School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 13
-
ItemSystem and history: a critique of Russian formalism( 1980)The theoretical development of Russian Formalism, and of its structuralist successors in Prague, is the record of an exemplary attempt to fuse an immanent approach to the literary text to the literary system, which would locate significance in the structure of textual relations and not in genetic or mimetic features, with an awareness of the essential historicity of these relations. Implicit in the concept of literary evolution is a theory of the mechanism of change – that is, of the connection between literary history and history between the text and the social formation; but this theory was never adequately elaborated, both because of a refusal to postulate a direct causal connection between historical change and the apparently autonomous development of the literary system, and because of the Formalists’ almost constant separation of aesthetic from extra aesthetic functions (a separation which confirms the hiatus between the literary series and the social system in which it is inserted).
-
ItemSystem and norm in literary evolution: for a Marxist literary history( 1981)Russian Formalism provides a number of central categories for the construction of a non-teleological Marxist theory of literary evolution. In this paper I am concerned with working out some of their implications and in extending them to different problem areas. Particularly in its latter phases, the Formalist school worked towards a dynamic conception of the temporal field in which the literary text is situated; this field is constituted by the unity of the diachronic and synchronic systems to which the text belongs, that is, by the fact that every diachronic series is at each moment determined by the systematic configuration of elements at that moment, and that conversely “the synchronic structure of the work includes diachrony in that it carries within itself as a negated or cancelled element those dominant modes of the immediately preceding generation against which it stands as a decisive break, and in terms of which its own novelties and innovations are understood.”
-
Item
-
ItemStructuralist Marxism( 1982)Marxist literary theory in the twentieth century has been dominated by the urge to contract a ‘Marxist aesthetics’ that is, a comprehensive ontology of literary discourse. By contrast, the initial impetus of Macherey and Eagleton is to question the status of the ‘literary text’ as an object ‘factually given, spontaneously isolated for inspection’ (Macherey, p. 13), and of the field within which this object is constituted. If this field is a more or less fixed domain then the only option available to Marxist theory is a different form of description of the same object, a change of terminology on the same terrain as traditional aesthetics.
-
ItemWho shot Frank Hardy? Intertexuality and textual politics( 1982)The recently published Oxford History of Australian Literature — with its implied legitimation of a regional corpus — may serve by its very inadequacies to provoke again the methodological and political questions involved in the writing of literary history. These questions have in fact been discussed at some length in recent years; but not, apparently, in the halls of Sydney University. Two points should therefore be made at once. First, this is not a history in any meaningful sense of the word. It is a collocation of normative judgements, and history is present only in the gestural form of dates and sequencing. Second, it is capable of handling only those texts which seem to stay firmly within the limits of the “literary”; its typical strategies are those of decontextualisation and depoliticisation.
-
ItemGenre and history in the work of Georg Lukàcs( 1982)The writings of Georg Lukàcs on literary theory, from Die Seele und die Formen to Die Eigenart des Asthetischen, are knotted together by a small number of concepts and conceptual patterns which stretch continuously beneath the series of breaks marking off the different “phases” of his production. The crucial pattern is that which crystallises around the notion of mediation between conscious and totality, for a literary-theoretical study the best angle of approach to it is through Lukàcs’ conception of genre.
-
ItemMarxism after structuralism( 1984)This paper, which focuses on two recent bhe Polooks of Marxist literary theory, Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious and Terry Eagleton's Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, continues some of themes of a previous article on "Structuralist Marxism". In that piece I was mainly interested in exploring some of the limits of Althusserian structuralism; here I want to concentrate on the impact on Marxism of poststructuralist theory.
-
ItemVoice and Register in 'Little Dorrit'( 1981)In the last twenty or thirty years interest in the analysis of narrative has shifted from the structure of plot and character to narrative situation, the act of speaking through which a fictional world is constructed. But this shift has done little to overcome the basic dualism of narrative theory.
-
ItemMediation and metaphor: Adorno and the sociology of art( 1982)In a famous exchange of letters the Frankfurt School philosopher, aesthetician, and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) once elaborated a critique of the operations of mediation between disparate social realms used by his colleague Walter Benjamin in an unfinished work on Baudelaire. Adorno’s letters are of interest not only for the accuracy with which they penetrate Benjamin’s methodological weaknesses but also for the light they throw on the very similar problems caused by inadequate models of social correlation and of historical teleology in his own work.
-
ItemReading as system and as practice(Cambridge University Press, 1983)My concern in this paper is with the elaboration of a Marxist theory of reading, and this reminder of the many and often contradictory roles of the god is intended to serve as a warning against the confusion of determinacy with determinism or the setting of interpretative sanctions.