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Western critical theory has got rapid development in the 0th century. Following the full development of Russian Formalism in the early 0th century, other literary theories, such as new criticism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, reception theory, structuralism, deconstruction, come into being. Although all the theories have their specific concerns, they concentrate on a number of questions, such as the locus of literary meaning, the status of the text, the role of the reader, the function of language in the text, the relation between literary and society (history). It is certain that all theories have their strengths and weaknesses, but having a clear understanding of their theories and making a scientific judgment will enable us to have better correct attitudes towards literary works. Here, in this paper, I will tell my understanding of western literary criticism from two aspects, language and history. Formalism Formalism places the study of literature on a scientific footing by defining its object and establishing its own methods and procedures. In other words, they are making efforts to find the internal laws and principles that make a piece of literature literary, or the form of literature. They study the form of the work (as opposed to its content), although form to a formalist can connote anything from genre (for example, one may speak of the sonnet form) to grammatical or rhetorical structure to the emotional imperative that engenders the works (more mechanical) structure. No matter which connotation of form pertains, however, formalists seek to be objective in their analysis, focusing on the work itself and avoiding external considerations. They pay particular attention to literary devices used in the work and to the patterns these devices establish.Formalists have generally suggested that everyday language, which serves simply to communicate information, is stale and unimaginative. They argue that literariness has the capacity to overturn common and expected patterns (of grammar, of story line), thereby rejuvenating language. This doesn¡¯t mean that literature language is difficult language, but literature language lays emphasis on the process of experience. Then what can be done to achieve ¡®literariness¡¯? They put forward the concept of ¡°defamiliarization¡±, to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.(from Art as Technique by Shklovsky). Eagleton could not accept the concept of estrangement. He says, that a piece of language was estranging doesn¡¯t guarantee that it is always and everywhere so; it is estranging only against a certain normative linguistic background and if this alters then the writing might cease to be perceptible as literature. As to literariness, Eagleton says that it is a function of the differential relations between one sort of discourse and another; it is not an eternally given property, and ¡° it is in fact historically specific.¡± The Formalists quite rightly thought that literary criticism was overburdened with socio-political issues. In the late nineteenth century literature was indeed one of the principal media of discussion for political and philosophical issues. Consequently literary criticism was almost exclusively the guarded territory of journalism. Literary criticism was not considered an academic activity. Before the appearance of the Formalists, academic research, quite ignorant of theoretical problems, made use of antiquated aesthetic, psychological, and historical ¡®axioms¡¯ and had so lost sight of its proper subject that its very existence as a science had become illusory. There was almost no struggle between the Formalists and the Academicians, not because the Formalists had broken in the door (there were no doors), but because we found an open passage-way instead of a fortress. (Boris Eikhenbaum, The Theory of the ¡®Formal Method¡¯, Öì¸Õ£¬¡¶¶þÊ®ÊÀ¼ÍÎ÷·½ÎÄÕÅúÆÀÀíÂÛ¡·). Though the formalists did not deny that art had a relation to social reality they provocatively claimed that this relation was not the critic¡¯s business. So what they care in literary criticism is just form not the content which has certain relation with social reality. The most severe criticism of formalism comes from Marxism. Trotosky remarks that the form of art is, to a certain and very large degree, independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines.New Criticism Help with essay on Language, World in Western Literary Criticism
While Formalism was prevailing in Russia, there arose a similar literary movement in Europe and America, the New Criticism. New Criticism shares something with Russian Formalism; it keeps literary form as the only proper target of literary criticism.For most of the New Critics that job is practical criticism or close reading, in which the poem or literary text is treated as a self-sufficient verbal artifact. By careful attention to language, the text is presumed to be a unique and privileged source of meaning and value, sharply distinguished from other texts or other uses of language (particularly scientific language). Accordingly, the meaning of the poem is not conveyed by any prose paraphrase and is valued as the source of an experience (for the reader) available in no other way. For this among other reasons, opponents of the New Critics have frequently charged that they ignore history, ideology, politics, philosophy, or other factors that shape literary experience. While such charges are not entirely fair, they arise because New Criticism in practice came to focus almost exclusively on problems of interpreting individual texts. Above all New Criticism removed literature from the realm of politics. The text was interesting in itself, not in what it said about the world or how it was produced at it own historical moment. New criticism has a belief in the study of literature as independent of historical or authorial origins. The New Critics believed in this idea of the ¡®text in itself¡¯. Richards tries to explain literary reading in terms of modern semantics and psychology. His new criticism is psychological criticism which is not spontaneous response, but psychological response. It is practical criticism. In Practical Criticism, Richards puts forward four functions of language (sense, feeling, tone, and intention). We have symbolic discourse (scientific/poetic language) and evocative discourse. There is mysterious time of the evocator and the evocated in poetry. What is important in literature is how to evocate feelings. Richards has psychological concern about the text language. He is concerned how the readers are affected psychologically. So his criticism belongs to affective criticism. Richards¡¯ criticism not just persists in the text. His second stage concern is how emotion is aroused. It starts from the reader¡¯s view point, but it is more scientific.Ransom doesn¡¯t agree with Richards. He says that the primary task of literature is to deal with the objects. Language has meaning, language has reference to objects. If we have objects, the feelings will spontaneously attach to it, it is personal experience, so it is not necessary to talk about emotion and we just need to talk about the text. So long as the object seems sufficient on our feelings, it is not the critics¡¯ task to talk about emotion.T. S. Eliot is a member of new criticism. He focuses attention on tradition. In his classicism poetry, he emphasizes universal, in contrast with romanticism which emphasizes the individual. He says that no text can have an independent meaning. All texts depend on other texts for its meaning. So literary tradition, such as poems, belong to other texts. Then we have so called archetype. It means that any new text is new realization of the previous traditional texts. For Eliot the great poem is transparent, not of the authors mind but in terms of what the poem is about. ¡®The end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from which all accidents of personal emotion are removed; thus we aim to see the object as it really is. We focus on the object as it really is -- the poetic language at best effaces itself to allow view of what the poem is about. Eliot also believed that society was degenerating from an original organic state. He called this the ¡®dissociation of sensibilities¡¯-- a fatal split between intellect and feeling which he thought occurred sometime in the C17th.Leavis focuses on the language too, but he is different from the new critics. Leavis says that industry brings evils, alienation, and turn everything into commodity. We need something to save the society. Religion has failed for the development of science. Literature would provide us with life experience, so his criticism is criticism of life, to search for life behind language. But new criticism just goes through language, the surface of text. To Leavis, literature is also a reflection of ideology, and literature is panacea, social cement. He proposes not to change society, just to survive it. As to this point, Eagleton says that Leavis places too much emphasis on literature. Literature is not panacea. Leavis has put things upside down. To save society, we have to work from bottom to top.The following is the main differences between Leavis and the New Critics(1) The text and the authorLeavis discussion of work often slides into analysis of author¡¯s mind commonsense view of the author as the origin of meaning.New Critics author based reading is intentional fallacy. Work is self-sufficient.() The text and realityLeavis poetry must be about life, but he does not really explain whose life.New Critics The text is self-contained, but is supposed ultimately to return to reality. This is a philosophical stance--in practice new critics rarely has reference outside the specifically literary qualities of the text.() The text and reader Leavis Reader must be trained to respond sensitively to poetry.New Critics It is affective fallacy. Meaning must be in the text rather than a production of the reader.(4) The text and languageLeavis the text must have organic connection to life and language should be ¡®concrete¡¯.New Critics the text has poetic language, so it cannot be paraphrased.Eagleton adopts a critical attitudes toward all these new critics. ¡°What we value will not be our free choice, but be decided by the society in literature.¡± Eagleton here wants to clear away the subjectivity or any individual choice as literature. As to Eliot¡¯s view that tradition will never make mistakes, Eagleton says tradition is only a mystery. To Eagleton, Ransom¡¯s ontology, text has ontological meaning, is myth.PhenomenologyPhenomenological criticism, an idealist, essentialist, anti-historical, formalist and organicist type of criticism, aims at a wholly ¡®immanent¡¯ reading of the text, totally unaffected by anything outside it. Husserl, the chief representative of phenomenology, bracketed the real object, then the actual historical context of the literary work, its author, conditions of production and readership are ignored. 1. language For phenomenological criticism, the language of a literary work is little more than an ¡®expression¡¯ of its inner meanings. There is little place for language as such in Husserlian phenomenology. Husserl speaks of a purely private or internal sphere of experience; but such a sphere is in fact a fiction, since all experience involves language and language is ineradicably social. For Husserl, meaning is something which pre-dates language language is no more than a secondary activity which gives names to meanings. Husserl focused on things as they show themselves. The philosophy was to let things appear as they are or to refrain from reading our presuppositions into a text. The purpose of Husserls phenomenological reduction is to focus on what is immediate to experience, Everything not immanent to consciousness must be rigorously excluded. In this approach the meaning of the text has been fixed by the language and exists in an idealist sense. Eagleton phenomenology promises to give a firm grounding for human knowledge, but can do so only at a massive cost the sacrifice of human history itself. For surely human meanings are in a deep sense historical they are not a question of intuiting the universal essence of what it is to be an onion, but a matter of changing, practical transactions between social individuals. . World Husserl believes that we firstly think by our own language, then find suitable language for the idea, so he believes languages is in a secondary position. Thus we have pure meaning in Husserl, and this meaning is not influenced by history. According to Eagleton, meaning is actually product of specific historical point, and no meaning can be deprived from perspective.Hermeneutics Husserl and Heidegger share some similarities. They both agree the scientific understanding of the society should be rejected, but Heidegger brings history to the understanding of Hermeneutics. The recognition that meaning is historical was what led Husserl¡¯s most celebrated pupil, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, to break with his system of thought. Heidegger holds that language in not merely a device for human communication, it brings the world to be in the first place. Only where there is language is there ¡®world¡¯. He adds that language has an existence of its own in which human beings come to participate, and only by participating in it do they come to be human at all. Heidegger¡¯s hermeneutics is generally referred to as ¡®hermeneutical phenomenology¡¯ to distinguish it from Husserl¡¯s ¡®transcendental phenomenology¡¯ because it bases its theory on questions of historical interpretation rather than on transcendental consciousness. Structuralism Structuralism is appealing to some critics because it adds a certain objectivity, a SCIENTIFIC objectivity, to the realm of literary studies (which have often been criticized as purely subjective/impressionistic) This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating parole to langue; actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a system in the abstract. Thus structuralist readings ignore the specificity of actual texts. In structuralism, the individuality of the text disappears in favor of looking at patterns, systems, and structures. Some structuralists (and a related school of critics, called the Russian Formalists) propose that ALL narratives can be charted as variations on certain basic universal narrative patterns. In this way of looking at narratives, the author is canceled out, since the text is a function of a system, not of an individual. Structuralism argues that any piece of writing, or any signifying system, has no origin, and that authors merely inhabit pre-existing structures (langue) that enable them to make any particular sentence (or story)--any parole. Hence there is the idea that language speaks us, rather than that we speak language. We dont originate language; we inhabit a structure that enables us to speak; what we perceive as our originality is simply our recombination of some of the elements in the pre-existing system. Hence every text, and every sentence we speak or write, is made up of the already written. By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralists cancel out history. Most insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless. Structuralists cant account for change or development; they are uninterested, for example, in how literary forms may have changed over time. They are not interested in a texts production or reception/consumption, but only in the structures that shape it. In erasing the author, the individual text, the reader, and history, structuralism represented a major challenge to what we now call the liberal humanist tradition in literary criticism. Eagleton attacks structuralism for structuralism holds that social reality or history may be a condition of change of literary form, but it¡¯s not the cause of the change of literary form.Post-Structuralism while structuralism seeks to establish a science or poetics of literature, post-structuralist thought, has taken an anti-scientific stance and, pursuing the infinite play of signifiers, has resisted the imposition of any organising system. The leading figure in deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, looks at philosophy (Western metaphysics) to see that any system necessarily posits a CENTER, a point from which everything comes, and to which everything refers or returns. In his paper ¡°Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science,¡± Derrida says that any structure has a fixed origin as the center of ¡°structurality.¡± This center allows for and limits the freeplay of the structural elements, since it both organizes and balances the structure. However, to preside over the structure, this organizer is not part of the organization so that freeplay will not affect the center. The center, in this sense both within and outside the structure, is both the center and not the center. To post-structuralists, meaning is not immediately present in a sign. Meaning is scattered along the whole chain of signifiers, and it is a kind of constant flickering of presence and absence together. There is no fixed meaning in the text. When we read a text, a sentence doesn¡¯t have its own meaning. The sentence¡¯s meaning is changing. Language in post-structuralism is much less stable. Eagleton has his comment on post-structuralism. He says that Derrida¡¯s work has been unhistorical, politically evasive and in practice oblivious to language as ¡®discourse¡¯.
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