Text as Agent in Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class

Abstract

One of the assumptions that dominates aesthetic theory today is the problematic nature of the idea of the subject. 1 Since the 1960's, the influence of structural linguistics and anthropology has informed literary theory by questioning the following traditional notions: (1) the uniqueness and integrity of the author as the originating center of a work; and (2) the representational function of art and literature; that is, the possibility of a correspondence between a fictional character and a hypothesized counterpart in the objective world. Poststructuralist theory replaces these assumptions with a series of radically new tenets: (1) culture, particularly ideologies of authority and subservience, inscribes itself into language, and that inscription determines the ways in which texts organize themselves; (2) the institutionalizings of authorship, publication, distribution, and reading of texts are, in themselves, processes that articulate and sustain dominant cultural paradigms; and (3) the function of criticism is to identify the systems that voice themselves in the various languages of fiction, drama, and art. Criticism fulfills these tenets by implementing the premise that the text cannot represent a real object external to it but, rather, represents only itself as an aesthetic activity. Consequently, criticism today rarely focuses on interpretation what a work of art means. Instead, critical studies address the technical processes in which a literary text functions, either as a formal structure, an instrument of aesthetic technology, or as an interactive agent in a cultural exchange. Increasingly, criticism deals with the ways in which this