AESTHETIC DISTANCE

Aesthetic Distance is essentially a psychological rather than spatial or temporal concept. The concept is much the same in meaning as ‘detachment’ - the reader should not be too involved with a work of literature. In order to appreciate it properly one needs to be detached and disinterested. This reminds us of Matthew Arnold, who in his “The Function of Criticism in Present Time” (1864) defined criticism as “a disinterested endeavour.”

The idea of the concept is derived from Immanuel Kant, who analyzed the experience of an aesthetic object as an act of “disinterested contemplation”. Many later thinkers formulated the concept – Münsterberg, Puffer, Bullough etc. Edward Bullough in 1912 introduced the term “distance” into the type of impersonality theory. He says, “psychical distance is obtained by separating the object and its appeal from one’s own self, putting it out of gear with practical needs and ends.”

In contemporary literary theory aesthetic distance not only defines the nature of literary and aesthetic experience, but also analyzes the many devices by which the author control the degree of a reader’s distance or detachment with the actions of a literary work.

The aesthetic object may itself determine the distance required for its appreciation. According to David Daiches (1948), “each work of literary art, by its diction as well as other devices, provides an implicit set of directions concerning the distance from the object at the reader must stand if he is to see it for what it is.” Distance for the artist permits him to cultivate a detachment toward his work even while he is creating it in order to consummate it with the proper antinomy. Distance for the critic enables him to keep his perspective free of irrelevant subjective discoloration in order see in a work all the nuances that constitute the entirety of its meaning.

The term has a parallelism with the Russian Formalist concept of defamiliarization and Bertolt Brecht’s concept of alienation effect, which refer to the act of making familiar things seem strange and so to prevent the emotional identification or involvement of the audience with the characters and subject matter of a literary work.

Recently Hans Robert Jauss has used the term aesthetic distance in a new way. In the context of Reception Theory the term refers to the difference between how a work was viewed when it was published and how the same work is viewed today.

AFFECTIVE FALLACY

Affective fallacy like intentional fallacy was one of the main tenets of New Criticism. The term is derived from W.K Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, who for the first time used in an essay of the same title, written 1946, and reprinted in ‘The Verbal Icon’ in 1954. The concept as they define, refers to the critical error of evaluating a work of art in terms of its effects or its results in the mind of the audience.

As they wrote, the affective fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results…it begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of a poem and it ends in impressionism and relativism.” They relate the practice to the nineteenth-century tradition of affective criticism in which the critic is concerned to exhibit and record his emotional responses, to catch the intensity of his experience of a work without bothering to investigate the causes of the experience. This kind of romantic approach is still found in I.A Richards, who in “The Principles of Criticism” (1924) continued to associate poetry with an ‘emotive’ as opposed to a scientific use of language, and attempted to used behavioural psychology to analysis of the effects of poetry.

Wimsatt and Beardsley reacted against Richards and wanted to convey to him that descriptive criticism had to seek explanations not in psychology, but in language. They argued that emotive import depends on the descriptive and contextual aspects of a word; it is not something added on but a function of meaning. So, for an emotion we have not merely a cause, but an object, a reason.

David Daiches has questioned Wimsatt and Beardsley’s objection to affective criticism, which based on  “the individual critics response rather than on more formalistic criteria.” He claims that some form of legitimate affectiveness is necessary if the qualified reader is to avoid the “ontological fallacy of believing that a work of art fulfills its purpose and achieves its values simply by ‘being’.” He has suggested that a real relationship does exist between poetic effect and poetic value, and that affectivism can be saved from impressionistic and relativistic fallacies if the reader traces the ‘actual or potential effect’ of the work, which has caused such an effect. Daiches has thus suggested the relevance of ‘emotional effect as a guide to value’.

The reader response critics (led by Stanley Fish) have recently contested the concept of affective fallacy. They have deliberately dedicated their effort to describing the way individual readers ‘interpretive communities’ go about making sense of texts.

ALIENATION EFFECT

The term ‘alienation effect’ is the English translation of the German ‘Verfremdungseffekt’, which was first defined and used by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Even though the term appears to be the same with ‘alienation’, which is central to the Marxist thought, and Brecht himself was a Marxist, both are very different and the similarity seen in the surface level can be said to be unfortunate.

In developing his theory Brecht used a variety of different terms and the concept matured in Brecht’s thought as new terms were selected, and eventually reached the form in which he achieved fame as V-Effekt. Terms such as ‘dislocation’ and ‘estrangement effect’ probably offer better translations of the final German form of the concept, but alienation effect is probably too well established.

The concept shares common elements with the Russian formalist concept of ‘defamiliarization’, but Brecht was concerned more specifically with the stage and a particular dramatic technique than were the Russian formalists. Alienation effects were aimed at dispelling the audience’s empathy what they witnessed on stage and at preventing their sinking into the world of the play as well as preventing, too, the illusion that what they were watching/ witnessing was ‘real life’. Brecht wanted his audiences not to suspend all disbelief, but rather to recognize the constructed nature of the stage’s representations, to recognize that all things could have been and might be otherwise.

Alienation effect as a concept accompanies Brecht’s development of a theory of ‘epic theatre’. His ideas for the new epic theatre represent a reaction against dramatic theatre, which according to him is ‘bourgeois theatre’. Bourgeois theatre, according to him encourages the audience to an unthinking empathetic involvement with the dramatic characters. Such involvement stirs the emotions but only as long as the play lasts. On the other hand, Brecht wants to make them aware that the situations they are watching are not to be taken for granted. In ‘Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction’ written 1936 or earlier, Brecht makes the distinction between these two clear:

The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: “Yes, I have felt like that too – Just like me – It’s only natural – It’ll never change”; but for the epic theatre, I’d never have thought it – That’s not the way – That’s’ extraordinary, hardly believable – It’s got to stop.” 

Such is the justification for Brecht’s method of alienation or A-effect: The A-effect consists in turning the object of which one is to be made aware … from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected. To achieve such results Brecht’s epic theatre used an episodic representation of events very often involving narrative of an extra- mimetic nature broken up by songs, back projected pictures or texts commentaries and so on.

Brechtian has become a cliché, applied to any production, which shocks the audience, allows its actors to perform half of the performance in casual, rehearsal clothes or changes scenery in view of the audience. For Brecht, realism was not a matter of verisimilitude – “True realism has to do more than just make reality visible on the stage…one has to see the laws that decide how the process of life develop.”

AMBIGUITY

Ambiguity is the result of something being started in such a way that its meaning cannot be definitely determined. Some of the major causes of ambiguity are the use of pronouns without the proper referents, the use of words that have multiple meanings, unusual syntax and inordinate brevity.

Generally, ambiguity is considered a flaw, especially in speech. But modern literary criticism has turned it into a virtue, equivalent roughly to ‘richness’ or ‘wit’. This reversal of normal connections has been made possible by two factors: I A Richards’ argument that what is required of scientific language (lucidity) is not necessarily demanded in poetry; and the new critic William Empson’s promotion of the concept in ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ (1930). Since Empson, ambiguity has come to be regarded as a defining linguistic characteristic of poetry.

Ambiguity is not a specific figurative device that may be chosen at will for decoration; it is not a thing to be attempted. Rather, it is a natural characteristic of language, which becomes heightened and significant in verse. Ambiguity is common in ordinary language, but we do not notice it because context usually selects just one of the alternative meanings.

The simplest example of ambiguity is the ‘pun’. Pun is the play of words that are either identical in sound (homonyms) or very similar in sound, but are sharply diverse in meaning. Example:

            “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.”

-         Mercutio in ‘Romeo & Juliet’

A special type of multiple meaning is conveyed by the ‘portmanteau word’. It comes into literary use from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1871). A portmanteau word consists of a fusion of two or more words. For instance, ‘slithy’ means lithe and slimy – there are two meaning packed up into one word, explains Humpty Dumpty.

Sometimes ambiguity is of a more general nature whether the ghosts of Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1847) and Henry James’s ‘The Turn of The Screw’ (1898) and supernatural beings or hallucinations is left ambiguous. The whole play of Macbeth is ambiguous. Because from the beginning to the end, the play full of multiple meanings, confusions and uncertainties.

William Empson helped make current a mode explication which greatly expanded the awareness of readers of the complexity and richness of poetic language. The risk is that the intensive search for ambiguities will result in over reading, ingenious, overdrawn and sometimes contradictory explications of a literary word or passage.

Many have felt that Empson’s insistance on seven types of ambiguity is unnecessary and mistaken. William Tyndall, who finds Empson’s reading exemplary, terms his divisions into seven types ‘pretentious’. Jeremy Hawthorn comes heavily down upon Empson and says,

“Empson defined ambiguity loosely…Empson’s ambiguities were, after all limited and finite even they were multiple…in spite of his concern with ambiguity Empson frequently stressed both the way in which ambiguities produced meaning in a work, and how these often contradictory meanings could, nevertheless, merge into an aesthetic unity – and again these positions are likely to find less universal support than they once enjoyed.”

         - ‘Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory’

ANDROGYNY

Androgyny technically means the union of both sexes in one individual. The Oxford Dictionary terms it as biological term and equates it with hermaphrodism, but in recent feminist writing the term is used to refer to ‘culturally acquired characteristics’ rather than to biologically determined ones. This shift of amphasis was perhaps mostly due to Virginia Woolf, who in her long essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) revolutionizes it.

Woolf borrowed the term from S.T Colergidge, who made the remark that “a great mind must be androgynous”. She glossed it as meaning that ‘perhaps mind that is purely masculine cannot create any more than a mind that is purely feminine’. As Woolf presents it, creative androgyny looks very much like one of those myths of complementarity which feminists are suspicious of: male writers, according to Woolf, depend on the women part of the brain just as a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Many of Woolf’s critics, noting the unequivocal presence of androgynous themes in ‘Orlando’ and in some of the other novels have interpreted her own writings together with those of other members of the Bloomsbury group as examples of ‘androgynous vision’.

Near to this concept comes Julia Kristeva’s comment – “I don’t find it easy to define a masculine specificity when I think of the great aesthetic experiences of the decentering of identity.”

For those who look beyond intersexual strife, androgyny figures as an ideal alternative to the social inequalities of sex-role stereotyping. But others (the radical feminists) fear that androgyny is merely the sexist myth in disguise. Mary Daly, for example, says that “combining the ‘halves’ offered to consciousness by patriarchal language usually results in portraying something like a hole than a whole” (1979). K. K Ruthven in ‘Feminist Literary Studies’ (1984) has quoted Adrienne Rich’s objection that the very structure of the word replicates the sexual dichotomy and the priority of andros (male) over gyne (female). Responding to such criticisms, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber have suggested the alternative term ‘gyandry’; but this coinage has not gained general acceptance.

ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE

‘Anxiety of Influence’ is the title of a book by the American critic Harold Bloom, who is now best known for his controversial book ‘The Western Cannon’ (1994), developed a brand of revisionist or antithetical criticism in the 1970 s that challenged conventional conception of influence. In ‘The Anxiety of Influence’ Bloom significantly developed ideas set forth by Walter Jackson Bate in his book ‘The Burden of the Past and the English Poets’ (1970). While Bate has argued that poets inevitably feel that their precursors may have already accomplished all that can be accomplished, Bloom discusses the way in which poets deal with this fear or ‘anxiety’.

Bloom suggests that the writing of all poets involves the rewriting of earlier poets, and that this rewriting always and inevitably involves some form of ‘misprison’, a kind of misreading that allows the later writer’s creativity emerge. Thus for Bloom, poetic influence is a part of the larger phenomenon of intellectual revisionism. Bloom sees this ‘larger phenomenon’ in terms of Freudian concepts. So, the poet’s relation to these precursors is highly Oedipal in character: the struggle of the son against the father. Just as Oedipus has to kill his father, the aspirant poet also has somehow to destroy the power of his precursors, while simultaneously absorbing the transforming his strength and authority. Bloom’s insistence upon the anxiety associated with influence is consistent with this view: the poet’s attitude to his precursors is characterized by the same anxious mixture of love and rivalry, to which the Freudian ‘Oedipus Complex’ has been assigned.

For Bloom, the poet suffers always from a sense of belatedness, a sense that he or she has come after important things have been said; and after they have said in which constrain the poet and against which he or she has to struggle. Bloom asserts that poetic influence always proceed by misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily misinterpretation (1973). Most of the terms such as ‘Clinamen’, ‘Tessera’, ‘Kenosis’, ‘Askesis’ have not yet become common in contemporary literary debate. But the head term anxieties of influence and few others such as ‘misreading’, ‘misprison’, and ‘revisionism’ have gained currency.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who use Bloom’s theories concerning the male author’s anxiety about his forebears to highlight the very different situation of the female writer, have given bloom’s theories a specifically feminist emphasis. According to them a woman writer does not ‘fit in’ to Bloom’s essentially male literary history. Accordingly, for the women writer, the anxiety of influence that a male poet experiences…is felt as an even more primary ‘anxiety of authorship’ – a radical fear that she can not create, that because she can never become a precursor the act of writing will isolate or destroy her. (The Mad Woman in the Attic’ 1979).

APORIA

Aporia is a term derived from the Greek word meaning ‘unpassable path’, borrowed from logic for use in literary criticism, frequently in deconstruction theory. It indicates an interpretative dilemma or impasse involving render – meaning undecidable.

In traditional rhetoric, ‘aporia’ was regarded as suspect because it was a point beyond which the mind could not press further. It was used to describe statements by characters in just the state – of irresolvable logical difficulty – normally in soliloquy. For example, Hamlet’s famous soliloquy “To be or not to be…”.

More recently Jacques Derrida has adopted and developed the term and Alan Bass, the translator of ‘Writing and Difference’ glosses Derrida’s usage of it as follows – once a system has been ‘shaken’ by following its totalizing logic to its final consequence, one finds an excess which can not be construed within the rules of logic, for the excess can only be conceived as neither this nor that, or both at the same time – a departure from all rules of logic. This excess is often posed as an aporia for Derrida.

‘Aporia’, according to Christopher Norris, “may refer to the blind spots, that exist within any text, any discourse. They are moments of self-contradiction.” J.H Miller finds aporia a ‘loose stone’. Aporia implies a tension between what a text says and what, perhaps it wants to say. The later, (what the text wants to say) is often betrayed in the form of hints consciously or unconsciously relegated to what is called ‘the margins’ of the text which may be footnotes, passing metaphors etc.

In case of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, the poet believes that the power of imagination, i.e. poetic memory, can be the source for identifying his own “self”. But such a poetic memory does not allow him to go beyond the confines of language. Since the expression of those memories through language has become impossible, the possibility of identifying his “self” has become a futile attempt. Because, memory itself is constituted by language and does not exist without it. Here, the question of conceptual explanation of what constitutes poetic memory will show its interdependence on language. In the same way the need to supply conceptual explanation for the repeated use of bodily senses points to the erotic quality of the text that lies beneath the highly moral “exhortations” to his sister. A traditional reading of this poem would tend to overlook the aporia or contradictions inherent in the experience described in the order to construct a mystical system of thought as the basis of the poem. (Kathleen Wheeler)

In the wake of Derrida, the term has become more popular as a way of referring to those insoluble doubts and hesitations, which are thrown up by the reading of a text. The term is not normally used in a prejorative sense or to indicate disapproval, but rather to point to sites within a reader’s experience of text in which he or she is given freedom to play with the text by the irresolvability revealed at its stress points or faultiness.