Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: From Structuralism to Ecocriticism

371 Pages·2009·1.48 MB·English

by  Pramod K Nayar

CONTEMPORARY LITERARY AND
CULTURAL THEORY
From Structuralism to Ecocriticism

PRAMOD K. NAYAR

Longman
is an imprint of

Delhi • Chennai • Chandigarh
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prefacing Theory
1 Structuralism
2 Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
3 Psychoanalytic Criticism
4 Feminisms
5 Marxisms
6 Postcolonial Theory
7 Queer Theory
8 New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
9 Critical Race Studies
10 Ecocriticism
Bibliography
About the Author
About the Author
Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of
Hyderabad, India. He was Fulbright Senior Fellow at Cornell University
(USA) in 2005–2006; Charles Wallace India Trust–British Council Visiting
Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK) in 2001; and the Smuts
Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies, University of Cambridge (UK) in
2000–2001.
Among his interests are English colonial writing on India, literary and
cultural theory, postcolonial literature, and cultural studies. His published
books include English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics
(2008); The Trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar (2007); The Great Uprising: India,
1857 (2007); The Penguin 1857 Reader (2007); Reading Culture: Theory,
Praxis, Politics (2006); Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of
Cybertechnology (2004); Literary Theory Today (2002); etc.
Prefacing Theory
What is Theory and why are they saying such terrible things about it? (and
who, to indulge in paranoiac criticism, are ‘they’ anyway?) To take the
second part of the question first, ‘they’ say terrible things about Theory
because much of it is admittedly jargon-ridden and incomprehensible, but
also (and this is the uncharitable answer) because (i) it takes considerable
patience and effort to understand the ‘key’ essays and most diatribes against
Theory come from people who don't want to make the effort and (ii) it
destabilizes authority over interpretation, and authority is what teachers
(especially teachers of literary studies) seek to impose over texts, meanings
and readers.
A preface is supposed to propose in advance, its ‘pre’ makes, as one
philosopher put it, ‘the future present’, where the main text is presaged: it
‘puts before the reader's eye what is not yet visible’ (Derrida 2004 [1981]: 7–
8). It also functions, according to another commentator, ‘to ensure that the
text is read properly’, to provide the author's ‘statement of intent’ (Genette
1997: 197, 221). If these thinkers are correct, then ‘prefacing theory’ is a
statement of intention, an introduction (a warning, perhaps?) to what this
book does (as to whether there is a ‘correct’ way of reading—anything—I am
not so sure). ‘Prefacing Theory’ is a defence, a justification and a manifesto.

Literary Theory is the organized, systematized analysis of literary texts, the
institution of Literature (with L in upper case) and a reflection on the
interpretative strategies ‘applied’ to these texts. Cultural Theory moves
beyond literary texts and studies art forms, film, the superhero comic book,
sports, fashion—all cultural practices, of which Literature is one.
Contemporary literary and cultural theory, which is how this book positions
it, has conceptual, general, political and methodological questions that it asks
of cultural practices. It seeks to understand modes of interpretation, of how
knowledge is formed and distributed, the pedagogic—i.e., teaching,
classroom and educative—role of literary texts, the philosophical basis of
metaphors or image-making, the historical location and sources of texts (by
‘texts’ we now mean any form of representation, from fiction to film to the
Google opening menu) and interpretation, the psychological (individual or
collective) roots of particular kinds of images or representations and the
political consequences of literary and cultural representations. Thus, Theory
now is not restricted to literary texts or literary approaches to, say, the novel,
but has widened out into other domains. Such multiple roots of Theory in
anthropology, psychoanalysis and philosophy in addition to traditional
literary criticism, generates its complexity, its political edge, its jargon, its
agenda and (to its more sophisticated ‘users’) its riveting analytical rigour.
The most sophisticated approaches to literary texts have, at least since the
mid-1960s, come from these diverse, non-literary fields. Studies of
anthropology, of history or of art have influenced the way we read literary
texts.
Theory speculates on meaning-making, practices of representation and
consumption, on the relation of social structures and meanings in films and
books, on the nature of knowledge produced, on abstract realities like dreams
or desires, on the visible effects of invisible forces like power or structures
like class. But such ‘speculation’ cannot be taken as mere extended and
random fantasizing. Theory's speculation is based on close studies of words,
images, sounds, structures and economics. ‘Speculation’ here gestures at the
unquantifiable effects of words and social practices, but it is also taken to
mean a careful, considered reflection on how these practices work, of the
language in which power or desire operates in film or image or words.
Barbara Johnson's translator's introduction to Derrida's Dissemination is a
useful description of Theory itself:
the deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or generalized
skepticism, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the
text itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not meaning but
the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. (Johnson
2004: xv, emphasis in original)
No doubt this is the kind of language that gives Theory a bad name, but the
point Johnson is making is a general one about the work of Theory itself.
Theory works to show how one meaning or meaning-practice (‘signifying’)
has often been given importance over another. The task of Theory is to reveal
this process of rejecting or marginalizing one meaning in favour of another
and claiming that this privileged meaning is ‘natural’. Meanings of texts are
never final or natural—they are formed through practices of representation
and interpretation. Theory shows how certain kinds of representation and
interpretation propose a ‘natural’ meaning.
‘Theory’ etymologically comes from the Greek theoria, which means
contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at, and is linked to
theorein (to consider, speculate, look at) and theoros (spectator) and thea (a
view) and horan (to see). Theory thus gestures at several things at once: to
speculate and contemplate but also to see. Theory—and this is the simplest
explanation—is a way of seeing, a way of looking very, very closely at texts.
Theory is a way of seeing how meaning emerges in any cultural practice
whether film or fiction, architecture or fashion. Theory is the practice of
reading itself, but a reading of how we read buildings, road signs, dance
forms, novels, newspapers or political developments. Theory is the study of
the production of meaning in texts, the distribution of this meaning in various
forms (genres of literature, but also in rhetoric, visual culture) and the
reception of these meanings. In its detailed analysis of meaning-practices,
Theory studies authors, readers, texts and contexts. It examines the genre, the
medium, the language and the register of films, novels, advertising, political
speeches and clothes.
Theory is an examination of meaning-practices. Theory is thus political
because meanings—whether in ‘classic’ literature where Homer's male
heroes become more important than his women or in popular films where the
patriarchal family is praised as the ideal state—are always political, whether
they deal with the politics at the level of the nation or that of the family.
Theory is political also because it unsettles and upsets established
meanings of texts. It is political because it looks the structures—institutions
—such as law, the university, the family in which representations are
interpreted and meanings produced. It makes use of reviews, criticism,
commentaries, responses, social events, awards, prefaces, legislation, market
production as structures that inform, regulate and disseminate meanings.
Theory is interested in exposing not simply the linguistic and rhetorical
features that produce meaning, but in the very structures where these features
are studied, the principles of these studies formulated and practices of these
studies regulated by norms, values and systems of evaluation.
To return to the example used above, Theory (especially feminist theory)
shows how the idealization of the patriarchal family (where the ‘ideal’ nature
of the family is the common meaning of the concept of ‘family’) in films or
novels is based upon a politics: the politics of silencing the woman, the
politics of suppressing the value of her labour, the politics of equating her
with an endlessly giving ‘Mother Nature’, the politics of rejecting her
sexuality, among others. Feminist theory shows, therefore, how the
commonly accepted meaning of the ideal family or the ‘happy’ family in
‘common’ readings of films and novel conceals or ignores deeper
inequalities, injustice and oppression. Here Theory works to show how the
commonly accepted, so-called ‘obvious’ or ‘natural’ meanings are actually
masks for something else. This makes feminist theory a political device since
it points out the material, economic and social basis for the textual (filmic,
fictional) representation and our reading of the representation. Theory in this
case links social practices with textual ones and reveals how meanings are
produced and consumed.
Theory gives you a better, sharper way of seeing through the obvious. It is
not abstract speculations in ‘difficult’ language (or rather, it is not abstract
once you get the drift of the Theories): It is praxis—technically, theory that
seeks social change or transformation, but here taken to mean any analytic
method that refers to and seeks changes in the social realms of reading or the
making of meaning in the law or even the acts of writing histories—in the
sense it helps a reading practice, a political commitment and a mode of
interpretation.

When I wrote my first introduction to literary and cultural theory almost 10
years ago, I was teaching in a small university where students attending my
classes had problems even with basic academic English and, therefore, the
language of Theory seemed wholly incomprehensible. Now, teaching in a
wholly different setting (and perhaps having become, hopefully, a better
teacher), I find that the English language may make sense to students here,
the language of Theory still doesn't. This discovery led to the present book.
But I would be dishonest if I didn't admit that part of the impetus for this
book came from the mockery that I receive from no-doubt well-intentioned
colleagues about Theory (I would have called it, for their sake, ‘Monster
Theory’, but Jeffrey Cohen got in first with the title for his scintillating
collection on the monstrous!).
The aim of this book is to explain rather than critique, to define rather than
discern. The organization is based on schools of critical thought, “with the
assumption that students need a handle on a methodology or critical
‘approach’ (as these are often called). I have also eschewed the approach
where individual or ‘key’ essays are discussed because I am deeply sceptical
as to its pedagogic use: an essay does not summarize a school or indicate an
entire ‘approach’.
The use of definition boxes and occasional point-wise organization is
meant to facilitate readability and easy comprehension. The list for further
reading at the end of every chapter is a short one, and consists mainly of
basic works. A detailed bibliography offers primary texts of theorists as well
as secondary works and commentaries.
The chapter on Critical Race Studies demands an explanation. It was
originally intended as a chapter on African American literary theory. The
reviewer of the proposal, quite correctly, proposed that it could be expanded
into addressing other race-related matters in Theory. Since there was already
a chapter on Postcolonial Theory the via media was to look at other critical
approaches that foreground race and ethnicity. The result is ‘Critical Race
Studies’.

This is by no means intended as a substitute for reading, say, ‘The Death of
the Author’ or ‘Shakespearean Bullets’. It also does not adequately locate
schools of Theory within their philosophical, political and social contexts,
nor trace every school's ‘history of ideas’ except as a short account called
‘opening moves’. Every school of thought owes much to its antecedents with
whom it agrees and quarrels—and Theory is no exception. But this book does
not delve into intellectual histories of this kind, nor does it presuppose that
the student would be familiar with them. The book also does not elaborate the
newer critical theories being used in the interdisciplinary discipline called
Cultural Studies.
It serves as an introduction to concepts, authors, approaches and ideas in
the vast, turbulent reaches of Theory-universe. Having negotiated this
introduction, armed with the alphabet (A for Adorno, B for Bourdieu, C for
Chodorow … Z for Žižek) of Theory I hope you will turn (return?) to
‘original’ essays, albeit mediated and contaminated by this book.

Pramod K. Nayar
Hyderabad