Introduction to Postmodern Literary Theory Agenda Why study literary theory?

New Criticism

• T.S. ELIOT (1888-1965)

• New political reading of English literature
• Miltons and Romantics less important
• Metaphysicals upgraded
• French symbolists imported
• Eliot was an extreme right-wing traditionalist
• Assaulted middle-class ideologies of liberalism, romanticism, individualism
• Before Milton—poets could think but not feel
• After (Romantics)—feel but not think—and degenerated

New Criticism

• T.S. ELIOT

• Symbolism in context of classical and Christian traditions
• Believed language of poetry should communicate by objective correlatives—deep symbols and images that bypass rational thought and seize readers by “the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, the digestive tracts.” Images should penetrate to the primitive levels at which all men and women experienced alike—through symbols, rhythms, archetypes, images of death and resurrection, the Fisher King.

New Criticism

• AMERICAN NEW CRITICISM

• John Crow Ransom The New Criticism (1941)
• Poetry as an aesthetic alternative to the scientific rationalism of the North
• Sensual integrity of poetry as a form of human knowledge
• Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks
• A poem is a “unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude”

Existentialism

• Existence precedes knowledge (arationalism)

• “I am, therefore I think, I feel, I suffer…”

• There is no meaning that man does not create

• Inherent sense of alienation, angst, anxiety

• Nietzsche: Man should rise from the ruins of the broken cathedrals and assume his rightful supremacy, without mourning

• Kierkegaard: Faith in God, in fear and trembling

• Nihilism, absurdity and despair

• Christian existentialism

Phenomenology / Reception Theory

• JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980)

• What is Literature? (1948)
• A book’s reception by the reader is part of the work itself
• Includes an image of who the book is written for
• An implied reader is encoded in the book itself
• The dilemma of the contemporary writer, who can address his work neither to the bourgeoisie, the working class or the mythical man in general.

Phenomenology / Reception Theory

• “What did you make of the new couple?”

• The Andersons, George and Helen, were undressing.

Phenomenology

• EDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938) Crisis of the European Sciences (1935)—Wanted to launch a spiritual rebirth through an “absolutely self-sufficient science of the spirit”

• We can not be sure of the independent existence of objects
• Only absolute truth is what appears to us in our minds, things posited by our consciousness
• There are universal types or essences which we can grasp
• Knowledge of phenomena is intuitive

Phenomenology

• EDMUND HUSSERL

• Being and meaning are bound together; there is no object without a subject, no subject without an object.
• Centrality of the human subject
• Literary text is the embodiment of the author’s consciousness
• Deep structures and patterns within the work
• Limitation: ignores social Marxist view—a head without a world

Phenomenology

• MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889-1976)

• Rejects Husserl’s concept of a transcendental subject capable of knowing through intuition
• Heidegger begins with irreducible givenness of existence
• Dasein: Being-in-the-world
• We are beings in a world we cannot objectify
• Language is where reality unconceals itself (similar to structuralism)

Phenomenology

• MARTIN HEIDEGGER

• We must make way for Being via “humble listening,” open ourselves passively for truths to emerge
• Pre-Platonic “listening to the earth and stars”
• Understood that meaning of language is a social matter; language belongs to a society before it belongs to me
• CULTURE CONSTRUCTS US

Phenomenology / Reception Theory

• RECEPTION THEORY

• Role of reader as co-partner
• Reader brings considerable knowledge and experience to the literary encounter
• Including literary conventions
• Will fill in the blanks, select and organize
• Must open ourselves to the deep essences of things
• Look for recurring themes and patterns of imagery
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