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Literature is a form of human
expression. But not everything expressed in words--even when organized and
written down--is counted as literature. Those writings that are primarily
informative--technical, scholarly, journalistic--would be excluded from the rank
of literature by most, though not all, critics. Certain forms of writing,
however, are universally regarded as belonging to literature as an art.
Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if they possess
something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of
artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not
even pursue it to attain it. On the contrary, a scientific exposition might be
of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at all.
The purest (or, at least, the most
intense) literary form is the lyric
poem, and after it comes elegiac, epic, dramatic, narrative, and expository
verse. Most theories of literary criticism base themselves on an analysis of poetry,
because the aesthetic problems of literature are there presented in their
simplest and purest form. Poetry that fails as literature is not called poetry
at all but verse. Many novels--certainly
all the world's great novels--are literature, but there are thousands that are
not so considered. Most great dramas are considered literature (although the
Chinese, possessors of one of the world's greatest dramatic traditions, consider
their plays, with few exceptions, to possess no literary merit whatsoever). (see
also Chinese
literature)
The Greeks thought of history as one of
the seven arts, inspired by a goddess, the muse Clio. All of the world's classic
surveys of history can stand as noble examples of the art of literature, but
most historical works and studies today are not written primarily with literary
excellence in mind, though they may possess it, as it were, by accident. (see
also Ancient
Greek literature)
The essay
was once written deliberately as a piece of literature: its subject matter was
of comparatively minor importance. Today most essays are written as expository,
informative journalism, although there are still essayists in the great
tradition who think of themselves as artists. Now, as in the past, some of the
greatest essayists are critics of literature, drama, and the arts.
Some personal documents (autobiographies,
diaries, memoirs, and letters)
rank among the world's greatest literature. Some examples of this biographical
literature were written with posterity in mind, others with no thought of their
being read by anyone but the writer. Some are in a highly polished literary
style; others, couched in a privately evolved language, win their standing as
literature because of their cogency, insight, depth, and scope. (see also diary)
Many works of philosophy
are classed as literature. The Dialogues of
Plato (4th century BC) are written with great narrative skill and in the finest
prose; the Meditations of the
2nd-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius are a collection of apparently random
thoughts, and the Greek in which they are written is eccentric. Yet both are
classed as literature, while the speculations of other philosophers, ancient and
modern, are not. Certain scientific works endure as literature long after their
scientific content has become outdated. This is particularly true of books of
natural history, where the element of personal observation is of special
importance. An excellent example is Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789).
Oratory,
the art of persuasion, was long considered a great literary art. The oratory of
the American Indian, for instance, is famous, while in classical Greece,
Polymnia was the muse sacred to poetry and oratory. Rome's great orator Cicero
was to have a decisive influence on the development of English prose style.
Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is known to every American schoolchild.
Today, however, oratory is more usually thought of as a craft than as an art.
Most critics would not admit advertising copywriting, purely commercial fiction,
or cinema and television scripts as accepted forms of literary expression,
although others would hotly dispute their exclusion. The test in individual
cases would seem to be one of enduring satisfaction and, of course, truth.
Indeed, it becomes more and more difficult to categorize literature, for in
modern civilization words are everywhere. Man is subject to a continuous flood
of communication. Most of it is fugitive, but here and there--in high-level
journalism, in television, in the cinema, in commercial fiction, in westerns and
detective stories, and in plain, expository prose--some writing, almost by
accident, achieves an aesthetic satisfaction, a depth and relevance that entitle
it to stand with other examples of the art of literature.
If the early Egyptians or Sumerians had
critical theories about the writing of literature, these have not survived. From
the time of classical Greece until the present day, however, Western criticism
has been dominated by two opposing theories of the literary art, which might
conveniently be called the expressive and constructive theories of composition.
(see also literary
criticism)
The Greek philosopher and scholar Aristotle
(384-322 BC) is the first great representative of the constructive school of
thought. His Poetics(the surviving fragment of which is limited to an analysis of tragedy and
epic poetry) has sometimes been dismissed as a recipe book for the writing of
potboilers. Certainly, Aristotle is primarily interested in the theoretical
construction of tragedy, much as an architect might analyze the construction of
a temple, but he is not exclusively objective and matter of fact. He does,
however, regard the expressive elements in literature as of secondary
importance, and the terms he uses to describe them have been open to
interpretation and a matter of controversy ever since. (see also Aristotelian criticism)
The 1st-century Greek treatise On
the Sublime(conventionally
attributed to the 3rd-century Longinus) deals with the question left unanswered
by Aristotle--what makes great literature "great"? Its standards are
almost entirely expressive. Where Aristotle is analytical and states general
principles, the pseudo-Longinus is more specific and gives many quotations: even
so, his critical theories are confined largely to impressionistic generalities.
Thus, at the beginning of Western
literary criticism, the controversy already exists. Is the artist or writer a
technician, like a cook or an engineer, who designs and constructs a sort of
machine that will elicit an aesthetic response from his audience? Or is he a
virtuoso who above all else expresses himself and, because he gives voice to the
deepest realities of his own personality, generates a response from his readers
because they admit some profound identification with him? This antithesis
endures throughout western European history--Scholasticism versus Humanism,
Classicism versus Romanticism, Cubism versus Expressionism--and survives to this
day in the common judgment of our contemporary artists and writers. It is
surprising how few critics have declared that the antithesis is unreal, that a
work of literary or plastic art is at once constructive and expressive, and that
it must in fact be both.
Critical theories of literature in the
Orient, however, have been more varied. There is an immense amount of highly
technical, critical literature in India. Some works are recipe books, vast
collections of tropes and stylistic devices; others are philosophical and
general. In the best period of Indian
literature, the cultural climax of Sanskrit (c. 320-490), it is assumed by writers that expressive and
constructive factors are twin aspects of one reality. The same could be said of
the Chinese, whose literary manuals and books on prosody and rhetoric are, as
with the West, relegated to the class of technical handbooks, while their
literary criticism is concerned rather with subjective, expressive factors--and
so aligns itself with the pseudo-Longinus' "sublime." In Japan,
technical, stylistic elements are certainly important (Japanese discrimination
in these matters is perhaps the most refined in the world), but both writer and
reader above all seek qualities of subtlety and poignancy and look for
intimations of profundity often so evanescent as to escape entirely the
uninitiated reader. (see also Japanese
literature)
Far Eastern literary tradition has
raised the question of the broad and narrow definitions of poetry (a question
familiar in the West from Edgar Allan Poe's advocacy of the short poem in his
"Poetic Principle" [1850]). There are no long epic poems in Chinese,
no verse novels of the sort written in England by Robert Browning or Alfred Lord
Tennyson in the 19th century. In Chinese drama, apart from a very few of the
songs, the verse as such is considered doggerel. The versified treatises on
astronomy, agriculture, or fishing, of the sort written in Greek and Roman times
and during the 18th century in the West, are almost unknown in the Far East.
Chinese poetry is almost exclusively lyric, meditative, and elegiac, and rarely
does any poem exceed 100 lines--most are little longer than Western sonnets;
many are only quatrains. In Japan this tendency to limit length was carried even
further. The ballad survives
in folk poetry, as it did in China, but the "long poem" of very
moderate length disappeared early from literature. For the Japanese, the tanka
is a "long poem": in its common form it has 31 syllables; the sedokahas 38; the dodoitsu, imitating folk song, has 26. From the 17th century and
onward, the most popular poetic form was the haiku,
which has only 17 syllables.
This development is relevant to the West
because it spotlights the ever-increasing emphasis which has been laid on
intensity of communication, a characteristic of Western poetry (and of
literature generally) as it has evolved since the late 19th century. In the Far
East all cultivated people were supposed to be able to write suitable occasional
poetry, and so those qualities that distinguished a poem from the mass
consequently came to be valued above all others. Similarly, as modern readers in
the West struggle with a "communication avalanche" of words, they seek
in literature those forms, ideas, values, vicarious experiences, and styles that
transcend the verbiage to be had on every hand.
In some literatures (notably classical
Chinese, Old Norse, Old Irish), the language employed is quite different from
that spoken or used in ordinary writing. This marks off the reading of
literature as a special experience. In the Western tradition, it is only in
comparatively modern times that literature has been written in the common speech
of cultivated men. The Elizabethans did not talk like Shakespeare nor
18th-century people in the stately prose of Samuel Johnson or Edward Gibbon (the
so-called Augustan plain style in literature became popular in the late 17th
century and flourished throughout the 18th, but it was really a special form of
rhetoric with antecedent models in Greek and Latin). The first person to write
major works of literature in the ordinary English language of the educated man
was Daniel Defoe (1660?-1731),
and it is remarkable how little the language has changed since. Robinson
Crusoe(1719) is
much more contemporary in tone than the elaborate prose of 19th-century writers
like Thomas De Quincey or Walter Pater. (Defoe's language is not, in fact, so
very simple: simplicity is itself one form of artifice.) (see also Augustan Age, vernacular)
Other writers have sought to use
language for its most subtle and complex effects and have deliberately
cultivated the ambiguity inherent in the multiple or shaded meanings of words.
Between the two world wars, "ambiguity" became very fashionable in
English and American poetry and the ferreting out of ambiguities--from even the
simplest poem--was a favourite critical sport. T.S.
Eliot in his literary essays is usually considered the founder of this
movement. Actually, the platform of his critical attitudes is largely moral, but
his two disciples, I.A. Richards
in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and William
Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), carried his method to extreme
lengths. The basic document of the movement is C.K.
Ogden and I.A. Richards' The
Meaning of Meaning(1923),
a work of enormous importance in its time. Only a generation later, however,
their ideas were somewhat at a discount. (see also English literature,
American literature)
Certainly, William Blake or Thomas
Campion, when they were writing their simple lyrics, were unaware of the
ambiguities and multiple meanings that future critics would find in them.
Nevertheless, language is complex. Words do have overtones; they do stir up
complicated reverberations in the mind that are ignored in their dictionary
definitions. Great stylists, and most especially great poets, work with at least
a half-conscious, or subliminal, awareness of the infinite potentialities of
language. This is one reason why the essence of most poetry and great prose is
so resistant to translation (quite apart from the radically different sound
patterns that are created in other-language versions). The translator must
project himself into the mind of the original author; he must transport himself
into an entirely different world of relationships between sounds and meanings,
and at the same time he must establish an equivalence between one infinitely
complex system and another. Since no two languages are truly equivalent in
anything except the simplest terms, this is a most difficult accomplishment.
Certain writers are exceptionally difficult to translate. There are no
satisfactory English versions, for example, of the Latin of Catullus, the French
of Baudelaire, the Russian of Pushkin, or of the majority of Persian and Arabic
poetry. The splendour of Sophocles' Greek, of Plato at his best, is barely
suggested even in the finest English versions. On the other hand, the Germans
insist that Shakespeare is better in German than he is in English, a humorous
exaggeration perhaps. But again, Shakespeare is resistant to translation into
French. His English seems to lack equivalents in that language.
The very greatest translations may
become classics in their own right, of enduring literary excellence (the King
James Version of the Bible, appearing in 1611, is an outstanding example), but
on the whole the approximate equivalence of most translations to their originals
seems to have a very short life. The original work remains the same, of lasting
value to its own people, but the translation becomes out of date with each
succeeding generation as the language and criteria of literary taste change.
Nothing demonstrates the complexity of literary language more vividly. An
analogous process takes place when a reader experiences a literary work in his
own language; each generation gets a "new version" from its own
classics.
Yet the values of great literature are
more fundamental than complexity and subtleties of meaning arising from language
alone. Works far removed from contemporary man in time and in cultural
background, composed in a variety of languages utterly different from one
another in structure, have nevertheless been translated successfully enough to
be deeply moving. The 20th century has seen an immense mass of the oral
literature of preliterate peoples and of the writings of all the great
civilizations translated into modern languages. Understanding the growth of
literature and its forms in other civilizations has greatly enriched the
understanding of our own.
Literature, like music, is an art of
time, or "tempo": it takes time to read or listen to, and it usually
presents events or the development of ideas or the succession of images or all
these together in time. The craft of literature, indeed, can be said to be in
part the manipulation of a structure in time, and so the simplest element of
marking time, rhythm, is therefore of basic importance in both poetry and prose.
Prosody, which is the science of versification, has for its subject the
materials of poetry and is concerned almost entirely with the laws of metre,
or rhythm in the narrowest sense. It deals with the patterning of sound in time;
the number, length, accent, and pitch of syllables; and the modifications of
rhythm by vowels and consonants. In most poetry, certain basic rhythms are
repeated with modifications (that is to say, the poem rhymes or scans or both)
but not in all. It most obviously does neither in the case of the "free
forms" of modern poetry; but neither does it in the entire poetry of whole
cultures. Since lyric poetry is either the actual text of song
or else is immediately derived from song, it is regular in structure nearly
everywhere in the world, although the elements of patterning that go into
producing its rhythm may vary. The most important of these elements in English
poetry, for example, have been accent, grouping of syllables (called feet),
number of syllables in the line, and rhyme at the end of a line (and sometimes
within it). Other elements such as pitch, resonance, repetition of vowels
(assonance), repetition of consonants (alliteration), and breath pauses
(cadence) have also been of great importance in distinguishing successful poetry
from doggerel verse, but on the whole they are not as important as the former,
and poets have not always been fully conscious of their use of them. Greek and
Latin poetry was consciously patterned on the length of syllables (long or
short) rather than on their accent; but all the considerations of
"sound" (such as assonance and alliteration) entered into the
aesthetically satisfactory structure of a poem. Similarly, both the French and
Japanese were content simply to count the syllables in a line--but again, they
also looked to all the "sound" elements. (see also Latin literature, French
literature)
The rhythms of prose are more
complicated, though not necessarily more complex, than those of poetry. The
rules of prose patterning are less fixed; patterns evolve and shift indefinitely
and are seldom repeated except for special emphasis. So the analysis of prose
rhythm is more difficult to make than, at least, the superficial analysis of
poetry.
The craft of writing involves more than
mere rules of prosody. The work's structure must be manipulated to attract the
reader. First, the literary situation has to be established. The reader must be
directly related to the work, placed in it--given enough information on who,
what, when, or why--so that his attention is caught and held (or, on the other
hand, he must be deliberately mystified, to the same end).
Aristotle gave a formula for dramatic
structure that can be generalized to apply to most literature: presentation,
development, complication, crisis, and resolution. Even lyric poems can possess plot
in this sense, but by no means are all literary works so structured, nor does
such structure ensure their merit--it can be safely said that westerns,
detective stories, and cheap melodramas are more likely to follow strictly the
rules of Aristotle's Poetics than are
great novels. Nevertheless, the scheme does provide a norm from which there is
infinite variation. Neoclassical
dramatists and critics, especially in 17th-century France, derived from
Aristotle what they called the unities
of time, action, and place. This meant that the action of a play should not
spread beyond the events of one day and, best of all, should be confined within
the actual time of performance. Nor should the action move about too much from
place to place--best only to go from indoors to outdoors and back. There should
be only one plot line, which might be relieved by a subplot, usually comic.
These three unities--of time, place, and action--do not occur in Aristotle
and are certainly not observed in Classical Greek tragedy. They are an invention
of Renaissance critics, some of whom went even further, insisting also on what
might be called a unity of mood. To this day there are those who, working on
this principle, object to Shakespeare's use of comic relief within the tragic
action of his plays--to the porter in Macbeth,
for instance, or the gravediggers in Hamlet.
Assiduous critics have found elaborate
architectural structures in quite diffuse works--including Miguel de Cervantes' Don
Quixote (1605-15), Sterne's Tristram
Shandy (1759-67), Casanova's Icosameron
(1788; 1928). But their "discoveries" are too often put there
after the event. Great early novels such as the Chinese Dream of the Red Chamber(1754; first published in English 1929) and the Japanese Tale
of Genji(early 11th century) usually develop organically rather than
according to geometrical formulas, one incident or image spinning off another.
Probably the most tightly structured work, in the Neoclassicists' sense, is the
Icelandic Njál's
saga. (see also Murasaki
Shikibu)
The 19th century was the golden age of
the novel, and most of the more famous examples of the form were systematically
plotted, even where the plot structure simply traced the growth in personality
of an individual hero or heroine. This kind of novel, of which in their very
diverse ways Stendhal's The Red and the
Black (1830) and Dickens' David
Copperfield (1850) are great examples, is known as BildungsromanGustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is as rigorously classicist in form as the
17th-century plays of Racine and Corneille, which were the high point of the
French classical theatre, although Flaubert obeys laws more complex than those
of the Aristotelians. Novels such as Tolstoy's War and Peace (1865-69), Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov (1880), and the works of Balzac owe much of their
power to their ability to overwhelm the reader with a massive sense of reality.
The latter 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed an attack on old forms, but
what the new writers evolved was simply a new architecture. A novel like James
Joyce's Ulysses(1922), which takes place in a day and an evening, is one of the most highly
structured ever written. Novelists such as Joseph
Conrad, Ford Madox Ford,
Virginia Woolf, and, to a
lesser extent, Henry James developed a multiple-aspect narrative, sometimes by
using time shifts and flashbacks and by writing from different points of view,
sometimes by using the device (dating back to Classical Greek romances) of
having one or more narrators as characters within the story. (This technique,
which was first perfected in the verse novels of Robert
Browning, in fact reached its most extreme development in the English
language in poetry: in Ezra Pound's Cantos,
T.S. Eliot's The
Waste LandWilliam Carlos Williams' Patersonand the many long poems influenced by them.) (see also
"Cantos, The")
The content of literature is as
limitless as the desire of human beings to communicate with one another. The
thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands, since the human species first
developed speech have seen built up the almost infinite systems of relationships
called languages. A language
is not just a collection of words in an unabridged dictionary but the individual
and social possession of living human beings, an inexhaustible system of
equivalents, of sounds to objects and to one another. Its most primitive
elements are those words that
express direct experiences of objective reality, and its most sophisticated are
concepts on a high level of abstraction. Words are not only equivalent to
things, they have varying degrees of equivalence to one another. A symbol, says
the dictionary, is something that stands for something else or a sign used to
represent something, "as the lion is the symbol of courage, the cross the
symbol of Christianity." In this sense all words can be called symbols, but
the examples given--the lion and the cross--are really metaphors:
that is, symbols that represent a complex of other symbols, and which are
generally negotiable in a given society (just as money is a symbol for goods or
labour). Eventually a language comes to be, among other things, a huge sea of
implicit metaphors, an endless web of interrelated symbols. As literature,
especially poetry, grows more and more sophisticated, it begins to manipulate
this field of suspended metaphors as a material in itself, often as an end in
itself. Thus, there emerge forms of poetry (and prose, too) with endless
ramifications of reference, as in Japanese waka and haiku, some ancient Irish
and Norse verse, and much of the poetry written in western Europe since the time
of Baudelaire that is called modernist. It might be supposed that, at its most
extreme, this development would be objective, constructive--aligning it with the
critical theories stemming from Aristotle's Poetics. On the contrary, it is romantic, subjective art, primarily
because the writer handles such material instinctively and subjectively,
approaches it as the "collective
unconscious," to use the term of the psychologist Carl Jung, rather
than with deliberate rationality. (see also symbolism, Japanese
literature)
By the time literature appears in the
development of a culture, the society has already come to share a whole system
of stereotypes and archetypes:
major symbols standing for the fundamental realities of the human condition,
including the kind of symbolic realities that are enshrined in religion and myth.
Literature may use such symbols directly, but all great works of literary art
are, as it were, original and unique myths. The world's great classics evoke and
organize the archetypes of universal human experience. This does not mean,
however, that all literature is an endless repetition of a few myths and
motives, endlessly retelling the first stories of civilized man, repeating the
Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh or Sophocles' Oedipus
the King. The subject matter of literature is as wide as human experience
itself. Myths, legends, and folktales
lie at the beginning of literature, and their plots, situations, and allegorical
(metaphorical narrative) judgments of life represent a constant source of
literary inspiration that never fails. This is so because mankind is
constant--people share a common physiology. Even social structures, after the
development of cities, remain much alike. Whole civilizations have a life
pattern that repeats itself through history. Jung's term "collective
unconscious" really means that mankind is one species, with a common fund
of general experience. Egyptian scribes, Japanese bureaucrats, and junior
executives in New York City live and respond to life in the same ways; the lives
of farmers or miners or hunters vary only within narrow limits. Love is love and
death is death, for a South African Bushman and a French Surrealist alike. So
the themes of literature have at once an infinite variety and an abiding
constancy. They can be taken from myth, from history, or from contemporary
occurrence, or they can be pure invention (but even if they are invented, they
are nonetheless constructed from the constant materials of real experience, no
matter how fantastic the invention). (see also folk literature)
As time goes on, literature tends to
concern itself more and more with the interior meanings of its narrative, with
problems of human personality and human relationships. Many novels are
fictional, psychological biographies which tell of the slowly achieved
integration of the hero's personality or of his disintegration, of the conflict
between self-realization and the flow of events and the demands of other people.
This can be presented explicitly, where the characters talk about what is going
on in their heads, either ambiguously and with reserve, as in the novels of
Henry James, or overtly, as in those of Dostoyevsky. Alternatively, it can be
presented by a careful arrangement of objective facts, where psychological
development is described purely in terms of behaviour and where the reader's
subjective response is elicited by the minute descriptions of physical reality,
as in the novels of Stendhal and the greatest Chinese novels like the Dream
of the Red Chamber, which convince the reader that through the novel he is
seeing reality itself, rather than an artfully contrived semblance of reality.
Literature, however, is not solely
concerned with the concrete, with objective reality, with individual psychology,
or with subjective emotion. Some deal with abstract ideas or philosophical
conceptions. Much purely abstract writing is considered literature only in the
widest sense of the term, and the philosophical works that are ranked as great
literature are usually presented with more or less of a sensuous garment. Thus,
Plato's Dialoguesrank as great literature because the philosophical material is presented in
dramatic form, as the dialectical outcome of the interchange of ideas between
clearly drawn, vital personalities, and because the descriptive passages are of
great lyric beauty. Karl Marx's
Das
Kapital(1867-95)
approaches great literature in certain passages in which he expresses the social
passion he shares with the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament. Euclid's Elements
and St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa
theologica give literary, aesthetic satisfaction to some people because of
their purity of style and beauty of architectonic construction. In short, most
philosophical works that rank as great literature do so because they are
intensely human. The reader responds to Pascal's Pensées,
to Montaigne's Essays, and to
Marcus Aurelius' Meditations as he
would to living men. Sometimes the pretense of purely abstract intellectual
rigour is in fact a literary device. The writings of the 20th-century
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein,
for example, owed much of their impact to this approach, while the poetry of Paul
Valéry borrows the language of philosophy and science for its
rhetorical and evocative power.
Throughout literary history, many great
critics have pointed out that it is artificial to make a distinction between
form and content, except for purposes of analytical discussion. Form determines
content. Content determines form. The issue is, indeed, usually only raised at
all by those critics who are more interested in politics, religion, or ideology
than in literature; thus, they object to writers who they feel sacrifice
ideological orthodoxy for formal perfection, message for style.
But style cannot really be said to exist
on paper at all; it is the way the mind of the author expresses itself in words.
Since words represent ideas, there cannot be abstract literature unless a
collection of nonsense syllables can be admitted as literature. Even the most
avant-garde writers associated with the Cubist or nonobjective painters used
language, and language is meaning,
though the meaning may be incomprehensible. Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, the
great 19th-century exponents of "art
for art's sake," were in fact tireless propagandists for their
views, which dominate their most flowery prose. It is true that great style
depends on the perfect matching of content and form, so that the literary
expression perfectly reflects the writer's intention; "poor style"
reveals the inability of a writer to match the two--in other words, reveals his
inability to express himself. This is why we say that "style expresses the
man." The veiled style of Henry
James, with its subtleties, equivocations, and qualifications, perfectly
reflects his complicated and subtle mind and his abiding awareness of ambiguity
in human motives. At the other extreme, the style of the early 20th-century
American novelist Theodore Dreiser--bumbling,
clumsy, dogged, troubled--perfectly embodies his own attitudes toward life and
is, in fact, his constant judgment of his subject matter. Sometimes an author,
under the impression that he is simply polishing his style, may completely alter
his content. As Flaubert worked over the drafts of Madame
Bovaryseeking always the apposite word that would precisely convey his
meaning, he lifted his novel from a level of sentimental romance to make it one
of the great ironic tragedies of literature. Yet, to judge from his
correspondence, he seems never to have been completely aware of what he had
done, of the severity of his own irony.
Literature may be an art, but writing is
a craft, and a craft must be learned. Talent, special ability in the arts, may
appear at an early age; the special personality called genius may indeed be
born, not made. But skill in matching intention and expression comes with
practice. Naïve writers, "naturals" like the 17th-century English
diarist Samuel Pepys, the late 18th-century French naïf Restif
de la Bretonne, the 20th-century American novelist Henry
Miller, are all deservedly called stylists, although their styles are far
removed from the deliberate, painstaking practice of a Flaubert or a Turgenev.
They wrote spontaneously whatever came into their heads; but they wrote
constantly, voluminously, and were, by their own standards, skilled
practitioners.
There are certain forms of literature
that do not permit such highly personal behaviour--for instance, formal lyric
poetry and classic drama. In these cases the word "form" is used to
mean a predetermined structure within whose mold the content must be fitted.
These structures are, however, quite simple and so cannot be said to determine
the content. Racine and Corneille
were contemporaries; both were Neoclassic French dramatists; both abided by all
the artificial rules--usually observing the "unities" and following
the same strict rules of prosody. Yet their plays, and the poetry in which they
are written, differ completely. Corneille is intellectually and emotionally a
Neoclassicist--clear and hard, a true objectivist, sure of both his verse and
the motivations of his characters. Racine was a great romantic long before the
age of Romanticism. His characters are confused and tortured; his verse throbs
like the heartbeats of his desperate heroines. He is a great sentimentalist in
the best and deepest meaning of that word. His later influence on poets like
Baudelaire and Paul Valéry is due to his mastery of sentimental
expression, not, as they supposed, to his mastery of Neoclassic form. (see also
dramatic literature)
Verse on any subject matter can of
course be written purely according to formula. The 18th century in England saw
all sorts of prose treatises cast in rhyme and metre, but this was simply
applied patterning. (Works such as The
Botanic Garden [2 vol., 1794-95] by Erasmus Darwin should be sharply
distinguished from James Thomson's The
Seasons [1726-30], which is true poetry, not versified natural history--just
as Virgil's Georgics is not an
agricultural handbook.) Neoclassicism, especially in its 18th-century
developments, confused--for ordinary minds, at any rate--formula with form and
so led to the revolt called Romanticism.
The leading theorists of that revolt, the poets William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, in the "Preface" (1800) to Lyrical
Ballads urged the observance of a few simple rules basic to all great poetry
and demanded a return to the integrity of expressive form. A similar revolution
in taste was taking place all over Europe and also in China (where the narrow
pursuit of formula had almost destroyed poetry). The Romantic taste could enjoy
the "formlessness" of William Blake's prophetic books, or Walt
Whitman's Leaves of Grass, or the
loose imagination of Shelley--but careful study reveals that these writers were
not formless at all. Each had his own personal form.
Time passes and the pendulum of taste
swings. In the mid-20th century, Paul Valéry, T.S. Eliot, and Yvor
Winters would attack what the latter called "the fallacy of
expressive form," but this is itself a fallacy. All form in literature is
expressive. All expression has its own form, even when the form is a deliberate
quest of formlessness. (The automatic writing cultivated by the surrealists, for
instance, suffers from the excessive formalism of the unconscious mind and is
far more stereotyped than the poetry of the Neoclassicist
Alexander Pope.) Form simply refers to organization, and critics who attack form
do not seem always to remember that a writer organizes more than words. He
organizes experience. Thus, his organization stretches far back in his mental
process. Form is the other face of content, the outward, visible sign of inner
spiritual reality.
In preliterate societies oral
literature was widely shared; it saturated the society and was as much a
part of living as food, clothing, shelter, or religion. In barbaric societies,
the minstrel might be a courtier of the king or chieftain, and the poet who
composed liturgies might be a priest. But the oral performance itself was
accessible to the whole community. As society evolved its various social layers,
or classes, an
"elite" literature began to be distinguishable from the
"folk" literature of the people. With the invention of writing this
separation was accelerated until finally literature was being experienced
individually by the elite (reading a book), while folklore and folk song were
experienced orally and more or less collectively by the illiterate common
people. (see also folk
music)
Elite literature continuously refreshes
itself with materials drawn from the popular. Almost all poetic revivals, for
instance, include in their programs a new appreciation of folk song, together
with a demand for greater objectivity. On the other hand folk literature borrows
themes and, very rarely, patterns from elite literature. Many of the English and
Scottish ballads that date from the end of the Middle Ages and have been
preserved by oral tradition share plots and even turns of phrase with written
literature. A very large percentage of these ballads contain elements that are
common to folk ballads from all over western Europe; central themes of folklore,
indeed, are found all over the world. Whether these common elements are the
result of diffusion is a matter for dispute. They do, however, represent great
psychological constants, archetypes of experience common to the human species,
and so these constants are used again and again by elite literature as it
discovers them in folklore.
There is a marked difference between
true popular literature, that of folklore and folk song, and the popular
literature of modern times. Popular literature today is produced either to be
read by a literate audience or to be enacted on television or in the cinema; it
is produced by writers who are members, however lowly, of an elite corps of
professional literates. Thus, popular literature no longer springs from the
people; it is handed to them. Their role is passive. At the best they are
permitted a limited selectivity as consumers.
Certain theorists once believed that
folk songs and even long, narrative ballads were produced collectively, as has
been said in mockery "by the tribe sitting around the fire and grunting in
unison." This idea is very much out of date. Folk songs and folk tales
began somewhere in one human mind. They were developed and shaped into the forms
in which they are now found by hundreds of other minds as they were passed down
through the centuries. Only in this sense were they "collectively"
produced. During the 20th century, folklore and folk speech have had a great
influence on elite literature--on writers as different as Franz Kafka and Carl
Sandburg, Selma Lagerlöf and Kawabata Yasunari, Martin Buber and Isaac
Bashevis Singer. Folk song has always been popular with bohemian intellectuals,
especially political radicals (who certainly are an elite). Since World War II
the influence of folk song upon popular song has not just been great; it has
been determinative. Almost all "hit" songs since the mid-century have
been imitation folk songs; and some authentic folk singers attract immense
audiences. (see also popular
music)
Popular fiction and drama, westerns and
detective stories, films and television serials, all deal with the same great
archetypal themes as folktales and ballads, though this is seldom due to direct
influence; these are simply the limits within which the human mind works. The
number of people who have elevated the formulas of popular fiction to a higher
literary level is surprisingly small. Examples are H.G. Wells's early science
fiction, the western stories of Gordon Young and Ernest Haycox, the detective
stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Georges Simenon, and Raymond Chandler.
The latter half of the 20th century has
seen an even greater change in popular literature. Writing is a static medium:
that is to say, a book is read by one person at a time; it permits recollection
and anticipation; the reader can go back to check a point or move ahead to find
out how the story ends. In radio, television, and the cinema the medium is
fluent; the audience is a collectivity and is at the mercy of time. It cannot
pause to reflect or to understand more fully without missing another part of the
action, nor can it go back or forward. Marshall
McLuhan in his book Understanding
Media (1964) became famous for erecting a whole structure of aesthetic,
sociological, and philosophical theory upon this fact. But it remains to be seen
whether the new, fluent materials of communication are going to make so very
many changes in civilization, let alone in the human mind--mankind has, after
all, been influenced for thousands of years by the popular, fluent arts of music
and drama. Even the most transitory television serial was written down before it
was performed, and the script can be consulted in the files. Before the
invention of writing, all literature was fluent because it was contained in
people's memory. In a sense it was more fluent than music, because it was harder
to remember. Man in mass society becomes increasingly a creature of the moment,
but the reasons for this are undoubtedly more fundamental than his forms of
entertainment.
Literature, like all other human
activities, necessarily reflects current social and economic conditions. Class
stratification was reflected in literature as soon as it had appeared in life.
Among the American Indians,
for instance, the chants of the shaman, or medicine man, differ from the secret,
personal songs of the individual, and these likewise differ from the group songs
of ritual or entertainment sung in community. In the Heroic Age, the epic
tales of kings and chiefs that were sung or told in their barbaric courts
differed from the folktales that were told in peasant cottages.
The more cohesive a society, the more
the elements--and even attitudes--evolved in the different class strata are
interchangeable at all levels. In the tight clan organization that existed in
late medieval times at the Scottish border, for example, heroic ballads telling
of the deeds of lords and ladies were preserved in the songs of the common
people. But where class divisions are unbridgeable, elite literature is liable
to be totally separated from popular culture. An extreme example is the classic
literature of the Roman Empire. Its forms and its sources were largely Greek--it
even adopted its laws of verse patterning from Greek models, even though these
were antagonistic to the natural patterns of the Latin language--and most of the
sophisticated works of the major Latin authors were completely closed to the
overwhelming majority of people of the Roman Empire. (see also Latin literature)
Printing
has made all the difference in the negotiability of ideas. The writings of the
18th-century French writers Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot were produced from
and for almost as narrow a caste as the Roman elite, but they were printed.
Within a generation they had penetrated the entire society and were of vital
importance in revolutionizing it.
Class distinctions in the literature of
modern times exist more in the works themselves than in their audience. Although
Henry James wrote about the upper classes and Émile
Zola about workingmen, both were, in fact, members of an elite and were
read by members of an elite--moreover, in their day, those who read Zola
certainly considered themselves more of an elite than did the readers of Henry
James. The ordinary people, if they read at all, preferred sentimental romances
and "penny dreadfuls." Popular literature had already become
commercially produced entertainment literature, a type which today is also
provided by television scripts.
The elite who read serious literature
are not necessarily members of a social or economic upper class. It has been
said of the most ethereal French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, that in every
French small town there was a youth who carried his poems in his heart. These
poems are perhaps the most "elite" product of western European
civilization, but the "youths" referred to were hardly the sons of
dukes or millionaires. (It is a curious phenomenon that, since the middle of the
18th century in Europe and in the United States, the majority of readers of
serious literature--as well as of entertainment literature--have been women.
The extent of the influence that this audience has exerted on literature itself
must be immense.)
Hippolyte
Taine, the 19th-century French critic, evolved an
ecological theory of literature. He looked first and foremost to the national
characteristics of western European literatures, and he found the source of
these characteristics in the climate and soil of each respective nation. His History
of English Literature(5
vol., 1863-69) is an extensive elaboration of these ideas. It is doubtful that
anyone today would agree with the simplistic terms in which Taine states his
thesis. It is obvious that Russian
literature differs from English or French from German. English books are
written by Englishmen, their scenes are commonly laid in England, they are
usually about Englishmen and they are designed to be read by Englishmen--at
least in the first instance. But modern civilization becomes more and more a
world civilization, wherein works of all peoples flow into a general fund of
literature. It is not unusual to read a novel by a Japanese author one week and
one by a black writer from West Africa the next. Writers are themselves affected
by this cross-fertilization. Certainly, the work of the great 19th-century
Russian novelists has had more influence on 20th-century American writers than
has the work of their own literary ancestors. Poetry does not circulate so
readily, because catching its true significance in translation is so very
difficult to accomplish. Nevertheless, for the past 100 years or so, the
influence of French poetry upon all the literatures of the civilized world has
not just been important, it has been preeminent. The tendentious elements of
literature--propaganda for race, nation, or religion--have been more and more
eroded in this process of wholesale cultural exchange.
Popular literature on the other hand is
habitually tendentious both deliberately and unconsciously. It reflects and
stimulates the prejudices and parochialism of its audience. Most of the literary
conflicts that have seized the totalitarian countries during the 20th century
stem directly from relentless efforts by the state to reduce elite literature to
the level of the popular. The great proletarian
novels of our time have been produced, not by Russians, but by American
blacks, Japanese, Germans, and--most proletarian of all--a German-American
living in Mexico, B. Traven. Government control and censorship
can inhibit literary development, perhaps deform it a little, and can destroy
authors outright; but, whether in the France of Louis XIV or in the Soviet Union
of the 20th century, it cannot be said to have a fundamental effect upon the
course of literature.
A distinguishing characteristic of
modern literature is the peculiar elite which it has itself evolved. In earlier
cultures the artist, though he may have been neurotic at times, thought of
himself as part of his society and shared its values and attitudes. Usually the
clerkly caste played a personal, important role in society. In the modern
industrial civilization, however, "scribes" became simply a category
of skilled hired hands. The writer shared few of the values of the merchant or
the entrepreneur or manager. And so the literary and artistic world came to have
a subculture of its own. The antagonism between the two resultant sets of values
is the source of what we call alienation--among the intellectuals at least (the
alienation of the common man in urban, industrial civilization from his work,
from himself, and from his fellows is another matter, although its results are
reflected and intensified in the alienation
of the elite). For about 200 years now, the artistic environment of the writer
has not usually been shared with the general populace. The subculture known as
bohemia and the literary and artistic movements generated in its little special
society have often been more important--at least in the minds of many
writers--than the historical, social, and economic movements of the culture as a
whole. Even massive historical change is translated into these terms--the
Russian Revolution, for instance, into Communist-Futurism, Constructivism,
Socialist Realism. Western European literature could be viewed as a parade of
movements--Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Futurism, Structuralism, and so on
indefinitely. Some of the more journalistic critics, indeed, have delighted to
regard it in such a way. But after the manifestos have been swept away, the
meetings adjourned, the literary cafés of the moment lost their
popularity, the turmoil is seen not to have made so very much difference. The
Romantic Théophile Gautier (1811-72) and the Naturalist Émile Zola
(1840-1902) have more in common than they have differences, and their
differences are rather because of changes in society as a whole than because of
conflicting literary principles.
At first, changes in literary values are
appreciated only at the upper levels of the literary elite itself, but often,
within a generation, works once thought esoteric are being taught as part of a
school syllabus. Most cultivated people once thought James
Joyce's Ulyssesincomprehensible or, where it was not, obscene. Today his methods and
subject matter are commonplace in the commercial fiction of the mass culture. A
few writers remain confined to the elite. Mallarmé is a good example--but
he would have been just as ethereal had he written in the simplest French of
direct communication. His subtleties are ultimately grounded in his personality.
(see also social class)
Literature has an obvious kinship with
the other arts. Presented, a play is drama; read, a play is literature. Most
important films have been
based upon written literature, usually novels, although all the great epics and
most of the great plays have been filmed at some time and thus have stimulated
the younger medium's growth. Conversely, the techniques required in writing for
film have influenced many writers in structuring their novels and have affected
their style. Most popular fiction is written with "movie rights" in
mind, and these are certainly a consideration with most modern publishers.
Literature provides the libretto for operas, the theme for tone
poems--even so anomalous a form as Nietzsche's Thus
Spake Zarathustra was interpreted in music by Richard Strauss--and of course
it provides the lyrics of songs. Many ballets and modern dances are based on
stories or poems. Sometimes, music and dance are accompanied by a text read by a
speaker or chanted by a chorus. The mid-19th century was the heyday of literary,
historical, and anecdotal painting, though, aside from the Surrealists, this
sort of thing died out in the 20th century. Cross-fertilization of literature
and the arts now takes place more subtly, mostly in the use of parallel
techniques--the rational dissociation of the Cubists or the spontaneous action
painting of the Abstract Expressionists, for example, which flourished at the
same time as the free-flowing uncorrected narratives of some novelists in the
1950s and '60s. (see also theatrical dance)
Critics have invented a variety of
systems for treating literature as a collection of genres. Often these genres
are artificial, invented after the fact with the aim of making literature less
sprawling, more tidy. Theories of literature must be based upon direct
experience of the living texts and so be flexible enough to contain their
individuality and variety. Perhaps the best approach is historical, or genetic.
What actually happened, and in what way did literature evolve up to the present
day? (see also literary
genre)
There is a surprising variety of oral
literature among surviving preliterate peoples, and, as the written word emerges
in history, the indications are that the important literary genres all existed
at the beginning of civilized societies: heroic epic; songs in praise of priests
and kings; stories of mystery and the supernatural; love lyrics; personal songs
(the result of intense meditation); love stories; tales of adventure and heroism
(of common peoples, as distinct from the heroic epics of the upper classes);
satire (which was dreaded by barbaric chieftains); satirical combats (in which
two poets or two personifications abused one another and praised themselves); ballads
and folktales of tragedy and
murder; folk stories, such as the tale of the clever boy who performs impossible
tasks, outwits all his adversaries, and usually wins the hand of the king's
daughter; animal fables like those attributed to Aesop (the special delight of
Black Africa and Indian America); riddles, proverbs, and philosophical
observations; hymns, incantations, and mysterious songs of priests; and finally
actual mythology--stories of the origin of the world and the human race, of the
great dead, and of the gods and demigods.
The true heroic epic never evolved far
from its preliterate origins, and it arose only in the Heroic Age which preceded
a settled civilization. The conditions reflected in, say, the Iliad
and Odyssey are much the same as those of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf,
the German Nibelungenlied, or the Irish stories of Cú Chulainn. The
literary epic is another matter altogether. Virgil's Aeneid,
for instance, or Milton's Paradise
Lost are products of highly sophisticated literary cultures. Many long poems
sometimes classified as epic literature are no such thing-- Dante's
La
divina commedia (The
Divine Comedy), for example, is a long theological, philosophical,
political, moral, and mystical poem. Dante considered it to be a kind of drama
which obeyed the rules of Aristotle's Poetics.
Goethe's Faustis in dramatic form and is sometimes even staged--but it is really a
philosophical poetic novel. Modern critics have described long poems such as T.S.
Eliot's Waste Land and Ezra
Pound's Cantos as "philosophical
epics." There is nothing epic about them; they are reveries, more or less
philosophical. (see also "Waste
Land, The", "Cantos,
The")
Lyric poetry never gets far from its
origins, except that some of its finest examples--Medieval Latin, Provençal,
Middle High German, Middle French, Renaissance--which today are only read, were
actually written to be sung. In the 20th century, however, popular songs of
great literary merit have become increasingly common--for example, the songs of
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in German, of Georges Brassens and Anne Sylvestre
in French, and of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell. It is interesting
to note that, in periods when the culture values artificiality, the lyric
becomes stereotyped. Then, after a while, the poets revolt and, usually turning
to folk origins, restore to lyric
poetry at least the appearance of naturalness and spontaneity. (see also folk literature, oral
literature)
The forms of satire are as manifold as
those of literature itself--from those of the mock epic to the biting epigram. A
great many social and political novels of today would have been regarded as
satire by the ancients. Many of the great works of all time are satires, but in
each case they have risen far above their immediate satirical objectives. The
16th-century medieval satire on civilization, the Gargantua
and Pantagruelof
Rabelais, grew under the hand of its author into a great archetypal myth of the
lust for life. Cervantes' Don Quixoteoften called the greatest work of prose fiction in the West, is
superficially a satire of the sentimental romance of knightly adventure. But,
again, it is an archetypal myth, telling the adventures of the soul of man--of
the individual--in the long struggle with what is called the human condition. The Tale of Genjiby Murasaki Shikibu has
sometimes been considered by obtuse critics as no more than a satire on the
sexual promiscuity of the Heian court. In fact, it is a profoundly
philosophical, religious, and mystical novel.
Extended prose fiction is the latest of
the literary forms to develop. We have romances from classical Greek times that
are as long as short novels; but they are really tales of adventure--vastly
extended anecdotes. The first prose fiction of any psychological depth is the Satyriconalmost certainly attributed to Petronius Arbiter (died AD 65/66). Though it
survives only in fragments, supposedly one-eleventh of the whole, even these
would indicate that it is one of the greatest picaresque novels, composed of
loosely connected episodes of robust and often erotic adventure. The other great
surviving fiction of classical times is the Metamorphoses
(known as The
Golden Ass) by Apuleius (2nd century AD). In addition to being
a picaresque adventure story, it is a criticism of Roman society, a celebration
of the religion of Isis, and an allegory of the progress of the soul. It
contains the justly celebrated story of Cupid and Psyche, a myth retold with
psychological subtlety. Style has much to do with the value and hence the
survival of these two works. They are written in prose of extraordinary beauty,
although it is by no means of "classical" purity. The prose romances
of the Middle Ages are closely related to earlier heroic literature. Some, like
Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-century Le
Morte Darthurare
retellings of heroic legend in terms of the romantic chivalry of the early
Renaissance, a combination of barbaric, medieval, and Renaissance sensibility
which, in the tales of Tristram and Iseult and Launcelot and Guinevere, produced
something not unlike modern novels of tragic love.
The Western novel is a product of modern
civilization, although in the Far East novels began a separate development as
early as the 10th century. Extended prose works of complex interpersonal
relations and motivations begin in 17th-century France with The
Princess of Cleves (1678)
by Madame de La Fayette. Eighteenth-century France produced an immense number of
novels dealing with love analysis but none to compare with Madame de La
Fayette's until Pierre Choderlos de Laclos wrote Les Liaisons dangereuses(1782). This was, in form, an exchange of letters between two corrupters of
youth; but, in intent, it was a savage satire of the ancien
régime and a heart-rending psychological study. The English novel of
the 18th century was less subtle, more robust--vulgar in the best sense--and is
exemplified by Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749)
and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The
19th century was the golden age of the novel. It became ever more profound,
complex, and subtle (or, on the other hand, more popular, eventful, and
sentimental). By the beginning of the 20th century it had become the most common
form of thoughtful reading matter and had replaced, for most educated people,
religious, philosophical, and scientific works as a medium for the
interpretation of life. By the late 1920s the novel had begun to show signs of
decay as a form, and no works have since been produced to compare with the
recent past. This may prove to be a temporarily barren period, or else the novel
may be losing its energy as a narrative art form and in this sense giving way to
the medium of film. (see also French
literature)
Like lyric poetry, drama has been an
exceptionally stable literary form. Given a little leeway, most plays written by
the beginning of the 20th century could be adjusted to the rules of Aristotle's Poetics.
Before World War I, however, all traditional art forms, led by painting,
began to disintegrate, and new forms evolved to take their place. In drama the
most radical innovator was August
Strindberg (1849-1912), and from that day to this, drama (forced to
compete with the cinema) has become ever more experimental, constantly striving
for new methods, materials, and, especially, ways to establish a close
relationship with the audience. All this activity has profoundly modified drama
as literature. (see also dramatic
literature)
In the 20th century the methods of
poetry have also changed drastically, although the "innovator" here
might be said to have been Baudelaire (1821-67). The disassociation and
recombination of ideas of the Cubists, the free association of ideas of the
Surrealists, dreams, trance states, the poetry of preliterate people--all have
been absorbed into the practice of modern poetry. This proliferation of form is
not likely to end. Effort that once was applied to perfecting a single pattern
in a single form may in the future be more and more directed toward the
elaboration of entirely new "multimedia" forms, employing the
resources of all the established arts. At the same time, writers may prefer to
simplify and polish the forms of the past with a rigorous, Neoclassicist
discipline. In a worldwide urban civilization, which has taken to itself the
styles and discoveries of all cultures past and present, the future of
literature is quite impossible to determine.
Research by scholars into the literary
past began almost as soon as literature itself--as soon as the documents
accumulated--and for many centuries it represents almost all the scholarship
that has survived. The most extensive text of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the
first of the world's great classics, is a late Assyrian synthesis that must have
required an immense amount of research into clay tablets, written in several
languages going back to the beginning of Mesopotamian civilization. Many
Egyptian poems and the philosophic creation myth known as the "Memphite
Theology" survive in very late texts that carefully reproduce the original
language of the first dynasties. Once the function of the scribe was established
as essential, he invented literary scholarship, both to secure his position and
to occupy his leisure. The great epoch of literary scholarship in ancient times
centred on the library (and university) of Alexandria from its foundation in 324
BC to its destruction by the Arabs in AD 640. Hellenistic Greek scholars there
developed such an academic and pedantic approach to literary scholarship and
scholarly literature that the term Alexandrine remains pejorative to this day.
To them, however, is owed the survival of the texts of most of the Greek
classics. Roman literary scholarship was rhetorical rather than analytic. With
the coming of Islam, there was established across the whole warm
temperate zone of the Old World a far-flung community of scholars who were at
home in learned circles from India to Spain. Judaism,
like Islam, was a religion of
the book and of written tradition, so literary scholarship played a central role
in each. The same is true of India, China, and later Japan; for sheer bulk, as
well as for subtlety and insight, Oriental scholarship has never been surpassed.
In a sense, the Renaissance in Europe was a cultural revolution led by literary
scholars who discovered, revived, and made relevant again the literary heritage
of Greece and Rome. In the 19th century, literary scholarship was dominated by
the exhaustive, painstaking German academician, and that Germanic tradition
passed to the universities of the United States. The demand that every teacher
should write a master's thesis, a doctor's dissertation, and, for the rest of
his career, publish with reasonable frequency learned articles and scholarly
books, has led to a mass of scholarship of widely varying standards and value.
Some is trivial and absurd, but the best has perfected the texts and thoroughly
illuminated the significance of nearly all the world's great literature. (see
also Greece,
ancient, Ancient Greek
literature, Indian literature,
Chinese literature, Japanese
literature)
Literary criticism, as distinguished
from scholarly research, is usually itself considered a form of literature. Some
people find great critics as entertaining and stimulating as great poets, and
theoretical treatises of literary aesthetics can be as exciting as novels.
Aristotle, Longinus, and the Roman rhetorician and critic Quintilian are still
read, although Renaissance critics like the once all-powerful Josephus Scaliger
are forgotten by all but specialized scholars. Later critics, such as Poe,
Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Vissarion Belinsky, Matthew Arnold, Walter Bagehot, Walter
Pater, and George Saintsbury, are probably read more for themselves than for
their literary judgments and for their general theorizing rather than for their
applications (in the case of the first three, for instance, time has confounded
almost all the evaluations they made of their contemporaries). The English
critics have survived because they largely confined themselves to acknowledged
masterpieces and general ideas. Perhaps literary criticism can really be read as
a form of autobiography. Aestheticians of literature like I.A. Richards, Sir
C.M. Bowra, Paul Valéry, Suzanne Langer, and Ernst Cassirer have had an
influence beyond the narrow confines of literary scholarship and have played in
our time something approaching the role of general philosophers. This has been
true on the popular level as well. The Dane Georg Brandes, the Americans James
Gibbons Huneker, H.L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson--these men have been social
forces in their day. Literary criticism can play its role in social change. In
Japan, the overthrow of the shogunate, the restoration of the emperor, and the
profound change in the Japanese social sensibility begins with the literary
criticism of Moto-ori Norinaga
(1730-1801). The 19th-century revolution in theology resulted from the
convergence of Darwinian theories of evolution and the technical and historical
criticism of the Bible that scholars had undertaken. For many modern
intellectuals, the literary quarterlies and weeklies, with their tireless
discussions of the spiritual significance and formal characteristics of
everything from the greatest masterpiece to the most ephemeral current
production, can be said to have filled the place of religion, both as rite and
dogma. (see also American literature)
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