THREE VERSIONS OF THE LITERARY TEXT: NEW CRITICISM, STRUCTURALISM, AND RUSSIAN FORMALISM

In the present confusion surrounding literary studies, with the uneasy coexistence of a multiplicity of literary theories, the object of literary investigation has been obscured. A conceptual investigation of the characterization of the literary text in three major strands of critical thinking in modern times reveals a theoretical framework within which to set the discourse of criticism. This dissertation sets forth a dialectical sequence of these characterizations, beginning with the New Criticism and working through Structuralism and Russian Formalism. The development of the concept of the literary text is framed within the larger question of a science of literature. The New Criticism, in its attempt to characterize the text objectively, beyond the author's intentional control and the reader's response, seeks to establish the meaning of the text--a substantialist characterization of the literary object. Structuralism, developing a model on the basis of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theories, sees the text as a system of signs, which signifies in terms of a relational configuration of elements within the system--a relational characterization of the literary object. The Russian Formalists suspend the question of meaning and attempt to define their object of investigation in terms of the latter's function among various discourses in society--a functional characterization of the literary object. In the three moments examined, the dialectic of the literary object can be seen as a movement from a substantialist conception of meaning, through a relational view of signification, to a functional notion of literariness. The theoretical assumptions that underpin each enterprise suggest that the New Critical text, predicated upon a static view of language, remains beyond the determinations of history; that the Structuralist text, deriving from a hypostatized linguistic model, turns its back upon a genuine historicism; that the Russian Formalist text, in seeing its object as a variable conceptual space defined by the functional relationships between different kinds of discourse at different moments in time, ultimately remains open to the forces of change and to history.