Literary Criticism

This semester was my first real introduction into the world of literary criticism. Of course I had encountered literary criticism before. In fact, anybody reading this who went through high school in the U.S.A. probably had to do some sort of rudimentary literary criticism. Maybe you had to read a book like The Scarlet Letter or The Lord of the Flies and write an essay about symbolism. Maybe your paper’s outline sounded like this: “The conch represented order. Jack represented evil. Ralph represented good. Piggy represented logic.” And there was a lot of “nevertheless” and “moreover” stuff going on, just to make the paper sound smart, and you probably did not write in first person. Maybe you even wrote a horrid sentence like, “One needs only to look further into the real meaning of the conch for one to realize that the conch itself is not literally a conch but is a symbol for the author’s idea of order.”

But this semester in ENG 500: Graduate Literary Studies, I learned about a lot of different types of literary theories. Literary theories are lenses through which you look at a text. Or in some cases, a literary theory just seems to concentrate on one thing more than another. Like, feminist literary critics look for feminist stuff in a text, Marxist critics look at power relations and economic concerns in a text, and post-colonial critics look at the effects of colonization (the spreading of the British Empire, the cultural American stuff being exported to other countries, etc.) in a text.

I wanted to write a mock essay proposing a new kind of literary criticism that I invented, Unicornism, in which I look for unicorns in texts where it looks like there are no unicorns. But if the serious unicornist scholar looks hard enough, there’s bound to be unicorns, or at least unicorn-ish undertones or unicornist imagery, in say, I don’t know, King Lear, the Raven, and even in those little jingles little girls sing when they play hopscotch. I started the mock essay a while back and it was funny for a paragraph or two, but then I got bored, so I quit.

Anyway, for my essay that I put in my last blog post, I chose a psychoanalytic perspective, and so was concerned with stuff like the subconscious and the conscious mind and the Oedipal complex and wacko-Freudian stuff like that.

My English 500 class used the second edition of the textbook Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, by Peter Barry. That book provided a quick survey of several different theoretical platforms that “professional” literary critics use. (I put professional in quotation marks because it’s unclear what professional really means in the case of literary critics. I mean, who pays somebody to sit around and read books and write scholarly articles about literature?) The book covers liberal humanism, structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction, postmodernism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism, lesbian/gay criticism, Marxist criticism, New historicism and cultural materialism, postcolonial criticism, stylistics, narratology, and ecocriticism.

That list of theories seems daunting, I know. It still seems daunting to me after I took a class on it. But what’s important to realize is that there are mountains and mountains of academic journals filled with mountains and mountains of articles on literary criticism.

Where do all those journals come from? Who writes them? Who subscribes to them?

Well, imagine all the colleges in the world. Probably most of those colleges have an English or a literature department. And probably most of those English or literature departments have faculty members trying to get tenure or trying to get a better job somewhere else. One way to get tenure or to secure a different, better job at a University is to get published in an academic journal. So there’s a ga-zillion college professors who try to get published in these things.

Of course, I’m sure that for the most part they really care about what they’re writing about, and I’m sure the subscribers to the academic journals also really do care about the quality of the articles, somewhat… but… sometimes it’s hard for me to care about all those different theories and all those different literary interpretations. Who cares about the feminist undertones in some novel you’ve never heard of? Why is literary criticism important, or is it important?

Literary theories and those who practice them seem worlds away from guys like Joe Six-pack and Joe the Plumber, you know what I mean? It’s like literary critics go off in their own little world and talk about stuff that has virtually no real-world application.

That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing to talk about books in a scholarly way, though. And that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing to set up mental structures like feminist criticism or deconstruction so that interested scholars can agree on terms and ideas, and so that interested scholars can more easily communicate. Joe Six-pack’s a great guy for sure, but, he’s just not familiar with the world of literary criticism, so he can’t communicate with literary critics about literary criticism stuff.

I’ve often thought that I enjoy reading literature much more than I enjoy literary criticism. Have you ever tried reading literary criticism? It’s a lot like my last blog post, only denser, duller, and longer.

But what I really wanted to talk about in this blog post was the first type of literary criticism covered by Peter Barry, liberal humanism. See, before we’re taught in school that things in novels represent things, we have natural reactions to the books that we read. You know, we relate to certain characters; we hope that one character will die or just go away, and we hope that two particular characters will fall in love. And a lot of times after we read a book, we think, (or at least I think) what was the moral, or the main thrust, of that book? What lesson did I learn? Am I in some way enriched after reading that book? This “natural reaction,” generally speaking, is at the heart of liberal humanism.

Barry says that liberal humanism is sort of literary theory before literary theory came around, if that makes sense. He says that if you claim to practice literary criticism, but don’t know which flavor of literary criticism you subscribe to (New Historicism, postmodern, etc.) then you are a liberal humanist literary critic.

Peter Barry lays out “Ten Tenets of Liberal Humanism,” in his book on pages 16 – 20. One of my favorites is # 1 “The first thing, naturally, is an attitude to literature itself; good literature is of timeless significance; it somehow transcends the limitations and peculiarities of the age it was written in, and thereby speaks to what is constant in human nature.” Mmmm, that sounds good. I like that.

Another good tenet is # 6:

“The purpose of literature is essentially the enhancement of life and the propagation of humane values; but not in a programmatic way: if literature, and criticism, become overtly and directly political they necessarily tend towards propaganda. And as Keats said, ‘we distrust literature which has a palpable design upon us,’ that is, literature which too obviously wants to convert us or influence our views.” (I think this one applies to novels and poetry and stuff, but not to the Scriptures. The Scriptures have a very clear message, and the people who write them are unashamedly trying to convert us.)

I think liberal humanism appeals to me more than any other literary theory because I am a Mormon. I believe that we are all spirit children of a Heavenly Father, who loves us, and so we are all spirit brothers and sisters. I believe that everyone born on this earth has the Spirit of Christ shining in him or her. I believe in an absolute, objective reality. I believe that “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my [God’s] ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).

In contrast to having faith in God and in an ordered universe, some literary criticism nearly requires the literary critic to believe in a “decentered universe,” (Barry 62) a universe with no absolutes. A lot of these theories say that basically there is no such thing as reality, there is only language. Nietzsche, for example, said somewhere, “there are no facts, only interpretations.” Operating off of a relativist platform such as this, how can you ever talk about a fixed “human nature” or “morality”?

Do you see why literary theory doesn’t play nicely with my religious convictions? Do you see why I had a little bit of a tough time in ENG 500, being presented with all these secular types of literary criticism? Here’s an example of why some of the literary theory stuff conflicts with my views: On the first page on the chapter on post-structuralism, Barry is comparing structuralism to post-structuralism. He writes:

“…one of structuralism’s characteristic views is the notion that language doesn’t just reflect or record the world: rather, it shapes it, so that how we see is what we see. The post-structuralist maintains that the consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty, since we can have no access to any fixed landmark which is beyond linguistic processing, and hence we have no certain standard by which to measure anything” (Barry 61).

That’s a little bit like the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and it’s a little bit like my salt and pepper anecdote, that I put in a previous blog post, you know, the idea that language doesn’t merely reflect reality, but that language shapes reality. And because everybody speaks a different language and because everybody has his or her own idiolect, there is no fixed reality. In other words, everybody creates their own reality with the language they use.

Moving on a little bit, but sort of staying on the same subject a little bit, and rambling a little bit, I was talking with a friend the other day from my Graduate Literary Studies class. He was talking about how with language, you could defend pretty much any thesis and get an A on the paper. It’s just like Ed White wrote in his My five paragraph theme- theme. “Does God exist? Well, you can say yes and give three reasons or no and give three different reasons. It doesn’t really matter. You’re sure to get a good grade whatever you pick to put into the formula.”

Rhetoric is so powerful. It’s funny, you know we say that you can “twist the truth” by the words you use. But really you can never really “twist the Truth,” with a capitol T. The Truth is unchangeable. No matter what we say about it, no matter what words we use to describe it, the Truth is True forever.

Godless literary critics, godless philosophers, and godless scientists, are basically building a modern Tower of Babel. They are trusting in their own intellect and talents and strength to get to… I was going to say “Heaven” but maybe I should say “Mental Utopia” or “Enlightenment” or “Ultimate Awareness.”

Maybe you think that even though some of the literary theoretical platforms don’t set well with me, I could just play the game. You know, I could set aside my beliefs and practice post-structuralism or post modernism or something like that. I agree that I could do that for a little bit, just for the sake of the class, but why would I ever choose to do it outside of class? When I have a yummy steak with sautéed mushrooms and a big fluffy roll on a warm plate before me, why would I choose to eat oatmeal?

I am not advocating that Mormons or people of faith retreat from the world and all attend Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah or anything like that. I’m not saying that we ought to refuse to participate in anything secular or not totally in line with our religion and morals. After all, the thirteenth LDS Article of Faith says, “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.” But if we’ve looked into something a little bit, like post-structuralism or godless literary criticism, and seen that it is empty, why should we continue practicing it?