LITERARY THEORY

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

What is theory?
You have probably picked up this book because you want to know, or your
teacher or lecturer wants you to know, something about a reading tool called
‘literary theory’. In this book, you will find outlines for all the major groups
of literary theorists – what we call ‘schools’ of literary theory. Each school
represents a group of thinkers who are identified as sharing particular
approaches to thinking about the world.

If you gave these thinkers a simple and familiar question, they might all
answer it rather differently…

‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’

• Karl Marx: ‘It was a historical inevitability.’

• Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Because if you gaze too long across the road, the road
also gazes across you.’

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

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

• Jacques Derrida: ‘Any number of contending discourses may be discovered

within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is
equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because
structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!’1

What none of them would probably give us is the answer we might expect:
‘To get to the other side’.

This tells us something about what literary theory is. It is a set of different
answers to questions we might ask about the meaning, function and effect of
a text; these answers are often unexpected and complex. As a result of this
unique way of looking at things, each school offers us a different and
particular way to think about a literary text. It can give us a perspective on
what a literary text is, on the issues it contains, and the way it is written.

Literary theories are not all the same. Early theories, such as formalism and
structuralism, are very engaged with the nature of language and, even more
than this, with reading practices. Other theories, such as poststructuralism and
postcolonial theory, often discuss literature directly but within the context of
a wider range of concerns. Some literary theory, such as psychoanalytic and
Marxist theory, is based in another discipline which does not often explicitly
address literature, unless as an example. In these latter cases, literary theory is
about the application of ideas to literature, rather than finding within the
theory itself discussion of literary analysis.

This range of approaches means that you may also see literary theory
described as critical theory: a set of tools that are useful not only for the
interpretation of literature but also for interrogating much wider questions.
Much of what we call literary theory is not intended to be considered in terms
of literature. This is why Jonathan Culler, in his Literary Theory: A Very
Short Introduction (1997), defines theory as ‘works that succeed in
challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they
apparently belong’. Literary theory is, in essence, any ideas, whether directed
towards literature or not, that can shape literary analysis. You will also find
usages of the word ‘theory’ in other disciplines. For example, cultural theory
is the theory that enables us to ask questions about culture, while film theory
may or may not explicitly discuss film, but is regardless useful for its
interpretation.

These ‘fields’ that Culler writes about are somewhat arbitrary – it is often not
the thinkers themselves who identify with a particular school but other critics
and writers who group them in this way. To make things more complicated,
some thinkers may be associated with more than one school. This means that
you may find some theorists appearing in more than one chapter of this book.
Put simply, then, literary theory can be defined as a range of texts or ideas,
often associated with literature but not explicitly concerned with it, that offer
perspectives useful in the discussion of literature’s scope, content and form.
Most commonly, these ideas come from semiotics, philosophy, politics and
psychoanalysis, although they are increasingly also related to theories
surrounding the interpretation of culture. This represents a shift to some
extent in the content of theory. While early theoretical approaches may have
been largely focused on language and the practice of reading, it is only more
recently that interests have broadened to include philosophical and cultural
approaches. This shift reflects changes in reading practices since the 1940s,
which have become increasingly open to the contexts in which a text is read
and produced.

If you compare two books on literary theory, you might be surprised to see
that their contents are quite different. For some critics, literary theory is
specifically about work directly associated with literature; for others, it is
quite the opposite, and may stretch back to the early thinking of philosophers
such as Plato and Aristotle. In this book we have focused on modern theory,
although this may include use of earlier work (such as Aristotle’s relevance
to genre theory). In terms of theme, we have taken the widest understanding
of theory, to include all the major ideas that currently contribute to literary
analysis. This includes chapters on some literary movements that contribute
heavily to theory, or without which it is difficult to understand how theory
has developed. For example, modernism is usually described more as a
literary movement than a school of theory, but many of its central thinkers
contributed ideas that have become important to other fields of theory, such
as T. S. Eliot’s contribution to new criticism and Virginia Woolf’s feminist
thinking. Moreover, modernist ideas are so important to postmodern theory
that it would be very difficult to understand one without the other, so we have
included chapters here on both.

Why theory?
If you are asked to think about a piece of literature in relation to literary
theory, you are being required to undertake an approach to reading that may
be quite different from others you have encountered. When we read literature,
we may examine a variety of texts to assist us. We can look at information
about the author (the biographical material) or about the period in which the
text was written and/or set (the historical context). We can look at articles and
books that discuss the text we are interested in, or that focus on questions
about literature more generally. This work is usually referred to as literary
criticism and is not to be confused with literary theory, which – as we have
said – does not predominantly focus on either a specific literary text or on
literature, although it may use this as an example.

One question that is sometimes raised is why we need to think about these
approaches, which are not explicitly intended for use in the discussion of
literary texts. Indeed, literary theory has only really become popular since the
1960s, when it became more acceptable to look outside the text itself for
different meanings. In the conclusion to this book, we will consider the
question of literary theory’s future: one that is to some extent uncertain and
suggests that theory might not always be the dominant approach to reading
texts, at least not with the same kind of explicit focus that we have seen since
the 1980s. Despite these debates, perhaps the best answer to the question of
why theory is important is that theory has now become integral to how we
produce literary criticism. Literary criticism, unlike theory, can be thought of
as being our direct response to an author, a text or set of texts. Unlike literary
theory, literary criticism is always explicitly directed towards literature.
Criticism, then, is where we find the interpretation of literature. Theory, in
contrast, is where we find the tools to facilitate that interpretation.

When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the
biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different
approaches that literary theory offers. By making use of these, they create
new interpretations of the text that would not otherwise be possible. In your
own reading and writing, literary theory fosters new avenues into the text. It
allows you to make informed comments about the language and form of
literature, but also about the core themes that a text might explore – concepts
such as gender, sexuality, the self, race and class.

A good response to a literary text will make selective use of theory to expand
upon and support the reader’s ideas developed through close reading, within
the context of an understanding of the text’s biographical and historical
frameworks. In this way, theory is an essential part of the matrix of tools
available to you when you are interpreting a literary text. It is not a substitute
for a personal response rooted in your own engagement with the text, but a
way of expanding and supporting this, facilitating the development of new
interpretive directions. Indeed, a useful strategy when working with theory is
not to downplay your personal response to the text, but rather to find theory
that supports and enhances your own interests. Theory, we must remember, is
a text also and, just as with any other text, we will have a personal response
to it. The best uses of theory are those where the student has a passion for the
ideas that is as evident as their passion for the text(s) to which they relate.
The best use of theory will also not lose sight of the fact that what is central
to the discussion is literary criticism. This means that theory should not
overshadow the discussion of the text; rather, it should inform that
discussion. In this book you will find case studies based on the discussion of
literary texts alongside theory that provide examples of how such balanced
discussion works in practice.

If you are interpreting literature in an assessed context, one of the key things
a tutor is looking for in your work is originality. It is here that literary theory
plays perhaps its most important role: by giving you an almost limitless
number of texts to work into your own response, literary theory ensures that
your interpretation will be truly original. This is why, although literary theory
can initially appear alienating and difficult, it is something to get really
excited about. Imagine you are standing in the centre of a circular room, with
a whole set of doors laid out around you. You have the text in hand. And
each doorway opens on to a new and illuminating field of knowledge that can
change how you think about what you have read – perhaps in just a small
way, but also perhaps dramatically and irrevocably. You can open one door,
or many of them. The choice is yours. Put the knowledge you gain together
with your own interpretation, however, and you have a unique and potentially
fascinating response.

______________
1 Adapted from ‘Daily Philosophy Joke: June 14th 2014’, The Coeus House, http://coeushouse.org/​
category/​jokes/
 How to use this book
The chapters in this book cover all the major schools of literary theory. They
are constructed in such a way that you can read the book from beginning to
end, or dip in and out, focusing on the chapters that are of most interest.
Although the complex development of ideas makes a straightforward
chronology of theory impossible, nevertheless the early chapters of this book
focus on some of the first fields to be seen as defining approaches to
literature, whereas the later chapters of the book focus on more recent
developments.

In each chapter, you will find a number of key features to direct your study:

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

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

• Quotations outline key points and can be revised for examinations or

included in essays.

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

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

• Dig deeper sections give you further reading suggestions if you want to
know more.
 1
Aestheticism

The beginnings of literary theory are often identified as an

early twentieth-century development, occurring at the same
time as the movements that began to consciously name and
define literary and artistic production. Guides to literary
theory often begin with formalism: a field of literary criticism
that sprang up alongside the movement towards self-conscious
artistic definition. However, there was a tradition preceding
this of attempting to theorize approaches to thinking about
literature within the context of wider debates surrounding
artistic production. Certainly, we might see Romanticism as
one such movement. We could also refer to the metaphysical
poetry movement, or transcendentalism, as other examples.
We are going to begin, however, not with these but with
perhaps a less familiar term that is associated with the
nineteenth century – and that is aestheticism. It is often
neglected in accounts of literary theory, but it haunts the
twentieth-century movements that follow, particularly
modernism and, as we shall see at the end of the chapter, it has
seen a twenty-first-century resurgence.
The Pre-Raphaelites
Aestheticism has its roots in the Romantic ideas of John Keats (1795–1821),
the mid-nineteenth-century writings of John Ruskin (1819–1900) and the Pre-
Raphaelite movement. Unlike the American transcendentalist movement or
the largely English metaphysical poetry and Pre-Raphaelite traditions,
aestheticism can be seen to define thinking about literature beyond national
literary identities. Its significance comes, in particular, in the ways in which it
defined the role of art in relation to society. These definitions would be the
same ones that later critical schools such as formalism, new criticism (see
Chapter 2) and reader response theory (see Chapter 3) would grapple with.

In its early development, from 1850 until around 1870, aestheticism was
heavily influenced by Pre-Raphaelite ideas as well as by the emerging artistic
impressionist movement. The Pre-Raphaelites rejected narrative in favour of
imagery and atmosphere. They were particularly concerned with the nature of
beauty, which was often reflected in a focus on the female form, for example
in paintings such as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1852) and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1859) and Astarte Syriaca (1877). Paintings such
as Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents (1850) challenged classical
idealism with the representation of Christ as the member of an ordinary
working family.

Modernism (see Chapter 7) was a trend in literature with its roots in

aestheticism that was dominant from 1900 to 1965. Although the term was
used only rarely in literary criticism before the 1940s, the writers and artists
associated with it used the term as early as the 1910s and 1920s, when it was
at its peak. In contrast, a term like Romanticism, which refers to literary
trends of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would not have been
one used by the likes of the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron,
who are now so closely associated with it.

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

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

Key idea

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

Rossetti’s book is evidence of what we will see to be a recurring association

between ideas used for thinking about literature and those used for
considering the visual arts. Aestheticism in this regard is principally
concerned with the style and form of a literary work rather than its content.
Alongside Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite interests, aestheticism was
increasingly influenced by European ideas regarding poetic form, such as
those advanced by the French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821–67).

At the end of this early period came the writings of Walter Pater (1839–94), a
figure who brings together precisely this parallel concern for visual and
written art forms. Walter Pater was an Oxford professor and literary critic
whose book The Renaissance (1873) is an extension of Pre-Raphaelite
interests, but it also uses Italian culture as a veiled means of challenging
Victorian attitudes. It was criticized on publication for the dangerous
influence it presented to young, impressionable scholars; so much so that
Pater withdrew the conclusion of the book from its second edition. Pater
argued, like the Romantics, that art was intensely personal, and that it was the
experience of art, rather than the object created, that should be the central
focus of artistic endeavour. Yet while many of the Romantics were interested
in questions of social justice and morality – think, for example, of William
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) or Wordsworth and
Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) – Pater believed that art should exist
purely for the pursuit of this aesthetic experience. This brought Pater into
conflict, too, with Victorian writers such as Matthew Arnold, Charles
Dickens and George Eliot, who gave art and literature an elevated moral or
social function.

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

Art for art’s sake

To describe his approach, Pater invoked the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’. Its
origin is much debated, but it is most commonly attributed to the French
philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867), who first used it in 1818. It was
seen to be established in literary circles a little later, with the publication in
1830 of Mademoiselle de Maupin, a novel by Théophile Gautier (1811–72).
Gautier defined the phrase as ‘the pursuit of pure beauty – without any other
preoccupation’. It was immediately taken up by members of the aesthetic
movement such as Pater, for whom it defined a Romantic refusal of
rationalism. However, some criticized it for its disavowal of moral purpose. It
is for such controversy that the term is particularly relevant in the
development of literary theory, for it asks us to consider how literature relates
to the social, political and economic realities around it – the very realities that
preoccupy approaches such as reader response, postcolonialism, feminism,
Marxism and queer theory. Art for art’s sake suggests that literature must be
created not for any inherent moral or political purpose, but purely for the sake
of the beauty it creates.

Spotlight

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

Pater’s writing is central to the more defined period of aestheticism from

1870 until the turn of the century. Later aestheticism rejected both realism
and naturalism, two related approaches to art and literature that were
dominant until that point, embodied most particularly in literary terms by the
nineteenth-century realist novels of writers like George Eliot, Jane Austen
and Thomas Hardy (if not so neatly by the more gothic, Romantic fictions of
Charles Dickens and Emily and Charlotte Brontë). This represents a
rethinking around the notion of ‘truth’: the pursuit of truth becomes not an
engagement with the empirical world that can be touched but rather with the
imagined. It also represents a rethinking around notions of time. In The
Renaissance, Pater invokes what Carolyn Williams (1989) calls an ‘aesthetic
historicism’ that prefigures postmodern approaches to history, refusing
conventional historiography for the idea of multiple truths that challenge the
idea of any straightforward ability to access the past. Alongside this comes a
distinct focus on the intense pleasure of the here and now – what Pater
referred to as the ‘ecstatic moment’. While realism often involves a
historicism that looks back through history for meaning, aestheticism focuses
on the present and on each individual experience as worthy of indulgence and
celebration.
Such developments illustrate how, in this second phase, aestheticism can be
read less in relation to what came before it and more in terms of what would
come after. In particular, the development of aestheticism drove an interest in
symbolism that would become central to the emergence of modernism in the
early twentieth century. Aestheticism was influenced here again from
activities in France, where symbolist form, driven by the early influences of
Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), increasingly drove writing
away from realist representation.

Symbolism

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

Key idea

Symbolism is a late nineteenth-century movement using symbols and images to

express ideas, emotions and states of mind.

Alongside these French works, symbolism is evident most notably in the

novels of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) and in the United
States in the work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), whom Baudelaire
enthusiastically wrote about and translated. In his essay ‘The Poetic
Principle’ (1850), Poe argues that poetry ‘has no concern whatever with Duty
or with Truth’. These writings precede the official definition of symbolism,
which was established in 1886 with the publication of Jean Moréas’s
Symbolist Manifesto. In the manifesto, the French poets Baudelaire,
Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine (1844–96) are named as the three leading writers
of a ‘polymorphous’ movement that would resist artistic meaning in favour of
mystery and abstraction. Symbolists rejected realist description and replaced
this with powerful symbolic language – allusions, images and word pictures
meant to suggest particular ideas or ways of thinking. While all literature is to
some extent symbolic, the symbolists expanded this to all areas of their
writing, rather than reserving it for privileged objects or ideas as earlier
writing had done. Free verse was favoured over rhyme as more authentic to
the fluid, shifting nature of individual experience.

The importance of symbolism for literary theory lies in its central contention
that language does not refer to a pre-existing (what you may see referred to as
a priori) reality – as realism suggests – but rather plays a central role in the
construction of that reality. The goal of the writer is not to capture a thing, for
this is impossible, but rather to capture the effect of that thing or the
experience of it: the same sense of a subjective reality that would consume
modernist writers in the early twentieth century. Symbolism also challenged
the Romantic sense of writing as the expression of the author’s self or
subjectivity for a more complicated sense of the author’s reality – like reality
in general – in part being constructed through and during the act of writing
and the relationship with language. Here we can see the beginnings of the
debates regarding the relationship between language and ideas of reality and
truth that would preoccupy structuralist, poststructuralist and postmodern
literary theorists in the twentieth century.

Decadence
Aestheticism is often defined in relation to the term ‘decadence’, as the
rejection of moral and political concerns was seen to promote indulgence in
the artistic experience – in the heady, undirected and often passionate
engagement with life without purpose or order. Baudelaire used the word to
distinguish his and fellow writers’ work from what he saw as the stilted
Victorian culture. In The Eighteen Nineties (1913), Holbrook Jackson
identifies decadence as having four central characteristics: artificiality,
egotism, curiosity and perversity. In these characteristics can be seen the
aesthete’s interest in artistry rather than nature, in the relentless pursuit of
beauty, and also an indulgence in transgressions, sexual and otherwise.

Key idea

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

While proponents of aestheticism might be symbolists and decadents, not all

followers of aestheticism neatly fit into both categories. In particular, some
symbolist work can be seen to have a definite moral and/or political tone.
Indeed, Jean Moréas (1856–1910) originally devised the term ‘symbolist’ in
part to distinguish symbolist from decadent art.

The embodiment of the decadence movement is the Irish writer and critic
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), whose status not simply as a writer but also a wit
and raconteur – a flamboyant dandy of London society – was in sharp
contrast to the stern sobriety of many Victorian artists. Eminently quotable,
Wilde’s use of satire questions Victorian moral values and exposes their
hypocrisy. His plays The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Lady
Windermere’s Fan (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and A Woman of No
Importance (1893) laugh at the pretensions of Victorian society, while his
only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), defies realism with its dark
gothic narrative.

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

In his non-fiction, Wilde argues strongly that ‘art is individualism’; his

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

‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well

written, or badly written. That is all. […] All art is quite useless.’
Oscar Wilde, Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

While decadence is therefore sometimes read as a simple bridge between

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

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

Recent scholarship has associated decadence in particular with queer politics

and questions of sexuality. This is in part because of the influence of Wilde,
whose The Picture of Dorian Gray was critiqued for its homoerotic imagery,
and whose own sexuality and the scandal that surrounded it resulted in
Wilde’s prosecution for indecency in 1895 (when homosexuality was illegal
in England). Yet it also reflects a wider concern, evident in works such as
George Meredith’s book of sonnets Modern Love (1862) and the lyric poet
Algernon Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866), which was withdrawn by
the publisher because of its sexually explicit content. It is particularly
identified, also, with the influence of Baudelaire, whose inclusion of sexually
explicit material in his poems and themes of same-sex and transgressive
desire inspired the movement. (Baudelaire’s 1857 poetry collection Les
Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) was in the year of its publication at the
centre of a trial for obscenity because of its lesbian content.)

In this regard, aestheticism, though tied to form, might also be seen to

embody particular thematic concerns. It also complicates the suggestion that
‘art for art’s sake’ takes us away from the social or political importance of
literature. For, ironically, decadence can be seen as a politics that was
political precisely because of its eschewal of a political significance; it was a
contravention of Victorian morality that, through the elevation of beauty,
gave voice to a homosexual culture denied by previous cultural expression.

Case study: The Line of Beauty

One writer associated with the later period of aestheticism is the novelist Henry James
(1843–1916). Through this association, the modern British novelist Alan Hollinghurst
explores contemporary aestheticism as a continued embodiment of gay culture in his
2004 novel The Line of Beauty. The novel’s central character, Nick Guest, is a young
man living in 1980s London about to do graduate work on James’s literary style,
specifically his relationship to realism. As the title of the novel implies, Nick’s
fascination with James runs alongside an appreciation for the visual arts that aligns
him with aesthetic concerns. The ‘line of beauty’ in question is the line referred to in
William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753) as the shape of beauty itself.

In the novel, Nick and his wealthy gay lover, Wani, create a luxury magazine named
Ogee after the line’s formal name. Wani and Nick’s magazine embodies the aesthetic
notion of ‘art for art’s sake’; only a single issue is ever produced, and it exists purely
for the satisfaction of an imagined elite readership who would indulge themselves. It
is content without purpose, education or benefit. The line’s movement in both
directions – its double curve – comes in the novel to stand for the beauty of fluid
identities that move in multiple directions and, more specifically, Nick’s simultaneous
movement towards convention in his domestic life – lodging with the family of a
Conservative MP – and his movement away from this conservatism through his
exploration of his sexuality. Parallels can be drawn here between Nick’s position and
that of Wilde, whose own sexuality stood at odds with his establishment position at
the centre of London literary culture.

Hollinghurst’s novel in this respect is an exploration of the continued relevance of

aestheticism as an essential part of gay cultural expression, but also a problematizing
of ‘art’s for art’s sake’. Hogarth believed that art should have both a moral and a
pleasurable function, and his line represents a movement between these two polarities.
Nick, equally, must negotiate between the purity of the aesthetic position and the
social and economic realities of a classist, racist and homophobic Thatcherite London.
Whereas many in the nineteenth-century aesthetic movement lived on humble means,
Hollinghurst’s aesthetes are part of a consumerist capitalist culture driven by the same
right-wing agendas that would demonize homosexuality. Where is the place,
Hollinghurst asks, for a contemporary aestheticism that might posit a radical
decadence, not in support of conservative politics but against it? What is the
contemporary function of art?

New aestheticism
Hollinghurst’s novel illuminates the relevance that aestheticism holds in
relation to literary theory even to the present day. One recent response to this
is a renewed interest in aestheticism under the label ‘new aestheticism’.
Unlike its precursor, new aestheticism does not entirely eschew the moral or
political value of literature; rather, it attempts to emphasize the unique place
of literature and its ‘strangeness’ as a form that cannot easily be treated as
synonymous with other written discourses, and that evades truth as it is
reinvented on each reading in a dialogue between reader and text. New
aestheticism can be seen to have prompted a return to intense scrutiny of the
form and language of a text, rather than the kind of thematic interests of
alternative theoretical positions. However, it sees the form of the text as a
crucial response to these thematic interests. This, then, is a modified
aestheticism that recognizes how intense focus on the text can assist in the
development of ethical and political readings, as well as being something that
resists them.

The best-known text on this question is Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon
(1994), in which Bloom argues that writing can only be usefully judged in
terms of form, and that it is through form that one can identify literary
quality. New aestheticism in this regard is the discursive position responsible
for judging the importance of literary work. Its elevation of beauty asks that
we return to a concern for how a text is crafted rather than what it says. As
Bloom’s book illustrates, it is central to questions of taste and literary value:
to the possibility of what we call ‘the canon’.

Key idea

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

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

1 Who wrote The Renaissance?

a Walter Pater
b Dante Rossetti
c Oscar Wilde
d Christina Rossetti
2 What was the name of the artistic movement to which Dante Gabriel and Christina
Rossetti belonged?
a Modernism
b The Pre-Raphaelites
c Romanticism
d Symbolism
3 Who wrote the controversial poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal?
a Oscar Wilde
b Walter Pater
c Christina Rossetti
d Charles Baudelaire
4 Which of these years would we most associate with the fin de siècle?
a 1950
b 1900
c 2000
d 1800
5 Which of these is not a characteristic of the decadence movement?
a Curiosity
b Perversity
c Egotism
d Humour
6 Who first used the term ‘art for art’s sake’?
a Walter Pater
b Théophile Gautier
 c Oscar Wilde
d Harold Bloom
7 With what movement do we associate Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon?
a Decadence
b New aestheticism
c Modernism
d Postmodernism
8 In what country was the Pre-Raphaelite movement formed?
a France
b Germany
c England
d The Netherlands
9 Who wrote The Line of Beauty?
a Alan Hollinghurst
b Ian McEwan
c Oscar Wilde
d Nick Guest
10 For what crime was Oscar Wilde prosecuted in 1895?
a Theft
b Tax fraud
c Assault
d Indecency

Dig deeper

Beckson, Karl, ed. (2005), Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of
British Poetry and Prose. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Brodskaya, Nathalia (2012), Symbolism. New York: Parkstone.
Hall, Jason David et al., eds (2013), Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the
British Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mahoney, Kristin (2015), Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sizeranne, Robert de la (2012), The Pre-Raphaelites. New York: Parkstone.
 2
Formalism and new criticism

Literary criticism is a matter of not only when but where. The

multitude of perspectives now available in the study of
literature is testament to a contemporary global culture that
has, over time, drawn its influences from across the world. In
the early twentieth century, everyone, it seemed, was reading
poetry: decadent, aesthetic poetry and modernist poetry. And
the reading of this poetry changed the face of literary studies.
In continental Europe, these readers would come to develop a
literary method known as formalism. In Britain and the United
States, developments in reading practice would be called
practical criticism and – later – new criticism. Both schools of
thought would go on to have profound influence on how we
read literary texts.
Both new critics and formalists are interested in what is on the page. They
argue that it is only textual detail that should be of interest. The Anglo-
American poet T. S. Eliot, writing in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual
Talent’ (1919), argues that good poetry relegates the personality of the poet
and his emotions in favour of artistry that keeps the reader’s attention on the
text. At the centre of this are two facets central to early twentieth-century
criticism: firstly, an intense focus on the text and, secondly, a preoccupation
with quality that would evolve into the contemporary idea of the literary
canon.

‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is

not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’
T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919)

Spotlight

T. S. Eliot is famous for his ‘difficult’ modernist poetry. He is famously quoted as

having declared, ‘A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play
and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.’

Practical criticism
When the academic I. A. Richards took up Eliot’s work at the University of
Cambridge, he emphasized a focus on the text as a self-contained work and a
complete refusal of outside information. Richards called this ‘practical
criticism’, a methodology he outlined in his book of the same name in 1929.
As a basis for this study, Richards asked his students to interpret poems
without any knowledge of their author or historical context, and with no
concern for the role of the reader. His ideas would be furthered by William
Empson, one of his students, whose book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) is
a masterly study of reading texts according to Richards’s practice.

David Fuller (2006) calls Empson a ‘theoretical anarchist’, an idiosyncratic

radical who followed his own, often contradictory, impulses. Nevertheless,
what emerges from the work of Empson and Richards is a somewhat
prescriptive way of reading. It might be a process you have engaged with in
the course of studying literature: a pure type of ‘close reading’ in which you
are asked to write on a text you have not seen before or researched.

You may also see this approach referred to as Leavisite, a term applied with
more than a hint of implied criticism. This acknowledges the role played by
another Cambridge academic in its development: F. R. Leavis. Often
described as the most influential critic of modern literature, Leavis was an
outspoken critic of what he saw as the devaluing of art by popular culture.
More than any other critic, he advanced through his work The Great
Tradition (1948) the idea of close reading as a test of what made ‘great
literature’ – a narrow list comprising Henry James, Jane Austen, Joseph
Conrad and George Eliot. Reading is not a neutral activity, according to
Leavis, but rather a morally improving one, and thus the reader must be
directed to the most valuable works of literature.

‘It is necessary to insist, then, that there are important distinctions to be

made, and that far from all of the names in the literary histories really belong
to the realm of significant creative achievement.’
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948)

Key idea

Practical criticism is the close formal analysis of a literary work without reference to
its outside contexts, including the author and historical period.

The new criticism

What Richards and Empson outlined as practical criticism resonated strongly
with an American school of thought that was equally focused on poetry and a
desire to centre critical attention on the text alone. During the 1930s a group
of poets and academics, including John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren, developed the ideas of practical criticism in an
American context. Although they did not name themselves as such
immediately, they are the critics we now call new critics, a name they
eventually gave themselves via Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941).

Like the practical critics, the new critics considered the value of the text to
exist outside of author, reader or context. Their most influential text is
Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938), in which the authors
argue that poetry has its own unique literary language. The task of the student
or critic is to decipher this language, capturing the spirit of the original. So,
for example, one should avoid paraphrasing because putting a poem in non-
literary language would be to move away from its special literary properties.

Key idea

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

LITERARY FALLACIES
In the 1940s two other new critics, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley,
devised a terminology to describe the new critical approach, developed in
two related essays, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective
Fallacy’ (1949). In the former, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that, although
there is clearly an author who has creative power over a work of literature – a
‘designing intellect’ – there is no place for biography or other speculation. If
an author has been successful, the intention will be there in the poem, easy to
identify, but if we need to go outside the poem to find this information then
the poem has not been successful in conveying it and therefore there is no
need to look for it. Central to this is the idea that we must not confuse the
author with the voice of the poem (or, in fiction, the narrator). Rather than
looking for some relation to the author, we should focus on the meaning of
the text within and for itself. In what seems an aesthetic argument (see
Chapter 1), Wimsatt and Beardsley suggest that we should not demand of the
text any political or moral message or any accuracy of representation, but
rather appreciate it for its own inherent literary quality. The idea of intention
is false – it is a fallacy.

In ‘The Affective Fallacy’, Wimstatt and Beardsley turn their attention to the
reader. Just as it is impossible to know the intention of the author so, they
argue, the reader’s response – their emotional engagement with the text –
leads us to confuse what the poem is with what it does. The latter is
potentially dangerous, because individual responses can be unpredictable and
coloured by the reader’s own methods of reading, life experience and
subjectivity. Therefore we need to distance ourselves from emotional
responses in favour of objective analysis based on the actual text. These ideas
would subsequently be challenged both by reader response theory and by
other political ways of reading.

Key ideas

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

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

Spotlight

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

Like their Anglo-American counterparts, these scholars were disenchanted

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

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

Key idea

Defamiliarization is the tendency of literature to make language ‘strange’ through the

use of literary devices and structures.

How does this ‘making strange’ take place? In his essay ‘The Theory of the
“Formal Method”’ (1926), Eichenbaum outlines the specific qualities of
poetic language. Literature, he suggests, uses a series of literary devices that
are not found in ordinary language to create its own unique speech. These
devices tell the reader that what is being presented is not real or factual, but
imaginative: that they are adventuring into the realm of creativity. Rhythm, in
particular, is singled out. The musicality of literary language distinguishes it
from its everyday counterpart.

It may be useful to consider how literariness is signposted in different types

of literary text. For example, we might find it easiest to locate in poetry,
where rhyme and metre stand out from ordinary ways of organizing
language. We can also see it quite easily in experimental prose, such as
modernist or postmodernist novels that use language in unusual ways. Where,
however, can we locate defamiliarization in a realist novel that, in fact,
attempts to obscure its artistry and instead present itself as close to ‘truth’?

One answer to this comes in the distinction between what happens in a story
and how it happens – a distinction between what formalists called the fabula
and the syuzchet. In his Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997),
Jonathan Culler develops Aristotle’s theory of narrative and describes it as a
combination of events, story, plot and discourse. Story is the overall
impression the reader engages with; plot is the ordering of events that the
reader infers from the text to create that impression; and discourse is what the
reader actually encounters in reading. While story is the basis of narrative,
and plot and events are drawn from it by the reader, it is discourse that makes
literature. It is not so much in the language itself, but rather in the ordering of
the language, and the ordering of events through that language, therefore, that
fiction finds a correlative to rhyme and metre in poetry. Anything that
contributes to this ordering and the reader’s awareness of it creates
literariness. This includes breaks in chronology, framing material such as
footnotes, prefaces and epigraphs (what are called peritexts), and changes in
style or pace.

Case study: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

As an example, let’s look at the opening of a contemporary novel, Jon McGregor’s If

Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002):

If you listen, you can hear it.

The city, it sings.

If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of
a house.

It’s clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of
things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.

It’s a wordless song, for the most, but it’s a song all the same, and nobody hearing
it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out
each note.

McGregor pursues his description of the city without the introduction of human
character and so immediately we know that this is a literary construction. It is a prose
poem to the city: the granting of agency to the city as that which ‘sings’ takes a word
that is, in non-literary language, attached only to living beings and associates it with
the non-living physical space, so that ‘sing’ is drawn out of its normal contexts and
becomes literary. This is further developed when the song is described as ‘wordless’ –
an oxymoron (contradiction of opposites) that would be inaccurate in a real-world
context, but that here contributes to the poetic image. Move on again, and the
suggestion that the song ‘sings loudest when you pick out each note’ is a scientific
impossibility, which tells us again that we are in the realm not of fact but imagination.

McGregor’s description of the city continues across the novel’s opening pages to form
an extended image:

The low soothing hum of air conditioners, fanning out the heat and the smells of
shops and cafes and offices across the city, winding up and winding down, long
breaths layered upon each other, a lullaby hum for tired streets.

Such detailed description functions in a similar way to Shklovsky’s example of

defamiliarization: Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (1759). For Shklovsky, Sterne’s
detailed and unusual description of Shandy lying on his bed reawakens the banal, as
an everyday moment becomes linguistically exciting. Equally, McGregor takes the
banal details of the city and renews them: the hum of air conditioners is part of the
city’s life, its anthropomorphic transformation into a breathing, beating entity. The
reader is awakened, not by a new idea, but rather by the new linguistic presentation of
something familiar. McGregor, like Sterne, announces that what we are reading is
literature – and announces at the same time the unique and privileged place of that
literature.

As formalism developed, it began to question the idea that devices could be

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

Shakespeare’s use of iambic pentameter (lines of ten stressed and unstressed

syllables) puts us in the realm of literature rather than everyday occurrence:
the words that Shakespeare offers us are made new in this context. Yet, in
lines nine and ten Shakespeare deviates from this pattern – what is ordinary
within the text – by including an extra unstressed syllable (a feminine
ending). When the rhyme scheme deviates from the pattern, this awakens us
to newness, drawing our attention to the place of difference. In this particular
poem, this is compounded by the fact that Shakespeare does not use
traditional sonnet form, writing in rhyming couplets rather than the standard
abab form. The poem is thus simultaneously riven by difference to the non-
literary, but also an internal difference from the traditional and expected
poetic device.

HOW AND WHY

These concerns were the same as those of the new critics. Why then, given
these similarities, do we distinguish between them? The answer lies in a
fundamental difference of emphasis between new and formalist critics. While
both formalists and new critics direct the reader only to what is on the page,
formalists, as the name suggests, are principally interested in this textual
presence because it indicates the form of the text, and generalizable rules.
They have no interest in content, themes or attitudes. In contrast, new critics
rarely looked at the form of a text: they were more interested in the tones,
images and attitudes of the individual text, taken in its singularity. For new
critics, each text is different, whereas for formalism each text is part of a
greater pattern. Formalism is interested in how literature works in order to
achieve its linguistic effect (defamiliarization), but new criticism is interested
in how it works to uncover its deeper meaning.
To see this difference in practice, we can return to our Shakespeare sonnet.
Reading it from a formalist perspective, we can interpret the breaks in form
as shifting the reader out of their comfort in the sonnet structure and re-
awakening them to literary manipulations. A new critic would be equally
interested in this disruption but would also look at what this might mean – in
this case, perhaps, seeing the disruption as central to the speaker’s passionate
emotional engagement. Neither critic, of course, would speculate about the
reason for this, such as that this poem is one of several sonnets with broken
form directed towards William Herbert, a young man with whom
Shakespeare enjoyed an intense nine-year friendship that has been the subject
of much speculation, particularly from queer critics.

Spotlight

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

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

Case study: Mrs Dalloway

The Anglo-American literary scene may have been oblivious to Russian formalism,
but its literature was nevertheless exploring similar questions about language. In the
early pages of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), a young man and war veteran,
Septimus Smith, is sitting in Regent’s Park with his wife. Above him, and watched
intently by a large crowd, appears an aeroplane, engaged in a dramatic act of
skywriting. As the words gradually come into focus, the crowd is caught in
determining not only the words themselves but also their contextualized meaning.

But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still;
then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane
shot further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y
perhaps?

Septimus in this moment is the reader of fiction subject to defamiliarization. The

words he reads are not the words of poetry but the mundane, quotidian words of
advertising: the plane is being used to advertise a brand of toffee. This suggests a non-
literary context. These are the words of everyday language. But as the words come
into focus they take on a poetic quality, transfixing the people below, haunting them,
and serving as a refrain disassociated from the product they are advertising. Septimus
sees not an advertising campaign but rather ‘beauty…exquisite beauty’ in a language
he feels he cannot read. What renders these words strange is not their essential nature
but, rather, their striking positioning. The transformation of the sky into a writing
surface pushes the words out of their normal context. Woolf’s scene is an
exemplification of how the same words, used differently, may function differently.
The device here is an exaggerated one – the sky as canvas, the words appearing in a
performance as they slowly emerge on the skyline. Yet it speaks more generally to the
formalist sense of devices that position words and in doing so give them essential
properties.

Formalism today
New and formalist criticism offers an objective, quasi-scientific approach to
the literary text, far removed from the emotional subjectivity celebrated by
the aesthetic movement. Its contribution to today’s theory is to develop an
ongoing debate about literature’s relation to the world. As we shall see in
later chapters, the idea that the author or the context of a work is irrelevant
becomes problematic once the idea of a universal literary language is
questioned by the political readings of feminism, queer theory, Marxism and
postcolonial theory – all schools of thought that demand precisely the view
beyond the text that formalism denies.
However, this movement is not straightforward or linear. More recently, there
has been a renewed call for a return to close reading practices. The British
scholar Derek Attridge, for example, has argued that, while a work must be
situated in its historical context, there is a risk that such approaches mean that
‘We may be teaching our students to write clever interpretations without
teaching them how to read…’ For Attridge (2008), contemporary theory has
taken readers too far away from the text.

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

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

Fact check

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

 a F. R. Leavis
b Roland Barthes
c T. S. Eliot
d Derek Attridge
2 What is the name for the idea in practical criticism that we should disregard the
author when reading?
a The authorial fallacy
b The context fallacy
c The intentional fallacy
d The affective fallacy
3 What is the name for the idea in practical criticism that we should ignore the
possible effects of the text when reading?
a The affective fallacy
b The authorial fallacy
c The effective fallacy
d The impact fallacy
4 In what country did formalism originate?
a Germany
b Russia
c France
d The United Kingdom
5 In what country did new criticism first develop?
a The United States
b Canada
c Germany
d The United Kingdom
6 In what country did practical criticism originate?
a France
b Germany
c The United States
d The United Kingdom
7 Which text does Shklovsky use as an example of defamiliarization?
a Shakespeare’s sonnets
 b Tristam Shandy
c Robinson Crusoe
d Romeo and Juliet
8 Who wrote Seven Types of Ambiguity?
a William Smith
b William Shakespeare
c Willliam Empson
d Frank Empson
9 ‘The Death of the Author’ was written by which French critic?
a Roland Barthes
b Jacques Derrida
c Gilles Deleuze
d Charles Baudelaire
10 What term does Roman Jakobson use to define the specific features of literature?
a Creativity
b Literariness
c Defamiliarization
d Language

Dig deeper

Armstrong, Rick (2013), The New Criticism: Formalist Literary Theory in America.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Bogel, Fredric (2013), New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan
Kopcewicz, Andrzej and Semrau, Janusz, eds (2012), From Moby-Dick to Finnegans
Wake: Essays in Close Reading. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Sanford, Anthony J. and Emmott, Catherine (2012), Mind, Brain and Narrative.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 3
Reader response theory

Indulge me.
Stop reading for a moment.
Find a piece of paper and a pen.
And on it write the first words that come into your head.
Now tell me what you have written.
Is it the beginning of a poem? A story? A list? Even a play,
perhaps? A dramatic monologue?
More importantly, how do you know that is what it is? And
how do you know whether I will agree with you when I read it?
Does it mean for you what it will mean for me?
Is there a text on this paper?
Before the advent of what we called reader response criticism, no one was
interested in these kinds of questions. Formalist strategies of reading, which
make little reference to the social or political contexts in which a text is
produced, may seem quite alien to those of us producing literary criticism in
the twenty-first century. If we want to know why this is, then the answer can
be found in the changes to reading texts that took place in the 1970s and
1980s. In this period began a growing concern for how a text affects
individual readers – and also communities of readers. This theory, called
reader response theory, or reception theory, dramatically shifted the way in
which texts are now read. Once readers become part of the meaning of the
text, their own place in the world becomes important. The context of reading
becomes hugely important. Moreover, meaning becomes much less certain
and more unstable. If there is no longer an ideal reader but simply many
different readers, the text becomes a dynamic and changing entity.

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

Key idea

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

Jauss and Iser were influenced by a number of earlier developments. In

particular, reader response theory owes much to a school of philosophy called
phenomenology. Established by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl
(1859–1938) in the early twentieth century, phenomenology examines the
relationship between subjective, human consciousness and the real objects of
the physical world; what matters is not objects in themselves but, rather, the
lived experience of them. Reader response theory translates this into the idea
of studying how humans experience texts.

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

Key idea

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

‘The possible reader must be visualized as playing a particular role with

particular characteristics, which may vary according to circumstances. And
so, just as the author divides himself up into the narrator of the story and the
commentator of the events in the story, the reader is also stylized to a certain
degree, being given attributes which he may either accept or reject.’
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett (1974)

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

Key idea

An interpretive community is a group of readers who share a context for their

readings of a literary text.

Fish argues that there are multiple acts of reading that produce multiple
meanings. One thing that contextualizes this is the specific time and place of
reading. In particular, academic communities such as universities define
literary value to direct how words are engaged with. In Is There a Text in this
Class? (1980), Fish uses an example of writing a list of names on a chalk
board and asking a group of students to analyse that group of names,
pretending to them that it is a poem, in an exercise very similar to the one you
engaged with at the opening of this chapter. Given this institutional context,
the students behave as if the text is a poem and give literary evaluations.

As an example, let’s take a look at some lines of writing:

If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if
they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and
 it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a
catalogue.

How would you define this? On the page, these lines look like prose. They
are, however, in fact part of a poem called ‘Objects’ (1914) by Gertrude Stein
(1874–1946). One might argue that they are only poetry because they are
included in a poem and thus defined as such. Out of this context, they
become prose description. Like Fish’s example, we can see here how the
community shapes reading. Those who read this text in a book of poems,
having decided that a poem can be a prose poem, will read it as poetry. Those
who have defined poetry differently, however, and expect a different visual
appearance on the page, will define it as prose. While Stein’s intention here is
signalled by the inclusion of these words in a poem, this only limits the
reading when it is received in that context.

‘Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive

strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for
constituting their properties and assigning their intentions.’
Stanley Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’ (1976)

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

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

• What about readings that are the complete opposite of the established
readings?
• In short, can a reading ever be ‘wrong’?

Spotlight

In a recent online list of funny answers to literature exam questions comes the
following:
Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey
Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then
his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

Case study: The Rushdie Affair

A powerful example of interpretive communities can be seen in the events

surrounding the publication in 1988 of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The
Satanic Verses. Following uproar from certain segments of the Muslim community
regarding the novel’s content, in 1989 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran
issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. The author went into hiding in
London, from which he emerged only in 1998.

Readers were particular outraged by one particular scene in the novel, in which one of
the central characters visits a brothel where the women are named after the prophet
Mohammad’s wives. In addition, the novel hints, through the presence of a poet
named Baal who is sceptical about Mohammad’s abilities, that a number of verses
removed from the Qur’an for supposedly being falsely given to Mohammad by the
devil (the so-called Satanic Verses) were perhaps removed for other reasons, part of a
larger lack of authenticity. Finally, the novel was criticized for its use of derogatory
terms such as Mahound for Mohammad and Jahilia for Mecca. On 2 December 1988,
7,000 Muslims in the town of Bolton staged the first demonstration against the book,
which included publicly burning it.

Much attention has been given to how many of the critics of Rushdie’s novel had not
in fact read it – they had only seen distributed extracts that took the brothel scene out
of its satirical context. An interpretive community was formed that ‘read’ the novel as
offensive without regard for its overall content. Against this, other interpretive
communities of Muslim readers, such as the Southall Black Sisters, campaigned in
support of Rushdie. This vitriolic response shows the power of interpretive
communities in defining the meaning of a text: the novel polarized the opinions of
those who read it (Muslim and non-Muslim), opinions that were largely determined
by reading contexts. In reality, The Satanic Verses was satirical, something which
those opposing it seemed to ignore. However, at the same time, there is some
suggestion that Rushdie knew his novel would be found offensive and that he
intentionally tried to stir up controversy. He made the women in the brothel chaste,
and made the man who calls Mohammad by the name Mahound an unreliable figure,
thus attempting to create a problematic text in which it is possible to be offended but
difficult to uphold one’s offence. In this respect, although many interpreters of the text
had not read it, the meaning of the text lay fluidly between these absolute positions in
ways that make attitudes to criticisms of the novel (yet not the fatwa) somewhat
complex.

Spotlight

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

Our resistance to readings such as those that violently opposed The Satanic
Verses rests upon the fact that they are incomplete readings of the text. It
seems easy to argue against these but, at the same time, they are evidence of
how meaning exists beyond a written text in the dynamic relationship
between the text and its context. Meaning, then, becomes a matter not of the
text but of its creation through the individual reader, who is part of an
interpretive community.

If a text has been read, in its entirety and with great care, it is even more
tempting to want to say no, there cannot be a ‘wrong’ reading. But what if,
for example, a diligent reader said that Voldemort was the hero of Harry
Potter, that Jane Eyre was a villain, or that (as happened in one of my
classes) a book written in the first half of the twentieth century was about the
HIV crisis?
The short answer to this question is that reader response theory asks us to be
sensitive. We have to say that some readings are factually wrong. For
example, it is not possible to say that Nancy doesn’t die in Oliver Twist
(1838) or that Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813) marries Mr
Bingley. These readings are prevented by the reader’s central concern with
uncovering the intention of an imagined author, which means they play close
attention to the codes and structures the author has provided.

If we return, however, to the example of the student who said that an early
twentieth-century novel was about the HIV crisis that did not happen until the
1980s, it is possible to amend rather than dismiss this reading. The novel
cannot be ‘about’ the HIV crisis, because the device of historical context
makes this impossible. The text can, however, contain themes that resonate
with that later historical moment. That a reader might spot these resonances
and that the text is a transformative space in which those resonances shape
how the text is read is as important to a reader response critic as the surface
meaning.

Equally, one can argue, for example, that Voldemort’s exclusion as a young
man from an elite represented by Harry’s parents can produce a reading in
which his vengeance is, from a Marxist perspective, a mirror of violent
revolution against ruling power structures. Likewise, if one reads Jane Eyre
(1847) from a postcolonial rather than feminist perspective and identifies
with Rochester’s first wife Bertha, then Jane in fact can become the villain of
the novel: the representative of white, Anglican colonial supremacist
attitudes. These readings are not in line with our perception of authorial
intention. It is therefore important to note that reader response theory shares
with formalism a belief in the intentional fallacy. While it reintroduces
questions of affect and context, this is very much in the service of privileging
possible different interpretations of the text and understanding how those
readings come to exist, not in getting closer to any ‘essential’, author-driven
reading.

Case study: The Lord of the Rings

When J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings (1954), he intended it as a new
mythology for Britain. His work was shaped by his Catholic faith, his experience of
the First World War and his profound attachment to nature. When, however, The Lord
of the Rings became a massive publishing success ten years after its initial publication,
readers associated it with very different meanings – with liberal values including drug
use and free love. The text that led Leonard Nimoy, otherwise known for playing Mr
Spock in Star Trek, to record a song entitled ‘Bilbo Baggins’ and that saw fans
wearing pin badges declaring their support for the Hobbit seems a very different one.
Asked about the craze surrounding the novel, and plagued by phone calls to his home
by adoring fans, Tolkien merely replied that ‘many young Americans are involved
with the stories in a way that I am not’.

Tolkien’s own response, in which he refuses to say that such readings are ‘wrong’,
points to his own belief in the openness of the text. In an early essay, ‘On Fairy
Stories’ (1947), Tolkien writes of his desire for texts that include what he calls
‘applicability’: the possibility for a range of different meanings to be applied to a text
because of its inherent openness. While Tolkien may have been annoyed at the
telephone calls he kept receiving in his retirement, the nuisance only reflected his
success in achieving the expansive fiction he so believed in.

‘Readerly’ and ‘writerly’

One question raised by Tolkien’s theory is whether some texts are more open
to reader response than others. This idea is also important in the theory of the
(post)structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes. Barthes divides literature into
‘readerly’ texts and ‘writerly’ texts. The former – readerly texts – for Barthes
make up the majority of literary works. These are texts in which meaning is
largely fixed and the role of the reader is a passive one. By strategies of
description and direction, these texts limit the possibility of multiple
meanings. In contrast, writerly texts are a rarer group of works that allow the
reader an active role in creating meaning. With many possible meanings, the
reader becomes the writer of the text. Rather than there being one stable
meaning, a multitude of different meanings emerge.

As a poststructuralist, Barthes is interested in a deconstructive process

whereby what is hidden in a text is, through analysis, revealed. Thus,
although there may seem to be a sharp distinction between readerly and
writerly texts, in fact the situation is more complicated. Writerly texts merely
reveal the instability of meanings that a readerly text tries to obscure. What
makes a text readerly or writerly is also a complicated question – for while
the author may in part be responsible for this effect in their conscious
decisions, it is also a characteristic that is shaped by readers and the
interpretive communities they form. For Barthes, the ideal text was a writerly
one: his desire for non-linear, open texts predicts much about postmodern
literature.

Spotlight

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

‘The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language

(which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text
is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as
function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular
system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances,
the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.’
Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)

Key ideas

A readerly text is one for which the meaning is closed and the role of the reader is
passive.

A writerly text is one that is open and in which the reader is an active participant in
writing its meaning.

Reader response theory today

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

Fact check

1 Who wrote Is There a Text in this Class?

a Wolfgang Iser
b Stanley Fish
c Michel Foucault
d Alex Salmon
2 What is the name in reader response theory for groups of readers?
a Interpretive communities
b Reading groups
 c Reading communities
d Universities
3 Reader response theory is a rejection of the methods of which approach to
literature?
a Feminism
b Marxism
c Formalism
d Ecocriticism
4 Who wrote S/Z?
a Roland Barthes
b Walter Pater
c Jacques Derrida
d Kate Millett
5 Who is the author of The Satanic Verses?
a Zadie Smith
b Salman Rushdie
c Ian McEwan
d Stanley Fish
6 A TV star from which TV show recorded a song featuring a character from The
Lord of the Rings?
a Top of the Pops
b Star Trek
c Buffy the Vampire Slayer
d Red Dwarf
7 Barthes’s term for a text that is open to the reader’s meanings is called what kind
of text?
a Writerly
b Readerly
c Open
d Closed
8 What is Iser’s name for the imagined reader of a text?
a Imagined reader
b Real reader
 c Actual reader
d Implied reader
9 Fish’s early work was on what author?
a Shakespeare
b Milton
c Brontë
d Austen
10 What is the name of Gertrude Stein’s prose poem?
a ‘Objects’
b ‘Things’
c ‘Lily’
d ‘Red’

Dig deeper

Davis, Todd and Womack, Kenneth (2002), Formalist Criticism and Reader-
Response Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
D’Haen, Theo (1983), Text to Reader: A Communicative Approach to Fowles, Barth,
Cortazar and Boon. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Fish, Stanley (1980), Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
 4
Marxism and post-Marxism

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

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

As a materialist philosophy, Marxism is concerned with empirical difference:

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

Base and superstructure

So what does this material reality look like from a Marxist point of view?
Marxists see society as a combination of what they call the base and the
superstructure. The base is the material means of production, and the
superstructure is the cultural world surrounding it: art, literature, philosophy,
religion and law. For Marxists, there is a strong connection between base and
superstructure, so that the cultural world is determined by the economic base.
This means that at the centre of all artistic expression, driving its nature and
purpose, is the economic system. Marxists call this economic determinism.

Marxism, perhaps more than any other aspect, can be seen to be central to the
development of literary theory in the twentieth century. In fact, critical
theory, which as we examined in the introduction is one facet of literary
theory, has its basis very much in Marxist thought.
 Spotlight

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

For literary study, Marxism is important not simply because it asks us to

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

‘within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness
of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means
for the development of production transform themselves into means of
domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the
labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage
of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a
hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour
 process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an
independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject
him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its
meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife
and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.’
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (1867)

Spotlight

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

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

Key idea

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

The dominant ideology is that held by those in power, or by the majority in

society. For Marxists, ideology is a set of ideas held by the elite, which they
use power to maintain. This in turn keeps them in a position of economic
dominance. Ideology is presented by the state as natural – for this reason, we
do not go around thinking that we are being ideologically controlled. In fact,
even if we do, then this is something that ideology itself has accounted for –
even when we think that we are resisting, we are not!
 ‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real
conditions of existence.’
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an
Investigation)’ (1970)

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

Spotlight

In 1980, at the age of 62, Althusser killed his wife by strangling her. He was declared
unfit to stand trial due to insanity, and was committed to a psychiatric hospital for
three years. In a posthumously published autobiography, Althusser describes the
murder as an accident which took place when he was massaging his wife’s neck. In
the same book, Althusser also confesses to having only a limited knowledge of
philosophy. He writes, 'I knew the work of Descartes and Malebranche well, Spinoza
a little, Aristotle not at all; Plato and Pascal quite well, Kant not at all, Hegel a little.'

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

Key idea

Hegemony: state control through coercion rather than force.

Literature, like all other creative forms, is formed in relation to ideology, and
can serve hegemony. Unlike religion, philosophy, politics and legal
discourses, however, the arts are given a special place by Marx as being
capable of working both for and against ideological systems. Their unique
nature, their creative power, means they hold a radical potential not seen in
more explicitly institutional structures.

One Marxist critic with particular influence on literary theory is György

Lukács (1885–1971). His writings on realism continue to be influential to the
present day. For Lukács, modernism was a stagnant form that denied
historical realities and the dynamic politics of contemporary life. Instead, he
argues in The Historical Novel (1937) and Studies in European Realism
(1950) that realism as a form is capable of giving access to the reality of
experience: a truer, more complete essence. Ironically, this seems very
similar to the arguments modernism makes for its own relationship to reality.
For Lukács, however, it is only a realist text that strives towards a direct
representation that can achieve such closeness to the real world: modernism
can never achieve this because its focus on individual experiences closes it
off from taking in the bigger picture of events and their historical
significance. This view would continue to be espoused by later critics, such
as Eric Auerbach (1892–1957) in Mimesis (1946), and more recently its
essence can be seen in ethical criticism’s preference for realist narratives (see
Chapter 17).

The Frankfurt School

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

Case study: Brechtian alienation

One useful example of literature’s attempts to engage with Marxist principles is the
work of German dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). A life-long Marxist, Brecht
was concerned to create drama that would not allow the audience to be manipulated.
He saw this was the effect of realist drama, which allowed the audience to forget they
were watching a play. By being lured into the fantasy, Brecht felt that audiences
responded emotionally and lost the ability to engage with art as a social or political
critique. In order to prevent this, in the 1920s and 1930s Brecht developed the
alienation effect (in German Verfremdungseffekt, sometimes referred to as
distantiation effect). Interrupting social realism with songs, stage directions shouted
out on stage or obvious scenery changes, Brecht prevented audiences from immersing
themselves in the play in the hope that this would lead them to think critically about
the events being presented. For example, in both Mother Courage and Her Children
(1941) and The Threepenny Opera (1928) Brecht uses songs to draw the audience out
of the bleak events being presented, and characters announce the status of the action
as drama.

Brecht’s ideas have been very influential on theatre to the present day. For example,
in an English context one can see these ideas at work in a play such as John Osborne’s
The Entertainer (1957), where social realism is interspersed with music-hall scenes
that draw our attention to the artificiality of what is being presented and prevent us
from being drawn into the action, or more recently in Carol Ann Duffy’s 2015 version
of the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman which opens with a caretaker clearing
the stage, and which has dramatic set pieces including a giant wind machine and a
human garbage heap that draw attention to the theatricality of events. In terms of the
former, audiences must confront the play’s political context regarding the Suez Crisis;
in the latter they must engage with themes of poverty, capitalist exploitation and drug
abuse. These strategies illustrate how literature can resist its ideological function, and
actively engage the audience in a critical process.

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

Post-Marxism
From the 1980s in the United States and Britain there was a resurgence of
Marxist thinking, dominated by Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism,
Terry Eagleton’s rethinking of questions of ideology (1994), and the rise of
cultural studies. Jameson’s landmark study Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) argues that postmodernism is not a difficult,
avant-garde form, but rather the dominant cultural form of the late twentieth
century. For Eagleton, the radical function of avant-garde literature is
overestimated in the work of the Frankfurt School, and his focus is instead on
examining how literary texts of all kinds uphold and in fact produce
dominant ideologies pertaining to the time in which they are written. For
those working in cultural studies, which is discussed in more detail in
Chapter 14, the complex relationship between popular culture and audiences
exceeds the negative influence perceived by Adorno and Horkheimer.

This reappraisal of the Marxist tradition is referred to as post-Marxism. In his

book Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (2000), Stuart Sim defines post-
Marxism as a theoretical approach that has ‘rescued’ Marxism from its
decline as a global force in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and other
communist regimes across Europe, and the depressing failure of socialism
that these regimes represent. Theorists such as Ernesto Laclau (1935–2014)
and Chantal Mouffe (1943– ) adapt Marxism to work with the frameworks of
poststructuralism, feminism and postmodernism. So, while traditional
Marxism was often in tension with these other positions, post-Marxism
embodies a flexibility that makes it more relevant to the complex
contemporary world. In post-Marxism, economic processes are no longer
necessarily privileged, but instead become one aspect of a complex cultural
matrix.

With the decline of the working class and trade union power, post-Marxism
attempts to examine the new ways in which economic difference functions: in
particular, it needs to come to terms with a world in which the underclass are
not the workers, but the mass unemployed. The overthrowing of capital will
not be a revolution of the proletariat, but something quite different. And it
will rely upon a unity that Marxism assumes, but which does not in fact exist
– with the disenfranchised divided over questions of race, gender, religion,
class, disability and nationality. At the same time, class mobility means that
economic power is not necessarily aligned with social influence.

CULTURAL CAPITAL
One way in which post-Marxist perspectives have developed beyond the
centrality of economic power is via the concept of what we call cultural
capital. The term was first used in 1977 by the French theorist Pierre
Bourdieu (1930–2002) in his essay ‘Cultural Reproduction and Social
Reproduction’. By cultural capital, Bourdieu means all the elements, other
than financial wealth, that confer social mobility. This can mean education,
intelligence, knowledge of particular art forms, modes of dress, speech or
physical appearance. Bourdieu’s work draws attention to how social
advantage is not merely a matter of money, but also of particular modes of
behaviour and knowledge.

In the British class system, the operation of cultural capital can be seen in the
insidious idea of the nouveau riche, or new money. This refers to a distinction
made between those who have earned their money and those who have
inherited it, with the former seen as lacking the same heritage as the latter. In
practice, new money is judged not by declaration, but rather by a set of codes
and behaviours which have been taught to those with old money, but might
be absent in those who have earned their wealth. Alongside cultural capital
runs social capital – the influence of networks and associations that give one
access to sources of power. In this respect the idea of property is transformed
– from something that is exchanged through monetary means to something
that is the subject instead of a cultural exchange through knowledge and
influence.

Cultural capital complicates the Marxist position when it is evident that those
who are on low incomes but maintain cultural capital can in fact hold more
power than those with new money. For example, an individual who has
earned their wealth and does not work as a result may have less cultural
power than someone who has inherited cultural capital through family
background but in fact may now have to work as a result of a decline in
family fortune.

Case study: The Line of Beauty

This reality is exposed to great effect in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty
(2004), which we first encountered in Chapter 1. Set in the 1980s at the height of the
Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher who famously declared the end of
class in Britain, the novel ironically reflects on this reality by highlighting the cultural
capital that maintains power and prevents social mobility. The novel is populated by a
large number of upper-middle-class and upper-class Britons, who spend their time
indulging in high-cultural musical and artistic pursuits. The entry of new money into
their world is represented by the Lebanese businessman Bertrand Ouradi, whose son
Wani is the lover of the novel’s central character, Nick. His status as an outsider in
this world, despite his fortune, illustrates the closed world of British society –
dependent not on economic value, but rather on cultural wealth: the ability to display
certain behaviours which identify one as an ‘insider’.

Wani’s father cannot access social capital because his lack of cultural capital prevents
this. Much of the novel revolves around the ability of Nick to successfully ‘pass’ in
the upper-middle-class world he falls into from his resolutely middle-class and
suburban upbringing. Nick’s surname, Guest, testifies to this unstable position. Yet
his education and knowledge of art, music and literature allow Nick to enter this
world successfully in a way that is not available to Wani’s father, who is both
‘uncultured’ and an immigrant. Although Nick does not have money, he gains social
capital through his cultural capital, and it is only when he is embroiled in a gay
scandal that this advantage dissolves. In particular, the novel plays on this distinction
through the notion of objectified cultural capital – Bourdieu’s terms for owning
cultural objects. Wani’s father has the finances to create this, and the art magazine that
Wani and Nick set up refers to this buying and selling of culture. Yet he cannot in
Bourdieu’s terms ‘consume’ the artwork, because this is available only to those with a
knowledge and education required to display understanding of it. In contrast, Nick
cannot buy anything, but his knowledge, education and a certain understanding allow
him to display necessary ownership. In this respect, the novel powerfully exposes the
limitations of the Thatcherite discourse: an empty rhetoric which does little to address
the complex nuances of power in Britain entrenched not by wealth but by unspoken
judgements and prejudices.

THE POLITICS OF TASTE

Novels such as Hollinghurst’s illuminate how a politics of association which
aligns certain cultural knowledge with class continues to operate in society.
Bourdieu himself considers this through writings on the concept of taste,
which he articulates in a book written two years after his first discussion of
cultural capital, entitled Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste (1979). Bourdieu argues that it is those with cultural capital who
determine what constitutes ‘taste’. The result of this is that certain forms
continue to be privileged, and there is little space for new forms to be seen as
valuable. Cultural power is reproduced down through the generations as
parents transmit their taste to their children, who also inherit their cultural
capital, and therefore the ability to keep those privileged cultural texts in a
place of superiority. If those without economic or cultural capital have their
own ideas of good taste, these can never become dominant. Meanwhile, what
those in positions of dominance see as good taste becomes naturalized so
society ceases to question it. Bourdieu calls this an act of ‘symbolic
violence’.

‘Nothing more clearly affirms one’s “class”, nothing more infallibly

classifies, than tastes in music…there is no more “classificatory” practice
than concert-going, or playing a “noble” instrument.’
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1979)

By having good taste and cultural capital, individuals are able to associate
themselves with the social capital that allows for associations with others in
positions of power. Through these social connections, opportunities for
economic power arise. Taste ensures that power stays in the hands of those
who already have it, and that those from outside these networks of power
have only limited opportunities to acquire it, through a slow process of
education and assimilation. The opportunity to acquire power outside of this,
by changing the rules of taste, seems almost impossible.

Although Bourdieu’s ideas of taste can seem out of step with the more open
state of culture in contemporary society, nevertheless they still exist. For
example, we can ask why it seems more sophisticated to attend an opera
rather than a musical, a classical music concert rather than a pop concert, or
to spend an evening at the ballet rather than at a night of Irish dancing. These
are not matters of economics, for in fact the latter events may in some cases
be more expensive to attend. Instead, the privilege given to the first events in
each pair relies upon a cultivated sense that they indicate ‘good taste’. That
they are perceived as more exclusive and difficult to understand adds to the
sense that they cannot easily be bought. In this regard, they mirror ideas of
objectified capital, and the privilege given to cultural forms for which
understanding is more elusive than purchase. We can translate this into our
own experiences. Are we more impressed, for example, by a writer who
references obscure, early literature, or by one who references popular culture?
Do we value an artwork more if it is difficult to understand? Do we think it is
more impressive to understand a difficult poem written in early modern
English than an equally difficult rap lyric written in urban slang? All of these
responses are informed by associations between taste and capital.

Bourdieu’s ideas in this respect form an important addition to Marxist ideas

of hegemony, in that they show one way that power is reproduced via culture.
Taste encourages individuals to agree with cultural preferences as they
already exist, and not to challenge these, risking exclusion. Taste therefore
creates a system where it is important to concur with existing ideas about
what is culturally desirable. At the same time, it is difficult to change one’s
taste, because it is inherited by children from their parents during their early
education and family experiences. Identification with traditionally low-
cultural pursuits identifies an individual as inferior, while superiority is
reinforced by the ability to successful consume high culture. This means the
ideas of those in power are continually reinforced, with wider consequences
for their social dominance.

Case study: working-class degeneracy

While Marxist literary critics can examine how texts function in relation to ideology,
we can also turn our attention to how, in literature, question of power and influence
are played out in relation to economic circumstances. During the nineteenth century a
strong discourse emerged surrounding the fear of intellectual decline in the wake of
urbanization and an expanding working-class population. This fear of degeneracy –
the thought that somehow, rather than making progress, the human population was in
decline – filtered into literature of the period in texts such as Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1996). The stunted figure of
Hyde is a representative of the physically deformed degenerate, overcoming the
professional and middle-class Jekyll. In the twenty-first century the novelist Ian
McEwan resurrects the discourse of degeneracy in his 2005 narrative, Saturday, in
which the central character, a middle-class brain surgeon named Henry Perowne, is
forced to face an invasion of his home by a young, working-class man named Baxter,
who suffers from the genetic condition Huntington’s disease. Baxter is literally
degenerating, and his attack on Henry is presented as a coarse and violent event
without reason. When Baxter enters Perowne’s home, his plans to assault his
daughter, Daisy, are thwarted when she reads to Baxter – naked in the living room –
Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1867). In this highly problematic scene, high
literary culture and the liberal humanism that Arnold represents seemingly prevents
the decline into brutality that Baxter symbolizes. While we must as readers be careful
not to easily equate Perowne’s attitudes with those of McEwan, nevertheless such
scenes ask important questions about how far our attitudes have moved from the
associations between taste, cultural capital and class that Marxist critics have
emphasized.

As literary critics, it is useful to identify how our own understanding of

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

Fact check

1 Which cultural form for Bourdieu defined taste more than any other?
a Television
b Theatre
c Dance
d Music
2 What is Marx’s term for the middle class?
a Aristocracy
b Bourgeoisie
c Proletariat
d White-collar
3 Who are the proletariat?
a Urban workers
 b Farm labourers
c Teachers
d Office workers
4 What is Gramsci’s term for coercive state control?
a Ideology
b Hegemony
c Oppression
d Apparatus
5 What two elements make up society according to Marx?
a Base and substructure
b Base and structure
c Base and superstructure
d Basic and substratum
6 To whose art does the ‘line of beauty’ refer?
a Henry James’s
b William Hogarth’s
c William Shakespeare’s
d George Eliot’s
7 In Saturday, the poem Daisy recites is by which author?
a William Shakespeare
b Emily Brontë
c Phillip Larkin
d Matthew Arnold
8 The critical reappraisal of Marxism is referred to as
a Postmodernism
b Ecocriticism
c Cultural studies
d Post-Marxism
9 The idea of cultural capital was first used by which French philosopher?
a Gilles Deleuze
b Michel Foucault
c Pierre Bourdieu
d Giorgio Agamben
10 Carol Ann Duffy recently revived which play to include Brechtian elements?
a The Entertainer
b Love’s Labour’s Lost
c Antigone
d Everyman

Dig deeper

Boucher, Geoff (2014), Understanding Marxism. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.

Bowman, Paul (2007), Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies Theory, Politics and
Intervention. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Eagleton, Terry (2013), Marxism and Literary Criticism. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.
Reed-Danahay, Deborah (2004), Locating Bourdieu. Indiana: Indiana University
Press.
 5
Structuralism

Consider these two sentences:

The cat sat on the mat.
The cat sat on the rug.
Now take a look at the following two sentences:
The cat sat on the mat.
On the mat sat the cat.
What is the difference between the two sentences in each pair?
We are drawn to say, no doubt, that in the first case the
meaning is slightly different. A mat and a rug are not quite the
same thing. In the second case, perhaps, we are tempted to say
there is no difference. Yet we probably find that we think first
of a cat in the first sentence, while in the second we think first
of a mat. Although the overall image may be the same,
something is – somehow – different. But how?
It is these questions of how language constructs meaning, and how words
combine to create particular images and ideas, which preoccupy the school of
criticism known as structuralism. Coming to prominence in the period after
the Second World War, structuralism is in many ways a continuation of new
critical ideas in that it promises an objective, scientific means of studying
language. Its main proponents were the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-
Strauss (1908–2009), the French philosopher Roland Barthes and the Russian
formalist Roman Jakobson. Their ideas are strongly influenced by the earlier
work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). In his Course
in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure outlines an approach to the study of
language as a synchronic rather than diachronic system; this means simply
that he presents language as something that can be studied at a given point in
time without the need to look at its development across history. Although
later poststructuralist thinking challenged this idea, Saussure’s ideas were in
keeping with dominant new and formalist approaches to literature. For this
approach Saussure uses the term ‘semiology’, meaning ‘study of signs’. This
is because he sees language as a system of signs and the study of how these
signs work as the principal concern in the study of language.

‘Structuralism is not particularly interested in meaning per se, but rather in

attempting to describe and understand the conventions and modes of
signification which make it possible to “mean”.’
Phillip Rice and Patricia Waugh, Modern Literary Theory (1996)

Key idea

Semiology is the study of signs.

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

Key ideas

Langue is the fixed and rule-bound structures of language.

Parole means the acts of speech that express language.

Although the subjectivity of aestheticism is strikingly different from this

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

Spotlight: the mystery of snow

One way this relationship to language is often explained is through the myth of the
Inuit word for snow. In 1911 the American anthropologist Franz Boas wrote that the
Inuits had four different words for what in English is called snow. Then, in 1940, the
American linguist Benjamin Whorf took up Boas’s claim and expanded it to seven
words describing different types of snow. Thus began a process by which, over the
years, critics gradually increased the number of Inuit words for snow. Whorf believed
that what words we know dictate how we think: this is a theory called linguistic
relativity that is not dissimilar from structuralist ideas about the relationship between
language and reality.

However, claims that there are many Inuit words for snow neglect the fact that, firstly,
there is not one Inuit language and, secondly, that it does not function like English: it
creates compound words from nouns and adjectives so, for example, what we would
refer to as light snow becomes ‘lightsnow’.

Even though the Inuit case is a myth, it symbolizes an important structuralist

principle. Inuit words may be compound but the result is a much larger set of
individual words than we would find in English. In a very subtle way, this means that
Inuit reality is different. It is not a case of snow being particularly important to Inuits
but that the compound structure of their language equally gives them endless words
for trees, rain and any other noun. It does illustrate, however, that their sense of
objects is linguistically different as a result.

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

Key ideas

Sign is an actual object or thing, the meaning of which is a combination of the

signifier and the signified.
Signifier is the word used to name an actual object or thing.
Signified is the concept evoked by the signifier.

If we return again to our opening example, then ‘cat’ is an actual thing. This
is the sign. It is made up of the signifier (the word ‘cat’) and the signified (the
concept of a cat). The relationship between these two things is arbitrary, but
agreed. So when we use the word ‘cat’, we all think of a small furry animal
with four legs and a tail, which chases mice. We don’t think of an elephant!
We have been taught to associate word and image. There is no reason why
the word for this small animal could not be elephant, if we had communally
agreed it, but as we haven’t the rule is fixed: we cannot as individuals change
it.

This basic understanding of how language functions has been central to the
study of literature. Although the example here is simple, it represents a more
complex linguistic system, where words create meanings. So in the study of
literature we can consider why authors choose particular signs: why, for
example, one might choose the word ‘mat’ rather than the word ‘rug’ in
terms of the signified being evoked. Structuralism provides us with a
framework for considering these choices, along what Saussure calls
syntagmatic and associative relations. This is simply a way of saying that
meaning does not occur through words alone, but rather through difference:
through how one signifier is elected in favour of another, and how it is placed
in relation to other signs. These relations are often described as axes, with
Roman Jakobson’s word for the associative – paradigmatic – often favoured.
The syntagmatic axis describes the ordering of words within a sentence,
while the paradigmatic describes the choice of words against a range of
possible alternatives. If we return one final time to our opening example, we
can see how this works. First, let’s look at the syntagmatic axis:

• The cat sat on the mat.

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

• The mat sat on the cat.

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

• The cat sat on the mat.

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

Spotlight

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

In the 1950s and 1960s Saussure’s ideas were taken up by a number of

critics, including Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson and Barthes. It is at this point that
semiology becomes structuralism. Rooted in semiology’s ideas, structuralism
– as the name implies – concerns itself with the underlying structures of
language. Echoing formalism, structuralism sees no place for the author in
literary studies. Indeed, one of the most famous essays of this period, which
bridges structuralist and poststructuralist concerns, is Barthes’s essay ‘The
Death of the Author’ (1968).

‘The Death of the Author’

It seems fitting, given his subject matter, that you may find it difficult to
locate Roland Barthes in your study of literary theory. At times, he is
positioned as a structuralist; at others, he is defined very much as part of the
later group of poststructuralist critics. At the fulcrum of this turn comes
Barthes’s most famous essay, ‘The Death of the Author’. Although it is
important to poststructuralist thinking, its central argument regarding the
irrelevance of the author is very much aligned with the structuralist interest in
language as a system to be read as outside the authorial intention.

We know, of course, that this statement in itself is not new: it is rooted in the
new critical idea of the intentional fallacy, which we examined in Chapter 3.
For Barthes, the author is a modern construction, emerging out of a cult of
individuality that gives the author supreme influence. This power is not
neutral, but is aligned with political structures, particularly capitalism, which
favour the individual over the community. The idea that one can trace the text
back to an original meaning located in the author is a myth used to uphold
this cultish individualism.

It is here that Barthes departs from the new critical position. Whereas new
critics remove the author in order to construct a pure close reading that will
get them closer to the ‘true’ meaning of the text, for Barthes the author is to
be avoided precisely because that ‘true’ meaning is an illusion. Rather than
the author, meaning is constructed through a reader, although this reader, too,
is a function of the text: an individual ‘without history, biography,
psychology’. ‘The birth of the reader’, he writes, ‘must be at the cost of the
death of the author.’ What emerges in this interpretive space is not the pure
meaning of close reading, but rather multiple readings and meanings, the text
becoming a ‘multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of
them original, bleed and clash’. Here we see the beginnings of
poststructuralist ideas pertaining to the intertextuality of literature and the
instability of the sign.

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

Denotations and connotations

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

Key ideas

Denotation is the literal, obvious meaning attached to a signifier.

Connotation is the additional, hidden meanings given to a signifier, as agreed by
communal understanding in specific contexts.

For example, if we describe a person as ‘unique’, we might mean that they

are precious and individual. In a particular context, however, the same word
gives connotations of being strange or difficult. The original, surface
meaning has been added to by a further, almost contradictory meaning, and
our understanding of what is being implied depends on our ability to read the
speech act in which the word is placed. In literary studies, this means
considering not simply the most obvious meaning of a word but also the
connotation it holds. Decisions on the paradigmatic axis can often be made in
order to imply particular connotations. For example, in her book Parentage
and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (1994), Anny Sadrin
explores Dickens’s use of the word ‘governor’. Although the denotation for
this word is master, since the early nineteenth century it had also taken on the
secondary meaning of ‘father’. When a character in one of Dickens’s novels
uses this word, it implies not merely a master but also a father, often in ironic
terms (a harsh father, more like an employer) but also a kind of relationship
surpassing the professional.

Structuralism uses cases like this in order to draw our attention to the ways in
which language is always laden with conceptual meaning. Whereas we may
have been encouraged in our literary studies to look for obvious examples of
‘literary’ language such as metaphors or similes, structuralism dictates that all
language choices are literary. Such ideas shape the schools of reader response
theory and poststructuralism. As we examined in Chapter 3, for reader
response critics like Stanley Fish the idea of language choice would be
influential in considering how groups of readers construct meaning. For
poststructuralism, the idea of the sign would become the basis for considering
how the arbitrary nature of the relationship between signifier and signified
creates a fundamental instability within language.

‘There is no such thing as ordinary language.’

Stanley Fish (1980)

Case study: John Agard’s ‘Half-Caste’

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

Explain yuself
wha yu mean
 when yu say half-caste
yu mean when Picasso
mix red an green
is a half-caste canvas?

The poem goes on to describe England’s mixture of rain and sunshine as half-caste
weather, the music of Tchaikovsky written on a piano with black and white keys as
half-caste symphonies. Through these alternative signifieds, Agard’s poem illustrates
how the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary: half-caste
could be used to refer to all these different images, and yet it is applied only to mixed-
race individuals because of how a community of language users have agreed on its
meaning. The denotative meaning of two colours combined is overwhelmed by a
single connotation, produced in a twentieth-century setting and in the context of racist
discourse.

By associating the signifer with a host of beautiful and creative signifieds, Agard
reclaims the term from its negative and racist connotations and replaces them with a
series of positive connotations. In doing so, the sign is disrupted, interrogated and
transformed. Yet, as structuralists would argue, this is a matter of a speech act –
parole – rather than the langue, which is already fixed and determined. That Agard
imagines the alternative taking root and destroying the existing meaning speaks to a
possibility that for structuralism is utopian, although, as we shall see,
poststructuralism celebrates precisely this kind of linguistic slippage.

Metaphor and metonymy

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

Sometimes such associations are not as simplistic as we might think, and

pleasure in literature can come from the ambiguity that exists within such
definitions. For example, in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), the
haunting of the central house in the novel by a dead slave transforms the
house into a kind of slave ship. To treat a house as a ship might be seen as a
metaphoric substitution, where there is no connection between the two
objects in space or time, but the status of both as dwellings is a kind of
substitution. In this context it is in fact metonymic because of the inhabitants’
own experience of slavery, so that the transformation is an evocation of a
recent past and a psychologically connected space.

Key ideas

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

Narratology
There is a deep connection between structuralism and what is called
narratology. While structuralists are concerned with how language constructs
meaning, narratologists are concerned with how language constructs meaning
within stories. In particular, they are concerned with the patterns that exist
across different stories. Again, the ideas developed here are similar to those
developed by new critics: Jonathan Culler, for example, whose idea of plot
and discourse we discussed in Chapter 2, is also a well-known narratologist,
whose Structuralist Poetics (1975) and The Pursuit of Signs (1981) examine
how communities of readers construct and follow particular ‘competences’ –
understandings of sets of rules for reading – that limit and define the meaning
of a text.
The idea that there is a distinction between the idea of a story and how events
are ordered in its telling (the story’s discourse) is one shared by formalist and
narratological thinking. Consider, for example, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights (1847), which begins not at the beginning of the events it recounts
but midway through, or Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898),
H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
(1899), all of which begin at the end of their stories. How, narratologists ask,
do these orderings shape meaning, and how do they relate to the patterns
exhibited in other stories?

Structuralists want to know not so much what kind of literariness is at work

but what the root meaning of that literariness is. This concern developed into
a preoccupation with myth, as the origin of the founding structures of
language. Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) argues that myth is a specific type of
language with its own rules. While myth functions according to Saussure’s
theory of the sign, Barthes suggests that it functions with an additional layer
of meaning, which draws the audience away from the literal image and
towards a greater, symbolic function. This study of myth is also the central
focus of the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss. In his study of myth, Lévi-Strauss
returns to formalist ideas about story. In particular, he draws on the work of
Vladimir Propp (1895–1970), whose The Morphology of the Folktale was
first published in Russian in 1928 but not translated into English until 1958 in
the wake of structuralist activity.

Propp outlines 31 key actions essential to the function of a folktale: he argues

that each tale is constructed by the inclusion of elements from this list,
although there is no ‘perfect’ tale that contains all of them. These elements
detail the fortune of the hero, the role of the villain and the possible events,
encounters and resolutions to the story. It exemplifies therefore the
structuralist notion of the story that gathers meaning through its similarity to
and difference from other stories in the same cycle. What makes something a
folktale is the sharing of elements with other folktales, while the plot of the
story comes in how these elements are uniquely selected and ordered. The
stories contain an essential similarity, which is obscured by the uniqueness
not of the elements but of the discourse.
Influenced by Propp’s work as well as the work of Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss in
his 1958 work Structural Anthropology develops the idea of mythemes: the
central elements shared between myths and passed down through cultures.
There is no concern here, we should note, for questions of voice, style or
linguistic innovation. While structuralism as a whole is concerned with word
choice, early narratologists are concerned only with how plot choice might
create a particular type of narrative. Lévi-Strauss also applies the idea of
paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes to the workings of myth. He argues that
myths have meaning only in relation to other myths in the same myth
sequence. What Lévi-Strauss outlines has become influential in how we think
about literature more generally – for example the reading of a Shakespeare
play within the context of other Shakespeare plays, or the thought that one
can only truly understand one of Wordsworth’s pastoral poems within the
context of the entirety of the Lyrical Ballads (1798).

This kind of theory has been particularly influential in the study of popular
literatures, which often have more generalizable features than more complex
literary fictions (something we will return to in the chapter on genre theory).
Later structuralist narratologists, such as Tzvetan Todorov (1939–) and
Gérard Genette (1930–), refine and complicate Propp’s somewhat simplistic
structure. Todorov, for example, provides a more complex set of functions
than Propp in his attempts to find a formula, not just for folktale but for
narrative in general. Unlike Propp, he allows for the reordering of elements
and for more complex embedding of plot elements, such as through the use of
stories within stories. Genette, meanwhile, moves beyond the concern for
function to consider how the tale is told, distinguishing between mimesis (the
presentation of events as if they are happening, with action and direct speech)
and diegesis (the narrator telling the story). In our own literary analysis, we
can consider how a text moves between these two modes and for what
purpose, giving emphasis to particular events through the slow unfolding of
mimesis or reducing the impact of particular aspects of the story through
diegesis.

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

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

Spotlight

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

Fact check

1 What is the name for the study of signs?

a Semiotics
b Postmodernism
c Aestheticism
d Marxism
2 The signifier and signified together make up the what?
a Word
b Sign
c Signifying
d Language
3 What are the two axes on which meaning is constructed called?
a Paradigmatic and opposite
b Paradigmatic and vertical
c Paradigmatic and syntagmatic
d Paradigmatic and synthetic
4 What is the term for the use of a part to stand for the whole of something?
a Metaphor
b Symbol
c Metonymy
d Synecdoche
5 Barthes writes about what befalling the author?
a Love
b Poverty
c Death
d Hunger
6 Which theorist wrote Mythologies?
a Barthes
b Foucault
c Deleuze
d Freud
7 What is the reporting of events by the narrator called?
a Narration
b Diegesis
c Narrative
d Mimesis
8 Who developed the idea of mythemes?
a Propp
b Barthes
c Lévi-Strauss
d Saussure
9 Who wrote the poem ‘Half-Caste’?
a Carol Ann Duffy
b Grace Nichols
 c John Agard
d Benjamin Zephaniah
10 Who wrote The Morphology of the Folktale?
a Propp
b Barthes
c Saussure
d Lévi-Strauss

Dig deeper

Culler, Jonathan (1986), Saussure. London: Fontana Press.

Culler, Jonathan (1989), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the
Study of Literature. London: Routledge.
Hawks, Terence (1991), Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Routledge.
Fludernick, Monika (2009). An Introduction to Narratology. Hoboken: Taylor &
Francis.
Piaget, Jean (1976), Structuralism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
 6
Psychoanalytic criticism

In his 2002 debut novel, The Impressionist, British writer Hari

Kunzru presents the narrative of a young mixed-race boy
named Pran, growing up in colonial India. The novel sees Pran
move through a series of experiences in which he is forced to
enact a series of identity performances. Rather than uncovering
his ‘true’ identity, Pran realizes that underneath the
performances there is in fact nothing. He is in this respect the
perfect impressionist, with no actual authentic character
underlying his performance.
Kunzru’s fiction is concerned with the individual notion of the
self: our own internal sense of who we are. While identity and
self are both shaped by similar influences, internal and
external, Kunzru’s focus on the self is a particular one designed
to critique the very idea of that self’s existence.
Identity and the self
The question of what makes us who we are, and how our individual selfhood
is constructed, is the main concern of the school of thought we call
psychoanalytic theory. Unlike the other approaches discussed in this book,
psychoanalysis is also a very real-world, practical field of study designed to
treat mental health difficulties. The most dominant school of psychoanalysis
is that developed by the Austrian Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in the early
twentieth century. Freud believed that forces in our unconscious drive us to
behave in certain ways: we are unaware of these thoughts but they direct how
we feel and act. The individual represses many things, which remain within
the unconscious: desires, traumas and tensions that we do not acknowledge in
everyday life because we have mentally pushed them into a place where we
are not aware of them. For Freud, it is these unconscious feelings that
determine our behaviour, and understanding these impulses is central to our
mental wellbeing.

Key idea

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

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

Key ideas

The ego is one’s conscious self.

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

Spotlight

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

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

‘Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.’

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)

THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

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

A notable post-Classical imagining of the Oedipus complex is Shakespeare’s

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

Key idea

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

There have been several notable criticisms of Freudian psychoanalysis, most

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

‘In place of the benevolent pseudo neutrality of the Oedipal analyst, who
wants and understands only daddy and mommy, we must substitute a
malevolent, an openly malevolent activity.’
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977)
Feminist critics have also argued against Freud’s theories of female desire, in
particular his suggestion that women are driven by their lack of the symbols
of male power, what he terms ‘penis envy’. Kate Millett, in her highly
influential feminist text Sexual Politics (1969), argues that Freud’s work has
been central in supporting the continuance of patriarchal attitudes.

Spotlight

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

In 1913 Freud’s collaborator Carl Jung attempted to provide a female

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

Key idea

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

Case study: ‘The Uncanny’

Not of all of Freud’s most influential theories relate explicitly to the sexual, however.
In his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), Freud discusses his idea of what in German is
called the unheimlich. This word translates literally as ‘unhomely’, and Freud plays on
this notion to describe the sensation of something unsettling and yet familiar: that
which reminds us of home, but troubles us. Freud developed this idea from the earlier
work of the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch (1867–1919). Freud returns to a story,
‘The Sandman’ (1816) by E.T. A. Hoffman, which Jentsch discusses. To consider
easily your own experience of the uncanny, you might think about déjà-vu – the
feeling we sometimes get that we have experienced a certain event before. Or perhaps
you have had an occasion where you have gone to telephone someone and they were
about to call you – or messaged the same thing to someone in the same moment.
These coincidences can be seen to capture the uncanny – the sense we have of
something simultaneously intimate and disturbing. For Freud, these events are
connected to our psychology because they remind us, unconsciously, of our id. They
stir up in us things we have denied or repressed, by reminding us that we are never
really at home with ourselves – we are always on the edge of something threatening
and disturbing.

A useful literary example of the uncanny is the Henry James novella The Turn of the
Screw (1898). Widely discussed by literary critics, its meaning is open and difficult to
definitely determine. This means that the entire reading experience becomes uncanny,
in that readers feel they are in the familiar realm of a ghost story, yet unsettled
because the resolution they have come to expect is seemingly absent. Alongside this,
the story itself focuses on the experience of the uncanny. Set within a frame narrative
in which the story is read as a fireside tale from a manuscript, the novella tells of the
experiences of a young governess who goes to care for two young children but
becomes convinced that forces of evil are at work in their lives. She sees the ghostly
figures of a man and woman wandering on the estate, but no one else ever sees them.
When the governess learns that her predecessor had a relationship with another
employee, Peter Quint, she becomes convinced that it is the ghosts of these two
individuals who haunt the children. At the end of the novella, the governess confronts
the little girl, who denies seeing any ghost. In a dramatic final scene, the governess
attempts to prevent the young boy from seeing a ghost she sees at the window.
Holding him tightly, he dies in her arms. We never know whether the ghosts are real.

Psychoanalytic readings, however, have focused on the sexual imagery in the novella
and the governess’s preoccupation with the sexual fortunes of her predecessor. The
ghosts in this context are not real, but rather a psychosis induced by her repressed
sexuality. Their presence is uncanny because they come to the governess not in
monstrous form but as ordinary human figures. Their identity as ghosts thus rests
upon the governess’s sense of anxiety and unease, in the wake of something
seemingly normal. In accordance with Freud’s theory, what is really unsettled here is
the governess’s own sense of self – her repressed sexuality is awoken by these figures
who remind her of the sexual relationship she has uncovered. The suggestion is that
what the governess sees is nothing – but her own sexual repression turns this into the
strange and unusual.

THE DOUBLE
In his essay, Freud also considers the uncanny nature of the ‘double’, a figure
he had encountered in the work of his colleague, the Austrian psychoanalyst
Otto Rank (1884–1939). Literature is full of examples of uncanny doubles
which play on the idea of the repressed. For example, in Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Mr Hyde is
sometimes read as Dr Jekyll’s repressed homosexuality; Toni Morrison’s
Beloved (1987) features a ghost that is the double of a dead child,
representing the repressed trauma of slavery; and Helen Oyeyemi’s The
Icarus Girl (2005) represents a double of a dead twin, symbolic of the central
character Titiola’s alienation from her African heritage.

These latter examples point to one of the dangers of the uncanny, which is
that it can risk exoticizing what is different – it is important to remember that
the uncanny is not merely something that seems to us to be strange or
unfamiliar; it is rather what is familiar and unfamiliar: the homely that is
unhomely. Equally, we must remember that such ideas are culturally specific,
and what appears to us to be uncanny may in fact be merely the unknown.
Oyeyemi in fact plays on this tension in her novel – we are never quite sure
whether Titiola is a little girl or a ghost. Our unwillingness to accept her as
the former asks us to question our tendency to imagine the non-Western
world as an occult space, in keeping with long-held colonial attitudes. At the
same time, however, being unwilling to see her as a ghost might also mean
restricting our understanding to a narrow, Westernized world view. Rather
than resolve this tension, Oyeyemi keeps readers within it, so that the novel
experience becomes uncanny; and our own reading, something so familiar to
us, becomes strange and uncertain.

Jungian psychoanalysis
Although Freud tends to focus on the individual, one of his contemporaries,
the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, offers insight into how groups and
communities might share particular psychologies. This has particular
relevance for thinking about literature and the ways in which audiences
receive texts. Jung suggests that there exists what he calls a ‘collective
unconscious’ – ideas and impulses inherited from our ancestors. While
Freudian work stresses sexual impulses, Jungian approaches instead focus on
this inherited unconscious. Sexuality thus becomes only one element in a
much more complicated picture.

Jung developed some of the key terms of psychoanalysis that continue to

influence thinking about identity today, such as the idea of introverted and
extroverted personality types. In relation to literary studies, his idea of
archetypes is particularly useful. Jung used the word ‘archetype’ to describe
the myths and images that reside in our unconscious. These are inherited and
shape our understanding of the world. For example, the archetypal image of
the mother suggests fertility, wisdom and comfort. Collectively, we share this
understanding, and the presence of this archetype transmits these meanings
across generations, changing under the influence of social and historical
context. When one represents a mother, for example, one represents the
values of the archetype, which those consuming the cultural image recognize.
In literary criticism, the idea of the archetype is used to explain the key
motifs (the hero, the villain) that define the nature of a literary work. As we
shall discuss in Chapter 18, this is important for those critics who wish to
classify works into different literary types.

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

Spotlight

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

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

‘The mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously

from insufficiency to anticipation – and, for the subject caught up in the lure
of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented
image of the body to what I will call an “orthopaedic” form of its totality –
 and to the finally donned armour of an alienating identity that will mark his
entire mental development with its rigid structure.’
Jacques Lacan, Écrits (1966)

Key idea

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

In L. M. Montgomery’s classic children’s novel Anne of Green Gables

(1908), the orphan Anne has a very Lacanian experience. Confronted by her
reflection, she is forced to abandon the fantasy she has constructed and to see
herself as unique:
‘I can see my reflection in that splendid big mirror hanging on the wall. I
am tall and regal, clad in a gown of trailing white lace, with a pearl cross
on my breast and pearls in my hair. My hair is of midnight darkness and
my skin is a clear ivory pallor. My name is the Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald.
No, it isn't – I can't make that seem real.’
She danced up to the little looking-glass and peered into it. Her pointed
freckled face and solemn gray eyes peered back at her.
‘You’re only Anne of Green Gables,’ she said earnestly, ‘and I see you,
just as you are looking now, whenever I try to imagine I'm the Lady
Cordelia.’

This scene, ironically, comes from the chapter ‘Anne’s Bringing-up Is

Begun’. Often, characters see not themselves in the mirror, but another: a
displaced version that offers us in tangible form what it means to realize
one’s place as an individual in relation to others and particularly in relation to
authority. Other examples are when Jane looks into the mirror in the attic in
Jane Eyre (1847) and is confronted by Bertha Mason, pulling her out of her
fantasy and into the stark reality of sexual relations and patriarchal law, and
when Dorothy in Ozma of Oz (1907) looks into the magic mirror and sees not
herself but Ozma, the princess who signifies the adult rule of law that she,
too, must grapple with. Of course, we can think that there may be figurative
mirrors, too: encounters with others and with situations that also function to
prompt the kind of awareness Lacan speaks of.

Psychoanalysis and literature

The literary inspirations in Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and his
theory of the uncanny illustrate how central literature is to his thinking, as a
vehicle through which essential truths about the state of the human mind are
conveyed. One school of psychoanalytic literary criticism aims to identify
subconscious elements in the text that reveal the psychology of the author
and/or the society in which they write. The former is problematic when
considered in relation to formalist theories, which suggest that we can never
access the author’s meaning. This is made more complicated by the fact that
what the psychoanalytic critic aims to uncover is the unconscious – so not
what the author may have thought they intended but what they
unintentionally worked into the text. That we might be able to ‘know’ this is
still contentious, however. The idea that the author might unconsciously
reveal elements about a society is perhaps less problematic, although it does
still rely on the assumption that we can uncover such meanings.

Another way to make use of psychoanalysis is to examine how its theories

resonate with or are, indeed, even challenged by literary texts. In this
approach, whether the author was intentionally trying to comment on states
of mind or unconsciously doing so becomes irrelevant. In order to do this, the
critic looks for symbolism and imagery in the text that might speak to
unconscious motives. They identify archetypes that might echo Jungian ideas.
And they analyse relationships in comparison to Freudian and Lacanian
accounts of subjects such as desire, death and the development of the infant.

ABJECTION
While the applications of psychoanalytic theory are multiple, one with
particular use to literary scholars in the idea of the ‘abject’, meaning that
which is ‘cast off’ or rejected. Abjection, then, is a process by which what is
deemed unsuccessful or attractive is removed. The term originates in the
work of the French critic Julia Kristeva (1941– ), who was influenced by both
Freud’s and Jung’s philosophies. For Kristeva, the abject is that which is
unclean or monstrous, and in such a form disturbs and unsettles us. The
abject in this respect is what is rejected by society but it is also that which has
the power to force change, by pushing people beyond their comfort.

Kristeva was influenced by psychoanalysis in her belief that the abject is a

part of ourselves that we have come to separate off or deny. So the abject is
not something we are unfamiliar with, but rather something we have
repressed and forced out. What is abject is therefore not really unclean, but it
is made to seem so because it is socially unacceptable. We can think in these
terms, for example, about prejudices against homosexuality in the earlier part
of the twentieth century and before. These prejudices represented
homosexuality as dirty and unclean even though of course it is not. The
abjection of homosexuality thus stems not from its inherent dirtiness but,
rather, from its social unacceptability, which led to it being falsely
represented as unclean. Moreover, its abjection represents the heterosexual
subject’s fear of their own homosexual feelings. So it is not something
entirely separate from the subject, but something the subject has repressed.
Read through Freud’s theory, Kristeva’s own idea of the abject is the
maternal – the mother figure and her influence that is a part of all subjects,
but which is frequently denied in the wake of patriarchal culture.

Key idea

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

Kristeva’s use of Freud indicates the particular centrality of psychoanalysis to

feminist poetics. For example, Lacan’s concept of jouissance – a term that
means ‘enjoyment’, of both rights and sexual pleasure – has been taken up by
the French feminist Hélène Cixous (1937– ).
 Key idea

Jouissance means the fulfilment of intellectual delight or sexual pleasure.

Lacan describes jouissance as a pleasure that exists beyond socially

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

Fact check

1 What does Freud call the thoughts that determine our desires?
a The unconscious
b The conscious
c The id
d The superego
2 What does Freud call the part of the human mind that modifies our desires and
morals?
a The conscious
b The id
c The superego
d The ego
3 What story is the basis for Freud’s discussion of the uncanny?
a ‘The Sandman’
b ‘The Iceman’
c ‘The Sandcastle’
d ‘The Boat’
 4 Who wrote The Turn of the Screw?
a James Henry
b Henry James
c James Smith
d Henry Falconer
5 What Shakespeare play illustrates Freud’s Oedipus complex?
a Macbeth
b Romeo and Juliet
c King Lear
d Hamlet
6 Who developed the idea of abjection?
a Freud
b Jung
c Kristeva
d Deleuze and Guattari
7 Which feminist critic criticizes Freud?
a Kate Millet
b Julia Kristeva
c Elizabeth Grosz
d Rosi Braidotti
8 Which figure from mythology does Jung use for the female equivalent to the
Oedipus complex?
a Persephone
b Electra
c Helen
d Ariel
9 What is Lacan’s name for the stage at which a child recognizes its individuality?
a Reflection
b Mother
c Oedipus
d Mirror
10 What is the French term for the fulfilment of sexual pleasure?
a Object petit a
 b Amour
c Jouissance
d Desire

Dig deeper

Bowie, Malcolm (1997), Lacan. Waukegan: Fontana Press.

Easthope, Anthony (2000), The Unconscious. London: Routledge.
Kofman, Sarah (1991), Freud and Fiction. London: Blackwell.
Thurschwell, Pamela (2001), Sigmund Freud. London: Routledge.
 7
Modernism and surrealism

What does it mean to be modern? The word, first recorded in

1585, signifies what belongs to present or recent times. Of
course, this meaning contains the essence of the modern’s
paradox: what is defined as new in a particular moment must
always, eventually, with the passage of time become old-
fashioned or obsolete. Modern, then, is something that exists
only for a particular moment, and fleetingly. As a character in
Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895) declares, ‘Nothing is so
dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-
fashioned quite suddenly.’
For the writers and artists of the early twentieth century, time
was moving at a new pace, and newness seemed everywhere.
What could capture this mood better, then, that the idea of the
modern? It is in this context that modernism was born.
As a defining moment, the First World War of 1914–18 fuelled the sense of a
shift in thinking: the massive environmental destruction, loss of life,
mechanization of combat and economic downturn caused by the war
encouraged writers and artists to argue that a new way of representing reality
was needed. In this new, urbanized, chaotic world, the old grand narratives of
the past such as religion (already shaken by Darwin’s ideas), history and
government seemed unreliable. While modernist writers mourned the loss of
the stable orders of the past, they created vivid prose to capture the
fragmented and disordered state of twentieth-century life.

A close relationship can be identified between modernism and the cultural

movement known as surrealism. Like modernism, surrealism was an
experimental movement of both the visual and written arts that aimed to
unleash the creative potential of the unconscious mind.

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

Key idea

High modernism is associated with intense formal experimentation in literature

during the period 1910–30.

Modernism was expressed through both prose and poetry, and in both cases it
promised the advent of a new mode of expression. In poetry, modernism took
on the free verse (vers libre) already developing in poetry from the end of the
nineteenth century, as poets such as Gerald Manley Hopkins with his
development of ‘sprung rhythm’ moved away from traditional rhyme and
metre. Although free verse abandons many of the rules of poetry, especially
rhyme, it often keeps some adherence to the idea of the poetic line and the
important of rhythm. It is thus often not a complete dismissal of existing
formal structures, but represents freeness with them.

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

IMAGISM
In the early modernist period, the most notable figure in these terms was the
American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972). Pound’s poetry was, to begin with,
in the form of imagist works, which always employed free verse. The most
famous of these poems, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913), is a manipulation
of the Japanese haiku form, but with the poem’s title serving as the first line.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Imagism owes much to symbolism (discussed in Chapter 1), in that it strives

for a concrete image to represent a given thought. Its aim is clarity in
expression and communication. In Pound’s poem we see this in the final line,
where he strives to give a single image (the petals, on a wet, black branch) to
the sense of a mass of faces in an urban crowd. This relates to what Pound
defined as the ideogrammatic method – the use of contrasting concrete
images to express an abstraction. Pound called these images ‘luminous
details’: specific, tangible images that shine light on an abstract idea. Here,
the petals are juxtaposed with the black bough: the beauty of nature against a
darkness that suggests death; the lightness of the flower against the heaviness
of the branch. Together, these images create the experience of the abstract
idea that is seeing faces in a crowd.
 Key idea

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

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

Key idea

Vorticism was an artistic movement, established in London in 1913, directed towards

capturing the chaotic nature of modern life.

MODERNIST POETRY AND PROSE

These early poetic influences on modernist thinking can be seen in the later
work of poets including H. D. (Hilda Doolittle; 1886–1961) and T. S. Eliot
(1888–1965). The sparse form of Pound’s early works would give way,
however, to his epic poems such as ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (1920) and
The Cantos (1954), in which the same manipulation of form and symbolism
would come alongside dense classical reference, complex use of voice and
elusive meanings. These later poems have more in common with what has
become the defining modernist poem, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).
Eliot’s poem embodies the modernist concern with free verse, but also its
strong use of imagery and classical reference. Alongside this, its themes of
loss, urban decay and fragmentation are those that have come to define
modernism’s thematic concerns.

Because of its fragmented narrative, it is often difficult to identify the subject

of Eliot’s poem, and voices are frequently unidentified. The subject and the
world around them at times appear to blur. This blurring, in which the stable,
identifiable subject seems to wither away, is also the defining formal
characteristic of modernist prose.

The main modernist prose writers we think of today were James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson. Not all these
writers use the same form, but they all include elements of what is called
stream of consciousness: the interior thoughts of characters presented without
interruption. These ideas can at first glance seem unrelated, but further
examination reveals a string of associations that hold the ideas together. For
example, in the passage below from the opening of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway (1925), we are taken from the idea of a beach, to sea imagery (a
lark, a plunge), to the memory of an earlier sea view, to an old friend:
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their
hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa
Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when,
with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had
burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.
How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early
morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and
yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did,
standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to
happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off
them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh
 said, ‘Musing among the vegetables?’– was that it? – ‘I prefer men to
cauliflowers’ – was that it?

There are two main types of stream-of-consciousness narrative: free direct

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

Spotlight

The extract here from Ulysses is 167 words long, but the passage from which it comes
stretches to more than 24,000 words. Those 24,000 words are one single sentence –
one single sentence without any punctuation!
Free indirect discourse is a more filtered version of the same stream of
consciousness, framed by a third-person narrator who tells us who is
speaking. Whereas in a realist narrative we would have speech marks, in free
indirect discourse speech and thoughts are amalgamated into the third-person
narrative. Elsewhere in Ulysses, Joyce uses this form:
He kicked open the crazy door for the jakes. Better be careful not to get
these trousers dirty for a funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the
low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash
and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he peered
through a chink up at the nextdoor window. The king was in his
courthouse.

In this passage, the first sentence is traditional third-person description. The

second sentence is the point of view of the character. It is not the narrator’s
mediated report of that thought, but the thought itself. The former would read
differently:
He kicked open the crazy door for the jakes. He thought that he’d better
be careful, because he didn’t want to get his trousers dirty before the
funeral.

One of the difficulties of free indirect discourse compared to free direct

discourse is that it is not always clear when we are getting the unmediated
thoughts of the character. One of the useful things we can do to locate free
indirect discourse is to look at tense. Although the events here are reported,
so given in the past tense, the thought is in the present tense. It is in the
immediate moment, in the same way as the present tense of Molly’s
monologue.

Free indirect discourse is not entirely a modernist form. Consider, for

example, the passage below from Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1816):
Lady Russell […] had a cultivated mind, and was, generally speaking,
rational and consistent; but she had prejudices on the side of ancestry: she
had a value for rank and consequence, which blinded her a little to the
faults of those who possessed them. Herself the widow of only a knight,
 she gave the dignity of a baronet all its due; and Sir Walter, independent
of his claims as an old acquaintance, an attentive neighbour, an obliging
landlord, the husband of her very dear friend, the father of Anne and her
sisters, was, as being Sir Walter, in her apprehension entitled to a great
deal of compassion and consideration under his present difficulties.
They must retrench; that did not admit of a doubt. But she was very
anxious to have it done with the least possible pain to him and Elizabeth.

This passage is traditional third-person narration apart from one line,

highlighted in bold above, in which we are given not reported feelings but the
direct feelings of the character from their own head, inserted into the
narrator’s words. Austen used this technique frequently, to bring her readers
closer to her characters and their thoughts and feelings.

Key ideas

Stream of consciousness is a narrative form in which the prose follows mental

associations made by the character.
Free direct discourse, also called interior monologue, is a mode of narration that
gives the direct thoughts of the characters without an overseeing narrator.
Free indirect discourse is a mode of narration in which the thoughts of characters are
filtered through a narrator.

It is this ‘closeness’ that modernist writers were so keen to expand upon.

They desired to give the reader direct access into the thoughts and feelings of
their characters, to get closer to the ‘truth’ of human existence. For this
reason, it is not necessarily helpful to see modernism as the antithesis of
realism. For modernists, stream of consciousness is a way of getting closer to
reality as it is experienced – a more authentic way of representing our
complex engagement with the world, rather than a departure from it.
 ‘For the Novel written in England modernism was never so much in
opposition to realism as in fact instantiating a new realism, with detailed
psychological description replacing external social observation.’
Steven Earnshaw, ‘Literature and Culture in Modern Britain’ (2000)

MODERNIST THINKING ABOUT TIME

Both prose and poetry also share a modernist way of thinking about time
quite different from that espoused via earlier literature. Influenced by the
philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and in particular his idea of
duration, modernism rejects the straightforward idea of a linear timeline,
instead moving between past, present and future. For Bergson, the regular,
mechanical clock time is contrasted to the internal, subjective time of the
individual, which does not move in a linear direction. For example, in Mrs
Dalloway we move seamlessly from the central character Clarissa’s adult life
in London to scenes from her adolescence, without any introduction to the
change in time frame.

This movement reflects the modernist sense that reality is not the physical
world in front of us but, rather, the world in combination with our own
consciousness and perception, which might move us quite easily via memory
from that present moment to an earlier one, or via imagination from that
present to the future. The free form of stream of consciousness allows for
such associations to unravel, unhindered by narrative framing or by the need
for a continual reference to a stable external reality. So Clarissa can be,
simultaneously, in her house in London, and in her childhood home.

Surrealism
By the 1920s, neither imagism nor vorticism was impressing itself upon
modernist thinking. Instead, a close relationship can be identified between
modernism and the cultural movement known as surrealism. The word
‘surrealist’ was first used in 1903 by the French poet and playwright
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), but the movement itself was established
after the First World War by the French writers André Breton (1896–1966),
Louis Aragon (1897–1982) and Philippe Soupault (1897–1990). Breton had
been involved in the Dada movement, an international left-wing, pacifist
artists’ collective which had developed during the First World War. Together,
the three men started the literary journal Littérature and began to experiment
with what they called automatic writing. This practice was heavily influenced
by Breton’s interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and the working of the
unconscious. It involves attempting to create art without conscious control of
the process or content. This, too, was influenced by Dadaism, which in its
manifesto, written by Tristan Tzara in 1920, gave instructions for the writing
process.

In the same year as the Dada manifesto, Breton and Soupault published the
first work of literary surrealism – a novel called The Magnetic Fields (1920),
which was a piece of automatic writing. As one might expect, it is difficult to
make connections between sentences or to draw a conclusive meaning from
the text.

Spotlight

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

In 1924 Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto. A powerful critique of the

limitations of realist prose, it celebrates marvellous narratives, and includes
Breton’s definition of surrealist writing practice. The manifesto includes a
rather amusing list of other writers whom Breton saw as embodying surrealist
form. This includes the declaration that ‘Swift is surrealist in malice’ and
‘Sade is surrealist in sadism’.
 ‘SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one
proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other
manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the
absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or
moral concern.’
André Breton, Surrealist Manifesto (1924)

Although automatic writing is quite distinct from stream of consciousness,

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

When was/is modernism?

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

Case study: A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

Consider the following novel extract:

 See here this party. It’s a mad. I had never been. I have only seen and thought
films were like that. Music hurting on the innards. Door. Lungs. People pouring
noise out front back of this old house. Some glasses beakers. I have cans. In my
bag. Where do I?

When do you think this was written? It holds all the hallmarks of modernist prose. It’s
what we call free direct discourse stream of consciousness. It is a perfect example of
the modernist idea of reality – the truth of the complex, non-linear workings of the
human mind, which are in stark contrast to the ordered language we often use to shape
that vision of reality.

This isn’t a piece of writing from the high modernist period, however. It’s an extract
from Eimear McBride’s 2013 novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Publishers
famously rejected the manuscript for nine years before it was finally accepted, as
being too ‘difficult’. It is written entirely in this kind of ebullient but often
inaccessible prose and it has been compared, not to more moderate high-modernist
texts, but to that most difficult of works, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. In interview,
McBride has said that she saw her novel as attempting to open again a door that
Finnegans Wake had shut, a book so extreme that it was essentially declaring the end
of high modernism – that there was nothing left to explore.

Does this prose make the novel modernist? Does it open the door again, as
McBride desires? This is a difficult question to answer. The strategies used
by McBride, and also to a much lesser degree by writers like Smith, run
alongside postmodernism. They are certainly avant-garde, but are they
modernist? While McBride and Smith may use modernist strategies, this does
not necessarily mean that their social and political concerns, or even their
ideas of selfhood, mirror those of modernist thinkers. The modernist period –
in contrast to simply modernist style – refers to the alignment of both these
ideas and aesthetic practices. This is one other reason why modernism is not
the straightforward opposite of realism: whereas realism is an aesthetic, a
formal style, modernism is both this and a particular set of attitudes conveyed
through that style.

The modernist movement, unlike postmodernism, has not produced a reading

practice. While one might say that one is a postmodern critic, one is unlikely
to say that one is a modern critic. Modernism, then, is something we read for,
rather than something we do. As I explained in the Introduction, it is the
example of an aesthetic and a movement rather than a school of criticism.
That said, modernism did produce critics whose contributions to other fields
of literary theory are of great significance – for example, T. S. Eliot’s
contribution to new criticism and Woolf’s role in the feminist movement.
Although these engagements are very different, they illustrate that the
intellectual climate of modernism was the centre for the production of critical
thought, even though that thought did not take one defined character. You
will find these engagements discussed in other chapters of this book.

Fact check

1 Which is the period usually defined as that of high modernism?

a 1900–1950
b 1910–30
c 1910–40
d 1940–60
2 The imagist movement is associated most with which poet?
a H. D.
b Dorothy Richardson
c T. S. Eliot
d Ezra Pound
3 Who wrote The Waste Land?
a T. S. Eliot
b James Joyce
c Ezra Pound
d D. H. Lawrence
4 Which novelist wrote Mrs Dalloway?
a James Joyce
b Virginia Woolf
c Katherine Mansfield
d Joseph Conrad
5 Wyndham Lewis established which movement?
 a Surrealism
b Imagism
c Vorticism
d Modernism
6 What other term describes free direct discourse?
a Modernism
b Stream of consciousness
c Automatic writing
d Interior monologue
7 What is the mode of writing used by surrealism called?
a Stream of consciousness
b Automatic writing
c Interior monologue
d Realism
8 The final monologue at the end of Ulysses is spoken by which character?
a Molly Bloom
b Clarissa Dalloway
c Sally Seaton
d Jane Eyre
9 To what other novel has A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing been compared?
a Ulysses
b Mrs Dalloway
c NW
d Finnegans Wake
10 With what decade is Beckett’s modernist theatre most associated?
a The 1920s
b The 1930s
c The 1940s
d The 1950s

Dig deeper
Bradley, Fiona (1997), Surrealism. London: Tate Gallery.
Childs, Peter (2000), Modernism. London: Routledge.
Ross, Stephen, ed. (2009), Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. Hoboken:
Taylor & Francis.
Whitworth, Michael (2007), Modernism. Oxford: Blackwell.
 8
Existentialism

What does it mean to exist? And what is the purpose of that

existence? Although this question might seem like an age-old
one, it was only in the romantic period that the idea of the
individual self that we are familiar with today became fully
developed. This self was in part created through the idea of
writing – as more people learned how to read and write, they
began to document their experiences, in letters and diaries, and
through these to express themselves. The notion of ‘I’ for the
first time became central to thinking about the world.
Given the relationship between the development of selfhood
and writing, literary theory is also concerned for our place in
the world and our expression of individual selfhood.
Existentialism asks questions about where identity originates.
Do we have control over our destinies? Where does our
character come from? What must we do to be good citizens? In
asking these powerful and fundamental questions, it has been
highly influential on movements concerned with identity
politics such as feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory,
while also shaping theories concerned with selfhood such as
posthumanism, and those interested in moral behaviour, such
as ethical criticism.
Life and truth
The first existentialist philosopher is often seen to be the Danish philosopher
and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), although he never described
himself in such terms. Unlike the work of later existentialists who were often
atheists, Kierkegaard’s work is rooted in Christianity. He kept a number of
journals in which he described what was central to his thinking, which was
that the purpose of life is to uncover its truth – in a sense, that the purpose is
to uncover purpose. His focus on what existence means for the individual
became the central theme of later existentialist inquiry.

Kierkegaard’s concerns were developed by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), a

German philosopher who had been the student of Edmund Husserl (1859–
1938). Husserl was the leading philosopher of phenomenology, a movement
principally interested in how the external world is perceived and experienced
by human subjects. Husserl’s interest in individual experience – what we call
subjectivity – has been greatly influential on both poststructuralism and
reader response theory. For Husserl’s student Heidegger, however, it
prompted an interest in the nature of being – what it means to exist and how
the individual defines this.

Key ideas

Phenomenology is the study of how humans experience the world.

Subjectivity is the thoughts of the individual, shaped by their own internal ideas
rather than by external influences.

‘“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” That is the question.
Presumably it is no arbitrary question. “Why are there beings at all instead
 of nothing?”– this is obviously the first of all questions.’
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

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

Nietzsche’s Übermensch
Alongside Heidegger, the German nineteenth-century philosopher Frederic
Nietzsche (1844–1900) had also written about the self. He is associated with
a philosophy known as nihilism, the idea that life is without purpose.
Nietzsche argues that society can flourish only if nihilism is overcome.

The capability of the individual to resist nihilism comes for Nietzsche in the
ability to transcend the limitations of ordinary existence. In Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1883) Nietzsche creates a central character, Zarathustra, who
argues that society must strive to create the Übermensch (‘superhuman’).
Rejecting the supernatural, the Übermensch is strongly connected to the here
and now of the physical world, and through this resists the escapism that
others engage in to relieve themselves from the fears and distractions of the
meaningless, nihilistic existence that threatens society in the wake of the
death of God. In God’s absence, it is the superhuman who creates the new
values that give society structure.
 Spotlight

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

For existentialists, the superhuman represents the possibility of absolute

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

Key idea

Übermensch is defined by Nietzsche as a superhuman.

Authenticity and bad faith

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

Spotlight

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

Thinkers such as Sartre and de Beauvoir were particularly concerned for the
expression of identity to be authentic. To be authentic is an idea we are
familiar with, in that it has passed into common usage. If we are authentic,
we are being our ‘true self’ rather than performing an identity. To have
‘authentic Italian food’ is to eat food that is true to the cuisine of Italy.
Implied in the notion of authenticity is a value judgement – it is better to be
authentic. ‘Fake’ in this context is resolutely negative: it means to be
disingenuous; it means to be false and therefore unreliable; it means to be
untrustworthy. For existentialists, the idea of authenticity corresponds to this
general usage: it means to be true to one’s internal sense of self in how one
behaves.

Existentialism considers authenticity to be something with which the

individual must struggle in relation to outside influences. These external
pressures encourage the individual to behave in ways that are not in
accordance with oneself. In existentialist terms they are called ‘facticity’,
which is defined as all the concrete frameworks, such as the environment,
education, social interactions, even birth and the awareness of death, which
limit and constrain human freedom. In this there is implicitly an ethical
relation – not being true to oneself represents dishonesty. Both Sartre and de
Beauvoir refer to this dishonesty as being ‘bad faith’ – an act where
individuals give up their freedom and adopt false values to conform to
society’s ideals. When one acts in bad faith one denies one’s freedom. In this
moment, one is simultaneously both aware of one’s freedom (because
denying it) and yet not aware of one’s freedom (because repressing it). This
reflects the fact that each individual has for Sartre two states of consciousness
– a reflective consciousness that examines events after they have happened,
and a pre-reflective consciousness that exists in the moment of the event.

Key idea

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

This idea of the reflective consciousness is useful when considering

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

‘EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE’

The preoccupation with questions of identity in contemporary literature
means that existentialism continues to be a useful theoretical framework. In
particular, existentialist ideas are useful when exploring the recurring concern
in contemporary work with the extent to which identity is something we are
born with and the extent to which it is something that evolves through
experience. The notion of identity, as something imposed, is often contrasted
in these works with the idea of the self, as something inherent.

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

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

For literary critics, existentialism has a particular place because it emphasizes

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

Case study: NW

In her novel NW (2012), the British novelist Zadie Smith returns to the same north
London terrain that she used in her first bestseller, White Teeth (2000). In the earlier
novel, Smith asks philosophical questions about the nature of fate and chance. In the
later novel, this concern for the nature of existence becomes more explicitly
existentialist through concern for the idea of the relationship between existence and
essence. The novel begins in a modernist stream of consciousness in which one of the
novel’s central characters, Leah, declares repeatedly, ‘I am the sole author.’ This
statement frames the novel and its concern for whether our identity is something we
write or something that is given to us. Leah’s statement declares that her existence is
her own creation. Likewise, her best friend Keisha is a model of continual reinvention
of the self. As Keisha moves away from her working-class background and becomes a
lawyer, she changes her name to Natalie.

In this respect, NW exemplifies the existentialist belief in existence preceding essence.

The novel, however, is sceptical about the positive value of this reality. Leah’s control
of her destiny means lying to her husband about taking the contraceptive pill when he
thinks they are trying to have a baby. Likewise, Natalie’s talent for self-invention
leads to her realization that she is only existence – that she has no essence, even one
she has created for herself, to fall back on. This represents the flipside of the
existential ideal of self-determination, which is the pressure of self-creation and the
potential void that exists when one realizes one is only what one creates. Whereas
White Teeth celebrates the possibility of self-definition of the self in the wake of sexist
and racist attitudes, NW illustrates the complexities of taking on the responsibility of
that self-definition.

Because existentialists believe that there is always a power to choose,

whatever the circumstances, it opens up the possibility for a resistance that is
always possible. This is particularly useful from a literary criticism
perspective when examining literatures that deal with situations of oppression
– for example postcolonial literatures, feminist writings and those dealing
with issues of gender, class or disability. Existentialism drives us to consider
how resistance exists even in the most extreme circumstances, perhaps in
small and not always easily perceptible ways, as expressions of authenticity
in the wake of the harshest circumstances. So, for example, Anne Frank’s
writing of her diary (published posthumously in 1947) in the wake of the
Nazi persecution of the Jews and despite the most horrendous personal
circumstances can be read in existentialist terms as the triumph of her
authentic self in the resistance of external pressures and a refusal of bad faith.
Or, in fictional terms, one might consider the character of Jo March in Louisa
May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), who acts against gender stereotypes in the
pursuit of her ambition, or Desdemona in Othello (1604), whose marriage to
Othello may appear to be a capitulation to patriarchal structures (marriage in
this period being a transfer of woman as property from one man to another)
but in fact contains within it an act of resistance as her choice of husband is
an expression of her sexual desire and refusal of her father’s authority.
The freedom implied by existentialism also has ethical consequences. The
idea of ‘bad faith’ suggests that to act a certain way because of an imposed
legal framework or social convention is something to be rejected. This means
that to behave well should not be a result of overarching social values but,
rather, a result of individual responsibility. Existentialism says that we can
always behave well, and must therefore be accountable for any actions that
hurt or damage others. Freedom in this context is not at all a selfish mode of
self-expression but an obligation to accept responsibility.

Central to this is the existentialist idea of anguish – the concept that the
individual acts from a state of fear that he or she will fall short of the
potential of that freedom. For Sartre, anguish comes most in the moment
when one knows that freedom could lead to potentially devastating
consequences. This can be in terms of the potential to harm others, but also to
shape the course of one’s own life. For example, holding a knife may prompt
anguish that one could, if one wanted, use it to stab another person. Likewise,
standing by the side of the road prompts the anguish that one could, if one
wanted, walk out into the traffic. What we see in Smith’s NW are characters
trying to come to term with the burden of their freedom.

Key idea

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

Absurdism
One notable feature of existentialist works is what we call the absurd, by
which is meant the sense of the individual living in a chaotic and purposeless
universe. The name for the following of this belief is absurdism, and it is
central to existentialist thinking. The most notable absurdist philosopher is
the French thinker Albert Camus (1913–60). Camus had been associated with
the existentialism movement, but always denied that he was a follower of the
movement. In his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ (1942) he outlines his view
that life is a struggle between the individual’s desire to find meaning in it and
the fact that this search is futile. The feeling that arises from this tension is
the absurd. The title of the essay comes from the figure of Sisyphus in Greek
mythology, doomed to repeat for ever the task of pushing a rock up a
mountain, which would then repeatedly fall back to the bottom. Camus
argues that this is a metaphor for the individual’s life, but that despite this
futility one must persevere.

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

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

Spotlight

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

Case study: Under the Net

One novelist preoccupied with the idea of goodness was the British writer and
philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–99). The question of how one can be good outside
the dictates of society, and particularly of religion, is central to all her work. Murdoch
began writing in the 1950s, at the same time that existentialism was growing in
reputation. Her first novel, Under the Net, which was published in 1954, just eight
years after Sartre’s ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, is the story of a struggling writer
called Jake Donahue, whose adventures across London see him fall into a series of
disastrously comic scenarios which echo existentialist ideas of the absurd. Jake must
come to terms with the responsibilities of his freedom in the increasingly liberal
environs of post-war London. His frequent comic failures illustrate the difficulties of
freedom, reflecting the existentialist theory that it is a situation to which the individual
is condemned. Within this context, Jake must make sense of his freedom and strive for
authenticity. At the end of the novel there is the suggestion that he has tentatively
reached this moment – finally committing to the serious pursuit of his writing and
distancing himself from the anarchic behaviours that dominate the novel.

Jake’s journey is towards truth, in a society filled by bad faith. The woman he is in
love with, Anna, runs a mime theatre, and tells him that ‘Only very simple things can
be said without falsehood, and the simple things are the quotidian’. It is in everyday
life, the novel suggests, that we can be authentic. In this context, the ‘net’ of the
novel’s title is the world of philosophical discourse or theory under which Jake is
trapped, and from which he must free himself. This, of course, is a strange, anti-
theoretical, theoretical position, but it is completely in keeping with the motifs of
existentialism: Jake can come to truth only through living his freedom; it is not
through theorizing but, rather, through experience that he can become authentic.

It is useful for literary scholars to consider not merely how fiction exemplifies a
theory but indeed how it modifies that theory, or, in fact, is that theory. Murdoch is
often described as a novelist philosopher – an association that comes from her
simultaneous careers in both fields, but one that she resisted. In the case of Under the
Net, Murdoch seems to play out in fictional form her own interests in the work of
Sartre that she examines in her philosophical writing. Under the Net mirrors many of
the themes and concerns of Sartre’s 1938 novel La Nausée (Nausea). Yet, as
Murdoch’s career developed, she became increasingly critical of existentialism and
even in this early period she often expressed disagreement with the philosophy’s
central ideas. A key part of Murdoch’s critique of the Sartre is his lack of interest in
the role of human relationships – in Under the Net it is Jake’s relations with others
(particular Anna and an acquaintance named Hugo whom he first meets in a cold-cure
centre) that are crucial to his emerging understanding of the truth. This represents for
Murdoch a corrective to what she saw as the impoverishment and potential selfishness
of existentialism, focused as it is wholly on the expression of the individual.
 Fact check

1 Who wrote Being and Time?

a Jean-Paul Sartre
b Martin Heidegger
c Simone de Beauvoir
d Albert Camus
2 What is phenomenology the study of?
a Time
b Space
c Human experience
d Subjectivity
3 What novel by Sartre shares themes with Under the Net?
a Intimacy
b Nausea
c The Sea
d Sickness
4 Who wrote ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’?
a Jean-Paul Sartre
b Simone de Beauvoir
c Vladimir Propp
d Iris Murdoch
5 De Beauvoir can also be described as what kind of theorist?
a Postmodern
b Formalist
c Feminist
d Postcolonial
6 What is the name of the central character in Under the Net?
a Jack
b John
c Jill
 d Jake
7 What theorist do we most associate with the absurd?
a Jean-Paul Sartre
b Simone de Beauvoir
c Iris Murdoch
d Albert Camus
8 Which Greek mythological figure is associated with the absurd?
a Tantalus
b Prometheus
c Sisyphus
d Oedipus
9 What, according to existentialism, precedes essence?
a Existence
b Love
c Death
d Birth
10 Who wrote The Second Sex?
a Jean-Paul Sartre
b Iris Murdoch
c Julia Kristeva
d Simone de Beauvoir

Dig deeper

Caws, Peter (1979), Sartre. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Drefus, Hubert and Wrathall, Mark (2011), A Companion to Phenomenology and
Existentialism. Hoboken: Wiley.
Warnock, Mary (1996), Existentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 9
Poststructuralism

In May 1968 violent protests erupted in France, driven by

events that had begun earlier in the year when the French
socialist and communist parties had formed an alliance in an
attempt to topple the French president Charles de Gaulle and
his Gaullist Party. On 6 May the national student union led a
march of students and academics that ended violently, with
rioting. On 13 May some of the largest unions in France held a
one-day strike in support of the rioters. By mid-May 10 million
people were on strike, two-thirds of the French workforce. On
30 May the National Assembly was disbanded and a new
election called, which, however, the Gaullists won with a
decisive victory.
In the wake of these dramatic events, a new intellectual
movement emerged that has had a huge influence on literary
theory in the post-war period. That movement, called
poststructuralism, would redefine thinking about the
relationship between language and reality. The structuralist
idea that language exists outside of social and political contexts
would be irrevocably shaken.
Language and reality
The beginning of the protests in universities placed academics and
intellectuals at its centre. Jacques Derrida participated in the rallies of the
May 1968 protests, and organized the first general assembly at the École
normale superieure. Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) stood at the barricades
with the student protestors and sat on the Students and Writers Action
Committee. Julia Kristeva (1941– ), who had arrived in Paris as a doctoral
research fellow from Bulgaria in 1965, was a signatory to the revolutionary
declaration ‘Revolution Here, Now’, in the French literary magazine Tel Quel
of that year, calling for stronger links between Marxist theory and practice. In
2002 she would return to the events of that year in her book Revolt: She Said
to consider the idea of protest as a necessary element of not just any social
transformation but also individual consciousness and artistic practice. For
Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari (1930–92), the events were
intellectually life changing – it was in that month that they were first
introduced to each other. Deleuze was a doctoral candidate, while Guattari
was already working as a psychiatrist. Guattari was involved in the protests
through his existing work in socialist politics: his leftist group of friends were
heavily implicated in several Paris occupations. Deleuze attended the protests
and was one of the few members of his philosophy department at the
University of Lyon to openly declare support for the protestors.

Spotlight

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

The career of Michel Foucault (1926–84) is particularly interesting in these

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

Key idea

Discourse is the poststructuralist term for modes of knowledge.

Spotlight

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

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

Deconstruction
In Derrida’s early works he refers to a number of existing texts, mainly
philosophical but sometimes literary. He applies to these works a particular
kind of reading practice that has been taken up by literary critics, known as
deconstruction.

What does it mean to ‘de-construct’? If we think that the word ‘construct’

means to put something together, then we can think of ‘deconstructing’ as
taking apart that which has been built. The idea of deconstructing a text is the
central practice of poststructuralist reading. It means, quite literally, what it
suggests: to take the text apart. This should not be confused with the idea of
criticizing a text – or destroying it. Rather, it represents a way of analysing
the text by breaking it down.

Key idea

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

Poststructuralist criticism, then, looks for the obscured or denied meanings

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

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

Two terms closely related to deconstruction are différance and the trace. The
former, coined by Derrida in an essay of the same name (1982), means both
difference and deferral, playing on the two meanings of the word in French.
Derrida uses it to suggest that the idea of the relationship between the
signifier and signified implied by structuralism is never complete. There is
always an element of deferral – of reference to other words and meanings –
that causes a disruption of this process.

Take, for example, the word ‘cat’. Is it really possible to imagine this word
without imagining dog, or tiger, or mouse? Derrida suggests that these other
words are the additional signifiers that disrupt the straightforward
relationship that could make meaning transparent. By paying attention to this
in literature we can consider the layers of meaning at work in a text, and what
lies unspoken beneath obvious meanings.

Likewise, the Derridean idea of the trace, which appears in both Writing and
Difference and Of Grammatology, suggests that words are haunted by what
they do not mean. This, then, is the trace (or track) that readers can uncover
and follow to examine the complex, often contradictory, ideas that may be
suggested by a text. Influenced by psychoanalysis, such traces may not be
intentional but they are not accidental either – they exist, always, as what is
present and yet unseen in any use of language.

Key ideas

Différance is a French term coined by Derrida meaning both difference and deferral.
Trace means the haunting of words by what they do not mean.

Case study: Jane Eyre

Let us take as an example Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Traditional

scholarship on the novel tends to focus on its feminist credentials. This, we can say, is
the obvious reading of the text, and is what the author has directed us towards. Jane is
the novel’s heroine, and we are directed by the first-person narration to empathize
with her character: to celebrate her strong ‘I’ voice, her declaration ‘Reader, I married
him’ that reverses the traditional patriarchal institution of marriage as a transferral of
woman as property from one man (her father) to another (her husband). Jane’s strong
declarations of desire establish contemporary notions of female sexuality against
Victorian ideals of marriage as an institution for procreation.

What then happens if we look for the silences in the novel? The most notable silence
is the figure that haunts the upper floor of Thornfield Hall: Bertha Mason. She never
speaks, and so is literally a silenced figure. In poststructuralist terms, Bertha’s trace is
written all over the text. She is there from its very beginnings. In particular, she
exemplifies another poststructuralist concern – with the politics of haunting as the
current state of being, the ghost as present, or what is termed by Derrida in his book
Spectres of Marx (1993) ‘hauntology’. As a living, present ghost, Bertha refuses to
allow Jane to be the heroine she desires to be in the crafting of her own narrative. And
she also prevents us, as readers, from accepting Jane in those terms. In order to create
her happy ending, Jane must forsake Bertha to death: she must allow her to be labelled
as mad. And we, as readers, must silence our empathy for Bertha (out of place, in a
new country, abandoned by her husband, displaced by a younger and more culturally
acceptable woman).

In this respect, deconstruction opens up a new reading of the novel in which our
empathy for Jane is compromised, and her position as feminist heroine becomes
complicated by her own lack of empathy for another woman. This opens up new
theoretical possibilities, most notably postcolonial readings of the text such as those
by Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said. It also opens up new creative possibilities: Jean
Rhys’s attempt to tell Bertha’s story in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is
deconstructive process in action; it is more than a coincidence that it was written in
the same period as deconstructive thinking was being developed.
Poststructuralist politics?
It is in this context surprising that poststructuralism is sometimes accused of
being an apolitical movement. This is because of its focus on textuality, and
particularly because of the games with language that poststructuralist
philosophers often play. This playful, ironic tone can sometimes be taken as
irreverence when compared to the serious, scientific approach of
structuralism. In Of Grammatology, during a discussion of the work of the
French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Derrida stops to consider
his own relationship to Rousseau’s text, and what meaning it is possible for
him to draw from it. Considering whether he can read in such a way that his
reading might connect him to ‘a signified outside the text […] outside
language’, he says this is impossible. For, in fact, ‘there is nothing outside the
text’. This statement has become much discussed.

‘There is nothing outside the text.’

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967)

Does Derrida really mean that all that matters is the text? The short answer is
no. Rather, Derrida’s phrase is an expression of the poststructuralist belief
that language is an unstable entity and that we cannot really get to the essence
of reality through it. He goes on, later in the same discussion, to say that
‘there has never been anything but writing’. What Derrida is saying is that we
are all trapped within language, and therefore the only reality we know is
through language. Yet because this language is flawed, shifting and
imperfect, this means that all we really know is the language itself. The
reality it describes is ultimately elusive.

In fact, much of poststructuralism is very political, and this is one of the ways
it can be contrasted to the more purely linguistic focus of structuralism.
Derrida is particularly concerned, for example, with how language is
concerned with maintaining what he calls the logos (from the Greek term
meaning speech, thought, law or reason). In his later work, Derrida’s
poststructuralism becomes more overtly focused on developing political
concerns. This has led some critics to suggest an ‘ethical turn’ at work in
poststructuralism, where it becomes more concerned with political matters. It
is more useful, however, to think of this as a desire to make earlier abstract
ideas more concrete: what we see in the later work is more of an ethical
development than an actual turn.

Nowhere is the inherent politicization of poststructuralism more evident than

in the work of Foucault, in texts like Discipline and Punish and The History
of Sexuality (1978). In these texts, Foucault introduces the idea of a counter-
history, which includes silenced and marginalized subjects. In Discipline and
Punish the focus is on the criminal and the prison, while in The History of
Sexuality it is on intimate relationships and socially unacceptable desires. For
this approach he uses the term ‘genealogy’.

Key idea

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

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

‘In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with
 space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to
us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the
elements that are spread out in space.’
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986)

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

Key idea

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

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

In The Ground beneath Her Feet, Rushdie writes:

There is a change on the tape. The video snowstorm vanishes. In its place
is the image of a doll in a chair, holding a circular mirror, in which is
reflected a rectangular mirror, which in turn contains the reflection of
another doll.

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

‘…a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of

another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and
poetic language is read as at least double.’
Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and the Novel’ (1966)

Kristeva argues that no text is ever just itself. It is always in relation to other
texts, whether consciously or not, through processes of parody, allusion and
pastiche. Later theorists have gone on to outline in more detail the intricacies
of these different types of relation, grouping them into three types: obligatory
(meaning intended by the author and assumed necessary to understand the
meaning of the text), optional (also created by the author but not crucial to
understanding, functioning rather as an additional layer of meaning or tribute)
and accidental (not created by the author but brought by the reader to the
text). In reality, most readers will respond to a literary text involving all three
of these types – yet the balance of how they are integrated into the text may
contribute to the shaping of meaning. For this reason, we can consider
discussion of intertexts a very useful approach to the analysis of any literary
work.

Key idea

Intertextuality refers to the relationship, intentional or unintentional, between one

literary text and another.

Gilles Deleuze
It would be impossible to write a chapter on poststructuralism without
mentioning Gilles Deleuze (1925–95). As described above in the discussion
of May 1968, Deleuze embodies an anarchic and disruptive strand in
poststructuralist thinking that is at once quite similar to other poststructuralist
philosophies but also uniquely different. In contrast to the language games
offered by Derrida, the playfulness of Deleuze’s work comes in the entirety
of its form – a sweeping movement from one subject to another that reads
often like a modernist stream of consciousness. The ideas that Deleuze
develops alongside Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) offer fruitful
terrain for literary scholars. Ideas such as the body without organs,
deterritorialization, and becoming speak to questions of both space and
identity that are dominant themes in contemporary scholarship.

One concept of Deleuze and Guattari’s with particular relevance to literature

is the notion of the rhizome. A rhizome is an underground stem that puts out
a complex system of roots, unlike a normal root system. Deleuze and Guattari
see this as a metaphor for thinking about consciousness. They suggest that,
rather than thinking about the world and questions of politics and identity in
terms of roots, we might instead think in terms of the multiple pathways and
connections that the rhizome represents. To approach thinking through the
idea of the rhizome, one must abandon hierarchies, definitions and
classifications. Instead, one celebrates difference, randomness and chaotic
interplay. This, of course, has consequences for the kind of social relations
produced: it suggests openness, tolerance and the celebration of diversity. For
this reason, gender and postcolonial theory has been particular influenced by
this idea, as a way of exploring the complex relations that exist in terms of
gender, race and sexuality in contemporary culture.

Key idea

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

Case study: Girl Meets Boy

What does it mean to have a rhizome consciousness? In part, and noted by frequent
references in A Thousand Plateaus to modernist texts, it seems to imply a form that
expresses fluidity and movement. We might say in this regard that any modernist or
postmodernist text exhibits the principles of the rhizome. Some texts, however, also
exhibit rhizome consciousness in their thematic concerns. For example, Ali Smith’s
novel Girl Meets Boy (2007) is formally modernist, weaving individual voices,
shifting from one consciousness to another. At the same time, its thematic concerns
centre on ideas of fluidity and change. The novel’s first line, with its beautiful
simplicity, is a striking example of this in practice:

‘Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.’

Here Smith reworks the conventional motif of elder storytelling, disrupting it with
transgressive potential as gender is rendered unstable. As a novel that might also stand
as an example of the Deleuzian principle of becoming, it is full of characters whose
gender and sexual identities refuse to conform to established definitions. Rich with
water imagery, the novel evokes a world of flow and movement against the stifling
hardness of social expectation. Part of a series of texts commissioned to respond to
classic Greek myths, in this case the myth of Iphis, the novel is also emblematic of
Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality. In Greek myth Iphis was born as a girl, raised as a
boy, fell in love with a girl and was then transformed by the goddess Isis into a man in
order to live with her true love. Smith takes this story and weaves it into contemporary
stories of characters who long for such magic and illustrate its allure – who desire to
be transformed but also to be accepted for who they are.

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

Fact check

1 Who wrote Of Grammatology?

a Jacques Derrida
b Gilles Deleuze
c Roland Barthes
d Michel Foucault
2 A rhizome is a kind of what?
a Flower
b Tree
c Onion
d Root system
3 What term does Foucault use for counter-histories?
a Counter-discourse
b Historicism
c Ideology
d Genealogy
4 To be haunted by the presence of the unwritten can be defined by what term?
a Différance
b Deferral
c Trace
d History
 5 The term différance means both difference and what else?
a Deferral
b Death
c Decision
d Similarity
6 What does to deconstruct mean?
a To challenge
b To take apart
c To disappear
d To defer
7 In what year were the protests in France that influenced many poststructuralist
thinkers?
a 1961
b 1978
c 1968
d 1963
8 Deleuze’s writing partner, Félix Guattari, worked in what profession?
a Teaching
b Politics
c Psychiatry
d Painting
9 Who wrote Girl Meets Boy?
a Zadie Smith
b Ali Smith
c Tim Smith
d Smith Jones
10 Foucault’s term for the lived utopia is what?
a Dystopia
b Heterotopia
c Ambitopia
d Youtopia
 Dig deeper

Dosse, François and Glassman, Deborah (2010), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari:
Intersecting Lives. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gutting, Gary (2005), Foucault. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Royle, Nicholas (2003), Derrida. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.
Williams, James (2005), Understanding Poststructuralism. London: Taylor & Francis.
 10
Postmodernism

Post: to display a notice

Post: a long piece of timber or metal set upright into the
ground and used as a support or marker
Post: an official position or job
Post: subsequent; after
It was only in the 1960s that ‘post’ came to be used to mean
‘after’. Unlike its earlier usage, this ‘post’ was originally always
hyphenated in a compound word: post-modern, post-colonial,
post-structural. Yet at some point in the 1980s the hyphen fell
away. This removal of space – the refusal of a break – was not
unintentional. It marked, rather, a symptom of the very post
that the hyphen represents: a period in which we are too
uncertain to say that one thing is a definite break from what
came before. Instead, we look to see continuity with the past
and to recognize the history of the world not as a
straightforward teleology (narrative of progress) but as a fluid
movement both forwards and backwards in time.
What made us delete the hyphen, then, was the hyphenated: we
found post-modernism and we were required to turn it into the
postmodern. The ‘post’ in postmodernism implies an ‘after’,
but the nature of this after has been much debated.
On the one hand, ‘post’ indicates the fact that postmodernism is a mode of
critical thought that comes after modernism, in particular as a post-Second
World War theory in the same way that modernism is a theory inherently
connected to the aftermath of the First World War. On the other, the ‘post’ is
not so much a temporal shift but a conceptual one, indicating a movement
beyond modernism in terms of thinking. At the same time, much of what
modernism stands for stylistically remains in postmodernism: free indirect
discourse, non-linear narratives and stream of consciousness – the key
strategies we discussed in Chapter 7 as essentially modernist – are also
prominent stylistic features of the postmodern text.

To understand postmodern literature, then, we must situate it within a broader

context of postmodern culture. It is awareness of this culture that can be said
to define a work as postmodernist rather than modernist: a matter not merely
of stylistics but also of the underlying assumptions beneath these stylistics
and the thematic concerns they are used to express. This is most
simplistically defined as a difference in attitude. While modernist writers
presented their current world as one in which truth had been destabilized,
they believed a truth had once existed and grappled for its return. They saw
the fragmentation of their society as a fall from the reassuring order of the
past, destroyed by largely negative forces of war and technological change. In
contrast, these forces are often (though not always) exciting for
postmodernists, where fragmentation becomes translated into a celebration of
difference. Moreover, while modernists lament the passing of stability and
truth, postmodernists expose how these ideas have always been illusions.
Thus, at the same time as they focus on the present, they are also involved in
a process of rethinking the past and questioning assumptions about it.

Post, then, suggests both a development of and a going beyond.

Postmodernism is rooted in modernist strategies but goes beyond them in its
thematic concerns. It may be more or less formally experimental than high
modernism. Its difference is one of attitude rather than style.

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

Key idea

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

In later criticism, Lyotard’s original definition has been supplemented by a

number of features that are seen to define postmodern culture. For example,
Dominic Strinati (1947– ), in his essay ‘Postmodernism and Popular Culture’
(1992), gives five key features, including Lyotard’s but adding four new
elements:
1 The breakdown of the distinction between culture and society
2 An emphasis on style over substance
3 The breakdown of distinctions between high art and popular culture
4 More complex ideas of time and space
5 The decline of metanarratives.
 Spotlight

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

Postmodern and postmodernity can in this respect be distinguished from

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

The simulacrum
Now stop for a minute and imagine a simple scene. In an office, there is a
large copy machine. It holds a thousand pieces of paper. One day, you enter
the office and press the large green button on the front of the machine. And,
just as you might expect, out shoots a piece of paper.

You have placed nothing under the glass, so you are surprised to see that
there is an image on the piece of paper. You open the cover of the machine,
but there is nothing there. Looking again at the image, it seems vaguely
familiar to you. It is a picture of a small, ordinary house. In fact, it seems to
remind you of your own house. But some things about this picture are not the
same as your house. The door is different. The windows are larger. You scan
the image and run an image search on your computer, but there are no exact
matches.

The next day, for reasons you don’t understand, you go back to the copy
machine and copy the image again. As you do so, you put your original copy
into the recycling. And, again for reasons you don’t understand, you repeat
this process every day until all one thousand sheets of paper are gone.

You go home, and put the image into a frame and hang it on your wall. And
you are struck once more by how similar the house is to your own, and yet
how different. But you are pleased with this image: a copy of a copy of a
copy of a…with no original image.

It is this idea, of an image that has been endlessly repeated but is without
origin, that defines what Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) refers to as the
simulacrum. It is a difficult idea to understand, most obviously because we
see an inherent link between copies and the idea of the original. What, then,
does Baudrillard mean by invoking such an idea? He first introduced it in his
book Simulations (1983), in which he argues that we now exist in a
hyperreality – a world of exaggerated images where what is real and what is
not has become blurred. This leads to the ‘loss of the real’.

Baudrillard traces the process by which this loss takes place. In the
beginning, the image represents reality. This, however, gives way to a second
stage in which the image is not a true representation of reality but a distortion
of it. In the third stage, there is no reality on which the image is based, but
this is obscured, so we still think there is some underlying truth. Finally, in
the fourth and last stage it is clear that the image has no reality behind it.

Baudrillard’s most famous example of the third stage is the Disneyland theme
park in the United States. Baudrillard argues that Disneyland pretends that
there is a real place underlying it: an old-time America with a Main Street of
soda fountains and candy stores, where trams and trolley buses deliver
passengers to their destinations. This place is, however, a myth: it never
really existed. There is no reality underlying the image.

If we think of Baudrillard’s theory, then we can see how the idea of

postmodernists celebrating the postmodern condition is somewhat
problematic. Baudrillard here seems to represent an empty reality that is far
from exhilarating. Rather, it is deeply ambivalent. This reflects what we see
in a number of postmodern novels, for example the works of American
novelists Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, in which the postmodern lack
of reality is often rendered as troubling and destabilizing.

Key idea

Simulacrum means a copy without an original.

Spotlight

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

Postmodern politics
As for poststructuralism, one of the critiques of postmodernism is that it
reduces serious issues to a kind of game and underestimates the significance
of material inequalities and political issues. In particular, those examining
issues of race and gender have been critical of postmodernism for a perceived
white, masculine bias. This has led to critics attempting to define different
strands of postmodernism, or adapt it to political concerns. Also like
poststructuralism, however, postmodernism has itself responded to these
concerns.

For example, Baudrillard’s ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’ (1991) can
be seen as an attempt to move away from theoretical abstractions in much
postmodern theory towards a specific concern for how postmodernism might
illuminate political issues. In his provocatively titled text, Baudrillard
suggests that, while the violence of the Gulf War is undeniably true, what the
West received via media reporting was not true but, rather, a specific
manifestation of postmodernism. The war itself was a creation of an
ideologically driven Western media that wished to turn horrific violence into
something signifying in such a way as to generate media attention. This
media attention in turn served the needs of Western governments looking for
public support. In this context, what happened in Iraq cannot be said to bear
resemblance to what audiences received. Moreover, what really happened is
rendered unknowable in this process. In this respect the ‘war’, being the
event that we imagine took place, did not.

Another notable intervention into postmodernism from a politicized

perspective comes in the form of Frederic Jameson’s Marxist critique,
Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). For
Jameson, the artistic expression of postmodern culture is not a continuance of
modernism but an attempt to recreate it by a generation for whom newness is
increasingly impossible and the avant-garde ideas of the past no longer
relevant.

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

Yet this newness, Jameson argues, has been commodified by a culture that
desires to turn everything – even art – towards profit: he tells us that
‘aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity
production generally’. For this reason, postmodern expression is merely the
final phase of capitalism. Jameson’s famous example in this regard is the
Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Reading the hotel’s
architecture, Jameson explores how what would once have been a design
statement is now constructed to create a hyperreal experience that mirrors the
experience of the individual in society more generally. The ‘mutation in
space’ of the hotel creates an entire world within a building. Yet the result of
this is to alienate the individual from the outside world and replicate the
overwhelming global structures of late capitalism. The built space conditions
us to accept the confusion of the outside.

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

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

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

Key ideas

Temporal distortion refers to movements across space and time; the disruption of
straightforward clock or calendar time reflects the confusion of contemporary reality.

Metafiction is fiction in which the author draws attention to the artificiality of the
work and its construction. This often includes self-reflexivity (the novel reflecting on
itself) and self-referentiality (the novel referring to itself). It also includes features
such as unreliable narration, a term first used by Wayne Booth in his Rhetoric of
Fiction (1961) but now widely associated with postmodernism.

Pastiche, related to intertextuality and metafiction, is imitation that draws attention to

the artificiality of the text and its lack of originality. It often also facilitates an ability
to construct a counter-discourse by parodying the original text or period.

Hyperreality is the blurring of reality and simulation, following from theories of the
simulacrum, and draws attention to the artificiality of contemporary culture.

Irony is a playful, comic tone that reflects the surreal status of contemporary culture
and the death of overarching metanarratives and moral frameworks.

Disruptions of realism include genres such as magical realism, which are often seen
as postmodern forms, although postcolonial critics have recently argued that in fact it
may be more accurate to see postmodernism as a derivative of magical realism.
Nevertheless, the desire to expose realism’s artificiality (related to metafictionality),
and to engage with the surreal and/or absurdist nature of contemporary life, is
something often seen in postmodern literature.

Within this framework, it is important to note that postmodern literature does

not have a unified perspective on postmodern culture. While one postmodern
text may celebrate technology, for example, another may lament its incursion
into everyday life. What unites these texts is their sense of what
contemporary culture looks like, rather than a particular attitude towards that
culture.
Historiographic metafiction
One particular kind of metafiction associated with postmodern literature is
historiographic metafiction. This term, first coined by Linda Hutcheon in her
work The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), outlines the way in which
postmodern fiction claims to relate historical events but then combines them
with metafictional strategies that disrupt the idea of the text as a purveyor of
‘truth’. In doing so, the text draws attention to its unreliability as historical
truth, whether this is a historical or a fictional text.

Hutcheon’s example of this form is the novel Midnight’s Children (1981) by

Salman Rushdie, in which history is disrupted by unreliable narration, such as
the Independence of India being reported as taking place one day too soon.
Rushdie’s framing for the story, in which the narrative being told is that of
the narrative being written, is a common one in postmodern literature and it is
used to undermine the sense of the text as an accurate reporting of events.

Spotlight

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

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

The features of postmodern literature are nowhere more amply illustrated than in
Julian Barnes’s 1998 novel England, England. In Barnes’s novel the simulacrum of
Disney World that Baudrillard describes is an obvious intertextual inspiration for the
imagining of a future England in which the real country is recreated as a theme park
on the Isle of Wight. In order to make it attractive, the theme park is based on altered
histories and corruptions of English myths and traditions. Everything is filtered, so as
to not be offensive to the paying customers. As the theme park becomes established,
the ‘real’ England becomes increasingly unpopular. The new England becomes a
recognized state and member of the European Union, while the old England – the
‘real’ England – sinks into decay. What emerges, then, is a dramatic version of
hyperreality in which it is no long clear what is ‘real’. In fact, the ‘real’ England is not
so much real as the ‘first’.

In addition to this focus on the hyperreal and the simulacrum, Barnes’s novel features
many of the other qualities of postmodern writing. Alongside its comment on the
nature of reality, the novel functions as a satire of the tourist industry and the dilution
of history in the service of commercial success. In this respect, it reflects the ironic,
dark humour of the postmodern novel and its quality of parody and pastiche. It is
unclear when the novel is set: the time frame appears contemporary but the events are
such that we cannot place them in the present. Moreover, the novel’s conclusion sees
the real England returned to a feudal, pre-modern society. Finally, the novel disrupts
ideas of realism: it is set in the ‘real’ world but the surreal nature of the plot exceeds
realist boundaries.

One might speculate from this about the novel’s attitude to postmodern culture. On
the one hand, the fate of the island seems to critique the postmodern arrogance that
one might recreate an entire nation. At the same time, however, the novel seems to
suggest that even what is real is a fiction. This is present from the novel’s very
beginning, where the protagonist, Martha Cochrane, completes a jigsaw with her
father showing the counties of England – a metaphor for the ways in which all places
and our attachments to them are constructed, piece by piece, through memory and our
associations with others. In this sense, the novel reflects the lack of nostalgia of a
postmodern text against the kind of yearning for an ideal past that we might expect in
a modernist fiction.

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

attention to the political possibilities of postmodern literature, in the same
way that postmodern theory has responded to critiques of its early white male
bias. However, the novel seems happy at the same time to sit in a space of
comic or farcical fiction, where political concerns are secondary. It is this
tension that can be seen to sometimes make it unclear to what extent
postmodern is suited to very serious questions of racial and sexual violence.
More recently, collections such as Len Platt and Sara Upstone’s Postmodern
Literature and Race (2015) and Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s Postmodern
Utopias and Feminist Fictions (2013) illustrate the increasing sense of
postmodernism as a strategy that is available for a political purpose.

Such texts do not adopt postmodernism uncritically – indeed, they are keen to
point out the ways in which postmodernism might need to be revised in order
to open itself to questions of politics and identity. In such a way, they
respond to earlier texts such as Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay ‘Is the Post-
in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’ (1991) and Theo D’Haen and
Hans Bertens’s collection of essays Liminal Postmodernisms: The
Postmodern, the (Post-)Colonial, and the (Post-)Feminist (1994). The notion
of ‘postmodernisms’ in the plural represents the idea that, while some
postmodernisms may be politically conservative, others may in fact be
politically radical. Postmodernism has no definite politics of its own, but it is
nevertheless open to being employed for a radical political purpose.

Post-postmodernism?
One of the questions surrounding postmodernism is whether we are still in it.
In 2016 Len Platt and Brian McHale published The Cambridge History of
Postmodern Literature. This major landmark study presents postmodernism
as something we are capable of historicizing: that is, it is a matter for the past.
Likewise, David James and Urmila Seshagiri (2014) suggest that we might
now think of ourselves as in a phase called metamodernism: a post-
postmodernism that has emerged from postmodernism.

For other scholars, however, it is not that postmodernism is a thing of the

past, but rather that it has become so incorporated into our ways of thinking
that it has ceased to require a special terminology. The pervasiveness of
reality television, for example, marks a world in which we have become
comfortable with the blurring of fact and fiction. Social media, blogging and
Internet publishing have opened up forums of public opinion, making them
more democratic but also making us more used to the questioning of official
discourses such as religion, history and government, so that the idea of
questioning metanarratives is woven into our daily experiences.

As literature scholars, we need to distinguish between postmodern culture

and postmodern literature. However, at the same time we might think that
what was in the 1970s defined as ‘postmodern writing’ is now merely
‘writing’. The mainstream success of ‘experimental’ fiction has relocated it
from being something only read in largely intellectual and academic contexts
to being widely appreciated. Equally, the strategies of postmodern writing
have filtered into more mainstream fiction. Perhaps postmodernism is now
just what there is…

Fact check

1 Who had the idea of the simulacrum?

a Jean Baudrillard
b Michel Foucault
c Roland Barthes
d Jean-François Lyotard
2 Who wrote The Postmodern Condition?
a Jean Baudrillard
b Michel Foucault
c Roland Barthes
d Jean-François Lyotard
3 What real place is used as an example of third-order simulation?
a Disneyland
b Buckingham Palace
c New York
d Los Angeles
 4 What hotel does Jameson use to discuss postmodernism?
a The Hilton
b The Bonaventure
c The Metropole
d The Mayfair
5 How many orders of simulation are there?
a One
b Two
c Three
d Four
6 Which novel by Don DeLillo is a postmodern representation of the JFK
assassination?
a Underworld
b Cosmopolis
c Libra
d Falling Man
7 What is the postmodern name for the frameworks we use to explain the world?
a Metanarratives
b Postnarratives
c Ideologies
d Discourses
8 Who wrote England, England?
a Julian Barnes
b John Barnes
c Julian Smith
d Zadie Smith
9 What is another word for post-postmodernism?
a Metamodernism
b Modernism
c Postmodernism
d Counter-modernism
10 What is the name for literature that refers to the creation of literature?
a Metafiction
 b Referential fiction
c Anti-fiction
d Modernism

Dig deeper

Brooker, Peter, ed. and intr. (1992), Modernism/Postmodernism. Harlow: Longman.

Connor, Steven (1997), Postmodernism Culture, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harvey, David (1990), The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Hutcheon, Linda (1989), The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
 11
Feminist theory

In the wake of reader response theory came a number of

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

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

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

Second-wave feminism
Lessing’s story is in part a critique of the idea that making women conscious
of their own oppression is enough to combat it. Her central protagonist is
well aware of feminist debates, considers herself to have shaped a marriage
informed by these, and yet she ultimately finds herself imprisoned
nevertheless. Lessing wrote ‘To Room Nineteen’ in the wake of the second
wave of the feminist movement which concerned itself precisely with these
kinds of ‘consciousness raising’ activities designed to empower women to act
against oppression in their marriages, workplaces and social lives. The
beginning point for this second wave is debated, with some critics citing the
1949 publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and others dating
the shift to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

Given de Beauvoir’s interest in woman’s self-definition, it is more useful

perhaps to see her work as tentatively marking the beginnings of this second
phase, which challenged the limited ways in which women had been and
were being thought about. In The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir argues that
woman is not a biological fact but a concept created by long-entrenched
social values and expectations. This introduces the idea of socialization: that
gender identity is not inherent but something developed through the
individual’s introduction into a set of rules and acceptable behaviours to
which society shapes them to conform. Female identity, then, is not natural
but constructed.

‘One is not born a woman; rather one becomes a woman.’

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

De Beauvoir’s concern here, to distinguish the difference between biological

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

Spotlight

De Beauvoir was a dynamic feminist activist: she founded a feminist newspaper in

France, Nouvelle féminisme, and a feminist journal, Nouvelles questions féministes.

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

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

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

Spotlight

Friedan was one of 120 international signatories to the second humanist manifesto
published in The Humanist magazine in 1973, which included the line ‘No deity will
save us; we must save ourselves.’
The rise of feminist literary theory
Feminist literary theory emerged during the second wave of feminism.
Following from the aims of the second movement to raise women’s
consciousness and challenge stereotypes, feminist critics consider how
literary texts might reinforce patriarchal norms in society, and also how they
might question these. They see literature as an agent for change: not merely
reflecting the roles of women but also serving as a powerful tool for
socializing women into particular identities, and as a potentially radical space
where new identities are encouraged. Feminist literary theory also draws
attention to the gender bias in the creation of literature itself – the ways in
which female voices are less prominent in the literary world, or
stereotypically associated with certain kinds of writing such as romance or
children’s fiction.

Belief in the ability of literature to serve as a feminist manifesto is rooted in

early examples that have become central to the work of feminist literary
critics. In the late 1960s and 1970s, theorists such as Elaine Showalter (1941–
) and Kate Millett (1934– ) would take up these influences and use them to
argue for an overlooked female canon. Showalter defined the study of these
texts as ‘gynocriticism’, meaning simply the study of literature authored by
women.

Key idea

Gynocriticism is the study of female-authored literature.

Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) is a scathing critique of the representation of

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

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

Spotlight

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

‘What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental

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

Gubar and Gilbert’s approach is echoed in a number of other works from the
1980s, such as Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics (1985). Feminism’s
concern for the representation of women has also influenced studies in the
visual and popular arts, most notably film theory. For example, in her
landmark essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), Laura
Mulvey employs Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that
Hollywood cinema imagines a masculine viewer, placing the female
character in a position of being watched and objectified. This process she
calls the ‘male gaze’. By positioning the viewer as male (regardless of
gender), film reproduces patriarchy. It reaffirms men as voyeurs and
consumers of pleasure, and women as creators of that pleasure in the service
of male needs. As a challenge to this, Mulvey argues for a feminist, avant-
garde film-making practice that would disrupt Hollywood conventions.

Key idea

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

Case study: Blue Velvet

One self-conscious engagement with the idea of the male gaze is David Lynch’s 1986
film Blue Velvet. The film tells the story of a young man, Jeffrey (played by Kyle
MacLachlan), who, while out walking one day, finds a severed ear and becomes
drawn into the mysterious life of a woman named Dorothy (played by Isabella
Rossellini). Dorothy is being blackmailed by a violent sociopath called Frank (played
by Denis Hopper). Frank has abducted Dorothy’s husband and son, and is forcing her
to perform sexual favours in payment for their return.

In one defining scene from the film, Frank visits Dorothy, who hides Jeffrey in a
closet. During this scene the camera switches from a close-up of Frank and Dorothy’s
interactions to Jeffrey’s position in the closet. As Frank forces Dorothy to engage in
sexual acts and is brutally violent towards her, we see the action from Jeffrey’s
perspective. By including the viewer with the male gaze within the film itself, Lynch
draws the audience’s attention to their own voyeurism – they are no different from the
man watching in the closet. Any erotic pleasure derived from the highly sexualized
but also violent scene presented to us is therefore immediately associated with a kind
of distasteful, secret observation. This is reinforced by the fact that Jeffrey finds the
experience repugnant, and when Frank leaves and Dorothy attempts to sexually
engage Jeffrey, asking him to hit her, he refuses (although he later returns to the
apartment and does have sex with her). By making us feel like Jeffrey in the closet,
Lynch exposes how our erotic experiences are rooted in the codes perpetuated by the
male gaze.

In a later essay entitiled ‘Cult Etherworlds and the Unconscious: Oedipus and Blue
Velvet’ (1996), Laura Mulvey has argued that the relationships presented by Lynch in
the film are symbolic of the domestic abuse within families. Yet in his film The
Pervert’s Guide to Cinema – Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Film (2006), the
controversial philosopher Slavoj Žižek has suggested that Frank also represents
Dorothy’s fantasy, and in particular her desire to be shaken out of her passivity. If this
is the case, then we can read this as a damning example of how the male gaze is
internalized, as Dorothy’s own fantasy is to become the subject of Frank’s whims.

French feminist theory

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

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

Key idea

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

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

‘Better than a mother, then, is the working out of the idea of a mother, of the
maternal ideal. Better to transform the real “natural” mother into an ideal of
the maternal function which no one can ever take away from you.’
 Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’ (1991)

The risk in écriture feminine is that, despite Cixous’s open, heterogeneous

conceptualizing, it becomes distilled in such a way that it upholds binary
distinctions between male and female authors, and thus between male and
female identities more generally. Equally, it can be seen to contribute to other
stereotypes, such as the idea that certain subject matter is more naturally
‘female’ (for example, it has long been a stereotype of female poets that their
work is focused on the personal and approaches the political largely through
this).

There is a tension in the celebration of women’s writing at the same time that
the idea of what it is to be a woman is being challenged. This can be seen to
have split the feminist movement, between those arguing for an essential
mode of female expression that had been denied and those arguing that
women should be seen differently from men.

Feminisms
One way to address this problem, perhaps, is to see that there is something
that is female expression, and unavoidably so, but that this is not biologically
granted but socially determined. Another way to consider it is to think that
such ‘femaleness’ is not the preserve of women but, rather, something that
has been associated predominantly with women and given less status as such.
This latter position has been very influential on the queer theory we examine
in the following chapter.

The fact that feminism is not a single ideology but represents a number of
subject positions, some of which are in conflict with others, means that the
use of feminism in relation to literature can vary considerably. For example,
in the twenty-first century feminism has been dominated by an ideological
split – between those who call themselves liberal feminists and those who
define themselves as radical feminists. Radical feminists locate the source of
prejudice against women in patriarchal gender relations. They are principally
concerned therefore with how being a woman results in one being treated
differently. Although they see gender as fluid, they see sex as a biological
reality, and argue that it is for this biological reality that women are
oppressed. Their main aim is to overthrow patriarchy through direct action,
but also to question the stereotypical associations made about women’s
bodies, social roles and physical abilities. In contrast, liberal feminists are
focused on women’s rights of individual expression, and within that the legal
and social barriers to this.

Case study: the Suzanne Moore controversy

Many radical feminists support transgender rights. A small number however, have
argued that transgender issues are separate from feminism. They suggest that sex is
biological, and it is therefore impossible for someone who has not grown up as a
woman to experience the same oppression as someone who has. In addition, because
they refuse to recognize male-to-female transgender individuals as women, these
feminists argue that the transgender movement is a continuance of men speaking for
women. This, plus the suggestion that the stereotypical views upheld by many
transgender women are damaging to feminism, means that radical feminists have been
criticized for excluding transgender women. Liberal feminists supporting the
transgender position have defined these radical feminists through the acronym TERF,
which stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist.

The divisions between liberal and radical feminists on this issue have been fuelled by
social media, where transgender feminists have a strong presence. This was strongly
illustrated in January 2013, when the feminist journalist Suzanne Moore unwittingly
found herself at the centre of the debates. On 8 January, Moore published a piece in
the New Statesman magazine examining the relationship between gender and the
economic downturn in Britain, arguing that it was women who were facing the hardest
fallout from events. One line in the article, that women were ‘angry with ourselves for
not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that
of a Brazilian transsexual’ led to a massive response on Twitter accusing Moore of
transphobia. Moore’s comments in response were seen by many to be flippant and
insensitive, and the media storm that grew led to equally distasteful threats against
Moore that led her to close her Twitter account.

These debates draw attention to the complexities of defining feminism in the twenty-
first century. For literary critics, it means we must be certain about precisely what
feminism we think works might usefully engage with or represent.
Although often in disagreement with the radical feminism position on
transgender, this concern for the body is also manifested in the celebration of
the female body evidenced in much materialist feminism, which, as I discuss
in Chapter 15, has been a dominant influence on the new materialist
movement. While materialist feminism upholds the second-wave idea that
biological sex must not be confused with socially constructed gender, it
disputes the idea held by both radical and Anglo-American second-wave
feminists that this means that women need to be ‘freed’ from their body.
Instead, influenced by the kind of bodily theory of Irigaray, it announces the
need to reclaim the physical form from patriarchy.

Third-wave feminism and beyond

The move to feminisms is associated with where feminism is today – in a
third wave that began in the 1990s and continues to the present. This latest
feminist movement has opened itself to the need to acknowledge the varying
ways in which gender discrimination relates to other forms of social
oppression, and this has had an impact on the use of feminism in literary
criticism. As Mary Eagleton notes in the introduction to her excellent critical
reader Feminist Literary Criticism (1991), feminism constitutes a broad range
of diverse identifications, and debates with other theoretical interests.

Black feminists and Marxist feminists have foregrounded the ways in which,
respectively, race and class complicate the operation of patriarchy. The
theory that examines such significances is called intersectionality. It argues
that we cannot think about identity politics by just examining one particular
aspect of how a person is identified; we need to consider how each part of
their identity is important. Influential works in these terms are Michele
Barrett’s Women’s Oppression Today (1988), Catherine Belsey’s John
Milton: Language, Gender, Power (1988), and bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman:
Black Women and Feminism (1981). These works prompt us as literary critics
not to think exclusively about the gender politics of a text, but also about how
the representation of gender is affected by other elements of identity such as
class, sexuality, race and disability.
 Key idea

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

Third-wave feminism faces a challenge from what has become referred to as

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

Fact check

1 Which political group is associated with the first wave of feminism?

a The suffragettes
b The Luddites
c The Marxists
d The postmodernists
2 What does écriture feminine mean?
a Female thought
b Female writing
c Female thinking
d Female speech
3 Who wrote The Feminine Mystique?
a Betty Friedan
 b Luce Irigaray
c Kate Millett
d Simone de Beauvoir
4 What field is Laura Mulvey associated with?
a Literature
b Film
c Theatre
d Music
5 Who wrote Sexual Politics
a Betty Friedan
b Luce Irigaray
c Kate Millett
d Simone de Beauvoir
6 What is the term for the male inheritance of power?
a Gynopower
b Patriarchy
c Sexism
d Racism
7 What does the acronym TERF stand for?
a Trans exclusionary radical feminist
b Trans exclusionary real feminist
c Trans exclusive radical feminist
d Trans exclusionary radical femininity
8 Who wrote ‘To Room Nineteen’?
a Virginia Woolf
b Kate Chopin
c Louisa May Alcott
d Doris Lessing
9 Who wrote ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’?
a Betty Friedan
b Luce Irigaray
c Kate Millettt
d Simone de Beauvoir
10 What wave of feminism do we associate with Virginia Woolf?
a First
b Second
c Third
d Fourth

Dig deeper

Felman, Shoshana (1993), What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual
Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gilmore, Leigh (1994), Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-
Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Humm, Maggie, ed. (1995), Practising Feminist Criticism: An Introduction. London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf
Madsen, Deborah (2000), Feminist Theory and Literary Practice. London: Pluto
Press.
Miller, Nancy K (1988), Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Morris, Pam (1993), Literature and Feminism: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
 12
Queer theory

Two abstract and specific ideas – the variety in modes of

personal expression of identity, and the desire to love
differently – are the central themes of what is referred to as
queer theory. Queer theory, on the one hand, directs its
attention specifically towards questioning heteronormativity
and exploring other sexual identities. Yet, equally, it is
concerned with a broader interest in how identities are socially
sanctioned, how they are performed, and how alternative
performances come to exist and with what political resonances.
Dancing to your own tune
In 2006 Disney released an animated movie entitled Happy Feet. The story of
a young penguin called Mumble, Happy Feet begins with the young Mumble
in class with all the other penguins. This is not any class, however, but rather
a music class in which each penguin is encouraged to perform what will be
the defining creative expression of their penguin lives – their heart song.
Each penguin, we quickly learn, has their own unique heart song.

But the great opening drama of the movie is this: Mumble doesn’t have a
heart song. Much to his teacher’s and his classmates’ horror, when Mumble
opens his mouth to sing all that comes out is a hideous squawking sound. The
consequences of this are immense – to be a penguin without a heart song,
Mumble is told, ‘is to be hardly a penguin at all’. Not only this, but it is
through their heart songs that penguins find their lifelong mate. Without a
heart song, Mumble will be alone for ever.

The twist in this tale is Mumble’s restless, tapping feet. Although Mumble
indeed does not have a heart song, he does have another means of creative
expression: he loves to dance. Leaving the penguin colony in shame, the rest
of the movie is devoted to Mumble’s daring adventures and his heroism. By
the end of the movie, not only has he been accepted but he has also found
love.

On its release, much attention was paid to Happy Feet’s strident

environmentalism. But Mumble’s love of dance and his rejection of the heart
song also speak to a political statement. Mumble, in essence, refuses socially
sanctioned expressions of identity in favour of his own, unique, mode of
expression when all those around him are caught in acceptable displays of
selfhood. Moreover, Mumble’s mode of expression involves him not merely
in a desire to express selfhood differently but also to love differently.

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

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

Key idea

Queer is the political reclamation of what was once a term of abuse, to meaning anti-
establishment and transgressive sexualities.

Those identifying themselves as queer scholars build on an earlier tradition of

gay criticism, which was more specifically directed towards issues of gay
identity. Indeed, there is a rich vein of gay literature that explores these
themes: the writings of Alan Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit (1985), E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1971), Jean Genet’s Our
Lady of the Flowers (1943) and Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’
(1997) being notable examples.

Spotlight

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

Queer theory in particular builds on lesbian critic Adrienne Rich’s concept of

compulsory heterosexuality and the lesbian continuum (1980), Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick’s notion of the homosocial (1985) and Jeffrey Weeks’s
investigations of gay culture (1985). It is also deeply indebted to
poststructuralist theory, again both in abstract and specific terms. In abstract
terms, it borrows from poststructuralism the suggestion that the relationship
between signifier and signified is not only arbitrary (as per structuralism) but
also historically and politically constituted. In terms of the specifics, it is
deeply influenced by Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978), in
which Foucault applies this understanding to questions of sexual identity.

Foucault challenges the ‘repressive hypothesis’ that says there was no interest
in sexuality in Europe until the mid-twentieth century, arguing that, by the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a strong interest not only in
sexual behaviour but sexual transgression. Foucault examines how the
homosexual did not become an identity until the nineteenth-century
preoccupation with sex. The enshrining of sexuality as an identity rather than
a behaviour – one is homosexual, rather than does homosexuality – creates
sexuality as an absolute that comes to define our sense of self, but also how
we are treated by others. It was at the same time as these identities became
fixed that certain behaviours were defined as socially unacceptable, and as
illegal, aligning homosexuality with other categories such as the mentally ill
and the criminal. This interest in sexuality is another facet of power – an
extension of the control by the state, which Foucault first explores in
Discipline and Punish (1975). It is the broadening out of these concerns to
wider questions pertaining to sexuality and the performance of identity that
distinguishes queer theory from these earlier thinkers, although they have
served as key influences on the later work.

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

Key idea

Compulsory heterosexuality refers to society’s construction of relationships between

men and women as natural and alternative sexual relationships as unnatural, so that
heterosexuality is enforced.

Like many radical feminists, Rich here presents lesbianism as a political

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

‘But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she
 ever sleeps with women.’
Audre Lorde, interview (1980)

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

‘I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range – through each

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

Through these experiences, a woman is able to appreciate her gender identity

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

Key idea

Lesbian continuum describes the range of intimate relationships between women,

with or without sexual behaviour.
In her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(1985), Eve Sedgwick coins the term ‘homosocial’ to describe the male
equivalent of the lesbian continuum. Rather than sexual relations among men,
homosociality suggests strong non-sexual attraction. For Sedgwick, this may
at times be a displacement of sexual attraction. For example, she discusses
the love triangle as an event that might be read as a displacement of
homosexual desire – two men competing for a woman’s attentions but
subconsciously being driven by the desire to maintain an erotic connection to
each other. Sedgwick’s example of this connection is Shakespeare’s sonnets,
many of which are written to a male muse. Although there is no suggestion
within them of sexual activity, there is a depth of feeling with romantic
qualities – a level of intimacy that one associates more with sexual love. In
her later book Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick builds on this
analysis to critique the entire hetero/homosexual binary, as a structure kept in
place to serve those uncomfortable with the idea of more fluid sexual
identities and to drive both compulsory heterosexuality and the perpetuation
of fears surrounding same-sex desire, particularly in the wake of the AIDS
crisis of the early 1980s.

Key idea

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

One might consider that every novel that features marriage is a comment on
compulsory heterosexuality, and that every novel featuring male or female
friendship relates to the homosocial or the lesbian continuum. There are,
however, notable examples of fictions that explicitly connect with these
themes. For example, in nineteenth-century literature Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Herman
Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) explore male worlds in which male affection is
explicitly presented and male desire implicitly suggested. In the modernist
period, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) can be read as the tragedy of
a woman forced by compulsory heterosexuality to pass out of the intimate
relationship with a woman that characterizes her youth, and into a patriarchal
marriage. More recently, Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) explores the
strong, intimate connections between women that exist outside the effects of
patriarchy through the story of a group of young damaged women who form
a convent on the outskirts of a patriarchal African-American community.

Gender performativity
One particularly central tenet of queer studies is the relationship between
sexuality and ideas of gender. In fact, the best-known queer theorist, the
American academic Judith Butler, is principally concerned not with sexuality
(although her work does discuss this) but, rather, with questions of gender.
For this reason, you may also see this aspect of queer theory referred to
separately as gender theory, which relates to this specific element in queer
theory’s wider range of concerns.

The gender theory of Butler and those influenced by her is what we call anti-
essentialist; that is, it questions the idea that our gender identities are essential
and biologically determined. Here it is worth being clear on the traditional
distinction made between sex and gender.

Key ideas

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

Butler draws attention to society’s socialization, which often uses these terms
interchangeably. She argues that we have been taught to see a ‘natural’
connection between gender and sex, so that someone who is biologically
female will have a female gender, and someone who is biologically male will
have a male gender, but that in fact this association is merely a matter of how
we are taught to think and feel. There is no inherent reason why gender
expression should be limited to particular biological sexes. Rather, gender is
a series of impersonations. Influenced by postmodern theory, these
impersonations exist without an original source: they are an example of
Baudrillard’s simulacrum, where the copy exists without an original.

Butler first explores these ideas in her book Gender Trouble (1990) and later
in Bodies that Matter (1993). In these works, she argues for gender as
performativity. This idea should not be confused with the idea that gender is
merely a performance. What Butler means by performativity is that gender is
something that exists in the stylized repetition of acts – clothes, speech and
body language – which, over a period of time, come to define a particular
gender. One cannot freely choose a performance: this is something that
society determines through the ways in which it tells us what constitutes male
and female behaviour. Although destabilizing identities do exist – most
notably actions such as drag, which draw attention to gender’s performative
qualities – these are exceptions that are largely repressed because of society’s
deeply ingrained attitudes towards gender.

What does it mean, for example, to be female and masculine? This is a

question asked by Jack Halberstam in his book Female Masculinity (1998).
Halberstam draws attention to the acceptance of masculine femaleness in
childhood, when the tomboy is socially accepted, and to the increasing
prohibition of these ‘masculine’ behaviours in adolescence and adulthood.
Examining Hollywood cinema, Halberstam looks at a number of examples of
women who defy gender stereotypes, supporting the more widespread
acceptance of fluid gender identities.

Spotlight

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

Gender performativity is the idea that gender is something individuals perform

through a series of stylized acts and behaviours. Because these performances are
socially conditioned they are accepted as normal, apart from where they fall outside
expected gender norms.

THE PERFORMANCE OF BIOLOGY

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

Spotlight

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

‘If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called
“sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always
already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and
gender turns out to be no distinction at all.’
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)
Undoing gender
In the wake of recent publicity surrounding transgender identities, Butler’s
theory may seem unremarkable. When she began writing in the 1990s,
however, such theory was challenging. In her book Undoing Gender (2004),
Butler devotes a chapter to the story of David Reimer, a young boy who after
an accident during a circumcision procedure when he was seven months old
was gender reassigned from male to female and raised as a girl. This took
place under the supervision of a psychologist, John Money, who believed in
the theory of gender neutrality – the idea that gender is entirely socialized,
and therefore can be changed if enacted at a very young age. Because David
had an identical twin brother, he made an excellent research case. Yet
Money’s treatment involved activities that today would be defined as sexual
abuse, involving both boys. When David refused to identify as female despite
hormone treatments, his parents revealed his birth identity to him and he
underwent a series of procedures to reassert his male gender. At the age of
38, David committed suicide.

Butler uses this tragic case to explore the questions of gender identity, and in
particular to what extent gender can be seen as a performance, revisiting the
ideas she first explored in her book Gender Trouble. Because David’s brother
also committed suicide two years before him, and suffered from
schizophrenia, Butler exposes the difficulty of identifying whether David’s
suicide was a result of genetics, his gender identity or the sexual abuse he and
his brother experienced while receiving psychological treatment. Rather than
attempting to answer this question, Butler instead asks the reader to examine
how David’s voice is lost in the accounts of his experience, and how one
might ethically represent his story without reducing it to a scientific study or
intellectual argument. The humanity of Butler’s account represents a central
tenet of contemporary queer theory: to oppose the desire to categorize
individuals or simplify how gender identity is formed, in favour of
acknowledging the complex and often contradictory ways in which gender is
expressed.

Although Butler’s gender theory is often used without discussion of

sexuality, her relationship to earlier gay and lesbian critics lies in the fact that
she sees the association between biological sex and gender as one that society
reinforces in the service of compulsory heterosexuality. Anxiety regarding
gender, she argues, is in fact anxiety regarding sexuality: we need clear
identities as male and female to ensure a binary system of sexuality that
exists only if those categories are maintained. Thus, gender binaries are
socially maintained in order to maintain the idea of two sexes, in order to
continue the promotion of heterosexuality as normal and gay identity as
deviant. This in itself is in the service of patriarchal norms.

That is not to say, however, that these are easy parallels between political
LGBTQ activities and queer theory. In this respect, the influence of
poststructuralism has particular significance. Butler’s suggestion that gender
identities are performed, for example, refutes the idea that one can ‘be’ a
particular gender. In this respect, transgenderism becomes a need to be
respected, but the idea that gender and biology must be in alignment is
rendered politically conservative. This is problematic where transgenderism
implies surgical procedures to create this alignment. Such movement in the
terms of Butler’s theory can be read as a capitulation to socialized norms.
And while Butler strongly affirms the right of the individual to make these
associations, nevertheless it is hard, within the context of her theory, to see
such actions as radical in the way that expressions refuting this association
might be.

It is for this reason that Butler’s early work focuses in particular on concepts
of drag, while her discussion of David is directed towards a critique of the
medical profession that treated him in an attempt to reproduce precisely such
an alignment, even where intersexual biology made it impossible. Equally,
the fluidity of gender in these terms makes it difficult to posit an essentialist
politics: if everything is performance, even forced performance, then where
does that leave politics based on collective identities? Facing the same
tensions as those in race studies in this regard, queer theorists have had to
consider how their own poststructuralist-influenced politics might be
integrated into the very real associations with gender as ‘real’ that many
individuals desire (even if this desire can itself be seen to be a product of
socialization).
Following from Butler’s work come theories on the queering of other
identities, particularly of race and class. That these identities are equally
socialized rather than biologically inherent sees them function similarly to
gender in the sense that it is possible to look for how such identity
performances are reinforced, and where fissures are created that allow for the
exceptional acts of radical interruption when alternative identities are forged.
For example, more recently, there have been theories of race queerness that
examine the way in which race, like gender, is not a biological absolute but a
social construction used to uphold white privilege.

Queering literature
In literary terms, queer theory has concerned itself with both the abstract and
the specific. In terms of the specific, it draws attention to the inherent
queerness of literature, through the work of such writers as Oscar Wilde,
Alan Hollinghurst, Annie Proulx, E. M. Forster, Armistead Maupin, Virginia
Woolf, Alice Waker, Tony Kushner, Hanif Kureishi, Jeanette Winterson, Joe
Orton and Ali Smith. All these writers have explicitly addressed questions of
heteronormativity and homosexual desire in their works. At the same time,
critics have also addressed the specific concern of homosexual desire by
considering the queer currents across literature beyond this explicit
association: for example, Sedgwick’s reading (1985) of Henry James’s
novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903) or Elaine Showalter’s reading (1991)
of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). You might like to consider
how different these readings are from the formalist readings of the same
texts.

In the twenty-first century, it has been important for queer theory to move
beyond concerns for homosexual identities to questions of bisexuality,
pansexuality, asexuality and other alternative expressions. In particular, the
idea of queer itself implies not discrete gender identities but, rather, the
ability to see beyond gender – young people expressing queer identities make
statements such as ‘I just don’t see gender’. The idea of living outside gender
is explored in a number of novels, including Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-
winning The Bone People (1983) or Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (1986), an erotic
novel in which all the characters are genderless.
 Case study: Trumpet

In her novel Trumpet (1998), Jackie Kay tells the story of Joss Moody, a fictional
character based on the real-life story of Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who lived his
life as a man but on his death was revealed to be biologically female. Kay transfers
this story of an American musician to Scotland and London, and makes Tipton, who
was a drummer, into a trumpet player. In Kay’s narrative, we read Joss’s story largely
through the voices of those who knew him – his wife Millie and his adopted son
Coleman. While Coleman struggles to come to terms with the revelation about his
father’s biology, Millie upholds the idea of Joss as a man – as the perfect husband and
father. Her rather unconvincing unreliable narration jars against the details she
inadvertently reveals – such as her brushing of Joss’s hair – which suggest that there
is fluidity in Joss’s identity that Millie chooses to deny.

It is in this context that the central chapter of the novel, entitled ‘Music’, offers a
counter-discourse to the rest of the narrative. Apart from the end of the novel, it is the
only section told from Joss’s point of view. Strikingly, it does not present a sense that
Joss wishes to inhabit a traditionally male identity and that his trumpet playing
(complete with phallic associations) represents this, as one might expect. Instead,
Joss’s relationship to music is offered not as one that connects him to masculinity but
as something that allows him to exist in a space of artistic expression that transcends
gender.

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

Fact check

1 What is another term for queer theory?

a Gender theory
b Feminism
c Postcolonialism
d Gay theory
2 When was Maurice published?
a 1914
b 1941
c 1971
d 1917
3 Which critic introduced the idea of compulsory heterosexuality?
a Simone de Beauvoir
b Adrienne Rich
c Alan Hollinghurst
d Kate Millett
4 Who coined the term ‘homosociality’?
a Eve Sedgwick
b Adrienne Rich
c Suzanne Moore
d Kate Millett
5 What is the name of Judith Butler’s first book?
a Undoing Gender
b Bodies that Matter
c The Closet
d Gender Trouble
6 What is the name of the boy whose story of gender reassignment is told in
Undoing Gender?
a David Reimer
 b David Rime
c John Reimer
d Daniel Reimer
7 Trumpet is based on the real-life story of which musician?
a Daniel Tong
b Simon Crawford-Phillips
c William Coleman
d Billy Tipton
8 Who wrote Trans: A Memoir?
a Juliet Robbins
b Juliet Smith
c Juliet Jacques
d Juliet Jones
9 Which nineteenth-century novella does Elaine Showalter make a queer reading of?
a Dracula
b Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
c Heart of Darkness
d The Sign of Four
10 What is Rich’s term for intimate relationships between women?
a Compulsory heterosexuality
b The lesbian continuum
c Gender performance
d Homosociality

Dig deeper

Caroll, Rachel (2012), Rereading Heterosexuality Feminism, Queer Theory and

Contemporary Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Elliot, Patricia (2010), Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Morland, Iain and Wilcox, Annabelle (2005), Queer Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Sullivan, Nikki (2003), A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
 13
Postcolonial criticism

Postcolonial theory is concerned with the ways in which texts –

not just fictional texts but texts of all kinds – shape our
understanding of the colonized world, both historically and in
the present. This includes physical settlement of other
territories (colonialism), the wider cultural control of the
developing world by European powers (imperialism), and the
reworking of these methods of control in the contemporary
world (neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism).
The Empire writes back

Key ideas

Colonialism is the physical settlement of one country by another.

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

Spotlight

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

Although postcolonial criticism has now expanded (there is now, for

example, a developed school of postcolonial geographical criticism), its roots
in written text make it one of the most explicitly literary theories we can
examine. This emphasis comes largely from the fact that what might be seen
as the founding text of postcolonial criticism, the Palestinian critic Edward
Said’s Orientalism (1978), has a very literary focus. Although postcolonial
theory has been strongly influenced by earlier critics, most notably the
French Algerian writer Frantz Fanon and his seminal text Black Skin, White
Masks (1967), Said’s work brought the theorizing of postcolonial relations
into mainstream criticism. Heavily influenced by the work of Foucault and
his idea of discourse, Said argues that the West (the Occident) imagined the
Orient in a way that positioned it permanently as an inferior ‘other’.

‘The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced

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

Although Said is discussing the Middle East, his work has been used to
construct a more general theory of relations between the colonizer and
colonized, and has been applied to many different historical and geographical
contexts. In his later work Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said addresses
specifically the reading of colonial texts. He argues that the postcolonial critic
must read against the grain of texts, for their absences – for what is not said.
Here the influence of poststructuralist deconstruction can be clearly
identified.

For this practice, Said evokes a musical term: he describes this as a

contrapuntal reading. His example is the absence of slavery in Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park (1814), which, he argues, haunts the novel and its Antiguan
context. We could turn to several other examples, most notably Chinua
Achebe’s criticism of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), in which
he argues for the latent racism of Conrad’s supposedly anti-colonial novel,
reading for the silenced voices of the colonized and the novel’s female
figures. Achebe’s reading is a powerful example of how reading against the
currently held interpretation, and for what is not said, can dramatically alter
how a text is perceived. This way of reading has parallels in African-
American criticism with Toni Morrison’s argument in Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), in which she suggests that
within the canonical works of American literature there exists an ever-present
black cultural identity, which must be acknowledged if the racial history of
America is to be properly understood.

Key idea

Contrapuntal reading is similar to poststructuralist ideas of trace and différence –

the idea of reading a text for the voices silenced by the narrative.

Spotlight

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

Case study: Strange Music

A fascinating contemporary novel that explores contrapuntal reading is Laura Fish’s

Strange Music (2008). In this case, the contrapuntal reading is not of a novel but of
literary history. The story is told by three women: Kaydia, a Creole maidservant on an
estate in Jamaica; Sheba, an indentured labourer; and the English poet Elizabeth
Barrett (who later became Elizabeth Barrett Browning on her marriage to the poet
Robert Browning). Telling the story of Elizabeth’s abolitionist beliefs and her
interaction with the women working on her father’s plantation, the novel hints at the
possibility that Elizabeth herself has part-African ancestry.

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

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

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

Key idea

Counter-discourse is the process of ‘writing back’ to classic colonial texts with

postcolonial rewritings.

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

‘CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?’

The competing influences of postcolonial theory are most easily seen in the
work of one of its most prominent critics, the Indian academic Gayatri
Spivak. Spivak first made her name as the translator of Jacques Derrida’s
early poststructuralist work Of Grammatology (1967). In this respect, her
work is very influenced by poststructuralist ideas. Spivak, however, is also
affiliated with a group of Indian scholars called the Subaltern Studies group.
This group, which aims to recuperate the lost and silenced voices of ordinary
people in the developing world, has its basis in Marxist thinking.

In a ground-breaking essay first published in 1988 entitled ‘Can the Subaltern

Speak?’ Spivak attempts to bring together these Marxist and poststructuralist
influences. The focus of the essay is ‘the subaltern’, defined as that subject
entirely without a voice. The embodiment of this subject for Spivak is the
lower-class, colonized woman.

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

Key idea

The subaltern represents the completely marginalized subject, entirely without a

voice.

Spivak’s essay criticizes poststructuralist philosophy for claiming that it can

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

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

Spotlight

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

Case study: Foe

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

At the same time, bringing Friday back to London constructs a reversal of the
adventure narrative and its problematic consequences. Defoe’s Friday figure is mute –
there is a rumour that he has had his tongue cut out – and he cannot read or write.
Much of the narrative concerns Susan’s unsuccessful attempts to teach Friday and to
inculcate him into English methods of communication.

The figure of Susan raises difficult questions about the nature of privilege, and about
what constitutes subaltern identity. In one way, there is a powerful connection
between Susan and Friday, which suggests that on some level we can see their
experiences as commensurate. Both are marginalized by the patriarchal figure of
Daniel Foe and the spectre of Crusoe himself that haunts the narrative. Yet, at the
same time, Susan’s engagement with Friday illustrates her own racial prejudice and
her inability to escape the colonial attitudes she has inherited. In this respect, her
subaltern status is reduced by her Englishness in a way that is not available to Friday
on account of his masculinity. There is therefore no ultimate sense of affective
empathy between the two characters.

While Susan’s ability to speak allows her some capacity to tell her story, Friday is
voiceless. At the end of the novel Friday is dying, and he opens his mouth only for a
stream of bubbles to float into the water where he dies. On the one hand, such a
conclusion is an affirmation of the suggestion that the subaltern cannot speak, robbed
forever of his voice, and those efforts to represent him (such as Susan’s) being futile
and self-interested. Yet, on the other, Friday’s non-verbal communication through his
body does signify: he does create a sign, if not a written one. This seems to suggest
the alternative possibility – that in fact the subaltern can speak, and speak for itself,
but only if we reimagine what ‘speaking’ is, to take account of cultural difference and
diversity.

Writing from a South African perspective, Coetzee’s novel is simultaneously a

comment on its source material and period and on contemporary race relations. The
issue of racial segregation in South Africa and the tendency of white campaigners to
claim to speak for black South Africans is critiqued by the novel’s suggestion that
what should be at stake is the possibility for the subaltern to genuinely speak.

Criticism of postcolonial theory

Despite its competing influences, one criticism of postcolonial theory is that
it is too influenced by poststructuralist thinking, making it more concerned
with the linguistic games played in literary texts than with the material effects
of injustice caused by colonialism. The best-known work of such criticism is
Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory (1992). The central argument of Ahmad’s book is
that poststructuralist influences have undermined a material understanding of
the developing world, as is offered by Marxism. The book also includes an
extended critique of Said’s Orientalism, where Ahmad suggests that Said’s
book – written from a location in the United States and filled with Western
examples – reproduces exactly the Western humanist tradition that it claims
to be criticizing.

One of Ahmad’s criticisms is that postcolonial theory produces a kind of

abstract one-size-fits-all model that does not account for the specifics of
individual experiences of postcolonialism. This is a criticism that has been
made more widely by those critics who argue that postcolonialism obscures
the individuality of specific national literatures, and that it also keeps the
world locked in a situation of ‘us and them’, with previously colonized
countries always being seen (and potentially seeing themselves) as victims of
the colonial past. In their essay ‘What was Postcolonialism?’ (2005), Vijay
Mishra and Bob Hodge draw attention to this issue but also to the problems
inherent in the idea of the ‘post’. This is why, in early criticism, you may see
postcolonial written with a hyphen, as ‘post-colonial’, to signify the idea of
coming ‘after colonialism’. Later criticism, however, abandoned this idea of
‘after’ as simplistic. This is because, first, some countries are still colonial
territories. Second, the idea of ‘after’ seems to suggest that colonialism does
not have an impact into the present.

THE POSTCOLONIAL EXOTIC

One critic who draws attention to the generalizing effect of the idea of the
postcolonial is the British literary critic Graham Huggan (1958– ). Huggan
argues that the idea of ‘postcolonial literature’ both upholds and is upheld by
particular stereotypes about the colonized world that come both from readers
and publishers. In The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), Huggan criticizes Western
critics and publishers for suggesting that texts offer a ‘truth’ about the
postcolonial world, and that readers can, through reading them, have an
‘authentic’ experience of the developing world. He contrasts this with the
ways in which Anglo-American texts are read, not as representative but as
fictions. More comically, this is a point made by the Nigerian writer
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her Ted Talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’
(2009). Drawing attention to the different ways in which developing- and
developed-world texts are read, Adichie humorously draws attention to how
ridiculous it is to read a novel as if it were representative.

‘I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a

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

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

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

Key idea

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

This theory is affirmed by the work of Homi Bhabha (1949– ), a British

Asian critic who developed his work alongside the heavily poststructuralist
school of literary theory that developed at the University of Sussex in the
1980s, but who also incorporates into his analyses a range of influences
including psychoanalysis and Marxism. Bhabha’s work has two main strands.
In the first instance, developed in his edited collection Nation and Narration
(1990), Bhabha theorizes the nation in ways that echo the work of Anderson,
arguing that it exists as a kind of mythic narrative. In the second, defined in
his later collection The Location of Culture (1994), he considers how
migration has created diverse cultures. This centres on his theory of
‘hybridity’ as the space of ‘neither one nor the other’, where various cultural
influences merge until their differences are imperceptible.
At the centre of both of Bhabha’s strands of thinking is a historical focus that
is accompanied by attention to geographical specificity and a wider idea of
space – how people meet and how their identities are created through ideas of
location. Bhabha develops this in his idea of the third space: the physical
location for the enunciation of hybridity.

Key ideas

Hybridity means the mixing of different cultures.

Third space is Homi Bhabha’s term for the physical space in which hybridity comes
into being.

Elsewhere, this turn to the contemporary has led postcolonial theory to

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

Fact check

1 In what year was Orientalism first published?

a 1971
b 1975
c 1978
d 1987
2 Who wrote Orientalism?
a Daniel Barenboim
b Edward Said
c Homi Bhabha
 d David Harvey
3 What is Spivak’s term for the silenced subject?
a Colonial
b Diasporic
c Migrant
d Subaltern
4 What is the term given to communities of migrants who have settled in other
countries?
a Diaspora
b Immigrants
c Postcolonial
d Refugees
5 Who wrote The Postcolonial Exotic?
a Homi Bhabha
b Graham Huggan
c Gayatri Spivak
d Edward Said
6 What is Bhabha’s term for the physical location of hybridity?
a Diaspora
b Migrant
c City
d Third space
7 On which classic novel is Foe based?
a Robinson Crusoe
b Moll Flanders
c Jane Eyre
d Wuthering Heights
8 Which Jane Austen novel does Said use as an example of contrapuntal reading?
a Heart of Darkness
b Wuthering Heights
c Emma
d Mansfield Park
9 Which Marxist critic is known for his criticism of postcolonial theory?
 a Edward Said
b Louis Althusser
c Karl Marx
d Aijaz Ahmad
10 Who wrote On the Postcolony?
a Achille Mbembe
b Edward Said
c Homi Bhabha
d Gayatri Spivak

Dig deeper

McLeod, John (2000), Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester

University Press.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart (1997), Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics.
London: Verso.
Young, Robert (2000), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell.
 14
Cultural studies

Whether they are biological organisms, communities or

nations, cultures are what grow. In these terms, we can think
about cultural studies as focused on the growth of particular
identities, concerned for the ways in which we shape our
understanding of the world around us in our everyday lives.
How, then, is this important for literary studies? From a
cultural studies perspective, texts are one aspect of a complex
set of cultural influences also including film, visual art,
performance, mass media, advertising, the Internet and music,
which individuals and groups interact with in order to form
cultural identities. Literature in this respect is an important
contributor to the meanings we make in everyday life. In
keeping with the ideas of reader response theory, the text exists
not as a stable unit of meaning but, rather, as something
shaped by the specifics of when and how it is encountered. At
the same time, it can serve as evidence for a particular cultural
presence. Literature is a dynamic force that is simultaneously
shaping and being shaped by the culture in which it is
consumed.
What is culture?
Concern about questions of culture began in the nineteenth century – with
Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) – and stretched through to F.
R. Leavis’s formalism in the early to mid-twentieth century. What we call
cultural studies, however, began in earnest in Britain in the 1950s, with the
work of two British academics associated with the cultural materialism
movement (see Chapter 15): Raymond Williams (1921–88) and Richard
Hoggart (1918–2014). The early work by these critics – Williams’s Culture
and Society (1958) and Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) – question
some of the assumptions of Arnold and Leavis regarding the role of culture.
While Arnold and Leavis are largely concerned for the value of what we call
high culture – elite art forms, classical music, theatre and literary fiction and
poetry – Hoggart and Williams are also interested in more popular forms,
such as music hall, popular literature and magazines. They recognized that in
people’s everyday lives, and particularly for those from less privileged class
backgrounds, these popular forms are integral to forming an individual’s
ideas and values.

CODING AND DECODING

In 1964 Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
(CCCS). Based at the University of Birmingham, Hoggart attracted others
interested in his work, most notably a young academic named Stuart Hall
(1932–2014). Hall was particularly influential, and in 1968 he took over the
centre’s directorship, a position he held for the next 11 years.

Like Leavis, Hoggart followed the Frankfurt School view that mass culture
essentially functions only in the service of capital and the dominant
ideological power. Hoggart upheld the view of popular culture as serving
hegemony – Antonio Gramsci’s term for the manipulation of populations not
through threat of violence but, rather, through coercion and consent. In this
context, Hoggart’s broadening out of the field of interest meant maintaining
this position by contrasting this ‘mass’ culture with what he saw as more
‘authentic’ working-class culture that originated at grassroots levels. By the
1970s, however, Hall’s centre began to unravel this distinction. To begin
with, this meant distinguishing between ‘authentic’ and mass-produced
popular works. Later, however, this distinction, too, fell away.

Hall introduced the idea of ‘decoding’ – to explain the process by which the
meanings and messages of a text are received and then made sense of by an
audience. While the message is encoded by its creator with a set of meanings,
the ways in which these are unravelled by the receiver are not fixed, but
change depending on social context, cultural understanding and past
experiences. Within this, there is the possibility for radical and political
positions to be taken. Hall suggests that the interpreter can take three
positions: dominant/hegemonic, negotiated and oppositional.

Key ideas

Dominant/hegemonic position: this is where the meaning is taken just as it was

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

‘Decodings do not follow inevitably from encodings.’

Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse’ (1973)

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

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

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

• Finally, an oppositional position might decide that the Alliance is in fact a

corrupt, unelected ruling elite, while the Imperial forces represent
rebellion.

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

Critiquing mass culture

Case study: The Road Runner

A very simple example of this are the Warner Bros. Road Runner cartoons first
screened in the late 1940s, in which Wile E. Coyote chases the Road Runner, but he
never wins. In the context of mass culture theory, the cartoons tell the audience that
only the fastest and fittest can win – and that the underdog (or undercoyote in this
case) is never victorious. Audiences are encouraged to identify only with those
already in positions of supremacy, to celebrate the Road Runner’s victory and
Coyote’s defeat, which often comes in forms both comic and gruesome. This can be
seen to parallel government desire for those who are disenfranchised (the working
classes, ethnic minorities, women) to believe they can never triumph, and to accept
their current social status and treatment, while at the same time building their self-
hatred as they come to see themselves as villains against the desirable characteristics
of those in charge. We, the masses, are like Coyote. But the Road Runner is both
attractive and always wins, without exception.

In the context of more recent cultural theory, however, we can speculate about
whether this is always the case. What if one identifies as the Road Runner? Within the
narrative there seem to be possibilities for alternative readings that might disrupt the
dominant meaning. In a 1980 cartoon called Soup or Sonic, Wile E. finally ‘catches’
the Road Runner. Strangely, this happens at a moment where Wile E. is shrunk down
to a tiny size, the Road Runner hovering over him. Here there seems to be some
acknowledgement of the politics of the cartoon – Wile E. has won but he is forever
tiny in the wake of the power that the Road Runner represents. On his victory, Wile E.
turns to the viewer and holds up a sign reading: ‘Okay wise guys, you always wanted
me to catch him. Now what do I do?’ Again, one can see both a mass cultural and an
alternative reading of this final moment. It is a moment of possibility on the one hand,
but on the other it reminds audiences of how ill-equipped Coyote is for power. How
possible, then, is it to overturn the status quo? And – being somewhat defeatist – what
is the point of trying to do so?

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

Case study: It’s a Wonderful Life

As another example of popular culture’s ability to offer a range of meanings, consider

the Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Here, the film’s hero George
Bailey abandons his dream of leaving his small-town home of Bedford Falls to
continue the family business, get married and lead a small-scale domestic life. One
can see this as a mass cultural reinforcement of capitalist ideologies and working-class
immobility. The audience is told that George’s ‘wonderful life’ is essentially a
parochial one, discouraging thoughts of mobility or creative expression among the
working classes. However, at the same time, George’s local triumph is against Mr
Potter, the town’s unscrupulous landlord and property owner, and comes when the
townspeople unite to support George in a moment of financial crisis.

In this regard, the film simultaneously represents a challenge to established social

hierarchies and the suggestion of the positive possibilities of grassroots politics and
communal action, with models of community that owe much to a communist ideology
at odds with Cold War American discourse. Whereas a mass cultural theorist might
privilege the former, a cultural theorist will explore the ambiguity of both meanings of
the film, examining how one particular meaning might be privileged in particular
circumstances but also, in addition to this, how the very ambiguity of the text can be a
productive force that opens up the possibility of agency.

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

Barthes presents these events as examples of modern myths. Prefiguring

much work in cultural studies today, he suggests that such myths are
significant for their cultural power. Myths encourage us to accept ideas and
events, he argues, while forgetting their political character. Myths in this
sense ‘naturalize’ events and serve the ruling power. They are essential to the
idea of hegemony, part of the way in which ruling powers use culture to
discourage revolt and encourage acceptance of preferred ideologies.

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

Two particular terms that come from Barthes’s cultural studies work, with
relevance for literary studies, are the terms ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’.
Working from Saussure’s idea of the sign, Barthes examined how meaning is
more complicated than the ahistorical, stable idea of the relationship between
signifier and signified. Instead, we have the following:
Denotation
(sometimes called first-order meaning)
+
Connotation
(sometimes called second-order meaning)
=
Sign
Barthes considers these meanings in relation not merely to words but to
objects and images. The denotation of a sign is stable. It is always the same,
as Saussure, too, suggests about the signified. So, for example, a picture of a
block of ice is always a block of ice, the word ‘ice’ always means a cold,
frozen mass of water. By adding the denotation, however, Barthes illustrates
how there are extra meanings that do change over time and in different
contexts. For example, the picture of the block of ice on a wall in a drought-
ridden country might connote hopefulness; on the wall of a gallery it might
be an ironic symbol of ‘cool’, whereas accompanying an article on heatstroke
it would be a symbol of healing. Likewise, the word ‘ice’ might connote cold
weather or dismissive behaviour, or even be a slang term for diamonds or
drugs.

These possibilities ask us in literary terms to consider the vast array of

meanings a word can be given. Although the author may guide these
meanings, they are also constructed in the moment of consumption. This kind
of analysis was for Barthes part of the structuralist attention to the minutiae
of language. Yet it also has some affinities with reader response theory, in
which the audience shapes meaning. Barthes’s idea of connotation has
particular similarities to Stanley Fish’s suggestion (1980) that there is ‘no
such thing as ordinary language’: that, in fact, we must pay close attention to
the myriad meanings available in seemingly ordinary terms and, indeed, the
effects of seemingly inconsequential word choices. For literary scholars, this
means paying attention not only to the obviously poetic – to structures that
are figurative or stand out from everyday language. It means, instead,
examining every word for its potential impact.

The idea of connotation has been important to cultural studies because it

stresses the ways in which meanings come about as part of culture: meanings
are ideological and shaped by the world in which they are consumed.
Connotations are fluid, changing and can only be considered in the context of
their production and consumption.

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

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

Spotlight

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

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

Interdisciplinarity is the dialogue between two or more disciplines which allows

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

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

Spotlight

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

To undertake such studies, one must feel confident about employing the
methods and terminology that work across different disciplines – to be
comfortable with, if not an expert in, fields that have a distinct methodology
perhaps different from literary studies. This approach is, of course, not only a
sharing across disciplines but also across texts, which is usefully examined
through the ideas of both conscious and unconscious intertextuality discussed
in Chapter 9.

Cultural identities
By asking questions about how different artistic forms create meaning,
cultural studies is naturally drawn towards questions of community
formation. By focusing on questions of identity, it has been particularly
important to those fields that examine how identities are shaped, in particular
postcolonial studies, gender theory and feminism. To this one can add critical
race theory and disability studies.

Critical race theory is a field which began in the United States in the 1980s,
and which overlaps with what is referred to as African-American studies,
although critical race theory is more frequently employed in relation to the
social sciences (having begun in law scholarship), whereas African-American
studies is often associated more with arts disciplines. Critical race studies
examine how ideas of race, and particularly racial prejudice, are maintained
over time, particularly with regard to racist practices. It is also interested in
how such ideas might be challenged through cultural practice. In the arts and
humanities, the legal foundations of critical race theory are frequently fused
with ideas coming from philosophy, most notably the work of thinkers such
as Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. DuBois, whose seminal works emphasize the
ways in which a negative image of one’s own racial background is shaped by
cultural encounter, most particularly the oppositions made in society between
a positive whiteness and a negative blackness.

In a similar way and having emerged at a similar time, disability studies

concern the ways in which the idea of disability (as opposed to able-
bodiedness) is maintained in society with the possibility for prejudice, and
the ways in which culture shapes this idea. The landmark Disability Studies
Reader, first published in 1997, established the field as an interdisciplinary
concern that represented a hitherto overlooked crucial factor in identity
formation alongside sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender.

Each of these fields embodies the interdisciplinarity of cultural studies.

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

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

Spotlight

Teddy boys were known for wearing the kinds of clothing such as waistcoats popular
in the Edwardian period of 40 years earlier. The term ‘Teddy boy’ was coined when a
1953 Daily Express newspaper headline shortened ‘Edwardian’ to ‘Teddy’.
The ways in which these subcultures are shaped through music, clothes and
social practices illustrate the cultural construction of their identities through
multiple influences. Yet Hebdige also argued that such subcultures are
eventually made available to the mainstream, losing their radical potential.
Hebdige’s ideas were not all-encompassing – they gave little space, for
example, to the role of sexuality in the largely male and working-class
identities explored. They have, however, been profoundly influential.

‘The struggle between different discourses, different definitions and meanings

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

More recent work has examined the ways in which subcultures are
themselves stratified and driven by rules of inclusion. For example, in Club
Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (1995), Sarah Thornton
(1965–) suggests that in the same way as cultural capital exists (see Chapter
4), so a subculture relies on the production of subcultural capital, meaning the
distinct values that give that culture recognition as different from the
mainstream. This work has also considered how subcultures are not
inherently radical: they can, in fact, serve capitalist and dominant ideological
structures. For example, the explosion of the ‘pink pound’ and the
identification of gay individuals as targets for capitalism because of their
relatively high income and low outgoings have seen gay subculture become
commodified; more recently, hipster subculture has been the subject of
critique for encouraging a market for niche high-value goods focused on
supplying an ‘alternative’ lifestyle.
All of this has a direct relevance for literary studies. It broadens the range of
cultural objects we see as ‘texts’ and puts literature in a larger context. It also
asks questions about what constitutes value, with consequences more
specifically for debates in literature. In particular, questions surrounding the
value of studying popular cultural forms call into question literary ideas of
canonicity that have also been destabilized by critiques from gender and
postcolonial studies and genre theory. It is for this reason that some literary
critics are suspicious of cultural theory: their ideas of value (which are often
not much different from Arnold’s and Leavis’s ideas) lead them to conclude
that cultural studies promote a ‘dumbing down’ of academic studies. In
reality, however, cultural studies have opened up literary studies to the social
significance of texts in ways impossible prior to its evolution. The study of
popular literature, explored in Chapter 18 on genre theory, is one especially
notable example of how cultural studies have allowed us to focus on a wider
range of texts than ever before, and to ask more direct questions about how
that literature works in relation to other cultural forms, and with what
potential effects.

Fact check

1 What is the name for second-order meanings?

a Connotations
b Denotations
c Signs
d Signifiers
2 Which of these sports does Barthes discuss in Mythologies?
a Wrestling
b Hockey
c Surfing
d Netball
3 In which English city was the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies first
established?
a London
 b Manchester
c Southampton
d Birmingham
4 Who wrote Small Acts?
a Stuart Hall
b Paul Gilroy
c Roland Barthes
d Dick Hebdige
5 Dick Hebdige is famous for his study of what?
a Race
b Gender
c Subculture
d Disability
6 What is the term for the sharing of ideas so that disciplinary boundaries are
dissolved?
a Interdisciplinarity
b Infusion
c Intersectionality
d Transdisciplinarity
7 In which discipline does critical race studies originate?
a Sociology
b Drama
c Politics
d Law
8 Which theory does cultural studies complicate?
a Feminism
b Postcolonialism
c Mass culture
d Postmodernism
9 In what year was The Disability Studies Reader published?
a 1981
b 1997
c 1996
 d 1985
10 Which of these is a decoding position?
a Oppositional
b Against
c Confrontational
d Accepting

Dig deeper

Cockell, Moira, et al. (2011), Common Knowledge: The Challenge of

Transdisciplinarity. Philadelphia: EFPL Press.
Gelder, Ken (2007), Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice. Hoboken:
Taylor & Francis.
Goldberg, David Theo (2014), Sites of Race. Hoboken: Wiley.
Rojek, Chris (2007), Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Polity.
 15
Historicisms and materialisms

On a visit to Europe in 1833, the American writer Ralph Waldo

Emerson (1803–82) sought out the Scottish historian Thomas
Carlyle (1795–1881). Carlyle, so the anecdote tells us, gave
Emerson a pipe, took one himself, and the two men sat smoking
in silence until bedtime. It was the beginning of a life-long
correspondence.
Less than a decade after this first meeting, Emerson would
write his own essay on history, in which he would claim that
‘there is properly no history, only biography’. Emerson was far
ahead of his time in thinking about history as storytelling:
history as one person’s narrative of events, secured and taken
up by others through the beautiful and dangerous power of the
written word.
As we shall uncover in this chapter, for those thinking about
the relationship between history and literature, the anecdote is
much more than an amusing interlude. Rather, it exists
precisely to bring together history and literature in the ways
that Emerson suggests. If literature is history, and history is
literature, then it makes sense that in order to understand
fiction in its fullest form, we cannot read texts without
considering their relationship to the historical narratives that
frame them.
For much of the twentieth century, the influence of formalism meant that the
historical context of a work of literature seemed of little importance. With the
advent of poststructuralist and reader response theories, however, historical
context once again became important. This was only increased when critical
approaches such as Marxism, feminism and postcolonial theory focused on
the relationship between the text and specific social and political contexts. As
these contexts are impossible to understand without also understanding the
specific histories in which they function, more political readings have also
produced much more historical readings.

New historicist critics, at least in their initial formulation, came out of a

poststructuralist-influenced American school of criticism. At the same time,
British critics were also reappraising the role of history in the study of
literature. This parallel group of critics is referred to as cultural materialist.
Like new historicists, cultural materialists are interested in the relationship
between literary texts and historical texts but are driven by very different
theoretical underpinnings.

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

Key ideas

Historicism is the traditional study of history as a record of what happened at a

previous point in time.
Historicist reflects an approach focusing on historical events and their role in shaping
the subject under discussion.

In 1980 the American critic Stephen Greenblatt (1943– ) published a book

entitled Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare,
introducing a new approach to the relationship between literary texts and
their historical contexts. Rather than seeing history as the context or
background for the study of literature, Greenblatt reads both literary and non-
fiction texts alongside each other. Greenblatt not only uses non-fictional
sources to explain the fictional, but he also uses the fictional text to question
some of the arguments made in the historical texts.

‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead.’

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare Negotiations (1988)

This ‘new’ approach is what we call new historicism. In new historicism,

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

Key idea

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

NEW HISTORICISMS
Greenblatt’s work has been echoed in the criticism of others, including Louis
Montrose and Stephen Orgel. These critics follow Greenblatt’s initial
attention to the historical text, not as a stable background but rather as
something that is equally open to question through its relationship to the
fictional text. They are just as interested in analysing the historical text
through the fiction than in the more usual reverse order. New historicism,
then, is not really about historical context. Instead, it is about history as a
kind of text that is, in its own way, as imaginative as a fictional text.

New historicism in this respect is influenced by poststructuralist theories.

Like Derrida’s famous statement that ‘there is nothing outside the text’, new
historicists do not see the existence of a stable set of past events which
history records, but rather a set of words called history which define that past,
and which do so with an inherent unreliability and instability. There is no
stable historical context we can draw upon. Equally, there is no way in which
the fictional text can tell us anything certain about the real historical past. All
that exists are texts in discussion with each other.

Cultural materialism
The term ‘cultural materialism’ was first used, in the way we understand it
now, by Jonathan Dollimore (1948– ) and Alan Sinfield (1941– ) in their
edited collection of essays Political Shakespeare (1985). Like new historicist
work, their book stresses the status of the literary text as a historical
document, and the need to read both types of text equally alongside each
other. Materialism refers to the text as rooted in the world: it is a political
document that cannot be separated from the context of its production.

What, then, is the difference between the new historicists and the cultural
materialists? Essentially, the American new historicists and the British
cultural materialists are driven by very different theoretical underpinnings. In
the case of new historicists this is poststructuralism, and in the case of
cultural materialism it is Marxism. What this means in practice is a very
different attitude to the text’s cultural function. For new historicists, the
parallel between the historical text and the fictional text is evidence of the
fact that the fictional text cannot exceed the historical context of its
production – it exists of its time. This is in line with the poststructuralist
Michel Foucault’s position on the idea of agency, meaning the ability of a
group or individual to act. For Foucault, agency is always an illusion, because
individuals and groups are always shaped by the powerful thought systems
(what Foucault calls ‘discourses’, which is not dissimilar from what Marxists
call ideology) surrounding them. So the text cannot really be radical. In
keeping with ideas of deconstruction, it might appear to be radical, but this
radicalism is always revealed to be an artificial construction: it doesn’t really
exist, and underneath is something far more conformist.

In complete contrast to this, the Marxist approach to the literary text

privileges it as a site of radical interruption. Against Foucault’s notion of
discourse, cultural materialists employ the term ‘structures of feeling’. This
idea was developed by the British Marxist critic Raymond Williams (1921–
88) (Williams 1954). ‘Structures of feeling’ are the values people live,
against those enforced by the state or by society. In this sense, they are the
opposite of discourses, because they represent a challenge to official or
institutional ways of thinking, created by individuals or groups in their
everyday lives. While new materialists look for the places in which the text
replicates discourse, cultural materialists see the text as a crucial site of these
‘structures of feeling’. For cultural materialists, therefore, the text reveals not
a conformist attitude but a powerful site of transgression and political
engagement.

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

New historicism and cultural materialism, although both asking us to engage

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

Key idea

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

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

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

Spotlight

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

In the context of cultural materialism, Stowe is an example of how a text can

promote radical change. Uncle Tom’s Cabin seemingly challenges attitudes
prevalent at the time of its production and shifts the consciousness of its
readers. Yet, at the same time, this novel that was so praised for its liberal
values in the years immediately following its publication has in the
contemporary period been harshly criticized for its limitations. As the term
‘Uncle Tom’ filtered into public usage as slang for a passive, submissive
black man, so critics have argued that the figure of Uncle Tom in the novel is
a damaging stereotype: a black character whose goodness rests upon his lack
of aggression, and who is distinguished from those around him because of his
conversion to Christianity. Defenders of Stowe have argued that her choices
in these terms are strategic: they are designed to appeal to a white pro-slavery
readership that would have been alienated by a stronger, more confrontational
discourse. Indeed, Stowe herself points to this in her comments on her novel
when she says that she chose not to represent the reality of slavery but, rather,
an imaginative reconstruction. Equally, the strong reaction of Southern
readers to her novel suggests that she was correct in thinking that, without
values to make him appealing, Tom would not have engaged the public as he
did.

Nevertheless, these criticisms draw attention to the new historicist argument

that a text exists within the context of its production and is limited by it.
Although Stowe appeared radical in the time of writing, a later retrospective
reading of her novel illustrates that it is very much of its period, and carries
with it the limitations of that. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not unique in this regard
– one could equally consider the racist stereotyping of the African ‘other’ in
Joseph Conrad’s anti-colonial novel Heart of Darkness (1902), the subject of
a scathing critique by the African novelist Chinua Achebe, or the limitations
of novels such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) or Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice (1813), where strong female protagonists are ultimately
still constrained by patriarchal marriages.

Spotlight

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

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

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

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

Case study: Nervous Conditions

As literary critics, we can read texts to examine how they might offer new materialist
framings of the body. One example of such an engagement can be found in Tsitsi
Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions (1988). The novel’s central character,
Tambu, is a young girl growing up in Zimbabwe. Her cousin, Nyasha, spends a period
abroad in Europe, and returns with anorexia. From a feminist perspective, the novel is
a critique of the ways in which women are defined according to their bodies, and how
bodily norms and ideals of attractiveness damage the female sense of self. Nyasha is
intelligent, but her intellect is overshadowed by the pressure placed on her to conform
to a particular bodily ideal.

Nervous Conditions counters this representation with what can be seen as a new
materialist alternative. Rather than answering Nyasha’s experience with a rejection of
the body, the novel illustrates how Tambu celebrates a body that exists outside
Western ideals of beauty. Her own academic success comes alongside this bodily
celebration, so that we see her thriving mental capacity running alongside her thriving
physical form, as she moves from being shabbily dressed and malnourished to plump.
Body and mind are intimately connected, and the body is not to be rejected but rather
reclaimed. That this reclamation involves both a critique of patriarchy and of
colonialism (because what is being challenged are essentially Western ideals of
beauty that have been imposed on Africa) suggests how new materialist approaches
function in intersectional terms to bring together different schools of criticism.

Nervous Conditions embodies a celebration of the black female body that illustrates
how new materialism functions to assist in the exploration of reappraisals of the
Cartesian division of mind and body against patriarchal and racist ideologies. A
similar narrative is offered in Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise (1997) but from an
African-American perspective. Near the end of this story of a group of abused and
disenfranchised women living in a disused convent, the women undress, lie on the
floor and paint around their naked forms. On one page it is simultaneously declared
that ‘my body is nothing my spirit everything’ and ‘my bones on his the only true
thing’. These competing statements illustrate a physicality at once celebrated and put
into perspective alongside the intellectual. When the women paint the forms they have
drawn around, they embody this process: they celebrate the female form, yet
simultaneously distance themselves from it through the process of artistic creation.
What emerges is a new materiality: a physical document, but one that speaks to the
complex relation between body and mind.

By rejecting old oppositions, new materialism promises to open up spaces for

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

Spotlight

My five-year-old daughter recently began an after-school drama club. In her second

week, which came a few weeks before Halloween, she was asked to work in a group
to produce a play called ‘The Spooky Hotel’. When I asked her what part she had
played in that week’s exercise, she confidently told me she had been a bedside table!
After further questioning, she revealed that it was her idea to play this role in the play.
It was a spooky hotel, so of course this was no ordinary bedside table. Rather, it was a
bedside table that woke up in the middle of the night and scared the room’s
inhabitants. Although she recognized that a table does not normally have the life of a
biological organism (hence the spookiness), there was in her mind no sense that to be
a human was superior to being a bedside table. The humanist tradition has not yet
been inherited.
Decentring the human
In literary terms, we are used to narratives that focus on the human as the
centre of the story. While this in part can be explained by our desire to read
narratives as mirrors of our own selves, it is also representative of a
continued humanist belief that the human is the figure through which truth
and meaning are delivered. More recently, narratives have begun to give the
animal a stronger role alongside the human, and you will find examples of
these discussed in Chapter 19. It is rarer to find narratives that strip away
reference to the biological. One example of this, however, is the short stories
of Jon McGregor. Already associated in his novels with themes of
posthumanism, McGregor’s first short story collection, This Isn’t the Sort of
Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (2012) continues this theme with
narratives strongly focused on the natural landscapes of northern and central
England. In one of these stories, however, McGregor also points towards a
materialist focus. ‘I Remember There Was a Hill’ traces a movement through
a rural landscape from a hill, to a road, to a phone box, to a phone call, to the
door of the phone box slamming shut and finally sheep scattering across the
fields. Yet, apart from the ‘I’ of the title, the character making this walk is
never mentioned. The phone rings, and there is a voice, the door slams, but
the actor in these scenes is absent. This has the effect of re-centring events
with object or landscape rather than subject at the core. This can be seen as a
radical repositioning of the human within the story.

Like many of the ‘new’ and ‘post’ movements of the contemporary moment,
new materialism is perhaps more a newness of emphasis than a newness of
ideas. Nevertheless, it offers interesting new ways to think about the literary
text: to ask what role the non-biological plays, what the body means as an
integral part of consciousness, and how narratives function outside the
anthropocentric focus we often as critics employ in our analysis.

One focus of new materialism can also be the materiality of the text itself.
New materialism draws attention to the book as a physical object, and how
the reader’s engagement with this physicality shapes meaning. So when we
read as new materialists, we consider not just the text but also the form in
which we receive it – its illustrations, cover, weight or font, for example.
Ergodic literature
One particular engagement with the materiality of the text is what is referred
to as ergodic literature. The term, coined by Espen J. Aarseth (1965– ) in his
book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997), refers to the
effort required on the part of readers to read particular texts, which force
them to engage materially with the work. These texts are ergodic, while those
requiring only minimal user engagement are non-ergodic. As an example,
Aarseth says that cybertexts (online narratives) are ergodic because they
require the reader to follow links and navigate web pages. In the same way, a
narrative printed across instalments in magazines can be ergodic because it
requires the reader to find the relevant part across multiple sources. In
contrast, novels are largely non-ergodic because they require simply a
movement from the beginning to the end, turning pages and reading text.

One can think that some printed texts are also ergodic in their demands on the
reader – for example the famous series of Choose Your Own Adventure
stories for young adults requires readers to select from multiple choices and
to move backwards and forwards through the text based on their choices, in a
way much more akin to a cybertext. The most famous example is B. S.
Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), a book in 27 separate parts, designed to
be read in any order. More recent contemporary examples include texts such
as Doug Dorst’s S (2013), which contains a second novel written in the
margins of the first, or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), in
which readers are taken through a layered text where footnotes contain
footnotes and some pages contain only a few lines of text. This supporting
matter, what we call peritexts, also shapes meanings, as do those elements
that surround the work such as its cover and preface, what we called
paratexts. The French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1930– ) has argued
that this material ‘in reality controls one's whole reading of the text’ (1997).

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

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

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

Fact check

1 Which of these is a paratext?

a Endnote
b Novel
c Book cover
d Poem
2 Which school of criticism is cultural materialism influenced by?
a Postmodernism
b Poststructuralism
c Feminism
d Marxism
3 Which school of criticism is new materialism influenced by?
a Poststructuralism
b Postmodernism
c Marxism
d Postcolonialism
4 Feminism has been particularly influential on which of the following?
a Historicism
b New materialism
c Cultural materialism
d New historicism
5 Which book, published by Stephen Greenblatt in 1980, introduced new
materialism?
a The Renaissance
b Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
c Paratexts
 d The Long Revolution
6 In which country was cultural materialism first established?
a Britain
b The United States
c France
d Germany
7 Which other schools of theory are new materialists associated with apart from
feminism?
a Posthumanism and ecocriticism
b Humanism and ecocriticism
c Postmodernism and postcolonialism
d Reader response and ecocriticism
8 What do we call those texts that require special effort on the part of the reader?
a Demanding
b Ergodic
c Existential
d Postmodern
9 Who wrote Nervous Conditions?
a Tsisti Dangarembga
b Toni Morrison
c Chinua Achebe
d Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
10 What is the central ‘character’ in Jon McGregor’s story ‘I Remember There Was a
Hill’?
a A toaster
b A television
c A car
d A phone box

Dig deeper

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

Contemporary Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Robson, Mark (2014), Stephen Greenblatt. Florence: Taylor & Francis.
Veeser, Harold (1994), The New Historicism Reader. New York: Routledge.
Wilson, Scott (1995), Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
 16
Humanisms

A friend recently asked me what it meant to be a humanist and

I paused and asked them in what context they meant it. On the
one hand, the term ‘humanism’ more than any other seems to
gesture towards something we should understand. After all, we
are all human. Or are we?
In common, everyday usage, humanism often refers to a
rejection of religious principles or other occult or superstitious
practices. A humanist wedding, for example, refers to a non-
religious ceremony. Equally, a humanist funeral is one that
makes no reference to religious ideas or to the concept of an
afterlife. The British Humanist Association, founded in 1896,
defines itself as ‘the national charity working on behalf of non-
religious people who seek to live ethical and fulfilling lives on
the basis of reason and humanity’.
Being human
The popular usage of the term ‘humanism’ has something in common with
the academic usage of the term, which also implies a world centred on human
values. Yet the idea of humanism as a philosophical approach has a longer
history, and one that does not necessarily match popular usage. Although the
term entered the English language in the nineteenth century, it was preceded
by a long history of thinking centred on human experience: in fact, the
nineteenth-century term was used initially to refer not to current ideas but to
ideas that developed in Italy during the Renaissance beginning in the
fourteenth century. Unlike contemporary humanism, this did not mean that its
proponents were necessarily atheist. Rather, it indicated a desire to focus on
questions of human experience without the distraction of concern for the
supernatural, centred on moral and intellectual improvement. It is from this
notion that the subject of study called the humanities comes – learning
directed towards literature, the arts and philosophy.

Key idea

Humanism, in general usage, is a belief in human-based morality implying atheism.

In literary usage, it is a focus on the human beyond the supernatural.

READING THE MONSTER

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

Monster theory: ‘a method of reading cultures from the monsters they

engender’.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory (1996)

Spotlight

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

SOME HUMANS ARE MORE HUMAN THAN OTHERS

In the twentieth century and later, the idea of humanism and its preoccupation
with human uniqueness has been strongly critiqued. In particular, humanism
has been criticized by postcolonial and feminist scholars who have
emphasized the ways in which the notion of the ‘human’ has often been used
to define a non-human ‘other’ or a subject less than human, in order to
maintain the power and authority of particular groups in society. The monster
is often, in fact, human, and what it stands for is often a human subject that is
being denied justice or expression.

Non-white races and women have historically been represented as less

human, or more animal or monstrous, in order to justify mistreatment and
prejudice. There are striking examples of this in the way that slaves in the
United States were defined as property (similar to livestock), the way that
Africans were defined by colonialism as ‘savages’, closer to apes than to
humans, and the representation of Jews as vermin in Nazi propaganda during
the 1930s. More recently, criticism of humanism has been expanded by other
groups such as those working in disability studies (see Chapter 14), who
emphasize the ways in which the idea of ‘human’ and the privilege it affords
rests on the idea of a ‘perfect’ and healthy body.

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

‘Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, ways of

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

Humanism and literature

Humanism has had a particular influence on literary studies. In some
discussions you may find approaches to literature referred to as ‘liberal
humanism’. This is a term sometimes used to refer to the approaches to
literature that preceded explicitly theoretical approaches, and particularly
those with political interests such as feminism, Marxism and postcolonialism.
The formalist strategies outlined in this book’s early chapters, and the work
of critics such as Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, would fall under this
definition.

For these critics, literature is not specific to one cultural context but, rather,
has a universal value or truth, the uncovering of which serves a moral
purpose. With the advent of reader response criticism, liberal humanism was
subject to the same criticisms as humanism more generally: namely, that its
idea of the ‘human’ was limited to white, male, privileged subjects. What was
good was in fact what was good, rather, for these particular humans. In this
respect, a critique of humanism is also a critique of those reading practices
that fail to account for the varied ways in which texts are consumed and the
multiple possible effects that they may have. Humanism sees language as an
expression of truths about the world that already exist – it sees language as
secondary to the ‘reality’ of the material world. In this context, literature can
be a powerful teller of truths about that world (as Arnold and Leavis
expressed) but it does not shape that world. Part of the critique of humanism,
then, is also a critique of what comes from this attitude to language –
questioning the idea that there is one single meaning to a text, a truth to be
uncovered by a ‘correct’ reader, an authorial intention and – ultimately – one
single ‘good’ that exists outside the complexities of individual identities and
circumstances. In critiquing humanism, we also advance the idea of multiple
readings, multiple truths, and the awareness that how we explain the world
not only reflects it but also has a role in shaping it.

PLANETARY HUMANISM
Recognizing its moral potential, some critics have attempted to recuperate the
idea of humanism to incorporate those human subjects conventionally
‘othered’ by humanist ideas. The most notable example of this is British
sociologist Paul Gilroy’s idea of a universal, gender- and colour-blind
‘planetary humanism’ (2000).
One notable question that arises in relation to planetary humanism is whether
it exists only as a utopian ideal that encourages us to attempt to think beyond
identity categories such as gender and race, or whether the erosion of these
categories is, in fact, possible. The literary text may be seen to offer a unique
intervention into this debate because of its form. The world we live in is
driven by the visual presence of other people, which makes it hard to think
about them beyond their physical attributes – such as clothing, hair and skin
colour – that signify difference. This is replicated in artworks, film, television
and, to some extent, theatre. In contrast, written literature has the potential to
evade some of these categories because it can choose to what extent it makes
the visual available to the reader via different levels of description. In doing
so, it stages an imaginative intervention which can prompt the reader,
perhaps, to try to imagine what seems impossible: a world where differences
such as race, gender and some types of visible disability are no longer
perceived.

A number of twenty-first-century texts examine this idea by abandoning the

kinds of physical descriptions that indicate racial identity or gender. One
notable example of this is Jon McGregor’s novel If Nobody Speaks of
Remarkable Things (2002). McGregor does not remove references to gender
or race entirely, but he plays with reader expectations in his novel – he opens
his novel with voices that could be of any gender or race, and goes on in his
novel to question reader expectations regarding the latter in particular.
McGregor upholds a version of Gilroy’s planetary humanist reality,
constructed between the reader and the text and through the silences and
ambivalences that fill the novel.

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

Planetary humanism is a genuinely inclusive humanism that includes all, regardless

of class, race or gender.
Posthumanism is going ‘beyond’ the limits of thinking through the concept of the
human.
Transhumanism is a movement to encourage transcendence beyond the limitations
of human existence.

Transhumanism is often associated with rather disturbing supremacist

movements that aim to create ‘superhumans’. Although transhumanism is a
movement beyond the human, in many ways it echoes old humanist ideas
about certain individuals being superior to others. Critics of transhumanism,
such as Francis Fukuyama (1992), draw attention to the ruthless pursuit of
improvement via science which it promotes, for example through support for
cloning or selective reproduction. This kind of critique posits transhumanism
as a nightmare future in which ethics has given way to the discourse of
improvement at all costs.

In contrast to this focus on improvement, posthumanism recognizes the

increasing complication of the idea of the human with a more democratic idea
of going ‘beyond’ (hence ‘post’). For posthumanists, it is increasingly
difficult to separate the human from the technological and virtual world that
surrounds it. Yet, rather than this suggesting any superiority, for
posthumanists it offers the opportunity to understand a more connected way
of thinking, and to critique ideas of purity that may be associated with racist
or sexist discourses in favour of those that celebrate difference. Unlike
transhumanism, this means that woven into posthumanism is a criticism of
the humanist ideas that precede it, and a desire for an alternative way of
thinking about how humans relate to one another and the world around them.

THE CYBORG MANIFESTO

At the centre of the posthuman blurring of human and machine is a
fascination with robots, or what we see referred to as cyborgs: beings that
fuse robot parts with the biological. As I explain to students when I show
them my cardiac pacemaker, the idea of the cyborg is much more than the
stuff of science fiction – it exists in everyday life in the electronic implants,
mechanical limbs and virtual-reality glasses that connect us to the
technological world in intimate and life-defining ways.

In his novel Transmission (2004), Hari Kunzru considers this blurring

between human and machine in the twenty-first century through the story of a
global IT company and one of its employees, a migrant worker named Arjun.
When Arjun retaliates against his mistreatment by the company by releasing
a computer virus, the virus takes on a life of its own – it speaks in the first
person, makes personal relationships with those it infects, and procreates.
Conversely, the natural world is filled with artificial grass and plastic tubing
instead of roots. The technological is more alive than the supposedly natural
world it exists within. Kunzru exposes a cyborg reality, in which the
biological and the technological can no longer be easily separated from each
other.

Key idea

A cyborg is a biological and technological hybrid.

In her essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), the influential postmodern thinker

Donna Haraway (1944– ) looks at the consequences of thinking through the
idea of the cyborg towards wider questions of ethics and identity. In this
essay, Haraway examines the figure of the cyborg as a symbol of the
blending of discrete boundaries between human and machine. The cyborg’s
revolutionary potential lies in part because it breaks the rules of what has
come before it – it pays no attention to religious discourse or the laws of the
family, for example. Its morality is therefore unique and uninfluenced by past
ideologies, and its relation to others is not driven by the kinds of familial
patterns outlined by Freud. This means that the cyborg can create relations
that challenge racial, religious, patriarchal and class-based prejudices.
In particular, by being neither human nor machine, the cyborg – in a similar
way to the monster – questions the neat categories (taxonomies) into which
society divides things. These categories are for Haraway the foundation of
the process of ‘othering’, which splits the world into those who are dominant
and the ‘others’ without power or influence. By questioning these categories,
the cyborg opens up the possibility of a world in which traditional structures
of power are no longer able to maintain their dominance. It is a chaotic,
disruptive force, which breaks down established divisions.

Haraway’s politics are particularly directed at feminism – her manifesto asks

feminists to rethink their focus on the human in order to escape the
limitations of their theory and practice. Yet, as part of this new way of
thinking, feminism is also interwoven with questions of race and class. In this
way, Haraway’s work is an important contributor to what is termed
‘intersectional thinking’: approaches that cross various identity groups.

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

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

Spotlight

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

established in 1999.

Case study: Never Let Me Go

A particularly powerful image of the transhuman future is offered by Kazuo

Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005). An uncanny reworking of the boarding-
school novel tradition, Ishiguro’s novel is set in a future Britain not dissimilar to the
present day other than for the fact that the transhuman ideal of longevity has been
achieved through the production of clones, grown and raised in order to provide
genetically identical matches who can provide organs and other transplants for the
individual – the ‘originals’ – that they are based on. Narrated by one such clone,
Kathy, the novel traces how the clones deal with their own sense of identity, the threat
of donation, and their treatment by the humans who raise and educate them. Purposely
produced for a specific reason, they can be compared to sentient robots, and their
representation raises the same questions about the treatment of non-living subjects.

The claim of Kathy and the others at the school is that they exist regardless of
society’s ability to define and classify them as a species in the way that traditional
humanist discourse supports. Identified by their society as less than human, although
they are conscious, the fact that they are not ‘originals’ justifies to society the use of
their bodies for organ harvesting; the clones are denied a sense of past or future: they
have no family names, only last initials; they are sterile so that the possibility of a
genetic legacy is prohibited. Yet, at the same time, it is the clones in the novel that
form meaningful relationships, while their human teachers behave ‘inhumanly’. In
this way, they embody Haraway’s idea of the disruptive cyborg that unravels
ideological discourse by complicating traditional boundaries and classifications.
While the characters hold on to humanity, Never Let Me Go as a whole points to its
illusory nature. The clones are as human as the humans: their work at the school –
their art projects – is a mark of creativity which complicates the programme and
ultimately sees the school closed down because it proves the clones’ ability to think in
ways that exceed the technological. Yet what the novel also suggests is that humanity
does not exist: instead, it is rooted in false means of artificially giving a sense of self.

This idea of a false humanity is common in posthumanist discourse,

particularly in relation to animal subjects. In this respect, humanism is
influenced by figures such as the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942– ), for
whom the distinction between human and computer is a matter of years in
development rather than essential difference. Dennett’s Consciousness
Explained (1991) unravels the idea that there is anything distinct about a
human, not just in comparison to animals but also in comparison to other
humans.

Spotlight

In Consciousness Explained, Dennett asks readers to conduct a number of

experiments, including one that involves imagining in detail a purple cow to help
explain the existence of what he calls ‘mind stuff’.

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

Fact check

1 What is the name of the theory that deals with the monstrous?
a Monster theory
b Feminism
c Trangression theory
d Mass culture theory
2 Who devised the term ‘planetary humanism’?
a Paul Gilroy
b Richard Dawkins
c Daniel Dennett
d Stuart Hall
3 What is the name for the cultural equivalent of a gene?
a Grapheme
b Theme
c Meme
 d Decimeme
4 Who wrote ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’?
a Paul Gilroy
b Donna Haraway
c Rosi Braidotti
d Daniel Dennett
5 What is the name of the narrator of Never Let Me Go?
a Lulu
b Claire
c Kathy
d Grace
6 What do we call the movement associated with the idea of the ‘superhuman’?
a Posthumanism
b Transhumanism
c Modernism
d Cyborgism
7 What is the name of Jon McGregor’s first novel?
a Never Let Me Go
b If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
c Dancing Wolves
d The Cyborg
8 Who has critiqued the technological advances of posthumanism?
a Francis Fukuyama
b Danniel Dennett
c Paul Gilroy
d Donna Haraway
9 Who wrote Transmission?
a Ian McEwan
b Salman Rushdie
c Paul Gilroy
d Hari Kunzru
10 In what year was The Selfish Gene published?
 a 1989
b 1987
c 1986
d 1996

Dig deeper

Braidotti, Rosi (2013), The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.

Davies, Tony (1996), Humanism. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis.
Gilroy, Paul (2000), Against Race. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
 17
Ethical criticism

Everyone loves a villain, be it Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of

Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Mr Burns in The
Simpsons, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, or Professor Snape
in the Harry Potter novels. Likewise, it’s often hard to think of
how it is possible to be both good and interesting. We may love
Jane Eyre, or Hermione Granger, for their moral certitude and
reliability, but they would be of little interest to readers,
perhaps, without the challenges that come from the spectres of
threat that surround them. As the French philosopher Simone
Weil (1909–43) writes, ‘Imaginary evil is romantic and varied;
real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary
good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous,
intoxicating.’
How, then, can literature be a force for good? Should, indeed, it
try to be?
One of the criticisms of postmodernism is that it encourages thinking about
literature divorced from the social and political contexts of its production.
Although, as discussed in Chapter 10, this view is partly unfounded, it is in
the wake of such criticisms that literary studies responded with an ethical
intervention. You may see this intervention described as an ‘ethical turn’ –
the suggestion here being that we can identify a moment in which literary
studies have taken a new direction towards thinking about ethical questions.

Ethics can be defined as the moral principles that guide behaviour or conduct,
so, in the context of literary theory, ethics means considering how literature
might shape these moral principles.

The ethical text and morality

Key idea

Ethics is about the moral principles that guide behaviour – our sense of what is right
and what is harmful to others.

Ethical critics focus their attention on literary works that foreground

questions of morality – in particular what it means to be responsible, to act
well towards others, to pursue justice, and to be ‘good’. They also frequently
focus on the act of reading as an ethical encounter between the reader and the
text. Ethical criticism sees the literary text as having a defined social role.
The most notable and earliest theorist of this approach, Louise Rosenblatt
(1904–2005), argues that the text is a transaction between reader and its
content. Her approach is strongly influenced by reader response theory. In
this respect, an ethical text is one that is able to transmit ideas of moral
behaviour to the reader.
 ‘Through the medium of words, the text brings into the reader's
consciousness certain concepts, certain sensuous experiences, certain images
of things, people, actions, scenes. The special meanings and, more
particularly, the submerged associations that these words have for the
individual reader will largely determine what the work communicates to him.
The reader brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events,
present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a
particular physical condition. These and many other elements in a never-to-
be-duplicated combination determine his response to the peculiar
contribution of the text.’
Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (1938)

THE NOTION OF ‘THE OTHER’

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

Key idea

The other is the one who is different from oneself.

A particularly useful theorist in this regard is the French philosopher

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), whose work on encounter has been taken up
by ethical critics to consider how we meet with those who are different from
us. The idea of the ‘face of the other’ developed in Levinas’s Totality and
Infinity (1961) asks us to think about how we not simply meet but also
engage in transformative terms with those with whom we come into contact.
What does it mean to be other? Who decides? And how can an encounter
take place in which that other is treated well?
 ‘The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an
ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a
teaching.’
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961)

The ethical turn

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

Spotlight

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

THE ETHICO-POLITICAL
The ethico-political is a way to describe ideas that are both ethical and
political in character. An ethico-political literary critic will look both at
abstract ideas of goodness, justice and responsibility and at specific ways in
which these ideas are played out in relation to questions of politics, such as
race, gender and class.

Key idea

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

The idea of the ethico-political is most associated with the Marxist

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

Spotlight

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

The idea of the ethico-political has been taken up more recently to explore
the later, more political work of postmodern thinkers such as Jacques
Derrida. For example, Morag Patrick (1997) has argued that deconstruction is
an ethico-political practice, and that if we look at Derrida’s later ideas
(particularly his engagement with the idea of responsibility), we see work that
is asking questions about what it means to be both political and ethical in the
contemporary world. This is a good example of how, although being often
positioned as a response to postmodernism and poststructuralism, the ethical
turn is in fact also part of these disciplines.

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

THE ‘NEW SINCERITY’

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

Key idea

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

Case study: Atonement

The ethical modification of postmodernism is starkly evident in Ian McEwan’s novel
Atonement (2001). The majority of the novel is presented as a fusion of modernist
stream of consciousness and realist detail, the latter particular evident in the novel’s
harrowing depiction of the Second World War. At the end of the novel it emerges that
readers have been engaged with a very postmodern fiction: readers learn that the
narrative they have read is not in fact ‘truth’ but rather the fictional re-creation of one
of its central characters, Briony Tallis. Briony has written the narrative as an
‘atonement’: having been responsible for the false imprisonment for rape of her sister
Cecilia’s lover, Robbie, Briony attempts to atone for her actions by rewriting the story
of Cecilia and Robbie to give them the reunion they in reality never experience
(Robbie is killed in France, while Cecilia dies in London during an air raid).

This kind of ironic self-referentiality is exemplary of postmodern writing. Yet the

questions McEwan raises by its context here are precisely in line with the ethical turn
of late postmodern fiction. Indeed, the novel’s question – whether fiction can serve as
an alternative to a more practical intervention into a situation – speaks not merely to
the ethical in general (how does one atone?) but more specifically to the role of
literature as an ethical space (can literature serve as an atonement?). The novel is
unclear about how we are supposed to respond to Briony’s choice. On the one hand, if
we see merit in her act then we privilege writing as a space of ethical action. On the
other, if we reject her choice, we provide impetus for the need to move beyond
writing and act ethically in practical terms. Ironically, this means that in either case
McEwan’s Atonement itself is an ethical fiction: it is either, like Briony’s atonement,
an ethical act or it is the stimulus for us to act ethically beyond fiction.

Three ethical moments

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

1 THE PAUL DE MAN CONTROVERSY

In her essay ‘The Ethical Turn in French Postmodern Philosophy’ (1998), the
academic Beverly Voloshin (1949– ) outlines how many American critics
believe that there was a shift towards a concern for the ethical in postmodern
philosophy following the controversy surrounding the work of Paul de Man
(1919–83). A Belgian literary theorist based in the United States, de Man was
a key member of the Yale School of deconstruction and had been hugely
influential in importing poststructuralist thinking, particularly the work of
Derrida, into literary studies through a focus on deconstructive reading
practices. In 1988, five years after de Man’s death, articles were uncovered
that a young de Man had written for the Belgian journal Le Soir, which held
Nazi sympathies during the Second World War. In some of these articles de
Man expressed anti-Semitic sentiments; for example, in an essay entitled
‘Jews in Contemporary Literature’ (1941), de Man argued for a ‘Jewish
colony’ and suggested that literature had succeeded despite the dangers of
Jewish cultural influences.

The response of Derrida and other postmodern and poststructuralist critics to

the charges against de Man can be seen as a possible ethical turn, in that his
complicity with Nazism seemed to demand an interrogation of sometimes
abstract poststructuralist linguistic work with more concern for the politics of
poststructuralism. In her essay, Voloshin discusses the development of ethical
thinking in the work of four significant postmodern theorists – Derrida, Luce
Irigaray, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard – in order to complicate
this line of argument by suggesting that there exists across poststructuralist
and postmodern thinking an ethical concern that precedes the de Man
controversy. Voloshin draws attention to what is less a turn and more of a
development in which ethical ideas became more explicit in the work of
postmodern writing, and indeed also became more examined in the wake of
the de Man controversy. In this sense, the shift is not so much in the work of
the philosophers as it is in the wider academic community, which began to
pay more attention to ethical questions in the wake of events surrounding de
Man.

2 TRAUMA THEORY AND HOLOCAUST STUDIES

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

The discipline of trauma theory began in the 1970s, developed through the
1980s, and since then has become a recognizable theoretical framework. It
was strongly influenced by the work of Jewish philosophers Hannah Arendt
(1906–75) and Primo Levi (1919–87), among others. The majority of the
influential texts that we associate with the field were written in the 1990s.
Trauma theory has been associated principally with the field of Holocaust
studies. In the 1990s collections of essays emerged examining how survivors
and later generations had processed the Holocaust. Dominick LaCapra’s
Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) is a good
example of this approach. Heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, the essays
in LaCapra’s collection examine how the trauma of the Holocaust is
processed. More recently, works such as Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation
of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (2012) have
applied this concern specifically to literary and other texts.

Trauma theory is, however, rooted in attention not only to Holocaust

survivors but also to the survivors of other major conflicts such as the
Vietnam War, and also to those who have suffered abuse or tragedy. It is not
a literary field specifically, but an interdisciplinary field of study that has
become important to literary studies. Trauma theory is particularly interested
in how trauma manifests itself both for individuals and for communities, how
it relates to questions of place and history, how it is exorcised, and its long-
term consequences. The latter has led to the development of the idea of
inherited trauma – a concern for how nations, communities and individuals
pass on traumatic experiences to later generations. This is particularly
relevant to discussions of the Holocaust, but also to colonialism and slavery,
where the long-term effects of widespread abuse can be seen to be carried by
later generations.

By concerning itself with past experiences, trauma theory also has some
overlap with what is referred to as memory studies. Memory studies are
concerned for the ways in which our relationship to the past is itself a kind of
narrative. In her discussion of Holocaust trauma, Hirsch introduces the term
‘postmemory’ to explain inherited trauma: the idea that trauma can exceed
remembrance. At the same time, trauma theory examines memory in the light
of postmodern ideas of history, concerned for the ways in which individual
and collective remembrance is shaped by particular experiences, the identity
of the individual and social forces. For example, Cathy Caruth’s landmark
study Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996)
introduces the term ‘belatedness’ to describe the ways in which trauma is
accessed, not in the moment of its occurrence but only when it is returned to
via memory. Trauma exists thus not in the moment of the event but in its
aftermath.

In terms of literature, we can think about the ways in which narratives

foreground this subjective experience. For example, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway (1925), the character of Septimus Smith is haunted by his wartime
experiences and can be read through the lens of trauma theory: we might ask
questions about how his experience in London shapes his remembrance of
trauma, how his treatment by the medical profession exacerbates his
symptoms, and how his memory shapes a particular narrative of his
experience. The latter is part of a wider concern with memory in the novel:
the socialite Clarissa Dalloway is also haunted by her past and frequently
returns to it, so that past and present often seem indistinguishable. This non-
linear temporality is shaped by the novel’s modernist prose (see Chapter 7),
as stream of consciousness allows Woolf to focus on the internal experience
of characters against the official time of the external world. Literary concern
for trauma and memory is therefore particularly concerned with how modes
of narrative can respond to questions of trauma and the complexities of
representing its various facets.

Mrs Dalloway is also a prime example of how trauma theory and ethical
criticism intersect with psychoanalytic theory. Septimus’s post-war shell
shock has much in common with what Freud defined as hysteria, and which
was in the early twentieth century problematically associated with female
mental health. Woolf’s novel asks questions about the gendering of mental
health diagnoses and treatment: Septimus’s mistreatment at the hands of a
medical establishment that seems unable to empathize with his condition is in
strong contrast in the novel with the somewhat unlikely psychological
connection that Clarissa feels for this man she does not even know. More
recently, Pat Barker has explored these themes in her First World War
Regeneration trilogy, in which questions of homosexuality and class are
intertwined with themes of trauma, again emphasizing the ways in which
mental illness is codified by social background, gender and sexuality.

One of the debates that comes from concern for postmemory and inherited
trauma is precisely who can speak of the trauma of an event: who can do
justice to suffering and who has the right to claim a particular trauma. In the
terms of the Holocaust, the overwhelming nature of the experience –
something so horrific and almost unspeakable – has led some to argue that no
one who has not experienced the Holocaust should represent it. For some,
this right may be extended to the familial inheritors of that trauma, although
this in itself is contentious. These positions resist any development of a
‘genre’ of Holocaust literature as something that might be marketed. At the
same time, there is an equally strong argument to be made for literature as a
creative means of capturing the horror of something that seems almost
unspeakable. In this sense, Holocaust literature has much in common with
narratives of other ‘silenced’ atrocities, particularly slavery.

This is something recognized in Caryl Phillips’s novel The Nature of Blood

(1997), in which a narrative of Holocaust survival is paralleled with stories of
slavery and historic racism to examine the resonating force of prejudice in
society. The reverberating force of trauma that Phillips exposes is a useful
example of how trauma theory emerges out of Holocaust studies: while his
novel is a study of the Holocaust experience, what emerges from this in
conjunction with his other narrative threads is a much broader concern with
the nature of traumatic experience. A text such as The Nature of Blood views
the events of the past through the lens of the present, to understand what we
might learn from them in terms of shaping current relations.

This kind of ethical judgement of the past is sometimes referred to as

presentism. Often used negatively to signify an unfair judgement of the past,
which holds previous generations up to impossible contemporary moral
standards, presentism is important in allowing the future generations of those
who were subject to atrocities to process the inherited trauma of those
experiences. Moreover, it also allows us to relate to the past not as artefact
but, rather, as living intervention into the present. In this respect, ethical
criticism is engaged in complex negotiations of time, which bear similarity
with what Walter Benjamin (1940) calls ‘messianic time’ – an alternative to
clock time in which the past comes to resonate directly with the present.

3 THE RESPONSE TO 9/11

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

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

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

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

Spotlight

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

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

Case study: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

In the wake of 9/11, a number of novels were published that spoke specifically to the
tragedy. These novels also frequently addressed the wider concerns of trauma theory.
A notable example in this regard is Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close. A Jewish American, Foer tells the story of a young boy,
Oskar, whose father is killed in the Twin Towers. The novel tracks Oskar’s attempts
to find the meaning of a mysterious key that he finds in his father’s closet. As he
wanders through New York, Oskar enacts a physical exploration that parallels the
psychological journey he must undertake to come to terms with the loss of his father
in such horrific circumstances. Foer parallels this narrative with the story of Oskar’s
grandparents, survivors of the British bombing of Dresden during the Second World
War. Alongside these two major narratives, we are also given other voices, for
example the transcript of a survivor of the American atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki
in Japan in 1945.

These parallels question the exceptionalist rhetoric surrounding 9/11 in the United
States immediately after the tragedy, by drawing attention to previous crimes,
including those committed by the United States and Britain. At the same time, these
parallels – like those offered by Caryl Phillips – allow the narrative to function not
only as a 9/11 narrative but equally as a larger investigation into the nature of trauma.
Foer is particularly concerned with the place of trauma: as Oskar wanders the city his
movements trace the haunted landscape of New York after the attacks; likewise, his
grandparents spatially isolate themselves from each other by marking out the space in
their New York apartment, physically separating themselves in a way that mimics
their psychological distance from each other as they attempt to come to terms with
their differing experiences of the war.

Transversal poetics
What is at stake in all these projects is a dialogue, a talking across
differences, that is usefully defined by what has most recently been called
transversal poetics, or transversal politics. The term ‘transversal’ is originally
a geometric one, meaning a line that intersects two or more lines at different
points. To think transversally, then, is not simply to think across two different
perspectives but to cross one’s own point of view with multiple alternatives.
In ethical terms, to think transversally is to ask ‘What might this look like
from multiple alterative viewpoints?’ and, indeed, ‘How can one respect
multiple viewpoints in one act?’

This has much in common with feminist ideas of intersectionality, meaning

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

Fact check

1 Who developed the idea of ethical reading as transaction?

a Louise Rosenblatt
b Emmanuel Levinas
c Jacques Derrida
d Ian McEwan
2 In response to which event did Ian McEwan declare a ‘failure of the imagination’?
a The First World War
b The Vietnam War
c 9/11
d Dresden
3 Who developed the idea of the ethico-political?
a Antonio Gramsci
b Gilles Deleuze
c Jacques Derrida
d Emmanuel Levinas
4 What is Levinas’s term for a person different from ourselves?
a Self
b Other
c Man
d Human
 5 What kind of poetics is associated with ethical criticism?
a Transactional
b Transversal
c Transnational
d Translational
6 The controversy surrounding which theorist is central to the development of
ethical criticism?
a Jacques Derrida
b Gilles Deleuze
c Roland Barthes
d Paul de Man
7 Who wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close?
a Will Self
b Charles Dickens
c Ian McEwan
d Jonathan Safran Foer
8 What is the term for the ethical turn in American fiction?
a New meaning
b New truth
c New realism
d New sincerity
9 What other school of theory pertaining to the Second World War is central to
ethical criticism?
a Holocaust studies
b Memory studies
c War studies
d Hiroshima studies
10 What is Holocaust studies a branch of?
a Memory studies
b War studies
c Trauma theory
d Work theory
 Dig deeper

Adamson, Jane et al. (1998), Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy and

Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eaglestone, Robert (1997), Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Hayes, Peter and Roth, John (2010), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. New
York: Oxford University Press.
 18
Genre theory

The idea of genre – the grouping of texts by their essential

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

• differences in terms of harmony, metre and melody

• differences in terms of the moral goodness of the characters
• differences in how the narrative is presented – whether a story is
acted or told.
Aristotle’s form of analysis is the foundation for much genre
criticism today.
The influence of Aristotle
In Poetics Aristotle also suggests that a play should always follow three rules
– what he refers to as the three unities:
1 Unity of action: the narrative of a play should follow one event, and have
minimal subplots.
2 Unity of time: the action of a play should take place over a period of no
more than 24 hours.
3 Unity of place: a play should exist in a single physical space and not
represent more than one place.

Aristotle outlines the key features of the tragic form. Most importantly, the
tragic hero for Aristotle must be four things: good, appropriate, realistic and
consistent. Equally, the drama must have a specific effect on the audience,
inducing what we call catharsis – a tragic pleasure produced when the
audience experiences a strong emotional engagement with the plight of the
tragic hero. This association causes the audience to feel fear or pity for the
hero, so much so that it prompts an emotional release of their own feelings of
anxiety.

Alongside the specific character of the work and its effect, Aristotle outlines
a number of structural features essential to tragedy, relating to plot, the
character of the hero, thoughts and ideas, the words spoken (diction and
melody) and spectacle.

Key ideas

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

Aristotle’s form of analysis is still the foundation for much genre study. It is
concerned with isolating the elements in a literary work that give it a
particular character and for labelling the work on the basis of this character.
Here, as you see, is a method we could use to analyse any literary form –
breaking it down into its constituent parts and examining how each one has
been chosen particularly to match not just the physical form (in the this case
drama) but also the subtype of that form (in this case tragedy).

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Italian and French critics

expanded on Aristotle’s definitions to lay out the format for the structuring of
modern plays. However, English dramatists during this period did not follow
these rules, so Shakespeare, for example, rarely observed the unities in his
plays. The early literary criticism of writers such as John Dryden and Samuel
Johnson analyses Shakespeare against these features, in what can be seen as
an early example of genre criticism. Much as we would do today, Dryden and
Johnson engage in a detailed analysis of Shakespeare’s texts alongside
Aristotle’s theory.

Spotlight

A 2016 edition of the New Oxford Shakespeare credits Christopher Marlowe as co-
author of Henry VI Parts One, Two and Three for the first time, one of 17
Shakespeare plays the series now recognizes as containing contributions from other
playwrights.

The Chicago School

In the 1930s a group of critics known as the Chicago School began to be
heavily influenced by Aristotle’s work, so much so that they are often
referred to also as neo-Arisotelian. The Chicago School was associated with
1930s formalism, but distinguished itself by being interested in the principles
of literature outlined by Aristotle. In his Tragedy and the Theory of Drama
(1961) and The Theory of Comedy (1968), the critic Elder Olson (1909–92)
drew from the group’s development of Aristotle’s principles. Here we can
also see the influence of narratology and its structuralist ideas that were
developing at around the same time (see Chapter 5).

Although the Chicago School began in the 1930s, its ideas were inherited by
a second generation of critics who continued to be concerned with
categorizing literature. In 1957 the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye
(1912–91) published Anatomy of Criticism, in which he conducted a detailed
analysis of literary form based on Aristotle’s work.

‘The question of what the structural principles of literature actually are

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

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

• In epos the author speaks directly to the audience (storytelling).

• In fiction author and audience are hidden from each other.
• In drama the author is hidden from the audience; the audience experiences
content directly.

• In lyric the audience is ‘hidden’ from the author; that is, the speaker is
‘overheard’ by hearers.

Following these earlier works, Mary Doyle Springer’s Forms of the Modern
Novella (1975) outlines how different types of short novel can be grouped by
various different structures. Likewise, Austin Wright’s The Formal Principle
in the Novel (1982) focuses on the idea of ‘conventions’.

The Rhetoric of Fiction

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

Spotlight

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

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

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

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

‘Without the Canon, we cease to think.’

Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994)

Spotlight

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

William Shakespeare Charles Dickens

Dante Alighieri George Eliot
Geoffrey Chaucer Leo Tolstoy
Miguel de Cervantes Henrik Ibsen
Michel de Montaigne Sigmund Freud
Molière Marcel Proust
John Milton James Joyce
Samuel Johnson Virginia Woolf
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Franz Kafka
William Wordsworth Jorge Luis Borges
Jane Austen Pablo Neruda
Walt Whitman Fernando Pessoa
Emily Dickinson Samuel Beckett
Bloom’s narrow vision has been widely criticized by both postcolonial and
feminist critics, but the presence of such work long after Booth’s critique
suggests how ingrained such attitudes continue to be.

For Booth, realism is an attempt to create what he calls simulation: the sense
that the action goes on without authorial invention or presence. In doing this,
Booth says, we lose sight of the author as an ever-present force who exists as
a voice within the novel. This author is not ‘real’ but an imagined presence:
what Booth calls the ‘implied author’.

Key idea

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

Rather than being concerned with types, Booth suggests that we should
concern ourselves with variations in narrative, and the effects these may
have. This echoes Frye’s earlier work on the idea of presentation. To this end,
Booth outlines what he sees as five different types of relationship between
the narrator and the text:
1 The narrator may be more or less distant from the implied author, and this
distance may be moral, intellectual or temporal.
2 The narrator may be more or less distant from the characters. The narrator
may differ intellectually, morally or temporally from them and their
norms.
3 The narrator may be more or less distant from the reader and the reader’s
norms. This distance may be physical, emotional or moral.
4 The implied author may be more or less distant from the reader, a
distance that may be intellectual, moral or aesthetic. A book that expects
the reader to accept and share these values is unlikely to be well received
by its audience.
5 The implied author (carrying the reader along) may be more or less
 distant from the other characters. Distances can also be seen to fluctuate,
where a character might alternate between sympathetic and
unsympathetic.

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

The role of the reader

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

‘Popular’ literatures
Aristotle’s concern for not simply the form (drama) but also the type of form
(tragedy or comedy) has driven a contemporary interest in the idea of genre
that has expanded to be concerned not only with literary genres such as
drama, poetry and the novel but also with the characteristics of varying forms
within these genres. In novel criticism it is common to speak of genre not in
terms of the novel but, rather, in terms of the type of novel. In some criticism,
‘genre’ is reserved for describing works that do not contain all the features of
literary fiction, and that instead have a strong thematic identity such as
detective fiction, romance, fantasy fiction or science fiction. Of course, to
make this distinction is a false one because literary fiction is itself a genre,
with features that can be identified in order to categorize it.

Case study: Bleak House

When you think of the nineteenth-century author Charles Dickens, do you think of the
literary or the popular? Do you think of literary fiction or of genre fiction?

In 2012 The Economist published an infographic that laid out as a bar chart the sales
of Dickens’s works during his own lifetime. This was based on a study produced by
Robert Patten in 1978 entitled Charles Dickens and his Publishers. What the chart
shows is that between 1846 and 1870, Dickens had sold fewer than 20,000 copies of
Hard Times (first published in 1854) but more than 750,000 copies of Bleak House,
first published only two years earlier.

Bleak House tops the chart, but what do these figures actually mean? In 2015 E. L.
James sold more than a million copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, while Harper Lee’s Go
Set a Watchman sold just under 350,000. This seems to put Dickens to shame. Yet in
2015 the UK population was over 64.5 million people, compared to just over 27
million in 1850. Moreover, the nature of book sales has changed dramatically in the
past 150 years: a book like Fifty Shades of Grey sold quickly after publication, driven
by media exposure, but we can question whether it will in the long term achieve the
success of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which has to date sold around 200 million
copies.

More useful, then, is to consider how Dickens’s sales compared to sales of popular
works during his lifetime and literary works today. A first literary novel today sells
between 3,000 and 7,000 copies. In Dickens’s time, cheap romance and detective
fictions, published often as ‘penny dreadfuls’ (a term coined to explain their cost and
content) might far exceed the sales of Dickens’s work, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde sold an impressive 40,000 copies in the six
months following its publication in 1886. Yet Dickens’s own sales compared
favourably to those of other literary novelists at the time, such as Walter Scott (whose
first print runs were only 10,000 copies). When Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers was
initially printed in serial form, the magazine publishing it began to sell 20,000 copies
a month.

Is Bleak House a popular novel, then, or a literary one? The complexity of sales
makes it difficult accurately to say. What is evident, however, is that what we now see
as classic literature was far from obscure in its own period. In this context, it would be
foolish to see the bestseller as separate from the literary.

Reserving the term ‘genre criticism’ for works that are not seen to be literary
fiction returns the critic to earlier debates regarding the value of the popular.
As discussed in Chapter 4, for Adorno and the Frankfurt School mass culture
is a means of social control to be resisted. The early proponents of cultural
studies, such as the cultural materialist Raymond Williams, still saw popular
culture as representing much work of poor quality. They departed from the
Frankfurt School, however, by stressing that, although some of this work is
not attractive to academics, it has value as a democratic force that opens ideas
up to a wider population.

This follows the cultural materialist idea, discussed in Chapter 15, that
literature can act as a radical force for change. In the wake of this work, it is
not less common to see genre referred to pejoratively or to reserve it for ‘non-
literary’ works. Instead, we tend to describe these works as popular texts in
order to acknowledge their appeal to large audiences. Although some critics
might still use this term to distinguish such works from the literary, there is
an increasing interest not only in how these lines blur but also on how they
are artificially created by the media and the publishing industry. In
Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900 (2008), Clive Bloom (1953– )
outlines the genres most popular in the last hundred years and also traces the
development of ‘hybrid genres’ that have complicated the rigid boundaries of
earlier genre criticism. Alongside this book, Bloom has published a number
of studies examining specific genres such as horror and detective fiction.
Similarly, the critic Janice Radway (1949– ) has been particularly influential
in the study of romance – her book Reading the Romance (1984) uses reader
response criticism to test women’s responses to popular romance. Radway’s
work has considered how popular fiction might form social attitudes, and
whether these do indeed suggest the kind of conformity presented by the
Frankfurt School or something more complex. While it is beyond the limits
of this chapter to survey in detail the work on all the various popular fiction
genres, a wide range of scholarship is available.

Fact check

1 In what year was Anatomy of Criticism first published?

a 1965
b 1955
c 1957
d 1975
2 What is the name of Aristotle’s study of tragedy?
a Tragedy
b Poetics
c Poetry
d Drama
3 Who wrote, ‘Without the Canon, we cease to think’?
a Clive Bloom
b Harold Bloom
c Northrup Frye
d Wayne Booth
4 How many canonical authors are listed in The Western Canon?
a 24
b 26
c 28
d 30
5 Who wrote The Rhetoric of Fiction?
a Clive Bloom
b Harold Bloom
c Northrup Frye
d Wayne Booth
6 On what genre of popular literature does Janice Radway write?
 a Romance
b Crime
c Mystery
d Fantasy
7 Whose theory is mass culture theory?
a The Frankfurt School
b Poststructuralism
c Marxism
d Postmodernism
8 How many type of relationship between narrator and reader are outlined in The
Rhetoric of Fiction?
a Two
b Three
c Four
d Five
9 What is the genre theory term for the imagined author?
a Real
b Imagined
c Affected
d Implied
10 To what feature of tragedy does the Greek term mythos refer?
a Drama
b Speech
c Action
d Plot

Dig deeper

Bloom, Clive (2008), Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Dowd, Garin et al., eds (2006), Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism.
Bristol: Intellect.
Gelder, Ken (2004), Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field.
London: Routledge.
 19
Ecocriticism

The newest and most strongly emerging field of criticism

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

‘What’s the use of becoming animal of the child? What is extra being good
for? Strictly speaking: nothing. But invented styles of taking flight,
improvised ways of surpassing the given in exploratory lived abstraction,
experimental orbits of escape from known situations and their generic
themes, might suggest, by analogy, creative lines of flight out of other
situations where a heavy dependence on the already-expressed imposes itself
with a life-crushing weight of the imperative to conform.’

Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014)

The word ‘ecocriticism’ itself was first used in 1978 by the critic William
Rueckert in his essay ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in
Ecocriticism’ and there now exists an established body of work focused on
ecocriticism, including The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the
Environment (2010) and The Ecocriticism Reader (1996).

Early ecocritical approaches focus on the role of the environment in

literature, an interest that can be taken back as far as Raymond Williams’s
The Country and the City (1973). It is concerned with how literature
represents the environment and how this might contribute to understanding
the environmental crises of the contemporary world. Recent ecocriticism has
moved beyond the concern for the environment to questions about the human
as a part of the ecosystem. In particular, ecocriticism ask questions about
anthropocentrism – the way in which human thinking is centred on the
human subject and how this shapes our perspective on the world and our
treatment of it.
 Key idea

Anthropocentrism is human-centred thinking.

THE PROBLEM OF SCALE

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

‘One symptom of a now widespread crisis of scale is a derangement of

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

The death of nature

Early ecocritical responses tend to posit culture and nature as binary
opposites, the former being a human-made world of ideas and built spaces,
the latter being a tangible physical space that we can locate, rooted in plant
and carbon-based forms. That it is hard, in fact, to describe the latter without
using the word ‘natural’ or ‘nature’ shows how powerful this opposition has
become. Later ecocriticism, however, has complicated the idea of nature by
suggesting that it is itself a human-made construction – a kind of ideal space
imagined in opposition to the human world. Although this comes much closer
to poststructuralist thinking than earlier ecocritical work, it still puts forward
the idea that there is a real, physical space that is more than just imagined or
conceived of through language.

Like postcolonial criticism and feminism, then, ecocriticism can be seen as

part of a wave of theories that returns us to the materiality of the world and
asks us to think about literature’s relationship to that materiality. In this
respect, ecocriticism is about much more than the environment. Anthony Paul
Smith (2013), heavily influenced by the French philosopher François
Laruelle’s non-philosophy, defines this approach as an ‘ecology of thought’.
By this he means not simply to think about the environment but to take this as
an invitation to think differently.

Key ideas

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

Ecocriticism is a thought exercise, quite different from engaging in an

ecological literary criticism focused on tracing environmental themes in
literary works or establishing the influence of literature on ecological
thinking. Rather than restricting itself to these spheres, the power of
ecocriticism lies in its disruptive, questioning possibilities. Smith argues that
these have the potential to revise the fields of philosophy and theology. They
might also, however, equally offer the opportunity to shape any field of
theory concerned with the idea of human and identity politics. In this context
the environment is not the essential part of the theory: it is, instead, a
contributor to its development.

One of the criticisms of reading the environment in these terms is that it

makes the environment a metaphor for a wider political engagement, where
the human again becomes what is at stake. Critics of this approach argue that
we should allow the environment to stand for what it is, rather than always
making it stand for human interests. They argue that the latter never really
gets us away from the damaging hierarchies of old-fashioned humanism.

Critiquing the human

It is this relationship to the human, however, that is the value of ecological
thinking to identity politics. Thinking through the environment strikes at the
core of definitions of the human, which are implicated in thinking about
racial, gendered and disabled identities in particular. To invoke an ecological
way of thinking in the service of identity politics is to recognize ecocritique
with the potential to create new modes of identity. Smith argues that it is only
this kind of ecological thought that can counter the recourse to humanism that
exists in even the most radical contemporary philosophy.

For other ecocritics, ecological thought has an explicitly political function.

Bruno Latour (2004), for example, sees ecological crises as central to
political crises – borne out in the events of the Arab Spring, for example,
which environmentalists have argued were in part driven by climate change.
For Latour, it is not enough simply to reconcile humanity and nature: there
must be a radical rethinking of the very idea of nature and its relation to
questions of politics. Understanding the non-human, Latour argues, means
having to engage in a democratic process of equal rights. The result of this
means an acceptance of democracy more generally as ethical government.
More widely, it means a commitment to a genuine and inclusive democracy.

ECOLOGICAL FORM
What is the particular relevance of this theory for literary studies? Implied
within the idea of ecological thought is the suggestion that there might also
be an ecological form. Following the work of Angus Fletcher on American
poetry in his book A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the
Environment and the Future of Imagination (2004), Timothy Morton in
Ecology without Nature (2009) makes a call for what he calls an ‘ambient
poetics’: a way in which the form of narrative may suggest a particular, open
and expansive relationship to nature.

Central to ambient poetics, for Morton, is what he terms ‘ecomimesis’: a

scrupulous attention to the environment instead of the person. In its weakest
form, this mimesis exists whenever a place is described; when a writer
engages with landscape and place, they shift the reader’s focus away from
their anthropocentrism.

Key ideas

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

In a stronger form, ambient poetics gives literature a profound ambience, a

deep sense of place and ‘situatedness’. It transforms representation. Morton
describes this as a process where place is not simply copied but, rather, is
remade as a ‘compelling illusion’. This means that fiction that engages with
the ecocritical cannot be straightforwardly realist.

Morton outlines six features of an ambient work. The first, rendering,

suggests an attempt ‘to simulate reality itself’. The second, medial writing,
describes the way in which the form of writing, particularly its visual
appearance, means that ‘contact becomes content’. This means that the form
of the piece becomes its meaning, rather than merely reflecting or enhancing
it. This is followed by the timbral, which explains the musicality of the form,
the Aeolian, which pertains to a text’s presence outside subject or author, and
then tone, described as a ‘quality of vibration’. These later features are
expressed by use of parentheses, hyphen and the placement of words on a
page, as well as their rhythm.
The final element of ambient poetics is defined by what Morton calls ‘re-
mark’ – ‘a kind of echo’ – which might be seen as similar to a modernist
leitmotif. The purpose of such echoes is to bring spaces and the voices within
them in from the margins – to destroy the notion of the ‘in-between’ and
instead demand that the marginal voice is allowed relevance to political and
ethical decisions. It is with this final factor that the relationship between
ambient poetics and other identity theories becomes clearer. For the ambient
text is a spokesperson for the politics of recognition. It demands that voices
are heard and uses form to speak to this, not simply in the specific terms of
the environment but also as a more universal politics.

BECOMING ANIMAL
The ecocritical focus on the human can also be seen as an extension of the
posthuman project, in that it asks questions about the relationships between
humans, animals and the environment. It therefore takes ideas such as Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) ‘becoming
animal’ and Brian Massumi’s concept of ‘playing animality’ (2014) and
considers how these ideas might shape our understanding of literature.

A key philosophical engagement with the animal comes in Derrida’s essay

‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ (2002). In this essay,
Derrida describes how the encounter with a cat (or any animal) asks us to
consider our own body. Naked in front of the cat, his embarrassment
distinguishes him from the animal, whose nakedness does not exist because
an animal has never thought to dress itself: in ‘nature’ there is no nudity. In
the encounter with the animal, Derrida declares, we come to see the absolute
other, and to think what it means for that other to look at us.

‘The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done
more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbour than
these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.’
 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ (2002)

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

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

Spotlight

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

Haraway argues that we must attempt an ‘other-worlding’ in our encounters –

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

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

Case Study: The Flood

A model of ecological thought centred on the animal can be found in Maggie Gee’s
The Flood (2005), a dystopian fiction set in the near future. The city in the novel is a
socially divided one, and in the affluent north nature has overtaken ecology,
dominated by a large zoo and the cultivated Kew Gardens. In the city, ‘exquisitely
expensive animal parts’ are sold as commodities and animals are dispensable. Yet as
flood waters rise, this human-centred nature is transformed into an ecosystem.
Animals invade the city. Meanwhile, the humans encounter their own becoming
animal: the painter Ian at the zoo bares his skin to the air to show the inhabitants that
he is also an animal, a young child named Gerda attacks her mother ‘like a beaten
dog’, and a woman called Moira lies on the floor with her Labrador and howls.

Gee repeatedly uses animal similes to cement a figurative association that bonds
human and non-human animal together. So follows a series of human–animal
transformations: a computer simulation of a tidal wave where people ‘struggled like
ants’, Lola and Gracie prowling the streets like panthers. At the end of the novel, it is
Gerda, the most animal, who saves a young boy from drowning; what rescues him is
not human logic but animal instinct.

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

In the humanities, the Anthropocene is usually used to denote the profound

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

Key idea

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

Novels such as The Flood use becoming animal as a way to question the
Anthropocene and imagine a future beyond its narrow self-interest. Yet the
politics of becoming animal is not unique to Gee. It is also evident, for
example, in Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2006), where the objectification of
animals runs alongside hints of racist violence, where the young boy Magnus
imagines himself both as a hologram but then as a dog, with a dog brain, and
then as a series of animals. It can be seen in Jill Dawson’s The Tell-Tale
Heart (2014), in which a man who is the recipient of a heart transplant comes
to understand the mutability of identity and alongside it sees his children
transformed by their ‘animal aliveness’, and in the opening chapter to Diana
Evans’s 26a (2005), where the children’s hamster, Ham, is embodied with a
consciousness that comes to foreshadow the novel’s tragic ending, but also
stands as a statement of a thinking and connection beyond difference,
resonant with the novel’s representation of mixed-race identities. Evans’s
work uses magical realism to open the way to the animal in a strategy also
evident in Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys (2006). Gaiman’s novel is the story of
Fat Charlie: half-man, half-spider, son of the spider God Anansi but living a
‘human’ life in contemporary London, a space where Charlie’s Afro-
Caribbean roots strongly inflect his life, but neither skin colour nor animality
seems to register. Like postcolonial literature, these texts seem to suggest that
the alternative politics of ecocriticism also requires its own alternative literary
form.

Spotlight

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

It is fitting that this book’s final chapter is on such a perspective. In many

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

Fact check

1 Anthropocentric means centred on what?

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

Dig deeper

Buell, Lawrence (2009), The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental

Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Coupe, Laurence (2000), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to
Ecocriticism. London: Routledge.
Garrard, Greg (2012), Ecocriticism. Abingdon: Routledge.
 Conclusion
The title of Terry Eagleton’s book After Theory (2003) suggests that theory is
something of the past. Eagleton suggests that ‘theory’ – which here means
not just literary theory but cultural theory more widely – ceased to be
dominant in the 1980s. It was at this time that the so-called ‘theory wars’
took place. These were a series of debates about the relevance of theory,
which engaged high-profile academics at institutions both in the United
States and the UK. In this moment, theory appeared to be dynamic and
cutting edge. Moreover, it was where politics happened; it was the
intellectual location for the most transgressive, disruptive and radical thought.

The decline of theory, for Eagleton, can be explained by its refusal to take on
the responsibility of this political mandate – to address issues of morality and
ethics, and most of all to question capitalism. Theory, Eagleton argues,
became lazy and self-indulgent. It turned towards the playfulness of
postmodernism and away from the critiques of power it was also capable of
carrying.

Eagleton is certainly correct that theory no longer seems to attract the kind of
attention it did during this earlier period. Moreover, his view is supported by
a resurgence of approaches centred on the text outside the kinds of political
and social contexts that drive contemporary theories such as postmodernism,
postcolonialism and queer theory. In his book Reading after Theory (2002),
Valentine Cunningham argues for a reading beyond theory. He wants a
reading based on the senses: the possibility of touching the text, of an
intimate communion between reader and word.

As the early chapters of this book illustrate, however, what we call theory is
in the contemporary period often indissoluble from what we call criticism.
The kind of formalism that Cunningham celebrates is also a kind of theory,
and it is perhaps more threatening than Eagleton gives it credit for: it has
shaped the textual concerns of structuralism and poststructuralism, and it is
the raw material to which reader response critics and those in politically
oriented schools of theory respond. When one reads Reading after Theory it
is impossible not to think of new materialism and its engagement with the
physicality of the book, with the embodied experience of reading. Likewise,
renewed interest in historicist readings exists now only in the wake of new
historicist and cultural materialist theory: such readings can never be innocent
of the theoretical discussions that have shaped their current form.

Anti-theory, then, is also theory. And while theory as it exists today may lack
the kind of political dynamism Eagleton desires, it also speaks much more
widely and democratically than it could if it functioned only in the defined
ways that he suggests.

In this sense, the debate about whether theory is still relevant is an irrelevant
one. Ideas that give our reading purpose and frameworks that offer us variety
in how and why we read will be useful for as long as we are looking to
engage the literary text in new ways and explore it in more depth. The future
of theory may not be solely within the confines of those ideas emerging from
European philosophy, or those that engage with the responses of diverse
readerships, or those that function as politics. Rather, the future of theory
may lie in an ever-expanding sense of multiple routes of enquiry and multiple
voices – voices that stretch beyond those we have heard before, and even
beyond the human.

All in all, there is no better time to be a literary critic.

 References
Aarseth, Espen J. (1997), Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Abrams, J. J. and Dorst, Doug (2013), S. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (2009), ‘The Danger of a Single Story’.

TEDGlobal. https://www.ted.com/​talks/​
chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en

Agard, John (1996), ‘Half-Caste’, Why Is the Sky? London: Faber & Faber.

Ahmad, Aijaz (1992), In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. London:

Verso.

Alcott, Louisa May (1868), Little Women. Boston: Roberts Bros.

Althusser, Louis (1970), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes

towards an Investigation)’. In L. Althusser, ed. (1971), Lenin and Philosophy
and other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1991), ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in
Postcolonial?’ Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter), 336–57.

Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the

Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso

Arnold, Matthew (1869), Culture and Anarchy. London: Smith, Elder and
Co.

Ashcroft, Bill, Tiffin, Helen and Griffiths, Gareth (1989), The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.

Attridge, Derek and Staten, Henry (2008), ‘Reading for the Obvious in
Poetry: A Conversation’. World Picture 2.
http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/​WP_2/​Attridge_Staten.html
Auerbach, Eric (1946), Mimesis. Bern: A. Francke.

Austen, Jane (1813), Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. London: T. Egerton.

— (1814), Mansfield Park. London: T. Egerton.

Barnes, Julian (1998), England, England. London: Jonathan Cape.

Barrett, Michèle (1988), Women's Oppression Today: The Marxist/​Feminist

Encounter. London: Verso.

Barthes, Roland (1957), Mythologies. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

— ‘The Death of the Author’. Reprinted in (1977) Image-Music-Text, trans.

Stephen Heath. London: Flamingo.

— (1970), S/Z. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Baudrillard, Jean (1983), Simulations. trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip
Beitchman. New York: Semiotexte.

— (1991), The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Paris: Éditions Galilée.

Baum, L. Frank, (1907), Ozma of Oz. Chicago: Reilly & Britton Co.

Beecher Stowe, Harriet (1852), Uncle Tom’s Cabin. London: Clarke & Co.

Belsey, Catherine (1988), John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. Oxford:

Basil Blackwell.

Benjamin, Walter (1940), ‘On the Concept of History’. In Walter Benjamin:

Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–40 (2006). Harvard: Harvard University
Press.

Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas (2016), An Introduction to Literature,

Criticism and Theory, 4th edn. London: Routledge.

Bertens, Hans (2008), Literary Theory: The Basics, 2nd edn. London:
Routledge.

Bhabha, Homi (1990), Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.

— (1994), The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Bloom, Clive (2008), Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900, 2nd edn.
Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Bloom, Harold (1994), The Western Canon: The Books and School of the
Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Booth, Wayne C. (1983), The Rhetoric of Fiction, rev. edn. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977), ‘Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction’. In

Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education,
Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice. London: Sage.

— (1979), Distinction (La Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement). Paris:

Éditions de Minuit.

Brah, Avtar (1996), Cartographies of Diaspora. London: Routledge.

Braidotti, Rosi (2013), The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.

Brontë, Emily (1847), Wuthering Heights: A Novel. London: Thomas Cautley

Newby.

Brontë, Charlotte (1847), Jane Eyre. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.

— (1993), Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge.

— (2004), Undoing Gender. London: Routledge.

Carter, Paul (1987), The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History.
London: Faber & Faber.

Caruth, Cathy (1996), Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and

History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Césaire, Aimé (1969), A Tempest (Une Tempête). Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Cixous, Hélene (1976), ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith and Paula
Cohen, Signs, 1.4 (Summer), 875–93.

Clark, Timothy (2010), The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the

Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

— (2012), ‘Derangements of Scale’. In Tom Cohen, ed., Telemorphosis:

Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1. Michigan: Open Humanities
Press.

— (2015), Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold

Concept. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Coetzee, J. M. (1986), Foe. London: Secker & Warburg.

Cohen, Jeffrey, ed. (1996), Monster Theory. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Connor, Steven (1989), Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories

of the Contemporary. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Conrad, Joseph (1899), Heart of Darkness. Serialized Blackwood's

Edinburgh Magazine. Reprinted 1902.

Culler, Jonathan (1975), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and

the Study of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

— The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul.

— Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Cunningham, Valentine (2002), Reading after Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

Dangarembga, Tsitsi (1988), Nervous Conditions. London: Women’s Press.

Danielewski, Mark Z. (2000), House of Leaves. London: Anchor.

Davis, Lennard J. (1997), The Disability Studies Reader. London: Routledge.

Dawkins, Richard (1976), The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Dawson, Jill (2014), The Tell-Tale Heart. London: Sceptre.

de Beauvoir, Simone (1962), The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Paishley. London:

New English Library.

Defoe, Daniel (1719), Robinson Crusoe. London: J. Roberts.

Deleuze, Gilles (2006), ‘May ’68 Did Not Take Place’. In David Lapoujade,
ed., Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995, trans. Ames
Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotexte.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1977), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New
York: Viking Press.

— (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

DeLillo, Don (1988), Libra. London: Penguin.

— (1997), Underworld. London: Picador.

Dennett, Daniel C. (1991), Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin.

Derrida, Jacques (1966), ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences’. Public Lecture, Johns Hopkins University, 21 October.

— (1967), Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays of Husserl’s Theory of

Signs (La voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la
phénoménologie de Husserl). Paris: n.pub.

— (1967), Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie). Paris: Éditions de

Minuit.

— (1967), Writing and Difference (L'Écriture et la différence). Paris: n.pub.

— (1982), ‘Difference’. In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass.

Chicago: Chicago University Press.

— (1993), Spectres of Marx (Spectres de Marx). Paris: Galilée.

— (2002), ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, Critical

Inquiry, 28.2 (Winter), 369–418.

D’Haen, Theo and Bertens, Hans (1994), Liminal Postmodernisms: The

Postmodern, the (Post-) Colonial, and the (Post-)Feminist. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.

Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan, eds (1985), Political Shakespeare:

New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.

Dunn, Nell (1963), Up the Junction. London: MacGibbon & Kee.

Eagleton, Mary (1991), Feminist Literary Criticism. London: Longman.

Eagleton, Terry (2003), After Theory. New York: Basic Books.

Eagleton, Terry, ed. (1994), Ideology. London: Longman.

Earnshaw, Steven (2000), ‘Novel Voices’. In Clive Bloom and Gary Day,
eds, Literature and Culture in Modern Britain. Vol. 3: 1956–99. London:
Longman.
Eliot, T. S. (1922), The Waste Land. New York: Boni and Liveright.

— (1942), ‘The Music of Poetry’. Glasgow: Glasgow University

Publications.

Empson, William (1930), Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto &

Windus.

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds (1983), Realism and Consensus in the English

Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Evans, Diana (2005), 26a. London: Chatto & Windus.

Fanon, Franz (1967), Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lam
Markmann. London: Pluto.

Fish, Laura (2008), Strange Music. London: Jonathan Cape.

Fish, Stanley (1980), Is There a Text in this Class? Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.

Fletcher, Angus (2004), A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the
Environment, and the Future of Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.

Forster, E. M. (1971), Maurice: A Novel. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Foucault, Michel (1975), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison). Paris: Gallimard.

— (1978), The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley. New York:

Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel (1986), ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics
16 (Spring), 22–7.

Frank, Anne (1947), The Diary of a Young Girl. London: Vallentine Mitchell.
Freud, Sigmund (1919), ‘The Uncanny’. Reprinted (1976) in New Literary
History 7 (Spring), 619–45.

— (1899), The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung). Leipzig and

Vienna: Franz Deuticke.

Friedan, Betty (1963), The Feminine Mystique. London: Victor Gollancz.

Frye, Northrop (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

Fukyama, Francis (1992), The End of History and the Last Man. New York:
Free Press.

Fuller, David (2006), 'William Empson: From Verbal Analysis to Cultural

Criticism'. In Patricia Waugh, ed., Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford
Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gaiman, Neil (2001), American Gods. London: Headline.

— (2006), Anansi Boys. London: Headline Review.

Garréta, Anne (1986), Sphinx. Paris: Bernard Grasset.

Gee, Maggie (2005), The Flood. London: Saqi.

Genet, Jean (1943), Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman.
London: Paladin.

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

Cambridge University Press.

Ghosh, Ranjan, ed. (2006), (In)fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation,

Limits: (In)fusionising a Few Indian English Novels. Lanham: University
Press of America.

Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan (1979), The Mad Woman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New
Haven: Yale University Press.

Gilroy, Paul (1993), Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures.
London: Serpent's Tail.

— Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line.

Cambridge: Belknap Press.

Glotfelty, Cheryll and Fromm, Harold, eds (1996), The Ecocriticism Reader:
Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens, GA, and London: University of
Georgia Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen (1980), Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to

Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

— (1988), Shakespeare Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in

Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon.

Halberstam, Jack (1998), Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University

Press.

Hall, Stuart (1973), Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. n.p:
University of Birmingham.

Haraway, Donna (1985), ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology,

and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review 15.2, 65–107.

— (2008), When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis

Press.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000), Empire. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.

Hardy, Thomas (1886), The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a
Man of Character. London: Macmillan & Co.

— (1891), Tess of the D’Urbervilles. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine

& Co.
Hebdige, Dick (1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge.

Heidegger, Martin (1927), Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). n.p. n.pub.

— (1935), ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. Reprinted in (1971) Poetry,

Language Thought. New York: Harper & Row.

— (1936), ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’. Reprinted in (1949)

Existence and Being. Chicago: Henry Regnery.

— (1950), ‘Language’ (‘Die Sprache’). Public lecture.

Hirsch, Marianne (2012), The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual

Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hoggart, Richard (1957), The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class

Life. London: Penguin.

Hollingurst, Alan (2004), The Line of Beauty. London: Bloomsbury.

Hooks, Bell (1981), Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London:
Pluto.

Huggan, Graham (2001), The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins.

New York: Routledge.

Hulme, Keri (1983), The Bone People. London: Picador.

Hutcheon, Linda (1989), The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.

Irigaray, Luce (1985), Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press.

— (1985), This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.

— (1991), ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, trans. David Macey. In
Margaret Whitford, ed., The Irigaray Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

Iser, Wolfgang (1972), The Implied Reader. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.

— (1976), The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Ishiguro, Kazuo (2005), Never Let Me Go. London: Faber & Faber.

Jackson, Holbrook (1913), The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas
at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. London: Grant Richards.

Jacques, Juliet (2015), Trans: A Memoir. London: Verso.

Jakobson, Roman (1956), ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of

Aphasia Disturbance’. In Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals
of Language. The Hague: Mouton & Co.

James, David and Seshagiri, Urmila (2014), ‘Metamodernism: Narratives of

Continuity and Revolution’, PMLA 129.1, 87–100.

James, Henry (1898), The Turn of the Screw (A Tale). London: W.

Heinemann.

— (1903), The Beast in the Jungle. London: Methuen.

Jameson, Fredric (1991), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism. London: Verso.

Johnson, B. S. (1969), The Unfortunates. London: Panther.

Joyce, James (1922), Ulysses. London: Egoist Press.

— (1939), Finnegans Wake. London: Faber.

Kay, Jackie (1998), Trumpet. London: Picador.

Kristeva, Julia (1966), ‘Word, Dialogue and the Novel’. First printed (1969)
in Recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

— (1980), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Kunzru, Hari (2002), The Impressionist. London: Hamish Hamilton.

— (2004), Transmission. London: Penguin.

Kureishi, Hanif (1995), The Black Album. London: Faber & Faber.

Lacan, Jacques (1966), Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

LaCapra, Dominick (1994), Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory,

Trauma. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press

Latour, Bruno (2004), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into
Democracy. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Leavis, F. R. (1948), The Great Tradition. London: Chatto & Windus.

Lessing, Doris (1963), ‘To Room Nineteen’. In A Man and Two Women.
London: Paladin.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1969), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority,

trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Lukács, Georg (1937), The Historical Novel. London: Merlin Press.

— (1950), Studies in European Realism. London: Merlin Press.

Lyotard, Jean-François (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.

McBride, Eimear (2013), A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Norwich: Galley

Beggar Press.
McEwan, Ian (2001), Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape.

— (2001), ‘Only Love and then Oblivion’, The Guardian, 15 September.

— (2005), Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape.

McGregor, Jon (2002), If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. London:

Bloomsbury.

— (2012), This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You.
London: Bloomsbury.

Marx, Karl (1867), Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist

Production. New York: L. W. Schmidt.

Massumi, Brian (2014), What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Durham:

Duke University Press.

Mbembé, Achille (2001), On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Millett, Kate (1969), Sexual Politics. London: Virago.

Moi, Toril (1985), Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Methuen.

Montgomery, Lucy M. (1908), Anne of Green Gables. London: Sir Isaac

Pitman & Sons.

Morrison, Toni (1992), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

— (1987), Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

— (1997), Paradise. London: Chatto & Windus.

Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16.3,
6–18.
Murdoch, Iris (1954), Under the Net. London: Vintage.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1883), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach

Zarathustra). n.p.: Ernst Schmeitzner.

Okri, Ben (1991), The Famished Road. London: Vintage.

Olson, Elder (1961), Tragedy and the Theory of Drama. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.

— (1968), The Theory of Comedy. Bloomington and London: Indiana

University Press.

Osborne, John (1957), The Entertainer. London: Faber.

Oyeyemi, Helen (2005), The Icarus Girl. London: Bloomsbury.

Pater, Walter (1873), Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London:

Macmillan & Co.

— (1917), ‘Art for Art's Sake: Its Fallacy and Viciousness’, The Art World
2.2 (May), 98–102.

Patrick, Morag (1997), Derrida, Responsibility and Politics. Aldershot:

Ashgate.

Peeters, Benoit (2010), Derrida. Paris: Flammarion.

Phillips, Caryl (1997), The Nature of Blood. London: Faber & Faber.

— (2015), The Lost Child. London: Oneworld.

Platt, Len and McHale, Brian (2016), The Cambridge History of Postmodern
Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Platt, Len and Upstone, Sara (2015), Postmodern Literature and Race.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pratt, Mary Louise (1992), Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation. London: Routledge.

Proulx, Annie (1997), ‘Brokeback Mountain’, The New Yorker 13 October,

74–85.

Radway, Janice A. (1984), Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and

Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Rhys, Jean (1966), Wide Sargasso Sea. André Deutsch.

Rich, Adrienne (1980), ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian

Existence’, Signs 5.4, Women: Sex and Sexuality (1980), 631–60.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. (1938), Literature as Exploration. New York: D.

Appleton-Century Co.

Roy, Arundhati (1998), The God of Small Things. London: Harper Perennial.

Rueckert, William (1996), ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in

Ecocriticism’. In Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds, The Ecocriticism
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: The University of Georgia
Press.

Rushdie, Salman (1981), Midnight’s Children. London: Picador.

— (1988), The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage.

— (1999), The Ground Beneath Her Feet. London: Jonathan Cape.

Sadrin, Anny (1994), Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles

Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Safran Foer, Jonathan (2005), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. London:
Hamish Hamilton.

Said, Edward (1978), Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

— (1993), Culture and Imperialism. London: Knopf.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1938), La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard.

— (1946), ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’. Public lecture. Reprinted in

Walter Kaufman, ed. (1989), Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre. New
York: Meridian Company.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

— (1990), Epistemology of the Closet. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Showalter, Elaine (1991), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de
Siècle. London: Bloomsbury.

Sim, Stuart (2000), Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History. London:

Routledge.

Smith, Ali (2006), The Accidental. London: Hamish Hamilton.

— (2007), Girl Meets Boy. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Smith, Anthony Paul (2013), A Non-philosophical Theory of Nature:

Ecologies of Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Smith, Zadie (2001), White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Spivak, Gayatri (1988), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

— (1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the

Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Springer, Mary Doyle (1975), Forms of the Modern Novella. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1886), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
London: Longmans, Green & Co.

Strinati, Dominic (1992), ‘Postmodernism and Popular Culture’, Sociology

Review 1.4, 2–7.

Thornton, Sarah L. (1995), Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural

Capital. Cambridge: Polity.

Tolkien, J. R. R. (1947), ‘On Fairy Stories’. Oxford: n.pub.

— (1954), The Lord of the Rings. Oxford: George Allen & Unwin.

Voloshin, Beverly (1998), ‘The Ethical Turn in French Postmodern

Philosophy’, Pacific Coast Philology 33.1, 69–86.

Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer (2013), Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions.

New York: Cambridge University Press.

Waugh, Patricia, and Rice, Philip (1996), Modern Literary Theory. London:
Edward Arnold.

Weeks, Jeffrey (1985), Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and
Modern Sexualities. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Wells, H. G. (1895), The Time Machine: An Invention. London: W.

Heinemann.

Wilde, Oscar (1889), ‘The Decay of Lying’. Reprinted in Intentions (1891).

London: James R. Osgood McIlvaine & Co.

— (1890), ‘Preface’, The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: M. J. Ivers &
Co.

— (1891), ‘The Critic as Artist’. In Intentions (1891). London: James R.

Osgood McIlvaine & Co.

Williams, Carolyn (1989), Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic

Historicism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Williams, Raymond (1954), Drama in Performance. London: Watts.

— (1958), On Culture and Society. London: Chatto & Windus.

— (1961), The Long Revolution. London, Chatto & Windus.

— (1973), The Country and the City. Nottingham: Spokesman.

Winterson, Jeanette (1990), Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. London:
Pandora.

Woolf, Virginia (1925), Mrs Dalloway. London: L. and V. Woolf.

— (1929), ‘A Room of One’s Own’. London: L. and V. Woolf.

Wright, Austin M. (1982), The Formal Principle in the Novel. London:

Cornell University Press.

Young, Robert J. C. (1995), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture

and Race. London: Routledge.

Žižek, Slavoj and Fiennes, Sophie (2006), A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

Amoeba Film.
 Answers
CHAPTER 1
1 A
2 B
3 D
4 B
5 D
6 B
7 B
8 C
9 A
10 D

CHAPTER 2
1 C
2 C
3 A
4 B
5 A
6 D
7 B
8 C
9 A
10 B

CHAPTER 3
1 B
2 A
3 C
4 A
5 B
6 B
7 A
8 D
9 B
10 A

CHAPTER 4
1 D
2 B
3 A
4 B
5 C
6 B
7 D
8 D
9 C
10 D

CHAPTER 5
1 A
2 B
3 C
4 D
5 C
6 A
7 B
8 C
9 C
10 A

CHAPTER 6
1 A
2 C
3 A
4 B
5 D
6 C
7 A
8 B
9 D
10 C

CHAPTER 7
1 B
2 D
3 A
4 B
5 C
6 D
7 B
8 A
9 D
10 D

CHAPTER 8
1 B
2 C
3 B
4 A
5 C
6 D
7 D
8 C
9 A
10 D

CHAPTER 9
1 A
2 D
3 D
4 C
5 A
6 B
7 C
8 C
9 B
10 B

CHAPTER 10
1 A
2 D
3 A
4 B
5 D
6 C
7 A
8 A
9 A
10 A

CHAPTER 11
1 A
2 B
3 A
4 B
5 C
6 B
7 A
8 D
9 B
10 A

CHAPTER 12
1 A
2 C
3 B
4 A
5 D
6 A
7 D
8 C
9 B
10 B

CHAPTER 13
1 C
2 B
3 D
4 A
5 B
6 D
7 A
8 D
9 D
10 A

CHAPTER 14
1 A
2 A
3 D
4 B
5 C
6 A
7 D
8 C
9 B
10 A

CHAPTER 15
1 C
2 D
3 A
4 B
5 B
6 A
7 A
8 B
9 A
10 D

CHAPTER 16
1 A
2 A
3 C
4 B
5 C
6 B
7 B
8 A
9 D
10 A

CHAPTER 17
1 A
2 C
3 A
4 B
5 B
6 D
7 D
8 D
9 A
10 C

CHAPTER 18
1 C
2 B
3 B
4 A
5 D
6 A
7 A
8 D
9 D
10 D

CHAPTER 19
1 A
2 D
3 C
4 A
5 C
6 D
7 A
8 C
9 B
10 A
 Published in Great Britain in 2017 by John Murray Learning.
An Hachette UK company.

Copyright © Sara Upstone 2017

The right of Sara Upstone to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted
by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written
permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781473611931

John Murray Learning

Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk