Literary Standards

The Issue

What is literature, what is not literature, and who decides are hard to define. Few critics make serious attempts at defining what literature is; few, however, have resisted the temptation of constructing a set of standards by which literature may be judged as superior or inferior; in fact, whole academic disciplines and degrees are based on the study of literary theory and criticism. The study of literature entails examination of a recognized body of “literary” works not only in their historical context but also as successful or unsuccessful works of art in themselves. One may therefore argue that standards for literature exist not only to define what literature is—and what good literature is—but also to exclude forms of literature that the critic deems unworthy. Such judgments are likely to generate controversy. Moreover, literary standards shift with the times; many works have risen and fallen in critical estimation, sometimes being considered nonliterary during periods in which critics do not favor the works, and sometimes being “rediscovered” long after they were written when social and political attitudes favor them.

History

Historically, literature has been defined and judged from two perspectives: formally, that is, in regard to how the work adheres to a recognized set of standards for its genre (such as drama, novel, epic poem), and substantively, insofar as its subject matter and themes are deemed acceptable and worthy of literary focus. It is the latter that has been the source of most controversy. The Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first to propose standards for both: In his Poetics (c. 334-323 b.c.e.) for example, he defines tragedy as “an imitation [mimesis] of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude . . . through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions”; formally, he defined the structure of tragedy and recommended it have unity of time, place, and action. The Roman poet Horace, in his Ars poetica (c. 17 b.c.e.), insists on decorum and states that poetry should instruct and please its audience. These and other “rules” of literature had a significant influence on writers, poets, and dramatists through the Renaissance and into the eighteenth century.

The rise of the novel and the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century brought other standards to bear as social concerns and the common individual began to dominate the subject matter of literature. Romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, for example, believed in the prominence of the human will and the individual’s subjective experience of the world; naturalists such asÉmile Zola and Theodore Dreiser emphasized those forces of society that shape the common individual’s fate; writers as diverse as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot have been applauded for the epic scope of their works’ concerns; and in the late twentieth century, as the world became smaller with increased telecommunications and interchange among diverse peoples, a multicultural ethic arose to accommodate and celebrate the literary expression of a plurality of cultures learning to coexist within the walls of the global village. Formal, as well as substantive, standards for literature have likewise shifted with the times; some even argue that written or printed literature and genres such as the novel will eventually die, to be replaced by multimedia works of art. The varied forces that shape literature, then, also influence what is called “good” literature.

The Canon

Among academics, literary criticism emerged at the forefront of the debate with arguments about the “canon”—that is, the official list of great works that students study. Publications such as Mortimer J. Adler’s The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of the Great Books of the Western World (1952), coupled with a lack of access to the literatures of other cultures, have given the impression that “greatness” is restricted to a limited number of works judged by Eurocentric standards. The authors of the canon, as set forth in the twentieth century, are overwhelmingly white and male—a fact that implicitly devalues works by women and people of color. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University, argues that a truly adequate liberal education requires reckoning the “comparable eloquence of the African, the Asian and the Middle Eastern traditions.” Students need a global perspective and a critical understanding of their total culture, he argues.

On the other hand, defenders of the canon, such as Irving Howe and John Searles, argue that reduced emphasis on the great ideas of Western civilization results in, and is partly responsible for, the crisis that already exists in the American educational system. According to this view, declining test scores and rising dropout rates are the outgrowth of too much curricular experimentation in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Education based on a disciplined, acknowledged “common core” of knowledge is needed to reverse these trends. Similar ideas are echoed in books by E. D. Hirsch (Cultural Literacy, 1987), Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind, 1987), and Harold Bloom (The Western Canon, 1994).

Multicultural Standards

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the concept of multiculturalism was developed by activist members of cultural minorities to redress what was seen as a continuing pattern of unjust exclusion in a number of areas, including publication of marginalized groups’ literary works and, by implication, their self-expression. Proponents take a broad approach to inclusiveness that embraces members of various marginalized groups, such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, gays, and people with disabilities.

In literature, the multicultural movement has resulted in two significant trends in the dissemination of ideas, both at the educational level and, through publishing, at the consumer level. First, public schools—previously seen as agents of Americanization (especially when confronted with the huge immigrant influx of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s)—have had to meet the educational needs of desegregated African Americans and, more recently, of new immigrants from Latin America and Asia. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, colleges and universities established ethnic studies and women’s studies programs, inspiring the public school system to follow suit. A broad range of writings were suddenly legitimated as objects of scholarly inquiry, including slave narratives, autobiographies, and women’s journals. Works formerly considered minor or obscure—such as Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773, condemned by Thomas Jefferson as beneath the dignity of criticism), James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Black Elk, Zora Neale Hurston, and a host of others—were recognized as offering insights into the history and values of a particular people or group.

The second effect of the shift in literary standards was a steady rise in the popularity of works by newer authors giving voice to their cultural or other identities: N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), the “boom” in translations of Latin American literature such as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)—the list has mushroomed since the 1960’s. A concomitant boom in literature written expressly for young adults began to address such issues as divorce, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

Implications for Identity

The history of literature, in its formal development and in the evolution and variety of its subject matter, goes hand in hand with the history of literary standards. Works that are critical of established social institutions or that emanate from oppressed groups are often denied, at least initially, the status of literature. Before Wheatley’s poems could be published, for example, she had to be “examined” by eighteen of Boston’s most prestigious male minds, who signed a document attesting the authenticity of her work—so doubtful were her “patrons” that she had been capable of producing the neoclassical verses in the collection. Other works, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), undergo radical shifts in assessment. Appearing at the height of abolitionist fervor, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was widely read and, in the eyes of its author and others, successful in upholding the literary standards of its day: It was accurate in factual detail, appealed to the emotions, and moved the public to activism. By the standard of the 1960’s generation, however, Stowe’s novel was attacked for its sentimentality. James Baldwin also criticized the character Uncle Tom as a symbol of the submissiveness whites expect of blacks, coining a hateful epithet. Still other works have undergone the opposite shift in critical assessment. For example, the heroine of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, who in 1899 was reviled by editors and critics for her independence and sexual assertiveness, was hailed in the 1970’s as a prototype of the liberated woman.

It seems evident from these and other examples that literary standards will continue to be promulgated for both good and bad reasons, and will continue to evolve with time. Whether such standards are allowed to threaten self-expression and therefore the preservation and celebration of diverse identities remains a question. Censorship has often reared its head in the past: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), William S. Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch (1959), Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and Andrea Dworkin’s Ice and Fire (1987) have all been criticized and sometimes banned for their sexual content. Even Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) has been criticized, both for its celebration of interracial friendships and, retroactively, for its politically incorrect language. Many readers consider such works pornographic or deeply offensive and would like to see them regulated, whereas others counter that censorship only limits freedom of expression and replaces individual responsibility with tyrannical authority.

Henry Miller’s works, including Tropic of Capricorn (1939), were not allowed to circulate freely in the United States until after a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in 1964 which came to be known as the Brennan doctrine. The Brennan doctrine removed the courts from the business of deciding literary standards by granting that obscenity is too subjective a matter, in most cases, for legal review. The trend since that time has been to relegate literary standards to the province of academic debate, where they will be able to make their greatest contribution to the evolution of self-expression.

Bibliography

Aristotle. The “Poetics” of Aristotle. Translated by Preston H. Epps. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. An excellent starting place, setting the pattern for attempts by critics to establish literary standards.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994. Revisits and supports the theory of literary standards and of the canon, with appendices providing Bloom’s own list, organized by four great ages of Western literature.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. A landmark work of the so-called Chicago School or of Neo-Aristotelian criticism, which seeks to establish systematic study of literature at the level of genre rather than exclusively at the level of the individual work.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947. A definitive example of the New Criticism, concentrating on the text of the work and avoiding discussion of such contextual issues as social history and the author’s life.

Eliot, T. S. What Is a Classic? New York: Haskell House, 1944. An attempt to define a classic work.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Attempts definitions of various genres of literature—a key work of Neo-Aristotelian criticism.

Showalter, Elaine, ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. An excellent starting place in the study of feminist literary theory.

Tompkins, Jane, ed. Reader-Response Criticism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Presents reader-response theory, which argues for the subjectivity of textual interpretation, and, by extension, the subjectivity of the literary standards.

Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949. Attempts to define the difference between literature and nonliterature, arguing that literature is what defeats habits of thought and feeling, reawakening one’s perception.