My Guide to Literary Theory: Introductory Thoughts

I am very happy to have been offered the opportunity to study a masters in English Literary Studies at the University of Exeter. During the course, I will be specialising in an area that has always engaged me during my undergraduate degree; that of literary theory and criticism. Literary theory can be a daunting world of abstract thoughts and philosophies; so I thought I would begin a series of blogs in which I will break down this broad area of literary studies into easily digestible guides. In these guides I intend to provide an overview of the paradigms and debates that make up literary theory; providing the reader with a good basic introduction, and myself the opportunity to consolidate my own knowledge.

Literary theory is a difficult term to pin down. It is a term that incorporates elements of cultural, philosophical and sociological studies, and is made of numerous different approaches, many of which will feature in future blogs. Essentially literary theory is the study of how we read, understand, and analyze works of literature. As Jonathan Cuellar defines it “the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature.” Literary theory and literary criticism are intrinsically linked, but they differ in that literary criticism is concerned with the evaluation and appreciation of texts. It is the process of scrutinising texts to determine if they are worthy of study. The collection of texts that are deemed worthy of study, or of intellectual value, make up the Literary Canon, and these texts are continually scrutinised and may grow or decline in importance as different debates emerge. The Canon is the reason you may have studied Shakespeare or Dickens at school over other writers. Theory has no concern with appreciation or sensory experience of reading; only description, analysis and speculation. Theory tries to open up what is the ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ of literature and contemplate how reading gets done.

I have begun to put down a basic definition of theory, but there is another question to tackle and it is that of the “literary”. What is literature? It is this very question that is one of the fundamental questions that literary theory attempts to answer, or perhaps, not answer. As humans we are logical beings who require clarity and definition, but many scholars believe that literature simply can not be defined, and equally that it is not problematic to have no conclusive definition. As I progress through this series, we will see the many different ways schools of theory approach this very question.

For the remainder of this blog, I want to overview some of the philosophies that influenced the emergence of literary theory. A good place to start is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant who claimed that we cannot know the thing in itself. What Kant means by this claim is that we can only experience the phenomenon, the human sensation of a thing, and never experience the thing in itself. It can be difficult to get your head around that principle, but what he is essentially describing is a distance between the perceiver and that which is being perceived. Kant’s philosophy of the thing in itself is far more complex than my synopsis above, but for the sake of clarity it is only this distance between the perceiver and the perceived that I want to highlight, and I encourage you to research Kant further if you are interested.

It is from Kant's philosophy that the skeptical philosophers emerge. This group of thinkers believed that happening in the distance between the thing and how we perceive it, there is a type of corruption. They claimed that our own consciousness is alienated from its own underpinnings. That not only is the way we perceive a thing fundamentally differs from the thing in itself, but that we are also not in control of how we are perceiving said thing. The key figures I want to highlight in regard to literary theory are Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. These thinkers offered ways in which our own thought process may be outside of our control.

Marx - Suggested that individualism was the result of commodity fetishism and alienation. That the way in which we think is a result of the relationship between commodity and its means of production. These factors are outside of our control and are known as ideology.

Nietzsche - That the language we use is loaded with worn out figures of speech, and therefore incapable of telling the truth. He claimed that since we express our perception via language it is the very nature of that language itself that is determining our perception of things.

Freud - That the conscious is constantly unsettled by the unconscious. That the way in which we think is constantly influenced by thought processes we can not be aware of and can only infer.

We could also include Darwin to this collection of skeptics and his claim that the conscious may be biologically determined, and influenced by evolution and the survival of the fittest. I will return to all of these philosophies above later on in this series; as they are the basis of several specific schools of literary theory. Once again, I have condensed highly complex works, and I encourage you to read further, but what we can take from them is that there is an inherent skepticism or suspicion towards how we think. It is that very way of thinking, that undermining of foundational knowledge, that paves the way for the emergence of literary theory. If there is a great complexity and skepticism in the relationship of the perceiver and the perceived, there is the same process going on when a reader perceives a text. Theory attempts to apply these principles onto literary texts in order to contemplate what happens in the relationships between a text and its reader. Many of you will be asking your screens, ”Where does the author fall into this equation?”. A valid point, and one that brings us to another key question asked of literary theory that I will explore in my next blog. Does a text have an author?