SPIEL: Siegener Periodicum zur empirischen Literaturwissenschaft 16, 1997, 40-44.

LITERATURE AND LITERARY THEORY: THE CHALLENGE AHEAD

 Robert de Beaugrande

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Die zentrale Aufgabe für soziale Diskurse, darunter auch literarische, ist und bleibt die Integration von Theorie und Praxis. Dies ist in der bisherigen Literaturwissenschaft und Literaturtheorie nicht hinreichend reflektiert, und die Lage verschärft sich zusehends.

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1. Perhaps the next millennium will recall our own recent decades as the era when literature and literary studies ceased to be self-sufficient and self-justifying institutions. Probably a convergence of factors was responsible: the public displacement of literature by visual entertainment media, including a lavish filmings of novels and short-stories; the crisis within the arts whose ‘avant-gardes’ had lost their direction and drifted into abstruse self-alienations that repelled or baffled potential audiences; and the challenges against the traditional curriculum on all levels of education.

2. These factors may have also encouraged to the rise of ‘literary theory’ from the 1960s onward. Dissatisfaction had been rising against ‘close reading’ for being ‘closed reading’ in quest of the single ‘correct interpretation’ of a literary work in an equally closed ‘canon’. In theory, this quest was incompatible with the ‘openness’ and ‘aestheticity’ of artistic works (Eco 1968; Schmidt 1971); in practice, it would eventually put the interpreters out of business.

3. The rise of ‘literary theory’ might have been judged an opportunity to explore new ways of reading literature and possibly of teaching it as well. But the subsequent developments, as far as I can reconstruct them from the effusive discourse of the theorists (Beaugrande 1988), followed a more complex and diversified pattern. Emblematic was the discovery of ‘the reader’, the literary participant who had remained implicit and invisible; the ‘literature professionals’ had occupied the role themselves whilst they monumentalised the text and the author.

4. But who was the ‘reader’, and how does ‘reading’ take place? Before the rise of ‘literary theory’, such questions had rarely been posed. The ‘reader’ was a person who ‘read’ the canonical texts while going through an academic programme of literary history and biography, period studies, influence studies, and so on. This training would produce the ‘literature professionals’ whose tacit but consensual ‘professionalism’ would endow their readings with public interest and authority, especially in their role as teachers.

5. In the 1960s, this staid ambience came under pressure when the size and diversity of the student population exploded, and the universities were challenged to ‘modernise’ and ‘rationalise’ their programmes. The standard professional routines of ‘reading the literary canon’ had to be reassessed; and authority would have to be documented by academic publications — whence the famous ‘publish or perish’ syndrome.

6. The quest for single ‘correct interpretation’ of the canonical text sharply contradicted the demand for newer and broader forums of publishable discourses about ‘literature’. ‘Literary theory’ now offered fine opportunities for explicating, critiquing, and transforming our strategies of reading texts both inside and outside the canon. ‘Literature’ would not be a ‘canon’ of authorised texts, but a specifiably ‘literary’ class of creative activities, for which the professionals are highly competent in ways our ‘theories’ would now explain.

7. Still, two ominous questions persisted. If our older was reading and teaching had been misguided, restrictive, and intolerant, why should we be trusted now? And if non-professional readings were also a valid and valuable, why would ours be special? How far such questions influenced the evolution of ‘literary theory’ is hard to say insofar as its studied complexities kept them out of view.

8. Behind the complexity we might discern a few leading strategies. One strategy (e.g. Riffaterre, Iser) has been to idealise both the ‘act of reading’ and the theoretical ‘reader’. Our prior conventions of reading were not so much mistakes, it was implied, as partial approximations of the ideal: insufficiently reflective and not properly conscious of the intricacies and convolutions of reading which would now be accounted for with conceptions from philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and so on. These accounts would duly increase our competence and our authority and bring us closer to the explicit ideal. And our authority would be derived not from the ‘correct interpretation’ but from the ‘leading theory’.

9. A second and closely related strategy has been for the theorist to reoccupy the role of the new ‘reader’, sometimes quietly (e.g. Iser, Jauss) and sometimes noisily (e.g. Fiedler, Bloom), but always purporting to read just the way the ‘theory’ described (or prescribed). With a few exceptions (like Hirsch), the theory was not advocated for being ‘correct’ but for being supported by the personal authority and charisma of the theorist as reader and by the persuasive and ingeniously creative model ‘readings’ offered as demonstrations.

10. A third and more frankly egocentric strategy has been to formulate our accounts of reading in terms inaccessible not just to ordinary readers but to many professional ones too. Arcane terminologies, erudite and unreferenced citations, self-indulgent obscurities, and mystical invocations became fashionable, notably among the theoreticians (e.g. de Man, Hartman, Bloom) whose message was that all reading is necessarily ‘misreading’. The message carried an arresting shock-value for conservative professionals (like Hirsch) whilst comfortably evading serious critiques of past or present ways of reading — all just so many ways of ‘misreading’ whose attempts to be methodical, objective, and systematic were doomed by the ‘free play of the signifier’.

11. The same cheerful evasion handily applied to these new theories themselves. To critique them, you must traverse daunting thickets of obscurity to discover what they actually assert about reading, and whether the theory fits the theorist’s own practices. Moreover, your demonstrations that theory is wrong because, to the best of current knowledge, reading simply doesn’t work that way, or because the theory contradicts its own practices can be ignored if the theories were officially about ‘misreading’ to begin with: being wrong confirms their ironic affirmation and celebration of ‘unreadability’.

12. A fourth and radically different strategy would be to make reading an object of empirical investigation, borrowing upon such fields as sociology and psychology. Understandably, most of the leading proponents of the first three strategies have seen good reasons to disregard such work and keep it out of academic programmes and professional journals, particularly in the U.S. The most obvious reason would be the strongly anti-empirical bias of the traditional ‘humanities’, who have positioned both art at large and their own work inside a defensive opposition against ‘science’. The threadbare arguments about ‘artistic creativity’ being a mystical process that science cannot or must not seek to explain will still be devoutly accepted by professionals who claim to have become experts on that same creativity without scientific training.

13. More specifically, the empirical strategy menaces academic decorum in multiple ways. The investigator is often not a ‘literature professional’ at all nor academically housed in a ‘literature department’, but in sociology or psychology, or in an interdisciplinary institute. Nor does the investigator claim to approximate the ideal reader or to produce authoritative readings of literary texts, but just to be an amateur or admirer of literature whose real professional concern might be ‘discourse processing’ or ‘memory schemata’. In return, the activities of whole groups of real readers get taken very seriously not because they produce authoritative readings but just because their readings are real.

14. The theorists were perhaps most worried about the empirical strategy lending a more ‘scientific’ meaning to the term ‘literary theory’ or ‘theory of literature’. In the other three strategies, the term merely designates some high-level principles of literary communication which are made to sound novel yet plausible — or programmatically implausible — by means of charismatic rhetoric. Idealising ‘reader’ and ‘reading’ releases the theorist from having to show that those principles work, and how. In empirical research, in contrast, high-level principles are expected to be explicitly based upon the state of empirical knowledge about human processes and activities, and in ways that lead to testable hypotheses. Designing tests impels us to identify which factors may prove significant: how readers and reading may differ by social class, level of schooling, profession, and so on. We cannot rely either upon the comfortable uniformity of idealised readers and reading, nor upon the single charismatic theorist as reader.

15. For me at least, the key question remains whether any of these four strategies can provide the ‘theoretical’ critiques of reading that would reliably authorise and guide new and more democratic practices. During my own work as theorist and practitioner during the 1980s, I happened to be in the literature department of an America state university, where I was hired for my work on developmental literacy. As an extension of that work, I undertook to develop methods suitable for a huge clientele of students in ‘required courses’, who presumably differed dramatically from the ‘reader’ in most ‘literary theories’. They were not ‘literature majors’ and had no special interest in literature; some even detested it after their previous school encounters, as I learned through interviews. Since I refused to spend the semester either patronising them or rushing them through an indigestible survey of literary history, poetics, aesthetics, and so on, I had to show them, in understandable and believable terms, why literature is interesting and how they themselves could do interesting activities with it. This challenge taught me a great deal, and would be a healthy experience for ‘literary theorists’.

16. I saw the ‘openness’ of literary texts as a prime factor for encouraging creative responses whose value my students could readily see. To ensure they felt included, we always started with contemporary texts, including rock songs by Pink Floyd or U-2, rather than canonical ‘high literature’. My own readings were offered as user-friendly walk-throughs of what they would soon be able to do on their own.

17. My practical results, on which I have made several reports (Beaugrande 1985, 1987, 1989), fully confirmed my hypothesis that ordinary reading by non-professionals, though idiosyncratic from a historical or technical point of view, can be intensely interesting. Indeed, I attained a theory-driven yet empirical definition of ‘interesting’ for a practical criterion of evaluation which the students could readily understand, and which superseded the traditional but inappropriate standards of correctness and authorisation. A student’s interpretation is ‘interesting’ in proportion to how much creativity and energy were invested in constructing and interconnecting rich meanings and associations, including ones making multiple uses of the ‘same’ elements or images. Such an interpretation exploits the ‘openness’ of the literary text whilst demonstrating intensely personal responses, about which the student rather than the teacher or the textbook is clearly the chief authority.

18. Although my professorial chair in a European university no longer involves literary studies, I remain convinced that our main challenge for the future is to integrate inclusive theory with inclusive practice in all relevant discourse domains at a time when the ‘modernisation’ and ‘rationalisation’ of society at large and education in particular are sustaining inclusive theories (e.g. ‘democracy’, ‘free market’) with exclusive practices (e.g. curtailment of social and professional benefits) (Beaugrande 1997). Discourse is by nature inclusive, but is being enlisted against the grain in subtle and complex ways to disempower and silence ordinary citizens and minority groups.

19. The future of literature and ‘literary studies’ too hangs upon whether they can make an convincing transition from exclusive to inclusive. Multicultural and alternative programmes are a hopeful step, but are under constant and ferocious attack by a right-wing coalition of ‘conservative’ political groups who would allow literature only as a medium for sustaining mainstream culture, and who have placed intellectuals and artists on their long list of public enemies and betrayers of ‘human values’ (cf. Fish 1994). While academic and social progress since the 1960s is now being rolled back toward radical exclusion, models and strategies for inclusive discourse must be our top priority in literature and discourse at large.

References

Beaugrande, R. de 1985. Poetry and the ordinary reader: A study in literary response. In: Empirical Studies in the Arts 3: 1-21.

Beaugrande, R. de 1987. The naive reader: Anarchy or self-reliance? In: Empirical Studies in the Arts 5/2: 145-170.

Beaugrande, R. de 1988. Critical discourse. Norwood, NJ: Ablex

Beaugrande, R. de 1989. Naive readers and creative response. In: SPIEL 8/2: 233-254.

Beaugrande, R. de 1997. New foundations for a science of text and discourse. Greenwich, CT: Ablex.

Eco, U. 1968. L’opera aperta. Milano: Bompiani.

Fish, S.E. 1994. There is no such thing as free speech. Oxford: OUP.

Schmidt, S.J. 1971. Ästhetizität. Munich: Bayrischer Schulbergverlag.