogated and transformed. Yet, as structuralists would argue, this is a matter of a speech act – parole – rather than the langue, which is already fixed and determined. That Agard imagines the alternative taking root and destroying the existing meaning speaks to a possibility that for structuralism is utopian, although, as we shall see, poststructuralism celebrates precisely this kind of linguistic slippage.

Metaphor and metonymy Concern for the ordinary does not mean that structuralism is not interested in how specifically literary language works. Jakobson was one of the founding theorists of formalism, but is best known for his contributions to structuralist ideas about metaphor. In his essay ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasia Disturbance’ (1956), Jakobson argues that all language functions in terms of both metaphor and metonymy. The first of these relies upon similarity or substitution, whereas the latter relies upon spatial or temporal closeness. Metonymy in this regard produces equivalences, for example ‘suits’ to stand for business executives, although this should not be confused with synecdoche in which a part is used for the whole (such as ‘wheels’ to refer to a car). In contrast, metaphor uses spatially unconnected

terms, such as ‘pig’ to mean greedy. Sometimes such associations are not as simplistic as we might think, and pleasure in literature can come from the ambiguity that exists within such definitions. For example, in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), the haunting of the central house in the novel by a dead slave transforms the house into a kind of slave ship. To treat a house as a ship might be seen as a metaphoric substitution, where there is no connection between the two objects in space or time, but the status of both as dwellings is a kind of substitution. In this context it is in fact metonymic because of the inhabitants’ own experience of slavery, so that the transformation is an evocation of a recent past and a psychologically connected space.

Key ideas Metaphor is the use of a similar or connected word or image in place of the original word. Metonymy is the substitution of a word connected in space or time for the original thing meant. Synecdoche is the use of a part made to express the whole.

Narratology There is a deep connection between structuralism and what is called narratology. While structuralists are concerned with how language constructs meaning, narratologists are concerned with how language constructs meaning within stories. In particular, they are concerned with the patterns that exist across different stories. Again, the ideas developed here are similar to those developed by new critics: Jonathan Culler, for example, whose idea of plot and discourse we discussed in Chapter 2, is also a well-known narratologist, whose Structuralist Poetics (1975) and The Pursuit of Signs (1981) examine how communities of readers construct and follow particular ‘competences’ – understandings of sets of rules for reading – that limit and define the meaning of a text.

The idea that there is a distinction between the idea of a story and how events are ordered in its telling (the story’s discourse) is one shared by formalist and narratological thinking. Consider, for example, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), which begins not at the beginning of the events it recounts but midway through, or Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), all of which begin at the end of their stories. How, narratologists ask, do these orderings shape meaning, and how do they relate to the patterns exhibited in other stories? Structuralists want to know not so much what kind of literariness is at work but what the root meaning of that literariness is. This concern developed into a preoccupation with myth, as the origin of the founding structures of language. Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) argues that myth is a specific type of language with its own rules. While myth functions according to Saussure’s theory of the sign, Barthes suggests that it functions with an additional layer of meaning, which draws the audience away from the literal image and towards a greater, symbolic function. This study of myth is also the central focus of the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss. In his study of myth, Lévi-Strauss returns to formalist ideas about story. In particular, he draws on the work of Vladimir Propp (1895–1970), whose The Morphology of the Folktale was first published in Russian in 1928 but not translated into English until 1958 in the wake of structuralist activity. Propp outlines 31 key actions essential to the function of a folktale: he argues that each tale is constructed by the inclusion of elements from this list, although there is no ‘perfect’ tale that contains all of them. These elements detail the fortune of the hero, the role of the villain and the possible events, encounters and resolutions to the story. It exemplifies therefore the structuralist notion of the story that gathers meaning through its similarity to and difference from other stories in the same cycle. What makes something a folktale is the sharing of elements with other folktales, while the plot of the story comes in how these elements are uniquely selected and ordered. The stories contain an essential similarity, which is obscured by the uniqueness not of the elements but of the discourse.

Influenced by Propp’s work as well as the work of Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss in his 1958 work Structural Anthropology develops the idea of mythemes: the central elements shared between myths and passed down through cultures. There is no concern here, we should note, for questions of voice, style or linguistic innovation. While structuralism as a whole is concerned with word choice, early narratologists are concerned only with how plot choice might create a particular type of narrative. Lévi-Strauss also applies the idea of paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes to the workings of myth. He argues that myths have meaning only in relation to other myths in the same myth sequence. What Lévi-Strauss outlines has become influential in how we think about literature more generally – for example the reading of a Shakespeare play within the context of other Shakespeare plays, or the thought that one can only truly understand one of Wordsworth’s pastoral poems within the context of the entirety of the Lyrical Ballads (1798). This kind of theory has been particularly influential in the study of popular literatures, which often have more generalizable features than more complex literary fictions (something we will return to in the chapter on genre theory). Later structuralist narratologists, such as Tzvetan Todorov (1939–) and Gérard Genette (1930–), refine and complicate Propp’s somewhat simplistic structure. Todorov, for example, provides a more complex set of functions than Propp in his attempts to find a formula, not just for folktale but for narrative in general. Unlike Propp, he allows for the reordering of elements and for more complex embedding of plot elements, such as through the use of stories within stories. Genette, meanwhile, moves beyond the concern for function to consider how the tale is told, distinguishing between mimesis (the presentation of events as if they are happening, with action and direct speech) and diegesis (the narrator telling the story). In our own literary analysis, we can consider how a text moves between these two modes and for what purpose, giving emphasis to particular events through the slow unfolding of mimesis or reducing the impact of particular aspects of the story through diegesis.

Key ideas

Mimesis is the presentation of events in a narrative as they are happening. Diegesis is the reporting of events in a story by the narrator.

Consider, for example, how different a tale Jane Eyre (1847) might have been if Jane’s marriage to Rochester had been recounted rather than simply explained with the words ‘Reader, I married him,’ or, likewise, how the dramatic power of the opening of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), in which a drunken man sells his wife and child, would be so profoundly altered were that scene reported rather than mimetically unfolded. More recently, Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) begins with a three-pages-long description of the opening to a baseball game: a striking example of the slow unfolding of a single event. What, we might ask, is the effect of this indulgence in the process of mimesis?

Spotlight If you thought this chapter seemed rather dry and serious, then don’t forget the more humorous side of structuralism. It’s well known for its jokes: ‘I used to be a structuralist, but now I’m not Saussure.’

Fact check 1 What is the name for the study of signs? a Semiotics b Postmodernism c Aestheticism d Marxism 2 The signifier and signified together make up the what? a Word b Sign c Signifying d Language

3 What are the two axes on which meaning is constructed called? a Paradigmatic and opposite b Paradigmatic and vertical c Paradigmatic and syntagmatic d Paradigmatic and synthetic 4 What is the term for the use of a part to stand for the whole of something? a Metaphor b Symbol c Metonymy d Synecdoche 5 Barthes writes about what befalling the author? a Love b Poverty c Death d Hunger 6 Which theorist wrote Mythologies? a Barthes b Foucault c Deleuze d Freud 7 What is the reporting of events by the narrator called? a Narration b Diegesis c Narrative d Mimesis 8 Who developed the idea of mythemes? a Propp b Barthes c Lévi-Strauss d Saussure 9 Who wrote the poem ‘Half-Caste’? a Carol Ann Duffy b Grace Nichols

c John Agard d Benjamin Zephaniah 10 Who wrote The Morphology of the Folktale? a Propp b Barthes c Saussure d Lévi-Strauss

Dig deeper Culler, Jonathan (1986), Saussure. London: Fontana Press. Culler, Jonathan (1989), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge. Hawks, Terence (1991), Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Routledge. Fludernick, Monika (2009). An Introduction to Narratology. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Piaget, Jean (1976), Structuralism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

6 Psychoanalytic criticism In his 2002 debut novel, The Impressionist, British writer Hari Kunzru presents the narrative of a young mixed-race boy named Pran, growing up in colonial India. The novel sees Pran move through a series of experiences in which he is forced to enact a series of identity performances. Rather than uncovering his ‘true’ identity, Pran realizes that underneath the performances there is in fact nothing. He is in this respect the perfect impressionist, with no actual authentic character underlying his performance. Kunzru’s fiction is concerned with the individual notion of the self: our own internal sense of who we are. While identity and self are both shaped by similar influences, internal and external, Kunzru’s focus on the self is a particular one designed to critique the very idea of that self’s existence.

Identity and the self The question of what makes us who we are, and how our individual selfhood is constructed, is the main concern of the school of thought we call psychoanalytic theory. Unlike the other approaches discussed in this book, psychoanalysis is also a very real-world, practical field of study designed to treat mental health difficulties. The most dominant school of psychoanalysis is that developed by the Austrian Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in the early twentieth century. Freud believed that forces in our unconscious drive us to behave in certain ways: we are unaware of these thoughts but they direct how we feel and act. The individual represses many things, which remain within the unconscious: desires, traumas and tensions that we do not acknowledge in everyday life because we have mentally pushed them into a place where we are not aware of them. For Freud, it is these unconscious feelings that determine our behaviour, and understanding these impulses is central to our mental wellbeing.

Key idea The unconscious is the part of the mind of which the individual is unaware but which drives their desires and behaviours.

EGO, SUPEREGO, ID In order to explain these impulses, Freud divided the human mind into three parts: the ego, the super-ego and the id.

Key ideas The ego is one’s conscious self. The super-ego is the modifier of the id’s desires – one’s moral self. The id is one’s instincts.

Many of the id’s impulses, for Freud, relate to our sexual desires. This desire – or libido – contributes to our desire to live (what Freud calls the Eros drive) away from our desire for death (what Freud calls Thanatos, after the Greek word for death). Male power, equally, is related to this sexual desire, through what Freud calls the phallus: his word for the penis as a symbol of the masculine drive to dominate and control.

Spotlight Freud’s death may have been an early example of assisted suicide. In 1939 Freud was suffering terrible pain as a result of terminal, inoperable mouth cancer, caused by tobacco addiction. On 21 September, Freud grasped the hand of his friend and doctor, Max Schur, and asked him not to ‘torment me unnecessarily’. With the permission of Freud’s daughter, Schur injected Freud with a large dose of morphine. Freud slipped into a coma and never awoke.

A central place is given in Freudian thought to dreams, which are seen as the medium through which many of our repressed desires show themselves. A large amount of psychoanalytic therapy, therefore, is devoted to the discussion and interpretation of dreams.

‘Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.’ Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)

THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX At the centre of Freud’s concern for repressed sexual desires is his idea of the Oedipus complex. The complex is named after the Greek story of Oedipus. For Freud, this story is a reflection of a process in infant development, in which the male child must disassociate himself from his father and claim his own place as an individual, doing so by a process in which he desires to

murder his father and become the sexual partner of his mother. A notable post-Classical imagining of the Oedipus complex is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the play, Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, is challenged by the ghost of his father to avenge his murder at the hands of Hamlet’s uncle. Hamlet spends much of the play delaying his decision as to whether to do this, and psychoanalytic criticism argues that this is because Hamlet subconsciously wishes he was in his uncle’s place: he wants to kill his father so that he might enter into sexual relations with his mother.

Key idea The Oedipus complex is the process of male child development, in which the child identifies himself in competition with the father for the attentions of his mother.

There have been several notable criticisms of Freudian psychoanalysis, most notably from feminist, postcolonial and post-structuralist perspectives. In their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977), the French poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that the Freudian preoccupation with Oedipus reduces everything to myth, dangerously limiting the possible readings of the self. The consequences of this, they argue, are not simply the furthering of patriarchal ideologies but also racism and the furtherance of capitalist hegemony. Their alternative, schizoanalysis, influenced by Marxist ideas of production, is an anarchic and chaotic process that privileges disorder and disruption.

‘In place of the benevolent pseudo neutrality of the Oedipal analyst, who wants and understands only daddy and mommy, we must substitute a malevolent, an openly malevolent activity.’ Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977)

Feminist critics have also argued against Freud’s theories of female desire, in particular his suggestion that women are driven by their lack of the symbols of male power, what he terms ‘penis envy’. Kate Millett, in her highly influential feminist text Sexual Politics (1969), argues that Freud’s work has been central in supporting the continuance of patriarchal attitudes.

Spotlight By the end of his life Freud was depressed about the state of human existence, and particularly what he saw as society’s immorality. In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé written ten years before his death, Freud wrote, ‘In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.’

In 1913 Freud’s collaborator Carl Jung attempted to provide a female equivalent to the Oedipus complex. He named this the Electra complex, after the Greek mythological character Electra, who plotted with her brother to kill their mother and stepfather for the murder of their father. In Jung’s model, the girl child initially identifies with the mother, but rejects this association when she realizes she has no penis. Driven by penis envy, she then attaches to her father, and positions herself in competition with her mother.

Key idea The Electra complex is Jung’s female alternative to the Oedipus complex, in which the girl identifies with the mother but rejects this association in favour of her father, in her desire for the phallus.

Case study: ‘The Uncanny’ Not of all of Freud’s most influential theories relate explicitly to the sexual, however. In his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), Freud discusses his idea of what in German is called the unheimlich. This word translates literally as ‘unhomely’, and Freud plays on

this notion to describe the sensation of something unsettling and yet familiar: that which reminds us of home, but troubles us. Freud developed this idea from the earlier work of the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch (1867–1919). Freud returns to a story, ‘The Sandman’ (1816) by E.T. A. Hoffman, which Jentsch discusses. To consider easily your own experience of the uncanny, you might think about déjà-vu – the feeling we sometimes get that we have experienced a certain event before. Or perhaps you have had an occasion where you have gone to telephone someone and they were about to call you – or messaged the same thing to someone in the same moment. These coincidences can be seen to capture the uncanny – the sense we have of something simultaneously intimate and disturbing. For Freud, these events are connected to our psychology because they remind us, unconsciously, of our id. They stir up in us things we have denied or repressed, by reminding us that we are never really at home with ourselves – we are always on the edge of something threatening and disturbing. A useful literary example of the uncanny is the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). Widely discussed by literary critics, its meaning is open and difficult to definitely determine. This means that the entire reading experience becomes uncanny, in that readers feel they are in the familiar realm of a ghost story, yet unsettled because the resolution they have come to expect is seemingly absent. Alongside this, the story itself focuses on the experience of the uncanny. Set within a frame narrative in which the story is read as a fireside tale from a manuscript, the novella tells of the experiences of a young governess who goes to care for two young children but becomes convinced that forces of evil are at work in their lives. She sees the ghostly figures of a man and woman wandering on the estate, but no one else ever sees them. When the governess learns that her predecessor had a relationship with another employee, Peter Quint, she becomes convinced that it is the ghosts of these two individuals who haunt the children. At the end of the novella, the governess confronts the little girl, who denies seeing any ghost. In a dramatic final scene, the governess attempts to prevent the young boy from seeing a ghost she sees at the window. Holding him tightly, he dies in her arms. We never know whether the ghosts are real. Psychoanalytic readings, however, have focused on the sexual imagery in the novella and the governess’s preoccupation with the sexual fortunes of her predecessor. The ghosts in this context are not real, but rather a psychosis induced by her repressed sexuality. Their presence is uncanny because they come to the governess not in monstrous form but as ordinary human figures. Their identity as ghosts thus rests upon the governess’s sense of anxiety and unease, in the wake of something seemingly normal. In accordance with Freud’s theory, what is really unsettled here is the governess’s own sense of self – her repressed sexuality is awoken by these figures who remind her of the sexual relationship she has uncovered. The suggestion is that

what the governess sees is nothing – but her own sexual repression turns this into the strange and unusual.

THE DOUBLE In his essay, Freud also considers the uncanny nature of the ‘double’, a figure he had encountered in the work of his colleague, the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1884–1939). Literature is full of examples of uncanny doubles which play on the idea of the repressed. For example, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Mr Hyde is sometimes read as Dr Jekyll’s repressed homosexuality; Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) features a ghost that is the double of a dead child, representing the repressed trauma of slavery; and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) represents a double of a dead twin, symbolic of the central character Titiola’s alienation from her African heritage. These latter examples point to one of the dangers of the uncanny, which is that it can risk exoticizing what is different – it is important to remember that the uncanny is not merely something that seems to us to be strange or unfamiliar; it is rather what is familiar and unfamiliar: the homely that is unhomely. Equally, we must remember that such ideas are culturally specific, and what appears to us to be uncanny may in fact be merely the unknown. Oyeyemi in fact plays on this tension in her novel – we are never quite sure whether Titiola is a little girl or a ghost. Our unwillingness to accept her as the former asks us to question our tendency to imagine the non-Western world as an occult space, in keeping with long-held colonial attitudes. At the same time, however, being unwilling to see her as a ghost might also mean restricting our understanding to a narrow, Westernized world view. Rather than resolve this tension, Oyeyemi keeps readers within it, so that the novel experience becomes uncanny; and our own reading, something so familiar to us, becomes strange and uncertain.

Jungian psychoanalysis Although Freud tends to focus on the individual, one of his contemporaries, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, offers insight into how groups and

communities might share particular psychologies. This has particular relevance for thinking about literature and the ways in which audiences receive texts. Jung suggests that there exists what he calls a ‘collective unconscious’ – ideas and impulses inherited from our ancestors. While Freudian work stresses sexual impulses, Jungian approaches instead focus on this inherited unconscious. Sexuality thus becomes only one element in a much more complicated picture. Jung developed some of the key terms of psychoanalysis that continue to influence thinking about identity today, such as the idea of introverted and extroverted personality types. In relation to literary studies, his idea of archetypes is particularly useful. Jung used the word ‘archetype’ to describe the myths and images that reside in our unconscious. These are inherited and shape our understanding of the world. For example, the archetypal image of the mother suggests fertility, wisdom and comfort. Collectively, we share this understanding, and the presence of this archetype transmits these meanings across generations, changing under the influence of social and historical context. When one represents a mother, for example, one represents the values of the archetype, which those consuming the cultural image recognize. In literary criticism, the idea of the archetype is used to explain the key motifs (the hero, the villain) that define the nature of a literary work. As we shall discuss in Chapter 18, this is important for those critics who wish to classify works into different literary types.

Lacanian psychoanalysis Later psychoanalytic theory has been dominated by the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–81). Lacan is useful for literary studies because he sees the human mind as structured much like a language. He was very influenced by the structuralist movement discussed in the previous chapter, and in particular he takes up two key aspects of that movement: first, the idea that language is structured around the notion of difference (a mat is a mat because it is not a rug) and, second, the idea that the relationship between the signifier and the signified (the object and the concept) is always arbitrary and has no inherent meaning or logic. For Lacan, the unconscious operates in the same way: it makes random connections between symbols and

experiences, and makes meaning through oppositions.

Spotlight In 1963 Jacques Lacan founded the École freudienne de Paris (EFP), a school devoted to the training of analysts and the practice of psychoanalysis according to the Lacanian model. In 1980, a year before his death, however, he began a new school, the École de la cause freudienne (ECF), saying: ‘It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian.’

Lacan has his own theory of the development of the child. He argues that children exist originally in a state where they have no sense of self. This he describes as ‘the imaginary’. It is a state lasting until around six months of age, in which the child cannot distinguish between itself and the rest of the world or other people, looking only to the mother, which it idealizes. This then is followed by the ‘mirror stage’, so called because it describes the moment when a child first looks in the mirror and, according to Lacan, sees themselves for the first time as a separate person through their awareness of their own unique and distinct reflection. The child is now present in the world, and particularly the linguistic world. They find themselves, like everyone, trying to grasp the essence of things but limited by language, which is always insufficient. For this phase, Lacan uses the word ‘lack’. The mirror stage takes the child out of the imaginary and into what Lacan calls the symbolic. This means of existence is one where the child is now under the rule of the patriarchal logos, dictated to by ‘the father’, meaning not an actual father but rather the regime of patriarchal power of which he is a symbol.

‘The mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation – and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopaedic” form of its totality –

and to the finally donned armour of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure.’ Jacques Lacan, Écrits (1966)

Key idea The mirror stage is the point at which the child comes to recognize itself as a separate person, driven by looking at its reflection in a mirror and recognizing its uniqueness.

In L. M. Montgomery’s classic children’s novel Anne of Green Gables (1908), the orphan Anne has a very Lacanian experience. Confronted by her reflection, she is forced to abandon the fantasy she has constructed and to see herself as unique: ‘I can see my reflection in that splendid big mirror hanging on the wall. I am tall and regal, clad in a gown of trailing white lace, with a pearl cross on my breast and pearls in my hair. My hair is of midnight darkness and my skin is a clear ivory pallor. My name is the Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald. No, it isn't – I can't make that seem real.’ She danced up to the little looking-glass and peered into it. Her pointed freckled face and solemn gray eyes peered back at her. ‘You’re only Anne of Green Gables,’ she said earnestly, ‘and I see you, just as you are looking now, whenever I try to imagine I'm the Lady Cordelia.’ This scene, ironically, comes from the chapter ‘Anne’s Bringing-up Is Begun’. Often, characters see not themselves in the mirror, but another: a displaced version that offers us in tangible form what it means to realize one’s place as an individual in relation to others and particularly in relation to authority. Other examples are when Jane looks into the mirror in the attic in Jane Eyre (1847) and is confronted by Bertha Mason, pulling her out of her fantasy and into the stark reality of sexual relations and patriarchal law, and when Dorothy in Ozma of Oz (1907) looks into the magic mirror and sees not

herself but Ozma, the princess who signifies the adult rule of law that she, too, must grapple with. Of course, we can think that there may be figurative mirrors, too: encounters with others and with situations that also function to prompt the kind of awareness Lacan speaks of.

Psychoanalysis and literature The literary inspirations in Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and his theory of the uncanny illustrate how central literature is to his thinking, as a vehicle through which essential truths about the state of the human mind are conveyed. One school of psychoanalytic literary criticism aims to identify subconscious elements in the text that reveal the psychology of the author and/or the society in which they write. The former is problematic when considered in relation to formalist theories, which suggest that we can never access the author’s meaning. This is made more complicated by the fact that what the psychoanalytic critic aims to uncover is the unconscious – so not what the author may have thought they intended but what they unintentionally worked into the text. That we might be able to ‘know’ this is still contentious, however. The idea that the author might unconsciously reveal elements about a society is perhaps less problematic, although it does still rely on the assumption that we can uncover such meanings. Another way to make use of psychoanalysis is to examine how its theories resonate with or are, indeed, even challenged by literary texts. In this approach, whether the author was intentionally trying to comment on states of mind or unconsciously doing so becomes irrelevant. In order to do this, the critic looks for symbolism and imagery in the text that might speak to unconscious motives. They identify archetypes that might echo Jungian ideas. And they analyse relationships in comparison to Freudian and Lacanian accounts of subjects such as desire, death and the development of the infant.

ABJECTION While the applications of psychoanalytic theory are multiple, one with particular use to literary scholars in the idea of the ‘abject’, meaning that which is ‘cast off’ or rejected. Abjection, then, is a process by which what is

deemed unsuccessful or attractive is removed. The term originates in the work of the French critic Julia Kristeva (1941– ), who was influenced by both Freud’s and Jung’s philosophies. For Kristeva, the abject is that which is unclean or monstrous, and in such a form disturbs and unsettles us. The abject in this respect is what is rejected by society but it is also that which has the power to force change, by pushing people beyond their comfort. Kristeva was influenced by psychoanalysis in her belief that the abject is a part of ourselves that we have come to separate off or deny. So the abject is not something we are unfamiliar with, but rather something we have repressed and forced out. What is abject is therefore not really unclean, but it is made to seem so because it is socially unacceptable. We can think in these terms, for example, about prejudices against homosexuality in the earlier part of the twentieth century and before. These prejudices represented homosexuality as dirty and unclean even though of course it is not. The abjection of homosexuality thus stems not from its inherent dirtiness but, rather, from its social unacceptability, which led to it being falsely represented as unclean. Moreover, its abjection represents the heterosexual subject’s fear of their own homosexual feelings. So it is not something entirely separate from the subject, but something the subject has repressed. Read through Freud’s theory, Kristeva’s own idea of the abject is the maternal – the mother figure and her influence that is a part of all subjects, but which is frequently denied in the wake of patriarchal culture.

Key idea Abjection is the denied part of ourselves that is rejected by society and considered monstrous.

Kristeva’s use of Freud indicates the particular centrality of psychoanalysis to feminist poetics. For example, Lacan’s concept of jouissance – a term that means ‘enjoyment’, of both rights and sexual pleasure – has been taken up by the French feminist Hélène Cixous (1937– ).

Key idea Jouissance means the fulfilment of intellectual delight or sexual pleasure.

Lacan describes jouissance as a pleasure that exists beyond socially sanctioned pleasure – what he calls the pleasure principle. It represents pleasure beyond limits, although for Lacan this transgressive potential results only in pain. It symbolizes the elusive and damaging promise of unfulfilled desire – what Lacan calls object petit a. For Lacan, jouissance is masculine, and Cixous’s work represents a feminist attempt to restore jouissance to the female subject, but also to question the association between transgression and suffering.

Fact check 1 What does Freud call the thoughts that determine our desires? a The unconscious b The conscious c The id d The superego 2 What does Freud call the part of the human mind that modifies our desires and morals? a The conscious b The id c The superego d The ego 3 What story is the basis for Freud’s discussion of the uncanny? a ‘The Sandman’ b ‘The Iceman’ c ‘The Sandcastle’ d ‘The Boat’

4 Who wrote The Turn of the Screw? a James Henry b Henry James c James Smith d Henry Falconer 5 What Shakespeare play illustrates Freud’s Oedipus complex? a Macbeth b Romeo and Juliet c King Lear d Hamlet 6 Who developed the idea of abjection? a Freud b Jung c Kristeva d Deleuze and Guattari 7 Which feminist critic criticizes Freud? a Kate Millet b Julia Kristeva c Elizabeth Grosz d Rosi Braidotti 8 Which figure from mythology does Jung use for the female equivalent to the Oedipus complex? a Persephone b Electra c Helen d Ariel 9 What is Lacan’s name for the stage at which a child recognizes its individuality? a Reflection b Mother c Oedipus d Mirror 10 What is the French term for the fulfilment of sexual pleasure? a Object petit a

b Amour c Jouissance d Desire

Dig deeper Bowie, Malcolm (1997), Lacan. Waukegan: Fontana Press. Easthope, Anthony (2000), The Unconscious. London: Routledge. Kofman, Sarah (1991), Freud and Fiction. London: Blackwell. Thurschwell, Pamela (2001), Sigmund Freud. London: Routledge.

7 Modernism and surrealism What does it mean to be modern? The word, first recorded in 1585, signifies what belongs to present or recent times. Of course, this meaning contains the essence of the modern’s paradox: what is defined as new in a particular moment must always, eventually, with the passage of time become oldfashioned or obsolete. Modern, then, is something that exists only for a particular moment, and fleetingly. As a character in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895) declares, ‘Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow oldfashioned quite suddenly.’ For the writers and artists of the early twentieth century, time was moving at a new pace, and newness seemed everywhere. What could capture this mood better, then, that the idea of the modern? It is in this context that modernism was born.

As a defining moment, the First World War of 1914–18 fuelled the sense of a shift in thinking: the massive environmental destruction, loss of life, mechanization of combat and economic downturn caused by the war encouraged writers and artists to argue that a new way of representing reality was needed. In this new, urbanized, chaotic world, the old grand narratives of the past such as religion (already shaken by Darwin’s ideas), history and government seemed unreliable. While modernist writers mourned the loss of the stable orders of the past, they created vivid prose to capture the fragmented and disordered state of twentieth-century life. A close relationship can be identified between modernism and the cultural movement known as surrealism. Like modernism, surrealism was an experimental movement of both the visual and written arts that aimed to unleash the creative potential of the unconscious mind.

High modernism In the period 1910 to 1930 that constituted the era most closely associated with modernism – what we call ‘high modernism’ – no writer or intellectual would have identified themselves as a ‘modernist’. Applied retrospectively, however, the term has come to define a school of artists and thinkers who combined specific ideas about society and art with a range of experimental aesthetic practices (what you might see referred to as ‘avant-garde’).

Key idea High modernism is associated with intense formal experimentation in literature during the period 1910–30.

Modernism was expressed through both prose and poetry, and in both cases it promised the advent of a new mode of expression. In poetry, modernism took on the free verse (vers libre) already developing in poetry from the end of the nineteenth century, as poets such as Gerald Manley Hopkins with his development of ‘sprung rhythm’ moved away from traditional rhyme and

metre. Although free verse abandons many of the rules of poetry, especially rhyme, it often keeps some adherence to the idea of the poetic line and the important of rhythm. It is thus often not a complete dismissal of existing formal structures, but represents freeness with them.

‘No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.’ T. S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942)

IMAGISM In the early modernist period, the most notable figure in these terms was the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972). Pound’s poetry was, to begin with, in the form of imagist works, which always employed free verse. The most famous of these poems, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913), is a manipulation of the Japanese haiku form, but with the poem’s title serving as the first line. In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Imagism owes much to symbolism (discussed in Chapter 1), in that it strives for a concrete image to represent a given thought. Its aim is clarity in expression and communication. In Pound’s poem we see this in the final line, where he strives to give a single image (the petals, on a wet, black branch) to the sense of a mass of faces in an urban crowd. This relates to what Pound defined as the ideogrammatic method – the use of contrasting concrete images to express an abstraction. Pound called these images ‘luminous details’: specific, tangible images that shine light on an abstract idea. Here, the petals are juxtaposed with the black bough: the beauty of nature against a darkness that suggests death; the lightness of the flower against the heaviness of the branch. Together, these images create the experience of the abstract idea that is seeing faces in a crowd.

Key idea Imagism is a poetic technique focused on capturing thoughts in a single image.

VORTICISM ‘In a Station of the Metro’ also resonates with art movements that were developing around the same period, in particular vorticism, which was established in London by the artist Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). In 1913 Pound gave the group its name. The vorticists aimed to create art that reflected the complex, swirling experience of modern urban life – hence their name. They produced a magazine, Blast, in which they published their manifesto, to which Pound was a signatory. Pound’s early poems reflect the group’s focus on urban life and their desire to disrupt Romantic images with the striking and cutting reality of the present. Vorticism had much in common with the Italian futurist movement, whose own manifesto, published by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, also presented itself as a violent engagement with technology and urban reality. One essential difference, however, was (as the name implies) the vorticist preoccupation with movement.

Key idea Vorticism was an artistic movement, established in London in 1913, directed towards capturing the chaotic nature of modern life.

MODERNIST POETRY AND PROSE These early poetic influences on modernist thinking can be seen in the later work of poets including H. D. (Hilda Doolittle; 1886–1961) and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). The sparse form of Pound’s early works would give way, however, to his epic poems such as ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (1920) and The Cantos (1954), in which the same manipulation of form and symbolism

would come alongside dense classical reference, complex use of voice and elusive meanings. These later poems have more in common with what has become the defining modernist poem, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Eliot’s poem embodies the modernist concern with free verse, but also its strong use of imagery and classical reference. Alongside this, its themes of loss, urban decay and fragmentation are those that have come to define modernism’s thematic concerns. Because of its fragmented narrative, it is often difficult to identify the subject of Eliot’s poem, and voices are frequently unidentified. The subject and the world around them at times appear to blur. This blurring, in which the stable, identifiable subject seems to wither away, is also the defining formal characteristic of modernist prose. The main modernist prose writers we think of today were James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson. Not all these writers use the same form, but they all include elements of what is called stream of consciousness: the interior thoughts of characters presented without interruption. These ideas can at first glance seem unrelated, but further examination reveals a string of associations that hold the ideas together. For example, in the passage below from the opening of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), we are taken from the idea of a beach, to sea imagery (a lark, a plunge), to the memory of an earlier sea view, to an old friend: For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh

said, ‘Musing among the vegetables?’– was that it? – ‘I prefer men to cauliflowers’ – was that it? There are two main types of stream-of-consciousness narrative: free direct discourse (also called interior monologue) and free indirect discourse. In free direct discourse, we receive the thoughts of a character, unmediated by any kind of framing. This is a first-person voice. It is different from a realist firstperson voice in that we are given the voices of the characters without any kind of filtering. Sentences can be disjointed: ideas do not necessarily follow one from another in the way we might expect. This is the writing we often think of when we think of modernism. It is difficult to read because we have to work hard to uncover the meaning. The most famous example of free indirect discourse is the conclusion to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in which the character Molly Bloom gives an unmediated monologue. It ends with: O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Spotlight The extract here from Ulysses is 167 words long, but the passage from which it comes stretches to more than 24,000 words. Those 24,000 words are one single sentence – one single sentence without any punctuation!

Free indirect discourse is a more filtered version of the same stream of consciousness, framed by a third-person narrator who tells us who is speaking. Whereas in a realist narrative we would have speech marks, in free indirect discourse speech and thoughts are amalgamated into the third-person narrative. Elsewhere in Ulysses, Joyce uses this form: He kicked open the crazy door for the jakes. Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for a funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he peered through a chink up at the nextdoor window. The king was in his courthouse. In this passage, the first sentence is traditional third-person description. The second sentence is the point of view of the character. It is not the narrator’s mediated report of that thought, but the thought itself. The former would read differently: He kicked open the crazy door for the jakes. He thought that he’d better be careful, because he didn’t want to get his trousers dirty before the funeral. One of the difficulties of free indirect discourse compared to free direct discourse is that it is not always clear when we are getting the unmediated thoughts of the character. One of the useful things we can do to locate free indirect discourse is to look at tense. Although the events here are reported, so given in the past tense, the thought is in the present tense. It is in the immediate moment, in the same way as the present tense of Molly’s monologue. Free indirect discourse is not entirely a modernist form. Consider, for example, the passage below from Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1816): Lady Russell […] had a cultivated mind, and was, generally speaking, rational and consistent; but she had prejudices on the side of ancestry: she had a value for rank and consequence, which blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them. Herself the widow of only a knight,

she gave the dignity of a baronet all its due; and Sir Walter, independent of his claims as an old acquaintance, an attentive neighbour, an obliging landlord, the husband of her very dear friend, the father of Anne and her sisters, was, as being Sir Walter, in her apprehension entitled to a great deal of compassion and consideration under his present difficulties. They must retrench; that did not admit of a doubt. But she was very anxious to have it done with the least possible pain to him and Elizabeth. This passage is traditional third-person narration apart from one line, highlighted in bold above, in which we are given not reported feelings but the direct feelings of the character from their own head, inserted into the narrator’s words. Austen used this technique frequently, to bring her readers closer to her characters and their thoughts and feelings.

Key ideas Stream of consciousness is a narrative form in which the prose follows mental associations made by the character. Free direct discourse, also called interior monologue, is a mode of narration that gives the direct thoughts of the characters without an overseeing narrator. Free indirect discourse is a mode of narration in which the thoughts of characters are filtered through a narrator.

It is this ‘closeness’ that modernist writers were so keen to expand upon. They desired to give the reader direct access into the thoughts and feelings of their characters, to get closer to the ‘truth’ of human existence. For this reason, it is not necessarily helpful to see modernism as the antithesis of realism. For modernists, stream of consciousness is a way of getting closer to reality as it is experienced – a more authentic way of representing our complex engagement with the world, rather than a departure from it.

‘For the Novel written in England modernism was never so much in opposition to realism as in fact instantiating a new realism, with detailed psychological description replacing external social observation.’ Steven Earnshaw, ‘Literature and Culture in Modern Britain’ (2000)

MODERNIST THINKING ABOUT TIME Both prose and poetry also share a modernist way of thinking about time quite different from that espoused via earlier literature. Influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and in particular his idea of duration, modernism rejects the straightforward idea of a linear timeline, instead moving between past, present and future. For Bergson, the regular, mechanical clock time is contrasted to the internal, subjective time of the individual, which does not move in a linear direction. For example, in Mrs Dalloway we move seamlessly from the central character Clarissa’s adult life in London to scenes from her adolescence, without any introduction to the change in time frame. This movement reflects the modernist sense that reality is not the physical world in front of us but, rather, the world in combination with our own consciousness and perception, which might move us quite easily via memory from that present moment to an earlier one, or via imagination from that present to the future. The free form of stream of consciousness allows for such associations to unravel, unhindered by narrative framing or by the need for a continual reference to a stable external reality. So Clarissa can be, simultaneously, in her house in London, and in her childhood home.

Surrealism By the 1920s, neither imagism nor vorticism was impressing itself upon modernist thinking. Instead, a close relationship can be identified between modernism and the cultural movement known as surrealism. The word ‘surrealist’ was first used in 1903 by the French poet and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), but the movement itself was established after the First World War by the French writers André Breton (1896–1966), Louis Aragon (1897–1982) and Philippe Soupault (1897–1990). Breton had

been involved in the Dada movement, an international left-wing, pacifist artists’ collective which had developed during the First World War. Together, the three men started the literary journal Littérature and began to experiment with what they called automatic writing. This practice was heavily influenced by Breton’s interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and the working of the unconscious. It involves attempting to create art without conscious control of the process or content. This, too, was influenced by Dadaism, which in its manifesto, written by Tristan Tzara in 1920, gave instructions for the writing process. In the same year as the Dada manifesto, Breton and Soupault published the first work of literary surrealism – a novel called The Magnetic Fields (1920), which was a piece of automatic writing. As one might expect, it is difficult to make connections between sentences or to draw a conclusive meaning from the text.

Spotlight You can try automatic writing for yourself. On a piece of paper, write every word that comes into your head. The task here is not to leave anything out. Rather than the normal process of attempting to create a progression between sentences, you will find instead that you often have random words that are disconnected from one another. It’s actually more difficult than you might think to stop yourself from filtering what you write.

In 1924 Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto. A powerful critique of the limitations of realist prose, it celebrates marvellous narratives, and includes Breton’s definition of surrealist writing practice. The manifesto includes a rather amusing list of other writers whom Breton saw as embodying surrealist form. This includes the declaration that ‘Swift is surrealist in malice’ and ‘Sade is surrealist in sadism’.

‘SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’ André Breton, Surrealist Manifesto (1924)

Although automatic writing is quite distinct from stream of consciousness, we can see in this context how modernist writing in the 1920s, as it became more non-linear, was influenced by these wider artistic practices and contained strong surrealist elements. In particular, the work of novelists such as Woolf and Joyce, although not automatic, can be seen as attempts to engage with the same unfiltered thoughts that interested the surrealists. This is most evident in the free direct discourse that Joyce employs in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1939).

When was/is modernism? While modernism is often associated with the period from 1910 to 1930, it encompasses a set of literary techniques that were used both before and after this period. In drama, modernism was in fact at its height in the 1950s, with the work in particular of the playwright Samuel Beckett (1906–89). Beckett’s Theatre of the Absurd is the dramatic manifestation of modernist and surrealist thinking. In literature, equally, texts before 1910 embody modernist style and surrealist imagery, for example Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1899), which use of stream of consciousness and surrealist symbolism. In the twenty-first century, the writer Zadie Smith (1975– ) is often identified as a modernist writer, particularly in her novel NW (2012).

Case study: A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing Consider the following novel extract:

See here this party. It’s a mad. I had never been. I have only seen and thought films were like that. Music hurting on the innards. Door. Lungs. People pouring noise out front back of this old house. Some glasses beakers. I have cans. In my bag. Where do I? When do you think this was written? It holds all the hallmarks of modernist prose. It’s what we call free direct discourse stream of consciousness. It is a perfect example of the modernist idea of reality – the truth of the complex, non-linear workings of the human mind, which are in stark contrast to the ordered language we often use to shape that vision of reality. This isn’t a piece of writing from the high modernist period, however. It’s an extract from Eimear McBride’s 2013 novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Publishers famously rejected the manuscript for nine years before it was finally accepted, as being too ‘difficult’. It is written entirely in this kind of ebullient but often inaccessible prose and it has been compared, not to more moderate high-modernist texts, but to that most difficult of works, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. In interview, McBride has said that she saw her novel as attempting to open again a door that Finnegans Wake had shut, a book so extreme that it was essentially declaring the end of high modernism – that there was nothing left to explore.

Does this prose make the novel modernist? Does it open the door again, as McBride desires? This is a difficult question to answer. The strategies used by McBride, and also to a much lesser degree by writers like Smith, run alongside postmodernism. They are certainly avant-garde, but are they modernist? While McBride and Smith may use modernist strategies, this does not necessarily mean that their social and political concerns, or even their ideas of selfhood, mirror those of modernist thinkers. The modernist period – in contrast to simply modernist style – refers to the alignment of both these ideas and aesthetic practices. This is one other reason why modernism is not the straightforward opposite of realism: whereas realism is an aesthetic, a formal style, modernism is both this and a particular set of attitudes conveyed through that style. The modernist movement, unlike postmodernism, has not produced a reading practice. While one might say that one is a postmodern critic, one is unlikely to say that one is a modern critic. Modernism, then, is something we read for, rather than something we do. As I explained in the Introduction, it is the

example of an aesthetic and a movement rather than a school of criticism. That said, modernism did produce critics whose contributions to other fields of literary theory are of great significance – for example, T. S. Eliot’s contribution to new criticism and Woolf’s role in the feminist movement. Although these engagements are very different, they illustrate that the intellectual climate of modernism was the centre for the production of critical thought, even though that thought did not take one defined character. You will find these engagements discussed in other chapters of this book.

Fact check 1 Which is the period usually defined as that of high modernism? a 1900–1950 b 1910–30 c 1910–40 d 1940–60 2 The imagist movement is associated most with which poet? a H. D. b Dorothy Richardson c T. S. Eliot d Ezra Pound 3 Who wrote The Waste Land? a T. S. Eliot b James Joyce c Ezra Pound d D. H. Lawrence 4 Which novelist wrote Mrs Dalloway? a James Joyce b Virginia Woolf c Katherine Mansfield d Joseph Conrad 5 Wyndham Lewis established which movement?

a b c d

Surrealism Imagism Vorticism Modernism

6 What other term describes free direct discourse? a Modernism b Stream of consciousness c Automatic writing d Interior monologue 7 What is the mode of writing used by surrealism called? a Stream of consciousness b Automatic writing c Interior monologue d Realism 8 The final monologue at the end of Ulysses is spoken by which character? a Molly Bloom b Clarissa Dalloway c Sally Seaton d Jane Eyre 9 To what other novel has A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing been compared? a Ulysses b Mrs Dalloway c NW d Finnegans Wake 10 With what decade is Beckett’s modernist theatre most associated? a The 1920s b The 1930s c The 1940s d The 1950s

Dig deeper

Bradley, Fiona (1997), Surrealism. London: Tate Gallery. Childs, Peter (2000), Modernism. London: Routledge. Ross, Stephen, ed. (2009), Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Whitworth, Michael (2007), Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell.

8 Existentialism What does it mean to exist? And what is the purpose of that existence? Although this question might seem like an age-old one, it was only in the romantic period that the idea of the individual self that we are familiar with today became fully developed. This self was in part created through the idea of writing – as more people learned how to read and write, they began to document their experiences, in letters and diaries, and through these to express themselves. The notion of ‘I’ for the first time became central to thinking about the world. Given the relationship between the development of selfhood and writing, literary theory is also concerned for our place in the world and our expression of individual selfhood. Existentialism asks questions about where identity originates. Do we have control over our destinies? Where does our character come from? What must we do to be good citizens? In asking these powerful and fundamental questions, it has been highly influential on movements concerned with identity politics such as feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory, while also shaping theories concerned with selfhood such as posthumanism, and those interested in moral behaviour, such as ethical criticism.

Life and truth The first existentialist philosopher is often seen to be the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), although he never described himself in such terms. Unlike the work of later existentialists who were often atheists, Kierkegaard’s work is rooted in Christianity. He kept a number of journals in which he described what was central to his thinking, which was that the purpose of life is to uncover its truth – in a sense, that the purpose is to uncover purpose. His focus on what existence means for the individual became the central theme of later existentialist inquiry. Kierkegaard’s concerns were developed by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), a German philosopher who had been the student of Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938). Husserl was the leading philosopher of phenomenology, a movement principally interested in how the external world is perceived and experienced by human subjects. Husserl’s interest in individual experience – what we call subjectivity – has been greatly influential on both poststructuralism and reader response theory. For Husserl’s student Heidegger, however, it prompted an interest in the nature of being – what it means to exist and how the individual defines this.

Key ideas Phenomenology is the study of how humans experience the world. Subjectivity is the thoughts of the individual, shaped by their own internal ideas rather than by external influences.

‘“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” That is the question. Presumably it is no arbitrary question. “Why are there beings at all instead

of nothing?”– this is obviously the first of all questions.’ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argues that the experience of human beings – what he calls Dasein – is dominated by ‘facticity’: the way in which individuals find themselves in relationships and environments that define for them the nature of the world. It is this experience that constitutes being. It is through engagement with the world that we come to define ourselves. At the same time, however, the nature of this world – full of problems, distractions and diversions – takes us away from our ‘authentic’ self as we become caught up in everyday life. The result of this awareness is a depressing state for the individual, in which they experience loss and an unavoidable emptiness, which results in them becoming increasingly aware of their own death. In this experience, time is central. Influenced by modernist ideas of time, Heidegger stresses that the individual’s subjective, particular experience of past, present and future is crucial to how one sees one’s own identity.

Nietzsche’s Übermensch Alongside Heidegger, the German nineteenth-century philosopher Frederic Nietzsche (1844–1900) had also written about the self. He is associated with a philosophy known as nihilism, the idea that life is without purpose. Nietzsche argues that society can flourish only if nihilism is overcome. The capability of the individual to resist nihilism comes for Nietzsche in the ability to transcend the limitations of ordinary existence. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) Nietzsche creates a central character, Zarathustra, who argues that society must strive to create the Übermensch (‘superhuman’). Rejecting the supernatural, the Übermensch is strongly connected to the here and now of the physical world, and through this resists the escapism that others engage in to relieve themselves from the fears and distractions of the meaningless, nihilistic existence that threatens society in the wake of the death of God. In God’s absence, it is the superhuman who creates the new values that give society structure.

Spotlight In Germany during the 1930s and 1940s Hitler and the Nazis used the idea of the superhuman to support their fascist ideology. The superhuman reinforced their ideas about promoting a pure Ayran race – the fascists saw the superman as the human that would be created through selective breeding. This racial notion of the superhuman is not present in Nietzsche’s original philosophy.

For existentialists, the superhuman represents the possibility of absolute freedom. The superhuman is not constrained by external rules or dictates – it creates them. It is a creative, expressive free self at the height of its human capabilities.

Key idea Übermensch is defined by Nietzsche as a superhuman.

Authenticity and bad faith The questions existentialism asks, of how to be true to one’s self and uncover authentic being in the wake of nihilistic existence, are those taken up by thinkers after the Second World War, including the French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). Although earlier thinkers espoused ideas we may view as existentialist, Sartre was the first philosopher to use the term ‘existentialist’ to describe his way of thinking. A Marxist, Sartre was concerned with how conformity limits human freedom, and how one might break out of these structures to fully develop one’s humanity. De Beauvoir, meanwhile, fused existentialist thinking with feminist philosophy. Her classic feminist text, The Second Sex (1949), is driven by existentialist ideas concerning freedom and the ways in which patriarchy limits women’s abilities to express themselves. In this way, her work illustrates the political implications of existentialism for marginalized

identities.

Spotlight De Beauvoir and Sartre were in an ‘open’ relationship with each other. This was considered scandalous in the 1920s when their relationship began. It lasted, however, until Sartre’s death: a total of 51 years.

Thinkers such as Sartre and de Beauvoir were particularly concerned for the expression of identity to be authentic. To be authentic is an idea we are familiar with, in that it has passed into common usage. If we are authentic, we are being our ‘true self’ rather than performing an identity. To have ‘authentic Italian food’ is to eat food that is true to the cuisine of Italy. Implied in the notion of authenticity is a value judgement – it is better to be authentic. ‘Fake’ in this context is resolutely negative: it means to be disingenuous; it means to be false and therefore unreliable; it means to be untrustworthy. For existentialists, the idea of authenticity corresponds to this general usage: it means to be true to one’s internal sense of self in how one behaves. Existentialism considers authenticity to be something with which the individual must struggle in relation to outside influences. These external pressures encourage the individual to behave in ways that are not in accordance with oneself. In existentialist terms they are called ‘facticity’, which is defined as all the concrete frameworks, such as the environment, education, social interactions, even birth and the awareness of death, which limit and constrain human freedom. In this there is implicitly an ethical relation – not being true to oneself represents dishonesty. Both Sartre and de Beauvoir refer to this dishonesty as being ‘bad faith’ – an act where individuals give up their freedom and adopt false values to conform to society’s ideals. When one acts in bad faith one denies one’s freedom. In this moment, one is simultaneously both aware of one’s freedom (because denying it) and yet not aware of one’s freedom (because repressing it). This reflects the fact that each individual has for Sartre two states of consciousness – a reflective consciousness that examines events after they have happened,

and a pre-reflective consciousness that exists in the moment of the event.

Key idea Bad faith is to act in such a way as to deny one’s freedom.

This idea of the reflective consciousness is useful when considering literature. Both first-person fictional narrative and memoir engage the reader in a process of attempting to ascertain the authenticity of a self that is witnessed in the space of reflective consciousness. Both types of narrative may attempt to capture the pre-reflective consciousness – the moment in which events take place. In the majority of fictional narratives, the prereflective is always filtered through the reflective, through a past tense that recounts events after they have happened, and sometimes years later, such as in the Bildungsroman. The free direct discourse of interior monologue associated with modernist literature can be seen as an attempt to represent the pre-reflective consciousness and to capture the moment of an event. In contrast, memoir is always reflective. Existentialist theory in this regard is very useful for considering questions of memory and the reliability of narration. What it means to be conscious of oneself is a temporal process that is affected not just by the moment of an event but by the moment of the consciousness of that event.

‘EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE’ The preoccupation with questions of identity in contemporary literature means that existentialism continues to be a useful theoretical framework. In particular, existentialist ideas are useful when exploring the recurring concern in contemporary work with the extent to which identity is something we are born with and the extent to which it is something that evolves through experience. The notion of identity, as something imposed, is often contrasted in these works with the idea of the self, as something inherent. These ideas resonate with the existentialist idea that ‘existence precedes essence’. What this means is that, for existentialists, we are what we create

through our experiences. This is more important than anything that could be seen as a pre-existing nature. So essence – our sense of coherent self – comes not before experience, but only in the wake of (and in relation to) it. The idea was developed by Sartre and first appeared in his 1946 essay ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’. In this discussion, Sartre credits Heidegger as being the originator of the phrase. At its centre is the existentialist belief in freedom and choice.

‘In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing.’ Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ (1946)

For literary critics, existentialism has a particular place because it emphasizes the role of language, and literature more specifically, as a means of exploring this authentic being. In his essays ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935), ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’ (1936) and ‘Language’ (1950), Heidegger argues that poetry is one means by which authentic being can be expressed. Likewise, Sartre was a novelist as well as a theorist, and many of his fictional works can be seen similarly as attempts to work out how individual experience contributes to being.

Case study: NW In her novel NW (2012), the British novelist Zadie Smith returns to the same north London terrain that she used in her first bestseller, White Teeth (2000). In the earlier novel, Smith asks philosophical questions about the nature of fate and chance. In the later novel, this concern for the nature of existence becomes more explicitly existentialist through concern for the idea of the relationship between existence and essence. The novel begins in a modernist stream of consciousness in which one of the novel’s central characters, Leah, declares repeatedly, ‘I am the sole author.’ This statement frames the novel and its concern for whether our identity is something we

write or something that is given to us. Leah’s statement declares that her existence is her own creation. Likewise, her best friend Keisha is a model of continual reinvention of the self. As Keisha moves away from her working-class background and becomes a lawyer, she changes her name to Natalie. In this respect, NW exemplifies the existentialist belief in existence preceding essence. The novel, however, is sceptical about the positive value of this reality. Leah’s control of her destiny means lying to her husband about taking the contraceptive pill when he thinks they are trying to have a baby. Likewise, Natalie’s talent for self-invention leads to her realization that she is only existence – that she has no essence, even one she has created for herself, to fall back on. This represents the flipside of the existential ideal of self-determination, which is the pressure of self-creation and the potential void that exists when one realizes one is only what one creates. Whereas White Teeth celebrates the possibility of self-definition of the self in the wake of sexist and racist attitudes, NW illustrates the complexities of taking on the responsibility of that self-definition.

Because existentialists believe that there is always a power to choose, whatever the circumstances, it opens up the possibility for a resistance that is always possible. This is particularly useful from a literary criticism perspective when examining literatures that deal with situations of oppression – for example postcolonial literatures, feminist writings and those dealing with issues of gender, class or disability. Existentialism drives us to consider how resistance exists even in the most extreme circumstances, perhaps in small and not always easily perceptible ways, as expressions of authenticity in the wake of the harshest circumstances. So, for example, Anne Frank’s writing of her diary (published posthumously in 1947) in the wake of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and despite the most horrendous personal circumstances can be read in existentialist terms as the triumph of her authentic self in the resistance of external pressures and a refusal of bad faith. Or, in fictional terms, one might consider the character of Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), who acts against gender stereotypes in the pursuit of her ambition, or Desdemona in Othello (1604), whose marriage to Othello may appear to be a capitulation to patriarchal structures (marriage in this period being a transfer of woman as property from one man to another) but in fact contains within it an act of resistance as her choice of husband is an expression of her sexual desire and refusal of her father’s authority.

The freedom implied by existentialism also has ethical consequences. The idea of ‘bad faith’ suggests that to act a certain way because of an imposed legal framework or social convention is something to be rejected. This means that to behave well should not be a result of overarching social values but, rather, a result of individual responsibility. Existentialism says that we can always behave well, and must therefore be accountable for any actions that hurt or damage others. Freedom in this context is not at all a selfish mode of self-expression but an obligation to accept responsibility. Central to this is the existentialist idea of anguish – the concept that the individual acts from a state of fear that he or she will fall short of the potential of that freedom. For Sartre, anguish comes most in the moment when one knows that freedom could lead to potentially devastating consequences. This can be in terms of the potential to harm others, but also to shape the course of one’s own life. For example, holding a knife may prompt anguish that one could, if one wanted, use it to stab another person. Likewise, standing by the side of the road prompts the anguish that one could, if one wanted, walk out into the traffic. What we see in Smith’s NW are characters trying to come to term with the burden of their freedom.

Key idea Anguish is the state of fear that one will act in bad faith.

Absurdism One notable feature of existentialist works is what we call the absurd, by which is meant the sense of the individual living in a chaotic and purposeless universe. The name for the following of this belief is absurdism, and it is central to existentialist thinking. The most notable absurdist philosopher is the French thinker Albert Camus (1913–60). Camus had been associated with the existentialism movement, but always denied that he was a follower of the movement. In his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ (1942) he outlines his view that life is a struggle between the individual’s desire to find meaning in it and

the fact that this search is futile. The feeling that arises from this tension is the absurd. The title of the essay comes from the figure of Sisyphus in Greek mythology, doomed to repeat for ever the task of pushing a rock up a mountain, which would then repeatedly fall back to the bottom. Camus argues that this is a metaphor for the individual’s life, but that despite this futility one must persevere.

‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Albert Camus, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ (1942)

Camus argues that the struggle for the individual is to come to terms with the absurd and deal with its consequences, while still continuing to strive for meaning and understanding. In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ this includes an analysis of one central concern of existentialism, namely the question of suicide. For existentialists, the idea of freedom to control one’s self naturally touches on whether one should be able to end one’s own life. For Camus, suicide was a legitimate way to deal with the struggle of the absurd. In the text, he outlines, however, the ways in which life can be valuable, attempting to illustrate that even in the middle of great struggle one can choose life as an expression of freedom.

Spotlight Albert Camus was a huge football fan. He had hopes of a professional career as a footballer until he contracted tuberculosis at the age of 17.

Case study: Under the Net

One novelist preoccupied with the idea of goodness was the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–99). The question of how one can be good outside the dictates of society, and particularly of religion, is central to all her work. Murdoch began writing in the 1950s, at the same time that existentialism was growing in reputation. Her first novel, Under the Net, which was published in 1954, just eight years after Sartre’s ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, is the story of a struggling writer called Jake Donahue, whose adventures across London see him fall into a series of disastrously comic scenarios which echo existentialist ideas of the absurd. Jake must come to terms with the responsibilities of his freedom in the increasingly liberal environs of post-war London. His frequent comic failures illustrate the difficulties of freedom, reflecting the existentialist theory that it is a situation to which the individual is condemned. Within this context, Jake must make sense of his freedom and strive for authenticity. At the end of the novel there is the suggestion that he has tentatively reached this moment – finally committing to the serious pursuit of his writing and distancing himself from the anarchic behaviours that dominate the novel. Jake’s journey is towards truth, in a society filled by bad faith. The woman he is in love with, Anna, runs a mime theatre, and tells him that ‘Only very simple things can be said without falsehood, and the simple things are the quotidian’. It is in everyday life, the novel suggests, that we can be authentic. In this context, the ‘net’ of the novel’s title is the world of philosophical discourse or theory under which Jake is trapped, and from which he must free himself. This, of course, is a strange, antitheoretical, theoretical position, but it is completely in keeping with the motifs of existentialism: Jake can come to truth only through living his freedom; it is not through theorizing but, rather, through experience that he can become authentic. It is useful for literary scholars to consider not merely how fiction exemplifies a theory but indeed how it modifies that theory, or, in fact, is that theory. Murdoch is often described as a novelist philosopher – an association that comes from her simultaneous careers in both fields, but one that she resisted. In the case of Under the Net, Murdoch seems to play out in fictional form her own interests in the work of Sartre that she examines in her philosophical writing. Under the Net mirrors many of the themes and concerns of Sartre’s 1938 novel La Nausée (Nausea). Yet, as Murdoch’s career developed, she became increasingly critical of existentialism and even in this early period she often expressed disagreement with the philosophy’s central ideas. A key part of Murdoch’s critique of the Sartre is his lack of interest in the role of human relationships – in Under the Net it is Jake’s relations with others (particular Anna and an acquaintance named Hugo whom he first meets in a cold-cure centre) that are crucial to his emerging understanding of the truth. This represents for Murdoch a corrective to what she saw as the impoverishment and potential selfishness of existentialism, focused as it is wholly on the expression of the individual.

Fact check 1 Who wrote Being and Time? a Jean-Paul Sartre b Martin Heidegger c Simone de Beauvoir d Albert Camus 2 What is phenomenology the study of? a Time b Space c Human experience d Subjectivity 3 What novel by Sartre shares themes with Under the Net? a Intimacy b Nausea c The Sea d Sickness 4 Who wrote ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’? a Jean-Paul Sartre b Simone de Beauvoir c Vladimir Propp d Iris Murdoch 5 De Beauvoir can also be described as what kind of theorist? a Postmodern b Formalist c Feminist d Postcolonial 6 What is the name of the central character in Under the Net? a Jack b John c Jill

d Jake 7 What theorist do we most associate with the absurd? a Jean-Paul Sartre b Simone de Beauvoir c Iris Murdoch d Albert Camus 8 Which Greek mythological figure is associated with the absurd? a Tantalus b Prometheus c Sisyphus d Oedipus 9 What, according to existentialism, precedes essence? a Existence b Love c Death d Birth 10 Who wrote The Second Sex? a Jean-Paul Sartre b Iris Murdoch c Julia Kristeva d Simone de Beauvoir

Dig deeper Caws, Peter (1979), Sartre. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Drefus, Hubert and Wrathall, Mark (2011), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Hoboken: Wiley. Warnock, Mary (1996), Existentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9 Poststructuralism In May 1968 violent protests erupted in France, driven by events that had begun earlier in the year when the French socialist and communist parties had formed an alliance in an attempt to topple the French president Charles de Gaulle and his Gaullist Party. On 6 May the national student union led a march of students and academics that ended violently, with rioting. On 13 May some of the largest unions in France held a one-day strike in support of the rioters. By mid-May 10 million people were on strike, two-thirds of the French workforce. On 30 May the National Assembly was disbanded and a new election called, which, however, the Gaullists won with a decisive victory. In the wake of these dramatic events, a new intellectual movement emerged that has had a huge influence on literary theory in the post-war period. That movement, called poststructuralism, would redefine thinking about the relationship between language and reality. The structuralist idea that language exists outside of social and political contexts would be irrevocably shaken.

Language and reality The beginning of the protests in universities placed academics and intellectuals at its centre. Jacques Derrida participated in the rallies of the May 1968 protests, and organized the first general assembly at the École normale superieure. Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) stood at the barricades with the student protestors and sat on the Students and Writers Action Committee. Julia Kristeva (1941– ), who had arrived in Paris as a doctoral research fellow from Bulgaria in 1965, was a signatory to the revolutionary declaration ‘Revolution Here, Now’, in the French literary magazine Tel Quel of that year, calling for stronger links between Marxist theory and practice. In 2002 she would return to the events of that year in her book Revolt: She Said to consider the idea of protest as a necessary element of not just any social transformation but also individual consciousness and artistic practice. For Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari (1930–92), the events were intellectually life changing – it was in that month that they were first introduced to each other. Deleuze was a doctoral candidate, while Guattari was already working as a psychiatrist. Guattari was involved in the protests through his existing work in socialist politics: his leftist group of friends were heavily implicated in several Paris occupations. Deleuze attended the protests and was one of the few members of his philosophy department at the University of Lyon to openly declare support for the protestors.

Spotlight In 2006 Deleuze published an essay entitled ‘May ’68 Did Not Take Place’, playfully reworking the title of Jean Baudrillard’s famous and controversial book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995) itself a play on Jean Giradoux’s play La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (The Trojan War Will Not Take Place) (1935). In his essay, he argues that May 1968 ceases to hold any symbolic power because none of the shifts in thinking that it promoted were ever fully realized.

The career of Michel Foucault (1926–84) is particularly interesting in these terms. He was not present for the protests in France, having been working in

Tunisia since 1966, but instead became caught up in student protests there. In the wake of the riots, however, he returned to Paris to take a position as Head of Philosophy at the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes. This was one of a number of new universities set up in the wake of the protests, with the promise of greater intellectual freedom. Although Foucault had not been present, he was clearly motivated to contribute to the post-protest life of the French capital. And perhaps more than any other poststructuralist, the events explicitly shaped his concerns: his book Discipline and Punish (1975), on the nature of state control, is often read as being directly influenced by the events in May. In this work Foucault developed the idea of discourse. Discourse, like ideology, refers to a mode of knowledge or way of speaking, but unlike ideology it is not implicitly connected to power or influence. He also discusses the concept of agency – the ability (usually impossible) of the individual to act freely in their own life, without state coercion or the threat of violence.

Key idea Discourse is the poststructuralist term for modes of knowledge.

Spotlight The French literary theorist Roland Barthes had little time for the 1968 protests. He is notable for being the only one of the major poststructuralists to have had no involvement in the activities.

One cannot say that May 1968 determined the course of poststructuralism. Derrida, for example, began his own writing before this. His first essay, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, was published in 1966. In 1967 he published three major works: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. Nevertheless, May 1968 did shape the anarchic, political context of poststructuralist work: its desire to question structures of authority may not have arisen out of the

protests but is evidence of a more general mood in French intellectual circles during this period.

Deconstruction In Derrida’s early works he refers to a number of existing texts, mainly philosophical but sometimes literary. He applies to these works a particular kind of reading practice that has been taken up by literary critics, known as deconstruction. What does it mean to ‘de-construct’? If we think that the word ‘construct’ means to put something together, then we can think of ‘deconstructing’ as taking apart that which has been built. The idea of deconstructing a text is the central practice of poststructuralist reading. It means, quite literally, what it suggests: to take the text apart. This should not be confused with the idea of criticizing a text – or destroying it. Rather, it represents a way of analysing the text by breaking it down.

Key idea Deconstruction is the process of reading a text to discover what is hidden within it.

Poststructuralist criticism, then, looks for the obscured or denied meanings within the text. At the centre of this is the idea that a text may not be saying what it seems to be saying or what we think it is saying, but it also may not be saying what the author might have directed it towards. It carries an alternative meaning, one that can reveal new insights into the text’s context. The task of this kind of criticism is to look for these alternative meanings – for the contradictions and inconsistencies within the text. In addition to this, a deconstructive reading can look for the silences in the text – the things that are unspoken but which we might expect.

Spotlight In his biography of Derrida (2010), Benoit Peeters says that the philosopher loved to tell funny stories. The only problem was that he laughed so much that he often failed to get to the punchline!

Two terms closely related to deconstruction are différance and the trace. The former, coined by Derrida in an essay of the same name (1982), means both difference and deferral, playing on the two meanings of the word in French. Derrida uses it to suggest that the idea of the relationship between the signifier and signified implied by structuralism is never complete. There is always an element of deferral – of reference to other words and meanings – that causes a disruption of this process. Take, for example, the word ‘cat’. Is it really possible to imagine this word without imagining dog, or tiger, or mouse? Derrida suggests that these other words are the additional signifiers that disrupt the straightforward relationship that could make meaning transparent. By paying attention to this in literature we can consider the layers of meaning at work in a text, and what lies unspoken beneath obvious meanings. Likewise, the Derridean idea of the trace, which appears in both Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, suggests that words are haunted by what they do not mean. This, then, is the trace (or track) that readers can uncover and follow to examine the complex, often contradictory, ideas that may be suggested by a text. Influenced by psychoanalysis, such traces may not be intentional but they are not accidental either – they exist, always, as what is present and yet unseen in any use of language.

Key ideas Différance is a French term coined by Derrida meaning both difference and deferral.

Trace means the haunting of words by what they do not mean.

Case study: Jane Eyre Let us take as an example Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Traditional scholarship on the novel tends to focus on its feminist credentials. This, we can say, is the obvious reading of the text, and is what the author has directed us towards. Jane is the novel’s heroine, and we are directed by the first-person narration to empathize with her character: to celebrate her strong ‘I’ voice, her declaration ‘Reader, I married him’ that reverses the traditional patriarchal institution of marriage as a transferral of woman as property from one man (her father) to another (her husband). Jane’s strong declarations of desire establish contemporary notions of female sexuality against Victorian ideals of marriage as an institution for procreation. What then happens if we look for the silences in the novel? The most notable silence is the figure that haunts the upper floor of Thornfield Hall: Bertha Mason. She never speaks, and so is literally a silenced figure. In poststructuralist terms, Bertha’s trace is written all over the text. She is there from its very beginnings. In particular, she exemplifies another poststructuralist concern – with the politics of haunting as the current state of being, the ghost as present, or what is termed by Derrida in his book Spectres of Marx (1993) ‘hauntology’. As a living, present ghost, Bertha refuses to allow Jane to be the heroine she desires to be in the crafting of her own narrative. And she also prevents us, as readers, from accepting Jane in those terms. In order to create her happy ending, Jane must forsake Bertha to death: she must allow her to be labelled as mad. And we, as readers, must silence our empathy for Bertha (out of place, in a new country, abandoned by her husband, displaced by a younger and more culturally acceptable woman). In this respect, deconstruction opens up a new reading of the novel in which our empathy for Jane is compromised, and her position as feminist heroine becomes complicated by her own lack of empathy for another woman. This opens up new theoretical possibilities, most notably postcolonial readings of the text such as those by Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said. It also opens up new creative possibilities: Jean Rhys’s attempt to tell Bertha’s story in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is deconstructive process in action; it is more than a coincidence that it was written in the same period as deconstructive thinking was being developed.

Poststructuralist politics? It is in this context surprising that poststructuralism is sometimes accused of being an apolitical movement. This is because of its focus on textuality, and particularly because of the games with language that poststructuralist philosophers often play. This playful, ironic tone can sometimes be taken as irreverence when compared to the serious, scientific approach of structuralism. In Of Grammatology, during a discussion of the work of the French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Derrida stops to consider his own relationship to Rousseau’s text, and what meaning it is possible for him to draw from it. Considering whether he can read in such a way that his reading might connect him to ‘a signified outside the text […] outside language’, he says this is impossible. For, in fact, ‘there is nothing outside the text’. This statement has become much discussed.

‘There is nothing outside the text.’ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967)

Does Derrida really mean that all that matters is the text? The short answer is no. Rather, Derrida’s phrase is an expression of the poststructuralist belief that language is an unstable entity and that we cannot really get to the essence of reality through it. He goes on, later in the same discussion, to say that ‘there has never been anything but writing’. What Derrida is saying is that we are all trapped within language, and therefore the only reality we know is through language. Yet because this language is flawed, shifting and imperfect, this means that all we really know is the language itself. The reality it describes is ultimately elusive. In fact, much of poststructuralism is very political, and this is one of the ways it can be contrasted to the more purely linguistic focus of structuralism. Derrida is particularly concerned, for example, with how language is concerned with maintaining what he calls the logos (from the Greek term

meaning speech, thought, law or reason). In his later work, Derrida’s poststructuralism becomes more overtly focused on developing political concerns. This has led some critics to suggest an ‘ethical turn’ at work in poststructuralism, where it becomes more concerned with political matters. It is more useful, however, to think of this as a desire to make earlier abstract ideas more concrete: what we see in the later work is more of an ethical development than an actual turn. Nowhere is the inherent politicization of poststructuralism more evident than in the work of Foucault, in texts like Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality (1978). In these texts, Foucault introduces the idea of a counterhistory, which includes silenced and marginalized subjects. In Discipline and Punish the focus is on the criminal and the prison, while in The History of Sexuality it is on intimate relationships and socially unacceptable desires. For this approach he uses the term ‘genealogy’.

Key idea Genealogy is the process of creating new histories to account for marginalized voices and events not normally covered in official histories.

The heterotopia In a 1967 essay entitled ‘Of Other Spaces’, which was translated into English only after his death, Foucault directs us to rethink our engagement with place by outlining various imaginary spaces. He suggests that the contemporary preoccupation with history should not neglect the centrality of spatiality to present life.

‘In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with

space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space.’ Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986)

Time, Foucault argues, exists only in the context of space: we can have history only if it is located, and place is ever present. How, then, do we make use of this? Foucault suggests that we can think both about imagined places (utopias) and real places that achieve the possibilities of utopian thinking. These latter spaces he calls heterotopias: ‘hetero’, meaning mixed, refers to the diversity he sees as evident in these spaces, and their function as combining several ‘real’ physical spaces but also several times in one place. To make this clearer, he offers three examples of heterotopias in the spaces of the boat, the brothel and the colony. In these locations, difference is confronted and possibility for transgression created (even, as in the colony, in the wake of oppression). Foucault asks us to think about the potential of heterotopias – the rethinking of space to acknowledge its complexity in the same way that we can consider the complexity of time.

Key idea A heterotopia is the utopia as a real, lived place.

The notion of the heterotopia is an attractive one for fiction, because it allows writers to imagine how the disruptive possibilities of the utopia might be made tangible in real, here-and-now spaces. In his novel The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), Salman Rushdie makes direct reference to ‘heterotopic forays into alternative realities’. Elsewhere, the novel contains a scene that seems to directly echo Foucault’s prose. Foucault writes: The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see

myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. In The Ground beneath Her Feet, Rushdie writes: There is a change on the tape. The video snowstorm vanishes. In its place is the image of a doll in a chair, holding a circular mirror, in which is reflected a rectangular mirror, which in turn contains the reflection of another doll.

Intertextuality In his reference to Foucault, Rushdie enacts an intertextual relationship between his own work and ‘Of Other Spaces’ that is also a poststructuralist concern. The idea of textual relation far precedes poststructuralism: most notably it is drawn out in detail by the modernist writer T. S. Eliot in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). It was Kristeva, however, who first coined the term for this process as we describe it today in her 1966 essay ‘Word, Dialogue and the Novel’.

‘…a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.’ Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and the Novel’ (1966)

Kristeva argues that no text is ever just itself. It is always in relation to other texts, whether consciously or not, through processes of parody, allusion and pastiche. Later theorists have gone on to outline in more detail the intricacies of these different types of relation, grouping them into three types: obligatory (meaning intended by the author and assumed necessary to understand the meaning of the text), optional (also created by the author but not crucial to understanding, functioning rather as an additional layer of meaning or tribute) and accidental (not created by the author but brought by the reader to the

text). In reality, most readers will respond to a literary text involving all three of these types – yet the balance of how they are integrated into the text may contribute to the shaping of meaning. For this reason, we can consider discussion of intertexts a very useful approach to the analysis of any literary work.

Key idea Intertextuality refers to the relationship, intentional or unintentional, between one literary text and another.

Gilles Deleuze It would be impossible to write a chapter on poststructuralism without mentioning Gilles Deleuze (1925–95). As described above in the discussion of May 1968, Deleuze embodies an anarchic and disruptive strand in poststructuralist thinking that is at once quite similar to other poststructuralist philosophies but also uniquely different. In contrast to the language games offered by Derrida, the playfulness of Deleuze’s work comes in the entirety of its form – a sweeping movement from one subject to another that reads often like a modernist stream of consciousness. The ideas that Deleuze develops alongside Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) offer fruitful terrain for literary scholars. Ideas such as the body without organs, deterritorialization, and becoming speak to questions of both space and identity that are dominant themes in contemporary scholarship. One concept of Deleuze and Guattari’s with particular relevance to literature is the notion of the rhizome. A rhizome is an underground stem that puts out a complex system of roots, unlike a normal root system. Deleuze and Guattari see this as a metaphor for thinking about consciousness. They suggest that, rather than thinking about the world and questions of politics and identity in terms of roots, we might instead think in terms of the multiple pathways and connections that the rhizome represents. To approach thinking through the idea of the rhizome, one must abandon hierarchies, definitions and

classifications. Instead, one celebrates difference, randomness and chaotic interplay. This, of course, has consequences for the kind of social relations produced: it suggests openness, tolerance and the celebration of diversity. For this reason, gender and postcolonial theory has been particular influenced by this idea, as a way of exploring the complex relations that exist in terms of gender, race and sexuality in contemporary culture.

Key idea A rhizome is an underground stem with a complex root system that involves multiple pathways, used as a metaphor in poststructuralist thinking about consciousness.

Case study: Girl Meets Boy What does it mean to have a rhizome consciousness? In part, and noted by frequent references in A Thousand Plateaus to modernist texts, it seems to imply a form that expresses fluidity and movement. We might say in this regard that any modernist or postmodernist text exhibits the principles of the rhizome. Some texts, however, also exhibit rhizome consciousness in their thematic concerns. For example, Ali Smith’s novel Girl Meets Boy (2007) is formally modernist, weaving individual voices, shifting from one consciousness to another. At the same time, its thematic concerns centre on ideas of fluidity and change. The novel’s first line, with its beautiful simplicity, is a striking example of this in practice: ‘Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.’ Here Smith reworks the conventional motif of elder storytelling, disrupting it with transgressive potential as gender is rendered unstable. As a novel that might also stand as an example of the Deleuzian principle of becoming, it is full of characters whose gender and sexual identities refuse to conform to established definitions. Rich with water imagery, the novel evokes a world of flow and movement against the stifling hardness of social expectation. Part of a series of texts commissioned to respond to classic Greek myths, in this case the myth of Iphis, the novel is also emblematic of Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality. In Greek myth Iphis was born as a girl, raised as a boy, fell in love with a girl and was then transformed by the goddess Isis into a man in order to live with her true love. Smith takes this story and weaves it into contemporary

stories of characters who long for such magic and illustrate its allure – who desire to be transformed but also to be accepted for who they are. By illuminating how gender fluidity has always been present, but rendered unthreatening through its reimagining in myth, the novel presents both a contemporary myth and a statement about how such imaginings need no longer be necessary – the transformation can be a real one, and it needs not magic but social acceptance to make it possible. This moving, spreading out through both time and place – from the ancient to the contemporary, from Greece to England – illustrates the refusal of borders and boundaries essential to rhizome thinking.

Fact check 1 Who wrote Of Grammatology? a Jacques Derrida b Gilles Deleuze c Roland Barthes d Michel Foucault 2 A rhizome is a kind of what? a Flower b Tree c Onion d Root system 3 What term does Foucault use for counter-histories? a Counter-discourse b Historicism c Ideology d Genealogy 4 To be haunted by the presence of the unwritten can be defined by what term? a Différance b Deferral c Trace d History

5 The term différance means both difference and what else? a Deferral b Death c Decision d Similarity 6 What does to deconstruct mean? a To challenge b To take apart c To disappear d To defer 7 In what year were the protests in France that influenced many poststructuralist thinkers? a 1961 b 1978 c 1968 d 1963 8 Deleuze’s writing partner, Félix Guattari, worked in what profession? a Teaching b Politics c Psychiatry d Painting 9 Who wrote Girl Meets Boy? a Zadie Smith b Ali Smith c Tim Smith d Smith Jones 10 Foucault’s term for the lived utopia is what? a Dystopia b Heterotopia c Ambitopia d Youtopia

Dig deeper Dosse, François and Glassman, Deborah (2010), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. New York: Columbia University Press. Gutting, Gary (2005), Foucault. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Royle, Nicholas (2003), Derrida. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Williams, James (2005), Understanding Poststructuralism. London: Taylor & Francis.

10 Postmodernism Post: to display a notice Post: a long piece of timber or metal set upright into the ground and used as a support or marker Post: an official position or job Post: subsequent; after It was only in the 1960s that ‘post’ came to be used to mean ‘after’. Unlike its earlier usage, this ‘post’ was originally always hyphenated in a compound word: post-modern, post-colonial, post-structural. Yet at some point in the 1980s the hyphen fell away. This removal of space – the refusal of a break – was not unintentional. It marked, rather, a symptom of the very post that the hyphen represents: a period in which we are too uncertain to say that one thing is a definite break from what came before. Instead, we look to see continuity with the past and to recognize the history of the world not as a straightforward teleology (narrative of progress) but as a fluid movement both forwards and backwards in time. What made us delete the hyphen, then, was the hyphenated: we found post-modernism and we were required to turn it into the postmodern. The ‘post’ in postmodernism implies an ‘after’, but the nature of this after has been much debated.

On the one hand, ‘post’ indicates the fact that postmodernism is a mode of critical thought that comes after modernism, in particular as a post-Second World War theory in the same way that modernism is a theory inherently connected to the aftermath of the First World War. On the other, the ‘post’ is not so much a temporal shift but a conceptual one, indicating a movement beyond modernism in terms of thinking. At the same time, much of what modernism stands for stylistically remains in postmodernism: free indirect discourse, non-linear narratives and stream of consciousness – the key strategies we discussed in Chapter 7 as essentially modernist – are also prominent stylistic features of the postmodern text. To understand postmodern literature, then, we must situate it within a broader context of postmodern culture. It is awareness of this culture that can be said to define a work as postmodernist rather than modernist: a matter not merely of stylistics but also of the underlying assumptions beneath these stylistics and the thematic concerns they are used to express. This is most simplistically defined as a difference in attitude. While modernist writers presented their current world as one in which truth had been destabilized, they believed a truth had once existed and grappled for its return. They saw the fragmentation of their society as a fall from the reassuring order of the past, destroyed by largely negative forces of war and technological change. In contrast, these forces are often (though not always) exciting for postmodernists, where fragmentation becomes translated into a celebration of difference. Moreover, while modernists lament the passing of stability and truth, postmodernists expose how these ideas have always been illusions. Thus, at the same time as they focus on the present, they are also involved in a process of rethinking the past and questioning assumptions about it. Post, then, suggests both a development of and a going beyond. Postmodernism is rooted in modernist strategies but goes beyond them in its thematic concerns. It may be more or less formally experimental than high modernism. Its difference is one of attitude rather than style.

Postmodern culture

The term ‘postmodernism’ was first used in the way we now understand it in the late 1970s, although it has existed as a term since the 1930s. While modernism existed in a world before theory, postmodernism comes in the midst of these developments. For this reason, it is much more explicitly a theory, existing both in art works (including literature) and in philosophical texts. In 1984 the French theorist Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) published The Postmodern Condition, in which he argues that the contemporary condition is characterized by what he terms ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. By this, he means a disbelief in those grand ways of thinking about the world (such as Marxism, religion or science) that used to give people certainty. These, then, are the same narratives that modernists saw as eroded by modern culture, but that they continued to believe had once existed.

Key idea Metanarratives are framing narratives for how we think about the world, and include Marxism, religion and science.

In later criticism, Lyotard’s original definition has been supplemented by a number of features that are seen to define postmodern culture. For example, Dominic Strinati (1947– ), in his essay ‘Postmodernism and Popular Culture’ (1992), gives five key features, including Lyotard’s but adding four new elements: 1

The breakdown of the distinction between culture and society

2

An emphasis on style over substance

3

The breakdown of distinctions between high art and popular culture

4

More complex ideas of time and space

5

The decline of metanarratives.

Spotlight A number of full academic papers have been written on the subject of the longrunning animated comedy The Simpsons as postmodern, focusing on episodes such as ‘Bart of Darkness’, a parody of Heart of Darkness, or the narrative fragmentation of an episode such as ‘22 Short Films about Springfield’.

Postmodern and postmodernity can in this respect be distinguished from postmodernism. The former terms refer to a period in culture and its characteristics, while the latter refers to the philosophical ideas presented by figures like Baudrillard and Lyotard. You should be aware, however, that the critical use of these terms is often inconsistent and has changed across the short history of writing on the subject – for example Steven Connor’s early seminal study, Postmodernist Culture (1989), refers to the period rather than to philosophy, but more recent usage might describe this as postmodern culture and reserve ‘postmodernist’ for proponents of postmodernism.

The simulacrum Now stop for a minute and imagine a simple scene. In an office, there is a large copy machine. It holds a thousand pieces of paper. One day, you enter the office and press the large green button on the front of the machine. And, just as you might expect, out shoots a piece of paper. You have placed nothing under the glass, so you are surprised to see that there is an image on the piece of paper. You open the cover of the machine, but there is nothing there. Looking again at the image, it seems vaguely familiar to you. It is a picture of a small, ordinary house. In fact, it seems to remind you of your own house. But some things about this picture are not the same as your house. The door is different. The windows are larger. You scan the image and run an image search on your computer, but there are no exact matches. The next day, for reasons you don’t understand, you go back to the copy

machine and copy the image again. As you do so, you put your original copy into the recycling. And, again for reasons you don’t understand, you repeat this process every day until all one thousand sheets of paper are gone. You go home, and put the image into a frame and hang it on your wall. And you are struck once more by how similar the house is to your own, and yet how different. But you are pleased with this image: a copy of a copy of a copy of a…with no original image. It is this idea, of an image that has been endlessly repeated but is without origin, that defines what Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) refers to as the simulacrum. It is a difficult idea to understand, most obviously because we see an inherent link between copies and the idea of the original. What, then, does Baudrillard mean by invoking such an idea? He first introduced it in his book Simulations (1983), in which he argues that we now exist in a hyperreality – a world of exaggerated images where what is real and what is not has become blurred. This leads to the ‘loss of the real’. Baudrillard traces the process by which this loss takes place. In the beginning, the image represents reality. This, however, gives way to a second stage in which the image is not a true representation of reality but a distortion of it. In the third stage, there is no reality on which the image is based, but this is obscured, so we still think there is some underlying truth. Finally, in the fourth and last stage it is clear that the image has no reality behind it. Baudrillard’s most famous example of the third stage is the Disneyland theme park in the United States. Baudrillard argues that Disneyland pretends that there is a real place underlying it: an old-time America with a Main Street of soda fountains and candy stores, where trams and trolley buses deliver passengers to their destinations. This place is, however, a myth: it never really existed. There is no reality underlying the image. If we think of Baudrillard’s theory, then we can see how the idea of postmodernists celebrating the postmodern condition is somewhat problematic. Baudrillard here seems to represent an empty reality that is far from exhilarating. Rather, it is deeply ambivalent. This reflects what we see

in a number of postmodern novels, for example the works of American novelists Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, in which the postmodern lack of reality is often rendered as troubling and destabilizing.

Key idea Simulacrum means a copy without an original.

Spotlight According to its directors, Baudrillard’s ideas regarding the simulacrum were a direct influence on the Hollywood movie The Matrix.

Postmodern politics As for poststructuralism, one of the critiques of postmodernism is that it reduces serious issues to a kind of game and underestimates the significance of material inequalities and political issues. In particular, those examining issues of race and gender have been critical of postmodernism for a perceived white, masculine bias. This has led to critics attempting to define different strands of postmodernism, or adapt it to political concerns. Also like poststructuralism, however, postmodernism has itself responded to these concerns. For example, Baudrillard’s ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’ (1991) can be seen as an attempt to move away from theoretical abstractions in much postmodern theory towards a specific concern for how postmodernism might illuminate political issues. In his provocatively titled text, Baudrillard suggests that, while the violence of the Gulf War is undeniably true, what the West received via media reporting was not true but, rather, a specific manifestation of postmodernism. The war itself was a creation of an ideologically driven Western media that wished to turn horrific violence into something signifying in such a way as to generate media attention. This

media attention in turn served the needs of Western governments looking for public support. In this context, what happened in Iraq cannot be said to bear resemblance to what audiences received. Moreover, what really happened is rendered unknowable in this process. In this respect the ‘war’, being the event that we imagine took place, did not. Another notable intervention into postmodernism from a politicized perspective comes in the form of Frederic Jameson’s Marxist critique, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). For Jameson, the artistic expression of postmodern culture is not a continuance of modernism but an attempt to recreate it by a generation for whom newness is increasingly impossible and the avant-garde ideas of the past no longer relevant.

‘Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather “realistic,” and this is the result of a canonization and academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally that can be traced to the late 1950s. This is surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” as Marx once said in a different context.’ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (1991)

Yet this newness, Jameson argues, has been commodified by a culture that desires to turn everything – even art – towards profit: he tells us that ‘aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally’. For this reason, postmodern expression is merely the final phase of capitalism. Jameson’s famous example in this regard is the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Reading the hotel’s architecture, Jameson explores how what would once have been a design

statement is now constructed to create a hyperreal experience that mirrors the experience of the individual in society more generally. The ‘mutation in space’ of the hotel creates an entire world within a building. Yet the result of this is to alienate the individual from the outside world and replicate the overwhelming global structures of late capitalism. The built space conditions us to accept the confusion of the outside.

‘So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space – postmodern hyperspace – has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment – which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of spacecraft to those of the automobile – can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.’ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (1991)

In this sense, Jameson argues that postmodern is not merely one style or element of culture: it is the culture, the defining expression of the late capitalist moment.

Postmodern literature For literary critics, it is from this postmodern culture and in response to it that the postmodern narrative emerges. As we have discussed, this narrative may appear very similar to the modernist narrative, differing only in its attitude. Nevertheless, literary critics have defined a number of features they see as

common to many postmodern texts.

Key ideas Temporal distortion refers to movements across space and time; the disruption of straightforward clock or calendar time reflects the confusion of contemporary reality. Metafiction is fiction in which the author draws attention to the artificiality of the work and its construction. This often includes self-reflexivity (the novel reflecting on itself) and self-referentiality (the novel referring to itself). It also includes features such as unreliable narration, a term first used by Wayne Booth in his Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) but now widely associated with postmodernism. Pastiche, related to intertextuality and metafiction, is imitation that draws attention to the artificiality of the text and its lack of originality. It often also facilitates an ability to construct a counter-discourse by parodying the original text or period. Hyperreality is the blurring of reality and simulation, following from theories of the simulacrum, and draws attention to the artificiality of contemporary culture. Irony is a playful, comic tone that reflects the surreal status of contemporary culture and the death of overarching metanarratives and moral frameworks. Disruptions of realism include genres such as magical realism, which are often seen as postmodern forms, although postcolonial critics have recently argued that in fact it may be more accurate to see postmodernism as a derivative of magical realism. Nevertheless, the desire to expose realism’s artificiality (related to metafictionality), and to engage with the surreal and/or absurdist nature of contemporary life, is something often seen in postmodern literature.

Within this framework, it is important to note that postmodern literature does not have a unified perspective on postmodern culture. While one postmodern text may celebrate technology, for example, another may lament its incursion into everyday life. What unites these texts is their sense of what contemporary culture looks like, rather than a particular attitude towards that culture.

Historiographic metafiction One particular kind of metafiction associated with postmodern literature is historiographic metafiction. This term, first coined by Linda Hutcheon in her work The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), outlines the way in which postmodern fiction claims to relate historical events but then combines them with metafictional strategies that disrupt the idea of the text as a purveyor of ‘truth’. In doing so, the text draws attention to its unreliability as historical truth, whether this is a historical or a fictional text. Hutcheon’s example of this form is the novel Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie, in which history is disrupted by unreliable narration, such as the Independence of India being reported as taking place one day too soon. Rushdie’s framing for the story, in which the narrative being told is that of the narrative being written, is a common one in postmodern literature and it is used to undermine the sense of the text as an accurate reporting of events.

Spotlight In Midnight’s Children, the frame story revolves around a pickle factory, where each jar contains one chapter of the novel. You can now make the green chutney that stirs the memories of the central character of Saleem, its recipe having been recreated by an Indian online culture site. The secret to the green colour? Coriander mint, and green chillies!

While this undermines the status of the novel as truth, other fictions use historiographical metafiction to undermine the status of history as truth. For example, in his novel Libra (1988), Don DeLillo constructs the story of an investigator into the murder of American president John F. Kennedy in 1963. Rather than ‘solving’ the crime, the novel presents the fragmented discourse surrounding Kennedy’s supposed killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. The documents present only irreconcilable fragments that construct a man with no height, no eye colour – in the end not even a name, and certainly no politics. Using the fiction to show the fiction of history, historiographic metafiction in this case draws attention to the fictional nature of all narratives.

Case Study: England, England The features of postmodern literature are nowhere more amply illustrated than in Julian Barnes’s 1998 novel England, England. In Barnes’s novel the simulacrum of Disney World that Baudrillard describes is an obvious intertextual inspiration for the imagining of a future England in which the real country is recreated as a theme park on the Isle of Wight. In order to make it attractive, the theme park is based on altered histories and corruptions of English myths and traditions. Everything is filtered, so as to not be offensive to the paying customers. As the theme park becomes established, the ‘real’ England becomes increasingly unpopular. The new England becomes a recognized state and member of the European Union, while the old England – the ‘real’ England – sinks into decay. What emerges, then, is a dramatic version of hyperreality in which it is no long clear what is ‘real’. In fact, the ‘real’ England is not so much real as the ‘first’. In addition to this focus on the hyperreal and the simulacrum, Barnes’s novel features many of the other qualities of postmodern writing. Alongside its comment on the nature of reality, the novel functions as a satire of the tourist industry and the dilution of history in the service of commercial success. In this respect, it reflects the ironic, dark humour of the postmodern novel and its quality of parody and pastiche. It is unclear when the novel is set: the time frame appears contemporary but the events are such that we cannot place them in the present. Moreover, the novel’s conclusion sees the real England returned to a feudal, pre-modern society. Finally, the novel disrupts ideas of realism: it is set in the ‘real’ world but the surreal nature of the plot exceeds realist boundaries. One might speculate from this about the novel’s attitude to postmodern culture. On the one hand, the fate of the island seems to critique the postmodern arrogance that one might recreate an entire nation. At the same time, however, the novel seems to suggest that even what is real is a fiction. This is present from the novel’s very beginning, where the protagonist, Martha Cochrane, completes a jigsaw with her father showing the counties of England – a metaphor for the ways in which all places and our attachments to them are constructed, piece by piece, through memory and our associations with others. In this sense, the novel reflects the lack of nostalgia of a postmodern text against the kind of yearning for an ideal past that we might expect in a modernist fiction.

Barnes’s critique of empire through the lens of postmodern thought draws

attention to the political possibilities of postmodern literature, in the same way that postmodern theory has responded to critiques of its early white male bias. However, the novel seems happy at the same time to sit in a space of comic or farcical fiction, where political concerns are secondary. It is this tension that can be seen to sometimes make it unclear to what extent postmodern is suited to very serious questions of racial and sexual violence. More recently, collections such as Len Platt and Sara Upstone’s Postmodern Literature and Race (2015) and Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions (2013) illustrate the increasing sense of postmodernism as a strategy that is available for a political purpose. Such texts do not adopt postmodernism uncritically – indeed, they are keen to point out the ways in which postmodernism might need to be revised in order to open itself to questions of politics and identity. In such a way, they respond to earlier texts such as Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay ‘Is the Postin Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’ (1991) and Theo D’Haen and Hans Bertens’s collection of essays Liminal Postmodernisms: The Postmodern, the (Post-)Colonial, and the (Post-)Feminist (1994). The notion of ‘postmodernisms’ in the plural represents the idea that, while some postmodernisms may be politically conservative, others may in fact be politically radical. Postmodernism has no definite politics of its own, but it is nevertheless open to being employed for a radical political purpose.

Post-postmodernism? One of the questions surrounding postmodernism is whether we are still in it. In 2016 Len Platt and Brian McHale published The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature. This major landmark study presents postmodernism as something we are capable of historicizing: that is, it is a matter for the past. Likewise, David James and Urmila Seshagiri (2014) suggest that we might now think of ourselves as in a phase called metamodernism: a postpostmodernism that has emerged from postmodernism. For other scholars, however, it is not that postmodernism is a thing of the past, but rather that it has become so incorporated into our ways of thinking that it has ceased to require a special terminology. The pervasiveness of

reality television, for example, marks a world in which we have become comfortable with the blurring of fact and fiction. Social media, blogging and Internet publishing have opened up forums of public opinion, making them more democratic but also making us more used to the questioning of official discourses such as religion, history and government, so that the idea of questioning metanarratives is woven into our daily experiences. As literature scholars, we need to distinguish between postmodern culture and postmodern literature. However, at the same time we might think that what was in the 1970s defined as ‘postmodern writing’ is now merely ‘writing’. The mainstream success of ‘experimental’ fiction has relocated it from being something only read in largely intellectual and academic contexts to being widely appreciated. Equally, the strategies of postmodern writing have filtered into more mainstream fiction. Perhaps postmodernism is now just what there is…

Fact check 1 Who had the idea of the simulacrum? a Jean Baudrillard b Michel Foucault c Roland Barthes d Jean-François Lyotard 2 Who wrote The Postmodern Condition? a Jean Baudrillard b Michel Foucault c Roland Barthes d Jean-François Lyotard 3 What real place is used as an example of third-order simulation? a Disneyland b Buckingham Palace c New York d Los Angeles

4 What hotel does Jameson use to discuss postmodernism? a The Hilton b The Bonaventure c The Metropole d The Mayfair 5 How many orders of simulation are there? a One b Two c Three d Four 6 Which novel by Don DeLillo is a postmodern representation of the JFK assassination? a Underworld b Cosmopolis c Libra d Falling Man 7 What is the postmodern name for the frameworks we use to explain the world? a Metanarratives b Postnarratives c Ideologies d Discourses 8 Who wrote England, England? a Julian Barnes b John Barnes c Julian Smith d Zadie Smith 9 What is another word for post-postmodernism? a Metamodernism b Modernism c Postmodernism d Counter-modernism 10 What is the name for literature that refers to the creation of literature? a Metafiction

b Referential fiction c Anti-fiction d Modernism

Dig deeper Brooker, Peter, ed. and intr. (1992), Modernism/Postmodernism. Harlow: Longman. Connor, Steven (1997), Postmodernism Culture, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, David (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hutcheon, Linda (1989), The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.

11 Feminist theory In the wake of reader response theory came a number of approaches to literature more specifically focused on thinking about identity politics: negotiations of power as they relate to the interests of particular groups in society. The first of these to emerge with any defined presence was feminist literary theory. Feminist literary theory is built upon a history of political engagement that stretches back across the twentieth century. The word ‘feminism’ is a translation of feminisme, which was coined by the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier in 1837. Fourier challenged patriarchy and, although – like most nineteenth-century thinkers – he genuinely thought that differences between men and women would prevent full equality, he argued strongly for freeing women from what he considered the ‘slavery’ of nineteenth-century gender relations. Fourier’s term was first translated and used in English in the 1890s. It was at this time that what you may see referred to as the ‘first wave’ of the feminist movement developed. The central aim of this movement was a critique of what we call patriarchy: the system that hands power down through the male line from one male to another.

Key idea Patriarchy is the handing down of power from one male to another.

First-wave feminism In comparison to later feminist activity, the first wave was most explicitly concerned with political and legal reform, dominated in Britain for example by the activities of the suffragists and suffragettes campaigning for women’s right to vote. Yet it was also a particularly literary activity, with notable contributions from writers including (in the US) Kate Chopin and (in the UK) Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. In her essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) Woolf argues that female creative expression is limited by women’s material circumstances, which frequently deny them the opportunity for either the space or time to explore their creative and intellectual capacities. The need, then, for a ‘room of one’s own’ is symbolic of both the literal and psychological freedom that is denied by patriarchal culture. Later feminist writers would pick up on Woolf’s concern; for example, Doris Lessing in her short story ‘To Room Nineteen’ would in 1963, almost 40 years later, explore similar territory to Woolf and examine how women’s self-expression continues to be thwarted by even seemingly ‘progressive’ marriages and domestic arrangements.

Second-wave feminism Lessing’s story is in part a critique of the idea that making women conscious of their own oppression is enough to combat it. Her central protagonist is well aware of feminist debates, considers herself to have shaped a marriage informed by these, and yet she ultimately finds herself imprisoned nevertheless. Lessing wrote ‘To Room Nineteen’ in the wake of the second wave of the feminist movement which concerned itself precisely with these kinds of ‘consciousness raising’ activities designed to empower women to act against oppression in their marriages, workplaces and social lives. The

beginning point for this second wave is debated, with some critics citing the 1949 publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and others dating the shift to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Given de Beauvoir’s interest in woman’s self-definition, it is more useful perhaps to see her work as tentatively marking the beginnings of this second phase, which challenged the limited ways in which women had been and were being thought about. In The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir argues that woman is not a biological fact but a concept created by long-entrenched social values and expectations. This introduces the idea of socialization: that gender identity is not inherent but something developed through the individual’s introduction into a set of rules and acceptable behaviours to which society shapes them to conform. Female identity, then, is not natural but constructed.

‘One is not born a woman; rather one becomes a woman.’ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

De Beauvoir’s concern here, to distinguish the difference between biological sex and gender as a social expression, can be seen as the cornerstone of modern feminism. While biological difference exists, these differences are harnessed by patriarchy in the service of inequality that those differences themselves do not justify.

Spotlight De Beauvoir was a dynamic feminist activist: she founded a feminist newspaper in France, Nouvelle féminisme, and a feminist journal, Nouvelles questions féministes.

It is in Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) that the consciousness-

raising efforts of second-wave feminism come to the fore. Friedan, who had established the National Organization for Women in the United States in 1966, echoes many of de Beauvoir’s sentiments, particularly in terms of illustrating how patriarchy has used biological differences to limit women’s opportunities and rights. Her text was revelatory when it was published, however, because it directed its attention to the core of ordinary, married, middle-class white American women, to examine how their seemingly comfortable lives were dominated by stifling patriarchal values that limited their expression and creativity. This kind of female identity was enshrined recently in the TV drama Mad Men, where the central female character Betty Draper’s first name might be seen as a nod to Friedan’s theory. Friedan in this respect highlights how economic success only empowers patriarchy, and provides little advantage for women. Her discussion of the ways in which technological advancements in the home had not made life better for women but instead had developed ‘the problem with no name’ – the discontent felt by many housewives in the 1950s and 1960s – was highly influential on the focus of the second-wave movement on the psychology of oppression.

‘Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – “Is this all?”’ Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Spotlight Friedan was one of 120 international signatories to the second humanist manifesto published in The Humanist magazine in 1973, which included the line ‘No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.’

The rise of feminist literary theory Feminist literary theory emerged during the second wave of feminism. Following from the aims of the second movement to raise women’s consciousness and challenge stereotypes, feminist critics consider how literary texts might reinforce patriarchal norms in society, and also how they might question these. They see literature as an agent for change: not merely reflecting the roles of women but also serving as a powerful tool for socializing women into particular identities, and as a potentially radical space where new identities are encouraged. Feminist literary theory also draws attention to the gender bias in the creation of literature itself – the ways in which female voices are less prominent in the literary world, or stereotypically associated with certain kinds of writing such as romance or children’s fiction. Belief in the ability of literature to serve as a feminist manifesto is rooted in early examples that have become central to the work of feminist literary critics. In the late 1960s and 1970s, theorists such as Elaine Showalter (1941– ) and Kate Millett (1934– ) would take up these influences and use them to argue for an overlooked female canon. Showalter defined the study of these texts as ‘gynocriticism’, meaning simply the study of literature authored by women.

Key idea Gynocriticism is the study of female-authored literature.

Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) is a scathing critique of the representation of sexual relations in many canonical works of literature by famous male writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer. Instead, Millett applauds the complex gender politics of queer writers such as Jean Genet. In this respect, Millett’s work was of significance in the growing movement towards concerns with gender – rather than more exclusively women – that began to emerge in this period, paving the way for later queer theory. The study of this literature is seen to counter the patriarchal construction of womanhood that

feminist critics like Millett argue is present in many male-authored works. The best-known text in this regard is Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979). For Gilbert and Gubar, the male writing tradition positions women in only a limited number of roles designed to further the interests of patriarchy. And it is within this system that the female writer struggles to find her voice.

Spotlight The title of Gilbert and Gubar’s text has become the subject of affectionate humour, in that it refers to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1847); but the first Mrs Rochester lives not in the attic but in the upper floor of the house, which in fact has no mentioned attic at all.

‘What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and covertly patriarchal? If the vexed and vexing polarities of angel and monster, sweet dumb Snow White and fierce mad Queen, are major images literary tradition offers women, how does such imagery influence the ways in which women attempt the pen? If the Queen's looking glass speaks with the King's voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen's own voice? Since his is the chief voice she hears, does the Queen try to sound like the King, imitating his tone, his inflections, his phrasing, his points of view? Or does she “talk back” to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her own viewpoint?’ Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)

Gubar and Gilbert’s approach is echoed in a number of other works from the 1980s, such as Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985). Feminism’s

concern for the representation of women has also influenced studies in the visual and popular arts, most notably film theory. For example, in her landmark essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), Laura Mulvey employs Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that Hollywood cinema imagines a masculine viewer, placing the female character in a position of being watched and objectified. This process she calls the ‘male gaze’. By positioning the viewer as male (regardless of gender), film reproduces patriarchy. It reaffirms men as voyeurs and consumers of pleasure, and women as creators of that pleasure in the service of male needs. As a challenge to this, Mulvey argues for a feminist, avantgarde film-making practice that would disrupt Hollywood conventions.

Key idea The male gaze refers to the construction of visual media through an imagined male viewer and his desires.

Case study: Blue Velvet One self-conscious engagement with the idea of the male gaze is David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet. The film tells the story of a young man, Jeffrey (played by Kyle MacLachlan), who, while out walking one day, finds a severed ear and becomes drawn into the mysterious life of a woman named Dorothy (played by Isabella Rossellini). Dorothy is being blackmailed by a violent sociopath called Frank (played by Denis Hopper). Frank has abducted Dorothy’s husband and son, and is forcing her to perform sexual favours in payment for their return. In one defining scene from the film, Frank visits Dorothy, who hides Jeffrey in a closet. During this scene the camera switches from a close-up of Frank and Dorothy’s interactions to Jeffrey’s position in the closet. As Frank forces Dorothy to engage in sexual acts and is brutally violent towards her, we see the action from Jeffrey’s perspective. By including the viewer with the male gaze within the film itself, Lynch draws the audience’s attention to their own voyeurism – they are no different from the man watching in the closet. Any erotic pleasure derived from the highly sexualized but also violent scene presented to us is therefore immediately associated with a kind

of distasteful, secret observation. This is reinforced by the fact that Jeffrey finds the experience repugnant, and when Frank leaves and Dorothy attempts to sexually engage Jeffrey, asking him to hit her, he refuses (although he later returns to the apartment and does have sex with her). By making us feel like Jeffrey in the closet, Lynch exposes how our erotic experiences are rooted in the codes perpetuated by the male gaze. In a later essay entitiled ‘Cult Etherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus and Blue Velvet’ (1996), Laura Mulvey has argued that the relationships presented by Lynch in the film are symbolic of the domestic abuse within families. Yet in his film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Film (2006), the controversial philosopher Slavoj Žižek has suggested that Frank also represents Dorothy’s fantasy, and in particular her desire to be shaken out of her passivity. If this is the case, then we can read this as a damning example of how the male gaze is internalized, as Dorothy’s own fantasy is to become the subject of Frank’s whims.

French feminist theory Alongside these works stand a number of French theoretical texts that also examine female stereotypes. Although often not directly about literature, they are still concerned with questions of representation. The three major writers in these terms are Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, whose critical work encompasses feminist, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic influences.

L’ÉCRITURE FEMININE One influential term coined by the feminist critic Hélène Cixous is écriture feminine (female writing), which has become a central way of considering women’s creativity. The term first emerges in Cixous’s essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976). Écriture feminine is not new, however: it builds in particular on Woolf’s comments in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ that novel writing is dominated by a ‘masculine’ prose that she cannot naturally produce. Cixous, however, integrates Woolf’s ideas with her own poststructuralist thinking, so that, while there is a female writing, this writing is beyond definition – continually changing and exceeding boundaries so that it cannot be turned into a kind of absolute. This writing emerges through its difference from patriarchal writing, serving as a challenge to it and also to the

forms it upholds (prose, and realism in particular).

Key idea Écriture feminine refers to female writing, as distinct from and as a challenge to male writing.

Both Irigaray and Kristeva take up Cixous’s idea: for Kristeva it is embodied in two different parts of language – one that is ordered and structured, and driven by male control (the symbolic), and one which is fluid, disruptive and essentially female (the semiotic). Irigaray translates the idea into a broader notion of women’s speech – what she calls in This Sex Which is Not One (1985) parler femme, which is represented as a challenge to male authority. For Irigaray, women’s pleasure is impossible within male systems of language – desire, and its successful achievement (what Lacan called jouissance), is unavailable to women unless they are allowed to speak as women. This pertains for Irigaray to a wider celebration of the female body, in particular to those figures that have sometimes been silenced in feminist politics, such as the mother. Rather than rejecting this role as some feminists have done, as one into which women are socialized, Irigaray in her book Speculum of the Other Woman (1985) attempts to rehabilitate the figure of the mother by suggesting that it is possible to be both mother and woman, stating in her essay ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’ (1991) that ‘we do not have to renounce being women in order to be mothers’. To do so, one must separate out the materiality of woman from the ideal that she is often taken to represent.

‘Better than a mother, then, is the working out of the idea of a mother, of the maternal ideal. Better to transform the real “natural” mother into an ideal of the maternal function which no one can ever take away from you.’

Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’ (1991)

The risk in écriture feminine is that, despite Cixous’s open, heterogeneous conceptualizing, it becomes distilled in such a way that it upholds binary distinctions between male and female authors, and thus between male and female identities more generally. Equally, it can be seen to contribute to other stereotypes, such as the idea that certain subject matter is more naturally ‘female’ (for example, it has long been a stereotype of female poets that their work is focused on the personal and approaches the political largely through this). There is a tension in the celebration of women’s writing at the same time that the idea of what it is to be a woman is being challenged. This can be seen to have split the feminist movement, between those arguing for an essential mode of female expression that had been denied and those arguing that women should be seen differently from men.

Feminisms One way to address this problem, perhaps, is to see that there is something that is female expression, and unavoidably so, but that this is not biologically granted but socially determined. Another way to consider it is to think that such ‘femaleness’ is not the preserve of women but, rather, something that has been associated predominantly with women and given less status as such. This latter position has been very influential on the queer theory we examine in the following chapter. The fact that feminism is not a single ideology but represents a number of subject positions, some of which are in conflict with others, means that the use of feminism in relation to literature can vary considerably. For example, in the twenty-first century feminism has been dominated by an ideological split – between those who call themselves liberal feminists and those who define themselves as radical feminists. Radical feminists locate the source of prejudice against women in patriarchal gender relations. They are principally concerned therefore with how being a woman results in one being treated differently. Although they see gender as fluid, they see sex as a biological

reality, and argue that it is for this biological reality that women are oppressed. Their main aim is to overthrow patriarchy through direct action, but also to question the stereotypical associations made about women’s bodies, social roles and physical abilities. In contrast, liberal feminists are focused on women’s rights of individual expression, and within that the legal and social barriers to this.

Case study: the Suzanne Moore controversy Many radical feminists support transgender rights. A small number however, have argued that transgender issues are separate from feminism. They suggest that sex is biological, and it is therefore impossible for someone who has not grown up as a woman to experience the same oppression as someone who has. In addition, because they refuse to recognize male-to-female transgender individuals as women, these feminists argue that the transgender movement is a continuance of men speaking for women. This, plus the suggestion that the stereotypical views upheld by many transgender women are damaging to feminism, means that radical feminists have been criticized for excluding transgender women. Liberal feminists supporting the transgender position have defined these radical feminists through the acronym TERF, which stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist. The divisions between liberal and radical feminists on this issue have been fuelled by social media, where transgender feminists have a strong presence. This was strongly illustrated in January 2013, when the feminist journalist Suzanne Moore unwittingly found herself at the centre of the debates. On 8 January, Moore published a piece in the New Statesman magazine examining the relationship between gender and the economic downturn in Britain, arguing that it was women who were facing the hardest fallout from events. One line in the article, that women were ‘angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual’ led to a massive response on Twitter accusing Moore of transphobia. Moore’s comments in response were seen by many to be flippant and insensitive, and the media storm that grew led to equally distasteful threats against Moore that led her to close her Twitter account. These debates draw attention to the complexities of defining feminism in the twentyfirst century. For literary critics, it means we must be certain about precisely what feminism we think works might usefully engage with or represent.

Although often in disagreement with the radical feminism position on transgender, this concern for the body is also manifested in the celebration of the female body evidenced in much materialist feminism, which, as I discuss in Chapter 15, has been a dominant influence on the new materialist movement. While materialist feminism upholds the second-wave idea that biological sex must not be confused with socially constructed gender, it disputes the idea held by both radical and Anglo-American second-wave feminists that this means that women need to be ‘freed’ from their body. Instead, influenced by the kind of bodily theory of Irigaray, it announces the need to reclaim the physical form from patriarchy.

Third-wave feminism and beyond The move to feminisms is associated with where feminism is today – in a third wave that began in the 1990s and continues to the present. This latest feminist movement has opened itself to the need to acknowledge the varying ways in which gender discrimination relates to other forms of social oppression, and this has had an impact on the use of feminism in literary criticism. As Mary Eagleton notes in the introduction to her excellent critical reader Feminist Literary Criticism (1991), feminism constitutes a broad range of diverse identifications, and debates with other theoretical interests. Black feminists and Marxist feminists have foregrounded the ways in which, respectively, race and class complicate the operation of patriarchy. The theory that examines such significances is called intersectionality. It argues that we cannot think about identity politics by just examining one particular aspect of how a person is identified; we need to consider how each part of their identity is important. Influential works in these terms are Michele Barrett’s Women’s Oppression Today (1988), Catherine Belsey’s John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (1988), and bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981). These works prompt us as literary critics not to think exclusively about the gender politics of a text, but also about how the representation of gender is affected by other elements of identity such as class, sexuality, race and disability.

Key idea Intersectionality is the study of the rights of women alongside other identity factors such as race, class, disability and religion.

Third-wave feminism faces a challenge from what has become referred to as post-feminism: a movement that suggests we no longer need to focus on female inequality. Critics of post-feminism, however, draw attention to its essentially Western focus, an ethnocentrism (centring on one particular ethnic experience) which neglects the powerful inequalities still experienced, not only by women in the developing world but also by ethnic minorities within the developed world. At the same time, there are calls for a fourth-wave feminism from some campaigners, distinct from the third wave in its focus on social media and globalization. For literary critics, these debates mean that gender continues to be a rich source of discussion, as what we read is surely part of the changing sense of gender relations across the world.

Fact check 1 Which political group is associated with the first wave of feminism? a The suffragettes b The Luddites c The Marxists d The postmodernists 2 What does écriture feminine mean? a Female thought b Female writing c Female thinking d Female speech 3 Who wrote The Feminine Mystique? a Betty Friedan

b Luce Irigaray c Kate Millett d Simone de Beauvoir 4 What field is Laura Mulvey associated with? a Literature b Film c Theatre d Music 5 Who wrote Sexual Politics a Betty Friedan b Luce Irigaray c Kate Millett d Simone de Beauvoir 6 What is the term for the male inheritance of power? a Gynopower b Patriarchy c Sexism d Racism 7 What does the acronym TERF stand for? a Trans exclusionary radical feminist b Trans exclusionary real feminist c Trans exclusive radical feminist d Trans exclusionary radical femininity 8 Who wrote ‘To Room Nineteen’? a Virginia Woolf b Kate Chopin c Louisa May Alcott d Doris Lessing 9 Who wrote ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’? a Betty Friedan b Luce Irigaray c Kate Millettt d Simone de Beauvoir

10 What wave of feminism do we associate with Virginia Woolf? a First b Second c Third d Fourth

Dig deeper Felman, Shoshana (1993), What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gilmore, Leigh (1994), Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's SelfRepresentation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Humm, Maggie, ed. (1995), Practising Feminist Criticism: An Introduction. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf Madsen, Deborah (2000), Feminist Theory and Literary Practice. London: Pluto Press. Miller, Nancy K (1988), Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Morris, Pam (1993), Literature and Feminism: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

12 Queer theory Two abstract and specific ideas – the variety in modes of personal expression of identity, and the desire to love differently – are the central themes of what is referred to as queer theory. Queer theory, on the one hand, directs its attention specifically towards questioning heteronormativity and exploring other sexual identities. Yet, equally, it is concerned with a broader interest in how identities are socially sanctioned, how they are performed, and how alternative performances come to exist and with what political resonances.

Dancing to your own tune In 2006 Disney released an animated movie entitled Happy Feet. The story of a young penguin called Mumble, Happy Feet begins with the young Mumble in class with all the other penguins. This is not any class, however, but rather a music class in which each penguin is encouraged to perform what will be the defining creative expression of their penguin lives – their heart song. Each penguin, we quickly learn, has their own unique heart song. But the great opening drama of the movie is this: Mumble doesn’t have a heart song. Much to his teacher’s and his classmates’ horror, when Mumble opens his mouth to sing all that comes out is a hideous squawking sound. The consequences of this are immense – to be a penguin without a heart song, Mumble is told, ‘is to be hardly a penguin at all’. Not only this, but it is through their heart songs that penguins find their lifelong mate. Without a heart song, Mumble will be alone for ever. The twist in this tale is Mumble’s restless, tapping feet. Although Mumble indeed does not have a heart song, he does have another means of creative expression: he loves to dance. Leaving the penguin colony in shame, the rest of the movie is devoted to Mumble’s daring adventures and his heroism. By the end of the movie, not only has he been accepted but he has also found love. On its release, much attention was paid to Happy Feet’s strident environmentalism. But Mumble’s love of dance and his rejection of the heart song also speak to a political statement. Mumble, in essence, refuses socially sanctioned expressions of identity in favour of his own, unique, mode of expression when all those around him are caught in acceptable displays of selfhood. Moreover, Mumble’s mode of expression involves him not merely in a desire to express selfhood differently but also to love differently. These two ideas – the different ways of expressing identity and the desire to love differently – are the central themes of queer theory. And while the story of an animated penguin might be an unusual way to introduce this somewhat

serious school of literary theory, it also exemplifies the simultaneously abstract and specific nature of queer theory’s concerns. On the one hand, Mumble’s experience can be seen to be a very specific metaphor for homosexual and other sexual activities that challenge the dominance of heterosexuality and the ways in which society sanctions heterosexual practices in favour of alternative sexual identities – what is called heteronormativity. Mumble wants to love differently: he is a metaphor for alternative modes of attachment to the normative. Yet, he is also a more abstract metaphor for performing against socially sanctioned identities, and for the very nature of these identities as performative. Mumble’s dancing questions the fact that one must sing, and thus draws attention to how what the other penguins have just accepted is in fact determined by the rules of their community, and open to challenge and to change.

Queer Queer theory takes its name from a term of homophobic abuse, being used as a term of insult against gay individuals and communities. In the 1990s, however, the term was reclaimed by intellectuals speaking from the perspective of gay identities, as a political act against homophobia. These critics were taking up a wider reclamation of the word within the gay community, who reclaimed the word from its pejorative associations to reinstitute its original meaning as odd or different, but in a positive rather than negative sense: odd as different, anti-establishment, and making strange those conventions taken for granted as natural.

Key idea Queer is the political reclamation of what was once a term of abuse, to meaning antiestablishment and transgressive sexualities.

Those identifying themselves as queer scholars build on an earlier tradition of gay criticism, which was more specifically directed towards issues of gay identity. Indeed, there is a rich vein of gay literature that explores these

themes: the writings of Alan Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1971), Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers (1943) and Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ (1997) being notable examples.

Spotlight E. M. Forster’s Maurice was published in 1971, but it was in fact written in 1913–14. Although Forster showed the novel to friends during his lifetime, he felt that he couldn’t publish it because of attitudes to homosexuality at the time, and it was published only after his death.

Queer theory in particular builds on lesbian critic Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality and the lesbian continuum (1980), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the homosocial (1985) and Jeffrey Weeks’s investigations of gay culture (1985). It is also deeply indebted to poststructuralist theory, again both in abstract and specific terms. In abstract terms, it borrows from poststructuralism the suggestion that the relationship between signifier and signified is not only arbitrary (as per structuralism) but also historically and politically constituted. In terms of the specifics, it is deeply influenced by Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978), in which Foucault applies this understanding to questions of sexual identity. Foucault challenges the ‘repressive hypothesis’ that says there was no interest in sexuality in Europe until the mid-twentieth century, arguing that, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a strong interest not only in sexual behaviour but sexual transgression. Foucault examines how the homosexual did not become an identity until the nineteenth-century preoccupation with sex. The enshrining of sexuality as an identity rather than a behaviour – one is homosexual, rather than does homosexuality – creates sexuality as an absolute that comes to define our sense of self, but also how we are treated by others. It was at the same time as these identities became fixed that certain behaviours were defined as socially unacceptable, and as illegal, aligning homosexuality with other categories such as the mentally ill and the criminal. This interest in sexuality is another facet of power – an

extension of the control by the state, which Foucault first explores in Discipline and Punish (1975). It is the broadening out of these concerns to wider questions pertaining to sexuality and the performance of identity that distinguishes queer theory from these earlier thinkers, although they have served as key influences on the later work.

Compulsory heterosexuality A central contribution of queer theory has been to question binary ideas of sexuality: the sense that there is a straightforward and clear-cut opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality. In her 1980 essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ the American radical feminist Adrienne Rich argues that society constructs our belief that romantic, intimate relationships only exist between a man and a woman so that heterosexuality is seen as normal, and anything outside this becomes deviant. Heterosexuality therefore becomes compulsory. In this context, questioning heterosexuality is a political act that challenges patriarchy.

Key idea Compulsory heterosexuality refers to society’s construction of relationships between men and women as natural and alternative sexual relationships as unnatural, so that heterosexuality is enforced.

Like many radical feminists, Rich here presents lesbianism as a political choice as much as an innate feeling. While this does not disavow those who see their sexuality as inherent, it suggests that sexual identities may also be chosen as political acts. Lesbianism is radical because it is a statement of rejection of the crippling male power that heterosexuality acts to support.

‘But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she

ever sleeps with women.’ Audre Lorde, interview (1980)

At the centre of this ability to choose is Rich’s belief that sexuality is a fluid line upon which one moves, rather than a fixed position. For this fluidity, Rich coins the term ‘lesbian continuum’. This does not mean that all women have or will engage in sexual activity with other women but, rather, that all women – if they are to identify positively with their gender – must enact some kind of intimate relationship with another woman.

‘I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history – of woman-identified experiences, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman.’ Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980)

Through these experiences, a woman is able to appreciate her gender identity and sexuality in a way that is impossible through heterosexuality, which acts only to reproduce patriarchy. These experiences, however, are denied by society and women are encouraged to reject them in favour of heterosexual behaviour. One can see this when a woman abandons her female friends for her new boyfriend, or feels embarrassed when she desires to spend time with another woman. The pressure on women to reproduce heterosexuality, and to define themselves as heterosexual, serves patriarchal power.

Key idea Lesbian continuum describes the range of intimate relationships between women, with or without sexual behaviour.

In her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Eve Sedgwick coins the term ‘homosocial’ to describe the male equivalent of the lesbian continuum. Rather than sexual relations among men, homosociality suggests strong non-sexual attraction. For Sedgwick, this may at times be a displacement of sexual attraction. For example, she discusses the love triangle as an event that might be read as a displacement of homosexual desire – two men competing for a woman’s attentions but subconsciously being driven by the desire to maintain an erotic connection to each other. Sedgwick’s example of this connection is Shakespeare’s sonnets, many of which are written to a male muse. Although there is no suggestion within them of sexual activity, there is a depth of feeling with romantic qualities – a level of intimacy that one associates more with sexual love. In her later book Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick builds on this analysis to critique the entire hetero/homosexual binary, as a structure kept in place to serve those uncomfortable with the idea of more fluid sexual identities and to drive both compulsory heterosexuality and the perpetuation of fears surrounding same-sex desire, particularly in the wake of the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s.

Key idea Homosocial is a term describing strong non-sexual attraction between men.

One might consider that every novel that features marriage is a comment on compulsory heterosexuality, and that every novel featuring male or female friendship relates to the homosocial or the lesbian continuum. There are, however, notable examples of fictions that explicitly connect with these themes. For example, in nineteenth-century literature Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) explore male worlds in which male affection is explicitly presented and male desire implicitly suggested. In the modernist period, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) can be read as the tragedy of a woman forced by compulsory heterosexuality to pass out of the intimate relationship with a woman that characterizes her youth, and into a patriarchal

marriage. More recently, Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) explores the strong, intimate connections between women that exist outside the effects of patriarchy through the story of a group of young damaged women who form a convent on the outskirts of a patriarchal African-American community.

Gender performativity One particularly central tenet of queer studies is the relationship between sexuality and ideas of gender. In fact, the best-known queer theorist, the American academic Judith Butler, is principally concerned not with sexuality (although her work does discuss this) but, rather, with questions of gender. For this reason, you may also see this aspect of queer theory referred to separately as gender theory, which relates to this specific element in queer theory’s wider range of concerns. The gender theory of Butler and those influenced by her is what we call antiessentialist; that is, it questions the idea that our gender identities are essential and biologically determined. Here it is worth being clear on the traditional distinction made between sex and gender.

Key ideas Sex is the term used to refer to the biological attributes of a person, in most cases falling into the category of either man or woman, and in most cases reflected in chromosomal differences (xx for woman, xy for a man). Gender refers to how a person expresses their identity as either male or female, based on clothing, behaviours and the use of particular linguistic structures (such as he/she).

Butler draws attention to society’s socialization, which often uses these terms interchangeably. She argues that we have been taught to see a ‘natural’ connection between gender and sex, so that someone who is biologically female will have a female gender, and someone who is biologically male will have a male gender, but that in fact this association is merely a matter of how we are taught to think and feel. There is no inherent reason why gender

expression should be limited to particular biological sexes. Rather, gender is a series of impersonations. Influenced by postmodern theory, these impersonations exist without an original source: they are an example of Baudrillard’s simulacrum, where the copy exists without an original. Butler first explores these ideas in her book Gender Trouble (1990) and later in Bodies that Matter (1993). In these works, she argues for gender as performativity. This idea should not be confused with the idea that gender is merely a performance. What Butler means by performativity is that gender is something that exists in the stylized repetition of acts – clothes, speech and body language – which, over a period of time, come to define a particular gender. One cannot freely choose a performance: this is something that society determines through the ways in which it tells us what constitutes male and female behaviour. Although destabilizing identities do exist – most notably actions such as drag, which draw attention to gender’s performative qualities – these are exceptions that are largely repressed because of society’s deeply ingrained attitudes towards gender. What does it mean, for example, to be female and masculine? This is a question asked by Jack Halberstam in his book Female Masculinity (1998). Halberstam draws attention to the acceptance of masculine femaleness in childhood, when the tomboy is socially accepted, and to the increasing prohibition of these ‘masculine’ behaviours in adolescence and adulthood. Examining Hollywood cinema, Halberstam looks at a number of examples of women who defy gender stereotypes, supporting the more widespread acceptance of fluid gender identities.

Spotlight Madonna’s music video for the song ‘Vogue’ captures a Harlem street dance called ‘voguing’ popular with gay men in the 1980s. It is a powerful example of gender performance, with men adopting gender fluid poses that draw inspiration from the fashion runway.

Key idea Gender performativity is the idea that gender is something individuals perform through a series of stylized acts and behaviours. Because these performances are socially conditioned they are accepted as normal, apart from where they fall outside expected gender norms.

THE PERFORMANCE OF BIOLOGY Butler’s theory ultimately argues that distinctions between sex and gender are illusory. We maintain gender to uphold the idea of sexual difference. The most radical part of Butler’s argument is therefore that both sex and gender are performances, at least in the sense that the presence of intersex individuals (those with both male and female sexual characteristics) complicates the idea that the world is easily split into two discrete sexes.

Spotlight It has been estimated that there are tens of millions of people in the world who do not have standard xx or xy sex chromosomes. For example, approximately 1 in 1,000 people will have an extra y chromosome (xyy). Approximately 97 per cent of these people will have no idea that they do not have an xy genetic profile.

‘If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.’ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)

Undoing gender In the wake of recent publicity surrounding transgender identities, Butler’s theory may seem unremarkable. When she began writing in the 1990s, however, such theory was challenging. In her book Undoing Gender (2004), Butler devotes a chapter to the story of David Reimer, a young boy who after an accident during a circumcision procedure when he was seven months old was gender reassigned from male to female and raised as a girl. This took place under the supervision of a psychologist, John Money, who believed in the theory of gender neutrality – the idea that gender is entirely socialized, and therefore can be changed if enacted at a very young age. Because David had an identical twin brother, he made an excellent research case. Yet Money’s treatment involved activities that today would be defined as sexual abuse, involving both boys. When David refused to identify as female despite hormone treatments, his parents revealed his birth identity to him and he underwent a series of procedures to reassert his male gender. At the age of 38, David committed suicide. Butler uses this tragic case to explore the questions of gender identity, and in particular to what extent gender can be seen as a performance, revisiting the ideas she first explored in her book Gender Trouble. Because David’s brother also committed suicide two years before him, and suffered from schizophrenia, Butler exposes the difficulty of identifying whether David’s suicide was a result of genetics, his gender identity or the sexual abuse he and his brother experienced while receiving psychological treatment. Rather than attempting to answer this question, Butler instead asks the reader to examine how David’s voice is lost in the accounts of his experience, and how one might ethically represent his story without reducing it to a scientific study or intellectual argument. The humanity of Butler’s account represents a central tenet of contemporary queer theory: to oppose the desire to categorize individuals or simplify how gender identity is formed, in favour of acknowledging the complex and often contradictory ways in which gender is expressed. Although Butler’s gender theory is often used without discussion of sexuality, her relationship to earlier gay and lesbian critics lies in the fact that

she sees the association between biological sex and gender as one that society reinforces in the service of compulsory heterosexuality. Anxiety regarding gender, she argues, is in fact anxiety regarding sexuality: we need clear identities as male and female to ensure a binary system of sexuality that exists only if those categories are maintained. Thus, gender binaries are socially maintained in order to maintain the idea of two sexes, in order to continue the promotion of heterosexuality as normal and gay identity as deviant. This in itself is in the service of patriarchal norms. That is not to say, however, that these are easy parallels between political LGBTQ activities and queer theory. In this respect, the influence of poststructuralism has particular significance. Butler’s suggestion that gender identities are performed, for example, refutes the idea that one can ‘be’ a particular gender. In this respect, transgenderism becomes a need to be respected, but the idea that gender and biology must be in alignment is rendered politically conservative. This is problematic where transgenderism implies surgical procedures to create this alignment. Such movement in the terms of Butler’s theory can be read as a capitulation to socialized norms. And while Butler strongly affirms the right of the individual to make these associations, nevertheless it is hard, within the context of her theory, to see such actions as radical in the way that expressions refuting this association might be. It is for this reason that Butler’s early work focuses in particular on concepts of drag, while her discussion of David is directed towards a critique of the medical profession that treated him in an attempt to reproduce precisely such an alignment, even where intersexual biology made it impossible. Equally, the fluidity of gender in these terms makes it difficult to posit an essentialist politics: if everything is performance, even forced performance, then where does that leave politics based on collective identities? Facing the same tensions as those in race studies in this regard, queer theorists have had to consider how their own poststructuralist-influenced politics might be integrated into the very real associations with gender as ‘real’ that many individuals desire (even if this desire can itself be seen to be a product of socialization).

Following from Butler’s work come theories on the queering of other identities, particularly of race and class. That these identities are equally socialized rather than biologically inherent sees them function similarly to gender in the sense that it is possible to look for how such identity performances are reinforced, and where fissures are created that allow for the exceptional acts of radical interruption when alternative identities are forged. For example, more recently, there have been theories of race queerness that examine the way in which race, like gender, is not a biological absolute but a social construction used to uphold white privilege.

Queering literature In literary terms, queer theory has concerned itself with both the abstract and the specific. In terms of the specific, it draws attention to the inherent queerness of literature, through the work of such writers as Oscar Wilde, Alan Hollinghurst, Annie Proulx, E. M. Forster, Armistead Maupin, Virginia Woolf, Alice Waker, Tony Kushner, Hanif Kureishi, Jeanette Winterson, Joe Orton and Ali Smith. All these writers have explicitly addressed questions of heteronormativity and homosexual desire in their works. At the same time, critics have also addressed the specific concern of homosexual desire by considering the queer currents across literature beyond this explicit association: for example, Sedgwick’s reading (1985) of Henry James’s novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903) or Elaine Showalter’s reading (1991) of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). You might like to consider how different these readings are from the formalist readings of the same texts. In the twenty-first century, it has been important for queer theory to move beyond concerns for homosexual identities to questions of bisexuality, pansexuality, asexuality and other alternative expressions. In particular, the idea of queer itself implies not discrete gender identities but, rather, the ability to see beyond gender – young people expressing queer identities make statements such as ‘I just don’t see gender’. The idea of living outside gender is explored in a number of novels, including Keri Hulme’s Booker Prizewinning The Bone People (1983) or Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (1986), an erotic novel in which all the characters are genderless.

Case study: Trumpet In her novel Trumpet (1998), Jackie Kay tells the story of Joss Moody, a fictional character based on the real-life story of Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who lived his life as a man but on his death was revealed to be biologically female. Kay transfers this story of an American musician to Scotland and London, and makes Tipton, who was a drummer, into a trumpet player. In Kay’s narrative, we read Joss’s story largely through the voices of those who knew him – his wife Millie and his adopted son Coleman. While Coleman struggles to come to terms with the revelation about his father’s biology, Millie upholds the idea of Joss as a man – as the perfect husband and father. Her rather unconvincing unreliable narration jars against the details she inadvertently reveals – such as her brushing of Joss’s hair – which suggest that there is fluidity in Joss’s identity that Millie chooses to deny. It is in this context that the central chapter of the novel, entitled ‘Music’, offers a counter-discourse to the rest of the narrative. Apart from the end of the novel, it is the only section told from Joss’s point of view. Strikingly, it does not present a sense that Joss wishes to inhabit a traditionally male identity and that his trumpet playing (complete with phallic associations) represents this, as one might expect. Instead, Joss’s relationship to music is offered not as one that connects him to masculinity but as something that allows him to exist in a space of artistic expression that transcends gender.

Trumpet documents the current questions being asked by queer theory – the possibility of multiple subject positions, not merely those that question gender and sex alignment but those that also question the politics of realignment. The boundaries of queer theory are always moving, just as performance itself is always shifting. So, for example, as transgender and pansexual identities become increasingly accepted – the cases of Miley Cyrus and Caitlyn Jenner being obvious examples – so the questions of race, class and disability which inform intersectional feminist theory become increasingly relevant, as we are driven to ask just who is allowed to be queer and on what terms. This has led to new biographical writings, such as Juliet Jacques’s Trans: A Memoir (2015), which tries to expose transition not as a glamorous story but as a frequently mundane and frustrating experience. These social changes will undoubtedly prompt shifts in the future direction of

queer theory.

Fact check 1 What is another term for queer theory? a Gender theory b Feminism c Postcolonialism d Gay theory 2 When was Maurice published? a 1914 b 1941 c 1971 d 1917 3 Which critic introduced the idea of compulsory heterosexuality? a Simone de Beauvoir b Adrienne Rich c Alan Hollinghurst d Kate Millett 4 Who coined the term ‘homosociality’? a Eve Sedgwick b Adrienne Rich c Suzanne Moore d Kate Millett 5 What is the name of Judith Butler’s first book? a Undoing Gender b Bodies that Matter c The Closet d Gender Trouble 6 What is the name of the boy whose story of gender reassignment is told in Undoing Gender? a David Reimer

b David Rime c John Reimer d Daniel Reimer 7 Trumpet is based on the real-life story of which musician? a Daniel Tong b Simon Crawford-Phillips c William Coleman d Billy Tipton 8 Who wrote Trans: A Memoir? a Juliet Robbins b Juliet Smith c Juliet Jacques d Juliet Jones 9 Which nineteenth-century novella does Elaine Showalter make a queer reading of? a Dracula b Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde c Heart of Darkness d The Sign of Four 10 What is Rich’s term for intimate relationships between women? a Compulsory heterosexuality b The lesbian continuum c Gender performance d Homosociality

Dig deeper Caroll, Rachel (2012), Rereading Heterosexuality Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Elliot, Patricia (2010), Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory. Farnham: Ashgate. Morland, Iain and Wilcox, Annabelle (2005), Queer Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sullivan, Nikki (2003), A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

13 Postcolonial criticism Postcolonial theory is concerned with the ways in which texts – not just fictional texts but texts of all kinds – shape our understanding of the colonized world, both historically and in the present. This includes physical settlement of other territories (colonialism), the wider cultural control of the developing world by European powers (imperialism), and the reworking of these methods of control in the contemporary world (neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism).

The Empire writes back Key ideas Colonialism is the physical settlement of one country by another. Imperialism is the dominance of one country by another through trade and cultural influence, with or without settlement. Neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism describe the continuance of colonialism and imperialism in the twentieth century and beyond, after the ending of a formal colonial period.

Spotlight If anyone were to say that the serious themes of postcolonial criticism prevented it from having a sense of humour, they need only remember the title of one of the field’s most important books: The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin and Gareth Griffiths. The title is a witty play on the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, which was the movie hit of 1980. Whereas George Lucas’s epic movie makes the Empire into an evil force lead by the sinister Darth Vader, the Empire in this case comprises the countries previously colonized by European powers, whose colonial expansion into the developing world began in the fifteenth century and reached its peak in the late nineteenth century.

Although postcolonial criticism has now expanded (there is now, for example, a developed school of postcolonial geographical criticism), its roots in written text make it one of the most explicitly literary theories we can examine. This emphasis comes largely from the fact that what might be seen as the founding text of postcolonial criticism, the Palestinian critic Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), has a very literary focus. Although postcolonial theory has been strongly influenced by earlier critics, most notably the French Algerian writer Frantz Fanon and his seminal text Black Skin, White Masks (1967), Said’s work brought the theorizing of postcolonial relations

into mainstream criticism. Heavily influenced by the work of Foucault and his idea of discourse, Said argues that the West (the Occident) imagined the Orient in a way that positioned it permanently as an inferior ‘other’.

‘The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the orientalist’s work.’ Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

Although Said is discussing the Middle East, his work has been used to construct a more general theory of relations between the colonizer and colonized, and has been applied to many different historical and geographical contexts. In his later work Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said addresses specifically the reading of colonial texts. He argues that the postcolonial critic must read against the grain of texts, for their absences – for what is not said. Here the influence of poststructuralist deconstruction can be clearly identified. For this practice, Said evokes a musical term: he describes this as a contrapuntal reading. His example is the absence of slavery in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), which, he argues, haunts the novel and its Antiguan context. We could turn to several other examples, most notably Chinua Achebe’s criticism of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), in which he argues for the latent racism of Conrad’s supposedly anti-colonial novel, reading for the silenced voices of the colonized and the novel’s female figures. Achebe’s reading is a powerful example of how reading against the currently held interpretation, and for what is not said, can dramatically alter how a text is perceived. This way of reading has parallels in African-

American criticism with Toni Morrison’s argument in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), in which she suggests that within the canonical works of American literature there exists an ever-present black cultural identity, which must be acknowledged if the racial history of America is to be properly understood.

Key idea Contrapuntal reading is similar to poststructuralist ideas of trace and différence – the idea of reading a text for the voices silenced by the narrative.

Spotlight Edward Said’s interest in music extends beyond his theory of the contrapuntal. He was a talented pianist and great friend of the Israeli pianist and composer Daniel Barenboim, with whom he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the aim of which is to promote understanding between Palestinian and Israeli musicians. In 2004, a year after Said’s death, the Palestinian music conservatory was renamed the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in his honour.

Case study: Strange Music A fascinating contemporary novel that explores contrapuntal reading is Laura Fish’s Strange Music (2008). In this case, the contrapuntal reading is not of a novel but of literary history. The story is told by three women: Kaydia, a Creole maidservant on an estate in Jamaica; Sheba, an indentured labourer; and the English poet Elizabeth Barrett (who later became Elizabeth Barrett Browning on her marriage to the poet Robert Browning). Telling the story of Elizabeth’s abolitionist beliefs and her interaction with the women working on her father’s plantation, the novel hints at the possibility that Elizabeth herself has part-African ancestry. There has always been a rumour that the reason Elizabeth’s father prohibited his children from marrying (and was therefore so violently opposed to Elizabeth’s union

with Robert that he disinherited her) was because of his fear that the blackness of the family line might be revealed if it were to continue. Despite evidence for the family’s African connections, there is no mention of this by the foremost group of Browning enthusiasts, the Browning Society. Equally, images of Elizabeth vary widely – the portrait of her that hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery is of an olive-skinned woman with dark eyes and hair but the picture chosen by the Society for their webpage is a pencil drawing. Whether or not one believes the rumours about Elizabeth, one can see in these choices the construction of a specific literary history that silences the black presence. Only through enacting the kind of reading of that history that Said proposes can we uncover the more complicated truth about Britain’s colonial history.

Postcolonial spaces The idea of the West’s imagining of the colonized world and its populations is central to postcolonial theory. For example, in her book Imperial Eyes (1992), Mary Louise Pratt considers how European travel writing contributed to imagining and ‘othering’ the developing world, while Robert Young in his work Colonial Desire (1995) explores how colonial medical and religious discourses imagined and ‘othered’ the colonized body. More widely, critics have focused on how colonizers imagined the geographies of the colonized world to justify their colonial expansion. Texts such as Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay (1987) explore how colonialism imagined the colonial territories as blank spaces to be conquered. One particularly influential critic in this regard is Benedict Anderson. Not strictly a postcolonial text, Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) has been highly influential on postcolonial theory. The book’s argument is that the nation is an imagined space, created through complex narratives to make it appear natural. Anderson highlights how colonial authorities used such devices as the census and the map to enshrine a sense of colonial territories as official and therefore beyond challenge.

Postcolonial forms Alongside this focus on the colonial text, postcolonial criticism draws attention to voices from outside Europe and the United States and their

contribution to literature. The title of The Empire Writes Back points to this possibility, examining how authors writing from developing-world nations have critiqued the effects of colonialism in their own writings. In her later work, Helen Tiffin has discussed this in terms of postcolonial counterdiscourse: the ways in which writers challenge colonial narratives and the world views they perpetuate with directly focused and explicitly intertextual alternatives. Novels such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015) and Aime Cesaire’s play A Tempest (1969) engage in a deconstructive, contrapuntal process to reveal the silenced blackness of Bertha, Friday, Heathcliff and Caliban and, in doing so, ask readers to rethink the ideological effects of many classic works of literature.

Key idea Counter-discourse is the process of ‘writing back’ to classic colonial texts with postcolonial rewritings.

In her book Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (1983), Elizabeth Ermarth examines how the realist novel encourages a certain agreement among readers: it drives plots towards a particular conclusion and encourages readers to accept its Eurocentric world view. As a result, many postcolonial texts provide alternatives to realism. The magical realist form is particularly prevalent in postcolonial novels, chosen for its ability to remake realism and infuse it with developing-world myths and traditions. Examples of magical realist texts include Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1998). An argument can be made that the postmodern form associated with Anglo-American innovation is heavily influenced by magical realist incursions into realism by world writers. This challenges the earlier view that postmodernism influenced developing-world anti-realist strategies.

‘CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?’ The competing influences of postcolonial theory are most easily seen in the

work of one of its most prominent critics, the Indian academic Gayatri Spivak. Spivak first made her name as the translator of Jacques Derrida’s early poststructuralist work Of Grammatology (1967). In this respect, her work is very influenced by poststructuralist ideas. Spivak, however, is also affiliated with a group of Indian scholars called the Subaltern Studies group. This group, which aims to recuperate the lost and silenced voices of ordinary people in the developing world, has its basis in Marxist thinking. In a ground-breaking essay first published in 1988 entitled ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak attempts to bring together these Marxist and poststructuralist influences. The focus of the essay is ‘the subaltern’, defined as that subject entirely without a voice. The embodiment of this subject for Spivak is the lower-class, colonized woman.

‘Clearly, if you are poor, black and female, you get it in three ways.’ Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988)

Key idea The subaltern represents the completely marginalized subject, entirely without a voice.

Spivak’s essay criticizes poststructuralist philosophy for claiming that it can represent the voice of this subaltern subject. In particular, it challenges the work of two of the more political poststructuralists, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, and says that, instead, it is Derrida’s thinking which is most useful for trying to understand the subaltern position. This, for Spivak, is because Derrida does not attempt to represent the subaltern subject but, rather, focuses through his analysis of language on understanding exactly what representation means. In her critique, Spivak also draws on Marxist

criticism, using this to illustrate the material suffering of the subaltern subject and arguing that this cannot be ignored. The most famous part of her essay is its final pages. Here, Spivak attempts to answer the question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ By this, she is not, of course, asking whether the subaltern (the subordinate) can actually speak. What she means is, can the subaltern subject have a voice that is heard? Her example in this respect is the issue of sati, the traditional Indian Hindu practice of widows killing themselves on the death of their husbands. Spivak relates that during the colonial period in India, when the ruling British attempted to outlaw the practice, their colonized male subjects upheld it as a symbol of Indian nationalism. What resulted was ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, but nowhere was there space for the women’s voices to be heard. As a result of this, Spivak concludes that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’: her voice is taken up by others who claim to speak for her, but the truth of her experience is unavailable to us.

Spotlight In a revised version of her essay published in her later book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), however, Spivak retracts her famous statement. This suggests a much more optimistic position, in keeping with her Marxist influences, but also reflects the shift to more politicized work in later poststructuralism.

Case study: Foe One powerful meditation on the questions raised by Spivak’s theory is South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe. A counter-discursive reworking of Daniel Defoe’s classic tale of colonial adventure, Robinson Crusoe (1719), the novel employs a magical-realist form, reimagining the novel from the point of view of a woman called Susan Barton, who was also stranded on the island with Crusoe and Friday, and who returned to London with them, although Crusoe (here called Cruso) did not survive the journey. Susan approaches Defoe (here called Daniel Foe) to attempt to convince him to write her story, but instead ends up becoming his lover. Susan in this regard

represents the women absent from Defoe’s masculine story of adventure and, more widely, the silenced voices of women travellers who men refused to see outside the traditional frameworks of femininity and sexual desire. At the same time, bringing Friday back to London constructs a reversal of the adventure narrative and its problematic consequences. Defoe’s Friday figure is mute – there is a rumour that he has had his tongue cut out – and he cannot read or write. Much of the narrative concerns Susan’s unsuccessful attempts to teach Friday and to inculcate him into English methods of communication. The figure of Susan raises difficult questions about the nature of privilege, and about what constitutes subaltern identity. In one way, there is a powerful connection between Susan and Friday, which suggests that on some level we can see their experiences as commensurate. Both are marginalized by the patriarchal figure of Daniel Foe and the spectre of Crusoe himself that haunts the narrative. Yet, at the same time, Susan’s engagement with Friday illustrates her own racial prejudice and her inability to escape the colonial attitudes she has inherited. In this respect, her subaltern status is reduced by her Englishness in a way that is not available to Friday on account of his masculinity. There is therefore no ultimate sense of affective empathy between the two characters. While Susan’s ability to speak allows her some capacity to tell her story, Friday is voiceless. At the end of the novel Friday is dying, and he opens his mouth only for a stream of bubbles to float into the water where he dies. On the one hand, such a conclusion is an affirmation of the suggestion that the subaltern cannot speak, robbed forever of his voice, and those efforts to represent him (such as Susan’s) being futile and self-interested. Yet, on the other, Friday’s non-verbal communication through his body does signify: he does create a sign, if not a written one. This seems to suggest the alternative possibility – that in fact the subaltern can speak, and speak for itself, but only if we reimagine what ‘speaking’ is, to take account of cultural difference and diversity. Writing from a South African perspective, Coetzee’s novel is simultaneously a comment on its source material and period and on contemporary race relations. The issue of racial segregation in South Africa and the tendency of white campaigners to claim to speak for black South Africans is critiqued by the novel’s suggestion that what should be at stake is the possibility for the subaltern to genuinely speak.

Criticism of postcolonial theory

Despite its competing influences, one criticism of postcolonial theory is that it is too influenced by poststructuralist thinking, making it more concerned with the linguistic games played in literary texts than with the material effects of injustice caused by colonialism. The best-known work of such criticism is Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory (1992). The central argument of Ahmad’s book is that poststructuralist influences have undermined a material understanding of the developing world, as is offered by Marxism. The book also includes an extended critique of Said’s Orientalism, where Ahmad suggests that Said’s book – written from a location in the United States and filled with Western examples – reproduces exactly the Western humanist tradition that it claims to be criticizing. One of Ahmad’s criticisms is that postcolonial theory produces a kind of abstract one-size-fits-all model that does not account for the specifics of individual experiences of postcolonialism. This is a criticism that has been made more widely by those critics who argue that postcolonialism obscures the individuality of specific national literatures, and that it also keeps the world locked in a situation of ‘us and them’, with previously colonized countries always being seen (and potentially seeing themselves) as victims of the colonial past. In their essay ‘What was Postcolonialism?’ (2005), Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge draw attention to this issue but also to the problems inherent in the idea of the ‘post’. This is why, in early criticism, you may see postcolonial written with a hyphen, as ‘post-colonial’, to signify the idea of coming ‘after colonialism’. Later criticism, however, abandoned this idea of ‘after’ as simplistic. This is because, first, some countries are still colonial territories. Second, the idea of ‘after’ seems to suggest that colonialism does not have an impact into the present.

THE POSTCOLONIAL EXOTIC One critic who draws attention to the generalizing effect of the idea of the postcolonial is the British literary critic Graham Huggan (1958– ). Huggan argues that the idea of ‘postcolonial literature’ both upholds and is upheld by particular stereotypes about the colonized world that come both from readers and publishers. In The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), Huggan criticizes Western critics and publishers for suggesting that texts offer a ‘truth’ about the

postcolonial world, and that readers can, through reading them, have an ‘authentic’ experience of the developing world. He contrasts this with the ways in which Anglo-American texts are read, not as representative but as fictions. More comically, this is a point made by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her Ted Talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ (2009). Drawing attention to the different ways in which developing- and developed-world texts are read, Adichie humorously draws attention to how ridiculous it is to read a novel as if it were representative.

‘I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho – and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ (2009)

For both Huggan and Adichie, the danger of this is that readers are not given access to a full range of narratives. Adichie argues that texts published about the developing world often tell a ‘single story’ about suffering, creating the idea that the developing world is devoid of artistry and sophistication. Likewise, Huggan suggests that there is a particular type of postcolonial literature promoted by publishers that has become very popular with Western readers. This literature is often rooted in magical-realist tendencies, which for Huggan create the sense of the developing world as strange and different – as exotic. In doing so, they affirm orientalist thinking, by encouraging readers to think not of the similarities between their own world and the one they are reading about, but rather to focus on the supposed differences. Here both Adichie and Huggan are arguing for a much greater, more diverse range of postcolonial texts to be made available: ones that acknowledge the horrors of colonialism and its difficult legacy, but also those that might prompt other, more complicated readings. One result of this diversity would be that the potentially levelling effect of the idea of the postcolonial would be countered

by much more attention to specific national experiences.

POSTCOLONIALISM TODAY One other question facing postcolonial criticism is its relevance to the changing geographical and political landscape of the twenty-first century. Indeed, there is a question as to how relevant postcolonial theory is when the colonial period is becoming ever more distant. Although one response to this has been to emphasize the continuing legacy of colonialism in terms of racist attitudes, continued ‘othering’ and the problems facing the developing world as the result of colonial rule, there has also been a widening of postcolonial theory’s field of interest and some change of focus to consider in more detail questions of migration, globalization and diaspora. In her work Cartographies of Diaspora, Avtar Brah (1996) complicates the notion of diaspora, which means a group of people settling in a country other than the one where they were born. She suggests that, although this concept has been traditionally associated with a desire for return, the contemporary world is one in which diaspora is a positive space of belonging.

Key idea Diaspora means the movement of a group of people from their original homeland.

This theory is affirmed by the work of Homi Bhabha (1949– ), a British Asian critic who developed his work alongside the heavily poststructuralist school of literary theory that developed at the University of Sussex in the 1980s, but who also incorporates into his analyses a range of influences including psychoanalysis and Marxism. Bhabha’s work has two main strands. In the first instance, developed in his edited collection Nation and Narration (1990), Bhabha theorizes the nation in ways that echo the work of Anderson, arguing that it exists as a kind of mythic narrative. In the second, defined in his later collection The Location of Culture (1994), he considers how migration has created diverse cultures. This centres on his theory of ‘hybridity’ as the space of ‘neither one nor the other’, where various cultural influences merge until their differences are imperceptible.

At the centre of both of Bhabha’s strands of thinking is a historical focus that is accompanied by attention to geographical specificity and a wider idea of space – how people meet and how their identities are created through ideas of location. Bhabha develops this in his idea of the third space: the physical location for the enunciation of hybridity.

Key ideas Hybridity means the mixing of different cultures. Third space is Homi Bhabha’s term for the physical space in which hybridity comes into being.

Elsewhere, this turn to the contemporary has led postcolonial theory to consider the wider issue of imperialism, neo-colonialism and neoimperialism, particularly in relation to the effects of globalization and the political and economic dominance of the United States. Notable in this regard is Hardt and Negri’s Marxist critique, Empire (2000), and also the work of Achille Mbembe, whose On the Postcolony (2001) considers the complex fusion of colonial legacy and the neo-colonial present in the developing world.

Fact check 1 In what year was Orientalism first published? a 1971 b 1975 c 1978 d 1987 2 Who wrote Orientalism? a Daniel Barenboim b Edward Said c Homi Bhabha

d David Harvey 3 What is Spivak’s term for the silenced subject? a Colonial b Diasporic c Migrant d Subaltern 4 What is the term given to communities of migrants who have settled in other countries? a Diaspora b Immigrants c Postcolonial d Refugees 5 Who wrote The Postcolonial Exotic? a Homi Bhabha b Graham Huggan c Gayatri Spivak d Edward Said 6 What is Bhabha’s term for the physical location of hybridity? a Diaspora b Migrant c City d Third space 7 On which classic novel is Foe based? a Robinson Crusoe b Moll Flanders c Jane Eyre d Wuthering Heights 8 Which Jane Austen novel does Said use as an example of contrapuntal reading? a Heart of Darkness b Wuthering Heights c Emma d Mansfield Park 9 Which Marxist critic is known for his criticism of postcolonial theory?

a b c d

Edward Said Louis Althusser Karl Marx Aijaz Ahmad

10 Who wrote On the Postcolony? a Achille Mbembe b Edward Said c Homi Bhabha d Gayatri Spivak

Dig deeper McLeod, John (2000), Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moore-Gilbert, Bart (1997), Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso. Young, Robert (2000), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: WileyBlackwell.

14 Cultural studies Whether they are biological organisms, communities or nations, cultures are what grow. In these terms, we can think about cultural studies as focused on the growth of particular identities, concerned for the ways in which we shape our understanding of the world around us in our everyday lives. How, then, is this important for literary studies? From a cultural studies perspective, texts are one aspect of a complex set of cultural influences also including film, visual art, performance, mass media, advertising, the Internet and music, which individuals and groups interact with in order to form cultural identities. Literature in this respect is an important contributor to the meanings we make in everyday life. In keeping with the ideas of reader response theory, the text exists not as a stable unit of meaning but, rather, as something shaped by the specifics of when and how it is encountered. At the same time, it can serve as evidence for a particular cultural presence. Literature is a dynamic force that is simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the culture in which it is consumed.

What is culture? Concern about questions of culture began in the nineteenth century – with Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) – and stretched through to F. R. Leavis’s formalism in the early to mid-twentieth century. What we call cultural studies, however, began in earnest in Britain in the 1950s, with the work of two British academics associated with the cultural materialism movement (see Chapter 15): Raymond Williams (1921–88) and Richard Hoggart (1918–2014). The early work by these critics – Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) – question some of the assumptions of Arnold and Leavis regarding the role of culture. While Arnold and Leavis are largely concerned for the value of what we call high culture – elite art forms, classical music, theatre and literary fiction and poetry – Hoggart and Williams are also interested in more popular forms, such as music hall, popular literature and magazines. They recognized that in people’s everyday lives, and particularly for those from less privileged class backgrounds, these popular forms are integral to forming an individual’s ideas and values.

CODING AND DECODING In 1964 Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Based at the University of Birmingham, Hoggart attracted others interested in his work, most notably a young academic named Stuart Hall (1932–2014). Hall was particularly influential, and in 1968 he took over the centre’s directorship, a position he held for the next 11 years. Like Leavis, Hoggart followed the Frankfurt School view that mass culture essentially functions only in the service of capital and the dominant ideological power. Hoggart upheld the view of popular culture as serving hegemony – Antonio Gramsci’s term for the manipulation of populations not through threat of violence but, rather, through coercion and consent. In this context, Hoggart’s broadening out of the field of interest meant maintaining this position by contrasting this ‘mass’ culture with what he saw as more ‘authentic’ working-class culture that originated at grassroots levels. By the

1970s, however, Hall’s centre began to unravel this distinction. To begin with, this meant distinguishing between ‘authentic’ and mass-produced popular works. Later, however, this distinction, too, fell away. Hall introduced the idea of ‘decoding’ – to explain the process by which the meanings and messages of a text are received and then made sense of by an audience. While the message is encoded by its creator with a set of meanings, the ways in which these are unravelled by the receiver are not fixed, but change depending on social context, cultural understanding and past experiences. Within this, there is the possibility for radical and political positions to be taken. Hall suggests that the interpreter can take three positions: dominant/hegemonic, negotiated and oppositional.

Key ideas Dominant/hegemonic position: this is where the meaning is taken just as it was encoded. When these meanings are reproduced, they advance the ideas of their (elite) producers, so fuelling the dominance of existing groups and supporting hegemony. Negotiated position: here the interpreter accepts but also modifies the dominant meaning. This makes it possible for the interpreter to recognize their own needs within the context of appearing to conform. Oppositional position: here the interpreter recognizes the suggested meaning, but intentionally decides to impose an alternative meaning. This leads to the possibility of challenging dominant ideas.

‘Decodings do not follow inevitably from encodings.’ Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse’ (1973)

STAR WARS If we consider the Star Wars franchise, we can explore in simple terms how

decoding might work:

• Taking the dominant position, viewers accept the encoded meaning of the text that the Alliance led by Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia are the forces of good, whereas the Imperial forces are the forces of evil.

• In a negotiated position, the audience might still accept this but allow their own views to modify this reading – for example, viewers might allow themselves to believe that only Luke is the hero of the narrative, whereas Leia is a barrier to successful victory.

• Finally, an oppositional position might decide that the Alliance is in fact a corrupt, unelected ruling elite, while the Imperial forces represent rebellion. While traditional readings might see only the first of these interpretations as successful, cultural studies (influenced by reader response studies) privilege the range of responses given to any text. Less concerned with ‘correct’ readings, they suggest that it is more important to understand the context in which such readings are produced. For example, in the case given above, the negotiated reading might be produced in the context of sexist beliefs or cultures that make Leia’s military presence challenging. Likewise, an oppositional reading could come in the context of republican and antimonarchist sentiment. Such readings are not ‘wrong’: rather, they tell us about the culture in which the meaning has been produced.

Critiquing mass culture Case study: The Road Runner A very simple example of this are the Warner Bros. Road Runner cartoons first screened in the late 1940s, in which Wile E. Coyote chases the Road Runner, but he never wins. In the context of mass culture theory, the cartoons tell the audience that only the fastest and fittest can win – and that the underdog (or undercoyote in this case) is never victorious. Audiences are encouraged to identify only with those

already in positions of supremacy, to celebrate the Road Runner’s victory and Coyote’s defeat, which often comes in forms both comic and gruesome. This can be seen to parallel government desire for those who are disenfranchised (the working classes, ethnic minorities, women) to believe they can never triumph, and to accept their current social status and treatment, while at the same time building their selfhatred as they come to see themselves as villains against the desirable characteristics of those in charge. We, the masses, are like Coyote. But the Road Runner is both attractive and always wins, without exception. In the context of more recent cultural theory, however, we can speculate about whether this is always the case. What if one identifies as the Road Runner? Within the narrative there seem to be possibilities for alternative readings that might disrupt the dominant meaning. In a 1980 cartoon called Soup or Sonic, Wile E. finally ‘catches’ the Road Runner. Strangely, this happens at a moment where Wile E. is shrunk down to a tiny size, the Road Runner hovering over him. Here there seems to be some acknowledgement of the politics of the cartoon – Wile E. has won but he is forever tiny in the wake of the power that the Road Runner represents. On his victory, Wile E. turns to the viewer and holds up a sign reading: ‘Okay wise guys, you always wanted me to catch him. Now what do I do?’ Again, one can see both a mass cultural and an alternative reading of this final moment. It is a moment of possibility on the one hand, but on the other it reminds audiences of how ill-equipped Coyote is for power. How possible, then, is it to overturn the status quo? And – being somewhat defeatist – what is the point of trying to do so?

Central to the cultural studies position are questions about agency – the extent to which individuals can act according to their own free will, and to what extent they are shaped by the cultural forms to which they are exposed. It is easy to think that we are not shaped by what we read or view, and to see those we disagree with as negatively influenced by culture – in other words indoctrinated. In reality, however, cultural forces shape us all. There is disagreement about the extent to which this is true between the early Frankfurt School theorists and those coming in the wake of Hall’s work, who see much more of a role for resistance and change in how we relate to cultural influences. In this new context, the consumption of mass culture does not entire remove the agency of the individual; although we might be brainwashed by mass culture into serving the desires of political power, we can also use it to find possibilities of radical counter-arguments. What must be studied is not simply a text in isolation but how it functions in a particular

moment, in use by a particular individual or community. In this sense, the mass cultural text becomes much more ambiguous.

Case study: It’s a Wonderful Life As another example of popular culture’s ability to offer a range of meanings, consider the Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Here, the film’s hero George Bailey abandons his dream of leaving his small-town home of Bedford Falls to continue the family business, get married and lead a small-scale domestic life. One can see this as a mass cultural reinforcement of capitalist ideologies and working-class immobility. The audience is told that George’s ‘wonderful life’ is essentially a parochial one, discouraging thoughts of mobility or creative expression among the working classes. However, at the same time, George’s local triumph is against Mr Potter, the town’s unscrupulous landlord and property owner, and comes when the townspeople unite to support George in a moment of financial crisis. In this regard, the film simultaneously represents a challenge to established social hierarchies and the suggestion of the positive possibilities of grassroots politics and communal action, with models of community that owe much to a communist ideology at odds with Cold War American discourse. Whereas a mass cultural theorist might privilege the former, a cultural theorist will explore the ambiguity of both meanings of the film, examining how one particular meaning might be privileged in particular circumstances but also, in addition to this, how the very ambiguity of the text can be a productive force that opens up the possibility of agency.

MYTHOLOGIES This attention to productive ambiguity is reflected in an alternative set of influences that have shaped contemporary cultural studies. At the same time as Hoggart and Williams were establishing a discrete discipline of cultural studies, French theorists associated with structuralism and poststructuralism, such as Derrida and Barthes, were also thinking about culture. In Mythologies (1957), Barthes examines a range of cultural phenomena, reading them as one would a written text to attempt to examine their meanings. In common with the British cultural theorists, Barthes examines how these ‘texts’ function specifically at a particular moment of reception and in a particular place. His objects of study include soap powder advertisements, the 1953 Hollywood

movie Julius Caesar, the spectacle of professional wrestling, and a cruise taken by European royalty on the occasion of the coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. Barthes presents these events as examples of modern myths. Prefiguring much work in cultural studies today, he suggests that such myths are significant for their cultural power. Myths encourage us to accept ideas and events, he argues, while forgetting their political character. Myths in this sense ‘naturalize’ events and serve the ruling power. They are essential to the idea of hegemony, part of the way in which ruling powers use culture to discourage revolt and encourage acceptance of preferred ideologies.

‘The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters.’ Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)

Two particular terms that come from Barthes’s cultural studies work, with relevance for literary studies, are the terms ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. Working from Saussure’s idea of the sign, Barthes examined how meaning is more complicated than the ahistorical, stable idea of the relationship between signifier and signified. Instead, we have the following: Denotation (sometimes called first-order meaning) + Connotation (sometimes called second-order meaning) = Sign

Barthes considers these meanings in relation not merely to words but to objects and images. The denotation of a sign is stable. It is always the same, as Saussure, too, suggests about the signified. So, for example, a picture of a block of ice is always a block of ice, the word ‘ice’ always means a cold, frozen mass of water. By adding the denotation, however, Barthes illustrates how there are extra meanings that do change over time and in different contexts. For example, the picture of the block of ice on a wall in a droughtridden country might connote hopefulness; on the wall of a gallery it might be an ironic symbol of ‘cool’, whereas accompanying an article on heatstroke it would be a symbol of healing. Likewise, the word ‘ice’ might connote cold weather or dismissive behaviour, or even be a slang term for diamonds or drugs. These possibilities ask us in literary terms to consider the vast array of meanings a word can be given. Although the author may guide these meanings, they are also constructed in the moment of consumption. This kind of analysis was for Barthes part of the structuralist attention to the minutiae of language. Yet it also has some affinities with reader response theory, in which the audience shapes meaning. Barthes’s idea of connotation has particular similarities to Stanley Fish’s suggestion (1980) that there is ‘no such thing as ordinary language’: that, in fact, we must pay close attention to the myriad meanings available in seemingly ordinary terms and, indeed, the effects of seemingly inconsequential word choices. For literary scholars, this means paying attention not only to the obviously poetic – to structures that are figurative or stand out from everyday language. It means, instead, examining every word for its potential impact. The idea of connotation has been important to cultural studies because it stresses the ways in which meanings come about as part of culture: meanings are ideological and shaped by the world in which they are consumed. Connotations are fluid, changing and can only be considered in the context of their production and consumption.

Key idea

Connotation is the second-order meanings of any image or word, which are suggested by the context in which the text is placed and the role of the reader.

Cultural studies today can be frequently seen to draw from both British and continental European traditions. A useful example of this approach can be seen in the work of the sociologist Paul Gilroy, in books such as Small Acts (1993) and Against Race (2000). In these explorations of racial cultures in Britain and the United States, Gilroy draws on a range of cultural examples, including the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, hip hop culture and the couture fashion industry.

Spotlight Sacha Baron Cohen is most famous for his creation of the character Ali G. The comedian is notorious for avoiding public attention when out of character.

Interdisciplinarity One consequence of so many different influences is that cultural studies become naturally interdisciplinary. To make sense of a text means to consider it in relation to other texts that will have shaped how audiences decide upon its connotations. There is increasing discussion in academic terms of interdisciplinary work, but also to related terms such as transdisciplinarity, infusion and intersectionality. While interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity both suggest crossing disciplinary boundaries, it is only in the latter that disciplines dissolve. Infusion is the name given to this process, specifically in relation to literary study as developed by the Indian academic Ranjan Rhosh (2006). Intersectionality, meanwhile, is a politicized version of interdisciplinarity, which stems from feminism and in which one recognizes the need to acknowledge multiple sources of marginality and oppression when discussing questions of identity.

Key ideas Interdisciplinarity is the dialogue between two or more disciplines which allows each one to learn from the other. Disciplinary boundaries are maintained. Transdisciplinarity, like interdisciplinarity, is the dialogue between two or more disciplines which allows each one to learn from the other. However, disciplinary boundaries are not maintained. Infusion is the filtering of ideas from one discipline into literary study, as described in the work of Ranjan Ghosh (2006). Intersectionality is the recognition of multiple interrelated identities.

While each of these terms is different in their emphasis, they all share the suggestion that dialogue across different interests offers the most productive modes for analysis. In literary terms, we can consider how our own practice might be shaped by this kind of work. For example, how does reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) change when we read it alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War reworking Apocalypse Now (1978)? How does our reading of Ezra Pound’s imagist poetry change when read alongside the vorticist art produced at the same time? How might the albums of Prince and the Beatles inform our understanding of Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995), whose title takes its inspiration from them? And what does it mean to read a collection of short stories like Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963), about the lives of young women, alongside the most striking television play of the same decade, Cathy Come Home (1966)?

Spotlight A 1998 Radio Times readers’ poll voted Cathy Come Home the ‘best single television drama’ ever.

To undertake such studies, one must feel confident about employing the methods and terminology that work across different disciplines – to be

comfortable with, if not an expert in, fields that have a distinct methodology perhaps different from literary studies. This approach is, of course, not only a sharing across disciplines but also across texts, which is usefully examined through the ideas of both conscious and unconscious intertextuality discussed in Chapter 9.

Cultural identities By asking questions about how different artistic forms create meaning, cultural studies is naturally drawn towards questions of community formation. By focusing on questions of identity, it has been particularly important to those fields that examine how identities are shaped, in particular postcolonial studies, gender theory and feminism. To this one can add critical race theory and disability studies. Critical race theory is a field which began in the United States in the 1980s, and which overlaps with what is referred to as African-American studies, although critical race theory is more frequently employed in relation to the social sciences (having begun in law scholarship), whereas African-American studies is often associated more with arts disciplines. Critical race studies examine how ideas of race, and particularly racial prejudice, are maintained over time, particularly with regard to racist practices. It is also interested in how such ideas might be challenged through cultural practice. In the arts and humanities, the legal foundations of critical race theory are frequently fused with ideas coming from philosophy, most notably the work of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. DuBois, whose seminal works emphasize the ways in which a negative image of one’s own racial background is shaped by cultural encounter, most particularly the oppositions made in society between a positive whiteness and a negative blackness. In a similar way and having emerged at a similar time, disability studies concern the ways in which the idea of disability (as opposed to ablebodiedness) is maintained in society with the possibility for prejudice, and the ways in which culture shapes this idea. The landmark Disability Studies Reader, first published in 1997, established the field as an interdisciplinary concern that represented a hitherto overlooked crucial factor in identity

formation alongside sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender. Each of these fields embodies the interdisciplinarity of cultural studies. Indeed, for literary critics one of the most important elements of cultural studies is its encouragement to look beyond disciplinary boundaries. Critics such as Hall believed that culture could be understood only by looking beyond discrete ideas of discipline. As literary critics, we can use cultural studies to consider how literature exists in the context of other texts, as well as the frameworks offered by other disciplinary areas such as history and sociology.

SUBCULTURES One particular consequence of the focus in cultural studies on organic, grassroots forms is an interest in what are referred to as subcultures: underground or oppositional cultures that distinguish themselves from the mainstream. Unlike countercultures, subcultures exist not specifically to be oppositional but, rather, to define themselves uniquely. Examples of subcultures include goth, punk and emo music inspired identifications, and alternative sexualities including – traditionally – gay and lesbian culture but more recently queer and transgender communities. The work on cultural studies from its very inception included work on subcultures; Stuart Hall, alongside others at the BCCS, saw subcultures as possible sources of oppositional decodings. One particular student of the centre, Dick Hebdige (1951– ), became the most notable scholar associated with subcultural studies. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), Hebdige outlines the differences between a number of British subcultures, including Teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads and punks, seeing each as an oppositional force with the possibility to challenge hegemonic/dominant meanings.

Spotlight Teddy boys were known for wearing the kinds of clothing such as waistcoats popular in the Edwardian period of 40 years earlier. The term ‘Teddy boy’ was coined when a 1953 Daily Express newspaper headline shortened ‘Edwardian’ to ‘Teddy’.

The ways in which these subcultures are shaped through music, clothes and social practices illustrate the cultural construction of their identities through multiple influences. Yet Hebdige also argued that such subcultures are eventually made available to the mainstream, losing their radical potential. Hebdige’s ideas were not all-encompassing – they gave little space, for example, to the role of sexuality in the largely male and working-class identities explored. They have, however, been profoundly influential.

‘The struggle between different discourses, different definitions and meanings within ideology is therefore always, at the same time, a struggle within signification: a struggle for possession of the sign which extends to even the most mundane areas of life…safety pins…These “humble objects” can be magically appropriated; “stolen” by subordinate groups and made to carry “secret” meanings.’ Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)

More recent work has examined the ways in which subcultures are themselves stratified and driven by rules of inclusion. For example, in Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (1995), Sarah Thornton (1965–) suggests that in the same way as cultural capital exists (see Chapter 4), so a subculture relies on the production of subcultural capital, meaning the distinct values that give that culture recognition as different from the mainstream. This work has also considered how subcultures are not inherently radical: they can, in fact, serve capitalist and dominant ideological structures. For example, the explosion of the ‘pink pound’ and the identification of gay individuals as targets for capitalism because of their relatively high income and low outgoings have seen gay subculture become commodified; more recently, hipster subculture has been the subject of critique for encouraging a market for niche high-value goods focused on supplying an ‘alternative’ lifestyle.

All of this has a direct relevance for literary studies. It broadens the range of cultural objects we see as ‘texts’ and puts literature in a larger context. It also asks questions about what constitutes value, with consequences more specifically for debates in literature. In particular, questions surrounding the value of studying popular cultural forms call into question literary ideas of canonicity that have also been destabilized by critiques from gender and postcolonial studies and genre theory. It is for this reason that some literary critics are suspicious of cultural theory: their ideas of value (which are often not much different from Arnold’s and Leavis’s ideas) lead them to conclude that cultural studies promote a ‘dumbing down’ of academic studies. In reality, however, cultural studies have opened up literary studies to the social significance of texts in ways impossible prior to its evolution. The study of popular literature, explored in Chapter 18 on genre theory, is one especially notable example of how cultural studies have allowed us to focus on a wider range of texts than ever before, and to ask more direct questions about how that literature works in relation to other cultural forms, and with what potential effects.

Fact check 1 What is the name for second-order meanings? a Connotations b Denotations c Signs d Signifiers 2 Which of these sports does Barthes discuss in Mythologies? a Wrestling b Hockey c Surfing d Netball 3 In which English city was the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies first established? a London

b Manchester c Southampton d Birmingham 4 Who wrote Small Acts? a Stuart Hall b Paul Gilroy c Roland Barthes d Dick Hebdige 5 Dick Hebdige is famous for his study of what? a Race b Gender c Subculture d Disability 6 What is the term for the sharing of ideas so that disciplinary boundaries are dissolved? a Interdisciplinarity b Infusion c Intersectionality d Transdisciplinarity 7 In which discipline does critical race studies originate? a Sociology b Drama c Politics d Law 8 Which theory does cultural studies complicate? a Feminism b Postcolonialism c Mass culture d Postmodernism 9 In what year was The Disability Studies Reader published? a 1981 b 1997 c 1996

d 1985 10 Which of these is a decoding position? a Oppositional b Against c Confrontational d Accepting

Dig deeper Cockell, Moira, et al. (2011), Common Knowledge: The Challenge of Transdisciplinarity. Philadelphia: EFPL Press. Gelder, Ken (2007), Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Goldberg, David Theo (2014), Sites of Race. Hoboken: Wiley. Rojek, Chris (2007), Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Polity.

15 Historicisms and materialisms On a visit to Europe in 1833, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) sought out the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). Carlyle, so the anecdote tells us, gave Emerson a pipe, took one himself, and the two men sat smoking in silence until bedtime. It was the beginning of a life-long correspondence. Less than a decade after this first meeting, Emerson would write his own essay on history, in which he would claim that ‘there is properly no history, only biography’. Emerson was far ahead of his time in thinking about history as storytelling: history as one person’s narrative of events, secured and taken up by others through the beautiful and dangerous power of the written word. As we shall uncover in this chapter, for those thinking about the relationship between history and literature, the anecdote is much more than an amusing interlude. Rather, it exists precisely to bring together history and literature in the ways that Emerson suggests. If literature is history, and history is literature, then it makes sense that in order to understand fiction in its fullest form, we cannot read texts without considering their relationship to the historical narratives that frame them.

For much of the twentieth century, the influence of formalism meant that the historical context of a work of literature seemed of little importance. With the advent of poststructuralist and reader response theories, however, historical context once again became important. This was only increased when critical approaches such as Marxism, feminism and postcolonial theory focused on the relationship between the text and specific social and political contexts. As these contexts are impossible to understand without also understanding the specific histories in which they function, more political readings have also produced much more historical readings. New historicist critics, at least in their initial formulation, came out of a poststructuralist-influenced American school of criticism. At the same time, British critics were also reappraising the role of history in the study of literature. This parallel group of critics is referred to as cultural materialist. Like new historicists, cultural materialists are interested in the relationship between literary texts and historical texts but are driven by very different theoretical underpinnings.

Historicisms The study of history in the conventional sense is called historicism. Readings that place a text in its historical context and discuss its relationship to realworld events at the time of writing can be called historicist readings.

Key ideas Historicism is the traditional study of history as a record of what happened at a previous point in time. Historicist reflects an approach focusing on historical events and their role in shaping the subject under discussion.

In 1980 the American critic Stephen Greenblatt (1943– ) published a book entitled Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, introducing a new approach to the relationship between literary texts and

their historical contexts. Rather than seeing history as the context or background for the study of literature, Greenblatt reads both literary and nonfiction texts alongside each other. Greenblatt not only uses non-fictional sources to explain the fictional, but he also uses the fictional text to question some of the arguments made in the historical texts.

‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead.’ Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare Negotiations (1988)

This ‘new’ approach is what we call new historicism. In new historicism, there is no context, no background and foreground. Rather, the fiction and non-fiction are both interrogated alongside each other. Quite often, this means beginning a piece of literary criticism not with the literary text but with the reading of a non-fiction source, but analysing it in the same way as fiction. This is what Greenblatt terms the ‘anecdote’ – the historical text that, read as a fiction, supplants the usual contexts that are often given as introductory ‘scene setting’ in works of literary criticism.

Key idea New historicism is a reading practice in which fiction and non-fiction texts are read alongside each other with equal attention being given to each source.

NEW HISTORICISMS Greenblatt’s work has been echoed in the criticism of others, including Louis Montrose and Stephen Orgel. These critics follow Greenblatt’s initial attention to the historical text, not as a stable background but rather as something that is equally open to question through its relationship to the fictional text. They are just as interested in analysing the historical text

through the fiction than in the more usual reverse order. New historicism, then, is not really about historical context. Instead, it is about history as a kind of text that is, in its own way, as imaginative as a fictional text. New historicism in this respect is influenced by poststructuralist theories. Like Derrida’s famous statement that ‘there is nothing outside the text’, new historicists do not see the existence of a stable set of past events which history records, but rather a set of words called history which define that past, and which do so with an inherent unreliability and instability. There is no stable historical context we can draw upon. Equally, there is no way in which the fictional text can tell us anything certain about the real historical past. All that exists are texts in discussion with each other.

Cultural materialism The term ‘cultural materialism’ was first used, in the way we understand it now, by Jonathan Dollimore (1948– ) and Alan Sinfield (1941– ) in their edited collection of essays Political Shakespeare (1985). Like new historicist work, their book stresses the status of the literary text as a historical document, and the need to read both types of text equally alongside each other. Materialism refers to the text as rooted in the world: it is a political document that cannot be separated from the context of its production. What, then, is the difference between the new historicists and the cultural materialists? Essentially, the American new historicists and the British cultural materialists are driven by very different theoretical underpinnings. In the case of new historicists this is poststructuralism, and in the case of cultural materialism it is Marxism. What this means in practice is a very different attitude to the text’s cultural function. For new historicists, the parallel between the historical text and the fictional text is evidence of the fact that the fictional text cannot exceed the historical context of its production – it exists of its time. This is in line with the poststructuralist Michel Foucault’s position on the idea of agency, meaning the ability of a group or individual to act. For Foucault, agency is always an illusion, because individuals and groups are always shaped by the powerful thought systems (what Foucault calls ‘discourses’, which is not dissimilar from what Marxists

call ideology) surrounding them. So the text cannot really be radical. In keeping with ideas of deconstruction, it might appear to be radical, but this radicalism is always revealed to be an artificial construction: it doesn’t really exist, and underneath is something far more conformist. In complete contrast to this, the Marxist approach to the literary text privileges it as a site of radical interruption. Against Foucault’s notion of discourse, cultural materialists employ the term ‘structures of feeling’. This idea was developed by the British Marxist critic Raymond Williams (1921– 88) (Williams 1954). ‘Structures of feeling’ are the values people live, against those enforced by the state or by society. In this sense, they are the opposite of discourses, because they represent a challenge to official or institutional ways of thinking, created by individuals or groups in their everyday lives. While new materialists look for the places in which the text replicates discourse, cultural materialists see the text as a crucial site of these ‘structures of feeling’. For cultural materialists, therefore, the text reveals not a conformist attitude but a powerful site of transgression and political engagement.

‘The real dividing line between the things we call work and the things we call leisure is that in leisure, however active we may be, we make our own choices and our own decisions. We feel for the time being that our life is our own.’ Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1961)

New historicism and cultural materialism, although both asking us to engage critically and with scepticism towards the non-fiction text, in fact demand very different reading practices. For whereas in new historicism we are looking to uncover those places where the text falls back into the limitations of its non-fiction partner, so in cultural materialism we are looking for the places where the fictional text exceeds and challenges the same non-fiction

counterpart.

Key idea Cultural materialism is the study of literary texts alongside their historical texts to consider where literary texts might offer alternatives to dominant ways of thinking present at the time of writing.

The term ‘cultural materialism’ also implies other slightly different interests. For cultural materialists, all culture is part of the textual world. Cultural materialism in this respect was very influential in broadening out the study of literature to include other kinds of ‘texts’ such as television, music and art. It also means that cultural materialism is concerned not just with the historical context of texts, but also with how our reading of the past influences the present moment. For example, a cultural materialist reading might think about how we imagine the Victorian novel and its morality to comment on our own morals today, or how we choose to celebrate Shakespeare to continue particular ideas about Englishness. History, then, is an important part of culture in the present day, and the ways in which we construct history through literary texts is an important way of understanding our current ideas and values.

HISTORICISM IN PRACTICE What, then, happens when we attempt to consider a literary text in relation to these theoretical tensions? In 1852 the American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe published her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel was immediately a popular success, and it spawned a huge outpouring of associated products, which mean that it is often seen as the first example of book-related merchandising in the form we are familiar with today.

Spotlight In literary legend, when American President Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher

Stowe in 1862, in the middle of the American Civil War that would eventually lead to the abolition of slavery in the United States, he greeted her with the words, ‘So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.’ Such was the powerful impact of Stowe’s narrative of the hardships of slavery that she was credited with having deeply influenced the American population.

In the context of cultural materialism, Stowe is an example of how a text can promote radical change. Uncle Tom’s Cabin seemingly challenges attitudes prevalent at the time of its production and shifts the consciousness of its readers. Yet, at the same time, this novel that was so praised for its liberal values in the years immediately following its publication has in the contemporary period been harshly criticized for its limitations. As the term ‘Uncle Tom’ filtered into public usage as slang for a passive, submissive black man, so critics have argued that the figure of Uncle Tom in the novel is a damaging stereotype: a black character whose goodness rests upon his lack of aggression, and who is distinguished from those around him because of his conversion to Christianity. Defenders of Stowe have argued that her choices in these terms are strategic: they are designed to appeal to a white pro-slavery readership that would have been alienated by a stronger, more confrontational discourse. Indeed, Stowe herself points to this in her comments on her novel when she says that she chose not to represent the reality of slavery but, rather, an imaginative reconstruction. Equally, the strong reaction of Southern readers to her novel suggests that she was correct in thinking that, without values to make him appealing, Tom would not have engaged the public as he did. Nevertheless, these criticisms draw attention to the new historicist argument that a text exists within the context of its production and is limited by it. Although Stowe appeared radical in the time of writing, a later retrospective reading of her novel illustrates that it is very much of its period, and carries with it the limitations of that. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not unique in this regard – one could equally consider the racist stereotyping of the African ‘other’ in Joseph Conrad’s anti-colonial novel Heart of Darkness (1902), the subject of a scathing critique by the African novelist Chinua Achebe, or the limitations of novels such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), where strong female protagonists are ultimately

still constrained by patriarchal marriages.

Spotlight In a letter written to her niece in 1817, Jane Austen wrote, ‘Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.’

Each of these texts illustrate how a literary work may, in cultural materialist terms, push at the boundaries of dominant ideologies, yet at the same time, in new historicist terms, be constrained by the context in which it was written.

New materialism In the twenty-first century, the idea of materialism has once again risen to the fore, but in a quite different form. Seeming to bring together, at least linguistically, the earlier movements, new materialism promises a revival of materialism in the same way that new historicism promised a renewal of historicist criticism. Centred on feminist criticism, new materialism counts thinkers including Rosi Braidotti and Sara Ahmed among its proponents. It is a term used to describe a refocusing on physical realities – the material – but with an awareness of the previous limitations of such thinking. Most notably in these terms, new materialism is associated with feminist thinking in which the female body is a site of negotiation but also of radical possibility. This challenges the dominant view in much feminist thinking that holds the body to be a limiting structure primarily associated with patriarchal oppression. While a feminist critic might suggest that we think about a woman’s intellect rather than her body, a new materialist feminist recognizes how woman has been trapped by bodily associations, but then attempts to reclaim that body from previous representations.

Key idea

New materialism is the renewed focus on the physical materiality of the world, including the body.

Case study: Nervous Conditions As literary critics, we can read texts to examine how they might offer new materialist framings of the body. One example of such an engagement can be found in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions (1988). The novel’s central character, Tambu, is a young girl growing up in Zimbabwe. Her cousin, Nyasha, spends a period abroad in Europe, and returns with anorexia. From a feminist perspective, the novel is a critique of the ways in which women are defined according to their bodies, and how bodily norms and ideals of attractiveness damage the female sense of self. Nyasha is intelligent, but her intellect is overshadowed by the pressure placed on her to conform to a particular bodily ideal. Nervous Conditions counters this representation with what can be seen as a new materialist alternative. Rather than answering Nyasha’s experience with a rejection of the body, the novel illustrates how Tambu celebrates a body that exists outside Western ideals of beauty. Her own academic success comes alongside this bodily celebration, so that we see her thriving mental capacity running alongside her thriving physical form, as she moves from being shabbily dressed and malnourished to plump. Body and mind are intimately connected, and the body is not to be rejected but rather reclaimed. That this reclamation involves both a critique of patriarchy and of colonialism (because what is being challenged are essentially Western ideals of beauty that have been imposed on Africa) suggests how new materialist approaches function in intersectional terms to bring together different schools of criticism. Nervous Conditions embodies a celebration of the black female body that illustrates how new materialism functions to assist in the exploration of reappraisals of the Cartesian division of mind and body against patriarchal and racist ideologies. A similar narrative is offered in Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise (1997) but from an African-American perspective. Near the end of this story of a group of abused and disenfranchised women living in a disused convent, the women undress, lie on the floor and paint around their naked forms. On one page it is simultaneously declared that ‘my body is nothing my spirit everything’ and ‘my bones on his the only true thing’. These competing statements illustrate a physicality at once celebrated and put into perspective alongside the intellectual. When the women paint the forms they have drawn around, they embody this process: they celebrate the female form, yet simultaneously distance themselves from it through the process of artistic creation.

What emerges is a new materiality: a physical document, but one that speaks to the complex relation between body and mind.

By rejecting old oppositions, new materialism promises to open up spaces for new dialogues across existing theoretical positions and between groups with very different agendas. As such, it represents a continuance of ideas discussed in posthumanist and ecocritical frameworks, and its key thinkers – like Rosi Braidotti (1954– ) and Donna Haraway (1944– ) – are also associated with these other movements. An additional key factor in new materialism is therefore a shifting of focus away from the human. This may seem ironic, given the focus on the body in new materialist thinking, but it is in fact part of the reconfiguring of that body away from old humanist ideas. Shared with posthumanism and ecocritical frameworks (see Chapter 19), this means drawing attention to the technological and the animal, but what new materialism in particular adds is a concern for the non-animal but living (such as nature) and the non-living (the physical world), as elements both equally ‘alive’. Shifting attention to the physical world means questioning the human focus (anthropocentrism) of humanist thinking. As is discussed in more detail in the next chapter, questioning this humanist focus also means challenging the racist and sexist discourses that have treated some subjects as less than human.

Spotlight My five-year-old daughter recently began an after-school drama club. In her second week, which came a few weeks before Halloween, she was asked to work in a group to produce a play called ‘The Spooky Hotel’. When I asked her what part she had played in that week’s exercise, she confidently told me she had been a bedside table! After further questioning, she revealed that it was her idea to play this role in the play. It was a spooky hotel, so of course this was no ordinary bedside table. Rather, it was a bedside table that woke up in the middle of the night and scared the room’s inhabitants. Although she recognized that a table does not normally have the life of a biological organism (hence the spookiness), there was in her mind no sense that to be a human was superior to being a bedside table. The humanist tradition has not yet been inherited.

Decentring the human In literary terms, we are used to narratives that focus on the human as the centre of the story. While this in part can be explained by our desire to read narratives as mirrors of our own selves, it is also representative of a continued humanist belief that the human is the figure through which truth and meaning are delivered. More recently, narratives have begun to give the animal a stronger role alongside the human, and you will find examples of these discussed in Chapter 19. It is rarer to find narratives that strip away reference to the biological. One example of this, however, is the short stories of Jon McGregor. Already associated in his novels with themes of posthumanism, McGregor’s first short story collection, This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (2012) continues this theme with narratives strongly focused on the natural landscapes of northern and central England. In one of these stories, however, McGregor also points towards a materialist focus. ‘I Remember There Was a Hill’ traces a movement through a rural landscape from a hill, to a road, to a phone box, to a phone call, to the door of the phone box slamming shut and finally sheep scattering across the fields. Yet, apart from the ‘I’ of the title, the character making this walk is never mentioned. The phone rings, and there is a voice, the door slams, but the actor in these scenes is absent. This has the effect of re-centring events with object or landscape rather than subject at the core. This can be seen as a radical repositioning of the human within the story. Like many of the ‘new’ and ‘post’ movements of the contemporary moment, new materialism is perhaps more a newness of emphasis than a newness of ideas. Nevertheless, it offers interesting new ways to think about the literary text: to ask what role the non-biological plays, what the body means as an integral part of consciousness, and how narratives function outside the anthropocentric focus we often as critics employ in our analysis. One focus of new materialism can also be the materiality of the text itself. New materialism draws attention to the book as a physical object, and how the reader’s engagement with this physicality shapes meaning. So when we read as new materialists, we consider not just the text but also the form in which we receive it – its illustrations, cover, weight or font, for example.

Ergodic literature One particular engagement with the materiality of the text is what is referred to as ergodic literature. The term, coined by Espen J. Aarseth (1965– ) in his book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), refers to the effort required on the part of readers to read particular texts, which force them to engage materially with the work. These texts are ergodic, while those requiring only minimal user engagement are non-ergodic. As an example, Aarseth says that cybertexts (online narratives) are ergodic because they require the reader to follow links and navigate web pages. In the same way, a narrative printed across instalments in magazines can be ergodic because it requires the reader to find the relevant part across multiple sources. In contrast, novels are largely non-ergodic because they require simply a movement from the beginning to the end, turning pages and reading text. One can think that some printed texts are also ergodic in their demands on the reader – for example the famous series of Choose Your Own Adventure stories for young adults requires readers to select from multiple choices and to move backwards and forwards through the text based on their choices, in a way much more akin to a cybertext. The most famous example is B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), a book in 27 separate parts, designed to be read in any order. More recent contemporary examples include texts such as Doug Dorst’s S (2013), which contains a second novel written in the margins of the first, or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), in which readers are taken through a layered text where footnotes contain footnotes and some pages contain only a few lines of text. This supporting matter, what we call peritexts, also shapes meanings, as do those elements that surround the work such as its cover and preface, what we called paratexts. The French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1930– ) has argued that this material ‘in reality controls one's whole reading of the text’ (1997).

‘More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a

threshold.’ Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997)

In this respect, materiality is central to the meaning of any text we read.

Fact check 1 Which of these is a paratext? a Endnote b Novel c Book cover d Poem 2 Which school of criticism is cultural materialism influenced by? a Postmodernism b Poststructuralism c Feminism d Marxism 3 Which school of criticism is new materialism influenced by? a Poststructuralism b Postmodernism c Marxism d Postcolonialism 4 Feminism has been particularly influential on which of the following? a Historicism b New materialism c Cultural materialism d New historicism 5 Which book, published by Stephen Greenblatt in 1980, introduced new materialism? a The Renaissance b Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare c Paratexts

d The Long Revolution 6 In which country was cultural materialism first established? a Britain b The United States c France d Germany 7 Which other schools of theory are new materialists associated with apart from feminism? a Posthumanism and ecocriticism b Humanism and ecocriticism c Postmodernism and postcolonialism d Reader response and ecocriticism 8 What do we call those texts that require special effort on the part of the reader? a Demanding b Ergodic c Existential d Postmodern 9 Who wrote Nervous Conditions? a Tsisti Dangarembga b Toni Morrison c Chinua Achebe d Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 10 What is the central ‘character’ in Jon McGregor’s story ‘I Remember There Was a Hill’? a A toaster b A television c A car d A phone box

Dig deeper Colebrook, Claire (1997), New Literary Histories: New Historicism and

Contemporary Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Robson, Mark (2014), Stephen Greenblatt. Florence: Taylor & Francis. Veeser, Harold (1994), The New Historicism Reader. New York: Routledge. Wilson, Scott (1995), Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.

16 Humanisms A friend recently asked me what it meant to be a humanist and I paused and asked them in what context they meant it. On the one hand, the term ‘humanism’ more than any other seems to gesture towards something we should understand. After all, we are all human. Or are we? In common, everyday usage, humanism often refers to a rejection of religious principles or other occult or superstitious practices. A humanist wedding, for example, refers to a nonreligious ceremony. Equally, a humanist funeral is one that makes no reference to religious ideas or to the concept of an afterlife. The British Humanist Association, founded in 1896, defines itself as ‘the national charity working on behalf of nonreligious people who seek to live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity’.

Being human The popular usage of the term ‘humanism’ has something in common with the academic usage of the term, which also implies a world centred on human values. Yet the idea of humanism as a philosophical approach has a longer history, and one that does not necessarily match popular usage. Although the term entered the English language in the nineteenth century, it was preceded by a long history of thinking centred on human experience: in fact, the nineteenth-century term was used initially to refer not to current ideas but to ideas that developed in Italy during the Renaissance beginning in the fourteenth century. Unlike contemporary humanism, this did not mean that its proponents were necessarily atheist. Rather, it indicated a desire to focus on questions of human experience without the distraction of concern for the supernatural, centred on moral and intellectual improvement. It is from this notion that the subject of study called the humanities comes – learning directed towards literature, the arts and philosophy.

Key idea Humanism, in general usage, is a belief in human-based morality implying atheism. In literary usage, it is a focus on the human beyond the supernatural.

READING THE MONSTER At the centre of humanism, then, is the idea of humans as unique – in particular, the idea of humans as distinct from animals. Humanist discourse in these early forms was preoccupied with what makes one human. This has been the subject of countless works of literature – the monsters of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde all ask readers to consider what defines one as human. These kinds of texts have evolved into a specific concern for the monstrous, or what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996) has referred to as monster theory. The monster is always more than itself: it is always a cultural metaphor, and always a figure that escapes and exceeds the limits of the

culture that demonizes it, threatening order and promising change.

Monster theory: ‘a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender’. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory (1996)

Spotlight The Latin root for the word ‘monster’ is monstrum, meaning ‘an omen, supernatural being or object that is an omen or warning of the will of the gods’.

SOME HUMANS ARE MORE HUMAN THAN OTHERS In the twentieth century and later, the idea of humanism and its preoccupation with human uniqueness has been strongly critiqued. In particular, humanism has been criticized by postcolonial and feminist scholars who have emphasized the ways in which the notion of the ‘human’ has often been used to define a non-human ‘other’ or a subject less than human, in order to maintain the power and authority of particular groups in society. The monster is often, in fact, human, and what it stands for is often a human subject that is being denied justice or expression. Non-white races and women have historically been represented as less human, or more animal or monstrous, in order to justify mistreatment and prejudice. There are striking examples of this in the way that slaves in the United States were defined as property (similar to livestock), the way that Africans were defined by colonialism as ‘savages’, closer to apes than to humans, and the representation of Jews as vermin in Nazi propaganda during the 1930s. More recently, criticism of humanism has been expanded by other groups such as those working in disability studies (see Chapter 14), who

emphasize the ways in which the idea of ‘human’ and the privilege it affords rests on the idea of a ‘perfect’ and healthy body.

Humanist ethics At the same time as these critiques, humanism continues to be relevant particularly in the context of ethical and moral criticism. This is because humanism offers a philosophy of moral ‘goodness’ that exists outside religious teaching, with particular relevance in the contemporary period but also at any point and in any context in which there has been religious doubt. The most famous academic figure in these terms, Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins (1941– ), outlines in his book The Selfish Gene (1976) the idea that belief systems as well as physical characteristics might be inherited. For this kind of inheritance Dawkins introduces the term ‘meme’ – the cultural equivalent to a gene, referring to an idea or value that is passed down, inherited, and which is modified and evolves. Through Dawkins’s ideas, it is possible to consider how populations inherit moral values so that they no longer depend on religious belief or teaching. In this sense, Dawkins’s ideas are relevant to the humanist interest in how humans treat one another outside reference to the supernatural.

‘Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.’ Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1989)

Humanism and literature Humanism has had a particular influence on literary studies. In some

discussions you may find approaches to literature referred to as ‘liberal humanism’. This is a term sometimes used to refer to the approaches to literature that preceded explicitly theoretical approaches, and particularly those with political interests such as feminism, Marxism and postcolonialism. The formalist strategies outlined in this book’s early chapters, and the work of critics such as Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, would fall under this definition. For these critics, literature is not specific to one cultural context but, rather, has a universal value or truth, the uncovering of which serves a moral purpose. With the advent of reader response criticism, liberal humanism was subject to the same criticisms as humanism more generally: namely, that its idea of the ‘human’ was limited to white, male, privileged subjects. What was good was in fact what was good, rather, for these particular humans. In this respect, a critique of humanism is also a critique of those reading practices that fail to account for the varied ways in which texts are consumed and the multiple possible effects that they may have. Humanism sees language as an expression of truths about the world that already exist – it sees language as secondary to the ‘reality’ of the material world. In this context, literature can be a powerful teller of truths about that world (as Arnold and Leavis expressed) but it does not shape that world. Part of the critique of humanism, then, is also a critique of what comes from this attitude to language – questioning the idea that there is one single meaning to a text, a truth to be uncovered by a ‘correct’ reader, an authorial intention and – ultimately – one single ‘good’ that exists outside the complexities of individual identities and circumstances. In critiquing humanism, we also advance the idea of multiple readings, multiple truths, and the awareness that how we explain the world not only reflects it but also has a role in shaping it.

PLANETARY HUMANISM Recognizing its moral potential, some critics have attempted to recuperate the idea of humanism to incorporate those human subjects conventionally ‘othered’ by humanist ideas. The most notable example of this is British sociologist Paul Gilroy’s idea of a universal, gender- and colour-blind ‘planetary humanism’ (2000).

One notable question that arises in relation to planetary humanism is whether it exists only as a utopian ideal that encourages us to attempt to think beyond identity categories such as gender and race, or whether the erosion of these categories is, in fact, possible. The literary text may be seen to offer a unique intervention into this debate because of its form. The world we live in is driven by the visual presence of other people, which makes it hard to think about them beyond their physical attributes – such as clothing, hair and skin colour – that signify difference. This is replicated in artworks, film, television and, to some extent, theatre. In contrast, written literature has the potential to evade some of these categories because it can choose to what extent it makes the visual available to the reader via different levels of description. In doing so, it stages an imaginative intervention which can prompt the reader, perhaps, to try to imagine what seems impossible: a world where differences such as race, gender and some types of visible disability are no longer perceived. A number of twenty-first-century texts examine this idea by abandoning the kinds of physical descriptions that indicate racial identity or gender. One notable example of this is Jon McGregor’s novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002). McGregor does not remove references to gender or race entirely, but he plays with reader expectations in his novel – he opens his novel with voices that could be of any gender or race, and goes on in his novel to question reader expectations regarding the latter in particular. McGregor upholds a version of Gilroy’s planetary humanist reality, constructed between the reader and the text and through the silences and ambivalences that fill the novel.

POSTHUMAN Alongside these attempts at recuperation of humanist ideas have come twenty-first-century reappraisals of the idea of ‘human’ upon which humanism rests. While humanism supposes a unique human subject, advances in science have come to question human uniqueness. This leads to the two related terms of transhumanism and posthumanism. The former refers to the idea that the human can transcend (hence ‘trans’) the limitations of human biology to become ‘more than’ human.

Key ideas Planetary humanism is a genuinely inclusive humanism that includes all, regardless of class, race or gender. Posthumanism is going ‘beyond’ the limits of thinking through the concept of the human. Transhumanism is a movement to encourage transcendence beyond the limitations of human existence.

Transhumanism is often associated with rather disturbing supremacist movements that aim to create ‘superhumans’. Although transhumanism is a movement beyond the human, in many ways it echoes old humanist ideas about certain individuals being superior to others. Critics of transhumanism, such as Francis Fukuyama (1992), draw attention to the ruthless pursuit of improvement via science which it promotes, for example through support for cloning or selective reproduction. This kind of critique posits transhumanism as a nightmare future in which ethics has given way to the discourse of improvement at all costs. In contrast to this focus on improvement, posthumanism recognizes the increasing complication of the idea of the human with a more democratic idea of going ‘beyond’ (hence ‘post’). For posthumanists, it is increasingly difficult to separate the human from the technological and virtual world that surrounds it. Yet, rather than this suggesting any superiority, for posthumanists it offers the opportunity to understand a more connected way of thinking, and to critique ideas of purity that may be associated with racist or sexist discourses in favour of those that celebrate difference. Unlike transhumanism, this means that woven into posthumanism is a criticism of the humanist ideas that precede it, and a desire for an alternative way of thinking about how humans relate to one another and the world around them.

THE CYBORG MANIFESTO At the centre of the posthuman blurring of human and machine is a

fascination with robots, or what we see referred to as cyborgs: beings that fuse robot parts with the biological. As I explain to students when I show them my cardiac pacemaker, the idea of the cyborg is much more than the stuff of science fiction – it exists in everyday life in the electronic implants, mechanical limbs and virtual-reality glasses that connect us to the technological world in intimate and life-defining ways. In his novel Transmission (2004), Hari Kunzru considers this blurring between human and machine in the twenty-first century through the story of a global IT company and one of its employees, a migrant worker named Arjun. When Arjun retaliates against his mistreatment by the company by releasing a computer virus, the virus takes on a life of its own – it speaks in the first person, makes personal relationships with those it infects, and procreates. Conversely, the natural world is filled with artificial grass and plastic tubing instead of roots. The technological is more alive than the supposedly natural world it exists within. Kunzru exposes a cyborg reality, in which the biological and the technological can no longer be easily separated from each other.

Key idea A cyborg is a biological and technological hybrid.

In her essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), the influential postmodern thinker Donna Haraway (1944– ) looks at the consequences of thinking through the idea of the cyborg towards wider questions of ethics and identity. In this essay, Haraway examines the figure of the cyborg as a symbol of the blending of discrete boundaries between human and machine. The cyborg’s revolutionary potential lies in part because it breaks the rules of what has come before it – it pays no attention to religious discourse or the laws of the family, for example. Its morality is therefore unique and uninfluenced by past ideologies, and its relation to others is not driven by the kinds of familial patterns outlined by Freud. This means that the cyborg can create relations that challenge racial, religious, patriarchal and class-based prejudices.

In particular, by being neither human nor machine, the cyborg – in a similar way to the monster – questions the neat categories (taxonomies) into which society divides things. These categories are for Haraway the foundation of the process of ‘othering’, which splits the world into those who are dominant and the ‘others’ without power or influence. By questioning these categories, the cyborg opens up the possibility of a world in which traditional structures of power are no longer able to maintain their dominance. It is a chaotic, disruptive force, which breaks down established divisions. Haraway’s politics are particularly directed at feminism – her manifesto asks feminists to rethink their focus on the human in order to escape the limitations of their theory and practice. Yet, as part of this new way of thinking, feminism is also interwoven with questions of race and class. In this way, Haraway’s work is an important contributor to what is termed ‘intersectional thinking’: approaches that cross various identity groups.

‘Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.’ Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985)

In her later work, which is discussed in the final chapter of this book, Haraway has turned from the machine to questions of the boundaries between animal and human. Her work on the cyborg is in this context part of a larger project that critiques the idea of human uniqueness and its ideological consequences.

Spotlight There is an American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots. It was

established in 1999.

Case study: Never Let Me Go A particularly powerful image of the transhuman future is offered by Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005). An uncanny reworking of the boardingschool novel tradition, Ishiguro’s novel is set in a future Britain not dissimilar to the present day other than for the fact that the transhuman ideal of longevity has been achieved through the production of clones, grown and raised in order to provide genetically identical matches who can provide organs and other transplants for the individual – the ‘originals’ – that they are based on. Narrated by one such clone, Kathy, the novel traces how the clones deal with their own sense of identity, the threat of donation, and their treatment by the humans who raise and educate them. Purposely produced for a specific reason, they can be compared to sentient robots, and their representation raises the same questions about the treatment of non-living subjects. The claim of Kathy and the others at the school is that they exist regardless of society’s ability to define and classify them as a species in the way that traditional humanist discourse supports. Identified by their society as less than human, although they are conscious, the fact that they are not ‘originals’ justifies to society the use of their bodies for organ harvesting; the clones are denied a sense of past or future: they have no family names, only last initials; they are sterile so that the possibility of a genetic legacy is prohibited. Yet, at the same time, it is the clones in the novel that form meaningful relationships, while their human teachers behave ‘inhumanly’. In this way, they embody Haraway’s idea of the disruptive cyborg that unravels ideological discourse by complicating traditional boundaries and classifications. While the characters hold on to humanity, Never Let Me Go as a whole points to its illusory nature. The clones are as human as the humans: their work at the school – their art projects – is a mark of creativity which complicates the programme and ultimately sees the school closed down because it proves the clones’ ability to think in ways that exceed the technological. Yet what the novel also suggests is that humanity does not exist: instead, it is rooted in false means of artificially giving a sense of self.

This idea of a false humanity is common in posthumanist discourse, particularly in relation to animal subjects. In this respect, humanism is influenced by figures such as the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942– ), for whom the distinction between human and computer is a matter of years in

development rather than essential difference. Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991) unravels the idea that there is anything distinct about a human, not just in comparison to animals but also in comparison to other humans.

Spotlight In Consciousness Explained, Dennett asks readers to conduct a number of experiments, including one that involves imagining in detail a purple cow to help explain the existence of what he calls ‘mind stuff’.

Themes such as these can be explored in literary terms – what does it mean, for example, if we identify Frankenstein’s monster as human? How does that reshape our reading of the text and what does the division that is made tell us about the context in which the novel is read?

Fact check 1 What is the name of the theory that deals with the monstrous? a Monster theory b Feminism c Trangression theory d Mass culture theory 2 Who devised the term ‘planetary humanism’? a Paul Gilroy b Richard Dawkins c Daniel Dennett d Stuart Hall 3 What is the name for the cultural equivalent of a gene? a Grapheme b Theme c Meme

d Decimeme 4 Who wrote ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’? a Paul Gilroy b Donna Haraway c Rosi Braidotti d Daniel Dennett 5 What is the name of the narrator of Never Let Me Go? a Lulu b Claire c Kathy d Grace 6 What do we call the movement associated with the idea of the ‘superhuman’? a Posthumanism b Transhumanism c Modernism d Cyborgism 7 What is the name of Jon McGregor’s first novel? a Never Let Me Go b If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things c Dancing Wolves d The Cyborg 8 Who has critiqued the technological advances of posthumanism? a Francis Fukuyama b Danniel Dennett c Paul Gilroy d Donna Haraway 9 Who wrote Transmission? a Ian McEwan b Salman Rushdie c Paul Gilroy d Hari Kunzru 10 In what year was The Selfish Gene published?

a b c d

1989 1987 1986 1996

Dig deeper Braidotti, Rosi (2013), The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Davies, Tony (1996), Humanism. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. Gilroy, Paul (2000), Against Race. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

17 Ethical criticism Everyone loves a villain, be it Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Mr Burns in The Simpsons, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, or Professor Snape in the Harry Potter novels. Likewise, it’s often hard to think of how it is possible to be both good and interesting. We may love Jane Eyre, or Hermione Granger, for their moral certitude and reliability, but they would be of little interest to readers, perhaps, without the challenges that come from the spectres of threat that surround them. As the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43) writes, ‘Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.’ How, then, can literature be a force for good? Should, indeed, it try to be?

One of the criticisms of postmodernism is that it encourages thinking about literature divorced from the social and political contexts of its production. Although, as discussed in Chapter 10, this view is partly unfounded, it is in the wake of such criticisms that literary studies responded with an ethical intervention. You may see this intervention described as an ‘ethical turn’ – the suggestion here being that we can identify a moment in which literary studies have taken a new direction towards thinking about ethical questions. Ethics can be defined as the moral principles that guide behaviour or conduct, so, in the context of literary theory, ethics means considering how literature might shape these moral principles.

The ethical text and morality Key idea Ethics is about the moral principles that guide behaviour – our sense of what is right and what is harmful to others.

Ethical critics focus their attention on literary works that foreground questions of morality – in particular what it means to be responsible, to act well towards others, to pursue justice, and to be ‘good’. They also frequently focus on the act of reading as an ethical encounter between the reader and the text. Ethical criticism sees the literary text as having a defined social role. The most notable and earliest theorist of this approach, Louise Rosenblatt (1904–2005), argues that the text is a transaction between reader and its content. Her approach is strongly influenced by reader response theory. In this respect, an ethical text is one that is able to transmit ideas of moral behaviour to the reader.

‘Through the medium of words, the text brings into the reader's consciousness certain concepts, certain sensuous experiences, certain images of things, people, actions, scenes. The special meanings and, more particularly, the submerged associations that these words have for the individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him. The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-tobe-duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text.’ Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (1938)

THE NOTION OF ‘THE OTHER’ At the centre of ethical criticism is a concern for the relation between individuals, and what it means to treat others well. The notion of ‘the other’, in particular (as one who is different from oneself), is crucial to ethical criticism, by implying that we might build empathy with those of differing experiences, backgrounds and identities.

Key idea The other is the one who is different from oneself.

A particularly useful theorist in this regard is the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), whose work on encounter has been taken up by ethical critics to consider how we meet with those who are different from us. The idea of the ‘face of the other’ developed in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (1961) asks us to think about how we not simply meet but also engage in transformative terms with those with whom we come into contact. What does it mean to be other? Who decides? And how can an encounter take place in which that other is treated well?

‘The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching.’ Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961)

The ethical turn One of the problems with the idea of an ‘ethical turn’ is that it is unclear what is meant here by ethics and, indeed, what the consequences of this are for literary studies. The ethical turn in literary studies sits within a wider context of an ethical turn across the humanities and social sciences. There is a documented literature on ethical turns in anthropology, philosophy, aesthetics and politics. The latter illustrates how speaking of the ethical is not quite the same as speaking of a return to political concerns. In fact, some criticism of the ethical is that it overlooks the needs of specific political interests (for example class, race or gender) in favour of more abstract concerns with questions of what it means to behave well. As a response to this, some critics prefer the term ‘ethico-political’ to ethical, to describe an interest both in more general ideas of justice and their more specific development in relation to particular political ideas.

Spotlight Emmanuel Levinas, a devout member of the Jewish faith, was captured by the Germans while serving in the French army and spent much of the Second World War as a prisoner of war. While he was imprisoned, his friend the philosopher Maurice Blanchot helped his wife and daughter to hide in a monastery.

THE ETHICO-POLITICAL The ethico-political is a way to describe ideas that are both ethical and

political in character. An ethico-political literary critic will look both at abstract ideas of goodness, justice and responsibility and at specific ways in which these ideas are played out in relation to questions of politics, such as race, gender and class.

Key idea Ethico-political refers to the combination of political and ethical ideas.

The idea of the ethico-political is most associated with the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), whose ideas about ethicopolitical history, developed in the 1930s, have been influential in considering how the rule of power (what Marxists call hegemony) is not merely economic but is also concerned with moral questions about justice and how particular groups in society are treated. Gramsci developed his ideas from the work of the Italian philosopher Benedotto Croce (1866–1952), whose own ideas of the ethico-political were focused largely on moral principles rather than everyday political events. Gramsci both borrows from and critiques Croce’s ideas. His own idea of the ethico-political asks us to consider both these everyday events and their moral significance, and it is for this reason that it is so useful an answer to the potential limitations of ethical criticism.

Spotlight Gramsci was a lonely child. When asked about his childhood, he recalled that other children only came near him to make fun of him.

The idea of the ethico-political has been taken up more recently to explore the later, more political work of postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida. For example, Morag Patrick (1997) has argued that deconstruction is an ethico-political practice, and that if we look at Derrida’s later ideas (particularly his engagement with the idea of responsibility), we see work that is asking questions about what it means to be both political and ethical in the

contemporary world. This is a good example of how, although being often positioned as a response to postmodernism and poststructuralism, the ethical turn is in fact also part of these disciplines. A big question here is whether literature has become more ethical in the late postmodern period compared to the high postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s, or whether our approach to literature has changed. This is a difficult question to answer. Certainly, we can think that an ethical literature existed before this period. For example, one key author in ethical studies is the English novelist Iris Murdoch, whose novels explore questions of what she termed ‘goodness’ – the possible separation of ethics from religious morality and the ability of the individual to treat others well in a post-Darwin world.

THE ‘NEW SINCERITY’ For those critics who identify a definite shift in literature in this period, the term ‘new sincerity’ has been used to distinguish such literature from earlier writing. Advocates of new sincerity argue that, beginning in the 1980s but rising to prominence in the 1990s, authors (in particular American novelists) began to react against the supposed nihilism, self-referentiality and playfulness of postmodern literature with a new writing that did not reject postmodern stylistics but, rather, mediated these with a return to questions of meaning and truth. These representations are seen to reject the cynicism and irony of earlier postmodern writing with a more earnest tone – hence the reference to sincerity.

Key idea New sincerity is the American term for the modification of postmodernist ideas to allow for more definite meanings and more concerns for morality to be presented in the text.

Case study: Atonement

The ethical modification of postmodernism is starkly evident in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001). The majority of the novel is presented as a fusion of modernist stream of consciousness and realist detail, the latter particular evident in the novel’s harrowing depiction of the Second World War. At the end of the novel it emerges that readers have been engaged with a very postmodern fiction: readers learn that the narrative they have read is not in fact ‘truth’ but rather the fictional re-creation of one of its central characters, Briony Tallis. Briony has written the narrative as an ‘atonement’: having been responsible for the false imprisonment for rape of her sister Cecilia’s lover, Robbie, Briony attempts to atone for her actions by rewriting the story of Cecilia and Robbie to give them the reunion they in reality never experience (Robbie is killed in France, while Cecilia dies in London during an air raid). This kind of ironic self-referentiality is exemplary of postmodern writing. Yet the questions McEwan raises by its context here are precisely in line with the ethical turn of late postmodern fiction. Indeed, the novel’s question – whether fiction can serve as an alternative to a more practical intervention into a situation – speaks not merely to the ethical in general (how does one atone?) but more specifically to the role of literature as an ethical space (can literature serve as an atonement?). The novel is unclear about how we are supposed to respond to Briony’s choice. On the one hand, if we see merit in her act then we privilege writing as a space of ethical action. On the other, if we reject her choice, we provide impetus for the need to move beyond writing and act ethically in practical terms. Ironically, this means that in either case McEwan’s Atonement itself is an ethical fiction: it is either, like Briony’s atonement, an ethical act or it is the stimulus for us to act ethically beyond fiction.

Three ethical moments Three key moments exist in which there may be said to have been a shift in attention towards the need for a more ethically aware criticism. Two of these moments can be said to have come from within academic thinking, while the last is part of a much larger global change. In order to understand more about the ethical turn, it is useful to briefly examine each of these moments in turn.

1 THE PAUL DE MAN CONTROVERSY In her essay ‘The Ethical Turn in French Postmodern Philosophy’ (1998), the academic Beverly Voloshin (1949– ) outlines how many American critics believe that there was a shift towards a concern for the ethical in postmodern philosophy following the controversy surrounding the work of Paul de Man

(1919–83). A Belgian literary theorist based in the United States, de Man was a key member of the Yale School of deconstruction and had been hugely influential in importing poststructuralist thinking, particularly the work of Derrida, into literary studies through a focus on deconstructive reading practices. In 1988, five years after de Man’s death, articles were uncovered that a young de Man had written for the Belgian journal Le Soir, which held Nazi sympathies during the Second World War. In some of these articles de Man expressed anti-Semitic sentiments; for example, in an essay entitled ‘Jews in Contemporary Literature’ (1941), de Man argued for a ‘Jewish colony’ and suggested that literature had succeeded despite the dangers of Jewish cultural influences. The response of Derrida and other postmodern and poststructuralist critics to the charges against de Man can be seen as a possible ethical turn, in that his complicity with Nazism seemed to demand an interrogation of sometimes abstract poststructuralist linguistic work with more concern for the politics of poststructuralism. In her essay, Voloshin discusses the development of ethical thinking in the work of four significant postmodern theorists – Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard – in order to complicate this line of argument by suggesting that there exists across poststructuralist and postmodern thinking an ethical concern that precedes the de Man controversy. Voloshin draws attention to what is less a turn and more of a development in which ethical ideas became more explicit in the work of postmodern writing, and indeed also became more examined in the wake of the de Man controversy. In this sense, the shift is not so much in the work of the philosophers as it is in the wider academic community, which began to pay more attention to ethical questions in the wake of events surrounding de Man.

2 TRAUMA THEORY AND HOLOCAUST STUDIES The critique of de Man as a possible starting point for a more ethical emphasis shares its focus with a larger associated movement in literary studies, namely trauma theory and Holocaust studies. The response to de Man needs to be contextualized by the uncovering of information about his past precisely at the moment when the Holocaust more broadly had become a

particular focus of literary and cultural studies. The discipline of trauma theory began in the 1970s, developed through the 1980s, and since then has become a recognizable theoretical framework. It was strongly influenced by the work of Jewish philosophers Hannah Arendt (1906–75) and Primo Levi (1919–87), among others. The majority of the influential texts that we associate with the field were written in the 1990s. Trauma theory has been associated principally with the field of Holocaust studies. In the 1990s collections of essays emerged examining how survivors and later generations had processed the Holocaust. Dominick LaCapra’s Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) is a good example of this approach. Heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, the essays in LaCapra’s collection examine how the trauma of the Holocaust is processed. More recently, works such as Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (2012) have applied this concern specifically to literary and other texts. Trauma theory is, however, rooted in attention not only to Holocaust survivors but also to the survivors of other major conflicts such as the Vietnam War, and also to those who have suffered abuse or tragedy. It is not a literary field specifically, but an interdisciplinary field of study that has become important to literary studies. Trauma theory is particularly interested in how trauma manifests itself both for individuals and for communities, how it relates to questions of place and history, how it is exorcised, and its longterm consequences. The latter has led to the development of the idea of inherited trauma – a concern for how nations, communities and individuals pass on traumatic experiences to later generations. This is particularly relevant to discussions of the Holocaust, but also to colonialism and slavery, where the long-term effects of widespread abuse can be seen to be carried by later generations. By concerning itself with past experiences, trauma theory also has some overlap with what is referred to as memory studies. Memory studies are concerned for the ways in which our relationship to the past is itself a kind of narrative. In her discussion of Holocaust trauma, Hirsch introduces the term ‘postmemory’ to explain inherited trauma: the idea that trauma can exceed

remembrance. At the same time, trauma theory examines memory in the light of postmodern ideas of history, concerned for the ways in which individual and collective remembrance is shaped by particular experiences, the identity of the individual and social forces. For example, Cathy Caruth’s landmark study Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) introduces the term ‘belatedness’ to describe the ways in which trauma is accessed, not in the moment of its occurrence but only when it is returned to via memory. Trauma exists thus not in the moment of the event but in its aftermath. In terms of literature, we can think about the ways in which narratives foreground this subjective experience. For example, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), the character of Septimus Smith is haunted by his wartime experiences and can be read through the lens of trauma theory: we might ask questions about how his experience in London shapes his remembrance of trauma, how his treatment by the medical profession exacerbates his symptoms, and how his memory shapes a particular narrative of his experience. The latter is part of a wider concern with memory in the novel: the socialite Clarissa Dalloway is also haunted by her past and frequently returns to it, so that past and present often seem indistinguishable. This nonlinear temporality is shaped by the novel’s modernist prose (see Chapter 7), as stream of consciousness allows Woolf to focus on the internal experience of characters against the official time of the external world. Literary concern for trauma and memory is therefore particularly concerned with how modes of narrative can respond to questions of trauma and the complexities of representing its various facets. Mrs Dalloway is also a prime example of how trauma theory and ethical criticism intersect with psychoanalytic theory. Septimus’s post-war shell shock has much in common with what Freud defined as hysteria, and which was in the early twentieth century problematically associated with female mental health. Woolf’s novel asks questions about the gendering of mental health diagnoses and treatment: Septimus’s mistreatment at the hands of a medical establishment that seems unable to empathize with his condition is in strong contrast in the novel with the somewhat unlikely psychological connection that Clarissa feels for this man she does not even know. More

recently, Pat Barker has explored these themes in her First World War Regeneration trilogy, in which questions of homosexuality and class are intertwined with themes of trauma, again emphasizing the ways in which mental illness is codified by social background, gender and sexuality. One of the debates that comes from concern for postmemory and inherited trauma is precisely who can speak of the trauma of an event: who can do justice to suffering and who has the right to claim a particular trauma. In the terms of the Holocaust, the overwhelming nature of the experience – something so horrific and almost unspeakable – has led some to argue that no one who has not experienced the Holocaust should represent it. For some, this right may be extended to the familial inheritors of that trauma, although this in itself is contentious. These positions resist any development of a ‘genre’ of Holocaust literature as something that might be marketed. At the same time, there is an equally strong argument to be made for literature as a creative means of capturing the horror of something that seems almost unspeakable. In this sense, Holocaust literature has much in common with narratives of other ‘silenced’ atrocities, particularly slavery. This is something recognized in Caryl Phillips’s novel The Nature of Blood (1997), in which a narrative of Holocaust survival is paralleled with stories of slavery and historic racism to examine the resonating force of prejudice in society. The reverberating force of trauma that Phillips exposes is a useful example of how trauma theory emerges out of Holocaust studies: while his novel is a study of the Holocaust experience, what emerges from this in conjunction with his other narrative threads is a much broader concern with the nature of traumatic experience. A text such as The Nature of Blood views the events of the past through the lens of the present, to understand what we might learn from them in terms of shaping current relations. This kind of ethical judgement of the past is sometimes referred to as presentism. Often used negatively to signify an unfair judgement of the past, which holds previous generations up to impossible contemporary moral standards, presentism is important in allowing the future generations of those who were subject to atrocities to process the inherited trauma of those experiences. Moreover, it also allows us to relate to the past not as artefact

but, rather, as living intervention into the present. In this respect, ethical criticism is engaged in complex negotiations of time, which bear similarity with what Walter Benjamin (1940) calls ‘messianic time’ – an alternative to clock time in which the past comes to resonate directly with the present.

3 THE RESPONSE TO 9/11 While both the crisis surrounding de Man and the development of Holocaust studies are late twentieth-century moments, the final turning point towards the ethical is more recent. On 11 September 2001, Islamic terrorists hijacked four airplanes, flying two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, while another crashed when its passengers attempted to overthrow the hijackers. It is estimated that almost 3,000 people were killed in the attacks. In the wake of these events, literature attempted to respond to the horror of what had happened. Not only were a number of novels produced by high-profile writers, but these writers also spoke out against the terrorists. In particular, many were seen to make statements against censorship and in favour of creativity as a counter to perceived terrorist fundamentalism. In an article published four days after the attacks, the British novelist Ian McEwan called the terrorist events a ‘failure of the imagination’. At the centre of McEwan’s piece was the suggestion that imagination creates a kind of empathy that makes terrorism unthinkable.

‘If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.’ Ian McEwan, ‘Only Love and Then Oblivion’ (2001)

McEwan’s evocation of morality is an example of how 9/11 pushed writers

into a role they had taken less frequently in the postmodern period. In McEwan’s case it was particularly ironic, given that the novel he wrote just before 9/11 but that was released afterwards, Saturday (2005), is a meditation (following Atonement, discussed above) on the ways in which literature can prevent violence. In a rather problematic scene from the end of the novel, a young woman manages to avoid being sexually assaulted by reciting, naked, Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, seemingly inspiring precisely the empathy that McEwan would later write about in his response to 9/11. Set on the day of the London street protests against the British invasion of Iraq, the scene McEwan describes directly (and in ethical fashion) parallels this event. Unlike Iris Murdoch’s equivocal and subtle explorations, McEwan accepts a rather more didactic mandate that has more in common with earlier generations of writers: with the nineteenth-century presence of writers such as Charles Dickens, who explicitly wrote in relation to social inequality, and those such as George Orwell, who wrote large amounts of non-fiction alongside fictional narrative.

Spotlight Orwell frequently wrote in essays that he wished he had been born in a less political time so that he could have been a more experimental writer like the modernists he admired, rather than a political writer.

In the wake of 9/11, it can be argued that the writer who exemplifies the playfulness of high modernism is no longer desired by readers, who are now looking for writers with more in common with this earlier kind of public figure, and for narratives with a more explicitly ethical presence.

Case study: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close In the wake of 9/11, a number of novels were published that spoke specifically to the tragedy. These novels also frequently addressed the wider concerns of trauma theory. A notable example in this regard is Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. A Jewish American, Foer tells the story of a young boy,

Oskar, whose father is killed in the Twin Towers. The novel tracks Oskar’s attempts to find the meaning of a mysterious key that he finds in his father’s closet. As he wanders through New York, Oskar enacts a physical exploration that parallels the psychological journey he must undertake to come to terms with the loss of his father in such horrific circumstances. Foer parallels this narrative with the story of Oskar’s grandparents, survivors of the British bombing of Dresden during the Second World War. Alongside these two major narratives, we are also given other voices, for example the transcript of a survivor of the American atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki in Japan in 1945. These parallels question the exceptionalist rhetoric surrounding 9/11 in the United States immediately after the tragedy, by drawing attention to previous crimes, including those committed by the United States and Britain. At the same time, these parallels – like those offered by Caryl Phillips – allow the narrative to function not only as a 9/11 narrative but equally as a larger investigation into the nature of trauma. Foer is particularly concerned with the place of trauma: as Oskar wanders the city his movements trace the haunted landscape of New York after the attacks; likewise, his grandparents spatially isolate themselves from each other by marking out the space in their New York apartment, physically separating themselves in a way that mimics their psychological distance from each other as they attempt to come to terms with their differing experiences of the war.

Transversal poetics What is at stake in all these projects is a dialogue, a talking across differences, that is usefully defined by what has most recently been called transversal poetics, or transversal politics. The term ‘transversal’ is originally a geometric one, meaning a line that intersects two or more lines at different points. To think transversally, then, is not simply to think across two different perspectives but to cross one’s own point of view with multiple alternatives. In ethical terms, to think transversally is to ask ‘What might this look like from multiple alterative viewpoints?’ and, indeed, ‘How can one respect multiple viewpoints in one act?’ This has much in common with feminist ideas of intersectionality, meaning examining the place where alternative viewpoints (of race, gender, class) come together. While intersectionality stresses commonality, however, transversal politics provides a subtle contrast with its emphasis on difference.

In literary terms, we can ask how texts take account of multiple subject positions, for example how Mrs Dalloway gives us the voice of both the marginalized war veteran and the silenced woman. We can also enact transversal readings of literary texts. For example, an intersectional reading of Jane Eyre (1847) looks to consider the voice of Bertha Mason as that which crosses the experience of Jane in feminist terms. In contrast, a transversal reading might look to examine how one does justice to the stories of Bertha, Jane, Rochester and St John Rivers, who by the end of the novel are each marginalized in alternative terms (by race, gender, disability or religion). In this sense, ethical criticism asks us to read differently.

Fact check 1 Who developed the idea of ethical reading as transaction? a Louise Rosenblatt b Emmanuel Levinas c Jacques Derrida d Ian McEwan 2 In response to which event did Ian McEwan declare a ‘failure of the imagination’? a The First World War b The Vietnam War c 9/11 d Dresden 3 Who developed the idea of the ethico-political? a Antonio Gramsci b Gilles Deleuze c Jacques Derrida d Emmanuel Levinas 4 What is Levinas’s term for a person different from ourselves? a Self b Other c Man d Human

5 What kind of poetics is associated with ethical criticism? a Transactional b Transversal c Transnational d Translational 6 The controversy surrounding which theorist is central to the development of ethical criticism? a Jacques Derrida b Gilles Deleuze c Roland Barthes d Paul de Man 7 Who wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? a Will Self b Charles Dickens c Ian McEwan d Jonathan Safran Foer 8 What is the term for the ethical turn in American fiction? a New meaning b New truth c New realism d New sincerity 9 What other school of theory pertaining to the Second World War is central to ethical criticism? a Holocaust studies b Memory studies c War studies d Hiroshima studies 10 What is Holocaust studies a branch of? a Memory studies b War studies c Trauma theory d Work theory

Dig deeper Adamson, Jane et al. (1998), Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eaglestone, Robert (1997), Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hayes, Peter and Roth, John (2010), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

18 Genre theory The idea of genre – the grouping of texts by their essential properties – has been central to literary studies from their earliest beginnings. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s Poetics, written in around 335 BCE and first translated into English in the sixteenth century, is the earliest text to consider how we divide literary works in order to outline their essential features. The book is an account of poetry, which in this period would have also included drama. Aristotle identifies three essential differences between different types of dramatic works (comedy and tragedy) and different types of poetry such as the epic and the lyric. These are:

• differences in terms of harmony, metre and melody • differences in terms of the moral goodness of the characters • differences in how the narrative is presented – whether a story is acted or told. Aristotle’s form of analysis is the foundation for much genre criticism today.

The influence of Aristotle In Poetics Aristotle also suggests that a play should always follow three rules – what he refers to as the three unities: 1

Unity of action: the narrative of a play should follow one event, and have minimal subplots.

2

Unity of time: the action of a play should take place over a period of no more than 24 hours.

3

Unity of place: a play should exist in a single physical space and not represent more than one place.

Aristotle outlines the key features of the tragic form. Most importantly, the tragic hero for Aristotle must be four things: good, appropriate, realistic and consistent. Equally, the drama must have a specific effect on the audience, inducing what we call catharsis – a tragic pleasure produced when the audience experiences a strong emotional engagement with the plight of the tragic hero. This association causes the audience to feel fear or pity for the hero, so much so that it prompts an emotional release of their own feelings of anxiety. Alongside the specific character of the work and its effect, Aristotle outlines a number of structural features essential to tragedy, relating to plot, the character of the hero, thoughts and ideas, the words spoken (diction and melody) and spectacle.

Key ideas The plot (mythos), referring to the events of the tragedy, should include three elements: reversal, recognition and suffering. It should be complex and generate feelings of catharsis. The character (ethos) of the tragic hero should be good, consistent, appropriate and realistic, and ideally his downfall should be not because of chance but because of a

mistake. In many cases, this is seen to revolve around what we call a ‘tragic flaw’ or weakness, for example Macbeth’s ambition or Gatsby’s idealism. Thought (dianoia) refers to the ideas that explain the characters or plot. These can be spoken by the characters themselves, but are also in much Greek drama represented by a dramatic chorus, which outlines not only the action but also its moral consequences. Diction (lexis), meaning speech, should be appropriate to the characters. Melody (melos) defines the musical quality of the words spoken, making them pleasing and engaging, but also suited to the plot. A tragedy would contain a melody quite different from comedy, for example. Spectacle (opsis) defines how the drama appears on stage. For Aristotle this was far less important than the other elements of the play, but nevertheless, again, it was to be fitting to the tragic form.

Aristotle’s form of analysis is still the foundation for much genre study. It is concerned with isolating the elements in a literary work that give it a particular character and for labelling the work on the basis of this character. Here, as you see, is a method we could use to analyse any literary form – breaking it down into its constituent parts and examining how each one has been chosen particularly to match not just the physical form (in the this case drama) but also the subtype of that form (in this case tragedy). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Italian and French critics expanded on Aristotle’s definitions to lay out the format for the structuring of modern plays. However, English dramatists during this period did not follow these rules, so Shakespeare, for example, rarely observed the unities in his plays. The early literary criticism of writers such as John Dryden and Samuel Johnson analyses Shakespeare against these features, in what can be seen as an early example of genre criticism. Much as we would do today, Dryden and Johnson engage in a detailed analysis of Shakespeare’s texts alongside Aristotle’s theory.

Spotlight A 2016 edition of the New Oxford Shakespeare credits Christopher Marlowe as co-

author of Henry VI Parts One, Two and Three for the first time, one of 17 Shakespeare plays the series now recognizes as containing contributions from other playwrights.

The Chicago School In the 1930s a group of critics known as the Chicago School began to be heavily influenced by Aristotle’s work, so much so that they are often referred to also as neo-Arisotelian. The Chicago School was associated with 1930s formalism, but distinguished itself by being interested in the principles of literature outlined by Aristotle. In his Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (1961) and The Theory of Comedy (1968), the critic Elder Olson (1909–92) drew from the group’s development of Aristotle’s principles. Here we can also see the influence of narratology and its structuralist ideas that were developing at around the same time (see Chapter 5). Although the Chicago School began in the 1930s, its ideas were inherited by a second generation of critics who continued to be concerned with categorizing literature. In 1957 the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye (1912–91) published Anatomy of Criticism, in which he conducted a detailed analysis of literary form based on Aristotle’s work.

‘The question of what the structural principles of literature actually are seems important enough to discuss; and, as literature is an art of words, it should be at least as easy to find words to describe them as to find such words as sonata or fugue in music.’ Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

In the first essay in the book, Frye divides literature into tragedy, comedy and thematic works, seeing in each of the three types five different modes: mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic and ironic. For each of these

there is a different type of focus. For example, in terms of tragedy the mythic form deals with gods, the romantic with heroes such as King Arthur, the high mimetic with noble humans such as Oedipus, the low mimetic with ordinary humans such as Tess in Tess of the D’Ubervilles (1891) and the ironic with a character who is not noble but weak and pitiful, for example the character of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings (1954). Frye suggests that, rather than texts being divided by their subject matter (such as fantasy or romance) or by their length (the long epic or the novel versus the short story or lyric poem), they should instead be divided by what he calls presentation – meaning the way in which the author communicates to the reader:

• In epos the author speaks directly to the audience (storytelling). • In fiction author and audience are hidden from each other. • In drama the author is hidden from the audience; the audience experiences content directly.

• In lyric the audience is ‘hidden’ from the author; that is, the speaker is ‘overheard’ by hearers. Following these earlier works, Mary Doyle Springer’s Forms of the Modern Novella (1975) outlines how different types of short novel can be grouped by various different structures. Likewise, Austin Wright’s The Formal Principle in the Novel (1982) focuses on the idea of ‘conventions’.

The Rhetoric of Fiction One landmark book in the development of literary criticism with particular relevance to the idea of genre is Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983). Booth (1921–2005) was an American professor and follower of the work of the Chicago School. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth outlines the dominance of realism in fiction as a style that is implicated in the definition of genre – a novel, we are told, will be realistic, and if it is not then what we are reading is not a novel at all but, rather, a romance. In Booth’s American tradition, this stems back to the nineteenth-century development of the novel, where the works of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan

Poe – defined as romances – were contrasted to the emerging realist form. Booth argues that such definitions are dogmatic and limit what we perceive the novel to be.

Spotlight Jane Austen was keenly aware of the difference between the novel and the romance. In a letter of 1816 she wrote, ‘I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.’

‘The novel began, we are told, with Cervantes, with Defoe, with Fielding, with Richardson, with Jane Austen – or was it with Homer? It was killed by Joyce, by Proust, by the rise of symbolism, by the loss of respect for – or was it the excessive absorption with? – hard facts. No, no, it still lives, but only in the work of…Thus, on and on.’ Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983)

Booth suggests that these kinds of category exist only to allow us to decide quality – to say what fails and what succeeds, and on what terms. Through this, we define what we think people should read – what we call ‘the Great Tradition’ or ‘the Canon’. This idea of canonicity has persisted beyond Booth’s writing – for example, Harold Bloom (1930– ), in his text The Western Canon (1994), narrows the essential works of literature to those written by a select group of authors (see also Chapter 1).

Key idea The Canon refers to a group of literary texts recognized for their longstanding literary value.

‘Without the Canon, we cease to think.’ Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994)

Spotlight There are 26 authors on Bloom’s list. Is your favourite here? William Shakespeare

Charles Dickens

Dante Alighieri

George Eliot

Geoffrey Chaucer

Leo Tolstoy

Miguel de Cervantes

Henrik Ibsen

Michel de Montaigne

Sigmund Freud

Molière

Marcel Proust

John Milton

James Joyce

Samuel Johnson

Virginia Woolf

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Franz Kafka

William Wordsworth

Jorge Luis Borges

Jane Austen

Pablo Neruda

Walt Whitman

Fernando Pessoa

Emily Dickinson

Samuel Beckett

Bloom’s narrow vision has been widely criticized by both postcolonial and feminist critics, but the presence of such work long after Booth’s critique suggests how ingrained such attitudes continue to be. For Booth, realism is an attempt to create what he calls simulation: the sense that the action goes on without authorial invention or presence. In doing this, Booth says, we lose sight of the author as an ever-present force who exists as a voice within the novel. This author is not ‘real’ but an imagined presence: what Booth calls the ‘implied author’.

Key idea The implied author is the author as an imagined presence in any reading experience.

Rather than being concerned with types, Booth suggests that we should concern ourselves with variations in narrative, and the effects these may have. This echoes Frye’s earlier work on the idea of presentation. To this end, Booth outlines what he sees as five different types of relationship between the narrator and the text: 1

The narrator may be more or less distant from the implied author, and this distance may be moral, intellectual or temporal.

2

The narrator may be more or less distant from the characters. The narrator may differ intellectually, morally or temporally from them and their norms.

3

The narrator may be more or less distant from the reader and the reader’s norms. This distance may be physical, emotional or moral.

4

The implied author may be more or less distant from the reader, a distance that may be intellectual, moral or aesthetic. A book that expects the reader to accept and share these values is unlikely to be well received by its audience.

5

The implied author (carrying the reader along) may be more or less

distant from the other characters. Distances can also be seen to fluctuate, where a character might alternate between sympathetic and unsympathetic. The kind of narrator and implied author a text employs will shape our response: it may build our empathy and engagement or create a distance between reader and author that is difficult and leads to a hostile response. By considering how these elements relate to each other, Booth suggests that we can understand much about how the text wants us to respond to its characters and plot.

The role of the reader As this reading of Booth suggests, genre criticism has been increasingly influenced by reader response theory. Critics writing from the 1980s onwards ceased to see the author as purely creating form through rules and structures, but also as creating these in dialogue with a reader, who brings their own influences to the text. Equally, genre criticism has shifted in the wake of more political theories such as feminism and postcolonialism, to be concerned not only with how literature fits into a certain category but how and for what reasons it might break the rules of its form. While early criticism, such as Dryden’s reading of Shakespeare, presents this break either as ignorance or failure, contemporary critics are concerned with how selfconscious manipulation of formal structures might be a politically motivated act or might have effects with political resonance. For example, a play with wide-ranging geography may break Aristotle’s unity of action, but this might be a powerful statement on globalization; a novel without a fulfilling conclusion may be a postmodern comment on the search for meaning in contemporary culture.

‘Popular’ literatures Aristotle’s concern for not simply the form (drama) but also the type of form (tragedy or comedy) has driven a contemporary interest in the idea of genre that has expanded to be concerned not only with literary genres such as drama, poetry and the novel but also with the characteristics of varying forms

within these genres. In novel criticism it is common to speak of genre not in terms of the novel but, rather, in terms of the type of novel. In some criticism, ‘genre’ is reserved for describing works that do not contain all the features of literary fiction, and that instead have a strong thematic identity such as detective fiction, romance, fantasy fiction or science fiction. Of course, to make this distinction is a false one because literary fiction is itself a genre, with features that can be identified in order to categorize it.

Case study: Bleak House When you think of the nineteenth-century author Charles Dickens, do you think of the literary or the popular? Do you think of literary fiction or of genre fiction? In 2012 The Economist published an infographic that laid out as a bar chart the sales of Dickens’s works during his own lifetime. This was based on a study produced by Robert Patten in 1978 entitled Charles Dickens and his Publishers. What the chart shows is that between 1846 and 1870, Dickens had sold fewer than 20,000 copies of Hard Times (first published in 1854) but more than 750,000 copies of Bleak House, first published only two years earlier. Bleak House tops the chart, but what do these figures actually mean? In 2015 E. L. James sold more than a million copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, while Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman sold just under 350,000. This seems to put Dickens to shame. Yet in 2015 the UK population was over 64.5 million people, compared to just over 27 million in 1850. Moreover, the nature of book sales has changed dramatically in the past 150 years: a book like Fifty Shades of Grey sold quickly after publication, driven by media exposure, but we can question whether it will in the long term achieve the success of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which has to date sold around 200 million copies. More useful, then, is to consider how Dickens’s sales compared to sales of popular works during his lifetime and literary works today. A first literary novel today sells between 3,000 and 7,000 copies. In Dickens’s time, cheap romance and detective fictions, published often as ‘penny dreadfuls’ (a term coined to explain their cost and content) might far exceed the sales of Dickens’s work, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde sold an impressive 40,000 copies in the six months following its publication in 1886. Yet Dickens’s own sales compared favourably to those of other literary novelists at the time, such as Walter Scott (whose

first print runs were only 10,000 copies). When Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers was initially printed in serial form, the magazine publishing it began to sell 20,000 copies a month. Is Bleak House a popular novel, then, or a literary one? The complexity of sales makes it difficult accurately to say. What is evident, however, is that what we now see as classic literature was far from obscure in its own period. In this context, it would be foolish to see the bestseller as separate from the literary.

Reserving the term ‘genre criticism’ for works that are not seen to be literary fiction returns the critic to earlier debates regarding the value of the popular. As discussed in Chapter 4, for Adorno and the Frankfurt School mass culture is a means of social control to be resisted. The early proponents of cultural studies, such as the cultural materialist Raymond Williams, still saw popular culture as representing much work of poor quality. They departed from the Frankfurt School, however, by stressing that, although some of this work is not attractive to academics, it has value as a democratic force that opens ideas up to a wider population. This follows the cultural materialist idea, discussed in Chapter 15, that literature can act as a radical force for change. In the wake of this work, it is not less common to see genre referred to pejoratively or to reserve it for ‘nonliterary’ works. Instead, we tend to describe these works as popular texts in order to acknowledge their appeal to large audiences. Although some critics might still use this term to distinguish such works from the literary, there is an increasing interest not only in how these lines blur but also on how they are artificially created by the media and the publishing industry. In Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900 (2008), Clive Bloom (1953– ) outlines the genres most popular in the last hundred years and also traces the development of ‘hybrid genres’ that have complicated the rigid boundaries of earlier genre criticism. Alongside this book, Bloom has published a number of studies examining specific genres such as horror and detective fiction. Similarly, the critic Janice Radway (1949– ) has been particularly influential in the study of romance – her book Reading the Romance (1984) uses reader response criticism to test women’s responses to popular romance. Radway’s work has considered how popular fiction might form social attitudes, and whether these do indeed suggest the kind of conformity presented by the

Frankfurt School or something more complex. While it is beyond the limits of this chapter to survey in detail the work on all the various popular fiction genres, a wide range of scholarship is available.

Fact check 1 In what year was Anatomy of Criticism first published? a 1965 b 1955 c 1957 d 1975 2 What is the name of Aristotle’s study of tragedy? a Tragedy b Poetics c Poetry d Drama 3 Who wrote, ‘Without the Canon, we cease to think’? a Clive Bloom b Harold Bloom c Northrup Frye d Wayne Booth 4 How many canonical authors are listed in The Western Canon? a 24 b 26 c 28 d 30 5 Who wrote The Rhetoric of Fiction? a Clive Bloom b Harold Bloom c Northrup Frye d Wayne Booth 6 On what genre of popular literature does Janice Radway write?

a b c d

Romance Crime Mystery Fantasy

7 Whose theory is mass culture theory? a The Frankfurt School b Poststructuralism c Marxism d Postmodernism 8 How many type of relationship between narrator and reader are outlined in The Rhetoric of Fiction? a Two b Three c Four d Five 9 What is the genre theory term for the imagined author? a Real b Imagined c Affected d Implied 10 To what feature of tragedy does the Greek term mythos refer? a Drama b Speech c Action d Plot

Dig deeper Bloom, Clive (2008), Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dowd, Garin et al., eds (2006), Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism. Bristol: Intellect. Gelder, Ken (2004), Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field.

London: Routledge.

19 Ecocriticism The newest and most strongly emerging field of criticism covered in this book is that of ecocriticism. Ecocritical studies emerged in the United States in the late 1970s and then spread to Europe. From its beginning, like postcolonial criticism, it was dominated by literary scholars. Most notably, the critic Lawrence Buell (1939– ) was influential in shaping the early definition of the field as one in which literature and the environment would be studied in relation to each other. In Buell’s work is an explicit commitment to environmental values. For this reason, the field is also sometimes called environmental studies, or green studies.

Studying the Earth

‘What’s the use of becoming animal of the child? What is extra being good for? Strictly speaking: nothing. But invented styles of taking flight, improvised ways of surpassing the given in exploratory lived abstraction, experimental orbits of escape from known situations and their generic themes, might suggest, by analogy, creative lines of flight out of other situations where a heavy dependence on the already-expressed imposes itself with a life-crushing weight of the imperative to conform.’ Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014) The word ‘ecocriticism’ itself was first used in 1978 by the critic William Rueckert in his essay ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’ and there now exists an established body of work focused on ecocriticism, including The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2010) and The Ecocriticism Reader (1996). Early ecocritical approaches focus on the role of the environment in literature, an interest that can be taken back as far as Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973). It is concerned with how literature represents the environment and how this might contribute to understanding the environmental crises of the contemporary world. Recent ecocriticism has moved beyond the concern for the environment to questions about the human as a part of the ecosystem. In particular, ecocriticism ask questions about anthropocentrism – the way in which human thinking is centred on the human subject and how this shapes our perspective on the world and our treatment of it.

Key idea Anthropocentrism is human-centred thinking.

THE PROBLEM OF SCALE For Timothy Clark (2012) the problem of the ecocritical is one of scale: the continual need to move from thinking about how we treat the environment at a local level – putting out the recycling for collection, not running the tap when we brush our teeth – to the large scale of global warming and overfarming. Needing to respond to these ever-shifting scales, Clark argues, has profound implications for our sense of space and time and our understanding of our own place in the world.

‘One symptom of a now widespread crisis of scale is a derangement of linguistic and intellectual proportion in the way people often talk about the environment, a breakdown of “decorum” in the strict sense. Thus a sentence about the possible collapse of civilization can end, no less solemnly, with the injunction never to fill the kettle more than necessary when making tea. A poster in many workplaces depicts the whole earth as giant thermostat dial, with the absurd but intelligible caption “You control climate change.” A motorist buying a slightly less destructive make of car is now “saving the planet.”’ Timothy Clark, ‘Derangements of Scale’ (2012)

The death of nature Early ecocritical responses tend to posit culture and nature as binary opposites, the former being a human-made world of ideas and built spaces,

the latter being a tangible physical space that we can locate, rooted in plant and carbon-based forms. That it is hard, in fact, to describe the latter without using the word ‘natural’ or ‘nature’ shows how powerful this opposition has become. Later ecocriticism, however, has complicated the idea of nature by suggesting that it is itself a human-made construction – a kind of ideal space imagined in opposition to the human world. Although this comes much closer to poststructuralist thinking than earlier ecocritical work, it still puts forward the idea that there is a real, physical space that is more than just imagined or conceived of through language. Like postcolonial criticism and feminism, then, ecocriticism can be seen as part of a wave of theories that returns us to the materiality of the world and asks us to think about literature’s relationship to that materiality. In this respect, ecocriticism is about much more than the environment. Anthony Paul Smith (2013), heavily influenced by the French philosopher François Laruelle’s non-philosophy, defines this approach as an ‘ecology of thought’. By this he means not simply to think about the environment but to take this as an invitation to think differently.

Key ideas Nature, in ecocriticism, is the term used for the human conception of the environment. Ecology of thought, in ecocriticism, is a means of thinking differently not just in relation to the environment but in general terms.

Ecocriticism is a thought exercise, quite different from engaging in an ecological literary criticism focused on tracing environmental themes in literary works or establishing the influence of literature on ecological thinking. Rather than restricting itself to these spheres, the power of ecocriticism lies in its disruptive, questioning possibilities. Smith argues that these have the potential to revise the fields of philosophy and theology. They might also, however, equally offer the opportunity to shape any field of theory concerned with the idea of human and identity politics. In this context

the environment is not the essential part of the theory: it is, instead, a contributor to its development. One of the criticisms of reading the environment in these terms is that it makes the environment a metaphor for a wider political engagement, where the human again becomes what is at stake. Critics of this approach argue that we should allow the environment to stand for what it is, rather than always making it stand for human interests. They argue that the latter never really gets us away from the damaging hierarchies of old-fashioned humanism.

Critiquing the human It is this relationship to the human, however, that is the value of ecological thinking to identity politics. Thinking through the environment strikes at the core of definitions of the human, which are implicated in thinking about racial, gendered and disabled identities in particular. To invoke an ecological way of thinking in the service of identity politics is to recognize ecocritique with the potential to create new modes of identity. Smith argues that it is only this kind of ecological thought that can counter the recourse to humanism that exists in even the most radical contemporary philosophy. For other ecocritics, ecological thought has an explicitly political function. Bruno Latour (2004), for example, sees ecological crises as central to political crises – borne out in the events of the Arab Spring, for example, which environmentalists have argued were in part driven by climate change. For Latour, it is not enough simply to reconcile humanity and nature: there must be a radical rethinking of the very idea of nature and its relation to questions of politics. Understanding the non-human, Latour argues, means having to engage in a democratic process of equal rights. The result of this means an acceptance of democracy more generally as ethical government. More widely, it means a commitment to a genuine and inclusive democracy.

ECOLOGICAL FORM What is the particular relevance of this theory for literary studies? Implied within the idea of ecological thought is the suggestion that there might also be an ecological form. Following the work of Angus Fletcher on American

poetry in his book A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment and the Future of Imagination (2004), Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature (2009) makes a call for what he calls an ‘ambient poetics’: a way in which the form of narrative may suggest a particular, open and expansive relationship to nature. Central to ambient poetics, for Morton, is what he terms ‘ecomimesis’: a scrupulous attention to the environment instead of the person. In its weakest form, this mimesis exists whenever a place is described; when a writer engages with landscape and place, they shift the reader’s focus away from their anthropocentrism.

Key ideas Ambient poetics is a narrative form that reflects an open relationship with the environment. Ecomimesis is a focus on the environment rather than the person.

In a stronger form, ambient poetics gives literature a profound ambience, a deep sense of place and ‘situatedness’. It transforms representation. Morton describes this as a process where place is not simply copied but, rather, is remade as a ‘compelling illusion’. This means that fiction that engages with the ecocritical cannot be straightforwardly realist. Morton outlines six features of an ambient work. The first, rendering, suggests an attempt ‘to simulate reality itself’. The second, medial writing, describes the way in which the form of writing, particularly its visual appearance, means that ‘contact becomes content’. This means that the form of the piece becomes its meaning, rather than merely reflecting or enhancing it. This is followed by the timbral, which explains the musicality of the form, the Aeolian, which pertains to a text’s presence outside subject or author, and then tone, described as a ‘quality of vibration’. These later features are expressed by use of parentheses, hyphen and the placement of words on a page, as well as their rhythm.

The final element of ambient poetics is defined by what Morton calls ‘remark’ – ‘a kind of echo’ – which might be seen as similar to a modernist leitmotif. The purpose of such echoes is to bring spaces and the voices within them in from the margins – to destroy the notion of the ‘in-between’ and instead demand that the marginal voice is allowed relevance to political and ethical decisions. It is with this final factor that the relationship between ambient poetics and other identity theories becomes clearer. For the ambient text is a spokesperson for the politics of recognition. It demands that voices are heard and uses form to speak to this, not simply in the specific terms of the environment but also as a more universal politics.

BECOMING ANIMAL The ecocritical focus on the human can also be seen as an extension of the posthuman project, in that it asks questions about the relationships between humans, animals and the environment. It therefore takes ideas such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) ‘becoming animal’ and Brian Massumi’s concept of ‘playing animality’ (2014) and considers how these ideas might shape our understanding of literature. A key philosophical engagement with the animal comes in Derrida’s essay ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ (2002). In this essay, Derrida describes how the encounter with a cat (or any animal) asks us to consider our own body. Naked in front of the cat, his embarrassment distinguishes him from the animal, whose nakedness does not exist because an animal has never thought to dress itself: in ‘nature’ there is no nudity. In the encounter with the animal, Derrida declares, we come to see the absolute other, and to think what it means for that other to look at us.

‘The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbour than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.’

Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ (2002)

For some critics Derrida’s response does not go far enough. In her book When Species Meet (2008), the postmodern philosopher Donna Haraway argues that Derrida’s encounter may ask us to think about the cat but it still keeps the human at the centre. We are still thinking about what it means for Derrida when the cat looks at him, rather than truly attempting a ‘becoming animal’.

‘But with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning.’ Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (2008)

Spotlight Derrida was known to be a great cat lover. There are many photos of him with his cat, who was named Logos.

Haraway argues that we must attempt an ‘other-worlding’ in our encounters – a genuine transformation rather than an external sympathy. For literary critics, the question is how writers might facilitate such a process. An animal cannot speak. Do we speak for it? Does this raise the same problems that Spivak outlines in attempts to speak for the subaltern? How do we find our own animal consciousness? And what would this read like?

Spotlight

Haraway’s pet dogs also feature in her book: their names are Cayenne and Roland.

Case Study: The Flood A model of ecological thought centred on the animal can be found in Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2005), a dystopian fiction set in the near future. The city in the novel is a socially divided one, and in the affluent north nature has overtaken ecology, dominated by a large zoo and the cultivated Kew Gardens. In the city, ‘exquisitely expensive animal parts’ are sold as commodities and animals are dispensable. Yet as flood waters rise, this human-centred nature is transformed into an ecosystem. Animals invade the city. Meanwhile, the humans encounter their own becoming animal: the painter Ian at the zoo bares his skin to the air to show the inhabitants that he is also an animal, a young child named Gerda attacks her mother ‘like a beaten dog’, and a woman called Moira lies on the floor with her Labrador and howls. Gee repeatedly uses animal similes to cement a figurative association that bonds human and non-human animal together. So follows a series of human–animal transformations: a computer simulation of a tidal wave where people ‘struggled like ants’, Lola and Gracie prowling the streets like panthers. At the end of the novel, it is Gerda, the most animal, who saves a young boy from drowning; what rescues him is not human logic but animal instinct.

THE ANTHROPOCENE In its bleak, disaster-ridden narrative, The Flood appeals to Morton’s idea of a ‘dark ecology’ (2016): the sense of an ecological disaster not waiting to happen but that has already arrived. Morton’s vision of an ecological crisis in progress speaks to the concept of the Anthropocene. This is a term given to describe the current environmental age in which now we live, one in which the human effect on the environment can be seen to have shaped its future irrevocably. The term is a combination of Greek roots: anthropo- meaning ‘human’ and -cene meaning ‘new’. Although used by scientists since the 1960s, it was only in the 1980s that the term was used more specifically to refer to the human impact of the current period. In the humanities, the Anthropocene is usually used to denote the profound (and negative) impact of humans on the environment. It signifies a period in

which human-centred living has overwhelmed nature and dramatically altered not merely the natural environment but our sense of our own place in the world. This centredness has ideological consequences, in that it reinforces a reawakened humanism, possibly with all the same consequences as old humanist ideas (see Chapter 16). Approaching literature with these concerns is typified by Timothy Clark’s most recent work, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015), in which he argues that the ecological crisis requires not only an environmental but also an academic response that finds new modes of analysis suitable for the changing state of the planet.

Key idea The Anthropocene refers to the current period of time, defined by the unalterable impact of the human.

Novels such as The Flood use becoming animal as a way to question the Anthropocene and imagine a future beyond its narrow self-interest. Yet the politics of becoming animal is not unique to Gee. It is also evident, for example, in Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2006), where the objectification of animals runs alongside hints of racist violence, where the young boy Magnus imagines himself both as a hologram but then as a dog, with a dog brain, and then as a series of animals. It can be seen in Jill Dawson’s The Tell-Tale Heart (2014), in which a man who is the recipient of a heart transplant comes to understand the mutability of identity and alongside it sees his children transformed by their ‘animal aliveness’, and in the opening chapter to Diana Evans’s 26a (2005), where the children’s hamster, Ham, is embodied with a consciousness that comes to foreshadow the novel’s tragic ending, but also stands as a statement of a thinking and connection beyond difference, resonant with the novel’s representation of mixed-race identities. Evans’s work uses magical realism to open the way to the animal in a strategy also evident in Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys (2006). Gaiman’s novel is the story of Fat Charlie: half-man, half-spider, son of the spider God Anansi but living a ‘human’ life in contemporary London, a space where Charlie’s Afro-

Caribbean roots strongly inflect his life, but neither skin colour nor animality seems to register. Like postcolonial literature, these texts seem to suggest that the alternative politics of ecocriticism also requires its own alternative literary form.

Spotlight Anansi Boys is the second novel of Gaiman’s to feature Anansi, who makes his first appearance in Gaiman’s epic fantasy American Gods (2001).

It is fitting that this book’s final chapter is on such a perspective. In many ways, the story of literary theory is one of an attempt to engage with questions of human experience in their widest forms – be it through the moral value of art, the politics of race, gender and class, or the construction of the self through language. Where literary theory will turn next is perhaps as exciting as the territories it has already traversed. As ecocriticism suggests, the new intellectual terrain that opens up before us moves beyond these familiar parameters. If the literature of the twentieth century was human, then the literature of the twenty-first is posthuman.

Fact check 1 Anthropocentric means centred on what? a The human b The animal c Space d Place 2 What animal does Jacques Derrida philosophize about? a A dog b A rabbit c A hedgehog d A cat

3 Who wrote When Species Meet? a Jacques Derrida b Michel Foucault c Donna Haraway d Brian Massumi 4 What kind of poetics is associated with ecological literature? a Ambient b Spatial c Eco d Place 5 What word does Timothy Clark use to describe the different size of spaces we negotiate in the contemporary world? a Size b Globalization c Scale d Distance 6 What kind of ecology can we associate with The Flood? a Spatial b Contemporary c Global d Dark 7 Who wrote Anansi Boys? a Neil Gaiman b Ian McEwan c Timothy Morton d James Smith 8 Which of these is not a term associated with ambient poetics? a Re-mark b Medial c Expressive d Timbral 9 Who coined the term ‘playing animality’? a Gilles Deleuze

b Brian Massumi c Michel Foucault d Donna Haraway 10 What is the name for the current age? a Anthropocene b Isopocene c Ecolocene d Icene

Dig deeper Buell, Lawrence (2009), The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Coupe, Laurence (2000), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Garrard, Greg (2012), Ecocriticism. Abingdon: Routledge.

Conclusion The title of Terry Eagleton’s book After Theory (2003) suggests that theory is something of the past. Eagleton suggests that ‘theory’ – which here means not just literary theory but cultural theory more widely – ceased to be dominant in the 1980s. It was at this time that the so-called ‘theory wars’ took place. These were a series of debates about the relevance of theory, which engaged high-profile academics at institutions both in the United States and the UK. In this moment, theory appeared to be dynamic and cutting edge. Moreover, it was where politics happened; it was the intellectual location for the most transgressive, disruptive and radical thought. The decline of theory, for Eagleton, can be explained by its refusal to take on the responsibility of this political mandate – to address issues of morality and ethics, and most of all to question capitalism. Theory, Eagleton argues, became lazy and self-indulgent. It turned towards the playfulness of postmodernism and away from the critiques of power it was also capable of carrying. Eagleton is certainly correct that theory no longer seems to attract the kind of attention it did during this earlier period. Moreover, his view is supported by a resurgence of approaches centred on the text outside the kinds of political and social contexts that drive contemporary theories such as postmodernism, postcolonialism and queer theory. In his book Reading after Theory (2002), Valentine Cunningham argues for a reading beyond theory. He wants a reading based on the senses: the possibility of touching the text, of an intimate communion between reader and word. As the early chapters of this book illustrate, however, what we call theory is in the contemporary period often indissoluble from what we call criticism. The kind of formalism that Cunningham celebrates is also a kind of theory, and it is perhaps more threatening than Eagleton gives it credit for: it has shaped the textual concerns of structuralism and poststructuralism, and it is the raw material to which reader response critics and those in politically oriented schools of theory respond. When one reads Reading after Theory it

is impossible not to think of new materialism and its engagement with the physicality of the book, with the embodied experience of reading. Likewise, renewed interest in historicist readings exists now only in the wake of new historicist and cultural materialist theory: such readings can never be innocent of the theoretical discussions that have shaped their current form. Anti-theory, then, is also theory. And while theory as it exists today may lack the kind of political dynamism Eagleton desires, it also speaks much more widely and democratically than it could if it functioned only in the defined ways that he suggests. In this sense, the debate about whether theory is still relevant is an irrelevant one. Ideas that give our reading purpose and frameworks that offer us variety in how and why we read will be useful for as long as we are looking to engage the literary text in new ways and explore it in more depth. The future of theory may not be solely within the confines of those ideas emerging from European philosophy, or those that engage with the responses of diverse readerships, or those that function as politics. Rather, the future of theory may lie in an ever-expanding sense of multiple routes of enquiry and multiple voices – voices that stretch beyond those we have heard before, and even beyond the human. All in all, there is no better time to be a literary critic.

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Published in Great Britain in 2017 by John Murray Learning. An Hachette UK company. Copyright © Sara Upstone 2017 The right of Sara Upstone to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 9781473611931 John Murray Learning Carmelite House 50 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DZ www.hodder.co.uk