Need for Literary Theory

 

Many twentieth-century poetry movements boil down to very dubious notions, as they have over the centuries. Poets issue statements which are vague, wildly inconsistent and hardly followed through. Manifestos urge crusades to claim aesthetic new ground, which exists only through their own misunderstandings. Critics announce new associations of poets, who themselves deny such a movement exists.

Even more vexing is radical theory. Even if largely a tangled mass of assertions and misunderstandings of technicalities, it is still necessary reading today. Theory can focus attention on what writers should be trying to do, act as a prophylactic against the false and stultifying, and open up disciplines that support writing and are fascinating in their own right.

Though there is now no generally accepted theory of literature, matters are not much better in other disciplines. Logic and mathematics seem more worthy contenders for truth, and science is more practical. Both work towards abstraction, however, and cannot find a bedrock for their beliefs.

The arts have a different conception of truth, aiming at fullness and fidelity to human experience. By a twist of fate, science itself — through complexity theory, research in brain functioning, and in some aspects of linguistics — is now suggesting that poetry's view is not simply a viable alternative, but in some ways closer to how human beings actually function.

Literature is not built on or even assessed by theory, as it is all too easy to justify an atrocious piece of writing by selective appeal to abstruse matters. Literary theory explores and attempts to evaluate the bases of criticism, but literary criticism itself is a practical activity carried out in a community of interests. Ability comes with experience, by reading and thinking on a wide range of material, literature and criticism.

Nonetheless, radical theory rules in many English departments and in countless literary publications. Unless your productions observe current fads they will be rejected. Most certainly it is not sufficient to study the market and adopt the right dress codes. You will be found out, your slumming despised. Your work must positively reek of the right attitudes if it is to pass beneath the gaze of editorial boards.

And there is a better reason for attending to theory. Poetry is the workshop of language, the most acute and comprehensive way we have of expressing ourselves. And in poetry the medium is words. Prose may employ ready-made phrases — generally has to, given the needs of a busy world — but poetry works at a deeper level.

One essential distinction between poetry and prose — and only one: refer to aesthetics for the arguments — lies in the more sustained and elaborate attention paid to its constituent parts. Words for poets have meanings, appropriate uses, associations, connotations, etymologies, histories of use and misuse. They conjure up images, feelings, shadowy depths and glinting surfaces. Their properties are marvellous, endless, not to be guessed at from casual inspection. And each property — meaning, association, weight, colour, duration, shape, texture — changes as words are combined in phrases, rhythms, lines, stanzas and completed poems. Out of these properties the poetry is built, even if the end cannot be entirely foreseen but grows out of the very process of deployment, that continual, two-way dialogue between writer and poem. Radical theory was often wildly incoherent, but it dared to ask what had been overlooked in more traditional approaches. What purpose does language serve? How does it mediate between ourselves and the outside world? What happens when we view language through such disciplines as linguistics, psychiatry, sociology?

Continental philosophy can be luminously clear, full of insights and imaginative suggestions, but a long training is needed for sensible use. The radical critics cut corners: concepts were snatched at, names dropped, and the whole wrapped up in a worse-than-academic style. Perhaps they more lost themselves in these dense verbal thickets, but the radical critics were not wrong in their basic intuitions. Language is an important matter, and deserves the writer's continued study. Certainly the radical critics erred in their choice of champions — psychiatry, semiotics, Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Marxism — but the exploration is valuable if conducted properly. Rhetoric, hermeneutics, metaphor theory, depth psychology, brain functioning and cognitive science do give back a key role to writers, though it is one where they must stop playing God, and assume more mundane and human activities.

The above is a summary of an extended essay that appears, with references, on TextEtc.

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Literary Theory

 

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