The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

In granting ideology a determinate form,
the work unwittingly reveals that ideology’s
absences and silences, those things
of which it must at all cost not speak, and
so begins to come apart at the seams.
All ideologies are constituted by certain
definite exclusions, certain ‘not-saids’
which they could not articulate without
risk to the power-systems they support. In
daily life, this is not often obvious; but
once an ideology is objectified in literature,
its limits – and consequently that
which it excludes – also become more
visible. A literary text, then, may find
itself twisting into incoherence or selfcontradiction,
struggling unsuccessfully
to unify its conflicting elements.
For much Marxist and deconstructive
criticism, this is true of any literary writing
whatsoever. But there are also literary
works which are, as it were, conscious of
this fact, which renounce the illusory
ideal of unity in order to expose contradictions
and leave them unresolved. In
much MODERNIST writing, the fundamental
contradiction of all realist literature –
that it is at once FICTION and pretends not
to be – is candidly put on show, so that the
text becomes as much about its own
process of production as about a stable
reality beyond it. In the hands of Marxist
writers, such devices have been turned
to political use. For Bertolt Brecht, the
point of theatre is not to provide the audience
with a neatly unified product to
be unproblematically consumed, but to
reflect in its own conflicting, irregular
forms something of the contradictory
character of social reality itself.
‘Montage’ – the abrupt linking of discrete
images – and the ‘alienation effect’, in
which the actor at once exposes a reality
and reveals that this exposure is fictional,
are examples of such techniques. By
articulating contradictions, the Brechtian
drama hopes to throw the audience into
Convention 35
conflict and division, undermining their
consoling expectations of harmony and
forcing them to ponder the many-sided,
dialectical nature of history itself. See
also EPIC THEATRE.
See Leon Trotsky, Literature and
Revolution (1971); Lucien Goldmann,
The Hidden God (1967); Christopher
Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (1937).
TE
Convention A generalizing term
which isolates frequently occurring similarities
in a large number of works. If
critics are concerned to categorize a work,
they will describe it as belonging within
a convention which in this sense is a subcategory
of TRADITION. If, on the other
hand, they are more concerned to describe
the individual work, they will point out
that this or that element is conventional
without implying that the whole work is
thus defined as belonging within that
convention. As You Like It ‘belongs within
the pastoral convention’: or As You Like
It ‘has this or that element of pastoral’,
but is more usefully categorized in some
other way. Clearly it is largely a matter
of how all-pervasive the conventional
element is.
It is tempting to distinguish between
conventions of form and conventional
content. A convention in the first sense is
any accepted manner, hallowed by long
practice, of conveying meaning. The second
sense coincides with ordinary usage
and means a generally accepted, standard,
view or attitude. But it is as difficult to
keep these two meanings separate, as it is
generally to separate medium and meaning.
Take an example of what seems a
purely technical convention: the invisible
fourth wall separating the real world of
the theatre audience from the imaginary
world of the play. Even in this case it
might be argued, as Brecht argues, that