Literary Theory: Possibilites And Limits (An Old & Rare Book)

The literary theorists studied here have greatly influenced the course of literary studies in England, America, and wherever English Literature is studied and taught. The first chapter discusses expectations and promises literary theory could fulfil; it also high lights the limitations literary theory car ries with itself. The chapter adheres to the view that literary theory cannot begin or end in any specific period of time or that the individual anthro pomorphism cannot dream of making it self-sufficient in relation to our under standing of literature. Mimetic, intui tional, epistemological, cultural theories of literature are closely examined. The second chapter discusses the gestural aspect of language in the work of Ken neth Burke. Harold Bloom's concepts of misprison, misreading and revisionism are accounted for in the third chapter. The fourth chapter discusses the tropes of reading as developed by Paul de Man and his other reading-strategies that make the experience of reading litera ture a unique one. The fifth chapter picks up the arguments where chapter First had left them, with special refer ence to W.J.T. Mitchell's Against Theory. Kant and Heidegger are picked up from the Western tradition as the two most challenging thinkers who not only re orient Western modes of thinking but bring the East and the West a great deal closer. The last chapter briefly focusses upon what I feel a possible theory of literature could be.

Dr. Charu Sheel Singh (b. 1955) has been Reader in English at Kashi Vidyapith since 1986. He graduated in English from Aligarh Muslim Univer sity in 1976 and got his Ph.D in 1978 from Banaras Hindu University. In 1982, Dr. Singh went to a British University with a fellowship sponsored by the British Council. In 1985 Dr. Singh had the prestigious UGC's Scientist "B" Award for five years for an advanced research in English literature. He was selected as a post doctoral fellow at the University of Yale, in the USA during 1988- 89.Dr. Singh has been teaching over thir teen years under-graduate and graduate students and supervising research at the Ph.D level.He is a life member of American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad, Indian Journal of Writing in English, Gulbarga, Member of Indian P.E.N., Bombay. His name figures in Sahitya Akademi's Who's Who.

Theorising about literature, like criticism, or like the produc tion of literary text itself, is an ongoing activity which is intrinsic to the text as also extrinsic in that theoretical concerns include as well as extend a particular text's immediate linear-temporal and spatial parameters. Theory, in short, cannot begin or end in moments of writerly or readerly anthropomorphism that as sumes egotistic proportions of self- erasure while pretending to dream of the perfectibility of man. The chapters in this book examine the literary theory of certain contemporary practising critics; the chapters also chalk out a way through the main ethos of European tradition of theorising about literature. The belief throughout adhered to is one of M.H. Abrams who once said that although criticism is a valid activity, a valid critical or aes thetic theory is a logical impossibility. The instinct to theorise about literature and the volatile volitional will to go beyond theory, through practice, into freedom, points towards a poetics of liberation, what Eugene Goodheart calls the "higher criticism," his model critics being Coleridge and Arnold.I find Kant and Heidegger, specially the latter, to be critics who change the course of Western literary-philosophical her meneutics from a concept-centred, logico-empirical logology to a process-centering monological activity that includes all dialogical formulations, and points to the way, very much in the Buddhist sense. Heidegger deconstructs Kant in order to dis lodge self-sufficient mathematical stabilities that certain of Kant's concepts seem to give rise to; he supplements such stabilities of time with the concept of movement with a remark able momentum that makes objects (including the art-object) move and change their complex, colour, and texture at each in stant. Heidegger, Kant and Derrida (in their respective concepts of the Way, Apperception and Trace) seem to meet in their belief in the sheer impossibility of apprehending the Totality that maybe God in theology or meaning in literature. But this vital shift from logical-positivism, for which there is nothing beyond linear referentiality, is violated and broken by the neo-modernists like Heidegger, Derrida or even Barthes who enshrine polysemic beliefs in the erstwhile temple of a tyrant, monotheistic God.But this democratisation of literary discourse from being uni focal or authority-centred to being bi-focal, resulting in a dif ferential ethic (itself a Totality ?), could also be counter-produc tive, not necessarily by finding uniformity at variance with difference, but a uniformity inbred into, and underlying, dif ference. This is what the tenor of my argument in the book advances towards. By making the literary artifact atelic in rela tion to the author, I wish to achieve necessary distance and dis simulation within the conglomerate archive (that is the art work) which continually incarnates and disincarnates its inten tionally figural lineaments upon the surface of desire. Such atelic nature of the art-work, while it forms its own telos, gives neces sary freedom to the author (in relation to the text and otherwise) and the literary sign to chalk out their respective destinies. The relationship is one of internal cohesiveness and external cor respondence. This is what Josue V. Harari calls strategy-the method as a means of perception in order to arrive at knowledge.