Literary theory
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Literary theory is the systematic
History
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (January 2024) |
The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece (
Some scholars, both theoretical and anti-theoretical, refer to the 1980s and 1990s debates on the academic merits of theory as "the theory wars".[5] Proponents and critics of the turn to theory take different (and often conflicting) positions about what counts as a theory or what it means to theorize within/about/alongside literature or other cultural creations.[6]
Overview
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "what is literature?" and "how should or do we read?" – although some 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".[7]
Since theorists of literature often draw on very heterogeneous traditions of
Differences among schools
This section possibly contains original research. (May 2012) |
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
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.
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.
Mikhail 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.[8]
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
Listed below are some of the most commonly identified schools of literary theory, along with their major authors:
- Aestheticism – 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.
- African-American literary theory
- American pragmatism and other American approaches
- Cognitive literary theory – applies research in cognitive science and philosophy of mindto 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
- Cambridge criticism – close examination of the literary text and the relation of literature to social issues
- Q.D. Leavis, William Empson.
- Critical race theory
- 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
- Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
- Descriptive poetics
- Feminist literary criticism
- 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
- Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin
- Narratology
- 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
- Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, H. Aram Veeser
- 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
- Viktor Tausk
- 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
- Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
- Realist
- Russian formalism
- Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
- 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
- Communication theory
- List of literary terms
- List of literary movements
- Dramatic theory
- Critical theory
- Literary criticism
- Janet C. Richards
- Text (literary theory)
- School of Resentment
Notes
- ^ a b Culler 1997, p.1
- ^ Searle, John. (1990), "The Storm Over the University", The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990.
- ISBN 90-04-06854-6
- ISBN 9780226015989.
- ^ Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, Sara Rushing, "Introduction", in: Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, Sara Rushing (eds.), Histories of Postmodernism, Routledge, 2020.
- ^ https://iep.utm.edu/literary/
- JSTOR 40012241.
- ^ Bakhtin 1981, p.8
References
- ISBN 0-7190-6268-3.
- ISBN 0-19-285383-X.
- 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. ISBN 0-582-31287-6
- Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. Ed. 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.
Further reading
- ISBN 978-0-19-856830-8. Retrieved 2020-05-13.
- Castle, 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
- Writing: what for and for whom. The joys and travails of the artist, edited by Ralf van Bühren. Rome: EDUSC, 2024.
External links
- Aristotle's Poetics (350 BCE) A translation By S. H. Butcher
- Longinus's On the Sublime (1st century CE) A translation By H. L. Havell
- Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1595)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Literary Theory", by Vince Brewton
- Introduction to Modern Literary Theory
- "A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology", by José Ángel García Landa
- Annotated bibliography on literary theory
- The Litcrit Toolkit
- Critical Literary Theory
- Purdue OWL
- Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism