The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

34 Contradiction
What should be substituted for this is the
sentence ‘The interpretation of an utterance
is dependent upon a knowledge of
the contexts within which it occurs.’ The
problem may be seen at its most acute in
the use of puns, and is discussed by Paul
Ziff in his Semantic Analysis (1960). As
Ziff points out, knowing the meaning of
the words will not help one to understand
the remark ‘England had at least one
laudable bishop’. It is also necessary to
catch the pun. The range of contexts
within which utterances occur extends
from the narrowly linguistic (phonetic or
morphological) to the broadly philosophical,
and the task of literary criticism can
be seen, in part, as the need to relate
words, phrases, sentences and other parts
of literary works to their linguistic contexts.
The other, more open-ended part of
criticism involves relating the works
themselves to relevant psychological,
social and historical contexts. The obvious
difficulty of interpretation arises
from the need to assess the claims of
conflicting contexts, though throughout
the twentieth century an increasing
emphasis by Formalists, New Critics and
Structuralists, on the ‘foregrounded’ or
‘aesthetic’ elements of literature at the
expense of ‘utilitarian’or ‘referential’ones,
resulted in a general lack of interest in the
broader, human contexts within which
literature is produced and consumed.
In an attempt to correct this imbalance,
David Lodge suggests in his book
The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor,
Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern
Literature (1977), that when literary texts
work properly ‘it is because the systematic
foregrounding also supplies the place
of the absent context of facts and logical
entailments which validates nonliterary
discourse; one might say that it folds the
context back into the message, limits and
orders the context in a system of dynamic
interrelationships between the text’s
component parts and thus contrives to
state the universal in the particular’ (p. 8).
See also DISCOURSE.
BCL
Contradiction From Aristotle to
Coleridge, Hegel to T. S. Eliot, literary
criticism tended to conceive of the
literary work as an achieved unity, often
of an ORGANIC or ‘spontaneous’ kind.
Developments in MARXIST, SEMIOTIC and
DECONSTRUCTIVE criticism have queried
this view, regarding it as a misleading,
and potentially mystifying, account of the
nature of literary texts. Emphasis shifted
instead to the multiple, conflicting and
uneven character of such texts, which
may well attempt to resolve into harmony
materials which nevertheless remain
stubbornly various and irreducible.
Deconstructive criticism has characteristically
fastened upon those aspects of
a literary work which appear to an orthodox
eye fragmentary, marginal or contingent,
and shown how the implications of
such fragments may begin to deconstruct
or unravel the ‘official’, unifying logic on
which the text is founded. Expelled by
that logic to the text’s boundaries, such
unconsidered trifles return to plague and
subvert the literary work’s ruling categories.
For Marxist criticism, this process
has ideological relevance. Literary texts,
like all ideological practices, seek an
imaginary reconciliation of real contradictions;
the classical REALIST work, in
particular, strives for a symmetrical
‘closure’ or ‘totality’ within which such
contradictions can be contained. But in its
striving for such unity, a literary work
may paradoxically begin to highlight its
limits, throwing into relief those irresolvable
problems or incompatible interests
which nothing short of an historical
transformation could adequately tackle.