8. Literature, Culture, and the Reading Subject: An Overview of Major Trends in Literary and Cultural Theory

Throughout the history of literature, various critical approaches have been worked out to analyze and interpret texts. These approaches, of course, all reflected the determinations and characteristic features of the intellectual and political climate of the historical age in which they were formulated.

When we investigate the characteristics of various theories of literature and literariness, we can again rely on the idea of literature as communication, although we should also bear in mind that before the middle of the 20^th century these critical schools had no foundation in the linguistic and semiotic considerations that were discussed in our very first chapters.

As we move from the late 19^th century up to the late 20^th century in the survey of critical approaches, we can observe that the various trends mainly differ from one another in respect to which element of the communication model they put the greatest emphasis on. We see three major shifts in the focus of critical attention, displacing the concentration of theory upon different agents or elements in the process of communication, moving closer and closer to the problematization of the reader as a socially positioned human being:

AUTHOR -------------------------------------TEXT --------------------------------------- READER

HISTORICAL CONTEXT ---------------- LWA (??) --------------------HISTORICAL CONTEXT

                                                   1^st shift                2^nd shift                                  3^rd shift

                                                       1920s-40s         1960s – 70s                            1980s – 90s

Shifts:

1. From the focus on the biographical and historical context of the author to the focus on the inner linguistic, structural organization of the text: the emerging of formalism, formal critical trends.
2. From the focus on the text to the focus on the interaction between text and reader in the temporal act of reading: the emerging of reception theories on the basis of phenomenology and semiotics, reader-response criticism.
3. From the focus on the interaction between text and reader to the focus on the social, political, historical determinations and positionality of the human being as reader: the emerging of poststructuralism on the basis of semiotic theories of the subject and the critique of ideology.

On a general basis, we can say that theories of the LWA can be divided into two great groups which differ because they rely on two radically different concepts of the LWA. Trends belonging to the first group are called formal critical approaches, and they focus more or less exclusively on the inner, textual, linguistic, structural characteristics of the TEXT, since they are not observing the considerations of semiotics and they identify the TEXT with the LWA. Trends belonging to the second group are called contextual approaches, and they tend to open up the interpreted TEXT for its various contexts of production (author) and reception (reader), and they argue that the LWA comes into existence as a result of the interplay and interaction of these various contexts..

Basic difference in orientation:

Formal critical approaches: the LWA is a Self-enclosed, autonomous, organic unit, conveys aesthetic values independent of context. There is a network of interrelations within this closed “object”.

Contextual critical approaches: the LWA is an Open unit, it is a “discursive space” where different verbal-textual practices, discourses meet and cross each-other; every text influences every other text in a universe of intertextuality; there is an interaction between text and reader, contexts and traditions.

In what follows we are going to present an outline of the most important theoretical approaches to literature, in a chronological order of their development.