Lit1000: Literature through a critical lens

Critical Approaches

Few human abilities are more remarkable than the ability to read and interpret literature. A computer program or a database can’t perform the complex process of reading and interpreting—not to mention writing about—a literary text, although computers can easily exceed human powers of processing codes and information. Readers follow the sequence of printed words and as if by magic re-create a scene between characters in a novel or play, or they respond to the almost inexpressible emotional effect of a poem’s figurative language. Experienced readers can pick up on a multitude of literary signals all at once. With re-reading and some research, readers can draw on information about the author’s life or the time period when this work and others like it were first published. Varied and complex as the approaches to literary criticism may be, they are not difficult to learn. For the most part, schools of criticism and theory have developed to address questions that any reader can begin to answer.

There are essentially three participants in what could be called the literary exchange or interaction: the text, the source (the author and other factors that produce the text), and the receiver (the reader and other aspects of reception). All the varieties of literary analysis concern themselves with these aspects of the literary exchange in varying degrees and with varying emphases. Although each of these elements has a role in any form of literary analysis, systematic studies of literature and its history have defined approaches or methods that focus on the different elements and circumstances of the literary interaction. The first three sections below—“Emphasis on the Text,” “Emphasis on the Source,” and “Emphasis on the Receiver”—describe briefly those schools or modes of literary analysis that have concentrated on one of the three participants while de-emphasizing the others. These different emphases, plainly speaking, are habits of asking different kinds of questions. Answers or interpretations will vary according to the questions we ask of a literary work. In practice the range of questions can be—and to some extent should be—combined whenever we develop a literary interpretation. Such questions can always generate the thesis or argument of a critical essay.

Although some approaches to literary analysis treat the literary exchange (text, source, receiver) in isolation from the world surrounding that exchange (the world of economics, politics, religion, cultural tradition, and sexuality—in other words, the world in which we live), most contemporary modes of analysis acknowledge the importance of that world to the literary exchange. These days, even if literary scholars focus primarily on the text or its source or receiver, they nonetheless often incorporate some of the observations and methods developed by theorists and critics who have turned their attention toward the larger world. We describe the work of such theorists and critics in the fourth section below, “Historical and Ideological Criticism.”

Before expanding on the kinds of critical approaches within these four categories, let’s consider one example in which questions concerning the text, source, and receiver, as well as a consideration of historical and ideological questions, would contribute to a richer interpretation of a text. To begin as usual with preliminary questions about the text: What is First Fight. Then Fiddle.? Printed correctly on a separate piece of paper, the text would tell us at once that it is a poem because of its form: rhythm, repeating word sounds, lines that leave very wide margins on the page. Because you are reading this poem in this book, you know even more about its form. (In this way, the publication source gives clues about the text.) By putting it in a section with other poetry, we have told you it is a poem worth reading, re-reading, and thinking about. (What other ways do you encounter poems, and what does the medium in which a poem is presented tell you about it?)

You should pursue other questions focused on the text. What kind of poem is it? Here we have helped you, especially if you are not already familiar with the sonnet form, by grouping this poem with other sonnets (in “The Sonnet: An Album”). Classifying “First Fight. Then Fiddle.” as a sonnet might then prompt you to interpret the ways that this poem is or is not like other sonnets. Well and good: You can check off its fourteen lines of (basically) iambic pentameter and note its somewhat unusual rhyme scheme and meter in relation to the rules of Italian and English sonnets. But why does this experiment with the sonnet form matter?

To answer questions about the purpose of form, you need to answer some basic questions about source, such as: When was this sonnet written and published? Who wrote it? What do you know about Gwendolyn Brooks, about 1949, about African American women and/or poets in the United States at that time? A short historical and biographical contexts essay answering such questions might help put the “sonnetness” of this poem in context. But assembling all the available information about the source and original context of the poem, even some sort of documented testimony from Brooks about her intentions or interpretation of it, would still leave room for other questions leading to new interpretations.

What about the receiver of “First Fight. Then Fiddle.”? Even within the poem a kind of audience exists. This sonnet seems to be a set of instructions addressed to “you.” (Although many sonnets are addressed by a speaker, “I,” to an auditor, “you,” such address rarely sounds like a series of military commands, as it does here.) This internal audience is not of course to be confused with real people responding to the poem, and it is the latter who are its receivers. How did readers respond to it when it was first published? Can you find any published reviews, or any criticism of this sonnet published in studies of Gwendolyn Brooks?

Questions about the receiver, like those about the author and other sources, readily connect with questions about historical and cultural context. Would a reader or someone listening to this poem read aloud respond differently in the years after World War II than in an age of global terrorism? Does it make a difference if the audience addressed by the speaker inside the poem is imagined as a group of African American men and women or as a group of European American male commanders? (The latter question could be regarded as an inquiry involving the text and the source as well as the receiver.) Does a reader need to identify with any of the particular groups the poem fictitiously addresses, or would any reader, from any background, respond to it the same way? Even the formal qualities of the text could be examined through historical lenses: The sonnet form has been associated with prestigious European literature and with themes of love and mortality since the Renaissance. It is significant that a twentieth-century African American poet chose this traditional form to twist “[t]hreadwise” into a poem about conflict (line 5).

The above are only some of the worthwhile questions that might help illuminate this short, intricate poem. (We will develop a few more thoughts about it in illustrating different approaches to the text and to the source.) Similarly, the complexity of critical approaches far exceeds our four categories. While a great deal of worthwhile scholarship and criticism borrows from a range of theories and methods, below we give necessarily simplified descriptions of various critical approaches that have continuing influence. We cannot trace a history of the issues involved or capture all the complexity of these movements. Instead think of what follows as a road map to the terrain of literary analysis. Many available resources describe the entire landscape of literary analysis in more precise detail. If you are interested in learning more about these or any other analytical approaches, consult the works listed in the bibliography at the end of this chapter.

EMPHASIS ON THE TEXT

This broad category encompasses approaches that de-emphasize questions about the author/source or the reader/reception in order to focus on the work itself. In a sense any writing about literature presupposes recognition of form, in that it deems the object of study to be a literary work that belongs to a genre or subgenre of literature, as Brooks’s poem belongs with sonnets. Moreover, almost all literary criticism notes some details of style or structure, some intrinsic features such as the relation between dialogue or narration, or the pattern of rhyme and meter. But formalist approaches go further by privileging the design of the text itself above other considerations.

Some formalists, reasonably denying the division of content from form (since the form is an aspect of the content or meaning), have more controversially excluded any discussion of extrinsic or contextual (versus textual) matters such as the author’s biography or questions of psychology, sociology, or history. This has led to accusations that formalism, in avoiding reference to actual authors and readers or to the world of economic power or social change, also avoids political issues or commitments. Some historical or ideological critics have therefore argued that formalism supports the status quo. Conversely, some formalists charge that any extrinsic—that is, historical, political, ideological, as well as biographical or psychological—interpretations of literature threaten to reduce the text to propaganda. A formalist might maintain that the inventive wonders of art exceed any practical function it serves. In practice, influential formalists have generated modes of close reading that balance attention to form and context, with some acknowledgment of the political implications of literature. In the early twenty-first century the formalist methods of close reading remain influential, especially in classrooms. Indeed, The Norton Introduction to Literature adheres to these methods in its presentation of elements and interpretation of form.

New Criticism

One strain of formalism, loosely identified as the New Criticism, dominated literary studies from approximately the 1920s to the 1970s. New Critics rejected both of the approaches that then prevailed in the relatively new field of English studies: the dry analysis of the development of the English language and the misty-eyed appreciation and evaluation of “Great Works.” Generally, New Criticism minimizes consideration of both the source and the receiver, emphasizing instead the intrinsic qualities of a unified literary work. Psychological or historical information about the author, the intentions or feelings of authors and readers, and any philosophical or socially relevant “messages” derived from the work all are out-of-bounds in a strict New Critical reading. The text in a fundamental way refers to itself: Its medium is its message. Although interested in ambiguity and irony as well as figurative language, a New Critical reader considers the organic unity of the unique work. Like an organism, the work develops in a synergetic relation of parts to whole.

A New Critic might, for example, publish an article titled “A Reading of ‘First Fight. Then Fiddle.’” (The method works best with lyric or other short forms because it requires painstaking attention to details such as metaphors or alliteration.) Little if anything would be said of Gwendolyn Brooks or the poem’s relation to Modernist poetry. The critic’s task is to give credit to the poem, not the poet or the period, and if it is a good poem, then—implicitly—it can’t be merely “about” World War II or civil rights. New Criticism presumes that a good literary work addresses universal human themes and may be interpreted objectively on many levels. These levels may be related more by tension and contradiction than harmony, yet that relation demonstrates the coherence of the whole.

Thus the New Critic’s essay might include some of the following observations. The poem’s title—which reappears as half of the first line—consists of a pair of twoword imperative sentences, and most statements in the poem paraphrase these two sentences, especially the first of them, “First fight.” Thus an alliterative twoword command, “Win war” (line 12), follows a longer version of such a command: “But first to arms, to armor” (9). Echoes of this sort of exhortation appear throughout. We, as audience, begin to feel “bewitch[ed], bewilder[ed]” (4) by a buildup of undesirable urgings, whether at the beginning of a line (“Be deaf,” 11) or the end of a line (“Be remote,” 7; “Carry hate,” 9) or in the middle of a line (“Rise bloody,” 12). It’s hardly what we would want to do. Yet the speaker makes a strong case for the practical view that a society needs to take care of defense before it can “devote” itself to “silks and honey” (6–7), that is, the soft and sweet pleasures of art. But what kind of culture would place “hate / In front of [. . .] harmony” and try to ignore “music” and “beauty” (9–11)? What kind of people are only “remote / A while from malice and from murdering” (6–7)? A society of warlike heroes would rally to this speech. Yet on re-reading, many of the words jar with the tone of heroic battle cry.

The New Critic examines not only the speaker’s style and words but also the order of ideas and lines in the poem. Ironically, the poem defies the speaker’s command; it fiddles first, and then fights, as the octave (first eight lines) concern art, and the sestet (last six) concern war. The New Critic might be delighted by the irony that the two segments of the poem in fact unite, in that their topics—octave on how to fiddle, sestet on how to fight—mirror each other. The beginning of the poem plays with metaphors for music and art as means of inflicting “hurting love” (line 3) or emotional conquest, that is, ways to “fight.” War and art are both, as far as we know, universal in all human societies. The poem, then, is an organic whole that explores timeless concerns.

Later critics have pointed out that New Criticism, despite its avoidance of extrinsic questions, had a political context of its own. The insistence on the autonomy of the artwork should be regarded as a strategy adopted during the Cold War as a counterbalance to the politicization of art in fascist and communist regimes. New Criticism also provided a program for literary reading accessible to beginners regardless of their social background, which was extremely useful at a time when more women, minorities, and members of the working class than ever before were entering college. By the 1970s these same groups had helped generate two sources of opposition to New Criticism’s ostensible neutrality and transparency: critical studies that emphasized the politics of social differences (e.g., feminist criticism) and theoretical approaches, based on linguistics, philosophy, and political theory, that effectively distanced non-specialists once more.

Structuralism

Whereas New Criticism was largely a British and American phenomenon, structuralism and its successor, poststructuralism, derive primarily from French theorists. Each of these movements was drawn to scientific objectivity and wary of political commitment. Politics, after all, had inspired the censorship of science, art, and inquiry throughout centuries and in recent memory.

Structuralist philosophy, however, was something rather new. Influenced by the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), structuralists sought an objective system for studying the principles of language. Saussure distinguished between individual uses of language, such as the sentences you or I might have just spoken or written (parole), and the sets of rules governing English or any language (langue). Just as a structuralist linguist would study the interrelations of signs in the langue rather than the variations in specific utterances in parole, a structuralist critic of literature or culture would study shared systems of meaning, such as genres or myths that pass from one country or period to another, rather than a particular poem in isolation (the favored subject of New Criticism).

Another structuralist principle derived from Saussure is the emphasis on the arbitrary association between a word and what it is said to signify—that is, between the signifier and the signified. The word horse, for example, has no divine, natural, or necessary connection to that four-legged, domesticated mammal, which is named by other combinations of sounds and letters in other languages. Any language is a network of relations among such arbitrary signifiers, just as each word in the dictionary must be defined using other words in that dictionary. Structuralists largely attribute the meanings of words to rules of differentiation from other words. Such differences may be phonetic (as among the words cat and bat and hat) or they may belong to conceptual associations (as among the words dinky, puny, tiny, small, miniature, petite, compact). Structuralist thought has particularly called attention to the way that opposites or dualisms such as “night” and “day” or “feminine” and “masculine” define each other through opposition to each other rather than by direct reference to objective reality. For example, the earth’s motion around the sun produces changing exposure to sunlight daily and seasonally, but by linguistic convention we call it “night” between, let’s say, 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., no matter how light it is. (We may differ in opinions about “evening” or “dawn.” But our “day” at work may begin or end in the dark.) The point is that arbitrary labels divide what in fact is continuous.

Structuralism’s linguistic insights have greatly influenced literary studies. Like New Critics, structuralist critics show little interest in the creative process or in authors, their intentions, or their circumstances. Similarly, structuralism discounts the idiosyncrasies of particular readings; it takes texts to represent interactions of words and ideas that stand apart from individual human identities or sociopolitical commitments. Structuralist approaches have applied less to lyric poetry than to myths, narratives, and cultural practices such as sports or fashion. Although structuralism tends to affirm a universal humanity just as New Critics do, its work in comparative mythology and anthropology challenged the absolute value that New Criticism tended to grant to time-honored canons of great literature.

The structuralist would regard a text not as a self-sufficient icon but as part of a network of conventions. A structuralist essay on “First Fight. Then Fiddle.” might ask why the string is plied with the “feathery sorcery” (line 2) of the “bow” (7). These words suggest the art of a Native American trickster or primitive sorcerer, while at the same time the instrument is a disguised weapon: a stringed bow with feathered arrows (the term “muzzle” is a similar pun, suggesting an animal’s snout and the discharging end of a gun). Or is the fiddle—a violin played in musical forms such as bluegrass—a metaphor for popular art or folk resistance to official culture? In many folktales a hero is taught to play the fiddle by the devil or tricks the devil with a fiddle or similar instrument. Further, a structuralist reading might attach great significance to the sonnet form as a paradigm that has shaped poetic expression for centuries. The classic “turn” or reversal of thought in a sonnet may imitate the form of many narratives of departure and return, separation and reconciliation. Brooks’s poem repeats in the numerous short reversing imperatives, as well as in the structure of octave versus sestet, the eternal oscillation between love and death, creation and destruction.

Poststructuralism

By emphasizing the paradoxes of dualisms and the ways that language constructs our awareness, structuralism planted the seeds of its own destruction or, rather, deconstruction. Dualisms (e.g., masculine/feminine, mind/body, culture/nature) cannot be separate but equal; rather, they take effect as differences of power in which one dominates the other. Yet as the German philosopher of history Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) insisted, the relations of the dominant and subordinate, of master and slave, readily invert themselves. The master is dominated by his need for the slave’s subordination; the possession of subordinates defines his mastery. As Brooks’s poem implies, each society reflects its own identity through an opposing “they,” in a dualism of civilized/barbaric. The instability of the speaker’s position in this poem (is he or she among the conquerors or the conquered?) is a model of the instability of roles throughout the human world. There is no transcendent ground—except on another planet, perhaps—from which to measure the relative positions of the polar opposites on earth. Roland Barthes (1915–80) and others, influenced by the radical movements of the 1960s and the increasing complexity of culture in an era of mass consumerism and global media, extended structuralism into more profoundly relativist perspectives.

Poststructuralism is the broad term used to designate the philosophical position that attacks the objective, universalizing claims of most fields of knowledge since the eighteenth century. Poststructuralists, distrusting the optimism of a positivist philosophy that suggests the world is knowable and explicable, ultimately doubt the possibility of certainties of any kind, since language signifies only through a chain of other words rather than through any fundamental link to reality. This argument derives from structuralism, yet it also criticizes structuralist universalism and avoidance of political issues. Ideology is a key conceptual ingredient in the poststructuralist argument against structuralism. Ideology is a slippery term that can broadly be defined as a socially shared set of ideas that shape behavior; often it refers to the values that legitimate the ruling interests in a society, and in many accounts it is the hidden code that is officially denied. (We discuss kinds of “ideological” criticism later.) Poststructuralist theory has played a part in a number of critical schools introduced below, not all of them focused on the text. But in literary criticism, poststructuralism has marshaled most forces under the banner of deconstruction.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction insists on the logical impossibility of knowledge that is not influenced or biased by the words used to express it. Deconstruction also claims that language is incapable of representing any sort of reality directly. As practiced by its most famous proponent, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), deconstruction endeavors to trace the way texts imply the contradiction of their explicit meanings. The deconstructionist delights in the sense of dizziness as the grounds of conviction crumble away; aporia, or irresolvable doubt, is the desired, if fleeting, end of an encounter with a text. Deconstruction threatens humanism, or the worldview that is centered on human values and the self-sufficient individual, because it denies that there is an ultimate, solid reality on which to base truth or the identity of the self. All values and identities are constructed by the competing systems of meaning, or discourses. This is a remarkably influential set of ideas that you will meet again as we discuss other approaches.

The traditional concept of the author as creative origin of the text comes under fire in deconstructionist criticism, which emphasizes instead both the creative power of language or the text and the ingenious work of the critic in detecting gaps and contradictions in writing. Thus, like New Criticism, deconstruction disregards the author and concentrates on textual close reading, but unlike New Criticism, it emphasizes the role of the reader as well. Moreover, the text need not be respected as a pure and coherent icon. Deconstructionists might “read” many kinds of writing and representation in other media in much the same way that they might read John Milton’s Paradise Lost—that is, irreverently. Indeed, when deconstruction erupted in university departments of literature, traditional critics and scholars feared the breakdown of the distinctions between literature and criticism and between literature and many other kinds of texts. Many attacks on literary theory have particularly lambasted deconstructionists for apparently rejecting all the reasons to care about literature in the first place and for writing in a style so flamboyantly obscure that no one but specialists can understand. Yet in practice Derrida and others have carried harmony before them, to paraphrase Brooks; their readings can delight in the play of figurative language, thereby enhancing rather than debunking the value of literature.

A deconstructionist might read “First Fight. Then Fiddle.” in a manner somewhat similar to the New Critic’s, but with even more focus on puns and paradoxes and on the poem’s resistance to organic unity. For instance, the two alliterative commands, “fight” and “fiddle,” might be opposites, twins, or inseparable consequences of each other. The word “fiddle” is tricky. Does it suggest that art is trivial? Does it allude to a dictator who “fiddles while Rome burns,” as the saying goes? Someone who “fiddles” is not performing a grand, honest, or even competent act: One fiddles with a hobby, with the account books, with car keys in the dark. The artist in this poem defies the orthodoxy of the sonnet form, instead making a kind of harlequin patchwork out of different traditions, breaking the rhythm, intermixing endearments and assaults.

To the deconstructionist the recurring broken antitheses of war and art, art and war cancel each other out. The very metaphors undermine the speaker’s summons to war. The command “Be deaf to music and to beauty blind” (line 11), which takes the form of a chiasmus, or X-shaped sequence (adjective, noun; noun, adjective), is a kind of miniature version of this chiasmic poem. (We are supposed to follow a sequence, fight then fiddle, but instead reverse that by imagining ways to do violence with art or to create beauty through destruction.) The poem, a lyric written but imagined as spoken or sung, puts the senses and the arts under erasure; we are somehow not to hear music (by definition audible), not to see beauty (here a visual attribute). “Maybe not too late” comes rather too late: At the end of the poem it will be too late to start over, although “having first to civilize a space / Wherein to play your violin with grace” comes across as a kind of beginning (12–14). These comforting lines form the only heroic couplet in the poem, the only two lines that run smoothly from end to end. (All the other lines have caesuras, enjambments, or balanced pairs of concepts, as in “from malice and from murdering” [8].) But the violence behind “civilize,” the switch to the high-art term “violin,” and the use of the Christian term “grace” suggest that the pagan erotic art promised at the outset, the “sorcery” of “hurting love” that can “bewitch,” will be suppressed.

Like other formalisms, deconstruction can appear apolitical or conservative because of its skepticism about the referential connection between literature and the larger world. Yet poststructuralist linguistics provides a theory of difference that clearly pertains to the rankings of status and power in society, as in earlier examples of masculine/feminine, master/slave. The Other, the negative of the norm, is always less than an equal counterpart. Deconstruction has been a tool for various poststructuralist thinkers including the historian Michel Foucault (1926–84), the feminist theorist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), and the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan (1901–81).

Narrative Theory

Before concluding the discussion of text-centered approaches, we should mention the schools of narratology and narrative theory that have shaped study of the novel and other kinds of narrative. Criticism of fiction has been in a boom period since the 1950s, but the varieties of narrative theory per se have had more limited effect than the approaches we have discussed above. Since the 1960s different analysts of the forms and techniques of narrative, most notably the Chicago formalists and the structuralist narratologists, have developed terminology for the various interactions of author, implied author, narrator, and characters; of plot and the treatment of time in the selection and sequence of scenes; of voice, point of view, or focus and other aspects of fiction. As formalisms, narrative theories tend to ignore the author’s biography, individual reader response, and the historical context of the work or its actual reception.

Narratology began by presenting itself as a structuralist science; its branches have grown from psychoanalytic theory or extended to reader-response criticism. In recent decades studies of narrative technique and form have responded to Marxist, feminist, and other ideological criticism that insists on the political contexts of literature. One important influence on this shift has been the revival of the work of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), which considers the novel as a dialogic form that pulls together the many discourses and voices of a culture and its history. Part of the appeal of Bakhtin’s work has been the fusion of textual close reading with attention to material factors such as economics and class and a sense of the open-endedness and contradictoriness of writing (in the spirit of deconstruction more than of New Criticism). Like other Marxist-trained European formalists, Bakhtin sought to understand the complex literary modes of communication in the light of politics and history.

EMPHASIS ON THE SOURCE

As the examples above suggest, a great deal can be drawn from a text without referring to its source or author. For millennia many anonymous works were shared in oral or manuscript form, and even after printing spread in Europe few thought it necessary to know the author’s name or anything about him or her. Yet criticism from its beginnings in ancient Greece has nonetheless been interested in the designing intention “behind” the text. Even when no evidence remained about the author, a legendary personality has sometimes been invented to satisfy readers’ curiosity. From the legend of blind Homer to the latest debates about who “really” wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays, literary criticism has entailed interest in the author.

Biographical Criticism

This approach reached its height in an era when humanism prevailed in literary studies (roughly the 1750s to the 1960s). At this time there was widely shared confidence in the ideas that art and literature were the direct expressions of the artist’s or writer’s genius and that criticism of great works supported veneration of the great persons who created them. The lives of some famous writers became the models that aspiring writers emulated. Criticism at times was skewed by social judgments, as when John Keats was put down as a “Cockney” poet—that is, Londonbred and lower-class. Women or minorities have at times used pseudonyms or published anonymously to avoid having their work judged only in terms of expectations, negative or positive, of what a woman or person of color might write. Biographical criticism can be diminishing in this respect. Others have objected to reading literature as a reflection of the author’s personality. Such critics have supported the idea that the highest literary art is pure form, untouched by gossip or personal emotion. In this spirit some early-twentieth-century critics as well as Modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf tried to dissociate the text from the personality or political commitments of the author. (The theories of these writers and their actual practices did not always coincide.)

In the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic criticism interpreted the text in light of the author’s emotional conflicts, while other interpretations relied heavily on the author’s stated intentions. (Although psychoanalytic criticism entails more than analysis of the author, we will introduce it as an approach that primarily concerns the human source[s] of literature; it usually has less to say about the form and receiver of the text.) Author-based readings can be reductive. All the accessible information about a writer’s life cannot definitively explain the writings. As a young man D. H. Lawrence might have hated his father and loved his mother, but all men who hate their fathers and love their mothers do not write fiction as powerful as Lawrence’s. Indeed, Lawrence himself cautioned that we should “trust the tale, not the teller.”

Any kind of criticism benefits to some extent, however, from drawing on knowledge of the writer’s life and career. Certain critical approaches, devoted to recognition of separate literary traditions, make sense only in light of supporting biographical evidence. Studies that concern traditions such as Irish literature, Asian American literature, or literature by Southern women require reliable information about the writers’ birth and upbringing and even some judgment of the writers’ intentions to write as members of such traditions. (We discuss feminist, African American, and other studies of distinct literatures in the “Historical and Ideological Criticism” section that follows, although such studies recognize the biographical “source” as a starting point.)

A reading of “First Fight. Then Fiddle.” can become rather different when we know more about Gwendolyn Brooks. An African American, she was raised in Chicago in the 1920s. These facts begin to provide a context for her work. Some of the biographical information has more to do with her time and place than with her race and sex. Brooks began in the 1940s to associate with Harriet Monroe’s magazine, Poetry, which had been influential in promoting Modernist poetry. Brooks early received acclaim for books of poetry that depict the everyday lives of poor, urban African Americans; in 1950 she was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. In 1967 she became an outspoken advocate for the Black Arts movement, which promoted a separate tradition rather than integration into the aesthetic mainstream. But even before this political commitment, her work never sought to “pass” or to distance itself from the reality of racial difference, nor did it become any less concerned with poetic tradition and form when she published it through small, independent black presses in her “political” phase.

It is reasonable, then, to read “First Fight. Then Fiddle,” published in 1949, in relation to the role of a racial outsider mastering and adapting the forms of a dominant tradition. Perhaps Brooks’s speaker addresses an African American audience in the voice of a revolutionary, calling for violence to gain the right to express African American culture. Perhaps the lines “the music that they wrote / Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing / Threadwise” (lines 3–5) suggest the way that the colonized may transform the empire’s music rather than the other way around. Ten years before the poem was published, a famous African American singer, Marian Anderson, had more than “[q]ualif[ied] to sing” opera and classical concert music, but had still encountered the color barrier in the United States. Honored throughout Europe as the greatest living contralto, Anderson was barred in 1939 from performing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., because of her race. Instead she performed at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday to an audience of seventy-five thousand people. It was not easy to find a “space” in which to practice her art. Such a contextual reference, whether or not intended, relates biographically to Brooks’s role as an African American woman wisely reweaving classical traditions “[t]hreadwise” rather than straining them into “hempen” ropes (5). Beneath the manifest reference to the recent world war, this poem refers to the segregation of the arts in America. (Questions of source and historical context often interrelate.)

Besides readings that derive from biographical and historical information, there are still other ways to read aspects of the source rather than the text or the receiver. The source of the work extends beyond the life of the person who wrote it to include not only the writer’s other works but also the circumstances of contemporary publishing; contemporary literary movements; the history of the composition, editing, and publication of this particular text, with all the variations; and so on. While entire schools of literary scholarship have been devoted to each of these matters, any analyst of a particular work should bear in mind what is known about the circumstances of writers at a given time, the material conditions of the work’s first publication, and the means of dissemination ever since. It makes a difference in our interpretation to know that a certain sonnet circulated in manuscript among a small courtly audience or that a particular novel was serialized in a weekly journal cheap enough for the masses to read it.

Psychoanalytic Criticism

With the development of psychology and psychoanalysis toward the end of the nineteenth century, many critics were tempted to apply psychological theories to literary analysis. Symbolism, dreamlike imagery, emotional rather than rational logic, and a pleasure in language all suggested that literature profoundly evoked a mental and emotional landscape, often one of disorder or abnormality. From mad poets to patients speaking in verse, imaginative literature might be regarded as a representation of shared irrational structures within all psyches (i.e., souls) or selves. While psychoanalytic approaches have developed along with structuralism and poststructuralist linguistics and philosophy, they rarely focus on textual form. Rather, they attribute latent or hidden meaning to unacknowledged desires in some person, usually the author or source behind the character in a narrative or drama. A psychoanalytic critic can also focus on the response of readers and, in recent decades, usually accepts the influence of changing social history on the structures of sexual desire represented in the work. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis has typically aspired to a universal, unchanging theory of the mind and personality, and criticism that applies it has tended to emphasize the authorial source.

FREUDIAN CRITICISM

For most of the twentieth century, the dominant school of psychoanalytic criticism was the Freudian, based on the work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Many of its practitioners assert that the meaning of a literary work exists not on its surface but in the psyche (some would even claim in the neuroses) of the author. Classic psychoanalytic criticism read works as though they were the recorded dreams of patients; interpreted the life histories of authors as keys to the works; or analyzed characters as though they, like real people, have a set of repressed childhood memories. (In fact, many novels and most plays leave out information about characters’ development from infancy through adolescence, the period that psychoanalysis especially strives to reconstruct.)

A well-known Freudian reading of Hamlet, for example, insists that Hamlet suffers from an Oedipus complex, a Freudian term for a group of repressed desires and memories that corresponds with the Greek myth that is the basis of Sophocles’s play Oedipus the King. In this view Hamlet envies his uncle because he unconsciously wants to sleep with his mother, who was the first object of his desire as a baby. The ghost of Hamlet Sr. may then be a manifestation of Hamlet’s unconscious desire or of his guilt over wanting to kill his father, the person who has a right to the desired mother’s body. Hamlet’s madness is not just acting but the result of this frustrated desire; his cruel mistreatment of Ophelia is a deflection of his disgust at his mother’s being “unfaithful” to him. Some Freudian critics stress the author’s psyche and so might read Hamlet as the expression of Shakespeare’s own Oedipus complex. In another mode psychoanalytic critics, reading imaginative literature as symbolic fulfillment of unconscious wishes much as psychoanalysts read dreams, look for objects, spaces, or actions that appear to relate to sexual anatomy or activity. Much as if tracing out the extended metaphors of an erotic poem by John Donne or a blues or Motown lyric, the Freudian reads containers, empty spaces, or bodies of water as female; tools, weapons, towers or trees, trains or planes as male.

JUNGIAN AND MYTH CRITICISM

Just as a Freudian assumes that all human psyches have similar histories and structures, the Jungian critic assumes that we all share a universal or collective unconscious (just as each of us has an individual unconscious). According to Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) and his followers, the unconscious harbors universal patterns and forms of human experiences, or archetypes. We can never know these archetypes directly, but they surface in art in an imperfect, shadowy way, taking the form of literary archetypes—the snake with its tail in its mouth, rebirth, the mother, the double or doppelgänger, the descent into hell. In the classic quest narrative, the hero struggles to free himself (the gender of the pronoun is significant) from the Great Mother to become a separate, self-sufficient being (combating a demonic antagonist), surviving trials to gain the reward of union with his ideal other, the feminine anima. In a related school of archetypal criticism, influenced by Northrop Frye (1912–91), the prevailing myth follows a seasonal cycle of death and rebirth. Frye proposed a system for literary criticism that classified all literary forms according to a cycle of genres associated with the phases of human experience from birth to death and the natural cycle of seasons (e.g., spring/romance).

These approaches have been useful in the study of folklore and early literatures as well as in comparative studies of various national literatures. While most myth critics focus on the hero’s quest, there have been forays into feminist archetypal criticism. These emphasize variations on the myths of Isis and Demeter, goddesses of fertility or seasonal renewal, who take different forms to restore either the sacrificed woman (Persephone’s season in the underworld) or the sacrificed man (Isis’s search for Osiris and her rescue of their son, Horus). Many twentieth-century poets were drawn to the heritage of archetypes and myths. Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, for example, self-consciously rewrites a number of gendered archetypes, with a female protagonist on a quest into a submerged world.

Most critics today, influenced by poststructuralism, have become wary of universal patterns. Like structuralists, Jungians and archetypal critics strive to compare and unite the ages and peoples of the world and to reveal fundamental truths. Rich, as a feminist poet, suggests that the “book of myths” is an eclectic anthology that needs to be revised. Claims of universality tend to obscure the detailed differences among cultures and often appeal to some idea of biological determinism. Such determinism diminishes the power of individuals to design alternative life patterns and even implies that no literature can really surprise us.

LACANIAN CRITICISM

As it has absorbed the indeterminacies of poststructuralism under the influence of thinkers such as Jacques Lacan (1901–81) and Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), psychological criticism has become increasingly complex. Few critics today are direct Freudian analysts of authors or texts, and few maintain that universal archetypes explain the meaning of a tree or water in a text. Yet psychoanalytic theory continues to inform many varieties of criticism, and most new work in this field is affiliated with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan’s theory unites poststructuralist linguistics with Freudian theory. The Lacanian critic, like a deconstructionist, perceives the text as defying conscious authorial control, foregrounding the powerful interpretation of the critic rather than the author or any other reader. Accepting the Oedipal paradigm and the unconscious as the realm of repressed desire, Lacanian theory aligns the development and structure of the individual human subject with the development and structure of language. To simplify a purposefully dense theory: The very young infant inhabits the Imaginary, in a preverbal, undifferentiated phase dominated by a sense of union with the Mother. Recognition of identity begins with the Mirror Stage, ironically with a disruption of a sense of oneness. For when one first looks into a mirror, one begins to recognize a split or difference between one’s body and the image in the mirror. This splitting prefigures a sense that the object of desire is Other and distinct from the subject. With difference or the splitting of subject and object comes language and entry into the Symbolic Order, since we use words to summon the absent object of desire (as a child would cry “Mama” to bring her back). But what language signifies most is the lack of that object. The imaginary, perfectly nurturing Mother would never need to be called.

As in the biblical Genesis, the Lacanian “genesis” of the subject tells of a loss of paradise through knowledge of the difference between subject and object or Man and Woman (eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil leads to the sense of shame that teaches Adam and Eve to hide their nakedness). In Lacanian theory the Father governs language or the Symbolic Order; the Word spells the end of a child’s sense of oneness with the Mother. Further, the Father’s power claims omnipotence, the possession of male prerogative symbolized by the Phallus, which is not the anatomical difference between men and women but the idea or construction of that difference. Thus it is language or culture rather than nature that generates the difference and inequality between the sexes. Some feminist theorists have adopted aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, particularly the concept of the gaze. This concept notes that the masculine subject is the one who looks, whereas the feminine object is to be looked at.

Another influential concept is abjection. The Franco-Bulgarian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection most simply reimagines the infant’s blissful sense of union with the mother and the darker side of that possible union. To return to the mother’s body would be death, as metaphorically we are buried in Mother Earth. Yet according to the theory, people both desire and dread such loss of boundaries. A sense of self or subjectivity and hence of independence and power depends on resisting abjection. The association of the maternal body with abjection or with the powerlessness symbolized by the female’s Lack of the Phallus can help explain negative cultural images of women. Many narrative genres seem to split the images of women between an angelic and a witchlike type. Lacanian or Kristevan theory has been well adapted to film criticism and to fantasy and other popular forms favored by structuralism or archetypal criticism.

Psychoanalytic literary criticism today—as distinct from specialized discussion of Lacanian theory, for example—treads more lightly than in the past. In James Joyce’s Araby, a young Dublin boy, orphaned and raised by an aunt and uncle, likes to haunt a back room in the house; there the “former tenant, [. . .] a priest, had died” (par. 2). (Disused rooms at the margins of houses resemble the unconscious, and a dead celibate “father” suggests a kind of failure of the Law, conscience, or in Freudian terms, superego.) The priest had left behind a “rusty bicycle-pump” in the “wild garden” with “a central apple tree” (these echoes of the garden of Eden suggesting the impotence of Catholic religious symbolism). The boy seems to gain consciousness of a separate self by gazing upon an idealized female object, Mangan’s sister, whose “name was like a summons to all my foolish blood” (par. 4). Though he secretly watches and follows her, she is not so much a sexual fantasy as a beautiful art object (par. 9). He retreats to the back room to think of her in a kind of ecstasy that resembles masturbation. Yet it is not masturbation: It is preadolescent, dispersed through all orifices—the rain feels like “incessant needles [. . .] playing in the sodden beds”; and it is sublimated, that is, repressed and redirected into artistic or religious forms rather than directly expressed by bodily pleasure: “All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves” (par. 6).

It is not in the back room but on the street that the girl finally speaks to the hero, charging him to go on a quest to Araby. After several trials, the hero, carrying the talisman, arrives in a darkened hall “girdled at half its height by a gallery,” an underworld or maternal space that is also a deserted temple (par. 25). The story ends without his grasping the prize to carry back, the “chalice” or holy grail (symbolic of female sexuality) that he had once thought to bear “safely through a throng of foes” (par. 5).

Such a reading seems likely to raise objections that it is overreading: You’re seeing too much in it; the author didn’t mean that. This has been a popular reaction to psychoanalysis for over a hundred years, but it is only a heightened version of a response to many kinds of criticism. This sample reading pays close attention to the text, but does not really follow a formal approach because its goal is to explain the psychological implications or resonance of the story’s details. We have mentioned nothing about the author, though we could have used this reading to forward a psychoanalytic reading of Joyce’s biography.

EMPHASIS ON THE RECEIVER

In some sense critical schools develop in reaction to the perceived excesses of earlier critical schools. By the 1970s, in a time of political upheaval that placed a high value on individual expression, a number of critics felt that the various routes toward objective criticism had proved to be dead ends. New Critics, structuralists, and psychoanalytic or myth critics had sought objective, scientific systems that disregarded changing times, political issues, or the reader’s personal response. New Critics and other formalists tended to value a literary canon made up of works that were regarded as complete, unchanging objects to be interpreted according to ostensibly timeless standards.

Reader-Response Criticism

Among critics who challenge New Critical assumptions, reader-response critics regard the work not as what is printed on the page but as what is experienced, even created through each act of reading. According to such critics, the reader effectively performs the text into existence the way a musician creates music from a score. Reader-response critics ask not what a work means but what a work does to and through a reader. Literary texts leave gaps that experienced readers fill according to expectations or conventions. Individual readers differ, of course, and gaps in a text provide space for different interpretations. Some of these lacunae are temporary—such as the withholding of the murderer’s name until the end of a mystery novel—and are closed by the text sooner or later, though each reader will in the meantime fill them differently. But other lacunae are permanent and can never be filled with certainty; they result in a degree of indeterminacy in the text.

The reader-response critic observes the expectations aroused by a text; how they are satisfied or modified; and how the reader comprehends the work when all of it has been read, and when it is re-read. Such criticism attends to the reading habits associated with different genres and to the shared assumptions that, in a particular cultural context, help to determine how readers fill in gaps in the text.

The role of the reader or receiver in the literary exchange has also been studied from a political perspective. Literature helps shape social identity, and social status shapes access to different kinds of literature. Feminist critics adapted readerresponse criticism, for example, to note that girls often do not identify with many American literary classics as boys do, and thus girls do not simply accept the stereotype of women as angels, temptresses, or scolds who should be abandoned for the sake of all-male adventures. Studies of African American literature and other ethnic literatures have often featured discussion of literacy and of the obstacles for readers who either cannot find their counterparts within literary texts or there encounter negative stereotypes of their group. Thus, as we will discuss below, most forms of historical and ideological criticism include some consideration of the reader.

Reception Studies

Where reader-response critics tend to analyze the experience of a hypothetical reader of one sort or another, reception studies instead explores how texts have been received by actual readers and how literacy and reading have themselves evolved over time. A critic in this school might examine documents ranging from contemporary reviews to critical essays written across the generations since the work was first published or diaries and other documents in which readers describe their encounters with particular works. Just as there are histories of publishing and of the book, there are histories of literacy and reading practices. Poetry, fiction, and drama often directly represent the theme of reading as well as writing. Many published works over the centuries have debated the benefits and perils of reading works such as sermons or novels. Different genres and particular works construct different classes or kinds of readers in the way they address them or supply what they are supposed to want. Some scholars have found quantitative measures for reading, from sales and library lending rates to questionnaires.

HISTORICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL CRITICISM

The approaches to the text, the author, and the reader outlined above may each take some note of historical contexts, including changes in formal conventions, the writer’s milieu, or audience expectations. In the nineteenth century, historical criticism took the obvious facts that a work is created in a specific historical and cultural context and that the author is a part of that context as reasons to treat literature as a reflection of society and its history. Twentieth-century formalists rejected this reflectivist model of art—that is, the assumption that literature and other arts straightforwardly represent, as in a mirror, the collective spirit of a society at a given time. But as we have remarked, the formalist tendency to isolate the work of art from social and historical context met resistance in the last decades of the twentieth century. The new historical approaches that developed out of that resistance replace the reflectivist model with a constructivist model, whereby literature and other cultural discourses are seen to help construct social relations and roles rather than merely reflect them. A society’s ideology, its system of representations (ideas, myths, images), is inscribed in literature and other cultural forms, which in turn help shape identities and social practices.

From the 1980s until quite recently, historical approaches have dominated literary studies. Some such approaches have been insistently materialist—that is, seeking causes more in concrete conditions such as technology, production, and distribution of wealth. Such criticism usually owes an acknowledged debt to Marxism, the large and complex body of concepts and theories built on the work of Karl Marx (1818–83). Other historical approaches have been influenced to a degree by Marxist critics and cultural theorists, but work within the realm of ideology, textual production, and interpretation, using some of the methods and concerns of traditional literary history. Still others emerge from the civil rights movement and the struggles for recognition of women and racial, ethnic, and sexual constituencies.

Feminist studies, African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, and studies of the cultures of different immigrant and ethnic populations within and beyond the United States have each developed along similar theoretical lines. These schools, like Marxist criticism, adopt a constructivist position: Literature, they argue, is not simply a reflection of prejudices and norms; it also helps define social norms and identities, such as what it means to be an African American woman. Each of these schools has moved through stages of first claiming equality with the literature dominated by white Anglo American men, then affirming the difference or distinctiveness of their own separate culture, and then theoretically questioning the terms and standards of such comparisons. At a certain point in its development, each group rejects essentialism, the notion of innate or biological bases for differentiating sexes, races, or other groups. This rejection of essentialism is usually called the constructivist position, in a somewhat different but related sense to our definition above. Constructivism maintains that identity is socially formed rather than biologically determined. Differences of anatomical sex, skin color, first language, parental ethnicity, and eventual sexual preferences have great impact on how one is classified, brought up, and treated socially, and on one’s subjectivity or sense of identity. Constructivists maintain that these differences, however, are constructed more by ideology and the resulting behaviors than by any natural programming.

Marxist Criticism

The most insistent and vigorous historical approach through the twentieth century to the present has been Marxism. With roots in nineteenth-century historicism, Marxist criticism was initially reflectivist. Economics, the underlying cause of history, was thus considered the base; and culture, including literature and the other arts, was regarded as the superstructure, an outcome or reflection of the base. Viewed from this simple Marxist perspective, the literary works of a period are economically determined; they reflect the state of the struggle between classes in as particular place and time. History enact recurrent three-step cycles, a pattern that Hegel had defined as dialectic (Hegel was cited above on the interdependence of master and slave). Each socioeconomic phase, or thesis, is counteracted by its antithesis, and the resulting conflict yields a synthesis, which becomes the ensuing thesis, and so on. As with early Freudian criticism, early Marxist criticism was often preoccupied with labeling and exposing illusions or deceptions. A novel might be read as a thinly disguised defense of the power of bourgeois industrial capital; its appeal on behalf of the suffering poor might be dismissed as an effort to fend off class rebellion.

As a rationale for state control of the arts, Marxism was abused in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states. In the hands of sophisticated critics, however, Marxism has been richly rewarding. Various schools that unite formal close reading and political analysis developed in the early twentieth century under Soviet communism and under fascism in Europe, often in covert resistance. These schools in turn have influenced critical movements in North America; New Criticism, structuralist linguistics, deconstruction, and narrative theory have each borrowed from European Marxist critics.

Most recently, a new mode of Marxist theory has developed, largely guided by the thinking of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Theodor Adorno (1903–69) of the Frankfurt School in Germany, Louis Althusser (1918–90) in France, and Raymond Williams (1921–88) in Britain. This work has generally tended to modify the base/superstructure distinction and to interrelate public and private life, economics and culture. Newer Marxist (or so-called Marxian) interpretation assumes that the relation of a literary work to its historical context is overdetermined—the relation has multiple determining factors rather than a sole cause or aim. This thinking similarly acknowledges that neither the source nor the receiver of the literary interaction is a mere tool or victim of the ruling powers or state. Representation of all kinds, including literature, always has a political dimension, according to this approach; conversely, political and material conditions such as work, money, or institutions depend on representation.

Showing some influence of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories, recent Marxist literary studies examine the effects of ideology by focusing on the works’ gaps and silences: Ideology may be conveyed in what is repressed or contradicted. In many ways, Marxist criticism has adapted to the conditions of consumer rather than industrial capitalism and to global rather than national economies. The worldwide revolution that was to come when the proletariat or working classes overthrew the capitalists has never taken place; in many countries industrial labor has been swallowed up by the service sector, and workers reject the political Left that would seem their most likely ally. Increasingly, Marxist criticism has acknowledged that the audience of literature may be active rather than passive, just as the text and source may be more than straightforward instructions for toeing a given political line. Marxist criticism has been especially successful with the novel, since that genre more than drama or short fiction is capable of representing numerous people from different classes as they develop over long periods of time.

Feminist Criticism

Like Marxist criticism and the schools discussed below, feminist criticism derives from a critique of a history of oppression, in this case the history of women’s inequality. Feminist criticism has no single founder like Freud or Marx; it has been practiced to some extent since the 1790s, when praise of women’s cultural achievements went hand in hand with arguments that women were rational beings deserving equal rights and education. Modern feminist criticism emerged from a “second wave” of feminist activism, in the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the civil rights and antiwar movements. One of the first disciplines in which women’s activism took root was literary criticism, but feminist theory and women’s studies quickly became recognized methods across the disciplines.

Feminist literary studies began by denouncing the misrepresentation of women in literature and affirming the importance of women’s writings, before quickly adopting the insights of poststructuralist theory; yet the early strategies continue to have their use. At first, feminist criticism in the 1970s, like early Marxist criticism, regarded literature as a reflection of patriarchal society’s sexist base; the demeaning images of women in literature were symptoms of a system that had to be overthrown. Feminist literary studies soon began, however, to claim the equal but distinctive qualities of writings by women. Critics such as Elaine Showalter (b. 1941), Sandra M. Gilbert (b. 1936), and Susan Gubar (b. 1944) explored canonical works by women, relying on close reading with some aid from historical and psychoanalytic methods.

By the 1980s it was widely recognized that a New Critical method would leave most of the male-dominated canon intact and most women writers still in obscurity, because many women had written in different genres and styles, on different themes, and for different audiences than had male writers. To affirm the difference or distinctiveness of female literary traditions, some feminist studies championed what they hailed as women’s innate or universal affinity for fluidity and cycle rather than solidity and linear progress. Others concentrated on the role of the mother in human psychological development. According to this argument, girls, not having to adopt a gender role different from that of their first object of desire, the mother, grow up with less rigid boundaries of self and a relational rather than judgmental ethic.

The dangers of such essentialist generalizations soon became apparent. If women’s differences from men were biologically determined or due to universal archetypes, there was no solution to women’s oppression, which many cultures had justified in terms of biological reproduction or archetypes of nature. At this point in the debate, feminist literary studies intersected with poststructuralist linguistic theory in questioning the terms and standards of comparison. French feminist theory, articulated most prominently by Hélène Cixous (b. 1937) and Luce Irigaray (b. 1932?), deconstructed the supposed archetypes of gender written into the founding discourses of Western culture. We have seen that deconstruction helps expose the power imbalance in every dualism. Thus man is to woman as culture is to nature or mind is to body, and in each case the second term is held to be inferior or Other. The language and hence the worldview and social formations of our culture, not nature or eternal archetypes, constructed woman as Other. This insight was helpful in challenging essentialism or biological determinism.

Having reached a theoretical criticism of the terms on which women might claim equality or difference from men in the field of literature, feminist studies also confronted other issues in the 1980s. Deconstructionist readings of gender difference in texts by men as well as women could lose sight of the real world, in which women are paid less and are more likely to be victims of sexual violence. With this in mind, some feminist critics pursued links with Marxist or African American studies; gender roles, like those of class and race, were interdependent systems for registering the material consequences of people’s differences. It no longer seemed so easy to say what the term “women” referred to, when the interests of different kinds of women had been opposed to each other. African American women asked if feminism was really their cause, when white women had so long enjoyed power over both men and women of their race and when the early women’s movement largely ignored the experience and concerns of women of color. In a classic Marxist view, women allied with men of their class rather than with women of other classes. It became more difficult to make universal claims about women’s literature, as the horizon of the college-educated North American feminists expanded to recognize the range of conditions of women and of literature worldwide. Intersectional feminist criticism concerns itself with race, class, and nationality, as well as gender, and the way these differences shape each other and intersect in the experience and representation of particular individuals and groups.

Gender Studies and Queer Theory

From the 1970s, feminists sought recognition for lesbian writers and lesbian culture, which they felt had been even less visible than male homosexual writers and gay culture. Concurrently, feminist studies abandoned the simple dualism of male/ female, part of the very binary logic of patriarchy that seemed to cause the oppression of women. Thus feminists recognized a zone of inquiry, the study of gender, as distinct from historical studies of women, and increasingly they included masculinity as a subject of investigation. As gender studies turned to interpretation of the text in ideological context regardless of the sex or intention of the author, it incorporated the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976). Foucault (1926–84) helped show that there was nothing natural, universal, or timeless in the constructions of sexual difference or sexual practices. Foucault also historicized the concept of homosexuality, which only in the later nineteenth century came to be defined as a disease associated with a distinctive personality type. Literary scholars began to study the history of sexuality as a key to the shifts in modern culture that had also shaped literature.

By the 1980s gender had come to be widely regarded as a discourse that imposed binary social norms on human diversity. Theorists such as Donna Haraway (b. 1944) and Judith Butler (b. 1956) insisted further that sex and sexuality have no natural basis; even the anatomical differences are representations from the moment the newborn is put in a pink or blue blanket. Moreover, these theorists claimed that gender and sexuality are performative and malleable positions, enacted in many more than two varieties. From cross-dressing to surgical sex changes, the alternatives chosen by real people have influenced critical theory and generated both writings and literary criticism about those writings. Perhaps biographical and feminist studies face new challenges when identity seems subject to radical change and it is less easy to determine the sex of an author.

Gay and lesbian literary studies have included practices that parallel those of feminist criticism. At times critics identify oppressive or positive representations of homosexuality in works by men or women, gay, lesbian, or straight. At other times critics seek to establish the equivalent stature of a work by a gay or lesbian writer or, because these identities tended to be hidden in the past, to reveal that a writer was gay or lesbian. Again stages of equality and difference have yielded to a questioning of the terms of difference, in this case in what has been called queer theory. The field of queer theory hopes to leave everyone guessing rather than to identify gay or lesbian writers, characters, or themes. One of its founding texts, Between Men (1985), by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009), drew on structuralist insight into desire as well as anthropological models of kinship to show that, in canonical works of English literature, male characters form “homosocial” (versus homosexual) bonds through their rivalry for and exchange of a woman. Queer theory, because it rejects the idea of a fixed identity or innate or essential gender, likes to discover resistance to heterosexuality in unexpected places. Queer theorists value gay writers such as Oscar Wilde, but they also find queer implications regardless of the author’s acknowledged identity. This approach emphasizes not the surface signals of the text but the subtler meanings an audience or receiver might detect. It encompasses elaborate close reading of many varieties of literary work; characteristically, a leading queer theorist, D. A. Miller (b. 1948), has written in loving detail about both Jane Austen and Broadway musicals.

African American and Ethnic Literary Studies

Critics sought to define an African American literary tradition as early as the turn of the twentieth century. The 1920s Harlem Renaissance produced some of the first classic essays on writings by African Americans. Criticism and histories of African American literature tended to ignore and dismiss women writers, while feminist literary histories, guided by Virginia Woolf’s classic A Room of One’s Own (1929), neglected women writers of color. Only after feminist critics began to succeed in the academy and African American studies programs were established did the whiteness of feminist studies and the masculinity of African American studies become glaring; both fields have for some time worked to correct this narrowness of vision, in part by learning from each other. The study of African American literature followed the general pattern that we have noted, first striving to claim equality, on established aesthetic grounds, of works such as Ralph Ellison’s magnificent Invisible Man (1952). Then in the 1960s the Black Arts or Black Aesthetic emerged. Once launched in the academy, however, African American studies has been devoted less to celebrating an essential racial difference than to tracing the historical construction of a racial Other and a subordinated literature. The field sought to recover neglected genres such as slave narratives and traced common elements in fiction or poetry to the conditions of slavery and segregation. By the 1980s, feminist and poststructuralist theory had an impact in the work of some African American critics such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (b. 1950), Houston A. Baker, Jr. (b. 1943), and Hazel  V. Carby (b. 1948), while others objected that the doubts raised by “theory” stood in the way of political commitment. African Americans’ cultural contributions to America have gained much more recognition than before. New histories of American culture have been written with the view that racism is not an aberration but inherent to the guiding narratives of national progress. Many critics now regard race as a discourse with only slight basis in genetics but with weighty investments in ideology. This poststructuralist position coexists with scholarship that takes into account the race of the author or reader or that focuses on African American characters or themes.

In recent years a series of fields has arisen in recognition of the literatures of other American ethnic groups, large and small: Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and Chicanos. Increasingly, such studies avoid romanticizing an original, pure culture or assuming that these literatures by their very nature undermine the values and power of the dominant culture. Instead, critics emphasize the hybridity of all cultures in a global economy. The contact and intermixture of cultures across geographical borders and languages (translations, “creole” speech made up of native and acquired languages, dialects) may be read as enriching literature and art, despite being caused by economic exploitation. In method and in aim these fields have much in common with African American studies, though each cultural and historical context is very different. Each field deserves the separate consideration that we cannot offer here.

• • •

Not so very long ago, critics might have been charged with a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of literature if they pursued matters considered the business of sociologists, matters—such as class, race, sexuality, and gender—that seemed extrinsic to the text. The rise of the above-noted fields has made it standard practice for critics to address questions about class, race, sexuality, and gender in placing a text, its source, and its reception in historical and ideological context. One brief example might illustrate the way Marxist, feminist, queer, and African American criticism can contribute to a literary reading.

Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was first produced in 1947 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Its acclaim was partly due to its fashionable blend of naturalism and symbolism: The action takes place in a shabby tenement on an otherworldly street, Elysian Fields—in an “atmosphere of decay” laced with “lyricism,” as Williams’s stage directions put it (1.1). After the Depression and World War II, American audiences welcomed a turn away from world politics into the psychological core of human sexuality. This turn to ostensibly individual conflict was a kind of alibi for at least two sets of issues that Williams and middle-class theatergoers in New York and elsewhere sought to avoid. First are racial questions that relate to ones of gender and class: What is the play’s attitude to race, and what is Williams’s attitude? Biography seems relevant, though not the last word on what the play means. Williams’s family had included slaveholding cotton growers, and he chose to spend much of his adult life in the South, which he saw as representing a beautiful but dying way of life. He was deeply attached to women in his family who might be models for the brilliant, fragile, cultivated Southern white woman, Blanche DuBois. Blanche (“white” in French), representative of a genteel, feminine past that has gambled, prostituted, dissipated itself, speaks some of the most eloquent lines in the play when she mourns the faded Delta plantation society. Neither the playwright nor his audience wished to deal with segregation in the South, a region that since the Civil War had stagnated as a kind of agricultural working class in relation to the dominant North—which had its racism, too.

The play scarcely notices race. The main characters are white. The cast includes a “Negro Woman” as servant and a blind Mexican woman who offers artificial flowers to remember the dead, but these figures seem more like props or symbols than fully developed characters. Instead, racial difference is transposed into ethnic and class difference in the story of a working-class Pole intruding into a family clinging to French gentility. Stella warns Blanche that she lives among “heterogeneous types” and that Stanley is “a different species” (1.1). The play thus transfigures contemporary anxieties about miscegenation, as the virile (black) man dominates the ideal white woman and rapes the spirit of the plantation South. A former soldier who works in a factory, Stanley represents as well the defeat of the old, agricultural economy by industrialization.

The second set of issues that neither the playwright nor his audience confronts directly is the disturbance of sexual and gender roles that would in later decades lead to movements for women’s and gay rights. It was well-known in New Orleans at least that Williams was gay. In the 1940s he lived with his lover, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales, in the French Quarter. Like many homosexual writers in other eras, Williams recasts homosexual desire in heterosexual costume. Blanche, performing femininity with a kind of camp excess, might be a fading queen pursuing and failing to capture younger men. Stanley, hypermasculine, might caricature the object of desire of both men and women as well as the anti-intellectual, brute force in postwar America. His conquest of women (he had “the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens” [1.1]) appears to be biologically determined. By the same token it seems natural that Stanley and his buddies go out to work and that their wives are homemakers in the way now seen as typical of the 1950s. In this world, artists, homosexuals, or unmarried working women like Blanche would be both vulnerable and threatening. Blanche, after all, has secret pleasures—drinking and sex—that Stanley indulges in openly. Blanche is the one who is taken into custody by the medical establishment, which in this period diagnosed homosexuality as a form of insanity.

New Historicism

Three interrelated schools of historical and ideological criticism have been important innovations in the past two decades. These are part of the swing of the pendulum away from formal analysis of the text and toward historical analysis of context. New historicism has less obvious political commitments than Marxism, feminism, or queer theory, but it shares their interest in the power of discourse to shape ideology. Old historicism, in the 1850s–1950s, confidently told a story of civilization’s progress from a Western point of view; a historicist critic would offer a close reading of the plays of Shakespeare and then locate them within the prevailing Elizabethan “worldview.” “New Historicism,” labeled in 1982 by Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943), rejected the technique of plugging samples of a culture into a history of ideas. Influenced by poststructuralist anthropology, New Historicism tried to offer a multilayered impression or “thick description” of a culture at one moment in time, including popular as well as elite forms of representation. As a method, New Historicism belongs with those that deny the unity of the text, defy the authority of the source, and license the receiver—much like deconstructionism. Accordingly, New Historicism doubts the accessibility of the past, insisting that all we have is discourse. One model for New Historicism was the historiography of Michel Foucault, who insisted on the power of discourses—that is, not only writing but all structuring myths or ideologies that underlie social relations. The New Historicist, like Foucault, is interested in the transition from the external powers of the state and church in the feudal order to modern forms of power. The rule of the modern state and middle-class ideology is enforced insidiously by systems of surveillance and by each individual’s internalization of discipline.

No longer so “new,” New Historicism has helped to produce a more narrative and concrete style of criticism even among those who espouse poststructuralist and Marxist theories. A New Historicist article begins with an anecdote, often a description of a public spectacle, and teases out the many contributing causes that brought disparate social elements together in that way. It usually applies techniques of close reading to forms that would not traditionally have received such attention. Although it often concentrates on events several hundred years ago, in some ways it defies historicity, flouting the idea that a complete objective impression of the entire context could ever be achieved.

Cultural Studies

Popular culture often gets major attention in the work of New Historicists. Yet today most studies of popular culture would acknowledge their debt instead to cultural studies, as filtered through the now-defunct Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and others at the University of Birmingham in England. Method, style, and subject matter may be similar in New Historicism and cultural studies: Both attend to historical context, theoretical method, political commitment, and textual analysis. But whereas the American movement shares Foucault’s paranoid view of state domination through discourse, the British school, influenced by Raymond Williams and his concept of “structures of feeling,” emphasizes the way that ordinary people, the receivers of cultural forms, can and do resist dominant ideology. The documents examined in a cultural-studies essay may be recent, such as artifacts of tourism at Shakespeare’s birthplace, rather than sixteenth-century maps. Cultural studies today influences history, sociology, communications and media, and literature departments; its studies may focus on television, film, romance novels, and advertising, or on museums and the art market, sports and stadiums, New Age religious groups, or other forms and practices.

The questions raised by cultural studies might encourage a critic to place a poem like Marge Piercy’s Barbie Doll in the context of the history of that toy, a doll whose slender, impossibly long legs, tiptoe feet (not unlike the bound feet of Chinese women of an earlier era), small nose, and torpedo breasts epitomized a 1950s ideal of the female body. A critic influenced by cultural studies might align the poem with other works published around 1973 that express feminist protest concerning cosmetics, body image, consumption, and the objectification of women, while she or he would draw on research into the creation, marketing, and use of Mattel toys. The poem reverses the Sleeping Beauty story: This heroine puts herself into the coffin rather than waking up. The poem omits any hero—Ken?—who would rescue her. “Barbie Doll” protests the pressure a girl feels to fit into a heterosexual plot of romance and marriage; no one will buy her if she is not the right toy or accessory.

Indeed, accessories such as “GE stoves and irons” (line 3) taught girls to plan their lives as domestic consumers, and Barbie’s lifestyle is decidedly middle-class and suburban (everyone has a house, car, pool, and lots of handbags). The whiteness of the typical “girlchild” (1) goes without saying. Although Mattel produced Barbie’s African American friend, Christie, in 1968, Piercy’s title makes the reader imagine Barbie, not Christie. In 1997 Mattel issued Share a Smile Becky, a friend in a wheelchair, as though in answer to the humiliation of the girl in Piercy’s poem, who feels so deformed, in spite of her “strong arms and back, / abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity” (8–9), that she finally cripples herself. The icon, in short, responds to changing ideology. Perhaps responding to generations of objections like Piercy’s, Barbies over the years have been given feminist career goals, yet women’s lives are still plotted according to physical image.

In this manner a popular product might be “read” alongside a literary work. The approach would be influenced by Marxist, feminist, gender, and ethnic studies, but it would not be driven by a desire to destroy Barbie as sinister, misogynist propaganda. Piercy’s kind of protest against indoctrination has gone out of style. Girls have found ways to respond to such messages and divert them into stories of empowerment. Such at least is the outlook of cultural studies, which usually affirms popular culture. A researcher could gather data on Barbie sales and could interview girls or videotape their play in order to establish the actual effects of the dolls. Whereas traditional anthropology examined non-European or preindustrial cultures, cultural studies may direct its fieldwork, or ethnographic research, inward, at home. Nevertheless, many contributions to cultural studies rely on methods of textual close reading or Marxist and Freudian literary criticism developed in the mid-twentieth century.

Postcolonial Criticism and Studies of World Literature

In the middle of the twentieth century, the remaining colonies of the European nations struggled toward independence. French-speaking Frantz Fanon (1925–61) of Martinique was one of the most compelling voices for the point of view of the colonized or exploited countries, which like the feminine Other had been objectified and denied the right to look and talk back. Edward Said (1935–2003), in Orientalism (1978), brought poststructuralist analysis to bear on the history of colonization, illustrating the ways that Western culture feminized and objectified the East. Postcolonial literary studies developed into a distinct field in the 1990s in tandem with globalization and the replacement of direct colonial power with international corporations and NGOs (nongovernmental agencies such as the World Bank). In general this field cannot share the optimism of cultural studies, given the histories of slavery and economic exploitation of colonies and the violence committed in the name of civilization and progress. Studies by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942) and Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949) have further mingled Marxist, feminist, and poststructuralist theory to re-read both canonical Western works and the writings of marginalized peoples. Colonial or postcolonial literatures may include works set or published in countries during colonial rule or after independence, or they may feature texts produced in the context of international cultural exchange, such as a novel in English by a woman of Chinese descent writing in Malaysia.

Like feminist and queer studies and studies of African American or other ethnic literatures, postcolonial criticism is inspired by recovery of neglected works, redress of a systematic denial of rights and recognition, and increasing realization that the dualisms of opposing groups reveal interdependence. In this field the stage of difference came early, with the celebrations of African heritage known as Négritude, but the danger of that essentialist claim was soon apparent: The Dark Continent or wild island might be romanticized and idealized as a source of innate qualities of vitality long repressed in Enlightened Europe. Currently, most critics accept that the context for literature in all countries is hybrid, with immigration and educational intermixing. Close readings of texts are always linked to the author’s biography and literary influences and placed within the context of contemporary international politics as well as colonial history. Many fiction writers, from Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) to Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967) and Zadie Smith (b. 1975), make the exploration of cultural mixture or hybridity central to their work, whether in a pastiche of Charles Dickens or a story of an Indian family growing up in New Jersey and returning as tourists to their supposed “native” land. Poststructuralist theories of trauma, and theories of the interrelation of narrative and memory, provide explanatory frames for interpreting writings from Afghanistan to Zambia.

Studies of postcolonial culture retain a clear political mission that feminist and Marxist criticism have found difficult to sustain. Perhaps this is because the scale of the power relations is so vast, between nations rather than the sexes or classes within those nations. Imperialism can be called an absolute evil, and the destruction of local cultures a crime against humanity. Today some of the most exciting literature in English emerges from countries once under the British Empire, and all the techniques of criticism will be brought to bear on it.

• • •

If history is any guide, in later decades some critical school will attempt to read the diverse literatures of the early twenty-first century in pure isolation from authorship and national origin, as self-enclosed form. The themes of hybridity, indeterminacy, trauma, and memory will be praised as universal. It is even possible that readers’ continuing desire to revere authors as creative geniuses in control of their meanings will regain respectability among specialists. The elements of the literary exchange—text, source, and receiver—are always there to provoke questions that generate criticism, which in turn produces articulations of the methods of that criticism. It is an ongoing discussion well worth participating in.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For good introductions to the issues discussed here, see the following books, from which we have drawn in this overview. Some of these provide bibliographies of the works of critics and schools mentioned above.

Alter, Robert. The Pleasure of Reading in an Ideological Age. W. W. Norton, 1996. Originally published as The Pleasures of Reading: Thinking about Literature in an Ideological Age, 1989.

Barnet, Sylvan, and William E. Cain. A Short Guide to Writing about Literature. 12th ed., Longman, 2011.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed., Manchester UP, 2009.

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 5th ed., Pearson, 2011.

Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2011.

Davis, Robert Con, and Ronald Schleifer. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. 4th ed., Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.

During, Simon. Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2005. ———, editor. The Cultural Studies Reader. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2007.

Eagleton, Mary, editor. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. 3rd ed., WileyBlackwell, 2010.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Anniversary ed., U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Groden, Michael, et al., editors. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed., Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

Hawthorn, Jeremy. A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory. 4th ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2000.

Leitch, Vincent B. American Literary Criticism since the 1930s. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2010.

———, et al., editors. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd ed., W. W. Norton, 2018.

Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. U of Chicago P, 1980.

Macksey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato, editors. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. 40th anniversary ed., Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.

Moi, Toril. Sexual-Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2002.

Murfin, Ross, and Supryia M. Ray, editors. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.

Piaget, Jean. Structuralism. Translated and edited by Chaninah Maschler, Basic Books, 1970.

Selden, Raman, and Peter Widdowson. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 3rd ed., U of Kentucky P, 1993.

Stevens, Anne H. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction. Broadview Press, 2015.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle. Translated by Wlad Godzich, U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Turco, Lewis. The Book of Literary Terms. UP of New England, 1999.

Veeser, H. Aram, editor. The New Historicism. Routledge, 1989. ———. The New Historicism Reader. Routledge, 1994.

Warhol-Down, Robyn, and Diane Price Herndl, editors. Feminisms Redux: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Rutgers UP, 2009.

Wolfreys, Julian editor. Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide. Edinburgh UP, 1999.