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the term) as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. The last two indeed still inspire the more informal investigations into literary tradition and reception that preceded the more "scientific" methods known as Textrezeptionstheorie, which is discussed below. The almost closed world of classical culture and classical texts is also spared the intellectual agonizing about what is, or should be counted as, "literature" or how far literature can be separated from culture in general. For all practical purposes, our données exclude such options, which is not to deny the relevance of analogous questions posed by modern critical theorists about canonicity. |
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Instead of looking at the underlying philosophical, linguistic or sociological bases of these critical theories and methods, it may be more helpful for our present purposes initially to examine their manifest, if sometimes overlapping, areas of interest, since it is generally accepted that literary critics and literary theorists tend to have at least four discernible, although not always clearly delimited, focuses: the author, the work, the reality or universe to which it relates (including of course its economic and historical dimensions), and the audience or readership.18 |
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Focus on the first concentrates on the genesis of the literary work, the nature of inspiration, the poet's voice, the relation of the individual talent to the literary tradition or collective archetypes, to the singer's or writer's racial and historical context, and even the role in artistic creation of unconscious wishes and fantasies. The second invites considerations of meaning, structure, language, and style, of the interrelation of theme and content, of genre and other modes of analysis. Then the theorist may turn to the relation of the work to the real world, past and present, or even to some spiritual, moral or aesthetic universe. Finally, in the examination of the moral, aesthetic and psychological affects of literature, theoretical questions arise about the nature of audience response; the constitution of meaning and evaluation; the establishment of critical canons; and the justification of literature in terms of pleasure, morality, utility, and education. These often entail broader issues of social control and hierarchical power, literary prescription, pornography, and moral or political censorship. |
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In contemporary critical theory, the first focus has become almost limited to psychoanalytical and phenomenological criticism, since biographical enquiries had been sternly excluded by the New Critics and rendered meaningless by structuralist and post-structuralist theory. The Romantic view that poetry was the language of feeling and that the temperament and morality of the poet was to be discovered, indirectly expressed, in the work was easily transmuted into a Freudian view that the important elements in a work of fiction are the elements of the author's personality or his unconscious wishes or conflicts. Alternatively, for the phenomenological |
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18 Abrams (1989) 3 uses the terms "expressive," "objective," "mimetic," and "pragmatic" for his discussion of these four areas. |
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