Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, fourth edition. New York: Longman, ©1998.

WHAT IS LITERARY THEORY?

PAUL DE MAN THE RESISTANCE TO THEORY [100]

Literary th can be said to come into being when the approach to literary texts is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic, considerations or, to put it somewhatbless crudely, when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning or value but the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their establishment - the imlication being that this establishment is problematic enough to require an autonomous discipline of critical investigation to consider its possibility and its status." /[104]

J. HILLIS MILLER, THE SEARCH FOR GROUNDS IN LITERARY STUDY [116]

..the terror or dread readers may experience when they confront a text which seems irreducibly strange, inexplicable, perhaps even mad..."[117]

literature has the burden of carrying the values of culture

Kant "set works of art as the reliable and indispensible member bet cognition and ethics [120]

Arnold says "There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received religion which does not threaten to dissolve..." [120]

nihilisn - Nietzsche called it the history of the next two centuries [122]

"Nihilism arises naturally and inevitably during a period, the era of technology, when the principle of universal accountability holds sway in the organization of society." [123]

bell hooks POSTMODERN BLACKNESS [130]

"During the sixties, the black power movement was influenced by perspectives that could easily be labeled modernist.Certainly, many of the ways black folks addressed issues of identity conformed to a modernist universalizing agenda.... militant protest was stifled by a powerful, repressive postmodern state." [131]

Radical postmodernist practice - = politics of difference - hetrogeneity, the decentered subject

critical break w/ authority

postmodern critique of identity

postmodern critique of essentialism as it pertains to comstruction of identity

"The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance." [132]

postmodernist reconstruction of 'master' narratives

"It is no accident that 'rap' has usurped the primary position of rhythm and blues music among young black folks as the most desired sound or that it began as a form of 'testimony' for the underclass. It has enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical vpoce, as a group of young black men told me, a 'common literacy.' Rap projects a critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging." [132-33]

Lawrence Grossberg: "...boasts that announce their own existence, like a rap song boasting of the imaginary (or real--it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They offer forms of empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but precisely through the forms of nihilism itself; an empowering nihilism, a moment of positivity through the production and structuring of affective relations." [133]

Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity..." [133]

Aijaz Ahmad LITERARY THEORY AND 'THIRD WORLD LITERATURE': SOME CONTEXTS [137]

Move to define objective criteria for literary analysis to displace the aristocratic notions of literary 'taste' [139]

1930s literary and cultural radicalism

but disappeared quickly

New Criticism

gtest power during McCarthyism

Golden years of US liberalism - 60s kennedy

liberal imperialism - led to Vietnam

Most teachers and critics still New Crit

new literary avant-garde of theory

specialness of lit - special language, special knowledge

analytic method refers to extra-literary positions - psychoanalysis, linguistics, phil

everything becomes literature

1980s - minority seeks politically informed readings

Algerian Rev and Vietnam caused intellectuals to question their place in the world

1968 - Tet offensive victories, Black rebellion, Johnson doesn't run again, anti-war mvmt

consequences for teaching lit

Black civil rights, Black Cultural Natioanlism

wider political space opened-Hispanic Am, Mexican agricultural laborers, Women's mvmt

Marxism makes serious appearance

issue of colonialism and imperialism

issue began not from th but from Black experience in US

led to int in African lit

Opposition to Vietnam war led to Q of how colony and empire had been represented in Western literatures

Colonial Discourse Analysis

necessary rereading of the Western archive.. claim that the whole was an archive of bad faith

Issue of exclusive emphasis in Western academy on experience of Europe and North America

led to category of Third World Literature

Thatcherite-Reaganite consensus

unwilling to grant space to dissent

seen as mad attacks on Western civ and famly values and degenerations of 'the Amerian mind.'

literary theorists out of stu mvmts of 60s and 70s

dropped out or didn't become theorists or weren't seriously involved in political mvmt

recession and stagnation of 70s put social justice mvmts on defensive

also consolidation of bourgeois nation-state in much of post-colonial world

turn int to 3rd world nat'lsm

= beg of "Third World Literature"

l1ter 80s - disillusionment w/[state of Third World

post-structuralism and deconstruction were theoretical positions for critique of nationalism

Disorienting effects

imperialism and nat'lism = twin faces of same falsity

rejection of rationalism

Only Power was universal and immutable

Affiliations could only be shifting and multiple

to speak of a stable subject position was to chase the chimera of the 'myth of origins'

the ideal of inquiry (which presumes pos of finding some believable truth is to be replaced by the idea of conversation (by its nature inconclusive) [153]

2 directions follow

American kind of pluralism

more sombre

whatever claims to be fact is none other than a truth-effect produced by the ruse of discourse

whatever claims to resist Power is already constituted as Power

then can only wander aimlessly thru effects, counting, consuming, producing them

theory as conversation has leveling effect

can cite Marxists and anti-Marxists, feminists andanti-feminists, etc. to validate successive positions

theory becomes marketplace of ideas

if try to conclude, one is rationalist or empiricist, or historicist

"The age of Marxism if over, 'the age of enjoyment of goods and services' is here! The world was, in other words, bourgeois/ [154]

EDWARD W. SAID. THE POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE

Ferment in minority, subaltern, feninist and post-colonial consciousness resulted in a Copernican revolution in all trad fields of inquiry. Eurocentrism has been challenged definitively... most scholars aware now that society and culture have been the heterogeneous product of heterogeneous people in an enormous variety of cultures, traditions, and situations.

No longer does TS Eliot's idea of the great Western masterpieces enduring together in a constantly redefining pattern of monuments have its old authority. [162]

contest @ canon continues

1st Q od adding Jane Austin to male writers

then displacing entire canon of American writers like Hawthorne and Emerson w/ best-selling writers of the same period like Harriet Beecher Stowe..

after that the logic of displacement bec more attenuated and the mere mention of names of politically validated living writers bec more impt than anything @ them or their wks [163]

but this is caricature

the real thing was "always a matter of opening and participating in a central strand of intellectual and cultural effort and of showing what had always been, though indiscernably, a part of it, like the work of women, or of blacks and servants - but which had been either denied or derogated."." [163]

It does not finally matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read. The idea that Plato and Aristotle are male and products of a slave society so they should be disqualified fro receiving contemporary attention is as limited an idea as suggesting that only their work, because it was addressed to and about elites should be read today... [165]

LINKS TO OTHER SECTIONS OF Contemporary Literary Criticism:

What Is Literary Studies?

What is Literary Theory?

Structuralism

Deconstruction

Cultural Studies