American Literary Theory Research Articles

American Literary Theory and Philosophical Exceptionalism

This essay argues that literary theory can no longer afford to adopt an exceptionalist view of its own disciplinary identity and relation to the Western tradition. To this end, it outlines a conceptual framework that distinguishes between competing tendencies within the Western tradition represented by the terms metaphysics and ontology. The implications of this distinction for literary theory are that the most important sources of the latter's disciplinary identity are neither the linguistics-based movement of French structuralism, as the term poststructuralism implies, nor a "modernity" that has been superseded, as the term postmodernism implies, but rather a modernist tradition of aesthetics shaped by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German romanticism and idealism.

The Ontological Turn: Philosophical Sources of American Literary Theory

The most important sources of contemporary American literary theory are neither the linguistics-based movement of French structuralism, as the term 'poststructuralism' implies, nor a 'modernity' that has been superseded, as the term 'postmodernism' implies, but rather a modernist tradition of aesthetics shaped by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German romanticism and idealism, movements that culminated in the work of Heidegger during the Weimar period between the World Wars and afterward, exercising an increasingly dominant influence on French theorists after World War II, from Sartre through Derrida, and subsequently on the development of poststructuralism and postmodernism during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. This essay strives to put well-accepted facts and issues within what Wittgenstein called a 'perspicuous' perspective. Although it is common to observe that deconstruction shares with Romanticism certain very general features, the same judgment is not often applied to deconstruction's semiotic account of language as a system of arbitrary signs without positive values. The essay's claim, by contrast, is that romanticist, especially German influences, operating in complementary relation with influences from the English and French Enlightenments, provided the cultural and conceptual milieu in which literary theory's distinctively modern, characteristically ontological, and anti-metaphysical view of language developed.

Issues of Class and Culture: An Interview with Aijaz Ahmad

Question: In your book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures you observe that American literary theory in the last two decades has been remarkably devoid of influences from the major work in Marxist political economy that has been done in the United States, not least by Monthly Review and its publishing house. Why is this significant? Why does literary theory need Marxist political economy?This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The blues detective: a study of African American detective fiction

This illuminating book makes the case for a tradition of African American detective fiction--novels written by black Americans about black detectives and incorporating distinctly African American tropes and themes. Beginning with Pauline Hopkins in 1901, black authors consciously altered and subverted the formulas of detective fiction in significant ways. Such writers as J. E. Bruce, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Ishmael Reed, and Clarence Major created a new genre that responded to the social and political concerns of the black community.Examining the work of these authors, Stephen Soitos frames his analysis in terms of four uniquely African American tropes: altered detective personas, double-consciousness detection, black vernaculars, and hoodoo. He argues that black writers created sleuths who were in fact blues detectives, engaged not only in solving crimes, but also in exploring the mysteries of black life and culture.Soitos grounds his study in African American literary theory, particularly the work of Houston Baker, Bernard Bell, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He offers both a new way of conceiving black detective fiction and a series of insightful readings of books in this genre.

Sterling Brown and the "Vestiges" of the Blues: The Role of Race in English Verse Structure

Although poets continue to discuss the significance of particular forms or verse schemes, literary critics less frequently examine the constitutive nature of such structures.(1) We usually comment on large structures like the sonnet or small ones like metrical variations only in order to drive home a point that originated elsewhere, in some other textual, biographical, historical, or cultural inquiry. Less often do we begin with versification as a way of understanding history or ideology, even though it is frequently the starting place for poets. This trivialization of prosody in literary criticism has as much to do with the dominance of the field by linguists as with the desire of literary critics to move beyond the formalism of the New Criticism and embrace psychoanalysis, marxism, feminism, new historicism, and other extratextual literary theories. The scientific density of linguistic analyses of versification make prosody seem stuffy and pointless, while the New Criticism has made verse structure difficult to imagine as anything but a closed, coherent linguistic universe outside history. The most successful attempt to break these habits has been Antony Easthope's 1983 study, Poetry As Discourse. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, Easthope first approaches poetry as verse structure and then finds in that structure history, psychology, and materialism. In short, he finds in formalism what others have tried to find beyond it. Looking at the most common structure in English verse, Easthope describes iambic pentameter as epochal form, co-terminous with the capitalist mode of production and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class (24) and explains not only how it differs from the hegemonic discourse of the feudal era, but also how it developed from the Renaissance to the Augustan and Romantic periods to unravel during Modernism. Easthope's work thus lays a foundation for a truly literary history by arguing that verse scheme--the very materiality of poetry--is a discourse, fully embedded in a dialectical history. With this important step made, we can now examine how the intersection of poetic discourse with other discourses, like race, produces poetry. Easthope tells the story of the emergence, consolidation, and disintegration of iambic pentameter as a hegemonic discourse, but of necessity he focuses on the poets who made that history--Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, and Pound--not the poets who resisted that history even while they were constituted by it. I will examine Challenge, a sonnet from Sterling Brown's 1932 volume Southern Road, because it offers a particularly dramatic example of how Easthope's terms produce a partial reading of the poem that requires the insights of African American literary theory to produce a fuller and more satisfying account. The result will be a union of linguistic and literary theory that begins in an analysis of verse schemes. I hope to show that a better formalism will yield a better material and cultural analysis. 1 I said, in drunken pride of youth and you, That mischief-making Time would never dare Play his ill-humored tricks upon us two, Strange and defiant lovers that we were. I said that even Death, Highwayman Death, 5 Could never master lovers such as we, That even when his clutch had throttled breath, My hymns would float in praise, undauntedly. I did not think such words were bravado. Oh, I think honestly we knew no fear, 10 Of Time or Death. We loved each other so. And thus, with you believing me, I made My prophecies, rebellious, unafraid.... And that was foolish, wasn't it, my dear? Challenge exhibits many of the features Easthope discerns in William Shakespeare's sonnet 73 (97-109). Sonnet 73 serves Easthope as an example of the founding moment of bourgeois discourse, and he contrasts its prosodic effects with those of the feudal ballad. …

Literary History and Sociology

Some anniversaries may seem to deserve to pass unnoticed. Why revive Gustave Lanson (1857-1934), the epitome of justly spurned literary positivism, on the centennial of the publication of his classic Histoire de la littérature française? Lanson's less than glorious reputation (established by 1913 and strengthened beyond correction after 1960) as the dogmatic sponsor of airless academic scholarship—which extinguished the life of literary works under the weight of idle historical fact, biographical and philological minutiae, and innumerable sources and influences—has not inspired a return of the sort that Novalis, August and Friedrich von Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm Dilthey, to cite only the German traditions, have enjoyed in recent years. Yet such a return could be productive and rewarding, for Lanson, a focal point of French criticism at the dawn of the twentieth century, crystallizes significant trends from the past and anticipates crucial tenets of German and American literary reception theory.

Bakhtin in African American Literary Theory

Bakhtin in African American Literary Theory

Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities

African Studies, contrary to some accounts, is not a separate continent in the world of American higher education. Its intellectual borders touch those of economics, literature, history, philosophy and art; its history is the story of the world, both ancient and modern. This is the clear conclusion of and the Disciplines, a book that addresses the question: Why should Africa be studied in the American university? This question was put to distinguished scholars in the social sciences and humanities, prominent Africanists who are also leaders in their various disciplines. Their responses make a strong case for the importance of research on Africa to the academy. Paul Collier's essay, for example, shows how studies of African economies have clarified our understanding of the small open economies, and contributed to the theory of repressed inflation and to a number of areas in microeconomics as well. Art historian Suzanne Blier uses the terms and concepts that her discipline has applied to Africa to analyze the habits of mind and social practice of her own field. Christopher I. Miller describes the confounding and enriching impact of Africa on European and American literary theory. Political scientist Richard Sklar outlines Africa's contributions to the study of political modernization, pluralism, and rational choice. These essays, together with others from scholars in history, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative literature, attest to the influence of African research throughout the curriculum. Contributors are Paul Collier, Sally Falk Moore, Richard L. Sklar, Steven Feierman, Susan Blier, Christopher L. Miller, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, in addition to the editors.

On the Matter of the Text

The following essay deals with one of the questions raised by the work of Stanley Fish, who ranks among the most important figures in North American literary theory over the past thirty years: the question of the status of the text. Fish has been perhaps the most prominent advocate for the thesis that the text is simply the product of the interpretive strategies brought to bear upon it by the reader, thereby reducing the text to the status of a tabula rasa, essentially a nonentity, which is nothing more than the (finally arbitrary) occasion for the expression of independently constructed and institutionally embodied norms. Fish developed his case in the context of an attack on 'formalism,' meaning any attempt to ground the reader's interpretation in features objectively inhering in the text itself. Interpretation indisputably exhibits certain 'forms' (definable and in principle replicable patterns); while the formalists (at the time the majority of literary critics) found the source of these forms in the text, Fish traced their origin rather to the activity of the reader and denied the text any ultimate role in their production.

Philosophers of Consciousness (review)

228Philosophy and Literature volvement. "The poem or fiction . . . gives us the truth of, or the truth behind, the world which we ordinarily inhabit. It takes us to where the real life of that world lies; or as D. H. Lawrence said of the novel, 'it can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead' " (pp. 113—14). Hence poets are, in the phrase ofShelley's thatis the leitmotifofFalck's book, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" (p. 78). Taken as theory, the development of these Romantic conceptualizations of subject and object is sound and convincing. Falck moves easily through both German and English sources, both philosophical and literary, in developing his tiiemes, all the while developing careful criticisms of recent French and American literary theory that has been influenced by Saussure. In virtue of its compelling arguments, Myth, Truth and Literature is a book that might well do some good in changing the current drift of literary theory and in reinvigorating literary work. It deserves a wide audience. But, despite die compelling character of its arguments, Myth, Truth and Literature also might well fail to have its intended effect, and this should lead us to rethink its achievement. The cultural world is both Balkanized and overwhelmingly influenced by the surrounding commodity culture. In this setting, could any intellectual argument—no matter how sound—by itselfopen up new possibilities of more coherent theory and practice? It seems unlikely. And if that is so, then perhaps it is not so open to poets to remake our world and restructure our involvements as Falck suggests. What is needed in order to develop the argument ofMyth, Truth and Literature further is not more theory— the theory Falck presents is sound—but more direct poetic work that brings currendy marginal practical involvements closer to the center of culture. To say this is to endorse Falck's general argument but also to wish that it had been more concretely developed in relation to specific present poetic particulars (Raymond Carver? Peter Handke? William Gaddis?). It is to be hoped that this concrete development is something that Falck himself, and now others, will have it in mind to complete. Swarthmore CollegeRichard Eldridge Philosophers ofConsciousness, by Eugene Webb; ix & 342 pp. Seatde: University of Washington Press, 1988, $30.00. This is one of those rare books that employs the tools of scholarship, not as a self-contained exercise, but as a means of uncovering the truth about man and his place in reality. No doubt it is unfashionable and vulnerable to the Reviews229 charge of naïveté to endorse such an approach. We are inclined to smile at the suggestion that scholarship is in search of the truth, so accustomed are we to the debilitatingcritiques thatrob intellectualinquiryofits confidence ofpurpose. But it is refreshing to encounter a book that reminds us of the higher calling of scholarship. For even though we may have difficulty defining what we mean by truth, or determining the criteria by which it is to be measured—as Eugene Webb would be the first to agree—we cannot abandon the quest for knowledge as the fullest expression ofour openness to reality. To do so not only condemns our scholarship to irrelevance, but impoverishes our human existence as well. Webb's latest book, Philosop^s of Consciousness, addresses the issue at the heart of our contemporary historical situation. We live in a world in which the spiritual traditions that had sustained its order have become opaque. The only possibility of recovering their meaning is through a process of rediscovery. Attention must be redirected from the symbols, ideas, and doctrines of the various traditions, to their prior experiential foundations within consciousness. It is this concern with the ultimate existential source of order in consciousness itself, that has been the driving force behind the modern search for a philosophy of consciousness. Webb's book is a formidable and illuminating contribution to this investigation. He explores the philosophy of consciousness through the writings of six figures: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, and Kierkegaard. The chapters devoted to each ofthem follow the order suggested by...

Facing Tradition: Revisionary Scenes in African American Literature

African American literary theory's quest for a distinctly black criticism implies the task of determining the contours and character of African American literary tradition. This task is, in fact, at once external and internal to that tradition, which arises in the very act of questioning its own possibility. African American literature deploys a topos for this simultaneous theorizing and enactment of tradition: the scenario of facing, wherein a protagonist experiences a pivotal moment of self-discovery by catching his or her reflection in the visage of an other (father, mother, master, etc.). Examples from Frederick Douglass to Alice Walker demonstrate the rhetorical and thematic nuances by which African American literature's facing motif establishes black tradition as a variegated scene of vision and revision.

The Thoreauvian Pilgrimage: The Structure of an American Cult

rHE subject of canonization has prompted much innovative work in recent American literary history and theory. This scholarship has established that canons are culture-specific instruments of promotion and exclusion, and it has begun to explain canonical formation and change in terms of models of cultural hegemony more complex and hard-headed than traditional historicists and New Critics employed: models that take into account not just aesthetic fashion and the philosophical temper of the age but also the more tangible power conferred by race, gender, and class. Since it began as a challenge to the received conception of who are the major authors deserving close study, the newer scholarship has understandably concentrated on the claims of figures marginalized by the received canon and on questioning the unexamined assumptions behind such exclusions. Little has been written about the phenomenon of canonical investment itself: that is, the rituals of remembrance through which those regarded for whatever reason as literary heroes become enshrined. Hence the present article, which examines the major forms of public reverence for Thoreau in particular and Transcendental Concord in general. Since Thoreau has become the closest approximation to a folk hero that American literary history has ever seen, and since Concord is still America's most sacred literary spot, this will be a case study representative in the Emersonian rather than in the statistical sense. But by the same token it should help to show that the sacral vocabulary drawn from biblical studies and hagiography by critical discussions of literary canonization points to patterns of behavior and experience that run deeper than such analogizing generally claims, patterns that substantiate the present climate of skepticism toward

Saussurian Theory and the Abolition of Reality

In this condition there may be discoverable under new forms certain spiritual illuminations, shining with a morality essentialized from experience directly, and not from previous precepts or preoccupations. It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward. hart crane The founder of modern linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure – on whose insights into the nature of signs and language the greater part of the French and American literary theory of the past two decades has rather perilously come to depend – based the main arguments of his project for a newly scientific study of language on what are in fact a pair of philosophical axioms. These are: (1) what Saussure called his “Principle 1,” or “ the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign ”; and (2) what might be called (though Saussure himself did not name or isolate it as such) “ the principle of the relational nature of all linguistic meaning .” In his argument leading up to the statement of “Principle 1” Saussure remarks that [s]ome people regard language, when reduced to its elements, as a naming-process only – a list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names… This conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words. (p. 65)

Revisionary Madness: The Prospects of American Literary Theory at the Present Time

Previous articleNext article No AccessCritical Response: For and against TheoryRevisionary Madness: The Prospects of American Literary Theory at the Present TimeDaniel T. O'HaraDaniel T. O'Hara Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 9, Number 4Jun., 1983 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448226 Views: 9Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1983 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: The Future of the Literary Critic, symplokē 22, no.1-21-2 (Jan 2014): 325–332.https://doi.org/10.5250/symploke.22.1-2.0325G. Douglas Atkins Introduction: Literary Theory, Critical Practice, and the Classroom, (Jan 1989): 1–23.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19873-3_1

New Thresholds, Old Anatomies: Contemporary Poetry and the Limits of Exegesis

Despite the increasing sophistication of American literary theory, its growing assimilation of European critical concepts, whether Phenomenologist, Structur alist, or Marxist, and its exciting debates on hermeneutics and communication theory in the pages of New Literary History or Diacritics or Po?tique, the prac tical criticism of contemporary poetry continues to be largely a matter of old fashioned explication. Pick up, say, John Fuller's A Reader's Guide to W. H. An den (1970) and open to the chapter on Auden's 1966 collection, About the House. We read:

The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory

The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory

The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory

The Voice of the Folk: Folklore and American Literary Theory

Hawthorne and Literary Nationalism

mHE MOST obvious literary influence on Hawthorne is the I work of Sir Walter Scott. Scott's influence on Hawthorne, in all its main aspects, has been recognized since G. E. Woodberry's Nathaniel Hawthorne.1 We now realize, too, that Hawthorne's early practice conforms to a critical demand that American materials be treated in the manner of Scott. Scott's work had a great influence on American literary theory in general, because combined significantly with the patriotic nationalism of American writers and, as G. Harrison Orians has said, converted the demand for nationalism into a quest for Scott-like ingredients in American life.2 By I825 the success of this quest was apparent.3 Hawthorne started out in his treatment of historical materials very much as current literary theory prescribed, but he developed away from and modified the theory which had directed his early work. To overlook the influence of current literary theory and fashion upon Hawthorne is to attribute to him an unwarranted isolation; to overlook the individuality of the treatment he gave quite ordinary materials is to miss something of his greatness as an artist. It is the purpose of this note to review the connections between Hawthorne's work and the contemnorarv desire for na1 See G. E. Woodberry, NTathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, I902), pp. I25-I26; G. H. Orians, and Hawthorne's Fanshawe, New England Quarterly, XI, 388-394 (June, I938). There is ample evidence of Hawthorne's intimate acquaintance with Scott's work. See Jurian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston, i885), I, io5, II, 269; G. P. Lathrop, A Study of Hawthorne (Boston, I876), p. io8, Appendix, pp. 34I, 343; James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors (Boston, I879), pp. IoI-Io2; Hawthorne's Works, Riverside ed., VII, passim, VIII, 263-274, 504-508, and passim. 2The Romance Ferment after Waverley, American Literature, III, 409 (Jan., I932). 'Jared Sparks, in an I825 review of ten American novels published within a year, says that he finds it expedient first to settle . . . the peculiarities of the Waverley pattern, of which most of the ten novels are acknowledged copies. He makes an excellent statement of the appeal the imitation of Scott had for his time: . . . the actors in these works have not only a human, but a national, and often a provincial character. . . . The subject of manners and customs is, moreover, one of general interest, and as an adherence to these serves to give individuality to the characters in these narratives, is so far an improvement on the practice of the older novels, and advantageous to the writer. See North American Review, XXI, 78-I04 (July, I825).