What is theory?
What is theory?
What is the relationship
between theory and literature?
Literary Theory in Two Bites
Poststructuralism (which often
encompasses deconstruction and
postmodernism)
“The possibility of reading materiality, silence, space, and
conflict within texts has opened up extremely productive
ways of studying the politics of language. If each text is
seen as presenting a major claim that attempts to
dominate, erase, or distort various ‘other’ claims (whose
traces nevertheless remain detectable to a reader who
goes against the grain of the dominant claim), then
“reading” in its extended sense is deeply involved in
questions of authority and power” (346). From Barbara
Johnson, “Writing.”
Derrida’s methodology of deconstruction, which connects
to his theory of différance, is a means of demonstrating
how two supposedly opposing concepts are actually
upholding each other’s meaning. If arguing that
something is biologically based, then embedded in your
logic is an assumption about how nurture constructs that
thing as well. Similarly the authentic and the
reproduction have a corresponding relationship.
Something can’t be authentic without the existence of its
reproduction (and vice versa). Deconstructionists (and
poststructuralists in general) used these theories to
examine the assumptions inherent in literature, or how
literary texts often allow for the deconstruction of norms
that shape human behavior.
If you’re interested in poststructuralism, you should look
further into feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonial
theory.
Historicism (or New Historicism)
“I regard any model that places personal life in a
separate sphere and that grants literature a
secondary and passive role in political history as
unconsciously sexist. I believe such models fail
to account for the formation of a modern
bureaucratic culture because they fail to account
for the place of women within it” (568). From
Nancy Armstrong, “Some Call it Fiction: On the
Politics of Domesticity,” (1990).
As its name suggests, historicism is interested in how
the study of history shapes our understanding of
literature but also in how literature is a lens through
which to study history. Some New Historicists also
argue that history, like literature, is discursively
constructed and that historical documents can be
interpreted textually—that is, as representations
rather than as mirrors of truth into the past.
If historicism appeals to you then you might also be
interested in archival research as well.
Feminist Theory
“It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent
perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the
axioms of imperialism. A basically isolationist
admiration for the literature of the female subject in
Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high
feminist norm. … In the figure of Antoinette, whom in
Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester [first represented in
Jane Eyre] violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggest
that so intimate a thing as personal and human
identity might be determined by the politics of
imperialism” (843). From Gayatri Spivak’s Three
Woman’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism (1985)
Feminist theory emerged in academia at around the same time
as the second wave feminist movement took root in the United
States in the 1960s/ 70s. Influenced by Marxism, psychoanalysis,
poststructuralism, critical race theory, ethnic studies, and then
later queer studies, it’s difficult to describe feminist theory as a
coherent approach to literature. Yet it’s possible to say that all
feminist theorists are interested in the role of gender in
literature. Because of feminist theorists the canon taught in
American universities was radically revised, and “lost” women
writers like Zola Neale Hurtson, Willa Cather, and others began
to receive more attention. Some early feminist theorists argued
that there are essential traits that constitute women, but they
were later critiqued by other feminist theorists, who drawing on
the work of Derrida, Foucault, and others, argued that
difference (or différance) categorized women and that in fact
there is no such thing as “woman.”
If you’re interested in feminist theory, you should also read
critical race theory and queer theory to see how these theories
have intersected and now inform each other.
Queer Theory
“…one main strand of argument in this book is deconstructive,
in a fairly specific sense. The analytic move it makes is to
demonstrate that categories presented in a culture as
symmetrical binary oppositions—heterosexual/ homosexual, in
this case—actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit
relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with
but subordinated to term A; but, second, the ontologically
valorized term A actually depends for its meaning on the
simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of term B; hence,
third, the question of priority between the supposed central and
the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably
unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is
constituted as at once internal and external to term A” (913).
From Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990).
Like feminist theory, queer theory emerged from a
political movement that sought to end the
discrimination of anyone who was classified as having
a non-normative sexuality. Also like feminist theory,
it’s difficult to define queer theory as one thing. It
encompasses work that examines the representation
of queer sexuality in literature (even when not
described overtly) to work that challenges the idea of
normativity. Some queer theorists began their careers
identified as feminist theorists (and there is still a lot
of crossover). Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, two key
critics in queer theory, both argued for the variability
and indeterminacy of gender and sexuality—even as
their approaches differ quite drastically.
Critical Race Theory
“Just as Fanon points out that some forms of nationalism can
obscure class, Asian American feminists point out that Asian
American nationalism—or the construction of an essentialized,
native Asian American subject—obscures gender. In other
words, the struggle that is framed as a conflict between the
apparent opposites of nativism and assimilation can mask what
is more properly characterized as a struggle between the desire
to essentialize ethnic identity and the fundamental condition of
heterogeneous differences against which such a desire is
spoken. The trope that opposes nativism and assimilation can
be itself a colonialist figure used to displace the challenges of
heterogeneity, or subalternity, by casting them as assimilationist
or anti-ethnic” (1040). From Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity,
Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,”
Diaspora (1991).
Critical Race Theory applies to a wide range of theory
with different fields as its focus. Since the 1960s when
scholars began focusing specifically on literature written
by African American writers, and then later Latino, Asian
American, and Native American writers, critical race
theory (sometimes referred to as ethnic studies) emerged
as an umbrella term that focuses on literatures written by
minority groups (or those viewed as belonging to a
minority group). Critical race theory has been influenced
by historicism, poststructuralism, and feminist theory; it
also often intersects with cultural studies as well. While
some critical race theorists take a more identity-based
focus by examining underrepresented writings by Asian
Americans or Latinos, other scholars examine the
category of race critically to understand how the concept
has shaped many different discursive strands in American
literary history.
Postcolonial Theory
“My contention is that by that very odd combination of
casualness and stress, Austen reveals herself to be assuming the
importance of an empire to the situation at home. Let me go
further. Since Austen refers to and uses Antigua as she does in
Mansfield Park, there needs to be a commensurate effort on the
part of her readers to understand concretely the historical
valences in the reference; to put it differently, we should try to
understand what she referred to, why she gave it the
importance she did, and why indeed she made the choice, for
she might have done something different to establish Sir
Thomas’s wealth. Let us now calibrate the signifying power of
the references to Antigua in Mansfield Park; how do they
occupy the place they do, what are they doing there?” (1119).
From Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993).
While the “post” in postcolonial theory might imply that
it examines texts and ideas that post-date colonialism and
colonial cultures, it actually more accurately describes a
methodology that rethinks how a colonial mindset
shaped certain texts and their core beliefs. Like the
previous theories described before, postcolonialism
covers a wide range of approaches, and it also covers a
wide geographical area as well. With the advent of
postcolonialism and its related field, transnationalism,
English Departments began to re-assess their focus on
British and American literary texts. Courses on the global
novel, world literature, and African literatures, to point to
just a few examples, emerged in part because of
conversations in postcolonial studies. However, this
methodology also opened up new ways to examine texts
that are established in the canon. The previous quotation
from Edward Said about Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is
an example of this approach.
Psychoanalysis/ Affect
“In this novel as in our other examples, the affective feeling of normativity
is expressed in the sense that one ought to be dealt with gently by the world,
and to live happily with strangers and intimates without being torn and
worn out by the labor of disappointment and the disappointment of labor.
Here, though, evidence of the possibility of enduring that way in one's object
or scene is not embedded in the couple form, the love plot, the family, fame,
work, wealth, or property. Those are the sites of cruel optimism, scenes of
conventional desire that stand manifestly in the way of the subject's thriving”
(113).
From Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011.
The two foundational figures in psychoanalytic literary
theory are Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan; their work
helped develop methods that take the human mind, its
relationship to itself and others, and its development in
childhood as means to understand literary texts. Lacan, in
particular, was also interested in language since like most
structuralists he believed that it was only through
language that we can understand our consciousness (or
unconsciousness, for that matter). More recently, literary
critics interested in the human mind have turned to affect
theory, or the study of human emotions and emotional
experiences/ reactions. Affect theory ranges from
discussions about how human emotions like shame,
disgust, love, and hatred shape our understandings of
texts to analyses of how affect shapes our readings
practices and to observations about the aesthetics of
emotions and emotional texts.
Almost all quotations were taken from Literary
Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and
Michael Ryan, 2004.
All summaries are mine.