Literary Theory: History, Debates, and Key Concepts

Historical Development of Literary Theory

Literary Science vs. Literary Studies

• Restrictiveness
• A search for models, patterns, and schemes in the literary work
• Repetitiveness
• Making theory firmer, more coherent
• Borrowing from linguistics
• (For example, Structuralists in the mid 20th century)

Interpretation in Literary Theory

Monistic Systems

• Psychoanalysis (relation of conscious and unconscious psychological processes)
• Hermeneutics (holy texts)
• Phenomenology (experienced from the first-person point)
• New Criticism (close reading)

Pluralistic Systems

• Deconstruction
• Neopragmatism (focuses on language)

A Debate on Interpretation

• Umberto Eco: Three rules of interpretation: "intentions", limiting freedom, category of a "modern reader"
• Richard Rorty: Getting rid of the idea of what a text is really about, interpretational anarchism, "appetite for literature"
• Jonathan Culler: A compromise, understanding vs. overstanding, the case of "The Three Little Pigs"

Major Questions in Contemporary Literary Studies

• 1) Ontological questions
• 2) Epistemological and methodological questions
• 3) The status of interpretation
• 4) Questions concerning "the subject"

Tendencies of Literary Theory in the 21st Century

Moving on to the practice of interpretation, moving away from "essentialism" to "pragmatism", expanding interpretation with cultural contexts

The Role of the Author in Literary Theory

• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye - author as a friend, as a sort of personal projection
• Roland Barthes, The Death of an Author - the author should be treated as absent from the text, text as a palimpsest
• W.K. Wimsatt, Monroe Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy - all we read is the text, the author's interpretation is also a text to interpret
• Michel Foucault, What is an Author? - author as a historical construction
• Emphasis on the author (since the 1970s) - emphasis on non-mainstream models of the author

Poststructuralism

Represented by new historicism, deconstruction, some forms of feminism, postcolonialism, queer theory: "We should undermine the text-world dichotomy."

• Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
• A poem as a work of seduction
• The problematic case of the speaker*
• The performative character of the poem*
• An example of heteroglossia (Mikhail Bakhtin)

Discourse in Literary Theory

Like text type, it is used as a term for any kind of classifiable linguistic expression. It has become a useful denotation for various linguistic conventions referring to areas of content and theme; for instance, one may speak of male or female, political, sexual, economic, philosophical, and historical discourse. The classifications for these forms of linguistic expression are based on levels of content, vocabulary, syntax, as well as stylistic and rhetorical elements.