LITERARY CRITICISM AND LITERARY THEORY: A STUDY

RAMKRISHNA BHATTACHARYA

1. Literary criticism in its rudiments is nearly as old as, if not synchronous with,
literature itself. Beginning with instant likes and dislikes, there developed, in the course
of time, certain objective norms, both literary and extra-literary (ethical, political,
religious, etc.) that were applied to the evaluation of literary works. Such ideas can be
found in embryo even in ancient literature, e.g., in Homer’s epics.2. Mimesis is the
aesthetic theory, derived basically from the visual arts – painting, sculpture, clay-
modelling, ornament-making, etc. an exact verisimilitude of the mode and lifelike
representation of events (in narrative poetry and drama) were considered to be the
criterion of excellence.

3. Aristotle, however, had to explore the elasticity of the sense of mimesis almost to the
breaking point in order to accommodate the ideal and the probable within its compass
(Poetics, Ch.25).

4. Mimesis, a polysemous term, remained the seminal doctrine of literary criticism down
to the middle of the eighteenth century – considered unchallengeable. As against it, a
rival doctrine of phantasia (which may be roughly rendered as ‘imagination’) was
mooted by Philostratus (c. 170 ̵ 245 CE) and at least partially adopted by ‘Longinus’.
Nothing significant, however, came out of it. Mimesis held sway throughout the
Renaissance and the neo-classical periods. All creative writers, Shakespeare and Milton,
Dryden and Pope, swore by mimesis, holding mirror to nature.5. It was only with the
emergence of Romanticism in Europe that several other theories – Pragmatic,
Expressive and Objective – came to Harder and Schlegel, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt,
Sainte-Beuve and Brunetiere, is the conscious avoidance of any reference to mimesis.
Literary criticism again became largely, though not wholly, subjective.

6. Two antonamastic examples, one from the nineteenth century and the other from
the twentieth, may be cited: Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis. Like the English
historians, they too used to walk (to quote E.H. Carr) “in the Garden of Eden, without a
scrap of philosophy to cover them.” Both of them had strong likes and dislikes and very
personal standards of literary judgment. Both steered clear of all political, psychological
or any other kind of preconception to vitiate their tastes. They never spelt out how they
were guided in making their pronouncements on different authors and their works.
Even when René Wellek urged Leavis to clarify his stand, he refused to do so.

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7. This is not to say that these literary critics never had any theory of their own. The
point is that they felt no need of formulating their positions in so many words. A wind
of change began to blow from Russia only in the twentieth century, though none
outside her borders knew anything about it then. “[I]f one wanted to put a date on the
beginnings of the transformation which has overtaken the literary theory in this
century, one could do worse than settle on 1917, the year in which the young Russian
Formalist Viktor Shklovsky [1883̵1984] published his pioneering essay, “Art as
Device/Technique”. This essay first put forth the idea of ostranenie, ‘making strange’ or
defamiliarization as a theory of literature. The notion spread by John Willett (and
claimed by Shklovsky himself) that Bertolt Brecht (1898̵1956) was indebted to the
Russian Formalist for his theory of Verfremdungseffekt (alienation- or Estragement-
effect), however, is totally misconceived, since it can be traced back to many earlier
writers, right from Dr Johnson, Hegel, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and other
German and Swiss authors.

8. Literary theory made its presence felt first in Europe and then in the USA in the late
1960s with the rise of a new approach called Structuralism, first in the field of linguistics
(Roman Jakobson) and anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss). Structuralism in literary
studies may be called the direct descendant of Russian Formalism. Jakobson emigrated
to Czechoslovakia from the then USSR in 1920 and became the focus of the Prague
Linguistic Circle. The word, struktura, was employed in post-revolutionary Russia in
order to avoid the word ‘form’, which was suspect. Struktura in the Slavic languages is
a loan word, quite unrelated to what is meant by ‘structure’ in English. It is akin to
German Gestalt, Ganzheit, totality, pattern.

9. Jakobson and his followers wanted to avoid all ‘subjective chitchat’ in the name of
criticism. So, very much like the Russian Formalists, they developed a purely grammar-
and rhetoric-based approach. It was essentially ahistorical (if not anti-historical) and
avoided all issues related to the content of the work. Phonetics superseded semantics,
stylistics usurped sociology.10. Obfuscation has become the hall-mark of Literary
Theory. David Lodge (whose ‘Readers’ have helped promote various brands of theory)
has admitted that ‘literary criticism has been damaged by the gulf between everyday
language and technical discourse’ (The Times Literary Supplement, 24.3.1982, p.458).
The gulf has by now become almost unbridgeable. ‘Jargon has now made much of the
humanities anything but humane – and the gain in knowledge is far from being, as a
rule, substantial’ (J.S. Merquior, From Prague to Paris, p.247). We are told that until
1982, when Lacan died, there were only two persons who could understand the
theories of Dr. Jacques Lacan: himself and God. Various eulogistic labels, such as
‘Derridadaism’, ‘poststructuralitis’, ‘theorrhea’, etc. have been coined to brand the
phenomena.

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11. Theory has apparently posed a challenge to literary criticism. Terry Eagleton, a neo-
marxist, declared that Bob Dylan was as significant a topic for study as John Milton. But
when it comes to editing a series called Re-Reading Literature, whom does the present
Oxford don select? William Shakespeare, of course.

12. Paul de Man, a Belgian-American, once said that literary theory sought to avoid all
historical and aesthetic considerations in order to concentrate on ‘the modalities of
production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their establishment.’ Such
an approach to texts, de Man implicitly admits, is both ahistorical and anaesthetic.
Instead of calling it ‘literary theory‘, it would be more appropriate to name it ‘pre-
literary theory’ or something like that. 13. The fact remains that even after all tortuous
structuralist interpretations and post-structuralist deconstructions, what comes out is
seldom new or in any way illuminating (as Jonathan Culler, the PR man of
postmodernism, himself admitted). Personal idiosyncrasies have staged a come-back
with vengeance (Cf. Eagleton’s claim that the witches are the heroines of Macbeth).14.
In spite of all fanfare and massive promotion, literary theory has not been able to
displace literary criticism that calls for contextual-biographical scholarship (anathema to
many postmodernists), understanding and clarity of exposition. As written by Aristotle,
so with many of the critics (with or without any philosophical bent), the proper study of
literature has been (to adapt Pope’s words) literature itself, not this or that theory to be
used as salt and pepper and sauce. Human relations and the feelings they entail occupy
the central position in fiction and drama. Communication is still the basic purpose of
human language, whether in day-to-day life or in literature. The text can never be a
pretext for airy philosophizing or a pre-text to be deconstructed or a sub-text to be
discovered (like a rabbit from the magician’s hat).

15. When Jacques Derrida visited Moscow (sometime before 1989), certain Russian
(Gorbachevite) philosophers assured him that deconstruction was the best translation of
perestroika. We all know what glasnost and perestroika led to: the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, the first workers’ state in the world. Let us hope that deconstruction will
not be equally successful in dissolving literature.

READING LIST

Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.

Lodge, David (ed.). Modern Criticism and Theory. London: Longman, 1988.

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Merquior, J.G. From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-structuralist
Thought. London: Verso, 1986.

Selden, Raman (ed.). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol 8. Camridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Webstar, Roger. Studying Literary Theory: An Introduction . London: Edwin Arnold,

1990.

Wiemann, Robert. Structure and Society in Literary History . London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1977.

FOR FURTHER STUDIES

Baldick, Chris. Criticism and Literary Theory: 1890 to the Present. London and New
York: Longman, 1996.Cohen, Ralph (ed.). The Future of Literary Theory. New York and
London: Routledge,
1989.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.

Eagleton, Terry. The Significance of Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Harari, Josué V. (ed.). Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-structuralist Criticism .

London: Methuen, 1980.

Thomson, E.P. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Merlin Press, 1978.

Timpanaro, Sebastiano. On Materialism. London: Verso, 1980.

Wellek, René. History of Modern Criticism 1750̵1950. Vol.7. Cambridge University

Press, 1991.