‘Rather than simply providing new methods for the study of literary works, it asks about the nature

and function of literature and the literary institution themselves. Rather than simply supplying us with
yet more sophisticated ways of tackling canonical texts, it inquires into the very concept of
canonicity’
‘Keynes once remarked that those economists who disliked theory, or claimed to get along better
without it, were simply in the grip of an older theory’
What is literature? Cannot define it simply as imaginative fictional writing because many books are
based on historical events, or tackle themes and emotions which are very real. Literature is more-so
elevating ‘ordinary language’, rhythms of speech can’t quite be captured as real life dialogue, it’s not
interesting.
- ‘Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust
upon them’ – literature can’t be objectively defined, since historical accounts or letters or
essays can be read in a literary style if you enjoy the imagery or prosaic style.
- We could evaluate literature in terms of the response of readers, provoking reflections,
emotion.
We read things, and hold them accountable/up to our present conditions and society – our opinions etc
are fundamentally intersected with social and personal modern conditions.
What’s the narrator? The medium by which the story is presented to us.
The canon: we cannot tell what our human society will value as works of literature in the future. I.A
Richards asked his students to rank anonymous poets and found well-regarded members of the canon
marked down.
- Reading the canon to access some passed golden age of literature and England, especially
around C20 during Industrial Revolution like romanticism, trying to revert back to ‘organic’
society before economical shift.
Literary theory: began preoccupied with the author (romanticism, 19th century), then exclusively the
text as an object (new criticism), then recently a shift of attention to the reader.

Rise of English:
- 18th century England post-civil war, polarisation between social classes, and therefore key
concepts were to reconcile social order – reason, nature, order, featured in literature.
- Concept of literature as imaginative emerges more fully in Romantic period, more valued
over “boring” prose or non-fiction. Revolutionary period (France, America, Industrial)
looking to the past, literature used politically. Idea of individualism prized.
- Late 19th century Victorianism, decline of religion. Oxford professor Gordon: ‘England is
sick, and… English literature must save it. The churches having failed, and social remedies
being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, to delight and instruct us, but
also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the state’ – literature is ideological. able to
provide experiences, discussions, morals.
- Literature directed to lower/middle classes, to women as part of their involvement in higher
education and teaching feminine values, but also in a masculine colonial sense to show off
Britain’s cultural superiority to their colonised people. Still time before English was fashioned
into a serious discipline, to explore ‘the most fundamental questions of human existence’
 - Oxbridge upper class, classism – preserving ‘Englishness’. When Eliot arrived in England
in1915 he published criticism upgrading metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, and
Milton/Romantics lessened.
- he preferred pre-Civil War works, like Ezra Pound (and formalism), believed poets were no
longer able to express thoughts/feelings simultaneously, language had become stale and
unsuitable for poetry in the industrial world. More right wing, contemptuous of
liberal/democratic values. Lineage of Romanticism.
Arguments that literature is a ‘ideology for reconstructing social order, and does so in the socially
disruptive, economically decaying, politicaly unstable years which followed the Great War’ (ww1)

Formalism: about the form and technique and devices used in literature, rather than social/contextual
factors, considering authorial intent etc. Sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative.
- Saw literature as elevating normal language with ‘linguistic violence’. But then what is the
standard of ordinary language that we are comparing special literary language with?
- ‘Formalists presumed that “making strange” was the essence of the literary’

Phenomenological criticism of literary works – based on Husserl’s Phenomenology – ‘aims at a

wholly immanent reading of the text, totally unaffected by anything outside it. Examines the aspects
of an author’s consciousness which manifest itself in their text. Concerned with grasping the author’s
mind through what they write, with no biographical info.
- Works are the mediators between the consciousness of the author, and the way they live their
lives.
Hermeneutics: Hirsch and Heidegger – multiple valid interpretations of an author’s intended meaning.
However, whether or not we access it, authors assign literary meaning, it’s ‘absolute and wholly
resistant to historical change’. readers assign significance which can change depending on historical
period. Meaning of a text belongs to author.
- But meanings are not as stable as he assumes, even language and representation of a text is
slippery and subjective. ‘Any such notion of absolute objectivity is an illusion’. An author
might have several contradictory intentions in writing.
Iser’s Reception theory: considers the reader’s role in literature.
- ‘The reader makes implicit connections, fills in gaps, draws inferences and tests out hunches’
on a text, ‘constructing questionable interpretations’. Without them, a text isn’t really a
literary work.
- Worth adding the individuality and subjectgivity of readers’ responses, unique with our
individual historical and social experiences, drawn to certain adjectives more than others etc.
‘we read backwards and forwards simultaneously’, revising assumptions, guessing,
remembering other moments and links
- Roland Barthes places emphasis on the reader, meaning of a text is determined by reader’s
interpretations. He ignores the fact that no one encounters a text in a void – influenced by
socio-historical events which fundamentally shape their interpretations.
- Sartre had an idea that ‘every text is built out of a sense of its potential audience’, and the
‘implied reader’ is encoded in text.
- Stanley Fish: ‘the true writer is the reader’, more important to examine what the text does to
us. Everything is a product of interpretation, with no determined meaning. So can we make a
 literary text mean whatever we’d like? Certainly liberating, or is it a fantasy? I think it’s
freeing.

New criticism and Structuralism

American New Criticism (1930s-50s): scientific rationalism was destroying and stripping the
aesthetic life of the Old south. Poetry was the solution. Through its medium, the old world could be
restored.
- New criticism insisted that authorial intention and socio-cultural conditions have no relevance
to the interpretation of the text. Focused on poetry.
1950s – Northrop Frye’s Structuralism: literature can be classed in a system of our relationship to the
protagonist of the story. Comic, romantic, tragic and ironic narratives (mythoi).
- In myth, hero is superior to others. Romance, superior to a degree. Tragedy, superior to others
(need for pathos), but ultimately inferior to his environment which leads to downfall. And
comic/realism equal to us. Irony, protagonists are inferior.
- Continues New criticism’s tendencies to avoid historical context
- Allows us to judge all literature as a whole, rather than a series of separate pockets of history
or un-understandable texts.
Structuralism: language as a system of signs, signifiers – a tension between words and their meaning.
Meaning is not indicated by a word, but in its relation and proximity to other signifiers. We don’t
know what house means, but in context it’s larger than hut and smaller than mansion. Structuralism
challenged the belief that texts reflected a given reality, instead, it was constituted of linguistic
conventions and situated among other texts.
- A concentration not on meaning, but on words’ internal relations with one another.
- Jakobson comments that ‘the poetic consisted above all in language’s being placed in a
certain kind of self-conscious relationship to itself’. Talks about how in poetry, words are not
just chosen for their value in terms of meaning and communication, but ‘with an eye for
patterns of similarity, opposition, parallelism, created by their sound, meaning, rhythm and
connotations’
- Not taking language for granted
Semiotics means the study of signs (words, bird calls, symptoms, poems). Founder C.S Peirce
- Iconic: sign resembles what it stands for (photograph)
- Indexical: sign associated with a possible cause (smoke with fire, blotches with chickenpox)
- Symbolic: metaphorical sign of something
- Tension between what the sign stands for and connotations of that sign.

‘every literary text is made up of a number of ‘systems’, (lexical, graphic, metrical, phonological) and
gains its effects through constant clashes and tensions between these systems. Each of the systems
comes to represent a ‘norm’ from which the others deviate, setting up a code of expectations which
they transgress.’ When things intersect, like oxymorons or juxtapositions, or break into irregularity, it
‘heightens our awareness of its meanings…producing a sharper awareness of [words] similarity or
difference in meaning, generating new significances by the clash’
 - Semantics, placement of words are just as important as their meaning
- Sassure ‘was interested not in what people actually said but the structure which allowed them
to say it’

Narratology: Genette makes a distinction between the order of events in the text, the actual
chronological sequence of these events happening, and the act of narration itself.
1. time order of the narrative (flashback, tension, foreshadowing).
2. how the narrative expands or glosses over episodes, pausing or moving forward.
3. frequency (if an event happens once but is revisited, or repeating events).
4. Mood (free indirect speech, direct speech, perspective – first or third person)
5. Voice (homodiegetic, heterodiegetic, autodiegetic, speaking in present tense, recounting
afterwards, involved in narrative, distance from other characters, concerned with the act of
narrating itself, what kind of narrator)

Literature is performative? Described as ‘imitations of speech acts’, since the narrator or characters
aren’t actually talking to us, ‘uses language within certain conventions in order to bring about certain
effects in a reader’, but it doesn’t actually represent reality in dialogue or description. The
dramatization of the language in literature is great, whether what it describes actually exists or not is
unimportant.

Poststructuralism (derrida)
- Responded negatively to structuralism’s insistence on frameworks and structures to access
truths. Deconstructive – emphasising the instability of authorial meaning. Prioritises the
reader.
- Believed in studying the socio-historical systems of knowledge that produced that text.
- Meaning isn’t stable, it hangs in the air, tension between what words could have signified (cat
 cap). Structuralists ahd too much of a stable view of language. Writing language is an
obstruction of meaning in some ways, misinterpreting, not as natural as spoken language as I
think it.
- Structuralism sorts things into binary opposites (man, woman, dark/light, high/low).
Deconstruction tries to show how these oppositions, in order to exist, rely on the other and
therefore almost invert and collapse.
- The instability of meaning doesn’t lend itself to a structure. Writing is inexhaustible, so are
texts, and all literary texts are woven out of other literary texts (intertextuality) – a work’s
writing spills over into other works, generating countless perspectives. Death of the author.
- ‘unable to break the structures of state power, post-structuralism found it possible instead to
subvert the structures of language’
Scepticism grew from this movement: ‘If meaning, the signified, was a passing product of words or
signifiers, always shifting and unstable, part-present and part-absent, how could there be any
determinate truth or meaning at all?’
- Links to political reality of feminism and socialism, post-structuralism similarly tried to undo
binary oppositions. Like gender or class.

Psychoanalysis: