THEORY OF LITERATURE

MANUSCRIT SOUS PRESSE - PRESSES UNIVERSITAIRES

Students are taught how to identify and recognize major literary and theoretical schools, read critically through various critical lenses, use literary approaches and concepts to analyze literary texts.

(1er Cycle)

Course Objectives:

By the end of the year, students will be able

to identify and recognize major literary and theoretical schools
to read critically through various critical lenses
to use literary approaches and concepts to analyze literary texts.

Teaching Method:

Students are taught to move from the traditional way of dealing with a literary text, through the thematic approach, to a more systematic approach. They are given a lecture on the linguistic revolution and its influence on other disciplines. We conclude that literature cannot be taught anymore without new concepts brought about by linguistics. Each session will be dedicated to the description of a given theory, the concepts it proposes. They will be illustrated through the study of a novel.

As we teach, we are all given a program to follow. We all try to adapt it to the time given to us and to our own intellectual development and level of research. My academic experience as a student, then as a teacher, taught me to present theory in a less hermetic way. The theory of literature can be explained through a regular practice of theoretical tools, so as to think about a phenomenon with the aim of building a systematic literary criticism.

Students are asked the following questions:

What does literature mean to you?
Describe your relationship to reading as a child and later.
What is the difference between reading for pleasure and reading for academic purposes in relation to your learning?

Students’ answers show a lack of understanding of what the global meaning of literature is, and how it is necessarily related to theory. They are used to studying only fragments of literary texts through a thematic approach - without any reference to theory.

What is lacking in that traditional way of teaching theory, is learning how to learn about literature and theory at the same time.

Ferdinand De Saussure’s contribution revolutionized linguistics and other disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and literature. All disciplines have been influenced by linguistics. Theoretical interdisciplinary studies opened doors to a reinvention of comparative literature. We finally saw the interrelationship between theoretical concepts coming from various disciplines as a necessity. This explains why this course proposes a text-oriented approach which takes us through philology, rhetoric, Formalism, Structuralism, New Criticism, semiotics and deconstruction, Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism and Feminism.

Most importantly, quoting Frederic Jameson, I stress the necessity of a socio-historical approach: “The force of a work of art is directly proportional to its historicity, that there is indeed no contradiction between our present day appreciation of a work and its concrete historical content.”

(Fredric Jameson, “Criticism in History”, in Weapons of Criticism. Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition, p. 49)

Historicity means that works of art are the product of the deepest tendencies of the period. Their content and form cannot be separated, especially aesthetically speaking, from the context in which they are created (Angenot 1978). In his article, Jameson dealt with various approaches: stylistic analysis, ethical criticism, myth criticism, Freudian approaches and structuralism, to finally show the importance of the relation between History and historicity, ideology, social classes and the function of a given literary work in a given socio-historical context. The historical approach acknowledges the important elements brought from other disciplines at the level of theoretical research (sociology, philosophy, epistemology, historical materialism) and from other currents of thought and methodological perspective (the current of semiotics/linguistics and Freudian Hermeneutics, for instance).

Jameson’s proposition is a comparative study of various theories with a perspective of a totalizing point of view. He shows how theorists have been useful in reaching a certain level of research. The addition of these points of view made him build a new approach to literary texts paving the way to the emergence of a system of characters. He believes that because we are locked in our disciplinary specialization, we come to be unable to see these similarities between views. Within this particular problematic, Marxism has, thus, “the obvious place to reassert its claim to being an interdisciplinary and a universal science” (ibid., p. 38). The understanding of dialectical thought and its evolution from Hegel to Marx compels us “to historicize”.

I combine Jameson's call for a socio-historical approach with the agential theory developed by my mentor, Darko Suvin. He offers to go beyond Georg Lukács’ deepening of “typical characters” (La théorie du roman, 1962), E.M. Forster’s distinction between “round” and “flat” characters (Aspects of the Novel, 1967), Roland Barthes and his “personage-personne” (“Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits”, 1966) and French semiotics' "actants" as it is developed in Greimas’ Structural Semantics, 1966.

The third - and most central - pillar to this course is the call for a feminist theory of literature. Various approaches to the study of woman’s image were developed during the second wave of feminism (1960-1970). Some theorists dealt with the notion of gender without revealing the real problem. Women were always defined through the binary opposition man/woman which defines them par la négative.

Kate Millet and Betty Friedan, following Simone de Beauvoir, struggled against traditional categories of analysis such as “women’s psychology” and “feminine nature”. However, their categories of analysis led them to face the complex hegemonic notion of domination and the difficulty of overcoming it. Other mainstream feminist theorists dealt with women as subject and followed post-structural theories. Today, I argue that it is a necessity to use feminist tools in the study of a literary text. I position this course in echo to radical feminists and queer philosophers who propose an alternative notion of gender which destroys traditional categories and defines women as being their own category (Butler 1990). Their theoretical approach follows the notion of deconstruction developed by Foucault and Derrida, as well as Fanon’s deconstruction of the colonized identity, when he uses the notions of“alienation”,“décolonisation de l’être” as the basis of an ambitious project for men’s liberation in L’An V, published in 1958, and in Les damnés de la terre, published in 1961 (Cherki, 1975). Feminist literary criticism is, thus, necessary. It proposes to use techniques related to the new importance given to gender and male/female relationships: these themes can then show how a literary text reveals male superiority over women.

Assessment Method:

Test: Questions on the lecture to evaluate students' knowledge of literary theory.

Exam: Analysis of literary devices in relation to the novel in order to test their knowledge of theory and practice.

General bibliographical references:

Angenot, Marc. Glossaire pratique de la critique contemporaine, Hurtubise : Montréal (1979)

Bakhtine, Mikhaïl. Esthétique et Théorie du Roman, Gallimard : Paris (1978)

Barthes, Roland. Le plaisir du texte, Éditions du Seuil : Paris (1973)

Benjamin, Walter. The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Knowledge, Pantheon Books : New York (1972)

Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism, Johns Hopkins University Press (1978)

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge: New York (1990)

Chomsky, Noam. American Power and the New Mandarins, Historical and Political Essays, Pantheon Books : New York (1969)

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex, Penguin: New York, 2011.

Duchet, Claude. « L’Espace Imaginaire du Texte et l’Idéologie : Propositions

Théoriques » in Sociocritique, Éditions Fernand Nathan : Paris (1979)

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press (1992, 2nd edition)

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Books: New York (1983)

Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Wordsworth Editions: London (2012)

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, ML: Hopkins University Press (1965)

Gramsci, Antonio. The Prison Notebooks: Selections, International

Publishers: New York (1971)

Gramsci, Antonio. The Modern Prince and Other Writings. International Publishers: New York (1980)

Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Twentieth Century Dialectical Theory of Literature, Princeton University Press (1971)

Saïd, W. Edward. Orientalism. Random House: New York (1979)

Saïd, W. Edward. Criticism Between Culture and System. Harvard University Press: Cambridge (1981)

Suvin, Darko. “Per Una Teoria Dell’ Analisi Agenziali”, in Versus n° 30 (1981): 87-109.

Wolfreys, Julia, Robbins, Ruth and Womack, Kenneth. Key Concepts in Literary Theory, Edinburgh university Press (2002)