On Liberal Humanism

BEGINNING THEORY: NOTE ON LIBERAL HUMANISM

The following are my personal notes on Peter Berry’s Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (2009)

The formation of English Studies and English Literature in the UK (12):

• Until the first quarter of the 19th century, higher education in England was monopolized by the Church of England.

• Only men who were members of the Anglican Church could attend the universities and the teachers had to be unmarried Church of England clergy.

• Ancient Greek and Latin literature, divinity, metaethics were classic subjects at that time.

• It was not until 1828 that English language was first taught as a degree subject in England.

• English literature was taught at King’s College in the beginning of 1831.

• A greater sense of direction was given to English in the Cambridge English School in the 1920s. As English Cambridge English was the most recently founded (from 1911), changes were easier to make. People who engineered this change were those who taught at Cambridge in the 1920s. They were: I. Armstrong Richard, William Empson, Frank Raymond Leavis.

• Richard pioneered the technique called ‘Practical Criticism’ or ‘New Criticism’ (in the US in 1970s) an approach aims to make a close-reading of literature by isolating the text from history and context.

• Empson’s basic attitude toward language (language is a very slippery medium) can be seen as an anticipation from within the British tradition of post-structuralist views about the unreliability of language as a medium. (29)

Beliefs of liberal humanism: (pp.16-20)

• Good literature transcends the limitations of the age it was written in, and thereby speaks to what is constant in human nature.

• Writing not for an age, but for all time

• Good literature is ‘news that stays news’ (Ezra Pound’s definition of literature)

• The literary text contains its own meaning within itself; Literature is a self-contained and self-sufficient aesthetic object.

• The true business of criticism is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ (Matthew Arnold).

• To understand the text well one shall closely analyze the text without prior ideological assumptions, or political pre-conditions, or specific expectations of any kind.

• The purpose of literature is the enhancement of life and the promotion of humane values; but not in a programmatic way.

• Form and content in literature must be fused in an organic way so that Sincerity (comprising truth-to-experience, honesty towards the self, the capacity for human empathy and compassion) can be discovered. Sincerity is a quality that resides within the language of literature.

• What is valued in literature is the ‘silent’ showing of something, rather than the explaining, or saying, of it.

How ideas are formed in our mind? (20)

• According to John Locke, ideas are formed when direct sense impression from the world are imprinted on the mind. The mind then assembles these, so given rise to the process of thinking.

• Locke maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is determined only by experience derived from sense perception, a concept now known as empiricism.

Who was the first one who develops the ‘reader-centered’ approach in literature? (21):

• Aristotle was the first to develop a ‘reader-centered’ approach in literature, since he tried to describe how drama affected the audience. The audience exercises the emotions of pity, fear, and empathy through identifying with the plight of the protagonist.

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• The Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley (22)

• After the Romantics the main developments in critical theory were the work of the mid and late Victorians: Goerge Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Henry James (24)

There are two distinct ‘tracks’ in the development of English criticism (25):

1. ‘Practical criticism’ or ‘text-led’ track: traditional close-reading

2. ‘Idea-led’ track: general issues concerned with literature (e.g. what is the nature of literary language? How does literature relate to matters of politics and gender? What can be said about literature from the lens of philosophy? Etc.)

Matthew Arnold’s ‘Touchstone’ (25-26):

• Arnold thought that literature played an important role to promote common system of beliefs, values, and images after the decline of religion. In his “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” it is stated that the goal of literary criticism is that of attaining pure, disinterested knowledge, that is, […] of simply appreciating ‘the object as in itself it really is’ without wanting to press the insight gained into the service of a specific line of action.

• The notion of Touchstone = avoid any definitions of desirable qualities, merely suggests using the aspects of the literature of the past as means of measuring and accessing the literature of today.

The growth of critical theory (all aimed against liberal humanism) in the post-war period (32):

1960s, Marxist criticism

         Psychoanalytic criticism

         Linguistic criticism

         Feminist criticism

1970s, Structuralism

         Post-structuralism

1980s, New historicism         

         Cultural Materialism

1990s, Post-colonialism

         Postmodernism

         Black feminism, gay and lesbian criticism

The common bedrock of critical theory (33-35):

1. Politics is pervasive. Many of the notions (e.g. gender identity, the notion of literature, individual selfhood) which we regard as the basic ‘givens’ of our existence are fluid, unstable things, rather than fixed and reliable. They are socially constructed, that is, depending on social and political forces and on shifting ways of seeing thinking.

2. Language is constitutive.

3. Truth is provisional. Language doesn’t record reality, it shapes and creates it, so that the whole of our universe is textual. For the theorists, meaning is jointly constructed by the reader and the writer. It isn’t just ‘there’ and waiting before we get to the text but requires the reader’s contribution to bring it into being.

4. Meaning is contingent. The meanings within a literary work are never fixed and reliable, but always shifting, multi-faceted, and ambiguous. Literary texts, once they exist, are viewed by the theorists as independent linguistic structures whose authors are always ‘dead’ or ‘absent.’

5. Human nature is a myth. Theorists distrust all ‘totalizing’ notions. For example, the notion of human nature is to be distrusted since it is usually in practice Eurocentric and Androcentric; the notion of ‘great’ book as absolute is to be distrusted as books always arise out of the particular socio-political situation.