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Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation
of literature and literary criticism. Its history begins with classical
Greek poetics and rhetoric and includes, since the 18th century,
aesthetics and hermeneutics. In the 20th century, "theory"
has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches
to reading texts, most of which are informed by various strands
of Continental philosophy. (In much academic discussion, the terms
"literary theory" and "Continental philosophy"
are nearly synonymous, though some scholars would argue that a clear
distinction can be drawn between the two.)
Literary theory and literature
One of the fundamental questions of literary theory is "What
is literature?", though many contemporary theorists and literary
scholars believe either that the term "literature" is
undefinable or that it can potentially 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." For
some scholars of literature, "texts" means "books
belonging to the literary canon". But the principles and methods
of literary theory have been applied to non-fiction, popular fiction,
film, historical documents, law, advertising, etc., in the related
field of cultural studies. In fact, some scholars within cultural
studies treat cultural events like fashion, football, riots, etc.
as "texts" to be interpreted. Taken broadly, then, 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 "schools" or types of literary theory,
which take different approaches to understanding texts. Most theorists,
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
the New Criticism, formalism, Russian formalism, and structuralism,
post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism and French feminism, new historicism,
deconstruction, reader-response criticism, and psychoanalytic criticism.
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 (Longinus' On the Sublime is an often cited early example
as is Aristotle's Poetics), 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 and Yale) 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
research, 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. Since
then, and 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 acrimonious. 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.
Differences among schools
The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds
of literary theory are often radically different. Some differ so
strongly that even finding a set of common terms upon which to compare
them is not a trivial effort.
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.
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
her thought from a body of critical social and economic thought,
and the post-structuralist's work emerges from twentieth-century
Continental philosophy of language. 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.
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 (particuarly 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.
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 of these
cases, such as those of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault
and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, these authors
were not literary critics and did not primarily write about literature;
but, since their work has been broadly influential in literary theory,
they are nonetheless listed here.)
- American pragmatism and other American approaches
- Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty
- Cultural studies - emphasized the role of literature in everyday
life
- Paul Gilroy, John Guillory
- Deconstruction - which sought to emphasize the ambiguities
in a text
- Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller
- Feminism (see feminist literary criticism) - which emphasizes
themes of gender relations
- Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Elaine Showalter
- Formalism
- German hermeneutics and philology
- Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Erich Auerbach
- Marxism (see Marxist literary criticism) - which emphasized
themes of class conflict
- Georg Lukács, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin
- New Criticism - which looked 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 a text by also examining other
texts of the time period
- Stephen Greenblatt
- New Weird
- China Mieville
- Postcolonialism - examines literature produced by countries
that were once occupied by a governing force
- Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha
- Post-structuralism - criticism of structuralism
- Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, the late Roland Barthes, Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Maurice Blanchot
- Psychoanalysis (see psychoanalytic literary criticism) - looks
at works with close attention paid to the unconscious mind of
the author
- Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, Viktor Tausk
- Queer theory - examines, questions, and criticizes the role
of gender in literature
- Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick
- Reader Response - focusses upon the active response of the reader
to a text
- Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, Stuart Hall
- Russian Formalism
- Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
- Structuralism and semiotics (see semiotic literary criticism)
-- examined the underlying structures in the content of a text
(plot, for example)
- Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the early Roland
Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurij Lotman
- Other theorists: Robert Graves, Alamgir Hashmi, John Sutherland
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