Literature, Theory, and Common Sense

by Compagnon, Antoine

• ISBN13: 9780691070421
• ISBN10: 0691070423
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-07-06
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

In the late twentieth century, the common sense approach to literature was deemed naïve. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hillis Miller declared that all interpretation is theoretical. In many a literature department, graduate students spent far more time on Derrida and Foucault than on Shakespeare and Milton. Despite this, common sense approaches to literature--including the belief that literature represents reality and authorial intentions matter--have resisted theory with tenacity. As a result, argues Antoine Compagnon, theorists have gone to extremes, boxed themselves into paradoxes, and distanced others from their ideas. Eloquently assessing the accomplishments and failings of literary theory, Compagnon ultimately defends the methods and goals of a theoretical commitment tempered by the wisdom of common sense. While it constitutes an engaging introduction to recent theoretical debates, the book is organized not by school of thought but around seven central questions: literariness, the author, the world, the reader, style, history, and value. What makes a work literature? Does fiction imitate reality? Is the reader present in the text? What constitutes style? Is the context in which a work is written important to its apprehension? Are literary values universal? As he examines how theory has wrestled these themes, Compagnon establishes not a simple middle-ground but a state of productive tension between high theory and common sense. The result is a book that will be met with both controversy and sighs of relief.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION What Remains of Our Loves?	1	(14)
Theory and Common Sense	4	(3)
Theory and Practice of Literature	7	(2)
Theory, Criticism, History	9	(1)
Theory or Theories	10	(1)
Theory of Literature or Literary Theory	11	(1)
Literature Reduced to Its Elements	12	(3)
CHAPTER 1 Literature	15	(14)
The Scope of Literature	17	(2)
The Comprehension of Literature: Function	19	(2)
The Comprehension of Literature: The Form of Content	21	(1)
The Comprehension of Literature: The Form of Expression	22	(3)
Literariness or Prejudice	25	(2)
Literature Is Literature	27	(2)
CHAPTER 2 The Author	29	(40)
The Thesis of the Death of the Author	30	(3)
"Voluntas" and "Actio"	33	(3)
Allegory and Philology	36	(3)
Philology and Hermeneutics	39	(4)
Intention and Consciousness	43	(2)
The Method of Parallel Passages	45	(3)
"Straight from the Horse's Mouth"	48	(3)
Intention or Coherence	51	(3)
The Two Arguments against Intention	54	(4)
The Return to Intention	58	(1)
Meaning Is Not Signification	59	(4)
Intention Is Not Premeditation	63	(2)
The Presumption of Intentionality	65	(4)
CHAPTER 3 The World	69	(33)
Against "Mimesis"	70	(3)
"Mimesis" Denaturalized	73	(3)
Realism: Reflection or Convention	76	(2)
The ReferentialFallacy and Intertextuality	78	(4)
The Terms of the Dispute	82	(1)
Critique of the Anti-mimetic Thesis	83	(5)
The Arbitrariness of Language	88	(4)
"Mimesis" as Recognition	92	(5)
Fictional Worlds	97	(3)
The World of Books	100	(2)
CHAPTER 4 The Reader	102	(21)
Reading Sidelined	102	(3)
The Resistance of the Reader	105	(3)
Reception and Influence	108	(1)
The Implied Reader	108	(5)
The Open Work	113	(2)
The Horizon of (Phantom) Expectation	115	(1)
Genre as a Model of Reading	116	(1)
Freewheeling Reading	117	(4)
After the Reader	121	(2)
CHAPTER 5 Style	123	(23)
Style in All Its Conditions	124	(5)
Language, Style, Writing	129	(2)
Down with Style!	131	(4)
Norm, Deviation, Context	135	(3)
Style as Thought	138	(2)
The Return of Style	140	(2)
Style and Exemplification	142
Norm or Aggregate	111	(35)
CHAPTER 6 History	146	(23)
Literary History and History of Literature	148	(3)
Literary History and Literary Criticism	151	(2)
History of Ideas, Social History	153	(3)
Literary Evolution	156	(1)
The Horizon of Expectation	157	(4)
Philology Disguised	161	(3)
History or Literature?	164	(3)
History as Literature	167	(2)
CHAPTER 7 Value	169	(24)
Most Poems Are Bad, but They Are Poems	170	(3)
Aesthetic Illusion	173	(3)
What Is a Classic?	176	(4)
On the National Tradition in Literature	180	(2)
Saving the Classic	182	(4)
The Last Plea for Objectivism	186	(2)
Value and Posterity	188	(3)
In Favor of a Tempered Relativism	191	(2)
CONCLUSION The Theoretical Adventure	193	(6)
Theory and Fiction	194	(1)
Theory and "Bathmology"	195	(1)
Theory and Perplexity	196	(3)
Notes	199	(12)
Bibliography	211	(6)
Index	217