Literary Criticism: A short note on the current state of the art

Just a place-holder, really, I’ve got other things I’ve got to do.

A meaning-centric criticism takes translation as its first principle. A naturalist criticism takes description as its first principle. The existing academic discipline focuses on the first and neglects the second. That’s why the discipline cannot deal coherently with form, though form is one of its central concepts. And that’s why the current interest in description is deeply problematic, for it’s not clear what the targets for description for a meaning-centric literary criticism. Oh sure, there’s versification and such, that’s been around a long time; it can be avoided. But it’s peripheral to the discipline. Putting that aside, how do you describe meaning?

The current discipline uses spatial metaphors (inside, outside, surface, hidden, deep, close, distant) to characterize the text and the relations between the text, the world, the audience, and the critic. A naturalist criticism considers the text a way the social-behavior scientist would – phonetics, graphemics, phonology, morphology, and so forth. Such a characterization is not utterly foreign to the meaning-centric critic, but it has little place in the critic’s practical criticism or even theorizing (such as it is).

The discipline had a brush with a naturalist conception back in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s what structuralism offered, a naturalist poetics. Structuralism was rejected, thus further entrenching meaning-centric criticism. A critic born in 1955 would have been 20 years old when Culler’s Structuralist Poetics was published. That critic might have encountered structuralism as a live possibility. Any critics born after 1960 would only know of structuralism as a thing of the past. My guess is that most critics currently active were born after 1960. These critics would know of the naturalist conception of language and texts, but it’s not something they are likely to have internalized in any degree; it's not something they’ve lived.

Computational criticism, however, is a different. On some level the computational critic has no choice but to approach texts as a naturalist critic would. Why? Because that’s how computers deal with texts. Computers deal with the signifiers (as opposed to the signifieds) that constitute texts. They have no access to semantics, to meaning. However, most (if not all) computational critics will have been trained in the meaning-centric spatial metaphors of conventional criticism. Thus they may well hold the naturalist conception of language, the one embodied in the software they use, at arm’s length. It is an unstable and delicate situation.

More later.

For extra credit: meaning-centric = logocentric (in Derrida's sense)?