What is theory?

1. What is theory?

2. What is theory? What is the relationship between theory and literature?

3. Literary Theory in Two Bites

4. 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.”

5. 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.

6. 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).

7. 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 Some New Historicists also argue that history, like literature, is discursively constructed and that historical documents can be interpreted textually—that is, as representations rather than as mirrors of truth into the past.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.

8. 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 GayatriSpivak’sThree Woman’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism (1985)

9. 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.

10. 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).

11. 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.

12. 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).

13. 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.

14. 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).

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. Almost all quotations were taken from Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2004. All summaries are mine.