Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies

On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory

On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory Marko Juvan In his paper, “The Literary in Theory,” Jonathan Culler claims that although the problem of literariness is central to literary theory from Russian formalism to French structuralism, it appears that “the attempt to theorize . . . the distinctiveness of literature . . . hasn’t been the focus of theoretical activity for some time” and that questions which have become central to theory are far less about aesthetics than issues of race, gender, and class (Culler 2000, 274–75 and passim). In my opinion, the impression that the question of literariness has become surpassed or irrelevant emanates from a specific cultural location and space: the asking about the essence or distinctive features of literature has to do with the history of the discipline, in this case Euro-American literary theory . When a literary theorist—in this case someone guided by Jakobson’s phenomenological imperative that the object of literary scholarship must be literariness (Jakobson 1921, 11)—discusses what the essence of literature may be, what discriminates texts deemed literary from other forms of communication , or, rather, what exactly changes their status into works of art, he/she not only asks questions about the object of inquiry. By asking this question the theoretical observer is also seeking an excuse for limiting the territory in which it is possible to utilize legitimately his/her explanatory concepts, tools, and plans. Or, as Culler puts it: “To ask ‘what is literature?’ is in effect a way of arguing about how literature should be studied” (Culler 2000, 276). In Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding, “it is clear that theoretical writings . . . are also (and more especially) contributions to the social construction of the very reality of this object” (1996, 294, Bourdieu’s emphasis; for constructivism, see Riegler). Thus, posing the question about literariness is indirectly and implicitly aimed 76 also towards the observer as a representative of the discursive field that has well defined and institutionally inherited cultural functions as well as a metalanguage with a specific history. In his paper, “Why did Modern Literary Theory Originate in East-Central Europe?,” Galin Tihanov argues that modern literary theory was actually born in the decades between World War I and II in East Central Europe owing to the disintegration of philosophical discourses (Marxism, phenomenology), to dissatisfaction with positivist and historicist legacies, and to changes in literature itself (i.e., its self-reflective and responsible uses of form). In his opinion, the emerging discipline of literary theory adopted ideas of Romantic aesthetics and philosophy of language and established its specific discourse in the uniquely multilingual and multicultural academic environment of Russia, Czechoslovakia , Poland, and Hungary (see Tihanov 2001). Further, the field of the theory of literature has become institutionalized as late as in the mid-twentieth century with such seminal texts as Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature (1942) while the discipline now as a standard part of literary studies was drawing exhaustively on the tradition of ancient poetics and rhetoric (see, e.g., Glaser 15–23; Groden and Kreiswirth; Ocvirk 6–12). However, since Aristotle, poetics and rhetoric used to reflect, describe, classify, and normalize the domain of communication that was either narrower or larger than what has been for approximately two hundred years considered belles lettres and written and read for aesthetic purposes: poetics dealt mostly with poetry, which, for instance, did not include prose genres, while rhetoric cultivated and studied the skill (in the sense of ars) of any kind of public speaking, not just that inspired by artistic muses (see, e.g., Lausberg). From poetics and rhetoric, literary theory adopted a series of issues and notions such as the principles of representation/mimesis, topoi, disposition, literary kinds and genres, diction, figures of speech, meter, etc. In literary theory such notions have become independent from practicalnormative aspects and have become anchored in a new epistemè and practitioners of the discipline presupposed the awareness of art as an autonomous system of social communication, i.e., a system governed by its own principles. From the Enlightenment on, these ideas were built on aesthetics such as Batteux ’s channeling of all beaux arts into a single, imitative principle, Schiller’s idea that art creates rules for itself, or Kant’s notion of beauty and aesthetic experience as contemplative enjoyment, devoid of practical interests (see, e.g., Tatarkiewicz 23–30). Aesthetics reflected and with its infiltration into ideology also encouraged one of the two great restructurings...