LESSON II: SURVEY OF LITERARY THEORIES AND APPROACHES
I. RUSSIAN FORMALISM
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In the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, two distinct groups of Russian scholars
emerged in Moscow and Petrograd (St. Petersburg) who would radically change the direction of literary theory
and criticism. Founded in 1915, the Moscow Linguistic Circle included in its practitioners such members as
Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky, Peter Bogatyrev, and G. O. Vinokur. The following year in Petrograd, the
Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOYAZ) was formed, including in its membership Victor
Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, and Victor Vinogradov. Although the adherents of both groups often disagreed
concerning the principles of literary interpretation, they were united in their rejection of many
nineteenth-century assumptions of textual analysis, especially the belief that a work of literature was the
expression of the author's worldview and their dismissal of psychological and biographical criticism as being
irrelevant to interpretation. These Russian scholars boldly declared the autonomy of literature and poetic
language, advocating a scientific approach to literary interpretation. Literature, they believed, should be
investigated as its own discipline, not merely as a platform for discussing religious, political, sociological, or
philosophical ideas. By radically divorcing themselves from previous literary approaches and advocating new
principles of hermeneutics, these members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and of the Society for the Study of
Poetic Language are considered the founders of modern literary criticism, establishing what is known as
Russian Formalism.
Coined by opponents of the movement to deprecate Russian Formalism's supposedly strict
methodological approach to literary interpretation, the terms Formalism and Formalist were first rejected by the
Russian Formalists themselves, for they believed that their approach to literature was both dynamic and
evolutionary, not a "formal" or dogmatic one. Nevertheless, the terms ultimately became the battle cry for the
establishment of what they dubbed a science of literature.
The first task of the Russian Formalists was to define their new science. Framing their theory on the
work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the French linguist and founder of modern linguistics, the Formalists
emphasized the autonomous nature of literature. The proper study of literature, they declared, is literature itself.
To study literature is to study poetics, which is an analysis of a work's constituent parts-its linguistic and
structural features-or its form. Form, they asserted, included the internal mechanics of the work itself,
especially its poetic language. It is these internal mechanics or what the Formalists called devices that compose
the artfulness and literariness of any given text, not a work's subject matter or content. Each device or
compositional feature possesses peculiar properties that can, as in any science, be analyzed. For the Formalists,
this new science of literature became an analysis of the literary and artistic devices that the writer manipulates
in creating a text.
The Formalists' chief focus of literary analysis was the examination of a text's literariness, the language
employed in the actual text. Literary language, they asserted, is different from everyday language. Unlike
everyday speech, literary language foregrounds itself, shouting, "Look at me; I am special; I am unique."
Through structure, imagery, syntax, rhyme scheme, paradox and a host of other devices, literary language
identifies itself as deviations from everyday speech patterns, ultimately producing the defining feature of
literariness, defamiliarization. Coined by the Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky, defamiliarization is the
process of making strange (ostranenie) the familiar, of putting the old in new light, what Shklovsky called a
"sphere of new perception." By making strange the familiar, defamiliarization (or what some Russian Formalists
call estrangement) slows down the act of perception of everyday words or objects, forcing the listener or reader
to reexamine the image. For example, when we read in a poem the words "dazzling darkness," our attention is
caught by the unusual pairing of these words. Our ordinary experience of everyday language is slowed down
because we must now unpack the meaning of the author's choice of language. When we do so, poetry with its
accompanying poetic diction has called attention to itself as poetry and to its literariness, allowing its listeners
or readers to experience a small part of their world in a new way by intensifying the act of perception. In
addition to examining the constituent devices present in poetry, Shklovsky also analyzed narrative prose and
declared that the structure Or a narrative has two aspects: fabula (storv) and syuzhet (plot). Fabula is the raw
material of the story and can be considered somewhat akin to the Writer's working outline. This outline contains
the chronological series of events of the story. The syuzhet is the literary devices the writer uses to transform a
story (the fabula) into plot. By using such techniques as digressions, surprises, and disruptions, the writer
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dramatically alters the fabula, making it a work of literature that now has the potential to provoke
defamiliarization, "to make strange" the language of the text and render a fresh view of language and/or the
reader's world.
What Russian Formalism contributed to the study of literature and literary theory is a reevaluation of the
text itself. Bringing a scientific approach to literary studies, the Formalists redefined a text to mean a unified
collection of various literary devices and conventions that càn be objectively analyzed. Literature is not, they
declared, the vision of an author or authorial intent. Using linguistic principles, the Formalists asserted that
literature, like all sciences, is a self-enclosed, law-governed system. To study literature is to study a text's form
and only incidentally its content. For the Formalists, form is su perior to content.
As a group, the Russian Formalists were suppressed and disbanded in 1930 by the Soviet government
because they were unwilling to view literature through the Stalinist regime's political and ideological
perspectives. Their influence did continue to flourish in Czechoslovakia through the work of the Prague
Linguistic Circie (founded in 1926, its leading figure being Roman Jakobson) and through the work of the
Russian folktale scholar Vladimir Propp. Fortunately for the advancement of literary theory and criticism,
Russian Formalism resurfaces in the 1960s in French and American structuralism.
APPLYING RUSSIAN FORMALISM TO A LITERARY TEXT
This theory stresses that art is artificial and that a great deal of acquired skill goes into it as opposed to
the old classical maxim that true art conceals its art. The Russian Formalists, led by Viktor Shklovsky, aimed to
establish a ‘science of literature’ – a complete knowledge of the formal effects (devices, techniques, etc.) which
together make up what is called literature. The Formalists read literature to discover its literariness – to
highlight the devices and technical elements introduced by the writer in order to make language literary.
The key ideas in this theory are:
● Baring the device – this practice refers to the presentation of devices without any realistic
‘motivation’ – they are presented purely as devices. For example, fiction operates by distorting
time in various ways – foreshortening, skipping, expanding, transposing, reversing, flashback and
flashforward, and so on.
● Defamilairization – this means making strange. Everything must be dwelt upon and described as
if for the first time. Ordinary language encourages the automatization of our perceptions and tends
to diminish our awareness of reality. It simply confirms things as we know them (e.g. the leaves
are falling from the trees; the leaves are green).
● Retardation of the narrative – the technique of delaying and protracting actions. Shklovsky
draws attention to the ways in which familiar actions are defamiliarized by being slowed down,
drawn out or interrupted. Digressions, displacement of the parts of the book, and extended
descriptions are all devices to make us attend to form.
● Naturalization – refers to how we endlessly become inventive in finding ways of making sense of
the most random or chaotic utterances or discourse. We refuse to allow a text to remain alien and
stay outside our frames of reference – we insist on ‘naturalizing’ it.
● Carnivalization – the term Mikhail Bakhtin uses to describe the shaping effect of carnival on
literary texts. The festivities associated with the Carnival are collective and popular; hierarchies
are turned on their heads (fools become wise; kings become beggars); opposites are mingled (fact
and fantasy, heaven and hell); the sacred is profaned; the rigid or serious is subverted, mocked or
loosened.
J. MARXISM
With the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, many heard the death knell
pronouncing loudly the demise of Marxism and its accompanying political and ideological structures. Down
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came the Berlin Wall, down came the Iron Curtain, and supposedly down came Marxism as an alternative form
of government to capitalism and as an acceptable worldview. Many capitalists rejoiced because Marxism had
apparently fallen. Seemingly, Marxists had only the glorious memories of the earlier decades of the twentieth
century in which to rejoice-a time when Stalin ruled Russia, when Marxist theory dominated both English and
American writings, and when college campuses in both the East and the West were led and taught by
intellectuals who committed themselves to Marxist ideology. Many now believed that such ideology was finally
dead!
Performing only a limited Internet search under the keyword "Marxism" results in a listing of more than
7 million sites with titles such as "Learning What Marxism Is About," "In Defence of Marxism," "Marxist
Media Theory," "Women and Marxism, "Marxism, Philosophy, and Economics," "Living Marxism," and "What
Is Living and What Is Dead in Marx's Philosophy," proving that Marxist theories and criticism are not only alive
but also may even be prospering. Announcements for newly published texts advocating sympathy for and
support of Marxist ideology in all academic disciplines appear regularly. College courses in Marxist political
theory, sociology, literature, and literary theory abound. Perhaps the death knell for Marxism was struck
prematurely.
What is it that fascinates intellectuals, politicians, and others about Marxism? Why did it not disappear with
the death of communism in the East? The answer lies in some of the core principles of Marxist thought:
● Reality itself can be defined and understood.
● Society shapes our consciousness.
● Social and economic conditions directly influence how and what we believe and value.
● The world as we know it can be changed from a place of bigotry, hatred, and conflict due to class
struggle into a classless society in which wealth, opportunity, and education are accessible for everyone.
By articulating a coherent, clear, and comprehensive worldview and a plan of action for implementation of
its ideas, Marxism asserts that it provides answers to many of the complex questions about how life is and ought
to be experienced while simultaneously challenging other ideologies to provide their pragmatic answers for
these same concerns.
The selfsame problems that gave rise to Marxism exist today. Despite its glory decades of the early
1900s and its present-day seemingly embattled position, Marxism declares that it offers a comprehensive,
positive view of human life and history that demonstrates how humanity can save itself from a meaningless life
of alienation and despair. A worldview that affords a bright promise for the future and a transformation of
society will not vanish with the knocking down of a wall or the collapse of the former USSR. Borrowing Mark
Twain's phraseology, "Announcements of Marxism's death have been greatly exaggerated."
MARXIST THEORISTS TODAY
Since the 1960s, American literary critic Fredric Jameson (1934- ) and British critic Terry Eagleton
(1943-) have dominated Marxist criticism. Jameson develops dialectical criticism. In Marxism and Form
(1971), a text revered by American Marxists, Jameson asserts that all critics must be aware of their own
ideology when analyzing a text, possessing what he calls dialectical self-awareness. In a later work, The
Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson merges psychoanalytic and Marxist theories. Borrowing Freud's idea of
a repressed unconscious, Jameson discovers a political unconscious, the repressed conditions of exploitation
and oppression. The function of literary analysis, Jameson believes, is to uncover the political unconscious
present in a text.
In 1991 Jameson continues Marxist theory and criticism's evolution with the publication of
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In this work, Jameson argues that cultural logic itself
encodes in every object in society the classical Marxist dialectic of base and superstructure. To read and
understand Jameson's text is no easy task because his complex and sometimes abstruse sentence structure
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embodies his postmodern, critical methodology, one that attempts through a Marxist lens to reconfigure
present-day political and world systems.
Perhaps the most influential contemporary Marxist critic is the British scholar Terry Eagleton (1943-),
author of numerous works, including Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), Literary Theory: An Introduction
(2008), and On Evil (2010). Believing that literature is neither a product of pure inspiration nor the product of
the author's feelings, Eagleton holds that literature is a product of an ideology, which is itself a product of
history. This ideology is a result of the actual social interactions that occur between people in definite times and
locations. One of the critic's tasks is to reconstruct an author's ideology and his or her ideological milieu.
Throughout his long and prestigious career, Eagleton, like most critics, develops, changes, and redirects
his own literary theory. At times he employs a variety of critical approaches to texts, including the scientific
approach of Louis Althusser, the psychoanalytic ideas of Lacan, and the poststructuralism of Jacques Derrida.
All his diverse approaches to textual analyses attack bourgeois hegemony and advocate revolution against its
values.
From the mid-1970s to the present, Marxism continues to challenge what It deems the bourgeois
concerns of its literary counterparts through the Voices of a variety of Marxist critics, including Renée Balibar,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Toril Moi, and Donna Landry. Critical movements and theories such as
structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, New Historicism, cultural materialism, and postcolonialism have all
examined Marxism's basic tenets and share some of its social, political, and revolutionary nature.
Like Marxism, these contemporary schools of criticism want to change the way we think about literature
and life. Present-day Marxism borrows from Contemporary schools of criticism and has now evolved into an
array of differing theories, so much so that there no longer exists a single school of Marxist thought. Common
to all these Marxist positions, however, is the assumption that Marx, no matter how he is interpreted, believes
that change through the eyes of its methods of economic production.
METHODOLOGY
As an approach to literary analysis, Marxism's methodology is a dynamic process that maintains that a
proper critique (proper defined as that which agrees with socialistic or Marxist beliefs) of a text cannot exist in
isolation from the cultural situation in which the text evolved. Necessarily, Marxists argue, the study of
literature and the study of society are intricately bound Such a relationship demands that a Marxist approach to
texts must deal with more than the conventional literary themes, matters of style, plot, or characterization, and
the usual emphasis on figures of speech and other literary devices used by other approaches to literary analysis.
Marxism claims that it moves beyond these literary elements and uncovers the author's world and his or her
worldview. By placing the text in its historical context and by analyzing the author's view of life, Marxist critics
arrive at one of their chief concerns: ideology. The ideology expressed by the author, as evidenced through his
or her fictional world, and how this ideology interacts with the reader's personal ideology are what interests
these critics. Studying the literary or aesthetic qualities of a text must include the dynamic relationship of that
text to history and the economic means of production and consumption that helped create the text and the
ideologies of the author and the readers.
This kind of an ideological and political investigation exposes class conflict, revealing the dominant
class and its accompanying ideology being imposed either consciously or unconsciously upon the proletariat. It
also reveals the workers' detachment not only from that which they produce but also from society and from each
other, a process called alienation, revealing what Marxists dub fragmentation, a fractured and fragmented
society. The task of the critic is to uncover and denounce this anti-proletariat ideology and show how such an
ideology entraps the working classes and oppresses then analysis in every area of their lives. Most important,
through such an analysis, Marxist critics wish to reveal to the working classes how they may end their
oppression by the bourgeoisie through a commitment to socialism.
A Marxist critic may begin such an analysis by elucidating how an author’s text reflects the writer's
ideology through an examination fictional world’s characters, settings, society, or any other aspect of the text.
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From this starting point, the critic may launch an investigation into that particular author's social class and its
effects on the author's society. Or the critic may choose to begin by examining the history and the culture of the
times reflected in the text and how the author either correctly or incorrectly pictures this historical period.
Whatever method the critic chooses, a Marxist approach exposes the dominant class, demonstrates how
the bourgeoisie's ideology controls and oppresses the working class, and highlights those elements of society
most affected by such oppression. Such an analysis, hopes the Marxist critic, will lead to action, social change,
revolution, and the eventual rise of socialism
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS
This theory aims to explain literature in relation to society – that literature can only be properly
understood within a larger framework of social reality. Marxists believe that any theory that treats literature in
isolation (for instance, as pure structure or as a product of the author’s individual mental processes) and keeps it
in isolation, divorcing it from history and society, will be deficient in its ability to explain what literature is.
Marxist literary critics start by looking at the structure of history and society and then see whether the
literary work reflects or distorts this structure. Literature must have a social dimension – it exists in time and
space; in history and society. A literary work must speak to concerns that readers recognize as relevant to their
lives.
Marxist literary criticism maintains that a writer’s social class and its prevailing ‘ideology’ (outlook,
values, tacit assumptions, etc.) have a major bearing on what is written by a member of that class. The writers
are constantly formed by their social contexts.
To gain a working understanding of a Marxist approach to literary analysis, the following questions will
provide you with a working framework for a close analysis of any text through the lens of Marxism and for
demonstrating Marxism's concern for the interactive relationship between literature and society.
● What class structures are established in the text?
● What characters or groups control the economic means of production?
● What class conflicts are exhibited?
● What characters are oppressed, and to what social classes do they belong?
● What characters are the oppressors?
● What is the hegemony established in the text?
● What social conflicts are ignored? Highlighted?
● Who represents the status quo?
● Does the work suggest a solution to society's class conflicts?
● What is the dominant ideology revealed in the text?
● Did the main character support or defy the dominant ideology
● Is the narrator a member of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?
● Whose story gets told in the text? Whose story does not get told?
● When and where was the text published?
● Is the author's stated intention for writing the work known or public?
● What were the economic issues surrounding the publication of the text?
● Who is the audience?
● Who is the ideal reader? Virtual reader? Real reader?
CRITIQUES AND RESPONSES
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Like psychoanalytical and feminist criticism, Marxist criticism concerns itself not only with what a text
says but also with what it does not say. According to Terry Eagleton, one of Marxism's most prominent
contemporary critics, the task of Marxist criticism "is to show the text as it cannot know itself, to manifest those
conditions of its making about which it is necessarily silent." Texts, like all elements of social life, cannot be
analyzed in isolation because they exist as part of a complex web of social forces and structures, not isolated
entities. Texts must be understood as part of the dynamic, ever-evolving historical processes of social relations.
Included within these social relations are the ongoing, ever-present societal conflicts and clashes, the struggles
between the have-nots and the haves. Maintaining their positions of power by controlling a society's hegemony
and, thereby, creating false consciousness, capitalists suppress the working classes, coercing them to accept the
capitalists' vision of reality. Literary criticism's objective is to reveal the class struggle evidenced in texts either
through what a text says or by its silence, the silence of oppression. From a Marxist perspective, all texts are
ideological, and the ideologies contained within them must be exposed to challenge the prevailing social order.
Although Marxism's internal consistency and the sheer breadth of its critique are impressive, critics of Marxist
theories abound. Whereas Marx and his adherents call their beliefs a theory and a form of criticism, others dub
it a philosophy of life that codifies a world view that is quasi-religious. Such a worldview, say some critics,
demands a total commitment and devotion as does any religion. But this religion, they assert, is devoid of God,
for it is thoroughly atheistic. The god of this religion is found in the mirror and in humankind's imagination.
Rejecting spiritual values, the concept of the soul, immortality, and a belief in God, this religion, which goes
under the name of theory and criticism, is materialistic. Ultimately, say these critics, an acceptance of Marxist
principles denies human worth. Such an all-encompassing worldview, they argue, will lead to a form of
totalitarianism that rests on a subjective understanding of reality, not objective, absolute truths. Other critics
assert that Marxist economic theory is simplistic and cannot provide either the correct lens or the correct
solution for contemporary societies' economic ills. Clinging to its basic tenets, orthodox Marxism ignores the
multifaceted nature of societies that contain a multiplicity of social groups, each possessing its own
understanding of human nature and social institutions. And above all, Marxism either dismisses or simply
ignores personal freedom, emphasizing in its place economic concerns. However, an individual critic views
Marxism, its theories and criticisms continue to develop and shape our social and cultural institutions.
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