Literary Theory Definitions

    1. A. canny/uncanny criticism as related to (B) engineer/bricoleur

J. Hillis Miller’s distinction between canny/uncanny criticisms parallels the distinction between institutional criticism and transformative critique.  Criticism is a set of formalized (though sometimes subverted) rules, an interpretive schema that produces interpretations in accordance with a procedural protocol.  In this respect, criticism serves institutional ends, while critique or "uncanny" criticism interrogates the motives of criticism, the assumptions and limitations of focus prescribed by "canny" criticism.  The uncanny explores the transformation of the institutional ends of the canny.  This "canny/uncanny" distinction arises out of Levi-Strauss’s "engineer/bricoleur" metaphor, proposing a similar distinction between the rational and institutionally oriented "engineer," and the innovating, experimental "bricoleur."  In this dichotomy, however, a genuinely transformative potential is not present as in the case of the uncanny criticism, due to the fact that the bricoleur is a "tinkerer," one who makes modifications to the existing model, one who would never scrap or displace certain consistencies lest he/she collapse the functionality of the model.   

    2. "guilty silence"

  Graff, in "The Humanist Myth," discusses a history of the relations among vantages or interpretive frameworks, exposing the "humanist myth" concerning literature, namely, the Arnoldian humanist "self-evident truths of literature;" in other words, that literature teaches itself.  These "self-evident truths" presuppose a particular "conceptual framework" even though the tradition proclaims its disinterestedness (harkening back to Kant philosophically) in the subject, ostensibly reporting "the best of what is known and said."   Thus, all approaches to "literature" or text are just that, approaches, deployed with implicit assumptions and presuppositions about the nature of reading and the cultural work of literary and discursive analysis that it holds to be self-evident.  Barthes describes the guilt of this tradition, extending as a critique on any tradition, not for its prejudices and assumptions "but for the fact that it conceals them, masks them under the moral alibi of rigor and objectivity."      

    3. "culture" according to:

    1. Matthew Arnold—in Culture and Anarchy, "a pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and, through this knowledge, a turning stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits."  Hence, Arnoldian humanism as earlier critiqued, with its formulated though tacit presuppositions concerning "that which most concerns us" and "the best" and "the means of getting to know."
    2. TS Eliot—owing a debt to Whitman, saw culture as "a construction of modern society and not as a "natural" outgrowth of any principalities or systematic gyrations.  In the disorientation following WWI, Eliot observes the impermanence of the social order, that culture can deteriorate, but that individual works of art can defy time, transcending the medium as personal encounters.  Eliot discusses the irreducibility of the individual genius, but that this genius can only be expressed contemporarily, reconciling innovation to the tradition.   

      3. Raymond Williams— In the General Intro, referenced as testimony to the profitable situation of the study of criticism as a leading part of the study of culture.  Culture is not some informing spirit within society, but "the signifying system through which necessarily a social system is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored."  A criticism studying signifying systems in some systematic, exact, and generalizing way would be positioned to direct its methods and observations to the widest areas of the production of meaning. 

    4. Intentional Fallacy/Affective Fallacy

Pertaining to New Criticism, specifically the belief that a work could be read "objectively and accurately in light of its own actual structure or form," the content of the structure being, not merely based upon, a pattern of paradoxical and ironic imagery.  Wimsatt and Beardsley, in "The Intentional Fallacy" stipulate the method of reading the "right" way.  To a new critic, the work is a "self-contained, self-referencing" cohesion of   paradoxical imagery, essentially "adding up" as a text independent of the author’s intentions when writing.  (It would seem that the New Critics retrieved from Romanticism "the concept of aesthetic wholeness and unity, as well as a unified interpretation of a work," though they would vehenamently deny this, seeking "what is" rigorously and objectively.)    To consider these intentions is, in New Criticism, the "wrong" way to read.  What this doesn’t clarify is the common experientiality and inculcations that a reader must address the text with.  The "Affective Fallacy" addresses this concern at the polar opposite end of New Criticism, that of the reader’s undisciplined "affective" response to a text, citing these as potential distortions in the correct apprehension of images.   

    5. Field Coverage Principle/ "teaching the conflicts"

From Gerald Graff, the current model for university departmental organizations, representing a type of union, rather, a compromise, ensuring humanistic breadth and facilitating specialized research.  The system seeks to uphold the liberal humanism attempting to restore "literature" itself to primacy over scholarship and methodology while providing an adequate spread or adequately balanced cover of periods and genres so that the student might, through diligent and unhindered accumulation of a vast array of knowledge, develop an interdisciplinary sense of interconnectedness.  The system is advantageous in the respect that it makes the department and the curriculum virtually self-regulating, eliminating the need for professors to debate aims and methods, and the flexibility it provides, simply including a new topic or field as the need arises.  However, the self-regulatory nature of the beast relieves professors from the need to discuss the reasons for doing what they are doing.  Instead, the curriculum is determined by political trade-offs, removing the clashing principles from the public domain, the very theoretical confrontations that indicate how the teaching aggregate divides and aligns, providing the student with a means of making sense of education and the cultural world.  The compartments are not integrated, existing as, in appearance to the student, disjunctive entities, the relations and contrasts preconceived and settled. "Teaching the conflicts" would overcome the guilty silence of the seemingly self-sustaining field coverage model, returning to the public domain and to student access to the confrontational processes by which the curriculum is sustained and/or modified.

    6. "theory" according to

      the ancient Greeks--(Habermas) In Greek, "theores" means "the representative sent by Greek cities to public celebrations.  Through theoria, or looking on, this observer abandoned himself to the sacred events.  Philosophically, theoria was transferred to cosmic contemplation.  Exploration of the object by subject immersed in, makes assumptions about "naturalness" of forms, object/subject autonomy. 

      Derrida (deconstructionism)—notes the relationship in the West between "knowledge" and "seeing" and attempts to construct knowledge at the extremes of objectification.  Theory explores "scientific normativity," i.e., "the assumptions behind what exactly creates the ‘norms’ of scientific as well as interpretive understanding.  Theory analyzes the "rhetoric, the rites, the modes of presentation and demonstration that the sciences continue to respect."  Formulated deconstructionist critique, intent upon exploding binary oppositions in which one is preferred over the other in western modes of conceiving and articulating knowledge, to expose the immovable centers around which meaning has been arranged.      J Hillis Miller—"the displacement in literary studies from a focus on the meaning of texts to a focus on the way meaning is conveyed."  This definition coincides with Derrida’s conception of theory as the exploration and testing of meaning, "examining understanding in aesthetic terms and by examining the contexts (social and otherwise) for aesthetics and a system of understanding."  Frank Lentricchia—"primarily a process of discovery of the lesson that I am calling historical; any single, formulable theory is a reduced version of the process, a frozen proposition which will tend to cover up the process it grew out of by projecting itself as an uncontingent system of ideas."  Lentricchia's focus on process nevertheless leads to the result identified by Derrida and Miller as the exploration and testing of meaning. 

    7. "mis en abime"

A term originally employed by the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, encompassing the absurd nothingness, the atheistic premise flavoring 20th century philosophy.  Sartre’s observation was that the only deducible principles in the world are discerned against the background of deafening silence, that metanarratives are not innocuous but detrimental, perpetuating a stockpiling of "bad faith," of dogged, religious misapprehension of the world.  Sartre’s "good faith" might be construed as no faith, or, specifically, no faith in the metanarratives dictating fictitious conditions.  One should not pretend that innate, ubiquitous, knowable rules govern human activity, rather, that meaning is derived from the man as a social machination.  Hence, meaning manifests in systems, and these systems are both provisional and projecting an illusory efficacy.  Provisional refers to the  temporal grounding of meaning, derived from and governing the fluctuating context that enacts and respects meaning.  The illusory efficacy of meaning accounts for the exclusivity, as well as the imperialistic nature of a system of meaning, attempting to subjugate all others, usually in the name of what is "natural" or seemingly immanent.  Mis en abime is this slipperiness of not just language but of the assessment and assignment of meaning, grounded in a percolating tumult of temporality and context.   

    8. the four grounds of meaning

J. Hillis Miller attempting to explicate the methods through which human beings can ground the slipperiness, the mis en abime, of discourse, pointing to human frugality in the consignment of resource, particularly in reducing the play of meanings. 

      "the author function"—reduces the play of meanings to the consciousness and unconsciousness intentions of the subject, fitting within the psychological grounding of discourse.

    1. Social—reduces the play of meaning to articulations of more or less explicit social forces

      2. Language itself—de Man’s linguistics and rhetoric which reduce the play of meanings to the linguistic forms and structures analyzed by the linguistic methods of structuralist criticism.  "ontological, properly religious or metaphysical"—appeals to a sense of wholeness, of cohesiveness, an overriding vision of the whole of "discourse" or cultural life.

    9. "Cratylian awareness of the sign"

A figure evoked by de Mann, Cratylus is a Platonic character, an essentialist who subscribes to an ideological vision positing the necessary and absolutely perfect correspondence between words and things, i.e., between the signifier and the signified.  Logic depends on this perfect correspondence.  This system contradicts Sausserian linguistics as a model of semiotics, proposing a reflectivity between signifier and signified, rather than an arbitrary relationship, designating reference prior to designating the referent.  Otherwise, in Cratylus’s world, language is ineffective in transmitting meaning, the mis en abime runs rampant, so how can one hazard words or speak of  "the truth" when terms with which to ascertain constantly fluctuate.  In de Man’s tail chasing system, the sign is constantly usurped and reinscribed, limited or grounded by certain human constructs.       

    10. referentiality/phenomenalism

Phenomenology, a major formulation of Reader-Response theory, dates back as a philosophy to Heidegger.  Phenomenology is a "philosophical view that posits a continuous field of experience between the perceiver (subject) and the object of experience and focuses on bringing to light the relationships of subject and object."  Phenomenology posits the inseparability of text and its reception, rendering the issue of referentiality, the questions of priority, independence, and autonomous demarcations of subjects and objects, as non-issues.  Literary experience is a gestalt, "holistically, with a minimal sense of separation between text and its interpretation."  The reader does not pinpoint and extract meaning from a text-object, noting his/her subject position distinct from the object, but creates meaning in this simultaneous intersection of "the reader’s experience, formal units, and the structure of intention."   

    11. "horizon of expectation" vs "semantic horizon"

Beginning with semantic horizon, I must reference Derrida’s deconstructive theory, proposing the explosion of binary relationships of the "superior" and "inferior" that gives meaning its infinite allusiveness or play.  Thus, we are left with the possibility of any meaning, the "semantic horizon," constantly receding upon approach, teasing us with an undecidability on meaning that, according to Derrida, will be arbitrarily unseated and reassigned.  The possibility of any meaning insinuates the possibility of particular definitions, but the problem in assigning particular definitions is their longevity and maintenance as meaning-ful.  Hans Robert Jauss, a phenomenologist of the reader response rank, refers to Heidegger’s discussion of consciousness as always being culturally situated, or Daisein, stressing the "mediational role of consciousness situated between a sense of an objective world "out there" and one’s most intimate thought and responses.  Jauss examines a works reception within a cultural milieu, attempting to establish a "horizon of expectation," a paradigm that accounts for a particular culture’s response to literature at a certain moment.   The "horizon of expectation" in a sense culturally shrinks the semantic horizon, describing the conditions and functions of assigning definitions (meaning).  

            12. Interpretive Communities

Stanley Fish, a reader-response theorist, hypothesizes that particular interpretive choices made by a reader are based upon belonging to an "interpretive community" of other readers, a community allowing certain readings as normative and rejecting others as untenable.  From this community censorship, a normative or "valid" reading of a text will emerge.  One may belong to several interpretive communities simultaneously, devaluing or elevating one over others or working concurrently in several.    According to Fish, points of struggle in a text occur at the intersection of interpretive communities, these crossroads of strategies that are the shape of our reading.  Nearly the whole substance of the reading activity, bent on creating a "competent" reading, implements the preferred conventions in a measurable fashion.  

            13. resisting reader Reader-response theory argues against the exclusive use of formalist approaches to literature through emphasizing reading or interpretation as an activity, an ongoing performative act rather than a static event.  But, a problem with this approach is its ongoing participation in the generalizing practices of western formalism, attempting to universalize and achieve a "utopian" aim within contemporary criticism, often overlooking, as Schweickart notes, issues of race, class, and sex.  Schweickart discusses the gender-based aspect of reading, proffering a variety of reader-response criticism vital in developing feminist criticism, i.e., the resisting reader.  The resisting reader endeavors to resist the "fiction intended for a male audience and, in doing so, to expose ‘the androcentricity of what has customarily passed for the universal.’"       

            14.  aporia and the deconstructive turn Obviously refers to deconstructionism, rooted in the philosophical hierarchy of two opposed terms, one of which is "superior" and one "inferior."   Deconstruction isolates these oppositions and points out that they are hierarchically opposed.  The deconstructive turn occurs when this relationship is inverted, the superior demeaned and the inferior ascends, attempting, according to Derrida, not merely to emplace now the inverted order as this would affirm the old system, but to "explode" the original relationship of superior and inferior that gave rise to the semantic horizon in the first place.  This attempts to confront interpretations seeking truth or origin other than in free play and the order of the sign with another interpretation no longer turned toward some origin.  In de Man’s terms, this "second interpretive gesture refuses the specific meanings of grammar for the "suspended" logic and meanings of rhetoric, refusing the propositional logic of language as conceived as constative information, for the open-ended promises of performative language.  This confrontation, however, should not constitute itself into a new hierarchy, for the process repeatedly undermines the binary relationships that are its structure.  So, we come to undecidability, an "aporia" rhetorically speaking, on how to proceed.  We are suspended, unable to assign merit to either bale, and the little donkey starves.  

    15. the return of the repressed and the historical unconscious

The return of the repressed is Freud’s description of neurotic symptom, how what is excluded returns, albeit in some other form, and calls attentions to itself.  This seemingly characterized the moves of deconstructioninsm, where hierarchical binary oppositions "are teased out of seemingly self-evident and simple ‘experience’ in order to demonstrate the mediated or constructed nature of what we feel is unmediated and natural."  The historical unconscious, as traced by Derrida and Foucault, is ferreted out and articulated, those institutions such as "reason" and "author" which we tend to think of as ubiquitous, universal categories, never having arisen at a particular moment but always being.   

    16. "privileged"

 The creation of an artificial hierarchy between terms of a binary opposition, situating one as the universal, "superior" case and the other as the particular, "inferior" case. Foucault, as his introduction explicates, directs us to view literature as a socially determined discursive practice, concerned less with language at the sign level and more concerned with the relationship of language and social institutions.  In Foucault’s essay "What is an Author," he explores the author-function that, instead of the notion of writer, privileges those writings, authorizing them with a certain force.  Foucault states that "the coming into being of the notion of author constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas…," noting the post-Renaissance "mattering" of the individual, the man, as the measure of all things.  This relatively recent development of the author function in literary discourse diverges from the repressed authorship in scientific discourse, elucidating the importance of several socially determined roles deemed the "author-functions."  Hence, the author’s proper name becomes synonymous with the designation of a clutch of ideas and styles, an ideally and unambiguously arresting description, descriptions (common nouns) being broader and vulnerable to mis en abime.            

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