What is Literary Theory?

Pragmatic

All theory is a response to Plato • In The • Social and/or didactic function of the
Republic poem

- Poets can’t be trusted, and are - Teach

• bad for society - Please, entertain

• subversive • Pragmatic theorists establish aesthetic

rules to judge
- Because they
- Skill (art) of the poet
• lie
- Taste (judgment) of the reader
- ... so they
• Impact of the poem on the reader
• should be kicked out of The Republic
Expressive

Relationship between the poem and the poet

Types of Theory Poetry is self-expression (Romantic view)
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp Captures the inner workings of a poet’s psyche
Poetry has a personal rather than social
- Mimetic function Prophetic rather than didactic purpose
Poet is a “seer"
• Poem and the universe
Poet and poem are closely linked
- Pragmatic

• Poem and the audience

Objective
- Expressive
Look at the poem as itself
• Poem and the poet
Internal relationships of the poem as an object
- Objective
- Universe, poet, are not as important as
• The poem itself
the poem itself
Mimetic
Poem is a self-contained, self-referential artifact
Mimesis-imitation
- It’s a microcosm-its own little world
The best poems capture the higher reality they
- Has its own observable laws
seek to imitate
Internal structure
- Imitates the universe most closely
• Formalism
- But does it bring us closer to reality
(Aristotle) or farther away from reality (Plato)? • Reader-Response Criticism

Concerned with ultimate essence of a poem • Sociological Criticism

- What does it mean? • Feminist Criticism

• Marxist Criticism
• New Historicism
• New Historical Criticism
• Psychoanalytic Criticism
• Structuralism 2—Deconstruction
Formalism
• Formalism stresses the importance of
literary form in determining the meaning of a
work.
• Biographical, historical, and social
questions are irrelevant to the work’s “real”
meaning.
• Formalists read the text closely, paying
attention to
- organization and structure
- verbal nuances
- multiple meanings.
• Formalist critics try to reconcile the
tensions and oppositions in the text in order to
develop a unified reading.
• The formalist movement began in England
with LA. Richards' Practical Criticism
(1929).
- He asked his students to read famous
poems without telling them the poets’ names.
- This encouraged close reading of the
text without relying on the poets’ reputation,
biological data, or historical context.
The American formalist movement, called new
criticism, was made popular by college
instructors. It was seen as a way for students to
work along with an instructor instead of
listening to lectures.
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren put
together a series of textbooks that have been
used in colleges for years.
After the 1950's, new critics began to
reevaluate their theories and broaden their
approaches. Few scholars currently maintain a
strictly formalist approach; however, nearly
every critical movement of this century owes a
debt to the close reading techniques introduced
by formalists.
Reader-Response Criticism
Reader-response criticism is a view that
opposes formalism. Reader-response critics see
a readers interaction with a text as central to its
interpretation. They feel a literary work has
gaps that a reader must fill in from his or her
own experiences and knowledge. Every reader
supplies personal meanings or observations;
this makes each readers response unique
Differing interpretations by different readers
can be seen as different personalities
constructing meaning form the same series of
clues. The reader not only “creates” the literary
work, but the literature may alter the reader’s
experience and interpretation.
• Reader-response theorists believe in
recursive reading. This is reading a work several
times with the idea that no interpretation is set
in stone.
• Later reading may produce a different
different interpretation than the first or third or
fifth reading.
The reception theory, proposed by Hans Robert
Jauss, suggests that each new generation reads
the same literary work differently. This is
because each age of readers has experienced
different historical events, read different books,
and has been aware of different critical
theories.
Stanley Fish argued that there may not be any
"objective" text at all. He says that no two
readers read the same book, though they can
be trained to have similar responses if they
have had similar experiences.
Sociological Criticism
Sociological theorists believe that a literary
work cannot be separated from the social
context in which it was created. They speculate
on why a particular work might have been
written and explore ways in which it reacts to a
specific situation.
Two strong branches of sociological criticism
have emerged as dominant. These are feminist
criticism and Marxist criticism.
Feminist Criticism
Modern feminist criticism began in the late
1960's. It began with works such as Mary
Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) and
Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969). In general,
feminist critics take the view that our culture
and literature is primarily controlled by males.
Simon de Beauvior stated that a person is not
born feminine but becomes so through cultural
conditioning. Feminist critics assert that
Western culture defines feminine as "other” to
the male, as passive and emotional, opposite to
the masculine who are dominating and rational.
Feminist critics claim that paternalistic cultural
stereotypes pervade the works of literature in
the canon.
They point out that until recently the canon
consisted almost exclusively of works by males
focusing on male experiences.
One response by the feminist critics has been to
reread the works in the traditional canon and to
examine any covert sexual bias in the work.
A second focus has been the redefinition of the
canon. The feminist scholars have rediscovered
women writers who were ignored during their
own times.
Thus several women writers from the late 19th
and early 20th centuries are now recognized as
worthy of study and consideration.
Marxist Criticism
Marxist criticism is based on reading of
literature on social and economic theories of
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels
believed that the dominant capitalist middle
class would eventually be overthrown by the
working class.
In the meantime, they thought the middle class
capitalists would exploit the working class. Marx
and Engels regarded all parts of society as
tainted by the corrupt values of middle class
capitalists.
New historicist critics focus on text in relation to
the historical and cultural
New Historicism
contexts of the period in which it was created
and evaluated.
- These are considered integral parts of
the text.
History is not composed of objective fact.
- it is interpreted and reinterpreted
depending on the power structure of a society.
Louis Althusser suggests that ideology intrudes
in the discourse of an era, positioning readers in
a way that "subjects" them to the interests of
the ruling establishment.
Michel Foucault believes that truth is produced
by the interaction of power and the systems in
which the power flows and it changes as society
changes.
Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that any discourse
contains within it many independent and
sometimes conflicting voices.
In historical criticism literature does not exist
outside time and place and cannot be
interpreted without reference to the era in
which it was written. Criticism also cannot be
evaluated without reference to the time and
place it was written. Historical critics believe
that readers are influenced and shaped by the
cultural context of their eras.
Some major points of his theories depend on
the idea that much of what is most significant to
us does not take place in our conscious life.
Freud believed that we have been forced to
repress much of our experience and many of
our desires in order to coexist peacefully with
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan combined
Freudian theories with structuralist literary
theories to argue that the essential alienating
experience of the human psyche is the
acquisition of language.
Psychoanalytic Terms
id - Part of the mind that determines sexual
drives and other unconscious compulsions that
urge individuals to unthinking gratification.
ego - Conscious mind that strives to deal with
demands of id and to balance its needs with
messages from the superego.
superego - Part of the unconscious that seeks to
repress the demands of the id and to prevent
gratification of basic physical appetites.
condensation - Takes place in dreams when
several elements form repressed unconscious
are linked together to form a new, yet
disguised, whole.
symbolism - Use of representative objects to
stand for forbidden objects.
displacement - Substitution of a socially
acceptable desire for a desire that is not
acceptable.
Oedipus complex - Repressed desire of a son to
unite sexually with his mother and kill his
father.
projection - Defense mechanism in which
people mistakenly see in others antisocial
impulses they fail to recognize in themselves.
Structuralism
Structuralism concentrates on literature as a
system of signs that have no inherent meaning
expect in their agreed upon or conventional
relation to one another. It is usually described
as a way to understand how works of literature
come to have meaning for us. Structuralism
developed from linguistic theory.
French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
suggested that the relationship between an
object and the name we use to designate it is
purely arbitrary. He was interested in how
language worked.
Literary structuralism leads readers to think of
literary works as part of a larger literary system.
It focuses on the importance of difference.
Structuralists believe literature is basically
artificial because the purpose of literature is not
primarily to relay data.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction developed from structuralism. It
argues that every text contains within it some
ingredient undermining its purported system of
meaning. The practice of finding the point at
which the text falls apart because of internal
inconsistencies is called deconstruction.
Deconstructive theorists, like formalists and
structuralists, have a concern for the work itself.
Also like formalists deconstructionists focus on
the possibility for multiple meanings in a text.
They believe any text is capable of many diverse
readings. As structuralists, deconstructionists
see literary texts as part of a larger system of
discourse.