Department of English Languages and Literature - Courses

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THEORY CHECKLIST: A WORKING

DOCUMENT
1997, 1999 by John Lye. This text may be freely used, with
attribution, for non-profit purposes.
As are all pages for my course, this document is open to change.
If you have any suggestions (additions, qualifications,
arguments), mail me.
One is faced at the very outset, when approaching literature
theoretically, with considerations such as the following. You
should build your own checklist of theoretical considerations as
we go through the course. For some other formulations of these
issues, see my pages Some Factors Affecting/Effecting the
Reading of Texts and The Problem of Meaning.
I. What is the Nature of and What Are the Functions of
Literature?
II. What is the Nature of the Subject?
III. Who is the Reader?
IV. What is the Relation of the Author to the Text?
V. What are the Relations of the Author and the Text to Society?
VI. Where (and How) Does 'Reality' Exist?
VII. What is Representation (Mimesis)?
VIII. What is the Nature and Status of Language?
IX. What is the Relation of "Form" and "Art" to Meaning?
X. Where is Meaning?

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I. What is the Nature of and What are the Functions of

Literature?
The question of what "Literature" in fact 'is' is a
difficult one. Why might a seventeenth century treatise
on religion be Literature, and scads of poems about
love not be Literature? Is this Literature, or not -- ?
Nobody knows,
Tiddley-pom
How cold my toes,
Tiddley-pom
How cold my toes,
Tiddley-pom
Are growing.

Well, if it isn't
Literature, what is it?
It's part of our culture,
our heritage; it's in
verse; it's in all the
bookstores.

Does literariness reside in the idea of quality (in which

case a well written book on brain surgery might be
Literature), or in conventions (but many works which
follow the conventions faithfully are not Literature), or
in fictionality -- that is, to be Literature it can't be true
-- well, not literally, at least? (The latter question
points of course to a further, serious problem: the truth
status of narratives. Is an autobiography true, or is it
someone's imagination of 'real' events, moulded to tell
a certain story of the self?)
Or, on quite another hand, is "Literature" merely what
your professor (as a local manifestation of the power of
the ruling class) says it is?
1. One might think of Literature as, for instance,
a. a body of texts marked by the imaginative verbal
recreation of the world as we experience it
b. relying upon the powers of form, allusion, poetic
qualities of language and tropes to intensify and
render complex such representation of
experience
c. and both drawing on and referencing the forms,
the genre and discourse conventions, and
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the genre and discourse conventions, and

specific examples, of previous literature
d. whose function is not simply to represent our
experience but to offer possible worlds which
may expand and/or critique our vision of or
understanding of human life.
Then again, on might have quite other ideas about
what constitutes this cultural practice, or
classification, that we call "Literature," for
instance....
2. And/or is Literature an institution: that is,
"Literature" as a creation of the joint workings of
publishing houses, professional critics, prizeawarding bodies, anthologizers, and the designers
of curricula in universities and schools. As such, its
form and its definition or nature, as well as its
'body' of works, may be said to represent the
interests of the professionals involved, and to
represent their political agenda and sense of their
place in the society.
Consider a comment from a recent supplement on
literacy, in the Canadian middle-brow, wishing it
were-highbrow, weekly magazine Saturday Night, a
supplement decorated with corporate logos and
paid for by the literacy organization ABC Canada, "a
joint initiative of business and labour." In it the
writer reports approvingly, surveying attitudes
toward literacy,
Pity and scorn intermingle in the voice of
[award-winning and financially successful]
novelist Carol Shields when she talks about
the businessmen who tell her that their wives
love her books, but they don't read fiction
themselves because they have to wade
through reports all day at the office.
Pity and scorn. Wow. Those barbarians!
3. Is Literature, to raise another problem, or the same
one in a different way,

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one in a different way,

a. a self-contained body of knowledge which refers
primarily to itself,
or
b. one instance of the ongoing engagement of
writers in the historical and cultural aspirations,
anxieties and crises of the time, consequently
responsive to and formed by the immediacies of
history and implicated in the forms and
discourse practices of their time?
These questions lead us to ask, among other things,
what the role of 'aesthetic' value or force as opposed to
representational value and force are in literature, what
the real functions of "literature" and "Literature" are
(that is, works which we characterize as literature, and
literature as a social structure and practice), what the
ideological and/or moral force of literature may be said
to be.
There are some suggestions for the nature of literature
on my page On the Uses of Studying Literature and on
my page on some considerations regarding quality.
II. What is the Nature of the Subject?
1. Questions of the nature of the reader and the
author, and of their place in the process of meaning
and significance, lead us to the question of the
nature of the subjectthat is, the experiencing self.
Is the subject (here are some possibilities)...
a. an integral entity existing independently of
language, cultural meanings, or the contexts of
experience
b. an entity which is created through one or more
of: language and other symbol systems; social
interaction; responses to contexts; such that the
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'subject' might be said to be a social formation

c. a being distributed across different meaning
frames and discursive practices, a 'de-centered'
subject, as the phrase is.
2. If the subject is in some manner an amalgam of
physical and mental being, what implications does
this have for ethical existence, for the nature of
consciousness and knowledge, and (hence) for the
nature and functions of modes of communication
such as literature?
3. If the subject is an entity or a continuum of
experience which has an unconscious and a
conscious component, what is the balance between
and the relation between the two, what is the
unconscious and how is it formed, and to what
elements of the unconscious and conscious self
does literature appeal?
III. Who is the Reader?
In brief,
a. is the reader an individual affected only
incidentally by history and social judgment, or is
the reader the product of a 'reading formation',
a set of cultural understandings and
expectations and a set of conventions for
reading literature?
b. is the reader outside of and independent of the
text, or is the reader in fact a formation of the
text, a 'self' created through interaction with it?
The first of these questions has implications for
interpretation and evaluation, the second has
implications for the role of literature, especially in
the socializing processes of the culture.
One must ask what the implications are of the
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apparent fact that one must be 'educated in' the

reading of 'good literature' in order to appreciate
and understand it. Does this mean merely that
appreciating literature is a complex process, or does
it mean that the reader is only a 'proper reader'
after a socializing process, so that 'literature' is
regulated and its interpretations patrolled by
guardians of correct reading? This of course gets us
back to many previous questions, including the
nature of 'aesthetic' experience.
IV. What is the Relation of the Author to the Text?
1. Is the text the intentional production of an
individual, or
2. Is the text an only partially intentional production
whose unintended determinants are one of or a
combination of
a. the psyche of the author,
b. the psyche of the culture,
c. the ideology of the culture,
d. the particular socio-economic conditions of the
production (the placement and role of the artist
in the culture, who pays for the production, who
consumes it, what are the rewards of successful
production, how are they decided and, what are
the material conditions of production)
e. the traditions of writing which pertain to the
text
f. the traditions of the treatment of the particular
subject-matter in the culture and in the genre
3. Or is the text in fact almost entirely the production
of the ideological and cultural realm, in which realm
the author is merely a function, whose role,
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aspirations, ideas and attitudes are created by the

society in which she lives. In this case, the text is a
complex structure of cultural and aesthetic codes,
none of which the author has created, arranged
around traditional cultural themes or topoi -whereas the author herself, while an existent being
(her existence and effort are not denied), has little
to do with the 'meaning' of the text, as she herself
is simply part of (or, constructed by) the circulation
of meanings within the culture.
[For some considerations on the 'death' of the
author, a thesis of poststructural theory, see my
page The 'death of the author' as an instance of
theory.]
V. What is the Relation of the Author and the Text to
Society?
This issue is implicitly addressed in the preceding
questions. As the author is operating within a
certain cultural milieu,
1. In what ways does she represent in her text,
deliberately and/or unconsciously, the
understandings of the world that the culture
holds?
2. In what ways does she represent in her text,
again deliberately and/or unconsciously, the
understandings of what art is and does, the
aesthetic ideolog(ies) of the time?
3. In what ways are the ideologies of the culture,
and of the 'educated classes', embedded in the
conventions, traditions, canons, style and
subject matter of the text?
Moreover the text not only will be an outcome of
this situated imaginative process, but will be
structured in its production and in its reception by
various material social forces; consequently one
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must ask questions such as these:

1. Who is the intended audience, and how does
that shape the production of (the imagination of,
the writing of, the editing of, the sale of) the
text?
2. Who has a say in the text's final form, directly
(e.g. editors), or indirectly (who will pay for it
and why, who will produce and distribute it)?
3. How is it paid for, and how it is distributed, who
has access to it, under what conditions, and
what effects might these conditions produce?
4. What status does that kind of writing have in the
culture (e.g. what is its cach, what is its
authority, where in the education and
enculturation system is it placed, how does it
relate to entertainment and to the cultural
practices that distinguish the elite)?
5. What cultural powers does the (successful)
author have?
VI. Where Does 'Reality' Exist?
1. If art represents reality, as Aristotle argued (and
most theorists since him have agreed), then to
theorize art we need to theorize 'represents' and
'reality'. At a very basic level,
a. does reality exist 'out there', independent of
humans? --- in which case knowledge must be
homomorphic with (essentially the same
structure as) reality, else we couldn't know
reality.
b. or on the other hand is 'reality' (or are some
aspects of the conglomerate of conceptions we
clump together under the heading 'reality') a
product of the human mind, of our systems and
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methods of knowledge, and of our symbols

systems, including language? How culturespecific is reality?
2. Can we ever know reality, or is what we think is
reality just a construct?
3. If we can know it, what is it we are knowing? After
all, we know symbolically, so all we know are our
symbols; and we know according to constructs of
the relations of things, so what we know are those
relations. The post-structuralist (or, structuralist,
depending on your definitions) marxist Louis
Althusser wrote that, in effect, what we know is our
imaginary relations to reality -- that we live in
ideology, not in 'reality'.
VII. What is Representation (Mimesis)?
One must consider what it is to represent
something, what gets represented, what relation
such representation might have to 'reality' (see the
issue of what 'reality' is, below).
Most compellingly, is literature a means of
representing reality, or it is a means of representing
particular imaginative constructions that we take to
be reality but which may have ideological, cultural,
political meanings which ground and shape the
'reality' we think we are looking at?
VIII. What is the Nature and Status of Language?
1. What is the status of language and rhetoric in
literature? Is the language of literature in any way
privileged, intrinsically or culturally? -- Is it
different from other discourses? -- If so why and
how?
2. Is there a particular literariness to some uses of
language, as Roman Jakobson, for instance, argues?
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Are there particular forms of language use, such as

ambiguity or irony, which forms mark a work as
literary ( for instance one school of contemporary
theory, lead by the late Paul de Man, maintains that
rhetoric, by which de Man means essentially tropes,
ways of saying something by saying something else,
are the hallmark of literary language)?
3. Is language composed of signs which have their
meaning only in reference to, and through
difference from, other signs, as in the popular
Saussurean model? Or is language an actual
indicator of the 'real world'?
4. Do we speak language, that is, is language subject
to our will and intention, or does language speak us,
that is, are we implicated in a web of meaning
located in and maintained by language?
IX. What is the Relation of "Form" and "Art" to Meaning?
1. What is the role of Form in the meaning of the text?
Is form anything at all, and if it is, what is it?-- A
means of constructing reader responses?-- A means
of putting meanings into particular relationships
with each other?
2. And what is what we call 'art'? Is art an inherent
property of human existence, or is it a set of learned
conventions? Does 'art' have a privileged role in
representing experience, or is Pierre Bourdieu
correct when, after the exhaustive analyses in
Distinctions, he concludes that 'art' and taste in art
are merely class markers, so that what we think of
as 'art' does not have any privileged
representational force or qualities (other than social
ones)?
X. Where is Meaning?
Does 'meaning' reside in the author's intentions, in
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the text, or in the reading?

1. If it is in the text, is it in the text now, or in the text
as an historical, culturally situated document, so
that to fully understand the meaning we might best
understand the cultural and aesthetic codes and the
traditions and the meanings of the particular time of
writing?
2. If it is in the author's intentions, is that in the
conscious, or the unconscious intentions? --In the
intentions before or after the writing, or somewhere
in between? Can, in this case, the text have
meanings of which the author was not aware?
3. If meaning is in the reading, is that an informed
reading, or any reading, and what difference does
that distinction really signal? Is it in an ideal nonhistorical reading, or in a historically and culturally
placed reading? (See my handout The Problem of
Meaning for slightly more elaboration.)
XI. In Conclusion
These are some of the issues that are raised by the
theorists on the course, and some of the basic
questions any consideration of the nature and
function of literature, and of the meaning and
function of particular works of literature, must
address

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