Handaout Criticism Unit 1-6

LITERARY THEORY & LITERARY CRITICISM
Chapter One
Ancient Literary Criticism
1. What is Literary Theory and

Literary Criticism?
The history of literary theory is a history of changing notions of reading and interpretation and changing notions of what constitutes literature
and the literary. The term literary theory is used to cover an array of principles and assumptions that govern theoretical reflection on the
nature and function of literary works. The genre of literary theory often develops out of the application of a more general ‘theory’ includes
works of anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies,
social and intellectual history, and sociology to literary works in the interests of a specific critical aim. Literary theory thus grows out of this
experimentation with concepts, terms, and paradigms taken from other spheres of intellectual activity.
On the other hand an English word “criticism” derives from the ancient Greek term krites, meaning “judge.” Perhaps the first type of criticism
was that which occurred in the process of poetic creation itself. Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of
inquiry from literary theory, or conversely from book reviewing, is a matter of some controversy. Literary criticism is distinct from literary
theory, the former being the practical application of the later on the other hand, tries to explain the assumptions and values upon which
various forms of literary criticism rest. Criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory ma y be more general or
abstract. Strictly speaking, when we interpret a literary text, we are doing literary criticism; when we examine the criteria upon which our
interpretation rests, we are doing critical theory.
Strictly speaking, literary criticism is the overall term for studies concerned with defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating
works of literature. Theoretical criticism proposes an explicit theory of literature, in the sense of general principles, together with a set of
terms, distinctions, and categories, to be applied to identifying and analyzing works of literature, as well as the criteria (the standards, or
norms) by which these works and their writers are to be evaluated. Literature, in all its forms, treats of human life, its nature and problems, its
mode of existence, its ways of coexistence and thought, and its belief systems. Any theory about these phenomena can, therefore, be
considered relevant to the study of literature.
2. Political and Historical Background of Classical Literary Criticism

“Classical” Athens in the fifth century BC – just prior to the time of Plato – was a thriving democratic city-state with a population estimated at
about 300,000. By this stage of its history, Athens was not only a democracy but also an imperial power, head of the so-called Delian League
of more than a hundred city-states, from whom it exacted tribute.
In all of these historical circumstances, there were at least three developments that profoundly influenced the nature of lit erature and criticism,
as well as of philosophy and rhetoric. The first was the evolution of the polis or city-state. The Greeks differentiated between themselves and
the non-Greeks known as “barbarians” primarily by this political structure. As the scholar M.I. Finley puts, the polis was comprised of
“people acting in concert, a community,” where people could “assemble and deal with problems face to face”. These assumptions are
common to the otherwise differing literary theories of Plato and Aristotle, who are both obliged to consider literature as a public or state
concern. Even the internal structure of drama was influenced by the ideal of the polis: the chorus (whether comprised of a group of dancers
and singers, or a single speaking character) was the representative of the community or polis. It is clear that literature and poetry had a public,
even political, function, which was largely educational.
The second political development pertinent to literature and criticism lay in the fact that Athens’ predominance in the Greek world did not go
unchallenged. The other major power in the Greek world was Sparta, who counterbalanced Athens’ leadership of the Delian League with its
own system of defensive alliances known as the Peloponnesian League. The struggle between these two superpowers was not only military
but also ideological: Athens everywhere attempted to foster its own style of democracy, whereas Sparta everywhere encouraged its own
brand of oligarchy. This struggle eventually led to the Peloponnesian War, which beginning in 431 BC lasted with the utter defeat of Athens
in 404 BC. The first twenty-four years of Plato’s life were lived during this war, and the issues raised by the conflict affected many areas of
his thought, including his literary theory.
A third factor that shaped the evolution of literature in archaic and classical Greece was Pan-Hellenism, or the development of certain literary
ideals and standards among the elites of the various city-states of Greece. Gregory Nagy points out that Pan-Hellenism was crucial in the
process of the continuous modification and diffusion of the Homeric poems and of poetry generally. It is well known that the Iliad and the
Odyssey were products of an oral tradition. According to Nagy, then, Pan-Hellenism had a number of important consequences. Firstly, it
provided a context in which poetry was no longer merely an expression or ritual reenactment of local myths. The traveling poet was obliged to
select those aspects of myth common to the various locales he visited. Hence the concept of “poet” or singer evolved into the concept of “the
master of truth.” The poet becomes the purveyor of truth, which is general, as distinct from myth, which is local and particular. A second
consequence of Pan-Hellenism, furthering the process of standardization, was the evolution of a certain group or “canon” of texts into the
status of classics. It was in the period of Alexandrian scholarship that the term “criticism” or “judgment” was used to differentiate between
works that deserved to be included within a canon. The third, related, consequence was the development of the concept of imitation or
mimesis into a “concept of authority.” Mimesis becomes an authoritative concept inasmuch as the author speaks with the authority of myth
which is accepted as not local but universal, timeless, and unchanging (Habib, 2005).
3. Basic features of classical literary criticism
In ancient Greece a poet would have made certain “judgments” about the themes and techniques to be used in his verse, about what his
audience was likely to approve, and about his own relationship to his predecessors in the oral or literary tradition. Hence, the creative act itself
was also a critical act, involving not just inspiration but some kind of self-assessment, reflection, and judgment. Moreover, the art of the
1 SET BY: ANWAR WOLKITE
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“rhapsode” or professional singer involved an element of interpretation: a rhapsode would usually perform verse that he himself had not
composed, and his art must have been a highly self-conscious. Even performances of lyric poetry must have shared this potential for diverse
interpretation, a potential which has remained alive through the centuries. In each case, the performance must be somewhat self-conscious and
informed by critical judgment (Gary, 2008).
In this broad sense, literary criticism goes at least as far back as archaic Greece, which begins around 800 B.C. This is the era of the epic poets
Homer and Hesiod, and of the lyric poets Archilochus, Ibycus, Alcaeus, and Sappho. What we call the “classical” period emerges around 500
BC, the period of the great dramatists Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the schools of
rhetoric, and the rise of Athenian democracy and power. After this the “Hellenistic” period, witnessing the diffusion of Greek culture through
much of the Mediterranean and Middle East, a diffusion vastly accelerated by the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the various dynasties
established by his generals after his death in 323 BC. But in 31 BC the Hellenistic empire defeated by Romans and control Mediterranean
region. During this span of almost a thousand years, poets, philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians, and critics laid down many of the basic
terms, concepts, and questions that were to shape the future of literary criticism as it evolved all the way through to our own century. These
include the concept of “mimesis” or imitation; the concept of beauty and its connection with truth and goodness; the ideal of the organic unity
of a literary work; the social, political, and moral functions of literature; the connection between literature, philosophy, and rhetoric; the nature
and status of language; the impact of literary performance on an audience; the definition of figures of speech such as metaphor, metonymy,
and symbol; the notion of a “canon” of the most important literary works; and the development of various genres such as epic, tragedy,
comedy, lyric poetry, and song (Habib,2005).
The first recorded instances of criticism go back to dramatic festivals in ancient Athens, which were organized as contests, requiring an
official judgment as to which author had produced the best drama. A particularly striking literary-critical discussion occurs in Aristophanes’
play The Frogs, first performed in 405 BC, just before the ending of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC in the utter defeat of Athens at the
hands of its rival, Sparta. It may seem odd, in our age of highly technical and specialized approaches to literature, that literary criticism should
be used to entertain and amuse a large audience of several thousand people.
It is clear that Aristophanes’ play both embodies and enacts the civic duty of poetry and literary criticism. This first recorded instance of a
sustained literary-critical debate reveals a number of salient features of both poetry and criticism in the ancient Greek world. Firstly, our
sometimes narr-ow focus on the “purely” aesthetic or literary dimension of a text would have been incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks;
poetry for them was an important element in the educational process; its ramifications extended over morality, religion, and the entire sphere
of civic responsibility; as such, poetry itself was a forum for the discussion of larger issues; it owed a large measure of its high esteem to its
public and political nature, as well as to its technical or artistic dimension(Habib,2005). Euripides agrees that in general the poet is valued for
his “ready wit” and wise counsels, and because he trains the citizens to be “better townsmen and worthier men” (Frogs, l. 1009). But he
claims that, in contrast with Aeschylus, he himself employs a “democratic” manner, allowing characters from all classes to speak, showing
“scenes of common life,” and teaching the public to reason.
4. Important literary figures of classical period
1. Plato
It is widely acknowledged that the Greek philosopher Plato laid the foundations of Western philosophy. Plato gave initial formulation to the
most basic questions and problems of Western thought: How can we define goodness and virtue? How do we arrive at truth and knowledge?
What is the connection between soul and body? What is the ideal political state? Of what use are literature and the arts? Plato’s answers to
these questions are still disputed; yet the questions themselves have endured, often in the forms and contexts posed by Plato.
Plato’s thought was influenced by a number of pre-Socratic thinkers who rejected the physical world known through our senses as mere
“appearance.” They sought to describe a reality underlying physical appearances. Heraclitus’ theory was that all things in the universe are in
a state of flux; Parmenides viewed reality as unchanging and unitary. From Socrates, Plato learned the dialectical method of pursuing truth
by a systematic questioning of received ideas and opinions. As exhibited in his early dialogues, he also inherited Socrates’ central concern
with ethical issues and with the precise definition of moral concepts. In general, both Socrates and Plato reject the morally incoherent vision
of the universe – found in poetic works of Homer, Sophocles, and other poets – as disordered, irregular, unpredictable, and subject to the
whims of the gods.
Plato on Poetry
The Greek word mousike, as its form suggests, refers broadly to any art over which the Muses preside, including poetry, letters, and music
Poetry, as we have seen, is viewed by Plato as a powerful force in molding public opinion. Hence he does not underestimate the danger it
presents to his ideal city, ordered as this is in a strict hierarchy whereby the guardians (philosophers) and their helpers ( soldiers) comprise an
elect minority which rules over a large majority of farmers, craftsmen, and “moneymakers”. Plato makes comments on poetry in many of his
dialogues. Plato’s ideals on poetry are almost conforms to ideals of Socrates. As Socrates he affirms that poetry derives from inspiration rather
than wisdom, and he also remarks on the pretensions of poets to knowledge that they do not possess. Plato’s most systematic comments on
poetry, however, occur in two texts, separated by several years. The first is Ion, where Socrates cross-examines a rhapsode or singer on the
nature of his art. The second, more sustained, commentary occurs in the Republic. Ion’s claim is strangely self-limited: he claims to recite
and interpret only one poet, Homer, and to be ignorant of and indifferent to the work of other poets. Ion is unable to identify any area in which
the rhapsode could interpret Homer’s poetry better than the practitioners of other arts. According to Socrates, the rhapsode, like the poet
himself, is in a state of “divine possession” and speaks not with his own voice, which is merely a medium through which a god speaks. The
Muse inspires the poet, who in turn passes on this inspiration to the rhapsode, who produces an inspired emotional effect on the spectators.
Hence, the rhapsodes are “interpreters of interpreters” .Having said this, Plato in this earlier dialogue accords poetry a certain reverence: he
speaks of the poet as “holy,” and as divinely inspired.
Plato’s theory of poetry in the Republic is much less flattering. Plato’s text has inspired several defenses of poetry, notably by Sidney and
Shelley. In general, political commentators have devoted their attention to the notion of justice while literary critics have tended to isolate the
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commentary on aesthetics from the overall discussion. Plato’s entire conception of justice arises explicitly in opposition to poetic lore. In the
Republic Plato mentions Socrates’ position stating “an ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry. Yet this conflict clearly emerges in
the opening pages not only as Plato’s starting point but also as a structural premise of his text.
Socrates argues that poetry has failed to examine justice “in itself” because poetic knowledge is confined to the world of appearance. Poetry
also has shortcomings in expressing justice, thereby providing a context of received wisdom against which philosophy’s “true” search for
justice can emerge as a refutation. Once again, poetry is equated with popular wisdom (received wisdom); it is associated with the sophistic
view that beliefs, laws, and practices claim only conventional rather than absolute validity. According to Plato and his predecessor Socrates,
Poetry, hence, teaches young men that seeming just is more profitable than being just. This honoring of dissemblance led to social
corruption. This terminology enables us better to understand just how Plato conceives of poetry as an ideologically destabilizing force. Plato is
once again marking out music as the arena of ideological conflict between poetry and philosophy. Poetry’s main threat resides in its ability to
upset the finely attuned balance achieved as a model of subjectivity in rulers. In book X, Plato will allege that poetry establishes a “vicious
constitution” in the soul, setting up emotions as rulers in place of reason. In The Republic, it will emerge explicitly that poetry appeals to the
“inferior” part of the soul, the appetitive portion (X, 603).
Adeimantus now offers his crucial observation that no one, in either poetry or prose, has adequately inquired as to what justice is “in itself”.
Hence the starting point of Socrates’ inquiry is finally arrived at through a complex strategy whereby (1) poetry is held to be the repository of
received popular wisdom concerning justice; (2) as such, poetry is a codification of the rationale of individual self-interest and desire, a
rationale which makes necessary the imposition of laws to constrain selfishness; (3) in consequence, such “wisdom” is morally incoherent,
furnishing a divine and human apparatus for the greater prosperity of the unjust man; (4) most fundamentally, the poets’ account is confined
to the appearance of justice, not real justice or justice “in itself”.
1.4.2. Aristotle (384-322B.C)
The most brilliant student at Plato’s Academy was Aristotle, who had come to Athens in 367 from his native Stageira in Macedonia to study
with Plato. He put literary and philosophical views in his book Poetics. It is recorded that Aristotle wrote twenty-seven dialogues, not the
works handed down to us, that he was known in the ancient world. What we now have of Aristotle’s works, which represent only one-quarter
of his actual output, are Aristotle’s lecture notes, composed by himself and his students, largely in the last twelve years of his life.
Aristotle’s Poetics
The Metaphysical and Ethical Contexts of the Poetics
In the opening statement of his Poetics, Aristotle proposes to examine poetry “in itself.” For Aristotle poetry and rhetoric had the status of
“productive” sciences; these disciplines had their place in a hierarchy of knowledge; and Aristotle viewed them as rational pursuits, as
seeking a knowledge of universals (rather than of random particulars), and as serving a social and moral function. The notion of poetic
autonomy as developed in modern times, the notion of poetry as an end in itself, as an independent sphere with its own laws, would have been
meaningless to Aristotle. In Nicomachean Ethics, he states quite clearly concerning productive activity that “the act of making is not an end in
itself, it is only a means, and belongs to something else.” The purpose of art, like that of metaphysics, is to attain to knowledge of universals.
For Aristotle, the subject matter of art is the “cause” behind experiential fact.
He even goes so far as to suggest that, at one level, the pleasure we derive from music might be an end in itself. However, he is quick to
qualify this remark by adding that such pleasure is only an “incidental result,” and that the true nature of music lies in its being a stimulus to
virtue and is expressed in its “effect on the character and the soul” (Poetics, VIII). Typically, however, Aristotle suggests an organic
connection between the pleasure derived from music and the virtue inspired by it. Aristotle’s overall conclusion concerning music is that,
since it has “the power to induce a certain character of the soul . . . , it must be applied to education, and the young must be educated in it.”
Music is all the more valuable in educating the young, says Aristotle, because it is pleasant. In contrast with Plato’s ideal state, where it is
viewed as an obstacle to morality, rationality, and genuine knowledge, poetry would seem to have a positive function in Aristotle’s state.
.
Aristotle’s Views of Imitation and Action
At the core of Aristotle’s Poetics are two complex notions, imitation and action, which are imbued with both Aristotle’s metaphysical
principles and his ethical/political dispositions. Like Plato, Aristotle holds that poetry is essentially a mode of imitation. But Aristotle
propounds an entirely different view of imitation, one which leads him to regard poetry as having a positive function. For Plato, imitation
itself embodied a step away from truth, since it produced an imperfect copy of the Form or essence of a given entity. In this sense, the entire
world of physical phenomena for Plato was an imperfect imitation of the world of Forms. Poetry, for Plato, ranked even lower than the
sensible world of appearances since it was obliged to imitate those appearances, which were already imitations of Forms. Aristotle, however,
invests imitation with positive significance. Accordingly poetic imitation is not simply mimicry(copy) , but it is an act of imaginative creation
by which the poet draws his material from the phenomenal world ,makes something new out of it. Rather than viewing it as a necessarily
denigrative activity, he sees it as a basic human instinct and allows it as an avenue toward truth and knowledge. Hence, for Aristotle,
imitation is both a mode of learning and associated with pleasure. This view is reinforced in Aristotle’s Rhetoric where he infers that, since
learning and admiration are pleasant, the imitative arts such as drawing, sculpture, and poetry must also be pleasant (Habib,2005).
The other crucial notion in the Poetics, that of action, is equally complex in Aristotle’s scheme. He states that “virtue in itself is not enough;
there must also be the power to translate it into action”. What these statements indicate is that action, for Aristotle, whether it be physical or
mental, communal or individual, has a moral end or purpose. Art imitates human action; but human action must have as its ultimate purpose.
Hence, the initial relationship between imitation and action is that of means and end (Day, 2008).
Aristotle asserts that all the various modes of poetry and music are imitations. The contrast between poetry and history is t aken up later in
Poetics
the where Aristotle offers some further general comments on imitation. It is not the function of the poet, maintains Aristotle, to narrate
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events that have actually happened, but rather “events such as might occur in accordance with the laws of probability or necessity”. What
distinguishes the poet from the historian is not that one writes in verse and the other in prose, but precisely the fact that the poet, unlike the
historian, is not constrained by the obligation to express actual events. He infers that poetry is more “philosophical” and “serious” than
history because poetry expresses what is universal (general truths), while history merely deals with individuals (particular truths).
Aristotle Noted that these imitations can differ in three ways: in the means used, in the kinds of objects represented, or in the manner of
presentation. The means can include color, shape, sound, rhythm, speech, and harmony. The art that imitates by words, says Aristotle, is
poetry. Given that Aristotle later suggests that the origins of the poetic art lie in natural causes, namely, our imitative nature and the pleasure
we derive from learning through imitation, it would seem that the art of the poet is a formalization of impulses possessed in common by
human beings. Again, this stands in sharp contrast with Plato’s view of the poet as divinely possessed, composing in an irrational frenzy. The
second way in which artistic imitations differ from one another is in the kinds of objects they address. What is common to all arts, however,
is that they imitate men involved in action. As suggested earlier, the actions Aristotle has in mind are those which have a significant moral
valence. The actions imitated, says Aristotle, must either be noble or base since human character conforms to these distinctions. What lies at
the basis of both human action and human character, then, is morality: it is this moral component of action and character which the artist must
imitate or represent. The third way in which imitations can be distinguished is in the manner of presentation. Aristotle allows only two
basic types: narration, in which the poet speaks in his own person or through a character, and dramatic presentation, in which the story is
performed and acted out (Poetics, III).
Aristotle seems to have broadened his definition of poetic imitation, making it less exclusive. He now says that the poet must imitate in one of
three possible ways. He must imitate 1. Things that were /things that are now 2.things that people say and think to be 3. Things which
ought to be. In other word ,art imitates what is past or present, what is commonly believed and what is ideal (probable) respectively, Those
earlier definitions, we may recall, referred imitation not to morality or realism but to probability and universality.
1.4.3. Horace (65–8 BC)

Horace is Roman lyric poet and satirist, whose works are masterpieces of Latin literature of the Golden Age. The influence of Horace’s Ars
poetica, composed toward the end of his life, has been vast, exceeding the influence of Plato, and in many periods, even that of Aristotle.
Horace is known primarily as a poet, a composer of odes, satires, and epistles. In the realm of literary criticism, he has conventionally been
associated with the notions that “a poem is like a painting,” that poetry should “teach and delight”. Though the Ars poetica is technically a
work of literary critical and rhetorical theory, it is itself written as a poem, a fact which dictates its structure and rhyt hm. The Ars is the first-
known poem about poetics, and such a poetic expression of literary-critical principles was imitated by several men of letters, been even more
extensive and continuous (Gary, 2008).
In assessing the temper of Horace’s work and worldview, we need to know something about the prevailing intellectual and literary attitudes in
the Roman world of his day. The most pervasive philosophical perspective was that of Stoicism, whose emphasis on duty, discipline,
political and civic involvement, as well as an acceptance of one’s place in the cosmic scheme, seemed peculiarly well adapted to the needs of
the Romans.
Horace’s apparently desultory treatment of these and other issues might be organized under certain broad headings: (1) the relation of a writer
to his work, his knowledge of tradition, and his own ability; (2) characteristics of the Ars poetica as a verbal structure, such as unity,
propriety, and arrangement; (3) the moral and social functions of poetry, such as establishing a repository of conventional wisdom, providing
moral examples through characterization, and promoting civic virtue and sensibility, as well as affording pleasure; (4) the contribution of an
audience to the composition of poetry, viewed both as an art and as a commodity; (5) an awareness of literary history and historical change in
language and genre. These are the largely conventional themes that preoccupy Horace’s text. With Horace, however, the definition of art
contains a genuine subjective element, in terms of both author and audience. To begin with, the writer’s materials are not pre-given but must
be selected according to his capacity: “When you are writing, choose a subject that matches your powers, and test again and again what
weight your shoulders will take and what they won’t take”.
A prominent and influential principle expressed in Horace’s text is the then standard rhetorical principle of “ decorum,” which calls for a
“proper” relationship between form and content, expression and thought, style and subject matter, diction and character. Like many modern
theorists, Horace’s notion of “form” encompasses language itself, and he seems to think that there is an intrinsic or internal connection
between form and content; in other words, the content cannot somehow be prior to or independent of the form as implied in Pope’s view of
language as the external “dress of thought.” Neither can the content and thought be prior to language.
Horace, who rejects the Alexandrian attitude of “art for art’s sake,” and insists on the moral function of literature, the depiction of good
character is indispensable. Indeed, this function should be effected in drama partly by the chorus which, says Horace, “should favor the good,
give friendly advice, restrain the enraged; it should praise the delights of a modest table, the bracing influence of justice and laws and the
leisure afforded by peace…” (Ars poetica, 196–201).
As against Plato, who had regarded the poet as necessarily distorting reality by offering a mere imitation of it, Horace insists that the
“principal fountainhead of writing correctly is wisdom” and he sees poetry as a repository of social and religious wisdom. In the depiction of
character, the poet must be aware of the various characteristics of men from childhood, youth, and manhood to old age. Hence, the poet’s
work must be based on knowledge; not bookish knowledge but a detailed empirical knowledge derived from acute observation of numerous
situations in actual life. In other words, Horace demands a high degree of realism from the poet, as expressed in this statement.
1.4.4. Cicero’s Rhetorical Theory

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Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) is the most renowned of the classical rhetoricians. Born into the equestrian order or upper middle class,
he was a prominent practitioner of the art of public speaking in the Roman senate and the law courts.
In De inventione Cicero stresses the political importance of rhetoric. He also affirms that the function of rhetoric is to help promote a society
based on justice and common welfare rather than physical strength. As such, the speaker must possess not only eloquence but also wisdom.
It is worth stating briefly Cicero’s definitions of the six parts of a speech. (1) The exordium is intended to make the audience well disposed,
attentive, and receptive. (2) The narrative is an account of the events which are alleged to have occurred. (3) The partition makes the whole
speech lucid, and has two forms: one indicates the areas of agreement or disagreement with the opponent, and the other is a preview of the
remainder of our own argument. (4) The confirmation is that part of a narrative which supports our case by enlisting arguments. All
argumentation is either necessary or probable. Necessary arguments cannot be refuted; probability operates in people’s ordinary beliefs. (5)
The refutation undermines the confirmation or proof in the opponent’s speech (6) The peroration which concludes the speech has three parts:
a resume of the speech’s substantial points, arousal of animosity against the opponent, and the arousing of sympathy for one’ s own case. A
peroration might also include personification as well as appealing to the pity of the jury.
Cicero also takes issue with Plato’s criticism of rhetoric. Where Plato sees rhetoric as focused on style and divorced from philosophy, Cicero
insists that the good rhetorician must speak on the basis of knowledge and understanding of his subject, and that philosophy and rhetoric
are complementary. A speaker must have knowledge of philosophy, law, and human psychology, and must be trained in the liberal arts. In
Orator Cicero argues that the functions of oratory – to teach, delight, and affect an audience. The ideal orator, says Cicero, will use the
plain style for proving his case, the middle style for delighting his audience, and the grand style for evoking specific emotional responses. An
orator using the grand style has the greatest power, but this should be mixed with other styles as appropriate. Commonplace subjects should be
treated in a simple way, great subjects in the grand style, and subjects falling between these in the middle style.
1.4.5. Quintilian
Quintilian was born in northern Spain in ad 35 and died shortly after 96, the year of publication of his Institutio orataria. This text was a
major contribution to rhetorical and educational theory as well as to literary criticism; its influence has been vast, second only to Cicero’s in
the Renaissance, and reaching into our own educational systems .
In the Institutio, Quintilian both describes in detail the Roman education system, which was centered on rhetoric, and offers a program for the
education of an ideal orator from childhood. In a preface, Quintilian stresses what is perhaps the most original theme of his text, the
dependence of true oratory on moral goodness: “the perfect orator . . . cannot exist unless he is above all a good man.” The orator thus
requires “every excellence of mind.” Like Cicero, Quintilian opposes Plato’s separation of rhetoric and philosophy. Quintilian’s integration of
these activities is based on morality: the orator must be morally good – and cannot leave the principles of moral conduct to the philosophers –
because he is actively involved as a citizen in the various enterprises of the state, civil, legal, judicial, private, and public. Like Cicero, then,
Quintilian views wisdom and eloquence as naturally and necessarily accompanying each other.
Quintilian has a number of interesting general observations on the nature and value of rhetoric. Rhetoric is foremost a practical art which is
concerned with action, rather than a theoretical art concerned with understanding or a productive art such as painting or sculpture . Quintilian
refuses the classical definition of rhetoric as the art of persuasion since the latter can be achieved by many means. He prefers to name rhetoric
the science of speaking well (II.xv). Rhetoric is by no means a morally indifferent art; it belongs to the province of a good person since one
cannot give forensic and epideictic speeches without knowledge of goodness and justice.
Chapter Two
The Middle Ages/Medieval Era
2.1. Organization of knowledge in the medieval period

The middle Ages, period in the history of Europe as lasted from about 350 AD to about 1450 AD. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the
western half of the Roman Empire began to fragment into smaller, weaker kingdoms. By the end of the Middle Ages, many modern European
states had taken shape. The term ‘Middle Ages’ was invented by writers of the Renaissance to discredit the achievements of the period
between the end of the classical age and the beginning of their own. Tough over the last half-century or so, scholars have challenged the prior
perception of the Middle Ages the era of medieval period claimed to be era of darkness, ignorance, and superstition.
As stated by Habib (2005) a number of factors contributed to the making of the Middle Ages: the evolving traditions of Christianity; the
social and political patterns of the Germanic tribes who overran the Roman Empire; vestiges of the Roman administrative and legal
system; the legacy of the classical world; and contact with Islamic civilization. The most powerful force in the development of medieval
civilization was Christianity. Even before the fall of Rome in 410, Christianity had been increasingly tolerated and was recognized as the
official religion of the Roman Empire.
There is distinction between medieval and contemporary perception of literature and criticism. The major difficulty in dealing medieval
literature is terminology for, while we use the words ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’ relatively freely, these terms had no currency in medieval
writing about poetry or the Bible. The word ‘literature’ first appeared in English in the fourteenth century. Martin Irvine is therefore right to
say that ‘there was no separate category of writings designated as “literary” in medieval culture’, and there was ‘no set of linguistic objects
valued exclusively for their aesthetic, imaginative or artistic worth’ (1994: 161). And if there were no such thing as ‘literature’ neither was
there such a thing as criticism. In addition to the differences in terminology there are also profound differences of outlook between the
medieval period and our own creating further obstacles in coming to terms with ‘criticism’ from that era. For example, medieval
commentators had no concept of a national literature. There was no body of English or French writing because the vernacular was not
viewed as sufficiently ‘literary’, a situation which began to change in the late thirteenth century. One of the major persisting endeavors
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throughout the Middle Ages was to reconcile classical philosophy and literature with the teachings of Christian scripture. The educated classes
of medieval Europe spoke Latin and subscribed to ‘a common heritage that included the Bible and a group of literary and rhetorical and
grammatical works which had been transmitted first or second hand from antiquity’. Another difference lies in the organisation of knowledge.
The medieval world divided it into the trivium – grammar, rhetoric and logic – and the quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy
and music. These were called the seven liberal arts. It is through the unfamiliar lens of the trivium and quadrivium that we have to try and
focus on the medieval conception of poetry – the nearest word we have for ‘literature’ in this period. It was variously associated with
grammar, rhetoric and logic. Very occasionally, it was linked with arithmetic because meter was based on measure, and the numerical
composition of verse was regarded as an imitation of the divine numbers responsible for creation. So, one measure of our remoteness from the
medieval mindset is, then, the organisation of knowledge into the trivium and the quadrivium and the unfamiliar perspective this offers on
poetry.
2.3. The Traditions of Medieval Criticism: Literature and Grammar

Most of the intellectual currents of the Middle Ages are founded on the tradition of textual exegesis deriving from the classical grammatical
tradition, and extended by Christian scholars to scriptural exegesis. Indeed, the most enduring placement of poetry was in the grammar
curriculum, and the association of grammar with the reading of poetry ; grammar defined as comprising exposition of poets and the rules for
the correct use of language.
The association of grammar with poetry spawned three characteristic types of treatise. The first was the commentary or gloss. The major
commentaries, such as those of notable medieval examples, include those of John Scotus Eriugena on Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, and
Nicholas of Lyra’s Glossa Ordinaria, which was the standard commentary on the Bible in the Middle Ages (MLC, 6–7). To understand the
importance of the gloss and commentary in the teaching and transmission of texts, we need to bear in mind the physical characteristics of
medieval books and manuscripts. To begin with, there was a great deal of textual variation: a text was not somehow fixed and closed. More
significantly, the pages were designed to include gloss and substantial commentary within the very wide margins; this meant effectively that
the division between the text and commentary was not as clear as it often seems with modern text. A second type of grammatical treatise
was the ars metrica, since the grammar curriculum included prosody (study of poetic structure) and a study of the standard poetic forms. The
third type of grammatical treatise was the accessus or prologue to an author. This prologue or introduction to an author had its roots in
Quintilian’s Institutio, which offers a list of curriculum authors; the medieval practice of formulating a list or canon of auctores.
All three types of grammatical treatise – the commentary, the ars metrica, and the accessus – were vehicles of medieval humanism. It should
be said that medieval grammar or grammatica was much broader than our modern notion of “grammar,” and its importance in the entire
scheme of medieval thought and ideology cannot be overestimated. As Martin Irvine has recently argued, although grammar was the first of
the arts of discourse, it was not merely one discipline among many. From late classical times until the early Renaissance, grammar had a
foundational role, furnishing a model of learning, interpretation, and knowledge. It was a social practice that provided exclusive access to
literacy, the understanding of scripture, knowledge of the literary canon, and membership of an international Latin textual community. It was
grammatica that elaborated the rules and interpretative strategies for constructing certain texts as repositories of authority and value; it
effectively constructed language and texts as objects of knowledge and as such was presupposed by all of the arts of discourse, including
biblical and literary interpretation, philosophy, theology, and law.
The medieval model of grammar, based on that formulated by the Roman writer Varro (116–27 bc), consisted of two broad elements: the
interpretation of literary texts and training in reading and writing. A later text influential in medieval times, the Ars Victorini, divided the
interpretative dimension of grammar into four parts: lectio, the principles of prosody and reading aloud; enarratio, the exposition of content
and the principles of interpretation; emendatio, the rules of linguistic correctness and textual authenticity; and iudicium, the criticism or
evaluation of the text. Hence, grammar involved the study of both language and literature; it constituted both a special field of knowledge – a
canon of traditional texts – and the rules of language as embodied in a standard written Latin .
2.3.Prominent Medieval philosophers

2.3.1.Plotinus (AD 204/5–270)
The third-century philosopher Plotinus has been variously referred to by scholars as the
greatest metaphysician of antiquity, the founder of
Neo-Platonism, and the most profound single influence on Christian thought. The philosophy of Neo-Platonism takes from Plato the idea that
ultimate reality subsists in another world, a transcendent and spiritual realm, from which the physical world takes its existence and meaning.
Like Plato, Plotinus believed that there was a real world and a world of appearances but, unlike his master, this did not lead to him devalue
the experience of art. ‘We must recognise’, he writes, that the arts ‘give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the reason
principle from which nature itself derives’.
In Plotinus’ system, the divinity itself is a hierarchical triad expressed in three principles or “hypostases”: the One, the Divine Mind or
Intellect, and the All-Soul. The One can also be termed the Absolute, the Good, or the Father. From this One emanates the Divine Mind,
which presides over the realm of Divine Thought or Intellection (this intellectual realm is equivalent to Plato’s eternal Ideas or Forms). This
Divine Intelligence contains all particular intelligences, and the intellectual forms in this realm are the archetypes of all that exists in the
lower, sensible sphere. Moreover, the Divine Intelligence is an expression of the One which is unknowable by mere intellect or reason. From
the Divine Mind emanates the All-Soul, or Soul of all things. The All- Soul has three phases: the intellective soul, which contemplates the
Divine Thought of the intellectual realm; the Reasoning Soul, which generates the sensible universe on the model of the archetypes in the
intellectual realm; and the Unreasoning Soul, which is the principle of animal life .
Plotinus’ views of art and beauty must be understood in the context of his philosophical and theological system as outlined above. Plotinus
treats the concept of beauty in two of the Enneads. The first point that Plotinus establishes is that beauty is ideal: in other words, it belongs
essentially to the realm of ideas rather than to the realm of sensible, physical objects. He gives the example of two stones, one which has
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been wrought by the artist’s hands into a statue, and the other untouched by art. The former, says Plotinus, is beautiful not as stone (i.e., not as
matter) but “in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by the art.” And this form exists in the artist’s mind before it enters the stone. In the
designer’s mind, in fact, the beauty exists in a far higher form, since it is “concentrated in unity,” than it does when it is diffused by entering
into matter. Art creates things by an idea it already has of the beautiful object. Plotinus calls this idea the “Reason-Principle” (Enneads,
V.viii.1). And this idea is more beautiful in its pure form than when it is mingled with matter. Indeed, it is only as an idea that beauty can
enter the mind. Hence, beauty is not in the concrete object but in “soul or mind” . This form or idea derives from the impulse of the One to
bind and control matter. Inspired by the One, the artist gathers the parts of nature and orders them into a whole . A key mark of art, then, is
unity; the bringing together of different elements to make a new totality. It is this quality that makes art beautiful. As Plotinus puts it, ‘the
several parts will have beauty not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total’ (ibid). We do not only find beauty in art
but also in action, manners and morality. Earthly beauty, then, derives from the perfect beauty of the divine world. Plotinus sees in art a means
of access to the divine world.
Indeed, according to Plotinus, the entire universe was created in this “artistic” fashion: it could not have been thought out in detail and built up
step by step. Rather, its existence and nature “come to it from beyond itself . . . all things must exist in something else.” In other words, the
entire universe is a copy or image of a preexisting world: “the entire aggregate of existence springs from the divine world, in greater beauty”
(Enneads, V.viii.7). According to this account of creation, everything that could possibly exist in our sensible world already existed as an
archetype in the realm of Forms.
2.3.2. St. Augustine (354–430)

Many of the foregoing tendencies can be found in, and indeed arose from, Augustine’s views of art and literature. It is in his work that the
profoundest synthesis of classical and Christian notions the early middle ages can be discerned. More than any other early Christian thinker,
Augustine profoundly influenced the traditions of both Roman Catholic and Protestant thought. Auguistine condemned liberal studies,
suggesting that only the scriptures were truly liberating. While he sympathized with Plato’s arguments for banishing poets and dramatists
on moral grounds, his views of poetry’s connection with truth were somewhat different. He suggests that paintings, sculptures, and plays were
necessarily false, not from any intention to be such but merely from an inability to be that which they represent. Augustine’s aesthetics rely
on a modified Platonic framework appealing to a higher spiritual realm to which the physical world is subordinated. As such, art, composed
of sensuous elements ,which far removed from God, the ultimate source of being, and the standard by which the reality accorded to
anything was measured, was assigned a lower degree of reality than spiritual life. The beauty of earthly things was viewed as an expression of
their divine origin, and rested on their unity – a unity in diversity – which imitated the Oneness of God. It is ultimately God’s unity which
confers unity and harmony on the vast diversity of the world (Habib, 2005).
Augustine’s strategy of adapting classical thought and literature to Christian purposes proved to be profoundly influential in the disposition of
medieval philosophy and theology. This strategy also marks Augustine’s important work De Doctrina Christiana, which deserves
consideration here since it not only concerns possible Christian uses of classical rhetoric and learning, but also details Augustine’s theories of
the sign and of figurative language.
2.3.2 .Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274)

Aquinas, was born into a noble family in 1224 or 1225 in Italy near the city of Naples, is known primarily for two major works. The first,
Summa contra Gentiles, was written between 1259 and 1264. It’s essential purpose was to defend towards Christianity against gentiles who
did not accept the authority of the scriptures. In the first four books of the Summa, Aquinas relies, therefore, not on scripture but on “natural
reason,” which can be used to prove God’s existence and the soul’s immortality. The truths of the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the Last
Judgment, however, are beyond the grasp of natural reason. Indeed, the provinces of reason and revelation need, according to Aquinas, to be
clearly distinguished. He holds that these two provinces, while distinct, cannot contradict and must accord with each other. This insistence on
a certain commensurability of reason and revelation reflects the intersection of Aquinas’ life with certain important historical circumstances.
Firstly, the feudal world itself was changing, moving increasingly away from an agrarian to an urban economy organized on the basis of
paternalistic trade guilds; hence a more rationalistic outlook toward the affairs of the world began to replace the other-worldliness and
contempt for the world which had characterized the earlier Middle Ages. Secondly, these developments coincided with the influx into Europe
of a naturalistic and rationalistic Aristotelianism, as filtered through Islamic philosophers .
Indeed, it was in response to a controversy initiated by the influx of Arab philosophy that Aquinas maintained the harmony of reason and
revelation. The Spanish Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd had held that religious knowledge and rational knowledge were two domains, which
are in compliance. Aquinas sees theology as a divine science, in relation to which all of the other elements of human knowledge are
hierarchically ordered. While Aquinas makes a distinction between intellection and reasoning, he sees them both as limited: they cannot
discursively fathom the gift of God’s grace yet they are complementary to the truths of revealed religion. Natural philosophy, he says,
proceeds via reason whereas divine science observes intellection. Reason looks at many things in order to arrive at one truth, whereas
the intellect grasps many things in one simple truth, “just as God in knowing His essence is cognizant of all things.” Aquinas terms
divine science “first philosophy,” given that it is this science “which confers principles on all the other sciences”.
In his second major work, Summa Theologia, Aquinas offers five proofs of the existence of God. The first is the argument of the unmoved
Mover: in order to avoid an infinite regress, there must be something which moves other things without being moved itself. Second is the
argument from First Cause, which follows a similar logic: there must be a cause which itself is not caused. Thirdly, there must be a primal
source of all necessity. Fourthly, the various types and degrees of perfection which actually exist in the world must have their source in
something absolutely perfect. Finally, even lifeless things serve a purpose, which must be directed toward some being beyond them. Some
of the major characteristics of God, according to Aquinas, are as follows. God is eternal, unchanging, and he has no parts or composition since
he is not material. God’s intellection is his essence, as Aquinas puts it, “God himself, in knowing Himself, knows all other things” . God’s

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knowledge is comprehensive, holistic, and instantaneous; it is not discursive, piecemeal, and rational. Aquinas believes that God created
the world ex nihilo or out of nothing; and that God is the end of all things, which tend toward likeness of God.
The foregoing represents the general world view which formed the background of Aquinas’ aesthetics. Medieval aesthetic sensibility was
concerned not only with beauty as an abstraction but also with beauty in its concrete physical aspect (Eco, 12–13). He also remarks the
medieval disposition, as evidenced in St. Bernard and others, to use the rejection of outward sensible beauty to elevate aesthetic sensibility to
a higher level, one which could all the more appreciate inner, spiritual beauty (Eco, 10). Hence “the emphasis on an interior beauty which
does not die was more than a simple opposition to an aesthetic of the sensible. It was, rather, a kind of reinstatement of such an aesthetic”
because the permanent inner essence of beauty was the source of the beauty of sensible appearances. Inner beauty was seen as expressed in
outer beauty.
Chapter Three
Literary Criticism of Renaissance Period
Historical and intellectual background of the renaissance era
The word renaissance means “rebirth” (some call it early modernism) is series of literary and cultural movements in the 14th, 15th, and 16th
centuries. These movements began in Italy and eventually expanded into Germany, France, England, and other parts of Europe. Participants
studied the great civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome and came to the conclusion that their own cultural achievements rivaled those of
antiquity. Their thinking was also influenced by the concept of humanism, which emphasizes the worth of the individual. Renaissance
humanists believed it was possible to improve human society through classical education. This education relied on teachings from ancient
texts and emphasized a range of disciplines, including poetry, history, rhetoric (rules for writing influential prose or speeches), and moral
philosophy. The idea of rebirth originated in the belief that Europeans had rediscovered the superiority of Greek and Roman culture after
many centuries of what they considered intellectual and cultural decline. The preceding era, which began with the collapse of the Roman
Empire around the 5th century, became known as the Middle Ages to indicate its position between the classical and modern world .
Habib (2005) pointed out that renaissance certainly bore certain distinctive traits marking it as an era of profound transformation and even
revolution. The most dominant trait of this new period has conventionally been identified as “humanism,” a term ultimately deriving from
Cicero and used by Italian thinkers and writers to distinguish themselves from the medieval scholastics. Humanism implies a world view and
a set of values centered around the human rather than the divine, using a self-subsistent definition of human nature (rather than referring this
to God), and focusing on human achievements and potential rather than on theological doctrines and dilemmas; the term also retained its
Ciceronian connection with the liberal arts and in general with secular and independent inquiry in all fields, as opposed to viewing these areas
of study as hierarchically bound within a theological framework. In this broad sense, humanism was indeed characteristic of much
Renaissance thought.
The most fundamental of these changes were economic and political: the fundamental institutions of the later Middle Ages – the feudal
system, the universal authority of the pope, the Holy Roman Empire, and the system of trade regulated by medieval guilds – were all
undermined. As a result of large-scale investment of capital, booming manufacture, and expanding trade and commerce, the focus of
economic life increasingly shifted away from the manorial estates of the feudal nobility to the newly emerging cities such as Florence, Milan,
Venice, and Rome, whose affluence enabled their prominence as centers of cultural efflorescence. This “renaissance” extended to several
other European cities such as Paris and London, which also contributed to humanist culture. Many factors contributed to the decline of
feudalism: the rise of monarchies and centralized governments, and the ability of serfs and villeins (helped by the absence of their warrior
overlords during the Crusades) to free themselves from the land and to find work in the expanding cities, which were increasingly
emancipated from the control of feudal lords. All of these developments went hand in hand with the weakening of the feudal nobility and the
rise of an increasingly powerful and rich middle class. The decline of the Holy Roman Empire and the power and prestige of the papacy
resulted in the increasing independence of states in Italy and elsewhere. Other characteristics include the increasing importance of vernacular
languages (and literatures) as opposed to, and alongside, Latin, and a more pronounced focus on style and aesthetics, as opposed to theology
or logic.
Besides, the early modern period witnessed the growth of a new secular class of educated people and a more secular employment of the
classics in fields such as rhetoric and law. The most distinguished humanists and classicists of this period fostered the revival of classical
literary forms in poetry and rhetoric. These figures included Albertino Mussato, who is credited with writing the first tragedy of this period,
and, even more important, Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), who outlined a curriculum of classical studies, focusing on the study of classical
languages and the traditional grammatical requirement of imitating the classical authors. Eloquence, based on a study of classical models, was
important for Petrarch, since it inspired people to virtue. Petrarch’s program, based on a combination of moral philosophy and rhetoric,
inspired others such as Leonardo Bruni to formulate curricula for the study of the humanities, deriving in part from the liberal arts curriculum
recommended by Cicero and Quintilian.
These new curricula overlapped to some extent with the medieval trivium (rhetoric, grammar, logic) and quadrivium (music, astronomy,
algebra, geometry) but laid a renewed emphasis on rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. Another major difference between
medieval and humanist attitudes to the classics was that the latter insisted upon a thorough knowledge of the classical languages, not only
Latin but also Greek, which began to be studied at the end of the fourteenth century. In the Middle Ages the classics had been studied largely
through Latin translations. Moreover, the humanists attempted to return to the pure Latin of the ancient authors as opposed to the medieval
Latin of the Church. The humanists also insisted on the direct study of ancient texts, unencumbered by the constraining framework of
medieval glosses and commentaries. Another difference was that the monopoly of Latin as the language of learned discourse and literature
was undermined, and in the works of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and many humanists the rules of grammar and composition were adapted to
theorize about vernacular tongues. Hence the humanists created a set of techniques and a framework of interpretation for both classical and

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vernacular texts. In general, the humanists supplanted the scholastic aversion to poetry and rhetoric with an emphasis upon the moral value of
these disciplines and upon worldly achievement in general.
These poets not only theorized about the vernacular but also wrote in it and cultivated its elegant expression. Giovanni Boccaccio adapted
classical forms to the vernacular, developing literary forms such as the pastoral, idyll, and romance. The cultivation of prose – in narratives,
epistles, and dialogues – was an important achievement of the humanists. Later Italian writers developed other literary forms: the epic
reached its height in the Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), which departs from the idealistic and moralistic nature of
medieval epics. Historiography and political writing also achieved a new level of realism: Machiavelli wrote a history of Florence that was
free of theological explanations and based upon “natural” laws. Machiavelli’s political writings entirely undermined medieval notions of
government: in his treatise The Prince (1513), he treated politics as an autonomous domain, free of the incursions of morality or religious
doctrine. He saw the state as an independent entity, whose prime goal was the promotion of civic rather than religious virtue, and self-
preservation at any cost .
Humanism flourished also in other parts of Europe. The Dutch thinker Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was the most renowned humanist of
his time and his works were widely read. His strong humanistic convictions in reason, naturalism, tolerance, and the inherent goodness of man
led him to oppose dogmatic theology and scholasticism, and to propound instead a rational religion of simple piety based on the example of
Christ. His Colloquia (1519), criticizing the abuses of the Catholic Church, has often been viewed as paving the way for the Lutheran
Reformation. France also produced notable figures such as François Rabelais (ca. 1494–1553), whose Gargantua and Pantagruel expounded
a naturalistic and secular philosophy glorifying humanity and ridiculing scholastic theology, Church abuses, and all forms of bigotry. In
England, the most renowned humanist was Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), whose Utopia (1516) was a thinly veiled condemnation of the
social and economic defects of his time: religious intolerance, financial greed, the glaring discrepancy between rich and poor, the notions of
conquest, imperialism, and war.
Literary Criticism
Just as many of our own institutions are descended from the early modern period, much of our own literary criticism, and indeed the very
notion of criticism as a relatively autonomous domain, derive from this era, in particular, the rise of the independent state and of a liberal
bourgeoisie enabled the pervasive growth of humanist culture and of national sentiment. The literature and criticism of the period tend to
reflect civic values, a sense of national identity, and a sense of place in history, especially as gauged in relation to the classics. The technology
of the period, such as the development and dissemination of printing, transformed the conditions of reading, facilitating the process of editing
(of especially classical texts), and vastly extending the sphere of the reading public. There were many activities that we might describe as
‘criticism’ in this period. So, for instance, criticism helps to establish vernacular literature by promoting the proper use of English. Another
aspect of criticism is therefore concerned with the moral value of literature. But some of the innovative characteristics of Renaissance literary
criticism, as has noted, include reappraisals of the nature and function of language, moving away from the scholastic fourfold allegorical
structure – grounded on a literal, referential, view of meaning – to a view of language as dialogic and as subject to historical evolution. Such a
shift entailed new approaches to reading, interpretation, and an increasing recognition that all literary criticism is intrinsically tied to specific
social context.
Indeed, much Renaissance criticism was forged in the struggle to defend poetry and literature from charges – brought within both clerical and
secular circles – of immorality, triviality, and irrelevance to practical and political life. The types of criticism proliferating in the early modern
period also included a large body of humanist commentary and scholarship on classical texts. The most influential classical treatises during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars poetica. A third important body of criticism in this period is
comprised of commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics and debates between the relative virtues of the Aristotelian and Horatian texts as well as
attempts to harmonize their insights.
Almost all of these defenses, commentaries, and debates concern a number of fundamental notions: imitation (of both the external world and
the tradition of classical authors), which characterizes as “arguably the predominant poetic issue of the entire period” ; the truth-value and
didactic role of literature; the classical “unities”; the notion of verisimilitude; the use of the vernacular; the definition of poetic genres such as
narrative and drama; the invention of new, mixed genres such as the romantic epic and the tragicomedy; the use of rhyme in poetry; the
relative values of quantitative and qualitative verse; and the place of literature and poetry in relation to other disciplines such as moral
philosophy and history. It will be useful to divide the influential writers of this period into three broad categories, while remembering that the
concerns and motives of each set of writers overlap considerably. The first set of writers, all Italian (Giraldi, Castelvetro, Mazzoni, and
Tasso), are concerned to formulate or reformulate their connections with the classical tradition; the second group, comprising both French
and English writers (Du Bellay, Ronsard, and Sidney), endeavors to defend poetry and the use of the vernacular; the third, represented here by
Gascoigne and Puttenham, aims to define the art of poetry, drawing on the traditions of rhetoric. In many of these writers, the promotion of
the vernacular and the very definition of the poetic is intrinsically tied to their political and often nationalistic affiliations (Habib, 2005).
3.3.1. Conforming to the Classical Heritage

As Renaissance writers returned to the classical past, they did so critically and inevitably with their own agendas in mind. In using classical
texts for their own ends, they were obliged to formulate their own stances toward the classical heritage – especially the poetic and rhetorical
heritage of Aristotle, Horace, and Cicero – and to articulate their own positions on issues raised by the ancient writers. These issues included
the meaning of “imitation,” the definition and expansion of genres, the formulation of the classical unities, and the connection of poetics and
rhetoric. A new and powerful stimulus to literary criticism arose when the Greek text of the Poetics was made available in 1508 and translated
into Latin in 1536. A number of editions of Horace’s Ars poetica were circulated, one of the most influential of which was produced in Paris
in 1500.

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Aristotle’s influence was profoundest on the Italian writers and critics who, however, used his work as a starting point for their own
conceptions of the poetic art. The salient issues raised by these writers include the “unities,” discussed by Giraldi and Castelvetro; the theory
of genres, which informs the work of Giraldi and Tasso; the doctrine of poetic imitation, treated by all of these writers, and most innovatively
examined in the work of Mazzoni. Renaissance writers added the doctrine of the unities of time and place to Aristotle’s original demand for
the unity of action. The newer, characteristically humanist, genres also included the essay and the dialogue form, as well as increasing focus
on the epigram as an instrument of wit. On the assumption that verisimilitude—the achievement of an illusion of reality in the audience of a
stage play—requires that the action represented by a play approximate the actual conditions of the staging of the play, they imposed the
requirement of the "unity of place" (that the action represented be limited to a single location) and the requirement of the "unity of time" (that
the time represented be limited to the two or three hours it takes to act the play, or at most to a single day of either twelve or twenty-four
hours). In large part because of the potent example of Shakespeare, many of whose plays represent frequent changes of place and the passage
of many years, the unities of place and time never dominated English neoclassicism as they did criticism in Italy and France (Abrams, 1999).
The Italian dramatist, poet, and literary critic Giraldi was embroiled in a number of controversies. Like Dante, he spoke in favor of the use of
vernacular languages and, as against the influential classical notions of literature deriving from Aristotle and Horace, he advocated a new
genre, the romance, a lengthy narrative poem which combined elements of the classical epic with those of medieval romances. Hence Giraldi
was effectively involved in a quarrel between “ancients” and “moderns” which was to last for many centuries. Giraldi’s leaning toward the
modern is shown in a number of ways. To begin with, he tends to view literature in a historical context, which means that classical values are
not necessarily applicable to all ages. He also reacted, both in his dramas and in his theory, against many of Aristotle’s prescriptions for
tragedy, such as unity of action and unity of time. His literary criticism, Discourse on the Composition of Romances (1554) was the most
controversial and influential, anticipates and parallels some of the views of Mazzoni, Du Bellay, and Coleridge. In other respects, Giraldi’s
views of poetry echo those of Horace and other classical writers. As regards the civil function of the poet, Giraldi insists that poetry must
“praise virtuous actions and censure the vicious.”
Another important writer of this category is Castelvetro. Castelvetro is best known for his stringent reformulation of Aristotle’s unities of time
and place in drama, his rigid approach being subsequently endorsed by neoclassical writers. As against a long critical tradition, deriving in
part from Horace, that the function of poetry was to be “useful” as well as to entertain, Castelvetro insisted, in a strikingly modern pose, that
the sole end of poetry was to yield pleasure. He also dismissed the long-held notion, arising most influentially with Plato, of poetry as
somehow divinely inspired and the poet as possessed by a divine furor or madness. The poet, he insisted, is made, not born: his creations are
the product of study, training, and art. Unlike most of his predecessors and contemporaries who had written commentaries on Aristotle’s
Poetics, Castelvetro saw Aristotle’s text as merely the unfinished draft of an uncompleted work. Castelvetro denies the title of poet to those
who have written history or science or art in verse form; the true poet, according to him, is “essentially an inventor” (Castelvetro, 105). True
invention is the product of great labor, a point often repeated by. Poetry must be verisimilar in two respects: it must imitate objects that are
real, not fantastic; and its manner of imitation must appear probable or at least possible to the audience (Castelvetro, 1984).
On the other hand Castelvetro taking Aristotle as his starts point, radically dissociated poetry from the other arts and sciences and defined it
instead as an exceptional skill. Indeed, science counts for little in this classification, since poems should give pleasure rather than instruction.
Castelvetro asserts that history and sciences are not fit subjects for poetry, for a number of reasons. The subject matter of history is not
furnished by the author’s genius but by “the course of earthly events or by the manifest or hidden will of God.” In contrast, the matter of
poetry “is invented and imagined by the poet’s genius” (Castelvetro, 18). The poet is primarily a technician of poetry, a craft with its own
rules about imitating the art of other poetry. The true office of the poet is to exert his “intellectual faculties to imitate human actions . . . and
through his imitations to provide pleasure for his audiences.” The final reason given by Castelvetro for the poet’s avoiding treatment of the
arts and sciences is perhaps the most integral to his own conception of poetry: “poetry was invented for the sole purpose of providing pleasure
and recreation . . . to the souls of the common people and the rude multitude.” Castelvetro’s views of tragedy usually agree with Aristotle’s,
though often for different reasons: like Aristotle, he considers plot the most important element, on the grounds that it requires more labor than
the other elements.
Born in Cesena, Italy, the Italian scholar Giacopo Mazzoni’s major work was a philosophical treatise called On the Three Ways of Man’s
Life: The Active, the Contemplative, and the Religious,1576. In this text Mazzoni attempted to reconcile the philosophies of Plato and
Aristotle. Following Aristotle, Mazzoni insists that the real distinction between the various arts and sciences lies in their differing ways of
knowing and constructing the same object. In explaining this basis of distinction, Mazzoni claims to be following Plato. There are three types
of objects, says Mazzoni, and three ways in which they can be approached. These objects are “idea,” “work,” and “idol.” These are,
respectively, the objects of the “ruling” arts, the “fabricating” arts, and the “imitating” arts. The objects are therefore approached as
observable, fabricable, or imitable. Mazzoni offers an example also given by Plato. Let us suppose that the object is a bridle. The “ruling” art
here will be the art of horsemanship, which is concerned only with the idea of how the bridle must work; the art of the bridle-maker will have
“work” or fabrication as its object, since this is the art that will actually make the bridle; the imitating arts will be concerned with the bridle
only inasmuch as it is imitable, by means of an “idol” or image (Mazzoni, 40). Unlike Plato, however, Mazzoni wishes to establish a firm
distinction between the imitating arts and the fabricating arts; after all, Plato had seen the fabricating arts (for example, bridle-making) as
imitating the idea of the object; Mazzoni retorts that while the art of bridle-making does indeed represent or copy the idea supplied by the
ruling art, it also serves other purposes, such as managing horses. So, while all the arts may involve some kind of imitation, states Mazzoni,
what distinguishes the imitative from other arts is that they have no other end or purpose beyond that of representation. Mazzoni also draws
upon a distinction made by Plato in his dialogue, the Sophist, between two kinds of imitation. The first kind, which imitates actual things, is
“icastic”; the second type, which imitates things of the artist’s invention, is “phantastic” (Habib,2005).
Habib continued forwarding the views of Mazzoni about poetry. Acknowledging that poetry is an imitative art, Mazzoni seeks to define it
according to its medium, its subject matter, and its final cause. The proper medium or instrument of poetry, he urges, is harmony, number, and
meter, all taken from music since they produce pleasure in an orderly fashion (Mazzoni, 57–58). Mazzoni appeals to the authority of Aristotle

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and even of Plato (for whom certain types of poetry which gave a truthful presentation of the gods were acceptable) to affirm that the poet
may indeed depict the truth as well as portraying fantasies; to put it another way, the poet may use “icastic” imitation. Again following
Aristotle (who had urged that poetry should imitate what is probable), Mazzoni states that the appropriate subject of poetry is the “credible”:
this category would include both truth and falsity (since what is false can sometimes be presented in a credible fashion) (Mazzoni, 72–73). In
the same way, Mazzoni viewed poetry, in three different modes, as having three different ends or purposes: in its mode of imitation, its end is
to provide a correct imitation or representation; considered as amusement, poetry’s purpose is simply to produce delight; thirdly, it can be
considered as “amusement directed, ruled, and defined by the civil faculty (general social discourse which lays down the rules for ethical
behavior)” (Mazzoni, 95).
Tasso has also long enjoyed a reputation as both one of the finest poets of the Renaissance and an influential critic. He is best known for his
epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581), whose topic was the First Crusade. Tasso’s own revised Discourses on the Heroic Poem had a
considerable impact not only on Renaissance but also on subsequent literary theory in Italy, England, and France. Tasso well understood the
important critical issues of his own day – such as the relative values of Homer and Vergil, ancients and moderns. Indeed, Aristotle is one of
the main sources of Tasso’s text, the others being Horace and the canons of classical rhetoric. He suggests that all of the species of poetry,
including epic, tragedy, comedy, and song, are forms of “imitation in verse” (Tasso, 1973: 7). What do they imitate? Tasso takes up the Stoic
view that poetry imitates human and divine actions. However, he rejects the idea, derived from Horace’s Ars poetica, that the purpose of
poetry is twofold, encompassing both pleasure and utility. A single art, says Tasso, cannot have two purposes which are somehow unrelated.
Hence, either poetry should set aside any “useful” purpose such as instructing and content itself wholly with delighting, or “if it wishes to be
useful, it should direct its pleasure to this end. It may be that pleasure directed to usefulness is the end of poetry” ( Tasso, 1973: 10). The
intrinsic connection between pleasure and usefulness demanded by Tasso proves effectively to be a subordination of pleasure to usefulness, in
the relation of means and end: the poet, he says, “is to set as his purpose not delight . . . but usefulness, because poetry . . . is a first philosophy
which instructs us from our early years in moral habits and the principles of life.” At any rate, the pleasure produced by poetry should be
circumscribed by its moral purpose: “We should at least grant that the end of poetry is not just any enjoyment but only that which is coupled
with virtue” (Tasso, 1973: 11). Poetry is therefore an imitation of human actions, made for the guidance of life; and its end is delight (it must
essentially delight) either because delight is its aim, or because delight is the necessary means of affecting the ethical end of art (Spingarn,
1899).
Defending the Vernacular and poetry

As we move into the Renaissance we can see a continuing preoccupation with the vernacular. Its steady rise eventually spells the end for a
‘universal’ culture based on Latin. As Richard Waswo points out, because of: “a conscious campaign and numerous polemics, first developed
in Italy, then continued in France, the results of which were simply transferred to England, the major vernacular languages of Western
Europe had, by that date, effectively dislodged the monopoly held by Latin on all forms of serious, written or printed enquiry” (cited in Day,
2008:111)
Notwithstanding the humanist reverence for the classics, many of the most illustrious minds of the Renaissance, including such writers as
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, William Langland, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote in the vernacular. Much of the impetus for this self-
extrication from the imperial language of Latin lay in nationalist sentiment, and the sixteenth century witnessed the growth of national
literatures in several countries, notably Italy, England, France, and Germany. The Protestant Reformation not only fueled such nationalist
sympathy but also fostered vernacular translations of the Bible as well as of liturgies and hymns, which in some cases laid broad foundations
for the development of national languages. Joachim Du Bellay engaged in a sustained defense of his French vernacular as against Latin.
Du Bellay’s Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549) was written as a response to a pamphlet published in 1548 that had
urged the equality of French popular poetry with Latin verse. Du Bellay begins his Defence by pointing out that languages are not somehow
spontaneous products of nature but rather of the “desire and will of mortals” (281). He acknowledges that some languages have indeed
become richer than others; however, the reason for this is not the intrinsic virtue of those languages but the “artifice and industry of men.” His
basic purpose in this treatise is to show that the French vernacular is not “incapable of good letters and erudition” (282). In response to the
charge that the French language is “barbarous,” Du Bellay enlists arguments. The appellation“barbarous” rests on no legitimate authority or
privilege but is entirely relative: the Greeks in their arrogance called all other nations barbarous. In their turn the Romans did the same thing:
Roman imperialism “sought not only to subjugate but to render other nations vile and abject” (282).Similarly Du Bellay argues that the French
language is currently in an impoverished state, this is not because of any intrinsic defects but rather due “to the ignorance of our ancestors”
who chose to cultivate noble actions rather than words (283). Du Bellay noted the French writers to engage not only in translation but also in
imitation of classical poets and forms as the Romans indeed enriched their language by imitating Greek authors.
Like his friend and distant cousin Joachim Du Bellay, Pierre de Ronsard eventually studied under the supervision of the Hellenist Jean Dorat
at the Collège de Coqueret in Paris, an institution that housed a nucleus of seven poets known as the Pléiade. This group, engaged in intense
study of Greek and Latin poetry, was dedicated to a renewal of French poetry and language based on imitation and adaptation of classical
models. In accordance with the literary ideals of the Pléiade, he wrote in French but imitated classical and Italian verse forms. His poetic
output included four books of Odes (1550), a collection of sonnets, Les Amours de Cassandre (1552), and an unfinished epic based on
Vergil’s Aeneid entitled the Franciade (1572), as well as his renowned Sonnets to Helene (1578). Ronsard’s “A Brief on the Art of French
Poetry” was published in 1565. Like Horace’s Ars poetica, this brief takes the form of a letter offering advice to a young poet. In this brief
essay, Ronsard begins with a somewhat radical claim: the art of poetry “can be neither learned nor taught by precept, it being a thing more
experiential than traditional.” In other words, the very nerve of poetry derives from the author’s experience of life.
The remainder of Ronsard’s “Brief ”, (in Habib,2005), deals with three of the conventional offices of rhetoric, namely, invention, disposition
or arrangement, and style. The aim of the poet, he says, is to “imitate, invent, and represent – things which are, or which may be – in a
resemblance to truth” (183). This is a somewhat elliptical formulation of the poet’s task: the poet may imitate or represent things which

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already exist, which already stand in “resemblance to truth”; but beyond simply imitating, he can also invent things that may hold such
resemblance; what seems to be invoked elliptically here is the Aristotelian requirement of probability, whereby the poet is obliged to present
not necessarily any actual truth about the world but something which, being probable, exhibits a resemblance to truth. Indeed, Ronsard is even
more insistent on this point when he turns to the office of “disposition” or arrangement of one’s material. Disposition, depending upon sound
invention, consists in “an elegant placing and ordering of the things invented; it does not permit what appertains to one place to be put in
another, but, operating by artifice, study, and application, it disposes and sets each matter to its proper point” (183). Again, the terms –
“order,” “proper,” “application” – are profoundly classical and conservative. Ronsard defines the third rhetorical office, elocution or style, as
comprising “a propriety and splendor of words, properly chosen and adorned.” A poem will shine “in proportion as the words be significant,
and chosen with judgment” (184). But again, Ronsard’s view of style is constrained by a need to return to the classics: the poet must guide
himself in these elements of style “by imitation of Homer” (184).
In the same way notable manifestoes or defenses of poetry were undertaken by writers such as Joachim Du Bellay and Sir Philip Sidney. Such
apologiae and defenses have been obliged to continue through the nineteenth century into our own day, highlighting the fact that the category
of the “aesthetic,” as a domain struggling to free itself from the constraints of theology, morality, politics, philosophy, and history, was in part
a result of Renaissance poetics. The vigorous defence of poetry in this period is an attempt to reverse its declining importance in the political
sphere and to counter claims of its corrupting influence.
Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie (1580–1581) is a seminal text of literary criticism. It is not only a defense but also one of the most acclaimed
treatises on poetics of its time. While its ideas are not original, it represents the first synthesis in the English language of the various strands
and concerns of Renaissance literary criticism, drawing on Aristotle, Horace, and more recent writers such as Boccaccio and Julius Caesar
Scaliger. It raises issues – such as the value and function of poetry, the nature of imitation, and the concept of nature – which were to concern
literary critics in numerous languages until the late eighteenth century. Sidney’s writing of the Apologie as a defense of poetry was occasioned
by an attack on poetry entitled The School of Abuse published in 1579 by a Puritan minister, Stephen Gosson.
Since poetry has fallen from ‘the highest estimation of learning’ to be ‘the laughing-stock of children’, Sidney proposes to bring four
‘available proofs’ to its defence. For ease of reference, we shall refer to these proofs as (1) by antiquity, (2) by etymology, (3) by ‘kinds’, and
(4) by purpose. Sidney’s initial argument is that poetry was the first form in which knowledge was expressed, the “first light giver to
ignorance,” as bodied forth by figures such as Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod, Livius, Ennius, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. And the first
Greek philosophers Thales, Empedocles, Parmenides, and Pythagoras, he points out, expressed their vision in verse. His point is that an
essential prerequisite of knowledge is pleasure in learning; and it is poetry that has made each of these varieties of knowledge – scientific,
moral, philosophical, political – accessible by expressing them in pleasurable forms. Sidney concludes here that “neither philosopher nor
historiographer, could at the first have entered into the gates of popular judgments, if they had not taken a great passport of poetry” .
Sidney’s second argument might be called the epistemology, “argument from tradition”. The second proof begins the main steps in the logical
argument, and Sidney takes the etymologies for ‘poet’ as his point of departure, since it appeals to the ancient Roman and Greek conceptions
of poetry and “stands upon their authorities” (Norton, 2008). Sidney argues that this definition of the poet was quite “reasonable,” as shown
by the fact that the Psalms of David are a “divine poem,” whereby prophecy is expressed in a poetic manner. The ancient Greek definition of
poetry is even more important for Sidney, providing access into his own view of the connection between poetry and nature. Sidney points out
that all other disciplines like, Astronomer, grammarian, rhetorician, and logician, mathematician depend on some aspect of nature, which
furnishes the ground of its exploration. the astronomer, for example, observes the stars as ordered in nature, The poet, however, is free of any
such dependence on nature: While each other art and science is committed to treat its ‘proposed matter’ assigned to it by Nature, ‘only the
poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection . . . making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite a new forms such as
never were in Nature. As such, the poet’s “making” or production is superior to nature.
The third proof of ‘kinds’ emerges logically out of the derivation of ‘poetry’ from poiein to indicate its definitive activity as that of ‘making’
and is introduced by a description of how that activity is to be realized. Poetry ‘is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word
mimesis”. His fourth proof is an expanded analysis of the moral efficacy of the third (mimetic) ‘kind’ of poetry. The poetic image, or the
confluence of imagines in a fictional narrative, may also overcome the ethical limits of history through the poet’s power to reveal the
‘universal’ by choosing exemplary figures and thereby supplying causes for effects in the ‘imaginative ground-plot’ of his ‘profitable
invention’. By means of the poetic image, that is, philosophy becomes apprehensible.
As elucidated in Norton (2008) Sidney addresses the specific charges brought against poetry. The first is that are other kinds of knowledge
more fruitful than poetry. Sidney states that the greatest gifts bestowed upon human beings are oratio and ratio, speech and reason. It is poetry
which most polishes the gift of speech, and it “far exceedeth prose” on two accounts: it engenders delight because of its meticulous ordering
of words, and therefore it is memorable. Since knowledge depends on memory, poetry has an affinity with knowledge (246 –247).The second
charge is that poetry “is the mother of lies” (247). Only the arts and disciplines with a specialized body of knowledge to learn and
communicate can fall into error and mislead. ‘The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true
what he writes.’ While reading ‘in History looking for truth, they go away full fraught with falsehood, so in Poesy looking but for fiction, they
shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention’ ( n. 15). Sidney’s famous retort is that “the poet . . . nothing
affirms, and therefore never lieth” (248). “what is, or is not, but what should or should not be.” He is writing “not affirmatively, but
allegorically, and figuratively” (249). The final, and perhaps most serious, charge that Sidney confronts is that Plato banished poets from his
ideal republic, some claiming that, as a philosopher, Plato was “a natural enemy of poets” (253). Sidney suggests that Plato opposed the abuse
of poetry rather than the art itself.
Poetic Form and Rhetoric

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There were various suggestions for reforming the language in the Renaissance. The most common was to aim for transparency in speech and
writing. Dudley North, one of whose hobbies was jousting, prayed that he might ‘write clearly and strongly rather than finely and artificially’
(Day, 2008).
During the Renaissance, rhetoric – or at least rhetorical theory – enjoyed a renewed centrality in educational institutions. The domains of
poetics and rhetoric increasingly overlapped, as did the procedures for analyzing poetry and prose, and the conceptions of poet and orator.
Poetry and prose were both seen to share the aims of persuasion, and, sometimes, of praising and blaming. Theorists and apologists of poetry
such as Vida, Minturno, Scaliger, and Sidney effectively treated poetry as a higher form of rhetoric, drawing on Cicero and Quintilian. Indeed,
one of the legacies of the Renaissance that has endured until today lay in the fact that the scope of poetics was broadened well beyond the
constraining boundaries of rhetoric to encompass moral philosophy, metaphysics, science, and political thought (The Art of Poetry, 1527).
The growth of the vernacular, along with the foregoing developments, fueled a number of problems of poetic form, concerning issues such as
meter and rhyme. In returning to classical precedents, Renaissance poets rejected the regular stress-based alliterative meter of medieval poets.
Some experimented with the idea of introducing classical quantitative meters, based on length of syllables rather than stress, into vernacular
languages. In general, the humanists rejected rhyme as an unclassical barbarism.
The poet and dramatist George Gascoigne is credited with having written the first literary-critical essay in the English language, entitled
“Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English.” Gascoigne’s essay “Certayne Notes” follows in the
tradition of Horace’s Ars poetica as a treatise or manual offering advice to the aspiring poet on the entire range of rhetorical issues, including
invention, prosody, verse form, and style. Gascoigne insists that the poet must employ “some depth of device in the invention, and some
figures also in the handling thereof”. Indeed, like many Renaissance literary theorists, Gascoigne advises the poet to “avoid the uncomely
customs of common writers” (163). Gascoigne cautions against the use of “rhyme without reason” (164). In other words, a poet should not be
distracted by rhyme for its own sake, nor should he allow the search for rhyme to guide the matter of the poem. Gascoigne also advises the
poet to be consistent in his use of meter throughout a poem. He admonishes the poet to situate every word such that it will receive its “natural
emphasis or sound . . . as it is commonly pronounced or used.” He indicates the three types of accent: gravis (\) or the long accent, levis (/) or
the short accent, and circumflexa (~), which is “indifferent,” capable of being either long or short (164). He notes that the most common foot
in English is the foot of two syllables, the first short and the second long (the iambic foot), and he encourages the use of the iambic pentameter
(in which, as many other writers have noted, the English language seems naturally to fall).
Another important critique to define poetry and rhetoric is George Puttenham. A long and influential treatise entitled The Arte of English
Poesie, published anonymously in 1589, is attributed to George Puttenham, though the evidence for this is not conclusive and continues to be
argued by scholars. The central purpose of Puttenham’s treatise is similar to that of writers such as Dante and Joachim Du Bellay: to justify
the use of the vernacular language for poetry, and specifically to establish English vernacular poetry as an art, requiring serious study and
labor. The Arte is divided into three books, the first justifying poetry as expressing the needs of individual and society; the second, “Of
Proportion,” devoted to the craft of poetry; and the third, “Of Ornament,” offering a renaming of the figures and tropes of classical rhetoric. It
might be said that his treatise not only contributed to the idea of“standard” English, but also founded and enabled some of the terminology of
early modern literary criticism in English. Terms such as “ode,” “lyric,” and “epigrammatist” were brought into standard currency partly
through the agency and influence of Puttenham’s text. In short, his text helped establish the terms and methods of modern English criticism.
At the outset of his treatise, Puttenham defines the poet as both a “maker” and an imitator: he is able to create from his own mind the
substance and form of his poetry, an ability that, as in Sidney’s defense, raises poetry above all other arts and sciences. The second book
undertakes a survey and analysis of stanza (staffe), meter (measure), rhyme, and rhyme pattern, offering advice on all of these matters to those
who would write English verse. Puttenham sees the English line of verse as based on meter and rhyme. Importantly, Puttenham moves toward
a perception of the function of stress in English verse (78–80). The final book of the Arte, “Of Ornament,” primarily addresses language as it
can be analyzed for the poet’s task. This section, which is a manual of rhetoric, reflects a broader background of humanistic concern with
language and rhetoric. Interestingly, the emphasis here is not on the classical balance of teaching and delighting, but on the latter: the poet
delights both the mind and the ear, the sensible effects of poetry being viewed as important; moreover, this delight proceeds from a new mode
of expression. These obligations of poetry will be repeated by many Romantics and modernists. In fact, according to Puttenham, a poet’s
chief merit lies in the skillful employment of figures (138). In his chapter “Of Figures,” Puttenham points out that figures of speech have an
intrinsic doubleness or duality, since they go beyond the limits of common utterance and plain speech. Metaphor, for example, is “an
inversion of sense by transport”. As such, all of these figures are subject to abuse; in the hands of the poet, however, whose only purpose is to
please his hearers, such dissimulations are not vices but virtues.
Puttenham sees the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic as simply a formalization – acquired by “studious observation” and practice – of his
natural abilities. And the poet’s relation to nature comprehends all of the foregoing possibilities, integrating imitation, supplementation, and
invention (306). But, like Sidney, Puttenham urges that poetry is unique among the arts inasmuch as it is enabled by “a cleare and bright
phantasie and imagination.” The poet, in fact, works in the same way that nature does: “even as nature herself working by her own peculiar
virtue and proper instinct and not by example or meditation or exercise as all other artificers do, [the poet] is then most admired when he is
most natural and least artificial”.

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Chapter Four
Seventeenth Century Criticism (Neo-classicism)
4.2. The tradition of neoclassical literary criticism
Though it is difficult to exclusively distinct the perceptions of seventeenth century about literature and literary criticism from the previous
outlooks, particularly Renaissance, it is possible to reflect some verifying feature of the period. The literary practice in this period roughly
expressed as Neoclassicism. Neoclassicism refers to a broad tendency in literature and art enduring from roughly from 1650s until around
1780s. The period is called neoclassical because its writers looked back to the ideals and art forms of classical times, emphasizing even more
than their Renaissance predecessors the classical ideals of order and rational control. While the nature of this tendency inevitably varied
across different cultures, it was usually marked by a number of common concerns and characteristics. Most fundamentally, neoclassicism
comprised a return to the classical models, literary styles, and values of ancient Greek and Roman authors. The writers of ancient Greece and
Rome—who were thought to have achieved excellence, and established the enduring models, in all the major literary genres. In this, the
neoclassicists were to some extent heirs of the Renaissance humanists.
But many of them reacted sharply against what they perceived to be the stylistic excess, superfluous ornamentation, and linguistic
oversophistication of some Renaissance writers; they also rejected the lavishness of the Gothic and Baroque styles. Many major medieval and
Renaissance writers, including Dante, Ariosto, More, Spenser, and Milton, had peopled their writings with fantastic and mythical beings.
Authors such as Giraldi had attempted to justify the genre of the romance and the use of the “marvelous” and unreal elements. Sidney and
others had even proposed, in an idealizing Neo-Platonist strain, that the poet’s task was to create an ideal world, superior to the world of
nature. The neoclassicists, reacting against this idealistic tendency in Renaissance poetics, might be thought of as heirs to the other major
tendency in Renaissance poetics, which was Aristotelian. Besides, whereas many Renaissance poets had labored toward an individualism of
outlook, even as they appropriated elements of the classical canon, the neoclassicists in general were less ambiguous in their emphasis upon
the classical values of objectivity, impersonality, rationality, decorum, balance, harmony, proportion, and moderation. Furthermore while
Renaissance theorists and poets were advocating new and mixed genres, the neoclassicists tended to insist on the separation of poetry and
prose, the purity of each genre, and the hierarchy of genres.
Much neoclassical thought was marked by a recognition of human finitude, in contrast with the humanists’ (and, later, the Romantics’)
assertion of almost limitless human potential. To a certain extent Neoclassicism represented a reaction against the optimistic, exuberant, and
enthusiastic Renaissance view of man as a being fundamentally good and possessed of an infinite potential for spiritual and intellectual
growth. Neoclassical theorists, by contrast, saw man as an imperfect being, inherently sinful, whose potential was limited. They replaced the
Renaissance emphasis on the imagination on invention and experimentation, and mysticism with an emphasis on order and reason. The
neoclassical writers reaffirmed literary composition as a rational and rule-bound process, requiring a great deal of craft, labor, and study. The
classical ideals of order and moderation which inspired this period, its realistically limited aspirations, and it s emphasis on the common sense
of society rather than individual imagination, could all be characterized as rational. And, indeed, it is often known as the Age of Reason. Both
religious belief and morality were grounded on reason: revelation and grace were de-emphasized, and morality consisted of acting rightly to
one's fellow beings on this earth. Neoclassical art is not meant to seem a spontaneous outpouring of emotion or imagination. Emotion appears,
of course; but it is consciously controlled. A work of art should be logically organized and should advocate rational norm.
Two of the concepts central to neoclassical literary theory and practice were imitation and nature, which were intimately related. In one sense,
the notion of imitation – of the external world, and primarily, of human action – was a reaffirmation of the ideals of objectivity and
impersonality, as opposed to the increasingly sophisticated individualism and exploration of subjectivity found in Renaissance writers. The
identification was based largely on the concept of nature. This complex concept had a number of senses. It referred to the harmonious and
hierarchical order of the universe, including the various social and political hierarchies within the world. In this vast scheme of nature,
everything had its proper and appointed place. The concept also referred to human nature: to what was central, timeless, and universal in
human experience. Neoclassical thinkers could use the past as a guide for the present because they assumed that human nature was constant--
essentially the same regardless of time and place. Art, they believed, should express this essential nature: "Nothing can please many, and
please long, but just representations of general nature" (Samuel Johnson). An individual character was valuable for what he or she revealed of
universal human nature . Hence, “nature” had a deep moral significance, comprehending the modes of action that were permissible and
excluding certain actions as “unnatural” (a term often used by Shakespeare to describe the murderous and cunning behavior of characters such
as Lady Macbeth). Clearly, the neoclassical vision of nature was very different from the meanings later given to it by the Romantics; this
vision inherited something of the medieval view of nature as a providential scheme but, as will emerge shortly, it was informed by more
recent scientific views of nature rather than by Aristotelian physics.
The neoclassical writers generally saw the ancients such as Homer and Vergil as having already discovered and expressed the fundamental
laws of nature. Hence, the external world, including the world of human action, could best be expressed by modern writers if they followed
the path of imitation already paved by the ancients. Invention was of course allowed, but only as a modification of past models, not in the
form of a rupture. Having said all of this, the neoclassicists were by no means devoted to slavish imitation of the classics. La Bruyère indeed
thought that the ancients had already expressed everything that was worth saying; and Pope, in one of his more insistent moments, equated
following the rules of nature with the imitation of Homer. But Ben Jonson, Corneille, Dryden, and many others were more flexible in their
assimilation of classical values. Moreover, the neoclassicists attempted to develop and refine Aristotle’s account of the emotions evoked by
tragedy in an audience, and an important part of their endeavor to imitate nature consisted in portraying the human passions. The ancients
were held to be the repository of good sense, natural laws, and the classical values of order, balance, and moderation.
The connection of neoclassicism to recent science and what would eventually emerge as some of the core values of the Enlightenment were
highly ambivalent and even paradoxical. On the one hand, the neoclassical concept of nature was informed by Newtonian physics, and the
universe was acknowledged to be a vast machine, subject to fixed analyzable laws. On the other hand, the tenor of most neoclassical thought
was retrospective and conservative. On the surface, it might seem that the neoclassical writers shared with Enlightenment thinkers a belief in

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the power of reason. The neoclassicists certainly saw literature as subject to a system of rules, and literary composition as a rational process,
subject to the faculty of judgment. But, while it is true that some neoclassical writers, especially in Germany, were influenced by Descartes
and other rationalists, the “reason” to which the neoclassical writers appeal is in general not the individualistic and progressive reason of the
Enlightenment; rather, it is the “reason” of the classical philosophers, a universal human faculty that provides access to general truths and
which is aware of its own limitations.
4.3. Prominent Figures Of Neoclassicism
4.3.1. Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

English poet Alexander Pope is known for the brilliant verse during the early and mid-18th century. Alexander Pope the chief representative of
pseudo−classicism in its most particular filed. He was predestined by Nature to be a poet. Brought up chiefly at the country home near
Windsor to which his father had retired, and left to himself for mental training, he never acquired any thoroughness of knowledge or power of
systematic thought, but he read eagerly the poetry of many languages. Pope emulated the classical style of the poets of antiquity and further
developed the poetic form known as the heroic couplet. He first earned fame with the work An Essay on Criticism (Abou-El-Seoud, 2009).
In the age of Alexander Pope, the classical spirit in English literature reached its highest point, and at the same time other forces became
manifest. Dryden's poetry had achieved grandeur, amplitude, and sublimity within a particular definition of good taste and good sense and
under the tutelage of the Roman and Greek classics. To the poetry of Pope this characterization applies even more stringently. More than any
other English poet, he submitted himself to the requirement that the expressive force of poetic genius should issue forth only in a formulation
as reasonable, lucid, balanced, compressed, final, and perfect as the power of human reason can make it.
Pope's reputation rests in large part on his satires, but his didactic bent led him to formulate in verse An Essay on Criticism (1711) and An
Essay on Man (1732-1734). The former attempts to show that poetry must be modeled on nature; but his conception of nature, a traditional
one shared by all his contemporaries, differs from that of succeeding generations. For Pope, nature meant the rules that right reason has
discovered to be immanent in all things, so that what the experience of reasonable minds through the ages has shown to be the greatest poetry
—namely, that of classical antiquity—provides a perfect model for modern times. Even An Essay on Criticism is written in verse, following the
tradition of Horace’s Ars poetica, and interestingly, much of the philosophical substance of An Essay on Man is already formulated in this
earlier poem, in its application to literature and criticism. A similar conservatism reappears in An Essay on Man, which longest of the essays
which he accomplished, the 'Essay on Man,' aims, like 'Paradise Lost,' to 'vindicate the ways of God to man' . An Essay on Man (1733–
1734) was a scathing attack on human arrogance or pride in failing to observe the due limits of human reason, in questioning divine authority
and seeking to be self-reliant on the basis of rationality and science.
Pope is not merely delineating the scope and nature of good literary criticism; in doing this, he redefines classical virtues in terms of an
exploration of nature and wit, as necessary to both poetry and criticism; and this restatement of classicism is itself situated within a broader
reformulation of literary history, tradition, and religion. Pope specifies two further guidelines for the critic. The first is to recognize the overall
unity of a work, and thereby to avoid falling into partial assessments based on the author’s use of poetic conceits, ornamented language, and
meters, as well as those which are biased toward either archaic or modern styles or based on the reputations of given writers. Finally, a critic
needs to possess a moral sensibility, as well as a sense of balance and proportion, as indicated in these lines. As we read through this synthesis
of the qualities of a good critic, it becomes clear that they are primarily attributes of humanity or moral sensibility rather than aesthetic
qualities. Indeed, the only specifically aesthetic quality mentioned here is “taste.” The remaining virtues might be said to have a theological
ground, resting on the ability to overcome pride. The “reason” to which Pope appeals is not the individualistic and secular “reason” of the
Enlightenment philosophers; it is “reason” as understood by Aquinas and many medieval thinkers, reason as a universal archetype in human
nature, constrained by a theological framework. Reason in this sense is a corollary of humility: it is humility which allows the critic to rise
above egotistical dogmatism and thereby to be rational and impartial, and aware of his own limitations, in his striving after truth.
Pope’s specific advice to the critic is grounded on virtues whose application extends far beyond literary criticism, into the realms of morality,
theology, and art itself. It is something of an irony that the main part of his Essay on Criticism is devoted not specifically to criticism but to art
itself, of which poetry and criticism are regarded as branches. In other words, Pope sees criticism itself as an art. Not only this, but there are
several passages which suggest that criticism must be a part of the creative process, that poets themselves must possess critical faculties in
order to execute their craft in a self-conscious and controlled manner. Pope’s view of nature as furnishing the universal archetypes for art
leads him to condemn excessive individualism.
Pope’s poem has been variously called a study and defense of “nature” and of “wit.” Among other things, nature can refer, on a cosmic level,
to the providential order of the world and the universe, an order which is hierarchical, in which each entity has its proper assigned place.
Nature can also refer to what is normal, central, and universal in human experience, encompassing the spheres of morality and knowledge, the
rules of proper moral conduct as well as the archetypal patterns of human reason. The word “wit” in Pope’s time also had a variety of
meanings: it could refer in general to intelligence and intellectual acuity; it also meant “wit” in the modern sense of cleverness, as expressed
for example in the ability to produce a concise and poignant figure of speech or pun; more specifically, it might designate a capacity to discern
similarities between different entities and to perceive the hidden relationships underlying the appearances of things. Pope’s notions of wit
were worked out in the context of this debate, and his redefinition of “true” wit in Essay on Criticism was a means not only of upholding the
proper uses of wit but also of defending literature itself, wit being a mode of knowing or apprehension unique to literature. It is pride which
leads critics and poets alike to overlook universal truths in favor of subjective whims; pride which causes them to value particular parts
instead of the whole; pride which disables them from achieving a harmony of wit and judgment; and pride which underlies their excesses and
biases. And, as in the Essay on Man, Pope associates pride with individualism, with excessive reliance on one’s own judgment and failure to
observe the laws laid down by nature and by the classical tradition. Indeed, Pope suggests in many portions of the Essay that criticism itself is

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an art and must be governed by the same rules that apply to literature itself. However, there are a number of precepts he advances as specific
to criticism.
4.3.2. John Dryden (1631–1700)

John Dryden occupies a seminal place in English critical history. Samuel Johnson called him “the father of English criticism,” and affirmed of
his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) that “modern English prose begins here.” Dryden’s critical work was extensive, treating of various genres
such as epic, tragedy, comedy and dramatic theory, satire, the relative virtues of ancient and modern writers, as well as the nature of poetry
and translation. In addition to the Essay, he wrote numerous prefaces, reviews, and prologues. Dryden in his text subsumes a number of
debates: one of these concerns the classical “unities” of time, place, and action; another focuses on the rigid classical distinction between
various genres, such as tragedy and comedy; there was also the issue of classical decorum and propriety, as well as the use of rhyme in drama.
All of these elements underlie the nature of drama.
Advocating Dryden’s view, Crites notes that poetry is now held in lower esteem, in an atmosphere of “few good poets, and so many severe
judges” (37–38). He reminds his companions that all the rules for drama – concerning the plot, the ornaments, descriptions, and narrations –
were formulated by Aristotle, Horace, or their predecessors. As for us modern writers, he remarks, “we have added nothing of our own, except
we have the confidence to say our wit is better”. The most fundamental of these classical rules are the three unities, of time, place, and action.
The unity of action, Crites urges, stipulates that the “poet is to aim at one great and complete action,” to which all other things in the play
“are to be subservient.” The reason behind this, he explains, is that if there were two major actions, this would destroy the unity of the play.
Crites cites a further reason from Corneille: the unity of action “leaves the mind of the audience in a full repose”; but such a unity must be
engineered by the subordinate actions which will “hold the audience in a delightful suspense of what will be”. Most modern plays, says Crites,
fail to endure the test imposed by these unities, and we must therefore acknowledge the superiority of the ancient authors.
If Dryden is neoclassical, it is in the sense that he acknowledges the classics as having furnished archetypes for drama; but modern writers are
at liberty to create their own archetypes and their own literary traditions. Again, he might be called classical in view of t he unquestioned
persistence of certain presuppositions: that the unity of a play, however conceived, is a paramount requirement; that a play present, through its
use of plot and characterization, events and actions which are probable and express truth or at least a resemblance to truth; that the laws of
“nature” be followed, if not through imitation of the ancients, then through looking inward at our own profoundest constitution. But given
Dryden’s equal emphasis on the poet’s wit, invention, and imagination, his text might be viewed as expressing a status of transition between
neoclassicism and Romanticism.
Dryden’s other essays and prefaces would seem to confirm the foregoing comments, and reveal important insights into his vision of the poet’s
craft. In his 1666 preface to Annus Mirabilis, he states that the central component of writing is wit: “composition of all poems is, or ought to
be, of wit; and wit . . . is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer”. He subsequently offers a more comprehensive definition: “the
first happiness of the poet’s imagination is properly invention, or finding of the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving, or
moulding, of that thought, as the judgment represents it proper to the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing or adorning that
thought, so found and varied, in apt, significant, and sounding words: the quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in
the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression”. Again, the emphasis here is on wit, imagination, and invention rather than exclusively on the
classical precept of imitation. The poetry of John Dryden possesses a grandeur, force, and fullness of tone that were eagerly received by
readers still having something in common with the Elizabethans. At the same time, however, his poetry set the tone of the new age in
achieving a new clarity and in establishing a self-limiting, somewhat impersonal canon of moderation and good taste. Dryden did perhaps
more than any other man to form modern style, a style clear, straightforward, terse, forceful, easy and simple and yet dignified, fluent in
vocabulary, varied, and of pleasing rhythm.
In fact, Dryden was later to write “Defence of An Essay on Dramatic Poesy,” defending his earlier text against Sir Robert Howard’s attack on
Dryden’s advocacy of rhyme in drama. Here, Dryden’s defense of rhyme undergoes a shift of emphasis, revealing further his modification of
classical prescriptions. He now argues that what most commends rhyme is the delight it produces: “for delight is the chief, i f not the only, end
of poesy: instruction can be admitted but in the second place”. And Dryden states: “I confess my chief endeavours are to delight the age in
which I live”. We have come a long way from Aristotle, and even from Sidney, who both regarded poetry as having primarily a moral or
ethical purpose. To suggest that poetry’s chief or only aim is to delight is to take a large step toward the later modern notion of literary
autonomy. Dryden goes on to suggest that while a poet’s task is to “imitate well,” he must also “affect the soul, and excite the passions” as
well as cause “admiration” or wonder. To this end, “bare imitation will not serve.” Imitation must be “heightened with all the arts and
ornaments of poesy”. If, in such statements, Dryden appears to anticipate certain Romantic predispositions, these comments are
counterbalanced by other positions which are deeply entrenched in a classical heritage.
But John Dryden still gave an essentially Horatian/Donatian definition of tragedy, as ‘a just and lively image of human nature, representing its
passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject; for the delight and instruction of mankind’. Dryden grudgingly
admitted that, he was more instructive in moral philosophy and stuck more closely to the teachings of Stoicism, ‘the most noble, most
generous, most beneficial to human kind, amongst all the sects, who have given us rules of ethics’. In the “Defence” Dryden insists that “they
cannot be good poets, who are not accustomed to argue well . . . for moral truth is the mistress of the poet as much as of the philosopher;
Poesy must resemble natural truth, but it must be ethical. Indeed, the poet dresses truth, and adorns nature, but does not alter them”. Hence,
notwithstanding the importance that he attaches to wit and imagination, Dryden still regards poetry as essentially a rational activity, with an
ethical and epistemological responsibility. If the poet rises above nature and truth, this is merely by way of ornamentation; it does not displace
or remold the truths of nature, but merely heightens them. Dryden states that imagination “is supposed to participate of Reason,” and that
when imagination creates fictions, reason allows itself to be temporarily deceived but will never be persuaded “of those things which are most
remote from probability . . . Fancy and Reason go hand in hand; the first cannot leave the last behind”. These formulations differ from
subsequent Romantic views of the primacy of imagination over reason. Following inmitations in Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Poetics, he
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suggests in his “Parallel of Poetry and Painting” (1695) that what the poet (and painter) should imitate are not individual instances of nature
but the archetypal ideas behind natural forms.
4.3.2. John Dennis (1657-1734)
Dennis was a poet and dramatist, but is best known for his criticism, which combines a respect for neo-classical theory with a passion for the
sublime, and with a dislike for the new sentimental comedy. He declared that the 'Rules of Aristotle' were 'nothing but Nature and Good Sense
reduced to a Method'. His critical works include The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry ( 1701 ), The Grounds of Criticism in
Poetry (1704), and An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare (1712) . Most studies in the eighteenth century devoted attention to
John Dennis, particularly to his analysis of the sublime. Put some aspects Dennis’s doctrine conflicts with each other. It is necessary to
rehearse Dennis’s many statements on the need for rule and order in poetry on the ground that art is an analogue of the creation and therefore
reflects the rationality and regularity of the universe
The great design of art is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by restoring order: the design of logic is to bring back order and
rule, and method to our conception. The design of moral philosophy is to cure the disordered that is found in our passion, from which process
all our unhappiness and all our vice: as from the due order that is seen in them, comes all our virtue and all our pleasure.
It is with this conception of order and harmony as a rational principle, and of a reason as a supreme faculty, that this theory of poetic passion
and of the sublime seems to conflict. Dennis viewed poetry as is based on emotion. To insist, as Dennis does, that poetry appeals to emotion is
not as such incompatible with his belief in orderly design. Horace; as well as Dryden, Pope and Johnson; agreed that poetry must move or at
least engage readers interest. Dryden reminding his contemporaries noted that enthusiasm was a prime requisite in the poet. Dennis assumed
the need for poetic fire (emotion or enthusiasm). He distinguished between mere enthusiasm, he says madness, and rightly regulated
enthusiasm or the enthusiasm of the sprit, which is essential to some kind of poetry; the greater kind he says “a just mixture of reason and
extravagance, that is such mixture as reason may always be sure to predominate, and make its mortal enemy (passion) subservient to its grand
design of discovering and illustrating sacred truth”. He regards reason as the controlling principle responsible for conformity to truth. He
corresponds genius with passion. Genius, he explained, is not something supernatural, but a very common passion, or complication of
common passion. Its effect on us is not only a transport of joy, but exaltation of mind.
It is necessary to see the relative parts he ascribes to passion and reason. He explained passions are necessary to the good life, and that it is
reason that both arouses them for a fit object and restrains them with in sustainable limits. He calls, the useful reason, is given different role; it
is impediment to our happiness on earth, it affects as “by setting our impotence or our guilty before us”. Nothing brings man out of this
languishing state, he says “but passion alone, which reason pretends to combat”. This leads to him define “the Height and fullness of pleasure
which we are promised in another life (heaven)” as proceeding from passion, not from reason. Dennis said “poem by the force of passion
instructs and reforms the reason”. Yet if reason is rule and order how does passion perform reason? Dennis himself seems to be puzzled by
this conception.
That passion, which disturbs the soul, should occur on it to produce harmony, which seems to imply the order
and composure of it. Whether this process from the secret Effort that the soul makes to compose itself, or
whether the cause is, the effect is certain. But as passion, which is the disorder of the soul, produce harmony;
so harmony which is concord, arguments and propagates passion, which is discord (Simon,1978).
Dennis had asserted that passion is the chief thing in poetry and therefore must be everything in poetry, but he had added that poetical
enthusiasm is a passion guided by judgment. He could, therefore, say that in an accomplished poem reason will be pleased as well as the
passion and sense. The reason is equated with judgment. But it is still difficult to reconcile his views of passion and reason. Yet in his book,
The Advancement, it is precisely the contemplation of order, in an art as in a universe that gratifies reason, that he argues the need for
regularity in art. Hence, Dennis’s view of reason lay down rules for the reformation of poetry. He reiterates the conception of art as analogue
to nature, governed by law or reason. Yet, here, he proceeds to define poetry “an art by which the poet excites the passion in order to satisfy,
delight and reform the minds and so to make mankind happier.” So Dennis’s argument tends to be obscure.
Chapter Five
Romantic Age
Socio
Economic
Background
of
Romanticism
The period of European history from 1760 to 1860 was dominated by two broad series of events, the French Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution, which oversaw the emergence and growth of Romanticism. Both of these phenomena contributed decisively to the most profound
structural change of this era, the transformation of Europe from a feudal to a bourgeois society (Habib, 2005). Romanticism was a broad
intellectual and artistic disposition that arose toward the end of the eighteenth century and reached its zenith during the early decades of the
nineteenth century. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against
the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on
historiography, education and natural history. From the perspective of its social and political dimensions, romantic literature and the critical
tradition that justified and explained it arose out of economic, social and intellectual changes that had been developing slowly from the time of
the Renaissance and the age of exploration, but became fully apparent to large segments of Europe’s population only through the upheavals of
the Enlightenment, industrial development, and the American and French revolutions. Most leading romantics, while welcoming some
political changes (such as the emergence of a free press and the expansion of the franchise to a larger share of the population), regretted the
1loss
7 of such positive ideals as the
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personal honor and of individual responsibility for those at other levels in the society—ideals that
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Thus, many of the Romantics, including Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, John, Keat and Byron, reacted against certain central features of the
new bourgeois social and economic order . Romanticism in any of its expressions as a straight forward reaction against the prevalent
bourgeois way of life. Romanticism – as a broad response to Enlightenment, neoclassical, and French revolutionary ideals – initially took
root. Moreover, the Romantics shared Enlightenment notions of the infinite possibility of human achievement, and of a more optimistic
conception of human nature as intrinsically good rather than as fallen and theologically depraved.
Tenets of Romanticism
Romanticism [as explained in Habib (2005)] cannot be identified with a single style, technique, or attitude, but romantic painting is generally
characterized by a highly imaginative and subjective approach, emotional intensity, and a dreamlike or visionary quality. Whereas classical
and neoclassical art is calm and restrained in feeling and clear and complete in expression, romantic art characteristically strives to express by
suggestion states of feeling too intense, mystical, or elusive to be clearly defined. The ideals of Romanticism included an intense focus on
human subjectivity and its expression, an exaltation of nature, which was seen as a vast repository of symbols, of childhood and spontaneity,
of primitive forms of society, of human passion and emotion, of the poet, of the sublime, and of imagination as a more comprehensive and
inclusive faculty than reason. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis
on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror (http://en.Wikipedia.org /wiki/romanticism). Thus, the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann
declared “infinite longing” to be the essence of romanticism. In their choice of subject matter, the romantics showed an affinity for nature,
especially its wild and mysterious aspects, and for exotic, melancholic, and melodramatic subjects likely to evoke awe or passion. Appalled
by the squalor and the mechanized, competitive routine of the cities, as well as by the moral mediocrity of a bourgeois world given over to
what Shelley called the principles of “utility” and “calculation,” they turned for spiritual relief to mysticism, to nature, to Rousseauistic
dreams of a simple, primitive, and uncorrupted lifestyle, which they sometimes located in an idealized period of history such as the Middle
Ages.
The early British practitioners of Romanticism included Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, and Robert Burns. The English movement reached
its most mature expression in the work of William Wordsworth, who saw nature as embodying a universal spirit, and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge who, drawing on the work of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, gave archetypal formulation to the powers of the poetic imagination. Like
their European counterparts, the English Romantics reacted at first favorably to the French Revolution and saw their own cultural and literary
program as revolutionary. In general, the Romantics exalted the status of the poet, as a genius whose originality was based on his ability to
discern connections among apparently discrepant phenomena and to elevate human perception toward a comprehensive, unifying vision.
Romantic poets and writers—among whom were also the first romantic critics—point to strategies for recovering, in a more egalitarian
society, the sense of community and personal worth that, they believed, was being eroded by a utilitarian spirit of calculation that tended to
dehumanize people into ‘hands’ of production and units of consumption. Thus romantic artists and critics appeared first in Germany, Great
Britain and France, where the modern commercial-industrial bourgeoisie first asserted dominance.
A pastoral-agrarian and, hence, reactionary and anti-rationalist bias is clearly articulated in the critical statements of the early romantics .
Wordsworth, in his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), writes that ‘a multitude of causes unknown to former times are
now acting…to dull the discriminating powers of the mind, and… to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor’, and that one of the chief
causes of this degeneration is ‘the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for
extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies’. Turning his back on these conditions of commercial
and industrial development, Wordsworth proposes to trace in the incidents of common life…the primary laws of our nature’; he, therefore,
chose: “low and country life…because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can obtain their
maturity…because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately
contemplated and more forcefully communicated.” (in Habib,2005).
Like Wordsworth, Emerson advocates the life of the country, a withdrawal from “the roar of cities or the broil of politics,” in order to
facilitate such a rejuvenation of language. Emerson goes on to explain that the “world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because
the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (in Habib, 2005). Nature makes man conscious of “a universal soul within or behind his
individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. Nature, according to Emerson, also
provides a “discipline” to our understanding, offering an immense variety of material which can educate our understanding and reason (in
Habib, 2005). Moreover, nature disposes us toward “idealism,” toward overcoming our immersion in material things.
Still earlier, Schiller had enunciated this romantic emphasis on the childlike and the primitive in psychological terms .This feeling is moral,
not aesthetic, says Schiller, because it is mediated by an idea: ‘We love in them the tacitly creative life, the serene spontaneity of their activity,
existence in accordance with their own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with themselves. They are what we were; they are what we
should once again become’ (trans, 1966, p. 85). And he goes on, later in the essay, to articulate a truth implicit in most other romantic
criticism: “The feeling by which we are attached to nature is…closely related to the feeling with which we mourn the lost age of childhood
and childish innocence. Our childhood is the only undisfigured nature that we still encounter in civilized mankind, hence it is no wonder if
every trace of the nature outside us leads us back to our childhood.”
Basic to romantic literary theory are two related ideas: first, the poetic faculty is linked with the universal imaginative process central to all
human endeavours (including religious expression, the law, and other aspects of social ideology); this makes it possible for poets to arouse in
all human beings responses kindred to the poets’ longings and ideals. Second, because the poetic imagination is so central to human nature,
the joy and hopefulness of a lost childhood could be recovered through the poetic faculty, and from this renewed feeling of security
(reproducing the child’s early sense of security when cared for by a loving family). By pointing out the links of poetic powers with the
primary imaginative faculty that evokes religious feelings and societal bonding, the romantics hoped to resist the inroads of mechanistic
psychologies drawn from the physical sciences. By emphasizing the inner and primary nature of the related roots of poetry and religion, they
tried to discourage the elevation of sensory factual data and rational analysis at the expense of human feelings and creative impulses.
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Generally speaking, as noted by Abrams (1999), romantic fiction is often opposed to Realistic fiction. The romance is said to present life as
we would have it be—more picturesque, fantastic, adventurous, or heroic than actuality; realism, on the other hand, is said to represent life as
it really is. It was, in fact, only with what we now call the 'Romantic period' that our own definitions of literature began to develop. By the
time of Romantic period literature was virtually synonymous with ‘imaginative: to write not.
Imagination
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the
supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the
approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many
functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute
reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling
(Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty,
enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the
Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables
us to "read" nature as a system of symbols. By the faculty of imagination, the poet is made to create a new world of his own,—a world in
which his genius is free to mould whatever its imagination takes hold of. This romantic doctrine of the freedom of genius, of inspiration and
the power of imagination owes its origin to Platonism.
Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and
Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was
applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the
tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was
reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world
within.
Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals through systematic contrast with the norms of "Versailles neoclassicism." In their
critical manifestoes--the 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, the critical studies of the Schlegel brothers in Germany, the later statements of
Victor Hugo in France, and of Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman in the United States--they self-consciously asserted their differences from the
previous age (the literary "ancient regime"), and declared their freedom from the mechanical "rules." Certain special features of Romanticism
may still be highlighted by this contrast. We have already noted two major differences: the replacement of reason by the imagination for
primary place among the human faculties and the shift from a mimetic to an expressive orientation for poetry, and indeed all literature. In
addition, neoclassicism had prescribed for art the idea that the general or universal characteristics of human behavior were more suitable
subject matter than the peculiarly individual manifestations of human activity.
Important Figures of Romantic Literary Criticism

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
Wordsworth describes, in the Prelude, described
the general manifesto of his romantic literary view.
Wordsworth’s devotion to nature was
lifelong; from first to last, he viewed himself as a follower of nature. Nature is regarded by Wordsworth as a fundamental unity, and here a
human community resting on equality is held to be an integral part of that unity. The most elemental factor in Wordsworth’s return to nature
was imagination. Earlier in the Prelude, he had referred to imagination as an “awful Power” that reveals with a flash the “invisible world” (VI,
594–602). In the conclusion of the poem, he says that imagination is “but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of
mind. This faculty has been his “feeding source,” and it is a power which enables one to engage in “spiritual Love,” whereby one can
transcend the dictates of custom, the pressures of conventional opinion, and the narrowness of concerns that are confined to the present. The
idea here seems to be that imagination is an intermediary power that stands above both reason and sense even as it connects them.
Imagination, in its capacity as “right reason,” orients our sensibility to the things that are truly universal and permanent; by implication, a
“wrong” use of reason, abstracted entirely from things of the sense, would either impel us to impose false schemes upon the world of sense, or
to be at the mercy of the world of sense, taking this alone as reality, and understanding its own function as ordering this reality which is
already given, already presented to our senses. Wordsworth defines poetry as, ‘is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its
origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
In contrast, imagination frees us from what Wordsworth calls this “tyranny” of sense, bringing us to the realization that we are creative in our
interaction with nature. The poet above all, having the gift of imagination, apprehends a “mighty scheme of truth,” and, exercising his mind
upon “the vulgar form of present things” and the appearances of the everyday world, discerns “a new world” that is founded on permanent and
universal principles. Hence, imagination is a power that does not simply, like abstract reason, leave behind the world of sense altogether and
impose its abstract ideals; rather, it has its foundation in the world of sense but transcends that world in its ability to discern what is truly
enduring and universal in it; imagination is a comprehensive and unifying power, allowing the poet to connect sympathetically with all of
nature and human nature; it lifts us beyond the world we see through our eyes to an invisible world that acts as an ideal. Imagination has not
only an important perceptual function, showing that human perception is creative, but also a vital moral function, guiding us to the realization
of truths that are beyond mere sensation and that are not located in the world as it is given.
Some of Wordsworth’s early republican sentiments, however, appear to inform his most important contribution to literary criticism, the
celebrated and controversial Preface to Lyrical Ballads. This collection of poems was published jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge in
1798. Wordsworth’s primary concern is with the language of poetry. He states that the poems in this volume are “experiments,” written
1 9 to discover “how far the
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of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society isWOLKITE
adapted to the purposes of poetic
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pleasure” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 116). What Wordsworth is calling for, then, is a return to a kind of realism, a descent of poetic language
from its stylized status, from its self-created world of metaphorical expression and artificial diction, to the language actually used by human
beings in “common life.” These expressions – “real language,” “common life”– are of course highly problematic. Wordsworth’s suggestion
that rural people speak a more “philosophical” language ,the formation of a philosophical language among humankind, a language that would
be universal and accurate in its expression of human conceptions and emotions. Wordsworth’s underlying aim is that the poet return to the
expression of permanent and fundamental human emotions, which are fostered by perpetual communion with nature. He regards both the
human mind and nature as possessed of “inherent and indestructible qualities” which have been clouded over and corrupted by recent
historical transformations:
A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the
discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost
savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and
the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for
extraordinary incident.(cited in Habib,2005)
Wordsworth is now addressing actual effects of industrialization and French Revolution: the chief of these is the artificial stimulation of
people’s passions, the blunting of their imaginations, and the degradation of their moral sensibilities. Yet, this imperative for the poet to return
to a purer language is a language that can express not only purer human emotions but also the often forgotten and blurred connection between
humanity and nature. So the poet does not, after all, present ordinary things in an ordinary way: he selects ordinary things but makes them
appear extraordinary, through the transforming power of imagination.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
The genius of Samuel Taylor Coleridge extended over many domains. In poetry he is best known for compositions such as “The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Christabel,” and “Kubla Khan,” as well as Lyrical Ballads (1798), which he co-authored with
Wordsworth. The Biographia is an eclectic work, combining intellectual autobiography, philosophy, and literary theory; some critics have
praised the insight and originality of this work, viewing Coleridge as the first English critic to build literary criticism on a philosophical
foundation, which he derived from German idealist thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, and German Romantics such as Schiller, the Schlegels,
and Schelling.
At the heart of Coleridge’s conservatism was his insistence, similar to Burke’s, that truth cannot be reached by focusing on the present alone.
Rather, both men appealed to what they called universal principles that would comprehend past, present, and future. Both men reacted against
the prevailing philosophies of the Enlightenment, and especially against what they saw as the principle of “abstract reason”. He accused
modern thinkers of seducing understanding from its “natural allegiance”. Coleridge effectively charged modern bourgeois thought with
reducing reason to understanding. The understanding, according to Coleridge, “concerns itself exclusively with the quantities, qualities, and
relations of particulars in time and space” (Lay Sermons, 59). The understanding, then, gives us a piecemeal knowledge of what Kant called
the “phenomenal” world, the world of our sense-experience in space and time. Reason, says Coleridge, “is the knowledge of the laws of the
Whole considered as One.” It is “the science of the universal ” (Coleridge, 59). So, as with Kant, reason is a faculty which stands above the
understanding, organizing the knowledge derived from the latter into a more comprehensive unity. If the understanding is employed in
isolation from reason, says Coleridge, it can be directed only to the material world and our worldly interests; he insists that the understanding
is merely “the means not the end of knowledge” (Lay Sermons, 68–69).
This contrast and connection between reason and understanding furnishes the broader context for Coleridge’s view of the imagination. He
sees understanding as a limited power, the corrective and contextualizing relation of reason to understanding as mediated by the imagination:
“The completing power which unites clearness with depth, the plenitude of the sense with the comprehensibility of the understanding, is the
IMAGINATION, impregnated with which the understanding itself becomes intuitive, and a living power” (Lay Sermons, 69). So Coleridge
seems to follow Kant in viewing the imagination as a faculty which unites what we receive through our senses with the concepts of our
understanding; but he goes further than Kant in viewing imagination as a power which “completes” and enlivens the understanding so that the
understanding itself becomes a more comprehensive and intuitive (rather than merely discursive) faculty. The Romantics, including
Coleridge, are often characterized as extolling imagination as the supreme human faculty. Nonetheless, Coleridge appears to view reason as
the supreme faculty, one which contains all the others: imagination combines sense with understanding, so reason, placed at a higher vantage
point, unites the knowledge derived from all three of these. And while Coleridge insists that each individual must bear witness to the light of
reason in his own mind, this reason is not strictly a faculty or personal property of any individual; rather, the individual partakes of the light of
a reason which is universal and divine. Coleridge is now very far from Kant, who had indeed viewed reason as a higher, regulative faculty but
one which was human, not divine. What, here, Coleridge does in attempting to rescue reason from its modern reduction to mere fragmentary
understanding is to redefine it. What the Enlightenment philosophers called “reason” was essentially an individualistic reason based on direct
but piecemeal observation and experience (Habib,2005).
In a sense, then, Coleridge is returning to an earlier and broader notion of reason, one that he elaborates, however, in post-Kantian terms.
What he does, in a bold and drastic gesture, is to equate reason with religion. Coleridge sees reason defined in this broader sense as a means
of counteracting the tendency of Enlightenment philosophy to reduce reason to a merely human faculty and one which operates independently
of faith. Hence, if modern thought has reduced all knowledge to the piecemeal knowledge of the understanding, religion does not dismiss such
knowledge but situates this within a unifying context, one which delves beneath the particularity of things to their true reality as contained in
their universal characteristics and the pattern of their connections with other entities.
Moreover, Coleridge notes that all knowledge “rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject” (Biographia1983 cited in Habib,2005).
For knowledge to arise, then, the dualism of subjective and objective, inherent in modern philosophy since Descartes, must be overcome.
Coleridge thinks that we can arrive at this reconciliation whether we start from the subjective or objective pole. If we begin with the objective,
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or nature, our initial perspective is that of the natural philosopher: the more we examine the world of nature, the more we realize that its
essence subsists not in material objects but in the laws that govern those objects and their connections, the very laws that subsist in man as
intelligence and self-consciousness. We realize, in other words, the essential identity of nature as object and ourselves as subjects
(Biographia, I, 255–256). If, on the other hand, we start out from the subjective side, our initial position will be that of a transcendental
philosopher: like Kant, Coleridge sees transcendental philosophy as assuming that there is a reality beyond our senses, but it is nonetheless
ultimately grounded in our senses: it cannot simply construct schemes of its own that bear no relation to our actual experience (the latter kind
of philosophy would be “transcendent” (Biographia, I, 237). Transcendental philosophy, then, would start out from the fundamental fact of
subjectivity, the “I AM” or immediate self consciousness, which Coleridge sees as “the ground of all other certainty.” In proceeding to
examine nature, we would find that this is identical with our self-consciousness (Biographia, I, 260). In other words, all the “external” objects
that we view are in fact modifications of this self-consciousness or “I AM” which is the fundamental principle of all philosophy.
Coleridge’s views on the nature of poetry and poetic language are intrinsically tied to his broader vision as outlined above and, in particular,
to his views of poetic imagination. While he shares some components of this broader vision with Wordsworth, the most basic point on which
he differs from Wordsworth is in his insistence that the language of poetry is essentially different from that of prose. Coleridge, like the New
Critics of the early twentieth century, saw poetry as essentially untranslatable into prose. Coleridge acknowledges that poetry is formed from
the same elements as prose; the difference lies in the different combination of these elements and the difference of purpose (Biographia, II,
11). Whereas science, history, and other disciplines have the communication of truth as their immediate purpose, this conveyance of truth is
for poetry an ultimate purpose. Poetry is distinguished from these other realms “by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; it is
also distinguished by its insistence on organic unity, such that the pleasure yielded by any component part of the poem is consonant with the
pleasure afforded by any other part and by the poem as a whole” (Biographia, II, 12– 13). Coleridge later gives something like a definition of
organic unity: “all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts” (Biographia, II, 72).
Wordsworth, too, had seen the immediate purpose of poetry as producing pleasure. Coleridge’s explanation of this, however, is different: the
ultimate aim of poetry is indeed the expression of truth, but pleasure is derived not merely from our view of this final goal but “by the
attractions of the journey itself” (Biographia, II, 14). This view anticipates many modern conceptions of poetry and poetic autonomy: the
primary purpose of poetry is not referential, but rather to draw attention to itself as a linguistic and material construct, to the journey or means
whereby truth is achieved.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Shelley’s Defence of Poetry is a powerful and beautifully expressed manifesto of fundamental Romantic principles, detailing the supremacy
of imagination over reason, and the exalted status of poetry. Shelley stands against the squalor and the mechanized, competitive routine of the
cities, as well as principles of “utility” and “calculation,”, the moral mediocrity of a bourgeois world, and agitate the society to turn for
spiritual relief to mysticism, to nature, to Rousseauistic dreams of a simple, primitive, and uncorrupted lifestyle, which they sometimes
located in an idealized period of history such as the Middle Ages. Shelley even saw imagination as having a moral function, as a power
enabling the self to situate itself within a larger empathetic scheme, as opposed to reason, which expressed the selfish constraints of the liberal
atomistic self. Hence, Shelley, who had read and been influenced by several earlier romantic milestones, defines ‘Poetry, in a general sense’,
as ‘the expression of the Imagination’, which makes poetry in this broad sense ‘connate with the origin of man’. Consequently, the relation
between Romanticism and the mainstreams of bourgeois thought, which had risen to hegemony on the waves of the Enlightenment, the
French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, was deeply ambivalent (Habib,2005).
For Shelley, ‘poetry’ is the radically creative energy in all of writing and culture, most apparent as itself in language, but not restricted to it. Its
creativity depends upon its being free both from purposive moral or empirical intent as well as beyond the control of the conscious will of the
poet. The poetic principle operates through the proliferation of pleasure and delight; it makes us transcend the ‘dull vapors of the little world
of self’ and also the limitations of doctrine and political difference. Poetry is to language and culture what love is in interpersonal relations;
both depend upon the synthesizing energies of metaphor, bringing contraries together and ‘turning all things to loveliness’ (p. 505). For
Shelley, the power of this poetry can be traced throughout human history, subject to temporary eclipse but never completely destroyed (Brown
, 2007).
The other great poet-revolutionary of the time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, seems much closer to the grandly serious spirit of the other romantics.
His most thoughtful poetry expresses his two main ideas, that the external tyranny of rulers, customs, or superstitions is the main enemy, and
that inherent human goodness will, sooner or later, eliminate evil from the world and usher in an eternal reign of transcendent love. It is,
perhaps, in Prometheus Unbound (1820) that these ideas are most completely expressed, although Shelley's more obvious poetic qualities—
the natural correspondence of metrical structure to mood, the power of shaping effective abstractions, and his ethereal idealism—can be
studied in a whole range of poems, from “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark” to the elegy “Adonais,” written for John Keats, the
youngest of the great romantics.

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Chapter Six
Theories of Literature and Criticism in the 20th Century
6.1. The early decades of Modern Movement - Henry James and T. S. Eliot
Henry James and T.S Eliot are among the earliest prominent scholars who influence the efflorescence of different contemporary literary
theories. Henry James (1843–1916) who had inspired realism experienced international scope. He was influenced by the European as well as
American Romantics, and was acquainted with the so-called realist and naturalist writers such as William Dean Howells, Gustave Flaubert,
and Émile Zola. It is in his essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884) that James most succinctly expressed his critical principles as well as a
justification of his novelistic endeavor. The motivation of his essay is twofold. Firstly, he is combating what he takes to be a general
reluctance to view the novel as a genuine art form. James is concerned to establish the novel as a serious art form rather than as merely an
amusing or escapist pastime. Secondly, James argued that the purpose of art is artistic: it must aim at perfection. He argues against Besant’s
claim that the novel must have a “conscious moral purpose”; the novel, says James, should be free of moral and other obligations. His
reasoning is apparently simple: “questions of art are questions . . . of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair.” Hence, for
James, novelistic freedom entails also liberation from moral and educational requirements and constraint (Habib, 2005).
While James’ central thesis is that the novel must be free, its freedom is first worked out in relation to the kind of novelistic realism on which
James insists: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life . . . as the picture is reality, so the novel is
history” (166–167). In attempting to represent life, the novelist’s task is analogous with that of the painter; and in searching for truth, the
novelistic art is analogous with philosophy as well as history. Form is not achieved in any a priori fashion; it is something that undergoes
continual modification through experience of reality. The novel must also be free in its choice of theme and subject matter: the province of art,
says James, is all life, not only those elements which are beautiful or noble. In all art, says James, one becomes “. . . the province of art is all
life, all feeling, all observation, all vision . . . it is all experience.” As such, nothing can be forbidden for the novelist, nothing can be out of
bounds. James suggests that the foremost capacity of the novelist must be that of “receiving straight impressions” (178). Fiction must catch
“the strange irregular rhythm of life . . . without rearrangement” so that “we feel that we are touching the truth” (177). The implication here
seems to be that the novelist accurately records “straight” impressions, without somehow distorting them.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was central to many of the tendencies toward twentieth century literary criticism, and his early essay ‘Tradition and
the Individual Talent’ (1919) has been perhaps the single most influential work in Anglo-American criticism. In it, Eliot does two things in
particular: he emphasizes that writers must have ‘the historical sense’ – that is, a sense of the tradition of writing in which they must situate
themselves; and that this process reinforces the necessary ‘depersonalization’ of the artist if his or her art is to attain the ‘impersonality’ it
must have if it is ‘to approach the condition of science’. Famously, he wrote: ‘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’, while characteristically adding that, ‘of course, only those
who have personality or emotions know what it means to want to escape from those things’. In another famous phrase from his essay on
‘Hamlet’ (1919), Eliot describes the work of art as an ‘objective correlative’ for the experience which may have engendered it: an impersonal
re-creation which is the autonomous object of attention. What emerges from all this in the context of the diverse developments of New
Criticism is the (seemingly) anti-romantic thrust of Eliot’s thinking (a new ‘classicism’); the emphasis on ‘science’, ‘objectivity’,
‘impersonality’, and the ‘medium’ as the focal object of analysis.
Of all the Western modernists, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) has been the most pervasively influential through both his poetry and his literary
criticism. He was initially influenced by the American New Humanists such as Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer, and his early ideas owed a
great deal to their emphasis on tradition, classicism, and impersonality. Eliot was also indebted to later nineteenth-century French poets and
particularly to Ezra Pound and the imagist movement.
3. Psychoanalytical Literary Criticism
Psychoanalytic Criticism appeared in the early 20th century after the development of psychoanalytical theory by Sigmund Freud.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is a way of analyzing and interpreting literary works that relies on psychoanalytic theory. It is an extrinsic
approach which consists in the application of some psychological values to the study of literature. Psychoanalytic criticism focuses on the
writer's psyche and the study of mental processes of creation, psychological types and principles within works of literature, or the effects of
literature upon its readers. When we look at the world through a psychoanalytic lens, we see that it is comprised of individual human beings,
each with a psychological history that begins in childhood experiences in the family and each with patterns of adolescent and adult behavior
that are the direct result of that early experience.
1. Freud’s Psychoanalytical Literary Theory
The psychological theory of Freud centers on expressing the nature of mind, especially, the unconscious psyche is pivotal on his analysis.
Freud, then, divided the mind into three-parts: the ego, the super-ego, and the id, these three 'levels' of the personality roughly corresponding
to, respectively, the consciousness, the conscience, and the unconscious.
The ego or "I," was his term for the predominantly rational, logical, orderly, conscious part. Another aspect of the psyche, which he called the
superego, is really a projection of the ego. The superego almost seems to be outside of the self, making moral judgments, telling us to make
sacrifices for good causes even though self-sacrifice may not be quite logical or rational. And, in a sense, the superego is "outside," since
much of what it tells us to do or think we have learned from our parents, our schools, or our religious institutions.
He called the predominantly passional, irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche the id, or "it." As M.A.R Habib (2005) states
much of our thoughts and actions are not freely determined by us but driven by unconscious forces. Moreover, far from being based on
reason, our thinking is intimately dependent upon instincts. What the ego and superego tell us not to do or think is repressed, forced into the
unconscious mind but not obliterated. The id is devoted solely to the fulfillment of prohibited desires of all kinds—desire for power, for sex,

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for amusement, for food—without an eye to consequences. In other words, the id consists largely of those desires regulated or forbidden by
social convention. Thus one of Freud's most important contributions to the study of the psyche, the theory of repression, goes something like
this: much of what lies in the unconscious mind has been put there by consciousness, which acts as a censor, driving underground unconscious
or conscious thoughts or instincts that it thinks unacceptable. Repressed to an unconscious state, they emerge only in disguised forms: in
dreams, in language (so-called Freudian slips), in creative activity that may produce art (slip of the pen), and in neurotic behavior. The
statement of Tyson summarizes the whole working of Freud’s unconscious mind.
The unconscious is the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions, those wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved
conflicts we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them. The unconscious comes into being when
we are very young through the repression, the expunging from consciousness, of these unhappy psychological events. However,
repression doesn’t eliminate our painful experiences and emotions. Rather, it gives them force by making them the organizers of our
current experience: we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to “play out,” without admitting it to ourselves, our
conflicted feelings about the painful experiences and emotions we repress (2006:12).
Thus, for psychoanalysis, the unconscious isn’t a passive reservoir of neutral data, though the word is sometimes used this way in other
disciplines ; rather, the unconscious is a dynamic entity that engages us at the deepest level of our being. In other words, we all go through
these experiences, and they are a natural and healthy part of maturing and establishing our own identities.
According to Freud, all of us have repressed wishes and fears; we all have dreams in which repressed feelings and memories emerge
disguised, and thus we are all potential candidates for dream analysis. One of the unconscious desires most commonly repressed is libido
(sexual) energy. Through all stages of childhood development--oral [when desires for nourishment and infantile sexual desires overlap], anal
[when infants receive their primary pleasure from evacuation], urethral [when urinary functions are the locus of sexual pleasure], phallic
[when the penis or, in girls, some penis substitute is of primary interest], and oedipal (where Oedipus complex created) children experience
sexual desire. In this development the first love object for both sexes is the mother, who is not yet perceived as distinct from the child’s own
body. At later stages ,however, sexual development undergoes the Oedipus complex. The child wishes to displace the parent of our own sex
and take his or her place in the affections of the parent of the opposite sex. This desire really involves a number of different but related wishes
and fears the boy focuses his sexual wishes upon his mother and develops hostile impulses toward his father. Contrary, the girl desires to
eliminate the mother and become the sexual partner of the father. But, the reality principle keeps individuals from enforcing their sexual
instincts and the children learns to direct sexual libido away from the ego (repressed).Thus upon realizing the cultural context, the boy
develops castration anxiety--may fear that his father will castrate him and the girl penis envy. In the psychoanalyst’s mind everyone’s actions
are governed by sexual/pleasure seeking motives (Tyson, 2006).
Tyson (2006) continues that a common way in which men replay unresolved oedipal attachments involves what is often called the good-
girl/bad-girl” attitude toward women. If I remain in competition (usually unconscious) with my father for my mother’s love, I am very liable
to deal with my guilt by categorizing women as either “like Mom” (“good girls”) or “not like Mom” (“bad girls”) and then by being able to
enjoy sex only with women who are “not like Mom.” In other words, because I unconsciously associate sexual desire with desire for my
mother, sexual desire makes me feel guilty and dirty, and for this reason I can enjoy it only with “bad girls,” who are themselves guilty and
dirty and whom I don’t associate with Mom. However, why are our wishes and fears repressed by the conscious side of the mind? As Roy P.
Basler puts it in Sex, Symbolism, and Psychology in Literature (1975), "from the beginning of recorded history such wishes have been
restrained by the most powerful religious and social taboos, and as a result have come to be regarded as 'unnatural,'" even though "Freud
found that such wishes are more or less characteristic of normal human development":
6.3.1.1. Defense Mechanisms
Defenses are the processes by which the contents of our unconscious are kept in the unconscious. In other words, they are the processes by
which we keep the repressed repressed in order to avoid knowing what we feel we can’t handle knowing. Defenses include selective
perception (hearing and seeing only what we feel we can handle), selective memory (modifying our memories so that we don’t feel
overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely), denial (believing that the problem doesn’t exist or the unpleasant incident never
happened),avoidance (staying away from people or situations that are liable to make us anxious by stirring up some unconscious—i.e.,
repressed experience or emotion),displacement (“taking it out” on someone or something less threatening than the person who caused our
fear, hurt, frustration, or anger), and projection (ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else and then condemning him for it,
in order to deny that we have it ourselves). Under ordinary circumstances, so, our defenses keep us unaware of our unconscious experience,
and our anxiety (Tyson, 2006).
Of course, sometimes our defenses momentarily break down, and this is when we experience anxiety. Anxiety can be an important experience
because it can reveal our core issues. For example, I become anxious when one of my friends goes to the movies with another friend because
it makes me recall the abandonment I felt from a neglectful parent whether or not I see the connection between the two events. That is, I feel
abandoned now because I was wounded by feeling abandoned as a child.
Another occasion, our defense malfunction is at the time of sleep. During sleep, the unconscious is free to express itself, and it does so in our
dreams. However, even in our dreams there is some censorship, some protection against frightening insights into our repressed experiences
and emotions, and that protection takes the form of dream distortion. The “message” our unconscious expresses in our dreams, which is the
dream’s underlying meaning, or latent content, is altered so that we don’t readily recognize it through processes called displacement and
condensation. Dream displacement occurs whenever we use a “safe” person, event, or object as a “stand in” to represent a more threatening
person, event, or object. For example, when someone dreams that an elementary school teacher is sexually molesting him in order to express
his unconscious knowledge that one of his parents sexually molested him. Condensation occurs during a dream whenever we use a single
dream image or event to represent more than one unconscious wound or conflict. For example, my dream that I’m battling a ferocious lion
might represent psychological “battles” or conflicts both at home and at work. In some cultures if one dream he is trapped or lost in a small,
dark room, he might be expressing an unconscious fear of his mother’s control over him. In this way, anxiety always involves the return of the

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repressed: the dreamer is anxious because something repressed, the painful, is resurfacing, and he want to keep it repressed. A single dream
event may thus be a product of both displacement and condensation. What we actually dream, disguised by our primary revision and presents
the actual message in the form of symbolic ,or the dream’s latent content, is the dream’s manifest content.
Regardless of how frightening or disturbing our dreams are, they are relatively safe outlets for unconscious wounds, fears, guilty desires, and
unresolved conflicts because, as we have seen, they come to us in disguised form, and we will interpret them only to whatever extent we are
ready to do so. In addition, if a dream becomes too threatening, we will wake up, as we most often do during nightmares. However, if
nightmares begin to occur while we are awake—that is,if the breakdown of my defenses is more than temporary, if anxiety cannot be stopped,
if the truth hidden by repression comes out before conscious self ,then the person is in crisis, or suffered from disorder called trauma.
2. How Can Freudian Psychoanalytical Theory be Applied to Literature?
Among psychoanalytic literary critics, there is much disagreement concerning how psychoanalytic concepts can best be applied to our study
of literature. But even we can’t get every psychoanalytic concept in every literary work, any literary work can be analyzed from perspective of
some psychological point of view.
Trauma (failure of defense) is recurrent Psychological manifestation in novels. For example, A psychoanalytic reading of Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman(1949) might examine the ways in which Willy Loman’s flashbacks to the past are really deteriorating episodes brought
on by his present psychological trauma: his own and his son’s lack of success in the business world. Willy needed success in order to alleviate
the massive insecurity he is suffered since his abandonment in childhood by his father and older brother. The play is thus structured by the
return of the repressed, for Willy, through his psychological insecurity the social inadequacy and business failure that have resulted. Another
concept of psychology to be interpreted in literature is fear of intimacy; the unconscious conviction that emotional ties to another human being
will result in one’s being emotionally devastated. This psychological problem is so prevalent in the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott
Fitzgerald. The novel is famous love story that the characters’ fear close relation with others in order to hide their repressed desire.
Furthermore most literary works dominated by revealing our core issues. So texts can be analyzed in reference to multifarious core issues of
human being .Fear of betrayal—the nagging feeling that our friends and loved ones can’t be trusted, for example, can’t be trusted not to l ie to
us, not to laugh at us behind our backs; low self-esteem—the belief that we are less worthy than other people and, therefore, don’t deserve
attention, love, or any other of life’s rewards; fear of abandonment—the belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us are
among frequent psychological dysfunctions appear in literary works.
The Psychoanalytic concepts such as sibling rivalry (Oedipus complex), inferiority complexes, and defense mechanisms are also in such
common use. Hamlet is typical example of Oedipus complex. In the play Hamlet's father is murdered by his own brother, Hamlet's uncle, who
then marries Hamlet's mother. The ghost of Hamlet's father appears to Hamlet and tells him to avenge the murder by killing his uncle. There is
no obvious difficulty about doing this, but Hamlet spends most of the play delaying and making excuses. So why the delay? Critics concluded
that Hamlet cannot avenge this crime because he is guilty of wanting to commit the same crime himself. He has an Oedipus complex, that is, a
repressed sexual desire for his own mother, and a consequent wish to do away with his father. Thus, the uncle has merely done what Hamlet
himself secretly wished to do. Thus the psyche drives hamlet to self-reproaches than revenge .
A later generation of psychoanalytic critics often paused to analyze the characters in novels and plays before proceeding to their authors. For
instance, in A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (1970), Robert Rogers states that writers reveal instinctual or repressed selves
in their books, often without realizing that they have done so. In this phase literary works begun to understood from psychological analysis of
portrayed characters. While not denying the idea that the unconscious plays a role in creativity, psychoanalytic critics such as Holland began
to focus more on the ways in which authors create works that appeal to our repressed wishes. Consequently, they shifted their focus away
from the psyche of the author and character toward the psychology of the reader . Holland's theories, which have concerned more with the
reader than with the author and the text, have helped to establish another school of critical theory: reader-response criticism. Elizabeth Wright
explains Holland's brand of modern psychoanalytic criticism in this way: "What draws us as readers to a text is the secret expression of what
we desire to hear, much as we protest we do not. The disguise must be good enough to fool the censor into thinking that the text is
respectable." . So, M. A. R. Habib summarizes these stages of psychoanalytical criticism saying:
Developing Freud’s ideas, have extended the field of psychoanalytic criticism to encompass: analysis of the motives of an
author, of reader and fictional characters, relating a text to features of the author’s biography such as childhood memories,
relationship to parent (2005:572)
3. Analogy Between Dream and Literature

Psychoanalytic literary criticism would often treat the text as if it were a kind of dream. This means that the text represses its real (or latent)
content behind obvious (manifest) content. Psychoanalytic critics treat metaphors as if they were dream condensations and metonym as if they
were dream displacements. Thus figurative literary language in general is treated as something that evolves as the writer's conscious mind
resists what the unconscious tells it to picture or describe. These mechanisms is called Freudian slip ,whereby repressed material in the
unconscious finds an outlet through such everyday phenomena as slips of the tongue, or slips of the pen. Freud believes that society
sublimates, or channels its unconscious through the creative process. This is where literature come into play. It seems natural to think about
novels in terms of dreams. Like dreams, novels are fictions, inventions of the mind that, although based on reality, are by definition not
literally true. Like a novel, a dream may have some truth to tell, but, like a novel, it may need to be interpreted before that truth can be
grasped. There are other reasons why an analogy between dreams and novels seems natural. Terrifying novels and nightmares affect us in
much the same way, plunging us into an atmosphere that continues to cling, even after the last chapter has been read or the alarm clock has
sounded.
6.3.2. Lacanian Psychoanalysis

In order to understand the Lacanian concepts that are most relevant to literary interpretation, we need to begin at the beginning with Lacan’s
theory of the psychological development of the infant. He broadened and redefined several basic psychoanalytic concepts in ways with which

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many orthodox Freudians disagree. According to Freud, in the earliest phase of childhood, the individual is dominated by the ‘pleasure
principle’, seeking unreflecting gratification, with no definitely established identity and gender. In pure Freudian terms this involves
preventing the child from realizing Oedipal desires for its mother by threatening it with castration. All this, of course, takes place on a
subconscious level. Identifying with the father now makes it possible for the child to take on a masculine role and makes it aware for the first
time of various forms of institutionalized law. The personality is then split between the conscious self and repressed desire (Carter, 2006).
Especially important in Lacanian literary criticism is Lacan's reformulation of Freud's concepts of the early stages of psychosexual
development and the formation of the Oedipus complex into the distinction between a prelinguistic stage of development that he calls the
imaginary and the stage after the acquisition of language that he calls the symbolic. Intervenient between these two stages is what Lacan calls
the mirror stage (Abrams, 1999).
In its early months, Lacan maintains, the infant experiences both itself and its environment as a random, fragmented, formless mass. Indeed,
the infant doesn’t even differentiate itself from its environment and doesn’t know that parts of its own body because it doesn’t have a sense of
itself that is capable of such an understanding. This stage, Lacan calls, the Imaginary Order, by which he means the world of images. It’s the
world that the child experiences through images rather than through words. And it is a world of fullness, completeness, and delight because
with the child’s sense of itself as a whole comes the illusion of control over its environment, of which it still perceives i tself an inseparable
part, and over its mother, with whom it feels it is in a union of mutual satisfaction: my mother is all I need and I am all my mother needs.
Remember, the child’s preverbal feeling of complete union with its mother. Lacan refers to this experience as the Desire of the Mother,
intending to imply the two-way desire just described, that is, the desire of the mother for the child and the child’s desire of the mother. During
this period, the child’s feeling of connection with its mother is, for good or ill, its first and most important experience, and this primary dyad,
or twosome, continues until the child acquires language (Tyson,2006).
At some point, Tyson (2006) continued, between six and eight months, however, what Lacan calls the Mirror Stage occurs the transition from
the Imaginary to the Symbolic. The child sees itself in an actual mirror or sees itself “mirrored” back to itself in the reactions of its mother, the
point is that the infant now develops during this stage a sense of itself as a whole rather than a formless and fragmented mass. In other words,
the child develops a sense of itself as a whole as if it had identified with the whole image of itself that can be seen reflected in a mirror. Of
course, the child doesn’t have words for these feelings, for it is still preverbal.
For Lacan, the child’s acquisition of language means a number of important things. He refers to the child’s acquisition of language as its
initiation into the Symbolic Order, for language is first and foremost a symbolic system of signification, that is, a symbolic system of meaning-
making. Among the first meanings we make—or more correctly, that are made for us—are that I am a separate being (“I” am “me,” not “you”)
and that I have a gender (I am a girl, not a boy, or vice versa). Our entrance into the Symbolic Order thus involves the experience of
separation from others, and the biggest separation is the separation from the intimate union we experienced with our mother during our
immersion in the Imaginary Order. For Lacan, this separation constitutes our most important experience of loss, and it is one that will haunt us
all our lives. We will seek substitutes great and small for that lost union with our mother. We will spend our lives unconsciously pursuing it in
the Symbolic Order—maybe I’ll recapture that feeling of union if I find the perfect mate; if I acquire more money; if I convert to a different
religion; if I become better looking; if I become more popular; or if I buy a flashier car, a bigger house, or whatever the Symbolic Order tells
me I should want—but we will never be able to sustain a feeling of complete fulfillment. Why? Lacan explains that it’s because the kind of
fulfillment we seek, though we don’t realize that we’re seeking it, is that feeling of completeness, plenitude, and union with our mother/our
world that disappeared from conscious experience when we entered the Symbolic Order, that is, when we acquired language (Tyson,2006).
The importance of loss and lack in Lacanian psychoanalysis cannot be stressed too strongly. The use of language in general, in fact, implies a
loss, a lack, because I wouldn’t need words as stand-ins for things if I still felt that I was an inseparable part of those things. For example, I
need the word blanket as a stand-in for my blanket precisely because I no longer have my former experience of my blanket. If I felt that my
blanket and myself were still in union, were still one and the same thing, I wouldn’t need the word blanket to refer to it. Thus, the Symbolic
Order, or the world known through language, ushers in the world of lack. I am no longer one with my blanket, my mother, my world. So I
need words to represent my concepts of these things.
In addition, the Symbolic Order, as a result of the experience of lack just described, marks the split into conscious and unconscious mind. In
fact, the unconscious is created by our initial repression of our desire for the union with our mother we felt we had prior to the advent of the
Symbolic Order. For the lack we experienced was repressed—our overwhelming sense of loss, our frustrated desire, our guilt over having
certain kinds of desire, and the fears that accompany a loss of such magnitude—and as we learned earlier in this chapter, it is repression that
first creates the unconscious. Indeed, Lacan’s famous statement that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (Seminar, Bk. VII 12)
implies, among other things, the way in which unconscious desire is always seeking our lost object of desire, the fantasy mother of our
preverbal experience.
The first rule, according to Lacan, is the rule that Mother belongs to Father and not to me. For little boys, at least, this initiation into the
Symbolic Order is what Freud calls the oedipal prohibition. Junior must find substitutes for Mother because she is no longer his alone. In fact,
because she is Father’s, she is no longer Junior’s at all. It should come as no surprise, then, that Lacan says the Symbolic Order marks the
replacement of the Desire of the Mother with the Name-of-the- Father. So enormous is the role of the Symbolic Order in the formation of
what we refer to as our “selves,” in fact, that we are not the unique, independent individuals we think we are. Our desires, beliefs, biases, and
so forth are constructed for us as a result of our immersion in the Symbolic Order. In other words, the Symbolic Order consists of society’s
ideologies: its beliefs, values, and biases; its system of government, laws, educational practices, religious tenets, and the like. That is, the
Imaginary Order makes itself felt through any experience or viewpoint that does not conform adequately to the societal norms and
expectations that constitute the Symbolic Order (Tyson, 2006).
6.4. Formalism
The Russians who developed the so-called formal method – which gave them the name Formalists –while the English and the Americans
were completely ignorant of the debates that took place in Russia (and later in Prague). It is only when a prominent Formalist, the Russian
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linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), when his fellow Formalists began to be translated into English in the late 1950s and 1960s, that the
English-speaking world began to take notice of their wholly different approach to literary art .
Formalists disagreed about what specific elements make a literary work "good" or "bad"; but generally, Formalism maintains that a literary
work contains certain intrinsic features, and the theory "...defined and addressed the specifically literary qualities in the text" (Richter 699).
Formalism attempts to treat each work as its own distinct piece, free from its environment, era, and even author. This point of view developed
in reaction to "...forms of 'extrinsic' criticism that viewed the text as either the product of social and historical forces or a document making an
ethical statement" (699). Formalists assume that the keys to understanding a text exist within "the text itself" (Tyson, 118).
Bertensm (1995) noted that as the phrase ‘formal method’ will have suggested, the Formalists were primarily oriented towards the form of
literature. Viktor Shklovsky, put it in 1917, literature has the ability to make us see the world anew – to make that which has become familiar,
because we have been overexposed to it, strange again ‘art exists that one may recover the sensation of life …. The purpose of art is to impart
the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known’. The result of this process of defamiliarization is that it enables us
once again to see the world in its full splendour or, as the case may be, true awfulness. From their earliest meetings, around 1914, the
Formalists are focused on what Jakobson in 1921 started to call ‘literariness’ –that which makes a literary text different from, say, a piece in
The Economist or Time. The secret of ‘literariness’, the Formalists decided, was that in poetry – the initial focus of their interest – ordinary
language becomes ‘defamiliarized’. It is this linguistic defamiliarization that then leads to a perceptual defamiliarization on the part of the
reader, to a renewed and fresh way of looking at the world. Roman Jakobson said in 1921, poetry is a form of language characterized by an
orientation towards its own form. What it first of all allows us to see in a fresh manner is language itself. What that language refers to – what
it communicates – is of secondary importance. Shklovsky held that the artistic work of art is autonomous, free from contingent social forces,
and that prose is essentially form driven by artistic “devices.” One way of formalists presentation of art is “defamiliarization” (ostranenie, or
estrangement), an artistic “device” that calls into question the alienating effect of things most familiar to us and indeed raises the question
whether reality is not itself purely an effect.
The two concepts fabula (the story) and syuzhet (the plot) introduced by Shklovsky in 1921. The fabula is a straightforward account of
something; it tells us what actually happened. Fabula is elemental materials of a story the author manipulates the fabula to create maximum
suspense. Such a manipulation of the fabula creates the syuzhet (the story as it is actually told) and it is the syuzhet that has the defamiliarizing
effect that devices have in poetry: like for instance rhyme, the syuzhet calls attention to itself.
In general, an emphasis on form parenthesizes concern for the representational, imitative, and cognitive aspects of literature. Literature is no
longer viewed as aiming to represent reality or character or to impart moral or intellectual lessons, but is considered to be an object in its own
right, autonomous (possessing its own laws) and autotelic (having its aims internal to itself). Literature is regarded as a unique mode of
expression, not an extension of rhetoric or philosophy or history or social or psychological documentary. Such an insular disposition also
betokens a retreat from history and biography, effectively isolating the literary artifact from both broad social forces and the more localized
and personal circumstances of its author. Shklovsky claims that defamiliarization “is found almost everywhere form is found.” Art’s purpose
is not to make us perceive meaning but to create a specific perception of the object: “it creates a ‘vision’ of the object instead of serving as a
means for knowing it” (13–18). Shklovsky views the language of poetry as a “roughened” language, which impedes and slows down
perception. The chief characteristic of the Formalists, says Eichenbaum, was their rejection of all “ready-made aesthetics and general theories.
Eichenbaum quotes Roman Jakobson’s affirmation that the “object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness – that is, that
which makes a given work a work of literature” (107). Hence, says Eichenbaum, instead of looking to these other disciplines, the Formalists
focused on linguistics, a science which borders on poetics and shares material with it(Habib , 2005).
Jakubinsky had argued that practical language contains a linguistic pattern of sounds and morphological features that “have no independent
value and are merely a means of communication.” But in other linguistic systems, such as those employed in poetry, the linguistic patterns of
these elements “acquire independent value” (108). A brief example might illustrate Jakubinsky’s claim: if I say to a friend “There is a strong
wind blowing,” my purpose is primarily to communicate information, perhaps about weather conditions or my reaction to them. But when the
poet Shelley states: “O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,” the purpose here is not merely or primarily to communicate a
message: as such, the various elements of this line (such as a consecutive stress on four syllables, the alliteration of the “w” and “b” sounds)
achieve an independence (a kind of excess) over their merely communicative content. We value the sounds for their own sake, not merely as
they contribute to meaning. Formalists rejected this notion –the harmony of form and content-, whereby form was viewed as an “envelope” or
vessel into which a liquid (the content) is poured. In the formalist view, form is itself understood as content. The Formalists – again, notably,
Shklovsky – also rejected conventional accounts of the evolution of literary form, such as Veselovsky’s view that “the purpose of new form is
to express new content”.
The formalist study of poetics, maintained by Habib (2005), exists within the more general study of language, which Jakobson characterized
in terms of its functions. The chief elements of this functional system are the addresser (emotive function) and addressee (conative function);
falling in between are a complex set of determinants that include context (referential function), message, contact (phatic function: “a physical
channel and psychological connection between the addresser and addressee”), and a code (metalingual function) known to both addresser and
addressee. Jakobson emphasized the poetic function of language, the “focus on the message for its own sake.” However, it is an
oversimplification to reduce poetry to a poetic function. “Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant,
determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent”. Jakobson defines the dominant as the
“focusing component of a work of art,” which can include such things as rhyme, syllabic scheme, or metrical structure; it “guarantees the
integrity of the structure”. What distinguishes the poetic function from the others mentioned above is that it focuses on the “message” for its
own sake. Here is how Jakobson schematizes the various functions:
REFERENTIAL
EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE
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PHATIC
CODE
Hence, in this structure the dominant function of
literature is poetic.
6
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Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-
Strauss (1908—) and the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980). It is difficult to boil structuralism down to a single 'bottom-line'
proposition, but if forced to do so that its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation - they have to be seen in the
context of the larger structures they are part of. It follows from this that meaning or significance isn't a kind of core or essence inside things:
rather, meaning is always outside. Meaning is always an attribute of things, in the literal sense that meanings are attributed to the things by the
human mind,Signnot=contained
Signifierwithin them; Signifier > theisword
that language or sound-image
nonreferential “table”
because it doesn’t refer to things in the world but only to our concepts
Signified
of things in the world (Barry, 2002). Signified > the concept of “table”
Sign > Actual object: table
But the foundations of structuralism were laid in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose insights were developed by the
Saussure's thinking stressed
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908),theRoland
three aspects
Barthes,of language:
and others. theInwayhislanguage
Course isinarbitrary,
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he attacks theway of thinking
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is viewedit gave them a process,
as a naming model ofeach
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word corresponding to the thinginitwhich
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Saussure
items
offers relate to other
objections itemsview:
to this and thus
it is create largerthat
assumed structures.
ready-made ideas exist before words; finally, it is assumed that the linking of a name and
thing is a simple operation. Saussure urges that both terms of the linguistic sign are psychological in nature; the sign unites not a thing and a
Firstly,
name but heaemphasized
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sound-image. Thewe giveistonotwords
latter are purely
the material soundarbitrary.
but theFurthermore,
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relationship
of thebetween
sound.” signifier and signified,
Saussure observed, is arbitrary: there is no necessary connection between a given sound-image and the concept to which it refers. There is no
reason why
Saussure the concept
makes of a treedistinction
a fundamental should bebetween
representedlangueby the
andsound-image “tree”. the
parole – between Thelanguage
relationship between
system, whichsignifier andactual
pre-exists signified is merely
examples of
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language, social
the convention: it’s whatever
individual utterance. the community
Langue is the socialusing
aspectitof
says it is. Consider
language: it is thethe sign-system
shared system of traffic
which welights:
(unconsciously) draw upon
as speakers. Parole is the individual realization of the system in actual instances of language. This distinction is essential to all later
red – amber
structuralist – greenThe proper object of linguistic study is the system which underlies any particular human signifying practice, not the
theories.
individual utterance. signifier (‘red’)
In his view, words are not symbols which correspond to referents, but rather are ‘signs’ which are made up of two parts
(like two sides ofsignified
a sheet of (stop)
paper): a mark, either written or spoken, called a ‘signifier’, and a concept (what is ‘thought’ when the mark is
Firstly,
made), the relation
called between signifier
a ‘signified’. Thus, a and wordsignified is arbitrary:
is not merely there is no (signifier),
a sound-image natural bond norbetween red and
is it merely a stop. Each(signified).
concept colour in the
A traffic
sound system
image
signifies
becomes nota wordby asserting
only whena it positive
is linkedunivocal meaning(Selden
with a concept but by &marking a difference,
Peter, 2005). a distinction
De Saussure puts thiswithin a system
linguistic of opposites
structure of a wordandas: contrasts:
traffic-light ‘red’ is precisely ‘not-green’; ‘green’ is ‘not-red’. The American philosopher C. S. Peirce made a useful distinction between three
types of sign: the ‘iconic’ (where the sign resembles its referent, e.g. a picture of a ship or a road-sign for falling rocks); the ‘indexical’ (where
the sign is associated, possibly causally, with its referent, e.g. smoke as a sign of fire, or clouds as a sign of rain); and the ‘symbolic’ (where
the sign has an arbitrary relation to its referent, e.g. language).
Secondly, Saussure emphasised that the meanings of words are (what we might call) relational. That is to say, no word can be defined in
isolation from other words. The definition of any given word depends upon its relation with other 'adjoining' words. For example, that word
'hut' depends for its precise meaning on its position in a 'paradigmatic chain', that is, a chain of words related in function and meaning each of
which could be substituted for any of the others in a given sentence. The paradigmatic chain in this case might include the following: hovel
,shed, hut house, mansion palace. The meaning of any one of these words would be altered if any one of the others were removed from the
chain. Thus, 'hut' and 'shed' are both small and basic structures, but they are not quite the same thing: one is primarily for shelter (a night-
watchman's hut, for instance), while the other is primarily for storage: without the other, each would have to encompass both these meanings,
and hence would be a different word. Likewise, a mansion can be defined as a dwelling which is bigger and grander than a mere house, but
not as big and grand as a palace. Thus, we define 'mansion' by explaining how its meaning relates to that of the two words on either side of it.
If we have paired opposites(binary opposites) then this mutually defining aspect of words is even more apparent: the terms 'male' and 'female',
for example, mainly have meaning in relation to each other: each designates the absence of the characteristics included in the other, so that
'male' can be seen as mainly meaning 'not female', and vice versa. Similarly, we could have no concept of 'day' without the linked concept of
'night', no notion of 'good' without a 'bad' to define it against. This 'relational' aspect of language gave rise to a famous remark of Saussure's:
'In a language there are only differences, without fixed terms'. All words, then, exist in 'differencing networks' or paired opposites (Selden &
Peter, 2005)..

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Thirdly, for Saussure, language constitutes our world, it doesn't just record it or label it. Meaning is always attributed to the object or idea by
the human mind, and constructed by and expressed through language: it is not already contained within the thing. Well-known examples of
this process would be the choice between paired alternatives like 'terrorist' or 'freedom fighter'. There is no neutral or objective way of
designating such a person, merely a choice of two terms which 'construct' that person in certain ways. Another example of the same concept is
seen in the two ways of referring to the domestic tax imposed in Britain by the Thatcher government: opponents of this tax called it the poll
tax, evoking images of the Middle Ages and the Peasants' Revolt. The government itself called the tax the community charge, avoiding the
negative word 'tax' and making use of the favoured term 'community'. It has been said that there are three versions of every story, your
version, my version, and the truth(Selden & Peter, 2005).
As we saw above, the components of a structure are not merely a collection of independent items: they form a working unit because they exist
in relation to one another. They interact. And we are able to perceive those components, as Saussure noted in terms of the structure of
language, only because we perceive their difference from one another. Difference simply means that our ability to identify an entity (such as
an object, a concept, or a sound) is based on the difference we perceive between it and all other entities. For example, if we believed that all
objects were the same color, we wouldn’t need the word red (or blue or green) at all. Red is red only because we perceive it to be different
from blue and green. According to structuralism, the human mind perceives difference most readily in terms of opposites, which structuralists
call binary oppositions: two ideas, directly opposed, each of which we understand by means of its opposition to the other. For example, we
understand up as the opposite of down, female as the opposite of male, good as the opposite of evil, black as the opposite of white, and so on.
In wider sense, Structuralists are not interested in individual buildings or individual literary works (or individual phenomena of any kind)
except in terms of what those individual items can tell us about the structures that underlie and organize all items of that kind. It’s a method of
systematizing human experience that is used in many different fields of study. The whole world of human culture is a “text” waiting to be
“read,” and structuralism provides the theoretical framework to do it. In other words, you are not engaged in structuralist activity if you
describe the structure of a short story to interpret what the work means or evaluate whether or not it’s good literature. However, you are
engaged in structuralist activity if you examine the structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that
govern their composition, for example, principles of narrative progression (the order in which plot events occur) or of characterization (the
functions each character performs in relation to the narrative as a whole). You are also engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the
structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system.
The world we live in consists of innumerable events and objects, that is, innumerable surface phenomena. However, the structures that
underlie and organize these phenomena are relatively few. Without these structures our world would be chaos. For instance, in English
language there are millions of individual linguistic surface phenomena (individual words and all the different ways people pronounce them),
there is a relatively simple structure underlying all these words, and it is that structure we master.
We should take a moment to consider how structuralism defines the word structure. First of all, as we noted earlier, structures aren’t physical
entities; they’re conceptual frameworks that we use to organize and understand physical entities. A structure is any conceptual system that has
the following three properties: (1) wholeness, (2) transformation, and (3) self-regulation. Wholeness simply means that the system functions as
a unit; it’s not merely a collection of independent items. The whole is different from the sum of its parts because the parts working together
create something new. To use a physical example, water is a whole that is different from its component parts (hydrogen and oxygen).
Transformation means that the system is not static; it’s dynamic, capable of change. The system is not merely a structure (a noun); it also
structures (a verb). In other words, new material is always being structured by the system. For example, language, a structural system, is
capable of transforming its basic components (phonemes) into new utterances (words and sentences). Self-regulation means that the
transformations of which a structure is capable never lead beyond its own structural system. The elements engendered by transformations (for
example, new linguistic utterances) always belong to the system and obey its laws.
Structuralism assumes that all surface phenomena belong to some structural system, whether or not we are consciously aware of what that
system is. The relationship of surface phenomena to structure might be illustrated by the following simplified diagram (Tyson ,2006).
Surface phenomena: dog runs happily

(words) tree appears green
Clouds roll ominously
Structure: Noun Verb

(Parts of speech) Descriptor
Rules of combination Subject + Predicate
If you read the rows of surface phenomena from left to right, you have a list of individual utterances, such as “dog runs happily” and “tree
appears green.” However, if you read the columns of the whole diagram from top to bottom, you can see that the surface phenomena, which
consist of fifteen different items but could consist of many more, are governed by a structure that consists, in this case, of only three parts of
speech and two rules of combination. Saussure realized that we need to understand language, not as a collection of individual words with
individual histories but as a structural system of relationships among words as they are used at a given point in time, or synchronically. In
order to differentiate between the structure that governs language and the millions of individual utterances that are its surface phenomena.
6.5.1. How Can We Apply Structuralism in Literary Criticism?

We must keep in mind, however, that structuralism does not attempt to interpret what individual texts mean or even whether or not a given
text is good literature. Issues of interpretation and literary quality are in the domain of surface phenomena, the domain of parole.
Structuralism seeks instead the langue of literary texts, the structure that allows texts to make meaning, often referred to as a grammar
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because it governs the rules by which fundamental literary elements are identified. The final goal of structuralism is to understand the
underlying structure of human experience, which exists at the level of langue, whether we are examining the structures of literature or
speculating on the relationship between the structures of literature and the structures of human consciousness. Structuralist approaches to
literature have tended to focus on three specific areas of literary studies: the classification of literary genres, the description of narrative
operations, and the analysis of literary interpretation.
6.5.1.1. The Structure of Narrative (Narratology)
Structuralist analyses of narrative examine in minute detail the inner “workings” of literary texts in order to discover the fundamental
structural units (such as units of narrative progression) or functions (such as character functions) that govern texts’ narrative operations.
Greimas observes that human beings make meaning by structuring the world in terms of two kinds of opposed pairs: “A is the opposite of B”
and “–A (the negation of A) is the opposite of –B (the negation of B).” In other words, we perceive every entity as having two aspects: its
opposite (the opposite of love is hate) and its negation (the negation of love is the absence of love). He believes that this fundamental structure
of binary oppositions, consisting of four components arranged in two pairs, shapes our language, our experience, and the narratives through
which we articulate our experience.
In our narratives, this structure is embodied in the form of plot formulas, such as conflict and resolution, struggle and reconciliation, and
separation and union. These plot formulas are carried out by means of actants, or character functions. For Greimas, the forwarding of the plot
—the movement from conflict to resolution, struggle to reconciliation, separation to union, and so forth—involves the transfer of some entity
(a quality or an object) from one actant to another. For example, Daisy in the novel Great Gatsby is transferred from Tom To Gatsby then
back to Tom. Thus, the fundamental structure of narrative is the same as the fundamental structure of language: subject-verb-object. This basic
narrative grammar generates the following three patterns of plots by aligning what Greimas sees as the six fundamental actants into three
pairs of oppositions:
Actants Plot types

Subject—Object Stories of Quest/Desire (a subject, or hero, searches for an object: a person, thing, or state of being)
Sender—Receiver Stories of Communication (a sender—a person, god, or institution—sends the subject in search of the object, which
the receiver ultimately receives)
Helper—Opponent Subplots of Stories of Quest/Desire or Communication (a helper aids the subject in the quest; an opponent tries
to hinder the subject)
In a manner similar to that of Greimas, Todorov draws an analogy between the structural units of narrative—such as elements of
characterization and plot— and the structural units of language: parts of speech and their arrangement in sentences and paragraphs (Tyson,
2006).
Units of narrative Units of language units of language

Characters <–––––––––––––––––––––––––> Proper nouns
Characters’ actions <–––––––––––––––––––> Verbs
Characters’ attributes –––––––––––––––––> Adjectives
Propositions <–––––––––––––––––––––––> Sentences
Sequences <–––––––––––––––––––––––––> Paragraphs
A proposition is formed by combining a character with an irreducible action (for example, “X kills Y” or “X arrives in town”) or irreducible
attribute (for example, “X is evil” or “X is queen”), that is, an action or attribute in its most basic form. A sequence is a string of propositions
that can stand on its own as a story. The structure of the most basic sequence is (1) attribution, (2) action, (3) attribution: the protagonist starts
out with an attribute (for example, he is unloved), and by means of an action (he seeks love) that attribute is transformed (he is loved or, at
least, has learned something important as a result of his quest).
To analyze the novel Great Gatsby from structuralist perspective, we look for guiding principles, the novel’s narrative “grammar,” which is
illuminated by the of Tzvetan Todorov’s schema of propositions. According to this framework we try to discover how the text is structured by
the pattern of relations among recurring actions (which are analogous to verbs) and attributes (which are analogous to adjectives) associated
with particular characters (which are analogous to nouns). In other words, we try to discover how the text is structured by the repetition of the
same grammar, the same formula, the same “sentence,” so to speak. In the case of The Great Gatsby, all the action can be reduced to three
verbs: “to seek,” “to find,” and “to lose.” These three verbs produce, in turn, the repetition of two related “sentences,” or narrative patterns:
(1) “X seeks, finds, and then loses Y” (Tyson, 2006).
6.6. Deconstruction
Although deconstruction is no longer a new phenomenon on the academic scene—the theory was inaugurated by Jacques Derrida in the late
1960s in France in the late 1960s. Other figures most closely associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes Barthes's work around this
time began to shift in character and move from a structuralist phase to a post-structuralist phase. Many students and faculty alike continue to
misperceive deconstruction as a superficial analysis of wordplay that destroys our appreciation of literature and our ability to interpret it
meaningfully. Nevertheless, deconstruction has a good deal to offer us: it can improve our ability to think critically and to see more readily
the ways in which our experience is determined by ideologies of which we are unaware because they are “built into” our language. And
because deconstruction offers these advantages, it can be a very useful tool for Marxism, feminism, and other theories that attempt to make us
aware of the oppressive role ideology can play in our lives. In the poststructuralist critique of structure the center is deconstructed, exposed as
contradictory, incoherent, a “mythology of presence.” Poststructuralists question the ability of language to designate the center, to remain
structured around a center, if there is no center, if there is only irresolvable contradiction. In deconstructive thought, these connections are not

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viewed as already existing prior to language, with language merely being the instrument of their expression or representation. Moreover, there
is no “truth” or “reality” which somehow stands outside or behind language.
A deconstructive reading of a text, then, as practiced by Derrida, will be a multifaceted project: in general, it will attempt to display
logocentric operations in the text, by focusing on a close reading of the text’s language, its use of presuppositions or transcendental signifieds,
its reliance on binary oppositions, its self-contradictions, its aporiai or points of conceptual impasse, and the ways in which it effects closure
and resists free play. According to Derrida, the concept of structure that has dominated Western science and philosophy has always been
referred to as a “center or . . . a point of presence, a fixed origin.” The function of such a center has been both to organize the structure and to
limit the free play of terms and concepts within it, in other words, to foreclose such play (Habib, 2005).
This point of view as encapsulated in Nietzsche's famous remark 'There are no facts, only interpretations'. Philosophy is, so to speak,
sceptical by nature and usually undercuts and questions commonsensical notions and assumptions. Thus, the post-structuralist's way of
speaking about language involves a rather obsessive imagery based on liquids - signs float free of what they designate, meanings are fluid, and
subject to constant 'slippage' or 'spillage'. This linguistic liquid, slopping about and swilling over unpredictably, defies our attempts to carry
signification carefully from 'giver' to 'receiver' in the containers we call words. Likewise, the meanings words have can never be guaranteed
one hundred per cent pure. Thus, words are always 'contaminated' by their opposites - you can't define night without reference to day, or good
without reference to evil.
6.6.1. Deconstructing Language
Tyson (2006) explicates that in our daily lives, most of us take language for granted, assuming that it communicates what we want it to, and
if it doesn’t, we assume that the fault is in ourselves, not in language. A phrase such as “Mary, please hand John the book” usually results in
the desired action, and even when it doesn’t we assume that the fault lies not in language but in Mary’s or John’s failure to understand the
request or refusal to act on it. Because we are so used to the everyday patterns and rituals in which language seems to work the way we want it
to, we assume that it is by nature a stable and reliable means of communicating our thoughts, feelings, and wishes. Deconstruction’s theory of
language, in contrast, is based on the belief that language is much more slippery and ambiguous than we realize. Consider, for example, the
following sentence: Time flies like an arrow.
Time flies like an arrow = Times passed quickly.
(noun) (verb) (adv. clause)
If I asked you to suggest additional meanings, you might say that the sentence could also mean that time moves in one direction, or straight
ahead, because that’s how arrows fly. But what would happen if we thought of the first word of the sentence as a verb in the imperative mode
—telling us to do something—and the second word as if it represented a kind of insect? Then the sentence would be giving us an order:
Time flies like an arrow = Get out your stopwatch
(verb) (obj.) (adv. clause) and time the speed of flies as you’d time an arrow’s flight.
And what would happen if we thought of the first two words of the sentence as if they represented a kind of insect—time flies (think of fruit
flies)—and the third word as if it were a form of the verb to like? Then the sentence would tell us something about the emotional life of a
certain kind of insect:
Time flies like an arrow = Time flies are fond of arrows (or at least of one particular arrow). (noun) (verb) (obj.)
This exercise shows how, without changing a word, a single sentence can have several meanings. It does illustrate that human utterances are
rarely, if ever, as clear and simple as the structuralist formula signifier + signified seems to imply. As we have seen, any given signifier can
refer to any number of signifieds at any given moment. That is, we could try to explain communication as a sliding accumulation of signifieds.
But what does the term signified mean? If the signifier is “tree,” then the signified must be the tree in our imagination that we can picture. But
what do we understand by this imagined tree? Of what does our concept consist? Our concept of the tree consists of all the chains of signifiers
we have come to associate with it over the course of our lives, in Tyson’s case, for example, “shade,” “picnics,” “climbing,” “broken
collarbone,” “hiking,” “Hocking Hills, “Ohio,” “vertigo,” “autumn leaves,” “raking,” “planting Douglas firs,” “pine-needle scale,” “lime
sulfur,” and so on (ibid).
According to deconstruction, then, the word tree never reaches the point when it refers to a concept, a signified. The signifier I utter refers to
chains of signifiers in my mind and evokes chains of signifiers in the mind. And each signifier in those chains is itself constituted by another
chain of signifiers. So for deconstruction, language does not consist of the union of signifiers and signifieds. Structuralism says that language
is nonreferential because it doesn’t refer to things in the world but only to our concepts of things in the world. Deconstruction takes that idea a
big step further by claiming that language is nonreferential because it refers neither to things in the world nor to our concepts of things but
only to the play of signifiers of which language itself consists.
Accordingly, our mental life consists not of concepts—not of solid, stable meanings—but of a fleeting, continually changing play of
signifiers. These signifiers may seem to be stable concepts—they look stable enough when we hear them spoken or see them written down!—
but they don’t operate in a stable manner in our mind. As we saw earlier, every signifier consists of and produces more signifiers in a
neverending Deferral. We seek meaning that is solid and stable, but we can never really find it because we can never get beyond the play of
signifiers that is language. In Derrida’s words, what we take to be meaning is really only the mental trace left behind by the play of signifiers.
And that trace consists of the differences by which we define a word. Meaning seems to reside in words (or in things) only when we
distinguish their difference from other words (or things). For example, if we believed that all objects were the same color, we wouldn’t need
the word red (or blue or green) at all. Red is red only because we believe it to be different from blue and green. So the word red carries with it
the trace of all the signifiers it is not (ibid).
To sum up, Derrida argues that language has two important characteristics: (1) its play of signifiers continually defers, or postpones, meaning,
and (2) the meaning it seems to have is the result of the differences by which we distinguish one signifier from another. He combines the
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French words for “to defer” and “to differ” to coin the word différance, which is his name for the only “meaning” language can have. At this
point, you may wonder, why use language at all if it seems to refer to a kind of stable meaning that doesn’t really exist? We must use
language, Derrida explains, because we must use the tool at our disposal if we don’t have another. But even while we use this tool, we can be
aware that it doesn’t have the solidity and stability we have assumed it has, and we can therefore improvise with it, stretch it to fit new modes
of thinking.
It seems rather important that we stretch language in new ways, given deconstruction’s belief that language is what forms us and there is no
way to get beyond it. There is no getting beyond language, beyond the play of signifiers, because we exist—we think, we see, we feel—within
the language into which we were born. How we see and understand ourselves and the world is thus governed by the language with which we
are taught to see them. That is, language mediates our experience of ourselves and the world. And for deconstruction, language is wholly
ideological: it consists entirely of the numerous conflicting, dynamic ideologies—or systems of beliefs and values—operating at any given
point in time in any given culture. To put the matter in philosophical terms, for deconstruction, language is our “ground of being,” or the
foundation from which our experience and knowledge of the world are generated.
Prioritization of language is the fundamental form of deconstruction’s exhibition and undermining of logocentrism. To explore the specific
ways in which our language determines our experience, Derrida borrowed and transformed structuralism’s idea that we tend to conceptualize
our experience in terms of polar opposites, called binary oppositions. Derrida points out that oppositions, such as those between intellect and
sense, soul and body, master and slave, male and female, inside and outside, center and margin, do not represent a state of equivalence
between two terms. For example, according to structuralism, we understand the word good by contrasting it with the word evil. However,
Derrida noted that these binary oppositions are also little hierarchies. Rather, each of these oppositions is a “violent hierarchy” in which one
term has been conventionally subordinated, in gestures that embody a host of religious, social, and political valencies. That is, one term in the
pair is always privileged, or considered superior to the other. Therefore, by finding the binary oppositions at work in a cultural production and
by identifying which member of the opposition is privileged, one can discover something about the ideology promoted by that production.
Perhaps the most significant opposition treated by Derrida, an opposition which comprehends many of the other hierarchies, is that between
speech and writing. According to Derrida, Western philosophy has privileged speech over writing, viewing speech as embodying an
immediate presence of meaning, and writing as a mere substitute or secondary representation of the spoken word. Speech implies, as will be
seen shortly, an immediate connection with the Logos, a direct relation to that which sanctions and constrains it; while writing threatens to
depart from the Logos. Logocentrism, then, is sanctioned and structured in a multitude of ways, all of which are called into question by
deconstruction. The privileging of speech over writing, for example, has perpetuated what Derrida calls a “metaphysics of presence,” a
systematization of thought and interpretation that relies on the stability and self-presence of meaning, effecting a closure and disabling any
“free play” of thought which might threaten or question the overall structure. It can be seen, then, that a metaphysics of “presence” refers to
the selfpresence, the immediate presence, of meaning, as resting on a complete self-identity that is sanctioned and preserved by the “presence”
of a Logos. For example, an isolated entity such as a piece of chalk would be regarded as having its meaning completely within itself,
completely in its immediate “presence.” Its meaning and purpose actually lie in relations that extend far beyond its immediate existence; its
meaning would depend, for example, upon the concept of a “blackboard” on which it was designed to write; in turn, the relationship of chalk
and blackboard derives its meaning from increasingly broader contexts, such as a classroom, an institution of learning, associated industries
and technologies, as well as political and educational programs. Hence the meaning of “chalk” would extend through a vast network of
relations far beyond the actual isolated existence of that item rather than sanctioned by the presence of a Logos. Viewed in this light, “chalk”
is not a name for a self-subsistent, self-enclosed entity; rather, it names the provisional focal point of a complex set of relations (ibid).
In order to discover the limitations of the ideology one thus has uncovered, Derrida observed, one must examine the ways in which the two
members of the opposition are not completely opposite, the ways in which they overlap or share some things in common. For example,
consider the binary opposition in American culture between the words objective and subjective. We tend to identify the objective with the
impersonal, the rational (which implies the intelligent), and the scientific dimensions of human experience and therefore consider objectivity a
necessary criterion of reliability. In sharp contrast, we tend to identify the subjective with the personal, the emotional (which implies the
unintelligent), and even the irrational dimensions of human experience and therefore consider it unreliable. To deconstruct this binary
opposition and learn something about the limitations of the ideology it supports, let’s consider the ways in which the objective and the
subjective are not really opposites. For example, when reporters, historians, and scientists gather “objective” data, on what basis do they
decide which data to use and which to discard? Even if they are following specific guidelines for data collection, how can we be sure those
guidelines are “objective,” and, in any case, how can we be sure that the guidelines are “objectively” interpreted and applied to each piece of
data collected or discarded? That is, aren’t reporters, historians, and scientists human beings with subjective needs, fears, and desires
(including career motivations) that might influence them with or without their knowledge? Can one totally escape one’s own viewpoints,
feelings, and biases? The point here is that language—the meanings of words, the linguistic categories by which we organize our experience—
doesn’t operate in the tidy fashion we like to think it does. Language is constantly overflowing with implications, associations, and
contradictions that reflect the implications, associations, and contradictions of the ideologies of which it is formed This type of philosophy—in
short, all Western philosophy—Derrida calls logocentric because it places at the center (centric) of its understanding of the world a concept
(logos) that organizes and explains the world for us.
For Derrida, the answer is that no concept is beyond the dynamic instability of language, which disseminates (as a flower scatters its seeds on
the wind) an infinite number of possible meanings with each written or spoken utterance. For deconstruction, then, language is the ground of
being, but that ground is not out of play: it is itself as dynamic, evolving, problematical, and ideologically saturated as the worldviews it
produces. For this reason, there is no center to our understanding of existence. There are, instead, an infinite number of vantage points from
which to view it, and each of these vantage points has a language of its own, which deconstruction calls its discourse.
6.6.2. Deconstructing literature
Now let’s take a moment to summarize the three main points we’ve discussed so far in this chapter. For deconstruction, (1) language is
dynamic, ambiguous, and unstable, continually disseminating possible meanings; (2) existence has no center, no stable meaning, no fixed

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ground; and (3) human beings are fragmented battlefields for competing ideologies whose only “identities” are the ones we invent and choose
to believe. As you may have noticed, the key word here is unstable. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that, for deconstruction,
literature is as dynamic, ambiguous, and unstable as the language of which it is composed (Tyson, 2006).
Meaning is not a stable element residing in the text for us to uncover or passively consume. Rather, literary texts, like all texts, consist of a
multiplicity of overlapping, conflicting meanings in dynamic, fluid relation to one another and to us. What have been considered the
“obvious” or “commonsense” interpretations of a given text are really ideological readings— interpretations produced by a culture’s values
and beliefs—with which we are so familiar that we consider them “natural.” Therefore, both literary and critical texts can be deconstructed.
There are generally two main purposes in deconstructing a literary text, and we may see either or both at work in any given deconstructive
reading: (1) to reveal the text’s undecidability and/or (2) to reveal the complex operations of the ideologies of which the text is constructed.
To reveal a text’s undecidability is to show that the “meaning” of the text is really an indefinite, undecidable, plural, conflicting array of
possible meanings and that the text, therefore, has no meaning, in the traditional sense of the word, at all. This goal can be accomplished, in
brief, by the following procedure: (1) note all the various interpretations—of characters, events, images, and so on—the text seems to offer;
(2) show the ways in which these interpretations conflict with one another; (3) show how these conflicts produce still more interpretations.
Undecidability does not mean that the reader is unable to choose among possible interpretations. And it does not mean that the text cannot
“make up its mind” as to what it wants to say. Rather, undecidability means that reader and text alike are inextricably bound within language’s
dissemination of meanings. That is, reader and text are interwoven threads in the perpetually working loom of language. Specific meanings
are just “moments” of meaning that give way, inevitably, to more meanings. Thus, the literary text is used to illustrate the indefinite, plural,
conflicting possible meanings that constitute all texts, literary and otherwise, because all texts are made of language. This is a useful and
interesting endeavor because such readings serve as helpful reminders that language and all of its products, including ourselves, are rich,
exciting, sometimes alarming but always interesting, proliferations of meanings.
The other purpose in deconstructing a literary text, which we’ll discuss at greater length, is to see what the text can show us about the
ideologies of which it is constructed. To understand how this kind of deconstruction works, let’s contrast it with the New Critical approach
because a New Critical reading often can serve as the first step in the deconstruction of a text. New Criticism seeks to reveal how the text
works as a unified whole by showing how its main theme is established by the text’s formal, or stylistic, elements. The New Critic identifies
the central tension operating in the text, for example, the struggle between good and evil. To find that ideological framework and understand
its limitations, a deconstructive critic looks for meanings in the text that conflict with its main theme, focusing on self-contradictions of which
the text seems unaware (Tyson, 2006).
6.7. Marxist Literary Theory
The tradition of Marxist thought has provided the most powerful critique of capitalist institutions and ethics ever conducted. Its founder, Karl
Heinrich Marx (1818–1883), was a German political, economic, and philosophical theorist and revolutionist. The influence of Marx’s ideas on
modern world history has been vast. Until the collapse in 1991 of the communist systems of the USSR and Eastern Europe, one-third of the
world’s population had been living under political administrations claiming descent from Marx’s ideas. Many branches of modern criticism –
including historicism, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonial and cultural criticism – are indebted to the insights of Marxism, which often
originated in the philosophy of Hegel. What distinguishes Marxism is that it is not only a political, economic, and social theory but also a
form of practice in all of these domains.
Marxism is a materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things without assuming the existence of a world or of forces beyond the natural
world around us, and the society we live in. Marxism argued that any relationship between human being is based on economical values.
Marxist theory insists that the way we think and the way we experience the world around us are either wholly or largely conditioned by the
way the economy is organized. Under a medieval, feudal regime people will have thought and felt different from the way that we think and
feel now, in a capitalist economy – that is, an economy in which goods are produced (the ‘mode of production’) by large concentrations of
capital (old-style factories, new-style multinationals) and then sold on a free, competitive, market. The aim of Marxism is to bring about a
classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange .For Marxism, getting and keeping
economic power is the motive behind all social and political activities, including education, philosophy, religion, government, the arts,
science, technology, the media, and so on. Thus, economics is the base on which the superstructure of social/political/ ideological realities is
built. Economic power therefore always includes social and political power as well, which is why many Marxists today refer to socio
economic class, rather than economic class, when talking about the class structure. In Marxist terminology, economic conditions are referred
to as material circumstances, and the social/political/ideological atmosphere generated by material conditions is called the historical situation.
For the Marxist critic, neither human events (in the political or personal domain) nor human productions (from nuclear submarines to
television shows) can be understood without understanding the specific material/historical circumstances in which those events and
productions occur. The Marxist theory basically lies on the principle: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on
the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”(Selden 2005:82)
From a Marxist perspective, differences in socioeconomic class divide people in ways that are much more significant than differences in
religion, race, ethnicity, or gender. For the real battle lines are drawn, to put the matter simply, between the “haves” and the “have-nots,”
between the bourgeoisie—those who control the world’s natural, economic, and human resources—and the proletariat, the majority of the
global population who live in substandard conditions and who have always performed the manual labor—the mining, the factory work, the
ditch digging, the railroad building—that fills the coffers of the rich. Unfortunately, those in the proletariat are often the last to recognize this
fact; they usually permit differences in religion, race, ethnicity, or gender to separate them into warring factions that accomplish little or no
social change.
1. Fundamental Elements of Marxist Theory
1. Ideology in Marxism
For Marxism, an ideology is a belief system, and all belief systems are products of cultural conditioning. For example, capitalism,
communism, Marxism, patriotism, religion, humanism, and environmentalism are all ideologies. Even our assumption that nature behaves
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according to the laws of science is an ideology. However, although almost any experience or field of study we can think of has an ideological
component, not all ideologies are equally productive or desirable. Undesirable ideologies promote repressive political agendas and, in order to
ensure their acceptance among the citizenry, pass themselves off as natural ways of seeing the world instead of acknowledging themselves as
ideologies. For instance in most societies the belief “It’s natural for men to hold leadership positions because their biological superiority
renders them more physically, intellectually, and emotionally capable than women” is a sexist ideology that sells itself as a function of nature,
rather than as a product of cultural belief.
By posing as natural ways of seeing the world, repressive ideologies prevent us from understanding the material/historical conditions in which
we live because they refuse to acknowledge that those conditions have any bearing on the way we see the world. Marxism emphasizes that no
repressive ideology, acknowledges underlying socio-economic aspects and works to make us constantly aware of all the ways in which we are
products of material/historical circumstances and of the repressive ideologies that serve to blind us to this fact in order to keep us subservient
to the ruling power system. Lois Tyson puts this fact vividly as:
Although Marxist theorists differ in their estimation of the degree to which we are “programmed” by ideology, all agree that the
most successful ideologies are not recognized as ideologies but are thought to be natural ways of seeing the world by the people
who subscribe to them. Many American middle classes, for instance, do not aware the fact that they are leading by the ideology of
the rich. That it is the wealthy in positions of power who decide who pays the most taxes and how the money will be spent. The
middle class is blinded by their belief in the American dream, which tells them that financial success is simply the product of
initiative and hard work. From a Marxist perspective, the role of ideology in maintaining those in power is so important (2006:56).
Classism, for example, is an ideology that equates one’s value as a human being with the social class to which one belongs: the higher one’ s
social class, the better one is assumed to be because quality is “in the blood,” that is, inborn. From a classist perspective, people at the top of
the social scale are naturally superior to those below them: those at the top are more intelligent, more responsible, more trustworthy, more
ethical, and so on. People at the bottom of the social scale, it follows, are naturally shiftless, lazy, and irresponsible. Therefore, it is only right
and natural that those from the highest social class should hold all the positions of power and leadership because they are naturally suited to
such roles and are the only ones who can be trusted to perform them properly.
2. Commodification
Marx’s concern over the rise of a capitalist economy was a concern for the effects of capitalism on human values. One of the main sins of
capitalism, according to Marx, was that it reduced all human relations to commercial relations. Even the family cannot escape such
commodification. In a capitalist economic system, an object’s value becomes impersonal. Its value is translated into a monetary “equivalent”
and determined solely in terms of its relationship to a monetary market. The question becomes, how many people will buy the object, and how
much money will they be willing to pay for it? Whether or not people really need the object in question and whether or not it is really worth
its assigned price are irrelevant issues.
Of course, many Marxist insights into human behavior involve the damaging effects of capitalism on human psychology, and those damaging
effects often appear in our relationship to the commodity. For Marxism, a commodity’s value lies not in what it can do (use value) but in the
money or other commodities for which it can be traded (exchange value) or in the social status it confers on its owner (sign-exchange value).
An object becomes a commodity only when it has exchange value or sign-exchange value, and both forms of value are determined by the
society in which the object is exchanged. For example, if I read a book for pleasure or for information, or even if I use it to prop up a table leg,
the book has use value. If I sell that same book, it has exchange value. If I leave that book out on my coffee table to impress my date, it has
sign-exchange value. Commodification is the act of relating to objects or persons in terms of their exchange value or sign-exchange value.
Similarly, I commodify human beings when I structure my relations with them to promote my own advancement financially or socially. Do I
choose my dates based on how much money I think they will spend on me (their exchange value) or on how much I think they will impress
my friends (their sign exchange value)? If so, then I’m commodifying them. Capitalism promotes the belief that “you are what you own”—
that our value as human beings is only as great as the value of our possessions. Gregory Castle elaborates the key aspects of commodification
more illustratively.
At issue here is a distinction between form and content. The form of the commodity corresponds with its exchange value while the
content corresponds with its use value. Exchange values have to do with specific systems of economic exchange in which a
commodity’s value may rise or fall depending on its desirability. Use values, which are derived from the labor expended in creating
the commodity, are constant and may bear no logical or intrinsic relation to the exchange value. Surplus value is what accrues to
the capitalist who owns the modes of production; it is the difference between wages paid and the actual work done by workers. In a
capitalist society, workers are, in principle, underpaid; the value of labor expended in a day’s work exceeds the wages paid for that
work…. The excess in value between the cost of producing a commodity and the price paid for it constitutes capital(2007:109).
In this regard in capitalist economy labor workers, treated as commodity, are always the disadvantageous class of the system. The system
severely exploit the proletariat for the benefit and so to facilitate luxurious life of the capitalist. For this reason Marxism considers capitalism
as unfair and oppressive economic system.
3. Dialectic Materialism
Marx develops dialectical critique what he calls the materialistic conception of history. He viewed the world, human beings, and history as a
product of human labor. Marx insisted that the dialectic of history was motivated by material forces, by upheavals in the forces and relations
of economic production. As he declaims in (The Communist Manifesto 1848 in Habib, 2005): “The history of all hitherto existing society is
the history of class struggles” (40).So the dialectic often characterized as a triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Accordingly historical
development of any society is neither random nor linear rather dialectical.
THESIS ANTITHESI SYNTHESIS, or

OPPOSING FORCES S CLASH NEW SOCIAL SYSTEM

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Marx refers to the history of class conflict from the ancient world to his own times: between slaves and freemen, patricians and plebeians,
lords and serfs. The major class conflict in modern times is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat or industrial working class. And, just
as the capitalist mode of production superseded the feudal mode, so the capitalist mode will give way to socialism. It is the bourgeoisie itself
which creates the instrument of its own destruction: the proletariat, on the one hand, who will unite against it; and, on the other hand,
increasingly destructive economic crises which are internal to the operations of capitalism internal to the operations of capitalism. It is the
activity and conditions of material production, not mere ideas, which determined the structure of society and the nature of individuals; law,
art, religion, and morality.
6.7.1. 4. Base and Superstructure
Marxist social theory begins with a base/superstructure paradigm. The base (or infrastructure) refers to the modes of production as well as to
the class formations and class relationships generated by them; the superstructure, on the other hand, refers to the social and cultural
institutions and traditions that promulgate and sustain the specific ideologies of the ruling class. The base of a society – the way its economy
is organized, broadly speaking – determines its superstructure – everything that we might classify as belonging to the realm of culture, again
in a broad sense: education, law, religion, philosophy, political programmes, and the arts. In this respect ideology refers to ideas and beliefs
that guide and organize the social and cultural elements of the superstructure. Ideology is typically associated with the ideas and beliefs of the
ruling class, which controls the means of production; this is the sense in which Marx himself used the term. In one account, Marx described
this view in terms of an architectural metaphor: the ‘superstructure’ (ideology, politics) rests upon the ‘base’(socio economic relations). To
say ‘rests upon’ is not quite the same as saying ‘is caused by’” (Seldom 83). If the way we think about our religious, political, and
philosophical views (superstructure) are determined by the sort of economy (base) we happen to live in, then clearly there is no such thing as
an unchanging human condition. Marx was arguing that what we call ‘culture’ is not an independent reality but is inseparable from the
historical conditions in which human beings create their material lives; the relations of exploitation and domination which govern the social
and economic order of a particular phase of human history will in some sense ‘determine’ the whole cultural life of the society. They exist, in
other words, as a superstructure to the basic economic structure of a society. If the economic ‘base’ indeed determines the cultural
‘superstructure’, then writers will not have all that much freedom in their creative efforts. They will inevitably work within the framework
dictated by the economic ‘base’ and will have much in common with other writers living and writing under the same economic dispensation.
This socio-economic base then conditions the cultural superstructure (Castle, 2007).
6.7.3. Applying Marxism in Literary Criticism

Marxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism based on socialist and dialectic theories. Marxist criticism views li terary
works as reflections of the social institutions from which they originate. According to Marxists, even literature itself is a social institution and
has a specific ideological function, based on the background and ideology of the author. For Marxism, literature does not exist in some
timeless, aesthetic realm as an object to be passively contemplated. Rather, like all cultural manifestations, it is a product of the
socioeconomic and hence ideological conditions of the time and place in which it was written, whether or not the author intended it so.
Because human beings are themselves products of their socioeconomic and ideological environment, it is assumed that authors cannot help
but create works that embody ideology in some form.
Tyson concerns not only the relation literature has with socio-economic realities but also emphasizes its form. The fact that literature grows
out of and reflects real material/historical conditions creates at least two possibilities of interest to Marxist critics: (1) the literary work might
tend to reinforce in the reader the ideologies it embodies, or (2) it might invite the reader to criticize the ideologies it represents. Many texts
do both. And it is not merely the content of a literary work—the “action” or the theme—that carries ideology, but the form as well or, as most
Marxists would argue, the form primarily (Tyson,2006: 66).
Although most Marxists believed that works which portray the suffering of the proletariat are most useful in promoting social awareness and
positive political change, many today consider that even those literary works that reinforce capitalist, imperialist, or other classist values are
useful in that they can show us how these ideologies work to seduce or coerce us into collusion with their repressive ideological agendas. In
this regard constituting element of Marxism commodification, base, superstructure and dialectical materialism are the core agenda of Marxist
criticism
6.8. New Historicism

The “New” Historicism dates back to Stephen Greenblatt’s use of the term in 1982 in an introduction to an issue of the journal Genre devoted
to the Renaissance. Both Greenblatt and subsequent critics identified with New Historicism rejected the notion that it was a theory or a
specific doctrine. Rather, they identified some persistent concerns and approaches.
New historicism began toward in the 1980s with German writers such as Herder, and continued through the nineteenth-century historians Von
Ranke and Meinecke to twentieth-century thinkers such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans Georg Gadamer. Stephen Greenblatt and Michel
Foucault's were an early important figure of New Historicism. Powerful historical modes of analysis were formulated by Hegel and Marx,
who themselves had a profound impact on historicist thinking; and literary historians such as Sainte-Beuve and Hippolyte Taine also insisted
on viewing literary texts as integrally informed by their historical milieux. Much of what passes under the rubric of the “New” Historicism is
not radically new, but represents a return to certain foci of analysis as developed by previous traditions of historicism. It emerged, largely in
reaction to the lingering effects of New Criticism and its historical approach. "New" Historicism's adjectival emphasis highlights its
opposition to the old historical-biographical criticism prevalent before the advent of New Criticism. In the earlier historical-biographical
criticism, literature was seen as a (mimetic) reflection of the historical world in which it was produced. Further, history was viewed as stable,
linear, and recoverable--a narrative of fact. In contrast, New Historicism views history skeptically (historical narrative is inherently
subjective), but also more broadly; history includes all of the cultural, social, political, anthropological discourses at work in any given age,
and these various "texts" are unranked - any text may yield information valuable in understanding a particular milieu. Rather than forming a
backdrop, the many discourses at work at any given time affect both an author and his/her text; both are inescapably part of a social construct
(Habib,2005).

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The “New” Historicism also reacted against both the formalist view of the literary text as somehow autonomous and Marxist views which
ultimately related texts to the economic infrastructure. It saw the literary text not as somehow unique but as a kind of discourse situated within
a complex of cultural discourses – religious, political, economic, aesthetic – which both shaped it and, in their turn, were shaped by it. If there
was anything new about this procedure, it was its insistence, drawn from Foucault and poststructuralism, that “history” itself is a text, an
interpretation, and that there is no single history. It broke away from any literary historiography based on the study of genres and figures. In
the same way, the “culture” in which New Historicism situated literary texts was itself regarded as a textual construct. Hence, New
Historicism refused to accord any kind of unity or homogeneity to history or culture, viewing both as harboring networks of contradictory,
competing, and un-reconciled forces and interests.
Historicism has been characterized by a number of concerns and features. Most fundamentally, there is an insistence that all systems of
thought, all phenomena, all institutions, all works of art, and all literary texts must be situated within a historical perspective. In other words,
texts or phenomena cannot be somehow torn from history and analyzed in isolation, outside of the historical process. They are determined in
their form and content by their specific historical circumstances, their specific situation in time and place. Hence, we cannot bring to our
analyses of Shakespeare the same assumptions and methods that we bring to Plato. The fact that they belong to different historical periods and
different social, political, and economic circumstances will profoundly shape their notions of truth, of art and polity, and hence whatever
meanings we might attribute to their texts. In other words, literature must be read within the broader context of its culture, in the context of
other discourses ranging over politics, religion, and aesthetics, as well as its economic context. A second feature of historicism is that the
history of a given phenomenon is sometimes held to operate according to certain identifiable laws, yielding a certain predictability and
explanatory power; this feature is pronounced in the writings of Hegel and Marx. A third concern arises from the recognition that societies
and cultures separated in time have differing values and beliefs: how can the historian “know” the past? The historian operates within the
horizon of her/his own world view, a certain broad set of assumptions and beliefs; how can she/he overcome these to achieve an empathetic
understanding of a distant culture? How can we avoid imposing our own cultural prejudices, not to mention our own interests and motives, on
texts historically removed from us?
Thinkers such as Gadamer, and E. D. Hirsch have offered various answers to this dilemma. Hirsch’s position aspires to be “objectivist,”
effectively denying the historical and context-bound nature of knowledge and proposing a distinction between “meaning,” which embraces
what the author meant or intended by his particular use of language, and “significance,” which comprehends the subjective evaluation of the
text according to the values and beliefs of the critic. The New Historicists tended, then, to view literature as one discourse among many
cultural discourses, insisting on engaging with this entire complex in a localized manner, refusing to engage in categorical generalizations or
to commit to any definite political stance. Indeed, New Historicists have been criticized for a political quietism that accompanies their alleged
principled indefiniteness. They are also accused of arbitrariness in the ways in which they relate literary texts to other cultural discourses.
6.9. New Criticism
Between the late 1930s and 1945 a critical approach known as New Criticism developed. Taking its name from a 1941 essay by John Crowe
Ransom, it emphasized close analysis of text and structure rather than analysis of social or biographical contexts. New Criticism’s
contribution to literary studies today, we need to remember the form of criticism it replaced: the biographical-historical criticism that
dominated literary studies in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. At that time, it was common practice to interpret a
literary text by studying the author’s life and times to determine authorial intention, that is, the meaning the author intended the text to have.
The author’s letters, diaries, and essays were combed for evidence of authorial intention as were autobiographies, biographies, and history
books. American New Criticism, which was active from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, also took on most of the ideas of Eliot and Richards,
as well as those of Empson.
For the New Critics, poetry existed as a self-evident, unique entity. It could not be paraphrased, nor could it be expressed other than as it was.
Every element in a poem was in balanced integration with every other element, leading to a coherence of the whole. A poem was considered
as an object in itself, cut off from both author and the world around it. Yet New Criticism did not consider the poem to be cut off completely
from reality. It was not, in other words, an entirely formalist approach, which would involve examining only the form of an isolated entity.
The poem was seen somehow to incorporate the outside world within itself. In practice, New Criticism concentrated on paradoxes and
ambivalence which could be established in the text. Eliot was very largely responsible for formulating this theory. For him poetry should be
impersonal. In Traditional and the Individual Talent (1919), he asserted that a poet did not have ‘a personality’ to express but a particular
medium. Poetry was to serve as an escape from the self: ‘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’. The poet’s personal and social circumstances were secondary to the poetry itself.
But whatever the socio-cultural explanations for its provenance, New Criticism is clearly characterized in premise and practice: it is not
concerned with context – historical, biographical, intellectual and so on; it is not interested in the ‘fallacies’ of ‘intention’ or ‘affect’; it is
concerned solely with the ‘text in itself’, with its language and organization; it does not seek a text’s ‘meaning’, but how it ‘speaks itself’ ; it is
concerned to trace how the parts of the text relate, how it achieves its ‘order’ and ‘harmony’, how it contains and resolves ‘irony’, ‘paradox’,
‘tension’, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘ambiguity’; and it is concerned essentially with articulating the very ‘poem-ness’ – the formal quintessence – of
the poem itself.
As New Criticism is, by definition, a praxis, much of its ‘theory’ occurs along the way in more specifically practical essays and not as
theoretical writing. But there are two New Critical essays in particular which are overtly theoretical and which have become influential texts
more generally in modern critical discourse: ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1949), written by W. K.
Wimsatt. Both essays, influenced by Eliot and Richards, engage with the ‘addresser’ (writer) –‘message’ (text) –‘addressee’ (reader) nexus
outlined in the Introduction, in the pursuit of an ‘objective’ criticism which rejects both the personal input of the writer (‘intention’) and the
emotional effect on the reader (‘affect’) in order purely to study the ‘words on the page’ and how the artefact ‘works’. The New Critics
exclude both the poet and the reader from their approach to poetry. As a result, they focus more on the actual form of literary works. The first
essay argues that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of

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literary art’; that a poem ‘goes about the world beyond [the author’s] power to intend about it or control it’ – it ‘belongs to the public’; that it
should be understood in terms of the ‘dramatic speaker’ of the text, not the author; and be judged only by whether it ‘works’ or not. In other
words, when we interpret a literary text, the author’s commentary, or what we know of the author’s intentions, is of secondary importance. It
is not only that the author does not have full control over the text’s meaning because in the actual writing process things may slip in of which
the author is wholly. The text itself became the battle cry of the New Critical effort to focus our attention on the literary work as the sole
source of evidence for interpreting it. For New Criticism, a literary work is a timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient) verbal object. Readers and
readings may change, but the literary text stays the same. Its meaning is as objective as its physical existence on the page.
This difference becomes very much clearer in the second essay, which argues that the ‘affective fallacy’ represents confusion between the
poem and its results’. While the ‘intentional fallacy’ has to do with the author, the ‘affective fallacy’ has to do with the reader. Readers who
are prone to this fallacy confuse their own emotional response to the poem with what the poem really tells them. The way the poem affects
them blinds them to its reality. Tears blur the picture, both literally and figuratively. ‘Close reading’, that is the focus on the text that Richards
and Leavis had promoted so vigorously, ‘trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem . . . ends in
impressionism and relativism’. Opposing the ‘classical objectivity’ New Criticism to ‘romantic reader psychology’, it asserts that the outcome
of both fallacies is that ‘the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear’. Poems, in other words, are our
cultural heritage, permanent and valuable artefacts; and therein lies the crucial difference from more contemporary theoretical positions.
As we have seen, these critics assume that good literature is not bound by time and place. It transcends the limitations of i ts place of origin
(including the author) and addresses the complexities of an essentially unchanging human condition. The concrete intentions of the author, or
the circumstances that triggered the poem, are therefore mostly or even wholly irrelevant. What does it matter if we know that poet X wrote
this particular poem because he was hopelessly in love with the undeserving Lady Y? In this sense, information about authorial intention or
the direct occasion for a work of literature may be damaging rather than helpful. For humanist critics such as Eliot, Richards, Leavis, and the
New Critics, human nature and the human condition have not changed over time and are essentially the same the world all over. Human
nature is not black, or white, or brown; it does not speak English or Tagalog; it is not prehistoric, medieval, or postmodern; it does not lean
towards deep-sea fishing, pig farming, or business administration. Such details will inevitably feature in a literary work, but they are
secondary to what a good poem, novel, or play has to offer (Bertensm , 1995).
6.10. Reader-Response theory
Attention to the reading process emerged during the 1930s as a reaction against the growing tendency to reject the reader’s role in creating
meaning, a tendency that became a formal principle of the New Criticism that dominated critical practice in the 1940s and 1950s. However,
Reader-response theory didn’t receive much attention until the 1970s. The leading members of this school were Wolfgang Iser and Hans
Robert Jauss. The New Critics believed that the timeless meaning of the text—what the text is—is contained in the text alone. Its meaning is
not a product of the author’s intention and does not change with the reader’s response. So, reader-response theory stands against this theory.
As its name implies, reader-response criticism focuses on readers’ responses to literary texts. Many new students of critical theory are relieved
and happy when they get to the unit on reader-response criticism, perhaps because they enjoy the idea that their responses are important
enough to become the focus of literary interpretation. Or perhaps they assume that reader-response criticism means “I can’t be wrong because
any way I interpret the text is my response, so the professor can’t reject it.” Depending on the kind of reader-response theory we’re talking
about, your response to a literary text can be judged insufficient or less sufficient than others. And even when a given reader-response theory
does assert that there is no such thing as an insufficient (or inaccurate or inappropriate) response, your job as a practitioner of that theory isn’t
merely to respond but to analyze your response. The good news, however, is that reader-response criticism is a broad, exciting, evolving
domain of literary studies that can help us learn about our own reading processes and how they relate to, among other things, specific
elements in the texts we read, our life experiences, and the intellectual community of which we are a member. For despite their divergent
views of the reading process, which we’ll examine a little later, reader-response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader
cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an
objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in litberature.
This second belief, that readers actively make meaning, suggests, of course, that different readers may read the same text quite differently. In
fact, reader-response theorists believe that even the same reader reading the same text on two different occasions will probably produce
different meanings because so many variables contribute to our experience of the text. Knowledge we’ve acquired between our first and
second reading of a text, personal experiences that have occurred in the interim, a change in mood between our two encounters with the text,
or a change in the purpose for which we’re reading it can all contribute to our production of different meanings for the same text.
Iser’s theories of reader response were initially presented in a lecture of 1970 entitled “The Affective Structure of the Text,” and then in two
major works, The Implied Reader (1972) and The Act of Reading (1976). Iser begins by pointing out that, in considering a literary work, one
must take into account not only the actual text but also “the actions involved in responding to that text.” He suggests that we might think of
the literary work as having two poles: the “artistic” pole is the text created by the author, and the “aesthetic” pole refers to “the realization
accomplished by the reader”. We cannot identify the literary work with either the text or the realization of the text; it must lie “half-way
between the two,” and in fact it comes into being only through the convergence of text and reader . His point here is that reading is an active
and creative process. It is reading which brings the text to life, which unfolds “its inherently dynamic character”. If the author were somehow
to present a story completely, the reader’s imagination would have nothing to do; it is because the text has unwritten implications or “gaps”
that the reader can be active and creative, working things out for himself. This does not mean that any reading will be appropriate. The text
uses various strategies and devices to limit its own unwritten implications, but the latter are nonetheless worked out by the reader’s own
imagination .
A written text is not an object, despite its physical existence, but an event that occurs within the reader, whose response i s of primary
importance in creating the text. Theorists disagree, however, about how our responses are formed and what role, if any, the text plays in
creating them. Opinions range from the belief that the literary text is as active as the reader in creating meaning to the belief that the text

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doesn’t exist at all except as it is created by readers. Let’s take a look at a representative sample of this range of approaches, which may be
loosely organized under four headings: transactional reader-response theory, subjective reader-response theory, psychological reader response
theory, and social reader-response theory.
1. Transactional Reader -Response Theory
Often associated with the work of Louise Rosenblatt, who formulated many of its premises, transactional reader-response theory analyzes the
transaction between text and reader. Rosenblatt doesn’t reject the importance of the text in favor of the reader; rather she claims that both are
necessary in the production of meaning. She differentiates among the terms text, which refers to the printed words on the page; reader; and
poem, which refers to the literary work produced by the text and the reader together.
How does this transaction take place? As we read a text, it acts as a stimulus to which we respond in our own personal way. Feelings,
associations, and memories occur as we read, and these responses influence the way in which we make sense of the text as we move through
it. Literature we’ve encountered prior to this reading, the sum total of our accumulated knowledge, and even our current physical condition
and mood will influence us as well. At various points while we read, however, the text acts as a blueprint that we can use to correct our
interpretation when we realize it has traveled too far afield of what is written on the page. This process of correcting our interpretation as we
move through the text usually results in our going back to reread earlier sections in light of some new development in the text. Thus, the text
guides our self-corrective process as we read and will continue to do so after the reading is finished if we go back and reread portions, or the
entire text, in order to develop or complete our interpretation. Thus the creation of the poem, the literary work, is a product of the transaction
between text and reader, both of which are equally important to the process (Tyson, 2006). Followers of Wolfgang Iser might explain what
Rosenblatt refers to as the blueprint and stimulus functions of the text in terms of two kinds of meaning every text offers: determinate and
indeterminate meaning. Determinate meaning refers to what might be called the facts of the text, certain events in the plot or physical
descriptions clearly provided by the words on the page. In contrast, indeterminate meaning, or indeterminacy, refers to “gaps” in the text—
such as actions that are not clearly explained or that seem to have multiple explanations— which allow or even invite readers to create their
own interpretations.
According to transactional theorists, different readers come up with different acceptable interpretations because the text allows for a range of
acceptable meanings, that is, a range of meanings for which textual support is available. However, because there is a real text involved in this
process to which we must refer to justify or modify our responses, not all readings are acceptable and some are more so than others. Thus,
transactional analysis relies a good deal on the authority of the text, insisted on by the New Critics, while also bringing the reader’s response
into the limelight.
2. Subjective Reader-Response Theory
In stark contrast to affective stylistics and to all forms of transactional reader response theory, subjective reader-response theory does not call
for the analysis of textual cues. For subjective reader-response critics, led by the work of David Bleich, readers’ responses are the text, both in
the sense that there is no literary text beyond the meanings created by readers’ interpretations and in the sense that the text the critic analyzes
is not the literary work but the written responses of readers. Subjective criticism is based on the belief that all knowledge is subjective— the
perceived can’t be separated from the perceiver.
To understand how there is no literary text beyond the meanings created by readers’ interpretations, we need to understand how Bleich defines
the literary text. Like many other reader-response critics, he differentiates between what he calls real objects and symbolic objects. Real
objects are physical objects, such as tables, chairs, cars, books, and the like. The printed pages of a literary text are real objects. However, the
experience created when someone reads those printed pages, like language itself, is a symbolic object because it occurs not in the physical
world but in the conceptual world, that is, in the mind of the reader. This is why Bleich calls reading—the feelings, associations, and
memories that occur as we react subjectively to the printed words on the page—symbolization: our perception and identification of our
reading experience create a conceptual, or symbolic, world in our mind as we read. Therefore, when we interpret the meaning of the text, we
are actually interpreting the meaning of our own symbolization: we are interpreting the meaning of the conceptual experience we created in
response to the text. Thus, the text we talk about isn’t really the text on the page: it’s the text in our mind.
3. Psychological Reader Response Theory
Psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland also believes that readers’ motives strongly influence how they read. Holland believes that we react to
literary texts with the same psychological responses we bring to events in our daily lives. The situations that cause my defenses to emerge in
my interpersonal life will cause my defenses to emerge when I read. To use a simple example, if I am quick to dislike new acquaintances who
remind me of my alcoholic father, then I probably will be quick to dislike any fictional character who reminds me of him.
Holland calls the pattern of our psychological conflicts and coping strategies our identity theme. He believes that in our daily lives we project
that identity theme onto every situation we encounter and thus perceive the world through the lens of our psychological experience.
Analogously, when we read literature, we project our identity theme, or variations of it, onto the text. That is, in various ways we
unconsciously recreate in the text the world that exists in our own mind. Our interpretations, then, are products of the fears, defenses, needs,
and desires we project onto the text. Interpretation is thus primarily a psychological process rather than an intellectual on e.
6.10. 4. Social reader response theory
While the individual reader’s subjective response to the literary text plays the crucial role in subjective reader-response theory, for social
reader-response theory, usually associated with the later work of Stanley Fish, there is no purely individual subjective response. According to
Fish, what we take to be our individual subjective responses to literature are really products of the interpretive community to which we belong.
By interpretive community, Fish means those who share the interpretive strategies we bring to texts when we read, whether or not we realize
we’re using interpretive strategies and whether or not we are aware that other people share them. These interpretive strategies always result
from various sorts of institutionalized assumptions (assumptions established, for example, in high schools, churches, and colleges by
prevailing cultural attitudes and philosophies) about what makes a text a piece of literature
Of course, interpretive communities aren’t static; they evolve over time. And readers can belong, consciously or unconsciously, to more than
one community at the same time, or they can change from one community to another at different times in their lives. In any case, all readers
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come to the text already predisposed to interpret it in a certain way based on whatever interpretive strategies are operating for them at the time
they read. Thus, while Bleich believes his students produce communal authority through a negotiation that occurs after they’ve read the text,
Fish claims that a multiplicity of communal authorities, based on the multiplicity of interpretive communities to which students already
belong, determines how students read the text in the first place.
6.11. Feminism
Feminism is collective term for systems of belief and theories that pay special attention to women’s rights and women’s position in culture
and society. The term tends to be used for the women’s rights movement, which began in the late 18th century and continues to campaign for
complete political, social, and economic equality between women and men. Historically, feminist thought and activity can be divided into two
waves. The first wave, which began in about 1800 and lasted until the 1930s, was largely concerned with gaining equal rights between women
and men. The second wave, which began in the late 1960s, has continued to fight for equality but has also developed a range of theories and
approaches that stress the difference between women and men and that draw attention to the specific needs of women. The feminist criticism
of today is the direct product of the ‘the women’s movement of 1960s’.The feminist movement of this stage of course, was the not the start of
feminism. Rather, a renewal of old tradition of thought and action which are already possessing in classical books. These books include marry
Wollstonecraft’s, A Vindication of the Right of Women(1792), Olive Schreinerner’s Women and Labor (1941),Virginia Wolf’s A Room of
One’s Own (1929), Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949),and male contributions like The Subjection of women (1869) by John
Stuart Mill and Origin of the Family (1884) by Friedrich Engels.
Feminists are united by the idea that women’s position in society is unequal to that of men, and that society is structured in such a way as to
benefit men to the political, social, and economic detriment of women. Broadly defined, feminist criticism examines the ways in which
literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women.
However, just as the practitioners of all critical theories do, feminist critics hold many different opinions on all of the issues their discipline
examines. In fact, some feminists call their field feminisms in order to underscore the multiplicity of points of view of its adherents and offer
ways of thinking that oppose the traditional tendency to believe there is a single best point of view.
To see how this negative oversimplification works to blind us to the seriousness of the issues feminism raises, let’s briefly examine one of the
most maligned feminist claims: that we should not use the masculine pronoun he to represent both men and women. For many people, this
claim suggests what they see as the trivial, even infantile, nature of feminist demands. What possible difference could it make if we continue
to use the “inclusive he” to refer to members of both sexes? We know what we mean when we do it: it’s simply a convention of language that
includes both males and females. Such people believe that feminists should just concentrate on getting women an equal crack at the dough and
forget all this nonsense about pronouns! For many feminists, however, the use of the pronoun he to refer to members of both sexes reflects
and perpetuates a “habit of seeing,” a way of looking at life, that uses male experience as the standard by which the experience of both sexes
is evaluated. In other words, although the “inclusive he” claims to represent both men and women, in reality it is part of a deeply rooted
cultural attitude that ignores women’s experiences and blinds us to women’s points of view.
7.11.1. Traditional gender roles
The above examples up front because they show some of the ways in which all of us have been programmed to see (or to be blind) ourselves.
Let consider someone as a recovering patriarchal woman. By patriarchal woman mean, of course, a woman who has internalized the norms
and values of patriarchy, which can be defined, in short, as any culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles. Traditional
gender roles cast men as rational, strong, protective, and decisive; they cast women as emotional (irrational), weak, nurturing, and submissive.
These gender roles have been used very successfully to justify inequities, which still occur today, such as excluding women from equal access
to leadership and decision-making positions (in the family as well as in politics, academia, and the corporate world), paying men higher wages
than women for doing the same job (if women are even able to obtain the job), and convincing women that they are not fit for careers in such
areas as mathematics and engineering.
Patriarchy is thus, by definition, sexist, which means it promotes the belief that women are innately inferior to men. Feminists don’t deny the
biological differences between men and women; in fact, many feminists celebrate those differences. But they don’t agree that such differences
as physical size, shape, and body chemistry make men naturally superior to women: for example, more intelligent, more logical, more
courageous, or better leaders. Feminism therefore distinguishes between the word sex, which refers to our biological constitution as female or
male, and the word gender, which refers to our cultural programming as feminine or masculine. In other words, women are not born feminine,
and men are not born masculine. Rather, these gender categories are constructed by society, which is why this view of gender is an example of
what has come to be called social constructionism.
The belief that men are superior to women has been used, feminists have observed, to justify and maintain the male monopoly of positions of
economic, political, and social power, in other words, to keep women powerless by denying them the educational and occupational means of
acquiring economic, political, and social power. That is, the inferior position long occupied by women in patriarchal society has been
culturally, not biologically, produced. For example, it is a patriarchal assumption, rather than a fact, that more women than men suffer from
hysteria (psychological disorders deemed peculiar to women and characterized by overemotional, extremely irrational behavior).
Patriarchy continually exerts forces that undermine women’s self-confidence and assertiveness, then points to the absence of these qualities as
proof that women are naturally, and therefore correctly, self-effacing and submissive. One calls herself a patriarchal woman because she was
socially programmed, as are most women and men, not to see the ways in which women are oppressed by traditional gender roles. She says
that she is recovering because she learned to recognize and resist that programming. To cite a similar example of patriarchal programming,
little girls have been (and some still are) told early in their educational careers that they can’t do math. Then the patriarchal mind-set points to
girls’ lower test scores in math and their failure to become math majors as proof that they are biologically ill-suited to mathematical studies,
which, given the close relationship between math and logic, suggests that females are less logical than males. In other words, patriarchy
creates the failure that it then uses to justify its assumptions about women (Tyson, 2006).

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It is also very aware of the ways in which patriarchal gender roles are destructive for men as well as for women. For example, because
traditional gender roles dictate that men are supposed to be strong (physically powerful and emotionally stoic), they are not supposed to cry
because crying is considered a sign of weakness, a sign that one has been overpowered by one’s emotions. In addition, men are not permitted
to fail at anything they try because failure in any domain implies failure in one’s manhood. It is important to note that all these behaviors
described—behaviors forbidden to men—are considered “womanish,” that is, inferior, beneath the dignity of manhood. Clearly, one of the
most devastating verbal attacks to which a man can be subjected is to be compared to a woman. Thus, being a “real” man in patriarchal
culture requires that one hold feminine qualities in contempt. This phenomenon implies that whenever patriarchy wants to undermine a
behavior, it portrays that behavior as feminine. It is important to note, too, that the patriarchal concept of femininity—which is linked to
frailty, modesty, and timidity—disempowers women in the real world: it is not feminine to succeed in business, to be extremely intelligent, to
earn big bucks, to have strong opinions, to have a healthy appetite (for anything), or to assert one’s rights.
6.11.2. Feminist’s objection to patriarchy
Feminists have long puzzled over the problem of getting beyond patriarchal programming and have offered many different solutions. Virginia
Woolf resisted patriarchal ideology in 1929 when she wrote A Room of One’s Own, as Simone de Beauvoir resisted patriarchal ideology in
1949 when she wrote The Second Sex, and as feminist theorists continue to resist it today. Perhaps the difficulty in theorizing our way out of
patriarchal ideology arises if we’re not completely beyond patriarchy, then we must be completely programmed by it.
Given the difficulties involved in resisting patriarchal programming, many feminist theorists and literary critics are cautious, especially about
using frameworks that are themselves patriarchal, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. Such frameworks are considered patriarchal because
they embody various elements of patriarchal ideology. For example, because he used male experience as the standard against which he
measured female experience, Freud believed that women suffer from what he called “penis envy” and that they tend to see their first-born
sons as “penis substitutes” to make up for their own lack. Despite Marx’s insights into the ways in which economic forces determine the l ives
of both sexes, he failed to realize the ways in which women have been oppressed by men despite their economic class.
Nevertheless, many feminists draw on elements of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory as well as other critical theories because they find them
useful in examining issues relevant to women’s experience. For example, psychoanalysis can be used to help us understand the psychological
effects of patriarchal ideology as well as how and why women and men internalize it. Marxism can be used to help us understand how
economic forces have been manipulated by patriarchal law and custom to keep women economically, politically, and socially oppressed as an
underclass. Structuralist principles can be used to study underlying similarities among the experiences and productions of women from
various cultures as well as underlying similarities in the ways they are oppressed.
Deconstruction ,helps us see, among other things, when our thinking is based on false oppositions, that is, on the belief that two ideas,
qualities, or categories are polar opposites—for example, love/ hate or good/evil—when, in fact, they are not. So deconstruction is also useful
to feminists in helping us see the ways in which patriarchal ideology is often based on false oppositions. For instance, in refuting the sexist
belief that men are naturally rational while women are naturally emotional, a feminist might do more than argue, for example, that women
have been programmed to be more emotional or that both categories apply equally to both genders. Using deconstructive principles, she might
argue that we are mistaken to separate the rational and the emotional into such diametrically opposed categories.
And for many French psychoanalytic feminists, the possibilities for women’s psychological liberation must be investigated at the site at which
most, if not all, of their psychological subjugation occurs—language—because it is within language that detrimental patriarchal notions of
sexual difference (what patriarchy believes are the essential, or inborn, differences between women and men) have been defined and continue
to exert their repressive influence. For instance, Hélène Cixous argues that language reveals what she calls patriarchal binary thought, which
might be defined as seeing the world in terms of polar opposites, one of which is considered superior to the other. Examples include such
hierarchical binary oppositions as head/heart, father/mother, culture/ nature, intelligible/palpable (that which can be understood by the mind
versus that which can be felt by the body), sun/moon, and activity/passivity. Oppositions like these organize the way we think, and for each
opposition Cixous asks, “Where is [the woman]?” That is, which side of each opposition is assumed to define some aspect of the female?
Clearly, according to patriarchal thinking, the woman occupies the right side of each of these oppositions, the side that patriarchy considers
inferior—heart, mother, nature, palpable, moon, and passivity—while it is assumed that the male is defined by the left side of each opposition,
the side that patriarchy considers superior: head, father, culture, intelligible, sun, and activity. Generally, Tyson (2006), speaking feminism
look for issues like:
1.Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary means by
which they are kept so.
2.In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is objectified and marginalized, defined only by her difference from male
norms and values, defined by what she (allegedly) lacks and that men (allegedly) have.
3. All of Western (Anglo-European) civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology, as we see, for example, in the numerous patriarchal
women and female monsters of Greek and Roman literature and mythology; the patriarchal interpretation of the biblical Eve as the origin
of sin and death in the world; the representation of woman as a nonrational creature by traditional Western philosophy. As we saw earlier,
even the development of the Western canon of great literature, including traditional fairy tales, was a product of patriarchal ideology.
4. While biology determines our sex (male or female), culture determines our gender (masculine or feminine). That is, for most English-
speaking feminists, the word gender refers not to our anatomy but to our behavior as socially programmed men and women. I behave “like
a woman” (for example, submissively) not because it is natural for me to do so but because I was taught to do so. In fact, all the traits we
associate with masculine and feminine behavior are learned, not inborn.
5. All feminist activity, including feminist theory and literary criticism, has as its ultimate goal to change the world by promoting women’s
equality. Thus, all feminist activity can be seen as a form of activism, although the word is usually applied to feminist activity that directly
promotes social change through political activity.
6. Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience, including the production and experience of l iterature,
whether we are consciously aware of these issues or not.
6.11.3. Feminism and literature
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Naturally, some literary works will lend themselves more readily than others to feminist analysis or at least to certain kinds of feminist
analyses. For students new to the field, I think it useful to examine the ways in which literary texts reinforce patriarchy because the ability to
see when and how patriarchal ideology operates is crucial to our ability to resist it in our own lives. Tyson (2006) summarize feminist
approaches to literature as follow:
1. What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy? How are women
portrayed? How do these portrayals relate to the gender issues of the period in which the novel was written or is set? In other words, does
the work reinforce or undermine patriarchal ideology?
2. What does the work suggest about the ways in which race, class, and/or other cultural factors intersect with gender in producing women’s
experience?
3. How is the work “gendered”? That is, how does it seem to define femininity and masculinity? Does the characters’ behavior always
conform to their assigned genders? Does the work suggest that there are genders other than feminine and masculine? What seems to be the
work’s attitude toward the gender(s) it portrays? For example, does the work seem to accept, question, or reject the traditional view of
gender?
4. What does the work suggest about women’s creativity? In order to answer this question, biographical data about the author and historical
data about the culture in which she lived will be required.
5. What might an examination of the author’s style contribute to the ongoing efforts to delineate a specifically feminine form of writing?
6. What role does the work play in terms of women’s literary history and literary tradition?
Keep in mind that not all feminist critics will interpret the same work in the same way even if they focus on the same feminist concepts. As in
every field, even expert practitioners disagree. Our goal is to use feminist theory to help enrich our reading of literary works; to help us see
some important ideas they illustrate that we might not have seen so clearly or so deeply without feminist theory; and to help us see the ways in
which patriarchal ideology blinds us to our own participation in, or at least complicity with, sexist agendas.
6.12. Postcolonial Theory
More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism. It is easy to see
how important this has been in the political and economic spheres, but its general influence on the perceptual frameworks of contemporary
peoples is often less evident. Literature offers one of the most important ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in their
writing, and through other arts such as painting, sculpture, music, and dance that the day-to-day realities experienced by colonized peoples
have been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential.
The term “postcolonial(ism)” was aftermath of World War II and first employed in such expressions as “the post-colonial nation-state.”
Whether or to what extent the term ever expressed an unequivocal conviction that colonialism was now securely relegated to the past (such
pastness being the import of the “post-”) is debatable. But it was only in the 1990s that postcolonial studies coalesced fully and finally as an
academic field. The field is frequently condensed to the emblematic names of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha.
None of the three, however, played any significant role in the naming or institutionalization of the field. The primary catalysts in that regard
were a less glamorous trio, Bill Ashcroft , Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, who produced two of the textbooks that were key in constituting
the field, namely, The Empire Writes Back and The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. But they were not alone, as the 1990s unfolded, field-
constituting “postcolonial” titles began to proliferate at a remarkable rate.
For the past two decades, both the term and the field of postcolonialism have been subjected to thorough and extensive criticism from the
perspectives of literary, political and religious studies. Theorists take different views about this field of study. From an optimistic point of
view, postcolonial theory is a means of defiance by which any exploitative and discriminative practices, regardless of time and space, can be
challenged. By contrast, the pessimistic view regards postcolonial theory as ambiguous, ironic and superstitious.
With regard to the pessimistic view, Russell Jacoby's argument to demonstrate how postcolonial theory is problematic for researchers because
of its “lack of consensus and clarity”. For others, according to Slemon, this lack of clarity in postcolonial theory together with its fluidity and
ambivalence, is “what is genuinely enabling about the field”. The term not only lacks clarity, but also keeps changing through “new forms of
social collectivity” as they emerge in time and space in a postcolonial world. These “new forms require new ways describing them”.
Therefore, it is difficult to keep pace with the rapidly changing world while at the same time keeping the definition (if any) of postcolonial
theory intact. For this reason, it is equally difficult to formulate a single theory to deal with all forms of the winds of change: social, political,
academic, military and economic – those that have created new histories in societies across the globe. Consequently, postcolonial theory
becomes a constant and continuing struggle in the company of humanity.
The critical part of a definition of “postcolonial” concerns the prefix “post”, which signifies two different meanings in one compound word.
According to Moore, such a conception of “post(-)colonial” can be viewed as “naïve, inadequate, or utopian”. Many critics prefer the term
“postcolonial” without a hyphen because it is less “suggestive of (imagined) chronological or ideological supersession”. What is evident here
is that, despite the past of colonialism in the exchange for “flag independence” that brought neither economic independence, nor reparation for
that past, imperialism as a concept and colonialism as a practice are still active in a new form. This new form is neo-colonialism.
The second challenge of a definition of postcolonial theory is its contextual framework, as it is linked to race, culture and gender, settler and
native. The pertinent questions theorists need to ask are: When does a settler become coloniser, colonised and postcolonial? When does a race
cease to be an oppressive agent and become a wealth of cultural diversities of a postcolonial setting? Or in the human history of migrations,
when does the settler become native, indigenous, a primary citizen? And lastly, when does the native become truly postcolonial? The answers
to these questions make postcolonial theory problematic. Based on such questions, the road from colonial to postcolonial never ends merely
with “post” in a postcolonial concept. Instead it becomes a new form of influence through local agents. This vicious circle does not allow the
world to be postcolonial – to be entirely free from colonialism.
Moreover, Bhabha (1994:171) sees postcolonial critique emerging from colonial experiences. He argues:
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Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of “minorities”
within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. They intervene in those ideological discourses of
modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic “normality” to the uneven development and the differential, often
disadvantaged, histories of nations, race, communities, peoples.
Theory formulates its critique around the social histories, cultural differences and political discrimination that are practised and normalised by
colonial and imperial machineries. Postcolonial critique also recognises anti-colonial movements as the source and inspiration of its politics.
Postcolonial critique can be defined as a dialectical discourse which broadly marks the historical facts of decolonisation. It allows people
emerging from socio-political and economic domination to reclaim their sovereignty; it gives them a negotiating space for equity. The
language of postcolonial theory is uncompromising, because it “threatens privileges and power” by rejecting and challenging the superiority
of some cultures over others. Its priority is to administer equality and justice to people . According to Young, postcolonial theory as a
“political discourse” emerged mainly from experiences of oppression and struggles for freedom after the “tricontinental” awakening in Africa,
Asia and Latin America: the continents associated with poverty and conflict.
1. Post-coloniality and theory
The idea of ‘post-colonial literary theory’ emerges from the inability of European theory to deal adequately with the complexities and varied
cultural provenance of post-colonial writing. European theories themselves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden by
false notions of ‘the universal’. Theories of style and genre, assumptions about the universal features of language, epistemologies and value
systems are all radically questioned by the practices of postcolonial writing. Post-colonial theory has proceeded from the need to address this
different practice. Indigenous theories have developed to accommodate the differences within the various cultural traditions as well as the
desire to describe in a comparative way the features shared across those traditions.
The political and cultural monocentrism of the colonial enterprise was a natural result of the philosophical traditions of the European world
and the systems of representation which this privileged. Nineteenth-century imperial expansion, the culmination of the outward and
dominating thrust of Europeans into the world beyond Europe, which began during the early Renaissance, was underpinned in complex ways
by these assumptions. In the first instance this produced practices of cultural subservience, characterized by one postcolonial critic as ‘cultural
cringe’ (Phillips 1958). Subsequently, the emergence of identifiable indigenous theories in reaction to this formed an important element in the
development of specific national and regional consciousnesses.
2. Postcolonial theories of literature
As writers and critics became aware of the special character of post-colonial texts, they saw the need to develop an adequate model to account
for them. Four major models have emerged: first, ‘national’ or regional models, which emphasize the distinctive features of the particular
national or regional culture; second, race-based models which identify certain shared characteristics across various national literatures, such as
the common racial inheritance in literatures of the African diaspora addressed by the ‘Black writing’ model; third, comparative models of
varying complexity which seek to account for particular linguistic, historical, and cultural features across two or more post-colonial
literatures; fourth, more comprehensive comparative models which argue for features such as hybridity and syncreticity as constitutive
elements of all post-colonial literatures. These models often operate as assumptions within critical practice rather than specific and discrete
schools of thought; in any discussion of post-colonial writing a number of them may be operating at the same time.
1. National and regional models
The first post-colonial society to develop a ‘national’ literature was the USA. The emergence of a distinctive American literature in the late
eighteenth century raised inevitable questions about the relationship between literature and place, between literature and nationality, and
particularly about the suitability of inherited literary forms. Ideas about new kinds of literature were part of the optimistic progression to
nationhood because it seemed that this was one of the most potent areas in which to express difference from Britain. Writers like Charles
Brockden Brown, who attempted to indigenize British forms like the gothic and the sentimental novel, soon realized that with the change in
location and culture it was not possible to import form and concept without radical alteration (Fiedler 1960; Ringe 1966). Once the American
Revolution had forced the question of separate nationality, and the economic and political successes of the emerging nation had begun to be
taken for granted, American literature as a distinct collection of texts also began to be accepted. But it was accepted as an offshoot of the
‘parent tree’. Such organic metaphors, and others like ‘parent–child’ and ‘stream–tributary’ acted to keep the new literature in its place
But as the extensive literature of the USA developed different characteristics from that of Britain and established its right to be considered
independently, the concept of national literary differences ‘within’ English writing became established. In many ways the American
experience and its attempts to produce a new kind of literature can be seen to be the model for all later post-colonial writing. The eventual
consequence of this has been that ‘newer’ literatures from countries such as Nigeria, Australia, and India could also be discussed as discrete
national formations rather than as ‘branches of the tree’. Their literatures could be considered in relation to the social and political history of
each country, and could be read as a source of important images of national identity.
Larger geographical models which cross the boundaries of language, nationality, or race to generate the concept of a regional literature, such
as West Indian or South Pacific literature, may also share some of the limitations of the national model. While the idea of an ‘African’
literature, for instance, has a powerful appeal to writers and critics in the various African countries, it has only limited application as a
descriptive label. African and European critics have produced several regional and national studies which reflect the widespread political,
economic, and cultural differences between modern African countries (Gurr and Calder, 1974).
Some regional groupings are more likely to gain acceptance in the regions themselves than are others, and will derive from a collective
identity evident in other ways. This is true of the West Indies. Both the West Indies and the South Pacific have regional universities with a
significant input into literary production and discussion. ‘West Indian’ literature has almost always been considered regionally, rather than
nationally. There have been no major studies of Jamaican or Trinidadian literatures as discrete traditions. A different regional grouping,
emphasizing linguistic determinants rather than geographical and historical ones, has also developed to explore ‘Caribbean’ literature, setting
literature in English from the region alongside that written in Spanish, French, and other European languages (Allis 1982). Despite such

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variants on the national model, most of the English literatures outside Britain have been considered as individual, national enterprises forming
and reflecting each country’s culture.
Comparisons between two or more regions
Theories and models of post-colonial literatures could not emerge until the separate colonies were viewed in a framework centred on their
own literary and cultural traditions. Differences between colonies were subordinated to their common difference from Britain. Thus three
principal types of comparison have resulted, forming bases for a genuine post-colonial discourse. These are comparisons between countries of
the white diaspora – the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – comparisons between areas of the Black diaspora, and, thirdly, those
which bridge these groupings, comparing, say, literatures of the West Indies with that of Australia.
One of the most important early works in the first category is J.P. Matthews’ Tradition in Exile which offers a comparison between poetry in
Canada and Australia in the nineteenth century. Tradition in Exile investigated significant similarities and important national and regional
differences and though, as the title indicates, it still alluded to the imperial connection, its investigations of developmental parallels occasioned
by the transplantation of the English language and traditions into other areas of the world laid the foundations for later studies which would
perceive the imperial–colonial relationship as disjunctive rather than continuous. For example, Jones considers important literary–political
similarities between the USA and Australia, and Kirkby which argues for the importance of the American, rather than the British, influence
on contemporary Australian poetry. Other critics like Moore , Ngugi, Griffiths concentrate on similarities between writing within the Black
diaspora, comparing the literatures of African countries with those of the West Indian nations and/or with Black American writing. Less
frequently, comparisons have been drawn between countries or regions across Black and white diasporas – Dorsinville’s Caliban Without
Prospero (1974) which deals with the literatures of Quebec (in Canada) and the Black diaspora. Such studies, because they can deal in greater
detail with two or three areas, form important bridges for the discourse of post-colonialism which deals with all areas, both Black and white.
2. The ‘Black Writing’ Model
Another grouping, which traverses several of the literatures from postcolonial societies is ‘Black writing’. This proceeds from the idea of race
as a major feature of economic and political discrimination and draws together writers in the African diaspora whatever their nationality –
African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and writers from African nations. The African characteristics of the model are important, for although
the classification might be extended to include, for instance, Polynesian, Melanesian, or Australian Aboriginal writing (and even writing by
whites about Africa or India as an antagonistic term), this extension has never been enthusiastically embraced by critics outside the African
diaspora. Even where the idea of Black writing has worked well, in comparing and contrasting Black American writing with that from Africa
or the West Indies (Baker 1976; Barthold 1981), it overlooks the very great cultural differences between literatures which are produced by a
Black minority in a rich and powerful white country and those produced by the Black majority population of an independent nation.
Despite these qualifications, race-centred critiques of Black writing and of writing by Europeans about Black societies have been influential
within post-colonial discourse. The concept of Négritude developed by the Martinican Aimé Césaire (1945) and the Senegalese poet and
politician Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senghor 1977) was the most pronounced assertion of the distinctive qualities of Black culture and identity.
The Black Power movements share many of the characteristics of the theory of Négritude in their assertion of the unique and distinctive
features of Black thought and emotion. But in making this assertion it adopted stereotypes which curiously reflected European prejudice.
Black culture, it claimed, was emotional rather than rational; it stressed integration and wholeness over analysis and dissection; it operated by
distinctive rhythmic and temporal principles, and so forth. Négritude also claimed a distinctive African view of time–space relationships,
ethics, metaphysics, and an aesthetics which separated itself from the supposedly ‘universal’ values of European taste and style. The danger
was that, as a result, it could easily be reincorporated into a European model in which it functioned only as the antithesis of the thesis of white
supremacy, a new ‘universal’ paradigm.
Modern Afro-American critics continue to assert the existence of a distinctive Black consciousness in their analyses of literature and theory.
The collection of essays Black Literature and Literary Theory (Gates 1984) illustrates how such concepts as ‘soul’ or the importance of
repetition in Black musical structure can be used to propose a distinctive Black aesthetic. But the fact that these features are subject to analysis
and that structuralism and discourse analysis are employed in these accounts would suggest how far Black literary theory has come from the
broadly polarizing assertions of early Négritudinist criticism, and the extent to which it acknowledges its European critical and
epistemological assumptions. Black writers have been critical of what have appeared to be new hegemonic categories like ‘Commonwealth
literature’, and this has forced critics and writers from colonized white countries to consider their own attitudes to race and to their often
ambiguous positions as both colonized and colonizers.
3. Wider Comparative Models
Finding a name
One of the first difficulties in developing a wider comparative approach to the literatures has been that of finding an appropriate name to
describe them. Some early attempts at a name which indicated the world-wide range of English writing never found general acceptance. The
term ‘Commonwealth literature’ which also emerged in the 1960s, although it secured much readier acceptance, nevertheless had
geographical and political limitations. It rested purely on the fact of a shared history and the resulting political grouping. In its loosest form it
remained a descriptive term for a collection of national literatures united by a past or present membership of the British Commonwealth.
Several attempts have been made to find a politically and theoretically more appropriate name for such literatures than ‘Commonwealth
literature’ ( Tiffin, 1983). The limited and pejorative term ‘Third World literatures’ has been used in some university courses, but the most
popular contenders have been ‘new literatures in English’ and, most recently, ‘post-colonial literatures’. The term ‘colonial literatures’ might
focus on what is shared by the writing and therefore suggest the direction in which to proceed theoretically,but the connotations of the term
are politically unacceptable to territories which have gained their independence. ‘Post-colonial’ seems to be the choice which both embraces
the historical reality and focuses on that relationship which has provided the most important creative and psychological impetus in the writing.
Although it does not specify that the discourse is limited to works in english, it does indicate the rationale of the grouping in a common past
and hints at the vision of a more liberated and positive future. In practical terms, the description we adopt – ‘post-colonial’ – is less restrictive
than ‘Commonwealth’; it shares with ‘new literatures in English’ the ability to include, for example, the english literature of the Philippines or
of the United States as well as that of ‘pakeha’ (white) or Maori writing in New Zealand, or that of both Blacks and whites in South Africa.

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However, the term ‘post-colonial literatures’ is finally to be preferred over the others because it points the way towards a possible study of the
effects of colonialism in and between writing in english and writing in indigenous languages in such contexts as Africa and India.
6.12.2.3. 1.Language and place
Several comparative models of post-colonial literature have been developed. An early and influential example, proposed by D.E.S. Maxwell
(1965), concentrated on the disjunction between place and language. Place and displacement, as the introduction has suggested, are major
concerns of all post-colonial peoples and Maxwell’s model for examining their literatures focused on this characteristic, questioning the
‘appropriateness’ of an imported language to describe the experience of place in post-colonial societies. Maxwell observed the similarity
between these societies in their use of a non-indigenous language which was always to some extent ‘alien’ to that place. He identified two
groups; the settler colonies and the invaded colonies. In the case of the settler colonies like the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and
Australia, land was occupied by European colonists who dispossessed and overwhelmed the Indigenous populations. They established a
transplanted civilization which eventually secured political independence while retaining a non-Indigenous language. Having no ancestral
contact with the land, they dealt with their sense of displacement by unquestioningly clinging to a belief in the adequacy of the imported
language – where mistranslation could not be overlooked it was the land or the season which was ‘wrong’. Yet in all these areas writers have
subsequently come, in different ways, to question the appropriateness of imported language to place. Maxwell’s theory suggests that in the
case of invaded societies like those in India or Nigeria, where indigenous peoples were colonized on their own territories, writers were not
forced to adapt to a different landscape and climate, but had their own ancient and sophisticated responses to them marginalized by the world-
view which was implicated in the acquisition of English. Whether English actually supplanted the writer’s mother tongue or simply offered an
alternative medium which guaranteed a wider readership, its use caused a disjunction between the apprehension of, and communication about,
the world.
For Maxwell, wherever post-colonial writers originated, they shared certain outstanding features which set their work apart from the
indigenous literary tradition of England: There are two broad categories. In the first, the writer brings his own language – English – to an alien
environment and a fresh set of experiences: Australia, Canada, New Zealand. In the other, the writer brings an alien language – English – to
his own social and cultural inheritance: India, West Africa.
There are two major limitations to this model: first, it is not sufficiently comprehensive in that it does not consider the case of the West Indies
or of South Africa, which are exceptional in a number of important respects; second, its lack of linguistic subtlety risks encouraging a
simplistic and essentialist view of the connection between language and place. To take the first point; in the West Indies, for instance, the
Indigenous people (Caribs and Arawaks) were virtually exterminated within a century of the European invasion. So the entire contemporary
population has suffered a displacement and an ‘exile’ – from Africa, India, China, the ‘Middle East’, and Europe. The West Indian situation
combines all the most violent and destructive effects of the colonizing process. Like the populations of the settler colonies all West Indians
have been displaced. Yet this displacement includes for those of African descent the violence of enslavement, and for many others (Indian and
Chinese) the only slightly less violent disruption of slavery’s ‘legal’ successor, the nineteenth-century system of indentured labour. As in
India and African countries the dominant imperial language and culture were privileged over the peoples’ traditions. Settler colonies could at
least have the temporary illusion of a filiative relationship with that dominating culture, whilst the colonies of intervention and exploitation
had traditional, pre-colonial cultures which continued to coexist with the new imperial forms. In the West Indies though, whilst individual
racial groups continued to maintain fragments of pre-colonial cultures brought from their original societies and whilst these continue to be part
of the complex reality of contemporary West Indian life (e.g. the many African features in contemporary West Indian culture) the processes of
maintaining continuity or of ‘decolonizing’ the culture are much more obviously problematic.
Maxwell also did not include South Africa in his category of settler colonies, but white South African literature has clear affinities with those
of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Black South African literature, on the other hand, might more fruitfully be compared with that of
other African countries. But the racist politics of South African apartheid creates a political vortex into which much of the literature of the
area, both Black and white, is drawn. The common themes of the literatures of settler colonies – exile, the problem of finding and defining
‘home’, physical and emotional confrontations with the ‘new’ land and its ancient and established meanings – are still present in literature by
white South Africans, but are muted by an immediate involvement in race politics. Pervasive concerns of Nigerian or Kenyan writing,
dispossession, cultural fragmentation, colonial and neo-colonial domination, post-colonial corruption and the crisis of identity still emerge in
writing by Black South Africans, but again are necessarily less prominent than more specific and immediate matters of race and personal and
communal freedom under an intransigent and repressive white regime. As to the second point, although Maxwell’s formulation goes a
considerable way towards identifying the scope and unity of post-colonial literatures, it might be seen to encourage an assumption that a
language somehow may be inherently inappropriate for use in another place.
Another major post-colonial approach, derived from the works of political theorists like Frantz Fanon (1959, 1961, 1967) and Albert Memmi
(1965), locates its principal characteristic in the notion of the imperial–colonial dialectic itself. In this model the act of writing texts of any
kind in post-colonial areas is subject to the political, imaginative, and social control involved in the relationship between colonizer and
colonized. This relationship posits important questions; for example, that of the possibility of ‘decolonizing’ the culture. Some of the most
vigorous debates in post-colonial societies have centred on exactly what such ‘decolonization’ implies and how it should be achieved. Some
critics have stressed the need vigorously to recuperate pre-colonial languages and cultures. For the most resolute of these critics, colonization
is only a passing historical feature which can be left behind entirely when ‘full independence’ of culture and political organization is achieved
(Ngugi 1986). Others have argued that not only is this impossible but that cultural syncreticity is a valuable as well as an inescapable and
characteristic feature of all post-colonial societies and indeed is the source of their peculiar strength (Williams ,1969).
In African countries and in India, that is in post-colonial countries where viable alternatives to English continue to exist, an appeal for a return
to writing exclusively, or mainly in the pre-colonial languages has been a recurring feature of calls for decolonization. Politically attractive as
this is, it has been seen as problematic by those who insist on the syncretic nature of post-colonial societies. Syncreticist critics argue that even
a novel in Bengali or Gikuyu is inevitably a crosscultural hybrid, and that decolonizing projects must recognize this. In settler colonies, where
decolonizing projects underlay the drive to establish national cultures, the problem of language at first seemed a less radical one. The fact that

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the language seemed to sit uncomfortably with the local ‘reality’ was perceived to be a minor irritant that would be solved in time.
Nevertheless, as later critics have perceived, this position, too, glossed over major problems of language and ‘authenticity’.
6.12.2.4. Models of Hybridity and Syncreticity

While post-colonial literary theory has drawn on European theoretical systems it has done so cautiously and eclectically. Theories proposed
by critics like Homi Bhabha and writers like Wilson Harris or Edward Brathwaite proceed from a consideration of the nature of post-colonial
societies and the types of hybridization their various cultures have produced. In much European thinking history, ancestry, and the past form a
powerful reference point for epistemology. Homi Bhabha has noted the collusion between narrative mode, history, and realist mimetic
readings of texts. Similarly, the St Lucian poet, Derek Walcott, in his essay, ‘The muse of history’, takes issue with what he regards as the
West Indian writer’s obsession with the destructions of the historical past, and makes a plea for an escape from a prison of perpetual
recriminations into the possibilities of a ‘historyless’ world (Walcott, 1974).
The West Indian poet and historian E.K. Brathwaite proposes a model which, while stressing the importance of the need to privilege the
African connection over the European, also stresses the multicultural, syncretic nature of the West Indian reality. Similarly, for the Guyanese
novelist and critic, Wilson Harris, cultures must be liberated from the destructive dialectic of history, and imagination is the key to this. Harris
sees imaginative escape as the ancient and only refuge of oppressed peoples, but the imagination also offers possibilities of escape from the
politics of dominance and subservience. Mixing past, present, future, and imperial and colonial cultures within his own fiction, Harris
deliberately strives after a new language and a new way of seeing the world. This view rejects the apparently inescapable polarities of
language and deploys the destructive energies of European culture in the service of a future community in which division and categorization
are no longer the bases of perception.
In Harris’s formulation, hybridity in the present is constantly struggling to free itself from a past which stressed ancestry, and which valued
the ‘pure’ over its threatening opposite, the ‘composite’. The complication of time meeting space in literary theory and historiography, with its
attendant clash of the ‘pure’ and the ‘hybrid’, is well illustrated by the contradictions that have arisen in the Canadian situation. Canadian
literature, perceived internally as a mosaic, remains generally monolithic in its assertion of Canadian difference from the canonical British or
the more recently threatening neo-colonialism of American culture. Alternatively, it has striven for outside recognition by retreating from the
dynamics of difference into the neo-universalist internationalist stance. Where its acute perception of cultural complexity might have
generated a climate in which crossnational or cross-cultural comparative studies would be privileged, little work of this kind seems to have
been done.
According Post-colonial literary theory, then, has begun to deal with the problems of transmuting time into space, with the present struggling
out of the past, and, like much recent post-colonial literature, it attempts to construct a future. The post-colonial world is one in which
destructive cultural encounter is changing to an acceptance of difference on equal terms. Both literary theorists and cultural historians are
beginning to recognize cross-culturality as the potential termination point of an apparently endless human history of conquest and annihilation
justified by the myth of group ‘purity’, and as the basis on which the post-colonial world can be creatively stabilized. The recent approaches
have recognized that the strength of post-colonial theory may well lie in its inherently comparative methodology and the hybridized and
syncretic view of the modern world which this implies. This view provides a framework of ‘difference on equal terms’ within which multi-
cultural theories, both within and between societies, may continue to be fruitfully explored.
The various, reveal, models by which texts and traditions in post-colonial literatures are discussed intersect at a number of points. However,
place is extremely important in all the models, and epistemologies have developed which privilege space over time as the most important
ordering concept of reality. In the same way the poles of governor– governed, ruler–ruled, etc. are inverted and the concept of dominance as
the principal regulator of human societies is recognized but challenged. Likewise, language localizes and attracts value away from a British
‘norm’ eventually displacing the hegemonic centrality of the idea of ‘norm’ itself. Finally, the ‘double vision’ imposed by the historical
distinction between metropolis and colony ensures that in all post-colonial cultures, monolithic perceptions are less likely.

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LITERARY THEORY & LITERARY CRITICISM

Ancient Literary Criticism

1. What is Literary Theory and

2. Political and Historical Background of Classical Literary Criticism

1.4.3. Horace (65–8 BC)

1.4.4. Cicero’s Rhetorical Theory

2.1. Organization of knowledge in the medieval period

2.3. The Traditions of Medieval Criticism: Literature and Grammar

2.3.Prominent Medieval philosophers

2.3.2. St. Augustine (354–430)

2.3.2 .Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274)

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3.3.1. Conforming to the Classical Heritage

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Defending the Vernacular and poetry

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Poetic Form and Rhetoric

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4.3. Prominent Figures Of Neoclassicism

4.3.1. Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

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4.3.2. John Dryden (1631–1700)

4.3.2. John Dennis (1657-1734)

Important Figures of Romantic Literary Criticism

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

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3. Analogy Between Dream and Literature

6.3.2. Lacanian Psychoanalysis

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Surface phenomena: dog runs happily

Structure: Noun Verb

Rules of combination Subject + Predicate

6.5.1. How Can We Apply Structuralism in Literary Criticism?

Actants Plot types

Units of narrative Units of language units of language

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THESIS ANTITHESI SYNTHESIS, or

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6.7.3. Applying Marxism in Literary Criticism

6.8. New Historicism

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6.12.2.4. Models of Hybridity and Syncreticity

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