Literary theory

Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. 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. In humanities in modern academia, the latter style of scholarship is an outgrowth of critical theory and is often called simply "theory." 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

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 (Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example), ancient India (Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra), ancient Rome (Longinus's On the Sublime) and medieval Iraq (Al-Jahiz's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and ibn al-Mu'tazz's Kitab al-Badi), and the aesthetic theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and 19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied to the history of literature.

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. As of 2004, the controversy over the use of theory in literary studies has all but died out, and discussions on the topic within literary and cultural studies tend now to be considerably milder and less lively (though the appearance of volumes such as Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphne Patai with Will H. Corral, sought a resurgence of the controversy). Some scholars 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.

About

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 define a "text".

The principles and methods of literary theory apply to non-fiction, popular fiction, film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., and in the related field of cultural studies. Some scholars within cultural studies treat cultural events, like fashion or football riots, as "texts" to be interpreted. By this measure, literary theory can be thought of as the general theory of interpretation.

Since theorists of literature often draw on a very heterogeneous tradition of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of language, any classification of their approaches is only an approximation. There are many types of literary theory, which take different approaches to texts. Even among those listed below, combine methods from more than one of these approaches (for instance, the deconstructive approach of Paul de Man drew on a long tradition of close reading pioneered by the New Critics, and de Man was trained in the European hermeneutic tradition).

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

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.

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 of literary theory

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.
  • Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Harold Bloom
• American pragmatism and other American approaches
  • Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
• 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
  • Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, and Stuart Hall (British Cultural Studies); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Michel de Certeau; also Paul Gilroy, John Guillory
• 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
  • Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gayatri Spivak, Avital Ronell
• Gender (see feminist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of gender relations
  • Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter
• Formalism - a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text
• German hermeneutics and philology
  • Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Erich Auerbach, René Wellek
• Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) – which emphasizes themes of class conflict
  • Georg Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin
• New Criticism – looks at literary works on the basis of what is written, and not at the goals of the author or biographical issues
  • W. K. Wimsatt, F. R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren
• 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
• 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
  • Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Declan Kiberd
• Postmodernism – criticism of the conditions present in the twentieth century, often with concern for those viewed as social deviants or the Other
  • Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Maurice Blanchot
• 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
  • Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva
• 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
  • Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Tausk
• Queer theory – examines, questions, and criticizes the role of gender identity and sexuality in literature
  • Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michel Foucault
• Reader-response criticism – focuses upon the active response of the reader to a text
  • Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
• 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
  • Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yurii Lotman, Umberto Eco, Jacques Ehrmann, Northrop Frye and morphology of folklore
• Eco-criticism – explores cultural connections and human relationships to the natural world
• Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland, Leslie Fiedler, Kenneth Burke, Paul Bénichou, Barbara Johnson, Blanca de Lizaur

The concept of emergence has been applied to the theory of literature and art, history, linguistics, cognitive sciences, etc. by the teachings of Jean-Marie Grassin et the University of Limoges (v. esp.: J. Fontanille, B. Westphal, J. Vion-Dury, éds. L'Émergence—Poétique de l'Émergence, en réponse aux travaux de Jean-Marie Grassin, Bern, Berlin, etc., 2011; and: the article "Emergence" in the International Dictionary of Literary Terms (DITL)).

See also

• List of literary terms
• List of literary movements
• Dramatic theory
• Critical theory
• Text (literary theory)
• School of Resentment

References

• 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

• 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 text
• 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

External links

• Aristotle'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 Love
• The Litcrit Toolkit
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Literary Theory," by Vince Brewton
• Annotated bibliography on literary theory
• David Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners
• Critical Literary Theory
• Introduction to Theory
• Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Purdue OWL
• Johns Hopkins Guide