List of literary movements
This is a list of modern literary movements: that is, movements after the Renaissance. These terms, helpful for curricula or anthologies, evolved over time to group writers who are often loosely related. Some of these movements (such as Dada and Beat) were defined by the members themselves, while other terms (the metaphysical poets, for example) emerged decades or centuries after the periods in question. Ordering is approximate, as there is considerable overlap.
These are movements either drawn from or influential for literature in the English language.
Amatory fiction
* Romantic fiction written in the 17th century and 18th century, primarily written by women.
o Notable authors: Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley
Cavalier Poets
* 17th century English royalist poets, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after Ben Jonson).
o Notable authors: Richard Lovelace, William Davenant
Metaphysical poets
* 17th century English movement using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religion.
o Notable authors: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell
The Augustans
* An 18th century literary movement based chiefly on classical ideals, satire and skepticism.
o Notable authors: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift
Romanticism
* 18th to 19th century movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to the Enlightenment.
o Notable authors: Victor Hugo, Lord Byron
Gothic novel
* Fiction in which Romantic ideals are combined with an interest in the supernatural and in violence.
o Notable authors: Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker
Lake Poets
* A group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District who wrote about nature and the sublime.
o Notable authors: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
American Romanticism
* Distinct from European Romanticism, the American form emerged somewhat later, was based more in fiction than in poetry, and incorporated a (sometimes almost suffocating) awareness of history, particularly the darkest aspects of American history.
o Notable authors: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Pre-Raphaelitism
* 19th century, primarily English movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter Raphael. Many were both painters and poets.
o Notable authors: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti
Transcendentalism
* 19th century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technology.
o Notable authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau
Dark romanticism
* 19th century American movement in reaction to Transcendentalism. Finds man inherently sinful and self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious force.
o Notable authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, George Lippard
Realism
* Late-19th century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns.
o Notable authors: Gustave Flaubert, William Dean Howells, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Frank Norris
Naturalism
* Also late 19th century. Proponents of this movement believe heredity and environment control people.
o Notable authors: Émile Zola, Stephen Crane
Symbolism
* Principally French movement of the fin de siècle based on the structure of thought rather than poetic form or image; influential for English language poets from Edgar Allan Poe to James Merrill.
o Notable authors: Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry
Stream of consciousness
* Early-20th century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without authorial presence.
o Notable authors: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce
Modernism
* Variegated movement of the early 20th century, encompassing primitivism, formal innovation, or reaction to science and technology.
o Notable authors: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., James Joyce
The Lost Generation
* It was traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir A Moveable Feast. It refers to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression.
o Notable Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Waldo Pierce
Dada
* Touted by its proponents as anti-art, dada focused on going against artistic norms and conventions.
o Notable authors: Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters
First World War Poets
* Poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took place.
o Notable authors: Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke
Los Contemporáneos
* A Mexican vanguardist group, active in the late twenties and early thirties; published an eponymous literary magazine which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928-31.
Imagism
* Poetry based on description rather than theme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol."
o Notable authors: Ezra Pound, H.D., Richard Aldington
Harlem Renaissance
* African American poets, novelists, and thinkers, often employing elements of blues and folklore, based in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s.
o Notable authors: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
Surrealism
* Originally a French movement, influenced by Surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict the unconscious rather than conscious mind.
o Notable authors: Jean Cocteau, Dylan Thomas
Southern Agrarians
* A group of Southern American poets, based originally at Vanderbilt University, who expressly repudiated many modernist developments in favor of metrical verse and narrative. Some Southern Agrarians were also associated with the New Criticism.
o Notable authors: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren
Oulipo
* Mid-20th century poetry and prose based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added challenge.
o Notable authors: Raymond Queneau, Walter Abish
Postmodernism
* Postwar movement skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity, irony, and word play.
o Notable authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Alasdair Gray
Black Mountain Poets
* A self-identified group of poets, originally based at Black Mountain College, who eschewed patterned form in favor of the rhythms and inflections of the human voice.
o Notable authors: Charles Olson, Denise Levertov
Beat poets
* American movement of the 1950s and '60s concerned with counterculture and youthful alienation.
o Notable authors: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey
Hungryalist Poets
* A literary movement in postcolonial India during 1961-65 as a counter-discourse to Colonial Bengali poetry.
o Notable poets:Chattopadhyay Shakti,Malay Roychoudhury,Binoy Majumdar
Confessional poetry
* Poetry that, often brutally, exposes the self as part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of human frailty.
o Notable authors: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath
New York School
* Urban, gay or gay-friendly, leftist poets, writers, and painters of the 1960s.
o Notable authors: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery
Magical Realism
* Literary movement in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic circumstances. Most often associated with the Latin American literary boom of the 20th century.
o Notable authors: Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Günter Grass, Julio Cortázar
Postcolonialism
* A diverse, loosely connected movement of writers from former colonies of European countries, whose work is frequently politically charged.
o Notable authors: Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka
Prakalpana Movement
* This ongoing movement launched in 1969 based in Calcutta, by the Prakalpana group of Indian writers in Bengali literature, who created new forms of Prakalpana fiction, Sarbangin poetry and the philosophy of Chetanavyasism, later spreads world wide.
o Notable authors: Vattacharja Chandan, Dilip Gupta.
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5 Januari 2010
Critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two quite different meanings with different origins and histories, one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism. This has led to the very literal use of 'critical theory' as an umbrella term to describe theoretical critique.
Critical theory, in the sociological context, refers to a style of Marxist theory with a tendency to engage with non-Marxist influences (for instance, the work of Nietzsche and Freud).[1] This tendency has been referred to pejoratively by stricter Marxists as 'revisionism'. Modern critical theory arose from a trajectory extending from the nonpositivist sociology of Weber and Simmel, the neo-Marxist theory of Lukács and Gramsci, toward the milieu associated with Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. It is with this so-called 'Frankfurt School' of theorists that the term is most commonly associated: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas. With the latter, critical theory shed further its roots in German Idealism and moved closer to American Pragmatism.[2]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Two primary definitions
* 2 In social theory
o 2.1 Postmodern critical theory
o 2.2 Critical ethnography
* 3 In literary criticism
* 4 Language and construction
o 4.1 Language and communication
o 4.2 Construction
* 5 See also
o 5.1 Lists
o 5.2 Related subjects
o 5.3 Journals related and/or dedicated to Critical Theory
* 6 Footnotes
* 7 References
* 8 External links
[edit] Two primary definitions
There are two meanings of critical theory which derive from two different intellectual traditions associated with the meaning of criticism and critique. Both derive ultimately from the Greek word kritikos meaning judgment or discernment, and in their present forms go back to the 18th century. While they can be considered completely independent intellectual pursuits, increasingly scholars are interested in the areas of critique where the two overlap.
To use an epistemological distinction introduced by Jürgen Habermas in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), critical theory in literary studies is ultimately a form of hermeneutics, i.e. knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions. Critical social theory is, in contrast, a form of self-reflective knowledge involving both understanding and theoretical explanation to reduce entrapment in systems of domination or dependence, obeying the emancipatory interest in expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination.
From this perspective, much literary critical theory, since it is focused on interpretation and explanation rather than on social transformation, would be regarded as positivistic or traditional rather than critical theory in the Kantian or Marxian sense. Critical theory in literature and the humanities in general does not necessarily involve a normative dimension, whereas critical social theory does, either through criticizing society from some general theory of values, norms, or oughts, or through criticizing it in terms of its own espoused values.
[edit] In social theory
Main article: Frankfurt School
Critical theory was first defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of sociology in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory: Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Horkheimer wanted to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxian theory, critiquing both the model of science put forward by logical positivism and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. Core concepts are: (1) That critical social theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), and (2) That critical theory should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.
This version of "critical" theory derives from Kant's (18th-century) and Marx's (19th Century) use of the term "critique", as in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Marx's concept that his work Das Kapital (Capital) forms a "critique of political economy". For Kant's transcendental idealism, "critique" means examining and establishing the limits of the validity of a faculty, type, or body of knowledge, especially through accounting for the limitations imposed by the fundamental, irreducible concepts in use in that knowledge system. Early on, Kant's notion associated critique with the disestablishment of false, unprovable, or dogmatic philosophical, social, and political beliefs, because Kant's critique of reason involved the critique of dogmatic theological and metaphysical ideas and was intertwined with the enhancement of ethical autonomy and the Enlightenment critique of superstition and irrational authority. Marx explicitly developed this notion into the critique of ideology and linked it with the practice of social revolution, as in the famous 11th of his "Theses on Feuerbach," "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in certain ways; the point is to change it".[3]
One of the distinguishing characteristics critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer elabroated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the “pessimism” of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.[4] This ambivalence was rooted, of course, in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, in particular, the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.[5] For Adorno and Horkheimer state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional critical theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) and private property had been replaced by centralized planning and socialized ownership of the means of production.[6] Yet, contrary to Marx’s famous prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, critical theory was left, in Jurgen Habermas’ words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal; and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope."[7] For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.
In the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests, by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation. Though unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkeimer's thought presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.[8] Habermas dissolved further the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German Idealism, though his thought remains broadly Marxist in its epistemological approach. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action; the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called 'post-modern' challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his theory; thought which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy.
[edit] Postmodern critical theory
While modernist critical theory (as described above) concerns itself with “forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system,” postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems “by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 52). Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to the rapid transformation in social structures and as a result the focus of research is centered on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations.
Postmodern critical research is also characterized by what is called, the crisis of representation, which rejects the idea that a researcher’s work is considered an “objective depiction of a stable other” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). Instead, in their research and writing, many postmodern scholars have adopted “alternatives that encourage reflection about the ‘politics and poetics’ of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). For an example of postmodern critical work, see Rolling’s (2008) piece, entitled Secular Blasphemy: Utter(ed) Transgressions Against Names and Fathers in the Postmodern Era.
[edit] Critical ethnography
Main article: Critical Ethnography
Critical ethnography is "a type of reflection that examines culture, knowledge, and action...Critical ethnographers describe, analyze, and open to scrutiny otherwise hidden agendas, power centers, and assumptions that inhibit, repress, and constrain" (Thomas, 1993, pp. 2–3). While "conventional ethnography" "describes what is", critical ethnography "asks what could be"….Conventional ethnographers study culture for the purposes of describing it; critical ethnographers do so to change it" (Thomas, 1993, p. 4).
[edit] In literary criticism
Main article: Literary theory
The second meaning of critical theory is that of theory used in literary criticism ("critical theory") and in the analysis and understanding of literature. This is discussed in greater detail under literary theory. This form of critical theory is not necessarily oriented toward radical social change or even toward the analysis of society, but instead specializes on the analysis of texts. It originated among literary scholars and in the discipline of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, and has really only come into broad use since the 1980s, especially as theory used in literary studies has increasingly been influenced by European philosophy and social theory.
This version of "critical" theory derives from the notion of literary criticism as establishing and enhancing the understanding and evaluation of literature in the search for truth. Some consider literary theory merely an aesthetic concern, as articulated, for example, in Joseph Addison's notion of a critic as one who helps understand and interpret literary works: "A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation."[9] This notion of criticism ultimately goes back to Aristotle's Poetics as a theory of literature.
From the literary side, starting in the 1960s literary scholars, reacting especially against the New Criticism of the previous decades, which tried to analyze literary texts purely internally, began to incorporate into their analyses and interpretations of literary works initially semiotic, linguistic, and interpretive theory, then structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and deconstruction as well as Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and hermeneutics, and critical social theory and various other forms of neo-Marxian theory.
Thus literary criticism became highly theoretical and some of those practicing it began referring to the theoretical dimension of their work as "critical theory", i.e. philosophically inspired theory of literary criticism. And thus incidentally critical theory in the sociological sense also became, especially among literary scholars of left-wing sympathies, one of a number of influences upon and streams within critical theory in the literary sense.
Furthermore, along with the expansion of the mass media and mass/popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s and the blending of social and cultural criticism and literary criticism, the methods of both kinds of critical theory sometimes intertwined in the analysis of phenomena of popular culture, as in the emerging field of cultural studies, in which concepts deriving from Marxian theory, post-structuralism, semiology, psychoanalysis and feminist theory would be found in the same interpretive work. Both strands were often present in the various modalities of postmodern theory.
[edit] Language and construction
The two points at which there is the greatest overlap or mutual impingement of the two versions of critical theory are in their interrelated foci on language, symbolism, and communication and in their focus on construction.
[edit] Language and communication
From the 1960s and 1970s onward, language, symbolism, text, and meaning became foundational to theory in the humanities and social sciences, through the short-term and long-term influences of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, George Herbert Mead, Noam Chomsky, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and other thinkers in the traditions of linguistic and analytic philosophy, structural linguistics, symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, semiology, linguistically oriented psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Alfred Lorenzer), and deconstruction. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Habermas also redefined critical social theory as a theory of communication, i.e. communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap or intertwine to a much greater degree than before.
[edit] Construction
Both versions of critical theory have focused on the processes of synthesis, production, or construction by which the phenomena and objects of human communication, culture, and political consciousness come about. Whether it is through the transformational rules by which the deep structure of language becomes its surface structure (Chomsky), the universal pragmatic principles through which mutual understanding is generated (Habermas), the semiotic rules by which objects of daily usage or of fashion obtain their meanings (Barthes), the psychological processes by which the phenomena of everyday consciousness are generated (psychoanalytic thinkers), the episteme that underlies our cognitive formations (Foucault), and so on, there is a common interest in the processes (often of a linguistic or symbolic kind) that give rise to observable phenomena. Here there is significant mutual influence among aspects of the different versions of critical theory. Ultimately this emphasis on production and construction goes back to the revolution wrought by Kant in philosophy, namely his focus in the Critique of Pure Reason on synthesis according to rules as the fundamental activity of the mind that creates the order of our experience.
Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two quite different meanings with different origins and histories, one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism. This has led to the very literal use of 'critical theory' as an umbrella term to describe theoretical critique.
Critical theory, in the sociological context, refers to a style of Marxist theory with a tendency to engage with non-Marxist influences (for instance, the work of Nietzsche and Freud).[1] This tendency has been referred to pejoratively by stricter Marxists as 'revisionism'. Modern critical theory arose from a trajectory extending from the nonpositivist sociology of Weber and Simmel, the neo-Marxist theory of Lukács and Gramsci, toward the milieu associated with Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. It is with this so-called 'Frankfurt School' of theorists that the term is most commonly associated: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas. With the latter, critical theory shed further its roots in German Idealism and moved closer to American Pragmatism.[2]
Contents
[hide]
* 1 Two primary definitions
* 2 In social theory
o 2.1 Postmodern critical theory
o 2.2 Critical ethnography
* 3 In literary criticism
* 4 Language and construction
o 4.1 Language and communication
o 4.2 Construction
* 5 See also
o 5.1 Lists
o 5.2 Related subjects
o 5.3 Journals related and/or dedicated to Critical Theory
* 6 Footnotes
* 7 References
* 8 External links
[edit] Two primary definitions
There are two meanings of critical theory which derive from two different intellectual traditions associated with the meaning of criticism and critique. Both derive ultimately from the Greek word kritikos meaning judgment or discernment, and in their present forms go back to the 18th century. While they can be considered completely independent intellectual pursuits, increasingly scholars are interested in the areas of critique where the two overlap.
To use an epistemological distinction introduced by Jürgen Habermas in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] (Knowledge and Human Interests), critical theory in literary studies is ultimately a form of hermeneutics, i.e. knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions. Critical social theory is, in contrast, a form of self-reflective knowledge involving both understanding and theoretical explanation to reduce entrapment in systems of domination or dependence, obeying the emancipatory interest in expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination.
From this perspective, much literary critical theory, since it is focused on interpretation and explanation rather than on social transformation, would be regarded as positivistic or traditional rather than critical theory in the Kantian or Marxian sense. Critical theory in literature and the humanities in general does not necessarily involve a normative dimension, whereas critical social theory does, either through criticizing society from some general theory of values, norms, or oughts, or through criticizing it in terms of its own espoused values.
[edit] In social theory
Main article: Frankfurt School
Critical theory was first defined by Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of sociology in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory: Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Horkheimer wanted to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxian theory, critiquing both the model of science put forward by logical positivism and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism. Core concepts are: (1) That critical social theory should be directed at the totality of society in its historical specificity (i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific point in time), and (2) That critical theory should improve understanding of society by integrating all the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology.
This version of "critical" theory derives from Kant's (18th-century) and Marx's (19th Century) use of the term "critique", as in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Marx's concept that his work Das Kapital (Capital) forms a "critique of political economy". For Kant's transcendental idealism, "critique" means examining and establishing the limits of the validity of a faculty, type, or body of knowledge, especially through accounting for the limitations imposed by the fundamental, irreducible concepts in use in that knowledge system. Early on, Kant's notion associated critique with the disestablishment of false, unprovable, or dogmatic philosophical, social, and political beliefs, because Kant's critique of reason involved the critique of dogmatic theological and metaphysical ideas and was intertwined with the enhancement of ethical autonomy and the Enlightenment critique of superstition and irrational authority. Marx explicitly developed this notion into the critique of ideology and linked it with the practice of social revolution, as in the famous 11th of his "Theses on Feuerbach," "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in certain ways; the point is to change it".[3]
One of the distinguishing characteristics critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer elabroated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the “pessimism” of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.[4] This ambivalence was rooted, of course, in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, in particular, the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Marxist sociology.[5] For Adorno and Horkheimer state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional critical theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) and private property had been replaced by centralized planning and socialized ownership of the means of production.[6] Yet, contrary to Marx’s famous prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, critical theory was left, in Jurgen Habermas’ words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal; and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope."[7] For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for the apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself.
In the 1960s, Jürgen Habermas raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests, by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from the natural sciences or the humanities, through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation. Though unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkeimer's thought presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality, the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement.[8] Habermas dissolved further the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German Idealism, though his thought remains broadly Marxist in its epistemological approach. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action; the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called 'post-modern' challenges to the discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his theory; thought which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy.
[edit] Postmodern critical theory
While modernist critical theory (as described above) concerns itself with “forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system,” postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems “by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in the process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 52). Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to the rapid transformation in social structures and as a result the focus of research is centered on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations.
Postmodern critical research is also characterized by what is called, the crisis of representation, which rejects the idea that a researcher’s work is considered an “objective depiction of a stable other” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). Instead, in their research and writing, many postmodern scholars have adopted “alternatives that encourage reflection about the ‘politics and poetics’ of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002, p. 53). For an example of postmodern critical work, see Rolling’s (2008) piece, entitled Secular Blasphemy: Utter(ed) Transgressions Against Names and Fathers in the Postmodern Era.
[edit] Critical ethnography
Main article: Critical Ethnography
Critical ethnography is "a type of reflection that examines culture, knowledge, and action...Critical ethnographers describe, analyze, and open to scrutiny otherwise hidden agendas, power centers, and assumptions that inhibit, repress, and constrain" (Thomas, 1993, pp. 2–3). While "conventional ethnography" "describes what is", critical ethnography "asks what could be"….Conventional ethnographers study culture for the purposes of describing it; critical ethnographers do so to change it" (Thomas, 1993, p. 4).
[edit] In literary criticism
Main article: Literary theory
The second meaning of critical theory is that of theory used in literary criticism ("critical theory") and in the analysis and understanding of literature. This is discussed in greater detail under literary theory. This form of critical theory is not necessarily oriented toward radical social change or even toward the analysis of society, but instead specializes on the analysis of texts. It originated among literary scholars and in the discipline of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, and has really only come into broad use since the 1980s, especially as theory used in literary studies has increasingly been influenced by European philosophy and social theory.
This version of "critical" theory derives from the notion of literary criticism as establishing and enhancing the understanding and evaluation of literature in the search for truth. Some consider literary theory merely an aesthetic concern, as articulated, for example, in Joseph Addison's notion of a critic as one who helps understand and interpret literary works: "A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation."[9] This notion of criticism ultimately goes back to Aristotle's Poetics as a theory of literature.
From the literary side, starting in the 1960s literary scholars, reacting especially against the New Criticism of the previous decades, which tried to analyze literary texts purely internally, began to incorporate into their analyses and interpretations of literary works initially semiotic, linguistic, and interpretive theory, then structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and deconstruction as well as Continental philosophy, especially phenomenology and hermeneutics, and critical social theory and various other forms of neo-Marxian theory.
Thus literary criticism became highly theoretical and some of those practicing it began referring to the theoretical dimension of their work as "critical theory", i.e. philosophically inspired theory of literary criticism. And thus incidentally critical theory in the sociological sense also became, especially among literary scholars of left-wing sympathies, one of a number of influences upon and streams within critical theory in the literary sense.
Furthermore, along with the expansion of the mass media and mass/popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s and the blending of social and cultural criticism and literary criticism, the methods of both kinds of critical theory sometimes intertwined in the analysis of phenomena of popular culture, as in the emerging field of cultural studies, in which concepts deriving from Marxian theory, post-structuralism, semiology, psychoanalysis and feminist theory would be found in the same interpretive work. Both strands were often present in the various modalities of postmodern theory.
[edit] Language and construction
The two points at which there is the greatest overlap or mutual impingement of the two versions of critical theory are in their interrelated foci on language, symbolism, and communication and in their focus on construction.
[edit] Language and communication
From the 1960s and 1970s onward, language, symbolism, text, and meaning became foundational to theory in the humanities and social sciences, through the short-term and long-term influences of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, George Herbert Mead, Noam Chomsky, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and other thinkers in the traditions of linguistic and analytic philosophy, structural linguistics, symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, semiology, linguistically oriented psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Alfred Lorenzer), and deconstruction. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Habermas also redefined critical social theory as a theory of communication, i.e. communicative competence and communicative rationality on the one hand, distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap or intertwine to a much greater degree than before.
[edit] Construction
Both versions of critical theory have focused on the processes of synthesis, production, or construction by which the phenomena and objects of human communication, culture, and political consciousness come about. Whether it is through the transformational rules by which the deep structure of language becomes its surface structure (Chomsky), the universal pragmatic principles through which mutual understanding is generated (Habermas), the semiotic rules by which objects of daily usage or of fashion obtain their meanings (Barthes), the psychological processes by which the phenomena of everyday consciousness are generated (psychoanalytic thinkers), the episteme that underlies our cognitive formations (Foucault), and so on, there is a common interest in the processes (often of a linguistic or symbolic kind) that give rise to observable phenomena. Here there is significant mutual influence among aspects of the different versions of critical theory. Ultimately this emphasis on production and construction goes back to the revolution wrought by Kant in philosophy, namely his focus in the Critique of Pure Reason on synthesis according to rules as the fundamental activity of the mind that creates the order of our experience.
Literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature.[1] However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes.[1] In the humanities, the latter style of scholarship is often called simply "theory." As a consequence, the word "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Most of these approaches are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy.
Contents
* 1 Literary theory and literature
* 2 History
* 3 Differences among schools
* 4 Schools of literary theory
* 5 See also
* 6 Notes
* 7 References
* 8 Further reading
* 9 External links
[edit] Literary theory and literature
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature?", though many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a "text." For some scholars of literature, "texts" comprises little more than "books belonging to the Western literary canon." But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to non-fiction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related field of cultural studies. In fact, some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like fashion or football riots, as "texts" to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be thought of as the general theory of interpretation.
Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many "schools" or types of literary theory, which take different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists, even among those listed below, combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive approach of Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).
Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include the Historical & biographical Criticism, New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism and French feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.
[edit] History
The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India (Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra), ancient Rome (Longinus's On the Sublime and Horace's Ars Poetica) and medieval Iraq (Al-Jahiz's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and ibn al-Mu'tazz's Kitab al-Badi),[2] and the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature.
The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure began strongly to influence English language literary criticism. The New Critics and various European-influenced formalists (particularly the Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.
In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities like Johns Hopkins and Yale) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge , and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as faddish or trendy obscurantism (and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars."
By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. As of 2004[update], the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less acrimonious (though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Nathan Parker with Andrew Costigan, may signal a resurgence of the controversy). Some scholars draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.
[edit] Differences among schools
The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds of literary theory are often radically different. Even finding a set of common terms to compare them by can be difficult.
For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.
Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, and the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.
In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.
For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.
Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.[3]
Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.
[edit] Schools of literary theory
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors. In many cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the authors were not primarily literary critics, but their work has been broadly influential in literary theory.
* Aestheticism- often associated with Romanticism a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed art for art's sake.
o Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom
* American pragmatism and other American approaches
o Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
* Cultural studies - emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
o Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory
* Comparative Literature - confronts literatures from different languages, nations, cultures and disciplines to each other
* Darwinian literary studies - situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
* Deconstruction - a strategy of close reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
o Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
* Gender (see feminist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of gender relations
o Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter
* Formalism
* German hermeneutics and philology
o Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach
* Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of class conflict
o Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
* Modernism
* New Criticism - which looked at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
o W.K. Wimsatt, F.R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren
* New historicism - which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
o Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser
* Postcolonialism - focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by western nations
o Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd
* Post-modernism - criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
o Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice Blanchot
* Post-structuralism - a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
o Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva
* Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) - Explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
o Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk
* Queer theory - examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
o Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Michel Foucault
* Reader Response - focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
o Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
* Russian Formalism
o Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
* Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) - examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
o Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurij Lotman, Antti Aarne, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of folklore
* Eco-criticism - Explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world.
* Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature.[1] However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes.[1] In the humanities, the latter style of scholarship is often called simply "theory." As a consequence, the word "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Most of these approaches are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy.
Contents
* 1 Literary theory and literature
* 2 History
* 3 Differences among schools
* 4 Schools of literary theory
* 5 See also
* 6 Notes
* 7 References
* 8 Further reading
* 9 External links
[edit] Literary theory and literature
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature?", though many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they define a "text." For some scholars of literature, "texts" comprises little more than "books belonging to the Western literary canon." But the principles and methods of literary theory have been applied to non-fiction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related field of cultural studies. In fact, some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like fashion or football riots, as "texts" to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be thought of as the general theory of interpretation.
Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many "schools" or types of literary theory, which take different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists, even among those listed below, combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive approach of Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).
Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include the Historical & biographical Criticism, New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism and French feminism, post-colonialism, new historicism, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.
[edit] History
The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India (Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra), ancient Rome (Longinus's On the Sublime and Horace's Ars Poetica) and medieval Iraq (Al-Jahiz's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and ibn al-Mu'tazz's Kitab al-Badi),[2] and the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature.
The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure began strongly to influence English language literary criticism. The New Critics and various European-influenced formalists (particularly the Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.
In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities like Johns Hopkins and Yale) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge , and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as faddish or trendy obscurantism (and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars."
By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. As of 2004[update], the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less acrimonious (though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Nathan Parker with Andrew Costigan, may signal a resurgence of the controversy). Some scholars draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.
[edit] Differences among schools
The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds of literary theory are often radically different. Even finding a set of common terms to compare them by can be difficult.
For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.
Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, and the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.
In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.
For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.
Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.[3]
Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.
[edit] Schools of literary theory
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors. In many cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the authors were not primarily literary critics, but their work has been broadly influential in literary theory.
* Aestheticism- often associated with Romanticism a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed art for art's sake.
o Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom
* American pragmatism and other American approaches
o Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
* Cultural studies - emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
o Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory
* Comparative Literature - confronts literatures from different languages, nations, cultures and disciplines to each other
* Darwinian literary studies - situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
* Deconstruction - a strategy of close reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
o Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
* Gender (see feminist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of gender relations
o Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter
* Formalism
* German hermeneutics and philology
o Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach
* Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) - which emphasizes themes of class conflict
o Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin,
* Modernism
* New Criticism - which looked at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
o W.K. Wimsatt, F.R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren
* New historicism - which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
o Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser
* Postcolonialism - focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by western nations
o Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd
* Post-modernism - criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
o Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice Blanchot
* Post-structuralism - a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
o Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva
* Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) - Explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
o Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk
* Queer theory - examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
o Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Michel Foucault
* Reader Response - focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
o Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
* Russian Formalism
o Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
* Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) - examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
o Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurij Lotman, Antti Aarne, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of folklore
* Eco-criticism - Explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world.
* Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson
30 Desember 2009
What's Literature???
Literature
From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium
Unlike scholars in certain fields of learning, such as biology, where the boundaries are fairly well defined, those in the field of literature still debate exactly what the term means. When the celebrated 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica defined literature as “the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing,” few dared question it. Now, though, a century of such questioning has broadened the definition so that it can include nearly any text in any human language, even works in other media. Practically speaking, literature’s present-day definition is shaped by the perspective from which one regards it: scholars of a theoretical bent see it as embedded in questions of race, class, and gender, and highly variable over historical time, while those more aesthetically inclined tend to emphasize its continuity within traditions of arts and humane letters. One perspective typically mistrusts the other.
Contents
* 1 The study of literature
* 2 Scope of literature
* 3 Literary media
* 4 Formal categories
* 5 Genres
* 6 National literatures
* 7 The future of literature
* 8 References
The study of literature
In its modern descriptive sense, literature denotes written texts; by extension scholars have also applied the term to spoken or sung texts ("oral literature"), writings in particular subject areas ("medical literature"), other collections of material in a given language or national tradition ("English literature"), visual texts such as video and illustration, and published ephemera (“campaign literature”). It is often divided into historical periods ("Victorian literature") as well as into formal categories (prose, poetry, or drama) and genres (such as the epic, the novel, or the folktale).
In its more traditional prescriptive sense (that of the 1911 Britannica), literature connotes a particular quality found in the written culture of humane learning, the profession of “letters” (from Latin litteras), and written texts considered as aesthetic and expressive objects. In that sense, the art of “literature” differs from the science of “language,” as studied by theoretical linguists and cognitive psychologists such as Steven Pinker.
Literature as a subject worthy of academic study was first identified in the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the English word itself back to the 1200s (when it described familiarity with classical learning); not until the early 1800s was it used in the more modern sense. Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome generally never recognized the study of “literature” as a discipline per se; rather, they looked at forms such as drama, history, poetry, philosophy, and mythology on their own terms, or in terms of various schools of philosophical or religious thought. With the revival of advanced learning in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, though, the focus of study became classical literature itself—the sense first recorded by the OED; a person of “letters” was one who knew the classical traditions, and could read the classics. Only after literature in modern vernaculars became too significant to ignore did the current sense of the word develop.
European universities long resisted according writers working in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other vernacular languages the same status in their curricula as that given to writers of classical Latin and Greek. Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries were always conscious of the perceived inferiority of their native language, even as they rivaled and surpassed the literary achievements of their classical precursors. As scientific learning began to supplant classical learning in the early nineteenth century, universities added philology (the predecessor of modern linguistics) as a discipline, but that field focused more on the historical relationships between languages than on their literature.
In the United Kingdom, for example, the first institutions to offer instruction in literature were not the elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, but those geared toward students seeking to move up in the world, such as the London Working Men's College (founded in 1854). There, much to their surprise, sons of London bricklayers and artisans encountered teachers such as F.J. Furnivall, an early editor of the OED, who opened his classes with the dramatic announcement that he was about to return a national literature to its citizens, and then commenced reading aloud in Middle English from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, J.C. Collins stressed the influence of classics on English literature, shifting studies of the language away from philology and toward the present-day discipline of comparative literature[1]. In the United States, the study of literature was introduced at normal schools (schools for the preparation of teachers, mostly women at that time), and subsequently at land grant universities, where English literature was given the place assigned at older universities to reading in Latin and Greek.
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
Early professors of English literature, among them Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Henry Morley, devoted much of their attention to establishing a canon of suitable texts for study. In the twentieth century, this led to standardized anthologies, such as the Oxford and Norton anthologies of English literature. With the rise of the New Critics in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, scholars began looking at the literary text as a cultural object—a living repository of tradition extending across ages and civilizations. This movement coincided with expanding post-World War II college populations and helped elevate literature’s place and prestige in university curricula. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, proponents of poststructuralist theory began questioning the traditional literary canon and accepted hierarchies: Why, for instance, should lyric poetry be regarded as worthy of literary study, when comic books weren’t? Couldn’t we learn important things about contemporary culture from native American storytelling traditions as well as Italian opera? Practically speaking, this has meant that while college English departments still teach courses in Shakespeare and James Joyce, the sense of a highly exclusive canon of “great writers” is much diminished, and more kinds of literature are fair game for scholarly inquiry.
Scope of literature
In its broadest sense, literature came into being with the first use of pictographs, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, or alphabetic scripts, although it is more common to designate as "literature" only those texts which contain a degree of imaginative, emotive, allegoric, didactic, or descriptive content. Thus, business records, tallies, or lists are not generally included, even though such texts, which can be found in the earliest civilizations, are significant from a historical and archaeological perspective. The earliest literature evolved from the transcription of pre-existing oral traditional narratives, and progressed gradually to a point where such materials were first composed in written form.
Religious texts, while they have of course an entirely different significance to the adherents of the faiths to which they pertain, may also be considered literature when their narrative, figurative, or compositional qualities are foregrounded. The earliest instances of literature, therefore, those termed "ancient", include a variety of texts ranging from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Hebrew Torah, and onward to the Hellenistic Odyssey of Homer. These texts, though clearly recognized as literature, share an origin in pre-literate cultures, and thus predate, in some sense, the modern use of the term. Later in human history, the deliberate writing of imaginary or fanciful texts, disseminated in written form to a literate audience, marks the first fully self-conscious literary traditions. In this context, although still considered ancient, might be placed such compositions as the Latin Aeneid of Virgil, the Chinese Songs of Chu, or the Greek lyrical poetry of Sappho. With improvements in the production and dissemination of written texts, from Roman copyhouses to the invention of the printing press, along with the increase of a literate reading public, a third sense of "literature," and the one most commonly used today, came into being. Specifically, literature encompasses all imaginative writing in any language, as well as essays, criticism, travel writing, biographies, memoirs, diaries, and collections of letters.
Literary media
Literature was first recorded in pictographic and alphabetic systems of writing, which were either incised on clay tablets or stone, or written with inks or dyes on various flat organic media such as papyrus or parchment. The development of alphabetic systems, in which characters stood for sounds instead of things, by the Phoenecian and Greek cultures, enabled a rapid advancement in the variety and dissemination of written literature. In earliest times, such documents were generally prepared and stored on long sheets rolled into scrolls, but beginning in the second century CE, the codex, a bound set of trimmed sheets with a cover, began to predominate; this is the ancestor of the modern book.
The introduction of paper to Western Europe in the later Middle Ages greatly reduced the cost of written manuscripts, and the invention of movable type in 1450 led to to the printing of books in large numbers, and still further reduction in cost. Further refinements to the printing process, such as machines which could cast whole blocks of type at once, led to the emergence of print as a mass medium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with new formats such as magazines and newspapers printed in thousands of copies, both for subscribers and for sale at booksellers and newsstands. Genres such as the novel gained tremendous new audiences through appearances in periodical and serial forms, bringing writers such as Poe, Dickens, Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to a mass audience, and establishing literature as a popular medium.
In the later twentieth century, the field of popular literature continued to expand, both through the introduction of mass-market genres such as the dime novel and the illustrated press, and via the new commitment to public education and developing a literary curriculum of standard school texts. Established genres, such as detective fiction and science fiction, gained new audiences through the introduction of the paperback book, printed on inexpensive paper with a thin cardboard wrapper, and sold for a small fraction of the cost of a hardcover book. The large number of young readers led to a great expansion of children's literature and adolescent literature, as well as to new popular forms such as the comic book, which in recent years has emerged as a medium for adult fiction in the form of graphic novels.
With the advent of new media and technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, texts are often stored and transmitted electronically, magnetically, or digitally, without ever being printed on paper; they also often include, or are linked to audio, video, or multimedia content. Speech can now also be recorded, stored, and transmitted, so that some literary historians, such as Walter J. Ong, regard this as an age of "secondary orality". Such changes will doubtlessly expand and alter the definition of literature, just as did earlier technological developments.
Formal categories
A formal distinction common to many literary traditions is that between poetry and prose. Although the precise distinction between these two categories varies somewhat among world literatures, and though the boundaries between them have grown more blurred according to certain modern literary theories, it may generally be observed that poetry depends upon a relatively fixed array of metrical and phonological patterns used as repetitive devices, and involves a more densely interconnected arrangement of imagery and metaphor. In Old English poetry, as in the earliest Latin verse, a fixed pattern of stressed syllables, with the alliteration of their initial sounds, provides the basic structure, whereas in ancient Greek poetry, the length of the syllables was the primary principle. Rhyme, the assonance of the final sounds of words or lines, is one of the most common and recognizable options of poetic structure. Prose, of course, especially prose described as "poetic", may partake of all these qualities as well, though generally not in such a dense and closely patterned manner. Modern poetry also includes forms such as free verse and concrete poetry, which depart from the strict poetic meter or earlier forms, or attempt to abandon formal constraints altogether.
Prose is a far more inclusive category, and indeed envelops a wide variety of texts, such as business letters, instruction manuals, newpapers, memos, lists, contracts, speeches, and legal documents, which may not be considered literature at all. The earliest epic narratives were poetic in form, and prose was more generally reserved for the writing of history, religious instruction, or descriptive accounts of events or travels. The modern western tradition of literary prose emerged in the later Middle Ages, in texts such as Boccaccio's Decameron, or the prose segments of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales such as the Tale of Melibee, which Chaucer himself describes as "a litel thing in prose". By the time of the Renaissance, literary prose tended to take the form of extended essays, such as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or in narratives now regarded as early antecedents of the novel such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. From the eighteenth century onward, literary prose has largely comprised either narrative fiction or essays, along with collections of personal letters, biography, and autobiography.
Genres
The evolution of various genres of literature has varied considerably in different languages and cultures, although some very general categories can be outlined. Much early imaginative literature can be classed as epic; within this category one would find texts as various as the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Finnish Kalevala, the Elder Edda, or the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Epic literature is marked by a strong, central narrative, often focused on the deeds of a single heroic figure, and featuring elaborately detailed accounts of battle. The Greek term "lyric" also has close equivalents in many world literatures; lyric poetry is generally written in short stanzas or strophes, with an emphasis on image and affective emotion. Significant lyric poets in world traditions have included Sappho, Li Po, Kabir, Keats, and Dickinson.
Another early and continuing form, dramatic literature, consists of words and actions to be spoken and performed upon a stage by actors; while it has often been recorded in writing and print, the primary venue for this form of literature is theatrical performance. In ancient Greece, where plays evolved out of the religious observances of Dionysus, the works of Aristophanes, Sophocles, and others retain their force after two millenia. Significant world playwrights include Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett. Some of the paradigms of the stage extend to those of cinema film, and today film studies are often conjoined academically with the study of literature.
In the past few centuries, the novel has emerged as one of the dominant literary forms of modern literature, combining some features of the epic (such as a strong, central protagonist) with elements of historical narrative, travel writing, and the naturalistic dialogue of plays. Many claim Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) as the first novel, though some assign it instead to the category of mock epic. Among the great practitioners of the novel over the centuries since have been Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner. Novels themselves, from their first appearance, have been categorized in a variety of topical or formal sub-genres, such as the picaresque novel or the epistolary novel, as well as broader thematic categories such as science fiction, detective fiction, or fantasy.
National literatures
De Vulgari Eloquentia
De Vulgari Eloquentia
Although their names imply otherwise, national literatures often emerged before the emergence of modern nation-states. Dante, famously, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, his defense of writing in Italian, declared that literary Italian must be "curial", or "of the manner of the Italian court"" - even though, at the time he wrote there was no such singular Italian state. Like Chaucer and other medieval poets, he wrote before the language of his compositions reached its modern form. The writers of the Renaissance were a vital part of the emergence of their respective national literatures, though some, like Sir Thomas More, eschewed their own vernacular in favor of Latin. Even writers whose works now seem essential to their national literature, such as Goethe or Shakespeare, only became legitimate subjects of serious academic consideration very late in the nineteenth century, when national vernacular literatures became subjects for schools and universities. Today, at a point when literary works are frequently translated into other languages soon after their publication, and literacy rates around the world are at historic highs, there is a growing sense of an international audience for literature.
Not all the study of literature takes place along national lines; comparative literature is one academic discipline that engages in the study of literature in an interdisciplinary and transnational context. The relationships between the national literatures of former colonial powers has also led to postcolonial literature's emergence as a significent area of study. Other interdisciplinary fields with close ties to literature, such as film studies and cultural studies, also move readily across the old boundaries of national and ethnic literatures.
The future of literature
In 2003, poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, noted that the average American spent a mere twenty-four minutes per day reading, compared to more than four hours spent watching television. "The decline of print as our culture's primary means of codifying, presenting, and preserving information isn't merely a methodological change," he observed, "it is an epistemological transformation."[2] This trend, combined with the proliferation of new media for literary expression—such as e-books, "blogs" and other online vehicles, audiobooks, "podcasts," text messaging, and other technologies—could be seen as cause for alarm about the future of letters, especially on the part of devotees of traditional written literature. Yet Gioia and other literary futurists suggest that the likely outcome is not the end of literature, but new ways in which the literary impulse expresses itself through new media. In other words, the future of literature may have less to do with traditional literacy and letters than anyone can predict.
References
* The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921). http://www.bartleby.com/cambridge/
* CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu
* Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 2002.
* Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
* Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven, Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
* Ashcroft, Bill, et. al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York Routledge, 2002 (ISBN 0415280206)
* Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Prentice-Hall, 2005. (ISBN 0131344420)
From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium
Unlike scholars in certain fields of learning, such as biology, where the boundaries are fairly well defined, those in the field of literature still debate exactly what the term means. When the celebrated 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica defined literature as “the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing,” few dared question it. Now, though, a century of such questioning has broadened the definition so that it can include nearly any text in any human language, even works in other media. Practically speaking, literature’s present-day definition is shaped by the perspective from which one regards it: scholars of a theoretical bent see it as embedded in questions of race, class, and gender, and highly variable over historical time, while those more aesthetically inclined tend to emphasize its continuity within traditions of arts and humane letters. One perspective typically mistrusts the other.
Contents
* 1 The study of literature
* 2 Scope of literature
* 3 Literary media
* 4 Formal categories
* 5 Genres
* 6 National literatures
* 7 The future of literature
* 8 References
The study of literature
In its modern descriptive sense, literature denotes written texts; by extension scholars have also applied the term to spoken or sung texts ("oral literature"), writings in particular subject areas ("medical literature"), other collections of material in a given language or national tradition ("English literature"), visual texts such as video and illustration, and published ephemera (“campaign literature”). It is often divided into historical periods ("Victorian literature") as well as into formal categories (prose, poetry, or drama) and genres (such as the epic, the novel, or the folktale).
In its more traditional prescriptive sense (that of the 1911 Britannica), literature connotes a particular quality found in the written culture of humane learning, the profession of “letters” (from Latin litteras), and written texts considered as aesthetic and expressive objects. In that sense, the art of “literature” differs from the science of “language,” as studied by theoretical linguists and cognitive psychologists such as Steven Pinker.
Literature as a subject worthy of academic study was first identified in the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the English word itself back to the 1200s (when it described familiarity with classical learning); not until the early 1800s was it used in the more modern sense. Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome generally never recognized the study of “literature” as a discipline per se; rather, they looked at forms such as drama, history, poetry, philosophy, and mythology on their own terms, or in terms of various schools of philosophical or religious thought. With the revival of advanced learning in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, though, the focus of study became classical literature itself—the sense first recorded by the OED; a person of “letters” was one who knew the classical traditions, and could read the classics. Only after literature in modern vernaculars became too significant to ignore did the current sense of the word develop.
European universities long resisted according writers working in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other vernacular languages the same status in their curricula as that given to writers of classical Latin and Greek. Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries were always conscious of the perceived inferiority of their native language, even as they rivaled and surpassed the literary achievements of their classical precursors. As scientific learning began to supplant classical learning in the early nineteenth century, universities added philology (the predecessor of modern linguistics) as a discipline, but that field focused more on the historical relationships between languages than on their literature.
In the United Kingdom, for example, the first institutions to offer instruction in literature were not the elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, but those geared toward students seeking to move up in the world, such as the London Working Men's College (founded in 1854). There, much to their surprise, sons of London bricklayers and artisans encountered teachers such as F.J. Furnivall, an early editor of the OED, who opened his classes with the dramatic announcement that he was about to return a national literature to its citizens, and then commenced reading aloud in Middle English from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, J.C. Collins stressed the influence of classics on English literature, shifting studies of the language away from philology and toward the present-day discipline of comparative literature[1]. In the United States, the study of literature was introduced at normal schools (schools for the preparation of teachers, mostly women at that time), and subsequently at land grant universities, where English literature was given the place assigned at older universities to reading in Latin and Greek.
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
Early professors of English literature, among them Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Henry Morley, devoted much of their attention to establishing a canon of suitable texts for study. In the twentieth century, this led to standardized anthologies, such as the Oxford and Norton anthologies of English literature. With the rise of the New Critics in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, scholars began looking at the literary text as a cultural object—a living repository of tradition extending across ages and civilizations. This movement coincided with expanding post-World War II college populations and helped elevate literature’s place and prestige in university curricula. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, proponents of poststructuralist theory began questioning the traditional literary canon and accepted hierarchies: Why, for instance, should lyric poetry be regarded as worthy of literary study, when comic books weren’t? Couldn’t we learn important things about contemporary culture from native American storytelling traditions as well as Italian opera? Practically speaking, this has meant that while college English departments still teach courses in Shakespeare and James Joyce, the sense of a highly exclusive canon of “great writers” is much diminished, and more kinds of literature are fair game for scholarly inquiry.
Scope of literature
In its broadest sense, literature came into being with the first use of pictographs, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, or alphabetic scripts, although it is more common to designate as "literature" only those texts which contain a degree of imaginative, emotive, allegoric, didactic, or descriptive content. Thus, business records, tallies, or lists are not generally included, even though such texts, which can be found in the earliest civilizations, are significant from a historical and archaeological perspective. The earliest literature evolved from the transcription of pre-existing oral traditional narratives, and progressed gradually to a point where such materials were first composed in written form.
Religious texts, while they have of course an entirely different significance to the adherents of the faiths to which they pertain, may also be considered literature when their narrative, figurative, or compositional qualities are foregrounded. The earliest instances of literature, therefore, those termed "ancient", include a variety of texts ranging from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Hebrew Torah, and onward to the Hellenistic Odyssey of Homer. These texts, though clearly recognized as literature, share an origin in pre-literate cultures, and thus predate, in some sense, the modern use of the term. Later in human history, the deliberate writing of imaginary or fanciful texts, disseminated in written form to a literate audience, marks the first fully self-conscious literary traditions. In this context, although still considered ancient, might be placed such compositions as the Latin Aeneid of Virgil, the Chinese Songs of Chu, or the Greek lyrical poetry of Sappho. With improvements in the production and dissemination of written texts, from Roman copyhouses to the invention of the printing press, along with the increase of a literate reading public, a third sense of "literature," and the one most commonly used today, came into being. Specifically, literature encompasses all imaginative writing in any language, as well as essays, criticism, travel writing, biographies, memoirs, diaries, and collections of letters.
Literary media
Literature was first recorded in pictographic and alphabetic systems of writing, which were either incised on clay tablets or stone, or written with inks or dyes on various flat organic media such as papyrus or parchment. The development of alphabetic systems, in which characters stood for sounds instead of things, by the Phoenecian and Greek cultures, enabled a rapid advancement in the variety and dissemination of written literature. In earliest times, such documents were generally prepared and stored on long sheets rolled into scrolls, but beginning in the second century CE, the codex, a bound set of trimmed sheets with a cover, began to predominate; this is the ancestor of the modern book.
The introduction of paper to Western Europe in the later Middle Ages greatly reduced the cost of written manuscripts, and the invention of movable type in 1450 led to to the printing of books in large numbers, and still further reduction in cost. Further refinements to the printing process, such as machines which could cast whole blocks of type at once, led to the emergence of print as a mass medium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with new formats such as magazines and newspapers printed in thousands of copies, both for subscribers and for sale at booksellers and newsstands. Genres such as the novel gained tremendous new audiences through appearances in periodical and serial forms, bringing writers such as Poe, Dickens, Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to a mass audience, and establishing literature as a popular medium.
In the later twentieth century, the field of popular literature continued to expand, both through the introduction of mass-market genres such as the dime novel and the illustrated press, and via the new commitment to public education and developing a literary curriculum of standard school texts. Established genres, such as detective fiction and science fiction, gained new audiences through the introduction of the paperback book, printed on inexpensive paper with a thin cardboard wrapper, and sold for a small fraction of the cost of a hardcover book. The large number of young readers led to a great expansion of children's literature and adolescent literature, as well as to new popular forms such as the comic book, which in recent years has emerged as a medium for adult fiction in the form of graphic novels.
With the advent of new media and technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, texts are often stored and transmitted electronically, magnetically, or digitally, without ever being printed on paper; they also often include, or are linked to audio, video, or multimedia content. Speech can now also be recorded, stored, and transmitted, so that some literary historians, such as Walter J. Ong, regard this as an age of "secondary orality". Such changes will doubtlessly expand and alter the definition of literature, just as did earlier technological developments.
Formal categories
A formal distinction common to many literary traditions is that between poetry and prose. Although the precise distinction between these two categories varies somewhat among world literatures, and though the boundaries between them have grown more blurred according to certain modern literary theories, it may generally be observed that poetry depends upon a relatively fixed array of metrical and phonological patterns used as repetitive devices, and involves a more densely interconnected arrangement of imagery and metaphor. In Old English poetry, as in the earliest Latin verse, a fixed pattern of stressed syllables, with the alliteration of their initial sounds, provides the basic structure, whereas in ancient Greek poetry, the length of the syllables was the primary principle. Rhyme, the assonance of the final sounds of words or lines, is one of the most common and recognizable options of poetic structure. Prose, of course, especially prose described as "poetic", may partake of all these qualities as well, though generally not in such a dense and closely patterned manner. Modern poetry also includes forms such as free verse and concrete poetry, which depart from the strict poetic meter or earlier forms, or attempt to abandon formal constraints altogether.
Prose is a far more inclusive category, and indeed envelops a wide variety of texts, such as business letters, instruction manuals, newpapers, memos, lists, contracts, speeches, and legal documents, which may not be considered literature at all. The earliest epic narratives were poetic in form, and prose was more generally reserved for the writing of history, religious instruction, or descriptive accounts of events or travels. The modern western tradition of literary prose emerged in the later Middle Ages, in texts such as Boccaccio's Decameron, or the prose segments of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales such as the Tale of Melibee, which Chaucer himself describes as "a litel thing in prose". By the time of the Renaissance, literary prose tended to take the form of extended essays, such as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or in narratives now regarded as early antecedents of the novel such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. From the eighteenth century onward, literary prose has largely comprised either narrative fiction or essays, along with collections of personal letters, biography, and autobiography.
Genres
The evolution of various genres of literature has varied considerably in different languages and cultures, although some very general categories can be outlined. Much early imaginative literature can be classed as epic; within this category one would find texts as various as the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Finnish Kalevala, the Elder Edda, or the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Epic literature is marked by a strong, central narrative, often focused on the deeds of a single heroic figure, and featuring elaborately detailed accounts of battle. The Greek term "lyric" also has close equivalents in many world literatures; lyric poetry is generally written in short stanzas or strophes, with an emphasis on image and affective emotion. Significant lyric poets in world traditions have included Sappho, Li Po, Kabir, Keats, and Dickinson.
Another early and continuing form, dramatic literature, consists of words and actions to be spoken and performed upon a stage by actors; while it has often been recorded in writing and print, the primary venue for this form of literature is theatrical performance. In ancient Greece, where plays evolved out of the religious observances of Dionysus, the works of Aristophanes, Sophocles, and others retain their force after two millenia. Significant world playwrights include Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett. Some of the paradigms of the stage extend to those of cinema film, and today film studies are often conjoined academically with the study of literature.
In the past few centuries, the novel has emerged as one of the dominant literary forms of modern literature, combining some features of the epic (such as a strong, central protagonist) with elements of historical narrative, travel writing, and the naturalistic dialogue of plays. Many claim Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) as the first novel, though some assign it instead to the category of mock epic. Among the great practitioners of the novel over the centuries since have been Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner. Novels themselves, from their first appearance, have been categorized in a variety of topical or formal sub-genres, such as the picaresque novel or the epistolary novel, as well as broader thematic categories such as science fiction, detective fiction, or fantasy.
National literatures
De Vulgari Eloquentia
De Vulgari Eloquentia
Although their names imply otherwise, national literatures often emerged before the emergence of modern nation-states. Dante, famously, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, his defense of writing in Italian, declared that literary Italian must be "curial", or "of the manner of the Italian court"" - even though, at the time he wrote there was no such singular Italian state. Like Chaucer and other medieval poets, he wrote before the language of his compositions reached its modern form. The writers of the Renaissance were a vital part of the emergence of their respective national literatures, though some, like Sir Thomas More, eschewed their own vernacular in favor of Latin. Even writers whose works now seem essential to their national literature, such as Goethe or Shakespeare, only became legitimate subjects of serious academic consideration very late in the nineteenth century, when national vernacular literatures became subjects for schools and universities. Today, at a point when literary works are frequently translated into other languages soon after their publication, and literacy rates around the world are at historic highs, there is a growing sense of an international audience for literature.
Not all the study of literature takes place along national lines; comparative literature is one academic discipline that engages in the study of literature in an interdisciplinary and transnational context. The relationships between the national literatures of former colonial powers has also led to postcolonial literature's emergence as a significent area of study. Other interdisciplinary fields with close ties to literature, such as film studies and cultural studies, also move readily across the old boundaries of national and ethnic literatures.
The future of literature
In 2003, poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, noted that the average American spent a mere twenty-four minutes per day reading, compared to more than four hours spent watching television. "The decline of print as our culture's primary means of codifying, presenting, and preserving information isn't merely a methodological change," he observed, "it is an epistemological transformation."[2] This trend, combined with the proliferation of new media for literary expression—such as e-books, "blogs" and other online vehicles, audiobooks, "podcasts," text messaging, and other technologies—could be seen as cause for alarm about the future of letters, especially on the part of devotees of traditional written literature. Yet Gioia and other literary futurists suggest that the likely outcome is not the end of literature, but new ways in which the literary impulse expresses itself through new media. In other words, the future of literature may have less to do with traditional literacy and letters than anyone can predict.
References
* The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921). http://www.bartleby.com/cambridge/
* CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu
* Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 2002.
* Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
* Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven, Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
* Ashcroft, Bill, et. al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York Routledge, 2002 (ISBN 0415280206)
* Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Prentice-Hall, 2005. (ISBN 0131344420)
The Dramatic Monologue
The Dramatic Monologue
A dramatic monologue is a combination of the words dramatic and monologue (obviously). The "dramatic" says that it could be acted out, and is a form of drama, while the "monologue" defines it as a speech that one person makes, either to themself or to another. A dramatic monologue is written to reveal both the situation at hand and the character herself.
Here is a short one written by an Unknown, Anna Cormorant
Why am I standing here, alone,
When outside you are knocking, knocking?
I cannot come to you-
My feet are glued to the floor.
Forgive me, but I feared you!
Would that you could open the door,
But I have locked it!
Ah! What sorrow I have brought upon myself!
How you shout, how you plead for entrance
And how I want you to enter,
But you have not the strenth to break the door.
Well, come on then! Find another way in!
A dramatic monologue is a combination of the words dramatic and monologue (obviously). The "dramatic" says that it could be acted out, and is a form of drama, while the "monologue" defines it as a speech that one person makes, either to themself or to another. A dramatic monologue is written to reveal both the situation at hand and the character herself.
Here is a short one written by an Unknown, Anna Cormorant
Why am I standing here, alone,
When outside you are knocking, knocking?
I cannot come to you-
My feet are glued to the floor.
Forgive me, but I feared you!
Would that you could open the door,
But I have locked it!
Ah! What sorrow I have brought upon myself!
How you shout, how you plead for entrance
And how I want you to enter,
But you have not the strenth to break the door.
Well, come on then! Find another way in!
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (French pronunciation: [fɛʁdinɑ̃ də soˈsyːʁ]) (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. Saussure is widely considered to be one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics,[1][2] and his ideas have had a monumental impact throughout the humanities and social sciences.
Contents
[hide]
Biography
Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure, born in Geneva in 1857, showed early signs of considerable talent and intellectual ability. After a year of studying Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and a variety of courses at the University of Geneva, he commenced graduate work at the University of Leipzig in 1876. Two years later at 21 years Saussure studied for a year at Berlin, where he wrote his only full-length work, Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes (Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages). He returned to Leipzig and was awarded his doctorate in 1880. Soon afterwards he relocated to Paris, where he would lecture on ancient and modern languages. He taught in Paris for 11 years before returning to Geneva in 1891. Saussure lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva for the remainder of his life. It was not until 1906 that Saussure began teaching the Course of General Linguistics that would consume the greater part of his attention until his death in 1913.
[edit] Course in General Linguistics
Main article: Course in General Linguistics
Saussure's most influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye on the basis of notes taken from Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva. The Course became one of the seminal linguistics works of the 20th century, not primarily for the content (many of the ideas had been anticipated in the works of other 20th century linguists), but rather for the innovative approach that Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena.
Its central notion is that language may be analyzed as a formal system of differential elements, apart from the messy dialectics of real-time production and comprehension. Examples of these elements include the notion of the linguistic sign, the signifier, the signified, and the referent.
Saussure was at work compiling a written version of his lectures when he died. A manuscript of this effort was discovered in 1996 and published as Writings in General Linguistics, and offers significant clarifications of the gaps.
Laryngeal theory
While a student, Saussure published an important work in Indo-European philology that proposed the existence of ghosts in Proto-Indo-European called sonant coefficients. The Scandinavian scholar Hermann Möller suggested that these might actually be laryngeal consonants, leading to what is now known as the laryngeal theory. It has been argued that the problem Saussure encountered, of trying to explain how he was able to make systematic and predictive hypotheses from known linguistic data to unknown linguistic data, stimulated his development of structuralism. Saussure's predictions about the existence of primate coefficients/laryngeals and their evolution proved a resounding success when the Hittite texts was discovered and deciphered, some 50 years later.
[edit] Legacy
Saussure's ideas had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century. Two currents of thought emerged independently of each other, one in Europe, the other in America. The results of each incorporated the basic notions of Saussurian thought in forming the central tenets of structural linguistics. In Europe, the most important work was being done by the Prague School. Most notably, Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson headed the efforts of the Prague School in setting the course of phonological theory in the decades following 1940. Jakobson's universalizing structural-functional theory of primatology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses. Elsewhere, Louis Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School proposed new interpretations of linguistics from structuralist theoretical frameworks. In America, Saussure's ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield and the post-Bloomfieldian Structuralism of those scholars guided by and furthering the practices established in Bloomfield's investigations and analyses of language, such as Eugene Nida, Bernard Bloch, George L. Trager, Rulon S. Wells III, Charles Hockett, and through Zellig Harris, the young Noam Chomsky. In addition to Chomsky's theory of Transformational grammar, other contemporary developments of structuralism include Kenneth Pike's theory of tagmemics, Sidney Lamb's theory of stratificational grammar, and Michael Silverstein's work.
Outside linguistics, the principles and methods employed by structuralism were soon adopted by scholars and literary thinkers, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and implemented in their areas of study (literary studies/philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology respectively). However, their expansive interpretations of Saussure's theories, which contained ambiguities to begin with, and their application of those theories to non-linguistic fields of study such as sociology or anthropology, led to theoretical difficulties and proclamations of the end of structuralism in those disciplines.
[edit] Quotations
* "A sign is the basic unit of language (a given language at a given time). Every language is a complete system of signs. Parole (the speech of an individual) is an external manifestation of language."
* "A linguistic system is a series of differences of sounds combined with a series of differences of ideas."
* "The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary."
* "In language there are only differences, and no positive terms"
[edit] Works
* Saussure, Ferdinand de. (2002) Écrits de linguistique générale (edition prepared by Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler), Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-076116-9. English translation: Writings in General Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2006) ISBN 0-19-926144-X.
This volume is based on the manuscript of Saussure's "book on general linguistics", found in 1996 in Geneva. Saussure often mentioned the existence of such a manuscript, but it was thought to have been lost for a long time. With this new textual source, new light is shed on the work of Saussure. In particular, new elements appear that call for a revision of the legacy of Saussure, and call into question the reconstruction of his thought by his students in the Course in General Linguistics (1916).
* (1878) Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes (Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages), Leipzig: Teubner. (online version in Gallica Program, Bibliothèque nationale de France).
* (1916) Cours de linguistique générale, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger, Lausanne and Paris: Payot; trans. W. Baskin, Course in General Linguistics, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977.
* (1993) Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures in General Linguistics (1910–1911): Emile Constantin ders notlarından, Language and Communication series, volume. 12, trans. and ed. E. Komatsu and R. Harris, Oxford: Pergamon.
Ferdinand de Saussure (French pronunciation: [fɛʁdinɑ̃ də soˈsyːʁ]) (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. Saussure is widely considered to be one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics,[1][2] and his ideas have had a monumental impact throughout the humanities and social sciences.
Contents
[hide]
Biography
Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure, born in Geneva in 1857, showed early signs of considerable talent and intellectual ability. After a year of studying Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and a variety of courses at the University of Geneva, he commenced graduate work at the University of Leipzig in 1876. Two years later at 21 years Saussure studied for a year at Berlin, where he wrote his only full-length work, Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes (Dissertation on the Primitive Vowel System in Indo-European Languages). He returned to Leipzig and was awarded his doctorate in 1880. Soon afterwards he relocated to Paris, where he would lecture on ancient and modern languages. He taught in Paris for 11 years before returning to Geneva in 1891. Saussure lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva for the remainder of his life. It was not until 1906 that Saussure began teaching the Course of General Linguistics that would consume the greater part of his attention until his death in 1913.
[edit] Course in General Linguistics
Main article: Course in General Linguistics
Saussure's most influential work, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye on the basis of notes taken from Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva. The Course became one of the seminal linguistics works of the 20th century, not primarily for the content (many of the ideas had been anticipated in the works of other 20th century linguists), but rather for the innovative approach that Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena.
Its central notion is that language may be analyzed as a formal system of differential elements, apart from the messy dialectics of real-time production and comprehension. Examples of these elements include the notion of the linguistic sign, the signifier, the signified, and the referent.
Saussure was at work compiling a written version of his lectures when he died. A manuscript of this effort was discovered in 1996 and published as Writings in General Linguistics, and offers significant clarifications of the gaps.
Laryngeal theory
While a student, Saussure published an important work in Indo-European philology that proposed the existence of ghosts in Proto-Indo-European called sonant coefficients. The Scandinavian scholar Hermann Möller suggested that these might actually be laryngeal consonants, leading to what is now known as the laryngeal theory. It has been argued that the problem Saussure encountered, of trying to explain how he was able to make systematic and predictive hypotheses from known linguistic data to unknown linguistic data, stimulated his development of structuralism. Saussure's predictions about the existence of primate coefficients/laryngeals and their evolution proved a resounding success when the Hittite texts was discovered and deciphered, some 50 years later.
[edit] Legacy
Saussure's ideas had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century. Two currents of thought emerged independently of each other, one in Europe, the other in America. The results of each incorporated the basic notions of Saussurian thought in forming the central tenets of structural linguistics. In Europe, the most important work was being done by the Prague School. Most notably, Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson headed the efforts of the Prague School in setting the course of phonological theory in the decades following 1940. Jakobson's universalizing structural-functional theory of primatology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses. Elsewhere, Louis Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School proposed new interpretations of linguistics from structuralist theoretical frameworks. In America, Saussure's ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield and the post-Bloomfieldian Structuralism of those scholars guided by and furthering the practices established in Bloomfield's investigations and analyses of language, such as Eugene Nida, Bernard Bloch, George L. Trager, Rulon S. Wells III, Charles Hockett, and through Zellig Harris, the young Noam Chomsky. In addition to Chomsky's theory of Transformational grammar, other contemporary developments of structuralism include Kenneth Pike's theory of tagmemics, Sidney Lamb's theory of stratificational grammar, and Michael Silverstein's work.
Outside linguistics, the principles and methods employed by structuralism were soon adopted by scholars and literary thinkers, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and implemented in their areas of study (literary studies/philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology respectively). However, their expansive interpretations of Saussure's theories, which contained ambiguities to begin with, and their application of those theories to non-linguistic fields of study such as sociology or anthropology, led to theoretical difficulties and proclamations of the end of structuralism in those disciplines.
[edit] Quotations
* "A sign is the basic unit of language (a given language at a given time). Every language is a complete system of signs. Parole (the speech of an individual) is an external manifestation of language."
* "A linguistic system is a series of differences of sounds combined with a series of differences of ideas."
* "The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary."
* "In language there are only differences, and no positive terms"
[edit] Works
* Saussure, Ferdinand de. (2002) Écrits de linguistique générale (edition prepared by Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler), Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-076116-9. English translation: Writings in General Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2006) ISBN 0-19-926144-X.
This volume is based on the manuscript of Saussure's "book on general linguistics", found in 1996 in Geneva. Saussure often mentioned the existence of such a manuscript, but it was thought to have been lost for a long time. With this new textual source, new light is shed on the work of Saussure. In particular, new elements appear that call for a revision of the legacy of Saussure, and call into question the reconstruction of his thought by his students in the Course in General Linguistics (1916).
* (1878) Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européenes (Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages), Leipzig: Teubner. (online version in Gallica Program, Bibliothèque nationale de France).
* (1916) Cours de linguistique générale, ed. C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, with the collaboration of A. Riedlinger, Lausanne and Paris: Payot; trans. W. Baskin, Course in General Linguistics, Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977.
* (1993) Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures in General Linguistics (1910–1911): Emile Constantin ders notlarından, Language and Communication series, volume. 12, trans. and ed. E. Komatsu and R. Harris, Oxford: Pergamon.
Slog's Dad By David Almond
Slog's dad by David Almond
Slog always said his dad would come back one day. And, in the spring, he got his wish
David Almond's "Skellig" won the 1998 Whitbread children's book award
Spring had come. I'd been running round all day with Slog and we were starving. We were crossing the square to Myers pork
shop. Slog stopped dead in his tracks.
"What's up?" I said.
He nodded across the square.
"Look," he said.
"Look at what?"
"It's me dad," he whispered.
"Your dad?"
"Aye."
I just looked at him.
"That bloke there," he said.
"What bloke where?
"Him on the bench. Him with the cap on. Him with the stick."
I shielded my eyes from the sun with my hand and tried to see. The bloke had his hands resting on the top of the stick.
He had his chin resting on his hands. His hair was long and tangled and his clothes were tattered and worn, like he was poor
or like he'd been on a long journey. His face was in the shadow of the brim of his cap, but you could see that he was smiling.
"Slogger, man," I said. "Your dad's dead."
"I know that, Davie. But it's him. He's come back again, like he said he would. In the spring."
He raised his arm and waved.
"Dad!" he shouted. "Dad!"
The bloke waved back.
"See?" said Slog. "Howay."
He tugged my arm.
"No," I whispered. "No!"
And I yanked myself free and I went into Myers, and Slog ran across the square to his dad.
Slog's dad had been a binman, a skinny bloke with a creased face and a greasy flat cap. He was always puffing on a
Woodbine. He hung on to the back of the bin wagon as it lurched through the estate, jumped off and on, slung the bins over
his shoulder, tipped the muck into the back. He was forever singing hymns--"Faith of our Fathers," "Hail Glorious Saint
Patrick," stuff like that. "Here he comes again," my Mam would say as he bashed the bins and belted out "Oh, Sacred Heart"
at eight o'clock on a Thursday morning. But she'd be smiling, because everybody liked Slog's dad, Joe Mickley, a daft and
canny soul.
First sign of his illness was just a bit of a limp, then Slog came to school one day and said, "Me dad's got a black spot on
his big toenail."
"Just like Treasure Island, eh?" I said.
"What's it mean?" he said.
I was going to say death and doom, but I said, "He could try asking the doctor."
"He has asked the doctor."
Slog looked down. I could smell his dad on him, the scent of rotten rubbish that was always on him. They lived just down
the street from us, and the whole house had that smell in it, no matter how much Mrs Mickley washed and scrubbed. Slog's
dad knew it. He said it was the smell of the earth. He said there'd be nowt like it in Heaven.
"The doctor said it's nowt," Slog said. "But he's staying in bed today, and he's going to hospital tomorrow. What's it mean,
Davie?"
"How should I know?" I said.
I shrugged.
"It's just a spot, man, Slog!" I said.
Everything happened fast after that. They took the big toe off, then the foot, then the leg to halfway up the thigh. Slog said
his mother reckoned his dad had caught some germs from the bins. My mother said it was all the Woodbines he puffed.
Whatever it was, it seemed they stopped it. They fitted a tin leg on him and sent him home. It was the end of the bins, of
course. He took to sitting on the little garden wall outside the house. Mrs Mickley often sat with him and they'd be smelling
their roses and nattering and smiling and swigging tea and puffing Woodbines.
He used to show off his new leg to passers-by.
"I'll get the old one back when I'm in Heaven," he said.
If anybody asked was he looking for work, he'd laugh.
"Work? I can hardly bliddy walk."
And he'd start on "Faith of Our Fathers," and everybody'd smile.
Then he got a black spot on his other big toenail, and they took him away again, and they started chopping at his other leg,
and Slog said it was like living in a horror picture. When Slog's dad came home next he spent his days parked in a wheelchair
in his garden. He didn't bother with tin legs: just pyjama bottoms folded over his stumps. He was quieter. He sat day after day
in the summer sun among his roses staring out at the pebbledash walls and the red roofs and the empty sky. The Woodbines
dangled in his fingers, "Sacred Heart" drifted gently from his lips. Mrs Mickley brought him cups of tea, glasses of beer,
Woodbines. Once I stood with Mam at the window and watched Mrs Mickley stroke her husband's head and gently kiss his
cheek.
"She's telling him he's going to get better," said Mam.
We saw the smile growing on Joe Mickley's face.
"That's love," said Mam. "True love."
Slog's dad still joked and called out to anybody passing by.
"Walk?" he'd say. "Man, I cannot even bliddy hop."
"They can hack your body to a hundred bits," he'd say. "But they cannot hack your soul."
We saw him shrinking. Slog told me he'd heard his mother whispering about his dad's fingers coming off. He told me
about Mrs Mickley lifting his dad from the chair each night, laying him down, whispering her goodnights, like he was a little
bairn. Slog said that some nights when he was really scared, he got into bed beside them.
"But it just makes it worse," he said. He cried. "I'm bigger than me dad, Davie. I'm bigger than me bliddy dad!"
And he put his arms around me and put his head on my shoulder and cried.
"Slog, man," I said as I tugged away. "Howay, Slogger, man!"
One day late in August, Slog's dad caught me looking. He waved me to him. I went to him slowly. He winked.
"It's alreet," he whispered. "I know you divent want to come too close."
He looked down to where his legs should be.
"They tell us if I get to Heaven I'll get them back again," he said. "What d'you think of that, Davie?"
I shrugged.
"Dunno, Mr Mickley," I said.
"Do you reckon I'll be able to walk back here if I do get them back again?"
"Dunno, Mr Mickley."
I started to back away.
"I'll walk straight out them pearly gates," he said. He laughed. "I'll follow the smells. There's no smells in Heaven. I'll
follow the bliddy smells right back here to the lovely earth."
He looked at me.
"What d'you think of that?" he said.
Just a week later, the garden was empty. We saw Doctor Molly going in, then Father O'Mahoney, and just as dusk was
coming on, Mr Blenkinsop, the undertaker.
The week after the funeral, I was heading out of the estate for school with Slog, and he told me, "Dad said he's coming
back."
"Slogger, man," I said.
"His last words to me. Watch for me in the spring, he said."
"Slogger, man. It's just cos he was..."
"What?"
I gritted my teeth.
"Dying, man!"
I didn't mean to yell at him, but the traffic was thundering past us on the bypass. I got hold of his arm and we stopped.
"Bliddy dying," I said more softly.
"Me Mam says that and all," said Slog. "She says we'll have to wait. But I cannot wait till I'm in Heaven, Davie. I want to
see him here one more time."
Then he stared up at the sky.
"Dad," he whispered. "Dad!"
I got into Myers. Chops and sausages and bacon and black pudding and joints and pies sat in neat piles in the window. A
pink pig's head with its hair scorched off and a grin on its face gazed out at the square. There was a bucket of bones for dogs
and a bucket of blood on the floor. The marble counters and Billy Myers's face were gleaming.
"Aye aye, Davie," he said.
"Aye," I muttered.
"Saveloy, I suppose? With everything?"
"Aye. Aye."
I looked out over the pig's head. Slog was with the bloke, looking down at him, talking to him. I saw him lean down to
touch the bloke.
"And a dip?" said Billy.
"Aye," I said.
He plunged the sandwich into a trough of gravy.
"Bliddy lovely," he said. "Though I say it myself. A shilling to you, sir."
I paid him but I couldn't go out through the door. The sandwich was hot. The gravy was dripping to my feet.
Billy laughed.
"Penny for them," he said.
I watched Slog get on to the bench beside the bloke.
"Do you believe there's life after death?" I said.
Billy laughed.
"Now there's a question for a butcher!" he said.
A skinny old woman came in past me.
"What can I do you for, pet?" said Billy. "See you, Davie."
He laughed.
"Kids!" he said.
Slog looked that happy as I walked towards them. He was leaning on the bloke and the bloke was leaning back on the
bench grinning at the sky. Slog made a fist and face of joy when he saw me.
"It's dad, Davie!" he said. "See? I told you."
I stood in front of them.
"You remember Davie, Dad," said Slog.
The bloke looked at me. He looked nothing like the Joe Mickley I used to know. His face was filthy but it was smooth and
his eyes were shining bright.
"Course I do," he said. "Nice to see you, son."
Slog laughed.
"Davie's a bit scared," he said.
"No wonder," said the bloke. "That looks very tasty."
I held the sandwich out to him.
He took it, opened it and smelt it and looked at the meat and pease pudding and stuffing and mustard and gravy. He closed
his eyes and smiled then lifted it to his mouth.
"Saveloy with everything," he said. He licked the gravy from his lips, wiped his chin with his hand. "Bliddy lovely. You
got owt to drink?"
"No," I said.
"Ha. He has got a tongue!"
"He looks a bit different," said Slog. "But that's just cos he's been..."
"Transfigured," said the bloke.
"Aye," said Slog. "Transfigured. Can I show him your legs, Dad?"
The bloke laughed gently. He bit his saveloy sandwich. His eyes glittered as he watched me.
"Aye," he said. "Gan on. Show him me legs, son."
And Slog knelt at his feet and rolled the bloke's tattered trouser bottoms up and showed the bloke's dirty socks and dirty
shins.
"See?" he whispered.
He touched the bloke's legs with his fingers.
"Aren't they lovely?" he said. "Touch them, Davie."
I didn't move.
"Gan on," said the bloke. "Touch them, Davie."
His voice got colder.
"Do it for Slogger, Davie," he said.
I crouched, I touched, I felt the hair and the skin and the bones and muscles underneath. I recoiled, I stood up again.
"It's true, see?" said Slog. "He got them back in Heaven."
"What d'you think of that, then, Davie?" said the bloke.
Slog smiled.
"He thinks they're bliddy lovely, Dad."
Slog stroked the bloke's legs one more time then rolled the trousers down again.
"What's Heaven like, Dad?" said Slog.
"Hard to describe, son."
"Please, Dad."
"It's like bright and peaceful and there's God and the angels and all that..." The bloke looked at his sandwich. "It's like
having all the saveloy dips you ever want. With everything, every time."
"It must be great."
"Oh, aye, son. It's dead canny."
"Are you coming to see Mam, Dad?" he said.
The bloke pursed his lips and sucked in air and gazed into the sky.
"Dunno. Dunno if I've got the time, son."
Slog's face fell.
The bloke reached out and stroked Slog's cheek.
"This is very special," he said. "Very rare. They let it happen cos you're a very rare and special lad."
He looked into the sky and talked into the sky.
"How much longer have I got?" he said, then he nodded. "Aye. OK. OK."
He shrugged and looked back at Slog.
"No," he said. "Time's pressing. I cannot do it, son."
There were tears in Slog's eyes.
"She misses you that much, Dad," he said.
"Aye. I know." The bloke looked into the sky again. "How much longer?" he said.
He took Slog in his arms.
"Come here," he whispered.
I watched them hold each other tight.
"You can tell her about me," said the bloke. "You can tell her I love and miss her and all." He looked at me over Slog's
shoulder. "And so can Davie, your best mate. Can't you, Davie? Can't you?"
"Aye," I muttered.
Then the bloke stood up. Slog still clung to him.
"Can I come with you, Dad?" he said.
The bloke smiled.
"You know you can't, son."
"What did you do?" I said.
"Eh?" said the bloke.
"What job did you do?"
The bloke looked at me, dead cold.
"I was a binman, Davie," he said. "I used to stink but I didn't mind. And I followed the stink to get me here."
He cupped Slog's face in his hands.
"Isn't that right, son?"
"Aye," said Slog.
"So what's Slog's mother called?" I said.
"Eh?"
"Your wife. What's her name?"
The bloke looked at me. He looked at Slog. He pushed the last bit of sandwich into his mouth and chewed. A sparrow
hopped close to our feet, trying to get at the crumbs. The bloke licked his lips, wiped his chin, stared into the sky.
"Please, Dad," whispered Slog.
The bloke shrugged. He gritted his teeth and sighed and looked at me so cold and at Slog so gentle.
"Slog's mother," he said. "My wife..." He shrugged again. "She's called Mary."
"Oh, Dad!" said Slog and his face was transfigured by joy. "Oh, Dad!"
The bloke laughed.
"Ha! Bliddy ha!"
He held Slog by the shoulders.
"Now, son," he said. "You got to stand here and watch me go and you mustn't follow."
"I won't, Dad," whispered Slog.
"And you must always remember me."
"I will, Dad."
"And me, you and your lovely Mam'll be together again one day in Heaven."
"I know that, Dad. I love you, Dad."
"And I love you."
And the bloke kissed Slog, and twisted his face at me, then turned away. He started singing "Faith of Our Fathers." He
walked across the square past Myers pork shop, and turned down on to the High Street. We ran after him then and we looked
down the High Street past the people and the cars but there was no sign of him, and there never would be again.
We stood there speechless. Billy Myers came to the doorway of the pork shop with a bucket of bones in his hand and
watched us.
"That was me dad," said Slog.
"Aye?" said Billy.
"Aye. He come back, like he said he would, in the spring."
"That's good," said Billy. "Come and have a dip, son. With everything."
Slog's dad
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9304
Prospect Magazine
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk
Slog always said his dad would come back one day. And, in the spring, he got his wish
David Almond's "Skellig" won the 1998 Whitbread children's book award
Spring had come. I'd been running round all day with Slog and we were starving. We were crossing the square to Myers pork
shop. Slog stopped dead in his tracks.
"What's up?" I said.
He nodded across the square.
"Look," he said.
"Look at what?"
"It's me dad," he whispered.
"Your dad?"
"Aye."
I just looked at him.
"That bloke there," he said.
"What bloke where?
"Him on the bench. Him with the cap on. Him with the stick."
I shielded my eyes from the sun with my hand and tried to see. The bloke had his hands resting on the top of the stick.
He had his chin resting on his hands. His hair was long and tangled and his clothes were tattered and worn, like he was poor
or like he'd been on a long journey. His face was in the shadow of the brim of his cap, but you could see that he was smiling.
"Slogger, man," I said. "Your dad's dead."
"I know that, Davie. But it's him. He's come back again, like he said he would. In the spring."
He raised his arm and waved.
"Dad!" he shouted. "Dad!"
The bloke waved back.
"See?" said Slog. "Howay."
He tugged my arm.
"No," I whispered. "No!"
And I yanked myself free and I went into Myers, and Slog ran across the square to his dad.
Slog's dad had been a binman, a skinny bloke with a creased face and a greasy flat cap. He was always puffing on a
Woodbine. He hung on to the back of the bin wagon as it lurched through the estate, jumped off and on, slung the bins over
his shoulder, tipped the muck into the back. He was forever singing hymns--"Faith of our Fathers," "Hail Glorious Saint
Patrick," stuff like that. "Here he comes again," my Mam would say as he bashed the bins and belted out "Oh, Sacred Heart"
at eight o'clock on a Thursday morning. But she'd be smiling, because everybody liked Slog's dad, Joe Mickley, a daft and
canny soul.
First sign of his illness was just a bit of a limp, then Slog came to school one day and said, "Me dad's got a black spot on
his big toenail."
"Just like Treasure Island, eh?" I said.
"What's it mean?" he said.
I was going to say death and doom, but I said, "He could try asking the doctor."
"He has asked the doctor."
Slog looked down. I could smell his dad on him, the scent of rotten rubbish that was always on him. They lived just down
the street from us, and the whole house had that smell in it, no matter how much Mrs Mickley washed and scrubbed. Slog's
dad knew it. He said it was the smell of the earth. He said there'd be nowt like it in Heaven.
"The doctor said it's nowt," Slog said. "But he's staying in bed today, and he's going to hospital tomorrow. What's it mean,
Davie?"
"How should I know?" I said.
I shrugged.
"It's just a spot, man, Slog!" I said.
Everything happened fast after that. They took the big toe off, then the foot, then the leg to halfway up the thigh. Slog said
his mother reckoned his dad had caught some germs from the bins. My mother said it was all the Woodbines he puffed.
Whatever it was, it seemed they stopped it. They fitted a tin leg on him and sent him home. It was the end of the bins, of
course. He took to sitting on the little garden wall outside the house. Mrs Mickley often sat with him and they'd be smelling
their roses and nattering and smiling and swigging tea and puffing Woodbines.
He used to show off his new leg to passers-by.
"I'll get the old one back when I'm in Heaven," he said.
If anybody asked was he looking for work, he'd laugh.
"Work? I can hardly bliddy walk."
And he'd start on "Faith of Our Fathers," and everybody'd smile.
Then he got a black spot on his other big toenail, and they took him away again, and they started chopping at his other leg,
and Slog said it was like living in a horror picture. When Slog's dad came home next he spent his days parked in a wheelchair
in his garden. He didn't bother with tin legs: just pyjama bottoms folded over his stumps. He was quieter. He sat day after day
in the summer sun among his roses staring out at the pebbledash walls and the red roofs and the empty sky. The Woodbines
dangled in his fingers, "Sacred Heart" drifted gently from his lips. Mrs Mickley brought him cups of tea, glasses of beer,
Woodbines. Once I stood with Mam at the window and watched Mrs Mickley stroke her husband's head and gently kiss his
cheek.
"She's telling him he's going to get better," said Mam.
We saw the smile growing on Joe Mickley's face.
"That's love," said Mam. "True love."
Slog's dad still joked and called out to anybody passing by.
"Walk?" he'd say. "Man, I cannot even bliddy hop."
"They can hack your body to a hundred bits," he'd say. "But they cannot hack your soul."
We saw him shrinking. Slog told me he'd heard his mother whispering about his dad's fingers coming off. He told me
about Mrs Mickley lifting his dad from the chair each night, laying him down, whispering her goodnights, like he was a little
bairn. Slog said that some nights when he was really scared, he got into bed beside them.
"But it just makes it worse," he said. He cried. "I'm bigger than me dad, Davie. I'm bigger than me bliddy dad!"
And he put his arms around me and put his head on my shoulder and cried.
"Slog, man," I said as I tugged away. "Howay, Slogger, man!"
One day late in August, Slog's dad caught me looking. He waved me to him. I went to him slowly. He winked.
"It's alreet," he whispered. "I know you divent want to come too close."
He looked down to where his legs should be.
"They tell us if I get to Heaven I'll get them back again," he said. "What d'you think of that, Davie?"
I shrugged.
"Dunno, Mr Mickley," I said.
"Do you reckon I'll be able to walk back here if I do get them back again?"
"Dunno, Mr Mickley."
I started to back away.
"I'll walk straight out them pearly gates," he said. He laughed. "I'll follow the smells. There's no smells in Heaven. I'll
follow the bliddy smells right back here to the lovely earth."
He looked at me.
"What d'you think of that?" he said.
Just a week later, the garden was empty. We saw Doctor Molly going in, then Father O'Mahoney, and just as dusk was
coming on, Mr Blenkinsop, the undertaker.
The week after the funeral, I was heading out of the estate for school with Slog, and he told me, "Dad said he's coming
back."
"Slogger, man," I said.
"His last words to me. Watch for me in the spring, he said."
"Slogger, man. It's just cos he was..."
"What?"
I gritted my teeth.
"Dying, man!"
I didn't mean to yell at him, but the traffic was thundering past us on the bypass. I got hold of his arm and we stopped.
"Bliddy dying," I said more softly.
"Me Mam says that and all," said Slog. "She says we'll have to wait. But I cannot wait till I'm in Heaven, Davie. I want to
see him here one more time."
Then he stared up at the sky.
"Dad," he whispered. "Dad!"
I got into Myers. Chops and sausages and bacon and black pudding and joints and pies sat in neat piles in the window. A
pink pig's head with its hair scorched off and a grin on its face gazed out at the square. There was a bucket of bones for dogs
and a bucket of blood on the floor. The marble counters and Billy Myers's face were gleaming.
"Aye aye, Davie," he said.
"Aye," I muttered.
"Saveloy, I suppose? With everything?"
"Aye. Aye."
I looked out over the pig's head. Slog was with the bloke, looking down at him, talking to him. I saw him lean down to
touch the bloke.
"And a dip?" said Billy.
"Aye," I said.
He plunged the sandwich into a trough of gravy.
"Bliddy lovely," he said. "Though I say it myself. A shilling to you, sir."
I paid him but I couldn't go out through the door. The sandwich was hot. The gravy was dripping to my feet.
Billy laughed.
"Penny for them," he said.
I watched Slog get on to the bench beside the bloke.
"Do you believe there's life after death?" I said.
Billy laughed.
"Now there's a question for a butcher!" he said.
A skinny old woman came in past me.
"What can I do you for, pet?" said Billy. "See you, Davie."
He laughed.
"Kids!" he said.
Slog looked that happy as I walked towards them. He was leaning on the bloke and the bloke was leaning back on the
bench grinning at the sky. Slog made a fist and face of joy when he saw me.
"It's dad, Davie!" he said. "See? I told you."
I stood in front of them.
"You remember Davie, Dad," said Slog.
The bloke looked at me. He looked nothing like the Joe Mickley I used to know. His face was filthy but it was smooth and
his eyes were shining bright.
"Course I do," he said. "Nice to see you, son."
Slog laughed.
"Davie's a bit scared," he said.
"No wonder," said the bloke. "That looks very tasty."
I held the sandwich out to him.
He took it, opened it and smelt it and looked at the meat and pease pudding and stuffing and mustard and gravy. He closed
his eyes and smiled then lifted it to his mouth.
"Saveloy with everything," he said. He licked the gravy from his lips, wiped his chin with his hand. "Bliddy lovely. You
got owt to drink?"
"No," I said.
"Ha. He has got a tongue!"
"He looks a bit different," said Slog. "But that's just cos he's been..."
"Transfigured," said the bloke.
"Aye," said Slog. "Transfigured. Can I show him your legs, Dad?"
The bloke laughed gently. He bit his saveloy sandwich. His eyes glittered as he watched me.
"Aye," he said. "Gan on. Show him me legs, son."
And Slog knelt at his feet and rolled the bloke's tattered trouser bottoms up and showed the bloke's dirty socks and dirty
shins.
"See?" he whispered.
He touched the bloke's legs with his fingers.
"Aren't they lovely?" he said. "Touch them, Davie."
I didn't move.
"Gan on," said the bloke. "Touch them, Davie."
His voice got colder.
"Do it for Slogger, Davie," he said.
I crouched, I touched, I felt the hair and the skin and the bones and muscles underneath. I recoiled, I stood up again.
"It's true, see?" said Slog. "He got them back in Heaven."
"What d'you think of that, then, Davie?" said the bloke.
Slog smiled.
"He thinks they're bliddy lovely, Dad."
Slog stroked the bloke's legs one more time then rolled the trousers down again.
"What's Heaven like, Dad?" said Slog.
"Hard to describe, son."
"Please, Dad."
"It's like bright and peaceful and there's God and the angels and all that..." The bloke looked at his sandwich. "It's like
having all the saveloy dips you ever want. With everything, every time."
"It must be great."
"Oh, aye, son. It's dead canny."
"Are you coming to see Mam, Dad?" he said.
The bloke pursed his lips and sucked in air and gazed into the sky.
"Dunno. Dunno if I've got the time, son."
Slog's face fell.
The bloke reached out and stroked Slog's cheek.
"This is very special," he said. "Very rare. They let it happen cos you're a very rare and special lad."
He looked into the sky and talked into the sky.
"How much longer have I got?" he said, then he nodded. "Aye. OK. OK."
He shrugged and looked back at Slog.
"No," he said. "Time's pressing. I cannot do it, son."
There were tears in Slog's eyes.
"She misses you that much, Dad," he said.
"Aye. I know." The bloke looked into the sky again. "How much longer?" he said.
He took Slog in his arms.
"Come here," he whispered.
I watched them hold each other tight.
"You can tell her about me," said the bloke. "You can tell her I love and miss her and all." He looked at me over Slog's
shoulder. "And so can Davie, your best mate. Can't you, Davie? Can't you?"
"Aye," I muttered.
Then the bloke stood up. Slog still clung to him.
"Can I come with you, Dad?" he said.
The bloke smiled.
"You know you can't, son."
"What did you do?" I said.
"Eh?" said the bloke.
"What job did you do?"
The bloke looked at me, dead cold.
"I was a binman, Davie," he said. "I used to stink but I didn't mind. And I followed the stink to get me here."
He cupped Slog's face in his hands.
"Isn't that right, son?"
"Aye," said Slog.
"So what's Slog's mother called?" I said.
"Eh?"
"Your wife. What's her name?"
The bloke looked at me. He looked at Slog. He pushed the last bit of sandwich into his mouth and chewed. A sparrow
hopped close to our feet, trying to get at the crumbs. The bloke licked his lips, wiped his chin, stared into the sky.
"Please, Dad," whispered Slog.
The bloke shrugged. He gritted his teeth and sighed and looked at me so cold and at Slog so gentle.
"Slog's mother," he said. "My wife..." He shrugged again. "She's called Mary."
"Oh, Dad!" said Slog and his face was transfigured by joy. "Oh, Dad!"
The bloke laughed.
"Ha! Bliddy ha!"
He held Slog by the shoulders.
"Now, son," he said. "You got to stand here and watch me go and you mustn't follow."
"I won't, Dad," whispered Slog.
"And you must always remember me."
"I will, Dad."
"And me, you and your lovely Mam'll be together again one day in Heaven."
"I know that, Dad. I love you, Dad."
"And I love you."
And the bloke kissed Slog, and twisted his face at me, then turned away. He started singing "Faith of Our Fathers." He
walked across the square past Myers pork shop, and turned down on to the High Street. We ran after him then and we looked
down the High Street past the people and the cars but there was no sign of him, and there never would be again.
We stood there speechless. Billy Myers came to the doorway of the pork shop with a bucket of bones in his hand and
watched us.
"That was me dad," said Slog.
"Aye?" said Billy.
"Aye. He come back, like he said he would, in the spring."
"That's good," said Billy. "Come and have a dip, son. With everything."
Slog's dad
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9304
Prospect Magazine
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk
Poems by Benjamin Zephaniah
The British
Take some Picts, Celts and Silures
And let them settle,
Then overrun them with Roman conquerors.
Remove the Romans after approximately 400 years
Add lots of Norman French to some
Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings, then stir vigorously.
Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans,
Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese,
Vietnamese and Sudanese.
Then take a blend of Somalians, Sri Lankans, Nigerians
And Pakistanis,
Combine with some Guyanese
And turn up the heat.
Sprinkle some fresh Indians, Malaysians, Bosnians,
Iraqis and Bangladeshis together with some
Afghans, Spanish, Turkish, Kurdish, Japanese
And Palestinians
Then add to the melting pot.
Leave the ingredients to simmer.
As they mix and blend allow their languages to flourish
Binding them together with English.
Allow time to be cool.
Add some unity, understanding, and respect for the future,
Serve with justice
And enjoy.
Note: All the ingredients are equally important. Treating one ingredient better than another will leave a bitter unpleasant taste.
Warning: An unequal spread of justice will damage the people and cause pain. Give justice and equality to all.
Benjamin Zephaniah
The Death of Joy Gardner
They put a leather belt around her
13 feet of tape and bound her
Handcuffs to secure her
And only God knows what else,
She's illegal, so deport her
Said the Empire that brought her
She died,
Nobody killed her
And she never killed herself.
It is our job to make her
Return to Jamaica
Said the Alien Deporters
Who deports people like me,
It was said she had a warning
That the officers were calling
On that deadly July morning
As her young son watched TV.
An officer unplugged the phone
Mother and child were now alone
When all they wanted was a home
A child watch Mummy die,
No matter what the law may say
A mother should not die this way
Let human rights come into play
And to everyone apply.
I know not of a perfect race
I know not of a perfect place
I know this is not a simple case
Of Yardies on the move,
We must talk some Race Relations
With the folks from immigration
About this kind of deportation
If things are to improve.
Let it go down in history
The word is that officially
She died democratically
In 13 feet of tape,
That Christian was over here
Because pirates were over there
The Bible sent us everywhere
To make Great Britain great.
Here lies the extradition squad
And we should all now pray to God
That as they go about their job
They make not one mistake,
For I fear as I walk the streets
That one day I just may meet
Officials who may tie my feet
And how would I escape.
I see my people demonstrating
And educated folks debating
The way they're separating
The elder from the youth,
When all they are demanding
Is a little overstanding
They too have family planning
Now their children want the truth.
As I move around I am eyeing
So many poets crying
And so many poets trying
To articulate the grief,
I cannot help but wonder
How the alien deporters
(As they said to press reporters)
Can feel absolute relief.
What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us
We know who the killers are,
We have watched them strut before us
As proud as sick Mussolinis',
We have watched them strut before us
Compassionless and arrogant,
They paraded before us,
Like angels of death
Protected by the law.
It is now an open secret
Black people do not have
Chips on their shoulders,
They just have injustice on their backs
And justice on their minds,
And now we know that the road to liberty
Is as long as the road from slavery.
The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us to love each other
And never to take the tedious task
Of waiting for a bus for granted.
Watching his parents watching the cover-up
Begs the question
What are the trading standards here?
Why are we paying for a police force
That will not work for us?
The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us
That we cannot let the illusion of freedom
Endow us with a false sense of security as we walk the streets,
The whole world can now watch
The academics and the super cops
Struggling to define institutionalised racism
As we continue to die in custody
As we continue emptying our pockets on the pavements,
And we continue to ask ourselves
Why is it so official
That black people are so often killed
Without killers?
We are not talking about war or revenge
We are not talking about hypothetics or possibilities,
We are talking about where we are now
We are talking about how we live now
In dis state
Under dis flag, (God Save the Queen),
And God save all those black children who want to grow up
And God save all the brothers and sisters
Who like raving,
Because the death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us that racism is easy when
You have friends in high places.
And friends in high places
Have no use whatsoever
When they are not your friends.
Dear Mr Condon,
Pop out of Teletubby land,
And visit reality,
Come to an honest place
And get some advice from your neighbours,
Be enlightened by our community
,
Neglect your well-paid ignorance
Because
We know who the killers are.
Take some Picts, Celts and Silures
And let them settle,
Then overrun them with Roman conquerors.
Remove the Romans after approximately 400 years
Add lots of Norman French to some
Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings, then stir vigorously.
Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans,
Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese,
Vietnamese and Sudanese.
Then take a blend of Somalians, Sri Lankans, Nigerians
And Pakistanis,
Combine with some Guyanese
And turn up the heat.
Sprinkle some fresh Indians, Malaysians, Bosnians,
Iraqis and Bangladeshis together with some
Afghans, Spanish, Turkish, Kurdish, Japanese
And Palestinians
Then add to the melting pot.
Leave the ingredients to simmer.
As they mix and blend allow their languages to flourish
Binding them together with English.
Allow time to be cool.
Add some unity, understanding, and respect for the future,
Serve with justice
And enjoy.
Note: All the ingredients are equally important. Treating one ingredient better than another will leave a bitter unpleasant taste.
Warning: An unequal spread of justice will damage the people and cause pain. Give justice and equality to all.
Benjamin Zephaniah
The Death of Joy Gardner
They put a leather belt around her
13 feet of tape and bound her
Handcuffs to secure her
And only God knows what else,
She's illegal, so deport her
Said the Empire that brought her
She died,
Nobody killed her
And she never killed herself.
It is our job to make her
Return to Jamaica
Said the Alien Deporters
Who deports people like me,
It was said she had a warning
That the officers were calling
On that deadly July morning
As her young son watched TV.
An officer unplugged the phone
Mother and child were now alone
When all they wanted was a home
A child watch Mummy die,
No matter what the law may say
A mother should not die this way
Let human rights come into play
And to everyone apply.
I know not of a perfect race
I know not of a perfect place
I know this is not a simple case
Of Yardies on the move,
We must talk some Race Relations
With the folks from immigration
About this kind of deportation
If things are to improve.
Let it go down in history
The word is that officially
She died democratically
In 13 feet of tape,
That Christian was over here
Because pirates were over there
The Bible sent us everywhere
To make Great Britain great.
Here lies the extradition squad
And we should all now pray to God
That as they go about their job
They make not one mistake,
For I fear as I walk the streets
That one day I just may meet
Officials who may tie my feet
And how would I escape.
I see my people demonstrating
And educated folks debating
The way they're separating
The elder from the youth,
When all they are demanding
Is a little overstanding
They too have family planning
Now their children want the truth.
As I move around I am eyeing
So many poets crying
And so many poets trying
To articulate the grief,
I cannot help but wonder
How the alien deporters
(As they said to press reporters)
Can feel absolute relief.
What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us
We know who the killers are,
We have watched them strut before us
As proud as sick Mussolinis',
We have watched them strut before us
Compassionless and arrogant,
They paraded before us,
Like angels of death
Protected by the law.
It is now an open secret
Black people do not have
Chips on their shoulders,
They just have injustice on their backs
And justice on their minds,
And now we know that the road to liberty
Is as long as the road from slavery.
The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us to love each other
And never to take the tedious task
Of waiting for a bus for granted.
Watching his parents watching the cover-up
Begs the question
What are the trading standards here?
Why are we paying for a police force
That will not work for us?
The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us
That we cannot let the illusion of freedom
Endow us with a false sense of security as we walk the streets,
The whole world can now watch
The academics and the super cops
Struggling to define institutionalised racism
As we continue to die in custody
As we continue emptying our pockets on the pavements,
And we continue to ask ourselves
Why is it so official
That black people are so often killed
Without killers?
We are not talking about war or revenge
We are not talking about hypothetics or possibilities,
We are talking about where we are now
We are talking about how we live now
In dis state
Under dis flag, (God Save the Queen),
And God save all those black children who want to grow up
And God save all the brothers and sisters
Who like raving,
Because the death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us that racism is easy when
You have friends in high places.
And friends in high places
Have no use whatsoever
When they are not your friends.
Dear Mr Condon,
Pop out of Teletubby land,
And visit reality,
Come to an honest place
And get some advice from your neighbours,
Be enlightened by our community
,
Neglect your well-paid ignorance
Because
We know who the killers are.
Short Story
.......He paid the price for another man’s folly.
One life gone, 2 people dead !
A mother is devastated, she is howling with pain, yelling all she can in that dark and dingy corner of her four by four kholi. There was nobody to hear her yell and not a soul to pacify her, because outside her shack is a long winding lonely road. There was no existence of mankind for miles and miles ahead. The wind was at rest, the leaves didn’t rustle and no resonance of a barking dog, silence filled the air. Loneliness was already killing her, but no one knows what made her cry?
Losing something you love with all your heart isn’t really the grief you can ever overcome. Radha lost her baby. Her only means to live. She saw her child getting crushed under a car in front of her own eyes. Blood was all over and the accident was terrible. One lonely night, she was walking down the street t get a breath of fresh air with her child cuddled tight in her arms. She walked a long time s till she saw the face of mankind (in the evilest form).
The whole time she walked with her child in her arms the only thing that worried her was Aryans (her son’s) future. What kind of a person will he be? Will he make me proud? How much light is life going to bring in his existence? She was imagining and feeling every day of the Childs growth, and what she had in store for him. But who knows what’s in store for us tomorrow, life can change in the splits of a second. Talk about destiny, all those dreams hopes and expectations were snatched away from her in an instant. Her smiles were frowns and her faith just crumbled, like a deal soul in a living, rather breathing body.
This is how it happened…. On that abandoned road, were a few streetlights barely sufficient? There was this one light that was visible from a distance, but as it came closer it got brighter and brighter. That light changed radha’s life into darkness forever. A speeding car came down that road, as if the driver had jammed the accelerator, cutting across the wind. He came at a speek of 110kmph throwing beer bottles out of his half open window. He was definitely drunk, the speed took everything in its path. Just then, there was a loud cry, and silence set in again. The cry of a baby and no sight of a child.
Ironically the mother wasn’t hurt, not a scratch on a body, not a bruise on her arm. She opened her eyes and didn’t she Aryan, her vision was blur. After a few minutes when her sight cleared up she looked all over frantically for her baby, but alas! There was nothing. Just then she noticed something about then feet away it was blood draining into the gutter’s, and pieces of minced flesh, laying there saying so much without saying anything at all. The blood of her baby, the child who hadn’t even seen life,
He paid the price for another man’s folly. The same little child whose future was just being planned.
Simple, don’t drink and drive. You could take a life, but kill a number of people.
One life gone, 2 people dead !
A mother is devastated, she is howling with pain, yelling all she can in that dark and dingy corner of her four by four kholi. There was nobody to hear her yell and not a soul to pacify her, because outside her shack is a long winding lonely road. There was no existence of mankind for miles and miles ahead. The wind was at rest, the leaves didn’t rustle and no resonance of a barking dog, silence filled the air. Loneliness was already killing her, but no one knows what made her cry?
Losing something you love with all your heart isn’t really the grief you can ever overcome. Radha lost her baby. Her only means to live. She saw her child getting crushed under a car in front of her own eyes. Blood was all over and the accident was terrible. One lonely night, she was walking down the street t get a breath of fresh air with her child cuddled tight in her arms. She walked a long time s till she saw the face of mankind (in the evilest form).
The whole time she walked with her child in her arms the only thing that worried her was Aryans (her son’s) future. What kind of a person will he be? Will he make me proud? How much light is life going to bring in his existence? She was imagining and feeling every day of the Childs growth, and what she had in store for him. But who knows what’s in store for us tomorrow, life can change in the splits of a second. Talk about destiny, all those dreams hopes and expectations were snatched away from her in an instant. Her smiles were frowns and her faith just crumbled, like a deal soul in a living, rather breathing body.
This is how it happened…. On that abandoned road, were a few streetlights barely sufficient? There was this one light that was visible from a distance, but as it came closer it got brighter and brighter. That light changed radha’s life into darkness forever. A speeding car came down that road, as if the driver had jammed the accelerator, cutting across the wind. He came at a speek of 110kmph throwing beer bottles out of his half open window. He was definitely drunk, the speed took everything in its path. Just then, there was a loud cry, and silence set in again. The cry of a baby and no sight of a child.
Ironically the mother wasn’t hurt, not a scratch on a body, not a bruise on her arm. She opened her eyes and didn’t she Aryan, her vision was blur. After a few minutes when her sight cleared up she looked all over frantically for her baby, but alas! There was nothing. Just then she noticed something about then feet away it was blood draining into the gutter’s, and pieces of minced flesh, laying there saying so much without saying anything at all. The blood of her baby, the child who hadn’t even seen life,
He paid the price for another man’s folly. The same little child whose future was just being planned.
Simple, don’t drink and drive. You could take a life, but kill a number of people.
21 Desember 2009
Queer Theory
Queer Theory
The appeal of 'queer theory' has outstripped anyone's sense of what exactly it means
Michael Warner
A response to this piece has been received from C.W.Young
Once the term 'queer' was, at best, slang for homosexual, at worst, a term of homophobic abuse. In recent years 'queer' has come to be used differently, sometimes as an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginal sexual self-identifications and at other times to describe a nascent theoretical model which has developed out of more traditional lesbian and gay studies. The rapid development and consolidation of lesbian and gay studies in universities in the 1990s is paralleled by an increasing deployment of the term 'queer'. As queer is unaligned with any specific identity category, it has the potential to be annexed profitably to any number of discussions. In the history of disciplinary formations, lesbian and gay studies is itself a relatively recent construction, and queer theory can be seen as its latest institutional transformation.
Broadly speaking, queer describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire. Resisting that model of stability--which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect--queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire. Institutionally, queer has been associated most prominently with lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery. Whether as transvestite performance or academic deconstruction, queer locates and exploits the incoherencies in those three terms which stabilise heterosexuality. Demonstrating the impossibility of any 'natural' sexuality, it calls into question even such apparently unproblematic terms as 'man' and 'woman'.
The recent intervention of this confrontational word 'queer' in altogether politer academic discourses suggests that traditional models have been ruptured. Yet its appearance also marks a continuity. Queer theory's debunking of stable sexes, genders and sexualities develops out of a specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions. Queer is not always seen, however, as an acceptable elaboration of or shorthand for 'lesbian and gay'. Although many theorists welcome queer as 'another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual' (de Lauretis, 1991:iv), others question its efficacy. 1 The most commonly voiced anxieties are provoked by such issues as whether a generic masculinity may be reinstalled at the heart of the ostensibly gender-neutral queer; whether queer's transcendent disregard for dominant systems of gender fails to consider the material conditions of the west in the late twentieth century; whether queer simply replicates, with a kind of historical amnesia, the stances and demands of an earlier gay liberation; and whether, because its constituency is almost unlimited, queer includes identificatory categories whose politics are less progressive than those of the lesbian and gay populations with which they are aligned.
Whatever ambivalences structure queer, there is no doubt that its recent redeployment is making a substantial impact on lesbian and gay studies. Yet, almost as soon as queer established market dominance as a diacritical term, and certainly before consolidating itself in any easy vernacular sense, some theorists are already suggesting that its moment had passed and that 'queer politics may, by now, have outlived its political usefulness'. 2 Does queer become defunct the moment it is an intelligible and widely disseminated term? Teresa de Lauretis, the theorist often credited with inaugurating the phrase 'queer theory', abandoned it barely three years later, on the grounds that it had been taken over by those mainstream forces and institutions it was coined to resist.
Explaining her choice of terminology in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994), de Lauretis writes: "As for 'queer theory', my insistent specification lesbian may well be taken as a taking of distance from what, since I proposed it as a working hypothesis for lesbian and gay studies in this very journal (differences , 3.2), has very quickly become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry'. 3 Distancing herself from her earlier advocacy of queer, de Lauretis now represents it as devoid of the political or critical acumen she once thought it promised.
In some quarters and in some enunciations, no doubt, queer does little more than function as shorthand for the unwieldy lesbian and gay, or offer itself as a new solidification of identity, by kitting out more fashionably an otherwise unreconstructed sexual essentialism. Certainly, 'its sudden and often uncritical adoption has at times foreclosed what is potentially most significant--and necessary--about the term' 4 . Queer retains, however, a conceptually unique potential as a necessarily unfixed site of engagement and contestation. Admittedly not discernible in every mobilisation of queer, this constitutes an alternative to de Lauretis's narrative of disillusionment. Judith Butler does not try to anticipate exactly how queer will continue to challenge normative structures and discourses. On the contrary, she argues that what makes queer so efficacious is the way in which it understands the effects of its interventions are not singular and therefore cannot be anticipated in advance. Butler understands, as de Lauretis did when initially promoting queer over lesbian and gay, that the conservative effects of identity classifications lie in their ability to naturalise themselves as self-evident descriptive categories. She argues that if queer is to avoid simply replicating the normative claims of earlier lesbian and gay formations, it must be conceived as a category in constant formation:
[It] will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes, and perhaps also yielded in favor of terms that do that political work more effectively. 5
In stressing the partial, flexible and responsive nature of queer, Butler offers a corrective to those naturalised and seemingly self-evident categories of identification that constitute traditional formations of identity politics. She specifies the ways in which the logic of identity politics--which is to gather together similar subjects so that they can achieve shared aims by mobilising a minority-rights discourse--is far from natural or self-evident.
In the sense that Butler outlines the queer project--that is, to the extent that she argues there can't be one--queer may be thought of as activating an identity politics so attuned to the constraining effects of naming, of delineating a foundational category which precedes and underwrites political intervention, that it may better be understood as promoting a non-identity--or even anti-identity--politics. If a potentially infinite coalition of sexual identities, practices, discourses and sites might be identified as queer, what it betokens is not so much liberal pluralism as a negotiation of the very concept of identity itself. For queer is, in part, a response to perceived limitations in the liberationist and identity-conscious politics of the gay and lesbian feminist movements. The rhetoric of both has been structured predominantly around self-recognition, community and shared identity; inevitably, if inadvertently, both movements have also resulted in exclusions, delegitimation, and a false sense of universality. The discursive proliferation of queer has been enabled in part by the knowledge that identities are fictitious--that is, produced by and productive of material effects but nevertheless arbitrary, contingent and ideologically motivated.
Unlike those identity categories labelled lesbian or gay, queer has developed out of the theorising of often unexamined constraints in traditional identity politics. Consequently, queer has been produced largely outside the registers of recognition, truthfulness and self-identity.
Queer, then, is an identity category that has no interest in consolidating or even stabilising itself. It maintains its critique of identity-focused movements by understanding that even the formation of its own coalitional and negotiated constituencies may well result in exclusionary and reifying effects far in excess of those intended.
Acknowledging the inevitable violence of identity politics and having no stake in its own hegemony, queer is less an identity than a critique of identity. But it is in no position to imagine itself outside that circuit of problems energised by identity politics. Instead of defending itself against those criticisms that its operations inevitably attract, queer allows such criticisms to shape its--for now unimaginable--future directions. 'The term', writes Butler, 'will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized'. The mobilisation of queer--no less than the critique of it--foregrounds the conditions of political representation: its intentions and effects, its resistance to and recovery by the existing networks of power.
For Halperin, as for Butler, queer is a way of pointing ahead without knowing for certain what to point at. "'Queer" ... does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions', writes Halperin 6 ; "rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogenous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance". Queer is always an identity under construction, a site of permanent becoming: "utopic in its negativity, queer theory curves endlessly toward a realization that its realization remains impossible" 7 . The extent to which different theorists have emphasised the unknown potential of queer suggests that its most enabling characteristic may well be its potential for looking forward without anticipating the future. Instead of theorising queer in terms of its opposition to identity politics, it is more accurate to represent it as ceaselessly interrogating both the preconditions of identity and its effects. Queer is not outside the magnetic field of identity. Like some postmodern architecture, it turns identity inside out, and displays its supports exoskeletally. If the dialogue between queer and more traditional identity formations is sometimes fraught--which it is--that is not because they have nothing in common. Rather, lesbian and gay faith in the authenticity or even political efficacy of identity categories and the queer suspension of all such classifications energise each other, offering in the 1990s--and who can say beyond?--the ambivalent reassurance of an unimaginable future.
Annamarie Jagose is a Senior Lecturer in English at Melbourne University. This piece is extracted with permission from her new book, Queer Theory, University of Melbourne Press, 1996.
See the discussion on Global Queer in emuse and Dennis Altman's target essay On Global Queering
A response to this piece has been received from C.W.Young
References
1. de Lauretis, Teresa (1991) 'Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities', differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, 2, pp.iii-xviii
2. Halperin, David (1995) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, New York: Oxford University Press.
3. de Lauretis, Teresa (1994a) 'Habit Changes' differences: AJournal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, 2-3, pp. 296-313.
4. Phillips, David (1994) 'What's So Queer Here? Photography at the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras', Eyeline 26, pp. 16-19.
5. Butler, Judith (1993a) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex', New York: Routledge.
6. Halperin, David (1995) Saint Foucault: Towards A Gay Hagiography, New York: Oxford University Press.
7. Eldeman, Lee (1995) 'Queer Thory: Unstating Desire', GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2, 4, pp. 343-6
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