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Introduction:
Critical Continuity and Contemporary Innovation |
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In recent decades the study and teaching of literature in Europe and the Americas have been radically influenced by modern critical theory in its various forms. Although the influence and the leading exponents of these various theories and approaches have been most noticeable in the study of modern literatures and culture, there has also been a perceptible impact of these theories in the study of Greco-Roman literature and, more broadly, in the examination of the mythologies, culture and mentalité, as far as that can be reconstructed, of Greece and Rome. |
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The rubrics attached to this group of theories are not always precise, and individual practitioners will often deny the applicability of such rubrics to their own work. These theories moreover often represent specific focuses of interest in literary phenomena, methods of approach to literary works, or even ideological perspectives on culture in general (including literature) rather than mutually exclusive conceptual systems. Nor is their prime concern always with literature, or even art in the broad sense. The situation therefore bears little resemblance to the conflict in evolutionary theory between Darwinism and Creationism or, in astrophysics, between the theory of the "Big Bang" and the Continuous Creation of Matter. Such terms as "New Criticism," (sometimes prefaced by the dismissive adjectives "old'' or "aging"), Structuralism and its continuation (or reactive response), Deconstructionism,1 are not to be put in the same logical category as Reader-Response Theory in its various forms such as Rezeptionsästhetik, although there may be theoretical connections between them. Semiotics is not an alternative to Poetics or Narratology, since it subsumes them. Hermeneutics, |
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1 It is not always remembered that the term "deconstruction" came into being in the context of Structuralism. It was taken from a sentence of Derrida's discussing the achievements of Structuralism in which he was merely questioning the epistemological basis of that general theory and the principles it used and calling for a re-examination of some of its polarities, premisses, and conclusions. This not altogether happy term seemed to catch on as applied to a certain group of critics at Yale: Derrida himself, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller; Harold Bloom would probably reject the description: see Davis and Schleifer (1985) viii, Lehman (1991) 24. Since then it seems to have attached itself to other "French" theorists or critics such as Tzvetan Todorov and Michel Riffaterre, and even (to his dismay) to the late Michel Foucault. |
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