The Case for Criticism Why Critical Theory Belongs in the English Literature Curriculum - Article Example

The Case for Criticism Why critical theory belongs in the English Literature curriculum “Why do I have to read this?” It’s the question most ninth grade students ask themselves when presented with a copy of Robinson Crusoe, Death Be Not Proud or Siddhartha. And it’s a fair question, one that most teachers can honestly answer only with some difficulty: The choices in the modern literary canon remain problematic and plagued with controversy. For every classic, there is an equal and opposite non-classic, and to explain to a freshman literature student why he must read, say, Pride and Prejudice instead of some other book is impossible unless one resorts to mumbling about the approved school system reading list. This may seem like a new problem for academia, but in fact, the issue of what books one should read has been hotly debated by critics since the days of Plato. (Plato, you may recall, felt that poets who wrote about anything besides religion and political fluff were deceitful troublemakers.) Indeed, since the birth of literature, there have been questions about what constitutes great literature and what books have literary “staying power” and importance. As R. R. Leavis writes, “It seems to me that in the field of fiction some challenging discriminations are very much called for; the field is so large and offers such insidious temptations to complacent confusions of judgment and critical indolence.” (300) The books on school reading lists, we all know, are both carefully and arbitrarily selected — we may be able to give reasons why one book is included where another is not, but for the most part these are simply explanations and justifications with no clear factual support to back them. But what does this have to do with critical theory? Simply this: Books are not fixed, and if texts cannot be said to be one thing or another, then neither can their meaning. A frustrated thirteen-year-old may have no interest in the plot and characters of Pride and Prejudice and so be helplessly bored by the formalist approach. At the same time, his modern life may afford him no relevant experiences to make a reader response criticism any more interesting. Caught between these two traditional high school evaluations, he will likely read the Cliff Notes, write a bumbling paper with a few buzzwords from in-class lectures and relinquish his still-shiny copy of Pride and Prejudice to the recycling pile with a little sigh of relief. Suppose, though, that he had the opportunity to examine the text in a different way, that he understood that the text was not necessarily a meaning in its own right as an occasion for making meaning. In that case, Pride and Prejudice does not simply have to be the story of five sisters in search of husbands. It can become the story of how money and property shape the cultural and ideological positions of a certain period of British history. Taking the Marxist approach and following the economic concerns reshapes the book: Mr. Bennet’s browbeaten husband is beaten as well by the English legal system, which will leave his family of women penniless. Mr. Darcy’s titular pride comes from a complete lack of involvement in the means of production that support everyday life. Throughout the book, we find possibilities — the abstract — collapsed into the concrete by the economic shape of the novel’s world. When Mr. Collins, for instance, is mentioned, he is a symbol of possibility — the male heir to the Bennet estate, a possible suitor who could maintain the family’s lifestyle through matrimony to one of the Bennet daughters. In fact, though, he is a hanger-on to a greater estate, with no economic strength of his own to draw on, and we are sorry for Charlotte Lucas when she marries him. Money matters in Pride and Prejudice: There is much talk of the specifics of Mr. Bingley’s fortune, of the specific financial Wickham experienced from the Darcys, of the cost of dresses and caps and sweets. Suddenly, the novel is more ominous: A tale of have-nots struggling to make alliances with those in society who have. Some, like Elizabeth and Jane Bennet are successful. Others, like Wickham and Lydia Bennet, are not. The success of others, such as Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins, is debatable. Though Austen’s happy ending suggests that marriage across class lines is possible, the rest of the book — from the very marriage of the Bennet patriarch and matriarch themselves — suggests that happy ending is an illusion only. The facts of the book support a grimmer reality, where the upper class doles out favors and livings to those who know their place (such as Jane Bennet) or who learn it (including Elizabeth Bennet) while punishing those who seek to attain the status to which they were not born. Through this lens, however, the book is entirely altered. It is a different text. But what is the point of this kind of reading? How is it any more relevant than, say, a formalist approach would be? The answer is that it is not more relevant but that it may be more interesting or more reasonable or more useful to a given reader than said formalist approach would be. And for that reason alone, the English literature curriculum should consider its introduction. Consider Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. The novel with its density and symbolism is much less compelling to the thirteen-year-old brain than the movie versions of it, which concentrate on the gruesome narrative rather than the more complicated, introspective text. Suppose, though, that a group of students was told to read the book as though it were a detective story, to look for “clues” in the “coded” text that hinted at a secret rebellious message there. Imagine that the novel is the only means a captured prisoner has of telling her story, asking for help and warning the rest of her comrades to be careful of her captors. Suddenly, the passages of introspection and description are more than something to be skimmed in pursuit of the main storyline; they are sources of knowledge and information in building a case of feminist revolt in the classic monster narrative. In Shelley’s time, to be a woman was to be a second-class citizen, and even early feminists like Mary Shelley sought, whether consciously or unconsciously, to conceal their revolutionary feminism within a socially acceptable form. But revolutions simmered beneath the surface: “Women from Jane Austen and Mary Shelley to Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson produced literary works … whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning.” (Gilbert and Gubar 73) In other words, the novel Frankenstein acts like a cover story for Shelley’s real story, one of the monstrousness and unnaturalness of birth and of society’s unwillingness to tolerate individuals who deviate from social and cultural norms. Feminists, beware. High school students are uniquely positioned to find this kind of meaning in texts because they themselves feel frequently repressed and controlled by the society in which they live. Structuralism also lends a kind of coded meaning to reading. A structuralist reading of Pride and Prejudice, for example, would differ greatly from the Marxist reading above. The structuralist reading would attempt to reconcile Pride and Prejudice with other similar stories and to see how it agreed and differed with existing symbols, characters and meanings to decode its own possible meanings. We might trace Elizabeth Bennet’s character, for instance, through the fairy tale narratives of other young women who ended up married to “princes” through virtue of their own skills and accomplishments and see Pride and Prejudice as a kind of Cinderella story, in which a plucky heroine overcomes obstacles and unfortunate relations to attain the life of her dreams. In doing so, we would also compare Elizabeth Bennet to mythological characters, including Psyche, whose character flaws led to romantic troubles with their perfect mates, requiring mental and/or physical exertion on their part to overcome. By finding patterns that repeat, we can find a meaning of the text. Communication, for instance, is a recurring challenge for the characters in Pride and Prejudice, illuminating not just the challenges of expressing meaning but the specific challenges of expressing meaning across class and gender lines. Stories can be broken down into their contributing myths, and these myths are both clear and universal: Meaning is universal. What changes, from story to story and generation, is the significance of that meaning. Pride and Prejudice must have had a very different meaning for a reader in, say, Victorian London than it does to a reader in a modern freshman English course. The significance of the book may change depending on its historical context, but its meaning is always mythic and always the same. “Criticism is the search for truth, not in its revelation — the quest for the treasure rather than the treasure itself for the treasure can only be absent.” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 121) Theory makes literature accessible in ways that it might not be otherwise. Poststructural theory, for example, is a dream come true for most teenage students: Once they realize that poststructuralism demands that they question and counter every ounce of authorial intention is a text, deconstruction is a method of reading that most ninth-graders can get excited about. Reading a story like Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” for instance, can become a study in impossibility if a poststructural viewpoint is applied. The “meaning” of the story depends on whose viewpoint we take at a given moment: that of the protagonist Dupin, or his narrator, or another character. Depending on whose perspective the story is viewed through, it becomes entirely different: metaphors have different meanings, symbols appear or vanish, clues are hidden or apparent. There is no absolute meaning encoded in the text awaiting the reader’s discovery: rather, there are myriad possible meanings for each character and reader so that meaning is both always possible and always deferred. Analyzing a text in this way opens to door to exploring characters normally relegated to the background: How would A Prayer for Owen Meany look viewed through the eyes of Dan Needham? How would Gone With the Wind be different if it were told from the perspective of India Wilkes? The privilege of the narrator vanishes with poststructural reading, and every story in the text becomes an important one. For students, this freedom to construct and deconstruct the text as long as they can support their argument using the text becomes the ultimately literary playground. This approach encourages them to read closely and carefully, to think about minor incidents, to explore the story as they would explore a new world, cataloging its minutia until an idea of it forms in their minds. As Derrida writes: “If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinity of a field cannot be covered with a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field — that is, language and a finite language — excluded totalization. This field in fact that of freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble.” (96) Poststructuralism affords literature a freedom that few other high school academic disciplines employ, and educators would be foolish not to take advantage of it to bring interest to the literature curriculum. As long as the canon remains arbitrary — and how can it ever be anything else? — critical approaches to literature remain the best way to breathe life into a classroom and excite students about the possibilities of literature. Critical theory may seem off-putting and inaccessible by its nature, but as we have shown, applying it to otherwise occluded texts lends them a clarity and possibility they might not otherwise achieve with reluctant readers. “Criticism is not literature, and the pleasure of criticism is not the pleasure of literature … But experience suggests that the two pleasures go together, and the pleasure of criticism makes literature and its pleasure the more readily accessible.” (Trilling 4) Critical theory lends a needed perspective to the study of literature and allows students to find their own philosophical voice as they explore a work. Indeed, theory transforms the process of reading into the process of discovery, transforming the text into a sort of treasure map where an infinite number of Xs mark an infinite number of meanings. And students may surprise their teachers as well as themselves by what they uncover: “A piece of creative writing, like a daydream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.” (Freud, quoted in Juhl, 178) In fact, the absence of critical theory in many English classes is likely to discourage students from thoroughly exploring the works with which they are presented. Critical theory makes literature relevant, reveals its connections to experiences and meaning and pushes students to genuinely think about the ways in which they see a given text. Students of this age are ripe for examining lenses of belief and meaning, and the application of critical theory in literature classes gives them reasoning and examining skills which will carry over as valuable tools in other areas of study, including history and the sciences. Once they have learned to peruse the world with theoretical eyes, they have opened the door to genuine curiosity and intellectual play. Perhaps most important, though, these theories make otherwise unwieldy texts feel compelling and accessible. Implementing critical theories doesn’t mean banishing formalist or reader response criticism; those ways of reading will always remain significant textual approaches for students of all ages. But introducing critical theory broadens the reach of “classic” literature and encourages students to look at work in different ways, from different angles and with different interests, all of which enhance their reading experience — and perhaps, ultimately, their experiences with literature. WORKS CITED Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. In The Collected Novels of Jane Austen. New York: Random House, 1978. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Of Grammatology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Hirsch, E.D. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Juhl, P.D. Interpretation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Kermode, Frank. The Classic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Leavis, Frank Raymond. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry. New York: New York University Press, 1963. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Collected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Bantam Books. 1968. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Bantam Books, 1977. Trilling, Lionel. Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reader. New York: Random House, 1991. Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” In The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954. Read More