|
in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: M IT Press, i960), 352. For a
discussion of theory in this structuralist moment see Jonathan Culler, Structuralist
Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study o f Literature (Ithaca, NY; Cornell
University Press, 1974).
2. Jakobson, “Closing Statement,” 358.
3. Ibid., 357.
distinctiveness o f literature was central to theory in those early years, but
it hasn t been the focus o f theoretical activity for some time. This is not, I
should add, because we answered the question o f the nature o f literature.
Neither o f the principal lines o f thought led to an answer that resolved the
question. The first approach was to treat literature as a special kind of lan
guage, but each definition o f literariness led not to a satisfactory account
of literature but to an often extremely productive identification o f literari
ness in other cultural phenomena— from historical narratives and Freud
ian case histories to advertising slogans. The alternative approach was to
posit that literature was not a special kind o f language but language treated
in special ways. But despite valiant efforts by Stanley Fish, who sought to
show, for instance, that a list o f names of linguists written on the black
board could be read as a religious lyric, this never proved very satisfactory
either.^
There are two morals here. First, just as meaning is both a textual fact
and an intentional act and cannot be adequately theorized from either one
o f these points o f view alone or through a synthesis o f the two,^ so, in the
case o f literature, we must shift back and forth between the two perspec
tives, neither o f which successfully incorporates the other to become the
comprehensive framework; we can think o f literary works as language with
particular properties or features, and we can think of them as language
framed in particular ways, but any account o f particular properties or of
perceptual framing leads us to shift back ultimately into the other mode.
The qualities o f literature, it seems, can’t be reduced either to objective
properties or to consequences o f ways o f framing language.
The second moral, I think, is that questions about the nature o f lit
erariness or o f literature were not, in fact, attempts to discover criteria by
4. Stanley Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” in Ls
There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 322-
37. For general discussions of the problem of literariness see Terry Eagleton, Lit
erary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983),
1-12; Jonathan Culler, “La littérarité,” in Théorie littéraire, ed. Marc Angenot,
Jean Bessière, Douwe Fokkema, and Eva Kushner (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1989), 31-43; and Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduc
tion (Oxford, UK; Oxford University Press, 1997), 18-42.
5. See William Ray, Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruc
tion (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1984), 2.
The Literary in Theory
25
2
б
T H E O R Y
which we could distinguish literary from nonliterary works and sort them
into the right categories. On the contrary, attempts to answer these ques
tions always functioned primarily to direct attention to certain aspects of
literature. By saying what literature is, theorists promote the critical meth
ods they deem most pertinent and dismiss those that neglect what are
claimed to be the most basic and distinctive aspects o f literature— whether
literature is conceived as the foregrounding o f language, or as the integra
tion o f linguistic levels, or as intertextual construction. To ask “what is lit
erature?” is in effect aw ay o f arguing about how literature should be stud
ied. I f literature is highly patterned language, for instance, then to study
it is to look at the patterns, not to focus on the authorial psyche it might
express or the social formation it might reflect. Investigations o f the nature
o f literature seem to have functioned, above all, as moves in arguments
about critical method.
One o f the few exceptions in the United States to the recent neglect
o f theory o f literature has been a book by Steven Кларр, Literary Interest:
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: | 
