| UNIT 422-1: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORIES |
| 422.1.4.2. SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH |
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| Literature is a social phenomenon. The creation of literature is a social art. By writing we intend to communicate with a number of persons - a group, a class, a nation, the world at large. The values posited by a work of literature are posited as significant to a group, a class, a nation, or to everyone. Moral theories of literature are also therefore social theories. This is not to say that all morality is social morality, or that moral judgments are social judgments. A moral theory, if it pushes its analysis far enough, must value and explain literature by reference to this social totality. A moral theory will be more concrete and explicit. The more clearly defined is the social group in whose name it will speak. It will be more comprehensive and clearer, and significantly this group is seen in relation to he social totality. |
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| Edmond Wilson traces sociological criticism to Vico's eighteen century study of Homer's epics, which revealed the social condition in which the Greek poet lived. Before that century ended, Marx, and Engels had introduced a factor, the method of production, and thus made possible the development, in the thirties, of that special branch of the sociological approach - Marxist criticism. |
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| But with the economic depression writers began to add a powerful tool of judgment to their examination of literature as a mirror of society : the Marxist interpretation and evaluation of social forces. The result was an extraordinarily vigorous critical approach. But the excess of this critical aberration did not destroy the validity of the sociological study of literature. It is from the social applications of moral theory, of
which Marxism is now the chief, that we have learnt to refine and strengthen out notions of the writer's purpose. We have learnt that the effect of a writer's work may be different from that which he intends, and may even be contradictory to it.
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| 422.1.4.3. FORMALISTIC APPROACH |
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| The most influential critical method of our time is the formalistic. 'Formal' does not imply adherence to any particular notion of literary form: Ezra Pound's literary theory is largely formal : Yet he sets himself to break up most of the traditional meters and structures, and finally writers the cantos; i.e., 'formal' also includes informal. |
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| Formal theories are very late in making their appearance. It is only with Baumgarten and Kantian aesthetics that the formal point of view becomes sufficiently explicit and self-aware to amount to a theory of literature. Formal theories are the quite sophisticated. |
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| The difficulty with formal theory if to find the principles behind innumerable special pleadings. Three such principles have been found. They are - integrity, consonance and radiance. |
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| 1. |
Integrity refers to the almost universal requirement that the work shall be a whole, a chunk, a collection or a heep. This principle is involved throughout literary history, from Aristotle to the 'organic form' theories of modern criticism. |
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Consonance refers to the demand for coherence and proportion, the Coleridgean demand that the work 'shall contain' in itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise. |
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Radiance refers to the requirement that literature (as distinct and illuminate by its verbal communication) shall satisfy and illuminate by its verbal surface, by what John Crowe Ransom calls its texture. |
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| Everything that formal theory has to say about literature can be brought under one of these three heads. Probably no approach can boast so many brilliant practitioners as the Formalistic. Empson, Blackmar, Tate, Ranson, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren are only the best known. |
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