Rethinking the Value of Literary Text: A Modernist/Postmodernist Reading of the Hegemony of the Idea of the Classic and Enlightenment

Abstract

Western metaphysics has never been severed from its exclusive effort to monopolitically anchor Humanism as well as literary discourse in its own dogmatic vantage point. Western Humanism had not only invented idea of classic but had solidified and handed over its ideological hegemony that ultimately excluded from their literary discourse the other that may have threaten their social order and hierarchical cultural systems. From early Greek and Roman Civilization throughout medieval Western world down to late nineteenth century Western society, prominent thinkers and writers had perpetuated idea of classic and only monopolized literary discourse so as to secure their own cultural identification. But, modernist and postmodernist literary discourse including deconstruction, reader-response criticism, psychoanalysis criticism, inquires into very ideas of classic and enlightenment that had been indoctrinated by hierarchical systems of both aristocracy and middle class bourgeois society. Postmodernism is a new hermeneutic cultural movement that anchors their point of departure for inquiry to a pragmatic view, a position that, instead of bringing collective response, literary work remains a polyvalent text that reflects diverse socio-cultural interaction with unknown readers.