Humanist Literary Theory

Humanist literary theory

Text can be read in 4 ways

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  Context (historicism)
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  Author centric
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  Text centric
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  Reader centric

Historicism: when a text is read taking the place and time into consideration. Eg. Look Back In anger

Text centric criticism: when we believe text has a life and meaning of its own. The story takes charge of itself. This also lead to genre criticism giving birth to formalism and structuralism.

Reader response theory: when there is a scope for the reader to interpret the text. It can be subjective. Eg. Hills like white elephant.

Author centric criticism: when deliberate efforts are made to draw parallels between author’s personal life, his character and the plot of the story, and characters of the text. We can see reflection of author’s personal life.

Liberal humanists thought formed the concept of literature as universal significance, eternal and timeless.

Ben Jhonson view on Shakespear’s work is ‘…..of all people and all time’

This is the limitation of liberal humanism approach that all works are not always of universal significance. For instance Shakespear’s work is of no significance to a Dalit women, working in a construction site, to feed her 4 children.

Few questions posed were;

What is poetry or literature and art in general?

To answer this question Plato states theory of mimesis and theory of form .

Theory of Mimesis: Mimesis is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include: imitation, representation, mimicry, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self. 

It is the representation of nature. Poetry is the art of divine madness and the poet is subject to this divine madness, it is not his/her function to convey the truth. There is a possibility of emotional identification moving away from what we actually are.

Theory of Form: 

It is a metaphysical hierarchy of three worlds.

Ideal world of forms: it is the idealistic world in which all object has Real existence and it possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality

Material world of objects. This is the world we see and feel through our senses and perception. Here objects have real existence and is a mere copy of the ideal world is our search of a perfect world.

World of representation: It is the world which represents the material world through art and literature. This world is the copy of the copy. It is copied from the material world which is again a copy of the ideal world. Thus its copy detoriates progressively.

Should literature be banished or censored as it conveys bad values,negative notions of god and does psychological damage?

There is no definite answer to this question (at least with me) but the augments made in favor of censoring poetry or warning one who is reading it by Plato are given as follows: Art is a realm of lies and is twice removed from the world of truth and perfection. And since artists only evoke emotions they don’t have anything to do with rationality or truth. Some of the poetrys convey unconventional ideas of life or aspects of violence and anger, one can identify himself to the negative character in a poem and these factors can influence the reader’s negatively as poetry has the power to evoke the emotions. Thus it can have a negative impact on the society. So he says, Literature is important, and needs to be regulated or supervised because it has the power to affect its readers.

Immediate question arising in your mind would be that poetry also conveys positive thoughts, good ways of living etc. but Plato never took a note of these aspects of poetry and thus questions are left unanswered by him.

On the contrary, Sir Philip Sydney wrote An Apology for Poetry (or, The Defence of Poesy) in approximately 1579, and it was published in 1595, after his death. The essence of his defense is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. The significance of the nobility of poetry is its power to move readers to virtuous action . True poets must teach and delight – a view that dates back to Horace.

The question posed is why denying other writers from other lands and different time zones by only sticking to Shakespeare.

Binary understandings by Plato

Some set of binaries are;

Reason vs emotion

Ideal world vs sensory world

Philosophy vs art

Actual vs representation

Eternal vs transient

Rational vs irrational.

Examples:

Ideal world is better than sensory world because it gives us the idea of chairness which is beyond physical boundaries where as the sensory world only apply it as chair.

In the same way reason is better than emotion as it helps us to reach the ideal world where as emotions take us no where.

Limitations of binary understanding

In such a concept we deny the scope for things that come in between and only concentrate on the extremities. Eg. In the fight of black and white we ignore the concept of grey. It also rules out other ambiguities. Narsimha shows acceptance of ambiguities in eastern culture where as western culture heavily believes in binary understanding. With binaries we are trained to think that one is superior over the other.

(Inputs are from P.K. sir’s; Renu mam’s classes and Internet. It also contains my understandings about the topic.)