Modern Criticism and Theory [antikvár]

Foreword This book is a companion volume, and in some sense a sequel, to my 20th Centiny Literaiy Criticism: A Reader, which was published by Longman in 1972. As such books go, 20th Centiny Literary Criticism has been very successful. It has sold some 35,000 copies to date, and is used as a textbook in universities and colleges all around the world. Fifteen years later, however, it seems, not surprisingly, a litde dated, and in need of supplementation. The most recent essay included in it (Frank Kermode's 'Objects, Jokes and Art') was first published in 1966. An enormous amount of important criticism and literary theory has been published since then, and entire new schools or movements have arisen (for example, deconstruction, reader-response cridcism, feminist cridcism). Moreover, much of this work has built upon or reacted against an intellectual tradition that goes back well before 1966, but was barely reflected in 20th Centur)' Literary Criticism—the tradidon, loosely speaking, of 'structuralism'. What is structuraHsm—or perhaps one should ask, what was structuralism? In the opinion of many qualified judges, structuralism is a thing of the past—was already in terminal decline by the time the English-speaking world became aware of its existence in the late 1960s. We live in the age of post-structuralism—but to understand that we must know what came before. Structuralism is, or was, a movement in what Condnental Europeans call 'the human sciences', which sought to explain and understand cultural phenomena (from poems to menus, from primitive myths to modern advertisements) as manifestations of underlying systems of significadon, of which the exemplary model is verbal language itself, especially as elucidated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. One can trace a line from Saussure to the Russian Formalists, from the Russian Formalists (via Roman Jakobson) to the Prague Linguisdc Circle, and from there to the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the eruption of la nouvelle critique in Paris in the 1960s. This tradidon was very inadequately represented in 20th CentuT}! Literarj! Criticism (represented, in fact, by two short pieces by Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, respectively) for the simple reason that it had only just begun to impinge on my consciousness at the time when I was compiling that Reader. In this respect I do not think that I lagged conspicuously behind my peer group in the British academic world. 20th Centuiy Literaiy Criticism was intended primarily for readers in Britain and America, and was heavily biassed towards Anglo-American cridcism, as I admitted in the Foreword. That bias, however, seemed increasingly obvious as Anglo-American cridcism itself became increasingly oriented to European criticism and theory. 'Theory' has more than one meaning in this context. Structuralism has generated in literary cridcs a much greater interest in, and anxiety about, the theory