What is Theory?

- A theory must be more than a hypothesis: it can’t be obvious; it involves complex relations of
a systematic kind among a number of factors. It is not easily confirmed or disproved.
- Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and further, an attempt to
show that what we take for granted as ‘common sense’ is in fact a historical construction, a
particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us that we don’t even see it as a theory.
o Theory is interdisciplinary - discourse with effects outside an original discipline.
o Theory is reflexive, thinking about thinking, enquiry into the categories we use in
making sense of things in literature and in the other discursive pact.

Reader’s – Response Theory

- Literary text do not exist on bookshelves. They are processes of signification materialized only
in the practice of reading. For literature to happen the reader is quite as vital as the author.
- The reader ‘concretizes’ the literary work which is in itself no more than a chain of organized
black marks on page.
- Reader-response theorists believe:
1. that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and
2. that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective
literary text rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature.

Transactional Reader - Response Theory

- Often associated with the work of Louise Rosenblatt
- She differentiates among the terms text, which refers to the printed words on the page;
reader; and poem, which refers to the literary work produced by the text and the reader
together.
- Text is a stimulus/blueprint.
- Reading in aesthetic mode vs efferent mode
 Aesthetic mode – experience a personal relationship
 Efferent mode – focus on just of the information contains in text

Affective Stylists
- is derived from analyzing further the notion that a literary text is an event that scars in time –
that comes into being as it is read – rather than an object that exists in space.
- Affective stylistics is not a description of the reader’s impressionistic responses but a
cognitive analysis of the mental processes produced by specific elements in the text. Indeed,
it is the “slow-motion,” phrase-by-phrase analysis of how the text structures the reader’s
response for which affective stylistics is perhaps best known.
Subjective Reader – Responsive Theory
- Subjective criticism is based on the belief that all knowledge is subjective the - perceived can’t
be separated from the perceiver – which is a belief held today by many scientists and
historians as well as by many critical theorists.
- For subjective reader-response critics, led by the work of David Bleich, reader’s responses are
the text, both in the sense that there is no literary text beyond the meanings created by
readers’ interpretations and in the sense that the text the critic analyzes is not the literary
work but the written responses of readers.

Real objects & Symbolic objects

- Bleich calls reading (the feelings, associations, and memories that occur as we react
subjectively to the printed words on the page) as symbolization: our perception and
identification of our reading experience create a conceptual, or symbolic, world in our mind as
we read.
- Therefore, when we interpret the meaning of the text, we are actually interpreting the
meaning of our own symbolization: we are interpreting the meaning of the conceptual
experience we created in response to the text. He thus calls the act of interpretation re-
symbolization.

Subjective Reader-Response Theory as pedagogical approach

- To summarize Bleich’s procedure, students are asked to respond to a literary text by writing
a response statement and then by writing an analysis of their own response statement, both
of which tasks are performed as efforts to contribute to the class’s production of knowledge
about reading experiences.
- There’s big difference between knowing what you like and understanding your taste, and it is
the latter goal that is, for Bleich, the appropriate goal for the classroom. Indeed, he believes
that the organized examination of taste promoted in the subjective classroom is a natural
place for students to begin their study of language and literature.

Psychological Reader-Response Theory

- This theory suggest that readers’ motives strongly influence how they read.
- It focuses on what readers’ interpretations reveal about themselves, not about the text: that
we react to literary texts with the same psychological responses we bring to events in our daily
lives.

Social Reader-Response Theory

- For social reader-response theory, usually associated with the later work of Stanley Fish, there
is no purely individual subjective response.
- These interpretive strategies always result from various sorts of institutionalized assumptions
(assumptions established, for example, in high schools, churches, and colleges by prevailing
cultural attitudes and philosophers) about what makes a text a piece of literature – instead of
a letter or a legal document or a church sermon – and what meanings we are supposed to find
in it.
- As Fish notes, interpretations will always be controlled by the relatively limited repertoire of
interpretive strategies available at any given point in history.

Literary Theories
Formalism/New Criticism
- New criticism is sometimes known to be “science of literature” for it looks at the technical
aspect of the vocabulary that is used in the selection, the sounds, imagery, narrative, part of
view, and other that are used in a literary selection.
Reader’s Response
- Don’t go beyond the text.
- The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal
reflection to a text.
Structuralism
- Structuralism challenged the belief that a work of literature reflected a given reality; instead, a
text was constituted of linguistic conventions and situated among other texts.
- “considered language as a system of signs and significance, the elements of which are
understandable only in relation to each other and to the system”.
Psychoanalysis
- Freud’s theories are either directly or indirectly concerned with the nature of the unconscious
mind.
- Freud, then, powerfully developed an old idea: that the human mind is essentially dual in
nature.
- The passional, irrational, unknown and unconscious part of the id, or “it”. Ego or “I”, was his
term for the predominantly rational, logical, orderly, conscious part. Superego, is really a
projection of the ego. The superego almost seems to be outside of the self, making moral
judgements, telling us to make sacrifices for good cause even though self-sacrifice may not be
quite logical or rational. And, in sense, the superego is “outside”, since much of what it tells us
to do or think we have learned from our parents, our schools, or our religious institutions.
Sociological Criticism: Marxism
- The idea of Marxism started when Karl Marx wanted to understand how the capitalist society
works and where it would likely lead.
o Looking the way the workers are living and how this specifically affects their overall
well-being.
 o The workers alienated from the product itself, because the workers will almost
never have the opportunity to experience or use products that they produced by
themselves.
o Because of the demand of mass production and labor, the workers to compete and
be indifferent to other human beings.
o The work to
Sociological Criticism: Feminism
- Feminist literary criticism is literary analysis that arises from the viewpoint of feminism.
- Identifying with female characters: This is a way to challenge the male-centered outlook of
authors. Feminist literary criticism suggests that women in literature were historically
presented as objects seen from a male perspective.
- Re-evaluating literature and the world in which literature is read: This involves questioning
whether society has predominantly valued male authors and their literary works became it has
valued males more than females.
- Feminist literary criticism assumes that literature both reflects and shapes stereotypes and
other cultural assumptions.
New Historicism
- The idea is that before or after you appreciate a literacy text, you need to be familiar with who
the author is and the world he or she lives in back when the text was written.
- Seek to find political function of like back when it was
o Literary historicism deals with the problem in social organization, taboos, prejudices,
practices and so much more.
o It also seeks to
Modernism
- Explored the possibilities and individuality.
Post Modernism
- Rejection the modernist way of doing things - trying to make things new or avant grade.
- It is the skeptical interpretation of culture, art, history, architecture and literature.
- Skeptical = There is always an art of critique and emphasis on a certain work of art
- The postmodernist aims to look at the variety rather than the ornamentation or novelty.
- It also rejects the idea of “totality”, “unity”, or being “cohesive”.
Deconstruction
- It is a science that seeks to understand how a system works. In this case.
- Language, the structure of language comes from the human mind.
- Deconstruction indicates arriving at a new thought or perspective by taking apart an already
existing one (or taking apart an already existing one thanks to framing it through something
new)
Post Structuralism
- It held that language is not a transparent medium that connects one directly with a “truth” or
“reality” outside it but rather a structure or code, whose parts derive their meaning from their
contrast with one another and not from any connection with an outside world.

New Criticism
“The Text Itself”
- To fully appreciate New Criticism’s contribution to literary studies today, we need to
remember the form of criticism it replaced the biographical-historical criticism that dominated
literary studies in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth.
- It was common practice to interpret a literary text by studying the author’s life and times to
determine authorial intention, that is, the meaning the author intended the text to have.
- “The text itself” became the battle cry of the New Critical effort to focus our attention on the
literary work as the sole source of evidence for interpreting it.
- Sometimes a literary text doesn’t live up to the author’s intention.
- Sometimes it is even more meaningful, rich, and complex than the author realized.
- Sometimes the text’s meaning is simply different from the meaning the author wanted it to
have.
- Knowing an author’s intention, therefore, tells us nothing about the text itself.

Intentional Fallacy vs Affective Fallacy

Intentional Fallacy
- Refer to the mistaken belief that the author’s intention is the same as the text’s meaning.
- Confuses the text with its origins.

Affective Fallacy
- Such a conclusion
- Confuses the text with its affects, that is, with the emotions it produces.
- Leads to impressionistic responses (if a reader doesn’t like the character, then that character
must be evil) and relativism (the text means whatever any reader thinks it means)

- A literary work is a timeless, autonomous (self-sufficient) verbal object.

- This is why New Criticism asserted that the meaning of a poem could bot be explained simply
by paraphrasing it, or translating it into everyday language.

Literary Language and Organic Unity

- The importance of the formal elements of a literary text is a product of the nature of literary
language, which, for New Criticism, is very different from scientific language and from everyday
language.
- Literary language, in contrast, depends on connotation: on the implication, association,
suggestion, and evocation of meanings and of shades of meaning. (For example, while the word
“father” denotes “male parent”, it connotes “authority, protection, and responsibility.)
- Literary language is expressive: it communicates tone, attitude, and feeling.
- Literary language, however, organizes linguistic resources into a special arrangement, a
complex unity, to create an aesthetic experience, a world of its own.
- Literary language – the word choice and arrangement that create the aesthetic experience – is
inseparable from its content, its meaning.

Paradox
- Statement that seems self-contradictory but represent the actual things way.
- Ex “You must lose your life in order to gain it.”

Irony
- Statement or event undermined by the context in which it occurs.
Ambiguity
- Occurs when a word, image, or event generates two or more different meanings.
Tension
- Broadly defined, means the linking together of opposites.
- Is also created by the dynamic interplay among the text’s opposing tendencies, that is, among
its paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities.
Close Reading
- Scrupulous examination of the complex relationship between a text’s formal elements and its
theme, is how the text’s organic unity was established by the New Critic.
- Belief that the literary text can be understood primarily by understanding its form.
Figurative Language
- Language that has more than, or other than, a strictly literal meaning.
Image
- Illustrated by our use of the word earlier, consists of a word or words that refer to an object
perceived by the senses or to sense perceptions themselves: colors, shapes, lighting, sounds,
tastes, smells, textures, temperature, and so on.
Symbol
- An image that has both literal and figurative meaning, a concrete universal.
Metaphor
- Is a comparison of two dissimilar objects in which the properties of one are ascribed to the
other.
Simile
- Describes something by comparing it to something else.
- Requires one small step.

New Criticism as An Intrinsic Objective Criticism

- New Criticism asked us to look closely at the formal elements of the text to help us discover
the poem’s theme and to explain the ways in which those formal elements establish it.
- New Critics believed that this was the only way to determine the text’s value. By staying
within the poem in this manner.
- New Critics believed they allowed the literary work itself to provide the context within which
we interpret and evaluate it.

Intrinsic Criticism
- New Critics believed their interpretations were based solely on the context created by the text
and the language provided by the text.
Extrinsic Criticism
- Because it goes outside the literary text for the tools needed to interpret it.

Objective Criticism
- Because their focus on each text’s own formal elements ensured, they claimed, that each text
– each object being interpreted would itself dictate how it would be interpreted.

• New Criticism’s success in focusing our attention on the formal elements of the text and on
their relationship to the meaning of the text is evident in the way we study literature today,
regardless of our theoretical perspective.
• New Critics believed that a single best, or most accurate, interpretation of each text could
be discovered that best represents the text itself: that
best explains what the text means and how the text produces that meaning, in other words,
that best explains its organic unity.