We began class by talking about what literature is, and how you know a piece of literature, as distinct from any other kind of writing. We then talked about what literature does, why one reads it, what one gets out of it; I made a list on the board of all the responses, and then began to talk about how "literature" moved from being something one read for pleasure to an academic field of study or type of knowledge.

Literary study began in Britain in 1840s, with the idea that the study of literature would "emancipate us from the notions and habits" of our own age, connecting us instead with what is "fixed and enduring"--the idea here is that literature holds timeless universal human truths (and hence can be read without regard to historical context of its production, and without regard to particular historical moment in which we read it and make meaning out of it).

The idea behind literary study was to secure middle-class values, to transmit them to all classes (working class as well as aristocracy) so that those values would indeed become universal.

The problem with studying lit at the university level initially was problem of defining HOW one studies lit. If the study of literature develops taste, educates sympathies, enlarges the mind, makes one a better human--how are those things measured? How can they be studied and assessed? At the end of the nineteenth century, in both England and America, as academics began to push for university courses in English and American literature, these questions arose. How could the study of literature be defined and carried out in a manner that was disciplined and objective enough to give it status as an academic pursuit (and not just "chatter about Shelley," as one critic put it--or as statements about what one likes or doesn't like in lit.)

This debate led, not only to the development of the first English departments, but to the development of the first types of literary theory, i.e., theories about how literature worked, what it did, and how it ought to be read and studied.`

There are two main tracks in literary theory. One begins with I.A. Richards' notion of "practical criticism," which we might call "close reading." This theory insisted that the best, and indeed the only, way to study literature was to study the text itself in close detail, and to disregard anything outside the text itself, including the author's biography, the historical context in which the work appeared, how it related to other works both before, during, and after its appearance, and how critics and readers responded to the text. In short, this branch of criticism theorized the literary text as an isolated object, something to be studied in and of itself alone. This is the theory that says what literature students ought to do is read the words on the page, and nothing else.

The second track in literary theory looks at the text as a key to understanding questions and ideas beyond the text itself. (This tradition is traced through Phillip Sidney, Wordsworth, and Henry James, among others). Rather than centering on the text alone, this track asks "big picture" questions: How are literary texts structured? How are they different from non-literary texts (if indeed they are)? How do literary texts affect audiences/readers (i.e. what does literature DO to you)? Is there such a thing as a specifically "literary" language, and if so, what is it like? How does literature relate to other aspects of a culture, such as politics, or gender relations, or philosophy, or economics? Theorists in this track use the literary text as a kind of springboard to ask questions that are not solely concerned with "the words on the page."

Current literary theory comes from both tracks. We begin by acknowledging that "the words on the page" are the basis for any analysis of any piece of literature--the raw material from which any argument or ideas must necessarily come. But the analysis rarely stops with close reading; that close reading shows us something, not only about the construction of the text, but about the author, the reader, the social contexts of both, and about the methods of interpretation available to authors and readers.

Both tracks, up until about the late 1960s, shared certain fundamental assumptions about what literature was, how it worked, how we read it, and why reading literature was important. We can sum up these assumptions in ten major points.

Liberal humanism started to lose its credibility in the late 1960s. What happened in the 1960s is pretty complicated, in terms of literary and social history. In a nutshell, literary critics responded to the social and political questions arising about race, gender, class, sexuality (etc.) by asking whether these timeless universal human truths found in lit. really were timeless and universal, or whether they weren't just as bound to race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture as everything else in the world. In other words, they started to ask questions like, is Shakespeare really "universal," or did he write as a white male in the 16th century? And if so, how did we come to read Shakespeare as "classic" and "timeless"?

Not everything prior to the 1960s fell under the heading of "humanism," however. In fact, many writers throughout the 20th century have questioned one or more of the basic assumptions of humanism, as have several schools of criticism and theory. Marxist criticism and psychoanalytic, for example, which pay attention to how social class and sexuality (respectively) function in producing literature, authors, readers, and particular kinds of interpretations, have challenged humanist principles consistently. What changed in the 1960s was that humanism became labeled as such, as a particular perspective or kind of theory of literature, rather than simply "the truth" about literature and how one approaches it.

The theory "boom" that occurred in the 1970s threw all of the humanist assumptions into question. The theories we'll be looking at this semester will strike you as alien and unfamiliar precisely because they throw out all the familiar ways we've learned to think about literature and about ourselves.

Just to start with: the theories we'll be reading have certain ideas in common. They include

Don't worry too if you dislike all the ideas I've just gone over. Some people would point to the decline of the humanist perspective, and the rise of the modern theoretical perspective (with its insistence on relativism, ambiguity, multiplicity, etc.) as EXACTLY what's wrong with the world today. (If only we could return to the old-fashioned values, and believe in absolute truth, value, and permanence, they say, everything would be or at least a lot better than it is now). That's one of the questions we'll be looking at as we study these anti-humanist theorists this semester.