ACL 1001 |
Lecture 2 by Ian Syson |
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This lecture will trace the rise of the study of Literature in Britain and beyond, paying particular attention to the work of F.R. Leavis. It will also focus on ways of defining and reading contemporary fiction. Terms
In this unit, we read literature published after 1970. In many courses taught at university level, introductory units look at texts published much earlier, often in a particular historical period.
Typically students read those writers deemed to be the greats of these eras. When taken as a whole, these writers and their works are sometimes referred to as the canon of English literature, the great works. The �literary canon' is a collection of literature deemed to be �good' based on particular societal values. In this unit w e think about the notion of a literary canon and the types of texts included in it. The literature taught in this unit challenges �the canon'. Terry Eagleton points out that
So why was the �canon' constructed? English literature as a discipline has its roots in the great changes of the 19 th century:
Matthew Arnold wrote in � Dover Beach '
Arnold was a school teacher and inspector who observed the collapse of religion and advocated its replacement by literature. If religion was failing us as a moral guide then literature could be its replacement. In Culture and Anarchy he argued that literature provided us with the �best that has been thought and said� and that its reading could � make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light�. At this stage (c.1870) Arnold had a difficult job because English literature was not seen to be a suitable object of study in universities. He also had some conceptual problems because history has shown us that people who have read literature do not necessarily become decent people because of it. F.R. Leavis
Across the Atlantic a related school of criticism was developing: the New Criticism
It was a school that seemed less concerned with the moral seriousness that Leavis propounded and more with the idea of aesthetic beauty. The business of critical reading then was to read closely the words on the page and understand that everything else was unimportant
Between 1920 and 1960 these two schools tended to dominate literary criticism. Another social upheaval in the 1960s in which marginalised groups started to agitate for social change.
All began to assert their existence and identity as against the anglo-masculine norm. So too within literary studies: The canon was, not surprisingly, dominated by texts written by white anglo-celtic men from England , Ireland and America and it was felt that the rules of inclusion into the canon were also effectively rules of exclusion for others. New ways of thinking about literature emerged in this time, ways that broke down the closed and insular ideas of Leavisism and the New Criticism. It also involved the rise of what became know as literary theory, ways of breaking down the old assumptions and analysing them and often rejecting them. Perhaps one of the main assumptions to be rejected was the idea of the text having a single and central meaning. Instead the notion of Culturally Activated Readers became important
Theory What is Theory? Jonathan Culler defines �theory' in four ways:
Culler also asks What is literature; what is theory the theory of?
fiction Fiction is, superficially, an easy term to define. Simply it is
Yet each of these definitions is not equivalent with the others. Just because something is not a fact does not mean it is untrue. Take the statement �The world would be a better place if everybody learned to be less selfish and became more sharing�. Is this a fact or not? It doesn't really make sense to see it in these terms. While it might be an imagined fact, is it also an invented one? Did I really think it up all on my own? Arguably the statement is true. In a sense it is both a made up statement and a true statement. And this is a tempting definition of fiction: something that is both made up (in the sense that it never happened) and true (in the sense that it is true to something: imagination; itself, the rules of fiction; life). The word fiction comes from a root which means to fashion or form
And we have to be aware of both sides of the word. Contemporary Fiction Drawing all these threads together then, we can say that contemporary fiction relates to:
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