Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic
study of the nature of
literature and of the methods for analyzing literature.
[1] However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes which are of relevance to the way humans interpret meaning.
[1] In
humanities in modern academia, the latter style of scholarship is an outgrowth of
critical theory and is often called simply "theory."
[2] As a consequence, the word "theory" has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Many of these approaches are informed by various strands of
Continental philosophy and
sociology.
History[edit]
The modern sense of "literary theory," however, dates only to approximately the 1950s, when the
structuralist linguistics of
Ferdinand de Saussure began strongly to influence
English language literary criticism. The
New Critics and various European-influenced
formalists (particularly the
Russian Formalists) had described some of their more abstract efforts as "theoretical" as well. But it was not until the broad impact of structuralism began to be felt in the English-speaking academic world that "literary theory" was thought of as a unified domain.
In the academic world of the United Kingdom and the United States, literary theory was at its most popular from the late 1960s (when its influence was beginning to spread outward from elite universities like
Johns Hopkins,
Yale, and
Cornell) through the 1980s (by which time it was taught nearly everywhere in some form). During this span of time, literary theory was perceived as academically cutting-edge, and most university literature departments sought to teach and study theory and incorporate it into their curricula. Because of its meteoric rise in popularity and the difficult language of its key texts, theory was also often criticized as
faddish or trendy
obscurantism (and many academic satire novels of the period, such as those by
David Lodge, feature theory prominently). Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1970s and 1980s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars."
By the early 1990s, the popularity of "theory" as a subject of interest by itself was declining slightly (along with job openings for pure "theorists") even as the texts of literary theory were incorporated into the study of almost all literature. By 2010, the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies had quieted down, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less lively. However, some scholars like
Mark Bauerlein continue to argue that less capable theorists have abandoned proven methods of
epistemology, resulting in persistent lapses in learning, research, and evaluation.
[4]Some scholars do draw heavily on theory in their work, while others only mention it in passing or not at all; but it is an acknowledged, important part of the study of literature.
[citation needed]One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is
literature?" – although many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of
language. Specific theories are distinguished not only by their methods and conclusions, but even by how they create meaning in a "
text". However, some theorists acknowledge that these texts do not have a singular, fixed meaning which is deemed "correct".
[5]Broad schools of theory that have historically been important include historical and
biographical criticism,
New Criticism,
formalism,
Russian formalism, and
structuralism,
post-structuralism,
Marxism,
feminism and
French feminism,
post-colonialism,
new historicism,
deconstruction,
reader-response criticism, and
psychoanalytic criticism.
Differences among schools[edit]
The different interpretive and epistemological perspectives of different schools of theory often arise from, and so give support to, different moral and political commitments. For instance, the work of the
New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by
T. S. Eliot or
Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile, a
Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem's religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a
post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem's references to "God" by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to. A critic using
Darwinian literary studies might use arguments from the
evolutionary psychology of religion.
Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language, and the Darwinian from the
modern evolutionary synthesis. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all "theories of literature" without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.
In the late 1950s, the Canadian literary critic
Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his
Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual "order of words" and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.
For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between "literary" and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of "texts", including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.
Bakhtin argued that the "utter inadequacy" of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the
novel; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.
[6] Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author's own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author's intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the "correct" interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on "the text itself" in a
close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author's interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.
Schools[edit]
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors. In many cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher
Michel Foucault and the anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the authors were not primarily literary critics, but their work has been broadly influential in literary theory.
- Aestheticism – often associated with Romanticism, a philosophy defining aesthetic value as the primary goal in understanding literature. This includes both literary critics who have tried to understand and/or identify aesthetic values and those like Oscar Wilde who have stressed art for art's sake.
- American pragmatism and other American approaches
- Cognitive Cultural Studies – applies research in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive evolutionary psychology and anthropology, and philosophy of mind to the study of literature and culture
- Frederick Luis Aldama, Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, William Flesch, David Herman, Suzanne Keen, Patrick Colm Hogan, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Blakey Vermeule, Lisa Zunshine
- Cultural studies – emphasizes the role of literature in everyday life
- Darwinian literary studies – situates literature in the context of evolution and natural selection
- Deconstruction – a strategy of "close" reading that elicits the ways that key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable
- Eco-criticism – explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world
- Gender (see feminist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of gender relations
- Formalism – a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text
- German hermeneutics and philology
- Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of class conflict
- New Criticism – looks at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
- New Historicism – which examines the work through its historical context and seeks to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature
- Postcolonialism – focuses on the influences of colonialism in literature, especially regarding the historical conflict resulting from the exploitation of less developed countries and indigenous peoples by Western nations
- Postmodernism – criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
- Post-structuralism – a catch-all term for various theoretical approaches (such as deconstruction) that criticize or go beyond Structuralism's aspirations to create a rational science of culture by extrapolating the model of linguistics to other discursive and aesthetic formations
- Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) – explores the role of consciousnesses and the unconscious in literature including that of the author, reader, and characters in the text
- Queer theory – examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
- Reader-response criticism – focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
- Russian formalism
- Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism) – examines the universal underlying structures in a text, the linguistic units in a text and how the author conveys meaning through any structures
- Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson, Blanca de Lizaur
See also[edit]
- ^ Jump up to:a b Culler 1997, p.1
- Jump up^ Searle, John. (1990) The Storm Over the University, The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990.
- Jump up^ van Gelder, G. J. H. (1982), Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem, Brill Publishers, pp. 1–2, ISBN 90-04-06854-6
- Jump up^ Bauerlein, Mark (13 November 2014). "Theory and the Humanities, Once More". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 27 February 2016.
Jay treats it [theory] as transformative progress, but it impressed us as hack philosophizing, amateur social science, superficial learning, or just plain gamesmanship.
- Jump up^ Sullivan, Patrick (2002-01-01). ""Reception Moments," Modern Literary Theory, and the Teaching of Literature". Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. 45 (7): 568–577.
- Jump up^ Bakhtin 1981, p.8
References[edit]
- Peter Barry. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. ISBN 0-7190-6268-3.
- Jonathan Culler. (1997) Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-285383-X.
- Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. ISBN 0-8166-1251-X.
- Terry Eagleton. After Theory. ISBN 0-465-01773-8.
- Jean-Michel Rabaté. The Future of Theory. ISBN 0-631-23013-0.
- The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. ISBN 0-8018-4560-2.
- Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. 2nd Ed. ISBN 0-582-31287-6
- Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. Ed. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral. ISBN 0-231-13417-7.
- Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press.
- René Wellek. A history of modern criticism : 1750-1950. Yale University Press, 1955-1992, 8 volumes.
- 1: The later eighteenth century
- 2: The romantic age
- 3: The age of transition
- 4: The later nineteenth century
- 5: English criticism, 1900-1950
- 6: American criticism, 1900-1950
- 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European criticism, 1900-1950
- 8: French, Italian and Spanish criticism, 1900-1950
Further reading[
edit]
Carroll, J. (2007). Evolutionary Approaches to Literature and Drama. In Robin Dunbar and Louise Barrett, (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Chapter 44.
Full textCastle, Gregory. Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. (
http://www.upress.umn.edu/)
Literary Theory: An Anthology. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Lisa Zunshine, ed.
Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010
External links[
edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to:
Literary theoryAristotle's Poetics (350 BCE)Longinus's On the Sublime (1st century CE)Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1595)"A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology", by José Ángel García Landa"Some Literary Criticism quotes", by Tim LoveThe Litcrit ToolkitInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"Literary Theory," by Vince BrewtonAnnotated bibliography on literary theoryCritical Literary TheoryIntroduction to TheoryEncyclopedia of PhilosophyPurdue OWLJohns Hopkins Guide
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