Theory: A Summing Up

 

Many of the current problems stem from the squeeze on academic tenure, take-overs in the publishing trade, pre-packaging by the culture industry, widening social inequalities, deepening distrust of big business, politics and public life, a general downgrading of intellectual standards and the difficulties most writers currently experience in making even a modest living.

But very much better theory has been available in aesthetics for some fifty years, and advances in our understanding of metaphor, hermeneutics, brain function and complex systems are underlining these earlier insights. Scientific theories — abstract, objective, seeking exterior regularities — do not make good models for literature.

Literary theorists tried to make their own theory by borrowing some of the scientific approaches — the search for laws, derivation of context-less generalities of depth and power, the development of a thin, abstruse language that modelled itself on logic and mathematics — but the venture was not only optimistic, but wholly wrong-headed. Mathematics, Anglo-American philosophy and science are different enterprises that continue to explore the abstract and general, even though their hopes of finding a bedrock of logic and unquestionable procedures have been widely disappointed.

Literary theory, by contrast, is a chaotic assemblage of elements borrowed from linguistics, psychiatry, semiotics, Structuralism, Poststructuralism and left-wing political thought. To varying extents, it suffers from these weaknesses:

  • theory has replaced appreciation, with poems being valued more for what can be read into them than any literary qualities they may possess.

  • important aspects of literature — sensibility, generous tastes, wide experience — have been subverted by speculative model-building.

  • critics do not have the proper training in the disciplines they borrow from: evidence is quoted out of context and/or misunderstood.

  • often the reasoning is circular, theory employing as evidence what it needs to prove.

  • many elements of theory are no longer accepted by their parent disciplines.

  • theory has been pushed to the furthest edge of abstraction, and evacuated of meaning, reference and example.

  • a fissile and convoluted prose makes evaluation difficult, perhaps intentionally so.

  • though theory is tenaciously entrenched in the newer universities, is widely quoted by critics and writers in serious magazines, it is essentially a "levelling down" to unexamined standards of political devising: a local currency.

  • Specifically, the various approaches:

  • psychiatric methods invoke an unconscious that doesn't exist, and call as supporting evidence a treatment that doesn't work.

  • structuralism is simplistic, reductive and wholly at odds with the larger findings of anthropology, hermeneutics and biology.

  • political colouring enters into all aspects of language, but there is no evidence that wholesale political repression exists, and many reasons for supposing that it does not — notably heteroglossia, metaphor theory and the careers of its theoreticians.

  • poststructuralism is self-defeating, offers no explanation as to how language actually operates, and seems purposefully ignorant of Anglo-American philosophy and the relevant sciences.

An extended article can be found on TextEtc.

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Literary Theory

 

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