in all the chapters in this volume, far more has been documented than mere change and adjustment. It is not for nothing that recent studies have invoked phrases such as the ’formation of Europe’ in relation to the early middle ages and in particular to the two centuries between 700 and 900, the period examined in such detail in this book. Since the planning got under way in the late 1950s for the splendid Council of Europe exhibition on Charlemagne, mounted at Aachen in 1965, the Carolingian ruler has been the symbol, rightly or wrongly, of European unity and the common cultural heritage of Europe. The Carolingian period and the role of Frankish political expansion and cultural imperialism have taken their place in the historiography of most European countries as an essential phase in those countries’ development. As is clear from the relevant chapters above, some areas, such as Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Bulgaria or Scandinavia, were outside the direct sphere of influence of the Franks, yet cannot be said to be totally unaffected by events within the Frankish world. Peripheral regions, at the. fines imperil, were affected in one way or another. Not one region of the area we now think of as Europe was so self-contained as to remain entirely untouched by events in the Carolingian heartlands, even among those for whom the benefits of Carolingian rule may not have been either welcome or obvious. To this extent, therefore, the Frankish dominance of the historical evidence is not entirely unaccountable.

Introduction

‘Phenomenology’ is usually used to designate a major movement in twentieth-century philosophy. The word itself stems from the Greek verb ‘phaino’ meaning ‘to bring to light’ or ‘to make to appear’, and has the literal meaning of ‘science of appearances’. It was first used by the German philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) in his Neues Organon (1764); Lambert, however, considered phenomena to be illusions and thus his notion of phenomenology was a science of illusions. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) employs the word in his natural philosophy to distinguish the study of the realm of appearances for us (phenomena) from the study of the realm of essences or things as they are in themselves (noumena). In Hegel's (1770–1831) philosophy, which denies this Kantian division, phenomenology refers to different appearances of consciousness; the Phenomenology of Mind (1807) describes the various stages of human consciousness as it comes to complete awareness of itself. Later in the nineteenth century, particularly in the writings of Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) and C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), the term becomes associated with the study of facts or things as they really are. Only in the early part of the twentieth century, however, in the writings of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) did phenomenology become a designation for a philosophical school. Today the term is usually identified with Husserl, his students, or the various philosophers who were influenced by Husserl's work. In discussions of literature two distinct tendencies emanate from phenomenology. and poetics, was developed centrally by Husserl's own students, especially the Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden (1895-1970); the other, a more practical direction involving literary criticism, is associated with the work of the Geneva School in the middle of the century.

In the late nineteenth century, Germanic philology initiated the rise of scholarship in the English-speaking university world; in the 1920s, the writings of T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards launched the era of criticism. To risk a third sweeping generalization, we may regard the period between the mid-1960s and the present day as the age of theory. The present volume explores the major critical movements of the period since 1960, also taking account of relevant earlier developments. The critical writings of Todorov, Barthes, Derrida and Iser have more in common with the Classical and Renaissance philosophers and rhetoricians than with the preceding period of British and American criticism. The dominance of continental European philosophy and poetics over the positivist and empirical traditions of British thought has marked a major break in criticism – a sort of geological shift. ‘Feeling’, ‘intuition’, ‘life’, ‘tradition’, ‘organic unity’, ‘sensibility’ are no longer the dominant terms of critical discourse. A dominant humanistic discourse has begun to give way to the languages of formalism, structuralism, and phenomenology. Of course, the new theoretical modes sometimes preserve humanistic perspectives: Wolfgang Iser's reception theory, for example, is founded upon the human experience of the reader. However, the structuralist tradition has proved more resistant to reappropriation by humanisms of one kind or another. It is this theoretical ‘anti-humanism’ which marks a real break with the era of ‘criticism’. These generalizations cannot disguise the fact that resistance to ‘theory’ has been ubiquitous. But if we are to understand these controversies we must remember that ‘theory’ is a term which possesses at least three meanings in this context.

The groundwork of structural poetics laid by the Russian Formalists was developed into the first system of twentieth-century literary structuralism by scholars of the Cercle linguistique de Prague (Prague Linguistic Circle – PLC). The personal and theoretical links between the Russian and the Prague schools are well known. Jan Mukařovský, the most prominent literary theorist of Prague, acknowledged that the conceptual system of his first major work – the May monograph of 1928 – originated with the Russian Formalists (Kapitoly, II, p. 12). Later on, in his review of the Czech translation of Shklovsky's Theory of Prose (published in 1934) Mukařovský summed up not only the Czech indebtedness to, but also the Czech criticism of, early Russian Formalism (‘K českému překladu’, Kapitoly, I, pp. 344–50; Steiner, The Word, pp. 134–42). The first president of the PLC, Vilém Mathesius, surveying the first ten years of the Circle's activities in 1936, highly commended the contribution of Russian scholars, but emphasized the domestic sources of Prague School thought. He strongly protested the claim that the work done in Prague was nothing more than an application of Russian linguistic and literary-theoretical trends; the ‘working symbiosis’ achieved in the Circle is a ‘mutual give and take’ (‘Deset let’, pp. 149ff.; cf. Renský, ‘Roman Jakobson’, p. 380). In the same year, Roman Jakobson, who was a member of both Schools, spoke as well of a ‘symbiosis of Czech and Russian thought’, but pointed also to influences from Western European and American science.

The movement known as ‘deconstruction’ is, at the time of writing, not much more than twenty years old. It achieved self-consciousness only in the 1970s. In retrospect, however, it is often dated to 1966 – the year in which the French philosopher Jacques Derrida read a paper called ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’ (reprinted in Writing, pp. 278–94) at a conference on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. That paper, which was marked by an explicit break with the assumptions of structuralism, was promptly heralded as the emergence of ‘poststructuralism’. But this term was, and has remained, hopelessly vague. It acquired whatever sense it had from a wave of the hand in the direction of Derrida and Michel Foucault.

These two profoundly original thinkers did not, however, think of themselves as belonging to a common movement, nor as motivated by some special hostility to structuralism. Each of them had a distinct agenda, reacting to quite different traditions and focusing on quite different topics. Derrida's early work, the work which had the most influence on deconstructionism, was a continuation and intensification of Heidegger's attack on Platonism. It took the form of critical discussions of Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche, Saussure, and many other writers, including Heidegger himself. By contrast, though Foucault too was greatly influenced by Heidegger, the books which made him famous were histories of institutions and disciplines, rather than works of philosophy. These books had a distinctively political cast, whereas Derrida's earlier writings only occasionally touched on political topics.

Russian Formalism is a convenient label for a loosely knit group of critics whose signal role for contemporary literary studies can hardly be overestimated. They were born mostly in the 1890s, came to prominence in Russian letters during World War I, established themselves institutionally through the restructuring of academia after the Communist revolution, and became marginalized with the rise of Stalinism in the late 1920s. Though the affinities of Russian Formalism to some previous trends in Russian poetics cannot be denied (A. Potebnya's theory of poetic language, A. Veselovsky's historical poetics, or the metrics of the Symbolist poet-theoreticians A. Belyj and V. Bryusov), it represents a radical departure from the previously dominant mimetic theory of art. The Russian Formalists assailed the view of literature as an emanation of the author's soul, as a socio-historical document, or as a manifestation of a philosophical system. In this way, their theoretical orientation corresponded to the aesthetic sensibility of modernist art, in particular Futurism, with which the Russian Formalists were initially closely allied. It was the Futurist emphasis on the shocking effect of art and the understanding of poetry as the ‘unfolding of the word as such’ that found an analogue in Russian Formalist poetics.

Russian Formalism resists a totalizing historical synthesis for several reasons. First of all, from its very inception it was split geographically into two centres: the Moscow Linguistic Circle established in 1915, among whose members were Petr Bogatyrëv, Roman Jakobson and Grigory Vinokur, and the Petersburg OPOJAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) founded in 1916, with such scholars as Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov.

One of the more evident manifestations of the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism is the process whereby a fairly unified methodology has dispersed into a plurality of theoretical approaches. Within this diversity Marxism and psychoanalysis are, along with deconstructionism, the two most important strands. Both are concerned to challenge the idealist conception of the subject – i.e., the subject as centred in itself, essentially conscious and ‘free’ in the sense that it pre-exists social or other determinations. Structuralism itself of course also rejects such a conception of the subject, and in its insistence on the determining role of language-like structures provides a basis for a materialist theory of subjectivity. But the Saussurean view of the sign in practice reinstates a different form of idealism, as Coward and Ellis argue in their Language and Materialism; a genuinely materialist account of the subject has to break out of the confines of a ‘pure’ linguistics-based structuralism, and the Marxist and psychoanalytic perspectives are above all ways of doing this. Conversely, however, structuralism has undoubtedly forced Marxism and psychoanalysis to rethink some of their basic tenets in a rigorous and productive way; as Robert Young puts it in his introduction to Untying the Text, poststructuralism would not have been possible without structuralism. Specifically, the theoretical developments that Lacan has introduced into psychoanalysis and Althusser into Marxism are both heavily influenced by, and extremely critical of, structuralism. Lacan and Althusser are the principal figures in question here, and both develop an anti-humanist conception of the subject determined by the unconscious and/or by ideology. These issues go far beyond the practice of literary criticism, but they have opened up a new kind of access to the literary text, and generated a substantial body of critical readings.

The Saussurean model

The small number of students who, in the years 1906–7, 1908–9, and 1910–11, attended the lectures on general linguistics given at the University of Geneva by Ferdinand de Saussure could scarcely have guessed that they were participating in the birth of one of the new century's most potent intellectual movements. Those lectures, recreated after Saussure's death in 1913 by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from students’ notes and published as the Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) in 1916, produced two great waves of influence, the first upon the fledgling discipline of scientific linguistics itself, the second – after a delay of several decades – on the wider study of cultural practices and concepts. It is the second, the movement known as ‘structuralism’, which constitutes a major development in twentieth-century literary studies, but in order to explain the impact of Saussure's linguistic model upon this field (as well as upon a number of other fields, including anthropology, psychoanalysis, cultural history, and political theory), it is necessary to devote some attention to the most important elements of that model, and to the later modifications it underwent within linguistic theory. The development of the model within literary studies is largely covered in other chapters in this volume and in volume 9, and this chapter will offer only a sketch – with the exception of the work of Roman Jakobson, who occupies a unique position at the juncture of linguistic and literary studies.

Introduction

Reception theory is commonly used to designate a direction in literary criticism developed by professors and students at the University of Constance in West Germany during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The School of Constance advocated turning to the reading and reception of literary texts instead of to traditional methods that emphasize the production of texts or a close examination of texts themselves. To this extent its approach is related to reader-response criticism as it appeared in the United States during these same years, although the School of Constance for a time was much more homogeneous in its theoretical presuppositions and general outlook than its American counterpart. Also known as ‘The Aesthetics of Reception’ (Rezeptionsästhetik), the approach developed by the School dominated literary theory in Germany for about a decade. It was virtually unknown in the English-speaking world until around 1980 when it was made more readily accessible by a number of translations of the most seminal works. Hans Robert Jauss (1921– ) and Wolfgang Iser (1926– ) are the two most original theorists of the Constance School, although several of Jauss’ students, among them Rainer Warning, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Wolf-Dieter Stempel and Karlheinz Stierle, also made important contributions to this branch of theory. In response to the writings of Jauss and Iser, scholars from the German Democratic Republic such as Robert Weimann, Claus Träger, Manfred Naumann, and Rita Schober raised objections to some propositions and suggested Marxist alternatives, and the most productive East–West postwar dialogue in literary theory involved issues of reception and response.