Twentieth-century Literary Theory Research Articles

European Writers in Exile

European Writers in Exile

Categorising C.S. Lewis's Literary Theory

C.S. Lewis's two volumes of literary theory are compared and contrasted with the particular works in mainstream twentieth century literary theory that they most closely resemble. The Personal Heresy is akin to, but ultimately divergent from, the New Critical papers ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’. Likewise An Experiment in Criticism is akin to reader-response theories of the phenomenological variety, especially those of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, and Roman Ingarden, but unlike most other kinds. Lewis's position as a theorist is too reader-focused for New Criticism but also more formalistic than most reader-response theories. Nevertheless, these are the two movements with which his work has most in common, unlike other major twentieth-century movements, such as gender studies, Marxist theory, new historicism, queer theory, postmodernism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism.

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

In Memoriam: Kenneth McMillan Newton (1941–2021)

Remembering Ken Newton

Remembering Ken Newton

Remembering Ken Newton

Remembering Ken Newton

"ЛИТЕРАТУРНАЯ ТЕОРИЯ" КАК ВЫЗОВ АКАДЕМИЧЕСКОМУ ЛИТЕРАТУРОВЕДЕНИЮ, (1960-1990-Е ГОДЫ). ЧАСТЬ 1. ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЕ ПРЕДПОСЫЛКИ ЛИТЕРАТУРНОЙ ТЕОРИИ

The article concerns the phenomenon of so-called «literary theory» in the West in the second half of the twentieth century. While in the first half of the century literary studies (and humanities in general) sought to justify their own autonomy, i.e. independence from other disciplines and systematic philosophy, struggling against the traditions of the nineteenth century, in the second half of the twentieth century literary theory tried to preserve the autonomy principle of «literariness» and at the same time to go beyond this principle by relying on other disciplines (particularly linguistics). Although the achievements of that trend seem to be controversial and problematic, some questions literary theory raised in its own time are still relevant today.

William Wordsworth’s Theoretical Contribution to Canon of Literary Criticism in Light of Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802) is both a revolutionary manifesto and a kind of foundational text in the context of the canon of Romantic poetry because of its normative analysis on the nature of poetry and its basic constituent parts although when compared to the systematic approaches in the twentieth century literary theory, Wordsworth does not present an autonomous critical method capable of providing universally valid principles in evaluation of the text. This paper mainly aims to discuss Wordsworth’s contribution to canon of literary criticism on the theoretical level by giving concrete examples from Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems (1802) as well as scrutinizing Wordsworth’s definition of poetry and the poet, his ideas on the origin of poetry, the subject matter of poetry, and the language of poetry respectively in order to show that it is revolutionary in terms of prescribing some principles in evaluation of a literary work.

Genius in France: An Idea and its Uses

Genius, as the Introduction to this rich and engaging account usefully outlines, is a longstanding but frequently contested object of study. Its multiple etymology, its employment to refer to both attribute and individual, and the prevailing sense that it is somehow a self-evident quality, all contribute to the difficulty writers have in defining the term. Ann Jefferson quite explicitly makes no attempt to provide any such definition, or to construct any coherent theory of genius. Rather, she examines the uses to which the notion has been put across three centuries of French culture, in particular with reference to the concepts to which it has been opposed. These ‘others’ include talent, learning, madness, imposture, and taste, but the most consistent ‘other’ is the observer: the third party who is required to recognize, determine, comment upon, or even constrain genius. This book sets out to define the specific contribution of French thinkers to the genius debate, a contribution Jefferson suggests has traditionally been marginalized. The precise linguistic, literary, and sociocultural analysis with which she supports this wide-ranging exploration of intellectual history provides compelling evidence for her contention that there is value in taking into account the particular language and cultural tradition within which ideas are expressed. The study moves through a series of apparently unrelated contexts in which genius has been discussed: from eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy, through the nineteenth-century quest for national identity, medical attempts to quantify and pathologize intellect, and the media fascination with child prodigies, to twentieth-century literary theory. Jefferson makes a virtue of what she terms this ‘discontinuity’, suggesting that it is precisely the continued freshness of genius that makes it attractive as an object of debate. Yet there are also several themes that link these disparate case studies. Time and again we encounter genius as the originality of perception that is necessary to human progress. The relationship between individual and collective genius appears in both discussions of national identity and considerations of an international, atemporal dynasty of genius. Genius as a performance relates precocious children to fraudulent adults, and plays a part in analyses of the qualities required to recognize genius in others. And there is a persistent fascination with how far genius resides in the biography or biology of an individual. Most striking of all is how frequently discussions of genius are used to position their author, or say something about the discipline within which that discussion is taking place. Hugo ostentatiously leaves a space for himself in his presentation of national genius; doctors define the objective, progressive logic of their discipline with respect to the uncontrollable spontaneity of genius/madness; and Sartre makes parallels between his own childhood and that of the prodigy that he describes. Jefferson concludes on the impossibility of ever stating precisely what genius is, but this study — which begins and ends with the idea of thinking with rather than about genius — provides more than ample proof of just how productive this impossibility can be, for scholars in so many fields.

A Survey of Twentieth-century Literary Theory and Criticism in Chinese

In their article "A Survey of Twentieth-century Literary Theory and Criticism in Chinese" Xiaoming Chen and Anfeng Sheng survey Chinese-language scholarship that for the reason of the East-West divide is less known in the West. Although heavily influenced by both Western and Soviet Marxist thought, twentieth-century Chinese literary theorization and criticism produced much incisive scholarship based on the vast knowledge existing in Chinese culture and literary scholarship. Chen and Sheng survey pioneering works by numerous Chinese literary theorists and critics who have been influential in their own time and exerted persistent modeling influences until today and the article is meant to adjust the anonymous position of Chinese literary theorization in the West and thus to contribute to the diversity of literary studies.

David Duff Romanticism and the Uses of GenreRomanticism and the Uses of Genre. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.

<i>David Duff</i> Romanticism and the Uses of Genre<i>Romanticism and the Uses of Genre</i>. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv+256.

The idea of epic and New Italian Epic

This article attempts to describe some characteristics of New Italian Epic (NIE), especially in relation to the epic mode itself. It aims to liberate the term ‘epic’ from the perception inherited from twentieth-century literary theory, and to reassess it as a component of NIE. The article shows how NIE interprets ‘epic’ as a way of rereading history critically by engendering new myths (mythopoesis), and how it conveys a desire for stories that encompass a search for historical truth. NIE is described as a corpus of new metahistorical romances for the contemporary moment, a tool that enables readers to take an active part in the construction of meaning within a society that seems to have progressively forgotten how to interpret data, to the detriment of historical truth. This is achieved through the recalling of events in the form of allegorical narratives, which, while they do not recount Italian historical facts as such, evoke real events by referring to what has been left unsaid in Italian history. This...

The idea of epic and New Italian Epic

This article attempts to describe some characteristics of New Italian Epic (NIE), especially in relation to the epic mode itself. It aims to liberate the term ‘epic’ from the perception inherited from twentieth-century literary theory, and to reassess it as a component of NIE. The article shows how NIE interprets ‘epic’ as a way of rereading history critically by engendering new myths (mythopoesis), and how it conveys a desire for stories that encompass a search for historical truth. NIE is described as a corpus of new metahistorical romances for the contemporary moment, a tool that enables readers to take an active part in the construction of meaning within a society that seems to have progressively forgotten how to interpret data, to the detriment of historical truth. This is achieved through the recalling of events in the form of allegorical narratives, which, while they do not recount Italian historical facts as such, evoke real events by referring to what has been left unsaid in Italian history. This perspective involves the problematic question of realism, which leads, in this frame, to a search for truth and knowledge. Realism emerges as a pure textual fact, and thus parataxis no longer represents a rhetorical strategy to obtain mimesis. In NIE parataxis works as a basic element of epic narration, whose aim is to evoke. A number of examples from NIE novels are discussed in illustrating how this narrative strategy is created.

Del texto a los contextos

Este artículo bosqueja, con pinceladas amplias, el cambio de paradigmas conceptuales en el campo de la teoría literaria durante el siglo XX. Se muestra cómo las teorías esencialistas, como el primer formalismo ruso o el new criticism norteamericano, buscaban modelos explicativos a través de conceptos como la literariedad o la ironía. Se revisa el impacto de la lingüística en el quehacer teórico de los estudios literarios, en especial en el estructuralismo francés. Finalmente se describe cómo otros enfoques —entre los que se encuentran el dialogismo bajtiniano, el neohistoricismo y la estética de la recepción— pusieron en crisis esas aproximaciones al fenómeno literario, a la vez que ampliaron los modos de comprensión de los textos de creación.

Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry

Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry

The Dramatics of Time

AbstractArt has as many definitions as it has practitioners, but one function of art is to help us understand the human experience, regardless of how our definitions of that experience differ. And since time is experience, art is particularly well-suited to treat it. Along with space, time, as a basic category of human experience, is, therefore, a basic category of artistic inquiry. Space is the primary focus of the visual arts, whereas music is an art form in time. Literature, however, always deals with both, and nowhere is this more apparent than in drama, where the time and space of the literary text are realized in the real time and real space of the performed text. Yet despite the widespread interest in time in much twentieth-century literary theory, the unique potential for the investigation of experiential time in drama has gone largely ignored. The purpose of this article is to address that curious absence, first by looking at the ways existing theories approach literary time (and largely fail to approach dramatic time), and then by discussing the generic and performative characteristics of drama (especially Russian drama, since that is the tradition with which I am most familiar) that make it in many ways the ideal art form in which to investigate time.

A discourse of wonders: audience and performance in Ovid's Metamorphoses

In A Discourse of Wonders, Stephen M. Wheeler introduces a fresh perspective for readers of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Drawing on Ovidian scholarship and twentieth-century literary theory, he argues that the poem is not an anthology or collection but a single continuous performance. Wheeler's thorough, detailed analysis of how Ovid constructs, cultivates, and transforms his audience challenges the assumption that Ovid's narrative persona addresses the reader. Wheeler proposes instead that Ovid represents himself in the poem as an epic storyteller moved to tell a universal history of metamorphosis in the presence of a fictional audience. The longstanding critical interest in Ovid's poetics, Wheeler maintains, has tended to obscure the role of the audience in reading and interpreting the Metamorphoses. A Discourse of Wonders offers an imaginative and accessible revaluation of one of the greatest surviving works of classical poetry, one whose enduring influence can be found in literature, art, music, and the performing arts from the Middle Ages to the present.

The Audience by Herbert Blau (review)

252Rocky Mountain Review do American writers find inspired innovators in France; rather "the most fertile lessons in U.S. writing today are being learned from Latin Americans such as Borges, Cortázar, and particularly García Márquez" (208). Gene Bell-Villada is one of a handful of scholars in the field of Hispanic letters who write with authority, precision, and flair. However, even he is not immune to the dangling-modifier syndrome. For example, of the Patriarch he states, "Starting out as a homespun populist who made direct contact with the people, curing their stud bulls ofworms and fixing their sewing machines, his hunger for power led him to systematically eliminate all rival generals . . ." (156). But this outstanding scholar merits an accolade for a careful reading of García Márquez's oeuvre and an awesome knowledge of foreign literatures. GEORGE R. MCMURRAY Colorado State University HERBERT BLAU. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 383 p. Herbert Blau's aim in The Audience is to explore what might at first appear a simple question: What is an audience? From the opening pages of his book, Blau follows recent critical theory and abandons traditional assumptions about audience—its nature, its power, its role in creating or interpreting meaning in the theatre. For Blau, the concept of audience as a group ofindividuals with a shared body ofvalues and common expectations for drama (or other art form) is no longer tenable. From such a view, an audience "seems like the merest facsimile of remembered community paying its respects not so much to the still-echoing signals of a common set of values but to the better-forgotten remains of the most exhausted illusions" (1). Even the integrity and stability ofthe individual spectator's response to a work, Blau asserts, are problematized by the ambiguities involved in the very act of representation. Throughout The Audience, Blau views audience as a convention—or, more properly, as a figure of speech. Blau then explores various metaphors for audience—an appealing strategy since the theatre is persistently used as a metaphor for making sense of the world. The members of an audience are at once consumers, voyeurs, eavesdroppers, participants, witnesses. Ultimately, Blau writes that the audience is not so much a gathering of human beings, but "a body of thought and desire. It does not exist before the play but is initiated orprecipitated by it; it is not an entity to begin with but a consciousness constructed. The audience is what happens when, performing the signs and passwords ofa play, something postulates itself and unfolds in response" (25). The book is indeed a meditation on this "happening" and its relations to representation, alienation, repression, and power. Blau's prose style is simultaneously exhilarating and maddening. The book deliberately becomes a self-conscious performance, an intimidating yet often playful mixture of allusion, extensive quotation, and dense jargon from poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Although the primary focus ofthe book is drama, Blau continually engages in a wide-ranging cultural critique that Book Reviews253 sends the reader spinning from Aristotle to Oliver North, Restoration drama to film, body art to Shakespeare, and more. In placing his study in the context of late twentieth-century literary theory and cultural criticism, Blau relies heavily on the work ofsuch figures as Barthes, Benjamin, Foucault, and Lacan (to cite only the most frequently quoted writers); this tendency alone contributes significantly to the book's complexity. The end result is a sometimes brilliant, sometimes mystifying text that some readers may simply find unreadable. Yet Blau's text forces his readers—the book's audience—to test out the very roles for an audience that he attempts to describe. The nature of the book and its theoretical framework make it impossible for Blau to offer definitive conclusions from these meditations. But the book does offer a compelling new analysis of some venerable critical problems. Although Blau often focuses upon traditional dramatic texts from ancient Greece and Renaissance England, his work is especially good in exploring the role of the audience in modern and contemporary drama and in performance art and experimental theatre. Blau's treatment of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud as precursors ofpoststructuralism...

(Re)Reading the Landscape

Insights from literary theory are applied to the analysis of landscapes. It is suggested that the concepts of textuality, intertextuality, and reader reception may be of importance to those interested in the notion that landscapes are read in much the same way as literary texts. It is further suggested that landscapes can be seen as texts which are transformations of ideologies into a concrete form. This is an important way in which ideologies become naturalized. What is lacking in the radically relativistic theoretical perspective of much of twentieth-century literary theory, however, is a consideration of the sociohistorical and political processes through which meaning is produced and transformed. Examples of the relation between texts and landscapes from several different types of societies are then offered.

Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: The Example of Charles Mauron.

This study has a double focus: in the first place, it seeks to chart the parallel re-evaluation of both formalism and psychology in twentieth-century literary theory by using the work and career of the French literary critic, Charles Mauron (1899-1966) as a scaffolding. Using a structure of biography and literary history, it investigates Mauron's rather odd position, both inside and outside two different critical contexts, the French and the English, a position that makes his work a particularly revealing reflection of the diverse critical trends and tensions of our age. The second focus of this study is suggested in the tension in Mauron's work created by his need to objectivise the subjective. The recent conflicts between continental and British criticism or, more generally, between the new formalism (represented by structuralism and semiotics) and the liberal humanist tradition raise an important contemporary issue prefigured in Mauron. The broader context of his work is that of the eternal theoretical debate regarding the designation of literary criticism as an objective or a subjective activity, as a science or as the ultimate human and humane act.