Reasserting the Poetics of Style in the Age of Poststructuralism: A Study of Dickens' Writing as a Means of Reclaiming the Text

Reasserting the Poetics of Style in the Age of Poststructuralism: A Study of Dickens' Writing as a Means of Reclaiming the Text

This article explores aspects of artistic creativity in literary writing that facilitate stylistic patterns, tone, expressive momentum, etc. By considering such aesthetic attributes as the crucial instrument of articulating or performing texts, the article intends to challenge what can be seen as textual determinism in recent critical writings, a tendency that places literary elements within the confines of ideological or historical paradigms. On the one hand, such a deterministic approach reflects a growing demand in literary studies for replacing the traditional image of literature with a view that treats it as part of a complex web of social. political or ideological forces in contentious negotiation. One immediate upshot is the blurring of the text-context divide, by means of which the notion of authorship or creative imagination is seen as an image produced and appropriated by sweeping forces of ideology and culture. On the other hand, such a contentious outlook, in an effort to explore the ideological or cultural 'meaning' of the text, fails to consider the possibility of viewing literary or aesthetic elements as a creative means of reflecting on the world outside. It is often the case that figural or narrative styles give rise to an effect of 'authenticity' in human experience, an ambiguous, yet distinctly unique register of human perception that constitutes our sense of being in the world, which cannot be clarified by methods and terms of positivistic or empirical reasoning. In an effort to exemplify this creative potential of literary style. the essay deals with Dickens' writing by offering readings of selected passages from a few of his novels. Dickens' writing evokes the way people latch onto and appropriate the forces of social and technological transformations that. at a more impersonal level. are increasingly being channelled into a centralised. disciplined organization of urban space. Thus. his writing captures the paradoxical quality of social defiance and subversive freedom in his characters. concealed within their apparent conformity to the instrumental rules and devices of society. The descriptions of fictional characters convey the volatile, contingent immediacy of their physical experiences. which often exceed the limit of representational transparency. Underlying this effect are Dickens' unique linguistic patterns that add an intriguing sense of 'experiential authenticity' to variegated social and cultural realities.