In writing this brief generalized survey of
twentieth-century literary criticism, I am giving short shrift to the
cultural/historical literary approaches that have dominated academic study from
the decline of Deconstruction to the rise of New Formalism. In its focus on the historical/cultural
context or the polemical/political content of the literary work, in my opinion,
postcolonial and new historicist criticism, not to mention women’s studies, gay
studies, and studies devoted to the writings of Native Americans, African
Americans, Mexican Americans, etc. have shown more concern for social issues
than for the art work. Consequently,
they have shown very little or no interest in the literary short story, which
has seldom emphasized social issues.
In his 1986 Presidential Address to the Modern Language
Association, J. Hillis Miller called attention to the fact that in the early to
mid eighties, the study of literature had a sudden, almost universal turn away
from an orientation toward language to “history, culture, society, politics,
institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context….” Miller attributes this shift to the
academy’s demand to make itself “ethically and politically responsible” in its
teaching and writing—“to grapple with realities rather than with the
impalpabilities of theoretical abstractions and barbarous words about
language….” To which Stanley Fish
responded in his own polemical 2008 book, Save the World in Your Own Time.
It is not surprising that academics became fed up with
theory, for as Frank Kermode pointed out in his 1988 review of Stephen
Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations and Steven Mullaney’s The
Place of the Stage--two early and influential examples of the so-called New
Historicism--literary theory had reached a point that university teachers of
English only seemed to be talking to each other, publishing works with such
obscure titles that external observers probably gave up hope. Furthermore, says
Kermode, the techniques of deconstruction seemed to have become
“indistinguishable from the older kind of formalism only by the use of the
patented jargon and by an interpretative liberty that some old fogeys cannot
distinguish from license. Thus, the academic call for a return to what “really
mattered” in society, or a “return to history,” gave rise to ethnic studies,
multicultural studies, postcolonial studies, and the new historicism.
The first and most prominent of these various social or
content approaches--Feminist Criticism—was generated out of the so-called
Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Feminist
Literary Criticism as an academic field of study began with several primary
projects. First of all, feminist critics focused on the sexist biases male writers
were often guilty of embedding in their works that became unquestioned
paradigms of belief in our culture. Secondly,
feminist critics argued that the established "canon" of so-called
great literary works in Western culture was developed and maintained by males
and therefore needed to be expanded to include valuable but previously ignored
works by female writers. Another
important project for Feminist Criticism was the establishment of female
writers as a "counter-tradition" of literature characterized by a
radically different consciousness and value system than those embodied in the
so-called "great tradition" of male writers.
Such critics as Patricia
Meyer Spacks in The Female Imagination (1975) and Elaine Showalter in A
Literature of Their Own (1977) argued that women writers have often
been concerned with matters considered peripheral by men and that they have
thus expressed the values of a subculture within the framework of society at
large. Perhaps the best-known and most-influential study to focus on what has
come to be known as a female literary tradition is The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
(1979) by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who argued that the very idea of
authorship and thus literary authority has always been unyieldingly
paternalistic.
Whereas Feminist
Criticism marked a divergence from modern theory's predominantly formalist
approach to literature simply because it was more interested in the social
content of the literary work than its form, a group of critics loosely termed
the New Historicists mounted a direct assault on the formalist tradition and
urged a return to approaches which focus on the authorial "intention"
of the work, its socially human referent, and its socio-historical context.
The New
Historicism's basic attack against modern literary theory was outlined by
Berkeley professors Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in two articles
published in 1982 and 1987 in the journal Critical Inquiry, entitled
"Against Theory" and "Against Theory II: Hermeneutics and
Deconstruction." The philosophic
basis of Knapp and Michaels' arguments and assumptions are primarily derived
from German thinker Hans-George Gadamer, who argued that criticism cannot find
a basis for an absolute meaning in a literary work unprejudiced by history; and
from his best-known follower, Hans Robert Jauss, who argued that the literary
work must be studied in terms of the various historical moments of its
reception.
However, the most
dominant figure of the New Historicism is Stephen Greenblatt, who introduced
the term in an introduction to a special 1982 issue of the journal Genre,
entitled “The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance.”
Basically, the New Historicists scorned literary formalism, especially for its
neglect of the social and political “context” of literary works. D. G. Myers, in a 2001 essay in the journal Academic
Questions, summarizes the basic principles of the New Historicist method as
follows: (1) Literature is historical;
it is not the record of one mind, but a social construct shaped by multiple
consciousnesses; “the proper way to understand it, therefore, is through the
culture and society that produced it.” (2) Literature must be assimilated to
history; (3) There is no such thing as a human nature that transcends history,
just as there is no such thing as a literary work that transcends history. (4)
No one can rise above his or her own ideological upbringing; since no modern
reader can ever read a work as its contemporaries read it, one can only try to
reconstruct the ideology that gave rise to it.
The problem with
such an approach is, as Frank Kermode says in his review of Greenblatt’s Shakespearian
Negotiations, is that while it unearths a great deal of peripheral detail
about a work, it does not seem to evince much interest in the work itself. As Kermode has it, “There is a great
quantity of sexological or political sack, but only a pennyworth of
interpretative bread.” Or as Terry
Eagleton says in a November 3, 2011 review of two new historicist studies of
the novels of Daniel Defoe: “Both
writers add to our understanding of the social context of Defoe’s writing, but
neither would spot a shift in tone, an unreliable narrator or a pattern of
imagery if it leapt into their laps.”
Postcolonial Studies, which has been described as part of a
larger multicultural educational reform, is said to have originated with the
1978 publication of Edward W. Said’s book Orientalism, which argued that
the predominant western approach to what was then called oriental studies, had
the effect of maintaining power over Arabs and Islam. Homi Bhabha, a critic of Commonwealth literary studies, made use
of the work of the activist Frantz Fanon to continue the attack against a
“Western mode of thought.” Postcolonial
studies became a continuation of sixties and seventies Multiculturalism in
America, for the disenfranchisement of racial minorities was called a form of
colonization. While faculty began
developing departments on university campuses to teach writings by women,
African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and gays, scholars
began to be hired to teach the writings of so-called Third World, i.e.
Postcolonial, counties. The first
introduction to the new postcolonial studies, pop- culturally entitled The
Empire Strikes Back.
In a brief essay in PMLA in 2003, playfully subtitled
“Still Crazy After All These Years,” W.J.T. Mitchell admits that the concept of
“form” seems to have outlived its usefulness in discussions of literature.
However, in spite of the fact that so many literary scholars and academic
critics think they have moved beyond formalism into “more capacious arenas like
history, culture, and politics,” Mitchell thinks that formalism, like other
discredited notions such as imagination and beauty and spirit, keeps
returning. Mitchell concludes that
although the old notion of form “some new notion of form, and thus a new kind
of formalism, lies before us.”
And that “new notion of form,” for lack of a more imaginative
term, is beginning to be known as the “new formalism.” Perhaps the best-known review of the new
formalism is the long essay by Majorie Levinson in the “changing profession”
section of the March 2007 issue of PMLA, entitled “What is New Formalism?” [An
even longer version of this review, which is the version I have read, is
available online at:
sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article
Levinson begins by suggesting that new formalism (she does
not capitalize the phrase) is “better described as a movement than a theory or
method.” She divides new formalist
studies into two groups: those who want to restore to historical criticism its
original focus on form (which she calls “activist formalism”), and those who wish
to bring back a sharp division between history and literature (which she calls
“normative formalism”) Both kinds of formalism, however, she says want to
“reinstate close reading,” which she defines as a “multilayered and integrative
responsiveness to every element of the textual dimension.” The central work of new formalism, Levinson
says, is “rededication” to the idea of form, noting that words common to
several of the essays are “commitment,” “conviction,” “devotion,” and
“dedication.”
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