Literature, Theory, and Common Sense

Description

In the late-20th century, the common sense approach to literature was deemed naive. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hillis Miller declared that all interpretation is theoretical. In many a literature department, graduate students spent far more time on Derrida and Foucault thatn on Shakespeare and Milton. Despite this, common sense approaches to literature - including the belief that literature represents reality and authorial intentions matter - have resisted theory with tenacity. As a result, argues Antoine Compagnon, theorists have gone to extremes, boxed themselves into paradoxes and distanced others from their ideas. Assessing the accomplishments and failings of literary theory, Compagnon ultimately defends the mthods and goals of a theoretical commitment tempered by the wisdom of common sense. While it constitutes an engaging introduction to recent theoretical debates, the book is organized not by school of thought but around seven central questions: literariness, the author, the world, the reader, style, history and value. What makes a work of literature? Does fiction imitate reality? Is the readerpresent in the text? What constitutes style? Is the context in which a work is written important to its apprehension? Are literary values universal? As he examines how theory has wrestled these themes, Compagnon estabalishes not a simple middle-ground but a state of productive tension between high theory and common sense.

Antoine Compagnon is Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor of Literature at the Sorbonne.

"Like everything that Antoine Compagnon writes, [this book] is intelligent, oblique, ironic, surprising the reader with unexpected shifts and reversals. It may annoy both theorists and the advocates of common sense, but if they surrender to their annoyance, they will have missed the point."--Terence Cave, Times Literary Supplement