When first considering this book in March, I was just developing an interest in critical theory but saw this text as related only to ‘literary criticism’ and somehow different to critical theory, so kept putting it to one side. The chapter headings seemed to lay out the exact chronology of theory I was looking for so I eventually dipped into the introduction and was instantly hooked. Reading this was like walking into a series of slowly illuminating, interconnected rooms on account of how clear and accessible this text is. As a humanities student I hadn’t really appreciated such a range of critical approaches existed as the type of close reading you perform in classical studies is the traditional history-centric approach, a method quite different to contemporary literary analysis.
This book introduces several schools of thought from the domain of critical theory and demonstrates their application to interdisciplinary literary criticism. In each of the following chapters a strand of theory, its main thinkers, along with their approaches and applied examples, were provided in a most comprehensible way.
Ch. 1: Theory before ‘theory’
A useful primer on ‘liberal humanism’, the traditional “pre-theory” approach which might be summarised as very close reading of the text only, ignoring the historical and authorial context.
Ch. 2: Structuralism: 1950s onwards.
Protagonists: Barthes and Levi-Strauss (anthropologist), later Saussure (linguist). Structuralists believe(d) that you need to examine something in the context of the larger structures they are part of to truly understand them. If the liberal humanist is interested only in closely examining ‘the egg’ then the structuralist would only consider the egg within the context of ‘the chicken that laid it’. The associated theory is somewhat more complex but well explained in the text. I can easily see how this would be applied as theory outside of literary criticism.
Ch. 3: Post-structuralism and deconstruction: Late 1960s
Protagonists: Barthes and Derrida. Rather than construct/reconstruct a text, deconstruction seeks to read against the grain, look for unconscious or hidden meaning in the text or behind the author’s intent. Derrida is the key thinker cited here and it’s a useful history lesson on someone frequently cited in critical theory. If I were an English Literature student I would be taking a lot from this and the preceding chapter.
Ch. 4: Postmodernism: 1980s
Protagonists: Habermas, Lyotard and Baudrillard. I have really struggled to distinguish postmodernism from modernism. If modernism is a term relating to what came after the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason (Kant, Hume) then postmodernism is a blurred boundary that demarcates when thought (and music/culture) ceased to be original, merely recycling older ideas or culture (this is easily understood when applied to music and art). It is the introduction of Baudrillard’s ideas that I found most fascinating and relevant. Baudrillard argued that pervasive film, TV and advertising had blurred boundaries between ‘the reality’ and ‘the illusion of it’, between surface and depth. Baudrillard explored this thinking in his ideas of ‘hyperreality’ and ‘the simulacra’. A crude summary of his ‘system of signs’ is found within this quote:
“Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal”
Ch. 5: Psychoanalytic criticism: 1980s
Protagonists: Freud then Lacan. Useful as someone new to Zizek, a contemporary thinker who grounds a lot of his theory in their readings of Lacan. A good primer on Freud’s psychoanalytic work is given, along with its application as literary criticism. This is often centred around the Oedipus complex and functions of the id, ego and super-ego (again, the elucidations of these Freudian concepts are made delightfully comprehensible to amateurs). If Freudian analysis looks for unconscious motives of the author, then Lacanian analysis looks for unconscious meanings of the text itself, similar to and building upon the ideas of deconstruction.
Ch. 6: Feminist criticism: 1970s/80s/90s
Protagonists: Wollstonecraft, Woolf and De Beauvoir, then Butler. Really interesting and insightful overview of the ‘waves of feminism’ and its application to literary theory. Phase 1, a critique of patriarchal stereotypes in literature, subsequent phases (paraphrased heavily) moving into an exploration of the female outlook, followed by establishing a canon of female writers.
Ch. 7: Queer theory: 1990s
Protagonists: Sinfield and Dollimore, Sedgwick and Butler 1990s. This section explores movements and ruptures within feminism and the emergence of distinct reactionary fields such as black feminism. Lesbian feminism, it is explained, exerted itself as a ‘truer feminism’ in so much as it was genuinely antagonistic to the status quo of male power, in a way that heterosexual feminism couldn’t be. Lesbian feminism separated from traditional feminism and then later aligned with gay men to create the foundations of queer theory. Fascinating just as meta-theory.
Ch. 8: Marxist criticism
Protagonists: Marx and Engels, adopted widely by other theories including feminism, Althusser then Eagleton. A really nice one-page primer on the basics of Marxism (slightly more accessible than Mieville’s recent work!). Marxism is a materialist philosophy (as opposed to idealist) and based on common/state ownership of the means of production rather than private. Good discussion of Marx and Engels in the context of their wider work/thought plus an explanation of how their reasoning was based on the ideas of Hegel. While there is much in this chapter that explores various applications of Marxist literary theory, this chapter is (I think) best read as an exploration of Marxist and neo-Marxist thought and its adoption, criticism and absorption by other thinkers, especially Althusser.
It was the introduction to Althusser’s thought that I really valued in this section. Althusser influenced much recent Marxist thinking on literature. Althusser’s Decentring (poorly paraphrased) allows art and culture to exist slightly outside of the Marx-Engelsian notion that the superstructure is simply a reflection or encapsulation of the economic base. Althusser helpfully distinguishes between ‘state power’ and ‘state control’ the latter of which is maintained by ‘repressive structures’:
… institutions like the law courts, prisons, the police force, and the army, which operate, in the last analysis, by external force. But the power of the state is also maintained more subtly, by seeming to secure the internal consent of its citizens, using what Althusser calls ideological structures or state ideological apparatuses. These are such groupings as political parties, schools, the media, churches, the family and art (including literature) which foster an ideology — a set of ideas and attitudes — which is sympathetic to the aims of the state and the political status quo. Thus each of us feels that we are freely choosing what is in fact being imposed upon us.
The trick whereby we feel like we are choosing when really we have no choice is called by Althusser ‘interpellation’ thus
democracy makes us feel like we are choosing the government we have but in practice the differences between political parties, once in power, are far fewer than the the rhetorical gulfs between them.
Althusser strived to articulate a more subtle view of how society works than is provided by traditional Marxism.
Ch. 9: New historicism and cultural materialism: 1970s/80s
Protagonist: Greenblatt. New historicism perhaps best summarised as a literary approach that involves parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts of the same historic period e.g. a play and contemporary historical document. It is the American counterpart and dialogue partner of British ‘cultural materialism’. I think this is best described as similar to the US approach but with added Marxism to explore “the context of exploitation” from which the text emerged.
Ch. 10: Postcolonial criticism: 1990s
Originators: Said, Spivak, Ashcroft and Louis-Gates, Jr. A rejection of Eurocentric-universalism and the othering of “Orientalism” as famously explored by Said. Also fascinating as theory, history and meta-theory. Similar stages to feminism with phase 1 commencing a critique of colonialism then an exploration of the culture that was “buried” by colonisers before establishing a canon of historic and contemporary non-European writers. I would highly recommend this to any humanities student who struggles with a simple explanation and approach for postcolonialism.
Ch. 11: Stylistics
Less a theory and more a practice. An empirical approach, similar to liberal humanism. A simple example might be analysing a text and noting the absence of superlatives as a deliberate and consistent authorial method, or counting the frequency of certain types of grammatical structures. Stylistics describes the technical aspects of a text and then uses this for an interpretative view. Feels like it would be ideal for Literature students on the autism spectrum!
Ch. 12: Narratology
Protagonist: Propp. The study of narrative structures within texts. Mostly this sections covers literary theory and focuses on distinctions between story and plot. Propp’s work examines the structure of Russian folktales and extracts a list of building blocks that provide common functions across all tales. Each tale contains a selection of functions that are held together by a narrative. Barthes gets cited a lot here and I feel there is a wider application of narratology as a method of critical theory and it will be interesting to see if this method surfaces elsewhere. I feel this method could be applied to a critique of rolling news coverage, for example.
Ch. 13: Ecocriticism: 1970s/1980s/1990s
The US version of this method focuses on the foregrounding of nature in texts, especially the works of the ‘transcendentalists’. Interesting discussion on how Nature isn’t reducible to a concept. Theory always focuses on language and the subject but, as Kate Soper’s remarks, “it isn’t language which has a hole in its ozone layer”. Ecocriticism has arrived to challenge theory but its easy to see the overlap with other schools of thought. An example is the well-known hymn “All things bright and beautiful” which used to contain the line:
“The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them high and lowly”
Here it appears as if social inequality is ‘naturalised’ and ‘disguised as nature and God-given’ when the material reality is that such inequality is the product of politics and power. I can’t help but see Marxist theory reflected in this.
Ch. 14: Literary theory — a history in ten events
A short but incredibly history of important events and scandals in the world of theory such as Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War didn’t happen” and “the Sokal affair” all of which have fuelled anti-theory grifters such as Peterson and Lindsay.
Ch. 15: Theory after ‘Theory’
A quick overview of new strands of theory that have germinated since the earlier editions of this text. ‘Presentism’ and ‘New Aestheticism’ are of interest here but my main focus was on the topic of ‘Posthumanism’. The text dealt more with the “techno-futurism” school of posthumanism thought e.g. cyber-modifications, robots and techno-futurism (think Elon Musk) outcomes like being able to download your consciousness. I reject this “humanism” school of thought in favour of ‘post-Anthropocene posthumanism’ which seeks to re-orient the human into a more symbiotic relationship with the world and is often discussed alongside social systems thinking.
TL;DR; This was a fascinating, incredibly helpful primer on theory, along with its practical application in literary analysis. I would recommend it to any student entering undergraduate/postgraduate English Literature or any branch of Critical Theory.
