Wayne Deakin

Modern Language, Philosophy and

Criticism
Wayne Deakin
Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

ISBN 978-3-031-30493-4 e-ISBN 978-3-031-30494-1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively
licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is
concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service

marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a
specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective
laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice
and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date
of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a
warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company

Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham,
Switzerland
“A spirited, polemical, and informative survey of the practice and
philosophy of literary criticism, charting its historical roots and intellectual
underpinnings and laying out an intriguing trajectory for the way forward.”
─Peter Lamarque, Professor of Philosophy, University of York, Editor
of the British Journal of Aesthetics 1995–2008.
“With a grand-vista synopsis of stand-out texts throughout 2500 years
of poetics, Deakin prepares readers to assess the major schools of twentieth-
century literary criticism, arming them with relevant developments in
philosophy before launching into present-day debates. Deakin supports his
arguments throughout with analyses of romantic and modernist works. His
thrust deserves attention: that rather than repeat established patterns of
political messaging, philosophically informed literary criticism continually
requires a return to the first principles of the literary arts.”
─Peter Cheyne, author of Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy
(Shimane University and Durham University).
“Wayne Deakin brings unique inter-cultural insights to his take on
Philosophy, Language and Modern Criticism, borne of his experience in
teaching and research at Chiangmai University in Thailand. He draws on
this positionality to explore the interrelationship, for example, between
modernity and postmodernity and its connections with much older
traditions, testing his hypotheses against the work of Thai literary critics
and novelists. The result is both powerful and provocative.”
─Rachel Harrison, Professor of Thai Cultural Studies, SOAS
University of London and editor of Disturbing Conventions: Decentering
Thai Literary Cultures (2014).
For Mark, Noi, Denny and…the children
In loving memory of Adrian Williams
1957–2023
Preface
…In true philosophically romantic fashion… this book was originally
envisaged as a sort of rough guide for both students studying Literary
Criticism and Theory, but also for more intrepid members of the general-
public. As such, this book, in part, may appeal to those who also wish to
explore this sometimes exciting, sometimes infuriatingly difficult, and
much of the time, misunderstood field of the humanities. It can be most
difficult to even find a way into a subject that has been in its nascent stage
for much of history, waiting to be called off the substitute’s bench after
nearly 2 millennia, while also having become embroiled with the names of
the many (generally-speaking Continental) philosophers, who have had
their names used to slander the name of the “philosophical tradition.”
Moreover, with more recent claims that it has already died, still-born from
the substitute’s bench, Literary Criticism has stoked many questions within
the humanities and perhaps in some ways caused the humanities to ask
searching questions of itself as a superordinate subject-category. These are,
in the main, regarding its own perspicuity, its sometimes arcane, prose, its
oftentimes conflated identification with abstract categories like the
postmodern, its equally bizarre (and essentially incorrect) conflation with
anything remotely “Left” and perhaps (and most pertinent amongst the
objections herein levied), its failure to critically analyse the rhetoric of
literary texts, which signifies an object lesson in identity crisis, if ever there
was one…
My attempt here is to render answers to some of the understandably
large, questions and notions indicated above—anyone can appreciate the
difficulty of this task. For one it’s not terribly easy to escape in composition
the indeed arcane nature of the prose in this current ballpark and as a
gardener or a brain surgeon would no doubt insist given their own
respective terrain, I hereby stake my claim to of necessity having to submit
to some of the jargon involved to get my point across to my dear reader.
This is the reason the first few chapters of this book come across as more of
a contextual survey of the field and its potted history, whereas the latter
portion of the book comes across like a series of essays attempting to in
some ways access the subject while addressing the complex and tangled
precis outlined above. My intention is simply to open the subject up for
possible debate and question, and as I say at the end of the book, if I’ve
upset any apple carts or sensibilities then my work here is done; my main
purview is to open the subject up for public debate and to warn against any
form of ossification or complacency upon the part of people already
involved in the industry of Literary Criticism and Theory. In large part I
contend that the subject itself is part of what Maurice Blanchot termed the
infinite conversation, and we allow the riverbed (or its possibly attendant
propositions) to dry up at our peril.
The current book—and I use this term in a number of possible senses, as
will hopefully be made clear by the end of this monograph, if indeed I keep
your attention for that long, a job never easy given the landscape of the
subject under review—is sure to infuriate but hopefully also delight in equal
measure; but at least it hopes to pique interest in this strongarm subject of
the humanities, whilst returning us to a sense of the Socratic nature of
theory and criticism and equally its politically neutral character. This is of
course not the same as staking a claim for its politically neutralised
character, only that as a tool for political action and engagement, we do not
forget to at least come to the any text with an open mind and to formulate
our politics as a result of detailed reading, not as a necessary preliminary
political adjunct to any reading rendered of a given text. This is a springe
into which I feel many contemporary masters and neophytes alike have
fallen into not only with regards theory and criticism, but also with regards
the wider and sociologically powerful area of the humanities as an area in
its own right. Given this personal and professional proviso, I have
embarked upon the current study.
After 18 years of teaching literary criticism at Chiang Mai University, I
felt it was time to in some ways attempt to render what I have learned
heuristically through valuable interactive sessions between myself and my
students, both in the lecture format and more particularly in the mode of the
seminar discussion. The personal excitement and originality of this project
lies in the fact that as a foreign member of faculty, I have found myself in a
unique and perspicuous position to be able to discuss texts (both canonical
and non-canonical/Western and Thai) from the standpoint of a uniquely
intercultural locus. Moreover, I have also found myself more than a little
aware of the potential for irony, self-satire and the ongoing precarious
position of critical analysis or ‘critique’. The excitement of engaging in
criticism from both a Eurocentric cultural angle and from a South-East
Asian angle is something I constantly garner from the fascinating
discussions that I have entertained with my student interlocutors.1
One of the current mission statements of my current employer, Chiang
Mai University (CMU) is to inculcate Lifelong Education into not only the
local community, but also Thai society at large. This is an educational
mission statement in line with many universities in the Western academic
industry, but only in its nascent stage in Asia, for a number of geopolitical
and sociological reasons. Therefore, the putative audience of this book is
diverse, ranging from undergraduate students of the humanities (especially
but not exclusively in the literature and philosophy streams), to people
living and working not only in Thailand but in any foreign culture or
climate in relation to the coordinates of their native culture, who share in
my passion for adult learning and instruction. One of the key elements
behind the original inculcation of the philosophy of Everyman books and
the rise of English Studies in the UK.2
At the outset of writing this book, each section of delivered the same
essential kernel of information as had been contained in the lectures I had
previously conducted with both fourth year and graduate CMU students.
However, as the book took shape, I started to develop a narratorial compass
that catered for the non-specialist market and in part for my own
edification. Based upon my own concurrent lectures and readings in
philosophy, I have discerned a deeper connection between philosophy for
the humanities and literary criticism as it has been characterised by that
self-same modernity; a connection that sees criticism as not only a direct
offshoot of the cul-de-sac in which philosophy found itself in the so-called
modernist period, but also one that a fortiori allows for other literary critical
readings using different philosophical underpinnings. In this case, these
readings are taken from the ordinary language philosophy of a thinker such
as Donald Davidson.
In addition, each section contains, if not explicitly, then certainly
implicitly, a number of wider questions for the reader to ponder, in order to
formulate what the philosopher and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge many
moons ago termed an aid to reflection.3 Reflection and speculation are all
that should ever be asked of the most philosophical of the reading audience;
Socrates adhered to this doctrine and there is no tangible reason to turn
away from the elenchus and dialectics which were postulated in the Golden
Age of Athens. These questions are in the main raised by the very nature of
literary texts, with their concomitant narratorial fissures and aporias, by the
very nature, in fact, of the very literary discourse (or idiolect may perhaps
be a better phrase—at the risk of having the jargon label pinned firmly to
my lapel) in which these texts are formulated.
In delineating the seismic shifts of the twentieth century humanities by
way of the shifting landscape of criticism and philosophy in this manner, I
intend to dovetail both philosophy and literary criticism into a nodal point,
whereby I argue that literary criticism has in some sense displaced
philosophy, and that it has come to articulate philosophy—or questions that
at some historical precis were central to the make-up of philosophy—
through a sort of literary-critical hermeneutics. Therefore, although the
shape of this book starts out as a survey of literary criticism in its broadest
terms, it morphs into a more expository structure, that intends to locate the
gradients and movements within literary criticism and track them in relation
to the newly emerging areas of interest in the philosophical world itself;
namely through the post-Russell and Fregean “linguistic turn” in
philosophy. A turn at times articulated in the guises of analytic philosophy,
ordinary language philosophy and hermeneutical phenomenology. In this
connection, the work of Peter Lamarque (2010, 2020), Stein Haugom Olsen
(1998, 2006), Eileen John (2021), John Gibson (2018), and Stephen Davies
(2012), have borne considerable influence upon my analytical approach to
aesthetics and literary theory. Moreover, political philosophies such as
Marxism, pragmatism and neoliberalism have also played major roles
within the newly emerging discourse surfacing herein. This discourse
naturally changes definition under certain sociocultural lighting conditions,
which is a notion embraced and adumbrated within the pages of this study.
This book is also projected to be an English language accompaniment to
the other excellent major works on literary criticism currently in a
specifically Thai context, such as: Wean Wanna-khadi Thritsadi Ruamsamai
by Thanya Sangkhaphantanon (2016) and Thritsadi wanna-khadi Wichian
Tawantok Nai Sattawat Thi 20 by Suradech Chotiudomphan (2017).
However, this will be the first English language book to outline and assess
modern literary criticism from an Anglo-Thai perspective and to further
delve into the philosophical connections and implications for the humanities
in general, with a dual focus not just on the Western tradition but also with
an inclusive view at this terrain from a South-East Asian perspective. At the
risk on no doubt sounding utterly cliched here (something my students past
and present would no doubt argue is an article of my creed), as the narrative
unfolded during the writing of this work it also appeared more and more
clearer to me that this “text” was attaining a life of its own. This is due in
part to its interrogation of the relationship, both with and of, the major
Western philosophical tradition in general, and particularly its relationship
towards such seminal areas as cultural studies, linguistic philosophy and the
more recent flourishing of the various sub-theories such as Posthumanism,
Queer Theory and the post-subjective theory, Trans-Humanism. These
variegated approaches to modern theoretical criticism and theory have in
their own way presented challenges to a number of the philosophical and
literary-critical approaches previously taken for granted in both literary
studies and philosophy. Their effect upon the academy in general has been
in some sense revelatory, yet in other senses they have fulminated against
tradition in a not-altogether positive fashion, inculcating a new doxa or
status quo, that in some cases needs to be challenged. To use a well-worn
trope, the emperor’s new clothes have sometimes prevented full and fair
enquiry, especially within the current articulations of the humanities and the
social sciences. I say this with a lingering gaze towards the purview of the
growing politicisation of identity within the Western academy, and in
recognition that this has come out of the new paradigmatic rise of theory
and criticism, which has paradoxically led to certain cases where free
speech has, in some instances, been stifled. This is of course connected to
the political issues with regards theory and criticism flagged above.
As a writer and academic, I feel strongly about these issues and have
not shied away from addressing their relative merits and intellectual pitfalls,
whenever is has seemed necessary to confront them as an inherent part of
my overall argument. I am sure (and sincerely hope) that I have upset some
of my erstwhile readers and colleagues, whilst at the same time being able
to authentically draw out some of the more questionable aspects of these
more recent ‘critical’ theories. These questions, raised in critical enquiry,
should be able to shine their light in all areas of the new intellectual
metropolis, while not being restricted to the areas that muster currency in
view of the new intellectual hierarchy.
However, one of the interesting aspects of the more recent
mushrooming of theories in their various sociological guises has been the
fact that while the first wave of theories perhaps acted like the old English
acts of land enclosure on cultural discourse, the new wave of “diggers”
signified the fact that cultural discourse not only exploded, but also—to
expand the geopolitical trope—opened up the previously unchartered lands
of the female, homosexual, and the subaltern, to a whole new audience. As
the poet Tony Harrison brilliantly ejaculated “So right, yer buggers, then!
We’ll occupy/your lousy leasehold-Poetry.” In such a spirit of enquiry, each
aspect of culture formerly seen through patrician eyes as either pristine, or
in some cases, even aesthetically mute, should be screamed out—or
Howled, to use Allen Ginsberg’s characterisation—using the tools of the
cultural trade. Without exception, the opening up of works from The Break
of Day by Collette or The Awakening by Kate Chopin, to Michel
Houellebecq’s Submission, or any of the controversial novels that have
arisen from both the Western and Thai canon, such as the revealing
epistolary Bildungsroman novella—A Young Man’s Fancy by King Rama
VI—have all in their own ways illuminated and opened doors in their
respective general culture. Moreover, in the academy, they have provided
voices that in their own ways have challenged privileged contemporaneous
heteronomy at different times in literary-cultural history. One of the
objectives of this book is to outline and assess these aspects and challenges,
whilst allowing the reader to decide for themselves upon the attendant
efficacy of each narrative voice.
The structure of the book begins with a chapter on contextualising the
meaning of Literary Criticism and hopes to answer some of the bedrock
assumptions—and misapprehensions—of non-specialists about this field of
inquiry. Chapter 2 gives a (very) brief history of the family tree of the
humanities in relation to the subject, with a view to reinforcing its
relationship with the philosophical tradition and reads more like an
historical survey of the subject in its very nascent stages and epochs,
identifying four main epochs for the various phases of criticism, in line with
those outlined by M.H. Abrams in 1953.4 Having thus contextualised this
study, the third chapter explores the very notion of criticism and its more
objective pretensions as articulated in the twentieth century, within the
horizontal measures of formalism, the new criticism and structuralism—
whilst also adumbrating the concomitant movements towards objectivism in
philosophy for the modern humanities, as explored by Bertrand Russell and
thinkers in his wake. The next chapter begins to properly dovetail the two
areas of analytical philosophy (which later morphs into ordinary language
philosophy and speech act theory), and the concurrent emergence of
poststructuralism. It also attempts the mammoth task of demystifying the
subsequent doubled two-headed monster: Derrida the deconstructor, and
the subsequent furore in a structural teacup that followed, and has somehow
continued to flourish, in the wake of this gallic encroachment upon the
scenery of the modern humanities.
The next chapter, Linguistic Twists, Turns and Dovetails in the Modern
Humanities, digs deeper by following the line of argument that if my thesis
is correct about the convergence of the twain in these two areas of the
humanities, then not only can work from the continental tradition be
successfully absorbed by literary criticism, but also work from the ordinary
language tradition. This is a thesis that is further developed in the next
chapter, by my contention that the work of thinkers such as W.V.O. Quine
and, more specifically, Donald Davidson can also be applied to literary
criticism with surprisingly fruitful results. This is essentially because both
traditions are working within the same sceptical doubts with regards the
efficacy of language in dealing with modern philosophical scepticism. This
claim is furthered in the next chapter, entitled Literary Méditations
Hégéliennes, which is derived from a phrase coined by Wilfrid Sellars that
aptly summarises the developing communitarian standpoint of my overall
argument: that language as a necessarily social phenomena is developed by
both traditions and this is the reason that literary discourse and its attendant
criticism is best fitted to both our ordinary and continental language
analyses, which are essentially, two sides of the same sceptical coin. The
chapter also develops both communitarian and philosophically romantic
standpoints as developed by Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell, whose
combined oeuvre helps illustrate the strength of connection between literary
criticism, the philosophy of language, and scepticism. This ‘philosophical
romanticism’ provides tacit acknowledgment of our epistemological
limitations, which is an acknowledgment openly endorsed in criticism and
theory, as well as in the actual practice of literary discourse.
The next chapter on postmodernism and modernism develops the main
argument by arguing the point that postmodernism, as it has been
incorrectly yoked with Marxist thought by reactionary thinkers who attack
the ‘Left’, is an offshoot of Liberal Humanism, bolstering the ideology of
Late Capitalism. However, I also levy the contention that postmodernism
finds itself in many guises, including the philosophical and aesthetic and so
cannot be reduced to a one-size-fits-all relativism, cheaply reduced to the
status afforded it by thinkers such as Jordan Peterson. In line with the rest
of my argument, I posit that High Modernism was in many ways the high
watermark of literary discourse, with its self-conscious treatment of art as a
form of sceptical ideology. The final two chapters in effect concretise the
foregoing arguments by summarising what has been said hitherto, whilst
analysing various literary texts. I crucially connect the scepticism, gaps,
dissonances and aporias of current criticism and theory to epistemological
tensions stemming back to the age of the Greeks. These are tensions
stretching back to the sophists and the logocentric tradition. Moreover,
throughout the book are contained numerous analyses of both Western and
Thai literary texts, to a fortiori help reinforce the uses of literary criticism
and theory, to illustrate the broader philosophical argument.
In one sense, the first half of the book can be read as a broad survey and
contextualisation of theory and criticism, whereas the second half can be
read as a series of discrete essays based upon the communitarian position
that I develop and lead up to through the first half of the book. As a whole,
one may say that the bald argument developed here follows the lines of the
original romantic movement, latterly called upon by thinkers who are
labelled philosophical romantics, among whose thought I would place my
own, as developed herein.5 As such, it attempts to resituate philosophy and
literature in their close proximity as asserted by the Frühromantik (the
German romantic movement), whilst drawing a clear line under the ability
of philosophy to ascertain complete objectivity. The argument instead
partakes in an infinitely open dialectical process, reflected in the reciprocal
play, organic movement and openness to continued novel and fragmented
processes. This process is checked by an ironic awareness of the necessary
scepticism associated with these infinite transformations, or to borrow
Blanchot’s phraseology, the infinite conversation.
As I stated previously, I hope to in some ways engender discussion and
further thought about a topic, which in one sense has been a bugbear
haunting the humanities for the past 80 years or so. The book, by self-
definition, doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive, either in its scope or its
argumentation. In fact, due to the romantic position inherited by the author,
the text is aware of its own limitations and apprehensions. If the style is
sometimes non-academic, the author equally makes no claim that the book
is purely an academic study and should be read as such. On one hand, it’s a
broad polemic about linguistic philosophy and literary criticism, whilst also
acting as a tinder box to perhaps ignite bigger argumentative fireworks that
may go off in one’s hand. Perhaps it should come with a safety warning, as
did the firework boxes of my childhood, and as it seems, does everything in
the current intellectual climate. Perhaps we need to get our hands burnt…
Finally, I’d like to extend a thank-you to my friend and colleague Dr.
Pasoot Lasuka for encouraging me to write this monograph and also the
myriad students and very good friends (both specialist and non-specialist
alike), who have helped me develop these materials and equally aided in my
own reflective development as a teacher in this stimulating and
interdisciplinary area of the humanities. I never gave my friends public
health warnings when I broached many of these topics but they are still
happy to be counted as my friends…so I can only hope I can retain the
second person friend I address directly here. As I say every year to my
students at CMU, stick to the subject at hand, through all of the inherent
difficulties and potential arcane hurdles, and the rewards will I hope, be
many. If not, we’ll still have the existence of national parks and Premier
League football afterwards. Moreover, scholars who intend to study at
postgraduate level or wish to read more advanced texts in any of the
discrete academic areas contained herein will hopefully find the knowledge
they glean from this work of great use for their future studies, whether
personal, academic, or professional…or just plain philosophically romantic.
Wayne Deakin
Chiang Mai, Thailand
2022
Acknowledgments
For various conversations, advice, comments, encouragement, and much
more, I’d like to thank the following fellow philosophical travellers: Sing
Suwwanakul, Pasoot Lasuka, Piyaboot Sumettikoon, Por Boonpornprasert,
Nahum Brown, Peter Cheyne, Brendan George, and Keston Sutherland; and
in particular, thanks to Patrick Keeney and Joseph Wheeler—whose
precious time and patience are hugely appreciated. In friendship.
Contents
1 What Is Literary Criticism and Theory?​
2 A Brief (but Timely) History of Literary Criticism
3 The Philosophical Self-Consciousness of the New Criticism and
Formalism
4 Structuralism, Semiotics and Ordinary Language Doubts
5 Linguistic Twists, Turns and Dovetails in the Modern Humanities
6 Literary Méditations Hégéliennes
7 Whither Postmodernism?​Whether It’s New Liberalism?​
8 Phrónēsis in Literary Criticism—The Pragmatic Denouement
9 In Through the Outdoor
Bibliography
Index
Footnotes
1 Rita Felski’s excellent study The Limits of Critique (2015) provides an interesting analysis of our
inherited notions of scholarly critique and some of the assumptions or prejudices about the process,
which are often opaque to its practitioners. The theoretical underpinnings of this text, first postulated
by Paul Ricouer in his book Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970).

2 See Terry Eagleton’s widely read introductory chapter in the seminal tome, Literary Theory: An
Introduction “The Rise of English” pp. 17–53.

3 Aids to Reflection (1825) was a series of lay sermons aimed specifically at young men and was in
essence a commentary in the form of aphorisms and selected passages from the writings of
Archbishop Leighton. The Aids, which may be regarded as an eirenicon between faith and reason,
and at one time served as a kind of manual of liberal orthodoxy, brought their compiler applause and
recognition, and since his death have been frequently republished. This genre of conservative and
literary work, would also, after the posthumous Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1840) became a
mainstay of Anglo-American cultural criticism, exemplified by thinkers as diverse as Carlyle,
Emerson, Thoreau, Arnold, Leavis; and—more recently—Jordan Peterson. One may even discern the
roots of the modern self-help genre in extant texts like this.

4 I refer to Abrams’ stimulating chapter on the “Orientation of Critical Theories” in his seminal
monograph, The Mirror and the Lamp: romantic theory and the critical tradition, New York: OUP,
1953. pp. 3–29. Having read this work twice, I find that it is still possibly the most outstanding of all
of the extant studies that subsist in the category of Literary Theory. It also correctly locates the
continuing importance of the Romantic tradition in its overall relationship to the subject and its place
in the humanities in general.

5 See the book Philosophical Romanticism, Nikolas Kompridis (ed). London: Routledge, 2007.

OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_1

1. What Is Literary Criticism and Theory?

Wayne Deakin1
(1) Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

What indeed? And why? The current book itself, as anyone can see from
perusing the following pages, covers areas as diverse as cultural studies, the
social sciences, anthropology, sociology and philosophy. This is due in part
because one of the central theoretical frameworks utilised in modern
literary criticism is an interdisciplinary approach called structuralism.
Whilst structuralism was originally a new branch of linguistics, it soon
spread as a theoretical framework for studying the aforementioned subjects
respectively, using a standardised set of metrics.
However, the discrete discipline of literary criticism really came into its
own in the twentieth century as a major study area in the humanities. This
was partly because teachers such as Cleanth Brooks and I.A. Richards
intended to place literary criticism on a par with other rigorously theoretical
subjects such as physics and biology. Thus, came the inception of
movements such as the ‘New Criticism’ and on the continent,
‘Formalism’—both of which were normative and highly theoretical
approaches intended to measure literature in the same way that other, more
scientific areas—could be measured.
However, some critics, such as the British teacher F.R. Leavis,
massively influential in at least early twentieth-century criticism, still took
an “a-theoretical” approach to the subject, arguing that literature was a
special form of discourse that transcended the new age of industrialisation
and modern, mechanised civilisations. Leavisite criticism and the literary
journal edited by Leavis and Knights, Scrutiny (1932–1953)), became
synonymous with what was known as “moral formalism.”1 This was
because, echoing the work of nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold,
certain novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and
George Eliot, supposedly used a literary form that made the reader more
aware of the moral complexities of life, as well as making the reader aware
of the best qualities that were required in terms of how to live a complete
human life.
Other later approaches gradually grew out of other areas of knowledge
—psychoanalysis, Marxism and philosophical areas such as
phenomenology (the philosophical study of consciousness) and gradually
literary criticism became the rich area of study and research that it is today.
Even though the field is a difficult (and at times contested) area of the
humanities, it is also highly innovative and one of the mainly exciting
concepts that seems to have come out of this milieu is that there are a
number of prisms through which to read any given text. Thus, even though
this is a difficult and at times contested area of study, the reading public can
feel in some measure assured by the fact that there is no single and correct
way of reading a poem such as “The Flea” or a novel such as Wuthering
Heights; a single and correct reading would mean, as the structuralist
Roland Barthes famously phrased it, “victory to the critic”2 In some ways, it
can be argued that even though literary criticism and theory is a difficult
area of learning, it also has rewarding heuristic elements, not least of which
is the fact that it “democratises” the text itself, leaving it open to manifold
readings and interpretations, taking the power away from the teacher and
“critical expert,” while placing it back into the hands of the readers
themselves.
The paradox then, is that even though the original “new critics” were
looking for theoretical stability, by the end of the twentieth century, literary
studies had become as open-ended as ever, with a general consensus that
there is no fixed, univocal way of reading a text. Indeed, most critics
nowadays talk of “re-reading” texts. If there were a simple and correct way
to read a text, why indeed would there be such a plethora of literary-critical
texts on the market. Why indeed, would we need to read yet another PhD on
Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Eliot’s The Wasteland? The inventiveness of
readings and the subtleties of reinterpretation have led in some ways to
more readings than ever since the formalists and new critics came along to
objectify literary criticism and to fix it as a science—or break its wings on a
wheel—not everyone subscribes to the eight division of the syntagmatic
high club. One man’s metonymy is another man’s symbolism.
 Poorly worded technical ‘jokes’ aside, one constant objection to literary
criticism that is voiced by both specialists and non-specialists alike, is that
taking a mechanical approach such as structuralism, poststructuralism or
formalism to a text in some ways destroys not only the integrity of the text,
but also the integrity of the reading experience itself. This however is a
misnomer. One may use a simple analogy to demonstrate the erroneous
nature of this train of thought. Take a brand new, shiny, aesthetically
beautiful motorbike—or at the risk of piquing the ire of the Virago Press
school of feminist poetics—a brand-new Aston Martin. Now, imagine you
were to take the motorbike apart in order to look at the engine inside: the
carburettor, the oil filters, the spark plugs: the very engine itself. This gives
one a unique insight into the very inner function of the machine itself and it
also provides us with special tools and words for understanding the
mechanics of the bike itself. However, we can still reassemble the
motorbike itself and see it again in all its original aesthetic glory; indeed,
we can perhaps appreciate this glory even more if we understand what is
under the curvaceous surface of the machine, or what drives this wonderful-
looking product. This is the same principle as when we read a poem or short
story: we understand devices such as meiosis (understatement), paradox,
hyperbole, prosopopoeia (personification), metaphor, simile and
onomatopoeia; however, we still appreciate that the whole is greater than
the sum of its parts and this technical understanding in no way detracts from
our overall appreciation of the text as an aesthetic object.
One may also add that traditionally, literary criticism and literary theory
have been viewed as one subject, which is true. A structuralist critic for
example, takes a whole theory (semiotics) which is rooted in a structural
theory of linguistics and then applies this to a text to understand how the
text works or by what rules the text is operating. This form of criticism is
rooted in a theory of language (and by extension composition) and may
give us theoretical insight as well as critical insight; for example, does the
text succeed or fail in what it is ultimately attempting? Whilst literary
theory gives us the tools and groundwork to analyse the text, literary
criticism is the actual use of these tools in order to critique and interpret a
text. If we follow the peregrinations of a literary critic such as Vladimir
Propp for example, we understand that he uses the theory of structuralism
with which to criticise and hence grasp the structural meanings of the
traditional fairy tale.
 Another often overlooked point in literary criticism is the function of
the word “criticism” itself. Traditionally, criticism (spanning back
etymologically to the Greek kritikos), means to be able to make judgements
or discern. This has often been related to judging in terms of quality.
However, in literary criticism the term is used simply as a normative term
for understanding the text—or the workings of the text. This in turn gives us
a closer comprehension of the text we are studying. I.A. Richards, for
example, supposedly provides us with the practical principles with which
we can successfully read literary texts.
There is however a second and more judgemental node of literary
criticism, which is usually connected to the later more political nature of
literary criticism. For example, a Marxist critic such as Gyorgy Lukács
makes clear distinctions in terms of the difference of political relevance
between a writer such as Thomas Mann and a writer such as James Joyce in
his essay “The Ideology of Modernism” (1963). Furthermore, feminist
critics and postcolonial critics make other such critical judgments that can
be seen to be rooted, to some degree, in the political, whether they be rooted
in class, sexuality, or ethnic identity.
Take for example Chinua Achebe’s assertion that Joseph Conrad’s
novella Heart of Darkness should be removed from the Western canon
altogether. Without question the politicisation of literary criticism and
approaches to the canon, or to what Barthes also claimed “…Gets taught.
Full stop”3 has also changed our idea of literary criticism since the time of
F.R. Leavis, who celebrates what he sees not only as the moral formalism
inherent in Heart of Darkness, but also the accompanying normative view
of this moral universe, symbolised by the very pioneering spirit of the
merchant service itself,

His interest in the tradition of the Merchant Service as a constructive

triumph of the human spirit is correlative with his intense
consciousness of the dependence, not only of the distinctive
humanities at all levels, but of sanity itself and our sense of a normal
outer world, on an analogous creative collaboration. (The Great
Tradition: p. 32)

Achebe’s latter, more postcolonial critical reception of Conrad’s book,

when held in sharp relief to the earlier formalistic Leavisite criticism of this
nature, goes some way towards illustrating the politicisation of what has
been historically regarded as the literary canon. Achebe4 wrote the
following:

Whatever Conrad’s problems were, you might say he is now safely

dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still.
Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by
a serious scholar as “among the half dozen greatest short novels in
the English language.” And why it is today the most commonly
prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English
Departments of American universities.
There are two probable grounds on which what I have said so far
may be contested. The first is that it is no concern of fiction to
please people about whom it is written. I will go along with that. But
I am not talking about pleasing people. I am talking about a book
which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults
from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and
atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many
places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity
of black people is called in question. (Achebe, p. 259)

One may of course argue, as has Terry Eagleton, that Leavis’ humanist
criticism is in itself ideological and by extension, political—on this reading
all criticism is up to a point political as it simply can’t function in an
historical vacuum. However, Achebe’s polemic is more overtly political in
its self-representation, and much more directly political. Leavisite criticism
runs back to S.T. Coleridge’s (post-Kantian)5 idea of a learned cultural
intelligentsia or “clerisy” and Matthew Arnold’s own particular humanist
call to the middle classes to engage with their working-class counterparts.
In wider political parlance it may be contended that whilst the Coleridge,
Arnold and Leavis school of literary humanism form a conservative branch
of literary (and cultural) criticism, the subsequent schools of criticism and
theory have come to represent a more liberal (many would argue Liberal-
New Left) school of criticism. One thing this demonstrates is that it’s
possibly a mistake to simply relegate literary criticism to an a-theoretical
locus, in which it is shielded from the real world in which we live. In point-
of-fact, the so-called “culture wars” that have provoked such civil unrest in
Tocqueville’s formerly utopian Land of The Enlightenment, The United
States, are testament to this very point. Whatever our ideas of literary
criticism, there are deep cultural and political implications, which have
moved from a stress on form and structure towards a far more political
critique of our institutions, at all civic levels—not just on purely aesthetic
considerations.
One should also remember that the raised political awareness provided
by critical theories such as postcolonialism and feminism has meant that the
scope of literature readily available to the scholar has increased
dramatically since the post-war years. Books such as Kate Chopin’s The
Awakening are now regularly taught in liberal arts literature classes,
however the novel’s reception upon its initial publication in 1899 was
nothing short of hysterical. Likewise, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and
works such as Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain also currently get the
recognition they always warranted. These political changes to the canon
would not have been possible were it not for literary-critical theories that
challenged and interrogated the political status quo.
One further pertinent question is: What about the relevance of literary
criticism to Thai students (or other nationalities)—let alone the general
public? There are obviously a number of answers to this query; the first
response may be to simply throw the question back at your interlocutor—
why not? Do all academies simply require Business, Engineering and
Science faculties? Perhaps part of the entrenched fear lies in the fact that
literature historically makes up a large part of any culture and many
conservatives simply don’t want people thinking too critically about
narratives that have hitherto informed a particular culture—whether it be
Thai, US, Polynesian or British culture. However, this does not necessarily
mean that all literary scholars are going to start running around campus,
burning their underwear, or wearing Chairman Mao tee shirts. That said, it
may mean they will be able to pay closer attention to what the structures of
these narratives have in common with other narratives from other cultures.
In fact, while possibly raising the spectres of Marx, Derrida or Butler,
literary criticism may also provide a basis for more conservative values;
structuralism or archetypal criticism can equally bolster the idea that there
are eternal verities that perhaps cannot be deconstructed entirely, or
archetypal narratives and characters that transcend history; social
constructions and what became known as historical or higher criticism.6
These structures present what for the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
were universal archetypal symbolic structures; or narratives that presented,
through mythemes, universal a-historical myths, created through the binary
structures of the human mind.7
One may also add that we could question why indeed did neoclassic
poets such as Pope, Dryden and Grey bother with their ornate and polished
art at all in the first place? Their diction and periphrasis were certainly not
of an accord with the English spoken by common men? However, they were
testing the English language to see what could be done with it and whether
or not it was up to the same rhetorical standard or potential of the classical
and romance languages—and it turned out it was. As for criticism, why not
also see what we are capable of accomplishing in our reception and critique
of texts? How far should we interrogate texts and perhaps the received
assumptions within texts—whether they be Thai or English. Equally, why
should we not move beyond being able to say why we like Collins or
Rushdie? Why is Emily Brontë regarded as better than Danielle Steele?
Why are Thai authors like Pramoj or Wongsuwan worth closer inspection?
Literary criticism gives us the tools to offer arguments that may not be as
scientific as the new critics wished but may at least give us some scope of
objectivity.
Another common objection is to the jargon or specialist language that
makes up literary criticism. This is I think connected to the idea of why
spoil the reading of the text? outlined above. If one takes a course in human
anatomy they will be faced with a plethora of jargon; and in actual fact, if
one studies horticulture in-depth they will encounter certain arcane
terminology. However, in these cases not a word of dissent is uttered. We
rightly feel that literature (and by extension culture) belongs to everyone.
However, this does not ipso facto mean that specialist phraseology should
not be a part of this particular discipline. The simple answer is that we can
usefully employ tools and meta-expressions such as langue, parole, and
discourse to provide us with a linguistic rubric with which to antatomise
language and literature—as do horticulturists and biologists in their
respective fields. Literature, like the model of the body, or the motorbike,
can still be reassembled and appear as aesthetically beautiful as ever
afterwards.
Moreover, as the study of Thai literature mushrooms, the use of these
critical apparatus will be invaluable for closer readings of the texts that will
possibly make up the formative ‘canon’. Books for possible inclusion such
as Red Bamboo, Letters from Thailand, The Circus of Life or A Young Man’s
Fancy will be susceptible to deep analysis and assessment, perhaps
accounting not only for their formal or structural qualities, but also their
contextual, psychoanalytical, historicist and of course, political elements.
This is an exciting enterprise indeed, and one that promises rich rewards if
the scholar is equipped with a strong conceptual apparatus through which to
engage these texts: a grounding that engages with these texts at various
critical levels.
Finally, whether one is more conservative or more radical in one’s
persuasion, literary criticism simply offers tools with which to explore a
large part of our cultural universe. The reading subject can equally take
away conservative views, such as those outlined above and accorded to
Coleridge, Arnold or Leavis—or later on Roger Scruton; or more radical
views such as those attributed to Gayatari Spivak or Jacques Lacan. Then
again, the reader doesn’t have to inherit any of these political viewpoints
and may just enjoy the play, jouissance, or the comparative features of the
text. Whatever one takes away from criticism, one will be encouraged to
challenge traditional, univocal readings or “authoritative” readings of
literature. In sum, one will be encouraged to think critically about the text.
The text is at least given back to the student, which is after all what the new
critics originally wanted.

Footnotes
1 5 The monthly review Scutiny not only ran for 76 issues, but also had contributors and readers as
diverse as George Santayana, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, William Empson and I.A. Richards.

2 Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” in David Lodge (ed), Modern Criticism and Theory,
New York: Longman, 1991. pp. 167–172.

3 Roland Barthes, “Reflexions sur un manuel,” in L’Enseignement de la littera Serge Doubrovsky

and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, 1971) p. 170. (The author’s translation).
4 “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977;
pp. 7.

5 Peter Cheyne writes in his tome Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy, (London: OUP; p. 262)
“By 1829, in Church and State, Coleridge recommends ‘a national clerisy’ to disseminate the liberal
arts and sciences, thereby to serve as ‘an essential element of a rightly constituted nation’, securing
both its permanence and its progression. He is sometimes cited as coining the word ‘clerisy’ (he was
first to use it in English), although in doing so he effectively translates Kant’s Klerisei. Klerisei is
standard German for clergy, but Kant uses the word for an idealizing church of reason to free faith
from historical forms and direct it towards the moral law discoverable by reason. While Kant
suggested the term, however, Coleridge thoroughly developed the notion from his 1818 revision of
The Friend to its fullest form in Church and State (1829/30).”

6 Historical or Higher Criticism is a form of literary analysis that investigates the origins of a text.
And is contrasted with lower criticism (or textual criticism), whose goal is to determine the original
form of a text from among the variants and is more connected to the recent scholarship of Close
Reading. It is historically linked to the work of the German Biblical School of Hermeneutics as
practiced by the scholars of the Tübingen School, led by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). As
with Kant’s notion of a “clerisy” These Germanic scholarly ideas in part emigrated to England under
the tutelage of Coleridge.

7 Lévi-Strauss, as we shall see in the chapter on structuralism, coined the phrase “mythemes” from
the linguistic structural study of Ferdinand de Saussure and the binary nature of linguistic phonemes.

OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_2

2. A Brief (but Timely) History of Literary

Criticism
Wayne Deakin1
(1) Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Literary Criticism is a complex term that has its roots in antiquity, going
back to the ages of classical Greece and later Rome. We can examine
ancient texts such as Homer’s The Iliad and its call to the Muses, who
inspired the Bards (early poets) to record in a special discourse, the great
contemporaneous events. In a sense, the early poets were the chroniclers (or
historians) of their time and were therefore always involved in a specialised
use of language; an idea that has been handed down throughout the history
of literary criticism. These poets and sages were originally part of the epic
oral tradition—a tradition that centred on rhetoric and the persuasive nature
of the language figures, tropes and arguments contained within these
persuasive discourses.1
The Greek poet Hesiod famously wrote of how the muses met him on
Mount Helicon, whilst he was tending his sheep, giving him a staff of laurel
and a divine voice. Hesiod indeed founded the genre of the Pastoral. Even
the legendary Greek philosopher Plato, who was critical of the powers that
poets had over language and their influence, wrote that the poets had a
mystical, divine voice in his dialogue, The Ion. Moreover, The Greek poet
Pindar also saw himself, in writing his classical odes, as being set apart
from other men, because he had been being given a special voice in order to
transcend the limits of mortality. His belief was also that natural talent
would outshine learning, something echoed later on by Longinus. Thus, the
early, self-critical attitude of poets often supposed a specialised, divine
voice given by the Gods of the Muses to the poet who was a “seer.”
 Poets were also disclosers of ethical information in the early ages. In
Aristophane’s play The Frogs, Aeschylus claims “Children have a master to
teach them, grown-ups have the poets.”2 Ancient literary criticism thus
grew out of a philosophical requirement to discuss the actual functions and
uses of literature—as it had been perceived as having such a high-ranking
place in society. The poets also came to be regarded as superior craftsmen,
which was another conception that challenged the idea of a more divine
inspiration. Pindar himself also endorsed this idea. Indeed, the word
“poetry” has its origins in these meanings, the poet became described as a
maker poietes and his product is a poiema “a made-up thing.”
In an early instance of literary criticism, Aristophanes satirises the ideas
of taste and criticism his play The Frogs by pitting the tragedians Euripides
and Aeschylus together in a discussion of their poetic “trade” in order to
curry the favour of the Greek God Dionysus. This is an early form of
informal satire that challenged the differing views of language utilised by
tragic writers such as Sophocles, Aeschylus and later Euripides. What the
prologue to The Frogs informs us is that Greek writers were becoming more
aware of stylistic questions: questions about the effect a poet should have
on the audience, while also considering general criticism as a form of
discourse itself.
Later orators, such as Gorgias of Leontini, also emphasised the power of
language itself to influence people’s thoughts and emotions; indeed, the
Sophists were teachers of rhetoric who would instruct pupils on the best
ways in which to use language to influence people’s psychology and beliefs
and their influence, as we shall see in a later chapter, has been lasting. One
may think of advertisements today or even the behaviour of politicians and
their use of rhetoric to influence crowd psychology—Donald Trump being
one of the more extreme examples. These were all elements of early literary
criticism that developed as the ancients sought to discover the best usages
of rhetorical language and started to ask questions about who was the best
practitioner of the art(ifice) of poetry. The poets (both Comic and Tragic),
would compete at competitions for coveted prizes, such as the right to
slaughter the sacrificial goat: in fact, the word tragedy means “goat song.”
In a perhaps surprising turn of events, given the rhetorical nature of his own
rendering of his mentor Socrates’ dialogues, the legendary philosopher
Plato wrote about poetry in various dialogues (The Ion, Protagoras,
Republic and Laws). However, although in texts such as the Ion Plato
recognised the mystical, intoxicating power of poetry, in the Republic he
repudiated poets for misleading the people by seizing upon their deeper
emotions and leading them away from reason to emotion—something not
generally celebrated in the rational Socratic dialogues.
Plato argues that in the text through which poets and artists alike
represent the world to us—they are removing us from the ideal realm—of
the Idea or nous. For example, a bed, as an already “imperfect form” or
representation of an ideal bed, in the realm of nous, thus becomes
represented a third time when represented as an aesthetic object such as a
painting of a bed (or a bed as depicted in a poem) or perhaps as Tracey
Emin’s infamous installation art in the Tate Britain—no doubt a feminine
take on the Platonic idea of representation. In other words, all we perceive
is the representation of an ideal (perfect) world, and then to have this object
aesthetically rendered again—as a painting, found object, sculpture or a
poem—is to have it at a third form removed from its original Idea.
Therefore, through mimesis this mimes the ideal original. Plato is trying to
replace poetry with a new form of discourse: that of reason, leading to a
higher rational insight through The Logos. His ideal Nous contained the
ultimate ideas.3 As an ultimate consequence of this philosophy, he wished
to expel poets from his republic. He also saw a moral danger in allowing
Greek plays to take place, because of the strength of their influence on
citizens. Think of debates today about the effects of television and computer
games on young people’s minds. Thus, Platonic literary criticism ultimately
saw the skill and craftsmanship involved, as well as sometimes great
inspiration, but for moral purposes felt that poets should be banned from the
ideal democratic polis. The mimetic nature of poetry was one of the major
reasons for this, as well as its possible morally corrupt capacity (or its
capacity for moral corruption), through false representation and its
emotional sway over people’s emotions.
Later critics and philosophers such as Plotinus and Schopenhauer would
celebrate the power of art to actually by-pass the secondary representative
nature of the world and penetrate into the transcendental inner or ideal form
of life—or the realm of nous; thus, these Neoplatonic art critics would use
the Platonic model but change its emphasis from negative to a more
positive approbation.
The other bearded bad boy of antiquity, and none other than Alexander
the Great’s personal tutor, was of course Aristotle. In his Poetics, he
famously saw poetry in a much more favourable light than had Plato in his
defence of his putative Republic. For Aristotle, much more the proto-
individualist, poets didn’t simply imitate, without thinking, as they did with
Plato, but actively and rationally constructed their works. This view differed
from Plato’s view of the irrational nature of poetic composition and the
more simplistic mimetic view. Aristotle actually celebrates mimesis, and
argues that Greek Tragedy imitates life, but in so doing instructs the
audience and is therefore a positive genre. Whereas Plato feared a deeper
engagement with our irrational emotions, Aristotle actually encouraged and
celebrated this aspect of Greek Tragedy, claiming it offered the audience a
cleansing of their emotions, or a catharsis. Aristotle’s Poetics is the first
real extant text of literary criticism that offers a normative account of the
subject and covers aspects such as magnitude, spectacle, unity and plot.
Aristotle it would appear was asking everyone but the Greek chorus to get
on the couch and get it off their chest and—depending on how you read the
translation of the old Greek—was it seems into not just spectacle but also
mass sublimation. This was perhaps not surprising given he was very much
in favour of a free economy and home ownership, whereas his older
counterpart Plato wanted a proto-communist republic that shared pretty
much everything. It would appear Plato himself needed to visit a few
Aristotlean plays to get some things off his chest.
The Roman critic and poet Horace wrote the next famous literary-
critical tract in history, Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) in which he outlined
the classical idea of decorum and propriety in a work of poetry. By this,
Horace meant that all aspects of a work must be appropriately chosen; thus,
the choice of subject must match the genre, expression, character, meter and
tone, all of which must all be appropriately fitted together into a structural
whole. Verisimilitude and the non-mixing of different genres (something
that is actually a major element in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and much so-
called ‘postmodern’ works), were all parts of Horace’s theory of decorum.
Like Plato and Aristotle, Horace believes art to be imitative, and this should
be reflected throughout the work of art: incongruity was a technical mistake
in Horace’s Ars Poetica. Horace also emphasised the concept of practice
and polishing your poetry, and thus the craftsmanship element of poetry is
ingrained into his poetic theory. Horace looked back to the Hellenistic age
of Greece for the great poetics and as such was a classicist and thought the
highest aim of literature was to please and benefit people morally—a
doctrine echoed below by the neoclassical or pragmatic school of criticism.
After Horace, Longinus was a classical critic whose work was
discovered in the 1600s and is generally regarded as the critic who
introduced the seminal concept of the sublime into criticism. His treatise On
the Sublime states the central idea that great literature contains hupsos
(grandeur/sublimity) and contains passages that are able to transport the
reader, or remove them away in their mind, overwhelming them with its
power. Sublimity often manifests itself in individual lines or phrases, as
opposed to a whole work and the best writers can occasionally slip into the
sublime mode. However, echoing earlier critics, Longinus also argues that
even though the sublime is innate in the writer, it is still a skill that requires
cultivation and needs honing. Powerful emotions, deep thinking capacity,
the ability to visualise a scene and present it to an audience (phantasia) and
the language of enthusiasm are all central to Longinus’ treatise. His major
impact was perhaps felt most strongly in the literature of the Age of
Sensibility and in Romanticism and its attendant expressive theory of
criticism, discussed at length below.
The early part of the Middle Ages followed the dictates of Horace, but
also of Cicero and Quintilian. It comprises the main categories of artes
poeticae, artes dictaminis (or treatises on letter-writing) and above all artes
praedicandi which follow classical precepts. This is be the prescriptive
aspect of medieval literary theory; essentially, a series of manuals giving
instructions for authorial composition, focusing their attention on the
prospective author.
These critics and arbiters of taste however, also faced their own
particular textual issues. The majority of medieval critics were priests,
monks or theologians. Therefore, the hegemony of Christian authority
punctuated the Middle Ages in the history of literary theory and criticism.
Attempting to assimilate the critical theory of the classical writers, they
were doing so within the strict precis of Christian dogma. The resulting
critical hybridity made for major developments in the way we approach
textuality, language, and developing notions of form and taste. The ultimate
textual yardstick was the book of books, the Bible itself. There was a solid
basis in the exegesis of the bible and as a result, the human science of
hermeneutics was born. The importance of this science of interpretation
cannot be stressed enough; as we shall see it was further developed by the
latter romantics such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, before being assimilated
into modern philosophy by Martin Heidegger and his erstwhile pupil, H.G.
Gadamer. As will be revealed later in this current study, literary criticism
also came to the feast, as part of its wider encroachment into modern
philosophy.
In the early middle or “Dark Ages” the main critics or theoreticians
were Augustine, with his seminal texts, The Confessions and The City of
God; Boethius, with his De consolatione philosophiae; the English monk
Bede, with his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and his De natura
rerum; and finally, Isidore of Seville, with his Etymologiae. Boethius’ De
consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), was and still is
a hugely popular text. Written during his incarceration, it polemicises the
notion that the contemplation of God can reconcile us to sublunary
miseries. And what misery Boethius had at this time: he was awaiting
execution. In attempting to reconcile the classical tradition of mimesis and
decorum with the Herbaic tradition, Bede’s De Arte Metrica produces from
this synthesis a formal criticism. In so doing, he argues that Hebrew poets
anticipated the classical stylistics of mimesis. Bede also adds writers such
as Prudentius, Arator, Sedulius, and Ambrose to the canon of “classical”
poetics.
By the time of the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” universities and
organised monastic orders had emerged, with the mushrooming of both
systematic studies and commentaries upon extant texts. These scholastics,
(or schoolmen), faced the issue of incorporating the rediscovered texts of
Aristotle’s universe to the now extremely powerful hegemony of Christian
dogma. In general, the classical authors were usually given a didactic gloss,
sometimes producing a Christian political and moral pathology. This is a
complexity that, borne of the medieval period of literary criticism, has
resurfaced since the Second World War, in the guise of some of the political
pathologies of modern theory and criticism. This is a critical praxis that
rereads texts in terms of prevailing liberal notions, such as feminist,
postcolonialist, and queer theory.
In this scholastic period, Ovid, for instance, was a difficult author to
scrutinize, because of his perceived immoral notions and tropes. Some more
proto-formalist criticism explored the rhetorical forms in Ovid’s oeuvre,
noting that we could at least discern the ornatus verborum (aesthetic
beauty) of its structure, and its pulchras positiones (syntactical beauty) in
works such as his Heroides and Amores. Some commentators also tried to
analyse the Heroides through an ethical topology:

He uses the example of Penelope to discuss lawful love, the

example of Canace to discuss unlawful love, and the example of
Phyllis to discuss foolish love. He includes two of the forms, foolish
and unlawful love, not for their own sake, but in order to commend
the third. Thus, in commending lawful love he criticizes foolish and
unlawful love. (Minnis et al., Introduction to Medieval Literary
Theory and Criticism c.1100-c 1375: The Commentary Tradition,
21)

However, other critics, such as Conrad of Hirsau, were not so generous with
their critique. Utilising a Christian-didactic pathology, Conrad writes:

Why should the young recruit in Christ’s army subject his

impressionable mind to the writing of Ovid, in which even though
gold can be found among the dung, yet the foulness that clings to
the gold defiles the seeker, even though it is the gold he is after?
(Minnis et al., Introduction to Medieval Literary Theory and
Criticism c.1100-c 1375: The Commentary Tradition, 56)

Therefore, the establishment of a canon of classical authors, was generally

based upon their usefulness from the point of view of Christian education.
In fact, according to Augustine, Cassiodorus and Rabanus Maurus, the chief
justification for the study of the classics and other secular texts, was as
preparation for study of the Bible.
Later medieval poetical exegesis also included the Trivium, which was
the linguistic structure of grammar, logic and rhetoric. As we shall see, this
was later elaborated upon in the poststructuralist work of Paul de Man, by
way of his interrogation of language use and its inherent deconstructive
tensions and ironies. It was complemented by the Quadrivium, which
consisted of the spellbinding topography of arithmetic, geometry, music and
astronomy. Poetic studies consisted, in large part, of the application of the
Trivium to the critical explication of a work.
Another important critic of the latter era of this period was Geoffrey of
Vinsauf, who composed his Poetria Nova in the early twelfth century. Just
as Longinus’ theory of the sublime was to have a marked effect upon the
modern criticism of the romantics, Geoffrey’s emphasis on the power of the
mind to give shape to the subject matter, and the primacy of the intellect as
a guiding “hand” was to have a clear influence on the latter romantic notion
of organicism, as exemplified in the work of S.T. Coleridge. Geoffrey used
not only an organic trope to describe process of composition, but also a
sartorial trope, in that the idea is “clothed” in the material garments of
poesy.
A final critic of note from this period is Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas
famously imposed the literal meaning of the bible over the other three of
the fourfold meanings: the allegorical, the tropological (moral) and the
anagogical. Aquinas firstly restricted the fourfold method of interpretation
to the Holy Scripture—but not for literature in general—because only
scriptural literature has this signifying structure. This later scholastic
hermeneutics hinges on the notion that the literal sense denotes what is
properly Christian doctrine and only after this can one explicate the
allegorical or anagogical meanings, which stem from the primary literal
meaning. This restricts readings of scripture, but was also later developed
by Dante Alighieri, in terms of secular and profane literature. Aquinas also
acknowledges the various social and historical conditions of the scriptural
authors, and in so doing, introduces into literary criticism the notion of
historicist, or biographical, criticism. Moreover, Aquinas and other
scholastic critics delimit the mystical meanings of scriptural texts.
Figurative language is read as oriented by the literal level, because any
intention was consciously motivated by the authors themselves, and not
directly by the mouth of God.
To summarise, we can observe that many aspects of later critical
movements, such as humanism, romanticism, formalism, and even Post-
War political criticism, to some degree, have their roots in the criticism of
the medieval and the middle-ages.
The sometimes-called early modern pragmatic school certainly laid
claim to the ministry of classical nomenclature’s attention and with equal
certainty adopted the classical notions of criticism described above. They
provided us with a background to literary criticism, which in some respects
lay dormant until many of these texts were rediscovered and retranslated,
having been kept by Arabian custodians, during the Renaissance. In the age
of what is commonly called neoclassicism, writers and critics were working
to rejuvenate the older critical traditions and philosophical theories and
make them “fit” the modern world. Neoclassic writers such as Swift,
Addison, Pope and Dryden all tried to imitate the classic poets and orators
and as such developed highly ornate standards of criticism, not unlike those
of the ancients. Moving away from the more strictly Christian tradition,
they championed stylistic devices such as periphrasis, Latinate inversions
and epithets to give their work a more pronounced veneer. Moreover, they
also wrote in poetic metrics that matched those of the ancients. They also
argued for poetry that would act to inform and morally educate the reader or
audience, with a strong emphasis also placed upon the pleasure derived
from the text. Therefore, their theories were formal and stylistic but also
strongly pragmatic in that they argued for the importance of the pragmatic
or moral effect upon the reader of the text. Thus, examples such as Swift’s
satiric Gulliver’s Travels and Pope’s various versions of his magical Essay
on Criticism or The Rape of the Lock have a strongly instructional bent.
While straight comedy has laughter as its ultimate purpose, neoclassical
satire has moral or didactic instruction as its ultimate aim, but the comedy is
a formal and pleasing element, very much intrinsic to the text.
One noticeable aspect of all of these theories is the lack of proper
discussion of, or even allusion to, a ‘human subject.’ After the rejuvenation
of the work of Longinus, and other “organic” theories of composition, such
as those of the English writers Alexander Gerard and Lord Shaftesbury,4 a
revolutionary movement came to Europe that—especially but not
exclusively—held prominence in Germany and England that came to be
known as Romanticism. Romantic literary critics, especially in Germany,
were originally looking back to the classical age of Greece as a lost age,
which we had to somehow re-find in the present. Critics such as the
Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August, wrote at length of this in Germany,
before formulating their own theory of romantic poetics. These theories,
whilst looking for a literary ‘golden age’ were also very original in their
emphasis on the mixture of genres, their moves away from the formal
objectivism of neoclassicism, their emphasis on the power of the
imagination and the politically revolutionary strain in their overall
philosophical ideals. In terms of specific literary criticism, the ‘organic’ was
usually privileged over the’ mechanical,’ the imagination over cognitive
understanding, (or the fantastical ‘the fancy’) and there was a reaction
against the strict compositional strictures of neoclassicism.
 In England, the two poets William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge,
were also looking at new modes of expression, which were outlined in the
preface to their 1800 edition of their poems, The Lyrical Ballads. In this
preface, Wordsworth famously attacked the prevailing poetry of
neoclassicism and its strict adherence to form and ornate decorum, instead
advocating a form of poetry that would originate organically from inside the
poet’s own mind and would reflect the language really spoken by common
men. Thus, this would come to represent an expressive mode of criticism
which would centre on the poet’s subjective imagination and his
“spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”5 These poets also focused on
the effects of the sublime, but as a much bigger category of feeling than that
originally discussed by Longinus; the impact upon the imagination of
sublime encounters was of upmost importance to romantic criticism and
theory.
Moreover, whereas pragmatic critics had emphasised decorum, sense
and the Aristotelian sense of “the golden mean” (a sort of restrained middle
way in poetics and versification), these poets celebrated revolution,
profound imaginative inner states, a more free-ranging poetic meter and
indulgence in subjects often supernatural and fantastic in nature—a long
way from the sense of decorum celebrated in the pragmatic/neoclassical
period. Coleridge’s book of criticism, Biographia Literaria (1817) also
emphasised the organic nature of true poetry as opposed to the mechanical
nature of poetry that utilised what he termed the “fancy’ as opposed to the
“esemplastic imagination.”4 In short, the poetry of the romantic school
usually emphasises subjective states of mind and revelation, celebrating the
revolutionary and invigorating power of the imagination. Gothicism is often
seen as an offshoot of Romanticism, particularly the gothic novel, for
example Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto or
Lewis’ The Monk. It is important to note however that not all poets noted as
being “romantic” fit this subjective, or expressive mode. Poets such as
Hölderlin, Byron and Shelley for example deal with subjective states of
mind but often use much more classical schemes of versification.
Another important element of Romanticism is its emphasis upon the
solitary individual figure in literature, this is in some sense a reflection of
the idea of the subjective imagination—or the expression of the subjective
imagination. Individual figures represented in poems such as Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelley’s Alastor, Byron’s Manfred, or
Wordsworth’s biographical self in The Prelude all reflect this solitary
individualism, possibly connected and rooted to some degree in Rousseau’s
concept of state of nature.6 This romantic individualism is an important
trope that connects to the celebration in romantic poetics of the expression
of the individual in the work of poetry.
Another major element in romantic criticism and poetics is the
importance of nature in the work of poetry. This is partly because of the
reliance on the individual imagination and the expression of the inner-self,
which is in some measure connected to the growth of the individual’s mind
and the effect upon this growth that is afforded by nature. This is celebrated
in Wordsworth’s encounters with nature in his epic, The Prelude, but also
by most of the poets working within the romantic tradition of criticism.
Wordsworth famously writes of spots of time in his epic poem, as well as
the psychological experiences that come back to the poet in moments of
reflection and shape his personality. Nature was also seen as an important
element in Romanticism because of the moral lessons one could learn from
communing with the external world of nature, and the effect it could have
upon one’s mind and imagination.
Other aspects of German romantic literary criticism, as outlined by the
German romantics (Frühromantik) have also had a continuing influence of
not only literary criticism, but also upon cultural studies and philosophy.
One of these is instanced in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lyceum Fragments (1797)
and the Athenaeum Fragments (1798)—a series of fragments and aphorisms
that were designed to performatively reflect romantic irony—the concept
that the human subject can never have a fully comprehensible ontological
grasp upon the external world, or environment. This philosophical limit or
lack is one that is not only reflected in certain areas of English
Romanticism, but also in much critical analysis; see for example: English
Romantic Irony by Anne K. Mellor (1980), The Romantic Ideology by
Jerome McGann (1983) and more recently my own Hegel and the English
Romantic Tradition (2015). Further examples of this romantic irony are also
to be found in both modernist and postmodern works of literature, for
example Joyce, Eliot, Pound, HD, Burroughs, Pynchon or Calvino. This
sense of romantic irony can also be sensed in modern cinema in works by
Tarantino, Nolan, Anderson and in Thailand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It
is especially prevalent also in the poetry of S.T. Coleridge, Lord Byron and
P.B. Shelley. Another German romantic was the poet and philosopher
Novalis, who also introduced an idea of the musical free-play of signifiers
in language, which reflect the play and entropy of nature. This can be seen
to have certain affinities with both the later postmodernism and
poststructuralist criticism to be discussed below. In conclusion, one can see
that romantic criticism, in all its variant forms, can be seen to have had a
lasting influence in literary studies right up until the present day; indeed, the
organic sense of Romanticism also has an affinity with the more recent
theory of ecocriticism. One can even see some connection between
Coleridge and the Frühromantiker insistence upon an organic connection
between the constituent parts of a work of art or poetry to some aspects of
the new criticism discussed below, even if the new critics ostensibly set out
to remove romantic subjectivism from the process of literary criticism.
In the twentieth century, modern literary criticism, which is the main
subject of this book, moved back to more formal and objective questions
about the nature of the work of art and therefore moved away from the
more expressionistic aspects of European Romanticism, instead
concentrating on the form over the content of the poem or novel. Whereas
for the romantics the content had been the main aspect of the poem,
whether it be a romantic symbol, the language of common people, an
expression connecting us to the higher faculty of the imagination or an
experience of the sublime in the natural world; the subsequent generation of
critics began to concentrate on the more technical or formal aspects of the
poem. This was a move away from what they felt was the enforced
subjectivism of romantic criticism. For literary criticism to become more
firmly grounded once again, it needed the firm ground of objectivity
afforded to the new sciences such as modern physics, biology and
economics.
Following on the success of the period of Romanticism, criticism in the
twentieth century veered towards the newly objective or formalist mode of
criticism that moved away from the more subjective literary criticism of the
romantics. Critics such as F.R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, T.S. Eliot, W.K.
Wimsett and I.A. Richards were central in this critical prism. However, it’s
also important to note that the new critics were more or less North
American academics. The British mode of moral formalism, or humanist
criticism, as discussed in the previous chapter, up to a point retained organic
elements of Romanticism, arguing to some degree that culture had been
degraded by the onset of industrialisation (and the Great War) and that
culture needed to be preserved and saved against the materialist onset of
modernity. This argument retains important elements of the
organic/mechanical distinction as originally laid out in Britain by Coleridge
some 100 hundred years previously. The writer as a humanist and cultural
hero also goes back to Shelley’s romantic essay, “A Defence of Poetry”
(1821).
A central essay in the new critical formal tradition of criticism was
actually originally that of a British writer, T.E. Hulme, called “Romanticism
and Classicism” (1924). In this essay, Hulme argues against the one-sided
view of poetry apparent in what he terms Romanticism, which he defines as
an aesthetic obsession with the expression of the self or the soul. For
Hulme, any subject matter is worthy of poetic treatment, including “small
and dry things.” He intends to examine the poem as a self-enclosed work of
art, working as Brooks also later claims, in strange combinations and
overlays. Likewise, for T. S. Eliot, the poet, in a reflection of the
neoclassical tradition, enters into a great tradition and must thus learn that
tradition in the same way that a watchmaker learns his or her craft. As we
shall see, the school of new criticism employs normative criteria to the
workings of a great poem—these reflect in some degree the ideas of Horace
in Ars Poetica. The poem is examined as a piece of self-sustained work,
with ultimately no reference to anything outside of itself—including the
author’s psyche, emotional state—or yearning for a purer imaginative
communion with the external world. However, as outlined above, this also
has to some degree a connection to Coleridge’s organic-imaginative energy
that connects all the elements of a successful poem together.
The European equivalent of this Anglo-American tradition was Russian
Formalism, arguably inaugurated by Victor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as
Technique” (1917) in which Shklovsky argued that literature is a special
form of linguistic utterance, one that “defamiliarises” the reader by unusual
uses of language. The formalist critics also paid attention to the words on
the page instead of the author’s biography or prevailing social events. Both
new criticism and formalism are objective theories in that they contend
against their romantic (and later symbolist) predecessors that objective
concentration upon the linguistic form of the poem provides the measure of
its critical success or failure. It is to these text-based theories that modern
criticism turned in the twentieth century, and in what follows I shall explore
literary criticism and philosophy for the humanities in light of this modality
of criticism.

Footnotes
1 The “oral tradition” predates the tablet and early scribes in early Classical Culture, as well as other
cultures such as Norse and Old English, where the first extant poem was a recorded version of the
oral epic Beowulf; with the MS dated at around the year 1000 CE.

2 Penelope Murray writes: “…in the words spoken by Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ play Frogs:
‘Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.’ It is only against this background
of the central importance of poetry in Greek society that we can begin to understand the ways in
which ancient literary criticism developed. For Greek criticism is not primarily concerned with
‘literary’ or aesthetic matters, but rather with philosophical questions relating to the moral authority
and ethical value of literature. The mainstream of ancient literary criticism takes it for granted that
poetry, and literature in general, is a form of communication, and that literature and morality are
intimately connected.” Murray & Dorsch (eds)., Classical Literary Criticism, (London: Penguin,
2000). p. 10.

3 For Plato, his theory of education is therefore also interestingly rationalist, in that the educator is
supposed to appraise the students of these ideas of the noetic realm, already a priori held but
forgotten after the trauma of childbirth. Even if one relinquishes the metaphysical implications of this
original theory of education, a deflationary (non-metaphysical reading) of Platos’s theory sounds in
some ways very similar to much of the neoliberal theories of discovery learning and child-centred
educational theories of pedagogy, currently popular and (quite rightly I think) descried by many
advocates of a more communitarian approach to modern education.

4 Shaftesbury’s seminal Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was first published in
1711 and certainly bears the hallmarks of the neoclassic, in that its title reads like a pragmatist
manifesto. However, the wonderful prose stylistic is of the ‘age of sensibility’ and comes in the
recent wake of the revolution in manners partly inspired by Addison and Steele’s journals, The Tatler
and The Spectator. Neither of which were to do with the newer emanations of the said publications
but were very much to do with the newly gentrified fashion of manners and politeness. Both
Shaftesbury and then later on also Alexander Gerard in his Essay on Genius (1756) advocated the
idea of organic and natural genius. Jonathan Cuthbert (the Cambridge Platonist) had similar ideas and
his work was taught in German at the Tubingen when Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin were students
there, no doubt influencing in part their own neo-Kantian ideas on Organicism.

5 This quote was famously part of Wordsworth’s own Preface, which was not part of the original
1798 anonymously published edition of the poems. By the final 2 volume edition of the book (1804),
Wordsworth had actually failed to include any of Coleridge’s poetic compositions.
6 The “state of nature,” sometimes later used synonymously with the so-called idea of “The Noble
Savage”, untouched by the chains of civilisation, was predominantly celebrated by Jean Jacques
Rousseau in his own book on educational theory: Emile: or on Education (1762); the concept in
terms of a natural connection to nature was also explored in his last book, Reveries of the Solitary
Walker (1776–78).

OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_3

3. The Philosophical Self-Consciousness of

the New Criticism and Formalism
Wayne Deakin1
(1) Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

New Criticism and formalism grew out of an attempt to render literary

criticism more “scientific,” that is, to make criticism appear more
measurable and thus a tool to analyse literary language through its form
rather than its content as had been the critical and philosophical bent of the
romantics. The organic/imaginative preference of both the Frühromantiker
in Germany and the English school of Romanticism had meant that the
formal boundaries between different genres of written discourse had been
dissolved. In philosophy this had been the age of modern aesthetics and
philosophers and poets alike had been exploring the link between aesthetics
and human subjectivity. The philosophy of art grew in stature, in works
such as Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794),
Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art in two volumes (1835),1 and Friedrich and
August Schlegel’s ‘fragments’ in both The Athenaeum and The Lyceum
(1798–1800); moreover, there were also other important treatises on
aesthetics by Goethe, Wackenroder, Tieck and Novalis.2 Meanwhile, in
England there was a vast exchange of letters on aesthetics, as well as
Wordsworth’s two famous poetic prefaces in 1800 and 1815. There was also
Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and his numerous other articulations of
literary criticism. Indeed, the title of this latter text reveals a lot about the
romantic form of criticism—it was often intimately bound to the subjective
biographical experiences of author-as-human subject. The later humanist
forms of criticism, in particular those of Arnold, Pater, Swinburn and more
recently, Leavis, while pointing the way to a more formal style of criticism,
still retained values such as culture, community and the conceptualisation of
the writer or artisan as the humanist hero or cultural custodian.
New critics such as T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks and I.A. Richards tended
to focus on the formal qualities of literary texts. This was, in part, a reaction
to romantic or expressive criticism, which had placed emphasis and value
upon the relationship between the text and the imagination, or the
expression of the inner/subjective. The romantics, and especially Coleridge,
had used nuanced phrases such as the mechanical understanding, the fancy
(fantasy as opposed to imaginative aesthetics) and the primary/secondary
imagination, which signified the special place in their philosophy for the
imagination. However, the new critics and formalists removed these
philosophical distinctions, which were in some way related to the dominant
philosophical concerns of the period. Indeed, the dominant philosophical
concerns of the early twentieth century were linguistic and logical. Ever
since Frege’s ground-breaking work in formal logic, thinkers such as
Russell, Whitehead, Carnap, and Wittgenstein had been working out both
the limits of formal logic and its relational limits to language; this trend was
initially known as analytic philosophy.
Following this ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, the preoccupation with
language use and utterances later became known under the aegis of the later
Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer as Ordinary Language
Philosophy. In fact, the humanities in general were seeking new axiomatic
grounds for certainty and this would also go for both our cultural re-
imagining and our critical approach to literature. This formal approach to
philosophy and social science (partly through verificationism and logical
positivism) was largely reflected in the almost anti-romantic stance of
thinkers such as Hulme, Eliot and Brooks; while also finding expression in
continental formalists such as Jakobson, Shklovsky and Propp. The other
big philosophical position of the twentieth century was transcendental
phenomenology; however, this was still based upon subjective experience—
albeit premised upon a rigorous critique of human consciousness—and later
on our very notion of Being itself.
One of the first points of departure for new criticism is its emphasis on
the form of the text itself, and as such its move from biographical or author-
centred criticism. The new critics emphasised the text itself, rather than the
author’s background or intentions. Wimsett and Beardsley (1946/1949)
wrote of the “intentional/affective” fallacy of a work and claimed that
neither the supposed intentions of the writer, nor the effects of a work of art
upon a reader should be taken into account when configuring a critical
appraisal; for example, whether we respond with sadness or joy, are not
important factors for criticism because the important factors are the way the
author accomplishes these affects—or the stylistic devices the author
employs in order to attain these effects. This also removes the romantic
notion of subjectivity from the literary critical prism; notions such as Keats’
negative capability, the egotistical sublime and the Coleridgean primary
imagination all presume a large element of personal subjectivity—even its
reception of the so-called “second generation” English romantics: Keats,
Shelley, Byron—was itself derogatory.3 Keats’ application of “the
egotistical sublime” to Wordsworth, as the phrase itself suggests, was
hardly congratulatory. Indeed, much of the early romantics’ work was also
very biographical in nature and the sense of romantic irony and the
fragment was based upon philosophical un-certainty, or what we also
similarly know as philosophical idealism within the phenomenal world.
However, as these philosophical concerns became replaced with the more
analytical approach, so the literary text would become closely read in terms
of its inherent forms and structures—not through its philosophical
relationship and proximity to human subjectivity and the external world at
large.
This movement was moving synchronically with the more formalised,
semantic and linguistic nature of Bertrand Russell’s analytic movement in
philosophy, which searched for a more formal-logical schematics of logical
annotation that would counter all more relative linguistic usage to the point
where many of the previous problems of philosophy would be made
redundant. Likewise, for the new criticism of texts, this formal approach
was isolating the paralogical and structurally creative nature of aesthetic
discourse and thus providing us with a clearer, more precise, less subjective
critical prism through which to discern the building blocks of literature.
Crucially, in the area of philosophy, Russell, Frege, Whitehead, Moore
(and later Austin and Wittgenstein), were also examining language in order
to define a logical relationship to the world we inhabit, a logocentric
relationship whereby we move away from an expressive epistemological
view of the world, or a more philosophically idealist understanding of the
phenomenal world to a view of the world where logic is mirrored in
language and the logicality of the world is represented through the logical
structure of language itself, hence the early Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s
idea of logical form and logical representation in language. Frege had been
working against the idea of “psychologism” and in his work on logic and
psychology he had separated the realm of logical language from the
subjective realm of psychology. On this analytic view of language, the laws
of logic are not governed by psychology (psychologism) but are objective
and independent, reflecting a position baldly known as logical realism. This
was a reaction in tandem with thinkers such as Russell, who in turn was
reacting against his own earlier neo-Hegelian philosophical idealism and
against the Romanticism in both critical and aesthetic theory, ushering in a
new form of empiricism (phenomenalism) that would underpin not only our
scientific, but also our social scientific and aesthetic theory. Significantly,
this analytic school of philosophy is more than clearly reflected in the then-
contemporaneous more analytic approach taken to literary criticism through
the prism of new criticism, where the move away from Romanticism,
biographical criticism and philosophical idealism spells a concomitant
move away from more expressive epistemologies to these more objective
modes of criticism and theory.4
However, the analytic model in philosophy, whilst serving its purpose
and becoming a mode that is still used today as a tool of philosophical
enquiry, did not completely supersede more expressive modes of inquiry,
running into its own logical brick walls. Russell himself encountered what
became known as the ‘Barber Paradox’ in the early stages of his research
into mathematics, language and a pure system of notational logic.5This
paradox led to major issues with the purely mathematical/logical approach
to philosophy, meaning that philosophy and criticism still had no firm
foundational grounds upon which to place themselves. Even though
thinkers such as Carnap, Sellars and Quine have made interesting inroads
into the analytic tradition, as Richard Rorty has pointed out, the same
intractable issues still ultimately remain. This is partly why concomitantly,
objective modes of literary criticism, have in the twentieth century faced
challenges from continental theories of criticism, rooted ultimately in the
very romantic schools that both the new critics and the analytic
philosophers were attempting to supersede.
Moving back to the shores of literary criticism, the new critics had a
number of canonical texts, and in his book Practical Criticism (1929),
Richards argues for a sort of “democratisation” of the text; by this we mean
that the text is equally accessible to all students, whatever their creed or
cultural background; this is because we only need to measure the objective
variables at work within a text—and any student can do this regardless of
his or her cultural background. This worked especially well as a theory of
criticism in US schools and colleges, as in the classroom there were so
many students with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Students
could pledge allegiance to the flag in the morning and be all equal in the
eyes of the literature teacher. If in the UK, the Leavisite moral formalists
were looking to an idyllic sense of community that had been lost after the
first great industrial war and had become downtrodden by the rapid onset of
industrialisation, the new critics were still trying to homogenise the US,
with a heady mixture of Dewey’s educational pragmatism and post-war
reintegration. The US was still finding identity among its localised
diaspora; and this meant allegiance to the flag and democratisation of the
classroom in the text. Everyone grappled with either Huckleberry Finn or
Basil Ransom.
There was also a sort of return to neoclassicism in the new criticism.
Poet and critic T.S. Eliot also wrote about the fact that, as with neoclassical
and classical criticism, an author or poet needed to take years of tutelage to
study the tradition of a literary style before becoming an “expert” in a
certain literary genre. For Eliot, the individual personality of the poet is not
important at all—and as with T.E. Hulme—Eliot was very much reacting
against the subjective ideology at work in romantic literary criticism. In his
essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) he famously argued that
poets enter into a tradition or style of writing, learn that style, and then
develop an individualised talent. Thus, for Eliot, poetry was an impersonal
exercise, and the best poetry requires a “continual surrender of himself as
he is at the moment to something more valuable.”
Some of the key points of the new criticism were that the literary
“canon” was naturalised. As such, certain texts that adhered to certain
objectively posited variables, were markers of what made a text universally
“great literature.” Thus, works of literature in effect become a-historical;
that is, they become recognised in terms of the inherent merits of their
internal cohesion and construction, not in terms of their specific place in
history. This makes the text more accessible to all literature students from
all cultural backgrounds. Moreover, the scholarly recognition of the
intentional/affective fallacy, which essentially meant that any purported
psychological and emotional effects of the text were to be removed in
importance (something that would have been anathema to the romantic
school of criticism) in a major sense reflects Russell and Frege’s separation
of psychologism and logic—another form of philosophical objectivism.
Furthermore, the poem or novel was to be seen as an aesthetic
heterocosm: a stand-alone object with internal contradictions and tensions
of its own. For thinkers such as Eliot, the last great movement in poetry was
the group of metaphysical poets, led by John Donne, who used subject
matters from various discursive areas to produce their tropes. In their self-
consciously abstruse juxtapositions of disparate figures and imagery, they
were to use devices such as what Eliot described as the “objective
correlative” in which various feelings and emotions were troped using
various figurative signifiers from fields as various as science, theology and
folklore. Therefore, for Eliot, the vehicle (rhetorical device or trope) was
most effectively used when signifying the tenor (feeling or emotion to be
conveyed) in a number of novel, and interesting formative ways—
something which Eliot himself did to great effect in his own epic The
Wasteland (1922). However, for romantics such as Wordsworth, the actual
feeling of, for example, joy or terror, would arise from a circumstance
invoked from everyday life and subjective experience (such as encountering
an old man on the road to seeing his dying son, or meeting a young girl
tending her sibling’s gravestone, as in the poem “We Are Seven”). In effect,
the new critics were displacing the action or event to a secondary and
supportive place in the process of poetic construction, with a focus and
emphasis moved to be placed upon the rhetorical devices used to convey
the poem itself.
The main elements under analysis in a poem using the new critical
objectivist technique are generally recognised as follows: paradox, irony,
ambiguity, tension and ambivalence. As Brooks and Richards point out, the
language of art doesn’t stand together in the same logical fashion as that of
science, politics or, in the case of the analytic tradition: philosophy. One
only needs to examine the linguistic structure of Donne’s “The Flea” or
Marvell’s “To His coy Mistress” to see the use of tension, ambiguity, irony
and paradox—elements that function as the building blocks for poetic
devices such as metaphysical conceit. This formula can be applied with
equal success to many literary works; one thinks of the use of stylistic
devices such as hendiadys or doubling in Hamlet to the structural tensions
in stories such as Joyce’s Dubliners collection to see both the successful
and technical use of paradox, tension, litotes or chiasmus in literary
discourse.
However, one can pick obvious issues with the idea that one should pay
attention only to the objective “heterocosm” on the page. I shall
demonstrate this critical issue below briefly, with examples from two major
canonical works of literature, the first of which is Shakespeare’s exemplary
sonnet 130. Here is the sonnet in full:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

The obvious brilliance lies in the formative paradox of the sonnet as a

whole. The lines function as a series of negatives that distance the muse
form any traditional form of comparison as exhibited in the traditional
Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet. In a startling use of conceit, the speaker
deconstructs the usual uses of simile, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche,
while negating all of the traditional uses of the five senses in stark imagery.
The traditional tropes: red roses, perfume, white snow and innocence,
passionate red—and ultimately the figure of a goddess—are all exploited
and turned on their head, in a brilliant use of anticlimactic statements that
paradoxically culminate in the final climactic statement. Moreover, the
three quartets culminate in the epigrammatical couplet, whereby the
resolution is that this particular series of dead tropes are in no way
appropriate for the feelings that the lyric speaker has for his mistress; she
cannot be “belied with false compare”. The new critic can have a field day
with this sonnet, as the ultimate conceit relies upon all of the main critical
elements leading up to the final powerful and self-conscious simile: irony,
paradox, ambiguity and ambivalence. These devices all form an obvious
tension because of the literary expectations at work here.
However, the theoretical issue transpires when one tries to read the
sonnet as a heterocosm—self-contained with its own internal tensions—and
one cannot accomplish this because the conceit relies upon a prior
familiarity with the existing literary conventions involved with the genre of
the love sonnet. The series of negatives only make sense and culminate in
the final paradox if the reader is aware, however indistinctly, of the formal
conventions that are being exploited. One may also use a more formalist
mode of analysis and utilise Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation (the
literary skill of making the familiar unfamiliar and by extension drawing
attention to it through this formal exploitation); in this case, the formal
conventions of the sonnet are defamiliarised to profound effect. However,
one also requires the literary context of a prior awareness of the formal
conventions of the sonnet as a poetic genre, in order for this to become
effective as a strategy.
Therefore, on one level the use of analytic, objective criticism works in
this sonnet extremely well. However, on another level the wider
philosophical theory upon which this formal explication relies fails—the
paradox comes through reading the poem in a protean fashion and seeing
this protean nature emanating in sharp relief from the usual structures
involved in this particular poetic genre. The intertextual nature of the field
of literature is what accounts for the novel aspect of this particular poem.
One may also ironically consider the extensive use of footnotes in scholarly
editions when thinking about how much we can read poems or novels in a
vacuum. Furthermore, another proposition about the “democratisation” of
the classroom text is at stake here. For example, would Thai EFL literature
students who were reading this poem for the first time and without prior
knowledge of the genre of the sonnet be at an advantage here? The answer
is undoubtedly in the affirmative.
One may also consider an author’s own literary predilections and oeuvre
when explicating some of their work. In fact, it is the work of a romantic
poet, Wordsworth, that supplies evidence in this regard. In his book The
Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks explicates Wordsworth’s sonnet in terms
of the language of paradox, using both the theoretical context of Coleridge’s
theory of the mechanical and the organic and Wordsworth’s treatment of the
‘things of ordinary life’ as outlined in his 1800 ‘Preface’ to The Lyrical
Ballads to bolster his argument:

The city, in the poet’s insight of the morning, has earned its right to
be considered organic, not merely mechanical. That is why the stale
metaphor of the sleeping houses is strangely renewed. The most
exciting thing that the poet can say about the houses is that they are
asleep. He has been in the habit of counting them as dead—as just
mechanical and inanimate; to say that they are asleep is to say that
they are alive, that they participate in the life of nature. (Lodge,
Modern Criticism and Theory, 294)

Therefore, for Brooks it appears that one requires a sense of history, or at

the very least a sense of the context of English romantic criticism—and by
extension Wordsworth’s previous work and attitude to towns and cities—to
be able to grasp the underlying paradox of this poem fully. The paradox of
the city becoming alive is unified, in-light of the poet’s previous poetic
encounters with the urban sprawl, as well as his previous injunctions about
how ‘the ordinary’ has been specifically associated with the rustic,
picturesque and sublime. The philosophical beauty here is that, as with the
concurrent analytic philosophical fixation with the pure forms of
mathematics and logic—the paradox not of the barber but of historical
acuity—prevents one from the simple ascension to the idea that poetry can
be read as a self-enclosed heterocosm. Ontologically and symbolically, the
universe refuses to be reduced to an epistemological vacuum. Its beauty and
ultimate paradox will confound the pretensions and programmes of both the
analytic philosophers and the equally analytical, new critics. The further
unintended paradox is that this theoretical paradox is exposed when one of
the foremost of the new critics, Cleanth Brooks, utilises the romantic theory
of Wordsworth and Coleridge in his apposite analysis of one of
Wordsworth’s finest sonnets.
However, the attentive reader must also remember that the tools of both
new criticism and analytic philosophy are of extremely practical usage in
the classroom for analysis of logical arguments or poems. For example,
Russell’s theory of descriptions in sentence structure is one of the most
important aspects of analytic philosophy bequeathed to the current
philosopher of logic and language. By the same token, one cannot
completely forgo other theories, such as romantic criticism or idealist
philosophy. What the limits of both these philosophical and literary-critical
Anglo-American traditions have ultimately illustrated has been the wiggle
room for other approaches and critical prisms in tackling either
philosophical problems or literary texts, or as is often the case, both of these
tasks taken together as one.
One other important element to consider is that the important factors
that the new critics tended to emphasise were tension, paradox, irony,
ambiguity and ambivalence, all of which tend to play a part in the overall
critical success (or failure) of a piece of literary work. In this analytical
framework however, the new critics have also paradoxically retained certain
aspects of Romanticism. For example, the emphasis upon the textual
interconnectedness of a work, or an underlying central principle that
informs the work, has in some ways actually echoed the romantic call for
“organic unity” and has reflected the Coleridgean trope (and later Keatsian)
analogy of an organic whole made up figuratively like the constituent parts
of a tree. Even if romantic metaphysics or subjectivism were removed from
new criticism, there was still an ancillary sense of romantic formalism
retained. It just didn’t have to connect directly to a primary imagination or
to the spiritually gnostic Natura Naturans of nature, as reflected and
configured in the higher awareness subjectively reflected in the mind of the
poet. In the next chapter, I shall examine a major form of criticism that
emerged in the twentieth century, rooted in a continental theory of
linguistics, which ultimately became part of a wider philosophical
movement that morphed into a theory that challenged not only the
assumptions of analytic and ordinary language philosophy—but also of the
new criticism. Philosophy and literary criticism were about to converge in
the age of structuralism and then poststructuralism.

Footnotes
1 The Lectures on Fine Art in Two Volumes was published in Hegel’s name but was in actual fact
collated from the lecture notes of one of his erstwhile students, named Hotho—Hegel died in 1831 so
the volumes were published posthumously. Hotho must have been a model student; both punctual
and attentive. The two combined volumes run to well over 1500 pages.
2 Tieck, Wackenroder, Novalis, Hülsen and Hölderlin, along with the Schlegel brothers, constituted
a large part of the German romantics (Frühromantik) and wrote in aesthetics journals such as The
Athenaeum, The Lyceum and Pollen. See the stellar (pun intended) work of ‘constellation philosophy’
and in particular the work of Manfred Frank, for insightful research into the theory and philosophy of
these thinkers. J.V. Goethe had written some undeniably romantic poetry and the tragic novel The
Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was also a key player in the Sturm und Drang theatrical
movement but after his trip to Italy and the resultant travelogue, Italian Journey (1786–88) changed
his aesthetic and philosophical position to that of a classicist. He even famously stated “Romanticism
is a sickness” and was very critical of much of the German romantic movement and novels such as
Friedrich Schlegel’s experimental romantic novel, Lucinde (1799).

3 Keats had coined the phrase “the egotistical sublime” for Wordsworth’s particular form of sublime
encounter because of its subjective and biographical mediation through the persona of the poet
himself. In his second (and very successful) and very satirical book of poetry, English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers (1809) Lord Byron had ridiculed the ‘Lake School’ of Southey, Coleridge and
Wordsworth. P.B. Shelley also wrote the satirical “Peter Bell the Third” about Wordsworth and many
of the younger romantics accused him of apostasy after his epic The Excursion (1814) and his latter
“Thanksgiving Ode” (1816), which celebrated the defeat of Napoleon. An excellent New Historicist
study has recently been made about this latter period in Wordsworth’s oeuvre by Jeffrey N. Cox,
William Wordsworth, Second Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo, Cambridge:
CUP, 2021.

4 Bertrand Russell, the founding father of the analytic tradition in philosophy, had been originally
trained in Hegelianism and later turned against this absolute Idealism in favour of the logical,
mathematical and analytical approach of matching the logic of sentence structures to mathematics
and thus deciphering a language of pure logic through which to underpin our sentences about the
empirical world. This was held in sharp relief by Russell to both Romanticism and German Idealism.
His (in) famous History of Western Philosophy (1945) was clearly also informed by the political
climate at the time of the Second World War, although the roots of his animus also clearly lie in his
apostasy with regards Hegelianism. The major irony of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics project is
that it was actually very Hegelian in design; just as Hegel’s The Science of Logic (1812–1816) was
designed as a foundational text for the sciences and in fact, all forms of knowledge enquiry in
general, so Russell’s text was putatively designed to form a bedrock and axiomatic propositional
logic to underpin all future inquiry. A further and (as far as I’m currently aware) unacknowledged
irony is that the ‘barber shop paradox’ as it later came to be known, would have been sublated-
through-negation in the jargon of the Hegelian system of logic. This option due to the mathematical
system of sets was simply not available to Frege or Russell.

5 This foundational “glitch” in the Frege/Russell project once again demonstrated the impossibility
of absolute grounds for axiomatic philosophical claims—and by extension and within the precis of
this book, in any form of literary analysis within the remit of the humanities. Russell’s paradox
basically runs like this: First of all in order to bring pure mathematics into the reified world of
sentential objects and structures, one had to reduce the pure notations of abstract mathematics to
classes; which produced and necessitated Set Theory. Therefore, for any particular collection of
objects you name there will be a set. For example, three bottles, the people in the room, your family.
The sets themselves become objects, thus, there are higher level sets that have sets as members; the
set that has one member and the set that has three spoons. And we therefore identify numbers with
sets. So, three will be defined as a set.
Then there will be a set whose members are themselves sets (as objects). The higher-level set
three will have the set with the three people, the three black cats and the three teachers. However, the
set of things not identical with itself-the null set-doesn’t exist but it is still by necessity and definition
a set. The logical theory goes that by using these sets with no connection to an abstract notion of
numbers we can explain maths by logical concepts.
The paradox: is that some classes are members of themselves—and there are some that are not
members of themselves. A class is a member of the class of classes (all classes) What about a class
whose members are not the same as themselves. A class of classes who aren’t members of themselves.
The puzzle shows that an apparently plausible scenario is logically impossible. In the paradox, the
barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves”. The question
is, does the barber shave himself?
In answering this question, we instantiate a contradiction. The barber cannot shave himself as he
only shaves those who do not shave themselves. Thus, if he shaves himself he ceases to be the barber.
Conversely, if the barber does not shave himself, then he fits into the group of people who would be
shaved by the barber, and thus, as the barber, he must shave himself. Later, and in a much more half-
hearted effort at his mathematical principles, Russell went on to attempt to resolve this logical
paradox with the theory of types.

OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_4

4. Structuralism, Semiotics and Ordinary

Language Doubts
Wayne Deakin1
(1) Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

In this chapter I draw attention to a theory that is more scientific in its

aspirations than even New Criticism and Formalism. Structuralism, as one
should understand from the noun itself, focuses on structure within a
literary text. However, it does this at the expense of the reader or the author
—rather than concentrating on either of these two “subject positions”, the
structuralist concentrates on structures (or codes), and reads the work in
terms of the codes that the writer has inherited. This is the reason why
many critics have called structuralism apolitical and anti-humanist—there is
a concentration on decoding texts and finding, through this exercise,
various textual codes that different texts have in common—once again
without any concern about the author or the reader’s subjective intention or
response to a text.
However, the reader will recall that even some of the new critics,
although focusing upon the words on the page, were still often concerned
with the humanistic and moral function of the texts, in a world, which has
become overly-technological and indifferent to “real culture.” This was the
position of the humanist educator and critic Matthew Arnold and then later
with the moral formalism of F.R. Leavis, who would have further hated
structuralism due to its highly theoretical nature: if we look back, Leavis
was very much anti-theory in his criticism. The culturally polyglot
aspirations of Eliot in The Wasteland and Pound in his Cantos are also plain
for all masochistic readers to see.
 It is indeed also arguable that structuralism is much more a form of
literary theory than actual criticism. When we apply this approach, all we
can really do is show what the writer is doing with an inherited set of codes
that it is down to the reader to de-cipher. Some critics, such as Jonathan
Culler, have even argued that we have varying degrees of competency as
readers and structuralism shows how we as skilled, (or less-skilled) readers,
respond to the actual text itself; however, the more we read literature, the
better and more competent we get at deciphering these codes.
Structuralism originated with the genesis of modern structural
linguistics, the principles of which were first laid out by Ferdinand de
Saussure in a collection of lectures entitled The Course in General
Linguistics (1916). In these revolutionary lectures, de Saussure laid out a
series of principles for the study of modern linguistics. The following
section briefly outlines some of his key points.
Firstly, linguistics should be the study of a language’s structure, as
opposed to the phonological study of sounds. Next, language is used by a
community of speakers who know the rules governing the structure—hence
it is a social-phenomena. Importantly, the study of language should be
synchronic and not diachronic. The system should be studied as it is used
now, contemporaneously, not by looking at its historical development. A
language is primarily made up of the sound (signifier) and the concept
(signified). Each of these two elements of the sign triggers each other
cyclically. Therefore, the sign itself is structured by two symbiotic sides,
signifier/signified. We can also apply this to other signs such as visual
signs, (in movies or paintings) and other indexical signs such as smoke-
signals, the morse code, etc.1
In de Saussure’s semiotic theory, the relationship between the signifier
and the signified is an arbitrary rather than a necessary one. Therefore,
when I say the word “tree” the linguistic sign registers certain phenomena.
However, this is socially constructed and agreed upon by a group of
language users—this sign could just as easily mean what is known as “dog”
or even in the classroom, “fan;” we just have to agree on meanings, as a
group of language users.
Also of key importance is the idea that signs work through difference (a
key concept for structuralists). For example, “dog” in relation to “cat” in
relation to “mouse” and so forth. Signs only gain meaning through their
relationship to other signs in a system. One may think of traffic lights: on its
own, red may connote a lot of things to different people, but when it is next
to “amber” and then “green” the signifier red signifies “stop.” It works in a
structural sign system, which can be studied independently of phenomena.
Of course, having driven in Thailand for nearly 20 years I can vouch for the
relative nature of traffic lights as signs; amber seems to mean follow the car
in front as fast as you can and whatever you do, DO NOT LOOK UP! We
can also think of other examples such as money (coins, notes) and even
musical notes. A note signifies something special in a piece of music, which
we recognise, and develops this meaning through its difference from other
notes on the system. Roland Barthes actually uses the example of the
phoneme “p” and argues this sign registers next to the sign “s” because it
signifies or distributes difference in the overall phonetic system. Think of
the word “spin”: when we utter this sign, we can hear a “b” (phonetic
sound) but our structural system doesn’t register this phoneme as
distributing difference when juxtaposed with “s” and therefore we register
the “p” phoneme-because the allophone produces the “p” phoneme through
the structural difference of this particular linguistic sign system. Think also
of Thai sounds such as “ng” in the word for “snake” (ngu). It works in the
Thai system because it is recognised as distributing difference with certain
phonemes around it and at the start of a word (sign). However, in English
this is not the case. Hence, English speakers have trouble with the Thai
word “ngu” at this phonetic location.
Finally, de Saussure also crucially distinguishes between “Langue” the
overall language system, (English/Thai/German) and an individual
utterance using the system “parole”, or the words an individual uses to
express herself, which is the syntagmatic (combination) pole. The langue is
from where we select words (signs), whereas the parole is the individual
way someone combines these signs to make an utterance. However, without
the structure of the overall langue, there could be no parole. These
distinctions were crucially applied, in different contexts, by thinkers such as
Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson.
In de Saussure’s original lectures, he posited that language was the
primary signifying system. However, culture at large was made up of other
such signifying systems. In de Saussure’s words:

Linguistic factors which at first seem central (for example, the

workings of the vocal apparatus) must be relegated to a place of
 secondary importance if it is found that they merely differentiate
languages from other such systems. In this way, light will be thrown
not only upon the linguistic problem. By considering rites, customs,
etc., as signs, it will be possible, we believe, to see them in a new
perspective. The need will be felt to consider them as semiological
phenomena and to explain them in terms of the laws of semiology.
(Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory, 9)

Therefore, de Saussure is giving birth to a new methodological concept, not

just in linguistics, but in the social sciences, anthropology and across the
humanities. Structuralism can be applied to all signifying systems that make
up a culture. Roland Barthes famously seized upon this ideal in his book,
Mythologies (1957), in which he brilliantly applied structuralism to cultural
studies. In this ground-breaking study he attempted to analyse all cultural
phenomena, including even realia as diverse as Wrestling Matches, Washing
Powder adverts and Restaurant Menus, in terms of the structuralist
principles laid out by de Saussure. Barthes “reads” the signs and signals
applied in these cultural artefacts in terms of the signifier and the signified
—signs that have been unconsciously passed down through cultural history
—as well as langue and parole. Moreover, he contests that they sustain
existing power relationships within society. Therefore, by moving
structuralist methodology into the realm of cultural signification, Barthes
goes some way to politicising the mechanics of structuralist theory—a
significant philosophical move—as we shall see below. For example, when
analysing soap powders, Barthes writes:

‘Persil Whiteness’ for instance, bases its prestige on the evidence of

a result; it calls into play vanity, a social concern with appearances,
by offering for comparison two objects, one of which is whiter than
the other. Advertisements for Omo also indicate the effect of the
product (and in superlative fashion, incidentally), but they chiefly
reveal its mode of action; in doing so, they involve the consumer in
a sort of direct experience of the substance, make him the
accomplice of a liberation rather than the mere beneficiary of a
result; matter here is endowed with value-bearing states. (Barthes,
37)
In this way, Barthes demonstrates how simple and “naturalised” cultural
phenomena work on assumptions (usually unconscious), at work in the
minds of the readers of culture: what he terms the ecrivain. We read these
messages through signifiers, and if we take the trouble to decode (decipher)
these messages properly, we find that they partake in a wider signification
system, a langue, from which these various utterances parole are taken and
combined to make, for example, a soap detergent advert.
When we watch Thai adverts, for example, adverts for whitening
creams, we have the same use of the signifier/signified. White signifies
cleanliness, but also middle-class “hi so” society values the privilege of not
having had to work in the sun, on the farm, or the rice field. The signifier
“white” signifies bourgeois contentment, cleanliness, and social status.
Barthes has taught us that there is no innocent, or “transparent” link
between signifier and signified. All is ideological, and as in language, all is
only arbitrary. One could easily change the apparent transparency of the
system to work within a differently coded system: let’s make the signifier
“white” signify exploitation, capitalist greed, an erasure of cultural “local
colour” and difference. The point is that the arbitrary meanings in these
systems are unstable and open to change.
In a recent example, which I found perfectly suited to structuralist
analysis, a school in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, was roundly criticised
and condemned for using mocked-up Nazi uniforms as part of a school
parade. Jewish groups, understandably objected in the strongest terms.
However, this has been carried out numerous times and in more than one
Thai school.2 The issue at stake here would be, upon a Barthesian
structuralist analysis, whether the signifier of the Nazi swastika connoted
the same signified in this particular socio-political-cultural context. As
anyone who knows the Thai secondary history curriculum would attest, the
students would not feel the same sense of historical gravity that a Western
pupil would read into this use of the Nazi symbol.3 Other signifiers that led
to an overall cultural reading, would be elements such as the fact that it was
a parade; moreover, the colours, the salutes and the utterances being made,
would all combine to provide a combination of signs that could aid in
providing a “reading” for this particular situation. However, (and this is
where the more subjective reader-response criticism discussed later comes
to the fore also), the reading context of this combination of signs also
comes from my own historical context. Am I Jewish? Were my parents
involved in the second world war at all? Am I Thai? What is my knowledge
of the second world war and the emotive events behind not only the rise of
the Nazi party but also aspects such as the Hitler Youth Movement? What
also of the Nazi treatment of Jews, Slovaks and communists during the
second world war. The system of interpretation runs both ways—the way
the signifiers are deciphered by the people (in this instance students and
teachers) who use a particular combination of signifiers. In this particular
case it was the school “Red House” and unfortunately the red and black
inverted swastika is one of the most prominent symbols of the twentieth
century; the signs are then also read by another socio-cultural group in a
very different manner; in essence, we have what the structuralist
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan termed, a floating signifier. That is that the
signified “glides” and moves under the signifier.4
As a final, and obvious illustration of this structuralist model, if I had
said to someone that I felt “gay” one hundred years ago, it would have
signified a deep feeling of happiness or contentment and not my sexual
orientation. if I said “I was “‘green’” one would assume I meant I feel angry
or jealous/envious about something; whereas now it may signify that I care
about the environment and so cycle to work every day.
Barthes also used the distinction between langue and parole in much of
his earlier work. For example, when I choose a set of clothes from my
wardrobe or closet, I am, in fact, selecting from the overall langue of my
clothing system. When I make a sequence (trousers, shirt, hat) I make an
individual utterance or parole about myself. One can say that there is a Thai
parole of university uniform, constructed from a certain combination of
(black skirt/white shirt), which is selected and followed. If I dress with
green hair and a sex pistols tee-shirt, with a ring through my nose, this is
equally a parole, the parole of the “punk.” People often say that clothes
“speak” or “speak volumes” about someone, or that someone “expresses”
themselves through the clothes that they wear. Another example of this sort
of individual utterance or parole, would be a dance D.J. The D.J. selects
from a wide selection of music from the langue category of musical signs,
and then makes an individual utterance or “tune” on the parole axis—the
way the D.J. combines these signs together—the of musical grammar or
syntax he used to combine these “samples.”
In its most basic methodological form, we can use this model to analyse
various literary texts by firstly examining the overall langue of literary
terms and methodology. For example, we can begin by deciphering what is
available for use and selection. Here we have categories and signs such as
imagery, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, simile, prosopopoeia,
onomatopoeia, litotes, hen di-a-dys, anaphora, chiasmus and so forth. Then
we can examine how a writer has combined these effects in her individual
parole and what effect these achieve in the overall work itself. For example,
why choose this metaphor, or this other figurative term? Why use it with
this type of imagery or this particular narrative structure? Pari passu, the
same methodological approach goes for cinema. Why use a certain type of
camera shot or angle over another type of shot or angle from the overall
available range? Using a basic structuralist analysis, the viewer may be able
to decode the film, poem, or the novel under analysis.
The similarity between structuralism and formalism should be evident
here—the critic concentrates on the form or structure of a text rather than
the actual content. However, formalists and new critics are examining the
verbal icon used in such a way as to use linguistic utterances to perform a
function such as, for example, defamiliarising the reader from a certain
everyday context. One recalls the Shakespeare and Wordsworth sonnets
discussed above. However, the structuralist approach is developed from a
particularised linguistic theory and relies upon the relationship between the
signifier and signified, which means that for the structuralist these arbitrary
relationships can be subject to change depending on historical context. In
contrast, the new critic or formalist is looking for a sort of unity within the
artwork as a specialised and a-historical utterance, which places them in
one sense closer to the romantic and organic form of criticism. The
structuralist also applies the system of signifier and signified over differing
sign systems within culture; finally, as with Barthes, this leads to (at least
the possibility of) a more political reading and engagement with any given
text. This has important philosophical implications, particularly when
comparing this notion of language as a sign system to the “linguistic turn”
in Anglo-American philosophy.
The linguistic turn in philosophy started with the analytical work of
Russell and Frege, a sort of formalism of logic and language. Indeed,
modern forms of propositional logic have their roots in this type of
propositional structure: P V Q. There are also propositional forms of
structuralist analysis, that closely examine the propositional structures of
narrative, to formulate different combinations of elements that make up the
structural elements of texts and, much like modern propositional truth
tables, are also supposed to symbolically represent the different possible
structures that are at work in a given text. For example, in analytic
philosophy Russell famously critiqued Hegel’s system as outlined in The
Science of Logic for its confusion of the subject and the predicate, which in
Russell and Frege’s modern system of logic is central. In analytic
judgments such as “A=A”, the logical concept of identity is invoked and by
analytic definition, the predicate is drawn from its necessary identity with
the subject. However, a tautological sentence such as “all bachelors are
male” is true, but only under further synthetic analysis, and is true due to a
mediating principle, which is not already contained in the concept of
“bachelor”. More recently, Gregory Moss has framed the argument in the
following Kantian terms:

All empirical judgments are of this sort: ‘all crows are black’
predicates ‘black’ to ‘crow.’ ‘Black’ is not entailed in the concept of
‘crow,’ but is attributed to the subject ‘crow’ by means of experience
as the mediating principle. Rather than an immediate identity with
the subject, synthetic judgments depend upon a mediating principle.
Kant’s main interest of course is the possibility of synthetic, a priori
judgments such as ‘everything that happens has a cause.’ The
concept of ‘causality’ is not entailed analytically in the concept of an
event; it must be added from without. (Moss, 369)

As discussed, this eventually results in Russell’s paradox, whereby we

cannot garner a simple first principle of logic without falling into
contradiction, or ‘whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of
that collection’ whereby a totality set is denied logical existence.
In terms of specialised structuralist literary analysis, this propositional
formalism analysed the text as a series of sentence structures, which would
follow the syntagmatic structure of sentences. However, a mediating third
would be added according to the structural motif of the particular narrative
in question. Thus, the subject position in a sentence would be inhabited by a
stock character who would be syntagmatically connected to a predicate that
would be a logical aspect of the character. Finally, these aspects in
combination would produce the structural third, which would be the action
or plot event associated with this particular structural combination.
Structuralist narratology, as it came to be known, would thus follow a
syntagmatic pattern of sentential events that would be filled on the
paradigmatic scale by stock characters and this combination would enable
the critic to decipher the narrative or even to see how a particular narrative
may have been considered to subvert these syntactic structures for a
particular effect. For example, one here thinks of postmodernist narratives
such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Crying of Lot 49 or The Name
of the Rose. In these texts, the reader’s expectations of the narrative are
subverted as the various structural codes are subverted or merged to
produce hybrid works of literature.5 In this way, one may be discern a form
of philosophical realism deciphered in these structures, which are designed
to follow the logic of the fictional narrative; in much the same way that
Russell’s ‘theory of description’ or the earlier ‘logical form’ were supposed
to mirror the formally realistic logic underpinning the world around us.
However, structuralist narratology was supposed to mirror the creative or
inventive structures, or the paralogical nature, of the structural fictional
universe.
A famous example of structuralist analysis that relies heavily upon a
reductive structural analysis is that of Vladimir Propp, who reduces the
structure of traditional fairy tales down to what he calls its functions,
whereby the subject of the sentence is a character: protagonist/ antagonist/
helper and the predicate (object) is the action the character commits as part
of the overall narrative structure of the story. For example, the hero resolves
the task or the hero slays the dragon. Of course, the structural template can
be filled with any content from various tales. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the
Rings, Frodo returns the ring to the volcano in Mount Doom and resolves
the task. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins slays the dragon. In the original Star
Wars trilogy, Luke Skywalker saves his father and the evil emperor is slain.
The point with this type of narratology is that it is a template applied to
various texts from different countries and periods of history. However, the
structuralist is looking for the universal structural connections between
these various stories. The work of Yory Lotman, A.J. Greimas and Tzvetan
Todorov use similar structural templates, often more comprehensively, to
examine the universal characteristics of narratives.6
At this juncture, the essential difference between theory and criticism
once again springs to the fore. The narratologists produced a theory of
literary production, which in many respects leaves no wiggle room for
actual critical analysis of a text—a discernment of the scaffolding of
literary structure tells us little of the actual literary merit of a text.
However, others have been critical of the overly mechanistic nature of
these types of analyses (one thinks of the romantic organicists once again
here, especially Coleridge). Indeed, just as analytic philosophy in the
linguistic turn came to be superseded by the ordinary language philosophy
of Austin, Quine, Sellars and the later Wittgenstein, so this more anti-
humanist form of structuralism has fallen out of current usage and has been
replaced by more humanist, and less purely objective modes of literary
criticism. For example, psychoanalytical criticism takes note of the
psychological processes of both the reader and the author; Marxist
approaches take notice of sociological and economic influences upon the
text and its historical analysis; and reader response notes the role of the
reader in constructing meanings—there doesn’t seem to be much room for
this in the readings provided by this narratological branch of structuralism.
This structuralist sense is one of language and signifying systems—as
structures—precluding ultimate autonomy of expression in the human
subject—because the human subject is constrained within pre-existing
discursive structures and codes. However, this is not to say that some
variations on the structuralist them do not allow for more nuanced analysis,
rather than a simple theoretical formal template. One thing this approach
demonstrates is perhaps why one may watch a movie and predict what is to
come or perhaps be surprised by a plot twist. The plot twist arises because
in unconsciously following a narrative pattern, our expectations are
suddenly thwarted by clever direction or authorship that twists a
recognisable syntactic pattern. As a young boy I used to assume my sister
had already “read the script” as she was so good at predicting what was to
come in a movie or TV programme. Little did I, or even she, know that she
had just become used to the structures of narrative at work in these
plotlines.
In another novel use of structuralist theory, Roman Jakobson’s famous
distinction between the metonymic and metaphoric poles was first outlined
in a famous essay entitled “The metaphoric and metonymic poles” (1956).
Jakobson uses de Saussure’s division between Langue and Parole in a
ground-breaking way. In studying children with the speech defect aphasia,
Jakobson found that some children tended towards using what he termed
the metaphoric pole (or selection) pole of Langue, whereas others tended
towards using the metonymic pole (or contiguity) pole of Parole. In
extrapolating from these findings, Jakobson argued that in various periods
of literary history, either of the poles had assumed the predominant role; an
argument that was further developed by David Lodge (1977).
To illustrate how this works, one may use a linguistic example such as
“ships crossed the sea” from which we can see that we may use the
metaphoric pole (selection) and exchange one sign for another. For
example, switch the verb phrase to “ploughed,” “coasted,” or “traversed”
the sea. Or using the same example, “ships crossed the sea,” we may
replace the noun phrase “sea” with “the deep” or “the blue” and then we
have used the figure of metonymy (change of name), which means using an
aspect of something, to usually present something bigger. Metonymy refers
to something else that one figure of speech is often close to and becomes
associated with in everyday experience. In Jacobson’ system, synecdoche,
which means a part for the whole—may be used by replacing “keels” or
“masts” for the sign “ships” and is, according to Jakobson, of the same part
of speech as metonymy. In his structuralist poetics, both of these terms—
metonymy/synecdoche—operate under the metonymic (syntagmatic) pole of
signification. Therefore, we could also use “Hollywood” for the US movie
industry, or if I like Shakespeare’s work, I may say “I like Shakespeare”
meaning I like his overall work—not him in person—who I’ve likely never
met unless I’m Doctor Who—or I possess a time-machine. So, for example,
a phrase such as “the wheels cut through the night” uses the metaphoric in
that “cut through the night” can represented in a non-figurative way as
“drove all night” and the metonymic (synecdochic) wheels could be
replaced by “the car.”
According to Jakobson, realist fiction is more metonymical, whereas
romantic and symbolist literature is more metaphorical; that is, realist
fiction uses more metonymic details to build up an overall contextual
picture for the reader, whereas romanticism uses more metaphoric and
symbolic description. We can equally use this distinction between certain
types of cinematic genre. For example, a horror movie will often use lots of
metonymic details in order to build up tension in a scene: a moving door
handle, a creaking door, a flapping window, a thunderstorm, the sound of a
crow/raven, etc. All of these contextual, and metonymic details, will
structurally build up an overall suspenseful picture for the viewer or reader.
 One way to think about the use of metonymy and synecdoche, (for
Jakobson the metonymic pole), is to think of the style in “filmic” terms. For
example, when you read the text, imagine if you were asked to film the
scene before you with a camera. If the scene appears as if it would be easy
to cover with a series (montage) of camera shots and angles, then it is more
than likely that the stretch of text you are reading is metonymic, as it is
building up a “scene” with contextual details.
On the other hand, a highly metaphoric movie may be a surrealist work,
such as Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1917) or David Lynch’s
Eraserhead (1977). These films are harder for the viewer to decipher as
they rely more on the metaphoric code for their representation. This is the
same in literature, whereby some genres or codes are more metonymic and
some are more metaphorical. A more metaphorical stylistic would not lend
itself not so easily to more traditional “filmic” imagery as a metonymic
piece of text. In applying his model to literary stylistics and history,
Jakobson writes:

In poetry there are various motives which determine the choice

between these alternants. The primacy of the metaphoric process in
the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been
repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realised that it
is the predominance of metonymy which underlines and actually
predetermines the so-called realistic trend, which belongs to an
intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise
of symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of
contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses
from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the
setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details. (Lodge,
Modern Criticism and Theory, 58–59)

A Jakobsonian analysis therefore concentrates on the application of the

various poles to various types of literature, and through this we can examine
the structural elements of a text and in effect the structural make up. One
consequence is that we can group texts together in terms of stylistic
continuities and recognise applications of the metaphoric and metonymic
poles. Many writers tend towards both of these devices in their work—often
to make a wider point.
 One such writer is James Joyce, who in his openly experimental
modernist novels such as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939),
wrote in a wide variety of discursive forms and styles. Joyce was
experimenting with the relationship between aesthetic form and content,
exploring their textual relationship and their nascent use as techniques for
describing our phenomenological experience of the world. One can make a
fascinating analysis of Joyce’ earlier short stories from his book Dubliners
(1914) using Jakobson’s structuralist system of metaphoric and metonymic
poles of discourse. If Joyce’s last book Finnegan’s Wake explores existence
in terms of a dream narrative, and relies heavily on the structurally
metaphorical, his earlier work relies more upon the dynamic and symbiotic
relationship between more traditionally realist modes of literary discourse
and more experimental modes of discourse. For example, in the story
“Araby”, one discerns a sense of both the romantic mode and the realist
mode of discourse, an experimental prism through which he presents the
character of an adolescent boy in terms of a both a romantic and at the same
time a character facing the harsh vicissitudes of everyday working-class life
in Dublin.
In the story’s first two paragraphs, details are presented in an extremely
metonymic fashion, illustrating the more realistic bent of the story. Using
the filmic analysis of imagery I mentioned above, one can easily imagine a
camera taking a mise en scene pan shot of the newly inhabited house and its
derelict garden. The scene is described in the following terms, and as we
read, we spectate, and glimpse the imagery of dereliction:

The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back
drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in
all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered
with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered
books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by
Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of
Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild
garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few
straggling bushes, under one of which I found the late tenant’s rusty
bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he
had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to
his sister. (Joyce, 21)
The reader senses in the stark imagery a very austere, dark, dreary abode.
Yet the books in the backroom speak to the exotic and the romantic—novels
by Scott and also The Memoirs of Vidocq (a secret agent in the French
police)—thus, through subtle but contextual details, the scene is set for the
wider scope of the story and in particular, the romantic psychology of the
young protagonist. The “straggling bushes” and “rusty bicycle pump”
further cementing the harshly objective and realist world, in which the
young boy finds his romantic imagination enclosed.
As the story progresses, we are made acutely aware of the boy’s
fascination, and indeed infatuation, with the sister of one of his friends. Her
sensual femininity is presented once again through metonymic details:

The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of
her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand
upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the
white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease. (Joyce,
24)

One imagines in structuralist terms a beauty commercial for lipstick or body

lotion, where the camera shows a montage of shots of a female body,
usually focusing upon the red lips of the female figure. The young boy
romanticises the female form, and we as proxy voyeurs (a recurrent motif in
Joyce—also used in this story as the boy watches the girl through the
lowered blind), follow the lines of the exoticised female form. However,
just before this description, Joyce has brilliantly combined both the
metaphoric and the metonymic to emphasise both the romantic idealism of
the young boy and the realistic world in which he finds himself. This takes
place in the market-place, full of working-class squalor but through which
he still manages to retain his sense of romantic idealism, straight from
Scott’s Ivanhoe or from a medieval romance:

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to

romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had
to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring
streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the
curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on
guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-
 singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a
ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged
in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice
safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at
moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not
understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why)
and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my
bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would
ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of
my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words
and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. (Joyce, 22–
23)

The sparse realism of the “drunken men”, “bargaining women”, “curses”,

and “shrill litanies” amongst the other stark imagery once again
contextualise a filmic sense for the reader, built up of the stock realist
images of the commercial marketplace. However, Gaelic songs about the
struggles of the native land suddenly converge, with their realism—but also
romantic nationalism—into one romantic image in the boy’s romantic
imagination. He tropes himself as carrying a chalice through “a throng of
foes” and the image culminates in the almost Aeolian-metaphor (something
central to romantic poets such as Coleridge and Shelley) of his body
becoming like a harp, played by the wind of her sensuous being. This
medieval image is, of course, the aspect of this poignant and sensationalist
scene in the story, which one cannot picture in a filmic sense. This is the
metaphoric axis, juxtaposed against the metonymic and realist axis,
providing the reader with a sense of the two aspects of the world, both
literally, and of course, literarily.
Joyce exploits this trope brilliantly and draws the two senses together
into a remarkably ambiguous image at the end of the story, where the boy
has finally visited the equally oriental-sounding “Araby” bazaar to obtain a
gift, troped as the chalice, through which he can both illustrate his love for
the unnamed maiden, whilst simultaneously escaping the springes of the
humdrum reality in which he finds himself ensconced. As the lights go out
at the bazaar and he realises he will not fulfill his quest, the immortal final
lines read “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven
and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” (28)
The final, terse ambiguity leads us to the conclusion that the boy is either
set against the brute nullity of the real world, or else he is defeated…by a
realisation that the humdrum reality of the world will forever overshadow
his romantic idealism. He is forever lodged in a world in which his youthful
hopes and dreams will be eternally estranged. Joyce leaves the character
stuck in a perfect equipoise between these two distant marks of the
emotional compass. These two points are blurred by the ambiguity of the
boy’s tears at the end of the story. Joyce accomplishes this, on a more
formalist reading, by the use of verbal irony, tension, ambivalence and of
course ambiguity; on a Jakobsonian-structuralist reading as I’ve just
demonstrated, Joyce has brilliantly tied together the two codes of the
metonymic and the metaphoric into a gordian knot at the end of the story
and in doing so, has evidenced both the experimental nature of his own
literary form, as well provided a deep exposition into the character of the
protagonist, in five pages or so—a remarkable literary feat.
To summarise this crucial chapter in modern literary criticism and its
relation to philosophy, structuralism has been a widely influential theory of
literature (and culture) that held sway in the humanities and the social
sciences for a while in the twentieth century. Using Saussure’s linguistic
model as a broad template, structuralism was applied with verve and gusto
across the academic board and its almost scientific formulas (especially in
thinkers like Propp, Greimas, Levi Strauss and Todorov), gave it a scientific
respectability, which the humanities were perceived to be in great need of
after the rise of logical positivism, quantum mechanics and the application
of statistical models to psychology and sociology. However, the
structurality of this structural approach itself was soon to be called into
logical question. Just as the analytic tradition in linguistic philosophy would
fall into paradox, despite its seeming initial concrete logical formality, so
the linguistic philosophy of structuralism would itself fall prey to similar
questions of circularity and infinite regress.
The next chapter will explore how the limits of this mode of analysis as
an interpretive model soon appeared and how this influenced originally
card-carrying structuralists such as Barthes, to develop a more open-ended
and less restrictive brand of structuralism, which became to be known as
‘poststructuralism.’ It is to this, which we will now turn. This is the period
in which philosophy and literary theory finally converged.
Footnotes
1 C.S. Peirce was the other big proponent of semiotics and his system used the three different forms
of the sign: the index (such as smoke signaling fire), the icon (the visual sign such as a bike for a
bicycle lane) and the symbol (one thinks of runes of writing in this category).

2 The school in question happened to also be a Christian school, to which I sent my son for a
number of years; despite the obvious verbal irony in this appellation, I can guarantee there were no
brown shirts in sight and not enough drums to produce the sort of cacophony preferred in a parade by
card-carrying Nazis.

3 I presented a paper that included a discussion of this event in a wider Thai context “Thailand,
Occidentalism and Cultural Commodity Fetishism” at the 1st International Culture, Language and
Literature Conference (ICLLS) in Chonburi, Thailand, in 2013.

4 Jacques Lacan is not discussed in this study; however, his work forms a major component of the
later poststructuralist theory. He brilliantly used the ideas as Parole and Langue and used them in
place of Freud’s theory in The Interpretation of Dreams of condensation and displacement, (by way
of Jakobson’s insertion of metaphor and metonymy in their place) brilliantly applying structuralism
to psychoanalysis. His main dictum was that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” This
may explain why upon reading Lacan, many readers find themselves, understandably, unconscious of
what he’s talking about.

5 There are numerous examples of the postmodern subversion of codes. One such instance is the
historiographical metafiction, such as Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) in which the code of
historical analysis is combined with the code of the detective fiction to produce a history overlaid
with a pulp fictional element. Speaking of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarrantino’s recent offerings,
Inglorious Basterds (2009) and the brilliant Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) also explore the
mixing of codes and genres. Viewers with enough knowledge of the Parole of the ‘spaghetti western’
genre will also pick up this code, as well as the historical narratives in these self-consciously
postmodern masterpieces.

6 These structuralist designs at finding universal codes and narratives in myth, folklore, culture and
other anthropological aspects were also to some degree employed by critics who used the theory of
archetypes to delineate literary theory and criticism. One thinks of Jung and Maud Bodkin. One of
my favourite and currently unrepresented critics is the Canadian thinker Northrop Frye. I am also
guilty of not giving him the voice warranted in this study; however, this is due to obvious limitations.
His classic study Anatomy of Criticism (1957) has been woefully absent in recent decades. One
wonders whether this a in part a political move; Frye’s criticism of texts, it can be argued presents a
conservative and perhaps patrician view of culture, which is at odds with the more fashionably
iconoclastic mood of criticism in the humanities in recent decades. This is something that of course
my study hopes to go some way towards remedying—or at least raising awareness of. It also shows
that criticism need not and IS NOT only left wing and radical. It can be conservative and in arguing
for universal archetypes one is placing a possible check on the notion that all archetypes and figures
are open to reconstruction and revision. Structuralism, in other words, when deconstructed itself, also
finds two opposing notions within its conceptual scope.

OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_5

5. Linguistic Twists, Turns and Dovetails

in the Modern Humanities
Wayne Deakin1
(1) Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

In his seminal monograph, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979),

Richard Rorty writes the following timely passage about changes in the
philosophical project in both what became known as the Anglo-American
Analytic tradition (essentially what I have been describing as the “linguistic
turn”) and the continental tradition (essentially phenomenology and
hermeneutics):

The spirit of playfulness which seemed about to enter philosophy

around 1900 was, however, nipped in the bud. Just as mathematics
had inspired Plato to invent “philosophical thinking,” so serious-
minded philosophers turned to mathematical logic for rescue from
the exuberant satire of their critics. The paradigmatic figures in this
attempt to recapture the mathematical spirit were Husserl and
Russell. Husserl saw philosophy as trapped between “naturalism”
and “historicism,” neither of which offered the sort of “apodictic
truths” which Kant had assured philosophers were their birthright.
Russell joined Husserl in denouncing the psychologism which had
infected the philosophy of mathematics, and announced that logic
was the essence of philosophy. Driven by the need to find something
to be apodictic about, Russell discovered “logical form” and Husserl
discovered “essences,” the “purely formal” aspects of the world
which remained when the nonformal had been, “bracketed.” The
discovery of these privileged representations began once again a
 quest for seriousness, purity, and rigor, a quest which lasted for
some forty years. But, in the end, heretical followers of Husserl
(Sartre and Heidegger) and heretical followers of Russell (Sellars
and Quine) raised the same sorts of questions about the possibility
of apodictic truth which Hegel had raised about Kant.
Phenomenology gradually became transformed into what Husserl
despairingly called “mere anthropology.” and “analytic”
epistemology (i.e., “philosophy of science”) became increasingly
historicist and decreasingly “logical” (as in Hanson, Kuhn, Harre,
and Hesse). So, seventy years after Husserl’s “Philosophy as
Rigorous Science” and Russell’s “Logic as the Essence of
Philosophy,” we are back with the same putative dangers which
faced the authors of these manifestoes: if philosophy becomes too
naturalistic, hard-nosed positive disciplines will nudge it aside; if it
becomes too historicist, then intellectual history, literary criticism,
and similar soft spots in “the humanities” will swallow it up. (Rorty,
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 167–68)

In the story I am unfolding in this book, philosophy inevitably dovetailed

into literary criticism partly due to the reasons outlined by Rorty. Both
“traditions” became historicised, anthropological and hermeneutic in their
findings. This was in part because in tandem with these changes in the
Western philosophical project, (which entailed the move away from a
“purely logical” or “essentialist” basis founded in the axiomatic roots of
geometry, mathematics and by extension language), literary theory and
criticism were also shifting from the more objectivist tendencies of
formalism, new criticism and ultimately structuralism, towards newer
modes of analysis. These newer analytical modes no longer viewed the
literary text as in some way ‘bracketed’ off from the social world and forms
of life in which they were subsumed. In this way, both philosophy and
literary criticism were moving towards a socially, historicised precis and
away from the putatively privileged status previously afforded both
disciplines.
Philosophy was being driven into the arms of literary criticism. This
historical fact has had a profound effect, the fulminations of which are still
being felt today and are one of the mainstays of the current state of the
humanities. Whilst philosophy as a “pure” discipline has been largely
abandoned, it has become a more descriptive discipline, and less normative,
deontological or prescriptivist. The same goes for literary criticism, which
has now found fertile ground in its historicist pretensions, and has embraced
areas such as anthropology, psychology, sociology and of course philosophy
as its bedfellows. Indeed, in a note to his observations about the changing
mission statement of Western philosophy, Rorty cites the (in)famous literary
critic Harold Bloom as an important interlocutor in assessing this changing
tide in the humanities in general:

I think that in England and America philosophy has already been

displaced by literary criticism in its principal critical function—as a
source for youth’s self-description of its own difference from the
past. Cf. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), p.
39:

The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the

teacher of history or philosophy or religion, is condemned to
teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy
and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of
Instruction, leaving the bewildered teacher of literature at the
altar, terrifiedly wondering whether he is to be sacrifice or
priest.

This is roughly because of the Kantian and antihistoricist tenor

of Anglo-Saxon philosophy. The cultural function of teachers of
philosophy in countries where Hegel was not forgotten is quite
different, and closer to the position in America. (Rorty, Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature, 168)

One can here read “countries where Hegel was not forgotten” as signifying
countries under the aegis of the continental tradition, where the Hegelian
project of ‘speculative philosophy’ entailed a move away from a
‘transcendental subjectivity’ towards a more historicised—and by extension
—social formula for philosophy, connecting to both the social and the
political world. A move away from epistemology as posited by Descartes
and critiqued by the empirical tradition to a more political and social praxis,
as originally outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Husserls’ Cartesian
Meditations (1960)1 was a last-gasp attempt at reviving the project of
modern epistemology—Heidegger’s hermeneutics signalled a return to
historicity; Russell’s move away from his earlier Hegelianism (under the
influence of British Idealism), The Principles of Mathematics (1903), was
similarly an attempt to salvage the Cartesian plot, while the later
Wittgenstein, Sellars and Quine also signalled a movement towards to
linguistic historicity, or the primacy of the public over the private in
language. These shifts in the tenor of philosophy and literary criticism,
produced their cross-pollination.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will reconnect to structuralism by
discussing poststructuralism as the inevitable rejoinder to structuralism (so-
called ‘poststructuralists’ are not actually ‘post’; they are simply taking
structuralism to its logical boundaries and as such, remain structuralists). I
will establish this by discussing the later work of Barthes, and referencing
the work of his controversial contemporaries, Paul de Man and Jacques
Derrida, while continuing to situate them in the overall dovetailing of
philosophy and literary criticism that I have been sketching out hitherto.
To broadly contextualise this latter act in the play of the modern
humanities, I’d like to start by turning to a thinly-veiled polemic in the form
of a book review by the late English philosopher Roger Scruton, about a
book by the French philosopher Alain Badiou, in which he wrote tersely
“The poetry of Hegelian Idealism gave way to the prose of Marxist
newspeak, and the moment of French philosophy met its nemesis in the
impenetrable syntax of Badiou, Althuser and Deleuze.”2 Anyone who has
read Scruton would have to admit that his prose, arguments and the tenor of
his language are very inviting. Anyone who has read Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) however, may beg to differ on his
characterisation of Hegelian Idealism as “poetry”; at least in the context to
which Scruton is referring to Hegel. Both Hegel’s Phenomenology and his
Logic (1812–16) have confounded many a specialist and non-specialist
alike—one of my friends to whom I gave a copy of the chapter from The
Phenomenology on the Reign of Terror—informed me that it gave him a
thunderous (and very literal)—headache. Most people, also specialist or
non-specialist alike, would probably contest his purely dismissive analysis,
on rhetorical grounds, of pretty much all of the popular (and unpopular,
depending upon your politics, it would seem), writers from the French
tradition since around 1968. He goes on to write “Unmentioned are the
advocates of traditional philosophy, such as Bertrand de Jounvenal or
Jacques Bouveresse…” Surely Scruton must recognise the questionable
logic of parsing other writers who are not of the poststructuralist or radical
Left tradition as “traditional?” The question not only of tradition but of who
is to be the arbiter of tradition is necessarily begged here. Martin Heidegger,
whom in numerous places Scruton praises, Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, and of course the ‘Old Mole’ Marx himself, can all be read as
adhering to traditions in philosophy, yet also writing against the grain,
whether it be materialism, Idealism or Cartesian dualism. It may also be
because the other writers had less to say, were less original, or were just too
conservative to add much value to the ever-expanding dialogical canon of
the humanities. The point is that difficult prose isn’t necessarily bad
criticism or poorly articulated philosophy and that this red herring has been
levelled against both not only the French tradition, but also the German
school of Critical Theory, time and time again. Most unfortunately, it’s
often been made by people who have either read internet commentaries on
the said scholars, or, at best, have heard lecturers in tweed jackets, with
personally signed copies of Scrutiny or unread copies of the Salisbury
Review, perambulate about their disgruntled reception of these allegedly
Left Wing versions of the Mystery Plays.
Heretical and as iconoclastic as these French thinkers may be, it’s
possibly too late to lock up your sons and daughters, who have no doubt
already been exposed to the horrors of Queer Theory or even Michel
Foucault. I only introduce this chapter using these tropes as a warning
against the tide of animus and ignorance that pervades much thought from
the often equally amorphous ‘analytic’ tradition. My use of speech-marks at
this juncture will become, I hope, self-explanatory below. Moreover,
Scruton’s brilliant and illuminating essay “Why I Became a Conservative”3
provides an insightful and as ever concise account of the political reasons
for his own philosophical persuasions; his obvious preference for Burke
over the “immeasurably less interesting Tom Paine,” is made very clear, and
then what still appears to me to be a woefully incorrect reading of Jean
Jacques Rousseau:

The final argument that impressed me was Burke’s response to the

theory of the social contract. Although society can be seen as a
contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the
 contract are either dead or not yet born. The effect of the
contemporary Rousseauist ideas of social contract was to place the
present members of society in a position of dictatorial dominance
over those who went before and those who came after them. Hence
these ideas led directly to the massive squandering of inherited
resources at the Revolution, and to the cultural and ecological
vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to recognize as the
principal danger of modern politics. In Burke’s eyes the self-
righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the
Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly
understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the
living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary
principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as
acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchised.
Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke’s view, the only real
safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its
privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a
contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees
of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on.
(Scruton, Why I Became a Conservative)

I take Scruton’s point about the relationship and debt to the future and the
past in the present, as indeed would a thinker such as Giles Deleuze or
Jacques Derrida; indeed Derrida makes this clear in his book Spectres of
Marx.4 I’m not entirely sure how the voluntarist Rousseauean social
contract, as opposed to Hobbes’ more ‘mechanically contractualist’ vision
of a social contract would in any way disinherit either future or past
generations? Primogeniture and much of the economics of the physiocrats
were already disinheriting future and past social players in the most
egregious fashion.5
I also share some of Scruton’s fears. However, from my current
historical precis, it’s in terms of the current wave of identarian/woke-ism
iconoclasts, who really do seem to work on de-legitimated notions of
historicism. They, more often than not, work with either a revisionist view
of history or a jaundiced and very selective view—but this is something I
will return to below when I discuss the political and ethical turn in
deconstruction.
 Moreover, all of this is also not to say that Scruton is completely
incorrect about some of the prose that stems from the French
poststructuralist tradition—there are numerous examples to be had of
impenetrable, prolix and gratuitous prose—just as there are also many
examples of rock stars who do indeed snort coke.
I will commence this chapter with such an example of critique, which
will paradoxically act as a segue into the wider argument of this book: that
the linguistic turn in philosophy of necessity reflected a wider malaise in
the humanities that eventually led to coalescence with literary theory and
criticism.
One needs to recall that the linguistic turn in philosophy was down to
the (perhaps paradoxical) search for truth that had been unsatisfactory in
terms of correspondent theories of truth, coherence theories of truth,
pragmatist theories and an eventual turn to the notion of truth as parsed in
the constructively logical utterances of the syntagmata itself; namely,
sentences and their t-values. Derrida’s terms are couched partly in the
theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose Course in General Linguistics had,
akin to the New Criticism and Formalism in literary studies, moved towards
a more rigid and by extension, closed system of analysis. Before we move
to John Searle’s ‘ordinary language’ critique of Derrida it’s probably best to
lay bare the bones of deconstruction, and the spectre of poststructuralism
that haunts the humanities.
The seeds of poststructuralism can be in part be traced back to the
classic structuralist text, mentioned in the previous chapter, Mythologies. In
a justly famous essay at the end of the book, Roland Barthes discusses the
structuralist methodology he uses in his cultural analysis (of everything
from soap powder to wrestling matches). In the essay Barthes talks of
“second-order signification,” whereby a sign becomes at a second, or higher
stage, a signifier which in turn issues in a new signified and a new sign. For
example, Barthes writes in the essay:

In myth, we find again the tri-dimensional pattern which I have just

described: The signifier, the signified and the sign. But myth is a
peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain
which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system.
That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and
an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the
 second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech
(the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects,
etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying
function as soon as they are caught by myth. (Barthes, Mythologies,
114)

Myth takes the first -order sign and then turns it, in a second-order system
into a signifier for a meta-language, or a critical language. If we look at the
classic example of structuralism of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,
one can discern how he examines the signs of various myths, from Native
American Indian culture (an owl in the Iroquois Indian symbolic system) or
the Sphynx in the Oedipus myth of Greece—and turns them both into
second order signifiers of a higher order (second-order system), that of
Strauss’ own myth analysis—his meta-language, which becomes
constructed of the mythemes he now uses in his parasitical metalanguage of
second-order signification. So, signifying systems can be fed upon
parasitically by second-order “parasitical” systems that in turn, logically,
could be then again turned into another system. Indeed, and by an infinite
extension, theoretically every system of signs could be replaced by another
structural higher-order language every time a new descriptive commentary
vampirises the old system and brings it back in the structuralist form of a
higher-order, descriptive, meta-system.
This is how “Myth” functions for Barthes, something becomes drained
of its original or first-order signification—and becomes captured by a
second, third, or fourth-order signifying system. This is, to use an obvious
example, clear in the narratives that spin the Greek and Roman
mythologies;6 this is how the mythopoetic function works. Furthermore, to
use two modernist examples from the Western literary canon, one could
argue that both The Wasteland and Ulysses, in using the so-called mythic
method to reengage the everyday, humdrum world of modernity in a mythic
net, use this type of structuralist second-order signification.
The signification is reworked, more simply as connotation in other
cultural domains. To use a current cultural Thai example, once again, the
case of the currently popular whitening creams/lotions; they may initially
signify whitening deodorants, but at a higher order level they are
transformed and signify white as opposed to black, which in turn signifies
working in the sun/not having worked in the sun, which in turn signifies the
class background and relative socioeconomic success of an individual.7
The roots of poststructuralism lie just here, in the relative instability of
sign systems; if they can become parasitically taken or appropriated into
another “mythic” system—what is to stop any originary sign system from
being re-appropriated ad infinitum? In fact, how do we know the original
imprints of the putative Ur-system? The answer is, of course, nothing; they
can be expropriated again and again and again…as in an infinite narratorial
palimpsest. The person who writes the catchment of the second-order
mythic system, such as Lévi-Strauss or Barthes are themselves skin-grafting
a myth onto a myth, and I in turn, could write a myth built upon their myth
—their myth being the myth of modern structuralism.
Therefore, Barthes initiates poststructuralism out of his original
structuralist system, whereby all sign systems are unstable and cannot come
to any final meaning or closure. Final meanings are constantly being
disrupted or pushed aside/displaced by other signs, or meta-signs, ad
infinitum. Poststructuralism is at its core an anti-system—a theory of non-
ultimate-knowledge—wherein we cannot get at any final truth or meaning,
just a cloudy web interrelationships and semiotic traces that we cannot step
outside of as we are perpetually in media res; or one may argue we’re in a
semiotic ground hog day.
Barthes later extended this theory in his seminal paper “The Death of
the Author” (1968). In this essay he posits the author as continually
surrendering himself to the weight of tradition and literary history. Writing
becomes the art of constructing ready-to-hand linguistic units in novel
ways; however, each time we formulate or choose a combination we lose
our personality in textual history:

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single

‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author- God) but a
multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of
them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations
drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard
and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime-and comic and
whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of
writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior,
never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the
 ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of
them. (Lodge, Modern Theory and Criticism, 170)

The urge for the presence of the author, that in more traditional historicist or
biographical criticism would explain away the text and once again give
“victory to the critic” is removed by Barthes as he moves into his
poststructuralist phase.8 In one real sense however, there is no “post”
structuralism; the theoretical implications hereby impinged are already
nascent in the very notion of the structuralist theory itself and are already
enunciated by Barthes and, as we shall see below, by Lévi-Strauss himself.
Two years before Barthes’ paper, Derrida explored similar principles in
a paper he delivered on the structural anthropology of Lévi-Straussdelivered
at John Hopkins University in 1966, entitled “Structure, Sign and Play, in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Derrida questions the very notion of
structure itself, or the “structurality of structure” and questions how we can
guarantee a centre-piece to any structural system that would hold the
structure in place—where would it be located? The history of the “Human
Sciences” and philosophy, has been a series of structures built onto other
structures ad infinitum. Derrida claims of the infinite “play” of signifying
systems as we replace one with another, or another structural totality with
another with a supposed newly orienting centre:

There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. The focus or the

source of the myth are always shadows and virtualities which are
elusive, unactualisable, and non-existent in the first place.
Everything begins with structure, configuration, or relationship. The
discourse on the acentric structure that myth itself is, cannot itself
have an absolute subject or an absolute center […] (He then goes on
to quote Lévi-Strauss himself)… “As the myths themselves are
based on secondary codes (the primary codes being those that
provide the substance of language), the present work is put forward
as a tentative draft of a tertiary code, which is intended to ensure the
reciprocal translatability of several myths. This is why it would not
be wrong to consider this book itself as a myth: it is, as it were, the
myth of mythology.” (Lodge, Modern Theory and Criticism, 116)
Therefore, the second-order signifying system, with no guarantee of center,
can be easily superseded by another myth (or discourse). Humankind is, as
it were, trapped within the very same sign system they have tried to totalise
in terms of latent meta-structures. We cannot step outside our sign system.
Or we cannot look down from a metalinguistic Olympian perspective on
our signifying practices as if from a mountain top. We are within our
signifying systems; we are constituted by our signifying systems and simply
cannot get outside of them.
To use another striking language trope proposed by the analytical
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, we cannot see ourselves seeing. We do it,
we see the world through it, but we cannot actually see ourselves seeing. In
the same way, we cannot step outside of our signifying practices to reach a
final, meta- signifying system. We also, to use another Wittgensteinian
figure, can’t cut the branch on which we stand; if we take the ladders away
on which we rely for our perspicuous purchase upon the world—we are left
with an obvious vacuum. However, we can expand this trope in
deconstructionist terms and also claim the ladder is posited/placed
somewhere in the field of experience. It orients this arbitrarily positioned
structure that then gages experience for us.
As we shall see below, with regards the politicisation of literary theory,
poststructuralism in general has been applied across literary criticism and
cultural studies, and theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Luce
Irigaray, Homi K. Bhabbha and Gayatari Spivak have all applied
poststructuralist principles to psychoanalytic criticism, feminism and
postcolonial criticism. The latter work of Derrida took the so-called ethical
turn. This entailed the application of the theory of deconstruction to ethical
and political matters, with some startling results and consequences—some
good and some awful—and with what I propose were eventually startlingly
misguided uses of the theoretical approach of deconstruction.
To help relocate poststructuralism back into its locus with regards to the
analytic tradition, it’s very instructive to examine Derrida’s critique of J.L.
Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, which in turn stems from an
obvious interest in Austin’s speech act theory and its ideal of contextual
immediacy that is attached to language utterances. Indeed, Derrida’s own
rendering of Austin in his essay “Signature, Event, Context” (1977) only
adds to this sense of an inevitable dovetailing of both sides of the coin of
the philosophy of language, with Searle’s own response in many ways
crystalising the mutual prejudices that still stood asunder the two sides of
the Great Wall of the Linguistic Humanities asunder. Following on from the
later Heidegger’s idea of language as the “House of Being” that is, Being
constructed by language, Derrida develops these ideas to the extreme point
of arguing that our whole conception of ontology is bound up with
language, but moving beyond Heidegger, Derrida draws on the
methodological toolbox of structuralism/semiotics to really get into this.9
This de-structuring implies that there is no stable subject position
because all “positions/doxa” are based upon our linguistic/semiotic
conception of reality. In Paul Ricoeur’s parlance, this is due to the modern
hermeneutics of suspicion, which becomes an open-ended, permeable and
variable modality of thought and being.10 However, as we shall also see
below, this is not the same as Postmodernism—nor is it a positive
indictment of the current trend of identarian politics, woke-ism or
neoliberalism. In fact, the so-called ethical turn in deconstruction actually
acts as a check and audit on any ideological limit that proclaims itself
arbiter of enquiry and academic acumen, dismissing other variations of
theory tout court.
The reason for Derrida’s point of difference with Austin lies not exactly
in the former’s performative/constative argument about linguistic
representation,11 but with his truly Logocentric apprehension of the “world”
(or in Heidegger’s parlance the hermeneutics of “worldhood”) and the sense
of logical realism that this view necessarily entails. In one sense, Derrida
carries on the tradition of Idealism, except his form of Idealism is linguistic,
and, in particular, a form of semiotic idealism. In this essay, Derrida
analyses the philology of the word “communication,” which he argues
designates “non-semantic movements.” However, “the value of
displacement, of transport, etc., is constitutive of the very concept of
metaphor by means of which one allegedly understands the semantic
displacement which is operated from communication as a non-
semiolinguistic phenomenon…” (Derrida, 310) In other words, the
metaphor of displacement or transport (involved in the concept of
communication) is itself a metaphor bound up in the nature of language
itself—so how do we step outside of this “metaphoricity” of all signifiers?
How can we have these pure speech acts when the very nature of language
is to move (commute) a signified from one place to another (a message);
therefore, pure presence is constantly absent in an utterance. Indeed, Austin
himself speaks of the “infelicities” in language, where the pervading/fixed
context is not there, such as a theatrical soliloquy; in this sense, Austin’s
own text deconstructs itself because it finds gaps in the meaning or in the
theory itself, which need accounting for. However, this implied open-ended
nature of meaning, without anchor, is in a sense pushed aside by Austin. For
Derrida, however, this repetition or “iterability” of speech/writing leads us
to the conclusion that all utterances are, in my own terminology,
“orphaned” and open to new interpretation, even the so-called
performatives—which are not disavowed by Derrida anyway, but just need
to be given their correct contextual praxis.
One may also consider Thai examples of orphaned signifiers to support
both my own and Derrida’s position on the dynamism of shifting contexts. I
have in the past also written of this in a Thai context, when considering my
own example of the symbology of the swastika, which has become (in my
reading) what one may call “orphaned” but then has also been “adopted” by
the Thai youth on tee-shirts and school walls as was mentioned in the
previous chapter on structuralism. In actual fact, the school in Chiang Mai
actually had a student parade, where students were wearing not only
swastikas, but were also on parade and making the gesture of the infamous
Nazi salute.12 The issue was not that the students were disrespectful of
historical injustices or prejudices, they were simply taking on signs that
were, to use Barthes’ phraseology, “drained” of all historical context. The
performative function of the salute (let alone the signifier itself) was
recontextualized; in much the same manner that the original swastika was
recontextulised by the Nazis themselves. This “position” amounts to a
rejection of fixed (logocentric) notions of language and meaning, i.e.
meanings are constantly being constructed and de-structed—hence the term
deconstruction, which entails destruction and construction in one signifier
—to amalgamate these two necessary oppositions and to exemplify this
continual, infinite, binary process. For Austin, this episode would have been
another infelicitous instance. For Derrida, texts such as Austin’s, Husserl’s,
Hegel’s and Lévi-Strauss’ (to name a few) deconstruct themselves by their
very intertextual nature. This is because of the nature of the sign (going
back to Saussure’s original theory) and the lack of a grounding, or a
transcendental signified: an idea that stands outside of and orients any
given structural sign system, such as God-the father of the Logos; the
intuitive Cogito; or the Husserlian eidetic essences of the mind; or Hegelian
absolute Spirit-Geist.
The subject under examination by linguistic thinkers such as Searle,
Austin, de Man and Derrida is the notion of modern semantics. This entails
an interrogation of the very notion of ‘truth’; notice here how the singular
speech-marks (“…”) themselves as marks bring something to the purity of
the sign ‘truth’—what does this signifier refer to? And how we can affix
truth to meanings in their very essence—or lack of essence as is the case
with deconstruction.
There is a difference between the idea that signs have meaning because
they conform to a tradition of use, and the assumption that signs express
inner, conscious, authentic intentions, as is proposed by philosophers such
as Austin and Husserl. Declaring a meeting open or declaring somebody
husband and wife is always a kind of theatrical speech act, something
indigenous to all forms of ritualistic language, and the attempt in Searle and
Austin to ban all theatrical or “non-serious” uses of language from playing
a role in philosophical language theory is therefore doomed from the outset
upon this reading. Signs, contrary to the logocentric theory of correct
usage, can function without direct referents or signifiers; they can be placed
into speech marks—as I did above—and the marks themselves provide
theatrical meaning and context. Derrida argues that “Every sign … can be
cited, put between quotation marks; in doing so it can break with every
given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is
absolutely illimitable.” (Derrida, 321). This goes for signatures too (Derrida
finishes the essay with a copy of his signature), as well as for every visual
icon, such as the swastika. He goes on to say, correctly, it seems to me, “To
state it now in the most summary fashion, I would like to demonstrate why
a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather in what way its
determination is never determined or saturated” (322). Thus, a context is
thus subject to many determinations and cannot be “fixed” outside of the
realm of signification.13 From this academic furor (or storm in an over-
sized teacup) we can see a crystallisation of Derrida’s conception of the
intentional, which is rooted in his critique of Husserl’s The Origins of
Geometry (1962) and the notion of a “metaphysics of presence;” we can
also clearly discern that Searle’s linguistic conception of the philosophy of
mind and intentionality is thoroughly imbedded in Austin’s “ordinary
language,” speech-act philosophy. A theme of Derrida’s work is that
philosophy has always had a conception of meaning that rests on a pure
presence of meaning. He holds that there is a commonality across
philosophical writings and traditions. His interest and obvious respect for
Austin lies partly in the fact that Austin tries to break out of the idea that
there are, fixed exterior concepts to an utterance, (logoi) to which
logocentrism refers and to understand language in other terms, whereby
speech acts function by their own self-representation, or to use a technical
term they function autologically.
However, Austin, he argues, still requires logoi, to which a speaker’s
intention refers (or defers) that a speaker deploys in order to distinguish the
speech acts that do what they are supposed to do from the various ways
(infelicitous) in which they can fail. This can be related to the example of
the speech act performed by an actor on the stage. Derrida’s critique of
Austin partly notes that, in distinguishing “felicitous” from “non-felicitous”
attempted speech acts, Austin had recourse to intentions, and that mere
convention will not remove the need for a supplementary intention.
Therefore, the idea that there is nothing else contextually behind language
making words meaningful has radical implications for Derrida that it does
not have for Searle. The great example here is of an actor (especially in a
play by Brecht!) on the stage who intends to alert the audience that there is
actually a fire in the theatre and would have genuine difficulties if the
performance makes it possible that “There is really a fire!” is a part of the
performance. Searle’s development of speech act theory entails the idea that
horizontal conventions will solve difficulties about whether a speech act is
serious—but this just begs the question about the self-referential nature of
the speech act. Whatever the horizontal conventions that determine that
something is a play, it is difficult to see how convention can separate the
real from the pretend, since any such conventional sign can be part of the
pretense. Austin is in effect shrinking the distance between the signifier and
the signified, whereas Derrida is emphasising their distance, allowing for
undecidability and much more context to rush into the resultant gap. At the
end of the essay, Derrida again rails against this idea of the “performative”
or ordinary language as being in a sense privileged speech, not by arguing
that performatives don’t exist, but by arguing they should not be set off
against Austin’s “infelicitous” language uses. In fact, performatives are
themselves subject to the same “iterability” as other (for Austin
“constative”) usages (and not just constative-also reflexive constructions,
imperatives, etc). All locution is subject to iterability, before we even get
into perlocution and illocution. In the final instance, we can see how
Derrida is claiming that this idea of a pure presence of a speaker is
something that echoes Western philosophy’s search for an unmediated, truth
or metaphysics of presence that is ultimately unattainable. At least, that is
so if you subscribe to his structuralist methodology, clearly something that
people in the “analytic” tradition (Searle, Ryle, Austin), would most likely
not do. Personally, I have sympathies for both sides of the tradition, and
thinkers such as Rorty and Stanley Cavell have themselves more recently
“deconstructed” this binary opposition, between continental/analytic
philosophy.
The resultant animosity between both Searle and Derrida after this
“controversy” only serves to substantiate the claim once made by Henry
Kissinger that “I formulated the rule that the intensity of academic politics
and the bitterness of it is in inverse proportion to the importance of the
subject they’re discussing. And I promise you at Harvard, they are
passionately intense and the subjects are extremely unimportant.”14 Of
course, this is also contextual and in the current climate of academia, the
stakes have become way higher. Philosophically however, and in terms of
philosophy for the humanities, the ‘quibble’ between Searle and Derrida
does act as an index to something much larger in terms of hermeneutics.15
The larger implications are discussed in the final chapter of this book.
While the humanities may not have had the historical and political
significance they once had under the aegis of different State and Church
socioeconomic relationships, especially in the time of Galileo, Copernicus
and Descartes, they are starting to have a more tangible and sometimes
pernicious effect in the realm of the apparent humdrum and the everyday.
In the context of literary studies and criticism, deconstruction has had
had a large effect, but it has perhaps had some unintended consequences in
the realm of ‘culture’ at large. I will just say for now that the second part of
the century of literary theory and criticism, where philosophy in some ways
dovetailed into literary theory through the ‘linguistic turn,’ also became the
politicised era of theory and criticism, where in some ways it turned away
from its more traditional purview of rhetorical analysis and ‘cultural quality
control’ and became a more political instrument. This movement largely
took place after the rise of deconstruction in the academy—although it’s
also incorrect to loosely brandish terms such as “The Left”,
“Postmodernism,” and of course, “Deconstruction,” without a full and
detailed contextual discussion as I am attempting here.16
A friend of Derrida, and a man not without controversy himself, Paul de
Man, is without question a better writer to talk about in terms of
deconstruction and its closer approximation to literary theory and
criticism.17 De Man wrote two amazing works of literary criticism,
Blindness and Insight (1983) and Allegories of Reading, (1982) which both
bring in the relationship between philosophy and literary theory and their
gradual encroachment into each other’s world of ideas. Difficult as it is to
pin de Man’s work down, he seems closest to H.G. Gadamer’s hermeneutics
in that he constantly interrogates the position of the critic concerning the
historical, philosophical and cultural location of both the text and the critic
and so the blindness and insights in both the text and the critic are
constantly refigured as we re-read the text and the critical reception of the
text.18 Therefore, and in true deconstructive fashion, any fixed location and
set position of ideas are difficult to establish.
One of de Man’s best essays is one of his last, in which he examines
literary criticism and the inherent “Resistance to Theory,” particularly from
the New Critical Tradition that had taken hold not just in the classroom but
in the academy at large. De Man argues here that a major factor in the
elusive nature of language itself is the elision of clear-cut boundaries
between the old scholastic model, flagged in Chapter Two, between logic,
rhetoric and grammar. For de Man, these boundaries continually
deconstruct themselves in the structuration of the text itself. For example,
the syntagmatic, metonymic or grammatical axis of subject-verb-
complement in a phrase such as “Wayne is a doctor”: in syntagmatic
language, the verb “be” becomes for grammarians the copula; however, it
also works also in a metaphoric/rhetorical fashion, because of the
substitutive and appositive, Wayne/doctor/senior lecturer/language
specialist. Therefore, there is an undecidability between the grammatical or
the rhetorical in the very structure of language itself. Crucially, de Man sees
literature as being a sort of self-conscious idiolectical discourse, which
gives it a special place. Unlike a discourse such as science or geography,
the process of literary discourse acknowledges its indirect (fictional)
connection to the world of phenomena. Hence the power of rhetorical
devices such as irony, chiasmus and paradox—and the world of postmodern
and modernist aesthetics, which acknowledges their precarious and purely
rhetorical connection to the “real” world.19
In another essay, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” de Man brilliantly shows
how a question can be both rhetorical and grammatical. He starts by
pointing out how structuralist literary theories such as those proposed by
Greimas, Barthes and Todorov, are derived from the work of Roman
Jakobson and by using the syntagmatic and paradigmatic models of
sentence structure and applying them to literary theory, do not recognize the
strict affinity hereby insinuated between grammar and rhetoric, or at least
don’t fully acknowledge this:

One of the most striking characteristics of literary semiology as it is

practiced today, in France and elsewhere, is the use of grammatical
(especially syntactical) structures conjointly with rhetorical
structures, without apparent awareness of a possible discrepancy
between them. In their literary analyses, Barthes, Genette, Todorov,
Greimas and their disciples all simplify and regress from Jakobson
in letting grammar and rhetoric function in perfect continuity, and in
passing from grammatical to rhetorical structures without difficulty
or interruption. Indeed, as the study of grammatical structures is
refined in contemporary theories of generative, transformational and
distributive grammar, the study of tropes and of figures (which is
how the term rhetoric is used throughout this paper, and not in the
derived sense of comment or of eloquence or persuasion) becomes a
mere extension of grammatical models, a particular subset of
syntactical relationships. (de Man, Allegories of Reading, 8)

Therefore, de Man defines the importance of the analytical discourse of the

French theorists, by pointing out that all textuality, right down to the most
simple, contains these indestructible undecidabilities. By way of example,
and using Jakobson’s own argument in his other famous formalist essay,
“Linguistics and Poetics” (1958), the reader may have noticed the sound
devices I used above in the phrase “indestructible undecidabilities” without
even really considering the acoustic properties of this formulation; whereby
language (langue) in other words to an extent has a life of its own that
constantly comes to the surface, even in our most everyday enunciations
(parole) such as in the commonly used phrase “innocent bystander”. This,
of course, is part of the reason for the prevalence of “literary theory” in the
late-modern age. In a brilliant piece of deconstruction, that I will quote at
unusual length—it’s very hard with de Man to find very short passages for
referential citation—we are informed:

Let me begin by considering what is perhaps the most commonly

known instance of an apparent symbiosis between a grammatical
and a rhetorical structure, the so-called rhetorical question, in which
the figure is conveyed directly by means of a syntactical device. I
take the first example from the sub-literature of the mass media:
asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoe laced
over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers with a question:
“What’s the difference?” Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his
wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing
over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only ire.
“What’s the difference” did not ask for difference but means instead
“I don’t give a damn what the difference is.” The same grammatical
pattern engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive: the
literal meaning asks for the concept (difference) whose existence is
denied by the figurative meaning. As long as we are talking about
bowling shoes, the consequences are relatively trivial; Archie
Bunker, who is a great believer in the authority of origins (as long,
of course, as they are the right origins) muddles along in a world
where literal and figurative meanings get in each other’s way,
though not without discomforts. But suppose that it is a de-bunker
rather than a “Bunker,” and a de-bunker of the arche (or origin), an
archie Debunker such as Nietzsche or Jacques Derrida for instance,
who asks the question “What is the Difference”—and we cannot
even tell from his grammar whether he “really” wants to know
“what” difference is or is just telling us that we shouldn’t even try to
find out. Confronted with the question of the difference between
grammar and rhetoric, grammar allows us to ask the question, but
the sentence by means of which we ask it may deny the very
possibility of asking. For what is the use of asking, I ask, when we
cannot even authoritatively decide whether a question asks or
doesn’t ask? (de Man, Allegories of Reading, 8–9)
The deconstruction here points to the notion of language as a whole
schema, one that is constantly overshadowing our utterances and constantly
forcing our “verbal icons” into patterns of ambiguity, whether the author
means this or not; this, for de Man, is an allegory of reading and it
illustrates the opaque and undecidable nature of language. So, of course,
one of the keys to unlocking the inherent difficulties of Modernism is the
realization that an HD, Joyce, Mallarme, Pound, Yeats or Proust is aware of
this difficulty and the constant cross-over of codes, to the point that they
weave this into their texts by playing with the referentiality of the text,
whether it be to itself as text, tradition, other texts or even to an ultimately
unknowable world just outside of the text.
De Man goes on to apply this logic—or inventive paralogy—may be a
better if not jargon-ridden phrase, to the last line of Yeats’ poem “Among
Schoolchildren,” where we are given the question “How can we know the
dancer from the dance?” Of course, the undecidability is here something
Yeats as poet draws our attention to, and in so doing draws out the irresolute
self-deconstruction of the poem itself:

It is equally possible, however, to read the last line literally rather

than figuratively, as asking with some urgency the question we
asked at the beginning of this talk within the context of
contemporary criticism: not that sign and referent are so exquisitely
fitted to each other that all difference between them is at times
blotted out but, rather, since the two essentially different elements,
sign and meaning, are so intricately intertwined in the imagined
“presence” that the poem addresses, how can we possibly make the
distinctions that would shelter us from the error of identifying what
cannot be identified? The clumsiness of the paraphrase reveals that
it is not necessarily the literal reading which is simpler than the
figurative one, as was the case in our first example; here, the figural
reading, which assumes the question to be rhetorical is perhaps
naive, whereas the literal reading leads to greater complication of
theme and statement. For it turns out that the entire scheme set up
by the first reading can be undermined, or deconstructed, in the
terms of the second, in which the final line is read literally as
meaning that, since the dancer and the dance are not the same, it
might be useful, perhaps even desperately necessary—for the
 question can be given a ring of urgency, “Please tell me, how can I
know the dancer from the dance?” (de Man, Allegories of Reading,
11–12)

The subtlety of deconstructive readings, whilst not easy, obviously give rise
to close readings that, if de Man and Derrida are correct in their structuralist
methodological assumptions, ask truly profound questions about our
relationship with the world and language. It seems to show how the
impossibility of analytic philosophy to hook on to the world with its
nomological net of mathematics, can, by extension, easily be applied to
language and the logic that all sides of this crisis in the humanities realise is
inherent in language itself, when it—as logocentric locus—also attempts to
hook itself onto the world. Hence, we are left with literary theory in the
final instance and as the final arbiter because this hermeneutic discipline
(and practice) acknowledges in its very nature that the world cannot be
entirely trapped within a nomological net. However, there are ways in
which the word is disclosed to us, in a truly Heideggerian sense, and in
which we can through our relative ontological relationship come to deeper
understandings of the world we inhabit—through and within a hermeneutic
circle.
For Frege and Russell the numericity of number was encoded in set
theory (or perhaps furnished is a better phrase). In symbolic language, there
is no set of the non-set as in number. There is just the paradox of the set of
all sets, Langue, which can only be presented in discrete modalities of
parole, or to use Wittgensteinian terminology, in language games. There is
no Ur-language outside of all linguistic sets.
For de Man, however, there is an autological function of literary
discourse—the representation of non-representation—in discourse a
necessarily fictive discourse. In this sense, and we see it in de Man’s
profound reading of Proust’s different modalities, his mimetic and diegetic
speech-acts, his necessarily rhetorical and metaphoric grammar, and his
representation of the outside from the inside. Literature is the new discourse
of philosophy, the discourse that dare not speak its name, except in criticism
and theory. As Schlegel, the high priest of German Romanticism had
already said back in the age of Frühromantik; “the poet can tolerate no law
above himself.”20
 In terms of literary criticism, deconstruction has been a very popular—
and divisive—theoretical approach since the 1970s in both the Western and
later the Far Eastern university system. Part of the reason for this is
probably the emphasis on the fact that there are many ways into the text, or
many undecidable readings—not one of which should be privileged over
another; every privilege produces what Derrida calls a “violent hierarchy.”
In de Man’s view, all texts deconstruct themselves in anything from Yeats to
Proust (as with de Man himself above) and also other sorts of discursive
texts, such as the example from popular US culture, Archie Bunker.
As a more literary example than our pop culture friend Archie, we can
look to William Blake and the fact that he famously examined John
Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost and argued that the poem, although
traditionally read as a Christian morality tale about the fall of Satan, can
also be read in terms of a certain sympathy for Satan. The undecidabilities
in much of Shakespeare’s work are very clear (or rather murky), for
example, in Hamlet; the central soliloquy of “To be, or not to be…” can be
read in terms of a central crux of Hamlet’s being trapped between two
binary oppositions, each of which “supplements” the other. Critics have
traditionally found it difficult to take a side in Hamlet, or formulate a
decisive reading, and the reason for this is the skill of Shakespeare as a
writer, and his ability produce all of these uncertainties in the texts—
uncertainties that reflect the binary nature of our real lives. For Harold
Bloom, human nature has been crystallised and made richer by
Shakespeare’s work, as exemplified in his book Shakespeare: The Invention
of the Human (1998).
Yet another Yale school critic, Geoffrey Hartman in a famous book on
Wordsworth’s epic poem The Prelude, (actually written before the term
“deconstruction” became part of critical parlance), published in the book
Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814 (1964), famously writes of the poet’s
attempt to attain imaginative autonomy (a commonplace of romantic
criticism) and his reliance upon the necessity of nature as an aid to his
romantic imagination, or his necessary receptivity to the external world. On
Hartman’s seminal reading, Wordsworth remains in a sense “beached”
between the two alternatives, which inform and counter-infect each other;
they are Akedah and Apocalypse; in a sense, two undecidable readings of
the relationship between nature and the self-sufficiency of the romantic
imagination. This I discuss, along with de Man’s treatment of the romantic
relationship between symbol and allegory, in my Hegel and the English
Romantic Tradition (2015).
Three great poems to re-read both in tandem and in a deconstructive
light, whilst offering good examples of the critical utility of this
methodological approach are Wallace Stevens’ “The Anecdote of the Jar,”
S.T. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and P.B. Shelleys’ “Ozymandias.” In
Stevens’ poem, we are given the stark idea of a signifier placed in the
middle of a desert, and how the central signifier, arbitrarily placed, is the
locus for a whole symbolic ecosystem to thrive. Stevens starts the short,
imagistic poem, with the following lines:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The arbitrarily placed jar is set amongst the “slovenly wilderness,” but it so
transpires that the wilderness “…rose up to it/And sprawled around, no
longer wild”. The central signifier, St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Eiffel Tower,
etc., sets off a signifying plain and reifies the notion of the process of city-
building by repeating the imagery of “And round it was, upon a hill” with
the imagery “The jar was round upon the ground.” The hill becomes level.
On this horizonal ground, the syntagmatic axis of signification can now
openly thrive. The vertical height of the hill is not displaced, but is forged
into a central signifier upon an axis which can act, like transformative
grammar, in any number of directions or locales. The imagery of “tall” is
still emphasized. However, the paradigmatic vertical axis crosses with the
horizontal, with the locus of the jar set as the central signifier in this
arbitrary social scheme.
The jar, however, is “gray and bare” because it’s function as a
grammatical signifier is paramount here; the jar’s content is of little
consequence; Stevens is addressing its arbitrary function as a signifier
within a newly formed and arbitrarily codified system of difference. Stevens
had also written of “The Idea of Order at Key West”; however, in this
particular poem the very notion of order is deconstructed along its
metaphoric and metonymic axis, in point of fact, the wilderness is
recognised as wilderness because of difference, because of what it is not—
it’s brought into existence by the existence of the central signifier, the jar.
Upon reading this, one may think of the “plain of jars” in Laos PDR, which,
though more recently noted as ritualistic burial signifiers, were at one point
surrounded in mystery, because they originally didn’t have the contextual
signification provided by this parole. Demystification occurs once a system
of signifiers is discerned, meaning is then given to the world, even aspects
of the world that otherwise have no pointed character or identification. The
jar, of course, can also be a symbol for culture—one thinks of containment
or a jar/petra dish, signifying culture in both senses of the term. It can infect
things around or if the culture escapes from the jar, a more literal metaphor
it can be seen as producing the ensuing signifying ecosystem. Furthermore,
that jar can be seen as producing culture in its social sense, and in this
reading the yearning for a return to nature—or the noble savage—is only
signified by the instantiation of the jar. As in Levi Strauss’ The Raw and the
Cooked, one signifying notion comes into a binary relationship with
another. We have a yearning for the signifier “originary nature” precisely
because of what it is not: culture.
In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge similarly places a signifier, the pleasure
dome, in a much less stratified signifying space than that envisioned by
Stevens. Coleridge’s work is already known for its fragmentary nature. The
poem is subtitled “A Vision” and a “Fragment.” It follows the structure of a
hortus conclusus narrative;21 however, the famous troping of the garden
surrounded thus: “So twice five miles of fertile ground/With walls and
towers were girdled round;” (6–7), which runs in stark contrast to the barren
imagery of Stevens’ poem, emphasising the syntagmatic horizontality of his
own poiein. Coleridge is addressing (in some senses the act of the process
of poesy itself, on its own self-representational paradigmatic axis). The
wilderness of “that deep romantic chasm which slanted/Down the green hill
athwart a cedarn cover!” (12–13). The romantic and metaphoric
imagination cannot be sustained for any prolonged period, locked up within
with the symbolic structure of the hortus conclusus. Indeed, the
unconscious bubbling to the surface of Langue is once again addressed by
the Khan-poet who “’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far/Ancestral voices
prophesying war!” (29–30). In Bloom’s phraseology the anxiety of
influence of symbolic and overridingly linguistic history haunts the poet
through its historical palimpsest, revealed through Coleridge’s symbolic
language, a symbolism that is, on the one hand functioning as a pure
romantic symbol, at the functional rhetorical praxis; whilst at the same time,
it’s equally important grammatical (and allegorical hortus conclusus axis)
strives to bind it within the structural troches of its expressive meter.
Therefore, the poem itself works self-consciously, between the allegorical
and symbolic.
Furthermore, and to cement the unsustainability of the romantic vision
or fragment, we are given a series of opaque images through which to view
the transcendental, but never directly attainable, central romantic signifier:
“The shadow of the dome of pleasure/Floated midway on the waves” (31–
2); “That sunny dome, those caves of ice!” (47) the signified is refracted,
ventriloquised and never beheld directly, because of its fragmentary and
symbolic nature. The floating signifier, in Lacanian terms, glides under the
weight of the symbolical language, reflecting, refracting and
paradigmatically hanging. If Steven’s poem is an allegory for the
categorizing process of poetry, then Coleridge is allegorically presenting the
deeply symbolic nature of his view of expressive poetic language, his
romantic hermeneutics of romantic composition, in his necessarily
fragmented and broken vision.
Shelley’s famous sonnet “Oxymandias” perhaps at this point, and given
the signification of the first two poems, should on my deconstructive
methodology have already deconstructed itself:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.—”

The lyric speaker is addressed in the second person, once again by history
and time as a palimpsest, as the signifying and codified discourse of
immutable time and history. This reminds one that without any given
signifying context, without the correct cues and discourse traces, meaning
is just as easily lost as it is created-hanging on a mediated yet necessary
play between the presence and absence of key signifiers. The decay and the
paradoxical power of the ancient sovereign are sustained only through the
lack of symbolic signifiers that are contextually lost in the wilderness, upon
the sand where inscription or trace cannot be sustained. “Nothing beside
remains,” and it’s the strange paradox of the “colossal Wreck, boundless
and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” The signification of
non-signification, the oxymoronic power of the negative signifiers that in
turn signify their own “ancestral voices prophesying war”. One is reminded
of the tenuous nature of existence, the folly of pride, the fact that without
the “Works” and signifiers of history, there are indeed only lifeless things—
things given life because of what they are not—or because of what they
bear traces of…logoi.
The three readings afforded here demonstrate the continued utility and
fruitfulness of deconstruction as a form of hermeneutics and as an exemplar
of the linguistic turn in both philosophy and literary theory. Juxtaposing
Coleridge, Shelley and Stevens provides not only an interesting interpretive
rubric through which to read these poets respectively, but also a structuralist
framework of positive tools that can be applied to these writers in their
various guises as both poets and thinkers in general.
In terms of Thai popular culture, and thinking about the example of
Archie Bunker above, one can draw many examples where the ‘text’ can be
read and then reread in other manners. In popular Thai culture the nam nao
drama, which roughly translates into English as ‘soap opera,’ can be seen to
exhibit stock characters, each of which exhibits archetypal traits and
enables them to act as binary foils to each other. If we take the examples of
the nang rai and nang ek stock characters, (the beastly bad girl and the
virginal homely lady), we can see how this works. Both of these characters
are female and are at odds with one another. The Nang Rai is perfidious,
ambitious, cunning, self-centred, ambivalent and indulges in more
promiscuous sexual behaviour than her counterpart, who is abstemious,
cordial, selfless, servile and very conservative in her behaviour. In her, we
can see the Snow White, Cinderella, or Rapunzel stereotype in popular
culture.
The usual pattern that unfolds is one where the nang rai will come
undone because of her behaviour. She will be foiled and will not attain the
societal status she may have desired. In fact, she ends up getting her ‘just
deserts’ and is often rewarded by social exclusion, ostracisation, or even
worse, penal punishment or death. The nang ek will be rewarded with a
stereotypical happy ending with a handsome prince male character, who
will have been tempted, like the chivalric knights of yore, by the sexual
enchantments and entrapments of the female antagonist. In some cases, the
male antagonist, nearly from a traditional, old-monied, well-to-do and
conservative family, may have actually slept with the female antagonist,
whilst being portrayed as being a victim of entrapment or of unsolicited
sexual advances. In some cases, the male character even has been seen to
abuse or rape women, only to come to his senses and adjust his moral
compass to one of a conscientious and civil young gentleman.22 Interpreted
from a more conservative locus, these morality dramas enforce the moral
law of Thai-ness, with their attendant warning of the dangers of perfidious
behaviour, especially by women.
However, read from another angle, these dramas can also be seen as
pointing out the hypocritical nature of the status quo, or the distance of
rights between males and females within this society. For example, a
feminist reading of these programmes may well advocate for the Nang Rai
character, as she is simply going after the same aspects of desire that a
young man, with a certain social privilege within society, will be set to
achieve or desire for his own satisfaction. The feminist reading may
problematise the more conservative reading but stand up equally strongly. If
we add the socioeconomic context to our analysis, we may be using a
Marxist analytical framework; equally, a reading of the combination of the
id, ego and superego could interpolate a Freudian/psychoanalytic reading. A
study of desire and the movement of metonymic signifiers to represent this
displaced and constantly recurring desire—along with an examination of
the way this female character is subverting the symbolic order of this
cultural signifying system, chosen from a background of possible instances
of parole, would instantiate a Lacanian-poststructuralist reading. In any of
these readings deconstruction/structuralism act as methodological tools to
facilitate the particular reading at play here.
The obvious objection would be that of the intention of the author or
director, but there are two obvious objections to this: the first is the
Wimsatt/Beardsley intentional fallacy argument, which is a type of
formalism in itself and the second is the more general idea of theory itself,
whereby langue is in the background, constantly bubbling to the surface so
that even an authorial intention is subject to the same pressures any purely
objective reading would be subject to. If also we refer back to a canonical
writer such as Wordsworth or Shakespeare, we see the undecidabilities of
the various readings of Hamlet or any of the 26 extant manuscripts of The
Prelude and we still encounter that bugbear: hermeneutics. We’re also
aware that what may be regarded as the canon can be constantly up for
review, depending upon the historical context, changes in what Stanley Fish
calls the interpretive community, and what R. Jauss and especially J.H.
Gadamer would argue are the cultural horizons of the time. Has theory
really just worked on a self-fulfilling prophecy and self-sustaining
economy? Are all of the new researches, PhDs, advances in theory down
simply to an academic industry? This would seem a difficult position to
adhere to and sustain. If we take hermeneutics seriously and we see
Saussure’s position as the father of synchronic and diachronic modern
linguistics as tenable, then it seems even more difficult to question the
relevance of theory.
Another objection is the idea that with deconstruction, there are infinite
interpretations of a text and we can’t find a meaning. This is singularly
incorrect and bred of willful ignorance to either engage with theory or to
read second-hand sources (such as Jordan Peterson) who is happy to
incorrectly align Derrida with Marxism. Anyone who has understood either
Derrida, de Man, Hartman or Bloom, or even what I have doggedly
attempted to explicate above, should recognise the fallacy of this claim.
There is more likelihood of my having read all 73 volumes of The Talmud
than Peterson to have read a single essay of Derrida—he hasn’t. The idea is
that the texts’ ultimate meanings are undecidable or it’s ultimately
impossible to find an arche or ultimate telos in which to locate any of these
texts, pace the limited nature of our interpretive faculties.23 Heidegger, who
was the father of the thought under discussion here, and its overall precis,
was also a Christian. However, the implicit claim in poststructuralist
analysis is that the various theses about texts are not impregnable, are
revisable and are always connected to traces and supplements outside or
inside the text in question.
The other claim is that deconstruction (or poststructuralist theory in
general) sanctions any reading, or bathes in the ether of relativism. So, on
this reading, one could not technically argue against Hitler’s discursive
ideas as expounded in Mein Kampf, or the vile racist sentiment of William
Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. However, this illustrates a staggering
misapprehension of the sentiments of deconstruction, which is attractively
democratic. It’s certainly not a theory of didactic normativity, in the
socialist sense of a thinker such a Gyorgy Lukacs. In fact, it’s a watchdog to
remind us that all these normative theories, including Marxism, are open to
investigation and critique. It’s a theory in the purest sense, borne of a
synthesis of hermeneutic phenomenology and structuralist linguistics.
When I was an undergraduate, my teacher in philosophy, who had
precious little time for poststructuralist thought (although, when pressed he
again admitted he’d also never actually read any Derrida), argued
incorrectly that a proponent of deconstruction would have to contend that
there was even an unlimited number of possible readings for a car
instruction manual. Of course, there are texts that one does not need to
really theorise about! I don’t think any other theorist would spend much
time on that ultimate classic, The Audi Quatro Users’ Manual, circa 1984.
As Roland Barthes argued, in his later poststructuralist phase, some texts
are more readerly and some are writerly. Put another way, a text such as
Ulysses is more based upon the authorial technique, whereas a crime novel
by Lee Child is probably more down to the reader’s interpretive skill in
reading the genre of the crime novel and following the structural and textual
clues. A car user’s manual is without question more
metonymic/syntagmatic, using much less of a metaphoric or paradigmatic
technique. It’s still infected by other signifiers and traces, while
supplements are found in the discourse of the manual. The space between
signifier and signified is still open, and although the interpretive gap is
obviously not nearly so wide as with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
—it can’t be read in a pure void—just as a car cannot be worked in a void
without a chain of signification. Once people get over the mistaken idea of
infinite interpretability, they can hopefully flag this error and recognize the
wasted time inculcated by this red-herring reasoning. However, I’ll spend
more time on the more general ramifications of Theory in the chapter on
Postmodernism, which comes later in this readerly book of yours…

Footnotes
1 The German edition was published posthumously, which has led to conjecture that Husserl had
never designated the lectures as ripe for publication. However, the original lectures were originally
delivered at the Sorbonne in February 1929, and a French version had been published as early as
1931. Having read much of Husserl’s other work and judging by the fact that the French edition was
partly supervised and translated by another giant of phenomenology, Emmanuel Levinas, I’d contest
that these lectures are a fair summation of Husserl’s post-Cartesian mission statement for
transcendental phenomenology.

2 Taken from Roger Scruton’s book review of Alain Badiou’s The Adventure of French Philosophy
“A nothing would do as well”. In the Times Literary Supplement, August 31st, 2012.

3 Roger Scruton, “Why I became a Conservative”, The New Criterion, February, 2003. https://​
newcriterion.​com/​issues/​2003/​2/​why-i-became-a-conservative

4 In his book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International, Routledge, 1994, Derrida makes it abundantly clear (indeed in the title of the text
itself), why revolutionary thinkers are haunted by historical thinkers, much in the same way Hamlet
is by his father, under the figurative stage upon which we reiterate our injunctions for justice.

5 This is outlined in much of the political economy of the 1800s but to give a clear example, Marx
addresses the issue of both primogeniture and the economics of the physiocrats in his Grundrisse,
1973.
6 This is brilliantly adumbrated by Robert Graves in his “Author’s Introduction” to his seminal two-
volume edition of the Greek Myths. The Folio Society, 2000.

7 One can of course make an easy connection here to the US synecdochical notion of “the redneck”
in this register also.

8 A similar argument about authorial agency is also posited by Michel Foucault when he discusses
the author function and the effect of early capitalist economics upon our notion of authorship in his
essay “What is an Author?” (1969).

9 Jacques Lacan famously took the Jakobsonian ideas of metonymy and metaphor and then used
these structuralist tools to describe the Freudian notions of displacement and condensation. Derrida is
also taking the terminology of structuralism and this time applying it to Heideggerian
phenomenology. It is quite clear upon reading Heidegger’s seminal text, Being and Time (1927) that
without the possibility of the linguistic development of Heidegger’s work, there would never have
been a further de-struction of metaphysics pace the paradoxical centre to Derrida’s oeuvre.

10 Ricouer’s notion of “the hermeneutics of suspicion” was first initiated in the introduction to his
brilliant Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, 1970.

11 Austin famously delineates between constative utterances that generally relay information that is
true or false and performative utterances that are being enacted as they are stated, often in the present
continuous or present simple construction of the verb.

12 https://​www.​bangkokpost.​com/​learning/​advanced/​258682/​anger-over-nazi-show

13 To further this argument through the self-determinations of the human science of linguistics, one
only has to examine the work that has been done in Pragmatics by thinkers such as Grice, Leech and
originally, Austin himself. Ideas such as NVC (Non-Verbal-Communication), implicature and of
course speech act theory itself all have their basis in contextualized situations. Both Derrida’s and
Austin’s formal arguments rest upon the importance of context and their major difference is of course
a metaphysical assumption about the distance between the signifier and signified in a linguistic sign
and how this can be influenced by contextual praxis.

14 One here recognizes the formulation of ‘Sayre’s Law’; William Sayre was alleged to have stated
“Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.”
However, if I’m correct in the assumptions behind my thesis about the dovetailing of literary
criticism and philosophy, and the more recent historicising of criticism, then the tenor of the dialogue
between Derrida and Searle (taken as two obvious players in a much larger play in the modern
humanities), and numerous other commentators, teachers and critics, has ramifications that move
beyond the obvious comedic element of Sayre’s Law.

15 The first English translation of “Signature Event Context” appeared in the first volume of the new
journal Glyph in 1977. The editor of Glyph, Sam Weber, invited John Searle to write a response to
“Signature Event History.” In his response, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Searle
points out a number of flaws in Derrida’s argumentation and his understanding of Austin. For the
second volume of Glyph (also published in 1977), Derrida contributed a response to Searle’s “Reply”
called “Limited Inc. a b c.” In contrast to Searle’s ten page “Reply,” Derrida’s “Limited Inc” ran to
ninety pages. Derrida’s “Limited Inc” is an almost merciless criticism of Searle, whom he calls
“Sarl.” For instance, he points out that Searle in his “Reply” hardly mentions signature, event, or
context. “Limited Inc” indicates Derrida’s growing frustration with the reception of his work,
especially in the Anglophone world. Derrida having been offered an honorary degree at Cambridge
University in 1992, a group of analytic philosophers wrote an open letter (see below) to the Times of
London, in which they objected to Derrida receiving this honorary degree. Despite the letter,
Cambridge University awarded Derrida the degree. It’s hugely ironic that one of Derrida’s main
detractors, as well as someone who clearly hasn’t read Derrida—and who’ll I’ll discuss more in the
chapter on postmodernism—Jordan Peterson similarly had an invitation to Cambridge rescinded back
in 2021. The authorities eventually saw the erroneous nature of this policing and Peterson was quite
rightly allowed to go and share his thoughts at Cambridge. I’m pretty certain it wasn’t a talk on
deconstruction although, given the context, the irony would have been too good to be true. Here is a
copy of the original open letter to the Times of London; one can’t help but think of Kissinger’s use of
Sayre’s Law again here:

The Times (London). Saturday, May 9, 1992

Sir, The University of Cambridge is to ballot on May 16 on whether M. Jacques Derrida
should be allowed to go forward to receive an honorary degree. As philosophers and others
who have taken a scholarly and professional interest in M. Derrida’s remarkable career over
the years, we believe the following might throw some needed light on the public debate that
has arisen over this issue.
Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the
marks of writings in that discipline. Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree
almost entirely in fields outside philosophy – in departments of film studies, for example, or
of French and English literature. In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those
working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does
not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.
We submit that, if the works of a physicist (say) were similarly taken to be of merit
primarily by those working in other disciplines, this would in itself be sufficient grounds for
casting doubt upon the idea that the physicist in question was a suitable candidate for an
honorary degree.
Derrida’s career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to
reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate
jokes and puns (‘logical phallusies’ and the like), and M. Derrida seems to us to have come
close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks
and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets.
 Certainly he has shown considerable originality in this respect. But again, we submit,
such originality does not lend credence to the idea that he is a suitable candidate for an
honorary degree.
Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his
antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary
French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule. Derrida’s voluminous writings in
our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all—as
every reader can very easily establish for himself (and for this purpose any page will do)—his
works employ a written style that defies comprehension.
Many have been willing to give M. Derrida the benefit of the doubt, insisting that
language of such depth and difficulty of interpretation must hide deep and subtle thoughts
indeed. When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that,
where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.
Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks
upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the
awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.
Yours sincerely,
Barry Smith
(Editor, The Monist)

16 One only needs to examine the evidence of classes in literary criticism themselves: how many
actually critique texts and how many talk about the political context of texts, while in some cases
having become self-appointed arbiters of what gets taught as ‘the canon.’ Moreover, I’ve have been
in meetings, at which a self-appointed guardian of culture has informed me that we should move
more female poets onto the syllabus. We already had a large presence of female poets on the given
syllabus—in proportion to the historical record the ratio was skewed in any case. The person gave a
self-congratulatory snigger when I dared to mention the literary canon and said “we haven’t
recognised a thing called the canon for years in the US”. The irony of the fact that the same person
had been at pains to say we should in no way indulge in hegemony or ideological instantiation in any
shape, form or guise whatsoever, seemed lost upon my colleague, who was patronising the (female)
course coordinator and implying his Neoliberal/humanist/‘progressive’ model was the particular
codification that our department needed to follow. People often do not realise the patronising nature
of this sort of discourse and the implied power-relations themselves that this insinuates; especially in
my opinion, in a context where we are teaching a truly representational Introduction to Poetry model;
a model where the “interpretive community” to use Stanley Fish’ phrase, needs to be taken into
account. With regards to the notion of the canon, this is something to which I will return in the final
chapter.

17 After de Man’s death in 1983, it was discovered that he’d penned antisemitic journalism for the
Belgian newspaper Le Soir. Because of the storm in the humanities that deconstruction had caused,
de Man had many supporters who offered weak and quite frankly embarrassing excuses for his
somewhat shady literary soirees in the past—the worst of which was probably that proffered by
Derrida. That said, I wouldn’t refuse to employ a great painter and decorator if they were
philanderers, so I don’t see why we can’t celebrate and recognize the brilliance and originality of de
Man whilst holding his decidedly questionable political views in abeyance. I’ve also read and
enjoyed Lous Ferdinand Celine…
18 Gadamer’s seminal text, Truth and Method (1975), uses the newly developed techniques of
hermeneutics and historicism to demonstrate how our historical and social juncture will invariably
affect our reading and reception of given texts, works of art or cultural artifacts. I’ll discuss Gadamer
more in the chapter that concerns reception theory.

19 Greilling articulated the semantic paradox “Greilling’s Paradox” in 1908. Essentially, some words
have the same property as what they signify, such as “short”; however, “long” doesn’t have this
property. “Polysyllabic” does in itself have an unusually long number of syllables, so is also the
same; monosyllabic does not have the semantic properties that is suggested by the signifier however,
as it only has one syllable. Words such as “polysyllabic” and “short” are homological or autological;
words such as “long” and “monosyllabic” are heterological. The paradox arises with the word
heterological itself: if it’s “heterological” it does not instantiate its meaning but this is what
heterological means, therefore it’s also “autological”. On the other hand, if “heterological” is
“autological”, then it must instantiate the character of applying to itself: therefore heterological is
also heterological. In my adapted usage of Greilling’s notion, Literature is an autological discourse
and not heterological; even though it semantically purports to non-representation of the real it’s
actually autological in that this non-representation is in fact, representational; this is a way of seeing
the self-referentiality of Modernism and later Postmodernism as referring to itself as fiction, therefore
as literary discourse making itself more autological than say, Realism.
As subject to de Man’s critique, other discourses on de Man’s reading would be heterological
because they don’t acknowledge the tenuous, mediative nature of the linguistic sign. This is in part
the basis for perhaps his famous essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969) in which he treats of
Romanticism’s contingent relationship to allegory and symbol. The Platonic (and more conservative)
notion of referentiality, the original correspondence theory of truth would invert this model and see
discourses such as science and history as autological and view literary discourse (the poets) as
heterological because the “sophistry” that they weave as truth. The phrase “sophistry” is
philologically taken to be negative in common parlance but originally was connected to rhetorical
skill, such as that used by politicians, lawyers and, in Plato’s case, the false prophets, three times
removed from the original, the poets. This in itself, is of philosophical interest and warrants further
investigation.

20 F.W. Schlegel also saw the intertextual predilections of philosophy and also argued for the
transcending of rhetorical, semantic and grammatical textual boundaries. Hence the philosophical
importance of his (admittedly poor) novel Lucinde (1799). His idea on the inability to completely
master epistemic knowledge of “worldhood” was also reflected in the Lyaceum and the Athenian
Fragments. It appears to me that these were also powerful influences on Nietzsche’s poetics in his
approach to philosophy—both in his aphorisms and also in the poetics of works such as Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (1885).

21 The hortus conclusus refers to an aesthetic representation of the Virgin Mary both in pictorial and
in actually constructed gardens, which began in the late Middle Ages. Coleridge’s depiction of the
landscape in “Kubla Khan” (1797) can be seen as connected to this aesthetic symbolism. See my own
chapter on “Intellectual Intuition in Coleridge’s Poetics” in Hegel and the English Romantic
Tradition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

22 For an excellent and engaging discussion of the Thai romance genre and its distribution in Thai
literary discourse, please see Dr. Sasinee Khunkaew, Femininity and Masculinity in Three Selected
Twentieth-Century Thai Romance Fictions; School of English, Communication and Philosophy,
Cardiff University: unpublished PhD Thesis, June, 2015.

23 The obvious objection to this is to stand by the alternative absolute Idealism of Fichte or Hegel,
which relies upon a teleological logic exemplified brilliantly in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),
where Hegel uses theories such as Anerkennung (mutual recognition) to demonstrate how the human
subject can escape subjectivity and enter into the realm of intersubjectivity and eventually absolute
spirit, Geist, or knowing. Or in faith-based reason, the Abrahamic faith in a God or Holy Trinity. In
poststructuralist terms these ideals are “transcendental signifieds” that stand outside the chain of
signification and are therefore unknowable.

OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_6

6. Literary Méditations Hégéliennes

Wayne Deakin1
(1) Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most important analytic philosophers of the
Twentieth Century, whose propensity for philosophical acuity was
unfortunately matched by his apparent love of gin. As a philosopher in the
tradition of Frege, Russell, Carnap and Quine, one certainly wouldn’t have
placed Sellars on a list of philosophers with a penchant for meditations
Hégéliennes but those were his words. His principle work was in the
philosophy of mind and language. As with all the other successful analytic
philosophers, he seemed to end up at the same Janus-faced revolving door
that led either back to the European room of academic scepticism or an
holistic room that, whilst dispelling the so called myth of the given (or logoi
to parse the jargon I’ve used thus far), dropped one into a post-metaphysical
linguistic garden. A garden in which he would have encountered W.V.O.
Quine, if not Alice herself.
After the continental tradition had embraced the linguistic through
phenomenology and hermeneutics, it seemed the analytic was heading
down the same cul-de-sac, with the difference that the continental had a
tacit embrace of the limits of language from the outset. This occurred partly
after Heidegger’s Kehre (change of direction towards an emphasis on
language) and Gadamer’s brilliant development of hermeneutics, which I
will discuss briefly below. However, the analytic tradition was still holding
onto the post-Kantian synthetic-analytic distinction and still determined to
find that elusive set of all sets, without falling into paradox or, worse still,
the Sturm und Drang of theory itself. Philosophers were perhaps finally
coming to the realization that historicity would trump all universality.
However, I added the modifier “Literary” to the title of this chapter and this
chapter will indeed bring the second modifier to the table. This allows a
future based not upon parochial notions of identity, but upon commonality,
historical perspicuity and an altar where we won’t sacrifice our literature
teachers or academics, who have finally firmly awoken from the nightmare
of history.
In the wake of Paul de Man having challenged the “resistance to theory”
that was incumbent on all humanities professors in the early 1980s, a couple
of new incumbents, Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels decided to
raise the bar with the notorious neo-pragmatist paper, “Against Theory.”1
Roland Barthes had challenged “victory to the critic” that was supplied by
the sleight-of-hand provided by biographical-historicist criticism, bringing
theory back to the fore. However, these straight-talking neo-pragmatists,
obviously influenced by Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, were
trying to wipe the pragmatist slate clean by in some ways flagging E.D.
Hirsch’ phenomenological criticism. This was a criticism wherein one could
find a meaning or pure essence or pure intentionality by discovering—much
to the ire of Wimsett and Beardsley—the author’s intention: victory once
again to the critic. Knapp and Michaels argued:

Contemporary theory has taken two forms. Some theorists have

sought to ground the reading of literary texts in methods designed to
guarantee the objectivity and validity of interpretations. Others,
impressed by the inability of such procedures to produce agreement
among interpreters, have translated that failure into an alternative
mode of theory that denies the possibility of correct interpretation.
Our aim here is not to choose between these two alternatives but
rather to show that both rest on a single mistake, a mistake that is
central to the notion of theory per se. The object of our critique is
not a particular way of doing theory but the idea of doing theory at
all. (Knapp & Michaels, 723)

They go on to state their main thesis that “The mistake made by theorists
has been to imagine the possibility or desirability of moving from one term
(the author’s intended meaning) to a second term (the text’s meaning), when
the two terms are the same. One can neither succeed nor fail in deriving one
term from the other, since to have one is already to have them both.” (724).
Given this desideratum, the simple truth is to find this purported apodictic
truth (the authorial intention), which is for example perhaps bound up in a
particular speech act.
However, there were a series of essays published in response to this
seminal paper on what is not just a critique about theory itself but also (and
more pertinently) a position about philosophical scepticism and the modern
epistemological enterprise as modern philosophy, which acts a good
catalyst with which to commence this chapter. It deals with the certainty of
meaning and the idea that theory only finds space to thrive in an area where
there is space for scepticism about final meanings, intentions and
foundations. We can read this space between foundational meaning and the
variously posited meanings of theory as in one sense the juncture where
literary theory and philosophy cross. One of the responders was a writer
who is a philosophical romantic in that he challenges the idea that there is a
clearly defined gap between genres such as psychoanalysis, film studies,
philosophy, literary theory and criticism: Stanley Cavell. His book of
essays, Must We Mean What We Say (1969), and his magnum opus The
Claim of Reason (1980), neatly summarise his signature position of
acknowledgment. This is a version of Hegel’s idea of “mutual recognition,”
or Anerkennung; but a deflationary or non-metaphysical position. It posits
that acknowledgment (as opposed to avoidance) of someone, something, or
some extrinsic logoi held by two subjects is how we foster knowledge (ac-
knowledge) any posited hypothesis about the logoi of the phenomenal
world.2 Cavell argues that this inter-subjective position is one explored by
many Hollywood movies, classical myths or modern novels—as well as by
psychoanalysis.
This mutual acknowledgment can be the basis for knowledge about the
world and deals with areas such as Wittgenstein’s work on the
incorrigibility of things such as raw feels and pain, because of how
knowledge is deduced or induced, in the sphere of public reason. Thus,
acknowledgment also locates knowing in a post-Wittgensteinean loci and is
deeply connected with both de Saussure’s and Peirce’s ideas on the
logically prior public nature of semiotic systems and structures before they
are private. Within the scope of these systems, we hold a series of
propositional attitudes that come bound with subjective stances and
positions on these topics. Once again, we can also clearly discern (or
acknowledge) in this semiotic ecosystem the connection between the whole
system of Langue and individual Parole.
 It can be discerned how the nature of sign systems is once again
autologically represented by a system such as that of an aesthetic idiolect,
optimally explored in the self-conscious aesthetics of Romanticism,
Modernism and (up to a point), Postmodernism. Another philosopher whose
work I’d like to offer up as a counterpoint to the anti-theoretical approach
of Knapp and Michaels is Donald Davidson. His culminated response to the
issues explored by Sellars and Quine, comes out in close proximity to
Cavell’s, Derrida’s and de Man’s work. Davidson also rejects the bald
notion of philosophical certainty, while positing that by a form of mutual
acknowledgment about propositions, translations and triangulations—
without subscribing to a holistic nomological theory of meanings, or a fixed
schematic model that explains the whole of the external world for us—we
can semantically communicate in mutually meaningful and reasonable
ways. It is because of this continued sense of the subject negotiating the
physical world, the breakdown of different genres or criticisms, or the
reorientation of the relationship of literary theory to philosophy, that I label
all of these philosophers, Philosophical Romantics.
In this chapter, I shall briefly breakdown the arguments of the
philosophers just mentioned, arguments that culminate in the re-
instantiation of theory, before examining the further possible political
ramifications of what I would call this Communitarian literary theory. I
supplement these theoretical standpoints by first offering a reading of
William Carlos Williams’ seminal modernist poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”
(1923) and then I offer a reading of a more recent and highly regarded
poem, Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy” (2007). I go on to outline the
concomitant phenomenology and hermeneutics of Heidegger, Gadamer and
Wolfgang Iser, which explicitly embraces the communitarianism that is
only implied within the work of philosophical romantics such as Rorty,
Cavell and Davidson. I conclude the chapter by illustrating its own utility in
reading a short story by Ernest Hemmingway.
John Searle, in addition to his war of the words with the Gallic upstarts,
was also the philosopher who famously took on the mantle of the
intentionalist theory of Austin’s speech act theory in the 70 and 80s by
developing a whole new range of speech acts, with perfomativity at their
centre. He also invented the famous Chinese Room argument for a computer
that could eventually learn all of the correct moves in following certain
speech acts or transformational-grammar-syntax rules to allow for the
computer to become a competent speaker.3 However, because of the rules
of implicature and context—in short pragmatics—Searle still argued we
could tell if it was a human being or a machine who was conversing with
us. This was in tandem with his Berkeley colleague Hubert Dreyfuss, who
tackled the same subject of AI from a phenomenological angle in his book
What Computers Can’t Do (1972); Searle’s was one of the first influential
philosophical ideas to tackle the subject of AI.
For Dreyfuss, phenomenological intentionality is key in reading and for
Searle the bare intentionality bound up with a speech act bears inscription
upon a text. However, in their own philosophical area, Quine and Sellars
were working within an empiricist tradition that was still looking for other
hallmarks of epistemic/empirical certainty within the post-analytic
tradition. The Sellars-Quine approach is premised upon the idea that there
is a relation of knowledge to reality, which is either the prospective given
structure (the holistic framework of “the given”) for Sellars; or for Quine, it
is an ultimately holistic analytic-physicist ur-vocabulary or radical
reductionist schematic model. However, by following the logic of his most
famous essay, “The Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine starts to distrust
“privileged representations” because he can’t logically justify or discern the
“‘idea’ idea” itself—which in poststructuralism is akin to the
transcendental signified. His logical-empiricist realism may appear
strategically different from continental hermeneutics, but he is also led to
the denial of extra-linguistic transcendent meanings in objects themselves
(logoi). The “‘idea’ idea” in modern epistemology is connected to direct,
unmediated representation, or what Rorty tropes as the mind as “the mirror
of nature” and something that can be now replaced by post-Wittgensteinean
epistemological behaviorism.
The Geisteswissenschaften (modern humanities, which are opposed to
the Naturwissenschaften) under the aegis of both the ‘continental’ and
‘analytic’, should be replaced in Rorty’s eyes by epistemological
behaviorism or what he later called “ironism” because there is no
“philosophical point” to be made about translation or “intentionality” or
“certainty” of the “problem of other minds”.4 The Quinean attempt to
distinguish between “scientific” and “unscientific” explanations, or for what
for Sellars would be a more holistic schema, for Rorty were pointless.
Rortyan Ironism, Derridean Poststructuralism, or what has loosely and
incorrectly been grouped as ‘postmodernsim’ are the forms of philosophy
that are the off-cuts of this crisis of modern philosophy for the humanities.
However, they can now produce some great readings and historically acute
hermeneutics in our tradition of reception, or in the newer tradition of
critical forms such as New Historicism. As Wheeler has recently pointed out
in the often-missed connection between figures who appear as historically
and epistemologically diverse as Derrida and Quine:

Both Quine and Derrida, then, attack the hidden realism built into
the kind of present meaning-content that will make the necessary the
a priori. Whatever has the full presence required either by
phenomenology or by logical positivism has to have some
objectively real objects, and so some objective necessities.
Furthermore, they both see no way to separate the meaning from the
sign. Meaning as pure, extracted, semantic content is an incoherent
notion. This hyperbole, once the special concerns of Derrida are
disregarded, makes the Quinean point that there can be nothing
behind writing or speech but more writing- or speech-like
phenomena. While Quine does not discuss “logocentrism,” his
treatment of speech and thought as inscription supposes that the
model of thought is writing. (Wheeler, 9–10)

In the same clear and revealing essay, Wheeler goes on to discuss

Davidson’s understanding of metaphor in terms of its truth value, claiming
that Davidson is following up on the idea that there is no privileged
representation outside of language. This is the logical rejoinder to Quine’s
empiricist position. These self-deconstructions of barriers between different
representations are similar to the barriers that as we saw earlier, were self-
deconstructed under the lens of de Man as he interrogated the line between
the rhetorical and the grammatical:

Once we have lost the contrast between the rhetorical and the truth-
conditional, it should not be surprising that the contrast between the
metaphorical and literal could not be sustained. In fact, this
breakdown seems to follow directly from there being no level of
representation which is not language-like. Davidson himself has
made this kind of point in a widely misread paper. Davidson argues,
apparently, that there is only the literal meaning of any term or
 sentence. The metaphorical “This essay is a quagmire of self-
descriptive traps” is to be explained, not in terms of some alternative
meaning which the metaphoric context directs us to, but as the
production of a sentence for a purpose other than alerting the hearer
to the drainage problems of my prose. Davidson is widely held to
have assigned a special privilege to something called “literal
meaning.” In fact, given Davidson’s dogmas of empiricism,
Davidson’s view could not be that metaphors have literal meaning.
Davidson’s claim is that to give the meaning of a metaphor is the
same as giving the meaning of any other use of language. A theory
of meaning pairs sentences with truth-conditions. “This essay is a
quagmire of self-descriptive traps” est vrai en Anglais si et
settlement si cette essai est une fondriere de trappes soi-
descriptives. Such a sentence gives all there is to give of the
meaning of the sentence. The point is that there is nothing behind
language but more language-like phenomena, and any explication of
a metaphor will itself have metaphorical as well as non-
metaphorical uses. (Wheeler, 14–15)

The newer, Quinean-Davidsonian interpretation is always “situated” in that

the interpretation is done from a particular specific cultural standpoint,
which we can call a “theory.” That “situation,” though, changes during
interpretation. I learn something when I grow to understand and
accommodate my own discourse with that of the discourses of physicists,
chemists, theologians or Jordan Peterson. Learning something is changing
my “theory.” That learning is a change in my theory, my standpoint of
interpretation, or my current vocabulary, to use Rorty. To use Gadamer in
Truth and Method, it’s connected to the horizon structure of my
phenomenological-historical location. To use the phraseology of Martin
Seel, we need to “let ourselves be determined” by history and contingency,
instead of trying to remain in control of our experience of history; we
should constantly hit the “refresh” button on our mental bowser.5
Something of an anathema to the local Trotskyite group.
Furthermore, Rorty writes of Davidson’s deconstruction of the barrier
between what he calls intensional and extensional vocabularies; once again
the idea that different vocabularies hold different values but are also subject
to “bridging laws”. For Davidson there are no bridging laws that bind
internal or psychic vocabularies with extensional vocabularies—therefore
he denies psychophysical parallelism as logically impossible. This means
that there cannot be a pre-conceptual holistic schema that precedes reality—
or at least not one that is discoverable through bridging laws between
nomological laws that explain the external world and those that describe the
psychical, or internal world. Therefore, he also rejects radical empiricist
reductionism as an explanatory device for the logoi that lie behind all
reality. As Rorty summarises this:

In Davidson’s view of the relation between different explanatory

vocabularies, there is no reason whatever for thinking that those
vocabularies which lend themselves to truth-functional formulations
“limn the true and ultimate structure of reality” in a way in which
intensional vocabularies do not. The extensional-intensional
distinction turns out to have no more and no less philosophical
interest than the distinction between nations and people: it is capable
of inciting reductionist emotion, but not capable of providing a
special reason for embarking on reductionist projects, so he does
away with psychophysical parallelism and reductionism in
empiricism. (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 205–06)

Important to Davidson is the idea that mental phenomena resist being

“captured in the nomological net of physical theory;” this is a rejection of
deterministic, non-normative laws bridging mental states with both physical
states and other mental states. Therefore, in arguing against the possibility
of psychophysical laws, Davidson has in mind the following kinds of
Bridging Laws (BL):

Here, “M” denotes some mental state or event and “P” denotes some
physical state or event and “iff” abbreviates “if and only if.”6 This crucial
rejection of bridging laws for Davidson indicates that one remains only
within another hermeneutic circle; one open to constant negotiation and
alteration—within its own semantic limits. Therefore, (and also in the same
sense as Rorty and the poststructuralists), Davidson is against holistic or
reductivist epistemology of any kind. For Davidson, there is no “underlying
mental reality whose laws we can study in abstraction from the normative
and holistic perspectives of interpretation.” Therefore, in a major sense,
what we get with the Davidsonian theory of meaning is an analytical-
hermeneutics, which is suddenly not so far from the hermeneutics of
Gadamer.
Crucially, Davidson finds that it is an a priori and apodictic truth that
mental and physical predicates are not logically connected to each other.
This is because both mental and physical phenomena have distinctly
different sets of features incompatible with each other. Therefore, bridging
laws linking properties from two distinct theoretical discourses (in this case
the mental and physical) would transmit properties from one distinct
discourse to another. In the case of mental and physical phenomena this
would lead into incoherence. Consequently, propositional attitudes, or
intentional states as they are sometimes called, are nothing more than
various cognitive attitudes: we can have hope that the proposition p is true,
we can fear that p is true, we can desire that p is true, and so forth. You and
I can have different attitudes toward the proposition “All swans are white.”
I hope that all swans are white, whereas you believe that it is but don’t hope
it is. The proposition itself, namely, that “All swans are white,” towards
which one has an attitude, is said to give the content to one’s mental state.
Due to this nomological gap between the mental and the physical,
radical interpretation is another interesting theoretical standpoint that
Davidson inherits and develops from Quine. For Davidson, we infer and
triangulate meaning as part of an ongoing interpretive process where we use
prior theory which in turn can become passing theory in the transactional
process. In fact, as stated above, Davidson’s theory is also about letting
oneself be determined by both prior and passing theory, which in terms of
literary theory is hugely interesting. Objectivity is actually attained through
subjectivity because without there being this triangulation of the world
there would be no objectivity. Therefore, walls of propositional statements
are being constantly amended, tested, teased out and modified though one’s
intersubjective interactions with others. These interactions help forge the
development of one’s triangulated standpoint towards an objectivity that is
constantly being postulated and triangulated, as in Cavell’s sense of mutual
acknowledgment. Therefore, the social is logically prior to the personal. In
fact, as with radical interpretation, the notion of the objective world is
developed and passed along through communitarian, social interactions, in
the very first place.
 Another interesting point to note about Davidsonian ordinary language
philosophy, is that contra Searle’s ordinary language notions of speech act
theory and performativity as noted above, Davidson is an externalist in that
the subject gets to (possible) intentions through the process of radical
interpretation. In contrast, Searle is an internalist because he starts out with
the intention. Like Knapp and Michaels as literary critics, a definite
intention is postulated at the outset by the speech act itself. For Davidson,
Rorty, Cavell (and in this sense Quine too), the social is logically prior to
the personal, and even the objective with Davidson. Consequently, it is
constantly being triangulated, radically interpreted, acknowledged, and
reconstructed. So, the bald argument I postulate here, is that ordinary
language philosophy has also resulted in two sub-branches: one which is
externalist and one internalist. In light of the foregoing arguments, I’d like
to postulate that in terms of letting oneself be determined, constantly
allowing literary interaction to remodify one’s schematic of the world is a
Davidsonian (and Perhaps Proustian), notion. This notion crucially entails a
buttress against stagnation and falling back into one’s stultified identity (or
identarian) politics. If the most honest way we can receive the word is
represented through the joyous, representational, and symbolic art of
literature, then perhaps this is the best way we can constantly hit the
“refresh” button in our mental schema of the world. This certainly goes
some way towards explaining our propensity towards literature and the
theory of literature’s encroachment (along with, to a degree) the social
sciences, into the modern philosophical landscape.
Furthermore, the work of thinkers such as David Damrosch and the rise
of World Literature as a sub theory can also be, to an extent, explained by
the rise of the theory of literature in the last 100 years or so.7 If philosophy
is running out of paradigms and historicity is the way to explore ideas and
new concepts, then perhaps the bridging laws we alluded to above are in
one sense only to be drawn or constructed through projects like those of
Damrosch. He posits the subject of World Literature as a connective
polyglot tissue, which will open up new horizons for us rather than closing
them off under the politicisation and weaponisation of the various identities
that make up the rich cultural tapestry spoken to by World Literature. It’s to
two apparently very different texts that I now turn, to substantiate the major
claims of this communitarian argument.
 The first poem is very well known and is, in the same sense as
Hemmingway in prose, deceptively easy to decipher at first glance. It also
celebrates the new ‘red face’ tradition of American literature.8 The poem is
William Carlos Williams’ seminal “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923). It works
in such a way as to straight away problematise the notion of intention, but
also to triangulate the reader in such a way as to reconsider their
phenomenological relationship with the external world of the everyday; it
asks the reader to suspend or bracket (epoche) their everyday or ‘natural’
attitude and reformulate their Being-in-the-everyday. The poem is a short
four stanza work and reads as follows:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

The first thing one notices is the concrete nature of the poem. The stanzas
are typographically spaced, to almost represent and concretise the shape of
the red wheelbarrow. The reader has the sense of the modernist
interrogation of form and content and in this work the actual form does
inform the content of the poem. One also notices how the form informs the
content in terms of the series of noun-phrases that sit underneath and
support their modifying phrases: “barrow” “water” “chickens”; couple this
with the fact that these phrases in turn sit beneath the highly symbolic
prepositional phrase “so much depends upon” and we discern a structural
pattern, based upon the layout of the sequence of the poem. Williams is
asking us (perhaps?) to consider the various codifications and formats that
make prose poetry. Wordsworth had famously written in his literary
criticism that there is essentially no difference between prose and poetry
and here Williams seems to be offering the same conclusion. If we read the
‘poem’ as a series of simple sentences, paratactic in their structure, and
rewrite the poem in the style of syntagmatic (horizontal) grammatical
structure one may not even discern a poem. However, once the prosody and
lines are broken up in this fashion, the syntagmatic axis becomes combined
with the paradigmatic axis, and we now have the form of a poem. Again,
the lines between the grammatical and the rhetorical are blurred, in such a
performative way as to challenge their scholastic and traditional parsing as
separate linguistic encodements.
One can also read this as a combination of two semiotic codes in a
Peircean sense. So, the first code is the symbolic code where we read each
signifier in terms of its denotative or connotative meaning, and the second
is the iconic, where we examine the layout of the signs to represent the
formatting of a poem. These combinations seem to imply that Williams is
perhaps interrogating the way things get presented as ‘art’ in much the way
as continental modernists such as Marcel Duchamp did with his ready-made
sculpture, R Mutt (1917).
In the final instance, based upon this purported interrogation of the
boundaries between form and content, grammar and rhetoric or the
symbolic and the iconic, one also senses an instance of Shklovsky’s key
formalist notion of defamiliarization at work here. The notion of the
everyday wheelbarrow-itself presented as a Duchamp-style ready-made
sculpture; but perhaps there’s also an interrogation at work of the use of
language itself? As the wheelbarrow or tool that composes the grammar of
our social reality to us. These very nouns and modifiers that are premised
upon this prepositional relationship of the fabric of our reality are all
linguistic and all carry our everyday world for us. As so much depends
ALSO upon the red wheelbarrow as an everyday farmyard tool. To use
Heidegger’s famous example of Being ready-to-hand and Being-at-hand:
when we use a hammer or drive a car, we aren’t really considering our
relationship with the car or hammer as utensils unless they are damaged.
Once they are damaged, our relationship with them is completely changed,
as is our phenomenological sense of Being. So, in one sense, we can
perhaps pinpoint an interior meaning but equally we can also read this
poem as challenging the very notion of our place in the world. This can also
mean opening a new horizon of Davidsonian triangulation, through which
to radically interpret our world. This can in turn be accomplished simply by
the actual process of reading the poem and the concomitant reformulation
of the form-content relations within this poem itself (as a poem).
 The second poem I’d like to explicate, using this novel, Davidsonian
form of reading, is Keston Sutherland’s original and powerful 2007 poem,
“Hot White Andy”. This poem is much more overtly experimental and very
long indeed. Similar to Williams however, Sutherland is very much
interrogating the perceived difference between various presentational
formats. The first thing we notice at work here is the gap between written
and spoken language; on the one hand the poem is clearly meant for
recitation, because of its verbal play and dexterity. On the other hand. it’s
also designed to be read because of the ‘notation’ of the punctuation within
the poem. Therefore, there’s straight away a sort of deconstruction of the
grammatical and the rhetorical difference in language, if we take
punctuation marks as functioning under the logic/grammar rubric, but also,
in this poem, acting as rhetorical and deictic devices illuminating or lighting
our path through the poem itself. The poem commences:

• A
Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to
the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them. Now swap
buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck,
phlegmophrenic, want to go to the windfarm,
Your * kids menu lips swinging in the Cathex-Wizz monoplex;
Your * face lifting triple its age in Wuhan die-cut peel lids;
ng pick Your out the reregulated loner PAT to to screw white
chocolate to the bone. The tension in an unsprung
r trap co

“The tension in an unsprung/r trp co,” is actioned in the very graphemes on

the page. Try for example to type the poem into word and see how much
resistance the AI algorithms give you in simply typing this into your
computer. Through AI, we have Langue again pulsating in the background
and forcing itself to the surface. One even thinks of the unconscious
elements flowing and pressing to the surface in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
once again-the “ancestral voices prophesysing war” but here it’s the
language itself in late modernity and the tension between the individual
Parole and the overall Langue pressing itself to the surface. Sutherland’s
“intention” seems almost inimical to a “correct” reading of the poem, the
poem functions, flows and feeds on the tensions thrown up by the language
itself at all levels: the grapheme, the verbal icon, the sound patterns and the
stress. There are also the allusions and puns, which themselves appear
almost randomly, yet the staccato cadence works as poetry and drives the
reader on. The absence of euphony is itself a device here in that it seems
Sutherland leaves nothing off the table and takes Pound’s modernist call to
“make it new,” taking also the different codes as similarly explored by
William Carlos Williams, to new levels and heights.
Lavrov was the Russian foreign minister and so we have again the ideal
of communication embodied in the symbolism of this person’s involvement
in the poem—possibly a diplomat who also represented the former Soviet
Union. This allusion just adds to the communicative, ancestral pressure
placed upon a simple ‘univocal’ reading of the poem. Because, without any
putative theory whatsoever, Sutherland is challenging the transparency of
language to simply transmit and codify linear messages. The allusions,
prosody, cadence and “sprung traps” of the poem further remove simple and
linear pursuance of meaning. In fact, meaning is exploded in this poem.
What, for example, may seem a difficult poem for Thai EFL students,
paradoxically challenges linguistic hierarchies and in thus could be said to
democratise the text. The uncanny allusions to Wuhan and Lavrov are,
given current sociopolitical circumstances, extremely prescient. However,
this again reminds us of how hermeneutics is a dynamic science. For
example, back in 2007, this would not have had the effect upon the reader’s
reception that the currently changed horizon holds about the war in Ukraine
and Covid 19. Moreover, the phrase “Stock Wizard” can also be a possible
refence to a stock character or a person who invests in stocks, even though
he’s from the formerly communist empire of the Soviet Union. This is
because things change, and you can swap your words, tonality and voices in
tandem with the fashion that history drastically fashions our signifiers, or
someone’s historical role.
Moreover, the tonality also switches pace in the poem, and one thinks of
the German romantic poet Hölderlin’s tonal theory of poetry, whereby the
modulating tones of the poem are also supposed to transport one and act as
an epiphenomenal effect of the poetry itself. Historical aspects,
characterisations and free-associative wordplay all attest to this further tonal
reading of the poem. Furthermore, in terms of tone there is also an
interesting signifier used in this dramatic opening of the poem: the sound
“ng”. Going back to the brief discussion of structuralism, one is reminded
of how this sound doesn’t distribute ‘difference’ in the English language but
does in tonal languages such as Thai and Chinese. So, in this poem,
Sutherland initiates the “ng” sound but as it doesn’t distribute meaning it
becomes a sort of Lacanian floating signifier—a homeless inscription that
haunts the first lines of the poem—and of course draws attention to the
tenuous nature of the structure of the linguistic utterances under
observation. This novel phonetic configuration also emphasises the
alliterative repetition of this sound in a language that was not phonetically
designed for this type of phonemic structure. Therefore, in “Hot White
Andy,” even the language itself sheds its identity and breaks down under
this extra tonal pressure. In addition, the name of the apparently randomly
selected Andy Cheng is that of a Hong Kong-born Hollywood stuntman and
given the stunt-like performative nature of the poem, and its dissection of
stable identity (at every level), this choice makes perfect sense. The poem
self-consciously defenestrates linguistic windows.
All this garnered from the first few lines of what appears to be a pretty
ambiguous set of utterances. This supports the hugely significant question
in the context of my overall argument about theory: there does not seem to
be a simple angle available for finding one’s intention or meaning. There is
only interpretation (radical in the Davidsonian sense of the term) and
triangulation, as we negotiate a space within the ambiguous tonality and
structure presented here. In this work, as with all literary utterances, the text
opens-up interpretive spaces for us, and in challenging our interpretive
faculties, explodes the world for us. More importantly, it allows us to be
determined by the objective world through this triangulated, interpretive
horizon that has been rent in the mind. Also, these stylistic operations also
open a political aspect of the poem for us.
There is also contained the notion of the Marxist commodity fetish and
its attendant desire, pressing in and hemming one in from all sides;
corroborated by glottal, voiced, unvoiced, and various other linguistic traps;
the fetishized world wrapped up, packaged and disguised in delivery
numbers and serial code numbers. The world at your fingertips. The poem
moves so fast and is stylised in such a way that one cannot but feel hemmed
in by a sensory overload:

I am adaptable for Binzel and Lincoln and Panasonic

my swan neck my shielded arc, my gap of hot fire
Lavrov sidesteps in the long arabesque of equivalence. What is
being this lids clampdown, being this cheek slant
onto something, being this duck breast implant
but what is there
to eat in a specific fang,
defecation being otherwise a welding helmet,
being a gas lens,
being this hot skit spilt on glass
eat all of me like a dispassionately incinerated fish cheek,
I want being phonic into your intestine, to cry
into my own blistered eyes on the inside of your stomach,
not dead as the sea but cracking; disjunctive part
lives will then cancel the asymmetry of self-inclusion,
each of them will have the whole of love in it.
You witness protection flourish as autonomy, CPA Order
Number 22, Camp Bermel, hot white Vietnamization et. al.

The incantation of the Asian fetish for the white, the occidental, is herein
personified by someone who traverses these cultural boundaries AND does
stunts for a living. But then traversal of the cultural boundaries is not
enough, and in the age of desire and fetishism the visceral boundaries are
also crossed “but what is there/to eat in a specific fang/defecation being
otherwise a welding helmet,/being a gas lens,/being this hot skit spilt on
glass/eat all of me like a dispassionately incinerated fish cheek…” The
liminal imagery blends and rolls out like Hegelian desire that eats itself
from the inside out and as love that is grounded in the body (as the Marlowe
quote that prefaces the poem tells us) “the asymmetry of self-inclusion/each
of them will have the whole of love in it.” There is also the desire that turns
into the acknowledgment of “the I that is We, and the We that is I” in Hegel,
which becomes “them” before becoming “it.” In other words, this is the
desire that cannot be transcended. In a Lacanian sense, the desire is
metonymic and linked in a chain of signifiers that cannot be elided, the
floating signifier of the “ng” in Cheng’s name is the Lacanian self-desire
that links-up throughout the poem. This is accomplished through sounds,
words, morphemes, identities; in fact, in chiasmatic modulation, it moves
back and forward and ultimately you can take the Andy out of Cheng, but
you can’t take the “ng” out of Cheng. This floating signifier that ultimately
elides any final, transcendental, fixed identity, wonders about and mutates
throughout the poem. Therefore, the chiasmatic image of desire presented
by a white hot—hot white Andy Cheng, floats until the end of the poem,
through a play, we are told, and various other forms until:

this finale to the whole Chang question the whole problematic

congelation of hot genitals wrapped in the Houston Chronicle
to crack its metaphysic ad banner. In white out
your tenses are the wanton of desire, gazing through the
Xi’an YMCA window at The imitation Gap lit up scampi-eyed
desire krush ex necromat it lives my own way,
soft hard soft hard soft, skewered by Metulla and Kfar Kila,
and other names besides, names to know and do.
I accumulate you: sky crated in Binzel and Change, crated in Illumination,
I accumulate you: hot sky deserted by Abner and tax phosphor.
The superpower to come is love itself. Articles 2
up and the Antepasseist 0. But since this is my only life
I accumulate you Andrew Lumocolor, not fit for waiting
away uptight in fire shopped to spit, but a real man
accumulating men, desire and intensity until I die.

The repetition of “accumulating,” “other names besides,” the insistence of

the phoneme “ng” in the Lacanian unconscious, “problematic/congelation
of hot genitals…,” and the final shanti shanti of “but a real
man/accumulating men, desire and intensity until I die.” The pronominal
ambiguity, and the final Pindaric links work through more metonymic
fusion. Finishing with Andrew Lumocolor: the Hot White canvas on which
any lumocolor identity can be inscribed. We of course remember that if
Andy is a stuntman, then changing identity is also part of his oeuvre. The
oriental fetish for the white perhaps being superseded by the occidental
fetishisation of “color”. Whatever this poem does, whether you like it or
not, it surely opens-up your horizon structure of experience and lets you be
determined. You feel like you’re losing control reading this poem about a
possible Asian stuntman and so much more; that you yourself are part of
this whole collection of anonymous speech acts that career into each other
like so many stunts.
 Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy” and William Carlos Williams’
deceptively simple “Red Wheelbarrow” appear fine instances of the version
of literary criticism and theory that Knapp and Michaels railed against.
Intention is certainly not clearly bound up with any postulated univocal
meaning of these poems; but the poems stand as fine testaments to the idea
of triangulation and radical interpretation that I feel goes into every reading
of every poem. Moreover, the poems also serve as fine exemplars of the
objective space that is opened-up and refined further, every time we allow
poems into our psychic sphere. This allows them to refine our perceptual
schemata and perhaps more finely attune our Being-in-the-World.
Sutherland’s poem is also testament to the idea that we can still find original
and novel ways of rethinking our usage of language and the way we use
language to interrogate our relationship with ourselves, others, and the
world at large, through a very much thriving system of hermeneutics.
Before fine turning the discussion to the state of the amorphous and at
the very best, loosely defined postmodern realm of literary criticism and
philosophy, it will also be of interest to see how the most subjectivist of all
of the literary-critical approaches, reader response and reception theory,
both coalesce with the more communitarian, triangulated theory of
Davidsonian ordinary language philosophy. This is because these theories
are also categorised under the hyponymic phrase ‘hermeneutics,’ which is
the seeming-buzz word for theory that has given up the post-Kantian ghost
in the machine of Enlightenment universals, along with Latinate phrases in
the bathwater, such as a priori, a fortiori or apodictic truth.
To begin with, reader-response criticism places emphasis on the
processes of the reader themselves in the production of meaning, so that
meaning within a text depends on a reader’s reaction to that particular text,
and without their reaction, meaning would not even inhere wholly in the
text itself. Thus far, the Davidsonian sense of letting the theory pass you,
triangulating meaning, and the performance of radical translation, all sit
very well with reader response theory. In its broadest terms, this type of
reception theory can be broken up into roughly three camps or approaches.
The first places emphasis on the individual background of the reader in
interpreting a text. For example, as Thai student the reader may have a
completely different reading of a book such as Botan’s classic 1969 novel
Letters from Thailand, to what I would as a Western reader and
interpreter/interlocutor. Moreover, a book such as Steinbeck’s The Grapes
of Wrath or Red Bamboo by Kukrit Pramoj may also solicit different
responses from a reader from Isaan (the North-East plains of Thailand), for
example, due to their evocation of agrarian themes in different political
climates and from different cultures. The psychologist and literary critic
Norman Holland in his text 5 Readers Reading (1975), examined at close
quarters the response of a small group of readers based upon their
subjective orientations and yielded some interesting results. However, one
wonders how much more Holland may have garnered had he applied the
triangulation and radical interpretation of each of these readers in light of
their respective backgrounds and linguistic competencies. Again, we can
only speculate on the possible results a Davidsonian analysis could have
brought to the research. One should also take caution in remembering that
whilst this seems a fair point of criticism of the construction of meanings, it
also tends to perhaps downplay the roles of the writer’s stylistic endeavours
when trying to influence our reaction to a text.
However, a second school of reader response criticism, most famously
represented by the critic and scholar Stanley Fish, has actually placed more
emphasis upon the way the writer stylistically influences and manipulates
our reaction to the text, by formalistic techniques. Fish’ close reading
approach requires that we pay close attention to the way sentences are
manipulated and change our expectations as we gradually read and as such
is a form of rhetorical criticism, similar to that advocated by another
scholar, Wayne Booth. This rhetorical analysis is of the sort exemplified
below in my micro-analysis of Hemmingway. One can also apply this (or
any of these methodologies) in tandem with a structuralist analysis such as
that advocated by Jonathan Culler, whereby theory comes to prominence in
our close reading of a text and we pay attention to existing codes and
structures, or linguistic units. In the case of an analysis of myth, perhaps we
would consider the smallest units, such as the mythemes. When analysing a
writer such as Joyce, Pound or Eliot, who are using the so-called ‘mythic
method’ in their narrative, theoretical attention to mythic structures or
patterns will obviously pay dividends for the perplexed scholar. This may
also be the case when analysing certain texts from the romantic period,
particulary the Frühromantik, who clearly have taken on the rhetoric and
tropes of myth as part of their self-representations.
This second sense of reader-response theory also places emphasis upon
the more communitarian aspects of modern literary criticism; there is an
ongoing dialogue and form of translation forming a dynamic triangulation
between the author and the reader; the dynamic nature of this passing
theoretical discursive practice also means that the conventions of the world
as inhabited by the reader are constantly under interrogation. Moreover, he
is allowing himself to be determined and has not taken the position of
mastery associated with forms of criticism that denote a simply correct or
incorrect manner in which to read the text under question. The educational
aspect of literary criticism here functions in the more Platonic sense of the
phrase: the ideals are drawn out of the reader—not poured into the reader in
the manner of the old ‘jug and mug’ pedagogy. We formulate our responses
and answers in an ongoing discussion or dialogue, which is not available to
someone who simply gets taught what is the correct explication of a text.
In the final instance, one may think of the more traditional and formalist
reading of the work of art as a spatial one; however, the hermeneutic,
historicised, Davidsonian theoretical approach, is temporal in its actual
praxis. It’s worked out through constant mediation and rather than assuming
a position of generalised mastery over the text, the position is mediative and
open to a symbiotic relationship with the novel itself. The myth of the
textual given is also exposed and there is no static and formalist encounter
with a statuesque, given truth. Instead, pragmatic and communitarian truths
are worked out through a dynamic, mediative encounter with both the
literary narrative and with temporal history itself.
Reader response theory also of course encapsulates the hermeneutical
phenomenology of Heidegger; a form of phenomenology that goes beyond
the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, which sought the same
certainties as did Russell’s logical form. The Heideggerian ideas of being as
“thrownness” (Geworfenheit) or of Being-already-there (Dasein) produce
the notion of philosophy as dealing with subject positions very much in a
state of ontological uncertainty and this is obviously reflected in the notion
that criticism and theory are also part of a changing ontological plane.
Consequently, they are also subject to the historicism later explored by
Gadamer. Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological reception theory even
contended that meaning was very much constructed in a virtual space
between the reader and the author. Therefore, it was constantly being
modified and supplanted with every rhetorical twist and turn within a text;
the author could have an implied reader, but the economic success of a
poem or novel depends upon what the actual reader makes of the rhetorical
confabulations speaking to them. This of course means that textual analysis
is a variety of close reading whereby the critic takes careful notice of the
traps and devices set by the author in a particular text. This is also why, in
many respects, this type of criticism goes back to the original rhetorical
criticism of Aristotle. However, in the phenomenological method, the reader
is paying little notice to the pragmatic or didactic aspects of the text, but
instead concentrates on the effect itself on the changing Gestalten (shapes
of consciousness) of the reader. In his Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle certainly
emphasised the importance of the audience and the way in which a writer
(or orator) could manipulate an audience by the use of rhetorical devices.
However, reader-response critics also place emphasis upon the novelty of
ways in which people can respond to different texts—and triangulate with
passing theory—as they renegotiate their experience through this textual
interaction.
Why for example, does Kate Chopin, in her novel The Awakening,
suddenly switch between a regular register to a more abstract, and more
hypotactic sentence structural style on page 16? She had been using more
paratactic sentence structures up until this point. This is part of her
reflecting upon the symbolic freedom experienced by Edna Pontellier when
she is near the sea, or in the presence of great aesthetic beauty. In his short
story “Appointment in Samarra,” W. Somerset Maugham uses lots of
conjunctions and compound sentences—hypotactic sentence structures—
that act to propel the reader forwards in the story. We don’t pause until we
realise at the end of this very short story that the mystery character is
“Death” himself. Maugham doesn’t give us the opportunity to reflect upon
where the short narrative is heading for us. The opening of the story also
produces the formula of the classical fairy tale “There was a merchant in
Baghdad…” This adds a sense of the fantastical to the story and helps us to
suspend our belief as the rest of the tale unfolds.
Gadamer’s seminal work of modern hermeneutics Truth and Method,
argued that we can only interpret from our personal historical perspective.
This means, of course, that interpretations can and do change in different
historical epochs. Thus, the reader is once again key in finding meaning in a
text, because of their historical location. This position supports the idea that
at certain points in history certain texts are canonised and recognised over
others and this is corroborated by the fact that since the advents of feminism
and postcolonialism, certain texts such as Chopin’s The Awakening or
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart have taken on a much stronger canonical
influence in the newer intellectual landscape. It also accounts, as described
in Chapter Two, for the scholastic rereadings of texts such as Ovid’s, and
the religious exclusion of certain texts from the medieval canon. However,
it also begets a further worrying question about our current age: the age of
soundbites, distraction and social media. Are we in a historicist locale
where the reading subject as was known in the great age of the novel is
disappearing and being replaced by a new set of responders? It seems that
the age of the novel and the time spent reading longer texts has perhaps
been superseded by an age in which the human subject is prone to more
distractions and influences, which are not congenial to the serial (or indeed
serious) reading of a text such as Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Or, to proffer an
even more extreme instance, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This is perhaps part
of a much wider question that is not within the purview of the current study
but warrants further attention.9
To conclude this chapter, I’ll give a micro-analysis of Hemmingway’s
exceptional short story, “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927). Hemmingway
was notoriously sparse as a writer and used a mimetic rather than a diegetic
style of narrative, providing a mirror to the action and events in the plot but
providing very little in terms of authorial voice or intervention. This method
came to be known as the “iceberg” method, because the implied reader only
got to see the surface events but none of the hidden psychological
phenomena below the surface, which in Freudian terms provides most of
the psychodynamics of human agency. In turn, this makes Hemmingway
perfect for reader-response criticism, because the reader responds to the
narrative gaps, or blind spots, left open in Hemmingway’s style. Also, for
EFL literature classrooms, the narrative structure and the linguistic register
are easier to understand.
In the story, there are two main characters, a younger American girl
named Jig and an unnamed older man, who is accompanying her on a trip to
Spain. The action takes place at a train station, which is instantly symbolic
of being at a crossroads in one’s life. The fact they are also in the Ebro
valley seems to signify that the two sides of the valley represent choices
that are available to the couple. The story is mainly constructed of dialogue,
but the power-relations can be discerned within this dialogue. The girl asks
questions such as her opening line “What should we drink,” and then goes
on to ask over 15 more questions about the landscape, an operation she’s
speculating on having (likely an abortion), and his feelings towards her. She
also asks almost childlike questions such as “And if I do it you’ll be happy
and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?” This apparent
insecurity about their relationship, demonstrates her insecurity, although
this is never overtly stated by Hemmingway. Therefore, the reader fills this
narrative gap, through a Davidsonian triangulated interpretation and a
reader-response sense. The reader brings their own experience and semantic
apparatus to the fore.
At the end of the story, there feels as if there is a shift in the dynamics
of the characters: “Do you feel better” he asked.

“I feel fine” she said, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine”.

The story ends with the older man asking a question, which is a clear
reversal of the power dynamic, and the girl making what appears as the
most declarative sentence of the whole story—a sentence repeated—for
added effect. The symbols in the story are also connected with transitory
and liminal elements associated with the trope of passing through: a bead
curtain that separates the man and the woman, the station itself and the fact
the man and the woman finish the story on different sides of the room, after
he’s been out alone to the train tracks, which may signify a sense of
abandonment or separation. The girl holds on to two of the beads on the
curtain, which could also signify a rosary, and the setting is a Catholic
country, Spain. The implications of abortion, given this context, are clearly
lurking in the narrative gap. Importantly, and as part of my radical
translation of the text, my own reading of these symbols opens-up a
dialogue, based upon my own assumptions, on whether the girl will go-
ahead and have the abortion after the story is completed. Indeed, one of the
most interesting aspects of teaching a story like this, is also the opportunity
it affords both the teacher and the students to provide possible endings to
the story itself. There is also the element that a white elephant sale can
signify something that’s unwanted in Western parlance, which again could
figure as an aborted child. In Asia however, this is often read as a rare white
elephant, and can this signify the special and rare nature of a child itself. Yet
another translation one may bring to the story is the idea of an elephant in
the room, which of course signifies something figuratively in the
background of a scene, huge, unwelcome, but nonetheless lurking in the
picture. This idea fits well the idea of the nascent abortion and the fact that
it is never alluded to directly in the story itself.
It’s clear that the abundance of possible interpretations that one brings
to Hemmingway opens-up a classroom and helps us each interrogate our
own assumptions and suppositions, as do all forms of literary discourse. It’s
communitarian sense thrives on the fact that we interrogate our own
bedrock assumptions, when entering-into a discourse that requires that we
take a tightrope walk, throwing or interrogating any pre-existing keys or
apparatus. Thinking outside of our own structural boxes in this way can in
no small measure act as a bulwark against ignorance and prejudice. This is
because we are expected to inhabit a territory that acknowledges the
sceptical limits of language and embraces this limit by exacting an act of
acknowledgment on the part of the careful and sensitive reader. Or perhaps
even upon the careful philosopher of language, such as Sellars or Davidson,
who further recognise the communitarian, social—and by extension
Hegelian—nature of language.

Footnotes
1 This is covered brilliantly and in great detail by Yale Professor Paul Fry, in a remarkable series of
Literary Theory lectures that are all available in the public domain on YouTube and are well worth
the time for anyone who not only wants a free course at Yale but also wants to hear a true master at
work. The lecture on Knapp and Michaels is very clear and concise, showing the importance of their
neo-pragmatic contribution to the whole literary theory debate. The whole series of lectures are
available for perusal here: https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​4YY4CTSQ8nY&​list=​
PLD00D35CBC75941​BD

2 The title of his seminal book of essays “Must We Mean What We Say” of course goes a long way
to indicate the theoretical position taken by Cavell. There is a philosophically loaded concept
regarding the identity of “saying” and “intention” in this very statement itself. Another pregnant
Cavellian statement is his dictum: “I can know the meaning of a word, but can I know the intention
of a word”.

3 Searle provides a concise summary of his famous Chinese Room Argument:

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of
Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the
symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols
which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine
 that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out
Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program
enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does
not understand a word of Chinese.

Searle, J., ‘The Chinese Room’, in R.A. Wilson and F. Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the
Cognitive Sciences, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

4 Rorty speaks at length about “ironism” in his next major work after Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature, in which he introduces various other works of philosophy and literature as “ironist”; these
include Nietzsche, Derrida, Heidegger and even Hegel. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989).
This work is interestingly also way less analytical in its methodological approach, and as such it’s a
much easier read than its predecessor.

5 See Martin Seel “Letting Oneself be Determined: A revised concept of self-determination” in

Komprdis (ed)., Philosophical Romanticism. London: Routledge, 2007.

6 A stronger version of a bridging law claims identity of properties from different theoretical
discourses. A weaker version claims only that whenever an object instantiates one property—then it
instantiates the other; either way these laws are rejected at the outset by Davidson—this goes some
considerable way in moving away from the Quinean notion of an Ur language based upon theoretical
properties of a field such as quantum mechanics. This would it seems to me signify that ideas such as
those expounded by Danah Zohar in The Quantum Self (1991) would at some epistemological
juncture face problems of translation from one discourse to another.

7 David Damrosch’ interesting work in the study and heuristic dissemination of World Literature
itself implies the communitarian notion of literary criticism that I am promulgating here and
delineates a similar educational ethos. Princeton University’s promotional blurb for his 2003 book
What Is World Literature reads as follows: “Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as
a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in
translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space
created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither
alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they
can be seriously mishandled in the process.” Damrosch gave a similarly positive account of his work
when I met him at Chiang Mai University a number of years ago. The communitarian aspect of this
project and its attendant notion of World Literature is without doubt a perfect corollary for the type of
literary criticism in the humanities that I am proposing for our new world of global citizenship.
https://​press.​princeton.​edu/​books/​paperback/​9780691049861/​what-is-world-literature

8 The distinction between ‘pale face” and “red face” literary sensibility was postulated by US critic
Philip Rahv, who contended that the two poles were best represented by Henry James as the
Anglophile writer and man of ‘pale face’ sensibility as opposed to Walt Whitman or Mark Twain,
who presented the authentic ‘red face’ indigenous US sensibility. One may of course take issue with
this dichotomy on postcolonial grounds.

9 I have also started conducting a study in this area tentatively entitled “Reading Dickens’ Little
Dorrit in the Age of Distraction” in which I argue that the “Age of Enlightenment” has been replaced
by the “Age of Entitlement” and that a major factor in the new age ethos is the return to tablets and a
digital scribal culture. In line with Foucault’s argument to which I refer to above, the author-function
has once again changed and with new platforms such as Facebook and Tik Tok, our conception of
both publication and authorship has moved into a whole new paradigm. Moreover, in terms of
Reader-Response criticism, I argue that the response of reading subjects and their response times
have changed to such a degree that the skill of responding to hypotactic sentences used by a writer
such as Charles Dickens is no longer phenomenologically available to a worryingly large
demographic of the implied reading public. This is connected to the short cuts to real textual analysis
and thinking expounded on the plethora of social media platforms. This is arguably connected to a
new historicist phase in which we now find ourselves—an age where the concept of self-authorship
has also given rise to an extreme lack of trust in the mass media, even promulgated by the former
President of the United States, Donald Trump.

OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_7

7. Whither Postmodernism? Whether It’s

New Liberalism?
Wayne Deakin1
(1) Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

On May 2nd, 2015, the Filipino boxer-cum-politician, Manny ‘the Pac-man’

Pacquiao came up against the illustrious Floyd Mayweather Jr. It was billed
as the fight of the decade-if not even longer in calendrical terms. It wasn’t
very good. It was akin to watching Thomas Hardy produce one of his
lasagna-like hypotactic sentences—clause upon clause of appositional,
rebarbative, dusty, Victorian statements. The last clause of my self-
avowedly, self-conscious sentence perhaps being itself a touch insensitive
and the general tenor of my statement was, to say the least obscure.
Something, which the main subject of this chapter, Postmodernism, can also
be accused of some, if not most, of the time. Just over four years later, on
19th April, 2019, another rumble in the cerebral jungle was set up between
two more so-called intellectual heavyweights: Jordan Peterson and Slavoj
Žižek. This was a return to the heavyweight “sluggers” of the late 70s and
the debate, just like the fight, certainly failed to live up to its purported
relevance. In some ways, troping an intellectual discussion in this fashion,
is however, pretty postmodern, as it bridges sundry gaps between various
cultural discourses, it democratises the intellectual higher ground for all to
see and behold, it challenges received dogmas and wisdoms and it most
certainly asks the perennial question: whither postmodernism? This was
(almost) the original title of a 1994 conference in Irvine, California,
“Whither Marxism,” with once again the ethereal involvement of that dark
deconstructive angel, Jacques Derrida.1 The question resonates now louder
than ever, the boxing analogy acting as a vehicle for the central theme of
postmodernism: Power. However, as with much of what seems postmodern,
the fight and the debate seemed to Peter out into not a great deal. The
postmodernists do like their puns and their irony; I can’t speak for Jordan,
but I can only guess at his quivering bottom lip upon hearing my limey
accent attending upon the playful, polyglot cloakrooms of the seamless, de-
historicized halls of the postmodern. I digress…
Literary theory and postmodernism seem not only to have dovetailed,
but they both seem to have become bogged down in discussions of the
postmodern; however, this term is usually used as a shortcut to actual
analytical thinking and thinkers such as Jordan Peterson have hooked onto
this Rylean category error, in order to rubbish the ‘New Left,’ or even worse
to use completely illegitimate phrases such as “cultural Marxism” (which is
deeply offensive to anyone who has really read and understood the tenor of
Marx’s work), while obfuscating their actual misunderstanding of Marx.2
Because of the political bent of literary criticism and theory since the
second world war, it’s hardly surprising that the postmodern has become the
superordinate term for all the ‘post-isms’ such as poststructuralism,
posthumanism and postcolonialism; much the same happened with its
predecessor modernism, which became the superordinate term for all of the
‘isms’, such as futurism, cubism and surrealism.
The Postmodern seems to be a church of plural aspirations and
sometimes, in open arms against the Hysteria and Anglicanism of the old
high priest of modernism, T.S. Eliot. Joyce’s headmaster in Ulysses found
history a tough nut to crack and Prufrock (there’s a lot in a name) was
paralysed by the passing of time and history. It’s never easy to locate
postmodernism, but it seems that a good place to start, like Stevens’ lone
jar, is somewhere in the middle of the Wasteland, or with modernism as its
antipode. The modernist fixation with history was just that—a fixation, a
site, whether it be cultural, aesthetic, sometimes nefariously political, or just
plain parochial.3 This locating would save one from drowning, from the
sirens, and remind one of the power of the mythic method to spruce up the
seemingly meaningless world after the horrors of The Great War. The
cultural cost, for all of the young men who survived Flanders, was that the
high modernism of Eliot, HD and Pound was out of the grasp of their
cultural horizon. The accompanying mythopoetic, patrician sense of art also
left very little room for the voice of the drinking classes, apart from the odd
allusion in Eliot to the mechanistic soundtrack of the modern office space
and the local public house at closing time.4
However, all the same, the Fisher King, with a copy of Miss Western’s
book under his one arm and The Golden Bough under the other had set up
his own particular jar of mythic dreams, just within sight of the
Metaphysical poets, but just short of the sort of commodity fetishism
required by a world of expanding capital and commodified culture.5 Hence
the “culture wars” in their first truly modern instantiation. The roots of
which, as this new battle for postcolonial, late capitalist, cultural hegemony,
were going to spin a historicist tornado that deposited much detritus and
hidden oriental treasure at the doors of the new multicultural plain of jars.
The desideratum of the modernist was to follow Pound’s injunction to
“make it new.” In one sense the modernists, whether in Bloomsbury or on
the Left Bank, were arguably the first group of revolutionary artists, each
with their own hypernym or “ism.” From the early Cabaret Voltaire of
Dadaism, (with their revolutionary cry of ‘hobby horse’) to the combination
of flea markets and psychoanalysis that became surrealism, to the hard-
edged fantasies of desire and capital that became Vorticism, Futurism and
the grainy creaturely lines of Fauvism. The so-called High Modernists of
the literary elite were also self-consciously tearing at their historical
bootstraps and in some cases self-consciously examining the
phenomenological limits of their Weltanschauung, as in novels such as
Virginia Woolfe’s brilliant Mrs Dalloway (1925), Lawrence’s Women in
Love (1920), or at times, Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (1922).
However, the other dimension of high modernism was its interrogation of
the relationship between form and content; in particular, in what ways could
form determine the content of the text? Pound and Eliot often worked
within these literary-critical paradigms. This meant that, the new Formalism
and New Criticism were, broadly speaking, testing out their theoretical loci
in the praxis of their high modernist art—hence they self-consciously
brought the “high” to modernism. Pound’s interminable Cantos are full of
this mythopoeia, structural experimentation, formalist self-consciousness
and literary self-referentiality, as on a considerably smaller scale, is Eliot’s
metaphysical, neoclassic, classic “The Wasteland.”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” here bears out this battle cry of
modernism for several reasons, and stands as a marvelous exemplar of high
modernism, partaking as it does, in all of the stylistic devices adumbrated
above. First and foremost, it’s an exemplary piece not only of metaphysical
poetry, but also addresses two of Eliot’s central theoretical set pieces: ‘the
objective correlative’ and the ‘dissociation of sensibility.’ In this light, one
can see the inner workings of high modernism in practice and the formal
praxis in the poetic text itself. The now infamous lines that start the poem
read:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit. (1–12)

The striking opening simile is instantly a profound example of the objective

correlative: here a man, a lyric speaker, a poet, a would-be lover or player
and a fine example of Eliot doffing his cap to the nightmare of history,
metaphysical poets and their propensity to “affect the metaphysics.”6 The
subsequent imagery of the poem is scattered like linguistic detritus across
the page. However, all the time the imagery is, as the self-conscious poem
itself, broken, fragmented, synesthetic and liminal. We are treated to
“muttering retreats” “restless nights” “one-night cheap hotels” “oyster
shells”, and the punctuated assonance, which all of the time pins the
speaker down to the self-reflexive page “deserted”, “muttering”, “retreats”,
“tedious” and “insidious” (5–6). Then, there is the refrain of frustrated
intent that delimits the poem ever gaining wings (both sexual and aesthetic)
“What is it?” Then the culmination of history, history repeated, personified
and through women who almost voyeuristically “come and go” staring at
the ceiling and also the more than accidental allusion to the most famous
ceiling in the world: the Sistine Chapel. At work is a deep-rooted salacious
metaphor, the vehicle of which, is itself, a metonym, a cleverly reversed
metonym of the historical female muse-musing at this most-famous of
aesthetic muses. The sense of bathos is reversed as the anti-climax (literally
and metaphorically) is exemplified through one of the most historically
pertinent works of art in antiquity. This objective correlative sets the tone
for the reversal of the rest of the poem and the theme of age and ages.
Grammatically, Eliot rhetorically ties the code of the self-reflexive
pronoun, bullied by his-story, into the reflexive present, only ever stepping
out of this indicative mood of the verb to cautiously try the temporal stream
of time and then step back into a present perfect frame of reference. The
second strophe, constructed of staunch Elizabethan pentameter, starts in a
resolute past simple construction before the amorphous, zoomorphic,
yellow Dickensian Parole falls asleep and we are given the injunction that
“there will be time”:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; (15–25)

And for the rest of the poem, the lyric speaker is trapped in the present of
the poem, constantly aware of uncertainty through the tonal modulations7 of
his rhetorical temporality and his modal verb constructions “Shall I say,” “I
should have been a pair of ragged claws” (73)—every editor’s nightmare,
both figurative and it seems literal (perhaps the most poignant literal
metaphor ever uttered)“And would it have been worth it, after all…” (87).
These ‘verbal icons’ signify this chiasmatic temporality, whereby the poet
continually returns and reverses his positions and tropes in the poem:

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. (45–49)

This rhetorical and grammatical lag of Eliot’s reflects the earlier semiotic
examination of the rhetorical and grammatical as beautifully postulated by
Paul de Man, playing out in a wonderfully performative praxis. In one
sense, the whole poem is one long speech act almost written for a self-
conscious, Brechtian, Elizabethan theatrical audience. After defamiliarizing
the audience and the lyric speaker, in true modernist style, we are reminded
at the close of the poem that:

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (126–131)

Anyone familiar with Pound’s Cantos, will here see the intertextual
influence of Pound here, and the brilliant bathos at the end of the poem, the
human voices in which we ultimately drown. For all our rhetorical tropes,
figures, characterisations and nightmares of history, we are reminded that
history and language are all too human. It’s not the sirens, the wreckers, the
mermaids, the music of poesy that will drown us, not the mythopoetic but
the literal. The final chiasmatic turn is that drowning comes with the
awakening of the grammatical at the poem’s end. Once again, the rhetorical
is laid to rest (like the zoomorphic ambiguity in stanza one) reversed all the
way down through the indecisions and non-poetic starters to the end of the
poem, where we are snapped back to history and we “drown” in yet another
figure. A figure piled on hypotactically to the other blind tropes of the
modernist poetic. This is the brilliance of the highest modernism and the
sublimity of Eliot’s patient gaze.
The strange tropes attest to Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ thesis and
also to the idea that, in this anti-subjectivist metaphysic, Eliot has strong
affinities with the later work of Roland Barthes, because both reject the
proto-humanism inherent in the metaphysics of subjective presence in
Romanticism, the author-ity of the author; for Eliot the author surrenders his
or her personality to tradition, while formulating their own voice
somewhere through the voice of their individual talent. Perhaps, had Eliot
attempted ‘Prufrock’ at a later stage in his career, he would not have
drowned in other human voices at the end of the poem.8 In a beautiful
further twist to this rich poem, Eliot takes the former protestations of two
canonical poets in the metaphysical tradition and he debunks their original
stance towards their prospective ‘sexual quarry’ or partners. For example, in
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker opens with the lines “Had we
but world enough and time, /This coyness, lady, were no crime,” whilst
finishing with the rhetorical flourish:

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run. (41–46)

So, Marvell takes up an actively erotic position of agency and switches the
common troping of the sun as life-sustainer and life-giver. In so doing, he
combines the apparent opposites of sweetness and strength, in order to
overrun the natural energy of the sun and transcend the movement of time
itself. He elongates the night that no longer belongs to the springes of
cyclical temporality. Likewise, Donne’s The Flea also uses conceit and
paradox to use an abstruse scholastic linguistic logic, to challenge once
again and open-up the gaps between the triumvirate of logic, rhetoric and
grammar, as also flagged earlier by de Man. The brilliance in Eliot is also to
subvert these codifications, demonstrating the opposite in the ability of the
speaker (or so it seems) to consummate the figural sexual relationship. The
logic of the discourse itself and any rhetorical unity that would play into a
more unified notion of temporality. The result is the startling high modernist
negotiation with tradition and history that is self-consciously, and
autologically, played out in the actual praxis of the poem itself.
But what of this reading of high modernism? Once again, we find
ourselves in a situation where, to use a structuralist trope, we can perhaps
now at least partially define postmodernism by what it is not. Perhaps we
can find our way past the myopic protestations of Jordan Peterson & Inc.,
by defining the post-modern primarily as an art form that challenges or
attempts to give art back to the people, or remove the inherent elitism of
Lawrence, Woolf, Pound, and Yeats. Or is it a form that supports the
commodification of art in the age of capital? True to the form of the rest of
this book, it’s also necessarily a corresponding philosophy of sorts, to which
this literary genre can of necessity be, at least partially, yoked.
The answer is that there is no clear truth, either in the work of art, the
text, or any philosophical system or hermeneutics of being that gives one
the topographical key to Being itself. The modernist appeal to both
tradition, mythology, a lost golden age, or a more self-conscious work of art
is one that was mirrored in the philosophical and mythopoetic tropes of the
Frühromantiker themselves.9 This is the high—and as yet unachieved—
ideal of art and culture in social life, the linguistic and public-sociological
organisation of the polity that sociological thinkers such as Jürgen
Habermas have repeatedly endorsed.10
The conservative bias against this type of philosophical outlook—an
outlook which is not at all new, when judged by philosophy’s own terms
and self-representations—goes back at least as far as Socrates with his
injunction that “the unexamined life is not worth the living” and his
oxymoron “The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.”11
Therefore, it’s nothing new for philosophy to be in this state of
epistemological remonstrance with the powers-that-be; whether it be card-
carrying Functionalists such as Habermas on the Left, or on the right Talcott
Parsons; or with the good old Sophists and Cosmogonists. One should also
remember that the use of irony is hardly new. Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe,
must have been long in the teeth with her husband as he strolled around
‘ironising’ in the local markets while she ironed his togas. The modern
philosophical era commenced with the academic and Pyrrhonist scepticism,
engaged by Bacon and Descartes and never really truncated until it found
its way inside the mind of Hegel. Unfortunately, history did not culminate
in the Prussian State of 1821 and the young Hegelians were allegedly, even
arguing over poor Friedrich’s grave ten years later. So, anyone who thinks
academic scepticism is something novel needs to get out more. Postmodern
irony and scepticism display a marked distrust of what Lyotard termed
‘metanarratives’ but after a twentieth century that produced Nazism,
Communism, Fascism and EastEnders, who could really blame them?
These philosophical roots of the current postmodern debate are something I
will return to in the concluding chapter of this study.
The “postmodern” is often used by thinkers as a strawman, and more
recently this has been the case with the outspoken Canadian clinical
psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has courted celebrities such as Stephen
Fry and philosophers such as Roger Scruton.12 Besides this, he partook in
the infamous and utterly tedious ‘debate’ with Slavoj Žižek, to which I
alluded at the commencement of this chapter: a spectacle that made the
presidential debates between Trump and Biden appear like the World Mensa
Finals.
Peterson’s early monograph, Maps of Meaning (1999), is excellently
articulated and makes perfect sense in an age of what Heidegger frames by
the term Gestell and in which Being is disclosed in such a technological,
alienating and industrialised fashion, that people are essentially
dehumanized and seen as raw products. However, as is the case with
Peterson’s more recent polemical postulations, one should perhaps be more
cautious than to use the hyponym ‘postmodern’ as a nomological net within
which to grasp all of the current existential crisis. I will attend to the logic
—or in Lyotard’s formation “Inventor’s Paralogy”—of the postmodern
artwork/science/political praxis, before then assessing its connection to
what certain thinkers term ‘postmodern’ philosophy. This being a
philosophy placed in speech-marks precisely because I don’t actually
believe there exists such a body of philosophy (I’m sure someone would
accuse me taking a typically postmodern position in making this utterance);
certainly, not in the sense that there existed a coherent analytic or
phenomenological tradition of philosophy. The term has more recently
come to be used in a derogatory fashion, much as the term “romantic” was
used once by more conservative thinkers.
To commence with, there are a number of key aspects or notions that
postmodernism shares with its modernist predecessor, such as what one
might call the self-conscious nature of the work of art itself, and the
ontologically interconnected nature of various works of art, (people
sometimes use Julia Kristeva’s phrase intertextuality in this sense). There is
a natural leaning towards poststructuralism here, although Derrida himself
was loathe to use the term (or even the term postmodernism). The inherent
difficulty of the work, as with my argument of homology or autology used
throughout this book, the self-reference to a discourse as inherently
negative or indirectly linked to an ultimately unknowable logoi, Quine’s
Idea idea, or Wilfrid Sellars’ Myth of the Given, is obviously destined to be
as clear as mud. None of this is going to add up to clarity of formulation in
the final instance; what is known is known by ambiguity and a naturally
limited or indirect formulation.13 One may even say that in Marcuse’s sense
of recuperation, the work of art is postmodern before it is recuperated and
transformed into a modernist work. The new is always already postmodern
and becomes modern once it is recuperated, so, boundaries are constantly
being interrogated with the postmodern.
Perhaps writers such as John Fowles best personify the aesthetic
postmodern, in novels such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969).
Fowles constantly steps out of the text: referring for example to a young
man working away at that time in The British Library Reading Rooms
(Marx) and another young man digging away at a different form of
stratification, (the geological work of Thomas Lyle), on another part of the
Dorsett Coast. Alternative endings are produced, and the author is
constantly reminding us of his tenuous ontology as author. The movie that
was made in 1981 is equally self-referential and postmodern, starring
Jeremey Irons and Meryl Streep. The screenplay by Harold Pinter is about a
movie being made about the book, brilliantly reflecting the postmodern
aspect of a hall of mirrors without a fixed original (all is simulacra—
another major theme of postmodernism). A theme of course explored by
various other authors of the postmodern novel, who developed one of its
most successful sub-genres, that of Sci Fi. Most famously, one thinks of
Phillip K. Dicks’ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), which of
course, became the movie Bladerunner (1982).
Much of the British popular comedy of the nineties was postmodern in
its origins, from Ricky Gervais’s brilliant—and at times bathetic—The
Office, Ali G, Trigger Happy TV, the brilliant satirical newsroom spoof, The
Day Today to the comedic tour-de -force, Brasseye. The self-conscious
nature of the postmodern aesthetic, the reshaping of boundaries and the
elevation and admixture of high and low culture made for an explosive
cocktail of comedy where boundaries and limits were constantly
rechallenged and reinterpreted. It would seem that even the most patrician
and traditional cultural guardians were no match for the satirical speed and
wit with which postmodern humour would take its merciless aim.
 Then there was the rise of much of postcolonial studies in universities,
such as Sussex and cultural studies departments such as that of Birmingham
(in the UK), under the aegis of Ranajit Guha, Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart
Hall. The last bastion of the elite was being challenged, culture, along with
the cultural superiority of (E)nglish; the pluralisation and nominalisation of
RP (Received Pronunciation) “RIP RP” as Tony Harrison memorably put it
in his poem “UZ and Them”; the age of knowledges, englishes and
epistemes was well and truly upon UZ. Now we could all take the episteme
—or so it seemed.
In short, very short, there was no place left to hide and a Welsh bloke
was reading the BBC News as 6 pm. Hugh do you think you are?14 The last
symbolic system was finally being eaten by capital, and as it turned out, it
was quite the feast. The only issue with liberal humanism on such a scale
was that with the cultural system’s structurally self-deconstructing identity
was suddenly rearing its Janus-faced, hybrid visage. If set theory had been
set for a collapse, if Russell had ruined Frege’s Christmas one hundred
years or so previously, if Husserl’s psychologism had fallen to linguistic
psychologism after the Origins of Geometry, then philosophical scepticism
was to be given free reign again; call it postmodernism, poststructuralism,
or even The Left, as many thinkers with intellectual Turret’s syndrome—a
propensity for philosophical category errors and badly misused terms of
metonymy—were prone to do.
The fact is, there aren’t many people in the twenty-first century who are
prone to go all Martin Luther and nail their demands upon the door these
days. One only needs to take a cursory glance at twentieth century
paradigms such as Stalinism, Maoism, Fascism and Nazism to remind
oneself why we have identity crises; at least, in the achieved or political
sense of the phrase anyway. One of the reasons ascribed identity has been
politicised is the fact that it seems the one form of identity that can be safely
bet upon in a neoliberal casino where the stakes on achieved identity are
way too risky. The philosophical game of Texas Scepticism is alive and
well, but the terms have been refreshed and you’re no longer a card-
carrying political player but a passport-carrying player. Bio-identity
became politicised while the lights were out. The stakes are way less risky
too: there’s no political position to ostensibly defend—with history
invariably against you—you simply show your passport and history is NO
LONGER the nightmare from which you’re trying to awake. In fact, it does
all of the legwork for you—a late capitalists’ wet dream.
In 1945, Bertrand Russell made another one of his bold claims about the
university system in general but it stuck in my head at the time I read it and
even though I was a just starting out as a doctoral candidate:

With the Reformation, the situation changed. Many of the most

earnest Protestants were business men, to who lending money at
interest was essential. Consequently, first Calvin, and then other
Protestant divines, sanctioned interest. At last the Catholic Church
was compelled to follow suit, because the old prohibitions did not
suit the modern world. Philosophers, whose incomes are derived
from the investments of universities, have favoured universities ever
since they ceased to be ecclesiastics and therefore connected with
landowning. At every stage, there has been a wealth of theoretical
argument to support the economically convenient option. (Russell,
The History of Western Philosophy, 199)

Lutheranism did indeed sit well with the underlying theological arguments;
and the newer one-size-fits-all options inherent in Lutheran eschatology
also sat well the new Protestant profs, who took tenure in perhaps more
ways than the simple academic parsing of the phrase. If this sounds
suspiciously Marxist (in the genuine and now ironically
conservative/classical sense of the phrase—as opposed to Jordan Peterson’s
fairytale version of the Left) then it indeed is. The fact is that the university
system, while allowing for a number of great teachers and philosophers,
was also singing to the tune of modern Liberalism and Adam Smith’s
hidden hand, or Marx’ base was sitting just below the superstructural
surface. In fact, the idea of tenure in this ironic landowning sense has now
burgeoned into something far more perilous, and querulous. For professors,
tenure is now tenuous at best, depending on your overall politics and
unfortunately sometimes upon your ascribed status. Politics have come to
mean something much more than previously imagined.
The new doxa (or intellectual status quo), has also been illustrated also
by Steven Connor in his excellent monograph, Postmodernist Culture:
 Sheer size does not in itself disprove the charge of impotence
levelled at the academic humanities, however, and it would be
possible to point to this as the mode of the academy’s withdrawal
from real life, in a bureaucratic multiplication of devices for How
Not To Do It, like Dickens’s Circumlocution Office. The point is
that, despite all this involution, the humanities in Britain and the US
have maintained a clearly visible and highly successful function of
accreditation for all the traditionally privileged professions and
social functions—which includes banking, commerce, and
individual management alongside ‘humane’ occupations like
teaching and social work. Far from being merely ‘irrelevant’, or
sacrificing their task of oppositionality, the humanities have come to
act as a it were, via their lack of direct effectuality, and in their
claims to provide ideological completeness and adaptability as an
important kind of lubricant in the machine of higher education, in its
reproductions of power and privilege. (Connor, 15)

In terms of SE Asia, one only has to see the reflection of this in the courses
that are for example provided by English Departments for other
specialisms, in particular, the growing roles of on-campus Language
Institutes to provide generic language courses for non-English majors in the
various areas of business language. A fine reflection of this was that two
years ago, after I’d been invited to give a keynote speech at a small One
Day Conference on The Rise of the New Left at CMU, the conference was
moved, for no ostensible reason, off-campus.
The postmodern politics we are discussing here, as opposed to the
aesthetic postmodernism delineated above, has also been accused of
complicity by Terry Eagleton. The complicity is in not only forging ahead
with an ideological agenda, but further neutralizing the critical and aesthetic
transmissions of modernism, to the point where once again the genuinely
new Avant-garde postmodern is recuperated, neutralised and then re-
acculturated into becoming an acceptable cultural discourse itself.

Alongside this account of the role of the academy in assimilating

modernism goes a conventional account of the progressive
withdrawal of institutions of criticism from social. political and
cultural engagement. For Terry Eagleton, the high point of criticism
 was the bourgeois ‘public sphere’ of the eighteenth century, when it
was still possible for the activity of criticism to still be seen as a
form of conversation in its conflict and disagreements, set against a
ground of consensus and free communicative exchange. The
subsequent academisation of criticism, during the nineteenth century
and in accelerated form in the twentieth century provided it with an
institutional bias and professional structure, but by the same token
signalled the beginning of its sequestration from the public realm.
(Connor, 12–13)

For Eagleton, as for myself, the romantic period seemed to mark the high
watermark of the humanist critic as hero, from Hogg, Hunt, Pater,
Coleridge, Carlyle, Shelley, to Hazlitt and Cobbett. Examples of public
debate about Wordsworth himself as the poet laureate after his Excursion
(1814) and his “Thanksgiving Ode” in 1815 really signify an original
‘culture war’ that was gloriously public and beautifully articulated on all
sides; this includes also the work of caricature by brilliant artists such as the
magnificent Gillray.15
One however needs to add yet another political proviso to the
postmodern/liberal politicisation not just of academic discourse, but also of
discourse in the public sphere of reason. Habermas’ dream of
‘communicative rationality,’ it seems to appear, has found a fertile ground
in the fecund jungle of social media. Yet here perhaps, we have all been
prithee to the great tech n’ scroll swindle. Suddenly, the intellectual dream
of a Coleridgean clerisy is no longer needed because we have all been given
our 15 minutes of infamy—we have all subscribed to the great online public
debate. While Rome is sizzling, between cross-cultural burger baps, we
have all switched off to the rational instrumentalisation of the university
campus and the rationalisation of the sphere of public discourse.
Unfortunately, it’s way more postmodern (and ironic) than that. We freely
give our biodata to Facebook, in the hope of having some idea how we’ll
look when we’re 64 (I’m sure that WAS NOT what McCartney had in mind
in Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), and we’re freely farmed every
day of the year, 365 DAYS… The real irony is of course the situational
irony of someone waxing lyrical on the Facebook platform about Julian
Assange’s rights or their (perish the thought—yet alone notion) freedom to
say what on earth they damn well please.
 These very nefarious aspects of postmodernism, also attest to the other
frightening fact of screen time in the digital age. Reading energy is indeed
lost in the rabbit hole that is social media, and the simple fact is that yes,
we’ve retuned to a culture of tablets and yes, the literacy rate seems about
as high as what it did when the original stone tablets were in place a few
millennia back. Can anyone hear a cultural Tik Tok? Even our use of
language LOL, has become shortsighted. If Wittgenstein was correct in
assuming that the “limits of my language are the limits of my world” then
we need to stop our myopic somnambulism sooner rather than later.
Prescient as ever, Heidegger wrote this in the introduction to his lectures on
the seminal German poet, Hölderlin:

One now speaks and writes of the “uni” and means the university.
The hideousness of this linguistic construction perhaps corresponds
to the degree of understanding one is able to summon for the
aforementioned institution.
This Americanization of language and increasing erosion of
language to a technical instrument or vehicle of communication
does not stem from some casual neglect or superficiality on the part
of individuals or entire professions and organizations. This process
has metaphysical grounds and for this very reason cannot be
“stopped,” which would indeed also only be a technical
intervention.
We must reflect upon the event that is transpiring [sich ereignet]
in this process: that the contemporary planetary human being no
longer has “time” left for the word (that is, for the highest
distinction of his essence). All of this has nothing to do with the
corruption or purification of language. This process––in which the
word is denied time and a phonetic abbreviation is seized upon––
extends back into grounds upon which Western history, and thereby
European, and thereby modern planetary “history” in general, rests.
(Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” 25)

Heidegger was however aware of—even before his own Kehre (turn)—the
dangers of a truly truncated linguistic world disclosure and where nations
could be heading if this decline was left unchecked. Our essence and its
development could, (and in my opinion) has, been paradoxically halted in
the wake of the fusion of the linguistic turn, in a sense we need to refresh
our home screens and start reusing language in such a manner as to still
give us all communitarian hope for the future. If literary theory and
philosophy dovetailed to disclose the postmodern world to us, it can equally
reenvisage—as it’s constantly prone to do—or refresh its vista of the world
for us, to reinvigorate our sense of Being-in-the-world. The verbal brilliance
and dexterity of postmodern aesthetics paradoxically also reminds us of the
power of our self-conscious, autological discourse, to re-disclose the world
to us. Our human ability’ as linguistic arbiters of ‘worldhood’, to reengage,
reconstruct and refresh the screen, reminds us not only of the ethical parsing
central to deconstruction but also of the new form of communitarian
pragmatics that I will offer in the subsequent chapters as one of the
solutions to the current crisis of the humanities—and culture at large.
The refresh button is also required in light of the crippled epistemology
that the internet autodidactics are daily offering up as cultural knowledge.
One indeed cannot expect more when confronted with the dizzying array of
conspiracies that form the current spectrum under the refraction of the
internet. One of the amazing sleights of hand has been the fact that the so-
called ‘New Left’ has become so parsimonious, as to reorganize categories
using ‘Newspeak’ in a manner by which Orwell himself would have been
more than impressed. A certain man, recently elected to the highest office in
the world, became a ‘fascist.’ Yet his predecessor, Barack Obama, not only
sold out en masse to the banks both during and after his tenure as president,
but also dropped more bombs by way of drone strikes than any other
president in US history.16
Moreover, “fake news” and “fake narratives” are about as postmodern
as things get. When we have a president falling victim to the legacy of
theory and in particular the synchronic/diachronic disjunct of modern
linguistic theory, it’s no surprise that the partisanship reaches such ugly
proportions and the covid 19 ‘metanarrative’ has becomes so questioned by
the general public. Perhaps the most colossal irony of all lies giftwrapped in
the lack of a metaphysics of ‘presence’ that, after the supposed rigours of
both Peircean and Saussurean semiotics/semiology, was bequeathed the so-
called ‘soft humanities.’ People are staggering around without any idea who
Jean Baudrillard or Jean Francoise Lyotard were.17
The narratives that I have claimed inherent instabilities for in this study
have been the formalist/ structuralist and analytical signifying systems that
in formal mathematics, logic and semantics were, by the very nature of their
DNA, doomed to paradoxical failure. These tectonic shifts of linguistic
scepticism aren’t going away; in fact, they’ve just finally erupted in media
res on an historical faultline, that stretches all the way from ancient Greece
to modern Washington. The irony is that the “postmodern” is a symptom
and not cause of this historical instability and needs to be addressed
accordingly.
The state of the democratic praxis is due, in large part, to the problem
that seasoned signifiers such as ‘left’ and ‘right’ should now be disbanded
altogether. The old binary logic needs realignment with new political
realities, which are bound up with the dynamism and the synchrony of the
changing structuralist landscape—otherwise there will be many more cries
of fake news and much more division amongst the working classes and the
rapidly shrinking middle classes. This is why the limits of Liberalist
political economy have been dressed up as Marxism. The problem is, and
here is yet another of the proliferation of fake narratives, Marxism, like
Christianity and Hegelianism, is one of the metanarratives to which Lyotard
referred in The Postmodern Condition, so it seems odd that it’s been aligned
by otherwise erudite thinkers such as Jordan Peterson with postmodernism?
This monumental category error was also outlined and countered by Terry
Eagleton’s neo-Marxist argument way back in 1986, in which he correctly
situates postmodernism as the aesthetic currency of Late Capitalism.

But the fact that modernism continues to struggle for meaning is

exactly what makes it so interesting. For this struggle continually
drives it towards classical styles of sense-making which are at once
unacceptable and inescapable, traditional matrices of meaning
which have become progressively empty, but which nevertheless
continue to exert their implacable force. It is in just this way that
Walter Benjamin reads Franz Kafka, whose fiction inherits the form
of a traditional storytelling without its truth contents. A whole
traditional ideology of representation is in crisis, yet this does not
mean that the search for truth is abandoned. Postmodernism, by
contrast, commits the apocalyptic error of believing that the
discrediting of this particular representational epistemology is the
death of truth itself, just as it sometimes mistakes the disintegration
of traditional ideologies of the subject for the subject’s final
 disappearance. In both cases, the obituary notices are greatly
exaggerated. (Lodge, Modern Theory and Criticism, 395)

For Eagleton, the traditional humanist subject is brought under scrutiny and
these two forms of aesthetics instantiate two divergent responses. One can
trace this back to the implacable bourgeois subjectivity of Prufrock to see
the selfsame narratorial subject under scrutiny. However, for Eagleton the
postmodern results in a negation of this subjectivity (a notion I’m confident
is also shared by Peterson—but under the incorrect nomenclature of
Marxism). However, according to Eagleton, the political agitator, the
Marxist man of political action hangs onto this subjectivity, whilst the
aesthetic currency of Late Capital, postmodernism, does not require this
subjectivity. The Warholean soupcan or the re-printable, re-stampable
commodity that is fed by the fetishism of capital and wage labour has no
need of this subject. The aura, once so messianically calibrated by
Benjamin is now celebrated by its absence. This well-thought-out position
is a long way from the oversimplified straw man Marxism carved under the
hammer and battery-driven scythe of Peterson.18
Eagleton’s vision of postmodernism and modernism was not the only
version in town, as was the case when The Frankfurt School of Critical
Theory analysed modernism. Their sense of the uses of modernism, was not
the same as either Benjamin or Brecht at the time.19 The whole point,
however, is that the one-dimensional argument of Peterson is a straw man.
One also imagines a very different ‘rumble in the jungle’ had Peterson
encountered Eagleton instead of the carnivalesque Slavoj Žižek.

Footnotes
1 One of the finest and clear-headed responses to deconstruction was delivered by that stalwart of
Literary Criticism and its attendant history, M.H. Abrams. His talk, at the MLA conference of 1976
addresses his fellow attendee J. Hillis Miller, directly. The talk was entitled “The Deconstructive
Angel” Lodge, 264–276. At least the spirit and tone in which Abrams addresses deconstruction
echoes the tones and the precis of my own work: in the spirit of an on-going conversation with
criticism and history.

2 The currently popular conspiracy theory of a more Marxist radical system of institutionalized
warfare was originally promulgated in the essay “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and ‘Political
Correctness’” (1992) written by Michael Minnicino, which was originally published in Fidelio
magazine. Later, in 1998 Paul Weyrich equated “Cultural Marxism” with the concept of “political
correctness”; even though “political correctness” originated under the aegis of Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan, who were hardly bastions of the Left. Later in the 1990s, Paul Weyrich
commissioned William S. Lind to write a history of “Cultural Marxism,” and hence in 1998 the term
was formally born. However, it has only been since around 2011 that the term has slowly gained
currency. One reason for this may of course be the mushrooming of the “freedom” of the internet.
The interesting semiotic aspect of this is how so many conspiracy theorists take this as what Emile
Durkheim would call a social fact, with precious little, if any, actual historical acuity or actual serious
academic research. I covered this aspect of Social Science Research and the new dangers of
conspiracy thinking/crippled epistemology in a talk given at the Faculty of Political Science, Chiang
Mai University; entitled: What Is Theory and What Are it’s Uses in E-Government Research and
Practice: A philosophical perspective. On Thursday March 17th, 2022.

3 I say nefarious because one always remembers Pound’s relationship with Italian fascism.
Heidegger was no card-carrying modernist but he was a card-carrying Nazi.

4 Both of these locations figured in The Wasteland (1922).

5 Eliot acknowledged his debt to the metaphysical poets and their influence upon his theory of the
poetic ‘dissociation of sensibility.’ Furthermore, his poetic notion of the ‘objective correlative’ to
represent a thought or emotion is also clearly influenced by their poetics.

6 John Dryden famously claimed that John Donne, as an exemplar of a then new style of poetry,
“affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should
reign”. “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693).

7 Hölderlin famously formulated a poetology that included a theory of tonal modulation throughout
the progression of a poem; the tonal modulations seem to have been worked through brilliantly by
Eliot pace his use of the varying sites of allusion and imagery as vehicles for developing his
argument or complaint, in much of his poetry.

8 The historical voices can also be read psychoanalytically, as in Harold Bloom’s argument in his
monograph The Anxiety of Influence (1973) in which he claims the writer searches for a voice but has
to labour under the Oedipal (or Electra) influenced anxiety of the historical influence of their
parental figure in their selected genre. For example, for Wordsworth in his epic work The Prelude,
this would be the influence of John Milton in Paradise Lost.
9 Both the German romantic and Idealist relationship to a new mythology of the aesthetic for
modernity is discussed at length by Andrew Bowie in his excellent in Chapter 4 “Schelling: Art as the
Organ of Philosophy” in his study Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietszche. Manchester,
MUP, 2003.

10 It came as no surprise that a friend of mine who teaches at the neighbouring Payap University,
mentioned a number of years back that when he stays at the home of his German wife, they notice a
sociologically wide interest in aesthetics and lots of civic promotion at both a local and national
governmental level of arts and cultural events.

11 In point of fact we can locate this sort of proto-nihilism even further back, to the first
metaphysicians and the pre-Socratics. One thinks of Heraclitus’ famous dictum that one can’t jump in
the same river twice.

12 Peterson’s work in his own field is way better, as if the case with his excellent 1999 tome, Maps
of Meaning. I also largely agree with his distrust of much of what now passes as political correctness
and identarian politics in the academy. The occurrence of what I would be as bold as to call linguistic
fascism and the bullying in the academy that has run in tandem with this new paradigm is something
that warrants genuine concern. I am also a member of the organisation SAFS (the Society for
Academic Freedom and Scholarship), www.​safs.​ca and sincerely hope more new academics will join
organisations like this, rather than bowing to divisive and often unwarranted, pressure from faculty
and admin staff keen to tick the PC checklist.

13 In reductionist terms, one even thinks of the Heisenberg principle of measurement in

experimental physics; it seems that there will always be a statistical degree of freedom, whichever
tool of measurement we employ.

14 The awful pun above was inspired by the fact that throughout the 90s, the early evening BBC 1
main news was read by the Welshman, Hugh Edwards. I could however still remember the age of
Alistair Burnett and Angela Rippon, where RP was still in full swinging parlance on the main
evening news. I hope to be excused my silly and profoundly tacky puns on the grounds that
Postmodernism is the subject under discussion and in the name of authenticity, I’m trying to break
down as many barriers as possible.

15 Jeffrey Cox’ monograph William Wordsworth, Second Generation Romantic: contesting poetry
after Waterloo, CUP, Cambridge, 2021 does a great job of historicising Wordsworth, whilst outlining
and assessing the cultural reaction to his perceived political apostasy after Waterloo, by thinkers such
as Hunt, Byron and Shelley.
16 This is not to politicise my polemic—I’d still personally vote for Barack Obama over Donald
Trump anyway—this is just to try give to some deictic sense to the sort of chicanery that goes on
under the aegis of the ‘postmodern.’ And Trump himself is also guilty of exploiting the literary and
cultural theory we have inherited, as are his Democratic opponents.

17 Jean Baudrillard famously made the claim that the 1991 Gulf War never happened-meaning that
in the age of simulacra/simulation and the hyperreal it’s hard to actually tell where the original is
located pace the mass media bombardment of our senses: therefore, how much of the presentation of
the war was mass media manipulation? Furthermore, one recalls the horror of 9/11 and the often
heard rection of people to those macabre events: ‘it was like watching a movie.’ Given current claims
about fake news narratives and sinister manipulation of the ‘real’ it’s hard to say just where one
stands ontologically, which of course is not to be taken literally but only in the context of the
symbolic exchange of signs in a mass-media habitat. Without question, the general public’s trust in
the mainstream media is down exponentially. Baudrillard’s work and thought was always recognised
as one of the mainstays of postmodern thought. As was Foucault, and now many on the ‘right’ would
find it hard to contend Foucault’s claims about the uses and manipulations governments make of
narratives in order to fit and facilitate political structures to new civic programmes or paradigms. The
obvious current example, which is connected to bio-identity, social gatherings and the organization of
labour amongst other things, has been the political and civic fall out from the Covid 19 pandemic.

18 Both Benjamin and the famous US Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, saw mass media production
in a much more positive light than did Eagleton. Jameson adumbrated his much more positive
rendering of the postmodern and the Marxist in his tome Postmodernism, or the Cultural logic of
Late Capitalism (1991). Benjamin’s famous and much-lauded essay “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) celebrates the revolutionary potential of the industry of mass
reproduction whilst famously adumbrating the potential loss of the ‘aura’ of an original work of art.

19 The Frankfurt school of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, saw modernism as a tool for alienation
that could both provide verisimilitude to the true state of the subaltern’s class position under the
labour conditions of capitalism, whilst also heightening their awareness of their situation in a
Brechtian sense by defamiliarising the familiar state of the mass-produced commodity markets
through its requirement for deeper intellectual engagement by the individual subject. By way of
contrast, the SS (Soviet Socialist) Realists, as represented by the thought of György Lukács in “The
Ideology of Modernism” (1963), argued that experimental novels written by writers such as Joyce
simply reflected the static consciousness of the human subject under capitalism, presenting a sort of
pathology that was normalised and in actual fact prevented the subject from acting in any politically
revolutionary manner whatsoever. Lukács compared a ‘realist’ monologue of Goethe’s novel Lotte in
Weimar with Molly Bloom’s interior monologue at the end of Ulysses, arguing that Goethe’s work
showed up the real historical context and circumstances, whereas Joyces ‘static’ representation did
nothing but replicate and reinforce the subjective pathology of the alienated proletariat under the
aegis of capitalism. Therefore, from a critical perspective Goethe’s work demonstrated more
verisimilitude and was consequently more valuable as a work of art.
OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_8

8. Phrónēsis in Literary Criticism—The

Pragmatic Denouement
Wayne Deakin1
(1) Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

All of the arguments adumbrated in this study arise from the idea that
literary theory and criticism came about in the modern sense of ‘theory,’
that is, out of a dovetailing of philosophy and the original notion of literary
criticism. This can be traced back to the fact that both philosophy in its
Anglo-American formations and its broadly labelled continental
formations, both reached limits within the guise of the scepticism by which
it has it has partly been characterised by since the classical era. The Anglo-
American tradition morphed from the logical form postulated by Russell
and Frege, as a counterattack upon the then Hegelian continental tradition,
(which at that time also dominated British philosophy), into the ordinary
language philosophy and its important sub-categories such as speech act
theory. Concomitantly, the continental tradition morphed into Husserlean
transcendental phenomenology, then into hermeneutical phenomenology
and its own sub-categories of poststructuralism, deconstruction, etc.
The scepticism upon which both traditions found themselves beached,
was now linguistic in its bent. I’ve also argued that as philosophy for the
humanities, it has become more and more identified with literary criticism
and theory. This is, in the main, due to this linguistic scepticism. This was
also the reason why thinkers such as Rorty, Cavell and Taylor have come
more and more to base their philosophical work in the purview of literary
theory and criticism and in particular theories such as Rorty’s behavioural
pragmatism, which give us a deictic sign towards new forms of knowledge
based not upon the traditional philosophical questions about certainty or
scepticism itself, but upon asking new pragmatic questions based upon
historical contextualisation and hermeneutics. Such questions find a
congenial home within the purview of literary criticism and theory. In this
chapter, by way of summary, I’d like to follow this line of argument for
literary theory and criticism, pointing to possible future developments, and
also assessing some of the pernicious dangers that have also arisen from the
politicisation of literary theory and criticism since the Second World War. In
what has very loosely been labelled: the postmodern era.
The Greek term phrónēsis is loosely translated into English using
phrases such as prudence, practical value, and pragmatic. It’s a form of
knowledge or wisdom that relates to what John Dewey, William James and
later Richard Rorty, parsed as pragmatism. It implies also both good
judgment and character, in a similar vein to what Spinoza would call
fortitudo and generositas. Through Medieval times, it was commonly
discussed in the categories first brought to light by the ancient Greeks. For
the purposes of our discussion, this form of knowledge is somewhat
different from the certainty that is implied within the remit of analytical,
positivist, empiricist or verificationist notions. The more general purview of
phrónēsis is closer to the sort of knowledge commonly farmed within the
husbandry of the humanities—the reason the humanities are held in such
high regard as an area of knowledge in Germany is because, going back to
their romantic movement, Das Geisteswissenschaften was regarded as an
epistemological category in its own right, as distinct from Das
Naturwissenschaft—which is the area of the natural sciences.
Perhaps one reason that philosophy for the modern humanities strayed
into the ball-park of set theory paradox and phenomenological hermeneutics
was that it partially took on the extra ballast of Naturwissenschaft.
However, philosophy clearly didn’t climb back through the fence without a
newly reinvigorated game of Phrónēsis. This, I would contest, is the reason
that humanities professors have been hammering out the finer points of
Sayer’s Law throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps the telos of
knowledge in the humanities was in the paradoxical recognition or
acknowledgment of our epistemological, ethical, and ontological limits.
From here-on-in, philosophers and theorists can peruse their institutional
libraries (or LRCs as they’re fashionably labelled), without the Manichean
baggage of avoiding either Lacan, Lyotard or Žižek, in preference for
Austin, Ryle or Russell. I dare them…
 Of course, language, and, more specifically, rhetoric, are commonly
sighted as a salient reason for the avoidance of much of the continental side
of the library.1 However, this also has deeper roots in the wider history of
both Western philosophy and theology. This was more recently flagged by
the conservative critic and theorist Leo Strauss, who argued that in the
Western tradition the apparent schism between Athens and Jerusalem, or
Western philosophy and the Judaic-Christian tradition has led into our
modern crisis of the Humanities (or culture) and can be traced to, amongst
other things, the difference between the conceptions of mythos and logos
and the sophists or the Platonists. These initial tensions are contestably
inherent in the DNA of modern Liberalism, between the Millenarian
narrative of the Logos and the pre-socratic metaphysical scepticism that
was outlined in Plato’s dialogue on the philosopher Gorgias.2
The original sophists, who attracted the ire of Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle, had argued pace the cornucopia of metaphysics concocted by the
pre-Socratics, and as exemplified by Gorgias, that we can’t know
knowledge, however, we can know the human world of politics and can
therefore understand this through a non-metaphysical, social constructivist
notion of the world.3
The baton of the Logos was however taken on by Christianity, which
was one of the reasons that Strauss argued that the idea of reason as against
revelation was a misnomer (a notion that would no doubt depend upon
one’s wider faith and politics). Having joined the historical relay,
Christianity refined pre-Socratic narratives such as the apeiron and post-
Socratic notions such as the demiurge, the unmoved mover, and the forms.
Moreover, these narrative schematics also theologically matured later
through St. Augustine’s famous Chapter 13 of The Confessions.4 The Logos
comes from this lineage and is a foundationalist ontology and epistemology
that stemmed from challenges to the sophistry of the Sophists.5 These two
positions have changed masks at the historical ball but have remained
within the genome that has blossomed in the numerous tensions in Modern
Liberalism.6 Indeed, in a prescient article in 1967, “Jerusalem and Athens:
Some Introductory Reflections” Leo Strauss wrote:

However much the science of all cultures may protest its innocence
of all preferences or evaluations, it fosters a specific moral posture.
Since it requires openness to all cultures, it fosters universal
 tolerance and the exhilaration which derives from the beholding of
diversity; it necessarily affects all cultures that it can still affect by
contributing to their transformation in one and the same direction; it
willy-nilly brings about a shift of emphasis from the particular to the
universal. By asserting, if only implicitly, the Tightness of pluralism,
it asserts that pluralism is the right way; it asserts the monism of
universal tolerance and respect for diversity; for by virtue of being
an “-ism,” pluralism is a monism. (Strauss, Jerusalem and Athens)
The paradox of the monism of pluralism, that, according to Strauss,
back in 1967 was an issue amongst cultural studies, has its roots in the
narratorial tradition of the logos and its failure to be able to fully
incorporate simple differences between cultures, unbridgeable gaps that are
currently manifest in not just Liberal Praxis, but also in the ethnocentric
execution of cultural studies.7
Transposing these ideas into the area of Thai culture and much of its
own literary persuasions, one may not be entirely incorrect in considering
the fact that a large region of the modern cultural doxa could be regarded as
way more conservative than its Western counterpart. Theravada Buddhism,
as opposed to Mahayana or Zen Buddhism is certainly in practice more
oriented towards a group mentality than an individualist mentality and one
would have to consider whether or not this is a mere coincidence, or related
to the wider cultural ideology or logos.8 A Marxist take on this cultural
praxis would indeed see the adoption of this branch of Buddhist thought, as
suited to the wider economic base and as part of the superstructure and as
such it orients citizens towards sustaining that branch.9 Literary texts in
Thai often seem to reinforce this status quo. However, the ultimate
undecidabilities in meaning also reflect the tensions discerned in the wider
DNA of foundational epistemology in general, which returns us to the
contestation between a Logos and the sophistry of the knowledge of
unknowing, or a pluralism and monistic aspect that can be deconstructed in
the wider self-representations of Thai culture, or waddthantham.
In Thai literary history, an apparent conservative bias can at first be
discerned in texts such as Kukrit Pramoj’ Red Bamboo, in which the
metonymic “red” signifies the threat of communism to the social order, and
the bamboo itself synecdochically represents agrarian promise, honesty and
labour. The bamboo can also represent nature itself and the red can
therefore be seen as sullying the natural purity of the bamboo. The
conservation of a natural order, a tree that is indigenous to Thailand, can
signify the danger of what would be lost when the natural state of things
fails to be preserved.10 The short preamble to the book ends:

Apart from the parallel here mentioned, the writer attempts to depict
a Thai village as it actually is, especially at the moment when life
there comes into contact with the new Thought and new Doctrine,
which seem to drive the world into a mad series of international
conferences at the present moment. (Pramoj, 2)

The “new thought and doctrine” are, of course, communism and its
perceived threat to the hegemony of the newly established world hegemon,
the United States, especially after the Marshall Plan and the economic and
national successes of World War Two. After this terse introduction, Pramoj
uses the literary device of local colour to metonymically (in a Jakobsonian
sense of the phrase) build up a rural idyl of an untainted and almost Elysian
village in a significant locale well north of Bangkok, which of course
signifies the new and cosmopolitan ideas threatening the idyllic village in
the north. We are also told, in a slightly ironic fashion that “…the name of
“Red Bamboo” may have an influence on the actions if those who have
chosen that village as a place to make a living or carry on their religion,
which, broadly speaking, may be described as the way towards self-
expression.” (4).
The remainder of the often highly amusing text is centred around the
conflict, more often than not portrayed in a satirical and commedia dell’arte
fashion, between the abbot of the monastery and the man with the ideas
towards self-expression, Kwaen. One more amusing chapter will suffice to
illustrate the satirically conveyed conservatism, and also the inherent
historicist tensions bubbling below the unconscious of the text.11 In chapter
five, which commences:

Kwaen Kaemchorn used to have a wireless set, but now he had it no

more. It was a set run on a very great number of flash light batteries
and it used to give out capitalistic news, reactionary opinions an
poisonous music. When the price of batteries went up out of
proportion to their short life, Kwaen threw the receiving set into the
canal, in full view of his comrades, saying emotionally: “We do not
 want our clean ears to be polluted by the corrupt and dirty vice of
exploiting capitalists!” (Pramoj, 65)

One hears the naiveté of the character, who functions as the symbiotic foil
to the Abbot, who in turn is subject to the humorous disdain of the Lord
Buddha idyl throughout the text, as his hyperbolically-charged rhetoric rails
against the “exploiting capitalists” and bemoans the loss of his “clean ears.”
Pramoj then uses the imagery of light as a predominant literary device in
the story, inheriting the archetypal binary relationship between light and
dark, with the image of red being exploited in the title of a “False Dawn.”
This seems to play on the semantics of a “red dawn” and the metonym
“red” as being similarly false. Then, as the character Thom gets excited
about the mistaken Red Army invasion he thinks is taking place, Pramoj
plays with comic effect on the specular imagery of the stars in his head:

Kwaen sat as still as a statue. His heart was beating in a way it had
never done before. Hot blood seemed to rush to his head, making it
reel and causing his eyes to see a constellation of red stars shining
brightly in front of him. He did not notice whether each red star had
its supporting sickle and hammer or not, since other thoughts were
coming into his mind with a terrible rush. (Pramoj, 67)

The humorous allusion to the symbol of the flag is conflagrated with

dizziness and uncertainty, after being hit over the head and becoming
confused. Furthermore, when Kwaen goes to the Abbot’s cell to warn him
of the coming danger, there is a light shining, which is the light of
Buddhism that shines when all around is either darkness or dizziness,
represented by the alternative faith in a communist future. However, having
listened to the Abbot’s speech about his loyalty to the synecdochic cloth and
by extension the Thai Nation, the rebel villagers begin to be taken over by
romantic nationalism.

“But wait, Kwaen,” Thiem said and nodded to Sai as though they
already had an agreement, “I’ve listened to the Abbot and I’m
beginning to wonder whether we’re on the right track. Everyone
loves his own country, and we don’t really know who is invading
our country at this moment…” (Pramoj, 76)
The singular, logocentric, metanarrative of international communism has
been superseded by the narrative of romantic nationalism. This is another
pluralistic narrative that draws on the paradox of cultural primitivism and
purity, in light of the monistic narrative of cultural materialism;
emphasising the sense that there is always another reading of history,
culture, or economics. The idea that none of the narratives that have been
spun in history are ever going to discern ultimate truth and certainty. In the
case of Red Bamboo it is true that Pramoj is defending against the very real
threat of both the cultural and material hegemony of the Communist
International, and is no doubt a writer with a conservative bias.12 Yet, even
with the inherent conservative ideology, as well that of his major novel,
Four Reigns (1950), the historical ambiguities and ambivalences brought to
the fore also illustrate, (whether Pramoj meant this or not),13 the
undecidabilities of our knowledge of the world and the instability in taking
any one clear epistemological position because of the inherent uncertainties
entailed in historicism and hermeneutics. The uncertainties and
undecidabilities in this theoretical praxis always lie just below the textual
surface, manifest inn Saussure’s langue and parole, or in the multifarious
categories of C.S. Peirce, which stem from the hypernyms index, icon,
symbol, or the tension between logos and sophistry.
All of these claims of reason have one thing in common, which is that
there is always necessary room for scepticism, unless we take a
metaphysical leap of faith. Such a leap might resemble the Coleridgean
romanticism of the organic versus the mechanical, or the supremacy of the
linguistic symbolic over the allegorical, which is based upon a faith in
contemplative reason, leading one to the steps of the divine.14 Coleridge’s
romantic argument runs back to the Platonic notion of an idea and runs as a
form of noetic contemplation, based partially on Jakob Böhme’s Christian
mysticism and ultimately has its own roots in the theory of the Logos as the
ultimate divine being and structural anchor, or transcendental signified.15
One other different but equally fruitful perspective on the dynamics of
language and its relationships to new technologies is the novel fusion of
sociolinguistic and historicist frameworks as expounded by Walter J. Ong,
particularly in his brilliant Orality and Literacy (1982), in which he
specifies the variegated forms of language use and the notion of narratorial
genres such as biography, law, narrative and literary criticism as being
suited to specific historical epochs and precis. For Ong, the various
linguistic paradigms within which these narratives are bound, such as the
oral tradition of language use, the written form of its use, and the more
recently technologised formats are part of the key to both comprehending
various texts, and to interrogating our own historical regionality.16 Ong’s
polemic entails the idea that language, as seen in structuralist analyses as a
fixed architectonic structure, was only inculcated after the codification and
systematisation implicit in the alphabetised and then the subsequently
developed written formats of language.

In sum, if philosophy is reflective about its own nature, what is it to

make of the fact that philosophical thinking cannot be carried on by
the unaided human mind but only by the human mind that has
familiarised itself with a deeply interiorised technology of writing?
What does this precisely intellectual need for technology have to say
about the relationship of consciousness to the external universe?
And what does it have to say about Marxist theories concentrating
on technologies as means of production and alienation? Hegelian
philosophy and its sequels are packed with orality-literacy problems.
The fuller reflective discovery of the self on which so much of
Hegel’s and other phenomenology depends is the result not only of
writing but also of print: without these technologies the modern
privation of the self and the modern acute, doubly reflexive self-
awareness are impossible. (Ong, 173)

Ong, in drawing attention to the relationship between the oral and the
textual as a mark of civilisation, is here ironically perhaps, drawing
attention towards the self-consciousness that textual expansion brings to
simple orality.17 The technology of print, as adumbrated earlier by Foucault,
and the printing press’ early capitalist mode of production also helped
shaped our notion of the “author” (the “author-function”). Ong also draws
our attention to deconstruction’s parsing of the Logocentric and the
Phonocentric traditions in philosophy. In relation to my own argument, the
technologising of the word has meant holding the word up to itself in a
mirror and seeing itself as ontologically divided. The result in modernity
has been the rise of the novel and its various forms18 as a form of
knowledge dissemination and as the literary critic as the theoretical-heretic
who stands on the fence in this no man’s land between the newly
historicised oral and textual traditions.19
One may even see a strong link between modern philosophy, after
Descartes, Newton, Galileo and Bacon, as also reflecting the new age of
McLuhan’s “Guttenberg Galaxy” after the codification of the Logos as
language and the ensuing post-Lutherean religious and market conditions.
This new historical paradigm expected closed systems, not just in the
ontology of the universe, but also in the newly codified universe of the
written word.20 The structuralist search for closed structural systems, and
the “rupture” as Derrida called it, that comes from this anthropological
codification: the question of the “centre,” or “structurality of structure,”
both stem from an historical epoch. It is an epoch that has now been
superseded by what people disparagingly parse as the “postmodern” but is
actually the tension between the Logos and Sophistry, a fixed parole as
opposed to an unfixable, dynamic, sophistic undercurrent that continually
rises to the surface, as in the subterranean forces of history and tradition in
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” When language is made self-conscious as logos,
is turned upon itself, the inevitable result will be the logical paradox of
Russell’s set theory, or the rupture from transcendental phenomenology to
hermeneutical phenomenology, or the rupture of structuralism to
poststructuralism. Language as form was never supposed to be closed in the
first place, which is what I think Ong and the poststructuralists agree upon.
In Ong’s words:

But why should all the implications suggested by language be

consistent? What leads one to believe that language can be so
structured as to be perfectly consistent with itself, so as to be a
closed system? There are no closed systems and never have been.
The illusion that logic is a closed system has been encouraged by
writing and even more print. Oral cultures hardly had this kind of
illusion, though they had others. They had no sense of language as
‘structure’. They did not conceive of language by analogy with a
building or other object in space. Language and thought for the
ancient Greeks grew out of memory. Mnemosyne, not Hephaestus,
is the mother of the Muses. Architecture had nothing to do with
language and thought. For ‘structuralism’ it does, by ineluctable
implication. (Ong, 169)
Ong’s reference point is the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. However, one
can interchange this for the ‘logical form’ sought by Russell or the ‘logical
investigations’ pursued by Husserl—as I have formulated this study. The
temporal modality of the linguistic sign—as opposed to the spatial model
deployed in analytical, formalist and structuralist epistemologies—and
recognised by Heidegger in his refreshed ontological page, implies an
ongoing conversation with history, as implied by the historicism of his pupil
Gadamer, and also implied in the work of Derrida’s teacher: Maurice
Blanchot.
In his brilliant, yet sometimes obscure, 1969 book The Infinite
Conversation, Blanchot commences with the following claim:

Yet when I speak of the “end of the book,” or better, “the absence of
the book,” I do not mean to allude to developments in the audio-
visual means of communication with which so many experts are
concerned. If one ceased publishing books in favour of
communication by voice, image, or machine, this would in no way
change the reality of what is called the “book”; on the contrary,
language, like speech, would thereby affirm all the more its
predominance and its certitude of a possible truth. In other words,
the Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of
notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of
thought over language, and the promise of a communication that
would one day be immediate and transparent. (Blanchot, 2)

In the very notion of “the book,” is the notion of a coming unity, a unity
that in this study has been characterised as Logos and is a-historical so that
even in an age that has jettisoned the notion of the unitary book in favour of
social media, still inherent, in Blanchot’s Saussurean terminology,21 is the
notion of the book-as-logos in the current post-digital age. For Blanchot,
this will-to-knowledge as power will no doubt be encapsulated in a digital
parole or speech, that will still come up against the recalcitrance of langue
and the whole, infinite system of signs that will continue to bubble to the
top, producing elisions, paradoxes and new forms of theory. This is the
same notion of the unitary book transmuted in Russell to be language as a
purified, yet unitary, logical form.
 The communitarian term acknowledgement best sums up the
epistemological state in which we continually find ourselves as human
subjects, the closest we come to foundational knowledge is through
foundations based upon common, reciprocated, acknowledgment. We
acknowledge things in science, engineering, logic, and, of course,
philosophy. Stanley Cavell first formulated the notion of acknowledgment
as opposed to avoidance and in the very word itself we indeed find
‘knowledge’. Acknowledgement is a non-metaphysical version of what
Hegel termed Anerkennung, or “Mutual Recognition.” Cavell claims that
our sense of acknowledgment is also due to our recognition of the sceptical
limits of our everyday existence. It functions as a replacement of
philosophical certainty, so, we can only know the world within the limits of
our mind. However, we can acknowledge another’s pain, or even freedom,
without entering-into an inter-subjective mode of recognition, which leads
to the discovery of Spirit (Geist) as it does in the metaphysical work of his
predecessor, Hegel. Cavell’s version of Hegel’s social theory of mutual
recognition (Anerkennung) differs crucially in retaining the sense of
scepticism localised in the “problem” of other minds. Whereas Hegel seeks
an inter-subjective route out of scepticism through mutual recognition in the
famous chapter 4 of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),22 Cavell retains a
scepticism that can only be countered by mutual acknowledgment.
However, we, as human subjects, always remain haunted by scepticism, and
avoidance of any formal truth acknowledgement is always a possibility.23
Therefore, scepticism is something, which, although avoidable in
Hegel’s formulation of Spirit, is ultimately part of the limitation of the
human subject in Cavell’s work—and is something we live with as human
subjects. For example, Cavell famously exemplifies the abdication scene at
the beginning of Shakespeare’s King Lear, where the king enacts the
impulse to scepticism towards his daughter Cordelia, and this failure to
acknowledge his daughter, or avoidance of love, feeds the logic of the
eventual tragic outcome of the play. Lear personifies the sceptical impulse
that haunts our human condition. In avoiding acknowledgement of
Cordelia’s love, he forgoes his knowledge of the responsibility the claim of
Cordelia has upon his person. This can likewise be instanced by the claims
that others have upon our person, and how our failure to acknowledge them
leads to scepticism and recognitive breakdown. Cavell’s application of the
philosophical concept of acknowledgement to Shakespeare can likewise be
applied to all texts and narrative forms. It is in this sense that Cavell is a
romantic thinker: he retains the sceptical sense in media res or infinite
Sehnsucht, central to the thought and poetics of the romantics and the
poststructuralists.24
This reading of Lear is also applied brilliantly in a Marxist framework
by Terry Eagleton. However, Eagleton uses Lear to exemplify the ultimate
“disembodiment’ of sovereign geopolitical power states such as the USA (of
course, one should also add Russia to this very short list, something often
unmentioned in Marxist commentaries). Eagleton’s reading of Lear does
however reflect nicely the idea of avoidance—as opposed to
acknowledgement—inherent in Lear’s actions. This changes, when he
finally recognises his biological, familial, and national ties, to his family
and his subjects, after he wonders off on the heath and gets lost in a literal
and figurative storm, which awakens his senses and forces him into an
acknowledgment of his “creatureliness” Eagleton writes:

The storm has thrown Lear’s creatureliness into exposure, deflating

his hubristic fantasies. He has discovered his flesh for the first time,
and along with it his frailty and finitude. Gloucester will do the
same when he is blinded, forced to ‘smell his way out to Dover’. He
must learn, as he says, to ‘see feelingly’—to allow his reason to
move within the constraints of the sensitive, suffering body. When
we are out of our body, we are out of our mind. Lear’s new-found
sensuous materialism takes the form of a political solidarity with the
poor. (Eagleton, After Theory, 183)

He goes on to add “If power had a body, it would be forced to abdicate.”

So, Eagleton combines Marx’s early materialism—his theory of our shared
“species being” (Gattungsweisen)—with Aristotle’s biological and social
theory of flourishing. The sense of bodily context, in media res, is taken up
to illustrate that in a materialistic economy, from the personal sense of
flourishing right up to our sociological sense of Eudaimonia, a key
recognitive factor is our sense of acknowledgment—of someone else’ pain,
grief, suffering, happiness—to our geopolitical sense of acknowledgment of
another nation’s sovereignty or political autonomy. This is so, whether we
are theorising from a liberal or a socialist perspective. In just the same
manner, Red Bamboo, through the vehicle of informal satire, also presents
our sense of acknowledgment. However, in Pramoj’ sense, it’s the sense of
distance literature gives us, the sense of an incomplete book, an incomplete
framing, a romantically ironic performative praxis through which our
incomplete grasp of ‘worldhood’ will forever lead to a sense of
epistemological aporia. Acknowledgment is always partial, mutual, limited
and based upon the sceptical realisation of our cognitive and logical
limitations.
The sense of acknowledgment engendered by our sceptical, post-
Wittgensteinean limits, is articulated two millennia earlier in the character
of the Sophists and has been more recently characterised by the
poststructuralists. This seems to me the reason that “Literary Theory” has in
some senses become the ventriloquised philosophy of the humanities.
Moreover, it shows us why ultimate readings are contestable and also why
we crave these sorts of discourse in order to make human sense of the
milieu in which we find ourselves. However, this scepticism has helped
engender a political turn in criticism (both cultural and literary), which has
fuelled the currently misunderstood attacks on “Postmodern” philosophy
and also warrants attention, before we close the current study.
If literary theory demonstrates the limits to our knowledge, or the in
media res nature of our human experience, it often uses its intellectual
arsenal to articulate certain political claims that are themselves highly
contentious, whilst ignoring the value of New Critical and Formalist
approaches to literary theory. After all, is literary theory and criticism
(according to the definitions set out at the beginning of this book—perhaps
one may contest my particular brand) not supposed to address actual texts
themselves? One would perhaps find themselves at best bewildered and at
worst in a state of bemusement, were they to sit in on some classes in this
particularly late-modern subject in the humanities. Upon my argument,
philosophy—and to a certain degree of necessity—has morphed into the
specter of literary criticism. However, whilst allusions are proudly made in
relation to other subject areas such as anthropology, sociology, economics,
and psychology—as they have been to an extent in this tome—students
often find themselves treading inter-disciplinary water and yet not being
offered an actual literary lifeline. This is of course understandable, and
further substantiates the inter-disciplinary claims made within these pages.
However, are we not throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we cease
to allude to actual literary texts themselves? Something that I’ve
endeavoured to do within the scope of this book.
One thinks back to Achebe’s claim about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
adumbrated earlier in the book. However, there are many other examples of
this type of reading, or perhaps rereading is a better phrase to articulate this
process. This is not to denigrate the clear advances made in important areas
such as feminist or postcolonial theory, but mainly to caution against
accepting all novel-political readings as the best route to the critical
reception of texts. One should at the very least incorporate other critical
apparatus when rereading an historical text, rather than just utilising a
somewhat myopic view instanced by taking one political reading. One
thinks back to the Christian hegemony discussed in relation to the reception
of the classics back in the Middle Ages. When considering the readings of
King Lear offered by both Cavell and Eagleton above, one clearly discerns
how these may be mutually beneficial. In the case of Conrad, one can easily
discern equal economies in applying New Historicist, Psychoanalytical and
Formalist readings, in addition to Postcolonial readings.
In his 2013 monograph, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital,
the sociological thinker Vivek Chibber even argues that a theory such as
postcolonialism fails to address the ills of Late-Capitalism and
Neoliberalism and has in fact become a political tool which needs to be
readdressed in more traditionally Marxist terms. Whilst I recognise
Chibber’s point here, one must remember his target is mainly the area of
sociology and cultural studies, and one must be weary in literary criticism
of simply replacing one critical polemic with another. However, there is no
doubt that postcolonial theory in literary studies has led at times to woefully
one-sided readings.25 These readings, for example, will recognise
characteristics such as hybridity or double-voiced discourse as illustrating
the strength and literary worth of a text, whilst ignoring the structural and
formal qualities that genuinely give the text its literary-critical
recognition.26At the end of his own book, Chibber lays down the gauntlet
for future scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences, taking more
particularised aim at the area of subaltern studies and what he sees as its
institutionalised self-serving political ends:

Postcolonial theory came to prominence during a period of massive

political defeats for the Left, all across the world. Indeed, I rather
 doubt there has ever been a time since the birth of the modern Left
that its forces were as enfeebled as they have been since the 1980s.
It is now a commonplace that the turn to irrationalism within the
self-styled “radical” intelligentsia was very closely linked to their
retreat into the academy. But it was not just that this brought about a
change in intellectual culture, narrowly conceived. Over the past
quarter century, enormous resources have been sunk into the
material infrastructure that sustains the theory. (Chibber, 295)

The current academic paradigm, on top of this infrastructural networking

within the area of the humanities, has helped pave the way for a wider
sociological doxa that has come to pervade much of the thought on the
“Left,” a doxa that brings within its purview identity politics and the
consequent weaponisation of otherwise attractively democratic fields such
as feminism, gender studies, queer theory, race studies and trans-humanism.
What has this to do with the current plot I am pursuing here? The
answer is, aside from the fact that just as totalising philosophical projects
such as those adumbrated by Russell and Husserl ended up drawn down
into the centripetal orbit of literary theory and criticism, so the new theories
have mushroomed in a centrifugal fashion out of the new universe of theory
and criticism that has pervaded the humanities. Some may wish to use the
label “postmodernism,” which I hope to have pointed out by his point, is a
short-cut to genuine discussion and debate about the current practice that
lines the walls of the humanities’ sacred halls.
The whole idea of the so-called “ethical turn” in areas such as
deconstruction, has been to challenge, (as I pointed out in the chapter on
poststructuralism), the “violent hierarchies” that are created through
theories of exclusivity, identity politics and individual rights-based political
and moral economies; that is, in contrast to the more open, inclusive, and
communitarian approach to philosophy and literary theory. The
performative acknowledgment of our epistemological and biological limits
engendered through the practice of literature, with all of its attendant
theories, or its perspectival form of phenomenological representation,
occludes the weaponisation of individual rights-based theories over and
against more communitarian theories. Furthermore, it reminds us of the
necessarily autological nature of the linguistic sign as it is represented in
literary discourse. This indeed, as I have also been arguing, is what gives
literature its special and continued predominance as a semiotic system of
symbolic representation.
The danger may be, as Ong flagged for us, a new technology of
language, or in Heidegger’s parlance, a new form of world-disclosure,
threatening the nature of the book as we currently conceive of its textual
boundaries. However, as Blanchot argued, the notion of structural unity that
was born with the early codification of linguistic signs, and the limits based
upon market conditions, (Foucault’s so-called “author function,”) and the
sense of delimitation ushered in by the notion of the Great Book, will in
some sense remain with us, even if the narrative is a comic book, a gaming
narrative, or some other manifestation of new technological
“advancement.”
The drive or will-to-power entailed in the concept of the great
logocentric book, Ur-language, or any other systematised form of notation,
(such as formal logic,) is what eventually drove philosophy into the cul-de-
sac that was the twentieth century. It returned, not empty handed, but with
the masque of literary criticism and theory firmly attached to its now wan
visage. If the humanities are not to return to a newer form of logocentrism,
a centrifugal force that feeds on identity and division, which, as Chibber I
think correctly argues, not only disguises, but is also in bed with the truer
nature of Liberal Humanist—Late Capitalist discourse—then they need to
acknowledge its limits. Moreover, they need to recognise the necessary
intervention of literary discourse and criticism as a driving force in the
current precis of the humanities.

Footnotes
1 Samuel Wheeler claimed that he once gave Derrida a copy of a clear and concise example of
analytic philosophy; the book Naming and Necessity by Kripke. Derrida said he couldn’t make sense
of the text, which may indicate a residual difference in reading methods and philosophical training in
the humanities. I personally find Heidegger less labourious to read than I do Donald Davidson or
W.V.O Quine. It would appear the sword of comprehension cuts both ways.

2 Strauss’ dichotomisation of Jerusalem and Athens was not the first as this was also flagged by the
second century African theologian Tertullian.
3 This is of the original form of ‘ethical egoism’ and so has its terminus in the work of another
conservative philosopher, Ayn Rand.

4 The notion of Christian values disguising their face in Enlightenment garb was also discerned by
Schopenhauer who had allegedly claimed that taking on the values of Kant’s ethical system of the
categorical imperative was like dancing at a masque all night with an Enlightenment notion and then
at the end of the night the dancer removes its mask and one sees that they’ve been dancing with a
Christian ethical system hidden in the deontological ethics (of duty) as argued in Kant’s theory of the
moral law.

5 Once again, under a philological microscope we see how a word has changed meaning due to
historicist happenstance. Sophistry has come to attain negative connotations since the historical
success of the Logos narrative. When people cite the sophistry of postmodern thought, they likely do
not realise how accurate they actually are—even though it’s in the original sense of the word.

6 Derrida has been criticized for his characterization of the “Logocentric” nature of the dominant
Western philosophical narratives. This is because it has been charged as an attack upon “logic” as it
has been characterised in this book. However, upon a close reading and in the context of the
historical facts delineated here, we can see that Derrida is critiquing the tradition of the Judeo-
Christian narrative as inherited from the Socratics and the claim that it’s an attack on the hegemony
of “Western” logic and reason is an utter straw man argument.

7 Without straying too far beyond the remit of the current study, one thinks of Edward Said’s 1979
classic postcolonial challenge to Western ethnographic hegemony, Orientalism.

8 In Thai secondary education, the humanities are very conservative, and often referred to or seen as
synonymous with “Thai Social Studies” and are very much an ideological tool through which to
communicate the ideational and hegemonic aspects of Thai culture. In Wittgensteinian terms the
forms of life communicated are often conservative; as in the West, the praxis of the Thai educational
system matches that in the Western system, as outlined by the neomarxist sociologists, Herbert
Bowles and Samuel Gintis, whereby a “hidden curriculum” is communicated through the structure of
the Thai school system, preparing Thai youth to be good citizens within the parameters of the wider
Thai culture.

9 Marx’ famous diagrammatic of the superstructure and the base was in actual fact popularised due
to the seismic growth of sociology during the second half of the twentieth century. Marxist theory is a
large contender for the crown in economics and philosophy but also more latterly in the field of the
social sciences, where this actual minor aspect of his political economy was outlined in a small
number of pages in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political of Economy (1859). It
was also explored as part of the main thesis in The German Ideology (1945), although in the main
that particular monograph became an Ad Hominem attack on Max Stirner and a survey of the main
figures involved in International Communism at that time.

10 Pramoj acknowledges the plagiaristic nature of the original serialised text, which was based upon
the series of short stories about the conflict between the pig-headed and tenacious priest Don Camillo
and the communist mayor Peppone in the Italian work of Giovanni Guareschi. The twentieth century
literary fashion in Thailand for plagiarising European texts, especially in the genre of Romance, is
also deftly coverd in Sasinne Khunkaew’s unpublished PhD thesis, Femininity and Masculinity in
Three Selected Twentieth-Century Thai Romance Fictions, 2015.

11 There is indeed more to be said of the specific Thai modality of hegemonic didacticism of this
text in comparison with that of two other books, A Young Man’s Fancy and The Circus of Life, which
this author intends to write about in this sociopolitical vein, for his next major project.

12 As well as being a polymath scholar, Kukrit Pramoj established the conservative Social Action
Party, the conservative newspaper Siam Rath in 1950 and was the Prime Minister between 1975 and
1976.

13 One of the arguments for theory over and against Knapp and Michaels’ “Against Theory”
argument is that this form of neo-pragmatism doesn’t take into account the Saussurean split between
langue (as an independent linguistic whole) and parole (as individual speech) and assumes langue
and parole are one and meaning is simply the author’s intention. The ethos of theory is of course that
langue is constantly at odds with individual utterance and as such constantly interfering with the idea
of meaning being as simple as the author’s intention. In Pramoj’ text the overall langue produces
meaning beyond any simple conservative intention that may have been intended by the author.

14 I discuss both Coleridge and Goethe’s linguistic analysis of symbol and allegory in Chapter Two
of my own Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition (2015), providing a poststructuralist bent to the
kernel of my thesis.

15 See Peter Cheyne’s excellent study; Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy, OUP, 2020.

16 One can also see a lose connection here with the rise of the academic discipline The History of
the Book, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. This fascinating subject area, which I
studied as part of my MA, traces the social, economic, aesthetic, historical and anthropological
factors that led to the various paradigms of book production, construction and reception. Notable
scholars in this field are William Ivin Jr. (1953), Martin and Febvre (1958), McLuhan (1962),
Eisenstein (1979) John’s (1998), Sherman (2008) and Blair (2010). It would seem with the decline in
readership, the change in reading interfaces and book reception in the technological age this subject
is now as timely as ever.

17 Ong also brilliantly draws attention to the possibility of reading philosophy comparatively, hence
a locus for “comparative philosophy” as well as comparative literature. How for example does the
relationship between textuality and orality reflect upon our understanding and reading of medieval
philosophy as opposed to Greek philosophy and in turn of course modern post-Cartesian philosophy
in relationship to its own relation to textuality and its distance from the oral tradition? While strictly
speaking his characterisation of Hegel’s work as phenomenological is incorrect (it’s a form of
Absolute Idealism), the self-consciousness and concurrently divided nature of his work, especially
his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is accurate. The notion that this is purely due to its self-conscious
relationship to the oral tradition as a textual work itself is I’m sure in part correct.

18 The Bildungsroman, the Roman a Clef, etc.

19 Moreover, if the thrust of my historicist argument is correct, then the technologising of the word
has also had a paradoxical effect in that it has culminated in a less-literate populous. This means the
logocentric (in both meanings as the privileging of “the Word” and as the tradition of ontological
narrative inherited from Socrates), has led to both a “postmodern condition” where metanarratives
such as Christianity have left town, or need ‘get out of jail free’ cards; or where the presence of ‘the
Word’ is less felt and has been superseded by less literacy, the return of a scribal/tablet relationship
with culture and in Peirce’s terminology, the rise of the icon as the dominant semiotic signal. So,
Ong’s technological-historicist analysis of orality, technology and the word seems more prescient
now than ever.

20 Such changing codifications and openings up in the British English of the burgeoning Second
Empire, caught between the twin peaks of Protestantism and classical linguistic influences were no
doubt in part the reasons for ships such as The Mayflower with its puritan baggage and the need for a
“good old lad” such as Noah Webster to reinvigorate into parlance, such stock phrases as “the fall”
instead of the lovely new “autumn.”

21 So, one here remembers that speech and language are no doubt being used in the Saussurean
sense. The notion of parole mastering langue is key to the idea in Russsell, Frege, Husserl and even
(to a point) the latter Heidegger after the Kehre. The notion of a pure, unitary language providing
certainty—for Russell at least—in place of his older search for certainty through the British take on
the absolute Idealism of Hegel. Of course, Russell would no doubt dispute the Saussurean claim.
22 I am here using the term “acknowledgment” more specifically in Cavell’s sense in that
knowledge acquisition, in a similar vein to that of Richard Rorty, in the sense that is not necessarily a
discovery of a truth that is in some way “out there” but an acknowledgment of something previously
not recognized by a human subject and thus literalized within a pre-existing discourse. This is also a
further expansion of recognition beyond that of Anerkennung as posited by Hegel. For the key
passage of Hegel’s movement into “Spirit” and eventually ethical substance, Sittlichkeit, see his
Phenomenology (110–12). Moreover, Cavell’s development of “acknowledgment” was outlined in
the essay “Knowing and Acknowledging” (Cavell Reader 46–71). It is in this sense of
acknowledgment that poets such as Hölderlin and Wordsworth add to existing experience of the
natural world, not in the sense of acknowledgment between two agents (as with Hegel). For a further
discussion of this in relation to romantic poetics, see my own “Acknowledgment and Avoidance in
Coleridge and Hölderlin.” In The European Romantic Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, 225–239, https://​doi.​
org/​10.​1080/​10509585.​2015.​1004548 (2015).

23 Hannah Arendt springs to mine here and the concept of “dehumanization” of whole ethnic
groups. The worst case avoidance would be the callous and instrumentally rationalised treatment of
the Jews, meted out by the Nazis during the Second World War.

24 See Cavell’s discussion of Lear and his relationship with Cordelia in “Prologue: The Avoidance
of Love (The Abdication Scene)” in The Cavell Reader. London: Blackwell, 1996. pp. 22–30.

25 One thinks of Fredric Jameson’s forceful point, which is made at the outset of his classic study
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. New York: Cornell University
Press, 1981. Jameson wades right in, but, given the climate of literary studies at the time, and the
controversy within the academy, this really was the only way to go about this task. The opening
paragraph reads as follows: “This book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary
texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optional
luxury to other interpretive methods current today—the psychoanalytic or the myth-critical, the
stylistic, the ethical, the structural—but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and all
interpretation”. Talk about coming out with all your Left-hand guns blazing! Upon the argument
presented in my own study, the stage Jameson talked of has very much passed, and his wish for the
political as the horizon came very much true. However, this polemic has now itself become dated and
the time has come to perhaps reorder the priority of the political, as it now risks occluding genuine
critical engagement.

26 The fact also mentioned earlier about critical reappraisals (or “re-readings”) of ‘the canon’ or the
constant rejection of formerly recognised texts, from Shakespeare to Dickens, to Kant and Hegel as
being no longer suitable or at least in need of editorial bowdlerisation, is something that has formed
what has become both the political and existential crisis in academia; particularly in the area of the
humanities. This warrants further examination and sustained assessment, which is outside the
purview of the current text.
OceanofPDF.com
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_9

9. In Through the Outdoor

Wayne Deakin1
(1) Department of English, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand

The sense of the role of literary discourse and criticism as moral philosophy
is what ultimately takes us back to the period of German Romanticism, with
its self-conscious fragments, self-conscious irony and its celebration of
literature and philosophy as being interdependent in their philosophical
roles and cultural value. I return via the long road home, to the
Philosophical Romanticism alluded to at the beginning of this book. In fact,
the sense of ironic limit to the self-conscious work also pervades the book
I’m writing here, as I try to find closure to my argument, a sort of
denouement: a sense of closing off of the book as a unitary whole.
Blanchot’s sense of the book as limit, as a specter that haunts both
exclusively the literary, and the literary-critical landscape, whilst other
aspects are constantly bubbling underneath the surface, trying to force
themselves through the literary and aesthetic idiolect.
The argument presented here has shown both the inherent strengths of
the critical tradition, whilst also flagging implicit weaknesses in the
direction of the discipline after the Second World War, and more
specifically after the so-called ‘ethical turn’ in poststructuralism. Criticism
became a formalistic discipline with scientific aspirations in tandem with
the concomitant analytical bent within the philosophical tradition, after the
work and aspirations of both Husserl and Russell. However, after the dead
end within which Russell, Frege, Husserl, and others, found themselves
after the analytical impasse and the structuralist crystallisation into
poststructuralism, these subjects merged under the aegis of literary criticism
—at least in terms of their pretensions at moral and ethical verisimilitude.
 The fact that the aesthetic idiolect of literature acknowledges its limit as
descriptive discourse, or its ontological limits as a correspondence theory of
reality, makes it an autological discourse. It “does what is says on the tin”,
so to speak, or it acknowledges its limit with regards its fictional
representation of reality. This is something that the analytical and objective
discourses that made their appearance at the turn of the century signally
failed to do, making them, in my parlance, heterological discourses.
Furthermore, it allows for distance, irony, authorial intervention, and
questions about the reliability of the narrator. Or, in Friedrich Schlegel’s
romantic formulation: wit, parabasis, and the wonderful phrase,
transcendental buffoonery.1 This self-consciously ironic stance is not
obviously available to discourses that adhere to a rarified notion of logical
form. Of course, there are subsequent political implications that take root in
this rich, yet subversive soil, composted of cultural bricolage and inevitable
precautionary, yet consequently didactic, seedlings.
One of the political implications of this newly discovered and
particularly modern sense of the perspicuous and accurate nature of literary
criticism and theory has been the more recent politicisation and in one sense
unfortunate weaponisation of identity, leading in some cases to critical
amnesia when it comes to the reception and recognition of literary texts as
canonical.2 A work such as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, with its
racial tropes, or The Taming of the Shrew, with its fairly obvious sexist
tropes, faces the danger of further cultural bowlderisation. Whereas, a poem
that ticks the correct (tropical) boxes, such as an emphasis upon hybridity, a
raised awareness of double-voiced discourse, or more generally sensitive
characterisation, would be critically celebrated in terms of its political
pretensions, rather than in terms of the more traditional formalist, rhetorical
and acoustic devices.3 This begs the question as to whether one is engaging
in literary criticism or sociological research into attitudes and popularised
rhetorical figures at various points in textual history. Is someone engaging
in historical exegesis or genuinely going back to the Greek kritikos at which
we started this journey into formal, literary and cultural taste? After all, is
not literary criticism at the very least, or in part, a form of rhetorical
criticism?
The other danger in this politically correct game of the Monopoly of
Taste, is whether, in falling over oneself to tick all of the correct boxes on
your task sheet, you’ve actually become so neutral as to have lost your own
identity. No one wants to become Switzerland at a drinks party. After all,
we are all formed from cultural creeds and traditions, some no doubt more
un-savoury than others. But, if we only claim to adhere to what is always
expected as the best form, it really wouldn’t take someone with a higher
qualification in sociometrics to find the best place to seat us at a wedding
ceremony: somewhere at the back, alone, where even if we couldn’t upset
anyone, we certainly couldn’t bore anyone to tears.
The political dangers of the said whitewashing of criticism and theory
have been touched upon within the body of the book but have not been my
primary focus. However, they are certainly something to consider when
thinking about the wider institutional ramifications of this type of
rationalisation of the academy. As I’ve also pointed out, the dangers of
taking what one might term “automated subject positions” and the further
danger of critics being unable to freely, and without perceived intellectual
prejudice, discuss many issues that have slowly become off-limits
altogether, without causing “trauma,” is of deep concern. Consequently, the
newly appointed ministers of philology and nomenclature may need to be
on their guard against an eventual intellectual rebound, if they continue to
police not only the academy and the humanities, but also the wider society
at large in such a fashion as to revise what starts off as literary history, and
soon becomes a disfigurement of history in general. The critical sphere
should be not only critical about the rhetorical quality of whatever gets
recognised as literature, but also whatever gets recognised as having
intrinsic value in the wider socio-cultural sphere.
Deconstruction was initiated as a way of auditing ideological
boundaries and preferences that naturally occur in texts that deconstruct
themselves and do indeed present historical doxas at certain points in
history. However, the conscious replacement of one cultural tower of Babel
with another, using the very self-conscious critical tools of
poststructuralism, is ironic beyond words (that can self-deconstruct).
Replacing one violent hierarchy with another is not what this philosophical
methodology was aiming at, raising our awareness of the linguistic nature
of our practices and the relationship between our mind, phenomena and
speech certainly was what this phenomenological theory was about. This
philosophical hybrid of Saussurean linguistics and Heideggerean
phenomenology was posited as a descriptive precis, but not as a prescriptive
one.
 The final issue which I hope to have gone some way to disentangling in
this book is that of the other dreaded specter that haunts theory, criticism
and the humanities in general: postmodernism. In this text I hope to have
shown that a postmodern ‘condition’ is not something that is unique to the
contemporary intellectual landscape. The rupture that can be at least traced
back to Greek civilization, between the logocentric and the sophistic,
through the Enlightenment to Hegel’s absolute monism and Kant’s dualism,
and now the postmodern versus other forms of culturally absolute
epistemology, has always in some way haunted the humanities and perhaps
always will. These indeed build up the essence of inquiry, because without
some subterranean forces haunting or challenging our traditions, we find
ourselves without critical enquiry and without challenges to any form of
existential cultural, epistemic, or ontological hegemony.
If Marx didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent him. The reason why
Marx and Engels themselves spent precious little time pontificating about
aesthetics, art history and hegemony was because, (judging by the allusions
and references Marx makes in Capital Volume One to works of cultural
significance), they seemed to have recognised the freedom and distance
engendered by great works of art and were inculcating a positively Hegelian
notion of aesthetics, at least in their recognition of the value, significance,
and the special place of aesthetics in the overall structure of political
economy.4 Finally, as indicated itself in the chapter on postmodernism, the
notion that Marxists—at least in the classical sense of the term, in which
someone like Jordan Peterson parses the phrase—are in any way
postmodernists, with a concurrent disavowal of meta-narratives, is self-
evidently deeply ironic!
However, one can see the deep water within which one may find oneself
if they embark too deeply upon the political exigencies and possible
ramifications of criticism and theory. This is not to say the political should
be divorced from literary theory and criticism, as this notion is itself absurd.
However, one should take care in then allowing the political, as an
epiphenomenon or by-product of criticism and theory, to become the over-
determining factor in divining theory and in then legislating which theory is
good and bad. Neither should we allow it to arbitrate which texts should be
read or not read, and whether there should be a canon in the first place. We
forget our place as critics if our criticism becomes determined from without
by pre-existing political pathologies that take us away from the privileged
and autological nature of literary language, philosophical theory, and
criticism itself. The Christian-hegemonic condition of scholasticism itself
should bear witness to the inherent dangers of these pathologies.

I can only close this sense of the “book” by affirming that if I’ve upset
anyone of offended their moral or intellectual sensibilities at all, then my
job here—for better or for worse—is done. Now we can all get on with the
job of reinventing, interrogating, triangulating, or rediscovering our
sensibilities though the critical enjoyment and assessment of novels, poems
and plays, in true philosophically romantic fashion…

Footnotes
1 Schlegel’s concept of the wit, distance irony encapsulated in transcendental buffoonery was taken
from Italian renaissance commedia dell’arte plays and the buffoon character—something also taken
up by Shakespeare in his own final, and very self-conscious play, The Tempest in 1611.

2 Christopher Hitchens in his at times super-egotistical autobiography, (I suppose it comes with the
terrain) dates the decline of the Left and the swerve towards identity politics to the end of the
swingingly ubiquitous 1960s. “As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began
to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the
words “The personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one
does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very
bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal
subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to
ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words:
“Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the
old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and
work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or
pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the
moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was
the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.” Hitchens’ divorce from the Left was
played out in great theatrical fashion through the ‘spat’ he had years later with his old comrade; non-
other than our own champion of the Left: Terry Eagleton. I have to say, a debate between Eagleton
and Hitchens, given their history would have been well worth the ticket price. Although their later
exchange was more concerned with Hitchens’ much publicised and slightly tedious foray into
atheism. One has to respect both of these giants of this period for their verve and gusto when it came
to discussion and debate. Hitch 22: A Memoir. New York: Hatchette, 2010. p. 121.

3 A number of years ago at a conference, I raised this issue when it seemed that many of the texts
under discussion were being given critical recognition by virtue of their adherence to aesthetic
devices such as hybridity and double voiced discourse, as posited by Homi K. Bhabha, rather than for
their own merit it terms of the more formalist structures inherent in the works themselves. Bhabha
himself, as I understand his (post Edward Said) postcolonial theory, justifiably celebrates these
aspects of the wider multicultural milieu, but doesn’t suggest a critical checklist in which these
potential aspects of a text are checked off in order to measure the critical worth of a particular text.
Suffice to say, in the main it appeared that my interjection was perceived at best as simply dated and
at worst, politically incorrect.

4 Aside from the allusive references to art works in Capital and the reference to classical works of
art at the start of The Grundrisse, which is Hegelian in its bent, Marx certainly exhibits precious little
“Marxist” theorising about literature, or indeed about art in general.

OceanofPDF.com
Bibliography
Abrams, M.H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford:
OUP, 1953)

Achebe, Chinua, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” Massachusetts
Review, Vol. 18. 1977

Augustine, St., Confessions, Trans. R.S. Pine- Coffin, (London: Penguin, 1961)

Austin, J.L., Philosophical Papers (Oxford, OUP, 1961)

Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: OUP, 1962)

Bhabha, Homi, K., The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)

Roland Barthes, “Reflexions sur un manuel,” in L’Enseignement de la littera Serge Doubrovsky and
Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: 1971)

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, Trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993)

Barthes, Roland, A Roland Barthes Reader (London: Vintage, 1993)

Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)

Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, Trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999)

Blanchot, Maurice, The Infinite Conversation, Trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: The University of
Minnesota Press, 1993)

Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999)

Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: OUP, 1997)

Botan, Letters from Thailand, Trans. Sue F. Kepner (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2001)

Bowie, Andrew, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd ed. (Manchetser,
Mancherster University Press, 2003)

Brooks, Cleanth, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt &
Brace, 1947)

Cavell, Stanley, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: CUP, 1969)

Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: OUP,
1979)

Cavell, Stanley, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: CUP,
1994)

Cavell Stanley, The Cavell Reader, Ed. Stephen Mulhall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)
Cheyne, Peter, Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2020)

Chibber, Vivek, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013)

Coleridge, S.T., The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, eds. J.
Engell & W. Jackson, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983)

Coleridge, S.T., The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Works Volume I and II,
Poems (Variorum Text), ed. J.C.C. Mays (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001)

Connor, Steven, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (London,

Blackwell, 1989)

Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1999)

Cox, Jeffrey, N., William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after
Waterloo (Cambridge, CUP, 2021)

Damrosch, David, What is World Literature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003)

Davidson, Donald, The Essential Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Davies, Stephen, The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (Oxford: OUP, 2012)

Deakin, Wayne, Hegel and the English Tradition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Deakin, Wayne, Acknowledgment and Avoidance in Coleridge and Hölderlin: European Romantic
Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, April, 2015 (London: Routledge, 2015)

Deakin, Wayne, “Thailand, Occidentalism and Cultural Commodity Fetishism” Paper delivered at the
1st International Culture, Language and Literature Conference (ICLLS), Chonburi: Thailand, 2013)

De Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust
(New York: Yale University Press, 1979)

De Man, Paul, Blindness & Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983)

Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass (New York, Routledge, 1978)

Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982)

Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International Trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006)

De Vries, W.A., & Triplett, T., Knowledge Mind and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellar’s “Empiricism
and the Philosophy of Mind,” including the complete text of Sellars’s Essay (Cambridge: Hackett,
2000)

Dreyfuss, Hubert, What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence; Revised Edition
(New York: Harper-Collins, 1978)
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)

Eagleton, Terry, After Theory (London, Penguin, 2003)

Eliot, T.S., Collected Poems: 1909-1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974)

Felski, Rita, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Fredrickson, Terry, Bangkok Post “Anger Over Nazi Show” (Bangkok: Bangkok Post, 28th
September, 2011; https://​www.​bangkokpost.​com/​learning/​advanced/​258682/​anger-over-nazi-show)

Frege, Gottlob, Foundations of Modern Arithmetic: A Logical-Mathematical Investigation into the

Concept of Number, Trans. Dale Jaquette (New York: Routledge, 2007)

Fry, Paul, Introduction to Theory of Literature with Paul H. Fry. (ENGL 300): Yale Online Courses.
https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​4YY4CTSQ8nY

Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000)

Gadamer, H.G., Truth and Method, Trans. Weinsheimer & Marshall (London: Continuum, 2006)

Gerard, Alexander, An Essay on Genius (London: Sagwan Press, 2015)

Gibson, John, “On the Ethical Character of Literature,” in Espen Hammer (ed.), Kafka’s The Trial:
Philosophical Perspectives. (Oxfrord: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths Vol I & II (London: The Folio Society, 2000)

Harrison, Tony, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1987)

Hartman, Geoffrey, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven: New Haven University Press,
1964)

Hegel, G.W.F., Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art: Volume 1, Trans. T.M.Knox (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975)

Hegel, G.W.F., Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art: Volume 2, Trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975)

Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxfrod University Press,
1977)

Hegel, G.W.F., The Science of Logic, Trans. George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: CUP, 2010)

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, Trans, Robinson & Macquarrie (London: Blackwell, 1962)

Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row,
1975)

Heidegger, Martin, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance”, Trans. McNeill and Ireland (Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 2018)
Hemmingway, Earnest, Men Without Women (New York: Scribner, 1997)

Hitchens, Peter, Hitch 22: A Memoir (New York: Hachette, 2011)

Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, Tans. Dorian Cairns

(London: Springer, 2012)

Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1982)

John, Eileen, “Dickinson and Pivoting Thought”, in The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Philosophical
Perspectives, E. Camp, ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2021)

Joyce, James, Dubliners (London: Penguin, 2000)

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. Marcus Weigelt (London: Penguin, 2007)

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, Trans. J.C. Meredith (Oxford: OUP, 2008)

Sasinee, Khunkaew, Femininity and Masculinity in Three Selected Twentieth-Century Thai Romance
Fictions (School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University: unpublished PhD
Thesis, June, 2015)

Knapp, Steven & Michaels, Walter B., “Against Theory” Critical Inquiry, (Vol. 8, No. 4: Summer,
1982, pp. 723–742)

Kompridis, Nikolas, ed., Philosophical Romanticism (London: Routledge, 2007)

Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, Trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989)

Lamarque, Peter, The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009)

Lamarque, Peter, The Uselessness of Art: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Literature (Eastbourne:
Sussex Academic Press, 2020)

Leavis, F.R., The Great Tradition (London: Penguin, 1962)

Lodge, David, ed., Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader (New York: Longman, 1972)

Lodge, David, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory (New York: Longman, 1991)

Lyotard, J.F., The Postmodern Condition:A Report on Knowledge, Trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian
Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)

Martinich, A.P., & Sousa, David, Ed., Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)

Marx, Karl, Grundrisse, Trans. Martin Nikolaus (London: Penguin, 1993)

Marx, Karl, The German Ideology, (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998)

Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume I, Trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990)
McGann, Jerome J., The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1983)

Mellor, Ann, K., English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980)

Minnis, A.J., Scott, A.B., & Wallace, D., (eds)., Introduction to Medieval Literary Theory and
Criticism c.1100- c 1375: The Commentary Tradition (Oxford: OUP, 1988)

Moss, Gregory, S., Hegel’s Foundation Free Metaphysics: The Logic of Singularity (New York:
Routledge, 2020)

Murray, Penelope & Dorsch, (eds)., Classical Literary Criticism, (London: Penguin, 2000)

Olsen, Stein Haugom, The Structure of Literary Understanding (Cambridge: CUP, 2008)

Olsen, Stein Haugom, The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge CUP, 2008)

Olsen, Stein Haugom & Lamarque, Peter, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective
(Oxford: OUP, 1996)

Ong, Walter, J., S.J., The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious
History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967)

Ong, Walter, J., S.J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen,
1982)

Peterson, Jordan B., Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York: Routledge, 1999)

Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009)

Pound, Ezra, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1986)

Parmoj, Kukrit, Red Bamboo (Bangkok: Progress Publishing Co, 1961)

Quine, W.V.O., Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine (New York:
Harvard University Press, 2004)

Rama, King, VI., A Young Man’s Fancy, Trans. Varee Tanthulakorn (Bangkok: S.U.P., 2001)

Rapheephat, Arkartdamkeung, The Circus of Life, Trans. Phongdelt Jiangphattanarkit (Bangkok:

TMC, 1995)

Richards, I.A., Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (New York: Harcourt & Brace,
1929)

Richards, I.A., The Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 2001)

Ricouer, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Trans. Denis Savage (New Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 2008)

Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (New York: CUP, 1989)
Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2009)

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, Emile: Or on Education (London: Moncreiffe Classics, 2022)

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, Reveries of the Solitary Walker (London: Penguin, 2004)

Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy: and its connection with Political and Social
Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961)

Russell, Bertrand, The Principles of Mathematics (New York: Norton, 1996)

Said, Edward, Orientalism (New Delhi: Penguin, 2001)

Scruton, Roger, Roger Scruton, “Why I became a Conservative”, The New Criterion, February, 2003.
https://​newcriterion.​com/​issues/​2003/​2/​why-i-became-a-conservative

Scruton, Roger, Book Review: The Adventure of French Philosophy “A nothing would do as well”.
(London: The Times Literary Supplement, August 31st, 2012)

Schlegel, F.W., Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, Trans. P. Firchow, (Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1971)

Searle, J., ‘The Chinese Room’, in R.A. Wilson and F. Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the
Cognitive Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)

Searle, J., Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (Cambridge: CUP, 2008)

Shaftesbury, The Third Earl of, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinion, Times, Ed. Lawrence E.
Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Smith, Barry, “Open Letter on J. Derrida” in The London Times (London: Saturday, May 9, 1992)

Strauss, Lévi Claude, The Raw and the Cooked, Trans. John & Doreen Weightman (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1983)

Sutherland, Keston, Poetical Works 1999-2015 (London: Enitharmon Press, 2015)

Wheeler, Samuel, “The Extension of Deconstruction” The Monist (Volume 69, Number 1, January
1986, pp. 3–21)

Wu, Ducan, ed., Romanticism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)

Tzachi, Zamir, ed., Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2018)

Index1
A
Abrams, M.H.
Academic scepticism
The Academy
Achebe, Chinua
Acknowledgment
Acknowledgment and Avoidance in Coleridge and Hölderlin
Addison, Joseph
A Defense of Poetry
Adorno, Theodor
The Adventure of French Philosophy “A nothing would do as well.”.
Aeschylus
Aesthetic heterocosm
Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietszche (n)
Against Theory
The Age of Sensibility
Akedah and Apocalypse
Alastor
Ali G
Alighieri, Dante
Allegorical
Allegories of Reading
Althuser, L.
Ambrose
Among Schoolchildren
Amores
Anagogical
Analytical
Analytic philosophy
The Anatomy of Criticism
Ancient Literary Criticism
The Anecdote of the Jar
Anerkennung (mutual recognition)
An Essay on Criticism
Anglo-American
Anglo-Thai
The Anxiety of Influence
Apeiron
Appointment in Samarra
Aquinas, Thomas
Araby
Arator
Archie Bunker
Arendt, Hannah
Aristotle
Arnold, Matthew
Ars Poetica
Art as Technique
Artes dictaminis
Artes poeticae
Artes praedicandi
Art of Rhetoric
Ascribed identity
Assange, Julian
The Athenaeum
Athenaeum Fragments
Augustine, Saint
The aura (Benjamin)
Austin, A.J.
Austin, J.L.
Autodidactics
Autological
Autological/autologically
Autological discourse (literature)
Autologically
Autology
Automated subject positions
Avant-garde
Avoidance
The Awakening
Ayer, A.J.
B
Bacon, Francis
Badiou, Alain
Bangkok
The Barber Paradox
The Bards
Barthes, Roland
Basil Ransom
Baudrillard, Jean
BBC News
Beardsley, Monroe
Bede
Behavioural pragmatism
Being ready-to-hand/being-at-hand
Benjamin, Walter
Beowulf (n)
Bhabbha, Homi K.
The Bible
Biden, Joe
Biographia Literaria
Bladerunner
Blanchot, Maurice
Blindness and Insight
Bloom, Harold
Bodkin, Maude
Boethius
Böhme, Jakob
Booth, Wayne
Botan
Bouveresse, Jacques
Bowie, Andrew
Brasseye
Break of Day, The
Brecht, Berthold
Brechtian
Bridging laws (BL)
British Philosophy
Brontë, Emily
Brooks, Cleanth
Burke, Edmund
Burnett, Alistair
Burroughs, William
Butler, Judith
Byron, Lord
C
Cabaret Voltaire
Calvino, Italo
Cambridge University
The Cantos
Capital Volume One
Carlyle, Thomas
Carnap, R.
Cartesian dualism
Cartesian Meditations
Cassiodorus
The Castle of Otranto
Category error (philosophical)
Catharsis
Cavell, Stanley
The Cavell Reader
Celine, L.F.
Centrifugal
Centripetal
Cheyne, Peter
Chiang Mai
Chiang Mai University (CMU)
Chibber, Vivek
Child, Lee
Chinese Room
Chinese Room argument
Chopin, Kate
Chotiudomphan, Suradech
Christian dogma
Christianity
Christian mysticism
Cicero
The Circus of Life
The City of God
The Claim of Reason
Classical Literary Criticism (n)
Cobbett, William
Coleridge, S.T.
Coleridgean clerisy
Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy
Collete
Collins, Wilkie
Commedia dell’arte
Commedia d’ellel arte plays
Commodified culture
Commodity fetish
Commodity fetishism
Communism
Communitarian (hope)
Communitarian literary theory
The Confessions
Connor, Stephen
Connotation
Conrad, Joseph
Conrad, of Hirsau
Constative utterances
Constellation philosophy
Contemplative reason
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
Copernicus
Cordelia
Cosmogonists
The Course in General Linguistics
Covid 19 ‘metanarrative,’
Cox, Jeffrey, N.
Crippled epistemology
Critical Race studies
Critical Theory
Critique, The Limits of
The Crying of Lot 49
Cubism
Culler, Jonathan
Cultural bowlderisation
Cultural hegemony
‘Cultural’ Marxism
Cultural studies
Cultural tower of babel
The “culture wars,”
Cuthbert, Jonathan (n)
D
Dadaism
Damrosch, David
Dark Ages, The
Dasein (Being-already-there)
Das Geisteswissenschaften
Das Naturwissenschaft
Davidson, Donald
Davies, Stephen
The Day Today
De Arte Metrica
De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy)
De Jounvenal, Bertrand
de Man, Paul
De natura rerum
de Saussure, Ferdinand
The Death of the Author
Deconstruction
The Deconstructive Angel
Defamiliarisation/defamiliarization
Deleuze, G.
The Demiurge
Demystification
Derrida, Jacques
Descartes, Rene
Dewey, John
Diachronic
Dialectics
Dick, Phillip K.
Dickens, Charles
Dickensian Parole
Difference
Dionysus
Discourse
Dissociation of sensibility
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Doctor Who
Donne, John
Double-voiced discourse
Dreyfuss, Hubert
Dryden, John
Dualism
Dubliners
Duchamp, Marcel
E
Eagleton, Terry
Eastenders
Eco, Umberto
Ecocriticism
Ecrivain
Educational pragmatism
Edwards, Hugh
EFL literature classrooms
The egotistical sublime
Eidetic essences
Elenchus
Eliot, George
Eliot, T.S.
Elizabethan
Elizabethan pentameter
Emile: or on Education
Emin, Tracey
Empson (n)
Engels
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
English Romantic Irony
The Enlightenment
Epistemological behaviorism
Epoche (bracket)
Eraserhead
Essentialist
Ethical (limits)
Ethical turn (in deconstruction)
Etymologiae
Eudaimonia
Euripides
The Excursion
F
Facebook
Fake narratives
Fake news
The fancy
Fascism
Fauvism
Felski, Rita
Femininity and Masculinity in Three Selected Twentieth-Century Thai
Romance Fictions
Feminism
Feminist reading
Fetishisation
Fidelio magazine
Film studies
Finnegan’s Wake
Fish, Stanley
5 Readers Reading
The Flea
The floating signifier
Flourishing
Formalism
Formalist self-consciousness
Formal logic
The forms
Fortitudo
Foucault, Michel
Four Reigns
Fowles, John
The fragment
Frank, Manfred
Frankenstein
The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory
Frege, G.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (movie)
Freud, Sigmund
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation
Freudian/psychoanalytic reading
The Frogs
Frühromantik
Frühromantiker
Fry, Paul
Fry, Stephen
Frye, Northrop
Futurism
G
Gadamer, H.G.
Galileo
Gattungsweisen, (species being)
Geist
Geisteswissenschaften (modern humanities)
Gender studies
Generositas
Geoffrey of Vinsauf
Gerard, Alexander
The German Ideology
German Romanticism
Gestalten (shapes of consciousness)
Gestell
Geworfenheit (thrownness)
Gibson, John
Gillray, James
Ginsberg, Allen
Glyph
Goethe, J. V.
The Golden Bough
The golden mean
Gorgias of Leontini
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Gothicism
The Grapes of Wrath
Graves, Robert
Greece
The Greek Chorus
The Greek Myths
Greeks, the
Greek Tragedy
Greilling, K., (Greilling’s paradox)
Greimas, A.J.
Greimas, H.
Grey
Grice, P.
Grundrisse
Guareschi, Giovanni
Guha, Ranajit
Gulliver’s Travels
Gyorgy, Lukács
H
Habermas, Jürgen
Hall, Stuart
Hamlet
Harrison, Tony
Hartman, Geoffrey
Hazlitt, William
HD, (Hilda Doolittle)
Heart of Darkness
Hegel, GWF
Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition
Hegel, G.W.F.
Hegelian continental tradition
Hegelian notion of aesthetics
Heidegger, Martin
Heideggerean phenomenology
Hemmingway, Earnest
Heraclitus
Hermeneutical Phenomenology
Hermeneutic circle
Hermeneutics
The hermeneutics of suspicion
Hermeneutics of worldhood
Heroides
Hesiod
Heterological discourses
The hidden hand
Higher Criticism
High modernism
High Modernists
Hilda Doolittle (HD)
Hills Like White Elephants
Hirsch, E.D.
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
The History of Western Philosophy
Hitchens, Christopher
Hitch 22
Hitler, Adolph
Hobbes, Thomas
Hogg, James
Hölderlin (poetology)
Hölderlin, F.W.
Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,”
Hölderlin’s tonal theory of poetry
Holland, Norman
Holy Scripture
Homer
Homology
Horace
Horizontal (speech) conventions
Horkheimer, Max
Hortus conclusus
Hot White Andy
Houellebecq, Michel
Huckleberry Finn
Hulme, T.E.
The humanities
Hunt, Leigh
Hupsos
Husserl, Edmund
Huxley, Aldous
Hybridity
Hybrid visage
Hybrid (works of literature)
I
The Iceberg method
The "idea,”
The Idea idea
Idealism
Identarian politics
The Ideology of Modernism
The Iliad
Imperatives
Implied reader/actual reader
Infelicitous (utterances)
The Infinite Conversation
Inglorious Basterds
Intensional and extensional vocabularies
Intentional/affective fallacy
Intentionalist theory
Intentionality
The Interpretation of Dreams of condensation and displacement
The interpretive community
Intertextuality
The intuitive cogito
Inventor’s Paralogy
The Ion
Irigaray, Luce
Ironism
Irons, Jeremy
Iser, Wolfgang
Isidore of Seville
Italian Journey
Iterability
Ivanhoe
J
Jakobson, Roman
Jakobsonian
James, Henry
James, William
Jameson, Frederic
Jauss, H.R.
Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections
John Milton
John, Eileen
Jouissance
Joyce, James
Judeo-Christian narrative
Jung, C.G.
K
Kafka, Franz
Kant, Immanuel
Kantian
Keats, John
Kehre
Kehre (turn)
King Lear
Kissinger, Henry
Klerisei
Knapp, Stephen
Knights
The knowledge of unknowing
Kompridis, Nikolas
Kripke, Saul
Kristeva, Julia
Kritikos
Kubla Khan
Kuhn, Thomas
L
Lacan, Jacques
Lamarque, Peter
Language as ‘the House of Being,’
Language games
Language Institutes
Langue
Laos PDR
Lasuka, Pasoot
Late Capitalism
Late capitalist
Lawrence, D.H.
The Laws
Leavis, F.R.
Leavisite criticism
Lectures on Fine Art in two volumes
Leech, G.N.
Le Soir
Letters from Thailand
Letting oneself be determined
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
Liberal Humanism
Liberalist political economy
Liberal-New Left
The Liberal Praxis
Liminal
Liminal elements
Limited Inc. a b c
Linguistic psychologism
Linguistics and Poetics
Linguistic scepticism
Linguistic turn
Literal meaning
Literary criticism
Literary Criticism and Theory
Literary Theory: An Introduction
Little Dorrit
Local colour
Lodge, David
Logic, rhetoric and grammar
Logical form
Logical positivism
Logical realism
Logocentric
Logoi
Logos
Longinus
The Lord of the Rings
Lotman, Yory
Lotte in Weimar
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Lucinde
Lukács, György
Luther Pierce, William
Luther, Martin
Lutheran eschatology
The Lyceum
Lyceum Fragments
Lyle, Thomas
Lyotard, J.F.
Lyotard, Jean Francois
The Lyrical Ballads
M
Magnitude
Mahayana Buddhism
Mallarme, Stephane
Manfred
Mann, Thomas
Mao, Tse Tung
Maoism
Maps of Meaning
Marcuse, Herbert
The Marshall Plan
Marvell, Andrew
Marx, Karl
Marxism
Marxist
Marxist analytical framework
Marxist approaches
Materialism
Maugham, W. Somerset
Maurus, Rabanus
Mayweather, Floyd
McCartney, Paul
McGann, Jerome
McLuhan’s “Guttenberg Galaxy,”
Mechanical
Medieval Criticism
Meditations Hégéliennes
Meditations of a Solitary Walker
Mein Kampf
Mellor, A.K.
The Merchant of Venice
Metanarratives
The metaphoric and metonymic poles
Metaphysical conceit
The Metaphysical Poets
Metaphysics of presence
Metonymy
Michaels, W.B.
Middle Ages, the
Miller, J. Hillis
Mimesis
Mise en scene
Modern Criticism and Theory
Modernism
Modern semantics
Modern Theory and Criticism
Modern Washington
Molly Bloom’s interior monologue
Monism
The Monist
The Monk
‘Monk Lewis’ Matthew
Moore, G.E.
Moral formalism
Moss, Gregory
Mrs Dalloway
Murray, Penelope
The Muses
Must We Mean What We Say
Myth
Mythemes
The ‘Myth of the Given,’
Mythologies
Mythopoeia
Mythos
Myth Today
N
The Name of the Rose
Naming and Necessity
Nam Nao Drama
Nang Ek
Nang Rai
Natura Naturans
Naturwissenschaften (modern sciences)
Nazi salute
Nazism
Nazi swastika
Negative capability
Neoclassic
Neoclassic poets
Neoliberalism
New Criticism
New Historicism
New Historicist
The New Left
New Liberalism
Newspeak
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nolan, Christopher
Nomological net of physical theory
Nous
Novalis, (Friedrich Von Hardenberg)
O
Obama, Barack
Objective correlative
Objectivism
The Office
Olsen, Stein Haugom
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Ong, Walter, J.
On the Sublime
Ontological limits
Orality and Literacy
Ordinary Language Philosophy
Organic
Orientalism
The Origins of Geometry
Ornatus verborum
Orphaned signifiers
Orwell, George
Ovid
Ozymandias
P
Pacquiao, Mani
Paine, Thomas
Paradise Lost
Paralogical
Parasitical (signifying) systems
Parole
The Pastoral
Pater, Walter
Payap University
Peirce, C.S.
Peircean
Performative function
Performatives (utterances)
Performativity
Peter Bell the Third
Peterson, Jordan
Phantasia
Phenomenalism
Phenomenological criticism
Phenomenology
The Phenomenology of Spirit
Philosophically romantic
Philosophical Romanticism
Philosophical romantics
Philosophical tradition, the
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Phonemes
Phrónēsis
The Physiocrats
Pindar
Pinter, Harold
Plato
Plato’s Gorgias
Plot
Plotinus
Poetria Nova
Poiema
Poietes
Political economy
The Politicisation of literary theory
Pollen
Pope, Alexander
Positions/doxa
Positivist
Postcolonial
Postcolonial criticism
Postcolonialism
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
Post-digital age
Posthumanism
Post-Lutherean
Postmodern
The Postmodern Condition
Postmodern era
Postmodern irony
Postmodernism
Postmodernism, or the Cultural logic of Late Capitalism
Postmodernist
Postmodernist Culture
Postmodern novel
Poststructuralism
Poststructuralist
Pound, Ezra
Practical Criticism
Pragmatic Denouement
Pragmatics
The Pragmatic School of Criticism
Pragmatism
Pramoj, Kukrit
“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political of Economy (1859)
Preface to The Lyrical Ballads (1800)
The Prelude
Pre-Socratic
The primary imagination
Primogeniture
The Principles of Mathematics
Prior theory/passing theory
Privileged representations
The problem of other minds
Propositional truth tables
Propp, Vladimir
Protagoras
Protestant Profs
Proto-Formalist Criticism
Proust, Marcel
Prudentius
Prufrock
Prussian State (of 1821)
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytical criticism
Psychologism
Psychophysical parallelism
Pulchras positions
Pulp Fiction
Pynchon, Thomas
Pyrrhonist scepticism
Q
Quadrivium
Quantum mechanics
Queer theory
Quine, W.V.O.
Quintilian
R
Radical empiricist reductionism
Radical reductionist schematic model
Rahv, Phillip
Rama VI, King
Rand, Ayn
The Rape of the Lock
Rationalisation (of public discourse)
The Raw and the Cooked
Readerly (texts)
Reader response theory
Reading Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” in the Age of Distraction
Realism
Received Prounciation (RP)
Recognitive breakdown
Recuperated
Red Bamboo
Red face/pale face literature
The Red Wheelbarrow
Reflexive constructions
Reiterating the Differences:A Reply to Derrida
The representation of non-representation
The Republic
The Resistance to Theory
The Rhetoric of Temporality
Richards, I.A.
Ricouer, Paul
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Rippon, Angela
The Rise of the New Left, (keynote speech)
R Mutt
The Romantic Ideology
Romantic irony
Romanticism
Romanticism and Classicism
Romantic movement, the
Rorty, Richard
Rousseau, Jean Jacques
Rushdie, Salman
Russell, Bertrand
Ryle, Gilbert
S
Said, Edward
Santayana, George (n)
Sartre, J.P.
Sasinee, Khunkaew
Saussure, Ferdinand de
Saussurean
Saussurean linguistics
Sayer’s Law
Sayre, William (Sayre’s Law)
Schelling, F.W.
Schiller, Friedrich
Schlegel, August
Schlegel, Friedrich
Schlegel, F.W.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich
Scholastic critics
Schopenhauer, Arthur
The Science of Logic
Sci Fi
Scrutiny
Scruton, Roger
Searle, John
Second-order signification
The Second World War
Sedulius
Seel, Martin
Self-conscious idiolectical discourse
Sellars, Wilfrid
Semiology and Rhetoric
Semiotic idealism
Semiotics/semiology
Semiotic systems (and structures)
Sensitive characterisation
Set theory paradox
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Shaftesbury, Lord
Shakespeare, William
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Shelley, P. B.
Shklovsky, Victor
Signature, Event, Context
Signifier/signified
Simulacra/simulation
The Sistine Chapel
Sittlichkeit
Smith, Adam
Smith, Barry
The social contract
The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS)
Socrates (Socratic)
The ‘soft humanities,’
Sangkhaphantanon, Thanya
Sophistry
The Sophists
Sophocles
The Sorrows of Young Werther
South East Asian
Southey, R.
Soviet Socialist Realists (SS)
Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International
Speech-act philosophy
Speech act theory
Spivak, G.C.
Spots of time
Stalinism
Star Wars trilogy
Steele, Danielle
Steele, Richard
Steinbeck, John
Stevens, Wallace
Stirner, Max
Strauss, Leo
Streep, Meryl
Structuralism
Structuralist narratology
Structure, Sign and Play, in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
Sturm und Drang
Subaltern studies
The Sublime
Submission
Superstructural surface
Surrealism
Sutherland, Keston
Swift, Jonathan
Swinburn, A.C.
Symbol and allegory
Symbology of the swastika
Synchronic
Synecdoche
T
The Taming of the Shrew
Tarantino, Quentin
Taylor, Charles
The Tempest
Tertullian
Thai culture
Thailand, Occidentalism and Cultural Commodity Fetishism
Thai popular culture
Thai Secondary Education
The Thai Social Action Party
Thanksgiving Ode
Theory of descriptions
Theravada Buddhism
Things Fall Apart
Tieck, Ludwig
Tik Tok
The Times(London)
Tocqueville, Alexis de
Todorov, T.
To His Coy Mistress
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Tolstoy, Leo
Tradition and the Individual Talent
Transcendental buffoonery
Transcendental phenomenology
Transcendental signified
Transformational-grammar-syntax rules
Trans-humanism
Translations (radical)
Triangulated interpretation
Triangulations
Trigger Happy TV
Trivium
Tropological
Trump, Donald
Truth and Method
The Turner Diaries
Twelfth-Century Renaissance
The Two Dogmas of Empiricism
U
Ulysses
Un Chien Andalou
Unity
The Unmoved-Mover
Ur-language
Ur-system
Ur-vocabulary
UZ and Them
V
Verbal icons
Verificationism
Verificationist
Violent hierarchies
Virago Press, the
Vorticism
W
Wackenroder, W. H.
Waddthantham, (Thai culture)
War and Peace
The Wasteland
Weaponisation of identity
We Are Seven
Weerasethakul, Apichatpong
The Well-Wrought Urn
Weltanschauung (World view)
The Western Tradition
Weyrich, Paul
What Computers Can’t Do
What is an Author
Wheeler, Samuel
Whitehead, C.
Whither Marxism
Why I Am a Conservative
Williams, William Carlos
William Wordsworth, Second Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after
Waterloo
Wimsatt/Beardsley (intentional fallacy)
Wimsett, W.K.
Wittgenstein, L.
Woke-ism
Women in Love
Wongsuwan, Rong
Woolfe, Virginia
Wordsworth, William
Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
World Literature
Writerly (texts)
Wuthering Heights
X
Xanthippe
Y
Yeats, W.B.
Young Hegelians
A Young Man’s Fancy
Z
Zen Buddhism
Žižek, Slovaj

Footnotes
1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

OceanofPDF.com