The Interpretation of Literature

The determination of literature is always started with a question about its factuality, about how it is functioned and applied to the human relation, or to the very basic, about its purest definition as knowledge, as one of the fields of human study. However, many thinkers, from the classic theorist to the modernist have been very often giving their voices speaking over these regulations about literature’s formal authenticity, there is not even one has successfully made his argumentations up as a foundation underlying the every thinker’s critical perspectives about literature itself. The simplest analytical mind is certainly reasonable to be addressed to the old theorist Plato and Aristotele, as like what Mitchell says in his Representation that both of those literary theory founding fathers just “regarded literature as simply one form of representation.” Catherine Belsey makes it clearer by speaking in Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text, if literature is a form of representation, then what is particular thing which is represented? She notes “literature represents the myths and imaginary versions of real social relationships...”, that in literature is just about the idea, the imagination of human’s reality, as to Althusser literature is “a system of representation concerning the real relations in which people live. But what is represented in ideology is not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live”, that literature is considered to be more ideological with only an image as a thing which is represented in it.

Mitchell goes further talking about representation and literature, that he says literature is not just that simple formation of representation of a general thing, or as a “representation of life” because of,  there will always be an ideology which is consisted, that it is indeed literature ”can never be completely divorced from political and ideological questions.” That to make a generalization, as how to make a consideration for “life” to be possibly represented through literature, is almost very unlikely to occur. Paul de Man has argued why literature will never work the generalization out, that he says in his Resistance to Theory, because literature is not a theory, it owns the normative principles which are “...cultural and ideological rather than theoretical.” If literature is a theory, the generalization may certainty be suitable, but, once it is related to what have theorists been said before, that literature is basically more ideological because it constitutes one-self’s ideology, which makes the understanding of literature as a theory, is not true.   

Monicha Nelis