The question of literary value

Theories of literary value fall into three categories: mimetic, expressive, and formalist. Aristotle founded the western tradition in aesthetics when he argued that poetry was ‘more philosophical’ than the writing of history because it showed not what had happened but typically the kinds of thing that do happen. Shakespeare’s Hamlet follows in that mimetic tradition, asserting that the purpose of theatre is to hold ‘the mirror up to nature’, as does Samuel Johnson in his ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765), ‘Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.’1 Coleridge announces an expressive theory of value when he claims that descriptions of the natural world ‘become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion’.2 In the twentieth century this Romantic tradition that the literary text is to be assessed as a significant expression of the ‘imagination’ of its author becomes dominant in mainstream literary criticism. At the same time and in contrast, Russian Formalism has defined literary value in terms of the formal linguistic properties of the text. The question of literary value simply will not go away, despite recent arguments by a number of Marxist and poststructuralist critics. With different inflections these have put forward a common view: that literature is not an essence contained in the canonical text and independent of the way the text is read-value is a matter of construction in the present, a construction at once institutional and ideological. As institutions within capitalist society, universities and colleges have a vested interest in maintaining existing relations of power; as part of this interest, Englit. has promoted a mystified notion of literature as a high cultural form in comparison with which popular culture can be dismissed as of no value. Far from being neutral, the claim that literature expresses ‘imaginative power’ lends almost supernatural justification to specialized and controlling definitions of class, gender, nation, empire.3 I subscribe to this account of the hegemonic function of traditional literary teaching and have been one of those who have advanced it along with the others in Peter Widdowson’s collection, Re-Reading English.4 However, as it is usually put forward, the account of literature-as-construction is incomplete and inadequate.