Selden - Et.al Introduction
Selden - Et.al Introduction
Selden - Et.al Introduction
A Reader’s Guide
to Contemporary
Literary Theory
FIFTH EDITION
Raman Selden
Peter Widdowson
Peter Brooker
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Introduction
until recently ordinary readers of literature and even professional literary critics
had no reason to trouble themselves about developments in literary theory.
Theory seemed a rather rarefied specialism which concerned a few individuals
in literature departments who were, in effect, philosophers pretending to be
literary critics. . . . Most critics assumed, like Dr Johnson, that great literature
was universal and expressed general truths about human life . . . [and] talked
comfortable good sense about the writer’s personal experience, the social and
historical background of the work, the human interest, imaginative ‘genius’
and poetic beauty of great literature.
For good or ill, no such generalizations about the field of literary criticism
could be made now. Equally, in 1985 Raman would rightly point to the
end of the 1960s as the moment at which things began to change, and com-
ment that ‘during the past twenty years or so students of literature have
been troubled by a seemingly endless series of challenges to the consensus
of common sense, many of them deriving from European (and especially
French and Russian) intellectual sources. To the Anglo-Saxon tradition, this
was a particularly nasty shock.’ But he could also still present ‘Structural-
ism’ as a newly shocking ‘intruder in the bed of Dr Leavis’s alma mater’
(Cambridge), especially a structuralism with ‘a touch of Marxism about [it]’,
and note the even more outré fact that there was already ‘a poststructuralist
critique of structuralism’, one of the main influences on which was the
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INTRODUCTION 3
the latter precedes the former. This is because Russian Formalism, albeit mainly
produced in the second two decades of the twentieth century, did not have
widespread impact until the late 1960s and the 1970s, when it was effect-
ively rediscovered, translated and given currency by Western intellectuals
who were themselves part of the newer Marxist and structuralist movements
of that period. In this respect, the Russian Formalists ‘belong’ to that later
moment of their reproduction and were mobilized by the new left critics in
their assault, precisely, on established literary criticism represented most cen-
trally, in the Anglo-Saxon cultures, by New Criticism and Leavisism. Hence,
we present the latter as anterior to Formalism in terms of critical theoret-
ical ideology, because they represent the traditions of criticism, from the
outset and principally, with which contemporary critical theory had to
engage. In any event, while the Reader’s Guide does not pretend to give a
comprehensive picture of its field, and cannot be anything other than select-
ive and partial (in both senses), what it does offer is a succinct overview of
the most challenging and prominent trends within the theoretical debates
of the last forty years.
But more generally, and leaving aside for the moment the fact that in
2005, if not in 1985, the effects of these theoretical debates have so marked
literary studies that it is unthinkable to ignore them, why should we
trouble ourselves about theory? How, after all, does it affect our experience
and understanding of reading literary texts? One answer would be that some
familiarity with theory tends to undermine reading as an innocent activity.
If we begin to ask ourselves questions about the construction of meaning
in fiction, the presence of ideology in poetry, or how we measure the
value of a literary work, we can no longer naïvely accept the ‘realism’ of a
novel, the ‘sincerity’ of a poem, or the ‘greatness’ of either. Some readers
may cherish their illusions and mourn the loss of innocence, but if they
are serious, they must confront the problematical issues raised about
‘Literature’ and its social relations by major theorists in recent years. Other
readers again may believe that theories and concepts will only deaden the
spontaneity of their response to literary works, but they will thereby fail
to realize that no discourse about literature is theory-free, that even appar-
ently ‘spontaneous’ discussion of literary texts is dependent on the de facto
(if less self-conscious) theorizing of older generations. Their talk of ‘feeling’,
‘imagination’, ‘genius’, ‘sincerity’ and ‘reality’ is full of dead theory which
is sanctified by time and has become part of the naturalized language of
common sense. A second answer might be, then, that far from having a
sterile effect on our reading, new ways of seeing literature can revitalize our
engagement with texts; that if we are to be adventurous and exploratory
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INTRODUCTION 5
CONTEXT
ADDRESSER > MESSAGE > ADDRESSEE
CONTACT
CODE
CONTEXT
WRITER > WRITING > READER
CODE
MARXIST
ROMANTIC > FORMALIST > READER-
HUMANIST STRUCTURALIST ORIENTED
INTRODUCTION 7
sections which introduced both theorists who had only more recently
begun to make a major mark on the field and the impact of work around
gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. In addition, there was an entirely
new chapter on gay, lesbian and queer theories, which brought the book’s
coverage of the most dynamic areas of activity up-to-date. Most of the above
has been retained in the present fifth edition, although revised and refined
where necessary. The most significant addition here, however, is the con-
cluding chapter on ‘Post-Theory’, which takes stock of the various emer-
gent tendencies and debates regarding aesthetics and politics which are
occurring under its banner. Finally, the ‘Selected Reading’ sections have
again been recast to make them more accessible and up-to-date. One
notable change in these is the inclusion (in square brackets) of dates of
first publication for many of the founding texts of contemporary literary
theory in order to indicate how much earlier they often are than the
modern editions by which they subsequently made their impact. Equally,
the date of translation into English of seminal European texts is included
for the same reason.
So what has been the turbulence between 1985 and 2005 in the field of
‘contemporary literary theory’; what is the context which explains the con-
tinuous need to revise A Reader’s Guide? For a start, ‘Theory’, even ‘literary
theory’, can no longer usefully be regarded as a progressively emerging body
of work, evolving through a series of definable phases or ‘movements’ – of
delivery, critique, advancement, reformulation, and so on. This appeared
to be the case in the later 1970s and early 1980s – although no doubt it
was never entirely true – when the ‘Moment of Theory’ seemed to have
arrived and there was an anxiety, even to those enthusiastically participat-
ing in it, that a new academic subject, worse a new scholasticism – radical
and subversive, yes, but also potentially exclusive in its abstraction – was
coming into being. Books poured from the presses, conferences abounded,
‘Theory’ courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level proliferated, and
any residual notions of ‘practice’ and of ‘the empirical’ became fearsomely
problematical. Such a ‘Moment of Theory’ no longer obtains – whether, para-
doxically, because it coincided with the rise to political power of the new
right, whether because, by definition in a postmodern world, it could not
survive in a more or less unitary state, or whether it contained, as itself a
postmodern creature, the catalysing agents for its own dispersal, are beyond
confident assertion. But a change has occurred – a change producing a situ-
ation very different to that of the increasingly abstract and self-obsessed
intellectual field which the original edition of this book felt itself just about
able to describe and contain. First, the singular and capitalized ‘Theory’ has
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INTRODUCTION 9
we might call ‘Metaphysics’, the second ‘New Criticism’ – and we have been
there before. In reality, of course, there is no crossroads: theory shadows
criticism as a questioning and interiorized companion, and the conversa-
tion between them goes on, whatever their apparent separation. The func-
tion of literary/critical theory is to reveal and debate the assumptions of
literary form and identity and to disclose the interleaved criteria of aesthetic,
moral and social values on which critical modes depend and which their
procedures enact and confirm. No justification should be needed, therefore,
to encourage this conversation further, to make criticism’s theoretical
assumptions explicit, to assess one theory by another, to ask how a theor-
etical framework influences the interpretation of literary texts. But perhaps
the most insistent fallacy is the judgement that the ‘radical’ Theory of the
post-1960s period failed to produce a criticism which matched its radical-
izing intentions; that instead of a theoretically aware, interventionist and
socially purposive criticism which could be deployed in the empirical ana-
lysis of texts came work of wayward or leaden abstraction and of self-
promoting dogma. Now we would be the first to admit that the academic
world has supped full of the ritualistic trotting-out of major theorists’
names and theoretical clichés; of wooden Foucauldian or Bakhtinian ‘read-
ings’ of this, that or the other; of formulaic gesturing towards the ‘theor-
etical underpinnings’ of this or that thesis – often seriously disjunct from
what are, in effect, conventional literary-critical analyses. In the present con-
text, then, we might want to recast ‘post-theory’ as ‘post-Theoreticism’, where
‘-eticism’ is shorthand for an arcane, hermetic scholasticism, but ‘theory’
properly remains the evolving matrix in which new critical practices are
shaped. In a sense, as the introduction to a collection of essays on the sub-
ject suggests, ‘post-theory’ is to flag no more than ‘theory “yet to come”’
(McQuillan et al. (eds), 1999: see ‘References’ for Conclusion).
In the event, the demystification of theory, which has resulted in the
great plurality of theorized praxes for specific interests and purposes,
should allow us to be rather more self-questioning and critical about it. For
example, in the context of ‘post-theory’, is one implication that we would
no longer have to face that overwhelming question which has haunted our
profession since the 1970s: ‘How to Teach Theory’? Would grateful stud-
ents no longer have to ‘do Theory’? The answer must surely be No; but a
principal anxiety about the term ‘post-theory’ is that it might seem to legit-
imate such ‘end of Theory’ fantasies. To restate the obvious, occupying a
theory-free zone is a fundamental impossibility, and to allow our students
to think that it is not would be a dereliction of intellectual duty. But if we
do continue to teach theory, familiar questions abound. Given that ‘the
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INTRODUCTION 11
Selected reading
Anthologies of literary theory
Brooker, Peter and Widdowson, Peter (eds), A Practical Reader in
Contemporary Literary Theory (Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf,
Hemel Hempstead, 1996).
Davis, Robert Con and Schleifer, Ronald (eds), Contemporary Literary
Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies: 1900 to the Present (4th edn,
Longman, London and New York, 1998).
Lodge, David (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism: A Reader
(Longman, London and New York, 1977).
Lodge, David and Wood, Nigel (eds), Modern Criticism and Theory:
A Reader (2nd edn, Pearson Education, Harlow, 1999).
Newton, K. M. (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader (2nd edn,
Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997).
Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia (eds), Modern Literary Theory: A Reader
(4th edn, Arnold, London, 2001).
Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology
(2nd edn, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004).
Rylance, Rick (ed.), Debating Texts: A Reader in Twentieth-Century
Literary Theory and Method (Open University Press, Milton Keynes,
1987).
Selden, Raman (ed.), The Theory of Criticism from Plato to the Present: A
Reader (Longman, London and New York, 1988).
Tallack, Douglas (ed.), Critical Theory: A Reader (Prentice Hall/Harvester
Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1995).
Walder, Dennis (ed.), Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and
Documents (2nd edn, Oxford University Press with the Open
University, Oxford, 2003).
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INTRODUCTION 13
Coyle, Martin, Garside, Peter, Kelsall, Malcolm and Peck, John (eds),
Encyclopaedia of Literature and Criticism (Routledge, London, 1990).
Eaglestone, Robert, Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students (2nd edn,
Routledge, London, 2002).
Green, Keith and Le Bihan, Jill, Critical Theory and Practice: A Coursebook
(Routledge, London, 1995).