Hello and welcome to this course titled Introduction
to Literary Theory.
In a today’s lecture we will try and understand
what constitutes literary theory, and we will
also familiarize ourselves with some of the
topics that we are going to cover as part
of this lecture series.
However, before we start discussing the term
literary theory we will need to keep in mind
that there is no readily available definition
of the term that is universally accepted.
Therefore, our task would be to analyse the
various available discourses about literary
theory and to arrive at a working definition.
We will then go on adding nuances to this
tentative definition as we proceed with our
course, so that by the end of it we should
have a thorough understanding of the subject.
Now according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
the term theory means, and I am quoting from
the dictionary, “the conceptual basis of
a subject or area of study”, and this conceptual
basis is understood in opposition to the notion
of practice.
Ok.
So, one easy way to understand literary theory
is to read it as a conceptual basis of the
area of study that we know as literature.
And this can then be opposed to the more practical
side of literary studies which deals with
analysing and evaluating particularly literary
texts.
And this second bit is usually identified
as literary criticism as opposed to literary
theory.
So, literary criticism takes up the practical
part of literary studies.
So, in other words literary theory deals with
the broad picture, attempting to give a comprehensive
vision of what constitutes the field of literary
studies and literary criticism concerns itself
with the practice of reading individual texts
by transforming abstract concepts of literary
theories into analytical tools.
However, in spite of this being a rather neat
and ready definition of literary theory this
does not take us very far, and this is because
for most of the students of English literature,
the term literary theory usually presents
itself as a self-contradictory concept.
Here, I should, would like to digress a little
and make clear that throughout this course
I would be talking about literary theory as
it is usually taught within the disciplinary
framework of English literary studies.
I would therefore, request you to keep in
mind that I teach English literature in an
Indian institute and it is from this location
that I will try to intervene in the field
of literary theory.
As in fact, you will see during the course
of our discussion that the location of the
scholar crucially determines the approach
to this subject, and so I thought it would
be better to clarify my own position, my own
location at the very onset.
Anyway coming back to where we left, I was
saying that the definition of literary theory
that we can construct from the dictionary
meaning of the word theory does not take us
very far.
And the reason for that is literary theory,
the term usually appears to be self-contradictory
to most of the students of English literature.
And there are several reasons for this: for
a start, most of the intellectuals that we
normally study as part of any standard syllabus
of literary theory, are not literary critics.
To give you an instance, Jacques Derrida,
one of the most common names that we encounter
in any course of literary theory was, in fact,
a professor of philosophy.
Jacques Lacan, another important name, was
a practicing psychoanalyst.
Claude Lévi-Strauss one of the founding figures
of Structuralism which is an integral part
of our study of literary theory today, in
fact, taught social anthropology in France.
Therefore, as you can see, for someone situated
within the framework of English literary studies,
most of what is discussed under the rubric
of literary theory seems to be concerned not
primarily with literature but with other things;
with things like philosophy for instance,
or psychology, or sociology, or history.
Indeed for someone like Jonathan Culler, and
Jonathan Culler is a Professor of English
at the Cornell University in America, the
two words that compose the term “literary
theory” appear to be so distinct from each
other that he insists on calling it simply
“theory”, without the objective “literary”
attached to it.
In his book Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction, Culler defines theory in literary
studies as a self-contained genre, which might
be concerned with anything and everything
under the sun, but not with, and here I quote
Culler, not with the “nature of literature
or the methods of its study”.
In Culler’s account, this kind of theory,
which originates outside the discipline of
literary studies and remains an alien presence
within it, is associated with a particular
date and with a particular decade rather,
and that particular decade is a decade of
the 1960s.
I would like to underline this date because
in a significant number of textbooks you will
find the 1960, repeatedly mentioned as a moment
of origin for what we now consider as a literary
theory.
I will have to come back to this date and
why it is regarded as a watershed moment,
later on, but right now let us move on to
another peculiar point about literary theory,
which seems problematic to most of the students
of English literature.
Now if you are doing a course on a literary
theory as part of any English literature programme,
I am sure you will be struck by the number
of French authors that you encounter in your
course.
So, you will encounter for instance Claude
Lévi-Strauss, you will encounter Jacques
Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Althusser,
Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu,
Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and I can
go on – the list seems to be endless.
And these are figures who now form a permanent
part in any syllabus of literary theory within
the field of English studies.
But they were scholars who worked from within
the French intellectual tradition and are
therefore, in some sense, outsiders to the
world of English literary studies.
In fact, most of their works were available
to the English speaking world only after a
very significant delay.
Thus to give you an example Michael Foucault’s
famous book Folie et déraison, which was
published in French in 1961, was available
to the English speaking world all after a
delay of 4 years when R. Howard translated
it and brought it out under the title Madness
and Civilization.
However, this 1965 English version translated
by Howard was a highly abridged edition of
Foucault’s original text and in the English
version about 300 pages of the original text
along with 800 footnotes were left out.
Indeed the first unabridged edition of the
text by Foucault was not available to the
English readers before 2006, 45 years after
the original text was published in French.
You remember the date is 1961) and the final
version becomes available in English only
in 2006.
Similarly, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s
celebrated translation bearing the title Of
Grammatology was published 11 years after
Jacques Derrida’s French original, De la
Grammatologie.
(And of course, Derrida’s work was originally
published in French).
Thus, as you can see the very core authors
and texts who are studied as part of a literary
theory course, in the English speaking world
reaches the Anglophone readers from outside
and only after a very significant delay.
This notion of literary theory arriving from
outside to the universities of the English
speaking world is translated into a devastating,
but witty metaphor by Terry Eagleton in his
book Literary Theory: An Introduction.
So, Eagleton speaking as a professor of English
literature located in England, (again I need
to remind you that the location of the scholar
is very important as far as this course is
concerned) so, Eagleton located in England
as a Professor of English literature describes
how the job of a section of British literary
critics was reduced to waiting at the port
city of Dover to receive the latest shipment
of theory dispatched from Paris, which on
an average took a decade or so to sail across
the channel separating France and England.
For those of us who study literary theory
within the English departments of India or
other places in the global south like Africa
and Latin, America, the texts and theorists
appear to be even more foreign and the delay
in accessing them is much longer.
For us, therefore, waiting to acquaint ourselves
with the latest in literary theory not only
means waiting for these works to be first
conceptualized by theorists sitting in the
continent then translated in English, but
it also involves waiting for the publishers
to bring out affordable editions for our local
markets, so, they can be purchased and readily
studied by our students in the class.
In what follows my effort would be to reduce
these feelings of alienation and confusion
that usually surrounds the concept of literary
theory.
And I wish to do this by addressing two issues.
The first is how, what is labelled as “theory”
is connected with the idea of literature.
This is the first issue that I would like
to address and as I have said earlier, for
some, the general impression is that theory
is external to the field of literature.
But I would like to question is that so?
Is that really the case, or are they both
part of a wider cultural scene which integrally
binds them together?
The second point that I would want to focus
on is how we, the students of English literary
studies in India are connected with the evolving
story of literary theory.
Here again, the general impression is that
we are at least twice removed from the main
source of action.
As I said, first we wait for the European
continental philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysis
to come up with the theories and then we wait
for them to be translated in English and subsequently
handed down to us in the form of affordable
local editions.
But I think our location in India might not
be as marginal to the evolving story of literary
theory as is usually made out to be.
But before we go into these issues, let us
concentrate on the connection between literature
and theory and see how tenuous or how strong
the links are between the two.
And to do this we will need to go back to
the decade of the 1960s.
In the month of May in the year 1968, the
streets of Paris were on fire.
Open battle was going on between graduate
students and the police.
The ranks of the students were swelled by
workers and they were putting up barricades
in the famous university area in Paris known
as the Latin Quarter, and the graffiti on
the walls read anti-authority slogans like
“Il est interdit d’interdire” (It is
forbidden to forbid).
Many of the French intellectuals that we had
listed a moment ago as prominent theorists
of our time, including the two most famous
names Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault,
were student participants in the events of
May 1968.
And it is generally agreed that these events
which came to a head in Paris in the May of
1968 have had a transformative influence on
how literature is read and theorized, but
why were these anti-establishment riots taking
place in Paris, and what is the connection
between these scenes of violence and anti-establishment
protests with how literature is read and theorized?
To understand or to answer this question we
need to look beyond 1968.
In fact, the story of the events of 1968 actually
starts from after the end of the Second World
War after 1945.
In spite of the huge amount of devastation
that was wrecked by this war the years following
it saw significant economic growth and all
round prosperity, especially in the developed
capitalist countries, but also in the communist
ruled Soviet Bloc.
America whose economy had got a great fillip
in the war years continued to grow even after
the war was over.
But it was the economy of the non-communist
countries in the Europe that were more successful,
and they were almost completely transformed
by the 1960.
The USSR was also faring equally well in terms
of economy and grew at a rate that was comparable
to the developed capitalist countries.
But this prosperity what was not just confined
to the USA, or Europe, or the USSR.
Rather it was a worldwide phenomenon and as
a historian Eric Hobsbawm for instance observes
in his book Age of Extremes, between the end
of the world war 1945 and the 1970 there was
a spectacular growth in world population but
at the same time there were no mass starvation
except as a product of war and political madness
as in China of the 1958.
And this was because there was a boom in food
production, which rose faster than the population.
The average life expectancy also shot up by
an incredible 7 years and this is the global
average.
So, there was all round prosperity in the
years following the Second World War.
And one of the key social features that characterize
the changing times after the Second World
War was a sharp decline, in the number of
people engaged in farming and this in spite
of the fact that food production actually
increased.
And this decline in the number of people engaged
in farming was complimented by a parallel
trend – a dramatic rise in occupations that
required higher education.
And this requirement for higher education
in turn was matched by growing number of families
worldwide, who because of the economic boom
could afford to send their adolescent children
to secondary schools and then to universities,
rather than forcing them to go to work early
to support the family income.
So, from the 1960s to say the 1980s, the student
population in different parts of the world
multiplied by anything between 3 to 9 times.
In France alone, the student population which
was roughly around 100,000 at the end of the
Second World War grew to become 651, 000 by
the end of the 1960s, and most of this increase
was noticed in the departments of humanities
and social sciences.
This enormous rise in a student population
had profound consequences, because most of
these new students were first generation learners
and had a very different class profile from
the group of social elites who attended universities
till the Second World War.
There was therefore, a sense of a natural
class resentment that most of these students
felt towards the university authority which
was geared for hundreds of years to serve
only the social elite.
This class resentment felt by the students
found echo within the ranks of the workers
and so in the May of 1968 we see students
and workers coming together to build barricades
and to resist authority in general.
However, these anti-authority, anti-establishment
unrests were not just limited to Paris.
Paris was indeed the epicentre.
But similar student revolts were witnessed
all over Europe as well as in America where
it usually took the form of anti-Vietnam war
movement protesting against the American military
action against Vietnam.
And these student protests and the erosion
of the social status quo that it is represented
had deep reaching impact in the field of humanities
and social sciences, and this of course, includes
the field of literary studies.
In countries that witnessed the student unrest
during the 1960s, the socio-cultural vantage
point from which literature was read and analysed
till the pre-Second World War era was not
the point of reference that was shared by
the new students in the post war generation.
This resulted in a breakdown of the meaning
making process that is necessary for communication.
The social and cultural norms which had stabilized
the meanings of words and which had structured
them, structured the process of meaning making
till recently, were now put under question.
The old figures of authority who had fixed
the meaning were now being dismantled.
This crisis of meaning was most powerfully
put forward by Jacques Derrida in a 1966 lecture
which later became the essay, “Structure,
Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences”.
In this essay Derrida posited, or in fact,
posits the idea of discourse as a decentred
structure which is devoid of any central figure
of authority.
The meanings of words, therefore, do not get
fixed but in a free play continues to lead
from word to word.
For students of literature, this crisis in
meaning making due to lack of an authority
figure was perhaps even more clearly stated
by Roland Barthes.
Barthes in his famous 1967 essay, announced
the death of the author, the figure who was
assumed to be the ultimate authority on what
his words on the printed paper might mean.
Refusal to accept any authority meant refusal
to accept the power that an author might have
in controlling the meaning of his words – a
central tenet that would inform the school
of Post-Structuralist literary theory which
is one of the things we are going to take
up in one of our future lectures.
Now, this erosion of authority which erupted
in the form of violent riots in the 1960s
in Europe and America was, however, not merely
confined to the university campuses and streets
but was also felt within the intimacy of the
family structure.
In the years following the Second World War
the number of women in the higher education
section rose considerably.
And I am here stating figures from all over
Europe and from the USA.
So, whereas, till the Second World War women
constituted only 15 to 30 percent of the student
population enrolled in higher education, by
the end of the 1970 the number had risen to
almost 50 % in most of the developed countries.
So, this means that the wave of new student
population that we have been discussing so
far also had a large number of women in them
– women who were as disaffected, if not
more, at least as disaffected with the authority
and with the old established order as their
male counterparts.
The rise in the women student population across
Europe and America was complimented by another
trend.
It was complemented by an equally dramatic
rise in the participation of women in workforce.
And such an expansion of the social group
of educated and economically independent women
resulted in obvious tensions within the family
structure which was inherently patriarchal,
and within which the superiority of men over
women was almost taken for granted.
This tension gave rise to the social and intellectual
movement that is referred to as a second-wave
of feminism – a movement that took up issues
of female sexuality, reproductive rights and
position of women both in the workplace as
well as within the family, and in the field
of literary studies this movement manifested
in the form of a quest to find new parameters
for writing and reading literature as a woman.
Women were however, not the only marginalized
section of the society who gained prominence
in the change scenario after the Second World
War.
Another previously marginalized social group
now enjoyed a similar kind of emancipation
and a similar kind of foregrounding.
And here I am thinking about the inhabitants
of the vast stretches of colonized area in
the global South which gained independence
in the decades immediately following the Second
World War.
So, it started with the independence of countries
like India and Pakistan, but soon it spread
across to Africa, and most of this continent,
most of Africa, was decolonized during the
1950s and 1960s.
There was again a huge impact of this emancipation
on how literature is read and analysed.
So, by the 1960s the literature produced by
authors from erstwhile colonies managed to
carve out a niche in the global book market.
In England for instance the publisher Heinemann
started bringing out the African Writers Series
which published and brought to the metropolitan
readers the work of authors like Chinua Achebe,
Ngugi wa’ Thiongo, Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi
Emecheta, and so on.
And these are authors, that we will have to
remember, they would not be considered part
of mainstream English literature even say
50 years ago.
Also, just as the second-wave feminism gave
rise to various intellectual debates regarding
how women as a reader should engage with literature,
the new sense of emancipation and prominence
gained by the people in the global South gave
rise to a whole new field of literary theory
concerned with how the once colonized subject
should intervene in the field of literature.
And we will talk more about this particular
kind of literary theory when we discuss postcolonialism
again in one of our future lectures.
So, as you can see therefore, the world changed
radically between the end of the Second World
War and the end of 1970 beginning of 1980s.
This meant that not only the context in which
literature is studied and made sense of underwent
a very significant transformation, but also
this means that the profile of producers of
literature as well as the students who critically
analysed these literary texts within the classroom
setting they changed dramatically.
The new prominence that literary theory enjoyed
in the second half of the twentieth century
was therefore a result of students and scholars
trying to connect their study of literature
with this changed context – an effort which
involved redefining the very conceptual basis
of literary studies and connecting it with
the new streams of thought in the sister areas
of humanities and social sciences like as
I have already mentioned philosophy, psychology,
sociology, history and so on.
Now one of the reasons that the post-1960s
boom in literary theory is often regarded,
as we saw, as an alien intervention within
the field of literary studies is because the
scholars who made use of these new theories
who still make use of these new theories are
actually challenging the prevalent ways in
which literature was being read and understood,
till, say the Second World War.
However, what we need to remember here is
that no matter how alien theory might appeared
at a particular historical moment no reading
of literature can be ever bereft of theory
altogether.
So, those who portray the literary theories
that has emerged in the post 1960s often forget
that existing ways in which literature was
being read and understood till that point
in time, were themselves underlined by certain
conceptual basis which echoed certain other
philosophical or sociological or historical
outlook of that time.
And therefore, with each major shift in the
economic social and cultural context we can
see fresh attempts to put literary studies
on a new conceptual basis.
That is not only more in tune with the changed
world, but also in tune with the changing
perspectives in other academic disciplines.
So we need to remember that the reading of
literature has never been an isolated practice
that is cut off from other disciplines of
human enquiry.
An attempt to create an inside outside division
and place literature on one side and theory
on the other side is therefore, something
which cannot be sustained for very long.
In other words that significantly changed
global context of the Second World War or
the post-Second World War era might have led
to a previewed profusion of new literary theories,
but it was definitely not the first attempt
to theorise how to read and how to engage
with literature.
Here I would like to give you an example,
and I would of course, borrow this example
from within the field of English literary
studies: Near the very end of the 18th century
William words worth and Samuel Coleridge two
friends and literary collaborators significantly
changed the ways in which literature is created,
is conceived, and is read.
This revolution in the field of English literary
studies is usually referred to as the Romantic
Movement.
But if we look deeper we will see that this
reconceptualization of literature also had
a broader, social, political and cultural
context.
On the one hand these urge to think about
literature a new was fuelled by the great
political and intellectual changes that were
brought about by the French revolution.
Indeed Wordsworth was present in Paris immediately
after the most iconic act of French revolution
the storming of the Bastille Prison had been
performed and a republic had been declared
in place of a monarchy in France.
And the revolutionary political change that
was worth witnessed in France had such an
impact on him that he sought to express this
paradigm shift in poetic form in his autobiographical
piece The Prelude.
And I will read out some lines from the prelude
here.
(It was in truth an hour of universal moment,
mildest men were agitated and commotions,
strife of passion and opinion, filled the
walls of peaceful houses with unique sounds.
The soil of common life was at that time,
too hot to tread upon.)
I am sure some of you were able to hear the
echoes of the events of 1960s, in these lines
written about how things were unfolding in
the 1790s.
But it was not just this political agitation
that led to a re-conceptualization of literature
within the domain of English literary studies
both words worth and Coleridge in their efforts
to rethink the very process in which literature
is created and consumed also drew significantly
from French philosophers like Jean Jacques
Rousseau, and also a German idealists like
Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Friedrich Schelling,
and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
So, as you can see through this comparison
1960s was not the only moment when English
literary studies was opened up to external
influences, and theories were imported from
other disciplines to arrive at a new conceptual
basis for literature.
The theory of literature forwarded by the
English Romantic Movement was in fact, equally
dependent on the ideas of intellectuals who
were firstly, neither literary critics, secondly,
nor were they working from within any English
tradition.
Literary theory in the field of English studies,
therefore, does not start in the 1960s.
The 1960s is just one watershed moment one
of the watershed moments in the evolving history
of literary theory.
You need from the vantage point of being a
student of English literature we can spot
a number of such watershed movements, one
of them being of course the emergence of the
English Romantic Movement, about which we
just discussed, and the 1790s when a new theory
of literature emerged along with the writings
of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
But we can spot another watershed moment at
the beginning of the 18th century when the
English word “literature” started acquiring
its modern meaning the meaning that we understand
now.
As Raymond Williams notes in his book Marxism
and Literature, the term which, the term literature,
which has its origin in the Latin word “littera”
started being used in English from around
the 14 century and in its earlier forms which
was by the way spelt with a double t, so the
spelling was l-i-t-t-e-r-a-t-u-r-e and this
was because the Latin word “littera” was
also spelt with a double “t”, right.
So, in this earlier form it signified just
someone’s ability to read.
So when the late 16th /early 17th century
English scholar Francis Bacon for instance
mentioned someone being “learned in literature”,
he was actually simply referring to the fact
that the person was able to read.
Now, therefore, and we still retain something
of this earlier use when we use the term literacy
for instance which was initially connected
with the word literature right.
Now that connection, of course, has been lost,
the connection between literature and literacy.
William Caxton, if you know your English history
you will know this that William Caxton had
introduced the printing press in England in
the fifteenth century.
So, by the end of the 17th century when printed
reading material was available in sufficient
abundance literature had come to signify not
only ones ability to read, but also more specifically
the ability of someone to read printed books
or the practice of reading printed books.
Moreover, literacy and the availability of
printed books, whereas is, I think, obviously
limited to a small section of elite within
a society.
Think of India even now and you will get the
meaning of what I am trying to say here.
And so by the 18th century literature was
also associated with this with a kind of elitist
aura.
Why?
Because literacy and availability of printed
material was restricted to only to a group
of social elite.
And by the 18th century literature was also
associated with a certain degree of cultural
sophistication.
It was associated with everything that social
elite is associated with.
Engaging with literature therefore, was a
way of gaining as well as displaying cultural
values and civilizational attainments.
Raymond Williams also notes that by the 18th
century the use of the word literature changed
in another fundamental way.
During this time it acquired the meaning of
imaginative composition or imaginative writing
and while it gained this meaning it subsumed
within itself the earlier category of poetry
or poesy which had signified imagined imaginative
composition before then.
Now, with the development of the term literature
poetry was confined primarily to metrical
composition.
Even now we associate poetry primarily with
metrical composition, but it is important
to remember that at one point of time, it
was not just one kind of literature, but poetry
or poesy signified a much broader thing.
It signified imaginative composition in general.
And why I am saying it is important to remember,
because we will often come across terms like
poetics, which actually signifies more than
just a commentary on poetry.
It signifies more than that.
It signifies a commentary on literature in
general as we understand the term now.
Coming back to the point it is in this time
of change, 18th century, when literature gradually
became what we understand it to be now that
I would like to locate the origin of literary
theory or literary criticism.
Because it is only when certain works started
being identified and thought as literature
that we encounter the growth of theories to
sustain it as a field of studies as a separate
field of independent studies.
Interestingly India and Indian students of
literature played a very significant role
in this 18th century story of how English
literature developed as a separate field of
study and how a complementary field of literary
theory developed along with it.
And this is, because India was one of the
earliest places in the world where English
literature was studied as an academic discipline.
So, you can see rather than being marginal
to the story of literary theory we those of
us who teach and study English literature
in India are actually at the very heart of
it.
Not only during the moment of its origin in
the 18th century, but also in later times
when India again comes to prominence with
the rise of post-colonial literature and post-colonial
theory and with the emergence of theorists
like Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and Homi Bhabha.
We will encounter these names again in our
lectures of postcolonial literary theory later
on.
I would like to point out that though I have
just mentioned the early 18th century as the
point from where we should start our discussion
of literary theory, because the very concept
of literature was absent within the field
of English studies before that.
But, in practice, in actuality our syllabus
will go will begin far back in time.
And this is because ancient Greek and Roman
philosophers like Plato for instance, or Aristotle,
or Horace, or Longinus also known as Pseudo
Longinus they had a very significant impact
on the theorists of the 18th century and these
philosophers, therefore, form an integral
part of the history of literary theory as
it is taught and studied within the academic
discipline of English literature.
In our next lecture therefore, we will first
discuss Plato and Aristotle.
And we will discuss their commentary, on the
idea of mimesis.
You will discover that this term mimesis has
been crucial in guiding all later understandings
of literature in particular and art in general.
So, we will first discuss that and then we
will in turn move to Longinus and his theory
of the sublime and how that theory of the
sublime relates to literature.
And it is only after these initial lectures
that we will be able to start discussing,
how literature and literary theory started
being studied in the field of English studies
from the 18th century.
So, when we will move to the topic of literary
theory in the context of 18th century England,
we will see how there was an effort to mould
the emerging field of literature in accordance
to the rules borrowed from the writings of
ancient Greek and Roman philosophers.
This is why, in fact, the kind of literary
theory that we see developing in England between
the second half of the 17th century right
up to the first decades of 18th century is
referred to as the new classical school of
literary theory.
And here the word neoclassical refers to a
renewed interest in the writings of classical
authors of Greek and Roman antiquity.
Now the interest in these classical authors
of ancient Greece and Rome were already kindled
in England during the Renaissance, but it
was not until the late 17th and early 18th
century that we encounter substantial body
of theoretical writings based on the thoughts
and insights provided by the classical authors.
Incidentally and also very interestingly the
classical authors often did not influence
the literary theoreticians in England directly.
Rather they were influenced via the works
of French intellectuals like Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux,
better known as just Boileau, and therefore,
in the debates and discussions through which
English literary theorists tried to modify
and expand or even contradict the ideas of
the classical authors of Greek and Roman antiquity
to arrive at a new understanding of literature.
Often these discussions had French intellectuals
like Boileau as powerful interlocutors.
And, so you see, Terry Eagleton complaint
about certain twentieth century English literary
critics waiting in the port City of Dover
for their intellectual shipment to arrive
from France can in fact be extended back to
the late 17th early 18th century, because
even back then what was happening in France
in the intellectual circles of France had
a major impact on the intellectual life of
England and of the Anglophone world in general.
By the end of the 18th century, however, the
edifice of neoclassical literary theory was
crumbling.
The world was changing and it was changing
primarily under the influence of two major
revolutions the industrial revolution and
the French revolution and there were also
new intellectual currents which were at work.
By the end of the 18th century, all this resulted
in the new set of literary theories that I
have mentioned before as forming the Romantic
Movement forming part of the Romantic Movement.
So, after discussing the neoclassical theory
first, of course, we will begin with the works
of Greek and Roman intellectuals like Plato,
Aristotle, Longinus, etcetera.
Then we will move on to a discussion of neoclassical
literary theories as it developed in late
17th and the first half of the 18th century.
And after that we will move to this new kind
of literary theory that developed at the very
end of 18th century early nineteenth century,
which we see as part of the greater Romantic
Movement.
In our subsequent lectures, after we have
completed Romanticism, completed discussing
Romanticism, we will again move forward roughly
a 100 years from the Romantic Movement.
And we will see that a fresh set of literary
theories had started emerging during the early
twentieth century and here we will deal with
how different strategies of reading literature
were experimented with by the American school
of New Critics for instance by the Russian
Formalists.
And we will also pay special attention to
Mikhail Bakhtin who was part of the Russian
Formalist movement, but he was also a major
theorist in his own right and terms like dialogism,
for instance, which is today integrally associated
with literary theory and how we understand
literature goes back to the writings of Bakhtin.
So, when we will discuss Russian formalism
we will also especially focus on the works
of Mikhail Bakhtin and we will also focus
on the German Phenomenologists like Russell
for instance or Heidegger, who initiated a
school of literary theory that later developed
into what we now call what we now know as
the reader response theory.
After these discussions we will then move
on to a set of lectures that would help us
connect literary theory with three major developments
that marked the beginning of the twentieth
century.
We will start here with the development that
is perhaps least discussed in the world outside
the academia, but nevertheless which has had
an astonishing amount of influence within
the field of literary theory.
Here, I am talking about the 1916 publication
of the book titled Cours de linguistique générale,
or Course in General Linguistics, that is
the title under which its English translation
was published.
And this book is basically a collection of
lectures collection of lectures delivered
by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
and he, Saussure, delivered these lectures
between 1906 and 1907 and by the time the
book was published in 1916, Saussure was already
dead.
But it is to this book, to this collection
of lectures, that we can trace the beginning
of Structuralist theory, which not only influenced
the field of linguistics, but also had a profound
impact on the field of sociology and literature.
For instance, earlier in this lecture we have
mentioned someone called Claude Levi-Strauss
for instance who was a sociologist but who
may have used this Structuralist insight in
his analysis of societies and Strauss, in
general, influenced literature and literary
theory, which goes under the name of [Structuralist]
literary Structuralism.
It’s, in fact, the influence of Saussure
and his text continued even after the 1960s.
And we see for instance even Jacques Derrida
taking his cue from Structuralist theory,
indeed he states, in his famous essay “Structure,
Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences”
by critiquing the work of Levi Strauss.
So, the new kind of theory that emerged after
the 1960s and that is associated primarily
with the name of Jacques Derrida is also referred
to as post structuralism.
This is because of its close links with structuralism
often structuralism and post structuralism
do not agree on major points, but nevertheless
there are a significant number of links between
these two kinds of theories for us to place
them together and to learn about them one
after the other from a discussion of Structuralism
and Post-structuralism.
We will then move on to the second major development
that shaped the twentieth century and this
one is the Bolshevik revolution which happened
in Russia in 1917.
Now, with this revolution the revolution in
1917 Karl Marx’s economic theory first gained
the major politically expression.
There was always political undertones in the
writings of a Marx, but it was primarily document
which critiqued economic theories.
With 1917 this economic theory now transformed
into a major significant political movement.
And the communists took over the reign of
Russia by bringing to an end the rule of the
Romanov monarchs.
However, the Bolshevik revolution did not
merely bring Marxism to the political foreground,
but also expanded it as a field of debate
and this expansion was also felt within the
field of literary studies.
And throughout the twentieth century Marxism
continued to remain a very strong intellectual
force guiding theories about how to read,
how to analyze, and indeed how to create how
to produce literature.
The third major movement was marked by the
1899 publication of Sigmund Freud’s Die
Traumdeutung which was translated in English
under the title The Interpretation of Dreams.
And this was a major publication because it
assured in the new science of psychoanalysis.
And from the very beginning psychoanalysis
had a very strong relationship with literature
and Freud for instance borrowed character
names like Oedipus from ancient Greek literature
to express psychoanalytic concepts we have
for instance the Oedipal complex.
And also apart from borrowing literary terms
Freud also used his insight as a psychoanalyst
to interpret various literary texts including
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
This strong connection between psychoanalysis
and literary theory has continued well beyond
Freud.
And throughout the twentieth century we have
had intellectuals like Carl Gustav Jung, for
instance, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Felix
Guattari, and all of them have either used
psychoanalytical insights to interpret literature
or whose works on psychoanalysis have been
borrowed by other theorists to explicate specific
literary works.
Next after completing this we will move to
the topic of literature and gender and in
this lecture we will try to see how the different
waves of feminism have impacted literary theory.
But in this lecture we will also try and move
beyond feminism to see how the more recent
queer movements have also played a part in
building a new set of literary canons and
promoting a new kind of discourse around literature.
As is common knowledge perhaps the prefix
post plays a very significant role in any
syllabus of literary theory almost as significant
as a suffix -ism.
In fact, we have already encountered quite
a few -isms in the form of Romanticism, Structuralism,
Marxism, Feminism.
And we have also come across the prefix post-
in the form of Post-structuralism, but we
will focus on two more examples of this prefix
post, when we do Postmodernism and Postcolonialism.
Again two very important topics as far as
literary theory is concerned.
And from there we will move on to theories
of Ecocriticism.
And this in a way we will actually bring us
up to date, because much of the contemporary
literary theory is emerging out of concerns
about our shared environment and ecology.
In the final lecture I will try to give a
brief introduction to certain literary theories
that have had their origin in ancient India
within ancient Indian tradition.
And here I will be talking about things like
the Rasa theory and how Dhvani can be used
as a tool of literary analysis, but it is
also important to note that these “Indian
theories” are not usually included in courses
of literary theory within the field of English
studies.
However, it would be agreed to try and expand
the already eclectic field of literary theory
a bit more and make it slightly more relevant
to us who study literary theory from within
the context of Indian institutes.
So, as you can see we have a lot of ground
to cover in this course.
And we will continue our journey in the next
lecture, where we will talk about the ancient
Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle and
we will discuss their lasting impact in the
study of literature and literary theory.
Good bye till then.
