Chapter Ten: An Introduction to the Critical Theories of Modern Poetry
This article will introduce several common types of literary criticism and Western schools of literary criticism.
Section One: Three Common Types of Literary Criticism
I. Impressionistic criticism (impressionistic criticism)
It is essentially the critic’s personal response after reading; the critical discourse directly expresses the reviewer’s intuitive perception and value-oriented thinking.
This type of criticism often does not follow any established rules, “following one’s feelings” and saying whatever comes to mind. It adopts “casual and improvised” commentary in its interpretation of the text.
Such criticism not only fails to help guide readers in appreciating poetic texts, but frequently misleads them.
Within the field of criticism of modern poetry, this type of “fortune-teller-style” criticism constitutes the largest number.
Reviewers mostly use such commentarial texts as complimentary gifts for “social courtesy,” doing their utmost to please the author being reviewed, thereby forming a widespread phenomenon of “presenting wreaths” or “carrying the sedan chair and pushing the wheelchair.”
II. Documentary-style criticism
Critics of this type mostly focus on documentary research and the biography of the writer.
They often excerpt passages from poetic discourses or lyric discourses throughout the ages, or adopt arguments from modern or contemporary poetry critics’ essays, in order to verify or support the critic’s own viewpoints and arguments.
This kind of “patching things together from east and west” and “formulaic” critical strategy has become the most commonly used magic tool for many teachers and students in academic institutions when writing critical essays to muddle through and impress readers.
III. Theoretical criticism
This type adopts modern or contemporary Western critical methodologies and conducts criticism that is systematic and structured.
Among these are intrinsic criticism centered on the text (text), such as “New Criticism,” “instrumental theory (rhetorical grammar) criticism,” “Surrealism,” “deconstructive criticism,” and “semiotic criticism”;
and extrinsic criticism centered on the author of the text and the era of its creation, that is, the cultural background in which it was situated, such as “phenomenological criticism,” “feminist criticism,” and “postmodernist criticism,” among others.
(I) The Evolution of Western Literary Criticism
1. Author-centered theory
During the periods of Classicism and Romanticism: interpretation was conducted with the author as the center, and the text was regarded as something “attached.”
2. Work-centered theory
Formalism, New Criticism, and Structuralism: the text exists independently of the work.
The author exits the stage; the work enters the stage.
3. The Turn Toward the Reader
The work-centered approach exits the stage, the author still remains absent, and the reader enters the stage, such as “reader-response theory” (reception aesthetics).
Section Two: Major Western Literary Critical Theories
Modern Western literary critical theories, since the twentieth century, include Formalism, New Criticism, Archetypal Criticism, Structuralism and Semiotics, Reader-Response Theory (Reception Aesthetics), Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, Deconstruction and Post-structuralism, Psychoanalytic Criticism of literary texts, Feminist Criticism, Postmodernist Criticism, Postcolonial Discourse Criticism, New Historicist Criticism, and Cultural Studies, among others.
The author will selectively introduce several of these critical schools.
I. Formalism
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Formalism was an influential school of literary criticism prevalent in Russia.
It encompassed the works of many highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars, such as Viktor Shklovsky, Tynyanov, Propp, and Roman Jakobson.
The theoretical propositions of Russian Formalism:
- The subject of literary study is the literariness of the work.
- A literary work cannot exist independently apart from its external form; this constitutes their new definition of literary “form.”
- Defamiliarization (Defamiliarization) is the fundamental principle of artistic processing and treatment.
The Russian Formalist scholar Shklovsky (Shklovsky) proposed the core concept of “defamiliarization,” which is among the most valuable and still enlightening ideas in Formalist literary theory.
“Defamiliarization” means “to make it strange,” emphasizing that aesthetic feeling does not derive from unconscious experience, habit, or perception in daily life; rather, it must establish differentiation at the level of (literary) aesthetic form.
If “familiarity” represents a state of proximity within perceptual experience, then “strangeness” is a distancing that follows familiarity, creating an aesthetic gap between oneself and familiar objects through a perspective that exists beyond distance.
That is to say, it removes the literary work from its normal sensory domain and, by employing creative techniques, reconstructs the perception of the work, thereby expanding both the difficulty and breadth of cognition, continuously providing readers with a sense of freshness as a mode of creation.
The value of literature lies precisely in enabling people, through reading, to restore their sense of life, and in this process of sensation to generate aesthetic pleasure.
With regard to modern poetic texts, the theory of defamiliarization may be annotated by Du Gongbu’s saying, “語不驚人死不休,” incorporating the two-dimensional concepts of “development” and “innovation,” manifested in several aspects:
① exploration and development of new fields (e.g., science fiction poetry),
② discovery and construction of new subject matter (e.g., multimedia visual poetry),
③ renovation and creative transformation of old subject matter (the application of the method of “recasting the embryo and replacing the bones” and harmonious parody),
④ creation of new imagery and lexical grafting,
⑤ use of new grammar (e.g., postmodern poetry), and so forth.
4. Syntagm (syntagm) and Paradigm (paradigm)
The Russian linguist Jakobson (Jacobson), in his 1962 essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasia,” first pointed out that the characteristic relationship among the components of a syntagm (syntagm) (Author’s note: referring to the sequential combination and arrangement among the components of a system, for example, the successive sequence of phonemes when speaking, and the left-to-right succession of written characters when writing) is “contiguity” (contiguite), whereas the relationship among the components of a paradigm (paradigm) (Author’s note: referring to the series of elements that can substitute for any given component within that syntagmatic segment; these constitute the paradigmatic set) is “similarity” (similarite).
“This is an outstanding insight: contiguity has only one possibility, whereas similarity may exist in different respects; therefore the same component may have a series of paradigmatic sets.”
Jakobson further pointed out: “These two characteristics are in fact precisely the characteristics of the two principal types of trope: a trope based on similarity (association by similarity) is metaphor (metaphor), that is, substitution on the basis of similarity in some respect, for example, comparing a flower to a young girl; whereas a trope based on contiguity is metonymy (metonymy), that is, substitution on the basis of a certain contiguous relationship, for example, using a skirt or braid to stand for a young girl.”
In another essay, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” Jakobson held that these two modes of association constitute the two poles of all symbolic human activity.
From a linguistic perspective, they are precisely the two poles of metaphor and metonymy; the internal laws constituting these two poles are the law of similarity and the law of contiguity.
Metaphor lies in concealment, while metonymy lies in substitution; the former primarily performs a descriptive function, whereas the latter primarily performs a referential function.
From the perspective of literary history, these two poles constitute representation and expression, namely the two literary stylistic tendencies of Realism and Romanticism.
The author, referring to the concise diagram in Modern Aesthetic System (p. 177) edited by the scholar Ye Lang, and reorganizing it, presents Jakobson’s dichotomy of “syntagm (axis of combination) and paradigm (axis of selection)” as follows:
Syntagm (axis of combination) → contiguity (association by proximity) → law of contiguity → metonymy → expression → Romanticism
Paradigm (axis of selection) → similarity (association by similarity) → law of similarity → metaphor → representation → Realism
II. New Criticism (New Criticism)
New Criticism is one of the most influential schools in modern Anglo-American literary criticism. It originated in Britain in the 1920s, took shape in the United States in the 1930s, and flourished in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. The text-centered semantic analysis advocated and practiced by New Criticism may be regarded as one of the fundamental methods of literary criticism, and it has exerted a profound influence on contemporary literary criticism, especially on poetry criticism.
It advocates the autonomy of the work (autonomy), and seeks to grasp the intrinsic meaning of the text through textual reading and contextual reading. New Criticism focuses on the formalist criticism of the textual subject, holding that literary study should take the work (text) as its center and conduct meticulous analysis of the work’s language, structure, imagery, and so forth (the method of close reading).
Common Terminology in New Critical Poetry Criticism:
1. Ambiguity and Paradox
A student of John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994) made his principal contribution by concretizing the principles of New Criticism. According to the operational principles of New Criticism, in dealing with the structure of poetry one must grasp “irony” (irony) and the “poem as drama”; in dealing with poetic language one must grasp “ambiguity” (ambiguity) and “paradox” (paradox).
In addition, he opposed simplifying poetry through paraphrase, believing that such an approach constitutes the “heresy of paraphrase.” Content and form constitute a dialectical unity, and one should comprehensively analyze a poem’s content, form, structure, imagery, diction, and so forth. Many good poems do not possess only a single meaning.
Ambiguity (semantic indeterminacy) refers to the phenomenon whereby, during the reading of a poetic text, certain words in the context form a compound semantic environment of multiple meanings. In other words, ambiguity refers to a linguistic unit (character, word) containing two or more meanings, or to the phenomenon whereby a single sentence admits multiple interpretations; it denotes the multiple effects produced by certain rhetorical devices (such as punning or homophony). Ambiguity is regarded by New Critics as one of the characteristics of poetic language; it can enrich semantic meaning and give rise to “wit.” The proposal and application of the term ambiguity, from the perspective of semantics, provide a multifaceted understanding of poetic meaning, thereby enriching the poem’s connotation.
2. Irony (irony)
Brooks offered the most detailed explanation of irony, defining it as “the obvious distortion of a statement by the context.” Context can invert the ambiguous meaning of a sentence—this is irony. All the words in a poem are subject to the constraints of context; their meanings are influenced by context, and thus all possess a certain degree of irony.
Irony can manifest itself in linguistic technique, for example, deliberately understating something while the listener understands its full weight. Irony can also be embodied in the overall structure of the work.
3. Tension (tension)
“Tension” was originally a term in physics. It was introduced into literary criticism by Allen Tate (1888–1979), a student of John Crowe Ransom, and became an important concept in New Criticism. In his essay “Tension in Poetry” (1938), Tate proposed the two concepts of extension and intension in poetry—that is, the denotative meaning and the connotative meaning of words. From the interplay between a poem’s extension and intension, we can find the unified totality of meaning: namely, “tension” (tension). Tate’s theory of tension directed poetic criticism toward internal study.
What Tate calls “tension” refers to the interdependent and mutually constraining relationship produced in poetry between a word’s dictionary meaning (literal meaning) and its extended meaning (deep meaning). The tension of poetry derives from the unity of the various meanings manifested through the extension and intension of language.
A poem ought to maintain a balance between its dictionary meaning and its extended meaning; both literal meaning and deep meaning (metaphor, symbolism, pun, homophony) must coexist and remain in a state of tension. If excessive emphasis is placed on dictionary meaning, the poem will lack the poetic resonance that invites sustained appreciation; if excessive emphasis is placed on metaphorical meaning, it will often become obscure and difficult to understand. Only through the mutual constraint and limitation of the two can deep meaning operate within the bounds of intelligibility, and literal meaning maintain its coherence within the bounds of suggestion—thus enabling the poem to be rich in connotation and enduringly evocative.
4. Metaphor (metaphor)
Metaphor is a type of figurative comparison, and it is also an important concept in New Criticism’s poetic analysis. Here, it is no longer merely a rhetorical term, but has become a fundamental element of poetry. Brooks once said: “We can summarize the technique of modern poetry in this way: rediscover metaphor and make full use of metaphor.” Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979) divided metaphor into two parts: the vehicle and the tenor. The former is a concrete image, and the latter is the abstract meaning derived from the image. Generally speaking, in figurative language, a simile explains the tenor directly through the vehicle, whereas a metaphor requires that the vehicle and the tenor be “distant” and “heterogeneous.”
5. Close Reading (close reading)
Close reading in New Criticism is not a self-interested, impressionistic criticism, but rather a “meticulous interpretation”—a method of criticism that involves detailed analysis and explanation of the work. In this kind of criticism, the critic seems to read every word with a magnifying glass, capturing implied meanings, suggestions, and associations within the literary phrasing. The process of close reading can generally be divided into three steps:
First, understand the meaning of words; second, understand the context; third, grasp the rhetorical features.
6. Misread (misread) and Overread (overread)
These two are technical terms specific to the New Criticism school. The former refers to a misunderstanding or incorrect interpretation of the poet’s original intention, with the logical formula: if p, then not q; the latter refers to the reader’s interpretation exceeding the author’s original intention, with the logical formula: if p, then q plus a. When misreading or overreading occurs in a text, sometimes the reader must bear part of the responsibility. In highly suggestive poetic lines, such as those containing symbolic metaphor or metonymy, if readers do not understand these rhetorical techniques, the probability of misreading is quite high. However, if even a well-trained poetry critic misreads, the problem may lie in whether the poet’s lines contain “linguistic errors” (errors in grammatical or syntactic relationships) or “semantic obstacles” (disordered logical relationships), or whether the informational cues (retrieval codes) provided in the lines are insufficient.
III. Archetypal Criticism (Archetypal Criticism)
Archetypal criticism starts from shared human psychological experiences and conducts a macro-level analysis of recurring expressive patterns, plot themes, and character types in literary works. Archetypal criticism was a highly influential school in the Western world during the 1950s and 1960s. Its principal founder was the Canadian Northrop Frye (1912–1991), who was closely associated with mythological archetype criticism. In 1957, he published his seminal work Anatomy of Criticism, in which he thoroughly expounded on the ideas of mythological archetype criticism, thereby establishing his prominent position in the field of literary criticism. Archetypes, as a key term in Frye’s critical thought, reflect his fundamental views on literature and criticism.
The important concept connecting archetypes with the collective unconscious of the artist is the archetype itself. Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) referred to the contents of the collective unconscious as primordial images. The term “primordial image” signifies an original model, with other similar existences forming according to this primal model. The synonym of primordial image is archetype. In The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Jung pointed out that “the term archetype corresponds to the Forms in Platonic philosophy,” indicating an innate predisposition in the collective unconscious, a priori determinant in psychological tests, and a universal preexistent form inherent in all psychological reactions. It enables individuals to act in ways similar to how their ancestors would respond to analogous situations.
Although archetypes belong to the collective unconscious, they can manifest as impressionistic images. Within each collective unconscious, numerous archetypes exist. The same archetype may vary in details or in name, but its core meaning remains fundamentally the same, corresponding to a common psychological requirement of humanity. In Dr. Carol S. Pearson’s monograph The Hero Within, six archetypes derived from Jungian theory are introduced: the Innocent, the Orphan, the Martyr, the Wanderer, the Warrior, and the Magician. Pearson points out their respective personality traits and indulgent behaviors. These archetypes frequently recur in literary works, and their intrinsic meanings remain relatively consistent.
Readers are invited to refer to the author’s own poetry criticism written according to the methodology of “Archetypal Criticism”:
Example: Zheng Chouyu — The Wanderer and the Rogue (see Volume II of this work).
IV. Reader-Response Criticism (Reader-Response Criticism)
In contrast to structuralism’s emphasis on linguistic forms and text structures, Reader-Response Criticism (Reception Aesthetics) emphasizes the dominant role of the reader in assigning meaning to the work, as well as how different cultural contexts across eras shape varying interpretations and reception phenomena of the text. “There are a thousand readers, there will be a thousand Hamlets.” In essence, this highlights the multiplicity of meanings in our reading of texts and the multiplicity of interpretations.
1. Horizon of Expectations
When a work is presented before a reader, the reader’s own reading experience and the reading memories stored in their mind are immediately activated. Consequently, the reader instantly participates in the reading activity, immersing themselves in a specific emotional state. Factors influencing a reader’s engagement with a text include the following three:
- Historical horizon (the reader’s own cultural, ideological, and conscious background)
- Legitimate prejudice (constraints of the reader’s personal cognition)
- Constraints of social discourse
2. Theory of the Implied Structure (Constitutive Structure)
This involves the filling in of numerous gaps and blanks in the text in order to complete the reading of the work.
Reading summons meaning through:
- The establishment of an intersubjective relationship between reader and author
- Tacit understanding or rapport between reader and author
- Reading as “filling in the blanks”
Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007) distinguished between literary works and texts, arguing that a literary work has an artistic level (i.e., the text) and an aesthetic level (i.e., the reader). The artistic extreme is the author’s text, while the aesthetic extreme is realized through the reader. He proposed the theory of the implied structure of the text (structure of enunciation), arguing that the text’s implied structure is composed of three elements: “blanks,” “gaps,” and “negations,” which stimulate the reader’s imagination to fill these blanks and gaps, establish a new perspective, and constitute the basic structure of the text.
3. Implied Author (implied author)
This concept was proposed by American literary theorist Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), referring to a persona or consciousness that manifests in the final form of the narrative text. In other words, a narrative text takes the shape it does because the implied author consciously or unconsciously injects their ideology, values, aesthetic taste, and other elements into it.
When an author completes a work, they have already embedded the implied reader within it. In this sense, we can understand the viewpoint of the implied reader: it embodies the preconstituted potential meaning of the text. That is, before the work is formed, as the creator, the author has preset, anticipated, or hoped for a conception of which type of reader the work will address.
Scholarly Interpretations of the Concept of Implied Author
The various scholarly understandings of “implied author” can be summarized as follows:
- Created by the real author: The real author’s “second self,” a guide for the reader — Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction, p.71)
- Created by the reader (real or implied?): The author inferred by the reader, ≤ the reader — Chatman (p.148), Eco (Between Author and Text, p.84)
- Identical with the text’s meaning: (Bal, p.120)
- The one who endows the text with meaning: (Nells, p.33)
- The speaker within the narrative communication structure: Chatman (p.151)
The differing interpretations above have made the concept of the “implied author” increasingly ambiguous. For example, in the second case (the implied author is created by the reader), who exactly creates the implied author: the real reader or the implied reader? If it is the former, the implied author becomes an undiscussable concept, because each real reader creates a different implied author, and given the “amateur” status of many readers, many instances are likely unreliable. If it is the latter, the interpretive burden is merely shifted from the “implied author” to the “implied reader,” which solves nothing.
