Readings 101 Literature Theory Checklist

6/22/09 10:33 AMDepartment of English Languages and Literature - Courses

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THEORY CHECKLIST: A WORKINGDOCUMENT

1997, 1999 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, withattribution, for non-profit purposes.As are all pages for my course, this document is open to change.If you have any suggestions (additions, qualifications,arguments), mail me.

One is faced at the very outset, when approaching literaturetheoretically, with considerations such as the following. Youshould build your own checklist of theoretical considerations aswe go through the course. For some other formulations of theseissues, see my pages Some Factors Affecting/Effecting theReading of Texts and The Problem of Meaning.

I. What is the Nature of and What Are the Functions ofLiterature?

II. What is the Nature of the Subject?

III. Who is the Reader?

IV. What is the Relation of the Author to the Text?

V. What are the Relations of the Author and the Text to Society?

VI. Where (and How) Does 'Reality' Exist?

VII. What is Representation (Mimesis)?

VIII. What is the Nature and Status of Language?

IX. What is the Relation of "Form" and "Art" to Meaning?

X. Where is Meaning?



I. What is the Nature of and What are the Functions ofLiterature?

The question of what "Literature" in fact 'is' is adifficult one. Why might a seventeenth century treatiseon religion be Literature, and scads of poems aboutlove not be Literature? Is this Literature, or not -- ?

Nobody knows, Tiddley-pomHow cold my toes, Tiddley-pom How cold my toes, Tiddley-pom Are growing.

Well, if it isn'tLiterature, what is it?It's part of our culture,our heritage; it's inverse; it's in all thebookstores.

Does literariness reside in the idea of quality (in whichcase a well written book on brain surgery might beLiterature), or in conventions (but many works whichfollow the conventions faithfully are not Literature), orin fictionality -- that is, to be Literature it can't be true-- well, not literally, at least? (The latter questionpoints of course to a further, serious problem: the truthstatus of narratives. Is an autobiography true, or is itsomeone's imagination of 'real' events, moulded to tella certain story of the self?)

Or, on quite another hand, is "Literature" merely whatyour professor (as a local manifestation of the power ofthe ruling class) says it is?

1. One might think of Literature as, for instance,

a. a body of texts marked by the imaginative verbalrecreation of the world as we experience it

b. relying upon the powers of form, allusion, poeticqualities of language and tropes to intensify andrender complex such representation ofexperience

c. and both drawing on and referencing the forms,the genre and discourse conventions, and



the genre and discourse conventions, andspecific examples, of previous literature

d. whose function is not simply to represent ourexperience but to offer possible worlds whichmay expand and/or critique our vision of orunderstanding of human life.

Then again, on might have quite other ideas aboutwhat constitutes this cultural practice, orclassification, that we call "Literature," forinstance....

2. And/or is Literature an institution: that is,"Literature" as a creation of the joint workings ofpublishing houses, professional critics, prize-awarding bodies, anthologizers, and the designersof curricula in universities and schools. As such, itsform and its definition or nature, as well as its'body' of works, may be said to represent theinterests of the professionals involved, and torepresent their political agenda and sense of theirplace in the society.

Consider a comment from a recent supplement onliteracy, in the Canadian middle-brow, wishing itwere-highbrow, weekly magazine Saturday Night, asupplement decorated with corporate logos andpaid for by the literacy organization ABC Canada, "ajoint initiative of business and labour." In it thewriter reports approvingly, surveying attitudestoward literacy,

Pity and scorn intermingle in the voice of[award-winning and financially successful]novelist Carol Shields when she talks aboutthe businessmen who tell her that their wiveslove her books, but they don't read fictionthemselves because they have to wadethrough reports all day at the office.

Pity and scorn. Wow. Those barbarians!

3. Is Literature, to raise another problem, or the sameone in a different way,



one in a different way,

a. a self-contained body of knowledge which refersprimarily to itself,

or

b. one instance of the ongoing engagement ofwriters in the historical and cultural aspirations,anxieties and crises of the time, consequentlyresponsive to and formed by the immediacies ofhistory and implicated in the forms anddiscourse practices of their time?

These questions lead us to ask, among other things,what the role of 'aesthetic' value or force as opposed torepresentational value and force are in literature, whatthe real functions of "literature" and "Literature" are(that is, works which we characterize as literature, andliterature as a social structure and practice), what theideological and/or moral force of literature may be saidto be.

There are some suggestions for the nature of literatureon my page On the Uses of Studying Literature and onmy page on some considerations regarding quality.

II. What is the Nature of the Subject?

1. Questions of the nature of the reader and theauthor, and of their place in the process of meaningand significance, lead us to the question of thenature of the subjectthat is, the experiencing self.Is the subject (here are some possibilities)...

a. an integral entity existing independently oflanguage, cultural meanings, or the contexts ofexperience

b. an entity which is created through one or moreof: language and other symbol systems; socialinteraction; responses to contexts; such that the



'subject' might be said to be a social formation

c. a being distributed across different meaningframes and discursive practices, a 'de-centered'subject, as the phrase is.

2. If the subject is in some manner an amalgam ofphysical and mental being, what implications doesthis have for ethical existence, for the nature ofconsciousness and knowledge, and (hence) for thenature and functions of modes of communicationsuch as literature?

3. If the subject is an entity or a continuum ofexperience which has an unconscious and aconscious component, what is the balance betweenand the relation between the two, what is theunconscious and how is it formed, and to whatelements of the unconscious and conscious selfdoes literature appeal?

III. Who is the Reader?

In brief,

a. is the reader an individual affected onlyincidentally by history and social judgment, or isthe reader the product of a 'reading formation',a set of cultural understandings andexpectations and a set of conventions forreading literature?

b. is the reader outside of and independent of thetext, or is the reader in fact a formation of thetext, a 'self' created through interaction with it?

The first of these questions has implications forinterpretation and evaluation, the second hasimplications for the role of literature, especially inthe socializing processes of the culture.

One must ask what the implications are of the



apparent fact that one must be 'educated in' thereading of 'good literature' in order to appreciateand understand it. Does this mean merely thatappreciating literature is a complex process, or doesit mean that the reader is only a 'proper reader'after a socializing process, so that 'literature' isregulated and its interpretations patrolled byguardians of correct reading? This of course gets usback to many previous questions, including thenature of 'aesthetic' experience.

IV. What is the Relation of the Author to the Text?

1. Is the text the intentional production of anindividual, or

2. Is the text an only partially intentional productionwhose unintended determinants are one of or acombination of

a. the psyche of the author,

b. the psyche of the culture,

c. the ideology of the culture,

d. the particular socio-economic conditions of theproduction (the placement and role of the artistin the culture, who pays for the production, whoconsumes it, what are the rewards of successfulproduction, how are they decided and, what arethe material conditions of production)

e. the traditions of writing which pertain to thetext

f. the traditions of the treatment of the particularsubject-matter in the culture and in the genre

3. Or is the text in fact almost entirely the productionof the ideological and cultural realm, in which realmthe author is merely a function, whose role,



aspirations, ideas and attitudes are created by thesociety in which she lives. In this case, the text is acomplex structure of cultural and aesthetic codes,none of which the author has created, arrangedaround traditional cultural themes or topoi --whereas the author herself, while an existent being(her existence and effort are not denied), has littleto do with the 'meaning' of the text, as she herselfis simply part of (or, constructed by) the circulationof meanings within the culture.

[For some considerations on the 'death' of theauthor, a thesis of poststructural theory, see mypage The 'death of the author' as an instance oftheory.]

V. What is the Relation of the Author and the Text toSociety?

This issue is implicitly addressed in the precedingquestions. As the author is operating within acertain cultural milieu,

1. In what ways does she represent in her text,deliberately and/or unconsciously, theunderstandings of the world that the cultureholds?

2. In what ways does she represent in her text,again deliberately and/or unconsciously, theunderstandings of what art is and does, theaesthetic ideolog(ies) of the time?

3. In what ways are the ideologies of the culture,and of the 'educated classes', embedded in theconventions, traditions, canons, style andsubject matter of the text?

Moreover the text not only will be an outcome ofthis situated imaginative process, but will bestructured in its production and in its reception byvarious material social forces; consequently one



must ask questions such as these:

1. Who is the intended audience, and how doesthat shape the production of (the imagination of,the writing of, the editing of, the sale of) thetext?

2. Who has a say in the text's final form, directly(e.g. editors), or indirectly (who will pay for itand why, who will produce and distribute it)?

3. How is it paid for, and how it is distributed, whohas access to it, under what conditions, andwhat effects might these conditions produce?

4. What status does that kind of writing have in theculture (e.g. what is its cach, what is itsauthority, where in the education andenculturation system is it placed, how does itrelate to entertainment and to the culturalpractices that distinguish the elite)?

5. What cultural powers does the (successful)author have?

VI. Where Does 'Reality' Exist?

1. If art represents reality, as Aristotle argued (andmost theorists since him have agreed), then totheorize art we need to theorize 'represents' and'reality'. At a very basic level,

a. does reality exist 'out there', independent ofhumans? --- in which case knowledge must behomomorphic with (essentially the samestructure as) reality, else we couldn't knowreality.

b. or on the other hand is 'reality' (or are someaspects of the conglomerate of conceptions weclump together under the heading 'reality') aproduct of the human mind, of our systems and



methods of knowledge, and of our symbolssystems, including language? How culture-specific is reality?

2. Can we ever know reality, or is what we think isreality just a construct?

3. If we can know it, what is it we are knowing? Afterall, we know symbolically, so all we know are oursymbols; and we know according to constructs ofthe relations of things, so what we know are thoserelations. The post-structuralist (or, structuralist,depending on your definitions) marxist LouisAlthusser wrote that, in effect, what we know is ourimaginary relations to reality -- that we live inideology, not in 'reality'.

VII. What is Representation (Mimesis)?

One must consider what it is to representsomething, what gets represented, what relationsuch representation might have to 'reality' (see theissue of what 'reality' is, below).

Most compellingly, is literature a means ofrepresenting reality, or it is a means of representingparticular imaginative constructions that we take tobe reality but which may have ideological, cultural,political meanings which ground and shape the'reality' we think we are looking at?

VIII. What is the Nature and Status of Language?

1. What is the status of language and rhetoric inliterature? Is the language of literature in any wayprivileged, intrinsically or culturally? -- Is itdifferent from other discourses? -- If so why andhow?

2. Is there a particular literariness to some uses oflanguage, as Roman Jakobson, for instance, argues?



Are there particular forms of language use, such asambiguity or irony, which forms mark a work asliterary ( for instance one school of contemporarytheory, lead by the late Paul de Man, maintains thatrhetoric, by which de Man means essentially tropes,ways of saying something by saying something else,are the hallmark of literary language)?

3. Is language composed of signs which have theirmeaning only in reference to, and throughdifference from, other signs, as in the popularSaussurean model? Or is language an actualindicator of the 'real world'?

4. Do we speak language, that is, is language subjectto our will and intention, or does language speak us,that is, are we implicated in a web of meaninglocated in and maintained by language?

IX. What is the Relation of "Form" and "Art" to Meaning?

1. What is the role of Form in the meaning of the text?Is form anything at all, and if it is, what is it?-- Ameans of constructing reader responses?-- A meansof putting meanings into particular relationshipswith each other?

2. And what is what we call 'art'? Is art an inherentproperty of human existence, or is it a set of learnedconventions? Does 'art' have a privileged role inrepresenting experience, or is Pierre Bourdieucorrect when, after the exhaustive analyses inDistinctions, he concludes that 'art' and taste in artare merely class markers, so that what we think ofas 'art' does not have any privilegedrepresentational force or qualities (other than socialones)?

X. Where is Meaning?

Does 'meaning' reside in the author's intentions, in



the text, or in the reading?

1. If it is in the text, is it in the text now, or in the textas an historical, culturally situated document, sothat to fully understand the meaning we might bestunderstand the cultural and aesthetic codes and thetraditions and the meanings of the particular time ofwriting?

2. If it is in the author's intentions, is that in theconscious, or the unconscious intentions? --In theintentions before or after the writing, or somewherein between? Can, in this case, the text havemeanings of which the author was not aware?

3. If meaning is in the reading, is that an informedreading, or any reading, and what difference doesthat distinction really signal? Is it in an ideal non-historical reading, or in a historically and culturallyplaced reading? (See my handout The Problem ofMeaning for slightly more elaboration.)

XI. In Conclusion

These are some of the issues that are raised by thetheorists on the course, and some of the basicquestions any consideration of the nature andfunction of literature, and of the meaning andfunction of particular works of literature, mustaddress

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