feminist criticism A development and movement in critical theory and in the evaluation of literature which was well under way by the late 1960s and which has burgeoned steadily since. It is an attempt to describe and interpret (and reinterpret) women's experience as depicted in various kinds of literature — especially the novel (q.v.); and, to a lesser extent, poetry and drama.
It questions the long-standing, dominant, male, phallocentric ideologies (which add up to a kind of male conspiracy), patriarchal attitudes and male interpretations in literature (and critical evaluation of literature). It attacks male notions of value in literature - by offering critiques of male authors and representations of men in literature and also by privileging women writers. In addition it challenges traditional and accepted male ideas about the nature of women and about how women feel, act and think, or are supposed to feel, act and think, and how in general they respond to life and living. It thus questions numerous prejudices and assumptions about women made by male writers, not least any tendency to cast women in stock character (q.v.) roles.
The inquiry (or discourse, q.v.) has posed a number of questions. For example, the possibility or likelihood of ecriture feminine {q.v.): writing that is essentially, characteristically, feminine or female in language and style. And, if such a thing exists, whether or not it is a fruitful idea to make distinctions between male and female writing; whether or not the making of such distinctions would merely result in 'sexual polarization'.
There is debate in feminism itself about how productive are: (a) the notion of an essential difference expressed in writing — a kind of separatism; (b) a radical desire to recognize that male representations of women are as important as women's writing, and also to recognize that the notion of an ecriture feminine surrenders to a traditional marginalization of women's voices.
Here perhaps one may amplify to make a crude but serviceable distinction between the 'essentialists* and the 'relativists'. The essentialist position holds the view that there is a fundamental distinction (not based on biological determinism so much as social and economic factors and their psychological consequences) between the way women and men think and write - to such a degree that there is such a thing as ecriture feminine: that is, a way that women have of expressing themselves totally opposed to the representative aspects of male language and discourse. This position is associated with French feminists. The relativist position - broadly associated with Anglo-American critics - is that the analysis of the representation of men and women by male and female authors is important. No fundamental difference separates men and women's writing except the way male critics and authors have undervalued the latter.
Formalism» Russian A literary theory which developed in Russia in the early 1920s. The Russian Formalists were primarily interested in the way that literary texts achieve their effects and in establishing a scientific basis for. the study of literature. In their early work, human content in literature (e.g. emotions, ideas, actions, 'reality' in general) did not possess, for them, any significance in defining what was specifically 'literary' about a text. Indeed, the Formalists collapse the distinction betwee'n form and content. And they, regard the . writer as a kind of cipher merely reworking available literary devices and conventions. The writer is of negligible importance. All the emphasis is on the 'literariness' (q.v.) of the formal devices of a text. OPOJAZ went so far as to suggest that there are not poets or literary .figures: there is just poetry and literature. Viktor Shklovsky (1893—?) summarizes the attitude in his definition of literature as 'the sum total of all the stylistic devices employed in it'.
The Formalists also developed a theory of narrative, making a distinction between plot and story. Syuzhet ('the plot') refers to-the order and manner in ,which events are actually presented in the narrative, while fabula: ('the story') refers to the chronological sequence of events.
Boris Tomashevsky, another of the Formalists, used the term 'motif' (q.v.) to denote the smallest unit of plot and distinguished between 'bound' and 'free' motifs. The 'bound* motif is one which the story absolutely requires, while the 'free' is inessential.
The concept of 'motif' is clearly linked to 'motive' and thus to 'motivation'. Formalists tended to regard a poem's content as subordinate to its formal devices. This dependence on external 'non-literary' assumptions was called 'motivation'. Shklovsky defined the motivation of a text as the extent to which it was dependent on 'non-literary' assumptions.
four levels of meaning The origins of the four levels of meaning are not certain, but an awareness of them is manifest in the Middle Ages. It was Dante who explained most clearly (in the Epistle to his patron Can Grande della Scala) what they consisted of. He was introducing the matter of the Divina Commedia and he distinguished: (a) the literal or historical meaning; (b) the moral meaning; (c) the allegorical meaning; (d) the anagogical. Orwell's Animal Farm (1945)
Freudian criticism/psychoanalytic criticism Broadly speaking, so-called Freudian criticism or classical psychoanalytic criticism — which is often speculative - is concerned with the quest for and. discovery of (and the subsequent analysis of) connections between the artists (creators, artificers) themselves and what they actually create (novels, poems, paintings, sculpture, buildings, music, etc.). As far as literature is concerned it analyses characters 'invented' by authors, the language they use and what is known as 'Freudian imagery'. Thus, in the Freudian method a literary character is treated as if a living human being; whereas, for example, in the method of Jacques Lacan literature is seen as a 'symptom' of the writer.
Marxist criticism Karl Marx (1818-83) an(^ Friedrich Engels (1820-95) were primarily concerned with economic, political and philosophical issues and worked out explanations of the capitalist theory and mode of production.
Much earlier Marxist criticism has been devoted to a reconstruction of the past on the basis of historical evidence in order to find out to what extent a text (say, a novel) is a truthful and accurate representation of social reality at any. given time.
The concept of 'socialist realism' {q.v.) marked an important advance in the development of Marxist and, ipso facto. Communist views.on literature—.and art in general. Basically, socialist realism required a v/riter (or any artist) to be committed to the working-class cause of the Party. And it required that literature should be 'progressive* and should display a progressive outlook on society. This necessitated forms of optimism and realism. Moreover, ^-doctrine demanded that literature should be accessible to the masses. This was particularly true of the novel.
A key figure is the first major Marxist critic, namely the Hungarian Georg Lukacs (1885-1971). He developed the critical theory of 'reflection', seeing literary works as reflections of a kind of system that was gradually unfolding. In his.view, the novel, for instance (and he had much to say about this genre) revealed or ought to reveal underlying patterns in the social order and provide a sense of the wholeness of existence with all its inherent contradictions,. tensions and conflicts.
The principal theorist of Marxist criticism in Britain is Terry Eagleton, who has developed various views of Althusser and Macherey and suggests that a basic problem is to make clear the relationship between an ideology (e.g. Marxism) and literature. In his view texts do not reflect reality but influence an ideology to produce the effect or impression of reality. By ideology he does not necessarily mean political or Marxist ideology but all systems and theories of representation which help to make up a picture of a person's experience.
New Criticism
The New Critics advocated 'close reading' and detailed textual analysis of poetry rather than an interest in the mind and personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications. The application of semantics to this criticism was also important
structuralism
Broadly speaking it is concerned with 'language' in a most general sense: not just the language of utterance in speech and writing. It is concerned with signs and thus with signification. Structuralist theory considers all conventions and codes of communication; for example, all forms of signal (smoke, fire, traffic lights, Morse, flags, gesture), body language, clothes, artefacts, status symbols and so on. In theory, at any rate, it is to do with any or all of the means by which human beings convey information to each other: from a railway timetable to a thumbs-up sign; from a PR brochure to a siren.
The biologist's and zoologist's study of animal, insect, fish and bird behaviour, for instance, is equally concerned with 'language'1 signs and signification (zoosemiotics). In the non-human order communication- is astonishingly refined and complex, not least through scent. For example, the female silk moth (Bombyx mori) secretes a chemical substance (a pheromone) into the air whose scent is so alluring that it can attract a male moth over a distance of half a mile; and the secretion weighs but the thousandth part of a gram. Indeed, even the antennae of a disembodied male, monitored by electrodes, will respond to a mere molecule of Bombykol.
Everything, then, in the theory of structuralism, is the product of a system of signification or code (q.v.). The relationships between the elements of the code give it signification. Codes are arbitrary (all signs are arbitrary) and without them we cannot apprehend reality.
As far as literature and literary criticism are concerned, structuralism challenges the long-standing belief that a work of literature (or any kind of literary text) reflects a given reality; a literary text is, rather, constituted of other conventions and texts.
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