Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
Important Literary Theories
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
The Symbolist Manifesto
Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. The Symbolist manifesto ("Le Symbolisme", Le Figaro, 18 Sept 1886) was published in 1886 by Jean Moréas. Moréas announced that Symbolism was hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description," and that its goal instead was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal":
Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes ; ce sont là des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales.
(In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.)
Symbolism in literature is distinct from Symbolism in art although the two overlapped on a number of points. In painting, Symbolism was a continuation of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition, which included such artists as Caspar David Friedrich, Fernand Khnopff and John Henry Fuseli and it was even more closely aligned with the self-consciously dark and private Decadent Movement.
There were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, among whom Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edvard Munch, Félicien Rops, and Jan Toorop were numbered. Symbolism in painting had an even larger geographical reach than Symbolism in poetry, reaching Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Victor Borisov-Musatov, Martiros Saryan, Mikhail Nesterov, Leon Bakst in Russia, as well as Frida Kahlo in Mexico, Elihu Vedder, Remedios Varo, Morris Graves, David Chetlahe Paladin, and Elle Nicolai in the United States. Auguste Rodin is sometimes considered a Symbolist in sculpture.
The Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence. The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and Les Nabis. In their exploration of dreamlike subjects, symbolist painters are found across centuries and cultures, as they are still today; Bernard Delvaille has described René Magritte's surrealism as "Symbolism plus Freud".
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
Symbolists
Precursors
• William Blake (1757-1827)
• Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)
• Gérard de Nerval (1808-55)
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49)
• Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
• Charles Baudelaire (1821-67)
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82)
• Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont (1846-70)
• Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Authors
• Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1838-89)
• Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98)
• Paul Verlaine (1844-96)
• Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91)
• Georges Rodenbach (1855-98)
• Innokenty Annensky (1855-1909)
• Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916)
• Jean Moréas (1856-1910)
• Albert Samain (1858-1900)
• Rémy de Gourmont (1858-1915)
• Gustave Kahn (1859-1936)
• Albert Giraud (1860-1929)
• Jules Laforgue (1860-87)
• Antoni Lange (1861-1929)
• Paul Adam (1862-1920)
• Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
• Stuart Merrill (1863-1915)
• Fyodor Sologub (1863-1927)
• Adolphe Retté (1863-1930)
• Francis Viélé-Griffin (1863-1937)
• Henri de Régnier (1864-1936)
• Albert Aurier (1865-1892)
• Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865-1941)
• Albert Mockel (1866-1945)
• Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949)
• Konstantin Bal'mont (1867—1942)
• Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945)
• Paul Valéry (1871-1945)
• Paul Fort (1872-1960)
• Alfred Jarry (1873-1907)
• Tadeusz Miciński (1873-1918)
• Valery Bryusov (1873–1924)
• Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1873-1944)
• Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911)
• Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski (1876-1901)
• Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932)
• Renée Vivien (1877-1909)
• Josip Murn Aleksandrov (1879-1901)
• Émile Nelligan (1879-1941)
• Alexander Blok (1880–1921)
• Andrei Bely (1880-1934)
• George Bacovia (1881-1957)
• Dimcho Debelyanov (1887-1916)
Influence in English literature
English language authors that influenced, or were influenced by Symbolism include:
• George MacDonald (1824-1905)
• Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
• Eric Stenbock (1860-95)
• William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
• Arthur Symons (1865-1945)
• John Gray (1866-1934)
• Ernest Dowson (1867-1900)
• Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
• Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
• Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)
• T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
• Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)
• Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961)
• Hart Crane (1899-1932)
• Geoffrey Hill (1932-)
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
Structuralism
Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. But many French intellectuals perceived it to have a wider application, and the model was soon modified and applied to other fields, such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory and structuralism (architecture). This ushered in the dawn of structuralism as not just a method, but also an intellectual movement that came to take existentialism’s pedestal in 1960s France.
Structuralism enjoyed much popularity, and its general stance of antihumanism was in sheer opposition to the Sartrean existentialism that preceded it. But in the 1970s, it came under internal fire from critics who accused it of being too rigid and ahistorical. However, many of structuralism’s theorists, from Michel Foucault to Jacques Lacan, continue to assert an influence on continental philosophy, and many of the fundamental assumptions of its critics, that is, of adherents of poststructuralism, are but a continuation of structuralism.
Structuralism isn’t only applied within literary theory. There are also structuralist theories that exist within mathematics, philosophy of science, anthropology and in sociology. According to Alison Assiter, there are four common ideas regarding structuralism that form an ‘intellectual trend’. Firstly, the structure is what determines the position of each element of a whole. Secondly, structuralists believe that every system has a structure. Thirdly, structuralists are interested in ‘structural’ laws that deal with coexistence rather than changes. And finally structures are the ‘real things’ that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
Structuralism in linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure was the originator of the 20th century structuralism, and evidence of this can be found in Course in General Linguistics, written by Saussure's colleagues after his death and based on student notes, where he focused not on the use of language (parole, or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language (langue) and called his theory semiology. However, the discovery of the underlying system had to be done via examination of the parole (speech). As such, Structural Linguistics are actually an early form of corpus linguistics (quantification). This approach focused on examining how the elements of language related to each other in the present, that is, 'synchronically' rather than 'diachronically'. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection - as when we silently recite lines from a poem to ourselves - or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a signified (the concept or meaning of the word). This was quite different from previous approaches which focused on the relationship between words and things in the world that they designate.
Key notions in Structural Linguistics are the notions of paradigm, syntagm and value, though these notions were not yet fully developed in De Saussure's thought. A structural paradigm is actually a class of linguistic units (lexemes, morphemes or even constructions) which are possible in a certain position in a given linguistic environment (like a given sentence), which is the syntagm. The different functional role of each of these members of the paradigm is called value (valeur in French). Structuralist criticism relates the literary text to a larger overarching structure which may be a particular genre, a range of intertextual connections, a model of a universal narrative structure or a notion of the narrative being a system of recurrent patterns or motifs.
Saussure's Course influenced many linguists between World War I and WWII. In America, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark and Alf Sommerfelt in Norway. In France Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste would continue Saussure's program. Most importantly, however, members of the Prague School of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted research that would be greatly influential.
The clearest and most important example of Prague School structuralism lies in phonemics. Rather than simply compile a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague School sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus in English the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases (minimal pairs) where the contrast between the two is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope - it makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ in English is because these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. While this approach is now standard in linguistics, it was revolutionary at the time. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different forms.
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
Structuralism in literary theory and literary critics
In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death.
The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family + Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy - Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed.
Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. One branch of literary structuralism, like Freudianism, Marxism, and transformational grammar, posits both a deep and a surface structure. In Freudianism and Marxism the deep structure is a story, in Freud's case the battle, ultimately, between the life and death instincts, and in Marx, the conflicts between classes that are rooted in the economic "base."
Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories and myths, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth. As in Freud and Marx, but in contrast to transformational grammar, these basic elements are meaning-bearing.
There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory and Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and has an affinity with New Criticism.
The other branch of literary structuralism is semiotics, and it is based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
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