poly system theories

A theory that seeks to establish scientifically the cultural laws and conditions governing literary production, polysystem theory is also a theory of culture. Developed by Itamar Even-Zohar (1990) of the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics at Tel Aviv University in response to problems concerning translation, polysystem theory is grounded in Russian formalism, especially in the work of Victor Shklovsky (1893–1984), Jurij Tynjanov (1894–1943), and Roman Jakobson (1896–1982). Even-Zohar regards such work as instances of what he calls dynamic functionalism or dynamic structuralism, as opposed to the static functionalism of Saussurean structuralism. The theory starts out from the semiotic premise that a culture is less a unified, monolithic entity than a system composed of various internal systems—hence, “polysystem.” Literature belongs to and indeed forms one such system, but because of the interrelatedness of the cultural polysystem, literature cannot be considered in isolation from other systems, as they function both synchronically and diachronically within the culture and in relation to the literary system. Polysystem theory is concerned less with investigating what constitutes literature than with how and why certain kinds of literary work come into or go out of favor; it also explores the relationships between various kinds of literary products and between these and other aspects of the polysystem. It is thus as concerned to explore questions of transfer, translation, and cultural or literary interference as it is to identify the nature and extent of the literary system itself.

The individual system can be seen as a replica in miniature of the entire polysystem. (In fact, polysystem theory allows for divergences in structure between system and polysystem, depending on historical factors.) As in conventional Marxist theory, a primary postulate is that this system—which we will assume to be the literary system, though it might indeed be any of a culture's multiple systems—is stratified rather than homogeneous. However, while Marxist theory connects the distinctions between “high” and “low” culture with the social means of production and the consequent division of people into classes defined by their relations to the means of production (as owners, workers, sellers, buyers, and so on), polysystem theory considers culture to have a center dominated by a group that establishes an official ideology. This ideology in turn influences the various systems within the polysystem by affecting their respective centers. Stratification in polysystem theory is thus like that of rings in a cross section of a tree trunk, rather than vertical stratification as seen in conventional Marxist theories of culture.

Systems within the polysystem may be imagined as distributed between the center of the polysystem and its periphery. Those at the center dominate and control the polysystem and thus both provide and govern its official ideologies and practices, while those toward the periphery represent alternative or marginal systems. The whole structure of the polysystem, however, is dynamic in that noncentral systems will tend to attempt to take over the center, whereas more central ones will tend to defend their positions, either by excluding or marginalizing the others or by appropriating them and converting them into agencies for central ideology and practice. Thus, for instance, whereas fifty years ago “green” issues in the political system or issues concerning health foods, organic farming, and so on in the culture's provisioning system were largely perceived and treated as the preoccupations of eccentrics or extremists and hence peripheral, today those same issues have moved toward the center. Politically, “green” issues in many countries have become an identifiable threat to conventional (that is, central or official) politics concerned with industry, science, technology, and the exploitation of the land and its resources, so that representatives of conventional politics have often found it expedient to adopt “green” stances (that is, they appropriate a particular ideology already present within the political system). Culturally, the notions of health food and organic farming have been adopted by major food companies as a sort of slogan to help sell their products. The possibility of alternative methods of food production and processing has been adopted by and adapted to the central system of mass production and marketing of foodstuffs.

It is through the struggle of systems within the polysystem to attain and hold the center that the culture survives and evolves: a totally static polysystem is an extinct one. The same struggle is evidenced within individual systems, where different models representing the system are engaged in competition for the center. The model is not identical with an actual object or procedure but is rather an abstract bundle of possible features or codes that contributes to a system's repertoire. The repertoire, in turn, allows people in the culture to actualize these models as “real” (that is, tangible) products—in the literary polysystem, as actual texts.

Models come into existence and may be located at the center or toward the periphery of the appropriate system, depending on their consonance with the models dominant at the center and, beyond that, with the systems dominant at the center of the polysystem itself. They may be generative or nongenerative, depending on whether people in the culture adopt them to produce actual texts—if they do, they may in fact add features to or change the configuration of the model. Moreover, models or certain of their features may become canonized—that is, deemed as legitimate and worthy of preservation. Noncanonized norms and works are often forgotten, though canonization and noncanonization are descriptions, not valorizations.

Once a model (or its features) enters the system's repertoire and becomes stabilized through canonization and imitation, it ceases to be a primary type and becomes a secondary one. This is a distinction between innovation and conservation, the latter leading to the establishment of normative features for texts so that deviations are regarded as shocking or as tending to produce inferior texts. Traditional models of genre provide a useful instance of how models become secondary: the model for dramatic tragedy established by Aristotle in the Poetics, for instance, became canonized and later secondary in many European cultures, so that it was still possible in the eighteenth century to condemn a tragedy because it did not observe the Aristotelian model, which included the so-called unities of time, place, and action.

Canonical status is usually conferred by the group that controls the center of the polysystem and that therefore often determines the relative prestige of possible repertoires. Should that group fail to preserve its government of both polysystem and canonized repertoire, it will be replaced by another group, which will then usually introduce a different repertoire, with other canons. Epigonism, or inferior imitation, occurs when the older, displaced repertoire and canon continue to function as workable models for groups at the periphery. Canonized but no longer generative texts may reenter the repertoire at a later point in a culture's history, whereupon they serve rather as models for the generation of new texts.

Models may migrate from one system within the polysystem to another or even from one polysystem to another, depending on geographical contiguity or cultural contact. An interesting case is that of the epic narrative, whose canonized model, represented by Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, contains such major features as the narrating of significant events in a culture's history, its formulation as a story in verse, its vast spatial and temporal scope, and minor features such as accounts of the mustering of armies and descriptions of weapons. This model proved generative for many centuries, so that epic narrative poems continued to be written in a number of cultures during the Renaissance, often with revisions or renovations of various features that helped the form to regain primary status. Thereafter, however, with a few exceptions, the epic narrative poem became secondary, and by the nineteenth century such works as Victor Hugo's La légende des siècles are clearly epigonic imitations. By this time, though, prose had become foregrounded as a feature of epic narrative, enabling the production of prose fiction epics (for instance, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Hugo's Les misérables). Subsequently, the model was transferred to the theater system (for example, J. W. von Goethe's two-part play, Faust), from which it was launched into the music system, especially in opera (Richard Wagner's operatic cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen) and, in the early decades of the twentieth century, into film (D. W. Griffiths's Intolerance, for instance, Cecil B. De Mille's various biblical extravaganzas, or, later, George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy). The prose model underwent a revival in the twentieth century, not only in national(ist) narratives such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (probably better known as a film epic) but also in fantasy narratives, of which the primary instance is J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The epic narrative model thus provides an illuminating exemplification of the migration of a model within the literary system and the transfer of a model both to other systems within a cultural polysystem and to other polysystems.

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