literary theory

Don't ask me, I'm still trying to keep my guys from peein' in the showers.

I took literary theory a semester ago and I still really don't understand all that much. My biggest help could be with deconstructionism. A deconstructionist tries to "deconstruct" things- good def. isn't it. But their point is to look at the world in a new manner, which is why they especially like poetry. They find something that is normally taken as a given and look at it in a completely new manner in order to find meaning about it. An example could be that instead of looking at a chair as a chair, they look at it as a puffy cloud to sit on (not a great example but I think it gets the idea across). Hope this helps/makes sense, literary theory is a b*tch

feminist theory attempts to interpret literature in light of cultural forces particularly those that illustrate the precarious position of women in history. Feminist theorist tend to look closely at literature that both reinforces women's traditional (and evolving) role as well as literature that tries to resist that traditional role.

Personally, I have found most feminist theorist to be quite intelligent but deeply in need of a good spanking from behind. When one gives them said good spanking, it also tends to make them more feminist. Strange?

marxist theorist attempt a similar feat as feminist but they pay attention to how literature illustrates the continual struggle of the working class to escape the subjugation of the high class (or, more often, how literature helps to solidify the high class control over the proles). Literature--as a reflection of culture--always can be explained in light of economic forces. They are not concerned about the price of a cup of tea, but rather how the high class controls the lows with a complex set of morals, religion, and norms.

Personally, marxist are very fun to drink with and, generally, nice guys. They also have a tendency to get in brutal bar fights. These bar fights escalate quickly when one yells "now we see the violence inherent in the system."

Structuralism is the idea that all complex thoughts/ideas/practices can actually be broken down into more simple structures such as (in the case of literature) mythologies. So, structuralist look for the underlying, basic elements whose "structure" allows literature to occur.

They tend to be the most boring people that I ever have to hang out with. They get excited about the most boring shit and have their sense of humors literally ripped out them by years of reading and studying worthless crap. Privately, they often aspire to be a guest on Fresh Air, hoping they can score with Terri Gross.

Deconstruction (or post-structuralism) tends to be critical of structuralism and also defies an easy explaination (intentionally I should add). Deconstructionist see literature as a product of an illogical world that defies any structure and meaning outside of the reader's subjective attempt to "construct" meaning.

These are wire-rimmed, intellectual, frenchy assholes who you tend to want to punch in the mouth because, quite suprisingly, your girlfriend finds them attractive. They also--I have found--have very weird collections like pez dispensers or hello kitty crap or x-rated anime. They generally suck.

I hope this helps you make your decision as to what you want to be.

Feminism - the work says something about the status and treatment (usually mistreatment) of women

Marxism - same as above except for the working/lower classes.

Deconstruction - in depth analysis (often line by line) to find out that basically a text can mean anything, and there is no such thing as authorial intent.

Structuralism - The form or structure of work is what gives it its meaning.

so you actually expect someone to explain those four theories to you in a single post?

here's some advice--

You have to grasp structuralism before deconstruction--read Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (THE structuralist bible).

Look to Derrida for deconstruction (which falls under the category of post-structuralism). Simply put, deconstruction defies metaphysics and celebrates the ambiguity inherent in language (and thus, everything). Words don't mean things, we make words mean. There isn't anything that sits behind and transcends language that makes it mean. Marxist and Feminist literary theory takes Marxist and Feminist principles and uses them as frameworks in which to understand literature. i.e. a Marxist critic would read OLIVER TWIST theorize on the novel reveals about the relations of production; a Feminist critic might read Sense and Sensibility to show how the courting situation exposes a patriarchal social structure.

Check out Rivkin and Ryan's Literary Theory Anthology; it's got good short selections that explain these and other theories.

dasaint wrote:

You have to grasp structuralism before deconstruction--read

hey! this is the very problem that i was having. in all of the literary theory books that i looked at, i was having trouble finding explanations of each theory without the writer referring to other theories. it was really annyoing.

the course i took in literary theory was one of my top 3 favorite classes on college. so interesting. id love to try to offer an explanation of all four but im tired.

hard to do wrote:

feminist theory attempts

marxist theorist attempt a similar feat as feminist but

Structuralism is the idea that all complex thoughts/ideas/practices can actually be broken down into

[snipped for brevity--go see original post above]

This was actually pretty good. Written on the fly, with typos and all, but knowledgeable and entertaining. Huzzah.

Modern feminist and Marxist theory is way beyond talking about how the lit REFLECTS certain oppressive social values. Generally, they're writing about how literature actually REPRODUCES those values.

Also, feminist theory should be divided into Anglo/American thoery and Continental. The Continentals believe that language itself is a tool for reproducing patriarchy. (They're basically nutjobs and you don't really have to study them in the US).

If you want to get a handle on deconstructionism, check out a bunch of articles from Critical Inquiry in the 70s. There was a big debate going on between J Hillis Miller, MH Abrams, Wayne Booth, and a bunch of other giants of the era. I think the famous one by Abrams was called "The Deconstructionist Angel."

Also, Abrams' Glossary of English Literary Terms is a really good primer for these theories before you jump right in. It can be kind of daunting as an undergrad.

Finally, when you have one of those moments when you decide that it's all a bunch of BS, you can turn to The Pooh Perplex, by Frederick Crews. It's a mock-undergrad theory reader in which all of the theories are applied to the Pooh stories, with ridiculous results. The funny thing is, it's not a bad book for getting the gist of different theories. If I ever teach literary theory to high school students I'm definately going to have them read a few of those essays.

can someone recommend an order in which to study the theories?

psychoanalytic was possible to learn out of order, but the other theories just seem to all refer to each other for explanation

When I first heard a feminist interp of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, I couldn't beleive it. I'm a middle aged man with a bachelor's degree in English, and this woman shook my take on literature.

When I offered that it was still a great book, I was told how bad it was and I was wrong. I can still remember her explanation of the lone pine tree as a phallus.

I thought it was Freud that said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But then again, he was a man and wouldn't get the deeper meanings of the repression that a cigar has over women.

The pretty much standard introductory text is "Introduction to Literary Theory" by Terry Eagleton. He's a Marxist (doesn't push this too much in "Intro," but his other works are pretty good), but he makes everything pretty easy to understand, and gives you the names to read in full after you're done with Intro to Lit...

Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory. It will answer most of your questions.

hard to do...

great answer!

read any book by David Lodge, they're good reads and literary theory is amply explained. "How Far can you go " is a good place to start.

hard to do wrote:

Privately, (structuralists) often aspire to be a guest on Fresh Air, hoping they can score with Terri Gross.

(Deconstructionists) are wire-rimmed, intellectual, frenchy assholes who you tend to want to punch in the mouth because, quite suprisingly, your girlfriend finds them attractive. They also--I have found--have very weird collections like pez dispensers or hello kitty crap or x-rated anime.

My first day in grad school, I went to my class in Marxian political economy, which was taught by a guy whose intellectual project it was to make a grand synthesis of Marx, Freud and recent developments in literary theory. My notes from that first day read like this:

epistemology

overdetermination

Derrida??

I remained utterly mystified for the rest of the semester. I sure wish you'd been around to explain things!

I know. It's ridiculous. You can't understand the material till you already understand it. It seems to be a point of pride with many theorists and their disciples that the quality of a theory is determined by the difficulty in apprehending it.

Nobody should feel stupid because they don't get the stuff. Get some of the few introductory books that really explain the theories and use them. You can prove how smart you are by interacting with the theories in a meaningful way AFTER you have developed an understanding. Lots of people pretend that they're totally on top of these early lectures but with rare exceptions, they're just as confused as you are.

Here is the way I defined some of these terms for a literary theory class. I received and "A" by the way.

Structuralism- “Structure” is defined as any conceptual system that functions as a unit, is capable of being changed, and the transformations of which it is capable never lead beyond its own structural system. Stucturalists focus on the underlying structures that organize individual parts (Tyson 199). They believe these structures are, “generated by the human mind, which is thought of as a structuring mechanism.” (199) Structuralism “sees itself as a human science whose effort is to understand, in a systematic way, the fundamental structures that underlie all human experience, and therefore all human behavior and production.” (198) Structuralists believe there are two levels in the world, the visible and invisible. The visible world is made up of objects and interactions we can see, and the invisible world is made of the structures that organize the visible world so we are able to make sense of it (Tyson 198). To illustrate the visible and invisible world, Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralism, uses language. Saussure says, “There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.” (Saussure 7) Language is simply a structure of signs that helps humans transmit their ideas and thoughts. This idea is called structural linguistics. Saussure believed language needed to be understood as a system of relationships among words at a given point in time, or synchronically, as opposed to the history of individual words over time, or diachronically. Saussure says that words are linguistic signs, made up of signifiers and signifieds. A signifier is the image of a sound, and a signified is the concept to which the signifier refers. Saussure uses the French word langue to stand for the structure of language, and parole to represent individual parts of language. Structuralists believe the human mind sees differences in objects as opposites, which is known as binary oppositions. Therefore, humans understand things not by what they are, but what they are not (Tyson 201-202).

Deconstruction- Deconstruction looks at the ambiguities in language. Deconstructive critics believe language is not as simple as the structuralist “signifier plus signified”. There can be an endless number of signifiers because the human mind can come up with infinite amounts of them. Deconstruction, “refers neither to things in the world nor to our concepts of things, but only to the play of signifiers which language itself consists.” (Tyson 245) The founder of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, says there are two important features of language. Its play of signifiers continually postpones meaning, and the meaning it seems to have is the result of differences by which humans distinguish one signifier from the other, which is known as “differance.” Humans must use language because it is all they have to use in communication. “Differance” is the name Derrida gives to the only “meaning” language can have. Deconstructionists believe language governs our experiences, and is made up of ideologies, or values and beliefs. Derrida says that in the structuralist idea of binary opposites, one term is always considered superior to the other. Such as good and evil, good is considered better. Derrida says that by looking at the privileged word, something can be learned about the ideology present (244-247). Deconstruction works to prove that there is no center of existence, and that humans invent ideologies and identities in order to try and find a center. Derrida says western philosophy is logocentric, because it places an object at its center, while the concept resides outside the world it explains. Derrida says that because these concepts are products of the human mind and language, they cannot be outside the ambiguities of human language (Derrida 878-879). An example of the deconstruction of a text is seen in Derrida’s deconstruction of structuralist Levi-Strauss’s work The Elementary Structures of Kinship. In this work, Levi-Strauss claims that what is natural is universal, and does not depend on a certain culture. He says culture depends on a system of norms regulating society and can be varied amongst social structures. Levi-Strauss sees something that seems to require both the “predicates of nature and culture”, and calls this a scandal. The scandal here is the incest-prohibition, which is both natural and cultural. Derrida says the real scandal is in the system that finds differences in nature and culture. Derrida says, “from the moment the incest-prohibition can no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition, it can no longer be said it is a scandalous fact, a nucleus of opacity within a network of transparent significations.” (882) Therefore, the incest prohibition escapes traditional concepts.

Cultural Criticism- Cultural critics focus on culture, especially popular culture. They believe culture is dynamic, an ongoing experience of one’s environment, and the product of multiple factors such as race, class, and gender. Cultural critics believe, “human history and culture constitute a complex arena of dynamic forces of which we can construct only a partial, subjective picture.” (Tyson 292) Cultural criticism believes human experience cannot be understood only by means of academic disciplines, but it is more complex. Cultural criticism is politically oriented, and shares many facets with Marxist criticism because it originally branched off Marxist criticism in the 1960’s. Cultural criticism does not believe the oppressed are helpless, but are able to change the system that oppresses them. Cultural criticism attempts to make connections to aspects of society, the culture in which they were produced, and the culture in which they are being interpreted (Tyson 293-295).

Thanks, 800 dude - but trust me, I'm long over it! (I should have clarified that grad school was, for me, 20+ years ago.) This was in an economics program, by the way, which is why so many of us had never heard of Derrida or given much thought to epistemology or spent a lot of our time "interrogating texts." A lot of us even harbored "essentialist" tendencies without knowing it (much less realizing what a very, very bad thing that was).

To the original poster (and anyone else who might be interested)... another good couple of books to read, both of them also of a satirical bent (like Crews on Pooh), are _Book_ by Robert Grudin and _The Trick of It_ by Michael Frayn. The first is a kind of mystery set in an English department, sending up academic politics in general and battling lit crit theorists in particular. The second is about a literary theorist who seduces and marries a writer (not just any writer, but the woman whose books he's spent his entire career analyzing). It's a very, very funny send-up of a clash between literary theory and literary creation.