ABSTRACT
Strange as it may seem, the idea that it is possible to have a true view of the world is now ‘traditional’ within literary studies. Although this does not necessarily mean that it is wrong, it is for many critics and theorists working today an untenable proposition. For them the idea that it is truly possible to know the world is theoretically unfounded. That idea, which is called essentialism because it claims that we can know the essence of things, is the main target of the poststructuralist thinkers that I will discuss in this chapter and in the next one. As I have just said, to many critics writing today the poststructuralist arguments against essentialism seem convincing. But certainly not to all of them. On the contemporary critical scene we still find liberal humanist criticism, both in its New Critical or Leavisite form and its feminist or African-American form, and we
still find ‘traditional’ forms of Marxist criticism. We also find a good many critics who are willing to accept that absolutely true knowledge of the world is out of reach, but who in spite of that keep on working with traditional assumptions. Accepting that their assumptions no longer have the status they used to have, they present them as a programme, or even only as a point of departure, as a perspective that will still say useful and illuminating things about literary texts. All the time, they are fully aware that that perspective is questionable and is not the last word. In his 1989 article ‘Marxism and Postmodernism’, for instance, the American Marxist Fredric Jameson suggests that we should see Marxism’s ‘base and superstructure’ no longer as a model – that is, a true representation of the world – but as ‘undogmatic’, as ‘a starting point and a problem’ (Jameson 1989: 41-42). Since the arrival of poststructuralism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, literary studies has become enormously varied. The contemporary literary-critical world is a fascinating mixture of the old, the new, and the old in new guises (which does not imply a negative judgement). But let us now turn to the poststructuralism that had such an enormous impact on the way we study literature.
