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typography characterize the texts of this era. Works such as John
Barth s (1930 ) Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Thomas Pynchon s
(1937 ) The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Raymond Federman s (1928 )
Double or Nothing (1971), and John Fowles (1926 ) The French
Lieutenant s Woman (1969) helped the movement to attain recognition
in literary criticism. Both the drama of the absurd, including works
such as Samuel Beckett s Waiting for Godot (1952) and Tom Stoppard s
Travesties (1974), and postmodern film adapt many elements from
postmodern poetry and fiction to suit their media.
In the 1980s, the avant-garde works of postmodernism, many of
which seem exaggerated today, were overshadowed by women s and
 minority literatures, that is literature written by marginalized
groups including women, gays, or ethnic minorities, the latter mostly
represented by African Americans, Chicanos, and Chicanas. These
literatures, which have gained considerably in importance over the
last few decades, sometimes return to more traditional narrative
techniques and genres, often privileging sociopolitical messages over
academic, structural playfulness. Writing by women, such as Sylvia
Plath s (1932 63) The Bell Jar (1963), Doris Lessing s (1919 ) The
Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), Erica Jong s
(1942 ) Fear of Flying (1973), or Margaret Atwood s The Handmaid s
Tale (1985), and African American literature, including Richard
Wright s (1908 60) Native Son (1940), Alice Walker s (1944 ) The
PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 73
Color Purple (1980), and Toni Morrison s (1931 ) Beloved (1987), or
the works of Chinese-American authors such as Maxine Hong
Kingston s (1940 ) The Woman Warrior (1976) ensure the influential
status of texts by women and minorities in contemporary literary
criticism.
In addition to women s literature, post-colonial literature has
recently become another center of attention. This vast body of texts is
also categorized under Commonwealth literature, literatures in English or
Anglophone literatures. Literatures from former British colonies of the
Caribbean, Africa, India, or Australia have contributed to a change in
contemporary literature. In many cases but by no means in all
dimensions of content have regained dominance and act to counter-
balance the academic playfulness of modernism and
postmodernism. Salman Rushdie s (1947 ) Satanic Verses (1988),
Derek Walcott s (1930 ) Omeros (1990), Chinua Achebe s (1930 )
Things Fall Apart (1958), and Janet Frame s (1924 ) An Angel at My
Table (1984) are respective examples of Anglophone literatures from
Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, and New Zealand. Partly under these
influences the general trend seems to privilege less complicated and
apparently more traditional narrative techniques, while at the same
time focusing attention on content more than in earlier, exaggerated
narrative forms.
This overview of the most important literary movements in English
has only skimmed the surface of this wide and complex topic, leaving
many authors unmentioned. Any survey of literary history confronts
the issue of whether an exact classification of authors and their works
is possible; such a classification must resort to conventions, in the
absence of set guidelines. For this reason, authors like Aphra Behn (c.
1640 89), Edgar Allan, and John Steinbeck (1902 68) are not
mentioned in this survey, since they cannot be assigned a definite
place in this particular classification of periods and movements.
74
4
THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO
LITERATURE
As with the classification systems of genres and text types, the
approaches to literary texts are characterized by a number of divergent
methodologies. The following sections show that literary
interpretations always reflect a particular institutional, cultural, and
historical background. The various trends in textual studies are
represented either by consecutive schools or parallel ones, which at
times compete with each other. On the one hand, the various
scholarly approaches to literary texts partly overlap; on the other,
they differ in their theoretical foundations. The abundance of
competing methods in contemporary literary criticism requires one to
be familiar with at least the most important trends and their general
approaches.
Historically speaking, the systematic analysis of texts developed in
the magic or religious realm, and in legal discourse. At a very early
date in cultural history, magic and religion indirectly furthered the
preservation and interpretation of  texts in the widest sense of the
term. The interpretation of oracles and dreams forms the starting
point of textual analysis and survives as the basic structures in the study
of the holy texts of all major religions. The mechanisms at work are,
however, most apparent in oracles. An ecstatic person (called a
medium) in a state of trance received encoded information about
future events from a divinity. These messages were often put into
rhymed verse, which could preserve the exact words more easily than
an oral prose text. Oral utterances could thus be  stored through
rhyme and meter in a quasi-textual way, making it possible to later
retrieve the data in unchanged form. An important aspect of this oral
precursor of written textual phenomena is that the wording of an
76 THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE
utterance was seen as a fixed text that could consequently be
interpreted. Famous classical examples of the different possible
interpretations of oracles can be found in Herodotus Histories (fifth
century BC).
The interpretation of encoded information in a text is important to
all religions; it usually centers on the analysis or exegesis of canonical
text such as the Bible, the Koran, or other holy books. As with dream
and oracle, the texts which interpretations consequently decode are
considered to originate from a divinity and are therefore highly
privileged. It is important to observe that the interpretation of these
kinds of texts deals with encoded information which can only be
retrieved and made intelligible through exegetic practices. This
religious and magical origin of textual studies can be traced from
preliterate eras all the way to contemporary theology and has always
exerted a major influence on literary studies.
Partly influenced by religion, legal discourse also had a decisive [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]