NEW MATERIALISM: PROJECTIONS INTO LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM

The article considers the recent (re)turn to materiality in philosophy and theory, in particular, such schools as speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. They offer rethinking of objects and criticism of anthropocentric worldview. The attention to materiality privileges matter, body, and nature. Theorists of New materialism reject the binary oppositions (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, etc.) and insist on intra-action as a new materialist orientation. The author argues that the new materialist critique of conventional critique will be useful for literary theory and criticism. According to Latour, critique should be productive and collaborative. As far as critical judgments rely on thelogic of representation that in its turn is based on similarity, analogy and opposition they restrict the analytic enterprise. Moreover, it is necessary to rethink conventional practices of interpretation and explanation. In this context, K. Barad proposes to substitute these strategies with the practice of ‘diffraction’. In the second part of the article, the author analyzes Graham Harman’s article The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer:Object-Oriented Literary Criticism. We pay attention to Harman’s critique of New Criticism, New Historicism, and Deconstruction in their contrast to object-oriented philosophy. In his analysis of New Criticism, Harman figures out the taxonomic fallacy within this theory. He argues against the idea that only poetry has all the non-prose sense while other disciplines have the literal sense. His second argument against New Criticism problematizes the unity of all the elementsin a literary work. Harman outlines the assumptions of New Historicism and points out that it turns everything into interrelated influences. Instead, he argues that contextuality is not universal. In his criticism of Deconstruction Harman underlines that Derrida wrongly believes that ontological realism automatically entails an epistemological realism. In his turn, Harman insists that the thing is deeper than its interactions are.

Post-Theory and Beyond

This article surveys and assesses the eclectic trends in literary theory and criticism in the post-theory age with a focus on three rubrics: the cultural turn, the historic turn, and the affective turn. It concludes with a consideration of the current debate about symptomatic reading versus surface reading.

Plato, Aristotle & the Dialectics of Poetry

The present paper attempts at estimating the legacy of two of the seminal philosophical minds, Plato and Aristotle. Their ideas have been so instrumental in shaping western critical literary tradition that any discussion on literary theory and criticism has to have them as a point of reference. Plato’s negative conception of mimesis is juxtaposed with Aristotle’s affirmative stand. The paper also examines the various philosophical and pragmatic charges labelled against poetry by Plato in his works such as Republic, Phaedrus and Ion. The paper concludes with a general overview of critical responses to Plato by succeeding men of letters.

Introduction

Although literature and logic share a number of surprising symmetries and historical contacts, they have typically been seen to occupy separate disciplinary spheres. Declaring a subfield in literary studies — logic and literature — this introduction outlines various connections between literary formalism and formal logic. It surveys historical interactions and reciprocal influences between literary and logical writers from antiquity through the twentieth century, and it examines how literary theory and criticism have been institutionally shadowed by a logical unconscious, from the New Criticism and (post)structuralism to recent debates about historicism and formalism. It further considers how the subfield of logic and literature, in its constitutive attention to form, is neatly positioned to cut across these debates, and it sketches ways of reading at the interface of aesthetics, philosophy of literature, and literary studies that might be energized by an appeal to logical contexts, ideas, and methods.