Post-Structuralist Aesthetics and the Paradoxical Nature of Language
Journal Title: Notions A Journal of English Literature - Year 2017, Vol 0, Issue 2
Abstract
Until the late 60’s, despite the prevalence of pluralistic approaches and multi-fanged practices, the relationship among the author, the text and the reader, and the definition of literature itself was of mutual respect and concern. Literary critics going all the way back to the days of Plato, has developed the genre, and ultimately provides us with parameters on how to study , analyze, deconstruct, interpret and evaluate literary works emphasizing the centrality of the author, the reader, or the context with varying degrees. Though the term “literature” existed even before, it was only from Mathew Arnold onwards that the term that came to take on the meaning of creative and imaginative literature only. David Lodge, favoring majority of contemporary critics, argues that ‘literature is language at its fullest stretch’ and its most striking feature is ‘it’s very high level of formal organization’. Elucidating this formulation Lodge sates that the extreme positions taken by Marxists ‘that art should have a content’, and by Structuralists that ‘art should be something which is itself of great beauty’ reveals only half-truth: the truth lies somewhere in between because the content of literature is as important as our insistence that literature can only be judged in terms of the words of the page. Likewise, the theories of language that appeared in Europe between the sixteenth and twentieth century generally followed the Coleridgean ‘ Semasiological’ stance, that language is to convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who representing it’. Therefore, the ultimate problem for the reader was to decipher language as a mediating agency between the categories of the mind and the world given to thought in perception. All these views came in for rigorous interrogation and re-evaluation in the 1960’s when post-structuralism replaced structuralism and critics like Foucault, Derrida and Barthes viewed language as constitutive both of the categories and the perceptions contained by it. While reducing “literature to writing, writing to language, and language in a final paroxysm of frustration, to chatter about silence”, they created more confusion than they essayed to solve it. What this confusion is and how they confuse the reader, depriving him of enjoying literature, will form the main parabola of this paper.
Authors and Affiliations
Dr. S. Karthik Kumar, Muzafar Ahmad Bhat
Keywords
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