Methodological
Options in Literary Theory and Criticism
for Developing a Doctoral Thesis in
the 21st Century University
Jesús G. Maestro
In this session, we are going to discuss a very important issue that affects many individuals pursuing doctoral theses in the 21st-century university. Here, we will address a series of fundamental methodological issues in literary theory and criticism for the development of a doctoral thesis in a university of this century.
These methodological issues, which are frequently encountered by anyone conducting research beyond an undergraduate thesis, i.e., a doctoral thesis, are essential to understand what we are talking about when we discuss literature. Most people pursuing a doctoral thesis are unaware of many of the issues we will discuss here, and often tackle them lacking a series of fundamental knowledge necessary for the doctoral thesis to not be an illusion, not be a mirage, and not, over time, become a failure.
Keep in mind that the majority of doctoral theses become outdated within 24 hours, among other reasons, because they are doctoral theses that are stillborn. The requirement to perceive a doctoral thesis topic and a doctoral thesis research methodology that is not necrotic, meaning that it does not lead to the death, within 24 or 48 hours, of that doctoral thesis, is absolutely decisive. So, many of you may wonder: what thesis topic can I select to ensure that the doctoral thesis I am going to carry out is not a failure, is not a mirage?
Firstly, the thesis topic must respond to a necessity, not so much to trends. Because if we do a doctoral thesis that falls within a trend, when that trend passes, the doctoral thesis will die, it will be completely annulled.
But there is another more serious issue: if we do a doctoral thesis that responds to the trend, our doctoral thesis will be Kitsch, that is, it will be just one among many other doctoral theses that respond to the current trend and, therefore, it will suffice to read the title to dismiss it. Why? Because often, a doctoral thesis that worships the methodological or thematic trends of a certain period is an already known doctoral thesis, that is, it will not say anything new and, therefore, it is a completely dispensable doctoral thesis. The academic qualification awarded to the doctoral thesis matters little. Do not pay attention to the academic qualifications awarded to you, because these academic qualifications often result, not only from an academic pact, but also simply from an approval, a complacency to get rid of the doctoral candidate and to also get rid of the problem or process of the doctoral thesis. But do not be deluded by the "passed with honors unanimously" because that really means absolutely nothing.
You might say: "Well, doesn't that mean that my thesis is approved, that I passed the test of my thesis?" Yes, but that means absolutely nothing. That is nothing more than an academic label that really leads nowhere, beyond the bureaucratic procedure. But if what you are really interested in is academic research, which is original within the field of Literary Theory and literary criticism research, perhaps what I am going to tell you might interest you.
I am going to address a series of absolutely fundamental methodological issues here, which I will list in eight points, and which I am going to present below in a fairly critical manner. I cannot guarantee that what I am going to tell you will please you, but I do not speak to please you, I speak to give you ideas. Whether the ideas are liked or disliked is another matter, and that is an emotional issue that depends on each individual.
1. Fundamental
Postulates
I present what I consider the first issue we face when we try to consider a series of methodological options for development in Literary Theory and literary criticism, that is, in literary matters, of a doctoral thesis in the universities of the 21st century.
The first issue requires recognizing a series of absolutely fundamental postulates, that is, when you face literature, you must necessarily move in relation to five completely indispensable criteria. Another thing is that you ignore the existence of these criteria, that is, you can navigate the sea without knowing the compass, and then you will reach land at some point, but not the land you want to reach, nor under the conditions you want to reach it. There is a concept that is the concept of elongation, which is the distance of a celestial body from the sun in relation to the earth. Well, here the elongation in which you find yourselves when developing a doctoral thesis will be the distance from you to a future and your own research in relation to the current state of research or work, but unrelated to you. And the one you intend to join. Consequently, at this point number one, in this first point, there are a series of postulates that are essentially five, and regarding those postulates, you will have to have clear criteria when making the doctoral thesis.
The first of these postulates is rationalism. You have to make a doctoral thesis on rational ideas. You may consider that all the ideas you handle are rational ideas. But if you want to make a thesis about the "soul of Russian literature," for example, or about the "soul of Spanish literature," you already start from a completely irrational concept, because in literature there is no "soul." That is, in literature there are authors, there are works, there are readers, and there are interpreters, but there is no "soul." That is, if you make a doctoral thesis based on poetic concepts as methodological concepts, you are completely mistaken. You have to study poetic concepts, not use poetic concepts to study poetic concepts, because then you are not doing a doctoral thesis, you are writing a poem. I will not say that the poem lacks quality, but it is not the same to write a poem, to interpret reality poetically, as to write a doctoral thesis about a poem, that is, to interpret a poem scientifically. In other words: interpreting a work of art scientifically is a completely different matter from interpreting a work of art poetically. Either we are poets, or we are scientists.
For these reasons, the first issue you have to face is to confirm that the criteria you handle are rational criteria. You cannot work with ideas that exceed human reason. That is, art is always a rational construction, even when it pretends to be irrational, like surrealism. Surrealist art is nothing more than the result of an extraordinarily rational process from which an irrational view of the world is built that obeys a deeply rational engineering. That is, there is only rationalistic art because there is no irrationalistic art. Irrationalism in art is a completely rational design construction. The irrational, in art, is a rationalism given at a different level from the rationalism known to the public. Hence the originality of art. Do not fall for the trap of thinking that you are going to explain the irrational by being a kind of "second Freud," because this is a complete scam, that is, you will have been completely deceived. You can only work with rational ideas and absolutely rational construction to interpret literature, even that literature or that work of art that is presented to you apparently rationally. Because any surrealist, dadaist, ultraist construction of art is a construction that offers results and demands deeply rational interpretations. The first postulate is rationalism.
The second postulate is criticism, that is, you have to do literary criticism, not advocacy for literature. That is, when an author is interpreted, a literary work is analyzed, when the readings that previous interpreters before us have made of a literary work are analyzed, you do not have to act as advocates for that author or as advocates for that literary work, nor as prosecutors. You have to act as judges, that is, you have to act as literary critics. The literary critic is someone who establishes values and counter-values, that is, establishes criteria that are analyzed by opposition and by antinomic relation. And precisely in the contrast and in the antinomic relation of criteria, literary criticism unfolds and develops validly.
Let's go to the third dimension, which is dialectics. We talk about rationalism first, and criticism secondly. I insist that criticism is the establishment of values that confront counter-values, in such a way that —I insist on it— when you analyze a literary work, you cannot act as lawyers for the literary work or as prosecutors either, you have to act as judges, that is, you have to contrast defensive values with negative values, positive values with accusatory values. And somehow there has to be a quotient that dialectically —and here we go to the third aspect— relates the first three dimensions: rationalism and criticism with a third one, dialectics.
Dialectics consists of interpreting an idea taking as a reference the contrary idea, the antinomic idea. It must be taken into account that dialecticians always start from those ideas they want to deny, while dialogists never perceive those ideas they want to deny, because they do not deny any idea, they simply assume them all uncritically. The dialogic relationship is an uncritical relationship, the dialectical relationship is a critical relationship. And you, if you intend to make an original thesis about literature, from current and competent methodological options, you have to adopt critical or dialectical positions, because if you adopt uncritical or dialogic positions, then you are not doing a doctoral thesis, then you are writing a eulogy, as Gorgias did in the Encomium of Helen, but you will not be doing a doctoral thesis. You will be doing Kitsch. It is one thing to like insects and another thing to be an entomologist. It is one thing to like literature and another thing to practice literary criticism. It is not necessary to be an insect to interpret insects, it is enough to be an entomologist.
You are not asked to become Edgar Allan Poe to interpret Edgar Allan Poe, you are asked to act as interpreters of the literature of Edgar Allan Poe. You do not have to confuse being a reader of a literary work with being someone who is completely enchanted by the literary work. Imagine that you are doctors practicing medicine and suddenly you come across a patient and fall in love with that patient. No one asks you to fall in love with literature or not, you are required to cure the illness of a patient, you are asked to examine literature. If you like literature and do not like literary criticism, do something else, and enjoy literature without analyzing it critically. But if what you propose to do is a doctoral thesis, regardless of the tastes you have for literature, you will have to offer a rationalistic, critical, and dialectical interpretation. And, of course, only from a rationalistic, critical, and dialectical interpretation is a scientific analysis of a certain reality built. When we eat an apple, we can taste the flavor of the apple, but naturally from a chemical point of view we know that the apple contains, among other components, glucose, and that it is possible to analyze scientifically the formula of glucose.
The same thing happens with literature: we can read the eclogues of Garcilaso, but that does not prevent us from establishing completely objective formulas, by virtue of which Garcilaso composes his eclogues using hendecasyllables, which are an import of Italian metrics into Spanish literature of the time. A hendecasyllable, a verse of eleven metric syllables. And this is an objective truth. Often we have been educated in the completely mistaken idea that criticism is always subjective. No, criticism can be subjective or it can be objective. Criticism is subjective when it is based on emotional, emotional, and psychological values, and criticism is objective when it is based on ideas, values, and criteria that exceed individual subjectivity and are objectified in a supra-subjectivity, so to speak, that is, in an objectivity, which goes beyond what an individual, an I, thinks, and is beyond what a group, a we, thinks. The traffic code is not a subjective criticism of how to circulate, because if everyone drove as they pleased, there could be no traffic code. The traffic code exists precisely because it is an objective criticism of different options for driving a vehicle, which in some cases are objectified as legal, if they are within legality, and in other cases are objectified as illegal, if they are outside legality, or they are issues that are the subject of legal dispute at a given time. A fine or a sanction, if it is the subject of a legal dispute, it is because there are objective criteria that allow to settle that dispute in judicial terms: in terms of "judicial court" a "court" can be established, saying up to here yes and up to here no. That, ultimately, is possible because there is an objective criterion capable of settling the interpretation, and that is what is maintained in this case: the ontological value of objectivity.
What is intended to be demonstrated is that the concept according to which all criticism, all critical interpretation, is always subjective is a completely absurd, useless, and gratuitous concept, because it is false. The criticism that, in geometry, can be based on the idea that a triangle is a polygon with three sides is a completely objective criticism. Therefore, considering that all criticism is subjective is equivalent to not knowing what is being said, not knowing what is being talked about at a given time. Let us discard this postulate, because criticism can be objective, if it is based on objective criteria, and subjective, if it is based on criteria, ideas, or emotional, psychological stimuli, which have no more foundation than the mood, more or less spontaneous, of the person speaking. You will know if what you are doing is a criticism based on an emotional state, more or less spontaneous, transient and occasional, or if it is a theorem like Pythagoras, which has been in force for more than three thousand years, we could even say, of course, more than two thousand five hundred years. We do not even know if anyone before Pythagoras could have formulated it.
In addition to these four criteria that I have mentioned —rationalism, criticism, dialectics, and science—, well obviously, it is necessary, I insist, to scientifically study literary materials, we must refer, lastly, to a fifth point. This is the concept of relationship or symploké, that is, literary materials maintain systematic relationships with each other, so that not all literary materials relate to each other, nor does any literary material remain isolated from another, but literary materials relate to some, to some, but not to all, and no literary material remains completely isolated. I mean by this that, when you make a doctoral thesis, you have to select those literary materials strictly related to the subject you study, but you must discard others.
What often happens is that, in many cases, the materials that are the object of study of a doctoral thesis are not properly related to those that are the cause or effect of them, and they usually relate, gratuitously, to aspects that have nothing to do with them. In short, the success of a doctoral thesis depends greatly, very seriously and very rigorously, on the rational, critical, dialectical, and scientific relationships that you establish between the chosen topics and the selected methodological procedures to interpret them. This is absolutely fundamental, because if you use a disorganized theme, a poorly related theme, obviously, the results are going to be a failure. And if you embrace a good theme, if you select a good theme, and yet analyze it from completely fraudulent methodological criteria, whose fraud you do not perceive, the result will be equally a failure.
I'll give
you an example: you can interpret Don Quixote from the presuppositions of
Buddhism. You can say "Cervantes was a Buddhist, and therefore, I am going
to interpret Don Quixote as a Buddhist novel." Surely, if you set out to
do it, you will succeed, and you will carry out a doctoral thesis where you end
up demonstrating that Cervantes, indeed, was a Buddhist. He was a
crypto-Buddhist. Well, you can do this, and surely you will find a jury that
gives you the apt with laude unanimously, because friendship solves all
problems among colleagues, sometimes enmity also, but you will find it, without
a doubt. Now, does that mean that you will have made a valuable, important
study of Don Quixote? No, that is not what such a thesis means. You will have
made a very good literary joke, a very good prank on the academic world. That
is the Cervantine Retablo de las maravillas. Why? Well, because in Don Quixote
it is not possible to find any structure typical of Zen Buddhism. However, if
you are anti-rational, if you do not exercise criticism, if you do not maintain
a dialectical relationship between Cervantes' ideas and Buddhism, if you deny
the scientific interpretation of Cervantine literary materials, and establish
relationships, or a symploké between Cervantes and Buddhism, as if that were
completely natural, then you have the result of a completely aberrant doctoral
thesis. Completely aberrant. But you may not know it, because you may be very
convinced that indeed Cervantes was a Zen Buddhist. It is a completely erratic
doctoral thesis. But I assure you that if you set out to do it, and find
someone to supervise it, you will end up obtaining an apt with laude
unanimously. However, this does not mean that your doctoral thesis is valuable.
It is original, yes, but originality does not consist of developing a
pathology, but it consists of developing innovative ideas from the point of
view of techniques and methodologies, and from the possibilities of the topics
dealt with, because they would be original topics because they have never been
treated before. It is true that nobody has spoken before about Buddhism in Don
Quixote, no, nor about Don Quixote as a Buddhist work, but I do not advise you
to do it, because it has no rational, dialectical, critical, or scientific
basis, and it is not possible to base a relationship in symploké of those
materials either. Therefore, when you make a doctoral thesis, tie these five
ends: let it be rationalist, let it be critical, let it be dialectical, let it
be scientific, and let the relationship in symploké of the different parts
coincide, at least, systematically.
2. The
Concept of Literature
Let's move on to point two. Point two contains a discussion on the concept of literature. If you are writing a doctoral thesis on literature, you must have a very clear understanding of what literature is. Ask yourselves this question: What is literature? And don't refer me to the books that many people have written with this title - "what is literature" - and then fail to answer this question. This is the case with Jean-Paul Sartre, it is the case with Terry Eagleton; they write books whose headings, whose titles, appeal to a definition of literature, and conclude that literature cannot be defined. This is not a book about the definition of literature; this is a mockery, whether written by Agamemnon or his swineherd, Jean-Paul Sartre or Terry Eagleton.
At this point, there is an absolutely fundamental fact, and it is the following: there is often a lack of a definition of literature. It is said that literature cannot be defined. Well, I am not going to waste time with this; I am going to give my definition of literature. Literature is a human construction, and it is also a rationalist construction. It is a human and rationalist construction because it springs from human reason, which makes its way towards freedom through struggle and dialectical confrontation. Literature always has a meeting with the exercise of freedom. Literature always expands the possibilities of human freedom and demands an expansion of the possibilities of human freedom beyond laws, beyond mathematical rationalism, which is a very rigid and deductive rationalism, beyond the scientific rationalism of other disciplines typical of the so-called natural sciences. Literature articulates a rationalism and demands a freedom that is not given at the same level and on the same scale as other human activities, such as medicine, mathematics, thermodynamics, physics, chemistry, or even music, which is nothing more than the sound of a more or less deductive mathematics.
The point is that literature is a rational and human construction that makes its way towards freedom through struggle and dialectical confrontation. Keep in mind that history always implies the triumph of illegality. History advances through the triumph of successive illegalities, and literature has much to do with the triumph of numerous historical illegalities. What was once illegal in the past is now a merit. As a result of what? Well, as a result of having faced an expansion of freedom, of having faced an expansion of realities and powers that limit human freedom, and regarding which literature has had much to say. The Book of Good Love, La Celestina, Don Quixote itself, La Regenta, the truly original works of the history of literature have been works that have faced the limits that power has imposed on freedom.
You can write a doctoral thesis to confirm the power that represses human freedom, adapting to whatever is politically correct at each epoch, or you can write a doctoral thesis defending literature that confronts those who limit human freedom. That is a matter for each person; those are the options that each one has on the table, but what cannot be forgotten is that Cervantes is an author who placed literature at the service of freedom, and Calderón de la Barca, for example, was an author who placed literature at the service of theology. That cannot be denied in any way. Another thing is whether we like or dislike Calderón's theology, and another thing is whether we like or dislike the concept of freedom to which Cervantes placed literature in service. What I maintain here is that literature is a human and rationalist construction that confronts the enemies of freedom and, through struggle and dialectical confrontation, seeks to expand that freedom.
Furthermore, literature uses linguistic signs. It uses language, words, signs to which it invests with a poetic function, a value, a poetic status, and also a fictional dimension. That is, language, poetics - what the German idealists called aesthetics - and fiction are three indispensable dimensions of literature. There is no literature without words, there is no literature without poetic value, and there is no literature without fiction. Anyone who presents me with literary forms without fiction, without words, or without aesthetic value, is not speaking to me about literature; they are talking about occurrences that are outside the field to which I refer. If you have occurrences of this nature, naturally you can write doctoral theses on such topics, but they no longer fall within what I am telling you. So, you can stop reading from this moment and focus on your doctoral thesis, but it will not be a doctoral thesis on literature; it will be a doctoral thesis on literary substitutes or on pathological forms of imitating literature. These are completely different things.
I insist that literature is a rational and human construction that makes its way towards freedom through struggle and dialectical confrontation, that uses linguistic signs to which it gives a poetic value, which the German idealists called aesthetic, and that possesses a fictional status, a fictional function and, furthermore, to finish, it is part of a communicative process of pragmatic dimensions, framed in a political, historical, and geographical context.
In short, literature develops over time, it constitutes a history, it develops over space, that is, through geography, and of course, it is always linked, implicated, embedded in a political society, that is, in a State. States, in a way, have carried out the expropriation of literary materials, at least since the Renaissance, which is when modern States were configured. Prior to the Renaissance and modern States, there are literary territories, literary histories, that have not always been intervened by a State. From the 21st century onwards, we witness the dissolution of States and the conversion of States into political entities without reference or power. Today they are completely phagocytosed, that is, there is a phagocytosis, if the word is allowed, by supranational structures, of States. This dissolution of States also implies a dissolution of national literatures, which are removed from popular literatures, or from popular approaches to literature. The 21st century is characterized by the failure of democracy, the dissolution of States, and the digital denaturalization of the human being. These are three typical characteristics of the 21st century, which have not necessarily manifested themselves in literary works yet, but probably, if literature continues to exist and revive throughout the 21st century, they will eventually develop. What I mean by all this is that literature is part of a communicative process of pragmatic and social dimensions, which naturally are embedded, coordinated, over time and history, over space and geography, and in a always political context, organized in a political community or State.
Furthermore, literature is objectified in four fundamental terms or elements which are the author, who exists, who writes the work, the literary work or text, the reader of the literary work, and the interpreter or transducer. The reader is someone who interprets for himself, the interpreter or transducer is someone who interprets for others.
This is the definition of literature that you must take as a reference if you want to define your position regarding literature. Another thing is that, once this definition is taken as a reference, you discuss it, overcome it, contrast it with others you know, and evaluate the utility that this concept of literature may or may not have. But what you cannot do in any way is to confront literature without having a clear idea of what literature is.
The most surprising thing of all is that most people graduate or obtain a degree in literary studies without having a clear definition of what literature is, and this happens mainly because literary studies taught in 21st-century universities develop not as literary studies, but as cultural studies, due to the influence of the Anglo-Saxon world. And it must be warned that the Anglo-Saxon world does not have a concept of what literature is, and has never had one. When one speaks of literature within the Hispano-Greco-Latin tradition, one speaks of something very different from what the Anglo-Saxon tradition conceives as literature. In other words, the Anglo-Saxon world does not have the same concept of literature as the Hispano-Greco-Latin world, and it is a huge mistake to assume that when someone goes to the United States, they will encounter the concept of literature that comes from the Hispanic, Greek, and Latin tradition. Another matter is whether we like the concept of literature from Homer, Dante, or Cervantes; that is another matter, but that is the core concept of literature.
From here, we can turn literature from the Hispano-Greco-Latin tradition into a yogurt maker, into an iguana, or simply into wind energy, but that is another outcome, it is another completely different matter. Harry Potter is not Don Quixote, Fifty Shades of Grey has nothing to do with Homer, that is to say, they are a kind of Agatha Christie, something that has nothing to do with Dante, Quevedo, or Apuleius. Today we can produce a so-called "low-cost" literature, just as powdered milk can be produced as a substitute for cow's milk, or synthetic meat can be made as a substitute for real meat. We know that the Anglo-Saxon world specializes in making low-cost products to cheapen consumption, to generate them easily en masse and to enrich the market of commerce enthusiasts, but that is not the issue of literature, that is not the concept of literature we handle. One thing is literature and another thing is - I insist - "consumption literature", that is, to turn literature into a commodity, both academically for registering doctoral theses in series, doctoral theses like churros, or as a product that is broadcasted or constructed in workshops, like the fiction literature that was "manufactured" in Orwell's novel 1984, according to which, through certain procedures - today it would be done by artificial intelligence -, novels were written on any theme to entertain the population. Let's not deceive ourselves: today the same thing literally happens. But that is not literature; that is a type of discourse that provokes emotional reactions, like those that can be provoked by a horror novel or a pornographic film. But that is not literature; literature does not aim to provoke emotions, although it may provoke them; the aim of literature is, above all, to challenge human intelligence and demand a scientific and normative interpretation, that is, the objective of literature is scientific interpretation. Another thing is that people are entertained by literature. Similarly, music is a challenge to human interpretation: any musical score is a challenge to its interpretation, and it requires the human being to be instrumentally interpreted. Another matter is whether the result of that interpretation, or the process itself of that musical interpretation, turns out to be satisfactory for the human being, and also emotionally pleasing, but that is a side effect, because the fundamental objective is to execute a good musical interpretation, just as, in any artistic form, the fundamental objective is to achieve a good aesthetic, poetic, architectural, sculptural, pictorial expression, etc. Once it is naturally constructed, it may provoke the effects of beauty, admiration, emotion, whatever you want, but it is also possible to scientifically study works of art, because otherwise, they would be unreadable, they would simply move us in an emotional field, in the field of the sensible, but not of the intelligible.
If you want to write a doctoral thesis in the field of the emotional and the sensible, naturally you can do so, but imagine that you practiced medicine in the field of the emotional and the sensible: you would not cure any disease. And you will say to me, "Well, we are not doctors." Yes, of course, but we don't have to be fools either. Or are only doctors going to be intelligent? Why do you want to renounce intelligence and the scientific status of literary interpretation? What do you gain by that, being happier? For that, you don't need literature; for that, you simply go for a walk, and you are already happier, or take care of a pet, or simply dedicate yourselves to making scribbles on paper or to sleeping and daydreaming.
Literature
is an excessively expensive procedure to make people happy when there are much
more elementary procedures to make anyone happy. There are instruments or toys
that allow people to be completely happy, and I am not thinking precisely of a
puzzle, but of anything that provokes a more or less immediate pleasure, and
nothing more. In short, literature is a much more complex form than all this,
and it cannot be reduced to the achievement of emotionally happy and
satisfactory moments, because the object of literature is scientific
interpretation.
3. The
Origin of Literature
Let's move on to the third point of our session. This third section delves into the genealogy of literature, that is, the origin of literature.
When conducting a doctoral thesis on literature, you will always refer to four types of literature, even if you are not aware of it. Firstly, there is primitive or dogmatic literature. An example is the Bible. It is a type of literature characterized by its lack of criticism. It's neither critical nor rational in the sense that stories where a human being divides a sea into two halves by divine intervention and can cross it are obviously not rational. You can stand in front of any sea and try to split it in half, and you'll see that it doesn't work. Therefore, literatures that are uncritical because they do not criticize anything, and are irrational because their idea of reason is not contemporary to us, being an idea of ex-temporal reason, of an ex-temporal rationalism, and therefore incompatible with current rationalism, these types of literatures are called primitive or dogmatic literatures. Why? Because they are uncritical and because they are actually irrational. They are based on types of knowledge articulated in myth, magic, religion, and basic techniques.
Contrary to primitive or dogmatic literatures, we have critical or indicative literatures. An example is Don Quixote. These literatures are critical of power and certain forms of reality, and are profoundly rational. Why? Because they have demystified myth. They demystify myth, and also rationalize magic. They expose that magic, in reality, is a trick, meaning that it consists of believing in the power of words which have no supernatural power whatsoever. It's another matter if we continue to believe in magic and think that by saying we are very well or that we are very handsome or very smart, we become beings of good health, handsome, and intelligent, even if we are complete fools or unfortunately suffer from an illness. I mean that ontological problems do not have philological solutions, nor necessarily psychological ones. I can say that I am a frog or that I am a hippopotamus, but I am not really. One thing is for me to deceive myself and for others to accept this deception, believing that words construct the world, a great philological deception, in which Wittgenstein lived, for example, and many other philosophers. Keep in mind that philosophy only and always talks about religion, politics, or self-help, and never about anything else. The content of philosophy is always a mortgage, an emptiness. In reality, philosophy is a true myth, it is an impressive myth in which anyone who pretends to be intelligent takes the bait. In reality, it is one of the biggest scams and myths ever constructed in the history of human thought, philosophy.
When myth is demystified, it loses its mythical value; when magic is explained rationally, it is exposed as a trick. All of Cervantes' work is nothing more than a demystification of tricks in which deception, fraudulent imagination, had believed and sold as scams. Obviously, when religious knowledge is discussed, we enter facets like those of science, which crush religious beliefs and demystify them. Faced with these positions, there are philosophical or religious reactions from which attempts are made to discredit science or progress. Science is reproached for materialism, consumerism, servility, even. These are always opposing positions, and in this context moves critical or indicative literature, which is based on critical reactions and rational, non-idealistic movements.
On the other hand, we have programmatic or imperative literature. Programmatic or imperative literature is one that develops a program, basically a political program, a political ideology. It is critical literature, but not against itself, but against other literatures, and it is rationalist, but in a sophist sense, meaning that it argues against others, but does not reason about its own foundations. It does not criticize its own foundations, it criticizes other ideologies, it argues against other philosophies, but always reserves an uncritical margin to preserve its own dogmas and foundations. It always reserves an irrational margin to avoid subjecting its own foundations to critical rationalism. In summary, it is a rational literature, but uncritical of itself and critical of others. This is the case of Rousseauian literature, of works like Emilio, for example, and it is the case for most philosophical works if we were to read them as literary works. If we were to read philosophy as literature, we would see that philosophy is a literature with a very poor fiction and that moreover the few fictions it has, it takes seriously, something that literature never really does.
Consider the amount of fiction in philosophical works: the nous of Anaxagoras, the apeiron of Anaximander, the noumenon of Kant, the perpetual motion machine of Aristotle, the Leviathan of Hobbes, the demiurge of Plato, the absolute spirit of Hegel, the pure substance of Spinoza, the unconscious of Freud, the superman of Nietzsche, the Dasein of Heidegger, the transcendental ego of Gustavo Bueno, etc. All philosophies, all philosophical systems are full of fictions, but unlike what happens with literature, philosophers believe in the real existence of their own fictions, while literati do not believe in them at all. If anything Borges teaches us, above all, it is that literature becomes the playground of philosophy. Borges read all philosophers as frustrated literary authors, and at that point, he showed us the weaknesses of philosophy.
In conclusion, as I said before, philosophy either talks about religion – in fact, all philosophers prior to the 17th century talked about religion when they talked about philosophy – or talks about politics – philosophers after the 17th century talk about politics when they talk about philosophy – and both always talked about self-help, from Epicurus to Plato himself, proposing group and guild therapies to overcome passions, as if human beings preserve their humanity apart from their passions.
At this point, literature is much more valuable and critical than philosophy. We have talked about primitive or dogmatic literature, which is uncritical and irrational; critical or indicative literature, which is critical and rationalist; and programmatic or imperative literature, which is uncritical and rationalist, but to a certain extent, because it never reasons against itself, so it acts as a literature that turns myth into ideology, that turns magic into pseudoscience, and that cleverly, cynically, like a sophist, tries to preserve many values of primitive or dogmatic literature.
Finally, we come to a fourth and final literary family, which is sophisticated reconstructive literature. This is a literature that pretends to believe in an irrationalism in which it does not believe and is profoundly critical. An example is all fantastic literature, from Apuleius' The Golden Ass to William Blake's poems. An example is the famous verse by Juan Ramón Jiménez when he writes that "God is blue." If we were to tell a philosopher that God is blue, imagine the look on Benedict de Spinoza's, Thomas Aquinas', or Plato's face. All three would say that this poet who claims that God is blue is crazy, obviously. Plato would say, "See how I am right, see how poets are crazy, psychopaths, or psychotic, who don't know what they are talking about, who don't know what they are saying." God cannot be blue because God is the first or supreme cause, pure substance, and a self-causing cause that is pure substance cannot receive accidents. Color is an accident. It is ridiculous to assert that a God is blue. Therefore, this poet, like all poets, is crazy, that is, lacks rationalism, is a lunatic. Such is the argument of the philosopher. Naturally, it is the judgment of someone who does not know what literature is. Nor fiction. It is the interpretation of someone who is ignorant of what a metaphor is, and who is not able to go beyond the literalness of tropes.
In conclusion, it is not like that. The God of poets is not the god of philosophers. The god of literature is not the god of religion, not the god of theology, fortunately. Because in literature, as I said before, there is a struggle for freedom and for the expansion of human possibilities. If you had written in the Middle Ages that God is blue, you would probably end up on an inquisitorial pyre, not for insulting God, but simply for misinterpreting the concept of pure substance, attributing improper accidents to pure substance, such as chromaticism. They would judge you for tarnishing the image of God. You cannot say that God is blue: God is blue when atheism, through Parnassianism and symbolism, and through the poetic mythology codified in the Spanish Golden Age, has managed to impose itself, and literature thus objectifies it. Therefore, when someone states that "God is blue," they have expanded our freedom. At least, they have broken with secular religious imperatives. Freedom has been expanded to the extent that you or I can today mention the name of God in vain, something that instills one of the most primitive and imperative commandments. This freedom, recorded in literature, has not always taken place, and neither philosophy nor religion has allowed it. Note that philosophy and religion have often been very allied in their attempts to limit, censor, and repeal multiple human freedoms. You will never find literature providing these services of political, religious, or ideological repression.
One of the main enemies of literature has not only been religion, but also philosophy. Philosophy was born precisely from Plato with the purpose of exterminating literature, of expelling it from the State, and of qualifying all those who engage in its cultivation as psychopaths and psychotics. And some have loved this philosophical condemnation, because due to unsatisfied narcissism, at least they are spoken of as crazy. That is, narcissists, as everyone knows, seek to provoke reactions both positive and negative in many facets because they do not perceive the consequences or care about them; they simply want to be talked about, even if it's negatively.
These are
the four literary genealogies. When you write a doctoral thesis on literature,
whether you are aware of it or not, you are referring to one of these four
genealogies, and it is very convenient for you to know very well what the
specific characteristics of each of these genealogies are because otherwise,
you may end up with very erratic and very mistaken procedures and results in
the interpretation of the literature you handle.
4. Literary
Materials
Let's move on to the fourth point of our session: literary materials. There are four literary materials. Not one more, not one less. These literary materials are the author, the literary work, the reader, and the interpreter or transducer, which are indicated in the definition I gave earlier of literature. The author is the person who constructs the literary work and who is the creator of the ideas formalized in the literary materials. It's another matter if we don't know who the author is and then we speak of anonymity. It's another matter if the author disguises themselves with a pseudonym, and then we speak of pseudonymity. And it's another matter if the author uses several names, and then we speak of polyonymy. But whether we talk about heteronymity – if they fictionalize their own identity –, polyonymy, pseudonymity, or anonymity, there is always someone who writes a literary work, one or several people who write a literary work.
Each literary work is objectified in a text, which naturally could have been inscribed on a wax tablet, on papyrus, on paper, on parchment, in a book, or on a digital or plasma template. It can be exclusively oral text because even before written support, literature has an oral transmission. However, there is always a work where literary values are objectified. Naturally, there is a reader, one or several readers, some recipients, and interpreters. The reader interprets for themselves; the interpreter or transducer is someone who interprets for others, someone who transduces, that is, someone who conveys meaning through a medium, someone who transmits something and by the very act of transmitting it also transforms it, hence the need to use this Latin etymology: transduction.
Keep in mind that if you follow Jakobson's scheme, if they still talk about Jakobson in 21st-century universities, you will notice that this linguist distinguished three basic terms in human communication: sender, message, and receiver. Jakobson talked about this in 1958, in a famous congress held in Indiana, United States, and everyone admired it, without exception, revealing clearly and openly their ignorance of Aristotle's Rhetoric.
Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, almost two and a half thousand years earlier, had written that there were three basic terms of human communication: the speaker, what is said, and the listener. Well, Jakobson repeats the same thing in 1958, and everyone is left with their mouth open, revealing not so much admiration for Jakobson as deep ignorance of the Hispano-Greco-Latin literary tradition because such a thing had been known for almost two and a half thousand years before. But the entire Anglo-Saxon academic world, and then the Hispanic one, which seems to have been educated in the United States instead of the Hispano-Greco-Latin tradition, completely admired this obviousness. It is always possible to discover the Mediterranean two and a half millennia later.
I always found this completely ridiculous. However, when you face literary materials, you have to know that you work on four literary materials, not three, and if you don't know it, you ignore an important fact such as the existence of an author that structuralism theoretically destroyed, in a kind of magical nihilism, by stating that the author did not exist. Barthes declared the death of the author, like a well-told joke. Foucault repeated, without much originality, that the author was a social function. If the author is a social function, why don't you sign a doctoral thesis, and instead of your name, declare that it was written by "a social function"? Don't put your first and last names, just write this: "a social function". If the author is a social function, why do you sign an employment contract? Indicate that the one working is "a social function", and let this social function collect your salary. It's curious that today social functions are not anonymous, and often have a corporate name.
It's very nice to say that the author is dead, paraphrasing fragment 125 of Nietzsche's The Gay Science, where he lunatically acclaimed that God was dead. In short, Barthes and Foucault only reproduce, in terms of pseudo-literary theory, neither more nor less, a philosophical occurrence of Nietzsche. We have not made a mistake about God, a contemporary writer of ours affirms today, but it turns out that those who have made the right choice of God bet on a God who dies in their hands – in Nietzsche's hands – just as it is recounted in fragment 125 of The Gay Science, God is dead.
However, the author has not died, because Cervantes is still there, obviously, and Agatha Christie is still there, even if she is not an author of literary works but of consumption literature. Highly praised in our time, especially when cultural studies replace literary studies, responding to a very Anglo-Saxon imperative, namely, that culture is an invention of peoples lacking literature. Peoples that do not have literature invent culture as a substitute for literature, just as powdered milk is a substitute for real milk, or synthetic meat is a substitute for real meat.
Those of us who have eaten real meat, drunk real milk, and read real literature, know how to distinguish wheat from chaff. It's another matter if, like editors who know how to distinguish wheat from chaff, they publish the chaff and burn the wheat. But that's what editors do, not real literary interpreters. Another issue is that in your doctoral thesis, knowing the true and knowing the false, you silence the valuable and study the fraudulent. Literature is superior and irreducible to culture. But that's a matter for each individual and their criteria for what they do, their literary knowledge, and their cultural limitations.
What is certain is that these four are the literary materials and that ignoring one of these four entails incurring what is called the ablation of literature and Literary Theory, to limit oneself to an ablative literary theory. An ablative literary theory is one that suppresses, amputates, or cuts off one or several of these four literary materials. Foucault's literary theory is an ablative literary theory from the point of view of the author because it suppresses it. Jakobson's literary theory is an ablative literary theory from the point of view of the transducer because it doesn't see it, meaning that many literary theories that you may use in the elaboration of your doctoral thesis may be ablative literary theories and you may not know it.
Think about
it, unless you are interested in effectively incurring in an ablative literary
theory, limited and impotent. It would be the same as if you study medicine and
specialize, for example, in internal medicine, and completely disregard the
rest of the organs in the body. You may end up saying that the brain thinks.
No, the brain doesn't think, the person with a brain does. You may conclude by
saying that the eye sees. No, the eye doesn't see. The eye doesn't see outside
the eye sockets, the person with eyes and a healthy vision sees. It's nonsense:
as if you say that a rapist doesn't rape, but their genital organ does. No, the
genital organ doesn't rape anyone, the rapist rapes, and not one of their
organs. It's an absurd way of speaking and saying "no, I'm innocent, my
genitals are guilty." Something like that is not funny, nor is it clever.
I don't have bad thoughts, my brain has bad thoughts, I'm not responsible for
my brain's bad thoughts. Nonsense. It's a way of interpretatively ablating
reality, and neuroscience itself, in a more neurotic than scientific way.
5. The
Scientific Knowledge of Literature
Point five requires us to talk about literary science. We consider here that Literary Theory is the scientific knowledge of literary materials. Literary materials precede literary science; one cannot build a literary science ignoring literature. Literary Theory, in fact, is a genitive discipline of literature; it is Literary Theory, not theory of culture. The theory of culture is something else. Literature is not soluble in culture; literature is superior and irreducible to culture, as we have already said. Literature is a specific genre within which a series of aspects develop that cannot be reduced to culture. That is, Homer is not just culture; Homer requires more than cultural knowledge for its interpretation, it requires linguistic, philological, and literary knowledge.
Reducing literature to culture entails assuming a myopic approach to what literary studies demand, and seeing literature in a blurry way. What is proposed and demanded here is a scientific interpretation of literature.
Literary
Theory is the scientific knowledge of literary materials, and to scientifically
know literature requires the involvement, learning, of a series of techniques,
methods, and procedures that allow us to confront literary materials. These are
sensitive materials from an intelligible perspective; we cannot reduce the
interpretation of literature to the sensible, because then we do not carry out
a literary interpretation, but a pile of emotional reactions. Literary
knowledge is not a display of emotional reactions; that is the same as if a
doctor examines a patient and, instead of giving a diagnosis of their illness,
simply gives an account of the state of sympathy, antipathy, or empathy that
their encounter with the patient may have caused. That has nothing to do
whatsoever with literary knowledge. That is, you can relate to literature as
someone who experiences sensations, or you can relate to literature as someone
who analyzes it critically, scientifically. Remember the initial postulates:
rationalism, criticism, dialectics, science, and systematic relations given in
symploké among literary materials. If you ignore this, you will do something
else, but not literary research.
6. Literary
Fiction
In sixth place, fiction. Fiction is an absolutely essential and indispensable element in literature; there is no literature without fiction. If you tell me there is literature without fiction, you can stop reading me immediately. Dedicate yourselves to literature without fiction, that is, to philosophy or religion. Because literature without fiction is philosophy, it is theology, it is an essay; literature without fiction is a text that is well written, that has rhetorical components, but lacks sufficiently developed poetic components to construct a fictional and properly literary fable. What makes seafood paella seafood paella, and not simply a grain dish, is that, apart from grains, it has other components that, combined, give rise to seafood paella.
To write literature, it is not enough to simply accumulate rhetorical figures; it is not enough to simply construct a text that sounds good, that has euphony to the ear; literary work requires poetic construction, not simply rhetoric. It is not an accumulation of words; that is, not always eleven metric syllables are an hendecasyllable; there can be literary hendecasyllables and non-literary hendecasyllables. That is, octosyllabic verses such as "and my heart beats / like a fried potato," which are not literary verses. Naturally, you can write a doctoral thesis on the literary values of such poetry. Well, it's a couplet, and moreover, a joke. No cardiologist can take this seriously. Although the hearts of poets are not the hearts of cardiologists, nor the hearts of bankers, which are intact hearts. You know the comment Mario Draghi made at one point, when asked what he would do if he found himself in a situation of terrible illness and needed a heart, would he choose between the heart of a banker or the heart of a good person, an honest person? Which would he choose? And Draghi replies: "I would choose the heart of a banker, because the heart of a banker is intact," that is, it is a heart that has never suffered anything for anyone. With all this, it means that the heart of poets is not the heart of cardiologists, but verses like the aforementioned couplet, evidently, contain a rhetorical figure, a figure that is a similarity, a similar cadence, a final rhyme, an epiphora, but it is not literary, that is, it is a cultural manifestation, but not a literary one. It is nonsense, to put it plainly. Don't insist on finding fiction where there is none to artificially turn a set of words into literature. Literature always requires fiction. There is no literature without fiction; literature without fiction is a literary simulacrum or simply a pathological way of making us believe that what we have in front of us is literature; that is, it is a farce, a mirage, a hallucination.
In short, when studying fiction in literature, you have to know which theory of fiction you subscribe to, even if you do so unconsciously. You subscribe to a theory of fiction, and there are several theories of fiction, but basically we could reduce them to three.
Those that consider reality surpasses fiction: it is the Aristotelian concept, according to which literature, art, is an imitation of reality, and therefore, by imitating reality, artistic imitation will always be below the achievements of reality, reality is the model, and art is a variable. It is also the thesis of socialist realism, that is, art and literature as a reflection of reality.
But, on the other hand, we have the theses of fiction with a Kantian variant, which consider that fiction surpasses reality, and fiction surpasses reality because art is an imaginary construction beyond reality itself, and the fiction that arises from that imaginary construction, by going beyond reality itself, surpasses the matrix reality.
There is a third variant, which is the Platonic one, according to which the reality we have in front of us is a fiction, and the true reality is the one that is beyond, the one that is in the world of the dead, and Plato talks about this with absolute ease, as if he had been in the world of the dead, had seen all that, had returned and had told about it in his unbelievable philosophical Republic. It's fascinating how so much credit has been given to such a paranoid work, truly, like Plato's Republic, and to so many other of his essays. Plato dispatched a series of ideas in his life with a staggering simplicity and immeasurable credit: poets were mad, he stated. In reality, if he had looked in the mirror of his own writings, he might understand at some point that he wrote absolutely psychopathic works. The Republic is, without complexes, the work of a psychopath, of an individual who has no knowledge of what reality is, nor does he care at all about the will of others. To imagine that a group of philosophers, supported by the army—a undoubtedly imaginary army—can implant a fierce totalitarianism throughout the earth is to have no idea what the human being is. I speak of philosophers, not of entrepreneurs. Nor of friends of commerce. Because even if he had said that a group of entrepreneurs or friends of commerce, supported by military forces, can maintain a world order, he would still have come close to what the 21st century is. And to Orwell's narrative in 1984. But to consider that philosophers, who are the most naive in the world, the most innocent there can be, really interpret reality, is a case of singular isolation from the world. Philosophers interpret reality by reading philosophers; ordinary people interpret reality by working, or simply by confronting it laboriously. Plato's case is that of a fiction without the slightest possible grace, because to consider that it is possible to design, with the political engineering described in the Republic, a State in which philosophers govern with the support of the army, and impose an absolutely totalitarian model of life, is a naivety, in addition to a senseless aberration. Gallows humor, moreover. A world where literature does not exist. A society in which literature does not exist is a society without freedom. Defending literature basically means defending fiction and also defending freedom.
And there is a fourth theory of fiction, apart from these three basics. It is the theory exposed in the Critique of Literary Reason: fiction is a matter that lacks operative existence. We have no possibility of having a real encounter, a real date, neither with Don Quixote, nor with Prince Hamlet, nor with Dante and Virgil walking through hell. That is, literary creatures, literary figures, are material realities, because in fact we build them and access them materially through language. And language is not immaterial, language is objectified in literary works, and even orally. If language were immaterial, it would be a ghostly construction that we could not perceive by the senses. Even ghosts have to materialize for us to know they exist. It is another thing if they materialize acoustically and not physically.
Considering that literature is immaterial is not knowing what matter or literature is. Let them tell librarians that literature is immaterial: the number of times they have to move books does not allow them to idealize literature. It seems incredible that someone who dedicates themselves to literature would say that literature is immaterial. And this gnoseological error is very recurrent. When one reads a book, what is one reading? Are immaterialities being read? That is, does any of us have the ability to relate to incorporeal forms? If literature were immaterial, it would be an incorporeal form. There are no incorporeal forms, except for Plato, who seemed to have gone to speak with them, known the pure ideas and returned to tell us about his experience. Something like this is called paranoia, simply, and that is a personality disorder that, in principle, should not be related to philosophy. This is the one who allowed himself to call poets crazy.
In summary,
the theory of fiction that you use, whether you are aware of it or not, is
something that will reflect the degree of knowledge that you have about
literary fiction in your doctoral thesis. Therefore, check all these
characteristics of fiction in your doctoral thesis, if you are interested in
being aware of the ideas and criteria you handle. If not, you can continue
reading Plato, Aristotle, or Kant. And also Pérez Reverte.
7. Literary
Genres
Seventh issue, literary genres. Genre is the set of common characteristics that can be identified among the different parts that constitute a whole. Genre is a system of similar characteristics among different parts, that is, analogous characteristics among different parts that constitute a whole. Lazarillo de Tormes, AMDG by Pérez de Ayala, and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Goethe are three different novels, but all of them have in common a characteristic which is being a Bildungsroman. It is often said that Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Goethe is one of the first Bildungsromans. So, if you haven't read Lazarillo de Tormes, isn't Lazarillo also a Bildungsroman besides being a picaresque novel? Lazarillo, The Rogue Justina, and The Spanish Bawd are three picaresque novels. But Lazarillo is also a Bildungsroman, like AMDG, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or the aforementioned work by Goethe. Obviously, they are novels that, being different from each other, present common characteristics. That's genre.
When you discuss literature in a doctoral thesis, you have a date with literary genre: it's another thing whether you ignore this date or not, but you have a date with literary genre. Look, I'm going to read you a sequence. I want to read it because I don't want to speak at this point from memory. In the Anglo-Saxon world, in the United States, it is said in the latest statistics from a survey conducted by "OnePoll on behalf of ThriftBooks," that the "literary genres" — that's exactly what they say, the "literary genres" — most popular in the United States are the following. You will tell me if these are genres and if they can refer to literature, because what I am going to mention here is not literature, they are types of books, but not literary genres. Well, that's the concept of literary genre that is handled in the United States. That's the literary theory that the Anglophone world handles. I tell you that there cannot be a good literary theory where there is bad literature. A literary theory cannot emerge from this. And they even talk about literary genres to refer to types of editorial books. They are nothing more than editorial products. These are the data. I quote. In order: fantasy, romance, history, science fiction, comedy, action and adventure, mystery, horror, thriller or mystery (again), self-help, mythology, and LGBTQIA Plus. Of course, these are not literary genres. These are types of books that, as commercial products, try to be sold in a society that doesn't know what literature is and doesn't care.
Keep in
mind that there has never been a passion for literature in the United States.
Literature is not read in the United States. In the United States,
"things" are read as they are read here too, undoubtedly. But to say
that these are literary genres is not knowing what literature is, nor what
genres are, nor what cultural products financially maintain publishers. Because
talking about fantasy as a literary genre, about romance as a genre... History
is not a literary genre; History is the scientific knowledge of past events.
Science fiction is not a literary genre; it is a writing genre, but not
necessarily literary. Mystery, horror, thriller, self-help... are not literary
genres; they are commercial products. Self-help is a philosophical scam, it is
a form of self-deception. In short, if we use categories from the Anglo-Saxon
world to interpret literature, and we are unaware of the categories that the
literary history of the Hispano-Greco-Latin tradition has provided us, all we
achieve is to make doctoral theses that are in line with the 21st century, yes,
but academically they will die in 24 hours. Doctoral theses with a programmed
obsolescence of just one day. If you want to make doctoral theses with
programmed obsolescence, you can do it, of course, but keep in mind that the
doctoral thesis is one of those works that, after a few months, can be
completely embarrassing, or not. I'm just warning you about these risks. If you
don't have a competent theory of literary genres, don't engage in the interpretation
of literature.
8. Comparative
Literature
Last point, eight: Comparative Literature. When you are facing a literary work in a doctoral thesis, consider the relationships that this literary work demands with other literary works and materials.
There are literary works that require more relationships than others, there are literary works that have very specific relationships, which need to be known, in some cases, of great significance, in other cases, of a very subtle connection, which not everyone is able to identify and follow. But do not disregard the awareness that is required to pay attention to these facts.
Don Quixote is a literary work that relates to many other literary works, but not to Buddhism. If you establish literary relationships that are not rational, not critical, not scientific, not dialectical, you can very easily make mistakes. Of course, you have to select those possible literary relationships, but you have to be right in the ones you propose. You cannot propose nonsense: you can only propose nonsense if you ensure a tribunal that accepts such nonsense, and there will be no lack of those who do, but another matter is whether you want to do a doctoral thesis to comply with a curriculum or you want to do a doctoral thesis to interpret literature. That is a matter of each individual.
The appointment with Comparative Literature is absolutely unavoidable, and I warn you of something important: postmodernity is incompatible with the exercise of Comparative Literature. Why is that? Because postmodernity is based on the idea of the equivalence of cultures, and it postulates an aberration: all cultures are equal, therefore, all literatures are equal, because literatures dissolve into culture. Consequently, if all cultures are equal, because all literatures are equal, then there is nothing to compare, since you cannot establish a comparison between two identical terms. If all literatures are equal, Comparative Literature is over. This paradox summarizes the comparative ideology of postmodernity: a hoax.
In short,
it is an ablation, not only of literature but also of a methodology of literary
interpretation such as Comparative Literature, a whole critical relationship
between literary materials: authors, works, readers, and transducers.
9. Conclusion
These eight points are, in my opinion, absolutely fundamental to critically review the methodological approaches, the interpretative options, that you have in the 21st century to carry out a doctoral thesis on Literary Theory and literary criticism in any university today. If you want to take them into account, you are very free to do so, and if not, also, but keep something very present: a poorly done doctoral thesis is a doctoral thesis of immediate obsolescence. Do you want to abort in less than a day a research work that has taken years? And just one last question: in the originality of doctoral theses, pay attention to this: you can make a doctoral thesis that is Kitsch. How do you make a doctoral thesis turn out to be Kitsch? By literally repeating what others have already said before you, that's Kitsch. If your doctoral thesis is understood by only reading the title, there is no need to move on to the next page because it will be a doctoral thesis like all the others, it will be one more of the same type, of the same genre. If you write a romance novel, it will be enough for the reader to have read Corín Tellado before to discard any originality in the new novel of the same genre, because they already know what a romance novel tells, and how it tells it. If your doctoral thesis is not original, if it is only Kitsch, it's not just that it has a 24-hour obsolescence, it's that no one will read it.
How do you overcome Kitsch? Use an original method, which is quite difficult in a doctoral thesis, because it is very difficult for someone doing a doctoral thesis to have the power to create a new method of literary interpretation. Something like that is quite improbable, I won't say impossible, but it is quite difficult. I have not known any case. But at least you can use a method that is more original than others, and that someone, with more experience, has built. If you make the umpteenth doctoral thesis on the same method, in which, for example, more than fifty years of doctoral theses have been made, the result will be much poorer, that is, much less original, than if you use a more recent, new and original method, more unusual, more current.
On the other hand, if you make a doctoral thesis on a known topic, even if it is a fashionable topic, that can give you more visibility or more audience at a given time, but the next day that effect or impact will have passed, because your thesis will be the number 7584 that has been made on the same topic. If you repeat a topic or clone a methodology, the chances of ending up in Kitsch are very high. If you use a new topic with a known methodology, you can develop the potential of that methodology. If you use a known topic with an original methodology, perhaps you can offer new methodological perspectives on that already known topic. And if you use a new methodology with a new topic, then you will already achieve much more lasting achievements, because that doctoral thesis will have a much more powerful and much more lasting presence over time than someone who repeats the themes and reiterates pre-existing methods.
At this
point, I insist, the fundamental session of this intervention is summarized, in
which I propose that, if you make a doctoral thesis in 21st-century
universities on Literary Theory and comparative literature, take into account
these procedures, which are those exposed in the Critique of literary reason.